THE VERY ELECT THE VERY ELECT BACCALAUREATE SERMONS AND OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES OF MATTHEW HENRY BUCKHAM, D.D. LL.D. PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT 1871-1910 With Biographical Notes and Studies in Appreciation THE PILGRIM PRESS BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO r ( Copyright, 1912 By LUTHER H. GARY THE RUMFORD PRESS CONCORD - N H . U S A CONTENTS PAGE FOREWORD vii OUTLINE OP PRESIDENT BUCKHAM'S LIFE 1 A MASTERPIECE IN LIVING 5 AN APPRECIATION 12 IDEALS AND AIMS 18 ADDRESSES AND LECTURES THE VERT ELECT: AN ADDRESS OP WELCOME, SEPT., 1907 ... 33 COLLEGE IDEALS IN PRACTICAL LIFE 44 Address at Vassar College on Founder's Day, 1891. ART, A LECTURE 57 CHRISTIANITY A WORLD-WIDE MOVEMENT 74 Address at the Triennial Congregational Council in Portland, Me., October, 1901. THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES 87 THE SCHOOLMASTERS' SELF-ESTIMATE 103 Address to the Vermont Schoolmasters' Club, March, 1909. THE DYNAMIC OF CATECHETICAL INSTRUCTION 112 Read before the Faculty Club, 1910. THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER: A VESPER HOMILY .... 121 THE LOVE OF DIFFICULTY: AN ADDRESS OF WELCOME, SEPT., 1908 132 SCHOLARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN EVERY-DAY LIFE: OPENING ADDRESS, SEPT., 1909 144 THE CLASSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY: REMARKS AT THE BANQUET OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK CITY, FEB., 1910. 156 "ON MIGHTY PENS" (THE CREATION) 160 263674 BACCALAUREATE SERMONS PAGE 1873. THE HEAVENLY VISION 167 1880. THE SPIRIT OP POWER 179 1886. THE MIND OF CHRIST ..196 1889. GOODNESS THE HIGHEST GOOD 209 1891. CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 222 1892. THE RELIGIOUS ESTIMATE OF LIFE 239 1894. SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP 252 1896. THE NOBLER ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER . . . . . . 266 1897. THE DOOR OPENING OF ITSELF 277 1898. WHO WILL SHOW us ANY GOOD 288 1900. LEADERS OF MEN 299 1906. THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF LIFE 307 1907. NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFIL 319 1908. THE SIMPLE LIFE 332 1909. FOR BRETHREN AND COMPANIONS' SAKES 343 1910. THE DEVOUT MAN OF THE WORLD 354 TRUE CHRISTIAN UNITY . 365 FOREWORD IT HAS not been thought best to attempt a formal biography in connection with this volume. It aims to present a repre- sentative collection of President Buckham's writings prefaced by an outline of his lifework and a few appreciations. The task of selecting the papers, addresses and sermons to be included has been a difficult one because of the abundance and variety of the material. No doubt many a reader will miss some address or sermon that he recalls with especial interest and would like to have found here, but the necessity of condensation has put limitations upon the compilers. The aim has been not so much at inclusiveness on the one hand or at unity on the other, as to secure an adequate expression of the convictions and the ideals of the man whose mind the volume seeks to reflect. It is our hope that the volume will prove to be a trust- worthy, though insufficient, memorial of the author, and at the same time an offering of permanent worth to the Univer- sity which he so long and so devotedly loved and served. JOHN W. BUCKHAM, J. E. GOODRICH. OUTLINE OF PRESIDENT BUCKHAM'S LIFE MATTHEW HENRY BUCKHAM came from England with his parents when but an infant. His destiny seems to have been foreshadowed in his birth, which occurred on the fourth of July, 1832. His father was an Independent, or Congregational minister, who sometimes added to his small stipend and his practical usefulness by conducting a private school. Matthew entered college at the age of fifteen, with an admirable grounding, received from his father, in all the subjects which a freshman should know. At the age of nineteen he took his first degree, winning the highest honors of a class many of whom were five to eight years his seniors. For two years he was headmaster of the old academy at Lenox, Mass.; then tutor in languages for a year at Burlington. Two years were next given to study and research abroad, chiefly at University College, London. Upon his return (in 1856) he accepted a temporary position on the teaching staff of the University of Vermont as professor of English Liter- ature, and the year following was made professor of Greek. In 1863 he took up again the duties of the chair of Rhetoric and English Literature, and continued in charge of both departments till 1871, when President Angell's resignation opened the way for his promotion to the presidency. At his death, 29 November, 1910, he had already well begun his fortieth year of oversight and direction, and was accounted the Dean of American college presidents. As an instructor Professor Buckham was admirably equipped for his work. His scholarship was accurate, his memory held fast whatever his wide reading had gathered. His taste in English Literature and his skill in the use of his mother tongue made his example in the lecture room of even more value than his formal precepts and criticism, i 1 THE VERY ELECT President AngelPs administration of five years had shown that he had in full measure the qualities demanded by the position. He was, in one sense, a hard man to follow, though he had done much to clear the way and lay a foundation for his successor to build upon. Professor Buckham had admi- rably discharged the duties of the class room; his ability to manage and direct, to win support and conciliate opposition, had yet to be proved. There were those who withheld a hearty co-operation, waiting to see what the new executive could do. The Agricultural College had not yet gained the support of all the farmers of the State, and schemes for sever- ing the college from the University and planting it elsewhere had still to be debated and fought to a finish in the Legislature. In this struggle for the control and use of the agricultural fund, and the final settlement of the question of location, President Buckham bore his share, and not without credit. This uneasy controversy did not favor the healthy growth of either the University or the Agricultural College. It took a dozen years of persistent effort to raise the roll of under- graduates (medical class not here counted) above a round hundred. By this time, however, opposition had mostly ceased, and the constituency of the University had gained confidence in the wisdom of their chief and the practicability of his plans. So in 1883 began what may be called the "building era" of the institution. Friends came forward with the means to give effect to the President's plans for growth and improved equipment. In 1883 came the reconstruction of the Old College building; in 1884 a more commodious housing for the Medical department. In 1885 the Billings Library was completed for many years the finest library edifice possessed by any college in America. Then came in 1890 three resi- dences for professors; in 1892 the group of Farm buildings; in 1895 the Converse Dormitory and the Williams Science Hall, two substantial structures generously equipped, to be PRESIDENT BUCKRAM'S LIFE 3 followed soon by a gymnasium, a spacious fireproof Medical hall, and last of all, the handsome structure erected by the State in honor of Senator Justin S. Morrill, worthy home of the Farmers' College. All this proves that President Buckham had found friends, and that these friends had satisfied themselves of the compe- tence of his management, and of the sagacity of his plans for future growth. The President's House is the only building in the college domain which remains as it was in 1882. This domain itself has been greatly extended and a corresponding progress is to be noted in new departments and courses of instruction, in a larger teaching staff, and a more adequate equipment in lecture halls and laboratories. If one compare the last thirty years with the previous history of the University, he will discover that greater advances have been made, and at more points, than ever before. Mr. Buckham's work has been quietly accomplished; the actual results are his monument. Mr. Buckham was well known through Vermont and New England as lecturer and preacher. His addresses on educa- tional subjects were always heard with the attention com- manded by ripe thought and long experience. As preacher, his services were in frequent request, particularly on special occasions. His characterizations of the lives and labors of notable men, presented at a funeral service, or in memoriam, were always models of restrained speech, never lapsing into fulsome eulogy. Twice was conferred on him the distinction of Doctor of Divinity, although he was never ordained. He chose always to retain the status of " licentiate" which had been granted him as early as 1857. He no doubt thought he would be freer to speak his mind on all questions of religion and theology in case he occupied a quasi-laical position. His paper on "Lay Theology" (1884) sufficiently indicates his sympathy 4 THE VERY ELECT with the rank and file of the church. A " doctor in theology" he would not have called himself, and had he been obliged to define the word " divinity" involved in the " semi-lunar fardels," he might have cited ScougaPs definition of religion, as "the life of God in the soul of man." In this divinity Mr. Buckham believed, and this divinity he preached, to the edification of all who heard. It was sometimes remarked that he seemed to cover both sides of debated themes. And there was reason for the criticism. He certainly preferred comprehension to the definitions and distinctions which lead to division. He received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Middlebury in 1900, and from Dartmouth and Wesley an in 1909. President Buckham never slighted his duties as citizen. He served on the State board of education for the seven years 1867-74; as school commissioner of the city of Burlington 1869-80; and one year as examiner of the United States Mili- tary Academy at West Point. His hand was on the Mary Fletcher Hospital from its inception till his death, and the Free Library of the city of his residence had the benefit of his active supervision from 1873. His departure made not one vacancy, but many vacancies, in positions which directly concern the common weal. J. E. G. A MASTERPIECE IN LIVING BY LEVI P. SMITH A LONG life amid scenes of beauty, service rendered to noble ends, the worth of sound judgment and great learning, the charm of fineness in appreciation and artistry of expression all this and more, mention of President Buckham will always bring to mind; he had withal an unfailing power of growth, a something very like perpetual youth. The last sixty years have witnessed such changes in thought, such discoveries and inventions, such advent of all the frills and circumstances of our life, that we of the extreme present are tempted to feel and almost justified in feeling that the world began about 1850. It would seem that one who was a grown man in 1850 must have been hopelessly shelved by the seventies, in matters of up-to-date thought at least, and a veritable walking sarcophagus in the early twentieth century, or, missing that, have fallen into the other calamity of having his life uprooted, as it were, and torn part from part as each successive discovery burst upon the world. The really remarkable thing about President Buckham's life was the way in which he bridged this gap. He was more active and useful and up-to-date during the last ten years of his life than at any other time, and yet his life was a marvel of con- tinuity. He did not break with the past; he grew out of it. He was looked upon as the very embodiment of tradition, a kind of fortress of conservatism, and yet his baccalaureate sermon of last June contained the very triumph of a quiet, sane, kind of heterodoxy. This power to be of the present, and yet in line with the past, was a part of the very nature of the man. His makeup 5 6 THE VERY ELECT was two-fold, the artist side of him clinging to what was beautiful and distinctive and human, and refusing to let it go, the keen, aggressive intellect, alert to examine every- thing new and embrace it if it stood the test. The manner and style of the man were of the past; his mind was of the present. There was a finish and polish about him, a gentle- ness and dignity, which were of the old regime. When he spoke, his diction was the diction of all time, but his manner was not reminiscent. When he wrote one of those rarely beautiful essays of his, which he could never be prevailed upon to publish but circulated among his friends in familiar white paper covers, he would shape to his use a goose quill. He liked the smooth glide of a quill pen, and he liked, too, the sense of having one more thing in common with the great writers of yore. When President Buckham became instructor in Greek at the University of Vermont, it must have been a quaint and primitive institution, and yet, even then, the home of tradi- tions and of real culture. It was a long way off in those days, a college in the woods, almost. Burlington was a busy little town nestled close beside the lake, with ample wharfing, a factory or two, and an old, dismantled battery lording it over the harbor. These were the very old times; the whipping- post had only recently been taken down. On the east, where a long hill rises gradually from the lake, were scattered a number of colonial mansions, each with its park-like setting, and still farther away from the town proper, at the very crest of this hill, was the college, a long brick building, surmounted by a blazing gilt dome, visible on a sunny day from Whitehall to Montreal. Clustered around the college were the homes of the college families; and a choicer little community, and one more remote from everything save religion and learning a man might go far to seek. This quiet town, with its spreading elms, its scattered dwellings and frugal, thoughtful people, its lake and rugged A MASTERPIECE IN LIVING 7 line of Adirondack Mountains to the west, its broad fields and undulant Green Mountains to the east, was the fit setting for that long life, that masterpiece of living. How great its influence may have been upon the man and his work is hard to say. Few men have known and loved the scenes and walks of this country better than President Buckham. And yet he was not an out-of-door character, one who haunts wild places and hunts and tramps through them constantly. He was the quiet man of books and thoughts, who looks upon scenes and returns to his study to remember them again and again and think them over. Perhaps the beauty of them got into his thinking and living, and lent something to the poise and patience which were his. Certain it is that he owed to the natural beauty of the locality in which he wrought, a deal of the good company which meant much to him throughout life. Beautiful scenes attract artists and men of refinement. Remoteness is a lure to contemplative natures. As the years came and went, there was never a time when the little college town could not afford a circle of choice spirits, ready to gather and discuss and exchange observations upon men and events. Or, if there was ever such a time, it was only in the early sixties, when well nigh every undergraduate went to the war. During the five years which immediately followed the war, James B. Angell was President, and it was when he left, to begin his long service at the University of Michigan, that President Buckham came to the head of the Institution. In the years which followed, interesting men were never far to seek. A life-long resident and close friend of President Buckham was Edward J. Phelps, the cultured and brilliant jurist who followed Lowell as minister to England (that was before the days of American ambassadors). Other men with whom he had a long, close friendship were Senators Edmunds and Morrill and Mr. John A. Kasson. He had a very delight- ful acquaintance with the architect Richardson, and I have 8 THE VERY ELECT heard him quote J. Q. A. Ward. The Vermont bar was excep- tionally strong in those days, and its ablest lawyers, gravi- tating naturally to Burlington, were an added stimulus to the thought life of the place. But probably his longest and closest fellowships were with a group of men whose life work, like his, centered in the college, Professor Torrey, Professor Barbour, Mr. Geo. Grenville Benedict, historian of the Civil War, editor, scholar, and active trustee of the institution, and others, some of whom survive him. The life of the college community was simple enough, but friendly and fine. At least once every month they all gathered in the home of one of their number, to read a play together, or listen to music, or hear the tales of travel which some one might have to tell, a kind of family club-life, which dwellers in larger cities might do well to imitate. President Buckham's work may be summed up briefly so far as it can be stated at all, for a thing so far reaching and subtle in many of its phases as a man's life work is bound to elude the pen, however hard one may try to reduce it to written words. He was chosen to lead a tiny college which boasted itself a University and yet lacked the housing of a first-rate academy; a thread-bare institution of high tradi- tions, beautiful location, a few good teachers and next to nothing else. Its curriculum was of the narrowest, its equip- ment was shabby. In its finances, there was a chronic stringency. For years he saved and scrimped and managed. He saw the advent of a brood of new, rich institutions, whose marble halls seemed to come to them without the asking. He saw the coming of a time when universities began bidding for one another's instructors. His institution was not in a rich country. It was in a small state amid a farming people and remote from the centers of population. And yet it had a service to perform. It was almost the only place of education available to hundreds of lads from the best stock of America. Against these odds and for this cause, he fought, manfully, A MASTERPIECE IN LIVING 9 patiently. He planned large, and at length, when a few of those farmer boys had made their way in the world, he was able to interest them. Building after building went up, and department after department was added, until now, where he found three buildings, he has left nearly a score; where he found a university in name only he has left a university in fact, not rich to be sure, but larger and committed to a broader scheme of growth and service. The other and more personal side of his work was subtler and infinitely more difficult to describe, and yet one might venture to say it was greater. He met generation after generation of youth, the best of a hardy New England stock, and quietly and not without a certain reserve introduced into their lives and thoughts the refinements and graces and intellectual joy which were meat and drink to him. He was never extremely accessible to any man. When after a vic- torious ball game, he cautioned the cheering mob to do nothing ungentlemanly, students might misunderstand. But these very qualities were bound to have their effect in the end. The man who in all humility holds himself dear, in the sense of daring always to be himself, will somehow, some time be held dear by his fellow men. Along toward the senior year it began to percolate through the skull of many a lad that here was a nature different from any he had met before, and that signified that one more boy was coming to know what dis- tinction of personality meant. Whatever he touched upon he invested with quality. The chasteness, the compression, the melody of his language were such as I have heard from no other man. And the richness and humanity of what he said, and the aptness of his allusions and quotations were an inspiration and a guide. It would be safe to wager that no student has graduated from the University of Vermont, in recent years at least, without having his tastes a little higher, or his nature gentler, or his outlook broader because of the contagious refinement and wide culture of the good President. 10 THE VERY ELECT All this wealth of suggestion and inspiration was more evident than ever in the later years of his service. He was one of those rare men who never stop growing. Most men seem to ripen and then, having attained normal stature, cease to grow; he went on and on. And his growth was ever in the direction of humanity. One can imagine him in early years lost amid interminable pages of Greek. And in late middle life, he was capable of making a strong political speech and then, as he took his seat, calmly inquiring of the man next him who the candidate might be. It happened that the man next him was the candidate, but the incident betrays an attention centered solely upon ideas and an utter disregard of the personal proposition that was entirely foreign to him during the last ten years of his life. During these years he was constantly writing, sympathetically, understandingly, on current happenings in the field of finance, in religous thought, in politics. He followed the students, even to the extreme point of reading their publications as one ex-editor can testify who received a very brief and unequivocal note of displeasure on the morning after the issue of one of these. He was singularly free from the prejudice against recent things and ideas because of their newness. It took a strident note or touch of the sensational to arouse him to antagonism. He al- ways counseled his students to read at least one London weekly and one of the great foreign reviews, to study about foreign countries and, when the time and money came, to travel. And he more than lived up to his own words in every respect. Perhaps the conscious effort to keep the horizon broad which these counselings seemed to indicate, together with patience to plan for the future, and the high-heartedness always to treat himself as young, may be the key to his secret of per- petual youth and perpetual growth. President Buckham probably never had a money-making thought, at least not for himself. His greatest salary was hardly more than is earned by a competent city bookkeeper. A MASTERPIECE IN LIVING 11 Yet he spent a long life industriously. He possessed unusual ability. He was a recognized leader among men. He cer- tainly never was in want. He never lacked the respect of men. He had the open sesame to rarest fellowships. He had the means and leisure for travel. He could grow wonder- ful roses in his own garden, and time and again was able to pick up some choice print or folio, all the dearer because he was helped to it by fine discrimination rather than a long purse. He knew the joy of weaving words into forms beautiful and expressive of every varying shade of thought. He had in full measure the satisfaction that comes of service well done. A long, good life, amid beautiful scenes, Who can say it was not the wealthiest and happiest and most fortunate life? MATTHEW HENRY BUCKHAM: AN APPRECIATION l BY DARWIN P. KINGSLEY IN THE history of Vermont as a rebellious and unattached territory, and in her history as an independent republic, two men stand out above all others: Ira Allen, the founder of the University of Vermont, and his brother Ethan, the almost mythological hero of the New Hampshire Grants. In the history of Vermont as a State, covering nearly one hundred and twenty years, many men stand out, but in my judgment three men stand pre-eminent: Thomas Chittenden, Justin Swan Morrill and Matthew Henry Buckham. Governor Chittenden's place has been confirmed and emphasized by the final arbiter of all greatness, the passage of time. Senator MorrilPs fame rests on foundations as broad as the nation itself, and with each passing year he is increasingly recognized as having been one of the creatively wise, the sanely patriotic statesmen of a period that demanded and produced giants. Matthew Henry Buckham's right to rank with Chittenden and Morrill will not be instantly recognized or conceded by all, not even by all Vermonters. His life and work were not the kind that usually or indeed often command quick recog- nition. He was not the political head of the State; he did not reach nor seem to care to reach the popular imagination. He did not stand in the Senate House and battle for sound money and the nation's credit. He created in the youth of the State the sound minds which gave political leaders sane 'A Paper read before the New York Alumni Association of the University of Vermont, February 17, 1910. 12 AN APPRECIATION 13 audiences. He moulded the intellects and the morals which lie back of good politics. His fame will rest on labors as undramatic and as vital as wholesome food and pure air. Vermont produces men. Why? The life work of President Buckham gives us a large part of the answer to that question. In a few words, what manner of man was he? What did he accomplish? First of all he was a scholar, using the word in its finer and shall I say? earlier significance. He exhaled no atmos- phere of pedantry or bookishness. His scholarship found expression in the exquisite refinement of his mind, in his quick and broad sympathies, in his intellectual and moral standards. Mere learning which not infrequently kills the spirit he cared little for. He was "orthodox" mentally and spiritually, but as applied to him the word loses all offense. He stood by his standards, but he loved the truth above all things and was never afraid to follow whithersoever it might lead him. He loved the old classical college training; but he early recognized the trend of modern life and instead of opposing he led it in the recent development ot the Univer- sity. He loved the standards of Congregationalism, but if the Church as a whole had met the discoveries of science in the spirit that actuated him, there would have been no conflict between Science and Religion. He was a modest man, as all brave men are. He hated shams. He had a fine sense of humor, that saving grace. He had a deep pride in the careers and work of the men and women whose lives he had strongly influenced. But of this one got only flashes now and then. His consciousness of the fact that he had profoundly influenced certain careers, he guarded jealously. But here, it seems to me, was his highest conscious reward. I don't believe he ever thought of how the world would hold him after he was gone. He was a shy man. This quality caused him not infrequently to be misunderstood by the students. 14 THE VERY ELECT At thirty-nine having already been related more or less closely to the College for over twenty years he came to the headship of the University of Vermont. He found it almost penniless; he left it after forty years with an annual income which represents an invested value aggregating well over $4,000,000. He found it almost without buildings; he left it architecturally surpassed by few New England seats of learning, if indeed it is surpassed by any. He found it almost without students; he left it with a body of undergraduates two-thirds as large as that of Yale University when he began his presidency in 1871. He found it without distinct standing in Vermont; he left it the leading institution of the State. He found it a struggling college; he laid the foundations and built some of the superstructure of a real university. For forty years he moulded the character of Burlington and of the State. He went about it so quietly that few realized his power. He set a standard of public speaking and of writing that few college presidents have ever reached standards by which all his successors will be measured. He toiled and struggled and hoped. His toil bore fruit; his struggles triumphed; his hopes came to be realized. He saw the College transformed in its equipment, in its courses, in its endowment. He lived to see the completion of the first great step toward an adequate endowment. Chittenden needs no monument, neither does Morrill, and I add neither does President Buckham. The University is his monument. The greater we make that, the surer and larger his fame. The University of Vermont can no more be separated at any time from the life and labors of Matthew Henry Buckham, than the State of Vermont can be separated from the labors of Chittenden. His place in its history is as fixed as are the outlines of Mansfield in the exquisite pano- rama which has daily changed its pictures and shifted its scenery before the eyes of a century of successive classes. If I may so speak without being misunderstood, President AN APPRECIATION 15 Buckham lived too much the life of the spirit. His spirit- uality, intellectual refinement, sensitiveness and modesty denied him a kind of success as an administrator which the world rates high; but that success if he had achieved it would not be dearer to some of us than our memories of President Buckham as he was. It was his habit (through occasional correspondence) to give some of "his boys" fugitive glimpses of the deep affec- tions he cherished. If he found a bit of fine poetry in a current magazine or review, he would clip it out and send it. The poems that came to me always expressed the attitude of the spiritually minded man toward the scenes and loves of earlier days. Some years ago he sent me and told me to keep a little poem entitled " An Old Virgil". 1 A quarter of a century had passed since I left the University. More than a half century had passed since he had, as a college student, laid aside his Aeneid. But if anyone questions whether he cherished, almost sentimentally, the spirit of his youth or that he kept the fires of affection always burning, let him listen : A faded, shabby little book, Besmeared with many an inky stain, Down from my silent shelves I took, And turned the well-worn leaves again. Not dearer to the scholar's heart His tomes of vellum and of gold Than this which has become a part And parcel of the days of old. Around each page, from far-off years, The glamour of one's boyhood clings And wakes once more the sense of tears, The sadness at the heart of things. W. H. Savile The Spectator. 16 THE VERY ELECT We saw not then the soul that lay Beneath the wistful, tender phrase, Nor thought how there would come a day When we had gone our different ways When that sweet charm, that magic touch Would pierce the heart with sudden pain, And make us long Ah me! how much! To see that Form-room once again. Observation teaches me that many students did not see in President Buckham "the soul that lay beneath the wistful, tender phrase," but now the day has come, we having "gone our different ways," when that sweet dignity which marked his every act and thought rises before us to "pierce the heart with sudden pain. " Whatever of the great prizes of life any of us may have won, or may hereafter win, there will always rest on the shelves of memory an ink-stained volume, redolent of youth whenever we tenderly take it down, recalling, when its leaves are turned, that gentle yet strong figure which has indeed now become "a part and parcel of the days of old." A college or university training is a succession of re-gener- ations. President Buckram was our intellectual and moral father the head of those regenerating forces which transform and re-transform, awaken and re-awaken, mould and re-mould. "A part and parcel of the days of old" he is, but equally a part and parcel of us as we are tonight. So by the law of the limitless sphere in which we came under his tutelage, he will forever remain a part and parcel of the University, of the State, and of the scholar's larger world. He sent me a little manuscript poem last summer, the author of which he did not know. He was then revisiting the scenes of his childhood, seeking the vigor that did not return. He was amid scenes which had power to recreate for him his long-departed youth. This poem expresses his emotions, voices his affections and his regret. It told and tells how a AN APPRECIATION 17 brave man can face the tragedy of age with the songs of youth on his lips. Sweet tangled banks where ox-eyed daisies grow And scarlet poppies gleam; Sweet changing lights that ever come and go Upon the quiet stream! Once more I see the flash of splendid wings As dragon-flies flit by; Once more for me the small sedge-warbler sings Beneath a sapphire sky. Once more I feel the simple, fresh content I found hi stream and soil, When golden summers slowly came and went And mine was all their spoil. The spirit of these lines so reflects the spirit of the man, his refinement, his fine feeling, that we may well believe, he having passed from our sight, that he has indeed found those " tangled banks" where " scarlet poppies gleam," that he has caught "the flash of splendid wings," and that "beneath a sapphire sky" his "golden summers" live again. IDEALS AND AIMS IThe only reason for venturing to add to the foregoing appreciations and others which have been published, without attempting a full biography of my father, is in order to dwell a little longer on those traits which all who knew and loved him valued, and also to represent his aims and ideals in words of his own, and thus to fulfil, as far as possible, his own estimate of unconscious autobiography as on the whole the best and most beneficent account of a man's life.] I. IN COMMON with others who have sought the secret of my father's work and usefulness, I find it first of all, though not most of all, in the breadth and comprehensiveness of his knowledge and attainments. Given a mind of native alert- ness and grasp, trained by a thorough disciplinarian with parental care, the rest came largely through two avenues, reading and travel. His reading began early and was never abandoned. He was not only a constant reader but an ardent lover of books, and he never failed to commend the joy and gain that comes from good books. In a day when such a privilege was rarer than now and at the cost of much self-denial he traveled. After his student days in London University, he wandered with knapsack and note book over much of Europe, recording his impressions in a series of letters published in the Courier and Enquirer of New York. When after his two years of teaching at Lenox, he returned to his Alma Mater as instructor in Greek he was not only a good scholar in that subject, but capable as he soon proved, of teaching English literature, rhetoric and Latin. Upon the broad foundation thus early laid he built broadly and richly until the wealth and resources of his mind became the joy and enrichment of all who knew him. It was quite other than that fund of information which so many men possess; his 18 IDEALS AND AIMS 19 was rather a treasure of well-ordered and harmonious reflec- tions expressed in language so chaste and captivating as to give to his teaching, his public speech, his conversation the charm at once elevating and instructive, to which so many of his students and friends have paid tribute. Never argumenta- tive, extravagant or dogmatic, he presented his case with so fine a clarity and sobriety as to lend a kind of "sweet reasonableness," of completeness and finality to his utter- ances. Comprehensiveness of knowledge begat breadth of outlook and sympathy. The list of great causes and issues as well as of less vital pursuits and interests in which he was vividly and productively interested is significant. As citizen and patriot his was no scholarly aloofness and indifference. His country was to him worthy not only of love but of service. He was conscientious in all of his civic duties and a loyal member of his political party. He was always stirred by allusions to the Civil War, always attended the Memorial Day gatherings and spoke with deep feeling and sympathy, and took pride in the record of Vermont soldiers. The State of Vermont was as dear to him as to any of her native sons, and he was as true a Vermonter as ever lived within the shadow of Mount Mansfield. Her welfare was to him paramount, her character and possibilities unsurpassed. In an address given many years ago to the teachers of the State he said: "I want to impress upon the teachers this thought, that to us as a body is largely committed the great responsibility of bringing out into active beneficent power the vast amount of latent intellect with which God has endowed the Vermont character, power enough, if developed, not only to multiply tenfold the aggregate production, material and spiritual, of our State, but to Vermontize, so to speak, half the other states of the Union." To "Vermontize" meant to him to endow with the sturdiest and finest qualities of brain and heart. He was fond of comparing the people of Vermont 20 THE VERY ELECT to the Scotch; and at the twelfth annual meeting of the Alumni Association of Boston in 1898, he said, in a character- istically playful vein; "As the good Father could not make all his children Scotchmen, after he had made enough to be an example to the rest of the world, and enough to fill most of the places of honor and profit in the world, then he made another people that were just as nearly like the Scotch as he could make them without repeating himself, that is, he made the New England Yankee, especially the Vermonter. " Whereupon he proceeded to draw out the likeness. And if he was a good Vermonter, he was an even better Burlingtonian. Not less faithful was he to the claims of the Church than to those of the State. The Church was always an object of his affection and service. He counted worship "the highest act of the soul;" and one of his favorite themes of study and discussion was the enrichment of the order of worship. To his own denomination he was inflexibly loyal and his counsel and service were as freely given as they were frequently sought. He was also most faithful to his own College Street Church, constant in attendance and always ready to help. And yet he was so catholic as to embrace all sects and denominations in his interest, a strong opponent of the "spirit which creates factions" and an earnest advocate of Christian Unity. 1 Theo- logically he was liberal yet not radical, progressive yet com- prehensive. The family, too, was not overlooked in his endeavors to do his utmost part to conserve the foundations of society. He never failed to recognize and emphasize the primary place of the home among human institutions. He was one of the founders and a life-long director of the New England League (now the National League) for the Protection of the Family. Deeply concerned with the large issues of life, he was in no way indifferent to its amenities. Art was not a passion i Sermon: "Is Christ Divided?" preached at First Church, Burlington, in 1909. IDEALS AND AIMS 21 but an unfailing source of delight and refreshment to him. His taste in architecture was recognized as of the best, as was also his judgment of a picture. A lecture on "Art," another on "Engraving," and an unfinished lecture on Archi- tecture reveal the study which he had given to these subjects. Literature was not only a fountain of knowledge but of joy to him, and he understood the composition and flavor of good literature as one to the manner born and to the art cultivated. A nature-lover he was, too, and loved walking and woods and birds and mountains and the perpetual charm of the sea. The shy sweet-scented flower of the Pilgrims, the trailing arbutus, was, I think, his favorite wild-flower, as the imperial rose which he cultivated so assiduously was the pride and delight of his garden. Those who as friends and neighbors knew him best will always associate his memory with the fragrance of roses. How rare is the strong man who also loves beauty ! Travel became increasingly a recreation to him and he loved to wander at will especially in Scotland, England and Holland. The diversity of his interests is indicated by two illustrated lectures which were the fruit of one summer abroad, one on "the Jersey Cow at Home" and one on Oxford University. Not that he held them at the same value, nor loved Jersey less but Oxford more! As a final evidence of the comprehensiveness of his acquirements one need only recall that he began his University instruction with Greek and closed it with Economics and International Law, and was master of all. But broad as was the scope of his interests and activities, all and always were subordinated to his one supreme and absorbing vocation, Education and Education as centered in the University of Vermont. Day and night he planned and dreamed, labored and sacrificed that this institution, to which he had given his life, and from which he refused to be lured, might be forwarded in all noble advance and achieve- ment. Even in the illness and exhaustion of the summer 22 THE VERY ELECT of 1910 in England he busied himself with University papers and affairs. The result of this long devoted service was not lost. In a moment of more than generous appreciation one of his older colleagues in the Faculty said of him: "He not only made the University, he was the University/' recalling his own words about Abelard, "He was a whole university in himself." If the range of his mental life was comprehensive, equally so was his view and treatment of every subject to which he gave his attention, from education to rose-culture. His inaugural address in 1871 was an effective defense of the place of science just then claiming recognition beside the humanities in the college curriculum, and his last significant utterance upon the same subject was an equally strong appeal, before the New York Alumni, for the conservation of the classics, now in danger of being thrust out by the well-domi- ciled invader. The principle which he consistently applied to all the newer studies, including Agriculture and Domestic Science, which he so readily incorporated in the curriculum was this, as stated in his brief paper in The Vermont Cynic, entitled "Hospitality": "We have come to see that not the material of study but its method and its spirit is what fits or unfits it to be a scholarly pursuit." The true spirit he proceeded to define as humanistic, "that is, that the human in us, or some one of its many sides, may be brought out and made the most of. " Culture itself, which he so loved to praise and to promote, he consistently subjected to the same test. If not human it was not true, and he never failed to place character higher than culture and to honor most the life of the spirit, which he held to be of supreme worth. II. Already there has been indicated another character- istic quality, which gave value and tone to his comprehen- siveness, namely an equally rare and fine discrimination. If he had breadth, he had also discernment. If his mind was inclusive, it was also selective. "He had an innate aesthetic IDEALS AND AIMS 23 sense, which had been strengthened and intensified by his early studies of Greek art and character; and the fine per- ception of proportion and of the eternal fitness of things which he thus developed shaped his character, moulded his thought and formulated his speech." 1 If he presented, as was said of him, both sides of a question, he never failed also to draw with delicate but firm hand the lines of his own conviction and preference. Few men had a clearer or keener insight into real merit in men and things. The showy, the cheap, the second-rate, the incompetent in a book, a speech, a sermon, a picture, a building, he instantly detected and condemned? No, but set aside charitably yet resolutely. And the high and fine standard of excellence which he set himself he succeeded in arousing in others. He was constantly seeking to lead us all "to approve the things that are excellent." To raise the criteria of excellence, to dismiss inferiority and send it to the rear, to make men dissatisfied with anything but the best attainable, this was the effect, if not the con- scious object, of his own purpose and example. It is to this discriminating demand for the best that the admirable architecture of most of the buildings of the Univer- sity of Vermont is largely due. He coveted the very noblest buildings possible for the University. When the first designs for the new library building were submitted he called me into his study to show me one, which to my untrained eye, seemed imposing and perfect. But it did not satisfy him. Nothing satisfied him, or the munificent donor of the building, until they found the greatest living American architect and secured from him one of his very choicest plans. And while the building was in process of erection he watched it with eagle eye. One day as the masons were putting in the ornamental work on either side of the great arch he observed that it was of a dark granite, which was so conspicuous as to mar the perfect harmony and simplicity of the beautiful front. He i Editorial in the Burlington Free PreSs, December 1, 1910. 24 THE VERY ELECT at once took the liberty to have the work arrested until Mr. Richardson could be consulted, with the result that the stone was made uniform throughout. The incident, slight as it is, indicates the affectionate care with which he gave his mind and heart to the architectural enrichment of the Univer- sity. III. Yet this large comprehensiveness and this fine judg- ment would have been but inconsequential and barren, as like qualities have been in so many men, had they not been motived and vitalized by an untiring, indomitable, well- directed faith and courage. His commitment to his ideals was entire. His were no napkin talents. He made devoted use of all his powers. His life was marked by steady advance in self-discipline and self-culture, and yet it was under the spur of no selfish ambition but in order better to serve his generation. We find something of the secret of his own life reflected in these words of his: "The aim of Christianity, St. Paul says, is to present every man perfect in Christ Jesus, that is, to empower every man to make the most of himself. This position is rescued from all taint of selfishness by the consideration that every man under the Christian conception of character, can make the most of himself only by federating himself with others in the effort to make the most of them- selves and thus perfecting all men." This kind of self- development is most consonant with the modesty which so many have remarked in him and which he so highly prized in others, modesty, which he was accustomed to call "the distinguishing virtue of the school-master," playfully exclud- ing "one of our great predecessors, Socrates, who had humility but not modesty, and another, Aristotle, who had neither." If this modesty kept him, perhaps, from receiving the degree of recognition that he merited, it kept him also from the self-assertion which he so distrusted. On the whole his life is a refutation of the too current notion that in order to win success one must advertise himself. IDEALS AND AIMS 25 Happily, too, his serious devotement of his powers to high ends was not narrowed, as it sometimes is, by an overstrained earnestness. He always preferred the term seriousness to earnestness and his temperament was serious rather than strenuous. He had, as so many have remarked with pleasure, the saving grace of humor. It lit up as genially the life of the home as the table at which he was a guest, and coined itself in many a cherished phrase that has become current among those nearest to him. His humor, as is so often the case with brave spirits, was an expression of courage and good cheer. A courage like his is bound to be cheerful, although in face of obstacles sure to be met with it is often silent and pre- occupied. It was a humor sui generis, playful, quiet, gracious, never broad or harsh. He has himself well defined the nature of true humor in an article on "The Element of Danger in Humor" 1 in which occur these words: " Whenever or wherever humor so far belies itself as to bring with it the smallest scin- tilla of ill-will, nay more, when it forgets for a single moment its promise and obligation to promote universal good-will and unalloyed pleasure, it forfeits all claims to the privileges of humor." It is needless to say that he was an optimist. Optimism was creed as well as temper and practise with him "An honest optimism" it was, "true to things as they are and the God of things as they are." 2 With this optimism he entered upon his life-work and it was steadily maintained to the close, as was evidenced for example in all his baccalaureate sermons and addresses to the students upon all manner of things from "The Love of Difficulty" to "The Economic Situation." Few more discerning and hopeful words have been spoken concerning the tendencies toward luxury and the love of ease in this country which are so disturbing to every thoughtful American than these of his in a Fore- * Vermont Cynic. Sermon on Christian Optimism. 26 THE VERY ELECT fathers' Day address: "The truth is, I suppose, that we are just now in that perhaps inevitable condition of extravagance which lies between two simplicities. We have left behind the primitive simplicity of poverty and are advancing, we trust, toward that higher simplicity which is the last fruit of fine culture." May these words prove directive as well as prophetic! They are the words, as were all of his, of an idealist, but of an idealist whose feet stood on firm ground and whose judgment was as careful as it was hopeful. In the manuscript of a characteristic lecture on "Common Sense" these revealing sentences are found in the course of a sagacious analysis of the excellencies and limitations of this homely and often despised virtue: "Common sense is the necessary substratum for the richer soil out of which grow the finer flowers and fruits of human nature. Good sense logically precedes fine sense. Given a good solid foundation and well-buttressed walls, then your towers and pinnacles, your lofty aspirations and your airy idealisms are both safe and comely." After an eloquent tribute to the English race as the nation that has won most of the great achievements of idealism on the basis of sound common sense, he continues: "If we turn now from the present to the future and look at the work yet lying before the human race, at the great problems, political, social, artistic, industrial, yet to be solved, and ask what should be the characteristics of the men equal to these great demands, we shall find ourselves thinking of an ideal race, combining the conservative good sense which appropriates all the good man has wrought out hitherto and the progressive, restless, daring genius which conceives and executes greater things than any past dreamed of. That race, if constituted of any race-elements now existing, must in its physical make-up unite Teutonic phlegm with Celtic blood; in its intellectual characteristics add to British thoroughness Norman grace; in its moral fibre inter- twine Puritan fidelity with Cavalier enthusiasm. It must be IDEALS AND AIMS 27 a people capable of being inspired by history, and yet more capable of inspiration by ideas. What if it should prove to be the American race?" His courageous optimism, which not only saw visions but wrought them into reality, was rooted and nourished in religious faith. His religious life was as sane and simple as it was deep and vital. No one who heard him conduct family or chapel devotion, or pray in a prayer-meeting, or preach a baccalaureate sermon had the least doubt of that. God to him was the central fact of the universe. His existence did not rest on argument or demonstration but on personal experience. " Practically our knowledge of God is personal knowledge. The knowledge of a person is easier, more direct, more certain, than the knowledge of a proposition. I have not seen God nor touched him nor heard his voice. I never shall see him. The archangel who stands nearest him does not see him. A visible, tangible, audible God would be no God. The God we know is a Spirit and we know him as spirit knows spirit, by communion, by sympathy, by devotion. We know whom we have believed. " Religion was to my father not a gloomy, ascetic restraint, but a fountain of life, freedom, hope. " Christianity allies itself to the prospective, not the retrospective, stage of man's life. It forgets things behind and reaches forth to things before. No man that looketh back is fit for the kingdom of God. " l Nor is religion, as he regarded it, a matter of times and places and seasons, but of every-day life. In this con- ception of religion he was greatly strengthened by the position of one who was, perhaps more than any other, his ideal, Thomas Arnold of Rugby, to whom he so often referred and whom he called, "the most earnest and intrepid thinker upon great questions in modern times." In a lecture upon Dr. Arnold he refers with strong approbation to "the warmth and urgency with which Arnold insisted that religion i Sermon. ' ' Forgetting the Things Behind . " 28 THE VERY ELECT is not something which we can separate from the rest of life and do, or do up, at particular times and places, or do by proxy. It is the spirit in which we do everything." At a time before the freer and saner conception of religious life had become general my father was one of those who led the way quietly and unostentatiously into the newer order. His children will not forget how in their younger years he tried to make Sunday for them not a day of repression and gloom but the best day of the week. Every Sunday after dinner there was a rush to see what was " behind the lounge" in the study which he had brought to sweeten the afternoon for us; and when he came with his well-chosen book to read to us there were memorable hours of comradeship. He made The Pilgrim's Progress a beloved book to us, though we always begged him to skip when he came to the oft recurring words, "Then I saw in my dream that they entered into discourse." Breadth and grasp of mind, sound and discriminating judgment, active and courageous faith how vitally these qualities entered into all his aims and work as a man, as well as a teacher and administrator! They marked the opening of his administration and distinguished its crowning act in taking the necessary steps for the completion of the endow- ment fund. Although it was in his capacity as an adminis- trator that he was seen most by the public, especially in the later years of his life, it should not be forgotten that he con- tinued by choice a teacher to the very last. He was a teacher- president. Called from the sheepcote of a schoolmastership to be an educational leader and administrator, he kept the virtues and characteristics of that calling which, though lowly, he held in the highest esteem and honor. The joy and reward of true teaching is finely described in an address given by him, evidently while yet the glow of his profession was upon him, from which a brief extract may fittingly be taken: "The good teacher never loses the admiration of IDEALS AND AIMS 29 those who like him and those who dislike him. There is nothing more charming, there are few things in life more satisfying, than the upturned glances of pupils to the face of an admired teacher. They seem to hang on his lips as if every word were too precious to be lost. Common things said by him sound to them like oracles. There is no homage so flattering as this, no power so sweet to the possessor of it. The pedagogue's chair after all is the real throne; it rules not by force over reluctant subjects; it sways young minds and hearts capable of generous enthusiasm. This may seem to explain why the Samuel Taylors, the Tayler Lewises, keep on teaching to the end and die in the harness. The admiration of pupils, the frank and affectionate homage of the class-room, has become essential to their existence. The aroma of life is gone with that. If it is now asked how does the teacher manage to inspire this admiration, the >answer is that it is not by management at all. It comes largely from the admiration the teacher has for his pupils. There must be, in the good sense of the phrase, a mutual admiration. That man or woman has in him or her no capability for teaching who does not admire, with absorbing and boundless admiration, the wonderful being with whom they have to do. Men get enthusiastic by study of inanimate and immaterial objects rocks, plants, animals, stars; why should they not become so in a ktudy a thousand times more interesting and wonderful than any of them, the study of a human soul in the spring-time of its 'eternal year, a being that enfolds within itself infinite capabilities waiting for the warm breath of inspiration from another living soul to expand it into fairest bloom." At the memorial service in honor of his pupil and friend, Reverend Austin Hazen, after quoting the words of the Scotchman to his friends who were commiserating with him on his approaching end; "Na, Na, Death is a grand ordina- tion, " President Buckham said: "As the night brings out 30 THE VERY ELECT the stars, as but for the night we should never see the glory of God in the heavens, so death brings out to us, brings to our astonished and admiring gaze, virtues in our friend, graces, lovelinesses, of which before we had been but dimly, if at all conscious." So it has been with himself, as the warm and heartfelt tributes attest. Other words of his spoken in honor of his colleague and comrade for so many years, Professor Henry A. P. Torrey, are equally fitting if applied to himself: "I cannot say that he is 'dead', for one who has been for a whole generation a part of the life of an institution does not die out of it in an hour, or a year, or in many years. The wise and faithful and loving teachers who in the century of its history have made this institution what it has been and is are they 'no more'? have they 'passed away'? What we call death has but added one more to the number of those who live, and will ever live, in the memory and in the lives of the past and the present and the future sons and daughters of the University. " J. W. B. ADDRESSES AND LECTURES THE VERY ELECT AN ADDRESS OF WELCOME : SEPTEMBER, 1907 AN ENGLISH writer, unknown to fame, quoted for us by Quiller-Couch, sets before us a charming vision of the school- going children of the world : "All over the world," he says, "the children are trooping to school. The great Globe swings round out of the dark into the sun. There is always morning somewhere, and forever, in this shifting region of the morn- ing light, we may see the little ones afoot; in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely moorlands, on the hillsides, in the woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen; along the seacliffs, and on the wet ribbed sands; trespassing on the railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in ferry-boats; in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only as a strange tradition. The morning-side of the planet is alive with them: one hears their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents sweep eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon, and as new nations with their cities and vil- lages, their fields, woods, mountains, and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side; lo ! fresh troops and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops, of these small school-going children of the dawn." If one had the fine imagination of this English seer, one might follow these myriads of children as they fall away into smaller and smaller groups, to be numbered by thousands, by hundreds, by scores, till they dwindle to the comparatively few who finally reach the college or the university. For even in our day of unlimited collegiate opportunity, the number of youths resorting to institutions of higher learning is small compared with the number of young persons of what we may call collegiate age. And yet, few comparatively as they are, they, like the children described by our Poet, come from all imaginable localities, and origins, and conditions. The time 3 33 34 THE VERY ELECT is past, if it ever was, when the higher learning was the exclusive privilege of wealth and leisure. I say, if this ever was, because history records no time when the poor boy of genius has not worked his way from the farm, and the forge, and even from the slave's cabin, to high positions in science and art and litera- ture. One argument which always confronts, and sometimes estops, collegiate endowments, is that genius does not need them, and mediocrity does not requite them. But while in times past collegiate opportunity has always been possible though difficult, it is now as easy as it is safe to make it with- out cheapening learning and pauperizing the recipients of public and private bounty. But wealth certainly cannot be charged, in our day, with arrogating to itself the distinction which attends the higher education. The sons and daughters of the rich are not found in great numbers in our colleges and universities excluded, perhaps, by a kind of providential fair play which forbids the too great accumulation of benefits upon any one group of society. But if wealth does not, what does, determine who shall have the high privilege and the choice distinction of a university career? Out of these millions of children whom the poet sees in the morning light wending their way to school, who, or what, makes selection of that fractional number of them who, in their eighteenth year, or thereabouts, on some morning in September, or October, cross the threshold of some college or university as enrolled members of it? When we look into this question carefully, we find going on a process, more or less automatic, selective, intelligent, not unerring but in the main effective, for bringing, in the interest of society in general, out of the mass of capable young men and women, those who are to receive, and to use for the good of all, the potencies which are conferred by a liberal education. Not to attempt to follow up the vision of our poet and see this influence working itself out in the wide world, let us watch its operation in that part of the world in which we are most ADDRESS OF WELCOME 35 concerned, and which we know best. If college students are in respect to the privileges conferred by education, "The Very Elect," let us ask on what principle of election their presence at the opening of their college career can be accounted for. The question of their perseverance we will reserve for another occasion. For the present, let us ask, Where, in our own country, do students come from to college? Why do they come to college? What are they doing in college? It becomes necessary at this point, though not by any means a pleasant duty, to clear the ground by a process like what in algebra we call "elimination" getting rid of negli- gible quantities. There is always in college a certain small number of students whom in lieu of a harsher name we will call "the Unaccountables " those who assume the role of matriculants for no good and sufficient reasons for no better reason, perhaps, than to escape hard work elsewhere, or to have "a jolly good time," or to play ball, or to get into a fraternity, or because their parents did not know what else to do with them. These are not proper college material. They have for the time being missed their way in life. The pertinent question about them is the question of the French comedy: Que diable allaitent Us faire dans cette galeref But the strange thing, the pathetic thing, in some of these cases, is that these young fellows will let their parents sacri- fice for them; they will bear hardships themselves, do irksome chores, and live on scanty fare; they will suffer the humiliation of going into debt to tradespeople and to the poor women who do their washing and mend their stockings; they will accept gratuities meant for the encouragement of honest effort; they will be the shirks and butts and spoons of their classes, the plague of their instructors, the suppliant waiters on the indulgence of committees, and all for what? for a chance to avoid work laboriously, to escape knowledge cun- ningly, to elude opportunity successfully for nothing gained that in after life will give them any help or satisfaction. To 36 THE VERY ELECT these, and such as these, the message of the university a not unkind message would that it could reach them in time to prevent mistake and waste is, "if you have not a great longing for what the university has to give, and are not willing to pay the heavy price in faithful work by which alone it can be secured, don't come; if you have come, and have found that you have made a mistake; if you have no heart in your work, no joy in doing it; if it is all mere drudgery, to be loathed, and shirked and shammed, then with our good-will and blessing, go where talents and merits of the non-collegiate order for such there are, and we do not doubt you have them will find more satisfying employment and more congenial compan- ionship." Turning our thoughts now to the real members of the uni- versity body to those who have put not merely their names upon its books but their hearts into its life we find that a large number of them, up to recent times the largest number, have come from what has been called "The Academic Caste" in American society, and have become college students mainly because they have inherited the traditions of this caste. By this expression is meant that group of society which main- tains intellectual standards of thinking and living. This element has always been relatively large in our country, especially in New England. The early settlers were of a con- spicuously intellectual, and we may say, academic strain. During the first century of New England history the proportion of Oxford and Cambridge graduates was much larger here than in the Mother Country, and this preponderance of highly trained men in the primitive stock has given character to our whole subsequent social life. Leaving out whatever may be invidious and un-American in the term, "The Academic Caste," we may use it to describe the temper and attitude of what has been till recently the leading class in our society, the sturdy men and capable women who do the plain work of the world with superior intelligence; who read good liter- ADDRESS OF WELCOME 37 ature; who take a patriotic interest in public affairs; who require and relish intellectual preaching; whose conversation glides easily into themes of history and philosophy and theol- ogy; the class which has maintained academies and high schools, and founded universities and colleges. This class has its representatives in almost all the localities and habitats indicated by our poet of the schools as many in the country as in the city, on the farms as in the urban homes. In all these homes, the avocations, the relaxations, the embellishments, of life, are, as in all best homes, social, intellectual, religious. Amid manifold hardships, much straitness, res angustce, high ideals of living are maintained. If one of the boys must stay at home and keep up the homestead farm; if one may seek a larger fortune in the West; one at least must go to college and keep unbroken the tie which connects the family with the higher life of the intellect and the spirit. Down to the time of the Civil War, these families largely supplied the colleges with their students. From the parsonages, the better farms, the families of village tradesmen, artisans, lawyers, and doctors, the boys found their way, and were helped by the minister, the schoolmaster and the country squire to find their way, to the colleges. In the old Webster's Spelling Book, in which all alike were schooled, the Temple of Knowledge on the first page was always inviting ingenuous youths to come up to the heights on which it stood, and a goodly number of them were continuously answering to the call. The pur- poses for which students came to college were not always perhaps not often definitely fixed in their minds. A certain few distinctly proposed the ministry, but the majority came to get a liberal education and what it might lead to. They all took the classical course, for there was no other. It would be more correct to say that the college course was what it was, because what was wanted of it was a liberal in distinction from a professional or technical education. In describing the "Academic Caste," and the relations of 38 THE VERY ELECT its constituency to the college, I have half-consciously glided into the past tense, as though it were obsolete, or obsolescent. But I believe that it still survives, though not, I fear, with the same relative vigor and influence. I speak regretfully of its possible decadence, because it, more than any other agency which is visible, is our reliance for conserving, amid an en- croaching materialism, the spirituality which has thus far characterized our New England Civilization. But if the signs do not mislead us, we are permitted to hope, not only for its survival, but for that reassertion of its old-time primacy which will make it the efficient ally we are all looking for in the task of revivifying the humanistic side of university disci- pline. I see another troop of youths headed toward the university under a motive which is vague to some of them, but quite definite to others, a yearning for an enlargement of life. Some in the formative stage of life are content to stay where they were born. To venture beyond their native habitat would be irksome to them. The "cool, sequestered vale of life" is to them the ideal home: outside of it is to them only "the madding crowd." Our feeling toward them is one partly of envy for they escape many of the trials and sorrows of the larger life one wholly of approval, for the world needs them and could not do without them just where they are. But in the breasts of others there is a stirring of unrest, a beating against the bars, a sense of suffocation a feeling which if expressed in words would say: "I know all there is in this way of life. It is a good life for those who love it and it is a lovable life. It affords opportunities for honest and faithful work, for pleasant friendships and loves, for small but useful services in neighborhood, and town, and church. It will be a good life to come back to, sometime. But its radius is small its horizon is near and there is not enough of it to satisfy." This feeling was rather bluntly expressed by an old-time Vermonter, who, driving with a friend through ADDRESS OF WELCOME 39 one of the beautiful scenes of the Lamoille Valley, exclaimed, "How lovely all this is, and how glad I am that I am out of it!" Acting under this impulse some move to new lands, some resort to the city, and some go to college. In former times the old county academy, in our day the high school, is a perpetual persuader to this last choice. I am inclined to think that this motive is a more vital one than that which works in the Academic Caste. It is both a vis a tergo and a vis ab ante. It impels by a feeling of unrest: it draws by a sense of mystery. The legends of the university, wafted in tradition and song to the boy in the remote valley, whisper to him of a possibility made glorious with hope. Many a man in after life will say to himself: "The gladdest day I have ever known in my life was the day on which I saw myself a member of college, for on that day I saw a new life opening before me, and though I knew little of what the intellectual life means, I had a boundless faith in its capabilities, and I believed that it had in store for me that which would repay me a thousand fold for the sacrifice made by me and for me in order that I might avail myself of its benefits." This impulse to break one's way into a fuller life is in every way commendable, if only it is well-founded that is, if it has a basis of ability, and endurance, and integrity. It will not always realize its dream. Ability may have been over- estimated : endurance may give out before the crucial strain is passed: worst of all, integrity may yield to the pressure of temptation. Some will come back to the farm, the shop, the small economies of the village, happier, perhaps, and saner, for their short experience of the larger world perhaps un- happier because they have learned to look with envy and bitterness on those who have left them behind. But on the whole these failures are surprisingly few. I give it as the testi- mony of one who has watched for a long time the working out of the scholarly motive in young lives, that the proportion of those who get creditably through college, or even through 40 THE VERY ELECT two or three years of college, and then fail of success as meas- ured by any reasonable standard, is very small, so small as to create the presumption that a young man of fair ability and good staying power may be sure of realizing a good part of what his young dream of a career in and after college prom- ised to him. Included within this general aspiration for ah enlarged life, is one form of it which specially touches the sex to whom the opportunities of a liberal education have come late, but who seem to be as eager to share its benefits as the other sex I mean the social opportunities which such an education offers. If Matthew Arnold is right in saying that conduct is three- fourths of life, we may add that fully half of conduct is social conduct that a large part of life's enjoyment is social enjoy- ment, and a large part of the deprivations most keenly felt are social deprivations. When Mr. Titmouse gazes enviously on the high-bloods disporting themselves at Hyde Park Corner on a Sunday afternoon and " curses the whole concern ;" when Browning shows us a woman who would sacrifice her dearest friend for an invitation to the Court Ball one night; this represents only the extreme and the perversion of that social sensitiveness and social pride which is human and uni- versal. The good and right side of this feeling is the desire for social recognition and fellowship among cultivated, re- fined, well-mannered people among those who care for the higher things in life, and who know how to use both the solid principles and the graceful amenities of life so as to get some of its sweetness and charm. To this social sphere the higher education gives the entree, not merely for its own sake, but by reason of other qualifications with which it is naturally as- sociated; and the appreciation of this fact brings, and with good reason, many of both sexes, and of one sex in particular, to college. Here we must pause for a moment to ask how much consid- eration ought to be given to a charge often brought against ADDRESS OF WELCOME 41 this aspect of the higher education, to the effect that it entices youths away from the great fundamental callings where they are most needed. The complaint comes most often and most loudly from those who assume to speak for the interests of agriculture. To educate boys and girls " away from the farm," they tell us, is to withdraw support from that interest which is the basis of all prosperity. To this we make two replies. First, that one main and indispensable office of the farm is, to breed men for the other professions for the highest and most im- portant places in them and that it is the duty of the college to seek them out hi the farm and educate them away from the farm if we must use the expression into the offices which need them and would suffer, and all society with them, if they are not forthcoming. And secondly, instead of withholding the higher education from the sons of the farm for fear of losing them, as this logic requires us to do, we will so educate the farm, so educate farm life, so liberalize and intellectualize it, that it will have a fair and equal chance, in competition with other professions, to attract and retain within its ranks bright boys and progressive men. There remains a class, an increasing class in our times, whom I shall call, in order to have a short name for them, "The Zeitgeisters," young men who are the products and exemplars of the age, in whose pulses beats the spirit of the times, whose sympathies are not with the past but with the present and the future. These young men act in accordance with a wisdom of which they may or may not be altogether conscious, in coming to a university for what is not in itself a proper uni- versity function, but rather that of a technical school. But with or without knowing it they come to the university to be not merely apprenticed but educated, to come under the in- fluence of ideas, to be sobered into reflection, and steadied to continuity of purpose and meanwhile, though not with the finality they may imagine, to get the scientific and tech- nical equipment which will fit them for immediate efficiency 42 THE VERY ELECT in a chosen calling. In times quite near the present, these young men have been told they are even now sometimes told by some belated adviser that a college career is for them a mistake, that experience with the rod and chain, or in the works, is better than books and laboratories. But the large managers and promoters are silencing this talk by ignoring it and calling for college-bred men, calling for them indeed in numbers far beyond what the colleges can supply. These students have one advantage over others in that they have a pressing inducement to do their very best in order to be able to meet the sharp competition which faces them at the very outset of their professional career and all through it. They have one disadvantage the narrow, and, unless they are on their guard, the narrowing views of collegiate training and of post-collegiate mental furnishing, which technical specialism naturally induces. On their side these students contribute to the general life of the university a strenuous and realistic enterprise, showing itself in a willingness to work more hours a week than other students, and on the other hand they get, if they know their opportunity, through participation in the humanistic spirit which is dominant in every true university, some degree of breadth and culture, which differentiates them from mere technical experts. These are the men who in the future will be the masters of manufacturing, transportation, commerce and finance; the great producers, managers, and inventors in agriculture; our foreign consuls, presidents of boards of trade and of insurance companies; organizers of the coming industrial unions based on the principle of co-opera- tive good-will; our leaders in a prosperity which will not be subject to the caprices of party leaders and the intrigues of demagogues. These are the men all of whom will have the due appreciation of benefits received, and some of whom will, we trust, have the business profits, untainted by envy and un- harmed by either mob or government spoliation, out of which will come benefactions to the institutions which, though poor, have made them and many rich. ADDRESS OF WELCOME 43 And so, like the writer quoted at the outset, who saw in vision the world's children flocking to school in the morning light, we may see, on this mid-autumn morning, the elect from this vast number, few and yet numbered by many thou- sands, from city and country; from hamlet and farm; from hill- side and river-side and sea-side; from homes of luxury and culture, from homes of homely thrift and intelligence and piety; young men and maidens representing the various classes of our great pupilary constituency, trooping to the four hun- dred or five hundred institutions of higher learning in our land. They will all be welcomed, as we welcome you and each other here today, without prejudice as to the environment from which they have come, or the objects they have in view, pro- vided only that they have had the antecedents and bring the qualifications, intellectual and personal, which make them fit to be members of a Very Elect Community. As I have had occasion to say many times before, the college men and women of our country come nearest to being an aristocracy of any we have, or are likely ever to have. They have the self-re- spect, the consciousness of privilege, and the sense of obligation, which are the marks of a true aristocracy. At the same time a college community is democratic to the last degree. Short shrift would be the fate of any member of it who should set up a claim to superiority on the strength of his money, or his family connection, or any other non-personal distinction. One thing the college is providentially called to do, is to show to the world that the Very Elect are the most democratic of all. Leadership there will be, and must be, but it will be the leadership of personal qualities, of intellectual gifts, of moral force, of persuasive personality, of contagious good-fellow- ship of those qualities which everywhere and of right gain mastery over men. Happy, as Virgil said of husbandmen, may we say of a college family like ours, happy if we but know our happiness! Let us all endeavor to know it, and to help each other to realize it to the utmost! COLLEGE IDEALS IN PRACTICAL LIFE ADDKESS AT VASSAR COLLEGE ON FOUNDER'S DAY, 1891 I SUPPOSE that never before or after do any of us have quite so pure and lofty a purpose in life as we have just as we come to the close of a college career, just when the college has done its perfect work in us, and before the world has had time to take off its bloom. I do not refer merely to those pensive musings, half-pleasing, half-melancholy, made up of regrets for youthful follies, high hopes and good resolutions for the future, and perhaps love's young dream, not to these merely, though they are no bad signs for the future; but rather to the young graduates' philosophy of life, their estimate of men and things, their aims and ambitions. A cynic may find in all this only matter for a smile at youthful conceit. But in this retrospect and this outlook and in the thoughts and purposes then and there prompted in the young mind and heart, a kindly observer will see much which he would wish they might carry with them into all their future. I say into all their future not merely for a few months while school- girl friendships last not merely for a few years " by the vision splendid, on their way attended," like Wordsworth's growing boy, until "it fade into the light of common day"; but that having once had the college vision of life, they should never lose it, never be wholly disillusioned, never grow callous to the old impressions, but carry into the hard work and the dull routine of life, such memories and hopes, such ideas and aspirations, that by means of them, they shall be always different and always better. And here I pause to say that in my judgment the best ser- vice a college can render to a young man and a young woman is to give them this true and lofty, and if you please, this 44 COLLEGE IDEALS IN PRACTICAL LIFE 45 romantic conception of the meaning and possibilities of life, and this high and noble purpose for their share in it, and that this one object should dominate all the plans and methods of collegiate education. A young man does not go to college to learn ways and means. A young woman does not go to college to learn accomplishments. Let us frankly say it this outfit for life which ends in savoir faire for one sex and savoir vivre for the other, can be got better elsewhere than in college. Not for this are colleges endowed, and teachers salaried, and pupils welcomed and tended and prayed over, not for this, not for any mere mercenary or professional or social successes; but just for this baccalaureate dream, this high and globing purpose to make one's own life, and all other lives, so far as possible, true, noble, heroic. And how shall collegiate edu- cation aim to accomplish this? By putting young minds and hearts, in their receptive and formative years, under the influ- ence of the best minds and the noblest characters the race has produced, its great reasoners, its great poets and artists, its great jurists and statesmen, its great heroes and heroines. They shall learn Greek, not finally that they may be able to trace the optative mood through all its subtle distinctions, but that they may get their minds into sympathetic communion with Homer and Sophocles and Plato. They shall study chemistry on the one hand and astronomy on the other, that they may appreciate the great constructive thoughts which God has put into the atom and into the universe. If one goes through college and brings from it into life only a certain amount of language and physical science and mathematics, and no great principles to enlarge and ennoble and sweeten life, better would it have been to remain under the tutelage of home, and useful occupation, and social reciprocities, which never fail to teach some human lessons of responsibility and service and charity. Now may one whose own undergraduate days are receding into the far distance, one who graduating every year in college 46 THE VERY ELECT has never graduated from college, may a man who, I suppose, never sees the ideal as clearly or surrenders to it as heartily as a woman may I try to interpret the thoughts which make up your own ideal of life, and by giving perhaps a little needed severity to its outline and a little sobriety to its tone, help you to make it realizable, even help you to make it real? I. If I were to ask you what kind of life is most distasteful and repulsive to you, and what most of all things you are resolved to avoid, you would all agree in saying, a life that is commonplace, humdrum, paltry; or if you had happened to read Matthew Arnold, you would sum up all your antipathies in the word "philistine." Not, I trust, that you despise the lowly duties of life, "the trivial round, the common task," with which every life is more or less taken up, but that you protest against a life that is always on this dead level, that never ascends into the upper air to get elevation, prospect, and inspiration, to put into the daily round. With your eager eyes you look over the life of ordinary men and women, and you see what a strong tendency there is in everything to gravitate to the commonplace. You see how most things are measured by the standard of a low common sense, and how the higher things which can be appreciated only by the uncommon sense, the instructed and philosophic sense, are neglected: how the fine arts any finer arts than cookery and upholstering have to struggle for an existence; how the highest poetry, Tennyson's and Browning's, is both praised and laughed at more than read; how religion itself, parent and nurse of all ideals, is put into rigid scholastic moulds, and robbed of all vitality and grace. You see that while there are ten whose notion of life is to be snug and comfortable, to be in a eupeptic and adipose-forming condition, not in body only but in intellect and heart, there is but one who cares for higher things and is willing to toil and suffer for them, and that that one in the ten, the prophet whose voice cries in the wilderness, the poet who lives in the attic and communes with the stars, COLLEGE IDEALS IN PRACTICAL LIFE 47 the one woman in the country church who sympathizes with St. Paul's wish to have things done decently and in order, that these few persons are really doing the whole work of keeping life from dropping down to a condition in which it would not be worth living. And it is with no mere selfish and aesthetic dilettantism that the college youth looks with disgust on this style of life. It is rather with a kind of holy rage that life should be robbed of its possible dignity and glory by the prevalence of low conceptions of its possibilities. For in truth life is full of questions to which the ready answer of commonplace minds is false and traitorous. I do not deny the competency of the average mind to deal with the ordinary experiences of life, but human life is divine as well as human. It has heights to which the wayfaring man on his two feet and with his staff cannot climb. It has depths which the plummet of common-sense cannot fathom. There are high themes which are within the range of minds that are gifted but are without training the poetry of Homer and Burns and the Bible, the art of the Sistine Madonna and the Angelus. But there are themes, and truths, and actions, which can be apprehended only by minds that have both gifts and training: the logic of Paul and the legal reasoning of Webster, the poetry of the Divina Commedia and of In Memoriam, the art of Michael Angelo. And unless the world is well supplied with minds both gifted and trained, the great profound questions of life will get shallow and false answers, and human life will shrivel into paltry and mean dimensions. What would have been the fate of mankind if when the great questions emerged as they have done from time to time all through the world's history the great-minded, far-seeing men had not come forward to solve them, the great organ- izers and statesmen, the Fathers of the church, the epoch- making men in industry and science and philosophy? What will befall us if the great, pressing questions of our day, social, economic, religious, are left to be settled by the average 48 THE VERY ELECT superficial thinkers and writers of the day? to be settled, that is, by rhetoric, sophistry, specious fallacies, by those arts of the demagogue which so easily lead the multitude astray? When it is said, and truly said, that the heart of the great body of the people is right, and that it is the part of wisdom to trust and accept their verdict, this also should be added, that the wisdom of the people consists in their choosing and fol- lowing the right leader, and that only as the superior minds instruct them patiently and earnestly in a wisdom which is above their own, are they capable of appreciating and choosing the right leadership. Now the college ideal of life gives large place and great power to the gifted and trained men and women and the higher sense which they bring to bear on the great questions of life. It would not have human life dominated by the philosophy of the average man. It says to that philosophy, There are more things in heaven and earth than you have dreamed of. It refuses to make its final stand upon the multiplication table and the column of statistics. It appeals from these low terres- trial things to considerations of celestial parallax, and right ascension, and the asymptotes. It is fond of paradox, because paradox is the antithesis to commonplace. If it has a weak- ness it is a passion for what is large, grandiose, cosmical. It does not always distinguish what is original from what is merely bizarre, what is nobly free from what is absurdly capricious. But in all its aspirations and in all its vagaries, it is in search of the true, the ideal, the heroic in human life. And for this, this inestimable, this unique service to mankind and to its earthly and its heavenly life, let us thank God and the colleges in which through his spirit these great thoughts are begotten and fostered. II. Again, the college view of life is optimistic. In its bright vocabulary there is no such word as fail. Like Charity in St. Paul's poem, it hopeth all things. Experience sees too many obstacles in the path, too many for its deficient sense COLLEGE IDEALS IN PRACTICAL LIFE 49 of overcoming power. Youthful idealism has such a bounding consciousness of vitality that it makes light of everything in its pathway. Since college pranks have taken on a more serious character, I wonder why students do not make an auto da fe of Schopenhauer. He is the very heresiarch of pessimism, the college diabolus, the accuser of the brethren, and of the whole sorosis. And on the other hand they should canonize Darwin. He is the saint of optimism. Evolution, be it true or false, is the most generous theory of life ever conceived. I cannot think of its origin save under Christian influences. It upholds the law, the eternal fact I see not why we may not say the divine, the evangelic fact that all things necessarily move forward to something better, all things, all beings, all conditions, all life; that no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself; but through all God is providing better and better things that by and by all may be perfect. Beautiful dreams, some one may say, but destined to a rude awakening when the youthful soul confronts the hard and awful facts of life. Why not dispel these school-day visions betimes? Why not train the character for contact with the actual life of wicked men and women? Why not inure these lily hands to weigh realities, and familiarize these virgin minds with the sin and corruption which make the world the pandemonium it is? For two good and sufficient reasons among many: first, because the knowledge of evil is depressing, while the knowledge of good is stimulating. "I would have you," St. Paul said to the young converts at Rome, "wise unto that which is good, but simple concerning evil." And so we may say, I would have college students as knowing as they can be made in all the good things of life and history, in the noble and beautiful deeds of men and women, their loves, joys, achievements, darings, sacrifices, heroisms, but very sparingly read in the tragic events of life, its sins, miseries, agonies, calamities. One of the most painful spectacles in life is a young man or 50 THE VERY ELECT young woman prematurely sobered, wise with that sad wisdom which comes from a too early familiarity with evil. And the other reason, akin to this, is that only during the period of illusions, or those transcendental realities which old age calls illusions, do human beings accomplish anything great. All the really great work of the world has been done under the inspiration of these illusions. By the force of an illusion which would not let him sleep but sent him restless and im- portunate to all the courts in Europe, Columbus discovered America. Nothing more than illusions and impossibilities and pronounced such by high scientific authority were ocean steamships and ocean telegraphy, till they became facts. Livingston and Gordon and Stanley were led on their perilous and beneficent ways by will o' the wisps. The grandest of all illusions is Christianity itself, and that astounding opti- mism of its founder which proclaimed that a dying Jew on a hill in Syria would draw all men to himself. And the reason why. an ideal optimism is practical is the fact that it has vital- ity in it, true soul vitality. Conventional propriety, timid accuracy, dead orthodoxy never move anything. "Do you not see," says one in the Inferno, "that that one moves what he touches? So do not the feet of the dead." If the self- confident enthusiasm of youth is sometimes headed wrong, that matters not; the thing that moves has power to correct aberrations. It is the dull clumsy thing that has no motive force that drifts into disaster. Give us young men and women who having seen more of the good than of the evil in the world; who, having more acquaintance and sympathy with the achievements of men than with their errors and follies, have faith in God and men and the future; who enter life with their brows lighted up with hope; who when the true and right are beset with difficulties which to the matter-of-fact minds seem insuperable, will say with the splendid audacity of the French Calonne, "if it is possible, it is already done; if it is impossible, it shall be done." For there are right before us COLLEGE IDEALS IN PRACTICAL LIFE 51 now, and there will be before every coming generation, things which are impossible, and which yet must be done, and will be done; and they will be done, and can be done only by those who, whether they themselves come out of college or not, do really bring college ideals, college optimism into practical life. And here permit me to interpose a word of protest against an influence, which, I fear, is intruding itself more and more into our modern thought, our literature, our journalism, our current speech an influence which began with Cervantes, which culminated in Voltaire, and which has reached its most degraded form in what is now known as realism, that spirit, I mean, which opposes itself to the ideal, which attacks all fine sentiments with caricature and mockery and ridicule, and takes for its standard the actual and the natural, meaning by that the lower hemisphere of human life, in which the common passions, the undisciplined sentiments, the horizontal and gravitating forces of human nature, have full play. If any are surprised that I charge Cervantes with leading this move- ment, let me ask what it is that he makes ridiculous in the knight of the sorrowful countenance, if it is not the very qual- ities which make knighthood admirable, and which he could make ridiculous only by associating them with a disordered intellect? Give Don Quixote a dose of hellebore and clear his brain and he becomes one of the most high-minded gentle- men in literature. I am not deeply read in modern fiction, but I have a suspicion that it is more or less Cervantesque, Voltairean, Gil-Blase. I fear that one of the chief dangers of youth is the danger of having their enthusiasms ridiculed and mocked out of them by the cynics of modern literature. How fresh and sane and true to men's best instincts is Greek literature in this respect, Homer and the Tragedians, and Pindar and Plato ! I have a deep conviction that in our mod- ern life, the refuge of a sound and cheerful faith in human nature, and the citadel when the defence against its pessi- 52 THE VERY ELECT mistic and Mephistophelian enemies must be maintained, are our colleges. But in order to keep them so, we must exercise unceasing vigilance to keep Schopenhauers out of our chairs of philosophy, and to have the humanities and the moralities taught by men and women who have faith and hope and charity. III. And the students' view of life includes also service. I think you can hardly affront the young students' prophecy of themselves more deeply than by implying that they will have no part in the world's work, and no share in the triumph to be achieved. Their idealism is no selfish, personal culture. Their optimism is no dolce far niente self-contentment. The true idealism, the true optimism have in them propulsive power. Just as the artist's idea haunts him by day and by night till he realize it in some concrete production, so the young enthusiast is impatient to put his or her dream of life into some tangible shape, some beneficent service, some insti- tution, some home, some humanity. A confirmation of this view which will at once occur to every one is the prominent part taken by college students and young graduates in all the reforms of the day. Just as a casual dog-fight in the streets of a city will bring instantly out of their holes and kennels a crowd of the lowest class, just as an accident will draw around its victim a crowd of kind-hearted men and women, so surely does the emergence of a great moral, social or religious ques- tion draw into its activity a crowd of college students. The most determined class which brute absolutism has had to deal with in Paris, or Germany, or Russia, is the class of uni- versity students. The most hopeful movement of our times in behalf of the degraded masses is the University movement in East London, a movement which is reproducing itself in all the great cities of Christendom. The most significant religious event of our day is the missionary uprising in our colleges in behalf of the evangelization of the world. Even men who are not to the manner born, but who study the COLLEGE IDEALS IN PRACTICAL LIFE 53 leadings of the times men like Mr. Moody have come to see that the way to get control of the forces that control society is to found colleges and mobilize the college spirit. What a mighty power of young life, and high purpose, and potential daring and sacrifice, is lodged in the hundreds of college communities in the United States ! I was present at a patri- otic meeting last fourth of July to which the representatives of some thirty or forty colleges in succession contributed each their college yell. I thought I heard in all this vocal tumult the promise and the potency of illimitable valor, as though it had been the multitudinous response of young hearts to the question, Quis pro Domino? Who is on the Lord's side? And how it cheers those who are planning the campaigns of the Lord, and heartens those who are already in the field, to think what power there is in these multitudes of youth out of which future levies are coming! And so when the fight is going hard, and the veterans drop off one by one, and we begin to flag and^waver, then it is good to hear coming on the air the slogan of Harvard and Yale, the sweet marching songs of Vassar and Wellesley, and to know that those that are for us are more than those that be against us. Blessings on your young hearts! You little know how your eager eyes and glowing cheeks and firm steps, as you come year by year from college halls into the ranks of toiling men and women, bring light and hope and energy into the long tedious strife! You bring to us heroism out of Plutarch, scorn of ease from the Odyssey, patriotism from Thucydides and Livy, high ambition from Cicero. From the great philosophies you bring lofty ideas of man's capabilities; from the history of the progress man has made in the past you bring most glowing prog- nostication of the progress he may make in the future. We must not insist too literally on the ancient maxim, "The old for counsel, the young for war." The counsel of age is too timid, too anxious, too mindful of difficulties, for a time of great opportunities like ours. We live in a 54 THE VERY ELECT time when the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force. That a movement in the interest of good morals or religion, is bold even to rashness, is something unprecedented, something bordering on the quixotic, is nothing against it, is rather a testimony to its splendid courage. When the gates of a hundred colleges are opened every summer and there pour through them into the world of action thousands of brave young hearts panting for activity in the world's work, we may well expect to see thrust upon public attention and pushed forward into practical experiment, enterprises which the fathers never dreamed of, which the wisest prophets and kings never foresaw, but which will prove to be the beneficent agencies of the future for the world's redemption. It may be that at this point, I have exposed myself and you to a criticism which I must hasten to disarm, the criticism, namely, that this collegiate standard of thought and life is the standard for a select few, that it is, to use an expressive popular epithet, " sniffy," that like some theological systems, it includes only you and me and a few of our friends. I hasten to say, and insist, that the collegiate conception of life is democratic. I need not remind you that of all human as- semblies the public school and the college are the most demo- cratic, that in no other place does a youth so inevitably find his or her true level. There are certain small city institutions in which distinctions of caste are rigidly maintained, but it is at the expense of all real mental and moral vitality and growth. In the great English Universities, where social distinctions have been formally recognized, the natural tendency of talent and mind to win the great prizes of university life has always counteracted and, practically nullified the false claims of gen- tility. In the collegiate world, even more than in the social or the political world, students get the rank they deserve. Hence as a result, partly of their experience, partly of their historic and philosophic studies, their philosophy of life is COLLEGE IDEALS IN PRACTICAL LIFE 55 generous and comprehensive, not selfish and exclusive. All large, hopeful schemes of reconstructing human society, the Pantisocracy of Southey and Coleridge, the millennial dreams of Owen and Fourier and Bellamy, are apt to have a fascina- tion for them. I never heard of a college in which Machia- vellism was taught, and could not conceive of such an attempt being made without a rebellion of the whole body of students. Even the maxims of a gracious and paternal government commended to the French Dauphin by all the genius and art of Fenelon never could have been taught to a body of students as practical principles of government. Our boys and girls will endure Telemaque as an easy French exercise, but in a political science class Telemaque would soon get put out of window, and perhaps the professor with him. I speak from long experience when I say that nothing will satisfy the stu- dent's conviction and feeling of what is due to humanity in its social and political relations short of the largest possible distribution of powers and privileges among the people. If a college should, as an exercise in political science, resolve itself into a constitutional convention, the constitution which they would construct for a state or nation would be the most liberal, the most democratic, ever put forth by any body of men. And this gives us the closing thought of my theme, that the highest ideas, the noblest ideals, are practicable, if only what Ruskin calls a majestic judgment be put into the task of mak- ing them real. There is a total change of realm between the noun "vision" and the adjective "visionary." If one has seen a vision in the true divine light, that which he has seen is not visionary. To say that a scheme is Utopian is not to say that it is too good to be a fact, but that it is not good enough not true to all the conditions of the case. We do not want Utopia here in this coming twentieth century, we want something vastly better. College ideals are none too good for human nature; or let me put it thus, that human nature is not unworthy of college ideals. Who would have 56 THE VERY ELECT thought that the briar of the heath could produce the Jac- queminot rose? The capabilities of human nature are infinite, provided infinite pains be taken to develop its capabilities. If the mission of the college-bred man or woman is to get the higher things of life appreciated, the first requisite for this task is to have faith in human nature, in its capacity of dis- cernment, of sympathy, of inspiration. Believe me, there is no great principle fitted to enter beneficently into the life of mankind that cannot be appreciated if it be patiently and lovingly urged upon the common mind and heart. Do not let education make you conceited and cynical. Let it rather impress upon you the boundless teachableness of mankind, and the duty and joy of imparting the good thoughts that have come to you. Freely ye have received; freely give. ART Is ART a mere pastime, an elegant and refined amusement, or has it a nobler office? Has it any such claim upon us that it can come to us and say, "You ought to give me a place among the things you prize and strive for?" Is human life complete without art, or if not poetically complete, is it in any important sense marred and defrauded, without art? Does a man lose anything essential to his manhood, if he leave art entirely out of his education and experience? Or, to make the question directly and intensely practical, If a man wishes to make the most of himself in a noble, Christian way, will he bestow any time and thought on the Fine Arts? These are some of the interesting questions about art which many would like to have answered. Another is this. Sup- posing it proved that art has an important office in every true life, is it within the reach of every life? Can those who will never see a genuine Old Master, or a piece of antique sculpture, or a Gothic cathedral, as long as they live, get any of the influence of art into their lives? or is art something for the few, for those who have leisure and abundance, while the many must not only lack the culture which art brings, but may not even know what it is that they lack? You will easily see why I ask these questions. Into the midst of our practical matter-of-fact New England Puritan communities art has come late, in very modest guise, and yet with a certain air which bespeaks high pretensions. She claims from us money, time, thought, admiration, and even a kind of worship. If truth were spoken, many among us hardly know what to think of her. She seems to look with a sort of stately disdain over the things we are busied with into some far-off scene whose light is reflected back into 57 58 THE VERY ELECT her face and from hers into ours as we gaze upon her, until, in this new and strange light, things which had always seemed great become paltry, and things we never saw before suddenly appear to us among the great things of life. But having been taught to look upon all fancies as idle, and all idleness as not only sin but loss, we are inclined to shake off the spell from us, and turn back to the practical work of life, doubting, at least, whether we can afford to give this newcomer a place in our minds and hearts. It is natural for the races that inhabit the luxuriant South and the gorgeous East to indulge their lively and festive imaginations with the beautiful sights and sounds which art can create: it is well enough for those who have abundant means of culture and opportunities for travel, to assimilate to themselves so far as is possible, these elegant tastes and enjoyments of the artistic races: but has not Providence in its distribution of good things, while bestowing on others the graces, assigned to us the homelier and grander virtues of life, the coarse rather than the fine arts, the arts by which nature is subdued, comforts are multiplied and cheapened, political freedom, social order, moral and religious well-being secured for ourselves and for all mankind? I have stated as well as I can the doubts and questionings concerning art which thrust themselves on a people to whom art is not native and reflection is; and I shall now try to answer them. I shall present some reasons for thinking that art is not an accident of special races or particular circumstances, but an essential element of human life: that it is not a mere elegant amusement but a practical force in character and life to which both were originally adjusted, and without which both are incomplete and I will even say deformed: that art comes to us not as a suppliant for favor and patronage, but with an imperial right to com- mand our homage: and that far from reserving her benign influences for the favored few, she distributes them to all conditions of men, to each according to its capacity to receive, ART: A LECTURE 59 and even bestows on the lowly and poor some peculiar favors which she withholds from all others. Speaking in the plainest possible terms, art is the material- izing of ideas, the concrete expression of mental conceptions. The Creator has put into the human mind, as one of its richest endowments, the power and the desire of expression; that is, the embodiment of its thoughts, imaginings, feelings, resolves, in some outward form. First and most effective of all modes of utterance is language, including facial expres- sion and gesture, and reaching its highest power in poetry, music and dramatic action. But besides these natural arts, so to speak, man has power to use a great variety of material objects as embodiments and memorials of his thoughts and feelings, such as wood, clay, marble and many other kinds of stone, the precious metals, colors. He can take a block of cold white marble and put so much of his thought into it and pour so much of his feeling round it, that for generations and ages after, men will gather round that piece of marble and get from it more high thought and more noble feeling than any living man can inspire in them. What is this power? Whence came it? How does it work? The power is the two-fold power of thought and feeling interfused, the greatest power that man can use or can feel. It came from the artist's mind, as great there as here, but great only for him. By expressing it in marble, he realized it, as we say; he made it objective, and brought it home to us. A work of art, then, includes these several things: first, a thought or conception of something; secondly, a feeling towards it love, admira- tion, reverence, some pure and elevating emotion; and thirdly, the skill which blends these so perfectly with the material of expression, be it marble or color, that no separate impression shall be made by the thought, the feeling, or the material, but there shall be one single and total impression, that namely of the artist's conception realized in material form. By thought in a work of art, I mean a true conception; by feel- ing, I mean a loving, or admiring, or reverent conception. 60 THE VERY ELECT For the sake of what I shall say hereafter, I must emphasize the importance of thought or truth in art. Without any question, whether or not that which is true is always beautiful, that which is beautiful is always true. In so far as any object, beautiful otherwise though it may be, violates the truth of things, by so much it fails of perfect beauty. As in the freest and wildest strains of music, every note and every succession and combination of notes must conform to a strict mathematical law which with tyrannous rigor pre- scribes what may be and what may not be in music, so in all art the first condition, without which there is no art, but only bungling and failure, is a most religious conformity to the truth of the conception, whatever it may be, which art professes to embody. In sculpture, the neglect or falsi- fication of anatomy; in painting, the violation of perspective or of light and shade; in architecture, the stuccoed or frescoed falsehood, all departures from truth, though in the fancied interest of beauty, are always blemishes and often mon- strosities. Here lies the cause of nine out of ten failures in art, as in life, in the lack of conscience, of supreme reverence for truth. Here is the cause of the difference between superficial and profound art, the art of Canova and the art of Michael Angelo the failure to recognize the supreme dominion of law and truth in art as in all other departments of life. One teacher of art thus sadly expresses his experience: "It is easy to provoke to enthusiasm, but I have hitherto found it impossible to humiliate one student into perfect accuracy." That is the right phrase, humiliate to take down this topping spirit of untutored vanity which assumes that it can make truth at its own capricious wish, and awe it into reverence of that truth which neither God nor man can vary one hair's breadth from its eternal fixed- ness. The place and value of a work of art depends largely on the amount of thought it contains. There may be as much thought in a great painting, like Leonardo's Last Supper, ART: A LECTURE 61 as there is in a system of philosophy. I am not sure but there is as much science on the walls of the Sistine Chapel as there is in the Vatican Library. All this, however, is very different from saying that art is the expression of fact. Imitation is the lowest form of art. To take a correct profile by outlining a shadow on the wall; to arrest the reflection of a face on a camera; to paint a Dutch interior so that the copper kettles shall shine and the tiles in the chimney shall glimmer, this is not art in any true and high sense. When a true artist paints a landscape, or a human face, or a domestic scene, he strives with all the powers he has, with his understanding, his memory, his learning, his imagination, first to comprehend and then to realize the whole truth, partly on the surface and partly underlying, which is in the subject. If there is no deep or important truth in it, it is not a subject for art. If he cannot find the truth which is in it, he will abandon the subject. Take such a subject as a tree say a beech-tree no unworthy subject for the most skilful pencil. The problem in the artist's mind is to conceive not merely of a beech-tree, but of the beech-tree, the tree which shall be typical of all the possibilities of that species of tree, a tree which shall be at the same time an individual and the whole species. Now of course he will never find such a tree. It must in the end be the product of his Imagination. Does he therefore, shut himself in his studio and imagine his beech-tree? Not at all. Go and look at his portfolio and you will find it full of "studies" of beech-trees. What is he studying? The ideal tree in the actual trees. But can he ever make a better tree than Nature has made? Certainly he cannot. He could not in a whole lifetime with the aid of all the arts and sciences which man possesses, make a single cell of a beech- tree. He is not trying to make a tree at all. He is making the picture or image of a tree. And he with his rational imagination can image forth to our imagination more of the 62 THE VERY ELECT divine conception of a tree than blind Nature can. In other words, he can make Nature tell him what God's idea of a beech-tree is better than her best realization of that idea. She is capable only of facts, of imperfect individual facts; he is capable of conceiving a truth, the general fact which is imperfectly expressed in the individual facts. So of the human face. What the photographer does is to fix the solar reflection of a face, as it was set for the occasion at twenty- three minutes past eleven on the 27th of February; or rather, not so much a face as a set of features from which by the necessities of the case, all thought and feeling, all sense and soul, had, for the time being, vanished. What the portrait- painter does, your Titian or your Reynolds, is to paint a man or a woman, the whole man or woman, soul and all, so that standing in front of the portrait you feel that from that picture the man or woman may be known, their character, their history even, by one who has the requisite discernment, as from the man or woman themselves, better than from any transient acquaintance. And from this follow two important inferences; first, that the true portrait of a man is a portrait of him at his best, taken in his period of greatest power, at the culmination of his life, in some supreme moment of his experience. And secondly, that such a portrait does not, as the common expression is, " flatter him." Other portraits, other appearances of the man himself may fail to do him justice; he is not flattered by being taken at his best. Or take the highest of all subjects, human life in some of its representative aspects, pathetic, tragic, heroic. The great pictures, those conceived and executed in what is called the grand style, produce the same effect on you as the Para- dise Lost or Macbeth. They dwarf everything else, especially yourself. They force on you the feeling: "Here are thoughts far beyond me; if ever I reach them it must be by growing up to them." That other spirit which so often airs itself in books of travel and in private, very private criticism, ART: A LECTURE 63 which would belittle a thing too great for it to comprehend, and claim the credit of frankness for doing so, is to be classed with other forms of ignorance and unbelief and so called by the right name. But a work of art must have something more than thought in it, must be something more than the embodiment of truth. It must embody also the feeling which the thought is adapted to awaken. Sic cogitavit thus thought Francis Bacon marks the Philosopher. The Poet and the Painter add, thus I thought and felt. All true art has a moral quality. In a purely mathematical figure, a triangle, a square, a circle, there is no beauty. Here we have perfect expression of pure intellectual conceptions. Beauty comes in with deflexion from the mathematical form, with the line of beauty in which one curve bends insensibly to meet an opposite curve, as in the outline of a Grecian vase. What we mean by grace in figures is that the stiff mathematical line has been made fluent as though by the infusion into it of some moral quality like gentleness or submission. Is this, then, a violation of truth? No, but mathematical truth has been embraced and overcome by a higher, a moral truth. One curve of a pointed arch springing up its airy way is met by another, and each, as for love of the other, stays in mid career. All color has a moral quality apart from the object which bears it. Every distinct shade expresses a different feeling. One color is soothing; another is irritating. Purple is royal by nature, not merely by usage; red is martial, black is funereal, white is festive, by the canons of moral instinct. And I do not think it enough to say that these feelings are due to associa- tion or suggestion; or to say with Allston that we impute these qualities to certain forms and colors. I think that the line, the form, the color, not only suggest but actually express moral feeling. To return for a moment to our beech-tree. Why should a painter choose a beech-tree for a subject rather than a white pine? Because as a single tree it is a more 64 THE VERY ELECT interesting tree. Why? Because its possibilities of moral expression are greater. The beech-tree, when fully brought out, embodies the ideas of firmness mingling with playfulness in its roots; ''wreathing/' as Gray has it, "its old fantastic roots so high": of power and endurance in its solid bole; of humility and tenderness in long drooping branches bowing down to kiss the gnarled roots. And it may be said in general that the great landscape painters are those who have had the deepest insight into the moral meanings of nature and made their landscapes most expressive of human feelings. In Claude nature seems in a reverie; in Salvator Rosa, in a passion; in Gainsborough, to be enjoying domestic repose. And be it said in honor of the painters that down to the time of Wordsworth they interpreted the moral aspects of natural scenery better than did the poets. Long before Wordsworth wrote, the English landscape painters had said in language as full of feeling as his, that for them "The meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." The art in which feeling is thought to have least play, is Architecture. And yet what is more radiant of feeling than a Gothic church? When we say that such a church is a hymn in stone, what do we mean but that the church and the hymn express the same moral ideas? I once took a young boy who had seen in churches only the bareness of the meeting- house into a cathedral. The vastness of the space, the lofti- ness of the roof, the dimness of the light, put him into an agony of terror; he trembled from head to foot and burst into tears. This is what the cathedral builders unconsciously meant to express the awfulness, the infinity of those mighty truths which Christianity had lifted up to the vision of man. On a maturer mind perhaps on the mind of the child in due time another and a more permanent impression would have been produced. There is something and it must be a moral ART: A LECTURE 65 something in those slender pillars reaching up from the com- mon light at their feet to the arched twilight of the far-away roof, and this also was in the soul of the builders though they may never have said it, something that uplifts the thoughts from the flat and sordid pavements of earth into the upper space where all the lines of grace meet and where the light is soft and heavenly. The art element in life, then, as I have called it, is this divinely implanted impulse and tendency to express the true and the good in the beautiful. Set the imagination at work to invent something in which a high thought and a noble feeling shall have fitting expression and you have all the elements of Art; first the truth, the high thought, the inspiring theme; then the fine feeling inspired by the thought; next the imagination blending the two into an image of beauty; finally the skill which makes the image objective in some sensuous form. Art as thus understood has a wide field in life; its forms are manifold. Wherever men put their best head-work, heart-work, and hand-work, their thought, feeling and skill into material objects, there is at least an attempt at art. Let us speak first of Art in connection with use. In a charming paper by Cardinal Wiseman on "The Identifica- tion of the Artisan and Artist," he imagines first that we have formed a cabinet of Classic Art containing the most beautiful of all the relics of antiquity, vases with their wonderful draw- ings, bronze vessels of the most exquisite carving, medals in gold and silver, engraved gems, mosaics, etc. He then imagines that the owner of all these things comes to claim them from us and to assign each to its proper place and use. That mosaic, railed off so carefully lest some one should soil it, he orders put back to the floor of his parlor. Looking at one beautiful vase he says, "Take that to the kitchen, that is to hold oil; take that to the scullery, that is for water; take these plates and drinking cups to the pantry; I shall 66 THE VERY ELECT want them at dinner. And those smaller, those beautiful vessels which yet retain the very scent of the rich odors which were kept in them, take these to the dressing-rooms, these are what we want on our toilet. This is a washing-basin which I have been accustomed to use. What have they been making of all these things to put them under glass and treat them as wonderful works of art?" And then Wiseman calls attention to the fact that these beautiful things were not only things of everyday use, but that they belonged to ordinary citizens, both because they were found in the inferior houses of the buried cities, and because in no houses have poor and ugly articles for the same uses been found. The question comes to us with provoking point, "a thousand years hence, will they dig up from the debris of the nineteenth century any of our household utensils and put them under a glass case in a cabinet as precious gems of art; our stoves, for example, our kerosene lamps, and, save the mark, our spit- toons? If we ask why household art was so much higher among the Greeks than among us, we shall find that in the first place they put better thought into it than we do, and secondly, better feeling. We put thought enough into our making of these objects but it is not true thought, not honest thought, but contrivance, scheming, money-making craft. Things are made now-a-days to sell, not to use. Now and then, however, we find an article which bears evidence of having had good thorough study put into it, and it is inter- esting to see that such an article invariably approaches at least to beauty, a Maydol hammer, for example, or a Brooks- ville axe, or an Ames plow. When we visit archaeological exhibitions, and see the implements and utensils of a hundred years ago side by side with the most perfect patterns of today from all parts of the world, one of the most instructive lessons is, I think, that the objects most perfectly adapted to their use by modern invention are those which have most genuine art in them. ART: A LECTURE 67 But a still stronger reason for the inferiority of our house- hold art is that we do not put enough of right feeling into it. The distinction that we make between things for use and things for show, between everyday life and fine life, is fatal to art. A stranger traveling through our country and noticing the very common practise of painting the three sides of a house which can be seen from the road white, and the rear red, might be excused for saying to himself that it was hopeless to expect any art from a people so given to shams. If Art means to us something that we keep merely for show, our Art will be insincere, and will become false. If we make one style of thing for service and another for ornament instead of making the serviceable thing so thoroughly, so truly to its own nature that ornament becomes a necessary part of it, we shall infallibly produce ugliness for service and false ornamentation for show. The true genesis of art as con- nected with use is thus described by Mr. Ruskin: "The moment we make anything useful thoroughly, it is a law of our nature that we shall be pleased with ourselves and with the thing we have made, and become desirous, therefore, to adorn or complete it in some dainty way with finer art expressive of our pleasure. " Here we have again our doctrine of conscience and love. I believe that this principle so happily stated by Mr. Ruskin would, if obeyed, fill our land with works of the truest art. We must not be too technical and fastidious in our limitations of Art, but should recognize and honor it wherever it really exists, even in humblest guise. In my boyhood, I knew a shoemaker who was a genuine artist. It was very interesting to watch him finishing a fine boot. You could not get him to make a cheap article. He would use none but the best material, and that he would make up thoroughly well, and then, when the boot began to take shape he would handle it as though he loved it, and finish it up, as Mr. Ruskin says, with a kind of dainty art expressive of his pleasure. There is hardly any work fit for 68 THE VERY ELECT a human being to do, which has not a place for art in it, and is not better for giving art that place. And I doubt very much whether we in this country shall ever get much high art, art for its own sake, worthy of the name, until we get a better quality of low art as a substratum. They tell us that beauty does not, except in romances, spring up out of low con- ditions and inferior races. No more does art, which is nothing if not perfectly truthful and thoroughly human, rise out of tricky handicrafts and a slovenly every-day life. But we have not reached a full conception of this art idea in human life when we make it merely an incident and an appendage to use. Beauty does not disdain to contribute to service, but that is out of grace and comity, not vassalage. In order to secure the highest favors of art, we must cultivate it, not for use, or pleasure, or ostentation, but for its own sake. Now I am aware that this is a hard saying, and if I did not have the talk all to myself, if this were a debate instead of a lecture and I had to defend my positions against attack, this would certainly be the point of danger. If a man devote his life to the pursuit of truth, we respect him; if he engage himself to the service of morality, we honor him; but if he give himself up to art, we set him down as a trifler. We don't give him the credit of doing a man's work in the world, of taking any share of the burden of human life on his shoulders. In other words, we think that art is not, in itself, a worthy object of pursuit. In this judgment there is some- thing wholesome and manly. Much that calls itself art is mere dawdling with colors and clay. Probably the most arrant nonsense that ever has been uttered in human language has been on the subject of art. I presume we all chuckled over that story of Carlyle's telling his host at dinner that he had been obliged to listen for an hour to a man who had talked to him on art, and now he begged for Heaven's sake a room by himself and a pipe. And it was on purpose to prepare for these objections that I spent so much time in ART: A LECTURE 69 the early part of this lecture in settling the fundamental ideas of art. Art divorced from truth and from morality is the contemptible thing which it is so often represented to be; but bear in mind that in that case not only the pursuit and the man are contemptible, but the result considered merely as art is also contemptible. On a low intellectual and moral basis you can not rear any fair superstructure of art. A great artist must be a great man. Leonardo and Michael Angelo were two of the grandest men that our race has produced. With what seriousness, we may say even solemnity, was art invested in their eyes! Was any anchoret or pietist ever less worldly or more severe with himself than Michael Angelo? The moment we come to conceive of art as the embodiment of that which is true in thought and that which is good in feeling and act, we rid its domain of all these fripperies and these trifling prettinesses which are but its caricature, and we recognize the lofty purpose, the pure majesty, the religious sanctity of true art. We can understand that apart from all the gains of art, commercial, social, patriotic, religious even, it is worthy of a man, of the truest and best man that lives, to cultivate art for its own sake, to satisfy this inoorn craving for the beautiful by putting some of his best life into art. " 'Tis to create, and by creating live a being more intense, that we with form endue our fancy" is Byron's idea of art. For the word " intense," which is too narrow, let us say that it is to live a being more full, more complete, more satisfying that we give form to fancy. In fine the motive to art is to satisfy the art element of our own nature. God made us all potentially artists. He put into us the desire to create the beautiful. When we repress that desire we defraud ourselves. When we gratify it, we add to our- selves something that of right belongs to us. The Irish- woman in the little shanty on the road to Mallet's Bay who every summer trains her scarlet-runner bean archwise over her humble door, and the great master who painted the 70 THE VERY ELECT Transfiguration, both wrought under the same universal and holy impulse to create the beautiful. Bearing in mind that art in order to be genuine must be pursued for its own sake, and not for any incidental benefits it may bring with it, we still recognize its beneficent offices in every department of life. Passing by many others of which I should like to speak, let us look at its office as consoler. Here let me gratefully refer to a thought of the Country Parson in the essay "Concerning Tidiness." The thought is this: When you are downcast and cannot rally yourself by your ordinary restoratives, just go and make something tidy. Take something that looks just as you feel, forlorn and dismal, a bit of garden wall, a flower-bed, a room in your house, and work away at it till you make it comely and smiling, and you will catch the smile yourself. Now I say, that is good sound philosophy. It is not merely occupation that works the change, it is the aspect of beauty growing under your hand. You must take something which has the possibility of art in it, something which has in it the potency of a bright feeling that shall irradiate your gloom. And you may carry the principle far above this point, and say that one of the noblest functions of art is the alleviation of sorrow. Of course here art means not the enjoying but the making of beautiful things. The real is forgotten in the ideal. Thought is occupied; counter feelings are awakened; aspiration drives out despair. This is the reason why women ordinarily endure sorrow better than men; they turn more naturally to the resources of art. A woman will rise up from some great sorrow, the tears still in her eyes, and betake herself to the making of some beautiful thing according to her capacity, and will live down her grief. A man, not usually having such aptitude for art, will betake himself to drinking, or some other stupefy- ing indulgence, or to that most cowardly of crimes, suicide. Think of what art did for Charles Lamb and William Cowper, who in the daily dread of insanity and the nameless horrors ART: A LECTURE 71 that hang about the mere thought of it, yet under the tutelage and inspiration of art lived the sweetest and most graceful of lives. Here comes in opportunely the subject of Dress. Some persons value themselves highly because they dress shabbily and because they scorn others for dressing well, assuming that the love of dress is sheer vanity. But there is a more kindly view we might take without offending sound reason. We can give and receive an innocent pleasure, not the highest but by no means a despicable pleasure, by dressing in good taste. It is permissible to gratify one's own love of things pleasant to look on by making and wearing them. It is more than permissible, it is commendable to wear them in order to please others. My hostess naturally wants her rooms to look gay and her table to look attractive to her guests, and to please her and them, I will wear my best. " Out into the outer darkness, and serve him right" we say of the man who intruded himself among the wedding guests and had not on a wedding garment. It is the art element in the parlor and the dining-room. Of course it may be carried to a mischievous extreme; what good thing may not be? And this brings me to say, in general terms, that the office of the art-element in life is to idealize it, to reduce to its lowest possible terms the gross material element of life, partly by subordinating it, partly by perfecting its processes, and to give the control of life to its higher and finer, its spiritual elements. Group for a moment in your imagination all the Fine Arts together, Poetry and Music, Painting and Sculpture, Architecture and Landscape Gardening, not omitting the humbler guises of the formative and decorative arts in household and other uses, and ask yourselves the question, What is this one principle which manifests itself in all these forms, and what is it doing for man? And again, for a moment, imagine it wholly struck out from the life of man. Still again, imagine that this our American people, in the 72 THE VERY ELECT course of their development should, without losing their practical enterprise and skill, come to give the art element as much prominence as it had in the life of the ancient Greeks. Now in the act of making these suppositions and asking these questions, we come to see how potent this art principle is; how different human life would be without it; how benign and healthful an element it is when existing in due harmony with the other elements of man's life; and how fatal to national and individual character and growth is either its neglect or its perversion. We sometimes say of a man that he has no poetry in him; or we vary the expression and say of him that he has no imagination, or no romance. What we mean to deny in him is this art-element, this tendency to see things above the commonplace and beyond the actual. It is equiv- alent to saying that he has no aspiration, no yearnings after truer and nobler things than he has. And that is the same as saying that he is a dull mechanical man, a man without a future. Once in a while we find ourselves beside a person, whose influence over us we should find it difficult to account for, but who has called up out of our hearts images, hopes, longings which we feel to be ours and not his, and yet which we never had been conscious of before. In the glow of our admiration and gratitude we ascribe high qualities to such a man. We call him inspired; the ancients called him divine. Perhaps it is not a living person who thus stirs and inspires us; it may be only some work of his. It is perhaps oftener the work than the man that thus affects us, but it is the man at his best in his work; it is art. It is a glimpse of perfection embodied before our imagination. It may be embodied in a little simple ballad, or in a grand epic; it may stand before us complete in every limb and feature, or so mangled by vandalism as to be a mere fragment; it may be historically inaccurate, it may be conventionally improper; it may be somewhat rude in execution and very faulty in many details: yet if there is a great and true thought in it and a pure and ART: A LECTURE 73 fine and loving feeling, such as that thought must awaken in a noble mind, and if this is accessible to us through all the rudeness and in spite of all the minor faults and mutila- tions, we have found the work, we have the man, that we are all eagerly looking for up and down the world, the man, or the man's work, that can reveal to us our own better selves and interpret to us our own higher aspiration. Let us under- stand that of us art requires something more than that we should talk learnedly of foreshortening and chiaroscuro, should admire Beethoven and praise the works of Pietro Perugino; that art is not, as so many suppose, the mere dandyism of culture. Let us understand that art has soul in it, more soul and a higher soul than any other object of man's pursuit saving only its true yokefellows, morals and religion. Let us understand that the truest and highest of all works of art is a perfect human life, ennobled by high thinking, inspired by beautiful feeling; and that every other work of art is excellent according to its success in inspiring these true and high thoughts and these beautiful feelings in other lives, and so reproducing the good and the true through the beautiful. CHRISTIANITY A WORLD-WIDE MOVEMENT AMONG our Lord's sayings respecting himself there is one which is significant almost beyond all the rest: "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself." Separate it from its connection with his other sayings and with his life, and it would seem to be startling and audacious egotism. Imagine any other personage in history uttering it, and it would seem either ludicrous vanity or sheer madness. But read in this gospel narrative it seems neither audacious, nor egotistic, nor even startling. It appears to have been uttered in perfect calmness; we read it without any shock almost without wonder. It does not seem extravagant for such a one as the Jesus of the Gospels to have said it. It does not now need the glance over subsequent history, making its fulfillment more and more probable, to put us into sympathy with it. We find it inherently credible, and even probable, that this young man, standing there amid a small group of disciples who only half believed in him, all the rest of the world indifferent or hostile, would, as time went on, draw all men to himself, was in fact then and there starting a move- ment which would be world-wide in its reach and co-extensi ve with history in its duration. There is, then, there must be, that in the character and teaching and work of Jesus which compels our assent to this vast claim, to this magnificent proph- ecy. What it is, we may not hope fully to understand, much less to put into statement; but we may perhaps get glimpses of it which will be helpful to our faith. The definite question to which we will first address ourselves is this: What gives to Christianity as a religion its character of uni- versality, its hold upon men of all climes, all races, all ages? It is easy, in the first place, to see why no one of the other religions of the world could be a universal religion. While 74 CHRISTIANITY 75 we can be thankful that God hath not left himself without witness in the various religions of mankind, we can, with the utmost breadth of charity, discover in none of them those germs of essential and universal truth which could be vitalized and expanded into a religion for all mankind. They are all vitiated by some taint of partiality or particularism. Mo- hammedanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, while all contain some truth respecting the right relations of man to God and man to man, all have wrought into them, into their warp and woof, ideas political and social, philosophies, cosmogonies, fictions, framed to support and perpetuate tribal and national institutions, conditions which do not forbid making proselytes by conquest or absorption of other races or religions, but which admit no freedom of thought or capabilities of extension be- yond certain definite limits. The same is true of Judaism in its earlier stages. Jehovah was at first only the tribal God of the Hebrews. The children of Israel had provisions by which strangers could be admitted to the privileges of the national cult, but that Jehovah should extend his protecting sway over heathen tribes was utterly abhorrent to them. Not till late in their history, if at all, did they attain to the conception of one universal truth and life for all mankind. Even the apostles found it hard to part with the idea that they must first Judaize before they could Christianize the world. And dare we say that the Christian Church, even the modern Christian Church, has wholly freed itself from this error of particularism? Are we sure that we are always insisting on at home, and sending into the unevange- lized world, that which is essential and universal in Chris- tianity and not that which is provincial and temporary? But waiving for a moment these practical questions, let us find our first note of universality in true Christianity in the thought that it is a human religion that is, that its object is the perfection of the human nature which is essentially in man, and potentially in all men, that nature as a whole and 76 THE VERY ELECT including all that it involves. If we ask, what wa in the mind of God as set forth in what St. Paul calls "the gospel of God concerning his Son, Jesus Christ," I think something like this would be the answer. I am now answering, not the question, what is the chief end of man, but what was God's chief end in the incarnation: the perfection of humanity, that every man should be perfect, i.e., a perfect man, in Christ Jesus. Christianity begins by recognizing the divine element in humanity. Man is man and not an inferior being because of the divine in him. God could not have been incarnate in humanity unless humanity had partaken of the divine nature. What angelic nature is, or super-angelic, if such there be, we know not, and are not deeply interested to know, for we never shall be angels and we know not yet what man is capable of being; but what he is capable of being, to its utmost extent, Christ aims to make real. Not the old Adam was, but the new man in Christ Jesus will be, the perfect man; and when perfect he will still be man human always not absorbed back into the bosom of Deity without identity or conscious- ness not an abstraction without body, parts, or passions, without desire or will; but human always and everywhere, capable of all human joys, endearments, choices, aspirations, endeavors. To be a Christian is to be truly a man or a woman. To be more and more of a man or a woman is to be more truly a Christian. When some unique Christian soul attains to greatness in thought or deed, to heroic achievement or sacri- fice, when some saintly woman radiates a divine beauty in character or life, some insincere poet, some rhapsodist, may call these traits superhuman; but they are not superhuman though they are divine, they are the intimations of what humanity can be they are human nature at its best respond- ing to a breath of inspiration from the Divine Spirit. Now Christianity holds as a fundamental belief that all which is essentially good in human nature is potentially in every man, of whatever clime, or time, or race. The doctrine CHRISTIANITY 77 of development, that is, that the germ contains within itself the possibility of perfection in its kind, is as vital to Chris- tianity as to Science; and Christianity maintains that every human soul, because it is human, contains this germ of infi- nite capabilities. This doctrine was beautifully applied by St. Paul to the condition of the Roman slave. Art thou a bondman? Care not for it: thou art God's freeman. Polit- ical status does not affect essential humanity. In Christ there is no bond or free, Jew or Gentile all are simply men, and all are truly men. It was for a long time a matter of doubt in some quarters whether the people of certain degraded races were really in all respects human whether they have the same intellectual and moral faculties as the superior races. The slaveholders of the South denied the humanity of the slaves. The Boers in South Africa, it is said, refuse to recog- nize the essential humanity of the Kaffirs. But a missionary experience now almost as extensive as the globe confirms the Christian postulate that people of every race, however degraded, are redeemable to any height of Christian excellence. The first message of the Gospel to every people is: "You are men; and because you are men, made in the image of God, children of a Heavenly Father, redeemed by the Son of God who gave himself for all men, come back and claim your in- heritance side by side with those who have come into the Kingdom of God before you, but whose right to be there is not greater than your own." Christianity, secondly, is a world-wide force because it is a vital religion, because it interests itself most of all with life with human life in its largest sense. It is the religion of life not of forms and ceremonies not of moods and ecsta- sies not of apathies and frenzies, but of health, of sanity, of activity, of enthusiasm but not of fanaticism, of sobriety without gloom, of enjoyment free from self-reproach. It answers the great cry of the human soul, "more life, and fuller, that we want." And so Jesus said, " I am come that they may 78 THE VERY ELECT have life" abundant life not quietude, not escape from the storm and stress of existence into a haven of Nirvana; not escape from pain, not mere passive enjoyment, sensuous, or intellectual, or spiritual; but life, freedom, movement, activity, achievement, growth. Christianity offers great tasks and glorious rewards to the intellect. It does not, as do some re- ligions, rob the intellect of its most precious right, that peril- ous but inestimable right of seeing things as they really are. There has always been an order of mind which craves for the settlement of truth by authority by some one who will say, and who has the right to say: "This is right; let this end all doubt and all thinking" an order of mind which has its rightful home not in Christianity but in some religion which rests on the will and force of a dominant caste. Christianity lets no human authority intervene between the soul and God. Authority has to do with conduct. Rightful authority may rightfully command conduct: it cannot compel belief. Christ said to the disciples, and says to us, "The Spirit will guide you into all truth and show you things to come." Truth comes by guidance and inspiration, not by authority. The Spirit will not dictate the truth to you, like a dull lecturer to his class, but will guide you into it. He will show you the truth but you must see it for yourself. Christianity inspires in us the desire for more and more truth, gives divine guidance in the search, but leaves to us the joys and pains and perils of the attempt, and the thrills and exultations of discovery. It gives us certain great and fundamental truths as solid ground to stand upon, sunlight above and harvests of plenty all around for the sustenance of our common life; but it also gives us a sky studded with innumerable worlds worlds made and worlds in the making and says to us "here also is intelligence, here also is law, here also is God. Wonder, study, interpret, adore." No religion, no type of Christianity if such there be, which pretends to settle by authority the great truths of the spiritual life, or which makes some priestly caste its guardian and dis- CHRISTIANITY 79 penser, which assumes that the little we know is all that can be known of the greatest things in the universe, can be a world religion. Christianity is no such religion. It is much more than a philosophy but it is a philosophy, a philosophy of the Universe: it makes its votaries philosophers, i.e., lovers of truth, thinkers, fearless but devout thinkers on the works and ways and Word of God, and it holds before the devout philo- sophic mind the prospect of truths even more noble and glo- rious waiting to be discovered. Again, Christianity is a universal religion because it fosters the universal human affections. It is as far as possible from being an ascetic religion. It does not inculcate a life of re- pression and restraint. The pietism which takes on this form misrepresents Christianity. In a noble, if slightly extravagant, burst of enthusiasm, Phillips Brooks, in one of his sermons, exclaims that Christianity so far from favoring a life of self-denial enjoins a life of self-indulgence, meaning of course, a life in which all the desires, affections and activities of the soul have room for free and full development. Chris- tianity reveals God, the Being who represents to us all per- fection, not in terms of force as the Almighty, not in terms of the intellect as the all-wise, but in terms of the affections. God is a Father; God is love; and thereby says to all God's children, let life be to you love, faith, trust, gratitude, devotion. And when Christianity has had free course it has developed this type of character a character rich in all the constituent universal human affections. If in its perversions it has been caricatured by the ascetics, by the hermits and anchorites, by St. Anthony and St. Simeon, in its truer forms it has blos- somed out into the sweetest family life, the noblest friendships, the most sublime devotions. The great classic apotheosizing the affections was not written by Anacreon or by Horace but by St. Paul. In thus addressing itself to the natural human affections, Christianity allies itself with that part of man's nature which 80 THE VERY ELECT is most constant and most permanent. The most primitive and the most degraded men have some human affections which can be reached through Christian appeals, and the men of highest culture retain under cover it may be of silence and reserve the natural feelings of their kind. Perhaps there will always be a few who will find fascination in a religion which makes a merit of mortifying the God-implanted desires and affections of humanity and cultivating an impassive, stolid temper of mind which they will call piety, but the religion which appeals to and satisfies universal human nature must, as Christianity does, inculcate and nurture a large, rich and full affectional life. Again, the life nurtured by Christianity is a life of action. The healthy human spirit always and everywhere leaps up in response to those stirring words of our Lord, "The Father worketh hitherto and I work." A new dynamic impulse has come into our conception of God with the revival and em- phasis of the doctrine of an imminent deity a personal God ever present and ever active in all the processes of universal life. In some of the earlier ages of Christianity and again in the eighteenth century the ideal Christian life took on the form of dreamy mysticism. Holiness was equivalent to passive- ness in the hands of God. The true life was a life of contem- plation of submission of patient waiting for ecstasy. This type of religion drove many into disgust with all religion, and brought on the reaction known as muscular Christianity. The lesson of it is that the Christianity which will draw all men to Christ is a Christianity which makes room for the joyful exercise of all man's powers and activities. Its out- come is what we call Christian civilization, with all its mani- fold and multiform outgoings. The religion for mankind ought to do in this regard what Christianity actually does it ought by its natural operations to produce arts, inven- tions, great cities, navies, commerce, swift transportation, lightning messages of intelligence, libraries, universities, CHRISTIANITY 81 splendid architecture, magnificent churches, noble temples of justice, all in this kind that the nineteen Christian centuries have produced and all that the coming Christian centuries will produce. If Christianity had been laggard in respect to these great productions of human genius and enterprise, and had left it to some pagan civilization to surpass it in these achievements, Christianity would have been discredited in the judgment of mankind and Christ would not draw all men to himself. This life of intellect, affection and action which Christianity begets and fosters, it commends to the favor of all men by the manifestations it makes of itself here and now. It has the promise of the life that now is, when men can see its nature and fruits, and forecast its further development in the life to come. Under the baneful influences of heathen political and social systems, life is so hard and wretched that the thought of a future life is only a terror. Some missionaries tell us they dare not preach eternal life until the thought of life itself is made more tolerable, and Chris- tianity confers this boon upon human thought of the future. It creates a life that is worth living, and then says, "it hath not entered, and could not enter, into the heart of man to conceive what life hereafter shall be; from the lowest depths of life to this, judge what may be the heights of life beyond this." There are many other attributes of Christianity which constitute its fitness to be the world's religion; e. g., its emphasis of human freedom, leading to the largest and richest social development, to democracy in government and spon- taneity in all communal life, secular and religious its toler- ation of wide differences in individual and national character unifying all in its comprehensive humanity, thus initiating and favoring movements like those which have produced international law and are tending towards universal peace and good-will. 82 THE VERY ELECT But there is time now to mention only one more of these essential characteristics, namely, that Christianity has its origin, its inspiration and its power in a universal personality. Christianity is not a book religion. The Mohammedans are wont to say that their religion and ours are the two great book religions. But Christianity is not essentially a book religion. It has a book which is to it unspeakably precious. Its life is bound up with the history of that book. It contains its charter and its laws. But that book is not the cause of Christianity but its product just as Magna Chart a and and the Constitution of the United States were produced by, and did not produce, the spirit of liberty. And Christianity is all the time producing new books, embodying and trans- mitting its life; or if not new books, new booklets; not new Gospels, but new prophecies, new psalms, new epistles, with an inspiration inferior both in kind and degree, but itill an inspiration from one and the same spirit of all truth. But the power which informs Christianity and makes it what it is and gives it universality and victory, is not the power of a book, not even of the Book, but the power of personality, of a divine human personality, the power of the personal Jesus. Christianity is essentially Jesus Christ. It is his own assertion: "I will draw all men unto myself." If all the essential doctrines of Christianity had been given to the world in abstract forms, impersonally, anonymously, would they have drawn men to themselves? It is a sufficient answer to say that most of these teachings considered as bare ethical precepts are not new to Christianity. That which made them really new and gave them vitality and momentum was the personality of Jesus Christ, and that which gives them equal vitality and momentum everywhere in the world is what I have ventured to call the universal personality of Jesus. All other men have their distinctive notes of nativity. Socrates is essentially Greek Augustine, Roman Luther, German Paul is a Hebrew of the Hebrews. CHRISTIANITY 83 But Jesus is not Hebrew. Take out the little touches and accessories which the evangelists have added and there is nothing Hebrew attaching to him. When some recent painters have given his countenance a Hebrew cast we all condemn and almost resent the suggestion. The faces most significant to us are those that have neither the Italian nor the German nor the Jewish type, but the human in its ideal form, and all are failures because the ideal of the painter is so far below the ideal o f the evangelists. By virtue of this human personality, divine though human and all the more human because divine, Christianity touchf >, quickens, draws all men. From Gibbon to the latest Philosophy of history, every attempt to explain history without making Christ the supreme force in it is a failure, and every attempt to set forth the potency of Jesus Christ in history by making him only a unique and exalted man is a failure. As a matter of fact all the best thinkers of all schools in our time have abandoned this attempt. The only question that now divides these schools is the relation of the divine and human elements by all admitted to be blended in this personality. Through all and above all the differences of school and sects this one vital fact asserts and maintains itself. To carry Christianity to a people to whom it is new is to carry Jesus Christ. All the pure ethics and noble philosophy which Christianity contains would be powerless to regenerate heathendom without him in whom it is all centred and by whom it is all made real and vital. And this I say is what more than all else fits Christianity to be the religion of all mankind. Jesus as a man, as a divine man, as a friend, as a Redeemer, as a Saviour, appeals to all men, because the human personality of him meets, satisfies, draws, persuades, assimilates the personality which is in all men. As Harnack has beautifully said, Jesus teaches his great truths to men in the language which a mother uses to her child, in the universal language of the human heart. How much more human, more easy 84 THE VERY ELECT to comprehend and get into sympathy with, is Jesus in his discourses and his prayers, than is Peter or Paul, Augustine or Luther, or any Father of the Church ancient or modern! And yet the Christian of highest attainments in thought and life feels sure that beyond him there can be no height of morality or spirituality. As Goethe has finely said: " Though the intellectual and spiritual culture of the world progresses, and the human mind expands as much as it will, beyond the grandeur and moral elevation of Christianity as it sparkles and shines in the Gospels the human mind will not advance." If then Christianity is the one and only religion adapted to the human nature which is in all mankind, and is therefore the rightful heritage of all mankind, the Christian Church to which has been entrusted this legacy of Christ to the world, has certain obligations which it becomes the Church deeply to consider. First, the Church is bound to have faith in Christianity a faith complete, utter, unassailable, and therefore calm, patient, charitable. Such faith it never yet has had. The so-called ages of faith in Church History were times when the Church depended on penal terrors for maintaining what it held to be truth, not on the assent of the free human thought and will. Alarms for the safety of the truth leading to persecutions and violence for error evince a feeble confidence in the truth itself. How many times has the Church cried out: "If this error is allowed a hearing it will br'ng a fatal hurt upon the Church," instead of saying: "If this counsel be of men it will surely come to naught." If Christianity is a world religion it will bring many surprises to those who dwell in its provinces and whose views of it are therefore provincial. Would it not be well for us all to recognize the fact that we are by our necessary limitations more or less provincial, while Christianity itself is continental and cosmopolitan? Is it not a confession of feeble faith to cry CHRISTIANITY 85 out: "If this or that view of Scripture or of a part of Scrip- ture be permitted, if this or that new view escape condem- nation in a heresy trial, all is lost"? Let us have such faith in Christianity itself that we shall be able to meet new truth and new error with calm confidence that truth will be seen to be truth and error to be error, and that the Church and the truth will prevail. Secondly, we should let the divine power which is in Chris- tianity develop itself in its own natural way. The nature of Christianity is not a Hebrew nature as the early disciples thought it to be nor a Greek nature as the Gnostics thought nor a Roman nature as Augustine thought nor an Angli- can nature, nor a Puritan nature, as some of us may be inclined to think. It has its own nature a divine-human nature, slowly developing as it finds the right environment here and there, toward the perfect humanity, the type of which it holds in its own bosom. Within this all-inclusive type it has many varieties many as yet unknown, undreamed of. God forbid that we should wish to make all types and all varieties conform to our own or to any known form. It is one of the glorious dreams, hopes rather of the Christian imagination, that among the undeveloped races which Chris- tianity is yet to dominate, will arise styles of Christian man- hood and womanhood, of social and political life, of arts and institutions, which will beggar and shame all the best in their kind that man has yet attained or known. Let us give the vital Christian principle full scope to grow and blossom under God's sunshine and the Holy Spirit's culture as seemeth good to him who has made men of different climes and races such that they will be eternally different and yet will be all one in him. And finally, the Church is under the most imperative and urgent obligation to plant the seeds of Christianity every- where among mankind. When it is said that the nations already have religions that are indigenous and therefore 86 THE VERY ELECT adapted to their needs, that Christianity is an alien and exotic religion that has to be forced upon them, the answer is that Christianity is not a Jewish or Gentile religion not an oriental or occidental religion not a primitive or transi- tional religion but the one human, universal religion, good for all, equally good for all, like wheat for food and water for drink that to defraud any people of it, or withhold it from any people, is to deprive them of what belongs to them as men, as an essential part of their heritage as children of God that to keep Christianity as the exclusive possession of the so-called Christian peoples, is to impoverish the Chris- tian Church among these peoples, to narrow Church life, to delimit Christian sympathy, and confine both individual and social Christianity utterly. By every consideration of pru- dence, of obligation for trusts committed, of love for our race and kind, of interest in human progress, above all of loyal devotion to h m who was lifted up from the earth that he might draw all men to himself, the Church is bound by an obligation which grows stronger and more pressing as the Christian years go by, to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES I PURPOSE to discuss this question and I wish I were sure of making the discussion as interesting to you as I know the question itself is How does the purely literary spirit stand related to the religious spirit, and specifically to the spirit of Christianity? I shall put to Literature the same question that is so often in our day put to Science: What is its attitude towards Spiritual Religion? And I regard this question as not only more novel but more important than the other more important, indeed, than the whole series of questions, challenging in the name of religion, now Science, now Philoso- phy, now the Fine Arts inasmuch as the spirit of Literature is much more pervasive, reaches and influences a far greater number of minds, than Science, Philosophy, and Art combined. No other evidence of this need be offered than the well-known fact that Science and Philosophy have to borrow the charm of Literature to gain the public attention. If Science had to make its way in the world through scientific channels only, it would never get far from the laboratories and lecture-rooms that produced it: but having succeeded in getting into the mail-routes of literature, it finds its way into every hamlet and home of the land. If the scientists and the philoso- phers of England and America were to become infidels, every one of them, it would, without the help of literature, take generations to indoctrinate any large portion of the English- speaking people into sympathy with them. But suppose the literary men of these two countries to be perverted to atheism as this class were in France just before the French Revolution and society would feel the baleful effects imme- diately. 87 88 THE VERY ELECT To put the question over again in a concrete form, let me state it thus: Bring up a young man upon Homer and Sopho- cles, Virgil and Tacitus, Dante and Goethe, upon Chaucer, Shakespeare, Addison, and Burke, upon Longfellow, Emerson and Lowell, and in what attitude have you put him toward God, and toward the religion of Jesus Christ? In order to clear the way for a satisfactory answer to this question, let me ask your assent to two obviously fair rulings in the case. First, in order to judge of the religious tendencies of literature, you shall make your appeal to books and not to the lives of their authors. In society, the man is every- thing and his book nothing. He may have written a treatise which honors and promotes every virtue under heaven, but that does not discharge for him the simplest personal obli- gation, or make amends for the smallest wrong. In literature, however, the man is lost out of sight behind his book, and he stands the mere shadow of a name. His personal qualities, his amiability or moroseness, his morality or immorality, his religion or the want of it, except so far as they find actual expression in his book and are a part of it, are no concern of the readers, and do not affect the total impression save in the very slightest degree. Some of the most holy of unin- spired strains were written by men of unholy lives. He who would expunge from even sacred literature the productions of all men who were chargeable with immorality, must begin with the Psalms of David, and go through the shelves of his library, robbing himself of one after another of the most precious of his religious treasures. But practically no man thinks of doing this. Literature has a life of its own independ- ent of the lives of its authors, and is judged according to its deeds, not theirs. And herein lies a profound truth which has an important bearing upon this whole discussion. Lit- erature is not the production solely of the men who indite it. It was Scotch piety that produced the Cottar's Saturday Night: Burns merely wrote it. When the Psalmist sang, INFLUENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES 89 "By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept," it was the national experience of sorrow, the yearning of all Israel for Zion, that flung themselves upon the Psalmist's harp. And so in a more or less literal sense, all literature is impersonal as regards its authors, and has a personality of its own. My stipulation is simply that it be judged as all responsible personality is judged according to its own merits or demerits. We might go farther and say that Literature is in part the production of those who read it, that is, that those who adopt it and give it fame are in part contributors to its power. The poetry of Keble, for instance, owes more to its adoption by a certain branch of the Anglican Church as the expression of its religious faith and hope, than to its intrinsic merit, considerable as that is. ( My second point is that the religious influence of literature shall not be tested by the proportion of the professedly reli- gious element in it. A book may be full of religious terms and phrases and yet have a decidedly irreligious tendency.; A book may not have a single religious term or phrase or reference however remote, and yet leave upon the reader's mind a friendly influence toward religion. We believe that God is in the Constitution, as he is in the Book of Esther, though his name is not there. The religious influence of many professedly religious books is so marred by ungracious, unloving and even untrue statements of the truth, that really one might be pardoned for wishing at times that religious instruction and religious influence should be sought only from that one book whose statements of the truth are always true; always gracious, even when severe; always sincere, even when most gracious. I would rather see in the hands of a young person whose mind is yet unsettled on the great questions of religious duty, one of the many literary works whose influence is intel- lectually ennobling and morally wholesome, which leaves the mind and heart in a susceptible and genial condition, disposed to receive impressions directly from the Word and the Spirit 90 THE VERY ELECT of God, than any of that large number of much lauded reli- gious books whose harshness repels, or whose sharpness dis- gusts, the young heart into an attitude of antagonism to religion itself. ' The chilling rigor of religious formalism, the rough blasts of religious controversy, only make the young man gird more closely around him the cloak of prejudice which protects him from religious impressions. But in the sunshine of the humanity, the gentleness, the charity of literary studies, prejudice is flung aside, the heart opens to receive all genial influences; and now the sentence of Scripture, or the warm word from some loving soul, wins the easily persuaded soul to reflection and to faith. I do not mean to disparage religious reading. I would do all in my power to uphold it as a means of grace. I am informed that more religious books are bought, and I suppose read, by English-speaking people, than books of all other kinds combined, and I rejoice at it; that is, I rejoice that there is such an appetite for religious literature; but I rejoice that it does not fall to my lot to select and recom- mend the books. If I were asked to name the religious books which I could recommend to young men with perfect confidence in the truth of their doctrine and the sanity of their influence, I think I could count them on the fingers of one hand. If, however, I had the opportunity of commending to them books to be read as literature, which without aiming to impart either instruction or influences distinctively religious, should yet bring the mind and heart into a more tender and receptive condition for the Word and Spirit of God to work upon, I could easily fill the shelves of a library, for I should find myself naming one after another the great literary works of the successive eras and the various nations of mankind. And this brings me to the point on which I shall mainly depend in my advocacy of this cause namely that literature is the expression and embodiment of that which is best in humanity. The best work of the human race, its noblest conceptions, its loftiest enthusiasm, its holiest affections, are INFLUENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES 91 enshrined in its literature. Not that the literary men of the race have done all the great thinking and lived all the fine living of the race; by no means, but that all the high think- ing of all the great thinkers, and the grand action of all the heroes and heroines of our race, have been gathered into its literature. The Iliad is the grandest epic and Homer is the greatest epic poet, because he has conveyed into language more than all other poets, of that magnanimity, that uncon- scious greatness of soul, which whole generations had toilfully wrought out of personal lives. Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist because he surpassed every other human being in discerning the potential but undeveloped capacities of human life. For the best literature does not content itself with repro- ducing the actual best that has been in humanity, but forecasts the best that is wrapped up in its infinite possibilities. The reason for the existence of literature is the satisfaction man- kind takes in the contemplation of its own capabilities. It is held by the best naturalists that the true nature of a thing is its perfection; that the natural apple as we call it is the degenerate offspring, not the parent, of the nobler fruit; that the rose reveals its nature, not in the single wild rose of the hillside, but in the more nearly perfect rose of the garden. Now literature reveals the true nature of man in the same way that a Belgian rose-garden reveals the nature of the rose. Literature is the rose-garden of humanity. The choicest specimens it produces here and there are trans- planted hither, and cultivated up to the highest attainable perfection. In literature man is greater and wiser and purer and nobler than real men are in actual life. Socrates is doubtless wiser in Plato than the man himself was. Chris- tianity, however weak it may be in the lives of its professors, is grand and ever triumphant not only in the Gospels and Epistles of its inspired founders, but in its hymns and anthems, and in its devotional literature, which is its true anthology. If to this it is replied that while literature is the storehouse 92 THE VERY ELECT of the best produced by humanity, this humanity is a fallen humanity, and that literature but partakes of the imperfect nature of its source; I answer that, though a fallen, it is not an abandoned humanity, but one in and with which the Spirit of God has always been striving, allying himself with that which is best in man and, unless all the instincts and traditions of literature are illusions, helping man in literature as nowhere else to erect himself above himself. What else is the meaning of the preludial invocation for aid and guidance to a higher power found so commonly both in ancient and modern poetry? Especially do we see this essential grandeur of literature in its most ambitious, I may say its most auda- cious creation, namely tragedy. For what is tragedy? What is the motive of tragic invention? Why do men subject themselves to tragic emotion? Why simulate suffering, and court gratuitous pain? There is no satisfactory answer to this question except the answer made by man's religious nature, that tragedy evinces man's compulsory interest in sin and its tragic consequences. Shakespeare says: " Conscience does make cowards of us all;" he might also have said: " Conscience makes tragedians of us all." Tragedy is one of the ways in which the human soul strives to work out great moral problems. It is contrary to the deepest in- stincts of man that a guilty being should be happy. The human race, conscious of its sinfulness, and in sympathy with the principle of retribution, makes confession in tragedy; it inflicts punishment on itself; it strives to expiate its guilt by self-inflicted suffering. When a whole audience weeps for Lear or Desdemona, and feels better for the weeping than if it had laughed with Beatrice or Rosalind, it indulges a feeling of vicarious suffering which has an element of expiation in it. Among ruder peoples this spirit manifests itself through the coarser tragic emotions. This explains the interest taken by the people in funerals, murders, executions; the tendency to emphasize and prolong all emotions connected with death. INFLUENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES 93 What Gray calls the " unlettered muse/' who writes the rustic epitaphs, makes them as tragical as possible. This is essen- tially true of the profounder peoples, the Scotch and the Puritans, for example, whose traditions, folklore, customs, even pastimes, are deeply tinged with somber and tragic shadows. Rainbows and gardens, cascades and mossy val- leys, friendships, love, honored old age, peaceful deaths, all this will do for a gay and frolic hour, but when men grow serious they want mountains, storms, Niagaras, thunders, earthquakes. Arcadia will do for the honeymoon; after that men want something to call forth the stronger emotions and give to life a sense of reality and depth. In short the human soul instinctively feels after, and harmonizes with, the Christian solution of the great problem of life. The central fact in Christianity is a tragedy, the one tragedy which includes within it all tragedy, and which modifies all other tragedy. The universal human consciousness of guilt, the soul's dread of and sympathy with retribution, its demand for expiation, was met and satisfied by the tragedy on Calvary. It is both reverent and scriptural to say that the death of Christ was intended to awaken tragic emotion, and even in Aristotle's phrase " to purify human passions. " It addresses itself to the grand passions, terror, grief, indignation, love in its highest forms. And it follows from this view that as Christianity more and more interpenetrates human consciousness, tragedy loses its place, and gradually falls into disuse. The world has seen its greatest tragedies. The great problem of human destiny has been solved. Tragedy is essentially a Pagan institution. Its themes were the unsolved problems of the moral realm: it has been superseded and can never be revived. Yet did I say never? There is one supposable contingency in which tragedy would have a melancholy revival. If certain thinkers and teachers should have their way, and should succeed in destroying man's faith in a personal God 94 THE VERY ELECT and in his wise and loving Providence, and in substituting for that faith a conviction that the universe is controlled by irresponsible forces and impersonal law, then the old, hard, baffling questions would return upon men with all their gloom and terror. Then again the loftier souls would struggle with the toils which a relentless destiny had thrown around human life; then again the sufferers would rave in impotent dithyrambics against the powers which would be deaf to their cries; and again the chorus, the echo of the best human wisdom, would with half-sincere calmness counsel patience and submission to that awful power which puny man can neither understand nor evade. But if we may allow ourselves to augur well from this fundamental conception of literature as being the treasure- house of the best that humanity has achieved or imagined of itself, we may hope for still more when we reflect that the judge who pronounces upon what claims to be the embodiment of the best, is mankind. All books are not literature, as all Christians are not found in the calendar of Saints. Literature is the canonized thought of the race. But who elects and consecrates to literary sainthood? No conclave of critics, no council of scholars, but the great multitude who think and feel, and whose voice is the voice of mankind. The total literature of the world is not large in amount. The Imperial Library of Paris with its two million volumes con- tains no more literature in the true sense than might be comfortably ranged on the modest shelves of a private study. Apply the test and see how much of all this mass of printed matter mankind so loves and prizes that it would not willingly let it die. Add to the books that are translated into all tongues because of the inalienable value of the thought, those for the sake of whose unmatchable beauties of form men will be at the pains of learning a foreign tongue, and how many works will you count up? Will there be thousands or only hundreds? The same process excludes from the rank INFLUENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES 95 of literature the great majority of the works in all languages which a capricious and shifting popular taste, or national vanity may have canonized, but which mankind at large will not admit into its Pantheon. It is quite within the limits of possibility for a diligent and long-lived student to make himself familiar with the total literature of the world. So chary is mankind of this highest honor within its gift, so reluctant to admit a new aspirant to the rank of literary kingship! How long the probation it requires! How slowly its judgment is matured! How intolerant it is of aught but supreme excellence! Voltaire, for example, has now been dead a hundred years, and the question of his admission to the calendar is approaching decision. He was unquestionably the greatest genius that France has produced. If called upon to match the English Shakespeare and the German Goethe, every Frenchman would name Voltaire. His contemporaries no more doubted that by the universal judgment of mankind his name would blaze at the head of all writers of every age, than they doubted his superiority to the insular and barbarian Shakespeare. And the question mankind has been all this time settling was not whether the genius of Voltaire was of the first order for that has never been disputed but whether for the sake of the genius it could overlook that spirit of mockery, that almost fiendish malice, which tainted everything that came from his pen. It seems to be well-nigh settled that Voltaire is doomed to almost the same degree of infamy in literature to which he has long been adjudged in religion. And the case is an interesting one as establishing this fact, that in awarding literary approbation and honors, mankind is determined to take good care that morality receives no detriment. Squeamish it does not pretend to be; grossness, though it does not approve, it can overlook ; but all tampering with moral ideas, all open irreverence, or covert sneers at virtue, or suspicion of impiety, the literary judgment of mankind has a thousand times consigned to the everlasting punishment of oblivion. 96 THE VERY ELECT Proceeding now to call attention to some of the character- istics of literature, which evince its friendliness to religion, let me mention first what I do not hesitate to call its unworldly spirit. The sympathies of literature do not go out toward power and grandeur and wealth, but toward simplicity and frugality, toward quiet and modest worth. Its ideal of life is unostentatious and unselfish. That which Horace says of the dramatic chorus is true of all literature. ' "It commends plain living, salutary laws, and peace with her open gates: it beseeches the gods that prosperity may return to the wretched and forsake the proud." 1 Its beatitudes, like those of Scripture, are for the poor in spirit, the meek, the peace- makers, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Its sternest invectives it bestows upon successful tyrants, and wealthy oppressors of the poor, upon pride glittering in splendor, and beauty tossing disdainful looks upon the courtiers who obsequiously bear her jewelled train. From Job down to Walter Scott and Tennyson, literature is con- tinually reversing contemporary judgments and pleading the cause of the afflicted and the unhappy. When it vexes the souls of the righteous to see that the ungodly prosper in the world, while the clean in heart are plagued and chas- tened every morning, and the thought is too painful for them to bear, then in the sanctuary of literature as in the sanctuary of God they shall hear voices reassuring them that all that is really to be desired in heaven and on earth is theirs, that God is guiding them here by his counsel and shall afterwards receive them into glory. Is not this, when translated out of the forms of the Hebrew into classical speech, the lesson of Greek tragedy and Roman philosophy? Could not the Psalmist be voluminously annotated from ^Eschylus and Sophocles, from Cicero, Horace and Seneca? Need I remind you how all the old myths and legends, the inexhaustible quarries of poetry, imitate the divine providence in that they i Ars Poetica, 199. INFLUENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES 97 put down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree? Consider with what religious fidelity to the claims of an unworldly justice the great poets enlist our feelings on the side of virtue though unhappy and in rags, against prosperous crime. With what tenderness they depict poverty, its hardships, its sorrows, its glimpses of native humanity! As Jesus himself moved about among the homes of the poor, pitying, sympathizing, cheering, but never deriding or stirring up discontent or resentment, so literature seems to take peculiar delight in covering up the hard features of poverty with a drapery of love, in training vines over lowly roofs, and echoing rebecks and madrigals, psalms and prayers, from the smoky rafters of huts and cabins. With what a loving hand does old Chaucer draw the protrait of the poure persoun of a toun, and how paltry and contemptible by the side of him seems the courtliest ecclesiastic of his time or ours! Whose heart does not warm towards the tartan of Jeanie Deans, poor simple soul that was afraid to tell a lie, but worthy that Queen Caroline should have been at her feet, not she at the Queen's. If any man or woman can follow the fortunes of (Edipus and Antigone, of Lear and Cordelia, of the patient Griselda and the meek Lady Clare, and not feel that there is a charm and loveliness in pure goodness which no prosperity can outshine, which no suffer- ing, nor reverse of fortune, nor calamity, nor death, can obscure, I hardly know what there is in religion itself that can teach the lesson. I notice next the charity of literature. The Greek drama- tist put into the mouth of his noblest heroine this divine sen- tence, worthy to have been uttered by the inspired lips of the Apostle John "My nature is to love with those who love, not to hate with those who hate." 1 In this respect literature resembles Antigone. Its loves are spontaneous and warm and universal; its hatreds are not narrow and 7 i Antigone, 523. 98 THE VERY ELECT malicious; they are but the protest of a loving nature against evil. One of the functions of literature is so to portray evil as to awaken one's antipathy and horror; that it has suc- ceeded in doing this without stirring our hatred is the triumph of charity. Several of the masters in literature have tried to picture the Evil One. Milton tried, but his lofty and generous soul misgave him, and he produced a magnificent archangel, only half ruined. Goethe drew his Mephistopheles, and succeeded in portraying a being toward whom we feel no drawing of sympathy only by making him passionless and unhuman. Poor Burns tried to say some hard things to the Deil, but broke down and ended by begging him to mend his ways. Indeed it is next to impossible to find in all literature a character so thoroughly and hopelessly bad that we have no relentings of feeling toward him, and when the rare instance is found it is revolting and painful. Dickens has sometimes erred in this way, in Fagin, e. g., and reveals therein his lack of the highest literary appreciation. And then again, notice the humanity, the tenderness with which literature addresses itself to correct the mistakes, the foibles and follies of mankind. Like a parent or an elder brother, who seeks to laugh out of his foolish whims and ways one whom he loves, and does not wish to offend, literature assails the follies of mankind by humor, which is the laugh of charity. I have noticed the mockery of Voltaire. Out of the vast mass of his writings, the charitable spirit of literature will suffer but some small fragments to live, while every line of Montaigne, of Cervantes and Goldsmith will always be dear to the heart of mankind. It is strangely pleasant, it gives one confidence in the virtuous impulses of mankind, to see with what wise charity literature defecates itself of the malice of Swift, the spite of Pope, the fleering jest of Byron; how year by year these writers occupy a less and less prominent place in literature, while Chaucer, and Shakespeare, Burns and Cowper and Goldsmith, men whose INFLUENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES 99 nature it is to love with those who love, and not to hate with those who hate, are multiplying their readers and admirers as the world grows older. What literature can do for us in cultivating our finer sensi- bilities, each one's experience, however limited, will enable him to some extent to appreciate. If the magazine story thrown off by some slight pen has yet some touches of nature in it which find or make some soft places in our hearts, if the scrap of second-rate poetry in the corner of the news- paper stir an emotion within us which vibrates perhaps through a whole day's experiences, what might we expect if we were to subject our souls to the influence of the great masters of Fiction and Poetry, skilled in all the pipes and stops of emotion, and capable of hurrying us up and down the gamut of the passions at their own sovereign pleasure? Does not this seem the most wonderful of all the wonderful powers that God has bestowed upon our kind? that certain men should have the power to say, "Thus and so I feel, and just so soon as I can tell the world how I feel, it shall feel exactly as I do? I will paint a jolly, greasy, lecherous monk so that all the world shall loathe the friars as I do; and I will paint a parish priest so meek, benign and Christlike that every parish in Chris- tendom shall make him their ideal of a parson. I have in my mind's eye a woman whom my own heart worships, and I will make all the world bow down before her. I will force men ages hence to share the indignation which at this instant I feel against ingratitude, treachery, falsehood." Strange power! There is no tyranny half so absolute as these men wield. No man can say, "I will read, but I will never sur- render my feelings to theirs." You can stop reading some- times, but if you trust yourself to the current you can no more stem it than a fly in a torrent. Why has God delegated such power as this to any man? Why has he so constituted us that the exhibition of a little genuine emotion makes us as submissive to a leader as a flock of sheep? Manifestly 100 THE VERY ELECT for this beneficent purpose, that those who feel may quicken those who do not; that the finer natures, that kindle quickly and get all aglow with noble and generous emotion, may convey the sacred fire to our duller and colder temperaments. Let me ask any of you who may have found yourselves under such a spell as I have described, What was it that touched you, which brightened up your outlook upon life and sent you with a new hopefulness to your work? Quite as likely as anything it was some one of those simple lyrics of our language, which go so gently and so irresistibly down through the crust of habit and the stoicism of our conventional life, down to the very hiding-places of feeling, where grief and joy, mirth and tears, mingle close together. I should say, indeed, not to go outside our own language, that we have some, nay, many, bits of literature, which are such true touchstones of genuine feeling that one who could read them amid favoring influences and not feel himself affected by them, roused or calmed, melted or set on fire, in laughter or in tears, would have good reason to think himself far gone towards a fatal insensibility. If any man or woman can without emo- tion follow the fortunes of Lear or Cordelia, or the Bride of Lammermoor; if he or she can read aloud some of the old English ballads, or Cowper's lines on his Mother's Picture, and be aware of no lump in his throat and no mist in his eyes, then in the gentle language of the Greek poet's impre- cation, "Let no such person be my friend, or sit at my hearth- stone." If now I have shown that literature exalts and persuades to that which is best, best actual and conceivable; that its spirit is unworldly and its tendency spiritualizing; and that it breathes a spirit of charity through all its works and into the minds of its votaries, I might here rest the case, and ask whether or not, with such characteristics, literature is favor- able to religion. I might ask if there is not something of the wisdom which is from above in that which is first pure, then INFLUENCE OF LITERARY /STUDIES'' : ; peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. But I add to this evidence of a religious spirit pervading literature, its incidental and yet positive recognition and enforcement of religious truth. I boldly make the assertion that the best literature is strongly committed to objective religion, and modern literature to the Christian religion. Indeed, I might almost say without qualification that all the best literature, ancient as well as modern, is a schoolmaster bringing men to Christ. Every scholar knows that ancient classical literature is full of premonitions of Christianity. Account for it as we may, whether by stray beams of the Hebrew revelation rinding their way into Egypt and Greece, or by the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, notions of sacrifice, of the incarnation, of the Holy Spirit, and other distinctively spiritual ideas, run through and give almost a Christian flavor to parts of the Greek and Roman literatures. Modern literature, especially English, is very largely Christian, not merely in its tone and drift, but in the doctrines it embodies and the life it commends. It is no new thought, but one which is acknowledged by enemies as well as by friends, that English literature is especially theological. Indeed, there is a very large section of the most vigorous and most imaginative literature in our language which, if we were classifying, we should hardly know whether to assign to literature or to theology. I mean such works as those of Jeremy Taylor, Hooker, South, not to say Spenser and Bun- yan. And this gives me the opportunity to offset a remark I made about religious reading, by saying that the deficiency in safe and wise religious books is largely compensated by the overflow of religion in literary works. If this assertion of religious doctrine and this pervasive evangelical spirit is something incidental, of which both writer and reader may at times be unconscious, none the less is it positive and salu- tary. Many a young man has unintentionally imbibed 102 THE VERY ELECT truths which were able to make him wise unto salvation, while he was intent only on human thought and imaginings. So thoroughly Christianized is our best literature, that if by some great calamity the Bible were swept from existence, and every religious treatise of every kind were burned or lost, all the great, saving truths on which mankind depend for life here and salvation hereafter would be saved to mankind in the shrines which literature has built for them. THE SCHOOLMASTERS' SELF-ESTIMATE AN ADDRESS TO THE VERMONT SCHOOLMASTERS' CLUB Men of the Schoolmasters 1 Club: I congratulate you on the name of your Club. I am glad that you are content and I trust proud to call yourselves schoolmasters that you have had the courage to challenge respect for a name which some of our craft would discard for a more pretentious one. We teachers in all grades are, or ought to be, " keeping school." When we feel above what that means, or may mean, we are not living up to the full reality of our calling. But having said this much I am going to ask you to indulge with me in a little, and not so very little, self-appreciation. It will not hurt us and it may do other people good, if, for the nonce, we yield ourselves to a frank expression of what we may call class- consciousness. It has been regarded as a brave and wise as well as witty thing to exclaim with Burns : "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!" the inference being if you will follow the words of the song a little further that we are, and should see ourselves to be blunderers, and fools, and hypocrites. Now however liable others may be to have these humiliating charges brought home to them by self-knowledge, we schoolmasters do not own to the impeachment. Indeed it seems to us that Burns' sly hit at people in general should be turned about to meet our case, and that it is a thing much to be desired that some Power would give to other people the gift to see us as we see our- selves. It would surely free them from many a foolish notion 103 104 THE VERY ELECT about us. For, as everybody knows, the world has been very much to blame in its estimate of us and its attitude toward us. It has injured us both by neglect and by abuse. The makers of history and literature and public opinion have never given to teachers a prominent place in the world's drama. The tragedians have passed us by entirely. They have never dignified us by representing us as capable of a great crime. Shakespeare in all his multitudinous range of tragic characters has no place for a schoolmaster. The only instance to the contrary which I recall is Eugene Aram, who sometimes comes upon our school stage between* two village beadles "with gyves upon his wrist." The comedians have always been free to use us as good material for humor, but have almost al- ways mixed malice with their humor, as though they had some score to pay off against old smarts and indignities. Aris- tophanes does not merely laugn at Socrates, he belabors him, and fairly draws welts upon his back. Would that Chaucer had portrayed our prototype of his time! Why should he not have been admitted to that jolly company along with the " Clerk of Oxenford," or was there no such person at that time? If Dan Chaucer had "done for us," or Charles Lamb, or Tom Hood, we should have been in the classical roll and could have laughed at ourselves in good temper. It has not tended to reconcile us to our assigned rank in the world's judgment to have Milton counted among us and to read his exculpation therefor in his serving without compensa- tion! But Goldsmith did depict the village schoolmaster, and Shenstone the schoolmistress; both with kindly touches; both with a grotesqueness which we pardon, and with a con- descension which we resent. The most genial and apprecia- tive portraiture of the schoolmaster which our literature presents is Ian McLaren's Dominie (long o, if you please) especially in his relation to the "lad o' pairts." But charm- ing, touching, reassuring as this portrayal is, it is not cypical, it is local, because no other country in the world could have THE SCHOOLMASTERS' SELF-ESTIMATE 105 furnished the environment which made it possible and real. You would have to get centuries of Scotch hard-he adedn ess and tender-heartedness, of Scotch metaphysics and theology and piety, before you could reproduce either Dr. McClure or the Domsie. What the world in all its characterizations of the school- master seems to deny us is the full, round, human life. They always represent us as solitaries, as living in and for our schoolroom, homeless elsewhere, getting all the satisfaction life affords us out of the scenes and implements and small bigotries of a spot unloved of memory by those who have passed through it. Are we really so unlovable, so un human? What are the faults with which we are charged? Let us either deny them, or correct them. They say we are opinionated. Well, we are. We spend most of our time in a company in which we are official umpires in which we have our own say, and our own way, without contradiction. Unless we have homes in which our dicta and our autocracy are effectively disputed, we have no fair chance to get the snubbing which every man needs in order to have the natural masculine arrogance taken out of him. But if peradventure we have that one chance, and suffer some lese-majeste thereby, or by any other ruffling of our plumes in a rude world outside of our schoolroom, let it not be said of us that we take our vengeance on the urchins who have no power to talk back to us till they get out into the world and join those who taunt us with being opinionated. They say we are censorious, that our view of life and of men is hard, inclined to be morose. They compare us to the elaer brother of the prodigal in the parable. They say, be- cause we do not approve cakes and ale we forbid other people having them. Perhaps there is some truth in this. It is one part of our business to see that no guilty grammar escapes no split infinitive or mixed metaphor. We believe with the 106 THE VERY ELECT Edinburgh Review, that, Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvi- tur. It is one of our virtues to be critical; otherwise the rising, and the risen, generation would get into slovenly and slipshod habits. It is possible we overdo this virtue. We will think of it. Le roi s'avisera. They say we are pedantic that is, that we judge outside matters by the standards of the schoolroom perhaps we are inclined that way. To Browning's Grammarian life meant only the opportunity to do justice to subjunctives, particles and enclitics. Too many hours spent on the second aorist and the binomial theorem, and too few on the practical prob- lems of good living, may distort our estimates of relative values. We may be in danger of becoming pedantic almost as pedantic as the lawyer who maintained that the question of the freedom of the will can never be settled until it is argued before and decided by a full bench of judges; almost as pedan- tic as the cleric who would settle modern social questions by the book of Leviticus. I hope other schoolmasters are not so far gone as that Boston master who after hearing one of Phillips Brooks' great sermons could be got to give no other judgment upon it than that the preacher had committed a grammatical blunder in one of his sentences. To be pedantic is let us confess it one of the defects of our qualities, to be guarded against, to be minimized, not to be defended or excused. But now suppose we are, to a certain degree, less or more, pedantic, and censorious, and opinionated, different forms of only one fault you will perceive, if any one should on the basis of this one fault, go on to put us in the rightly con- demned and abhorred class of cynics, he would be greatly mistaken, and would do us a great wrong. Cynics school- masters are not. A cynic is one who takes pleasure in the infirmities of his fellow-men who gloats over their mistakes and magnifies them who seeks them out not to correct them but to get scorn of them. It is impossible that the school- THE SCHOOLMASTERS' SELF-ESTIMATE 107 master should be a cynic, because he sees human nature where it is at its best in children and youth, and if he is in any degree an expert in his business, he sees how this nature re- sponds to good influences, and how great is his opportunity if he is equal to it. I wish I could say of the schoolmaster that he is constitutionally a humorist, for a fuller and more com- prehensive humor would correct most of his mistakes. But he comes much nearer to being a humorist than a cynic. A humorist is one who sees the faults of men as only foibles and would correct them by a laugh. The schoolmaster is so far a humorist that he wants to see the follies of mankind cor- rected, not kept on show for his delectation. We shall come nearer the right designation of him if we style him a " human- ist," one who has faith in human nature, in its actual worth and its capacity of indefinite improvement. The first men to bear this honorable historic name, the "humanists" of the Renaissance, were schoolmasters, virtually such. The es- sence of the humanistic spirit was faith in good learning, in literature, and philosophy, and art, as uplifting and vital- izing forces in human character and development. And what but this, in however humble guise, is the genius of the schoolmaster spirit in all climes and ages. What men caricature when they represent the schoolmaster as thinking to improve mankind by the rod, by horn-book and slate and grammar, by droning over dull lessons in drowsy afternoons, becomes a different thing when we think of the humanist teaching Greek to King Edward and Lady Jane Grey, of wandering scholars unlocking Greek manuscripts in monasteries and flooding the world with the light which made men eager to explore and discover and invent and make all life larger and more vital. What was all this but the same spirit which now amid the numbness of cold winter mornings and the dronings of drowsy summer afternoons, seeks to instill into the child's mind the humanity which now as then and ever is latent in horn-book and in illuminated man- 108 THE VERY ELECT uscript, in the words written or printed, conned in the school- room to be afterward wielded as the instruments of the thought, noble or subtle, which leads the world onward to its achievements. Great was the power of the horn-book when little Hans in Germany, Peterkin in England, and wee Rab in Scotland, began to master it. Great always and everywhere is rudimentary knowledge, the stock in trade of the schoolmaster, because out of it come all the dynamics of civilization and progress and humanity at its highest and best. The world owes the highest respect to schoolmasters be- cause they, together with the schoolmistresses, constitute a sort of intellectual caste in a community, which tones up the think- ing and conduct of the rest. They do for a community the service which Harry Brougham had in mind when he said that "the schoolmaster is abroad." They stand for intelli- gence and good taste and good manners in a community, for correct speech and good spelling and writing. If the reform- ers of spelling could enlist all the schoolmasters on their side the ^est of their work would be easy. Associated tacitly or openly with the minister, the doctor and the squire, they help to form in a New England town a quadrilateral of intelligence against ignorance and vulgarity and animalism. They work favorably upon the other members of che group, keeping the minister up to standard in his preaching, the doctor and the lawyer up to the requirements of a liberal calling. We may go a step farther and say that schoolmasters as a class can be depended upon and are actually relied upon to be on the right side of all social and moral questions which arise in a community, and to be among the leaders of that side. I mean to say that there is in every community so strong a presumption that teachers will give their influence in favor of law and order, of sobriety and decency and public virtue of all kinds, that an instance to the contrary would sur- prise and shock the general mind more than would such a lapse THE SCHOOLMASTERS' SELF-ESTIMATE 109 in a member of any other calling in the community. If any class is entitled to be considered censors of public morals and manners it is the schoolmasters. If in any community there arises a question of temperance in the best sense of the word, of decency in public exhibitions, of a quiet observance of the day of rest, of the humane treatment of animals, of quiet streets at night, of providing wholesome and excluding harm- ful literature for the young, and any of the hundred great and little things on which the comfort and well-being of citizens depend, you always know on which side of such questions the schoolmasters will be : and could there be any greater tribute to their value as members of the community? And they are not mere passive approvers of what other men do. What most communities need is men of initiative, of readiness to move off on new lines of effort called for by the times. And they have what is equally needed good judgment, discretion, wise mod- eration in reform movements. If some impatient agitator, man or woman, wants to stir up a community over some chimerical scheme for bringing in the millennium the day after tomorrow, he may find his victim and his dupe, possibly, in an editor, or a writer of drama or fiction, or a clergyman, never in a schoolmaster. But if you want to interest some one in a sober, sane movement for the betterment of village, or church, or politics, for better sanitation, or beautifying of yards and streets and cemeteries, go to the schoolmaster and you will get, first, a thorough, dispassionate investigation of the scheme proposed, and if approved, a countenance and support which will help to carry conviction to the minds of all the rest of the community. If these matters in which the school- master's influence is so potent seem to be minor matters as compared with the large politics and high finance which make talk in the newspapers, they are after all the things which make almost all the difference between a community fit to live in, and bring up children in, and come back to in old age, and one which all reputable people would forsake if they were in it, or avoid if they were outside. 110 THE VERY ELECT But the main reason why the schoolmaster is entitled to the respect of the world is because of the immense power which he holds in his hands and for the exercise of which he is held responsible. Measure it on one side by the evil he might do if he had the wicked will to do it. What conspiracy of evil outside of the infernal regions is comparable to what a com- pany of evil-minded teachers could effect, what wrong ideas they might instill, what vicious principles they might in- culcate; and how quietly and insidiously, and for a time unnoticeably, they could do their work of mischief. We put under heavy bonds, legal and moral, the men who are en- trusted with the funds of the community, we reward them for fidelity by honors and emoluments, we punish them severely for unfaithfulness, but what power of evil have they which could for a moment be compared with that in the hands of teachers, the power to teach untruthfulness, disobedience to parents, love of mischief, disregard of the rights of property, of order, of peace, in a community? What if we should find that in some of our public schools, the extreme doctrines of socialism, or of anarchism the right and duty of assassination, of pri- vate revenge, and of free love were openly or secretly incul- cated? Or if we may not imagine a bad teacher, directly imparting vicious principles, are we safe against a weak teacher, who does not discover and repress the evil which is ever latent in the few pupils of evil mind, and ready to spring up and work mischief if not kept under by the strong hand? But let us rather measure the teachers' value by the good which they do, and which we credit them with doing. What are the agencies which more than others determine what human society will be in the next generation? Are they the homes? Yes, first of all. The churches? Yes, next, in spite of all which is grievingly, or boastfully, said of their waning influence. But third in power and responsibility come the schools power, in many cases even if not rightly so, actually greater than that of the other two combined, because more systematic and vigi- THE SCHOOLMASTERS' SELF-ESTIMATE 111 lant. Is it cause or consequence, or both, of the phenomenal prosperity of the new Western states, that they have provided for themselves the most comprehensive and the most liberally endowed school system in the world splendid tribute paid by the foremost material civilization to the pre-eminence of the things of the spirit ! All over the United States, and among all enlightened and progressive peoples, the schools are among the foremost objects of public interest, regard and pride. In all public festivities and displays the children of the schools take conspicuous part. The school bill is among the largest in any civic budget: school architecture arrests the eye in city and country in almost equal rivalry with churches and courts of justice. The school " proposition," to use a Western term, looms up everywhere as one of the "burning questions" which excite and agitate parties and factions. It is the most promi- nent question in English politics; it is one of the great divisive factors in the social life of France; it is recognized as the leading element of prosperity in Germany. But the real agents in all this social and national well-being, the priests of this world-wide cult, the schoolmasters, what of them? They are the least conspicuous of all the personages in the scene. They live in modest houses in the back streets. They go on foot, not driven in sumptuous carriages nor wheeled in motor cars. On great public occasions they are not honored with seats on the platform. They are Mordecais sitting outside the palace gate while the Hamans of war and finance and com- merce pass in and out before the royal presence. But the day is coming, and is not far off, when the great royal, the great imperial, public will have its eyes opened to see who are its true servants and its real benefactors, and they will raise the cry, "What shall be done to the men whom the people de- light to honor?" and then the schoolmaster and by his side the schoolmistress will get their long overdue applause and honor and reward. THE DYNAMIC OF CATECHETICAL INSTRUCTION READ BEFORE THE FACULTY CLUB, 1910 THE question may be taken either as defending under a specious term our old friend the recitation, or as proposing something to take the place of it. In either case it is the oral lesson in comparison with the lecture method of instruction. It is not necessarily the one versus the other, for no one doubts that each has its place and value in a course of instruction. It is an attempt to put the so-called recitation method in the way of showing its best capabilities. It is never the part of wisdom to estimate the merits of any- thing by its capacity of abuse. The fact of very gross abuse may be an indication of great possibilities of good as well as of evil. The catechetic or recitation method of instruction has shown itself possessed of resources of both kinds. It is the oldest, simplest, most natural, most generally practised form of instruction. It has had in the various hands that have used it, the best results and the worst. The greatest teachers the world has produced have used it and have demonstrated its efficiency to such a degree as to leave no question as to its permanent place in the armory of educational instruments. On the other hand the poorest teachers have found in it a refuge for incompetency and a disguise both to others and to themselves of their inefficiency. But in spite of perversion and abuse it has not become an outlived and obsolete method of instruction. It will not become obsolete, because it has in it possibilities of good which scholastic philosophy will better and better discern, and which the scholastic art cannot afford to dispense with. Our object is to find the capabilities of the method when at its best. An easy, off-hand answer to 112 DYNAMIC OF CATECHETICAL INSTRUCTION 113 our question would be: "If you want to learn the capabilities of the method, read Xenophon and Plato." But while we recognize Socrates as the greatest exemplar of the power of the catechetic method, yet his method is not in all respects the ideal and the model for us. Socrates put to his interlocutor leading questions in which the right conclusion was implicit. The party of the second part was an accomplice in the process but not a principal. He was by his compulsory assent to one proposition compelled to assent to the next, and the next, until he was landed in a position which surprised him. The transaction was really monologue in the form of question and assent. The teacher really did all the reasoning to which the pupil gave his nod of approval. The art of it was that of the mechanical device known as the inclined plane; the ascent from premise to conclusion was so gradual and easy that the victim, if I may so call him, that is what one of the audience called himself the unconscious reasoner was hardly aware of his progress till he found himself on some pinnacle of philo- sophic speculation which it made him dizzy to contemplate. The modern teacher cannot do better than to study the didac- tic art of Socrates. From it he will learn much: the potency of the question as a factor in reasoning; the virtue of going slow in the process of convincing; the value of the side-light in the elucidation of an idea; the illusiveness and danger of imagery, especially when, as is the case of most imagery, a sensuous image is used to illustrate a spiritual conception; with many other helps of the greatest value to him as a student of didactic art; but it would be a great mistake for him to try to reproduce the Socratic method. What is the catechetical or recitation method at its best? First, where is it most available? I should answer, with younger students say, almost exclusively, up to the end of the Sophomore year, and in the elementary stages of all mathe- matical, linguistic, literary, historic, socialistic, political and philosophical subjects, and in connection with laboratory 114 THE VERY ELECT work in scientific and technical branches. This statement is meant to be in part a protest against the lecture method im- ported into our elementary teaching from Germany, without other German counteracting and sustaining agencies. The abuse of this method, the introduction of it at unfit periods, and the displacement by it of work on the part of the pupil and of individual drill on the part of the teacher, has in my judgment weakened the effectiveness of our elementary teaching to a deplorable extent during the last generation. The pupil, instead of being required and helped to master the elements and fundamentals of a subject, has in many cases been given courses on haphazard topics within the general subject, the preparation and delivery of which have been matters of interest and of ambition to the young instructor, but of questionable value to the pupil. The teachers of law and of medicine have found out earlier than other teachers the mistake of depending mainly on lectures, and now almost all high-grade schools of law and medicine insist on a large amount of text-book and catechetical instruction. When we have secured a basis of confirmed habits of study, and a knowledge of the fundamental elements and principles of the subject to be mastered, then and not before, we seek for the enlargement, the spirit of research, the inspiration, which may come from the lecturer and the investigator. So much for the when and where of catechetical teaching. As to the substance of it, let us first require a good text-book for a start. A good text-book is one which puts before the pupil the essentials of the subject in hand with clearness, with well-graded advance, with completeness so far as it goes. Such a book cannot be made by a novice. No one can so well set forth the elements of a subject as one who has made great advance in it. We of this day are suffering from a trade com- petition in the making and vending of text-books. Many of our books are made by young instructors who are hired by rival publishers to prepare them for "covers and a market." DYNAMIC OF CATECHETICAL INSTRUCTION 115 What writers of text-books in mathematics, for instance, are taking the places of the Legendres and Bourdons and the authors of the Cambridge series? What writers in philosophy, the place of Locke and Butler; in political economy, of Adam Smith and Say? It is a great advantage to be under the in- fluence of a great original and powerful mind, as we are when we study such works, rather than the texts struck off to order for profitable trade. Nevertheless, if the ordinary teacher will use the best available text-book, he will in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred do better than to extemporize a produc- tion in the form of a lecture of his own. The reason for using a text-book is in order to put before the pupil something to be mastered by his own resources, some definite task to be ac- complished. To be obliged to "get one's lesson," sounds very school-boyish, but more intellectual fibre is created and nourished by the process than by the attempt to absorb knowledge through a lecture. A certain moral discipline blends with the intellectual in this work of preparation for the class. It makes an appeal to will-power, to fidelity, to the sense of gratification in having done one's part well. The demoral- izing influence of a condition in which one feels that he can do as he likes, as regards preparation, the indulgences and vagaries and dolce-far-nientes into which the lecture system tempts an immature student, all this is most effectually counteracted by the stern obligation to master a certain defi- nite portion of a text-book every day under threat of mental if not physical vapulation if one fails. But preparation for the catechetical lesson is, or should be, more than a preparation in the subject in a certain definite assigned subject. This of course applies to pupils of somewhat mature age. Here is room and call for the initiative of the teacher and the enterprise of the pupil. Preparation should not with such pupils be a mere conning of formulated knowl- edge, but an effort to appropriate all available knowledge on the subject which time and means permit. Here is the place 116 THE VERY ELECT for the differentiation of pupils. There should be a somewhat definite minimum of expectation as regards the ordinary or average pupil, with which the better minds should not be suffered or suffer themselves to be content. The abler pupils should be called on to take part in the instruction of the class. The reason why it is so great an advantage to be a member of a certain class in college is that in such class a certain number of superior minds contribute an important element to the instruction of the class. The competent teacher requires of them this surplusage of preparation and co-opera- tion with himself in the amount and value of the matter brought out in the class-room. But preparation for this class-room involves more than preparation in the text-book and in the topic assigned; it is a preparation to meet the teacher; to meet him, to encounter him, to satisfy him. That is a pertinent phrase they have at Oxford: so-and-so has " satisfied the examiners." To satisfy the teacher in a personal encounter; not by pen or pencil work, which in some subjects operates as a disguise of ignorance in the same way as written work, lecturing, disguises the igno- rance of the teacher. To be able to write on and on about a subject "to talk about it, goddess, and about it" often conceals ignorance certainly requires far less knowledge than does an ability to handle a subject catechetically. In order to meet a class in a catechetical exercise a teacher needs to prepare himself thoroughly, to mark, learn and inwardly digest his subject, so that he can deal with it lucidly, comprehensively, accurately in an encounter with the dullness, the mistakes, the eager inquisitiveness, the latent or active power of appreciation in the pupils. And they, on their part, should be taught and accustomed to foresee and expect, and to have a certain wholesome fear of this encounter with the teacher; to fear it in such a way that to earn through it his respect and approba- tion brings an intellectual gratification and reward. But now with the appearance of the pupil in the class-room DYNAMIC OF CATECHETICAL INSTRUCTION 117 with his prepared lesson, comes the real distinction between the good and the bad use of the recitation method. The bad method has been gruesomely described as first swallowing something, and then regurgitating it. In so far as this is a taunt brought by the lecturists, a fair reply would be, that even this is better than carrying a predigested mass in an inert stomach. It is a fundamental mistake to make of the exercise a mere examination, an inquisition to find out whether the pupil has learned his lesson. This is only an incident, and a minor incident, in the proceeding. The main thing is to help the pupil to master, to appropriate, to assimilate this bit of knowledge. He has done what he could with a certain intel- lectual problem; he has attacked a difficulty, and in the doing of it he has got some knowledge and some discipline. But both his knowledge and his discipline can be added to. He has solved his problem but perhaps not in the best way; you are to show him the better way. He has worked out a translation of a difficult passage in Thucydides or Dante: you show him its deficiencies, and give him a more accurate or more elegant one. He has some glimpse of the right relations of value and price, and you help him to a clearer view of the whole matter. You do this in large part by question and answer, because what he himself does upon your suggestion and by way of inference and under the momentum of discussion, is of more value than what is merely loaded upon him as information. This is much more than examination; it is very inadequately termed recitation; it is on the part of the pupil not repetition but reproduction; and on the part of the teacher not inquisi- tion but discovery, adaptation, stimulus, encouragement, award. In its perfection it demands, of course, a class of such a size as not to forbid individual teaching, the personal play of mind between teacher and pupil, this and that actual pupil, with the capabilities and idiosyncrasies of each taken into the account. On the other hand private tuition, the instruction of one pupil by one teacher, does not afford the best oppor- 118 THE VERY ELECT tunity for the catechetic method. There is lacking the variety, the polarity, the parallax, which come from a number of minds all unlike, and all presumably pursuing the same quest. In this view "Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a solitary student on the other" lacks something of the idea of a univer- sity or even of a college. The old legal maxim ires faciunt collegium may be enough for a corporation, but not enough for a college proper. In most subjects not less than ten are needed to give the complexity and ferment and resiliency necessary to a really inspiring class. The managing of such a class is no easy task. It is a much severer strain upon intel- lectual effort and a heavier draft on intellectual resources than lecturing. An hour of it leaves the instructor exhausted. But it pays ! It educates the pupil instead of merely informing him. It adds something every time to his grip, and his grasp, and his power. To have fenced with a master of escrime, as every teacher in his place and measure ought to be, prepares one for the encounter wich error in the larger world: to have had one's mind cleared of the fogs which beset half -knowledge is to learn to be impatient of half-knowledge anywhere and everywhere. I digress here for a moment if it is digressing to speak of the power that lies in the question. I fancy some of us are ex- periencing some irritation jusfc now in view of the excess of what are called questionnaires, summonses to tell in manifold tables all we know and don't know and don't want to know about every conceivable subject under the stars; and are incapaci- tated from taking an impartial view of the question but the question is a thing of power in the class-room. To say, a good questioner, is almost to say, a good teacher. If I were to go on a tour of inspection in class-rooms, in quest of a teacher, this would be one main point of inquiry, Can he question well? The teacher puts a question which as he sees too late goes aside from the point; he elongates it to reach the point; finds the matter to be confused and tries over again; DYNAMIC OF CATECHETICAL INSTRUCTION 119 perhaps tries it over three or four times before he finally gets in his interrogation pause his own mind muddled by the effort and the pupil's mind mazed and paralyzed. Another teacher makes his question clear, sharp, direct, searching, comprehensive; if he has occasion to repeat it he does it in the same words; he requires one answer to that question and no other. If the pupil does not know the answer he will know that he does not know it, and that knowledge will be good for him. If he does know it, he will know it better by stating it in the form demanded by a clear question. But the question, rightly used, is more than a discloser of knowledge or ignorance. It is a stimulus to thought. It opens up lines of inquiry; it starts a series of concentric circles around the subject in hand. Some of these quests must be pursued on the spot while the interest is on. Others are carried away for more leisurely inquiry. Catechesis which is thorough does not stop with the end of the lesson for the day. It goes forth with the pupil into his fixed and permanent habits of mind; tends to make him inquisitive, persistent, appreciative of all lucidity and completeness, impatient of all obscurity and inaccuracy and shamming. We see then that the dynamic of catechetical instruction comes to its climax in the immediate vital contact of one lead- ing mental and spiritual personality with the personalities of a group of pupils; the intellectual and emotional currents passing freely to and fro, spontaneous on both sides, but always con- trolled and directed by the teacher. I have spoken advisedly of emotion as having a place in catechetical instruction. Teaching which does not generate it, or does not get momen- tum from it, is dull and spiritless. I have said also that this contact must be immediate immediate as to both time and touch. One disability of the lecturer comes from his isolation, his aloofness from his pupils. He has the disadvantage which attends preaching. He speaks to men, not at arm's length, but from a remote altitude. There is no talking back. The 120 THE VERY ELECT currents pass only one way; there is no immediate response. What he says, however effective, has time to get cold and stale before its effects are available. The best instruction is a matter of both strategy and tactics. The professor pre- pares his plan of campaign; studies his topography, that is to say, the character of his pupils; lays out the work adapted to their needs; parcels it out by sections and fields; plans for his auxiliary forces. Then, before the battle comes on, he has inured the pupils to habits of preparation, to the antici- pation of sharp conflict with a view to inducing every one to come with faculties in best condition, not fagged by excessive physical exertion, not dulled by loss of sleep, not stupefied by narcotics. In the class-room he employs tactics which in part are the traditional and well-established methods of an old-time professor not discarding them because they are old and in part the product of his own philosophy; taking care that whatever else his class-room may be, it shall never be drowsy, always alert, breezy, and at times it may be, even hilarious. THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER A VESPER HOMILY IN THE course of my last summer's reading, I came some- where upon this expression, "The Fine and Serious Art of Living Together." It struck me as a wonderfully happy expression of what our college life ought to be, both for itself and for the after-life of college-bred men and women. Living Together in a worthy and commendable way is an Art: it is a Serious Art: and it is a Fine Art. It is an Art. Art has been denned as making an idea, real or, in terms of philosophy, making the subjective, objective. Living To- gether is, for human beings, a matter of volition, choice, plan. Certain animals are gregarious by nature, and Nature deter- mines for them the methods, and, so to speak, the customs, according to which they herd together. With them living together is an instinct, not an art. But men and women, in order to live together in accordance with their true nature, have to exercise thought, deliberation have to study adap- tation of means to ends, to adopt some constructive principles of association. They need to determine why they are living together, and in what ways they can best attain the purpose for which they are living together. They need to realize in their minds the inherent absurdity, the self-defeating selfish- ness, the inhumanity, of such a life as Thoreau holds up to admiration the life which would get all the benefits of civiliza- tion, and return only the moroseness of savagery. It is some- times said that society is made up of individuals, and that what is good for the individual is good for society. The practical outcome of this philosophy of life would be "every man for himself." It is tersely expressed in Cain's question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Yes, St. Paul says, you are, "no man 121 122 THE VERY ELECT liveth to himself. " He does not put it as a duty no man ought to live to himself but as a fact : no man does live, or can live, to himself. To live together is a human necessity, and those who live together must affect each other. The question is, how they can affect each other for good, for the best possible; and this craves careful consideration. Wise and helpful Living Together, then, is an Art, is a policy. We have long known, and Maeterlinck has impressively reminded us, that Bees have a policy a wonderfully adjusted system by which they live and work together. Modern researches have shown us that the same is true of Ants, and quite likely of many other, possibly of all, creatures who live together in colonies, or as we may say in colleges. Doctor Worcester and Pro- fessor Perkins have found a marvelous kind of living together in the little red spiders which infest our rose bushes. If we men and women could find by human art a way of living together as wisely as these inferior creatures do after their kind, we should have solved most of our social and political problems. But our very intelligence, coupled with our freedom, makes our task of living together a difficult one. It is for us an Art. And a serious Art. It is an Art which requires, as two essential conditions of success, first, serious thought, and second, a serious moral purpose. For men and women to live together without serious thought about the right way to live together, is to invite, and ensure mistakes, blunders, wrongs, unintentional but none the less hurtful, wounds which leave life-long scars, alienations where harmonies ought to have been, enmities which were born of thoughtlessness and grew into crimes. But the most regrettable result of want of thought regarding our social life is what is lost thereby. Think for example, of the possibilities of such living together as we have in this University company. What opportunities for friendships which would enrich all after life! What open- ings for kindness, for helpfulness, for gracious ministries, THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER 123 and all that greater blessedness which comes from giving more than we receive! If college students have to forego the enjoyments and benefits of domestic life, they have what may be a greater substitute for it, the companionship of the most select community known to our civilization, the com- munity of men and women, youthful, young, middle-aged, mature, all engaged in intellectual pursuits and presumably devoted to high ideals of life. What a mistake it would be to lose the best of these opportunities, or any of them, for lack of the serious thought by which alone we can fully appre- ciate the immeasurable good they offer to us! But in order to realize the best of living together we must also enter into it with a serious moral purpose. It requires resolution, and courage, and patience, and good-will, and large amounts of them, to live well together. No man is fit to live with others who has a soft, easily impressed nature, a feeble will, who is the easy victim of a jest, or a taunt, or a sneer; who does not know how to hold his own in the face of a smart speech, or a bad argument. There is no college exercise so important that I would not give it up if I could secure instead of it the reading of the first chapter of Thack- eray's Newcomes the chapter in which the good uncle takes his nephew to the Cave of Harmony, that the lad may see how jovial spirits have a good time, but the moment an old roue starts a ribald song, the gallant and brave gentleman stalks out of the room in high indignation and with splendid rebuke! I doubt whether there is any spot in life, whether on the battle-field, in the drawing-room of the fast set, in the midnight revel where men who have forgotten God and all the Commandments meet to laugh down all good things, I doubt whether there is any place where it costs more, or means more, or does more good, to stand up and say and do the right unpopular thing, than at times in college. But the man who says it and does it is respected and remembered, and in after life he remembers it himself, and is glad and happy in the remembrance. 124 THE VERY ELECT When we say that living together in the best way is a Serious Art, we do not mean that one should be solemn and glum, that he should look upon the gay and frolicsome side of life with suspicion. It is meant only that he should do all parts of his college life, especially the social part, with something of the same spirit with which he does some parts playing ball for instance. I am always impressed with the seriousness of the modern game of baseball indeed it sometimes seems to me too serious for real recreation. But it is the perfection of a certain kind of art of very serious art. If teaching and study, if politics and religion, were con- ducted with a temper as serious, and a devotion as strenuous and whole-hearted, what angels we should be! But Living Together, especially living together in College, though a serious art, is also a Fine Art indeed partly because it is a serious art is it a Fine Art. An Art becomes fine when its creations are produced under the influence of imagination and sentiment. Any art of man, in whatever sphere, becomes a fine art when it idealizes what it works upon that is when it sets before itself an image of perfection and strives to realize it. On the New England sea-coast where I have for several years spent a part of my summer vacation, the dwelling- houses of ten generations are still standing. The first houses were necessarily rude mere shelters from storm and cold and wild beasts. By and by elements of shape and comeliness began to appear. The idea of what a house ought to be grew along with the means to realize the idea. The house became the creation of an artist. And finally no, not finally, for art knows no finality, but at length, the same imagination and feeling which conceived the Billings Library I mean H. H. Richardson's placed upon the shore of Sippecan Bay an ideal sea-side cottage, simple, picturesque, home-like, effective both for use and for admiration. In this same way all true art tends to become fine art. Not our houses only, but our furniture, our tools, our clothes, our books, our man- THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER 125 ners, our speech, come under influences that tend to make them finer, more artistic. Now the finest of all the fine arts is the Fine Art of Living Together, genially, gracefully, nobly. A gentleman, a gentlewoman, is one who is seriously cul- tivating the Fine Art of Living with other people. The first requisite in this art is to conceive of it as something worth while. What Michael Angelo said of his art is in a sense true of this art: "she is a jealous goddess she demands the whole and entire man." The man we call a "boor" is one who does not think it worth while to take any pains about his living with other people. There are many who do not deserve so harsh a name, and who yet are not good to live with, because while they may take a little pains, they are not willing to take enough pains to live with other people. For we must not disguise it that to do this thing well as to do most things we must take a good deal of pains. It is easy to look over a company of those whom we know and to divide them into those whom it is pleasant to live with, because they are willing to take a great deal of pains to make living with them agreeable, and those who will take no pains or only very little. There are those who practically say: "I will not put myself out much for other people : I want my own way : I want to say rude things when I feel like it. I have a knack at repartee, or sar- casm, or mimicry, and I like to indulge it. I don't like to be bored. I don't ' suffer fools gladly,' and Mr. Carlyle and I agree that most folks are fools. I am a frank sort of fellow, and if I don't like A, or B, or C, I don't conceal my opinion of them." What these persons do not say of them- selves, or hear said, but what other people cannot help saying or be blamed for saying, is "You are conceited, and sullen and irritable, and you are not good to live with. You have not learned you evidently do not care to learn the first rudiments in the Fine Art of Living Together." This brings us to say that there are two or three very important elements in the Fine Art of Living Together on which we will dwell for a few moments. 126 THE VERY ELECT The first and most essential is that we recognize each other's rights. As human beings living in a state of civilization, as members of a social, civil and political community, we all have rights. But that means not only that I have rights, but that other people also have rights, and that I have no rights except in so far as I recognize other people's rights. Rights are not independent but mutual. I have no right to the pursuit of my happiness unless I recognize the right of other people to the pursuit of their happiness. The difference between barbarism and civilization is that in barbarism men have to get their rights with a club, and in civilization men get their rights by recognizing other people's rights. In our college community we all have our rights. Professors, Instructors, Students, Janitors and Servants; Neighbors, Citizens, Sick People and Young Children, all have certain rights. Instruc- tors have the right to respectful and deferential treatment from Students. Students have the right to painstaking in- struction and kindly guidance from Professors. Neighbors have the right to a quiet and orderly vicinage, by day and by night. Citizens have a right to have due respect paid to their property, their streets, theatres and all public buildings, their walls, gates, signs, and all their personal belongings. And there is one right which we all have, the dearest and most cherished of all our rights the right to our feelings, to our just pride, to our personal sensitiveness and self-respect. The more highly men and women are cultivated, the more sensitive they become to affronts offered to their feelings. But it is a curious anomaly of human nature that the sensi- tiveness to offense in one's self is not always offset by a pro- portionate delicacy with regard to the same sensitiveness in others. Now if anywhere in the world living together should be carried on with a scrupulously painstaking regard to the feelings of others, it should be in our college community. I have given above a definition of a gentleman and a gentle- woman. I will extend it a little by saying, a gentleman or THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER 127 a gentlewoman is one who thinks more of other people's feelings than of his or her own rights, and more of other people's rights than of his or her own feelings. Next it is to be noted that all the Fine Arts have certain canons of art, certain principles which have become established and fixed, as standards of judgment and action. Even in a region as free as Art, some things become settled for all time, and do not need to be determined anew by each successive generation. So in the Fine Art of Living Together there are certain conventionalities which good sense and good feeling have established for helping social life to go (5n with smooth- ness and decorum. As a general rule these conventionalities are able to give good reasons for themselves, and should com- mand our easy acquiescence and adoption. But even when they do not, when they appear to be without good reason, and are to some extent irksome, it is better to conform to them, than to break in upon the general order by being singu- lar. The man in Scripture who went to the wedding and had not on the wedding garment, is the typical example of the social non-conformist. The man who asserts his independence and by assumption his superiority, by refusing to dress as other people do, or to use the conventional forms of polite manners or speech, may think that he is obeying his conscience by refusing to bow in the House of Rimmon, when perhaps he is only unwilling to take a little pains to carry into details the Fine Art of Living Together. We may find an illustra- tion not the best but it happens to be pertinent in the matter of wearing academic dress. Every one feels a little foolish the first time he gets on gown and hood and cap. The reasons for wearing it may not be very cogent in the forum of plain common sense. They are, briefly, that the dress is a significant survival of the garb which once distinguished the scholarly guild in the old University that it serves to preserve memorial associations and traditions and that in a great academic function it adds something to the festal aspect 128 THE VERY ELECT of the occasion. It has as much sense as, and no more than, the robes of the Judge on the Bench, the veil and orange- blossoms of the bride, the starched shirt-front of evening dress, and, some one may add, the cap and bells of the court-fool. But as almost all colleges now follow the custom, it seems like claiming .for itself an austere superiority of taste or virtue, for an institution to be alone, or almost alone, in dissent. One other attribute of gracious Living Together is the taking a kindly interest in one another's happenings and doings what the French happily express by their word, "camaraderie." It is a very welcome and helpful good fellowship which prompts one to uphold, defend, encourage, cheer, and when occasion offers, applaud one's partners and associates. In our college life together, there are times and seasons when the manifesta- tions of good will and kindly feeling are specially grateful, and the withholding of them specially trying and even morti- fying. College folks are a sensitive set, sensitive to approba- tion, sensitive to slight and hurt. Students have been known to carry through life resentment for a slight put upon them by an instructor, or by a fellow student. It is a college tradition that a student must take a joke against himself with good nature. A mere joke which will slip off like water from a duck's back, he ought. But if, either with malice or thought- lessness, you put acid into the water, it will not all run off, and you must not expect the victim to enjoy the smart. I make no allusion to personalities in our own Class-day exer- cises and college publications, which so far as I know are not open to severe censure, but in another institution I once witnessed a so-called joke put by his classmates upon one just about to graduate, which to have forgiven, had the case been mine, would have required a great deal more Christianity than I have, and which would have embittered the memory of Class-day and Classmates and College for all after life. Not to be able to distinguish between a joke that is harmless and one that hurts, shows bluntness of intellectual discern- THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER 129 ment, while to intend the hurt under cover of sport is both cruel and cowardly cruel because the laugh aggravates the hurt, and cowardly because the assailant slinks from the frontal at- tack. But let us speak rather of the kindnesses we can do to one another. A certain college has a song describing how the President once bowed to a freshman on the campus, and the freshman fell down dead with the shock of surprise. I take the lesson of that to myself. The time was when I knew and could call by name not only every student in college at the time, but almost every living graduate and old student not a graduate. It is the one regret attending our greatly increasing numbers, that I can no longer do this. But along with this increase in numbers has come into our college life of today a greater intimacy and a kindlier relation between instructors and students. It is no longer a reproach to a student in the eyes of his fellows that he cultivates acquaintance with a professor, or his family; it is no longer a matter of surprise if a professor is seen walking arm-in-arm with a student, or if he invites him to his room. This more intimate social life affords countless opportunities for the exercise of what I have called "camaraderie." Has a professor taken special pains to write a paper, or prepare an exercise, which he hopes to make specially helpful to his class, and do you find it so, thank him not only by general applause but by the personal word of appreciation. We are very human, we teachers, and are none the worse for a little praise. When the seniors foregathered with me last June I read to them a letter from an old graduate in which he spoke in terms of warm admiration for his old instructors here, naming and characterizing them one by one. It was too late in many cases but I hoped the seniors would take the hint and say a word of appreciation and gratitude to their instructors before it was too late. And let us instructors cultivate the grace of admiration as regards our students. Those w r ho go from us to other insti- tutions bid us be thankful for the material we have to work 9 130 THE VERY ELECT with. Certainly we are unfit for our work if we do not discern in the body of students we have here " promise and potency" enough to call forth all our capacity for admiration and for enthusiasm in work. But do we make as generous a use of our opportunities for approval and commendation as we might? Are we as eager to praise as we have a right to be? When a class is interested, but a student here and there is actively and provokingly listless; when the bluebooks reveal only crass ignorance or slovenly and inaccurate attempts at knowledge; when line upon line and precept upon precept fail to produce any effect except to show that the pupil be- longs to the class of whom the Proverb says that he "has a price put in his hand to gain knowledge but has no heart thereto;" then is the time to apply in all its rigor the maxim of the Edinburgh Review: Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur. But when a student makes a specially happy translation which is his own of a difficult passage; when he offers a neat solution of a hard problem; when he shows real grasp of a question in science, or philosophy, or history then let the instructor applaud as he would be applauded. Or suppose a situation still more appealing: when the student comes to one of the hard places in his intellectual or spiritual experience and to such places all students come places where he needs sympathy and encouragement and stimulus then and there be his friend in need, and not only he but you also will have found a friend indeed. In passing literary judgments we have found what is almost a new word. For- merly it was all "criticism." Now it is "an appreciation." Let us all appreciate one another better. So then living together wisely, and genially, and helpfully, is an Art not an instinct thafc takes care of itself without any thought or plan a Serious Art, demanding our best thought and endeavor, and repaying it a Fine Art, the finest of the Fine Arts, because its ideal is the highest and noblest and even more than an Art, a Religion for what is it but THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER 131 giving our best of mind and heart to vitalizing our Lord's precept : "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them." And the Apostle's injunctions: "Be kindly affectioned one to another, in honor preferring one another." " Rejoice with them that do rejoice: weep with them that weep." THE LOVE OF DIFFICULTY AN ADDRESS OF WELCOME : SEPTEMBER, 1908 ONE of the partners in an intellectual enterprise said to an interviewer, as reported, "My role is a difficult one and you know I love difficulty." It was a wonderfully fine saying, and has depths of meaning in it. Note, I pray you, the psychologi- cal significance of the "and" not "but," "I love difficulty "- that is, " I love my work not in spite of its difficulty but because of it." Is it a hard saying? Yes, it probes, it tests, it selects us. It is, as Scripture says of the word of God, "a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." It divides us into those who are intellectually brave aye, and morally brave, too and those who are intellectually and morally weak. It decides for us, among many things, whether or not we belong in a college community; whether we are worthy to be intrusted with the responsibilities of the intellectual life. It would be a good motto for a university. If Plato would have in the Acad- emy no one ignorant of geometry, we might well write over the gate to the university, "Let no one enter here who does not love difficulty." Let it be the theme of this opening service. We begin with one or two distinctions. First, that the dif- ficulty which we are to love must be inherent in the nature of the subject necessary to it, constituting in part at least its worth as well as its challenge. Difficulty which is factitious, extraneous, superinduced over and above what is essential to the matter in hand, is of no advantage and presents no claim on our respect involves in short mere waste of energy. If we define waste as the amount lost by misdirected effort, there is an immense amount of waste incurred in overcoming un- necessary, irrelevant, and we may say, stupid difficulty. The difficulty we love must be a difficulty we can respect as 132 THE LOVE OF DIFFICULTY 133 being in itself due, and legitimate, and standing where it belongs. Next, to love difficulty means much more than to be willing to do hard work for the sake of an end to be attained. Hard work may be where no difficulty is a patient, persistent, jog-trot of work all on a level no barriers to surmount, no heights to climb, no dragons to slay with no gleam of the imagination, no leap of the emotions, a mere effort of will. The theme is, that the difficulty we love is welcome for itself; that it enhances in our minds the value of the thing it encom- passes ; that we do not merely not shrink before difficulty, nor merely tolerate it and make the best of it, but love it; that while we may not love this and that form in which it presents itself, it is not difficulty itself that we dislike; that difficulty itself, less in one form and more in another difficulty in itself considered we admire and welcome and love. But here we meet at the outset the assertion that the highest of all work, the work of genius, is done most easily does itself, so to speak, with little or no conscious effort on the part of the doer. This truth, for it is a truth, we might pass over with the remark that it concerns only the few exceptional cases and need not hamper us in dealing with the usual mind, were it not true that work is easy to any of us according as it is adapted to our special gifts, which seems to involve the infer- ence that nature warns us off from what is especially difficult as not being our task. But it still remains true that even genius has its heights to climb which are as difficult to it as lower tasks are to other men. The most gifted men are not doing their best until they have reached the spaces where difficult obstacles confront them, and they too fail if they do not love their difficulties. Even Shakespeare, however easily he may have thrown off "Much Ado About Nothing," we cannot con- ceive of as living jauntily and sleeping sweetly o 'nights when he was working out the tragic progress of Lear or Macbeth or Othello. 134 THE VERY ELECT We come back then to our hard saying that the love of difficulty is essential to high attainment. It may make the approach to it easier if we remind ourselves of the ways in which we already concede the principle. What is it that gives at once fascination and dignity to athletic sports? What has caused the languid interest which barely kept alive the old ball games to mount into the spectacular enthusiasm which now magnifies them into almost national events? Is it not that to excel in these games has become more and more difficult; that the conditions of the games have become more and more complex and exacting, and therefore more selective and distinguishing? When it was proposed a few years ago to make football a game largely free from danger, in short a less difficult game, was there not a general refusal among vigorous lads to be made into " sissies" in their sports? What gives mountain climbing its zest but its difficulty? The scorn with which the new railway tunnels up to the summits of the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn are regarded by mountain climb- ers the disappointment of the new generation that there are no more such challenges to face sound the same note. When Nansen came to this city to tell us about his attempt to reach the North Pole, a citizen said to him, "I cannot see why you should make so much ado to reach the North Pole. It may be my ignorance." "It is," said Nansen, and he said no more. What he might have said in words as he did in deeds was: "The North Pole is a challenge to humanity. Up there in its solitude, it says, 'I am your superior. You boast of your prowess; I laugh at it. I defy you. I am invincible, and you, after all, are puny and outdone.' 7: But the spirit of man says, "You are matter and I am soul, and therefore, though you are difficult, you are not in- vincible. I accept your challenge. I return your defiance, and here I go in for one more trial at you." And when the North Pole is reached, as it certainly will be, there will come THE LOVE OF DIFFICULTY 135 the perhaps harder search for the South Pole, and when that is found, and the last inaccessible mountain climbed, then, unless new problems now unguessed arise, man will need and get a new earth, with new physical difficulties to be overcome, or he will degenerate into a being whose muscles will become flaccid, and his endurance tamed, because there are no Jung- fraus to climb, no Poles to reach, no more worlds to conquer. What we need to see is that this principle holds all through life; that to overcome difficulty is what in the main gives zest and joy to life; that what comes easily is little prized; that what is gotten by the hardest seems to us most worth while. It is one of the great and solemn facts of the universe that the really good things are the things hard to get. In primitive life few, very few, roots and berries which men may have for the picking barely sustain an existence which has no real pleasures. When man began to use his cunning to entrap the fishes and fight the wild beasts, his food began to have a good taste. In some torrid countries now where there are mangoes enough to live on over tomorrow, men will not work, and they live a life just one degree above sleep. A less indulgent climate teaches men first the necessity and next the joy of work, and rewards them with the real luxuries of food and clothing and household comfort. The great law of advancing civilization is that Nature will work for man only if he will work with her for himself. "Hitch your wagon to a star." Yes, but the difficulty comes in the hitching. That astronomical harnessing will cost you infinite climbing and struggle. I say this is a law of the universe, and it is a great point gained in life to learn that a law of the universe cannot be beaten. Some men are always trying to beat this law of the universe, to get the good things of the universe without conquering the difficulties which it has set before all its good things. They would evade the difficulty instead of overcoming it, would reach the good by shiftiness and trickery, thinking like Simon Magus that the gifts of God can be had 136 THE VERY ELECT in some way of craft. Some men deceive themselves by accept- ing the semblance of the good thing for its reality. They try to get the pleasure of hunger not by labor but by condiments and stimulants. They would buy a parchment in place of studying for an education. They contract a debt and play that they have got wealth. They would wear a sweater with the "V" without earning it. But the only persons they deceive are themselves. The universe goes on keeping its really good things for those who earn them and for those only. There are two possible attitudes which one may take when confronted with a serious difficulty. A third supposable attitude we will not consider worth thinking of, namely, the attitude of slothfulness, feebleness and cowardice, which leaves the gauntlet for others to pick up which says of everything really worth while, "It isn't worth while," le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle, which slinks into the shade and lets the great opportunity go by. Of these we will only imitate Dante's fine scorn as we "look and pass." The first thinkable atti- tude is: "I accept the inevitable. I do not love difficulty but I see it everywhere in my path. I am not going to swerve from my path because of it, I shall shut my teeth and brace my nerves and steady my will and go at it, and keep going at it. If the habit makes it easier, all the better. If patient contin- uance in it begets anything better than mere persistence, any elevation or enthusiasm, better still. But I don't look for it. I don't depend on it. I am in for a long, hard struggle and for the good I know such a struggle will bring to me." This attitude is not to be despised. It wins many second prizes. It does well much of the necessary routine work of the world. It may reach a kind of heroism. But it is not the ideal. The true attitude is, "I love difficulty. The sight of it, the thought of it, thrills and energizes me. I am in my ele- ment when I am facing it. I am only half awake, only half alive, when I am not battling with it. When it is most formid- able, most defiant, then I am most eager to meet it, and even THE LOVE OF DIFFICULTY 137 when for the moment I am baffled by it, I am more than ever determined to push my assault upon it to a victory." The comforting thought in connection with these two atti- tudes is that the first may beget the second faithful contin- uance in well-doing may lead up into the higher regions of action. One may come to find that he has in him the nobler spirit through conquest of difficulty, which often repeated may beget the sense of power which welcomes a task as an opportunity. The path which was entered upon as a struggle may through struggle lead to a height where with still greater difficulty may come greater strength to overcome. But we must hasten to apply our principle to our own im- mediate conditions. For some time past, say roughly half a century, education has been developing along a line which is directly the opposite of what we have called the law of the universe, the law which gives a premium to the overcoming of difficulty. The tendency has been to make the processes of education more and more easy, and to do this not only as an expedient but as a philosophy. It is an outcome of the new pedagogics call it the legitimate outcome, or the perversion, as we must. "Study the nature and the special characteris- tics of the individual mind and work in accordance therewith. Follow the lines of least resistance. In the kindergarten, blend work with play so that the child will not be conscious of any effort. Continue this method upward. Let the teacher go in advance of all work and do all the thinking and let the pupil acquiesce. Let him have keys to his problems and translations for his languages. Let the teacher lecture and the pupil take notes. Let the student follow the bent of his m : nd and choose the studies that are easy to him, "soft elec- tiv'es," in college phrase. By these methods, the old rough ways, the plebeian roads for hobnailed stogies, even the well graded zig-zags for tender feet, can be scorned and the youth can go up to the heights of learning by elevators and even balloons." The outcome of this method is very flattering, 138 THE VERY ELECT and very deceptive, until one gets out from this highly arti- ficial condition of things into the regions where the laws of the universe have their way, and then, face to face with the realities which bristle with difficulties, and with no professor to solve them for him, the youth finds that he has no training and no experience with which to encounter difficulties for him- self, and he either drops into a position unworthy of him, or begins all over again to learn the real secret of all true life that to succeed is to conquer one's own difficulties. Let us not seem to do injustice to the new doctrine. Part of it is true and good. The laws of mind and the methods of nature, the inward forces of personality, are surely to be fol- lowed, provided we follow them all duly and proportionately, and do not select some one tendency or principle and follow that out to an extreme which soon becomes extravagance. It is true that what the mind does easily, it does happily if it is worth doing. But it is also true that what the mind does with effort, with an effort which overcomes and acquires, it does still more happily, and what it does with most difficulty, it does with greatest joy and greatest benefit. No eurekas attend the accomplishment of an easy task. It is no great fun for a college team to beat a prep, school. There is no great exhilaration in getting to the top of Brigham Hill, superb as the view is from there. Graduates do not look back with pride on having got a pass mark in a soft elective. But when, leaving the laggards at the Half-way House, one climbs to the top of Mansfield on the Underbill side; when the youth, in spite of dismaying traditions safely crosses the Pons Asin- orum', when without help he solves those first puzzling prob- lems in algebra respecting the hare and the tortoise, the hour and the minute hands of the clock, and the first troubles over surds; when he has unlocked the syntax of that tough passage in the second book of Thucydides; when he divines the meaning of that deep passage in the Inferno or Faust ; when he has worked out a clear path to luminous results in some maze of history, or THE LOVE OF DIFFICULTY 139 philosophy, or economics; when he has mastered some intri- cate and far-reaching principle of science; then he has the great joy of feeling that he has done something by himself. Then he feels strong for future tasks and eager for the next difficulty to be overcome. Let us here again remind ourselves that the difficulty which we love to encounter is the difficulty which is inherent in the thing itself and is essential to it, not one which arises from a blundering way of doing it. We are not seeking for something that is good because it is hard but for the thing that is hard be- cause it is good. The effort necessary to overcome the in- herent difficulty of a supremely good thing that is what taxes and rewards and energizes. The effort called upon, to neu- tralize unnecessary obstacles is wasted effort and has nothing to say for itself. The spelling of English is a case in point. To learn English spelling uses up wastefully an immense amount of mental effort a waste tolerated only because it comes at a time when no other mental exertion is called for loudly enough. Such also is the waste inflicted by bad teaching say for example the teaching of arithmetic, in which there is a going out of the way to invent ingenious difficulties which no pupil can be expected to love or ought to love. The worst of all teaching except that which is so dull that it dulls every subject it touches is the teaching that first creates these unnecessary difficulties and then courts approbation by the ingenuity with which it graciously explains them, and thus robs pupils of any possible advantages there might have been in finding one's way through them. Now if we agree that this is the right view of the processes of education, two or three practical results will follow and they will close this discourse. First, it gives the pupil a right judg- ment of the teaching he receives. The most common excuse given by pupils and by parents when failures have to be ac- counted for is that the teacher does not " explain things" as he might. This may be a just criticism, meaning that the 140 THE VERY ELECT teacher's own statements are obscure, or involved, or not logically coherent and lucid. It usually means that the pupil has been allowed to get into the habit of expecting all difficulties to be solved for him by a too good-natured and therefore incompetent teacher, and that now he cannot master the difficulties which a good teacher requires of him to master for himself. The competent man, either in the class or in the business of life, is one who can " explain things" for himself when there is no teacher to explain them for him, and the busi- ness of education is to inure him to the task of explaining things that is, of thinking his way through difficulties. The next point is that in the choice of electives, whether elective departments or elective courses, a student should choose those which give him the discipline he most needs, not the kind of study he most likes. Here we must walk rather care- fully. Shall the student ignore the bent of his mind? Shall he force himself to pursue studies which are repulsive to him on the grounds that they are especially desirable for his dis- cipline? To a certain extent yes; beyond that, no. Take the question of mathematics which is the most common one. The normal human mind is capable of mathematical reasoning for the simple reason, as was so beautifully shown to us by Professor Keyser, that mathematical logic is necessary human thinking. And for that reason all fundamental education includes a certain amount of mathematics. No educator would ever think of leaving it out. If an individual student finds the process somewhat harder than does the next boy or girl, that is no more than the greater or less difficulty which varying minds must expect to encounter, and the greater difficulty is only an indication of the special need of that mind, and a challenge to the benefit of the extra exertion. The ordinary student should no more be willing to accept a judg- ment of incompetence in mathematics than he would of any other kind of mental inferiority. A long observation con- vinces me that inability to do the required mathematical work THE LOVE OF DIFFICULTY 141 of a college course is more a moral than a mental delinquency, a defect of will, of steadfast continuous will, that drops no stitches, that wills to do homely work in patient hours, rather than a deficiency of intelligence. When the question comes up respecting advanced mathematics, who should aspire to be senior wrangler and all that, this is a question of genius for there is a genius for mathematics as there is a genius for music or poetry or invention. What we have gained thus far is in substance this; first, provided the difficulty is not fictitious but real, the overcoming of difficulty is one of the main agencies of education, and the business of the teacher is to present difficulties in the right order, gradation, and magnitude, and to encourage and stim- ulate and guide the pupil in his task of overcoming them: secondly, it is the business of the pupil to face these difficulties honestly, bravely, resolutely and to value and enjoy his work in proportion as it is a real conquest of difficulties past and a happy anticipation of more worlds to conquer. What surprises me more than anything else in college students is the lack of that wholesome pride, that commendable self-respect, which is becoming to every fairly endowed youth but of which some seem devoid, with regard to their college standing. Does it ever come home to these students as it should, that one's record disguised under other names, really means: "feeble of will; beaten by small obstacles; dropped down or out for lack of pluck; recreant to one's trust; sleeping at one's post; a position among one's fellows not to be proud of? " That one should do one's best and not attain the highest position in a company in which many are capable and some are brilliant that is pardonable; but to fail and not to feel cha- grined at being beaten in the fair contest with the necessary and wholesome difficulties of an ordinary college course, is a con- dition to be wondered at, to use no stronger term. But the love of difficulty concerns more than school and college. It touches life hi every department and phase and 142 THE VERY ELECT process of it. Life itself is an art beset with difficulties. It is no easy dolce far niente business. Hedonism has no place in it. Our Supreme Deity is not a God of Epicurus but the Father who "worketh hitherto." It is for that reason the more interesting. Who would want to be transported to a planet in which there were no mountains to climb, no poles to discover, no stormy seas to cross a planet in which it would always seem afternoon? I am ready to go farther and so far endorse a questionable theology as to say, "in which there are no dragons to slay, no devils to fight, no wrong, no evil to contend with." If this is not the best of all possible worlds, it is a better world than one would be in which every- thing was fixed right to begin with; in which there was no pain, no struggle, no tragedy; in which all the boys were cherubs and all the girls blessed damozels. At any rate our world is one that does not leave us soft for want of the difficulties which develop robust characters. Let no one seek comfort in his indolence from the saying of the Ecclesiastical Cynic that "the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong," nor from the popular version which qualifies it by an "always." Don't chance it on the hope that you may come in under this "al- ways" that you may be the exceptional slower runner who sometimes wins the race, the suitor who, helped by the golden apple, outran Atalanta, the Marathon runner who won because of the faint of his rival, the beneficiary of some special inter- position of Providence. Be assured and act upon the assur- ance that in a world providentially committed to the process of evolution the race must be to the swift and the battle to the strong. No world would be fit to live in if the prizes in the race were to go to the slow and the victory in the battle to the weak. At any rate this is not our world and those are wise who govern themselves accordingly. There is no better time or place for wrestling with some of the main difficulties of life than here and now in college, only let it be done here and now as always and everywhere, in the THE LOVE OF DIFFICULTY 143 spirit of love and not hate of life's difficulties. Well it is for any of us if we can say with bravery, not with bravado, "I am glad that life to me has its difficulties for that means that it is worth while. It is worth while to get a V on the breast of my sweater; to get a good list of A's in my class work, especially in the courses which to me are especially stiff; to fight the temptations which beset every college student and those which beset me in particular; to win a position of leadership among my college mates in all good things popular and unpopular, especially the latter; and above all to live so that I can look my God in the face at all times and everywhere, and be sure of his approval and of his help when the difficulty which I cannot overcome and will not evade is too hard for my own strength." SCHOLARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN EVERY-DAY LIFE THE OPENING ADDRESS: SEPTEMBER, 1909 IT is not easy, and it is no part of my purpose, to make a sharp distinction between an educated and an uneducated person. The line is too broad and flexible to make such a distinction practicable. General public estimation discrimi- nates in a way between a well-educated man and one who does not in its judgment merit this description, but it is a judg- ment which does not well distinguish between the essentials of a good education and what we may call its accomplishments. My main purpose at this time is to insist upon the great value of certain abilities and attainments which all educated persons would be advantaged in having, but which many do not have, to their great disadvantage and loss. Let us for the sake of clearness try to state, in a general way, what it is which distinguishes the well-educated from the uneducated or half-educated person. Is it not the having acquired familiarity with, and training in, the working of the normal human mind in its reasoning, its imagining, its willing; in having learned certain universal and unimpeachable canons of judgment and taste; and in having become somewhat proficient in the art of expression? From a practical point of view, is not an educated man one who has been so trained that when he settles into the serious business of life, he can think clearly, can reason his way through the successive situations that confront him, and meet his life work with some well-founded confidence in his own power of initiative and decision? When we say of certain men that they have had a liberal education, we often mean no more than that they have 144 SCHOLARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 145 had the opportunity for such an education. Whether this one or that one has improved his opportunity and is really a well and highly educated man, is another question. A man is not well educated, whatever educational routine he may have gone through, who has not so profited by his acquaintance with the best models of thought and utterance as to be saved from false reasoning himself and from being misled by the false reasoning of others; who has no resources for meeting new problems and new opportunities; who goes wrong on some of the great practical issues of life where men who have only common sense to guide them go right. A liberal education is one that has brought within the reach of the educable man, and made available to him for the conduct of his own life, some good portion of the elementary wisdom which the race has accumulated up to his date, especially the wisdom which teaches one how to make the best of his particular endowments and opportunities. I say the elementary wisdom, meaning thereby the fundamental, rudimentary principles of knowledge and action, which are essential to right attainment and which if mastered almost guarantee it. The modern fad of certain educationists that every new individual must go through all the educating experiences which the race has gone through, must learn, as the race has learned, by repeating the ever old and ever new mistakes and follies of mankind, disdains all the lessons of history and forfeits all the promises of evolution. What a true education does for an open-minded and docile youth, is to teach him the methods by which men have attained truth, and avoided error, and improved life, and passed on a higher humanity to the succeeding age. To be still more explicit, to be liberally educated is to have drawn from a wide acquaintance with the best human thought a good stock of sound opinions available for the critical decisions of life; to have formed habits of clear and resolute thinking; to have learned by submission and discipline in the necessary laws of thought to gain freedom and power for one's own thought; to 10 146 THE VERY ELECT have attained order, and consecutiveness, and subordination, and proportion, in ideas and judgments and actions and measures; to be persuaded only after conviction; to hesitate and deliberate, and look at the matter all around, and then, and not till then, to decide, and will and do ; to do and to be all this, of course, gradually, progressively, as the years go by, and as necessities and opportunities require. In this enumera- tion of mental virtues I have not meant to imply that a good education guarantees all intellectual powers and charms, but only to point out what a complete education aims at and what it does actually accomplish in a greater or less degree for those who are its best exemplars. The world's judgment is not wrong when it highly approves of certain characteristics and qualities as attributes of those whom in a large and liberal spirit it admires as "well educated men." But there are certain attainments and abilities which are of next to the highest importance, which ought always to accompany a good education, and which so naturally grow out of it that their absence discredits whatever other education one may have had. The first I will mention is a Good Manner of Speech. By this I mean first of all and of course correct speech, and next what needs to be added to make speech pleasing and effective. I might though I shall not spend profitably a good deal of time in insisting on the importance of attaining the habit of speech which is simply correct, of clear articulation, right pronunciation, canonical syntax. I shall on this point make only one appeal and that you may not regard as the highest that speech more than almost anything else marks a social distinction. It reveals, as the servant maid said of the apostle Peter, it "bewrayeth" the speaker. It marks where one belongs not only racially, but geographically, often parochially, sometimes ecclesiastically, always socially. It declares whether or not one's ancestors, especially one's immediate family, were of the educated class, and whether one's associates are now of that class. There SCHOLARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 147 is in this country no such infallible social register as in England goes with the use and abuse of the one aspirate, but there are distinctions of tone and phrase, there are corruptions and solecisms, there are pitfalls of pronunciation and syntax, which lie in wait for the unwary and often expose him to blame for which his forbears and neighbors and his early teachers are partly answerable, but for which he has to suffer morti- fication and reproach. And there is another condition almost equally deplorable, that is, such a consciousness of liability to self -betrayal as to beget a painful habit of hesitation and self-criticism fatal to all spontaneity and flow of speech. This is the explanation though hardly the excuse for that slow, labored, staccato style of speech noticeable in many scholarly men, and said to be fostered rather than corrected by linguistic studies, which is more taxing to the ears and trying to the nerves of hearers than any number of downright, if they only be transient and fluent blunders. But beyond mere correct, errorless speech, is the speech which is a real accomplishment, speech which is at once spontaneous, simple, easy and yet effective, graceful, pleasing to the ear, persuasive to the mind and heart. I suppose this kind of speech, within the bounds of conversation, has reached its greatest perfection in highly cultivated women, in the coteries, the salons, the conversazioni, in which such highly cultivated women have set the key and furnished the model of a style of speech at once brilliant and colloquial. Even when we come to the higher forms of oral language, to public addresses, to oratory proper, we reach a stage beyond declamatory and turgid eloquence, or pseudo- eloquence, where we find the same qualities in the ascendant the spontaneous, the simple, the graceful, the strong. To sum up a small part of what one would like to say on the speech of an educated man or woman, let us advise these young persons while they are forming habits of speech to cultivate a mode of address which shall be correct in accordance with established usage, sufficiently fluent to avoid taxing the patience of 148 THE VERY ELECT hearers, simple, free from affectation, not bookish but free from slang (except under great provocation), strong in nouns and verbs, sparing in adjectives and explosives. For the educated man has a larger vocabulary to draw upon than the half -educated man; this should save him from two temptations which beset other men to profanity, and to slang both of which are largely traceable to a paucity of words with which to express ideas and emotions. Next among scholarly accomplishments I shall commend the Ability to Write Well. I include and even emphasize good handwriting, which in spite of all typewriting and other mechanical devices, will never cease to be a real accomplish- ment. I know that some highly educated men make shameless and even boastful confession of bad penmanship, just as some great mathematicians pretend to have forgotten the multipli- cation table. It is one of the small vanities of great men to disdain those arts in which ordinary men may excel. None the less it is a bit of conceit that we may pardon but ought not to be called upon to admire. It is the same kind of affront to conventional decorum which we see in shabby dressing by some rich men. Good writing is one of the smaller fine arts of life. As we all have to do with it, it is worth while to do it well. To do it awkwardly, in a slovenly fashion, is to be lack- ing in the fine sense of what is becoming to one's self and to consideration of others. And what may be thought more to the point, it is a distinct lowering of one's valuation in the estimate of the great social employer and paymaster of us all the public judgment of us. Now I must not spoil the effect of what I am saying by saying too much but oh! oh! what a tale the blue books tell of the need of my saying as much as I have said! I will only add that the ideal of pen-writing is the good old copperplate style learned at school, individualized by much rapid use, and become whatever personal taste, or fancy, or even caprice may ordain, provided that it be never characterless, never weak, never mean. SCHOLARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 149 But the accomplishment of good writing is much more than putting one's self well to the eye on paper; it includes the whole art and process of written expression, from the simple note by which one acknowledges a letter or accepts an invitation, to an elaborate paper in which one sets forth his views on some subject, economic, scientific, literary, social, political. A writer of the last century made a reputation which lasted a good while by an essay on " The Art of Putting Things " in which the art itself was well put. It is an apt phrase to describe the kind of writing, both less and more than rhetoric, by which thought is made effective and prevailing in the every-day life of this work-a-day world. It is an art not acquired without labor. Indeed when it seems to be most unstudied and natural, it has probably cost most labor to attain. If I wanted to find models of it to commend to your imitation, I should not look among the gorgeous periods of Cicero and Burke, but in the military despatches of Caesar and Wellington and Grant, in the judicial opinions of the great judges, in the scientific papers of Huxley and Tyndall, in the reports of great engineers, in the leading articles of the London Times, the Spectator, and the first class dailies of New York and Chicago. In the writing of even the last century there is too much leisure, too much waste of good English, too much beating about and what in another field is called " hovering." The accomplishment of which we are now speaking is not the making of literature: it is simply the saying in the most effective way something which in itself is worth saying. To do this well is to be lucid, to be rapid, to be brief, to be strong, to be graceful. There is one kind of writing on which a word of special comment is due that is letter-writing. To write a good letter, whether on matters of business or friendship or in the inter- change of social or literary amenities, is, next to conversation, the finest of all scholarly accomplishments. It is almost a special art by itself. It has its own forms of stationery, its own strict etiquette, its own linguistic style. By nothing else 150 THE VERY ELECT is a well-bred gentleman or gentlewoman more infallibly known. I receive some thousands of letters in the course of a year from a great variety of persons, very many from can- didates for positions in the University, or for recommenda- tions to positions elsewhere. Some of them are written on cheap, ruled paper, some in blue or purple ink, many have unconventional and strange forms of address, a large per- centage of them have words misspelled, some are illegible. All such letters discredit the writers and lumber the waste- basket. It is by no means an infrequent experience to receive a letter of several pages covered with titles of the writer's learned publications but sadly discounted by lapses from orthographic and epistolary good form. A letter on good, plain, white, unlined paper, with date, address, spacing, line- ending, folding, signature, sealing, superscribing, all comme il faut for all these are points of rigor among cultivated per- sons, is itself a good introduction, whereas to omit or commit wrongly on any of these points is to forfeit a kind of initial good-will which it were well worth while to gain. And the epistolary style is something to be well considered. With un- limited flexibility it adapts itself to the subject and the occasion is now concise and formal, in letters of business and ceremony ; now discursive, frolicsome, passing with light touch from one topic to another in friendly correspondence; always scrupu- lously correct even when gayest, yet as unconscious of gram- matical restriction as the summer swallow is of the laws of aviation. In letter-writing as nowhere else language obeys the slightest and the swiftest turns of thought and feeling. Covet, and by all means cultivate, the grace of good letter-writing. To its ingratiating charm many a one owes a good entree, that is, a chance to show what further good there is in one, and in the end a good position, a good circle of friends, even a good husband, a good wife. An accomplishment which is not in such constant service as those already referred to but one which is highly useful, is SCHOLARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 151 the ability to take an effective part in public meetings. This might be to preside over such meetings, to serve as chairman, or moderator, or toast-master. To do this successfully one needs to know a few simple parliamentary rules, to be able to keep a clear head amid entanglements of motions, and to maintain a sympathetic but impartial attitude toward all parties and interests involved. But in the multiplicity of opportunities afforded by fraternity and organization- and general college meetings, students seldom fail to get an adequate training in this function. A word or two respecting after-dinner speaking. The advice usually given to aspirants in this direction is to cultivate the art of saying something that is of no consequence but saying it smartly. I beg leave to improve on this and to enjoin: " Endeavor to say something of real, if possible of very great, consequence, but say it lightly and gracefully." There are men who can be hired for after- dinner performances " raconteurs" and they amuse us and we reward them with hand-clapping and guffaws. But they are not the speakers we care most to hear even in our semi-somnolent post-prandial mood. We prefer those who will give us something that is pleasant to hear and good to remember, good enough to reproduce at our own domestic prandial board. I could not better illustrate this than by recalling the speeches made at the Champlain Banquet in our own Gymnasium than which I have never heard better. The matter of every speech was anything but trivial. It was solid, of interest national, international, cosmopolitan. But everything was touched lightly, gracefully, often jocularly, yet never with sacrifice of dignity or good taste. My advice to a young man who aspires to excel in this difficult art as I know it to be in accordance with the practice of the most accomplished after-dinner speakers is: always prepare your- self with all possible care for your anticipated part; you are then safe against total failure you can eat and digest and lis- ten in quietness. But be on the alert to catch the suggestions 152 THE VERY ELECT which may come to you at the time and from preceding speakers; and in nine instances out of ten you will not make the speech you had prepared but a better one born of the inspiration which the occasion has brought to you. But I must not close this necessarily incomplete list of scholarly accomplishments without including one or two which concern themselves with the more distinctly aesthetic side of life for every educated person ought to acquire some such accomplishments, and for two reasons: partly on his own account, that he may do justice to himself in this impor- tant and too neglected side of his nature, and partly as a social obligation. Every educated person ought to have at least one social accomplishment, some gift, or faculty, or attainment by which he or she may contribute to the pleasure or profit of the social group to which they belong. Few things are more mortifying than to find one's self ignored, set aside, counted out by reason of having nothing to add to the common fund of social enjoyment. Scholarly accomplish- ments partaking of this nature, those in which highly educated persons have special advantages, might be, music of a high character, vocal or instrumental; dramatic invention or skill; cleverness with pencil, or crayon, or brush; the ability to read well with spirit and force, without elocutionary affectation any superiority which humanizes the man or woman and for the time sinks the lawyer, the parson, the teacher, in the social charmer. But it must be a superiority, that is, it must be something to which the person who makes the offering has given such special effort as to make him or her really an expert. For instance, any one is an appreciated contributor to good company who knows more than any one else about some subject which happens to be of special interest, it might be birds, or precious stones, or engravings, or heraldry, or Volapiik, or aviation; it might be one who has travelled in unwonted places, or one who has seen more than others in wonted places; one who can quote a required passage, or explain SCHOLARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 153 an allusion, or locate a reference. The one thing needful is to cherish the sense of obligation to one's social circle, to ask where one's attainments and capabilities may best contribute to the general benefit, and to use one's gifts and powers accordingly. The worst of all possible uses of a good educa- tion is to devote it to one's little sole self. The revival in our time of the old Epicurean doctrine that the final object of all education is self-realization, is unchristian, and unphilosophic, and unhuman. Will it be going too far afield if I say here a word on Good Manners? We smile at the excess of emphasis implied in the fact that in certain European circles "education" means training in manners "He has had no education" meaning, "he is ill-mannered." Still, so long as manners go so far towards securing or marring one's success, it is a great mistake to give the matter less attention than it really merits. Prob- ably William of Wykeham meant by his motto at Winchester College, "Manners maketh man," more than we do by the word manners; perhaps he was thinking of the Latin equival- ent, mores, which means both manners and morals. The good manners which should add grace to a liberal education are a combination of ethical and aesthetic virtues. They add to rectitude what Horace says poetry must add to prose beauty and sweetness. They get their inspiration from good- will a desire to please exhibiting itself in a fine sensibility to the rights and feelings of others. When this is present and manifest forms are of secondary importance. But though of secondary they are still of great importance. Right feeling has its appropriate expression and this is not something which the individual can extemporize. It is, like other fine arts, a study, a tradition, an institution, with its established canons, I had almost said its ritual. Better is a kind heart with a rough manner than che finest manners and hatred or unkind- ness therewith. But better still is the kind heart which has learned the way to double its kindness by a gracious manner. 154 THE VERY ELECT It ought to be comparatively easy for an educated person to take on the graces of culcivated society, or, borrowing St. Paul's formula, to add to his faith virtue, and knowledge, and brotherly kindness and to crown all with charity and courtesy. But as I have already intimated, the finest of all social accomplishments is the gift and grace of Conversation and with a word or two on that I will close. Among all the accomplishments I have mentioned this seems to be least dependent on what we call education, that is on scholastic training, for among those who in a very high degree enjoy its pleasures and display its merits are many whose education has been of the most elementary kind. I doubt not that most of us have known persons of limited education and of humble life whose conversation has been a delight to us. If asked where one would be surest to find conversation which would be racy, original, jovial, full-flavored of humanity, one should "hae a crack" with crofters at a Scotch ingle, or fall in with Italian laborers at a siesta, or gather with some of Bret Harte's adventurers in a mining-camp. Proficiency in the talk of the table, the fireside, or the shade, seems to be the special gift of certain individuals and to some extent of certain races. You are more likely to find it in a Frenchman than in a Dutchman, in an Irishman than an Englishman, in one born South than North of Mason and Dixon's line. When George Meredith wanted a personage who was to be his exemplar of brilliancy in conversation, he chose an Irish girl, and to her he gave the subtlety of perception, the flash of suggestion, the keenness of wit, the aptness of repartee, which make up the most brilliant conversationist in modern fiction. And yet if we can credit the biographies of men famous in letters, science and art, here is where we must look for a certain perfection of conversation nowhere else reached. Here we find the "noctes ambrosianae," and the "dies boreales." I imagine that an hour in company with such talkers as Walter Scott, Byron, Tom Moore, Charles Lamb, Sydney Smith, Coleridge; as Holmes, Lowell, Margaret Fuller; as the editors of the London SCHOLARLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS 155 Punch at their weekly dinner; as the contributors to the Atlantic at their annual banquet; would disclose what conver- sation can be when ifc reaches its bright consummate flower. Where else should we look than to the highly and broadly educated men and women for the resources, the versatility, the fine sense of quality in thought and feeling, the verbal finesse, which go to the making of perfect conversation, frank, sincere, vivacious, swift in movement, gentle in touch, keen but kindly, a profusion of intellect, an overflow of soul. If conversation could be taught it should be one of the required subjects for all students. But it cannot be taught. And yet it is both a result and a test of what is taught. It is one of the things which you come to college to learn. The conversation of college rooms is one of the means of culture for which the college exists. Its topics, its language, its applauses, its disapprovals, its silences, and most of all, its intellectual and moral tone and atmosphere, are highly significant indices of character and attainment and are among the most potent forces for good or for evil which University life offers to stu- dents. If we who feel ourselves to be in a measure responsible for your well-being could have the gift attributed to Asmodeus of seeing, ourselves unseen, and hearing, what goes on in college rooms, the things that would most interest us would be the themes of your most earnest conversation, the relative emphasis you put upon this and that interest of a true young life, the matters you talk about freely and volubly, and those you hold sacred and do not talk about at all. We should learn much, not only about you, but about ourselves, our successes and failures in our work for you and in you. It would be a better test than all our examinations not so much per- haps of the scholastic side of your work and ours, but of those by-products of a liberal education, those almost indispensable qualifications for a life of intellect and culture which for lack of a better word I have called accomplishments, and by which the world will judge you to be or not to be worthy of the name of educated men and women. THE CLASSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY REMARKS AT THE BANQUET OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 18, 1910 COLLEGE problems are in the air. We have had more public discussion of such problems within a few months past than in a whole generation heretofore. These problems are of two kinds those concerning educational values in general, and those pertaining to individual institutions. As regards the first, while the forms of opinion are various, there has been one general trend, a trend toward liberal culture. After the ex- perience of a generation in the other direction, toward practical results more or less narrowly estimated, there is a manifest dissatisfaction with the general outcome. The public, even the uneducated or half-educated portion of the public, misses something which is expected of fine scholarship. They do not fail to notice that the few men who speak to them with the ring which touches their imagination, are not products of the new regime. Not that modern changes have been wholly mistaken: many of them were inevitable: some of them will be permanent: but it is time for a recall to ideals temporarily overborne. We read much of "passings" and " renascences." We rarely take up a magazine without seeing headlines about the passing of something or the renascence of something. In the educational world it is the renascence of liberal culture and the passing of narrow specialism. A generation ago cul- ture was thrust out of the windows with jeers: today it is invited in at the front door with cheers and garlands. What is the culture we thrust out and now want to get in again? It is the education of the man for the sake of manhood and character and not merely for the sake of what he can be made to turn out in material products. I should not wonder if as 156 CLASSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY 157 a part of this general renascence of liberal culture there should be a renascence of that discipline which used to furnish so fine an example of it, the classical discipline. I should not wonder if Greek, and what Greek stands for, should have a revival in our higher institutions. There are a few institutions, of which the University of Vermont is one, which still require Greek, and what Greek stands for, in order to the A. B. de- gree. If I may venture on a prophecy, he who speaks to you in my place ten years hence, will be able tc congratulate you on the additional number of institutions requiring Greek for the A. B. degree. Not that I would have all students study Greek, but that I would have Greek taught in all higher institutions, and I would have no institution empowered to grant the A. B. degree in which Greek is not taught. I would have that which Greek stands for and of which it is in all history the finest embodiment and expression, diffused through the atmosphere and the life of every institution, reaching into the brain and heart of every student in every department, banishing what is coarse and mean and sensual, and bringing in sweetness and light and all the fine things of the spirit. What a right public judgment misses, what a growing thoughtful judgment is demanding, is more high and fine thinking, more imagination, more humanity, more spirit- uality, in fine, more culture in the teaching and the life of our institutions of learning. And next as regards the problems peculiar to each insti- tution. I hold that every American University, or College, should have a certain amount of individuality a vocation, a reason for being, which it is to maintain and magnify. A movement is now going on, pushed mainly by the universities of the West, to " standardize" all American universities, virtually to prescribe by feet and inches the dimensions on all sides which all ideal institutions should have, and to lop off or stretch out every institution until it conforms to this stand- ard. Of all the shapes which socialistic uniformity has taken 158 THE VERY ELECT on in our time, this seems to me to be the dreariest and most deadly. I for one would rather be suckled in any out-worn educational creed than in this newest one. When I was one day down in the dumps in view of a questionnaire bringing our university into this scheme, I lighted on a sentence of Lord Rosebery's which brought uplift and exhilaration: "True originality," he says, "can scarcely exist but in the back- waters of life. The great ocean of life smoothes and rolls its pebbles to too much the same shape and texture." Thanks, I said to myself, thanks for Lake Champlain, and the Winooski, and the backwaters or fresh waters of life, where amid calm and seclusion, and the slow processes of natural development, individuality is sacred, and originality is ma- tured, and each soul comes to its own selfhood. In the light of this thought and the suggestion which it brings, I think I can see more clearly than ever before the mission and the problem of our university. It is to discover, and encourage, and mature original native power. If our students as a body have any characteristic which distinguishes them from the general mass of college students, it is a rugged independence of intellect and character which has in it the potentiality and the promise of a very high order of ability. We have always a few brilliant men : they are a highly valuable element in our college community: they cheer up the life of the professors: we could do well with more of them. But the majority are not of this class. They are well endowed in their general make-up: their qualities are solid rather than brilliant: they require from their teachers patience and en- couragement, and sometimes even nil desperan dum: but by the middle of junior year they begin to surprise their pro- fessors with the exhibition of real power. In any truncated three years' curriculum they would not come to maturity. At the end of their college course it is too much to say in the Oxford phrase that all of them "have satisfied" their in- structors but they have given hopeful evidence of interior CLASSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY 159 power, of initiative, of originality, and their subsequent career in the majority of cases not only justifies this hope but more than rewards this faith in them which we cherish. For we have this faith in our men and yet- they are always surprising us. They do not have the brilliancy which flashes and goes out: they have as a class the ability which grows slowly at first but keeps on growing till it attains power, and mastery, and leadership. I would, if I dared, illustrate my point by calling names. They would be names of men in all professions, scattered through all parts of the country, every- where leading men, but long as the list might be, some of you would say, "Why did you omit this man, and this, and this?" And they would all be right. Enough. You will all, I know, admit the justice of my claim. It is something we all have reason to be proud of. If any other college claims to have some other characteristic equally honorable, or even this same characteristic after their kind, we will not deny or be- grudge them the possession of it. We will admit that our men have not a monopoly of the intellectual virtues, and that God had a hand in making other colleges than our own. At the same time, as Mr. Billings used to say when he wanted to defend some person who was under criticism, "You must not expect too much of one who was not graduated at the Uni- versity of Vermont." You see, Gentlemen, how these serious and searching public discussions are forcing upon us an unusual urgency of self- consciousness, and introspection, and challenge, and how we are meeting the situation, by discovering our own sources of strength, and maintaining our individuality with conviction and confidence. An institution has the right to live and prosper which has such a foundation in right educational prin- ciples, such a history of achievement in all professions and callings, such a body of "men of light and leading," as the University of Vermont can show to the world today, and hopes to show more and more in the future. ON MIGHTY PENS (The Creation) ON MY study table I keep two or three quill pens for use with red ink for correcting blue books. I was quite taken aback when one of our younger professors happening in, pointed to my pens and asked "What are those?" I had hardly recovered from my amazement at this kiddishness when another professor, somewhat older, asked the same question. And both these professors, as it happened, were of the agricultural department, and one of them had been brought up on a farm, presumably in daily companionship with the goose! What I replied to these gentlemen, so strangely ignorant of literary ornithology, was, in substance : " These, my dear sirs, are pens, pens proper, pens in their own right, not by brevet, not borrowed plumes; pens ety- mologic, the pens which you declined in your adolescent First Declension; the pens which are mightier than swords; the pens that signed Magna Charta and the Declaration of Inde- pendence, and wrote Hamlet and all the great thoughts and dreams of mankind quite down to these very recent times when Joseph Gillott began to make the metallic stubbs which you miscall pens; pens, which in clusters become 'pinions' and bear aloft the Theban eagle, or are the ' mighty pens' of the Oratorio quoted above. These particular pens which you are so curiously staring at, were once the property of the Bank of England, of whom, indirectly, I purchased them. For this high and mighty institution is so old-fashioned as to use only quill pens in its business. These very pens, for aught I know, may have been used for signing some of those cheques for fabulous amounts which pass through this cosmo- politan clearing-house. And this institution is so fastidious 160 ON MIGHTY PENS 161 that it never retains its quills for a second day's use on the same principle, probably as that on which it never reissues its notes however new and crisp they may be the 'same prin- ciple which Richardson carried out in architecture namely, that good art abhors repetition. But as each quill by succes- sive mendings is good for a full week's work elsewhere, the subordinates of the Bank make honest shillings by selling the discarded pens to bookkeepers and scribblers like myself. "But this fastidious taste which clings to the goose-quill pen lingers elsewhere than in the Bank of England. Old- fashioned folks, clerks in old banking-houses, literary men and women who retain the tastes of a former generation some covertly, as a cherished distinction some openly, and with a subtle claim of superiority more, probably, in old England and the Colonies than in the United States, more in our South than in our North still use the quill pen. Most of us save the two young professors know of such people and can guess others. Without knowing the fact, it would be safe for us to conjecture that among the number would have been Ruskin and all the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson. It is inconceiv- able that the "Idylls of the King" should have been written with a Brummagem steel pen! To come nearer home, our own Senator Morrill, who in spirit and manner was a gentle- man of the old school, always wrote with a quill pen. I have a large number of letters from him, some of them written in his extreme age, every character betraying the flexibility of his quill pen, not a slovenly stroke anywhere. It was the duty and I am sure the pleasure of the janitor of the Senate chamber to see that a newly-made pen was on his desk every morning. Rev. Mr. Ware, affectionately remembered and long to be remembered among us, who was for twenty years and more, Secretary of both the Mary Fletcher Hospital and the Fletcher Free Library, kept the records of both insti- tutions with a quill pen in a quaint and puzzling, but highly artistic handwriting. I can recall Mr. Ware at a session of the 11 162 THE VERY ELECT Library Trustees mending his pen preparatory to making his record, and Mr. Phelps remarking, 'See how the Secretary is getting ready to conceal our proceedings.' Professor Henry Torrey, artist in everything he did, during his long term of office as Secretary of the Faculty, made all his records with a quill pen, and in a very graceful and scholarly hand. Manu- scripts in my possession from the hand of President Calvin Pease are written in a beautiful Porsonian type of letter impos- sible to any other than a quill pen. "If any one ask why in our day any one should use an in- strument so obsolete that two college professors had to be told what it is, the answer would be a manifold consideration of habit, and sentiment, and association, and perhaps just a little of self-valuation on the score of singularity. The art instinct in us prefers that which is made with human hands to that which is machine-made. It prefers what brings with it history, and charming association, and literary sugges- tion, what is far-fetched and quaint, to what is new, and con- ventional, and common, and cheap, prefers it even at the expense of some inconvenience and want of economy. Who would write a letter to a friend, or to a lover, with an Ester- brook, or a Leon Isaacs, if he had the fine and now rare accom- plishment of shaping with his own pen-knife the pen which, adapted to his own hand and style, would responsively express every turn and shade of his thought and feeling? " But I have not quite done. Do you notice, Mr. Editor, Mr. Compositor, a change in my manuscript? In order to preserve the consistencies I have thus far written with a goose- quill pen. Do you now notice a change of style, a finer and more Italianate chirography, if I may say so? You ought, for I am now writing with a crow-quill pen which I made from a feather picked up in Catlin's Woods. The crow-quill also figures in literature. If I were to seek for illustrations of it for this paper, I should call up some of the beaux and dames who hovered around Sir Charles Grandison and Clarissa ON MIGHTY PENS 163 Harlow or from the sorority, male and female, who figure in the pages of Jane Austen. Or I might take De Quincey's suggestion and cause the English mail-bags to be rifled of their contents and find therein, as he says we should, some of the purest and sweetest English literature in the much-becrossed letters of English women. But the crow-quill pen figures chiefly in calligraphy in the beautiful pen-work in which our ancestors delighted, but which the printing-press and the type-writer have almost supplanted. The most delicate work in the MSS. of old times, the fine shadings and almost invisible strokes which made the last exquisite finish of the ancient and mediaeval manuscripts, were put in with the crow-quill pen. These pens can still be bought of some of the English and con- tinental stationers. Thus far I had reached and was about closing this bit of gossip when my eye fell on these words in the " Contents" of a book of American Poetry: " Lines on receiving an Eagle's- Quill f rom Lake Superior." How this made my heart bound! Think of it ! If by the pen plucked from the wing of the domes- tic goose such marvels of song have been written, what may we not expect when poets write with pens dropped by the eagle from the sky as he soars amid the clouds above Lake Superior? Good heavens! May we not have a new Dryden, an American Pindar? M. H. B. University of Vermont, Dec. 20, 1907. P. S. You will note, Mr. Editor, traces of the sand with which the ink of my manuscript was dried. There is in it "no line which I should wish to blot" with vulgar blotting-paper. I have to apologize for pale ink: my last bottle of "Walkden's" is used up. BACCALAUREATE SERMONS THE HEAVENLY VISION Whereupon, O King, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. Acts xxvi: 19. THE most intellectual and the most logical of the Apostles here declares himself a believer in visions. Indeed it appears that as his Christian life began with a vision, so it was attended with visions all the way along. In his epistle to the Corinth- ians, he speaks of coming to visions and revelations as things quite familiar to him and as though he thought it not best to tell how much had in this way been vouchsafed to him. When a simple-minded enthusiast speaks thus, some devotee whose imagination has been wrought upon by legends and mysteries, we can easily account for the hallucination. But that this clear-headed thinker, this man of vigorous practical judgment, should have had the whole current of his life suddenly arrested and turned completely back upon itself by an apparition, this at first staggers and confounds us. How could Paul tell when he came to himself how could any of those tell who in the olden tune saw visions and dreamed dreams whether the vision was from God or their own fancy? When we first wake after a dream how vivid and real sometimes are the scenes through which we have gone, the voices we have heard, the impressions made upon our feelings and at times even upon our consciences! And yet how weak it would be to resolve upon any change of opinion or of purpose on the strength of such impressions! How soon they fade! How idle an hour after seem the alarm, the penitence, the new resolution! Give me, says the man of reflection, something more solid and stable as the basis of my religious belief and life, than the baseless fabric of a vision! Talk not to me, says the man of science, of intuitions, and inward revelations and experiences: 167 168 THE VERY ELECT in such a momentous matter as this I can be satisfied with nothing short of hard, palpable facts. Doubtless in some such mood was Paul himself on his way to Damascus. He had prejudged the case against Christianity, as have so many men with no more reason than he had. But this vision appeared to him. It was a vision of the daytime, when every sense of his body and every faculty of his mind were awake. It addressed his reason and his conscience demanding, Why persecutest thou me? It not merely made an impression on his feelings, it was, as he afterward described it, a new revela- tion. It sent him to retirement and reflection and prayer, out of which he came a new man. Now what was there in all this which requires us to withdraw from Paul the respect which we pay to a man of vigorous practical judgment? And wherein does the conversion of Paul differ essentially from the con- version of other men? That which was miraculous in this event, the sudden arrest, the dazzling light, the audible voice, were but accessories: the main thing was the new revelation in the soul, the flashing of the truth, the illumination of the conscience, experiences which mark the epochs alike of birth and growth in every awakened soul. And this brings me to the statement which I shall commend to your consideration: that spiritual truth always comes to the soul by revelation on the part of God and by vision on the part of man. Religion, considered as an object of thought, of belief, has two departments, one consisting of facts and principles deducible therefrom, the other of truths. Considered in the first aspect, religion is one branch of science, as fully entitled to the name as any of the sciences. As such it holds its tenets subject to the same logical conditions which induce belief elsewhere. It asks no easier terms of demonstration, no shorter road to conviction than other sciences enjoy. Bishop Butler's Analogy of Religion is as thoroughly scientific a treatise as Newton's Principia. And one of the notable achievements of our scientific age, one for which thanks and THE HEAVENLY VISION 169 felicitations are due from us all, is a marked advance in the science of religion, in the critical investigation, the analysis and synthesis of the principles of Christianity. But in another aspect of it Christianity is not demonstrable. That is to say, it holds certain truths, and those the most essential and far-reaching of all, which cannot be reached by demon- stration. Science itself acknowledges such truths and in fact builds upon them its whole vast fabric. If the critic of geometry should, like the critic of religion, challenge the first unproved statement and arrest all progress till it should be proved, there would not be today, nor in any future age, any possibility of geometric science, or consequently of architecture, or astronomy, or navigation. A score of sciences and a hun- dred arts all depend on the validity of one or two statements on the first page of the geometry for which the only possible proof is that we must believe them and cannot help it. Now that which is true of science is true in a large and more impor- tant sense of religion. Its prime truths, its essential and in some respects its most important truths, are out of the reach of demonstration. This is not saying that they are irrational, but that the spiritual reason which apprehends them is a different faculty from the logical understanding, and works by different methods. That the whole is equal to the sum of all its parts, and that infinity is greater than the sum of all finite quantities, I know by intuitive reason. That the Supreme Being is holy and good and that the supreme good for man is to be like him, I know, at least I recognize and approve, by my spiritual reason. For it is not meant that because of this power of spiritual vision we can dispense with revelation, but that we can perceive the truth as revealed without the intervention of any logical demonstration. Notice how revelation itself throughout assumes the existence of this spiritual capacity. The most common mode of expression in the Bible, which is so constantly recurring and in so many different forms that it may almost be styled the characteristic 170 THE VERY ELECT figure of Scripture, is that which represents truth as the object of vision, revelati'on as the light or medium of vision, and the soul as seeing. Faith is denned by the Apostle as " seeing things not seen," that is, seeing in a supernatural light things not visible in natural light. If I were to read all the texts that imply this doctrine, those for instance which exhort us to "look unto God," to "look unto Jesus," those which describe the word as a "light," as "giving light" by its entrance, as "enlightening the eyes of the understanding," those which set forth the Saviour as "the light of the world" and as "bringing life and immortality to light," I should read a large part of both the Old Testament and the New. This appears further from the style of Revelation. It does not address itself to the pure intellect. It does not speak in abstract propositions set forth in logical statement and sequence. It does not betray any anxiety to get our assent. It tells us in the most simple way what to believe and how to obey. There is not a single complete demonstration in the Bible. It relates facts like one who brings tidings eagerly waited for. It reveals truths as one who should say: "Here is food for the hungry; eat and be welcome. Here is water for the thirsty; drink to your fill." It offers no official guar- anty that the food is wholesome and the water pure ; it provides no apparatus for testing them. It assumes that there is a spiritual palate which can distinguish meat from poison. When we forget this fundamental and characteristic principle of revelation, when we err first by attempting to formulate a spiritual truth in terms of the logical understanding, and then disagreeing as to its accuracy, fall to disputing and wrangling, and bring in our scholastic tricks for outwitting one another, and finally carry the case for adjudication to the same court that settles disputes in matters of mere fact and sense, we act just as irrationally as one who should seek to decide a question of taste by statute law or the diagnosis of a disease by astrol- ogy. If a revealed truth is obscure to us, we have but to open THE HEAVENLY VISION 171 our eyes wider by relaxing the prejudices which half close them ; to purge from them by purer living the films and motes which obstruct our vision; to gain by prayerful activity a loftier specular mount of spiritual life from which to observe them. If the tones of revelation sound confused and dis- cordant in our ears, we must retire into the serener air where secular noises cannot reach us, we must by devout meditation get our spirits retuned to finer harmonies and lay our ears more softly to the chords along which the divine spirit whispers to the listening soul. We find this view also abundantly confirmed by experience. I need only remind you of cases like those of Augustine and Luther and Bunyan; to which it would be easy to add a score of others, of men into whose souls at some unlocked for and improbable juncture, truth has darted like a flash of lightning with startling and convincing power, or has beamed with a mild radiance, bringing a calm repose of faith that years of study and spiritual wrestling had failed to attain. I might also suggest, without offering any explanation of it, how often this breaking in of spiritual light has been attended with vivid sensations as though coming from actual voices and appear- ances analogous to those of Paul's heavenly vision. But con- ceding that all this may be delusion, it must be admitted by all readers of biography that the successive stages of growth in men of character and reflection can almost always be traced from their moments of illumination. Indeed the one experi- ence common to all men of progressive life and power, which might almost be written out as a commonplace for every biography, is something like this: On some occasion, with or without antecedent preparation, but usually breaking in upon the immediate train of association, some great truth intellectual or spiritual, in the old and expressive phrase, was borne in upon the soul, flooding it with light and joy, allaying previous unrest and kindling new aspirations in the light of which all objects changed their relative positions, their shapes and 172 THE VERY ELECT hues, and in the possession of which the man felt himself to be in some important sense another man than he was. To many men this experience has come not once only but repeat- edly and at shorter intervals, so that at last the light which came to them at first in flashes, now comes in a broad, steady beam. And now I think I may leave the testimony of biography and of history, and appeal to universal experience. I may turn to you who are listening to me and ask whether there has not been something in your own lives, some sweet heavenly vision, whose remembrance confirms the truth I am main- taining. If so, if there is some white day in your past when your eyes opened to see some great truth and your heart opened to take it in, you need no argument to convince you that this seeing of visions is no impossibility and no illusion. He who is not conscious of having had such revelations may doubt their reality or distrust the guidance they offer: he who has seen and obeyed a heavenly vision can do neither. He may err in his judgment upon its accessories; he may ascribe too much to the miraculous and too little to the ordinary agencies of the Spirit of all truth; but that he has seen a vision, that a light which never was on sea or land has visited him, that the curtains of the invisible world have for an instant been parted before him and that he has gazed on things beyond mortal ken, this belief you cannot wrest away from him by argument, or authority, or ridicule. But what shall we do with false visions, with pretended revelations and the intuitions of the extreme mystics? We must treat them exactly as we treat similar cases in actual vision. Sailors often mistake clouds for land. Even the keen-sighted Arab is misled by the mirage. But all this does not invalidate the accuracy of natural vision, nor men's confidence in it. Every time that you and I looking upon a mountain, or a cloud, or a flower, speak of them as though they were the same to us both, we virtually set to our seal that God THE HEAVENLY VISION 173 is true, that he has not made our senses to deceive us. We sometimes think a cloud to be a mountain, we sometimes mistake an exhalation of our own fancy for one of the ever- lasting hills of God's revealed law. Is it a cloud that I see from my window in the dim distance among the Adirondack peaks, or is it the summit of Mount Marcy? I cannot always tell. But when Mansfield stands out clear and sharp against the afternoon sun, as firm as the promise of God on the spiritual horizon, it is of no use to remind me that yesterday I mistook a cloud for Mount Marcy. The great spiritual truths are set near me and round about me and I have but to lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help. But I now go a step farther and contend that not only can the human spirit apprehend spiritual truth directly without the intervention of logical demonstration, but that it can apprehend such truth in no other way. A fact can be com- municated by testimony, a scientific truth by demonstration, a spiritual idea only by vision. When Newton put the world in possession of the logic by which he established the great laws which bear his name, every man capable of feeling the cogency of mathematical reasoning might be as certain of those laws as was Newton himself. But not so of a spiritual truth. Here every man must see for himself. Take for example the being of God. The assertion is not that it is impossible to prove the being of God, but that the proof would have no cogency with a mind unwilling or unable to believe in God without the argument. Let an atheist read Barrow's, or Clarke's, or Paley's argument, and will he as he reaches its triumphant conclusion, fall on his knees and exclaim, "My Lord and my God?" No! But in some auspicious moment, he hears the voice of God, in his works, or in his word, saying simply, "I am:" he opens his spiritual eyes and sees God, dimly and remotely, but actually: he gets a glimpse of his divine glory and beauty, and now he adores and never again can he be a complete atheist. Another man doubts the 174 THE VERY ELECT validity of prayer. You give him an impregnable argument drawn from the nature of God and of man, from the declara- tions of Scripture and from the experiences of devout men. He finds it impossible to break your line of argument, but he does not pray. He challenges you to a trial of the medicinal power of prayer on the patients in a particular ward of a hospital. Suppose that the challenge were accepted and that marvellous recoveries immediately ensue. Will he pray now? Who is so credulous as to think it? But in some hour of great distress or of great joy, perhaps as he paces his room at mid- night while in the hushed chamber above a struggle is impend- ing between Life and Death for one he loves better than his own soul, perhaps in the moment of overwhelming joy which reveals the crisis safely passed and the life saved, his whole soul goes out to God in supplication or in gratitude. Behold he prays! His faith has broken through the adamantine chains which pride and unbelief had forged and which argument could not loosen, and has cast itself in humility before the throne of grace. For him henceforth and forever that throne of grace abides. He has seen it. He may turn his back upon it, but he knows it is there. He may turn his face toward it, and waves of passion and mountains of sin may hide it from him: but he knows that it is there. I have time only to suggest how mercifully this spiritual economy is adapted to the diversified endowments and oppor- tunities of men. If spiritual knowledge and spiritual life depended largely upon logical acumen, it would go hard with all our race save a few score of philosophers. But by God's grace the philosopher has no advantage over the wayfaring man though simple. The highest and grandest of all truths beams alike upon the sage who from his lonely watch-tower can unsphere the spirit of Plato and upon the simple souls gathered reverently round the big ha' Bible on the Cottar's Saturday night. When some scholastic pedant in the vanity of his argumentative skill endeavors to confuse the faith of THE HEAVENLY VISION 175 plain people by perplexing their intellectual conceptions, there is one reply which, thank God, they not only always will make, but which is a perfectly reasonable one to make: "You may stop my mouth in argument : you may bewilder my weak intellect with your learning; but let me get home and get my old Bible in my hands, and I care not for all your fine logic. Whether the rulers believe or no, I know not; what the scribes believe or disbelieve, I am not answerable for; one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see." And because of this answer from myriads of believing souls in all generations, rather tTian because of the apologies and the argumentative defences of Christianity, vital religion survives and grows and triumphs in the minds and in the lives of men. The question is sometimes asked, and with great anxiety, "Can Christianity maintain itself with thinking men?" The answer is, Christianity is for men as men. It addresses itself with vast advantage to men who think, provided they also love, and revere, and worship. But it is not a religion of the intellect merely. It satisfies, it glorifies the intellect, but it does not give to pure intellect the key which unlocks its mysteries, but to faith. Whosoever receiveth not the King- dom of God as a little child, with a child's large round open eyes to see, and a child's heart to trust, shall by no means enter therein. And this brings us to the practical point of this discussion. The vision enjoins something; the truth requires not acqui- escence merely but obedience. A spiritual vision is not a sweet, idyllic dream of something fair and bright on which we gaze with half-shut eyes on a summer afternoon. It is a glimpse of duty; it is a flash of light on the pathway that lies before us. When a scientific truth has been reached by demonstration the intellect says, "I am convinced." When a new spiritual truth rises above the soul's horizon, the con- science says, "Obey it." I may be convinced that the worlds above me are inhabited, or that they are not inhabited; either 176 THE VERY ELECT opinion will affect my conduct but slightly. But is the soul immortal? Can sin be forgiven? Does God answer prayer? These questions touch me very closely. A clear answer to these questions sends me immediately this way or that way on some duty which I am not at liberty to decline. For these questions are not answered just as they are asked. When the curious scribe asked our Lord, "Are there few that be saved?" the answer was, " Strive thou to enter in at the strait gate." So when we ask, "Is man immortal?" the reply is, "Prepare thyself for thine own immortality." "Does God answer prayer?" "Ask and it shall be given you." It is not for the satisfaction of our curiosity, not ultimately for the enlargement of our spiritual knowledge, that heavenly visions appear unto us, but that they may beckon and guide us upward along the path of obedience to heavenly heights of holy living. When, therefore, the apostle uttered these words, "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision," he enunciated in substance the law at once of spiritual knowledge and of the spiritual life. God sends into our natural darkness the light of his truth: our part is, first, to open our eyes and see; secondly, to obey what we see. By the first act we get knowledge; by the second, life. The enlarged life enables us in turn to attain higher knowledge: the increased knowledge in its turn helps us on to higher life. And thus the range of being expands, like circles in water or waves of ether, for ever and ever. "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision." Happy he who at the close of life can say this of all his past! "In my childhood when God came to me as I lay slumbering in the temple of unconscious innocence and called me by my name three times, I answered, 'Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth.' In my ardent and susceptible youth, when visions came thronging in upon me, visions from above and visions from my own fancy, visions of good and of evil, I broke the spell of all visions of pleasure, I tore the disguise from the specious visions of sin, and I obeyed the heavenly visions which beckoned me to THE HEAVENLY VISION 177 a life of duty and piety. In my manhood, when I felt the terrible power of all the influences which tended to make me hard, worldly, and sceptical, I often stole away to the mount of prayer and saw again, as in my youth, the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending, and in the strength of those visions I overcame the world. And so in my old age, when to most men the vision fails, when it is proverbially said that no new truth beams upon the enfeebled intellectual sight, God has vouchsafed to me, as he did to his aged servant, Isaiah the Prophet, visions of good things to come so full and glorious that, like him, I am always breaking forth into song." Such would be the earthly experience of one who uniformly obeyed the heavenly vision; and this heavenly experience was anticipated by this same apostle when he wrote : "Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face." Gentlemen of the Graduating Class: It is expressly declared in Scripture that in these latter days young men shall see visions. This is one of the privileges, and one of the greatest privileges of youth. To you truth comes in the tinted and glorified forms of a vision, rather than in the dry- light of philosophy. Therein lies for you the possibility of enthu- siasm, and generous faith, and noble ambition. During these years past, while you have been faithfully accomplishing the formal and preceptive part of your education with such guidance and help as we could render, the Divine Spirit has been carrying on another part of it in which we have had no share, opening the eyes of your spiritual understanding to behold truths far out of reach of your natural powers. And now that you have satisfac- torily endured all our questioning, and have fairly won the acade- mic honors which you are soon to receive, there is another question more important and far-reaching, which you must answer to yourselves and to God, Have you obeyed the heavenly visions? It would be a wrong inference from what I have been saying to suppose that your long and laborious education has given 12 178 THE VERY ELECT you no advantage over other men in the handling of religious truth. To stop the mouths of infidels and scoffers, to remove objections to the truth in the minds of the candid and thought- ful, to persuade men to come out of the darkness of evil-doing into the light where God's truth shines these and other possible services will always occupy and dignify cultivated intellect. And here and there over the land where the provi- dence of God may place you , we shall expect to hear that every one of you is rendering good service in this cause. You may always be sure that the old college will not lose sight of you, and that we shall be proud and happy when we hear of your success. But after all, remember and especially because of the temptation to intellectual pride, remember that as the sun rises and shines on gentle and simple alike, so the light of saving truth beams as directly upon the simplest and humblest of God's children as upon you. Do not, therefore, be ashamed of obvious truths. Do not reject them or think you must amend them because they are common to you and to inferior minds. Be not ashamed of Jesus Christ because the poor believe in him and some of the rulers do not. The most obvious truths are often the most important ones. Do not set your scientific intellect to keep watch and ward against all truth that comes not that way. Open a way through your heart also; keep your whole nature open to heavenly visitants. Your natural associations will be with men of culture, but keep close also to men who have warm hearts, and saintly characters, men of sympathy and faith and prayer. And so the day long hoped for, when your last college lesson should be over, has come. It seems to be my duty, my painful and yet pleasant duty, to give you your last lesson, painful because it is the last, and yet pleasant because words spoken at this hour are likely to be long remembered. Let the lesson, then, be this and my colleagues will all join me in saying it that we were never so anxious to impress a lesson deeply and indelibly upon your minds, as this: "Be not dis- obedient unto the heavenly vision." THE SPIRIT OF POWER "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power." // Timothy i: 7. IT WAS natural that the taunt implied in these words should have been brought against Christianity; it was natural that the Apostle Paul should resent it. The manly virtues had had a rich development under the old Greek and Roman civilizations. To deny that would be disingenuous. Paul was himself far from denying it. When he wrote in the Greek tongue, emphasizing the one Greek word which had been the rallying cry of Grecian heroism through eight centuries of history, "in the Liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, stand ye fast;" when he warned an officer of the danger of doing anything derogatory to the dignity of "a man that is a Roman;" he did homage, and challenged the world's homage, to those virtues which the Greek and the Roman had so grandly exhibited. It must be confessed that any new religion that should undertake to surpass the old civilizations hi respect to these virtues, had before it no easy task. But just this was the task which confronted Christianity and from which it could not and cannot excuse itself. It must show itself capable of producing, along with all other virtues, these essen- tial and constituent elements of high character, and that too of a purer and nobler strain than they have reached under any other influences, or it must confess its inferiority. Now we find that the general judgment, both that of the thinking few and of the unthinking many, went against Christianity in the first instance, as being lacking in the manly qualities. The early Christians were accused of indolence, of apathy, of a contemplative and mystic inefficiency. By an easy play upon words, for the name of Christian was substituted another 179 180 THE VERY ELECT Greek word which taunted them with being "good-for- nothing." This reproach was not forgotten at a later time when Chris- tianity was assailed by Celsus and Julian. And if we put our- selves back to the point of view from which the Greek philos- opher and the Roman statesman got their first superficial estimate of Christianity, we shall see how liable they were to mistake its spirit. It does not seem to magnify the manly virtues as do some of the old moralities. In the utterances of its founder, in the attitude and temper of its earliest dis- ciples and representatives, the qualities it emphasizes seem to be of another sort. " Blessed are the poor in spirit," appar- ently the key-note of the new teaching, sounded like com- mendation of a tame, submissive, craven spirit, which to them was the essence of all that is despicable. And when these Christians, followers of a leader who instead of fighting for his cause had submitted to death without resistance, like him yielded to their persecutors and returned only prayers and smiles for curses and death-blows, the lookers-on regarded them with something of the feeling which we have toward an animal, which instead of resisting our attacks crouches down in mortal terror before us and yields to its fate at our hands. It is true that Socrates, who in this respect was a Christian before Christ, had meekly yielded his life to persecution for the truth's sake, but he too was misunderstood and unappreciated. Far more sympathy and applause were awarded to that haughty, stoic spirit which refusing to yield to defeat sought death from the sword. It was a long time before the world, accustomed to associate courage with aggres- sion and resistance, could recognize an equal, possibly a higher type of it, in fortitude. The human mind could not then appreciate the austere glory of suffering. Nor does Christian- ity in our own time entirely escape this suspicion of being mild and innocent instead of being commanding and forceful. If a man were sought for a position of great daring and enter- THE SPIRIT OF POWER 181 prise, to be commander of an army or of an exploring expe- dition in the northern seas, I fear that it would not be deemed essential to choose a man who was a Christian rather than an unbeliever or one indifferent, hi order to make sure that he possessed these high qualities. And again what means this notion, unquestionably lurking hi a great number of minds, that great intellectual force is something alien to Christianity, or if not alien, yet out of place, not wanted, troublesome rather than helpful. Not to speak of the fear which attends a man of great vigor and originality, lest he do some damage to religion if within the church, is it not the popular judgment that such a man will find his most fitting place elsewhere, while the best servants of the church must be found among the moderate and the docile. Regret it as we may, the fact that the church is so largely made up of men of ordinary intellectual gifts, and that so many superior men are outside and antagonistic, must of necessity do something to divorce in the public mind the idea of religion from the idea of high intelligence, and thus expose Christianity to the sus- picion of intellectual inferiority. There are few things more trying to a man who thinks that his religion is based on con- viction, few things that so drive him to examine again and again the grounds of his faith, as to see so many professional men, so many business men of large ability, so many men of excellent judgment and unimpeachable good sense in all other relations, standing apart from the Christian church, eyeing it, as it were, askance, withholding from it that only sincere respect which is evidenced by self-committal and co-operation. Would it, or would it not, be fair to understand them as meaning, and yet out of consideration for the feelings of others refrain- ing from saying: "I regard religion as something fit and good for children, for women, for sentimental and effeminate men; I think enough of it to give to it my money, my public counte- nance, my bodily attendance, but not enough to give to it my all in all of conviction, affection, action." 182 THE VERY ELECT Now either Christianity deserves that supreme respect and devotion which men give to a power which wholly overmasters and dominates them, or it is a failure and an imposition. If it is not everything, it is nothing. Talk not of its salutary influence on minds of a certain order, or of its tendency to foster certain amiable virtues, or of its wholesome social restraints. If it cannot compel your respect, it will not accept your patron- age. If it does not meet the needs of all minds, and all minds equally; if it does not foster every virtue equally and to the utmost; if it does not ennoble and empower society as well as restrain it, Christianity has not the power it claims. Show me some philosophy, or some social or moral system which is adapted to produce any one of the virtues in finer perfection than Christianity can produce it, and I will acknowledge Christianity to be a failure. Take these virtues now under consideration. Convince any candid man that the Christian religion does not succeed in making men as brave both physi- cally and morally, as resolute in the assertion of will-power, as defiant of opposition and heroic in resistance, when need arises, as some other theory of human life does, then he is bound to transfer his allegiance to that other system whatever it may be because, whatever other virtues he may have or not have, without these he is something less than a man. If God has not given us in the Gospel the spirit of power and of a sound mind, but of fear, let us by all means betake ourselves to some pagan shrine or some philosopher's grove, where we may at least learn to be men, even if we cannot aspire to be angels or gods. It should not, therefore, surprise us that this most thorough- going expounder of the Christian faith, and at the same time this bravest and manliest of men, should assert, as he does, with some warmth, that God hath not given us the spirit of fear. The Christian spirit is not the timorous, craven spirit, that must ask leave to be and to have an opinion and express it, and that is always apologizing for presuming to occupy THE SPIRIT OF POWER 183 space and consume time in the universe of being. The Scrip- ture speaks commendingly of the broken heart; it would be nearer the truth to say that it speaks gently, encouragingly to the broken heart. It is broken-down stubbornness, not broken-down resoluteness, that it commends. The best exemplifications of the Christian temper are not broken- spirited but high-spirited men. Paul himself was broken down on his way to Damascus. He left there in the highway his Jewish obduracy and hate. But all through his Christian career he was one of the most high-spirited of men, withstand- ing Peter to his face because he was to be blamed ; giving place by subjection to certain meddlers, no, not for an hour; hurling his fierce wrath upon the High Priest for his unwarranted assault and then apologizing as only a large-minded gentleman would, for an unintentional affront to the sacred office; and amid all the trials and persecutions of those thirty years, animating his own and his followers' zeal by martial strains worthy of the famous soldier-poet of the Spartans. There have been men, there have been Christian sects, whose favorite language in their devotional exercises abounded in self-disparagement, characterizing them as vile, as worms of the dust, as nothing and less than nothing. This language came from a sincere desire to exalt God in their minds at their own expense. But when other men took them at their word, when King Charles and Laud and Claverhouse treated them as though they were worms of the dust, these others found them and they found themselves by no means ready to be trampled on. Not to the Puritans, despite their language, had God given the spirit of fear, nor to the Covenanters, nor to the Huguenots, nor to the Herrnhuters, nor to any others who have learned in the school of Christ to be at once humble and proud. True religion in subduing men does not crush them. There is no terrorism in the Gospel. Fear crouches under the sceptre of the law, beneath the sheltering wings of the Gospel it has no abiding place. There is a divine message of fear to men; but 184 THE VERY ELECT it is to men who will not have this man to reign over them, this man whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light. Fear unfits men for receiving the Gospel. It is selfish, suspicious, resentful. Not until it has been replaced by faith, which is open-hearted, sympathetic, self -abandoning, can the Chris- tian life begin. When the timorous soul, cowering in the shadow of its guilt cries out, "What must I do to be saved?" the first thing the Gospel does for him is to hearten him, to give him a manly confidence, not in himself but in another braver and stronger than he, his leader and captain: " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." So it was with Paul himself. When he fell down trembling and astonished and cried out in his terror, the word came to him, " Rise and stand upon thy feet." Why should a man be grovel- ing in the earth? You are a man and no worm. Up and be a man and go and do a man's work. And so all through the Scriptures we find religion represented as a deliverance from fear, from the fear of man which bringeth a snare, from the fear of death, which subjects to bondage, from a fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation which blasts hope in the soul and makes the soul itself dwindle into abject servility. What spectacles has a perverted Chris- tianity exhibited to the world of whole peoples kept in a low condition of vitality by the depressing influences of a religion, which appealing only to fear, has fostered a timid, dependent, childish character! where religious crusades, and autos da fe" and grottoes of the damned are the most conspicuous public expressions of the spirit of religion, there be sure to find a people who, though naturally high-spirited, have been so re- duced in their intellectual and moral tone that they are the easy victims of both secular and ecclesiastical tyranny. Surely that is a spurious religion which, entering into a soul full of daring and enthusiasm, rushing with eagerness into the battle of life, prompts it to halt and strike its colors and go softly and sue for peace and live thenceforward an underling! Surely THE SPIRIT OF POWER 185 there is more in the Christian religion than is dreamed of by those who laud it mainly for restraining hot tempers, and making youths sober and men sedate and women obedient and keeping society within the due bounds of law and order. The essence of religion is not restraint; the ultimate aim of Christianity is not like that of Buddhism, equilibrium and re- pose; God hath not given us the spirit of fear. But of Power. God hath given us the spirit of Power. Jesus of Nazareth stands for power, as well as for meekness and love. It is a total and fatal misconception of him which keeps this quality in the background. The very gentleness with which he exercised his power is an evidence of its might. Not as the warrior with battles and confused noise and gar- ments rolled in blood does he assert his sway over men and society, but as light and gravitation pervade and subdue all things throughout the universe. It was a mark of Jewish stupidity and narrowness to demand power in the Messiah and not be able to see it. No less is it a mark of gentile stu- pidity in our times to make the same mistake. Ask the secular mind of the day whether it gets a stronger impression of mere power from Jesus of Nazareth or from Julius Caesar, for ex- ample, who is just now the world's favorite hero, and how many would confess that the imperial qualities of the Caesar are the more striking. And yet take Caesar at the highest estimate given of him and how does the mere human Jesus tower above him in all imperial and heroic attributes! How much larger his plans, how much ampler his resources, how much more direct and steady his movement toward the accomplish- ment of his purposes! His power was not like that of the Caesars, Napoleons and Bismarcks, artificially built up, de- pendent on the uncertainties of a host of capricious wills, and in the last resort on physical force which he disdained; it was centered in himself and went forth from himself as virtue went forth to heal the sick. Not only was there power in his word, commanding wind and sea, diseases and devils and even 186 THE VERY ELECT death itself; not only in his frown, by one look sending men backward till they fell to the ground; not only in his denuncia- tion visited so heavily on the imperious Pharisees that they ran the risk of being stoned by the people; there was power above all in his gentleness, in his love, his blessing. Such love as his can come only from a nature divinely strong. Would you measure his compassion for the sinner? You must first measure his resentment against sin. As is his indignation, so is his forgiveness. When the Son of man shall come in his glory to judgment, he will not show forth more power than when he bowed his head on Calvary. Martyrdom, forsooth, some have called it. Nay, it was no martyrdom. "I have power," said he, "to lay down my life; no man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself." "Power to lay down his life!" That is the power we find it so hard to understand. The Jews did not understand it and rejected their Messiah. The Romans did not understand it, and thought the religion that embodied it a craven thing, unworthy of the lords of the earth. Some modern theologians do not understand it, and think that the only religion of power is a religion that can terrify. Other theologians do not understand it, and weep over so tragic an end to so gentle a life and miss all the meaning of the death. And so Christ is, as at first, misunderstood and rejected by many, because they do not feel the power of that life and that death. But to those who truly know Christ and the truth as it is in him, God hath given power the power, first, which comes from Conviction. True religion is not a mere sentiment, a mood of the fancy, a leaping up of the heart when one beholds a rainbow in the sky, a pensive feeling when one hears the winds sigh or sees the leaves fall, the religion of the swallow and the lamb. It is a deep conviction of his whole soul, to which all his faculties bring their share, and in which they all harmo- niously and joyfully consent. Few of us know the power there is in a conviction, because few of us have convictions of our THE SPIRIT OF POWER 187 own. One can begin the Christian life and go a little way in it by following the convictions of others, of mother, of father, of pastor, of catechism, of church; but he cannot go far, he cannot be a man of power, until he reach convictions of his own. They may coincide with the convictions of millions who have gone before him; they must do so hi the main; but they are his own, the result of processes that have gone on in his own being, the conclusions to which every element in his nature holds itself pledged. The mightiest force hi this world is such a conviction. One man thinks and thinks until he be- comes convinced that there is a continent somewhere to the west; another that a great wrong ought to be righted, and if not by others, then by him; and so a conviction in a solitary mind changes the course of human history. Especially when a man gets a religious conviction, let other men beware, for something will surely come to pass. The son of a poor miner becomes convinced of a great religious truth which the church had for ages obscured, so convinced of it that he dared tell the Emperor and the council that he must believe and preach it, and could not otherwise, God help him, and that convic- tion made the successor of the Gregories and the Innocents, of those to whom kings had sued in vain for mercy and before whom a barefoot Emperor in the snow had humbled the loft- iest head in Europe, give up the fairest half of his patrimony, never to be recovered. Compare the man who has a religious conviction with the man who has a religious doubt. Here is a man who thinks he has discovered some doubts about Christianity that are eminently fine. Does for he their sake make a martyr of himself? Or does he enrich himself by selling his indulgences? Here is another man who has exhausted the resources of a subtle Gallic intellect in explaining away the grandest and most profound of all human lives into "a sweet Galilean vision/' which infidel Paris, eager for a new sensa- tion, buys by the thousand, while he luxuriates on the proceeds in a charming rural villa. But let one come under the power 188 THE VERY ELECT of a religious conviction, and it drives Peter the Hermit as by a frenzy all over Europe to preach the crusades; gives Abelard a voice so full of energy that he calls young men by thousands to his university; sends John Howard and Eliza- beth Fry to relieve the suffering in prisons and Chalmers and Guthrie to teach the poor and save the lost in the slums of great cities; and impels Brainerd and Carey, Moffat and Livingston amid savages and pariahs, that they may carry to degraded and dying races the reviving and saving power of the gospel of the grace of God. The Christian has also the power that comes from Faith. He has faith in his convictions and is willing to stake all on their truth. But he has also faith in his faith. He believes in God ; he believes also in Jesus Christ ; he believes that God through Christ has wrought great things for him and put great possibilities within his reach, and he believes in his belief. He trusts it. He embarks upon it into great enter- prises full of unknown perils. He cannot see far forward into the unrevealed; but he does not, like the timid Greek mariner, merely skirt the shore and creep from point to point, and from island to island, from one sensuous and material fact to another, doubting of everything beyond the present horizon. He launches boldly out upon the promises of God, believing that new continents of truth and new climates of the divine love await him beyond the farthest ken of his intellect. In nothing does the best modern character more show its superiority over the best pagan character than in the boldness and power that come from faith. The Greek intellect was credulous, but faithless. Its most popular sect of philosophers doubted whether there is any such thing as absolute truth apart from our conceptions of it. The Greek lacked, therefore, that which Dr. Arnold used to insist on as the essential basis of character, moral earnestness. The Roman was serious enough but was enslaved by the authority of the mere practical judgment. Both were incapable of faith; hence both were open to super- THE SPIRIT OF POWER 189 stitious fear ; cowed before realities which they could not think their way through : brave but not courageous, for courage is born of faith. For feats of arms, for enterprises distant and peril- ous they had daring enough, if some bird or beast or meteor or noise did not create a panic among them ; for in the presence of all things invisible they had the spirit of fear and not of power. But the modern mind having received through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ a view of the invisible world which removes all its terror and peoples it with grandest possibilities, feels the power of the world to come in all the branches and fibres of its life, not only in its religious aspirations and activities, but in its intellectual opinions, its political and social systems, its material arts and enterprises. The great system of credit, individual, corporate and national, on which three-fourths of the enterprise of the world is dependent, is at once an evidence and an outgrowth of the principle of faith which has its origin in the religion of Christ. And to go from the lowest to the highest exempli- fication of faith, compare the lyrics of the Greek tragedy in which death and the hereafter are alluded to, with the songs of a Christian hymn-book; those, sad, querulous, dispiriting; these, cheerful, hopeful, exultant. How could it be but that that black uncertainty should throw a shadow over life under which courage should fail and enterprise should lose its pith and moment? How can it be but that the glory that is yet to be revealed to the Christian should embolden him to great endeavors here while he is waiting for greater things beyond? The Christian has furthermore the power that comes from Love. " There is no fear," says another strong Apostle, pre-eminently strong in love, as Paul was in conviction and faith, " there is no fear in love; perfect love casteth out fear; he that feareth is not made perfect in love." The man who is full of the love of God is a bold, strong, valiant man. As in a lower sphere the love of wife and children, of home and country, enlarges a man's nature and gives him worth and 190 THE VERY ELECT potency in the State, so in the highest sphere, the love of God as manifested in Christ and the love of all those for whom Christ died, imparts to the true Christian character, breadth, magnanimity, energy. And it is the special and distinguish- ing feature of Christianity that it elevates, dignifies, and em- phasises beyond all other qualities, this one quality of love. A powerful writer of our time seeking an expression that should be energetic enough to set forth such love as Christ would in- spire in his followers, calls it an enthusiasm, an enthusiasm for Christ, an enthusiasm for humanity, by which he means love raised to the height of a passion. For as a man in a passion is momentarily strong by gathering into a sudden act the vital energy of weeks and months to come, so the Christian, does not borrow from himself but receives from an inexhaustible divine source the energy which exalts his affection to an inten- sity above his mere nature, and makes impossibilities easy to him. Whence came the energy that sustained the perse- cuted saints of all ages, "poor weak women" some of them, as history called them? Whence came the greater devotion that has sent other "weak women" into hovels where the poor lay dying, and into camps feculent with disease and hospitals reeking with pestilence? At the very height and flowering of Greek civilization in the time of Pericles, a plague fell upon the city of Athens. Then came a trial of manhood more searching than any contest at Platsea or Salamis, and Greek valor quailed before it, a craven and dishonored thing. It fled from the couch of the sick; it did not know how to die in doing what it could for the suffer- ing, were that little or much, but left even the nearest and dearest to die, as the historian says, unattended and solitary, like sheep. Now turn forward the pages of history and read what Christian heroism did when the pestilence desolated Alexandria and Carthage and Antioch after Christ's spirit had been for two centuries working in the minds of men. The bishops, we are told, called together their flocks, reminded them THE SPIRIT OF POWER 191 of Christ's precepts to love one another, and to love their ene- mies and to minister to the sick for Christ's sake; and that all- powerful appeal prevailed. Christian and pagan, friend and persecutor, they tended alike, dying often in the service but glad to serve by their death. And so all through the Christian ages, Christian character has always been attended by Chris- tian heroism, in man and in woman. Let the ancient civiliza- tions or any of the non-Christian humanities bring forward their best examples of heroic daring, and we will shame them into silence by the unostentatious and untrumpeted act of some "poor weak woman," or some humble Moravian missionary, who did it in the simplicity of their hearts and for the love of Christ, and who at the judgment day will wonder and blush when they try to remember what they have done, and when they did it, that such acclaims should greet their entrance into heaven. In view of this attempted portraiture of the true Christian spirit, as a spirit of power, it becomes us to say, though it be superfluous to say it, that for most of us it is in large part an unrealized ideal. Not wholly so. Not in vain has this vital and vitalizing energy been working in the general Chris- tian mind for eighteen centuries. Not only is historic Chris- tianity rich in individual heroes, but the aggregate available energy of Christendom is nothing less than vast, and is steadily increasing. But the pertinency of this theme at this time lies in the need of reasserting the claims of the strong manly and womanly virtues to a foremost place in the Christian conception of character. The response which Mr. Thomas Hughes's tract on the " Manliness of Christ" has awakened, in spite of the slight shock occasioned by its title, reveals a conviction in the Christian mind that the word was needed and timely. We are today, to some extent, in the same condition as Paul was. Inasmuch as there are insinuations to the con- trary, we too assert with some warmth, God has not given us the spirit of fear but of power. If it is charged upon the Chris- 192 THE VERY ELECT tianity of the day that it is afflicted with intellectual timidity; that it shrinks from an encounter with science in the open field; if, on the other hand, it is charged upon Christianity that it has lost something of its old-time moral fibre and hardi- hood, that it preaches a soft and succulent gospel, that has no place for resentment and indignation and the holiness that cannot look upon sin, we may rebut the charges as well as we can on the score of facts, but we may not in the least degree challenge the standard to which our Christianity is brought. Let us learn from our enemies, it we have not learned else- where, that a timorous, harmless, indulgent Christianity is not the Christianity of Christ. The spirit which God has given us is the spirit of power; if we have gone and taken to ourselves any meaner spirit, that spirit is not of God. If a young man thinks to make his religious life blameless, but his secular life strenuous; if he thinks to put into his religion all his sacred musings and his fine Sunday feelings, but into his business all his warmth of purpose and energy of action, let him know that he does not intend to be religious at all after the Christian idea of religion. To be a devotee after the pagan sort, is to loiter about shrines and images and sacred groves, to breathe the fetid odors of decaying relics, to shrivel up one's vitality in caves and on pillars. To be devout after a Christian sort is to be strenuous in prayer and then strenuous in the action which in part fulfils your prayer, or, if need be, not stopping to pray, pray as you run, to be like those angels that excel in strength, that do his commandments, listening with upturned faces to catch the first word of his voice and then posting over land and ocean without rest. Listen not to the voices which say, "It is good to be here on the mountain top of contempla- tion and ecstacy, let us make tabernacles and abide in this se- rene, spiritual air." Such wist not what they say. It is not good for you, not good for others, that you abide there. Down below, in the world of reality, there are hard but necessary duties to do, evil spirits to be cast out, doubting disciples to THE SPIRIT OF POWER 193 be strengthened, Pharisees to be encountered, hardship, per- secution, ignominy to be undergone, that the truth may be lived and preached and made to conquer. As was Christ, so are we in the world. If we would reign with him we must fight with him. Blessed, truly, are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth. But there is a greater blessing for him that overcometh, that he shall sit with Christ on his throne, even as he overcame and is set down with the Father on his throne. Young Friends of the Graduating Class: I hope that you do not regard this as a ceremony of leave- taking. Speaking for all your instructors, I can give you our hearty good-bye. God be with you, now and always; but that does not mean that the college and you are going to part. You are to be graduated not from, but in the University. Your first degree instead of separating you from this academic family admits you more fully within it. Graduation means permis- sion to share the recognitions, the fellowship, the dignities of a university, or society of scholars. After a long and severe no- vitiate, you are about to be admitted into the guild of scholars which has its local habitation hi this University. Aliens elsewhere, you will always have here your intellectual home, your inalienable, untransferable domicile. And instead of severing your intellectual relations with us, I trust that you will find your relations with us and our successors only more free and intimate, because you will have passed from the con- dition of pupilage to that of fellowship. This institution hopes and expects to render to you many services in the future; it also expects to receive from you a large return of affection, gratitude and support. Let us then dismiss the false notion that those who are through college are through with the col- lege, and understand that the tie between a laureate student and his university is one of maternal affection and service till death them do part. 13 194 THE VERY ELECT Let me press upon your thoughtful consideration the sig- nificant fact that you have had your intellectual nursery, and will hereafter have your intellectual home in a Christian institution of learning. Not that this college sets up the claim of being more Christian than other colleges, but that all our colleges are Christian institutions. They are a genuine offshoot of Christianity; they spring from Christian ideas; just as naturally as certain plants and flowers accompany civilization round the world, do the common law, and the com- mon school and the college go with Christianity. Whether or not you have stopped to think of it, Christian ideas have pervaded your instruction all along; Christian truth has been incorporated into the structure and growth of your minds all these years. If unhappily any of you should hereafter repu- diate or by your lives dishonor the Christian faith or any vital part of it, you will be untrue to the teachings, and will bring reproach upon the fair name of your college. And in so far as you carry out into life, into good and noble deeds, the Chris- tian ideas here commended to you, you will justify the confi- dence which the University places in you when it certifies to all the world that you are worthy to take your first degree in Christian learning. There is a great work to be done for the world which you because you are scholars, must take your share in doing. You will have no monopoly of honorable places; do not cherish the conceit that you ought to have. But there is a kind of hon- orable work, as good as the best, which naturally falls to you, in the professions, the schools, the industries. To enter upon that work with well-trained powers is the best opportunity this life has to offer. To do a good work well is the glory of living. To go into active life, and to go through life, not with a timorous, listless, feeble spirit, but with the spirit of power, the power that comes from conviction, from faith, from love, is the best way to answer the question, Is life worth living? Twenty persons going with this spirit into the pro- THE SPIRIT OF POWER 195 fessions, industries, churches, homes, can not only make themselves and their class and their college famous, but what is better, they can do much for the honor of good learning, for the increase of true religion, for the advancement of man- kind and for the glory of Christ. And so, reminding you once more of the perpetual tie which binds you to this University, its indefeasible claim upon your affection and service, and its inalienable mother-interest in all your fortunes, we bid you hail and welcome. God be with you now and always. THE MIND OF CHRIST Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name. Philippians ii: 5-9- IF EVER there was a being who might with good reason insist on his rights, it might seem that that being was Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It might even seem that he was under obligation to do so. A being of exalted rank has duties to fulfil with respect to that rank. He owes it to himself and possibly to others not to suffer his dignity to be lowered. A king may not waive his kingship. Dante has put eternal infamy on one who committed "the great refusal/' who surrendered a great prize and a great opportunity; and the world has approved the doom and the phrase. This was precisely the conception the Jews had of the Messiah; an exalted being who would assert himself and insist upon his rights. To have power and not use it; to be a subject, almost a beggar, when he might have been a king : this was something so preposterous that they grew frantic in thinking of it. So it was also with the Roman. Pilate meant at once to mock Jesus and to express his contempt for the Jews when he said, "Shall I crucify your king?" And they meant to inform Pilate that they knew as well as any Roman what becomes a king, when they replied, "We have no king but Caesar.' 7 But the Son of God, being in the form of God, did not think that equality with God was a thing to be grasped at as a prize. He did not think it incumbent on him to maintain his dignity and assert his rights. He waived his kingship. He committed 196 THE MIND OF CHRIST 197 a "great refusal." He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. He, a sovereign, lowered himself to be a subject; he, incapable of the smallest wrong, submitted to the ignominy of a malefactor; he, the Lord of Life, yielded himself to death. He abandoned apparently every right he had. In the estimate of both Jew and Roman he committed the last act of baseness: he sub- mitted to indignity, contumely, infamy, without protest or resentment. The question therefore comes to us as it came to the Jews and the Romans. How can an exalted being waive all his rights and maintain his true position and character? How can a king who has abdicated, a potentate who has committed a great refusal, a reformer who has courted ignominious dis- aster, hope to establish his pretensions, how expect even to escape the imputation of weakness and failure? The answer to this is very simple; the child can give it out of his New Testament. But it is, after all, one of the hidden things of Christ's gospel, hidden from the wise and prudent; the great secret; the most difficult, the divinest lesson of all. There is such a thing as grasping at one's right and getting it, too, and being the loser thereby. There is such a thing as surrendering one's right and being the gainer thereby. There is dignity in waiving one's dignity for the sake of a great cause. There is a glory in suffering for others, beyond that of dis- playing one's glory to others. When a king abdicates for the good of his subjects, history uncovers to him with respect. We in this country have known of one who refused to be a king. Washington committed a great refusal, and behold what a throne he occupies in the eyes not of his countrymen only but of mankind! If Pope Celestine had surrendered the triple crown that Christendom might have some great advan- tage thereby, Dante would have set him upon a high seat in Paradise. The Son of God waived his own right that he might obtain rights for others. He left his own throne that he might 198 THE VERY ELECT make us kings and priests unto God. He was a man of sorrows that we might rejoice evermore. He suffered death that we might have eternal life. He refrained from insisting on his rights that those who had no rights whatever might have the supreme right to the tree of life, and to enter in by the gate into the City of God. But it is also to be remembered that all this was not by Christ's mere sufferance, but by his choice. In no sense, and in no particular of his plan, did he suffer defeat. His loss and shame were real, not theatrical; he literally and truly hun- gered and wept and suffered and died. But in it all he had his own will and wrought out his own sovereign purpose. When with dusty feet he trod the streets and fields of Galilee, when he was thrust from the precipice at Nazareth, when his feet and hands were nailed to the cross, he was in all things going steadily onward in the work which he had undertaken. His very death was a triumph. If their eyes could have been opened to see the reality of things, those who stood on Calvary saw the divinest spectacle this earth has ever seen or can see. Not when he comes in his glory with all the holy angels and sits upon the throne of his glory, will his real glory be greater than when he hung upon the cross. What the centurion said, constrained by that spectacle, all the world constrained by the same spectacle will one day echo, " Truly this was the Son of God." "Wherefore," says the apostle, as though he would say, not by an arbitrary decree but by the necessary operation of moral forces, "Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every name." God hath forever established, and Christ hath to all times and all worlds declared, that the way to excellency in name, in character, in power, in the affections of moral beings is not by self-assertion; is not by self-denial, not by insisting on one's rights, but by holding those rights in subserviency to the higher good. It is the instinct of nature to assert self. This is the univer- THE MIND OF CHRIST 199 sal instinct of brutes. When we see a dog or an elephant forego something for the sake of another, we recognize the modification the brute nature has undergone by contact with the human. Man in his primitive state is a self-asserting animal. He may, indeed, descend to a state below this and cease to assert himself. To submit doggedly to wrong is sign of a low moral condition; to submit contentedly, of a still lower. When we read how the people on the continent of Europe were treated by the nobles, how contemptuously, how brutally, and how long they submitted without retaliation; when we see in heathen countries still whole classes and races sunk below the capacity of resentment, we see what an important office in human society is assigned by the Creator to this primitive instinct of self-assertion, and how dangerous is the suppression of it. One of the first and most beneficent effects of Christianity upon these apathetic races is to rouse them to a sense of their rights and to embolden them to claim those rights. The ever-vigilant spirit of power, both secular and spiritual, stands ready to take advantage of the slightest relaxation of this sturdy native prerogative of all men. A foreigner has recently told us that of all people in the world, we are in danger of losing certain rights in default of insisting upon them. But all this belongs to the lower, the primitive life of man. For the substratum of character it is necessary, but it is not the material out of which character itself can be formed. The extension and development of the principle of self-asser- tion can never produce the true life of the individual or of society. If the best adjustment of social human life comes as the result of a mere conflict of rights, then Hobbes was right, and society is only an armed neutrality. But both history and philosophy assure us that the hope for human well-being lies not in that direction. The individual who is always standing upon his rights, insisting upon and magnifying what society owes to him, is hardly a general favorite. Everybody tires 200 THE VERY ELECT of him, dreads him, spurns him. Few things are more offensive than a certain persistent and uproarious selfishness that is forever claiming and screeching for more, more for one's self, more for one's class or sect or sex or profession. And when the claim is still further enlarged, when the rights of man are made emphatic over all else that pertains to man, over his obligations, and responsibilities, the results are anything but the peaceable fruits of righteousness. To found society on the rights of man, his rights only, is simply to incorporate the principle of multiplied self-assertion. That experiment has been tried, and its various phases have been hate, cruelty, bloodshed, anarchy, insurrections, massacres, the reign of terror, military despotism. History furnishes no single instance of a community beneficently organized upon a mere assertion of rights. The French anarchists were fond of justifying themselves by appealing to the American Declara- tion of Independence. But that document represented the spirit of American liberty only when taken in connection with the profound respect for law and the deep sense of religion which formed the substance of the American character. The movements which have permanently benefited man and society have sprung from a different spirit from that of self- assertion; from a spirit rather of concession, of self-sacrifice, of ministration. When the strong have been willing to forego their rights in order to aid the weak; when kings have yielded some part of their prerogative to the people, or when nobles have lifted up their standards to aid the people against tyrant kings, when parliaments have opened wide the gates of hos- pitality to strangers fleeing from persecution for their faith; when for the cause of pure religion, gently nurtured men and tender women have braved storms and exile and penury; when a rich, prosperous, self-sufficing people have poured out their best blood to redeem not their kinsmen but an alien race from slavery these are the acts, these the methods by THE MIND OF CHRIST 201 which the real dignity of men is exhibited, and social insti- tutions are established on a sure foundation. We in this country to say nothing about others have been living too long in the primitive stage of human society. We have built our social fabric too much out of mere assertion of rights. At times we have been lifted into a glorious for- getfulness of our selfishness, but have soon dropped back again into the old ways. Save a,s religion modifies the temper of our people, the spirit of American life is too much that of individualism. Every man is for himself. Politically we are democratic: socially we are intensely aristocratic. The strongest are the best. A profound student of political society, and a friendly critic, has recently written of us: " There has hardly ever before been a community in which the weak have been pushed so hopelessly to the wall, in which those who have succeeded have been so uniformly the strong, and in which in so short a time there has arisen so great an inequality of private fortune and domestic luxury." It is a startling but not an undeserved indictment. The American ideal of a man is of one who can most effectually assert him- self. It is not in the American code that the meek shall inherit the earth. A certain degree of insolence pervades all classes among us the poor quite as much as the rich. This riot of insubordination, disorder, violence, is the logical out- come of a rampant spirit of self-assertion. So long as the prime and main thought of every man, rich and poor, employer and employed, capitalist and wage-earner, is to assert, and so, of course, to magnify and exaggerate, his rights, regardless of all obligations, ministries and charities, so long will the con- flict of rights be bitter, disastrous and interminable. The solution of the vexed questions of the day is to approach them in a wholly different spirit the mutual spirit, if I may say so, rather than the self -asserting spirit. What the times need is not so much a new Political Economy as a larger infusion of 202 THE VERY ELECT Christianity into the social life of men. Poets love to sing of a time when none was for a party But all were for the state, When the great man helped the poor And the poor man loved the great. But though there never was such a time in the past, there will be in the future. And that future will be solely the product of Christianity. The natural selfish instincts of humanity can never produce it. When the spirit of him who did not insist on everything he might have grasped, but waived the prize in the interest of others: when his spirit pervades human society, then labor will recognize the rights of capital and employers will study the interest of the employed : then wealth will be regarded as a fund to be administered for the thriftless and improvident poor: political power as a trust delegated to capable hands in the interest of the weak: knowl- edge as a deposit of bullion to be paid out in current coin to the ignorant : then every talent and gift and opportunity bestowed upon one will be by him regarded as so many obligations to benefit and serve the many. A profound writer has pointed out that liberty and equality are incongruous that liberty generates inequality. But in the Christian state the inequality that is begotten of Christian liberty shall mean that one man has greater capacity of service than another, and that he who is greatest of all is minister of all. But the application of this principle most pertinent to the present occasion has reference to the determination of a career in life. "Let this mind be in you," says the apostle, addressing us one by one, and especially those who, as we say, are "making up their mind" for life, "let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." Let us try to conceive I am sure we may do it without irreverence of the career, the human career, of Jesus. Like others, throughout his youth and young manhood, he grew in wisdom and in all THE MIND OF CHRIST 203 human capabilities. He came by degrees, slowly but at last fully to the consciousness of his powers. Like other men he had to decide and this is always the great decision what he would do with those powers. In the strange and mysterious story of the temptation in the wilderness we have dimly out- lined to us the soul-searchings through which he came to his decision and determined his career. There was on the one side, the career of one to whom vast possibilities of power, of grandeur, of earthly dominion, were open, if he would use his powers for these ends; there was on the other hand, a career of obscurity, of lowly service, of companionship of the poor and ignorant, and of final infamy and death, but resulting in immeasurable good to other beings and to the interests of righteousness in God's universe. There was in short the satanic and the divine view of human life set before him. And he made his choice he reaffirmed the choice in his human career which he had before made when he chose to forego his divine dignity. He renounced the career of self- assertion and chose that of service. Now in a humble way each young person to whom Providence has committed the trust of power has to go through the same process. Power may come in various forms, in wealth, talents, social position, education, or in that most potent and charming of all oppor- tunities, the mere being young and having all the world before one. Every young person has within him powers unknown to himself, unknown to the world. What will he do with those powers, is the one great question of life. Now mere natural instinct within him says to him, "Assert these powers to the utmost for your own advancement, enjoyment, glory: put the spurs to all your faculties and ride through and over all opposition to the throne of your ambition." A more sober and more common policy bids him pay some deference to the rights of others, and by mingling persuasion with self-assertion win the favor and help of his fellow-men, but after all make self-realization the main thing. This is the substance of that 204 THE VERY ELECT modified selfishness which in our day is much extolled under the name of culture and Hellenism. But the example of Christ commends to us a wholly different policy of life, different in its source and inspiration, and different in all its outflow. He says to us : " Use power for the sake of blessing : subordinate your rights to the benefit of others." He does not bid you despise power, or undervalue rights, or fling away ambition. That were really and truly to commit "the great refusal," to choose basely and indolently the less in character and attain- ment when you might have had the greater; to be the man of one talent when you might have had the ten. Christianity exalts power, but consecrates it. It says, "Covet earnestly the best gifts," but use them in the more excellent way of charity. Look upon the careers of men and women. Between and across all other differences this main difference runs: one is actuated by selfishness, another by good-will. One may be a queen or a washerwoman, a duke or a day-laborer; one may be able to say, "Soul, thou hast much good laid up for many years," or be constrained to pray, "Give me this day my daily bread," and still the main difference is whether one will clutch all he can get, be it much or little; or bestow all he has, be it much or little; whether or not one is happy in making others happy; rich, but richer in charity; poor, but making many rich. It remains to say, finally, that the unselfish career is the only successful career. It is of the very essence of goodness that it harbors no thought of ultimate advantage; like the angels, doing "all for love and nothing for reward" but reward comes nevertheless and must come. It is in the nature of things, in the constitution of the universe, that goodness eter- nally succeeds and selfishness eternally fails. Things were all wrong were it otherwise. Rivers must run to the ocean; fire ascending seeks the sun; selfishness must debase, charity must exalt. Wherefore, in strict conformity to this law, God hath highly exalted Jesus and given him a name above every THE MIND OF CHRIST 205 name. And by the same "wherefore" God also exalts every one that humbles himself for the sake of others, and endears and glorifies the names of those who bear others' burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ. Whose are the exalted names in history? Theirs who assert and magnify and aggrandize themselves, who wade through slaughter to a throne? or those who come down from the throne to feed the poor and comfort the lowly? Has history canonized Herod or John the Baptist, Nero or Paul, Elizabeth of England or Elizabeth of Hungary, the unknown conquerer of the Battle of Zutphen or the dying knight whose compassion sent the cup from his own lips to the common soldier's? There are earthly names to which in a qualified sense every knee bows, every head is uncovered. They are not the names of men of great genius, usually self- indulgent, petulant, spoiled by applause; not the Byrons, the Shelleys, the Poes; not the men of iron will who ride down and trample on all that opposes them, the Wallensteins, the Napo- leons, the Bismarcks ; not the men who sweep into their own granaries such large portions of the world's annual harvests that their barns burst out with plenty; not these, but the names of those who spend and are spent to bring good to the needy and the suffering, the prisoner and captive, the homeless and lost, the Wilberforces and Howards, the Nightingales and Fryes, the Peabodys and Montefiores. And there are other names now unknown to fame, of those who have left luxurious homes to go down into the lowly cabins of the South to teach the children of the freedmen; of those who not without a natu- ral sigh have turned their backs upon libraries and the attrac- tions of learned leisure and have gone to preach the gospel to the Kaffir and the Hottentot; of those, the gentle, the tenderly-nurtured, the timid, who have picked their way through lanes and byways and city slums, amid filth, and pestilence and loathsome vice, seeking out and saving that which is lost, names which will never figure on any human roll of worthies, the mention of which in terms of praise would 206 THE VERY ELECT surprise and shock the possessors, but which will one day blaze out with a lustre excelling all other names of earth and shall shine as the stars in the firmament for ever and ever. There is no visible crown, however heavy with gold and studded with jewels and lustrous with historic glory, which is so much to be coveted as the diadem, now invisible, but hereafter to be revealed, which shall forever enrich the brow of Divine Charity. ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS The criticism lies heavily against what is called culture in our day, against the life you have been leading for the last four years, that it tends to selfishness. To rouse, cultivate, balance, perfect one's own powers, these, it is said, are the watchwords of culture, and these are but so many rubrics in the worship of self-seclusion from the active service of life. Supreme devotion to personal attainment, social intercourse limited and narrowing, all these things tend, it is said, and seldom fail, to produce egotism. Is the charge true? If it is true, it is a condemnation of the whole process and of the entire result. If education tends to make our youths self-conscious, self -asserting, selfish, it is unchristian; it is undoing what the grace of God in all the Christian ordering and discipline of life, is aiming to do. Better the loving service of their fellows by unlearned and ignorant men, by fishermen and laborers, than the cold, heartless, cynic refinement of self-centered scholars. But is the charge true? Is it true as regards you? What are your hearts set on as you look forward into life from the elevation reached today? Are you going into the world eager to clutch its prizes, to insist on your claim to the largest possible amount of honor, money, power, happiness? Or, if it is unreasonable to suppose that you have any very definite purposes as to what you will be or do, ask yourself which way you find yourselves unconsciously tending. That is a question which touches us as well as you. Which way is the momentum THE MIND OF CHRIST 207 generated by four years of study carrying you, toward self- assertion or toward service? Have you begun to be affected by the world's great needs, by the sight of men's sorrows, and infirmities and sins? Do human error and folly and wrong affect you with disgust, and prompt you to draw your scholarly robes about you and retreat into the shade; or do you long to take your human heart, your trained faculties, and your youth- ful energies into this serious, tragic, fateful but hopeful human scene, and do something as God shall give you grace and opportunity? I feel sure that you respond in some measure to this appeal, that you choose in your hearts today the generous, self-giving. Christian idea of life, and not the selfish, satanic idea. If you can look into your hearts and honestly say that such is your thought and purpose, and that it has been formed and con- firmed in you by the scholarly pursuits of these four years, that is the noblest thing you can say for liberal study and for your Alma Mater. It is to say that this is a Christian institution, that sound learning is handmaid to goodness, that science truly so called tendeth to charity. I do not, therefore, giving you today our last counsel, point out to you the prizes and honors of life, and bid you go and win them for your glory and ours. I point out to you a nobler mission. I call you to a higher glory, the mission and the glory of ministering to the highest good of men. Who among you will be the greatest? He or she who best serves others. There are great works to be done in scholarship, in professional and industrial life, and I trust that you will do your full share of them. There are pulpits to be filled, judges' benches to be occupied, papers to be edited, railroads to be built, and we expect you to be among the foremost in all these vocations. But we hope for you something better than that, namely, that you will serve your generation by the will of God, that you will fill your lives full of humble, loving ministrations to those who need you and them. Remember that the great 208 THE VERY ELECT prizes are not those that are snatched from unwilling hands, but those which are conferred by hands uplifted in thanks and blessing; that the name which is above every name is not the name that is sounded from the clarion of fame, but the name that is lisped by infants and syllabled by children, and whis- pered in secret prayer, and raised aloft in thanksgiving and song. Be your prize the Christian prize, your name the worthy name, by which to be called is the true nobility. GOODNESS THE HIGHEST GOOD Seeing that the root of the matter is found in me. 1 Job xix: 28. ONE of the sublimest and most pathetic passages in human experience for it must first have been experience or it could not have been drama is this of Job, prostrate amid the wreck of everything dear to him, scorned by his friends, forsaken apparently by God and man, and yet in spite of all lifting his voice above the storm and crying: " Till I die, I will not remove mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." This is the man who with sublime confidence in his convictions asserts that the root of the matter is found in him. And surely it is. Whether he was an Israelite or an Arabian, whether he was of the spiritual lineage and heritage of David and Solomon and Asaph, or was wrestling with the hard prob- lems of life alone in the desert, it is plain that God had spoken with him, had indeed imparted to him the great secret of the Universe. For what Job meant by "the root of the matter" was his answer to that greatest of questions which men have discussed in all ages and will continue to discuss to the end of time, the question over which the ancients disputed in their quest for the summum bonum, which the catechism proposes when it asks, " What is the chief end of man?" and which has been recently revived between the optimists and the pessimists in the query whether life is worth living. Job's answer, the answer more or less clear of all the sages and seers of the race, and God's final answer in Jesus Christ, is one and the same. To announce it is to seem to utter a commonplace, and yet to 1 Although the biblical scholarship of today assigns another meaning to this text than that here presented, the pertinence of the theme and its attachment to a phrase in itself singularly suggestive and expressive of the underlying motive of the book of Job has led to its inclusion. 14 209 210 THE VERY ELECT announce it with fitting accompaniment all the morning stars should sing together, and all the sons of God shout for joy, and the multitude of the heavenly host should sing Glory to God in the Highest for it is the glory of God and the glory of God's universe. Put together all that the human race has learned through its experience of sin and suffering, all that the wisest and best men have gathered by meditation upon human life, all that God has at sundry times and in divers manners spoken by his prophets; bring forth Christ's Sermon on the Mount and all his other sermons, and his conversations and prayers down to the very last word, and the sum and essence of it all is, that the supreme good in God's universe is to be good, even as God is good, even as the Lord Christ is good. And to know this, and to believe it, and to live by it, is to have the root of the whole matter. It is, first of all, to have faith in God as the supreme good, to admire him, to love him, to wor- ship him, not because he is almighty, or all-knowing, but because in the profoundest and loftiest sense and degree he has the root of the matter in him, because to him all-knowing and all-powerful as he is, the substance and heart of his Godhead is moral goodness. As he would not be true God, would not be worthy our love and worship if, having made all the stars and kept them in their orbits to the minutest second, he could commit one small action of cruelty or revenge, so Job would not be true man, would not have the root of the matter in him, if he could worship such a being. The most dangerous of all heresies, the most cor- rupting of all theologies, are those that tamper with the divine perfections in the supposed interest of his govern- ment, those which set up his force, his authority, his fiat, anything but his goodness, as supreme. His goodness is his sovereignty. He is the supreme being because he is the supreme goodness. And that this is the divine thought, that God's supreme care is that goodness, that righteousness and love prevail in his universe, we do not need to hold like Job GOODNESS THE HIGHEST GOOD 211 by mere tenacious and stubborn fidelity: we know it and all intelligences know it, because it has been revealed to us and to them in the most impressive and the most persuasive of all possible revelations, namely in Jesus Christ. To know Jesus Christ is to know that God is not content to "maintain a moral government by a system of rewards and punishments," as the moralists say of him, but that he will use all the resources of his omnipotent love to make goodness supreme in his uni- verse. To believe in Jesus Christ is to enter with him into this purpose with hearty and loving co-operation. For the root of the matter in man is the same as in God. I would say it is love if only we will remember that love is ethical. I would say it is righteousness if only we will remember that the heart of righteousness is love. For no one term will say for us all we need to say. Justice is cold and harsh: virtue shifts its meaning with times and races: holiness is a description rather than an attribute. To have the root of the matter is to give the supremacy in our convictions, our affections, and our wills to that supreme quality which our Lord had in mind when he said, "There is none good but one: that is, God." This belief as a practical force in character implies two things: the belief first, that goodness is best, and secondly, that it is strongest. And this is the right order first and chief, that it is best, most to be coveted and prized of all things, and that whether it succeed or not : but secondly, that it will prevail, and that those who side with it shall be the only successful ones in all the universe. First then, that goodness is best of all things, most to be desired by a man or a woman, living on this earth, or anywhere else, now, today, tomorrow and forevermore. These be brave words, and few of us are worthy to utter them. For to tell the truth, few of us believe them in our heart of hearts. Now and then in our inspired moments we see that all save goodness is vanity and vexation, but soon the glamour comes over everything, and we see things in false lights, and the beauty 212 THE VERY ELECT of goodness becomes dim to our eyes. And sometimes it seems as though the course of human life were designed by some malign intelligence for the express purpose of disguising from us this greatest of the truths we need to know as though the world were "all a fleeting show for man's illusion given" for persuading him that money, and power, and beauty, and pleas- ure are more to be desired than goodness. It sometimes seems to us that a simpler civilization, a more primitive and hearty style of living, fewer routs and gaieties, would give pure, simple goodness a better chance to win our hearts. But this is all a delusion. The Hottentots and Laplanders can make a Vanity Fair out of their rude gewgaws just as truly as the Parisians with their diamonds and lace. The hard thing to do and virtue is never easy is to give all the accessories of life their due and still make goodness chief: to covet earnestly all good gifts, money, power, social graces, perhaps to covet them much, certainly as much as they deserve, and still to covet goodness more so much more that not all the money and all the pleasure that the world can give would be purchased at the price of one wrong action or one wrong thought. It would be insincere and absurd for me to stand before these young persons who are going to live amid the splendid civilization of the twentieth century, and disparage invention and art and culture and all the grand and lovely things amid which they will live. No, go in and possess this goodly land in God's name, as much of it as virtue and honor and charity will sanction, and no more. For he who has the root of the matter in him, who cares supremely for goodness and temperately for all other things, can enjoy all these good things and be thankful, or he can forego them and be content, knowing that it is better to wear homespun over an honest heart than to cover a mean breast with lace and purple, better to be right than to be president, better to live amid hardship and obscurity and have sweet and holy thoughts than to ride upon the high places of the earth with remorse sitting by one's side and vengeance mounted behind. GOODNESS THE HIGHEST GOOD 213 But secondly, to have the root of the matter is to have faith in the triumphant power of goodness. There is a subtle agency at work among mankind every young man has felt its insidious suggestions persuading men to believe that good- ness is feeble, that evil is an overmatch for it; that not virtue but cunning, fraud, force, get the upper hand in the universe. I suppose the most dangerous of all temptations to a young man is that which is presented by the temporary success of evil. Why should I struggle, and pinch, and go threadbare in order to be virtuous, when moderate and respectable vice pays her followers so much more liberally? And so men losing faith in the stars hitch their wagon to a meteor. But he who has the root of the matter in him is not misled by these false appearances. He corrects the impressions of his eyes by the convictions of his heart. He believes that goodness wins always, even when it seems to lose; that cunning and fraud always lose even when they seem to win; that the heavy battalions are always on the side of the right, even when its visible champions are routed from the field. Who does not know that the routed cause won the battle of Bunker Hill and the battle of Bull Run? Has not the world confessed that the darkness which was over all the land from the sixth to the ninth hour was the dawn of the most glorious light the universe ever beheld? Having thus seen in an abstract way what it is to have the root of the matter in one, let us contemplate the actual man, the man of today, the man who is fitted to live in the twentieth century of the Christian era, because he has the root of the matter in him. But first for the sake of contrast look for a moment at the man in whom the root of the matter is not found the man who has not settled in his mind this greatest of questions, who leaves it for settlement by impulse and under the stress of temptation. We all know the rootless character the character devoid of principle we may say the charac- terless character. Because it has no root, it has no capacity 214 THE VERY ELECT of growth, no power of resistance, no form or comeliness: its leaf also withers and whatsoever it doeth comes to failure. The promising boy dropping into lassitude and foregoing all the prizes of life, the pet of the household and of the Sunday-school yielding little by little till he becomes the defaulter and the refugee; the young man who may see himself in the picture of Charles Stuart as drawn by the great satirist, "heir to one of the greatest names, of the greatest kingdoms and of the greatest misfortunes in Europe, he was content to lay the dignity of his birth and grief at the wooden shoes of a chamber- maid and repent afterwards in ashes taken from the dust- pan," the "expectancy and rose" of the fair Austrian state breaking his emperor's and his father's heart and shaming all who should have been his subjects by a career and a death over which history must be silent these are but types of the character which having no root of its own, no self-determining power, is the easy victim of any passion or folly which the idle, tempting, rosy hours may bring. Another type of character which it is very necessary to distinguish from the ideal we are contemplating is one which is often confounded with it. I hope it is not ominous that this profound biblical expression which we are considering, once so familiar, has almost become obsolete in our moral and religious vocabulary. It is certainly to be hoped that we have not transferred our moral approbation to what is implied in the word "radical" which describes a far inferior character, the fundamental conception of which is the tearing up and destroy- ing something, root and branch. The very term "radical" suggests platforms, heated resolutions, angry oratory, fanatics with long hair and fiery eyes, scattering invective and scorn, and investing every cause they advocate with associations of bitterness and hate. That the root of the matter may be found in one is the mild but vigorous phrase which brings before us the sweet, calm faces of presbyters in grave and solemn council; the family around the altar yearning over some absent GOODNESS THE HIGHEST GOOD 215 or wayward member; the Covenanter, the Puritan, the Huguenot, steadying their faith in the midst of adversity by clinging to the reality of things in the character and the providence of God. With all that is admirable and hopeful in the movements of our times there is a dangerous tendency toward radicalism. What we call progress is always on the verge of fanaticism. The cry of reform is, " There is no God but God and I am his prophet." There is a more excellent way. It is good to be zealously affected in a good cause. It is good to be honest and thoroughgoing. But it is better to have the root of the matter in us than to be radicals. Job is a better teacher of the problems of life than Mohammed. Christianity presents a better solution of human difficulties than any school of philosophy or any scheme of reform. I. We are now prepared to say that he who has the root of the matter in him will be a Realist, if I may use the word in this sense he will be a devotee of reality. It was this trait of the character in question which made it such a favorite with a certain serious order of mind in the elder days, because it seemed to those serious men to deal with the reality of things, because with a great and noble disdain for trivialities and accidentals it grasps in a masterful way the very heart of things. Let a man get it thoroughly settled in his mind that in God's universe righteousness can never be evaded, or flanked, or outwitted, that by no artifice of his can the course of provi- dential justice be obstructed or turned aside, and now you have one whose supreme interest is to know things just as they are. Subterfuge, evasion, plausible sophistry are to him an abomination. He turns a front face to everything: he says to every event, every man, every possibility, "Tell me just what you are." Let there be no adjusting the lights for effect, no collusion with plausibilities, no evasion or postponement of the main issue. Give me not a courtier who will disguise the truth from me under some fine phrase, but a Lioncourt who will say bluntly "Sire, it is a revolution," a Nathan who, 216 THE VERY ELECT when I have sinned and am luxuriating in my sin, will say unto me, "Thou art the man!" Forms, traditions, venerable systems, he will respect for the sake of the reality which they are assumed to enfold, but always reserves and often exercises the right to go back to the reality itself. The injunction, "not to move the things that are quiet," he meets with Dante's word that the living man "moves whatever he touches." Is this searching spirit all abroad in our day challenging everything, sparing nothing? Let it search. If Rachel is concealing her idols, let not the sanctities of the tent remit the search. Let us have the truth though all the conventionalities be offended. II. He will be an Idealist. The only real is the ideal. The true nature of anything is its perfection. The root is not satisfied with being root. It pushes up into stalk and leaf and bright consummate flower. The scripture term for this spirit is faith the substance of things hoped for. The man who has the root of the matter in him will be a man of faith. And by reason of his faith he will be able to pluck up sycamine trees, remove mountains, subdue kingdoms, work right- eousness, obtain promises, and overcome the world. And this is the type of man our age needs; not the radical, who destroys the good with the bad, who plucks up the wheat with the tares, and is often in virtual league with the enemy in thwarting measures for positive and practical good, but the idealist, the man of faith, who first clearly conceives the attainable good and then combines sober thought, glowing enthusiasm and devoted energy in the work of attaining it. All great permanent advances made by mankind have been first conceived in the heart of some man who had the root of the matter in him; who had a great and noble faith in truth, who believed that all truth is practicable; and who having this calm faith could wait like God till the fulness of time should come. All impatience, all fretfulness does but shatter the fruit before the mellowing year. Have you an idea, a veritable GOODNESS THE HIGHEST GOOD 217 idea? Have faith in it; work in harmony with its unfolding; grow with it as it grows; when it ripens you, too, will be ripe for action, swift, decisive, masterful. III. It is but a short step forward to say, he will be an Optimist. He who has the root of the matter in him, who believes in the supremacy of goodness in the universe, will never despair of mankind or of the future. He will not shut his eyes to the dark things of life, but he will see them to be the incidental and the transient things, not the principal and the permanent. All true religion is optimistic: pessimism is essentially irreligious. It springs from a lack of faith in the power of God to keep his promises. It is a shame and an outrage upon Christianity for a pulpit, or a religious journal, or a community of Christians to set forth a gloomy, morose, ill-boding, fretful Christianity. I go sometimes to the read- ing-room of a Sunday and look over the various religious journals. I grieve to say that, with the exception of one or two which are tabooed by all the rest as heretical, our religious journals are drearily pessimistic. Just as there are men for whom the sun has no interest except when on rare occasions he is in eclipse, so these journals see nothing in our religious life but infidelity, sabbath-breaking, the decay of conscience and abounding worldliness: nothing in the world of business but the few defalcations : nothing in our public life but corrup- tion: nothing in our social life but heartlessness and intrigue. From this false religious spirit made up of conceit and unchari- tableness, it is refreshing to turn to the less sanctimonious but far more fair and tolerant and really appreciative tone of the best secular press in its comments upon current events. When men are strong in their own faith and aspiring in their own lives, they look cheerfully and hopefully on all around them and all that is before them. When men begin to think that the universe is going to pieces, it is likely to be because their own heads are reeling and their own footing is tottering down. It was when the prophet was running away from his place and 218 THE VERY ELECT his duty that he thought himself the only faithful one left in Israel. When he went back to his post, he found seven thousand men ready to go with him to victory or death and they went to victory. Lord, we pray thee, open the eyes of all young men that they may see that they that are with God are more than they that be against him! Finally, he will be an Apostle. What right has a man who holds the secret of the universe to keep it to himself? Nay, he will have neither the desire nor the power so to do. Every true man feels the possession of a great truth to be a burden upon his heart, urging him forth first into the desert to try conclusions with his own soul, and then far and wide among men to persuade them to share with him the great revelation. Or rather, a great world-truth, a root-principle of human life, is not a possession at all : it is a trust : and the faithful trustee has St. Paul's feeling, "Woe is me if I preach not the good news!" Here comes a man who tells us that he has doubts about some things that we believe. We will say to him, "You may be right, but the trouble with me is not that I believe too much, but that I do not believe enough. Give me the right belief, and that will expel the wrong." But doubt never made an apostle, though it has made many radicals. It leaves the soul empty, swept and garnished only for fouler spirits to enter and dwell there. But once in a great while, ages intervening perhaps, there comes an apostle, one who has the root of the matter in him : he is earnest but calm : he is positive, but uses no superlatives : he believes what he says, but he says no more than he believes : he tells me that righteousness is the supreme good and that the heart of righteousness is love : that on this principle God's throne is built, and to it all this fair universe is adjusted: that all the beatitudes rest upon those who are in loving sympathy with it, and all the curses upon those who rebel against it : he preaches, in fact, or preaches over again, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Sermon on Calvary, the one greatest, grandest thought that God has GOODNESS THE HIGHEST GOOD 219 ever uttered, or can utter, that so absolute in his mind is the supremacy of goodness that in order to maintain it heaven itself must stoop to this far away sinful planet of earth and sacrifice something of its own felicity. This is the truth which has made apostles of men and women in all the Christian ages. This is the truth which, slowly dawning upon the Christian mind and heart, but coming with greater power in our own time than ever before, is to make apostles of all true believers. God give us all a share in this most glorious apostleship, which shall bring in the reign of righteousness and love in all the earth. To the Members of the Graduating Class: It is, I think, a fair assumption that to have made a college course a part of the preparation for life indicates in your minds a purpose to make thorough work of life itself. For surely the faith and endurance and sacrifice which a successful college career involves must give some good assurance of high and serious aims. There are few experiences in human life which more thoroughly test the quality of a youth, whether he has or has not the root of the matter in him, than those through which you have gone during the past four years. And it is the one great office of a wisely ordered system of education to deepen and confirm in the maturing mind this thoroughgoing faith in the high meanings of life and character. Years hence I trust you will be able to appreciate better than you now can, and that you will then heartily acknowledge that this institu- tion, the ideas for which it stands and which have entered into your intellectual and moral life, the training it has given you, the personal influence of its instructors, have helped you to get firm hold of those true principles of character which alone can give to life stability, dignity and power. That you may say perhaps to your children, and that your life should say to all who may know you, "Our Alma Mater gave us scientific knowledge, literary accomplishments, the love and the begin- nings of culture, but after all the best she did for us was to 220 THE VERY ELECT implant within our young hearts and minds the root of the matter, a reasonable and confident faith in the eternal prin- ciples which control the universe" this will be our great satisfaction and reward. To watch you hereafter winning your way, not by tricks and devices, not by any low arts which however they may seem to succeed, always lower the man and bring him to failure at last, but by joining your fortunes with those of truth and righteousness, and all good enterprises, and thus, whatever may be your intermediate future, earning the right to rejoice with those who shall as certainly win in the end, as God is true and goodness supreme this is in your behalf today, and in all the future, our prayer, our hope, our confi- dence. And now, assured that this root-principle of character is in some good degree established in you, our last counsel to you is that you do what in you lies to make this the root-principle of other men's lives, that is, that in your place and degree you be apostles. And to be an apostle it is not necessary to run up and down the land, and lift up your voice on the house- tops and in public assemblies. All that is not so great a power in the world as it seems to be. Remember that it is not knowledge, nor eloquence, nor pragmatic zeal, but goodness that is to be supreme; that its apostolate has the investiture of all the powers and all the promises. A real apostle can fulfil his ministry as truly in one pflace as another, if only it be the place where God has put him. That true woman, who amid the swirl and crash at Johnstown stood by her telephone to the last and perished with it and did not know that she was a heroine and an apostle, is today preaching fidelity in all lands and tongues with a pathos and power which no eloquence but that of a noble deed can equal. Only be faithful to the opportunities as they come to you, and they will be sure to come in ways and at times you could not have anticipated. I linger a moment to say one final word to correct one possible wrong impression. You have been wont to hear us GOODNESS THE HIGHEST GOOD 221 say much of the intellectual virtues. We have often extolled to you mental discipline, power, culture. I do not wish to retract anything so said. But perhaps we have said too little of what is far greater than all this. Perhaps we have left on your minds the impression that in our estimate science, learn- ing, art, eloquence, are the things worth living for. God for- give us if we have suffered any such impression to go forth from us, unworthy as that would be of the Christian scholars we ought and try to be. But now take from us as our last word the assurance of our deepest conviction that there is nothing supremely worth living for but in a large, noble and Christian way, to be good men and women, and to help to make others so. This is the root of the whole matter. And so God be with you ! CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. Matt, xiii: 33. DOES Christianity as such specially interest itself in social problems, and has it a distinct conception of social well-being which it aims to realize? These questions, always pertinent, are at the present time urgent and well-nigh imperative. To be frank with ourselves, the apparent attitude of Chris- tianity toward these urgent human problems is at first dis- appointing. An enthusiastic reformer, sincerely desiring to help his fellow men in bettering their condition, comes as in duty bound to the New Testament for guidance. Is it too much to say that having read it carefully through he has not found the guidance which he thought he had reason to expect? He knows from history that in our Lord's time society was in a fearful state of corruption, and that in the time of the apostles it grew sensibly worse; that the rule of the Tiberiuses and the Neroes, the administrations of the proconsuls and praetors, the slave-dealers, the dissolute condition of the family, that a hundred bad institutions and a thousand bad customs seemed to appeal to the reformer of that generation for a revival of the scathing denunciations which the prophets of old had uttered against the abominations of their times, and for the reconstructive word and power which should bring forth a new political and social status. He finds, to say the truth, very little which answers to this expectation. Our Lord bids the inquirer render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and adds no word to relieve or limit the injunction though Caesar were Tiberius. St. Paul is as strong and outspoken in his assertion that the powers that be are ordained of God, and that he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God, although he knew the actual powers to be unjust and 222 CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 223 tyrannical through and through as though the sceptre of imperial rule were a sceptre of righteousness. There are no red republican texts in the New Testament; few that are ap- parently radical or revolutionary. It seems indeed to have been easier for those who would inculcate the prerogatives of rulers and the submission of subjects to find texts to their liking, than for reformers and advocates of popular rights. On a cursory reading, the New Testament seems to favor exist- ing institutions, to inculcate a conservative amiable acquies- cence in things as they are. There is even a worse aspect of the case. When certain men wash their hands of all public respon- sibility, claiming either that they are so good, or that public affairs are so bad, that to touch a public interest is defilement, they seem to themselves to have our Lord's example to sustain them, and point to what they consider his sublime indifference to all that we call public affairs. It would shock the religious sensibilities of very many to conceive of Jesus as living in our day and taking part in public life; of the apostles as sharing in the activities of modern society; as voting, holding office, joining in public debate, bearing arms, and the like. We all, to some extent, conceive of our Lord and his immediate disciples as merely religious persons, more like monks than like men and citizens. And from this comes the common conception of religion as concerned only with piety and the next world, and as rather degrading itself by entering into pro- jects for making this world a better place for Christians to live in. But when we look more deeply into the teaching of our Lord and the apostles, we find more than at first appears. From the very outset of the evangelic era we begin to hear of what we should call, in modern phase, a new regime. Both John the Baptist and Jesus preached, " Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." It is part of our churchly training to understand by this phrase merely that a new religious dispen- sation was heralded, a new plan of salvation, a new organization 224 THE VERY ELECT for saving souls. For a long period, in fact till very recent times, those who were sent to preach the Kingdom of God in new lands seem to have confined themselves to a purely eccle- siastical view of human salvation; that is, to bringing about cer- tain spiritual affections and acts in individuals. If the church as a spiritual body was in an apparently flourishing condition, no great impatience was manifested to bring about a social renovation. It was not considered to be any necessary func- tion of Christianity as such to reconstruct human society. We have had a vigorous revival in our day of this conception of Christian propagandism, an exhortation to missionaries to put off civilization, to resume the habits of primitive man in order to be able to carry to the heathen in a sympathetic way the one only important thing, the message of Christ to lost souls. But is not this a fatally narrow and totally inadequate view of that kingdom of God which John heralded and which Christ preached and which his apostles helped men to begin to realize? I repeat that the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus and the Apostles used the phrase, means a new regime for mankind, a reconstruction of humanity result- ing in a reconstruction of human society in all its relations. What the noblest men have striven after in their ideal states, Plato in his Republic, More in his Utopia, Bacon in his New Atlantis, that is, a community of perfect men organized into a perfect society, the society contributing to the perfection of the men and the perfect men articulated into a perfect society, this also was the divine idea contemplated in the announcement and establishment of the kingdom of God. The method of bringing about this result was not in the divine plan as it had been in the human, by means of an elaborate system of legislation. What the divine plan was our Lord set forth, as he did so many other of his most profound and far- reaching principles, in this parable of the leaven hid in the measures of meal by which the whole was leavened. The Reformer who sought guidance in the New Testament did not CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 225 find it, because he brought to the search a wrong preconcep- tion of the Christian method of reform, which is to work, not by laws superimposed from without, but by securing the im- planting and vigorous working of certain indwelling principles of mighty force in themselves, and powerfully working out into the institutions and forms which are their natural embodiment. Christianity introduced into human life certain potent truths which had in them the virtue and the prophecy of all individual and all social well-being. We notice first the divine proclamation of the infinite worth of man. Before the incarnation men may be divided into two classes as respects their means of arriving at a true estimate of man. First, the mass of men, who, oppressed, despised, treated in every way as inferior beings by those above them, and with- out even any deep sense of wrong in being so treated, could not by any possibility reach any adequate sense of inherent worth. Secondly, the few whose measure of their own merit was only their superiority to those whom they despised. Here was no basis for any true conception of human worth, no standard by which to estimate the value of pure simple humanity. Men of low degree were vanity and men of high degree were a lie. There was needed some superhuman standard to which human measures could be referred. The incarnation of Christ gave such an authoritative statement of the question. It was God's testimony to the worth of man. It said to all worlds, and all beings, and most significant of all, it said to man himself: "This is no paltry being, of mean origin, and small capacity and low destiny, but a being of such high quality and such noble possibility that the Most High can afford to stoop and the ever Blessed One to suffer, in order that this being may be enabled to realize his nature." It became mani- fest that if God can enter into human nature and be sympa- thetic with it, it can only be because it is a god-like nature, with some elements akin to God, some affinities to the divine. It was a revelation to man of unsuspected greatness and nobility. 15 226 THE VERY ELECT It was a glimpse of possibilities of which man himself would never have had the hardihood even to dream. It was, as the Scripture says, the bringing in of a new hope, by which hope the Scripture also says, he is saved. The personal value of the incarnation to the soul of man can never be over empha- sized. But as a reconstructing social force it is an equally im- portant fact. For it was the coming of God into universal humanity, not into any class or race or moral grade, but into every class, into all races, into each grade, into every man. Thus by teaching the infinite worth of man as man, it taught the equality of all men. For there can be no degree in in- finity. If every man is of infinite worth in God's eyes, all minor distinctions pale before the simple majesty of pure humanity. In a minor sense of the word men are not equal. In the sense of the French clamor for liberty, equality, frater- nity, men are not equal, not even in the ideal and perfect state. It would be a monotonous universe, were it so, of which God himself and every intelligence would tire. But as all nations are equal because all are sovereign, so all men, being in their illimitable destinies all of infinite worth because of the essential manhood in them all, are in such sense equal that none can despise any and each must reverence all. For the first time in human history man was taught to respect himself as man without any regard to his condition, or rather he was emboldened to claim the condition which becomes a man. "Ye were bought with a price; be not the servants of men." All barriers between race and race, all invidious dis- tinctions of origin, of sex, of circumstances, were forever cancelled in view of the one all-equalizing fact of the common relation to Christ of Greek and Jew, bond and free, male and female. Not for a long time was the transforming power of this new social force realized not yet is it fully realized but it is this force and no other which has brought about and is bringing about the social revolution which has raised so many millions of serfs into freemen, has brought so many CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 227 barbarians within the pale of civilization, has lifted women into full partnership with man in all the joys and duties of redeemed humanity, and all through the relations of men to each other has pulled down the mighty from their undeserved seats and exalted them of low degree. Secondly, the common possession of this divine humanity binds men into a fellowship of interest and sympathy. It is a shallow and false view of religion that it is solely an affair between each man and his God. From its very nature the Christian faith is a source of new relations between man and man. One of the marked characteristics of paganism is, on the one side, the energy of the tribal and racial feeling, and on the other the intensity of the feeling of hatred for all outside. It was indeed said by them of old time, thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy, the enemy being all save the neighbor. The very term we employ for the feeling of uni- versal love philanthropy meant with those who framed it, a feeling which was limited to a very narrow circle of equals. Even the Israelites who could say: "Come thou with us and we will do thee good," could not carry good or send good to those outside. What community of interest was there in the Pagan or the Hebrew conception of man, which could have been the ground of a community of affection and action? But with this realization of the divine element in the nature of every man, whereby Christ is potentially in every man the hope of glory, lo a new relationship springs up between every man and every other man, a reason which may become a motive, even a passion for seeking intimacy and union with all others who have this glorious heritage. Bring together on a three months' voyage a hundred men, all strangers to each other, and those who have affinities will find each other and form little societies the thinkers in one group, the politicians in another, the artists in a third; those only who have no human interests will remain isolated. Suppose now that there is one man among them who has a new idea, some broad universal idea which 228 THE VERY ELECT appeals to a latent but common interest of them all, and sup- pose that he holds it with energy and asserts it with force. Now all the little groups will dissolve, the isolated individuals will come together and all will flow into the one group which represents the common idea. So it is with this all-embracing, all-absorbing idea of God with us. It is in every man, the divine potentiality of every human soul. It draws men irresistibly together; it breaks down barriers of language, traditions, institutions; it overleaps wide chasms of physical, intellectual and even moral disagreements, and prompts men in spite of them to rush into each others' arms. A man may be to me physically degraded and repulsive; no matter. He may be intellectually so far my inferior that he cannot share one of my opinions, nor I one of his without an effort of con- descension; no matter. He may be a bad man, sordid, hate- ful, cruel, depraved; still no matter. All these things are but accidents of the man; they are not essential parts of him. He may be brutal, but he is not a brute. He may be ignorant, but he may have the capacities of a philosopher; he may be depraved in character, but his nature is in the very image of God. The man, the essential man as God made him, and as God's holy spirit is willing to remake him, is of the same in- finite worth as myself; is a sharer with me in the glory of the nature which Christ has taken on and ever wears. If I have pain and sorrow in view of his sins and the degradation they have brought on him, I cannot but have the same feeling in view of my own. If I have hope for myself, for my future advancement in knowledge and holiness, I have the same hope for him. In Christ we are one. Our differences are as nothing to our common opportunity and possibility. Now no doubt the first effect of the Christian doctrine of the infinite worth of each man has been to promote individual- ism, because the first step in human progress was to break up those institutions which for long ages had deprived man of his right to himself. Caste, civil oppression, and we must add CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 229 the church itself in its perversion and error, slowly gave up to the individual those rights and dignities which Christianity had secured to him, so that the assertion and exaggeration of individualism was a natural process in the evolution of Chris- tian society. But we have now reached a point at which it is safe to relax the stress which former ages have laid upon individual rights. If that is not true which has been said on one side, that the principle of individualism has accomplished all that it is capable of accomplishing for social mankind, it certainly is not true on the other that the chief duty of man is now to stand up for his personal rights. Thinking men are not now looking in the direction of a further developed individualism for the bettering of man's estate, but in the direction of solidarity of interests, mutuality of service, union of hearts leading to co-operation of hands. Amid all this wild chaos of socialistic scheming, perhaps in spite of it, men's minds are inclining to a more fraternal conception of society, to the belief that men are not, in the divine plan, left to work out their salvation, temporal or spiritual, singly and alone, but that society is a divinely constructed whole of which each individual is a part, and that as he is dependent on the integrity of the whole for his personal completeness, so he is bound to contribute through the whole to the completeness of every other part. III. But this brings us naturally to the third principle which Christianity has contributed to social progress, namely, the supremacy of righteousness, of which the central element is love. All nature religion is a worship of power. More or less of the notion of right may mingle with that of power, but sovereignty and power are indissolubly united. Some later as well as earlier theologies enthrone power. All cor- porate priesthoods tend that way. Authority in the priest claims to represent authority in God. But power, authority, sovereignty, are not ethical ideas. The Supreme Being, the Almighty, the Lawgiver of the Universe, does not in these 230 THE VERY ELECT names present any attributes for my worship only for my submission, my obedience, my fear. Judaism was a gradual process of instruction in the supremacy of righteousness and in the true conception of righteousness. But it was reserved for Christianity to make full announcement and exemplifica- tion of the truth that God is supreme because he is supremely good, and that goodness in its last essence is love. This is the greatest of all truths that have ever been revealed to man. It is indeed the greatest of all possible truths. If this is true all else is provided for. If this is not true the universal fir- mament is rottenness. It is perhaps not to be wondered at that men come so slowly to the apprehension of this truth; that good men are afraid of it; that the Church too often proclaims it with a "but," or puts it into a foot note. Men come slowly to realize that love, divine love in God or man, is not merely emotional, it is ethical, it is holy, it is all aflame against evil. But not to dwell on the personal aspects of this great truth, the social bearings of it are of immeasurable con- sequence. The kingdom of God is the rule of righteousness and of a righteousness which is something more than the right- eousness of law, of precept, of technicalities and forms, beget- ting Pharisaic formalists and Sadducaic skeptics, a righteous- ness which abandons the mandate, Thou shalt not do this and that, for one which says, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself. Contrast now, as a basis for establishing the true relations of man to man, the pagan idea of justice, which is right in its legal and statutory bearings, with the Christian idea of right- eousness, which is love seeking the highest and holiest estate of all being. Justice, law, looks down from its height upon the doings of men, interested solely in their misdeeds. So long as men do not offend the law, justice may fold its arms and sleep. It does not take the initiative in moral progress. It does not of its own motion devise new and better things for men. It is active on the side of suppression debellare super- CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 231 bos, but passive where there is no resistance parcere subjectis. But evangelic righteousness is of a different temper. It looks upon the wrong-doer as not so much a fit object for retribution as a fit subject for reclamation. It is within the compass of ordinary human nature to feel resentment toward the sinner and to pity the miserable. But to pity the sinner not mainly because he is miserable but because he is a sinner ; to have the intensest hatred for sin and for that very reason to regard the sinner with infinite pity ah, that is divine, so divine that but for the manifestation of it in Christ we never should have been capable of it, so divine that we are only slowly climbing up to the conception of it with long ages of Christian progress. And more than this. Righteousness distresses itself not only over sin but also over weakness, incompleteness, imperfection. Righteousness is idealistic. It is not content merely to rectify faults in the domain of human life; it aims to fill it out till it touches all the meridians and all the parallels of its extreme sphere. Christian love looks abroad upon the doings of men, of all men, of all men alike, and its heart is big with the ques- tion, What can be done for the relief of man's estate? It has already done much. It has freed slaves; it has abolished caste; it has lessened and mitigated war; it has substituted international intercourse for barbaric national hatreds; it has greatly lessened the distance between social classes; it has distributed a large share of the benefits and blessings of life to all classes except the lowest, and is now with thought- ful brow and yearning heart bending over this last and most difficult problem, how to lift and save this lowest class. Let no man say that the social influence of Christianity has not been widespread, beneficent, effective. But Christianity has as yet achieved but the beginnings of what it contemplates. It looks for greater things than these. It looks for a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Good men, filled with the new evangelic spirit, now and then get glimpses of what this earth might be and shall be as a home for man, 232 THE VERY ELECT when the principles of Christianity shall have in some good degree leavened the mass of human society. But no Utopia, no New Atlantis, has yet foreshadowed the new regime which shall be when Christianity comes forth from the sanctuary and the closet and abides with men all the day in the sen- ate, in the forum, in the factory where the full wages of the laborer are counted out to him, in the market-place where buyers and sellers are both gainers by every bargain, in the wide world where each man is free to choose the calling which best befits him and to own all that he earns in it. One might be pardoned for thinking that it were a good time for a John the Baptist to stand again before the people and for each occu- pation to ask him again : Master, and what shall we do? An interesting and beautiful exhibition of the Christian spirit in social life is given to us in the infant church at Jerusalem im- mediately after the first great religious awakening, as we should call it as though consequent upon that awakening the communistic life of the early disciples. All that believed had all things common. It is all told in a few words and then we hear no more of it. It was a short-lived community soon ended by persecution and dispersion and by the natural limita- tions of such a condition. But coming where it does, and told as it is, it is very suggestive of the natural effects of such a re- ligious awakening. The little company were conscious of a supernatural presence among them. Their minds were aglow with new feelings which drew them closely together in a new fellowship. All other things seemed to them of minor impor- tance. To converse together, to pray together, to break bread from house to house in memory of their Lord, this seemed to be the chief business of life. Land, homes, possessions they freely parted with in order that this high spiritual festival might be constant. They were enjoying the luxury, the poetry of re- ligion. The plain prose, the necessary daily toil, the common duties of life, the arts and industries, commerce and politics, they were content to forget. If some one had asked the apostle CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 233 whether this was to be the permanent condition of the Chris- tian life, whether this was the social organization of the new order, he would probably have answered: "In form certainly not. This is not the Christian commonwealth. The conditions of it are not present in this little band of believers. Whatever it is to be, it cannot be extemporized out of new-born religious enthusiasm. By slow processes, through ages of experiment, it must gather its materials, mature its agencies, adjust its means and ends, and so perfect its form. But the spirit of the Kingdom of God is indubitably here. Here are souls sud- denly become conscious of their own worth and of that of all souls, and exultant in the discovery. Through their common consciousness of this common spiritual nature they are drawn together in sympathy and confidence. The wants of each are the care of all, and the good of each is the ambition of all. Give these principles permanent instead of temporary con- ditions, and let them work out naturally into laws, institu- tions, customs, and you have the Christian social life. We are now nineteen centuries distant from that first out- come of social Christianity, and men are talking in our times as if society still needed reconstruction. Much of the drift of current discussion assumes that things are all wrong; that hu- man life on its social side needs to be created de novo', and many self-constituted social reformers are constructing a new order out of their inner consciousness. It is one of the fashions of the times to create new social systems, usually with bland indifference to Christianity, which is really the source of all that is of any worth in these various systems. The fact is ignored that society has already been reconstructed, divinely reconstructed; that throughout Christendom the old pagan order has been superseded, and the Christian conception of society put into operation. The process is incomplete and in some departments of life hardly more than fairly begun. But the tendencies are in the right direction. The Christian world is in the condition of an inventor who has got hold of a 234 THE VERY ELECT valuable mechanical principle which with alternating successes and failures he is laboring to embody in a practical machine. The Redeemer of human society having given to mankind certain great organizing truths and principles, has left to men the task of working them out into their practical details. Every new appreciation of the real meaning of these principles, every accession of faith in them, is sure to be followed by new advances in social well-being. Every general spiritual awaken- ing, such as the Reformation, the rise of Methodism, the recent revival of biblical study, naturally brings an increased thought- fulness, a more fraternal spirit, an enthusiasm of philanthropy, in regard to man's social relations. If the controversies now going on in most of the churches, melancholy though they seem, result in any real gain to the apprehension of vital reli- gious truth, then we may be sure that men's homes and busi- ness, that politics and economics, the arts and industries will share in the resultant good. Society does not need revolu- tion; it needs further development of the principles of its true life. It is imperfect; it tolerates many abuses; it groans under many grievous wrongs; but all this is because men do not yet fully believe and practise the three great Christian social principles: the infinite worth of every man; the solidarity of all men in Christ; the supremacy of righteousness conceived as love. No mere social legislation, no organization of men into industrial hierarchies, no mere social constitution and by-laws will bring about the new Christian social regime only the amplification into all the details of life of the great divine principles which gave to the new regime its birth and character. This discussion leads to two practical conclusions. The first answers the question as to the true attitude of the Church toward social reforms. Should the Church assume the leader- ship in such reform? Very manifestly into the details of public activities the Church cannot go. The Church, as the Church, clad in her official robes and speaking with divine CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 235 authority, must not go into caucuses, courts and senates. She must not assume to regulate labor unions, to control social or political movements by a syllabus or a pastoral epistle. But there is a sense in which the Church ought to put itself forward as the leader in social reforms, because it alone has the true principles which should actuate such reforms. The Church is the divinely appointed conservator and propagator of these principles. The great failures of the Church in the past have been due not so much to her positive errors as to her want of fidelity to some one or all of the great truths through which the founder of the kingdom of God designed to reconstruct human society. She has not always with self- denying and humble zeal proclaimed the infinite worth of every human soul, the brotherhood of all men in Christ, and the supreme motive of love. At one time she has courted the rich and noble and forgotten the right of the poor and hum- ble. At another she has outlawed those who would not con- form to her rigid discipline and has set up a rule of power and authority in place of the supremacy of love. Let the Church but be true to her own divine mission, let her teach and exemplify the great principles of Christ's kingdom and her main work for society will have been performed. And it will be a mighty work, a work large enough to occupy all the ener- gies of her ministers, a work which if left undone no other agency can supplement, a work which well done will make easy and effectual the complementary work of all other human agencies. The second corollary is the need society has of Christian leadership. In great crises everything depends on the incli- nation of the people to choose as their leaders, Robespierre and Napoleon, or Washington and Lincoln. For the men who mould society and shape institutions are the few thinking, daring men who have this capacity of leadership, and rarely if ever has our country had greater need of statesmen, jurists, magistrates, writers, than in our day when these great social 236 THE VERY ELECT questions are in process of solution. The term Christian statesman unfortunately has been degraded by its applications, but what that term means apart from all cant and pretense, is what the world most needs today men who are profoundly versed in the jural and moral principles of Christianity, men whose aim is to re-enact and exemplify them in human laws and institutions. The greatest opportunities which the world now offers to men of large gifts and powers are in direct line with the work of him who is the prototype and exemplar of all true reformers, the Redeemer of mankind. Society, I say again, does not need to be revolutionized, but it does need to be redeemed to be redeemed from the remains of paganism, from unworthy views of humanity, from the selfish isolation of classes, from the enthronement of power, from the worship of success, from all those wrongs and evils of which men must repent in order that the new regime, the kingdom of God, which was at hand, and is now come, may come fully and with power. ADDEESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS It must be plain to every observer of present tendencies that the coming questions are to be social questions. I do not mean that we are to expect great revolutionary move- ments in society. But that there will be abundant social ferment, that revolutionary schemes will be proposed and discussed and to some extent tried, and that as in scrip- ture times men will seek to become famous by lifting up their axes upon the thick trees of existing institu- tions, all signs indicate. Now it would be conceit to im- ply that every college graduate is going to be a power in social reform, but it is no unreasonable demand upon educated men and women that they have sober, intelli- gent views upon great questions of public interest, and espe- cially that they be prepared to think their way calmly through the great practical problems which will from time to time CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL REFORM 237 confront them. One great peril of such times as ours is dema- gogism, that thoroughly selfish spirit masquerading as philan- thropy, which out of one real grievance agitates a hundred fictitious ones, and then hitches its private wagon to the movement which such agitation has created. In this way the one real grievance gets buried out of sight, the real friends of the good cause are antagonized by its false friends, and the reform gets into the hands of the baser sort who turn it into a private intrigue for pelf and power. And yet no worse evil can happen to society than the prevalence among good men of a spirit of disgust toward public affairs induced by the temporary success of demagogism. Reaction into excessive conservatism, though natural, would be one of the worst results of this condition of things. Let me urge upon you as the duty of every educated person to be in active sympathy with every movement which upon natural, historic, and Chris- tian considerations, promises richly for the improvement of society. Do not be easily disgusted or daunted or cajoled into letting bad men and bad things have their own way; especially avoid the danger of the scholarly temper, that of being warped by fanaticism into cynicism. For while the demagogue is only a nuisance to be abated or a species to be exterminated, the fanatic is a being of whom the wise man can learn, and whom he can often turn to good use. But as the greatest of all perils to be dreaded for the future is the absence of the Christian spirit and Christian principles in the adjustment of human relations, so the greatest of all opportunities and obligations is that of getting these principles incorporated more and more into the constitution of society. The new regime, the Christian commonwealth that is to be, will not be identical with the Church, but it will be as thor- oughly Christian as the Church as true to Christ's spirit and teaching in its sphere as the Church in hers. The Puritan was not far wrong. The man whose public action is not con- trolled by the principles of Christianity is not competent to 238 THE VERY ELECT legislate for the Christian commonwealth for that is nothing more nor less than Christianity formulated into civil and social institutions. Let me now in closing entertain the thought on which we have been dwelling over the whole domain of life. The apostle said "for me to live is Christ." We have no right to solve any problem, to decide any great question, to live any part of our life, without bringing Christianity to bear upon everything. You have found how every question of scholarship, every prob- lem of science, however remote at the start, always runs on into a religious question. You cannot settle anything right, certainly not any matter which has a human element in it, without calling in that divine-human standard of judgment which the gospel brings to us. Be thankful that religion comes to you today in this human appeal; that it recognizes every side of your being; that it respects the privacy and sanc- tity of your individual personality; and that more and more it invites you into the enjoyment and realization of that larger humanity which you share with all the sons of God, and with the Son of God. This is your high calling and election: give all diligence to make it pure. THE RELIGIOUS ESTIMATE OF LIFE All thy estimations shall be according to the shekel of the sanctuary. Lev. xxvii: 25. THE center of the Mosaic system, both as a worship and a polity, was the sanctuary, that is, the divine presence. From the day of the Exodus the Hebrews were a people grouped about a Holy Place. Forth from this central spot, forth from this central idea, radiated all their activities and all their institutions: hence came their morality, their legislation, their ritual, their domestic and national life. The test of upright- ness was to be fit to " stand in the Holy Place"; the safeguard against calamity was, "if thy presence go not with us, carry us not up hence"; deliverance in trouble was, "the Lord send thee help from the sanctuary" ; in order to be just, not approxi- mately, but scrupulously, religiously, exact in all weights and measures, in all valuations and judgments, "let all your esti- mations be according to the shekel of the sanctuary." Is not this one of those things, said by them of old time, which our Lord came not to destroy but to fulfil; not to destroy, because the principle of it is of perpetual validity; but to ful- fil, because it has infinite power of expansion and adaptation? That the highest standards are those which have the sanction of religion, that the values put upon human life and all things great and small pertaining thereto, are most just and most true when they are estimated as in the presence of God, this is a truth which can never grow old, which only becomes more full of meaning as life becomes broader and deeper and richer. No longer is the divine presence symbolized in a material sanctuary, no longer are all but the priest excluded from the holy place. Since Christ came the glory of God bursts through the veil and floods and hallows the whole 239 240 THE VERY ELECT earth, and every place is holy where a Christian stands face to face with God. But still and always the shekel of the sanctuary, the divine valuation, the estimate which God puts upon mortal thoughts and acts, and which we put upon them when we are consciously in his immediate presence and in closest sympathy with him, this is for us, and for all beings in all the earth and in all the universe, the only safe, the only wise, the most nearly infallible, standard of action, of character, of life. The true man, the Christian man, weighs and measures life not according to the shekel of the shop, or of the exchange, or of the laboratory; not by the standards of class, or school, or sect; not by the prevalent tone of literature, or science, or philosophy ; not by the dictates of the time-spirit or the world- spirit ; but in accordance with the best and highest conception of the human life divine which he gets when he enters into the holy place and sees all things in the light of God. It is not claimed, it would be historically false to maintain, that religious standards, are, simply because they are religious, necessarily true to the eternal and immutable verities. In all ages men have infused their own passions into their religious beliefs and practices. They have unconsciously and indis- criminately incorporated with their religions their philosophies and sciences, their patriotism and poetry; nor have we any right to assume that these tendencies of human nature have ceased to assert themselves. The religion of Christianity, we may fairly claim, cannot be easily perverted to the support of pious frauds, and cruelty and oppression; and yet we well know that its holy garb and its heavenly language have too often been borrowed to give sanction to the worst wrongs humanity has suffered. Men and churches assuming to ad- minister morality according to the shekel of the Christian sanctuary have done more than anything but religion could do to degrade the common standards of life and to corrupt moral- ity at its source. But let anyone, saddened and humiliated though he is by a historic survey of Christian morality, in a THE RELIGIOUS ESTIMATE OF LIFE 241 spirit of fairness consider this question: What influence has counteracted and gradually corrected these low and false standards of life? What influence throughout Christendom is slowly but surely elevating these standards to what they are in the best communities, and are sure in time to be every- where? And would not the answer be that it is religion, a purer Christianity and more of it, more and more entering into and controlling individual and corporate life? Or even if some should claim, as they well might, that this elevation of the moral standard is due in part to the finer discernment which comes with intellectual activity, to the superior range and accuracy of intelligence, and to the general progression of thought, the question returns, to what is this progress itself due but to the inspiration and enlargement which come from the religious view of life and man, from the Christian outlook upon the infinity of truth and the capabilities and destiny of man, the heir in Christ of all the infinities? In proportion as men appreciate more and more the capabilities of life, and get higher conceptions of its possibilities, they come to depend more and more on religious agencies for the realization of their ideals. In what direction are men now looking for the forces which shall regenerate modern society, in great cities, in pagan lands, in social ethics? As men throughout Christendom are coming to the conviction that humanity is ripening for a great advance in its moral and social condition, where do they look for that new standard, that new humanity, the humanity that is to be, but to religion, to those Christian conceptions of character and life which alone fill the aspirations of the leaders and prophets of our time? I. The religious estimation of life implies, in the first place, that we estimate all things according to a religious standard; not some things, not merely so-called sacred things, not merely the parts and persons, and offices of the sanctuary, but that all things are to be brought into the sanctuary for estimation. The great religious error of mankind in all ages has been that 16 242 THE VERY- ELECT they have put a religious estimate upon certain things and failed or refused to put it upon others, and so have lost the true relative est'mate of all things. They bring to the sanctuary certain opinions, certain sentiments, certain actions, which they submit to the prescribed test, but reserve other opinions, sentiments and acts as their private affairs. They assent to a certain amount of dictation, with which conviction more or less coincides, they acquiesce in a certain amount of regula- tion and restraint of their lives, for which they take compensa- tion in that part of life which religion is not permitted to invade. It is not the caricature, it is only the extreme of this form of religion, when we see the Italian brigand vowing a share of his plunder to the Virgin with the tacit understanding that she shall sanctify and bless the remainder. I am speaking, of course, of what men do unconsciously and in greater or less degree, but of what we are all prone to do in some degree. Perhaps we put under religious judgment our Sundays but not our Mondays; our prayers but not our tempers; our alms but not our charities. St. James speaks disparagingly of one who seemeth to be religious and bridleth not his tongue. There used to be an old phrase, perhaps not yet quite obsolete, "to enter into religion," meaning to enter a cloister, when it ought to have meant to enter into a full human life. The separation of religion from the whole of life into any mere part of it tends to make religion morbid and life godless, and even in the best man tends to give to religion a feverish and hectic intensity, and to all the rest of life a dull practicality. It is well to make religion prominent by giving up to its ex- clusive honor and use special days, special places, the services of a special order of men; but this is not in order to isolate it from the common plane of life, but rather the more effect- ually to extend its influence to all times, all places and all men. II. This religious estimate of life, in the second place, gives us the true valuation of all things. The merely secular view of life, or of anything pertaining to life, is false because it is THE RELIGIOUS ESTIMATE OF LIFE 243 incomplete. It is too limited, both as to space and time, to include the right relations of things. It does not afford parallax enough to give a view on many sides. The impression we get of the Adirondack mountains as seen from this point alone, the impression one might have got of the relations of Venus and Jupiter as seen on the evening of March 10, are false impressions. To get the right impressions, one must see the mountains from a balloon, and the planets from the sun. To see human life as it is in all its variety and reach and space, we must see it from above, that is, from the point of view of God himself. We must transport ourselves to his position, that is, speaking practically, we must get into sympathy with his mind and will, in order that we may see things as he does. The Psalmist was greatly perplexed by one of the vexing problems of life. He could not understand why the good were so often unhappy and the bad happy, and the more he thought upon it the more painful his thoughts became, until he went into the sanctuary of God, and then he understood. He had been estimating life by the secular standard. When he came under the influence of the sanctuary he found himself weighing happiness with a truer shekel. He saw, what we might wish every man might see, that the reality of happiness is better than its false shows; that money and place and power and the admiration of all eyes are good only relatively, only if they can be had without costing too much, but are no compensation for sorrow and pain, for heart-ache and a remorseful con- science; whereas peace of mind, an approving heart, the love of friends whom one has helped, and the favor of God, are good absolutely; which nothing but goodness can merit, and which no calamities can abolish or destroy. I have seen a young man stand in all the unconscious beauty and glory of his young manhood; erect, as knowing nothing to be ashamed of, open-eyed, frank, smiling upon the future; his strength as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure; and I have seen the admiration of men and women centering 244 THE VERY ELECT upon him, blessing him, cheering him on into his career, not because they foresaw that he would be rich, or famous, or powerful (though they would be glad that he should be all these), but because they saw that he had a noble idea of life, that he set a higher value on the higher things of an earthly career, and would not be bribed, as perhaps they themselves had been, by the sordid and ignoble successes of life to forego its real prizes and achievements. The splendor for which we sometimes envy men is often to them their misery; while we are envying them they are envying us. The only good which is satisfying and abiding is that which we can take into the sanctuary, and which will endure its tests. "Be a good man," said Walter Scott in his last hours to Lockhart, " nothing else will be of any use when you come here." Long before this he had put the same thought into the mouth of the Scottish maiden in her address to Queen Caroline. It is the appeal which the nobler minds are always making from the glamours to the realities of life, from the judgment of the world to the judgment of the sanctuary. Even the judgment of the world, we may thankfully believe, is slowly rising toward an apprecia- tion of that which is truly admirable and beautiful in life, and we are ever and anon startled to see how the world recog- nizes and applauds its real heroes ; but the true Christian spirit is still, as it has always been, the unworldly spirit, the spirit which estimates life not by its prosperity but by its worth. The ordinary current judgment of men upon each other is of superficial measurement only, it uses no astrolabes and no plummets, it has no power of measuring heights and depths. But to the young man whose ideal of life is still in the making there comes the unfailing vision of every true poet, the aspira- tion of every good man in his hours of exaltation, the unceas- ing cry of the prophet: "Beware of all these estimates of life which limit it to things material and temporal; which are false because they are low; which leave out all its nobilities and heroisms; which applaud gilded vice and scorn humble virtue; THE RELIGIOUS ESTIMATE OF LIFE 245 which call evil good if it is successful, and good evil if it fails." Bring all things to the test of the sanctuary. Judge as in the presence of God, and in the light of God: see that the most enviable life is the noblest, that the supreme good in this world, or in any world, is to be good, and that in order to be good one must be fit to stand, and must stand always in the holy place. III. Again, the religious estimate of life tends to elevate its aims and motives. The plane of a man's life is determined by his practical answer to the question: "What does life afford which is most worth striving for? What of all attainable ob- jects best repays toil and sacrifice?" Stand at the street corner and compel every man as he passes to answer this question, and you have got the secret of his life. The motive of life determines the plane of life. A sordid, self-seeking motive governing one's life keeps that life moving on a certain low level, above which it cannot rise, no matter how gorgeous are the circumstances which attend it on that level. A re- ligion controlling the life by unselfish motives lifts that life into an elevation and dignity from which no circumstances, however adverse, can lower it. There has been much discussion of late over the higher education, whether it is succeeding or failing in the object of education; and in certain quarters it is discredited because it does not, so it is said, turn out a larger number of conspicu- ously successful men of business. If the charge had been that the colleges do not foster those sciences and cultivate those powers of invention and enterprise by which the arts of life are improved, and communities are enriched, and mankind' is advanced materially and morally, the charge would have some meaning; though it would be totally unfounded, for who does not know that the world is indebted to institutions of learning for the scientific spirit out of which all modern in- ventions have come, and who doubts that a century void of new learning would be a century barren of all material progress? But when the colleges are challenged because their rolls of 246 THE VERY ELECT graduates contain few millionaires, without joining the hue and cry against millionaires, without denying that the mil- lionaire in the present organization of industry has an impor- tant and a potentially beneficent place, we beg leave to scan this roll of college graduates and ask what they are accom- plishing. If we had taught them that the highest aim in life is to get wealth, and had trained them for that end, and had sent them out consecrated to that one ambition, and they had in most cases failed to realize their hopes and ours, then our critics might have called upon us to modify our curriculum, and to give place to what they consider more practical systems of education. But be it to our credit or our discredit in the great world, we of the colleges measure success according to the shekel of the sanctuary. We do not undervalue material wealth. We have no Manichsean suspicion against it. We even rejoice when we see it pouring into our own coffers. We know well the advantages it brings to all the higher enter- prises of life. We claim to have had indirectly a large share in producing the wealth which others despise us for not pos- sessing. But when we are taunted with having so little of this wealth wherewith to serve the higher ends of life, we are not downcast, provided we are really serving these higher ends in some other way. What are colleges over the country now doing? If they are not producing wealth, are they pro- ducing something else equally important to human welfare, possibly more important? An influential class, because an educated class, are they as a class exerting their influence in behalf of the intellectual and moral elevation of the communities amid which they live? Does their example, do their words and deeds make for virtue, for private and public morality, for purity and order, for political integrity, for Christlike charity and pure religion? Are they in their communities the champions of struggling but righteous causes, the mainstay of noble enterprises, the valiant and fearless friends of all true reforms? Can they be relied on when need comes, as come it THE RELIGIOUS ESTIMATE OF LIFE 247 must, to fight manfully against the combined forces of mam- monism and the time-spirit, against the world, the flesh and the devil, in behalf of the things of the soul and of the nobler life, and so help to keep the standard of common life from trail- ing in the mire of animalism? I do not claim for college men that as a whole, or as a class, they come up to this high stand- ard. I only claim that this is the standard according to which they have been trained, and by which they ought to be judged. I believe, and am devoutly thankful to believe, that the shekel of the college is a spiritual shekel, as truly as is that of the Church, and that in this estimation of life the college and the Church are one, and that their combined and con- current valuation of life is more and more influencing the world's valuations. When a Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States leaves an estate hardly sufficient to pay his funeral expenses, when a Secretary of the Treasury leaves his widow dependent on the contributions of friends, though nothing but the purest sense of official honor stood between them both and the means of great wealth; when young men forego the prospects of lucrative positions that they may alle- viate a misery whose bitter cry will not let them sleep; when young women turn their backs on luxurious homes that they may teach and lift the ignorant and degraded; we see the influence on men and women of the religious estimate of life, how it makes them capable of great refusals and noble sacri- fices, how it refines and elevates and spiritualizes then* whole life. IV. This prepares us to say, finally, that the religious esti- mation of life teaches us how to devote all things to their highest ends. It may be said to be the business of life to transform the lower into the higher forms of being. From the mineral to the vegetable, from the vegetable to the animal, from the animal to the spiritual, all the forces of the universe seem to be employed in refining the crude, elaborating the essential, and passing up finer and finer products to be wrought 248 THE VERY ELECT into thinking, affection and volition. The noblest of all activities within the power of man is to transmute physical and intellectual into spiritual forces and results. The shekel of the sanctuary estimates things not in the gross but in the essence. It is a measure not of material volume, but of spirit- ual dynamics. As science calculates the force which is lodged in an amount of coal, so the sanctuary's estimate upon an act, or an institution, or a man, is in terms of spiritual vitality. What is a young man worth? The immigration bureau, esti- mating him by his muscular productivity, with brutal frank- ness declares him worth to the country a thousand dollars. The employment agency, looking him through more carefully, canvasses his abilities, his education, his promise of growth with experience, and rates him at so many dollars a month now and so many hundred or thousand a year ten years from now. Religion makes a larger and truer estimate of him. He has so much body as physical basis, so much brain, so much capacity of affection, so much power of will. Multiply all these by a religious purpose, by devotion to some high, noble and holy end which will bring up to its maximum efficiency without misdirection or waste every power and faculty he has, and the result in goodness, in spiritual attainment, in service to mankind, is what the man is worth. Time seems to be a comparatively unimportant element. Divine providence, which has an eternity of leisure for working out its designs, seems to delight in making short lives, and even single acts of noble lives, to go on living themselves over and over, as it were, through memory and transmitted influences ages after their natural duration has ceased. Let this suggest a thought with reference to a young man's calling. While it is not true that all callings are equally sacred, it is true that all callings are sacred, potentially sacred, and abundantly so in proportion to the devotion which is put into them. A consecrated purpose consecrates the call- ing, whatever it may be. But the truer view is to consider THE RELIGIOUS ESTIMATE OF LIFE 249 life itself as one's calling, and the religious estimate of life as furnishing the purpose which consecrates it. Life thus con- sidered ceases to be a thing of fragments and patches, par- celed out between a little religion in this part, and a good deal of dull, jogging, commonplace duty in every other part, but becomes rather a unit in its scope and aim, under one abiding and constant inspiration, every part contributing to the working efficiency of every other part, and all to the come- liness and joy and glory of the whole. Not that we with our limited earthly vision can always see how the simple and humble acts of a devoted life are made subservient to the higher ends to which they are consecrated. It is of the merit of faith to trust that the divine order of things will bring this about, to sing " God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." If a man makes a religious estimate of his life, that is, if he desires that God shall direct and control it so as to bring out of it the highest uses of which it is capable, be assured that in God's own way, and in God's own estimate, it will be a successful life; that whether long or short, whether splendid or obscure, whether in man's eyes or in one's own eyes it be a triumph or a failure, it will be acceptable to God, which is all one can ask; and, looked back upon from the future life with its clarified vision and its sanctified estimations, it will be seen to be the only life worth living, the life which to have lived will be the cause of never-ceasing joy and thank- fulness. God grant us all grace so to live. Gentlemen of the Graduating Class: There is no more interesting moment in human life than that which is at once the end of pupilage and the beginning of responsible manhood, the moment which receives all the cumulated forces of the years of preparation and projects them into the life of action. This interest centers partly upon this force itself, upon its amount and quality. What makes a college commencement so interesting to all thoughtful 250 THE VERY ELECT persons? It is the fascination which attends the thought and the spectacle of youthful energy, of the vitality stored up in young men and potential in achievements which are as vast as thought or hope. But of still greater interest is the possible direction which this force may take, the spirit which is to determine and control all this potentiality. On such an occasion we are all optimists. Imagination loves to forecast for these young men lives filled with the highest attainments and services, lives through which all this force shall become beneficent, consecrated, religious. Yourselves are optimists. If religion consists in the devotion of self to the highest ideals, you are all for the moment, and in that sense, religious. If every college graduate would live up to the aspirations of the baccalaureate week, neither man nor God need ask much more of him. Then at any rate, if ever, his estimations are accord- ing to the shekel of the sanctuary. The evolution of the man out of the college graduate is an instructive study. He graduates, if his college has done its work upon him at all well, in a fine glow of idealism. But this vision splendid fades in time into the light of common day. He gets to be worldly and what he calls practical. He believes less in his college and in college ideas. His estimations of life become those of the market-place and the exchange. We abolished the old custom of masters' orations on the com- mencement stage, because with occasional exceptions they were conspicuously on a lower key than those of the graduat- ing class. Their cynicism and affected worldly wisdom grated harshly on ears accustomed to finer tones. But, with the providential discipline and deeper experience of life, this scep- tical mood passes, and the more idealistic and more spiritual temper returns. And just as the pain and sorrow and realism of life so often bring the sceptic back to the faith he learned at his mother's knee, so the college graduate in the maturity and wisdom of his adult life comes back to the faith of his old col- lege. We shall quite likely hear from the class which will this THE RELIGIOUS ESTIMATE OF LIFE 251 week celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its graduation an amount of sentiment and of confidence in old college ideals which will show us how beatuiful it is to have a growing faith in all things high and pure and noble as men grow older and wiser. On no one point are the young men of this time to be more congratulated than on the present attitude of religion toward them and their life. In some former times thought was mainly occupied with getting a more religious conception of religion; it is now occupied with getting a more religious conception of life. The old way interested a few speculative and imaginative minds: it resulted in theological systems, in splendid churches, and hi a pietism which was often nothing better than a morbid and selfish other-worldliness. Religion says to the young man of to-day: "I have work for you to do here and now which is for the time being as important and as religious as any you will ever do in earth or heaven. I want to save men; that is, I want to give them good homes, thriving industries, helpful education, sanitary and remedial aid, the restraints and incen- tives which favor virtue, and above all the great stimulus and inspiration of the Christian hope. In this work I want evange- lists and pastors, but I want also faithful and devoted men in all the other callings. I offer you the greatest earthly oppor- tunity, the highest earthly satisfaction, that of a life which is at the same time your will and God's will, in which you will have a full, free, large activity, and will have at the same time the consciousness of making your life a response to God's call for service." And now, as the last word, let me say to you that the true religious estimate of life is Christ's estimate. He has not merely taught us. He has shown us what life is worth, and what is worth living for. To get his conception of life is the true preparation for life ; to live as he lived is life. Let the same mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, and your life will shape itself according to his life. SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP A man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company. Psalm lv: 13, 14. THE sacred Poet here gives us an idyl of human life in one of its happiest conditions. Looking back upon this bright past from a time of trouble and estrangement, how does his memory brood over it, amplifying its incidents, and fondly dwelling upon its details! And how readily does our own sympathy enter into and reproduce the experience! We see in that far-away time two friends walking arm in arm, con- versing of high themes congenial to them, their faces as their souls aglow with the interest awakened by the interchange of thought and feeling, their walk and their discourse leading them, as all high converse always leads, to the House of God. Is it a picture of two poets in Arcadia, or two saints in Para- dise, of two college friends walking by the Isis, or by the Vermont Lake? It is all of these. It is an experience which may be shared by all beings to whom God has given mind and soul. It is one of the common glories of human life. It is not denied to those in humblest life, who may, by God's grace, find some solace in trouble and some uplift above the petty cares of their narrow life, in imparting and receiving those better thoughts and feelings which social converse calls out from their hiding-place. It was a noble thought of Milton's to ascribe even to lost spirits a respite and a resource while " retired upon a hill apart they reasoned high" on themes of philosophy. But this enjoyment comes to its perfection when minds enriched with knowledge and gifted with utterance, and souls enamoured of truth and goodness, meet with kindred minds and souls, in an intercourse which friendship enhances 252 SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP 253 and which the years prolong and ripen. The supreme blessing of such an experience to a human life, and the unique oppor- tunity which college life affords for its realization, have given me my theme for this occasion. Our first thought will naturally be that suggested by the words, "a man mine equal," one congenial to me, one with the same tastes, views, and aims. How can two walk together except they are agreed? It is a great waste of brain-power and of heart-power for two persons to be calling to each other across a great gulf of differences which must always separate them. That good men have polar differences, not only of judgments but of mental and moral constitution, ensuring perpetual differences of opinion, so that they are not merely incompatible but mutually repellent, is a plain fact which it is idle to ignore. Christian biography shows that religion rather intensifies than abates these antipathies. They do not, hap- pily, prevent reciprocal respect or even admiration, but they are a bar to free intercourse. The friend to whom I give myself must be "mine equal," one who dwells in the same mental and moral zone with me. It does not follow that he must live on exactly the same parallel. I would rather he did not. The ideal companionship is that which grows out of general agreement varied by strong individuality. If the highest friendship is impossible between those whose differences are pronounced and radical, it is equally impossible between those who are exactly alike. In such a case friends contribute nothing to each other, and friendship dies for lack of anything to feed upon. He helps me most who compels me at the same time to sympathize with his position and to defend my own. The result will be, not a compromise which is always a mere make-shift, something feeble and colorless which neither party has any heart for, but that larger and richer truth which contains all the partial truths, which each saw in their separateness and now both see in their integration. Thus do equals enlarge and enrich each other's being. The outcome of such gentle conflict and final 254 THE VERY ELECT union is not the sum merely of their separate contributions but their product. There are dynamics of life, and intel- lectual companionship is one of its most potent forces. Our poet also remembers his friend as "guide." There was never yet a true friend who did not in his heart of hearts think himself to be the gainer in the partnership; that he received more than he gave; that not he but the other was the chief source of light and power. And paradox though it may be, this is true on both sides. Each is guide to the other. The way they take is the resultant of the parallelogram of their individual forces, verging this way or that according to the momentum of character in this or that department of thought. And how often is the greater force where it does not seem to be! How often the apparent leader, the one led! Just as we not seldom see the strong, masterful man unconsciously led by silken strings in gentler hands, so among young men does the meek and quiet spirit often lead the more robust and boisterous comrade. For there is that in the human heart which rejoices in superior guidance. Side by side with the love of mastery is the spirit of loyalty to a chosen leader. Especially among young men, deeper and saner, I think, than the ambition to lead, is the delight of finding some greater soul around whom they can rally and to whom they can devote themselves. Not till later in life comes that disbelief of superiority, that pessimism of judgment between merits and faults which makes late friendships almost impossible. "He was my guide," frankly and exultingly says the young man. "He was a better man than I. He was prompt to see and to act where I was dull. He saw more deeply into things than I did. When all the rest of us were bickering and retorting on some mooted question, he would come in with the decisive word which not only silenced but convinced." Many a man many a great man has said of such a one: "to him, my equal, my guide, I owe more than to all teachers and all books; to him I owe, under God, all that is worthy in what I have SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP 255 been and what I have done." The estimate is often exagger- ated and unjust. It is the enthusiastic tribute of the devotee in friendship. But the sentiment which underlies it is both true and noble. It is the heart's recognition of the worth of God's greatest earthly gift to man. And this prepares us for the thought that such friends, con- genial in their views and sympathies, loyal to their own convictions but rejoicing in reciprocal leadership, find the full joy of life in taking counsel together. Perhaps the bare possession of truth or of what one thinks the truth, the silent, solitary contemplation of reality and beauty ought to satisfy a normal human soul, and no accessories or conditions are really necessary to complete its happiness. But this is doubtful. Indeed it is doubtful whether this pure, independent, imper- sonal pursuit of the truth is the best way to get it whether it is possible to get the highest truth, the truth of life, in this way at all. Truth is many-sided: men are one-sided. It is not given to one man to see the many sides of truth: he sees only the side which is visible from his point of view. "Your opinions on religion," writes Pusey to Stanley, "deeply distress me." "I am sorry," replies Stanley to Pusey, "but your opinions would drive me into infidelity." But the truth, the full truth requires that each be faithful to his opinion. Pusey must plant and Stanley must water: Driver and Cheyne and Robertson Smith and Briggs must propound, and Burgon and Denison and Green and Bissell protest, and by and by some later generation will get the truth as to inspiration, to which each of the contending parties will have contributed according to its light. Then again the motive for the pursuit of truth is strengthened by companion- ship in that pursuit. To shout "Eureka" to sympathizing ears, to rush out of the laboratory into the circle of one's friends and cry, "Rejoice with me for I have at last found it," this is one great inducement men have to scorn delights and 256 THE VERY ELECT live laborious days. I am not sure but that God himself has this feeling and that it is no small part of his perfect joy. It is at least a relief to the impression we sometimes have of the loneliness of God that in the expression of himself in the uni- verse he appeals to the sympathies of the intelligences whom he has created that in the mathematics of the planets and the constellations, in all the colors and symmetries and graces of animal life, and above all in the ethics and theodicies of his moral administration he is calling upon all whom he has made in his image and who like to take counsel with him in respect to the eternal principles of truth and right. And so I say the full joy of life comes to those who take counsel together on these high themes. The places, the hours, the persons associated with these communings become sacred. Just as half a century after the event St. John remembered just where the sun was in the afternoon sky when he first saw Jesus, as the two who walked to Emmaus with every after-remembrance of that walk felt their hearts burn within them till those hearts ceased to beat ; so in all true lives there are consecrated memories of other walks, other companionships, other discourses, other heart-burnings moments when some great light has flashed from another soul into theirs, when under the inspiration of some holy communion with a kindred spirit they have reached a high resolve which made life another and a nobler reality for ever afterward. But into this ideal communion another element enters beside the intellectual. "We took sweet counsel together." It is counsel, that is, it is thinking, but it is feeling also. It is thinking under loving conditions. If stern philosophy says, " Beware of feeling, it bewilders and misleads," we reply, to deny feeling its due place is to shut up one of the avenues of truth, to darken the light upon which the moral sense depends, and to paralyze the will. True feeling, the feeling that issues forth from a pure and holy soul, has a discerning power, often far beyond the ken of intellect. Through the mist and storm SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP 257 of Gennesaret John was the first to recognize Jesus, because he loved him best. The beauty of truth, the quality by which it addresses the imagination and the affections, is not the least of its evidences. If our view of truth is harsh and crabbed, we must seek further till we find it musical as is Apollo's lute. The test of character is not perception of the truth, but love of the truth. Counsel becomes sweet by filtering through two human souls. Contact with life gives it freshness and real- ity. Struggling to get itself expressed in terms of life, truth overleaps all mere logical forms; it beams from the eyes; it curves the lips; it swells the tones; and assumes all the charms of personality. A dangerous as well as a beneficent power lurks in this subtle potency. If truth has its sweet counsels, error has its siren persuasives. The council chambers of statesmen, the conclaves of ecclesiastics, the clubs, coteries, salons of political intrigues, even the common-rooms of colleges, remind us how all that is winning in friendship, all the graces and fascinations of social life, may be devoted to the service and propagation of error. And yet there is truth in Newman's dictum that "Love is a safeguard of faith against superstition." We would fain believe, we must believe that a loving heart, is not, because it is loving, easily duped into mistake and wrong, that counsel is not dangerous because it is sweet. Surely two friends in linked converse on then* way to the House of God, are more likely to attain to that which it behooves man to know and to believe, than the disputants in the General Assembly, or Convocation, or the American Board, who with angry brow, belligerent emphasis and polemic arguments discredit the views they advocate and antagonize the listeners. The last touch of this picture brings the friends to the House of God. "We walked to the house of God in com- pany," or as the revised version has it, " We walked in the house of God with the throng." All good counsel faithfully pursued inevitably leads to the religious aspects of truth. Every 17 258 THE VERY ELECT process of thinking is unfinished till it reaches God. Every mind engaged in earnest thinking is unsatisfied till it gets back or forward to God. When two friends reach that point in their converse where each, or either, tacitly says, "I can go no farther in that direction, because we shall soon come to a religious question/' that is an end not only to all sweet counsel, but to all honest and thorough thinking. When we hear of two friends sitting up till three o'clock in the morning, we know that they have got upon the religious bearing of some question and that they are having it out like good friends and honest men. For the only thoroughgoing, thick-and-thin friend is the man with whom you can delve in the mines of truth till you get down into the religious strata. The particular stratum you reach at any time may be the theological; it may be one of those great deep questions in soul-life, which, with all the curses heaped upon them, will not down, questions which never settled, perhaps never to be settled, come up again and again, age after age, especially in companies of thinking youths, questions to the pros and contras of which, the combats and the sweet counsels, college walls have echoed in every suc- cessive generation. Or it might be one of the still greater and deeper themes of the personal religious life. For it is when friendly communion touches one of these themes, when soul meets soul in sincerity and confidence, giving and receiv- ing experience, aspiration, inspiration in this sphere of the moral and spiritual life, it is here that sweet counsel has reached its highest consummation. "Tell me, dear soul, what out of your own experience you know about prayer, about repentance, about the sense of forgiveness, about the hope that smiles on death and is full of immortality. Tell me what you have learned in thoughtful midnight hours, what your feelings were when with sober eye you looked on man's mor- tality. Tell me whether in some hour of agony, or some moment of exaltation, you have had visions of things that are very far off; and tell me how they looked to you then, and SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP 259 how other things looked in that strange revealing light." And so one soul gives up to another the deepest secrets of its life, and sweet counsel becomes inspiration. If now I have not exaggerated the value and potency of intellectual companionship and that could hardly be the promotion of it would seem to be one of the main purposes for which a college exists. This of course means something more than the common saying that the social enjoyments of college life are among its greatest attractions. It means that there are undeveloped possibilities of highest good in the communion of young souls under the conditions which college life at its best might afford. That there is now much of this better social life in our colleges I am happy to believe. But I am sure it might become more prevalent and more effective if it were frankly recognized and in every helpful way encour- aged as one of the main advantages of college life. To this end the architecture, the grounds, the regulations of college residence should all be adjusted. All the appointments of college should aim first and foremost to promote study, secondly and with hardly inferior solicitude to promote scholarly society. Secluded grounds, shaded walks within the college enclosure, groves and gardens, college common- rooms, all suggestions and opportunities for quiet, thoughtful companionship, should be among the objects of college endow- ments and of administrative forethought. Again, an institution for higher learning will best fulfill its functions by being in its essential idea a collegiate society. In the lower grades of education the distance between teacher and learner is wide. Authority, prescription on one side, submission, docility on the other, must be insisted on. But as the grades advance this distance becomes less and less. In the highest grades instead of dogmatic instruction education becomes guidance in co-operation. One of the wisest of the old college founders wished his college to be a hive of bees. We do not readily imagine Socrates as lecturing and Alcibiades 260 THE VERY ELECT as reciting. Earnest personal study, individual labor, guided, stimulated, tested, by more advanced minds that is the ideal higher education to which we are slowly but surely coming. The greatest teacher this University ever had was James Marsh, and his pupils unite in testifying that he gave them most when they met him in his study, or were taken by him on his walks. Then they took sweet counsel together. The same has been often said of that prince of teachers, Dr. Arnold, and of him whom so many in England are now lament- ing, the Master of Balliol. But all that I have tried to say is to little purpose if it does not make it perfectly clear that college life comes to its flower in the religious spirit which it fosters. If I should say that the humanistic element in education is the most important, that would be saying the same thing in another way. If univer- sities ever become mere groups of cabinets, laboratories, and dissecting-rooms, with never a spire or a chapel among them, testifying to the immortal dignity and destiny of man, the finest character and the noblest converse will be lacking. The scientific spirit, that spirit which cultivates coldness of temper and hardness of belief, especially needs to associate with itself, and to take sweet counsel with, the religious spirit, the spirit which believeth all things and hopeth all things. The time has been when logic, and history, and even theology, as taught, were thoroughly inhuman and irreligious studies. The time is coming and now is when chemistry, and biology, and mathematics, humanized, studied in their relations with life as it is and as it might be, are making their votaries better lovers of men and better worshipers of God. And this gives me our final thought on this theme the thought of him who when for a little while he was to be parted from his disciples said to them, " Henceforth I call you friends." In a few hours he was to die, and yet, as though he were looking forward to a long future, he said, "Henceforth I call you friends." This can mean nothing less than that the life of SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP 261 Christians is a life of friendship with their Lord, and with each other. He will be their equal, their guide, their acquaintance; he will take sweet counsel with them,, and walk to the House of God in their company. Here is the secret of the Church. It is the fellowship of those who walk with Christ. Here is the much sought bond of Christian union. It is the common friendship of those who are friends of Christ. Here is the perfection and fruition of life; it is entering into the joy of the Lord. ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS Four years ago you were led in the providence of God to this place and this University for a course of education, and by the same good providence you are now permitted to complete that course. We hope that on this day you have, and all through your life ybu will have, your own approval for what you have done during these four years. No joy in life is so sweet as the approval of a good conscience, carrying with it a sense of God's approval. If there are things you could wish had been other- wise, and your lot had else not been human still we trust that you can with gratitude and some degree of satisfaction remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you. You shall not lack in the comfort of this retrospect our com- mendation for fidelity in duty, for upright and courteous demeanor, and for good attainments. We send you forth into the callings of life with the confidence that you will prove your- selves workmen of whom the University will never be ashamed. As college men and women you will have a unique position in society, a position made up of privileges and obligations. On one point you must not deceive yourselves. Yours is not the fors clavigera. You do not because you are college grad- uates carry the key that opens all doors. You will have to match yourselves with men of equal, perhaps greater ability who are not college graduates. The knowledge you have acquired will have to be revised every day in the light of the 262 THE VERY ELECT latest thought of that day. But one great advantage you have, and we counsel you to make the most of it. You have learned the true standard of merit. You have got possession of fixed principles for judging of all mutable things. You are not tied down to the present and the concrete. You know, or you can know, or you have formed the habit of wanting to know, what is the best on every subject, what the best men have thought about it, what the prophets are looking and striving for. Colleges are breeders of ideals. All young graduates are visionaries; if they are true to their impressions they are always visionaries, only growing wiser and safer. It is the great pride and joy of a college to see its graduates carry the standards around which the best men and women of the community with one accord rally. The time was when it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that a college education did not fit men for the highest \isefulness, that it made them timid, impracticable, luxurious, unwilling to pull in the harness of everyday work. We hope we have changed all that, so far as it ever was true. The avowed aim of the best educators now is to make men and women useful members of society. In sending them out the college does not now say to them: " Continue to cultivate yourself; master more sciences; keep well up in esthetics. It says rather: "get yourselves well up in the great questions of the day; study sound finance and talk it vigorously on every street corner; meddle with politics, or rather enter into politics with a resolute will, and with no effeminacy or squeamishness serve on juries, and posses, and vigilance committees; do the work of good citizens, and let no man despise you. Be servants of the Church. Be preachers, prophets, bishops, missionaries, if God calls you to these offices; but if God calls you, equally be deacons, Dorcases, elders, vestrymen, class leaders, door- keepers in the house of God." Among the serious questions which confront you as you step across the academic threshold, will be the choice of a SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP 263 calling for truly a calling I trust you will consider it. Some of you, I hope and believe, will be called to the ministry of the Word, and will take up that blessed and blessing work which our beloved young Pitkin has just laid down, not however till he had shown us how even a short life may be a beautiful one, and fruitful in good works. And others of you will, I trust, be equally called of God to serve your own generation by his will in other occupations. In all vocations, not least in that of the home, there is room and call for trained minds, loving hearts, and consecrated wills. May the greatest and best of friends be your companion and guide, and may he ever give you his sweet counsel, until he bring you to the House of God on high. Members of the Graduating Class: It seems to me highly significant that the final counsels of the College to its pupils should be given not in its own halls, but in a church, and in connection with a religious service ; this has a two-fold meaning. It is a recognition first, that education is in its essence a character-forming agency, and as such seeks the inspiration and guidance of religion; and secondly, that the re- ligion with which the college allies itself is not something peculiar and esoteric, but that which it shares with the general Christian community. It is our belief and our joy, that the religious life of the college and of the community are mutually helpful, that we give and receive from each other influences which make both the college and the community better. We like to think that this service in which all the churches unite is their expression of interest as churches in the life of the college, as well as our expression of our feeling of community and fellowship with the common and total religious life of our place and time. You will see, therefore, that whatever special theme may be presented on these occasions, the subject always is the religious conception of life, and the aim always is to take advantage of these tender and thoughtful moments to get for this conception 264 THE VERY ELECT access and adoption. We believe that a college career in any department, studiously and faithfully followed through its four years' course, culminates naturally, almost necessarily, in that temper of mind and heart and that view of life, which leads one to choose the highest standards of thought and con- duct and the noblest type of human character, those standards which directly or indirectly we derive from the New Testa- ment; that type of character which is set forth in its perfection in our Lord Jesus Christ and in a lower degree by those who represent him and are most like him. And it is for this reason, you must permit me to say, that the world expects so much in this direction from liberally educated men and women. They say to you: " You have had leisure and endowments, you have been fed on thoughts transmitted to you by the great and good of all the race, and we have a right to expect in you something exceptionally fair and good. You are bound to take thought for things honorable in the sight of all men." If a young collegian, aside from his pardonable, because youthful, peccadilloes and with all his youthful conceit, has a standard of living no higher than that of average men, the world is surprised and shocked and pained. They are inclined to say, "If we cannot depend on you for leadership in the higher life, on whom can we depend?" I have tried, young friends, to present to you today the religious conception of life in that aspect of it which is at once the most attractive and the most severe; and I have done so with the conviction that it will be to you the most attractive because it is the most severe. The youthful spirit, if true to its instincts, is always crying out, "Give me difficulties, mountains to climb, hard problems to solve, heroic tasks to accomplish." It scorns the easy and the commonplace. This has always seemed to me to be one of the secrets of the teaching of Jesus. He proposed the highest standards. He set the hardest tasks. And these have always been fascina- tions to noble minds. And so in humble imitation of his SPIRITUAL COMPANIONSHIP 265 method I appeal to the noblest and truest within you when I call upon you to adopt for yourselves these highest standards of character. The most discouraging of all words to hear from a young man are, " Others do this, why may not I?" How much nobler to say, "Others have done this, why cannot I?" Noblest of all is it to say, " Though no man has done this, yet by the help of God, will I." And now I will add to these thoughts only this one more. Take your estimate of life and your principle of life from your highest moments. We are all at certain times lifted above our ordinary plane of thought and feeling. There are moments when we breathe diviner air, and see things in a more revealing light. There are thoughtful midnight hours. There are seasons of calm weather when our souls become far-sighted. To those who have not forsaken God, and whom God has not forsaken, these are sure to come. Take your views of life, and your aims in life, from these, and not from times when you are dispirited and perhaps disgusted, when the tones of mock- ery and unfaith disturb and depress you. Set your watches by the sun-dials and the stars, and not by the fog-bells. Get your estimates of life not from Zola but from St. John. And when you come back to us, as we trust you will year after year, do not bring with you that air of worldly wisdom by which you would have us believe that you are wiser because you have less faith than you had. Come to us with broader sympathies with all that is human, with a firmer faith in the diviner ele- ments in human life, and with your brows lighted up with hope. And so when we grasp your hands we shall get from you new faith and new courage to go on with you and with all the brave and true in this holy work of making this human life more and more divine. 1896. THE NOBLER ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER Take thought for things honorable in the sight of all men. Romans xii: 17. IN THIS same chapter the apostle exhorts Christians not to be conformed to this world. And yet here he sets up as a standard that which all men consider honorable. He appeals from the world's practice to the world's ideal. And in express- ing this ideal he has chosen the word which more than any other expresses the Greek ideal that one word which involves the opposite of all that is ugly, or base, or paltry, and includes all that is comely, graceful and noble. Jew though he was, Paul insists that righteousness, though the necessary founda- tion, is not the perfection of character, and so he imports, and purifies, and sanctifies those other elements of character, its graces, its amenities, its charms, which he, as a citizen of no mean Greek city, had learned to embody in the Greek word which has but partial expression in the English " honorable." That which is implied though but half expressed in this Eng- lish text will be our theme on this occasion: the higher and finer, the lovely, the noble, elements of Christian character, and these especially as they are manifested in young lives. And let me say at the outset that while I claim that a liberal education is one of the means which Christianity uses for pro- ducing such a character, I am not going to claim for it exclusive power to produce this result. Our own experience has been singularly unfortunate if it has not made us acquainted with simple and humble lives that were radiant with divine beauty. If any of you think that those characters with which recent Scotch fiction has made us familiar, characters that under an apparently rough exterior, cherish all the tenderness, the gentleness, the refinement, the heroisms of humanity in its finest types, if you think these are pure fiction, there are those 266 THE NOBLER ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER 267 of us who can assure you that you are mistaken, that no man could ever have conceived such characters unless he had known them. There are all about us, wherever the Bible and the Church and the Holy Spirit have done their purifying, elevating and ennobling work, lives which in their unconscious beauty and nobility, put to shame those of us who have had a thousand times their external advantages for personal culture. And yet is it not fab* to expect, even to exact, a good degree of conformity to this standard in those who have these excep- tional opportunities? If the world says to a certain relatively small number of men and women, "We will do the rough work of the world, we will delve in its mines, bring food out of its clods, toil in its mills and factories, and fetch and carry in its markets, and give you leisure and libraries and teachers, in order that you may form yourselves under the influence of the noblest thoughts of the wisest and best of all ages, and so show us what a man and a woman can become," is it too much to expect that these special opportunities will develop the higher and finer traits of manhood and womanhood? Whatever standard may be thought high enough for those in certain other conditions, ought not college-bred men or women, as they try to take their proper places and do their proper work in the world, to set their thought on the things that are fair and fine, honorable and lovely, in the sight of all men? What are these finer qualities that compel the admiration of all men, what are these "counsels of perfection," which by the universal suffrage of mankind canonize their possessors? What, at least, are some of them, the chief of them? Now of course we shall not number among these the rudi- mentary virtues, such as honesty, truthfulness, kindness, virtues the far-reaching importance of which it would be im- possible to overrate, which in their advanced stages are all too rare, but which belong to the foundation, not the super- structure, of character. 268 THE VERY ELECT Taking these for granted, I shall name first what we may call a fine Sensitiveness to the claims of the human in human life. That was perhaps an excusable, but it certainly was a false view; that mock humility, if we may use so harsh a term, which led men to debase and decry the human in order to exalt the divine. That essentially atheistic view of humanity Jesus condemned and outlawed when he glorified our human nature by taking it unto himself and calling himself the Son of Man. The great lesson of his life and of his teaching was the precious- ness to him and to God the Father, of a human life, and of everything affecting a human life. What a world, not of affection merely as we usually take it, but of appreciation, of valuation, lies in the assurance that the hairs of your head are all numbered. What other beings Jesus may love and care for in other worlds he did not tell us, but he left us to think and believe that in his estimate the greatest thing God has made is a man, his greatest care a human life, and that they please him best and are most like him, who honor most highly and care most lovingly and tenderly for human happi- ness and well-being. If these orbs above us are filled with beings who can think and love and will, as we do, then God has repeated this great truth in millions of worlds; if they are not so peopled, then we know that all the suns and all the con- stellations are not of as much worth to God as one human being. Now he who thus estimates man and human life will esti- mate accordingly everything which touches and affects that life. By this estimate he will measure things as great or small, as important or trivial. A speck of dust in a human eye will be to him a larger object than a mountain of gold which touches no life. Nothing is great which does not greatly affect human life; everything is great which does so affect it. Does the world so judge? Most certainly it does, in its saner hours. Some- times it seems not, but it does. It applauds with hands, with shouts, with caps in the air, the man of force; but with THE NOBLER ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER 269 hearts the man of gentle feeling, of kindly helpfulness and humanity. Who are the world's favorites, in actual life, and in ideal life? Not those who in some way have got themselves dubbed "the great" in history, but those who have brought healing and hope into other lives, the deliverers from bondage, the rescuers from peril, men like Livingstone and Gordon and Father Damien and Doctor Maclure, women like Elizabeth Fry, and Sister Dora, and Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton. Now to have what I have called a fine sensitiveness as to the value of the human is one of the chief characteristics of the higher type of manhood and womanhood. To be indiffer- ent or callous at this point is to be coarse: to be all alive with sympathy for men and women and children in their joys and sorrows, in their laughter and their tears, in their pain and suffering, and in their aspirations and ecstasies, this is what we mean by refinement. This is what Virgil has put into the mouth of Aeneas when wrecked and wandering amid strangers he saw his own misfortunes memorialized and exclaimed, "Here also tears are to human sorrows given, hearts feel for mankind." It is this which made a modern saint break out in the noble exaggeration that "it were more worth while to save the soul of one single wild bandit of Calabria, or whining beggar of Palermo, than draw a hundred lines of railway through the length of Italy, except so far as these great na- tional works tended to some spiritual good beyond them." Noblest and truest of all was our Lord's holy rage which prompted him to say that rather than lead astray one of his little ones it were better for a man to have a millstone about his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea. And this makes it natural to say next, that the higher natures are characterized by a specially fine sensitiveness toward the claims of the weaker and less favored in our common human life. It is significant that the ideal person in our English-speaking races is named after this characteristic 270 THE VERY ELECT a gentleman. It would not be going far aside from one mean- ing of the text to translate it for English readers, "take thought to be in the sight of all men, gentlemen, and gentlewomen." I know the etymology which gives a different turn to the word, which makes it a designation merely of rank, but so long as our adjective gentle has the same origin, the moral is the same. A man of the first rank has, or ought to have, as his distin- guishing quality, gentleness, consideration for the feelings, the dues, the claims of others. He may be as proud as St. Paul was in being a freeborn Roman and as strenuous to maintain his rights and dignities; as true to his convictions as Hampden in Parliament or Luther at Worms, but when it is a question of those over whom we have some advantage, those whose feelings are in our power, whose peace of mind, or self-respect, or good name is dependent on us, then comes the test of our grain whether it is fine or coarse, then, and not when we have on our fine clothes and our fine manners, do we show whether or not we are gentlemen and gentlewomen. If I were asked to define a gentleman I should say he is one who thinks more of other people's feelings than of his own rights, and more of other people's rights than of his own feelings. And if I were asked to point out the model gentleman I should bow my knee to him who being in the form of God, did not insist on this as a prize to be clutched, but made himself of no reputation, and humbled himself and became obedient even unto death, for us men and for our salvation. And in the one case as in the other the natural and necessary result is: " Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name." The man who is gentle towards others, who humbles himself for their sake, is the man who in the end is highly exalted, and has a name above every name. There is nothing so beautiful as the deference of a great soul, the unconscious self-effacement of a superior nature. Have your hearts been thinking of some one while I have been speaking of this type of character, of one who amid great fame, and in THE NOBLER ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER 271 high position, and of boundless influence, was utterly uncon- scious of his greatness, was meek and gentle, spake kindly words of his detractors, and might have said like the dying king in the Jerusalem Chamber, "I do not know that Christian man alive, With whom my soul is any jot at odds; I thank my God for my humility. " Have you been thinking of such a one and putting a name to the character I have been describing? Or rather, from my poor description have you not been moved to call up the form and lineaments of a man who was great in his gentleness and gentle in his greatness? Then you have been thinking of one whom all men admire and love and would gladly canonize, and not only that, of one who is dear to God, one who is great- est in the kingdom of heaven. Another and closely kindred characteristic of the type of men we are considering is their fine sense of Subordination. Let others conceive of heaven as they may. Whatever heaven may be or may not be, it will not be a democracy. We shall not then and there be governed by a crowd made up of our equals and our inferiors; I want to be governed by my superiors. I trust I shall be willing to command, if God sees fit to give me any small post of command, but I know I shall be more glad to obey, and it will be an intense joy to me to get into a con- dition in which I shall have set over me those who are wiser and stronger and nobler than I am. And I have not the small- est doubt that we shall all find it so; that the glorified angels, and glorified men, and saints of humbler gifts, will be grouped in subordination due, rank above rank, each and all happy that they are just where they are. And the finer souls long for some such condition here and now, and do what in them lies to realize it, by doing their own obedience sweetly and gently. Truth compels me to say that this fine instinct is specially liable to abuse and perversion, and that out of its perversion 272 THE VERY ELECT have grown some of the worst crimes of man against man. When any set of men in society, or state, or church, dwell too much on the virtue of obedience, especially when they make it the chief of the virtues, it is time to raise the danger signals and run up the standard of manly independence and preach the solemn duty of individual conviction. But never- theless, with this proviso of perpetual vigilance and tenacious reserve of protest, the normal condition of a human soul, especially of a youthful soul, is not self-assertion, but subordi- nation, which means, to know one's place, to submit to its conditions, and to be happy in such submission. It is this principle which, as Wordsworth says, "preserves the stars from wrong, and the most ancient heavens through it are fresh and strong." It is the parent of some of the most beautiful traits in human character, as its violation is of some of the ugliest. What is an uglier sight than insubordination in a child, or a pupil, or a soldier, or a sailor? What sight is more beautiful than prompt and hearty obedience to a legitimately constituted superior? One of the most beautiful sights I ever saw was a brief colloquy across the dinner table between the General of the Army and a Colonel who was then and there ordered to leave his pleasant post and go on a dangerous and difficult mission; but the beautiful thing about it was not the majesty of the command but the immediate and graceful obedience of the officer commanded. There is dignity in such obedience, and in all true-hearted loyal obedience to what is highest and best. There is a distinct loss of dignity in all hesitation, or reluctance, or sullenness, in one's obedience. What a beautiful picture is that which the psalmist gives us of the angels that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word, ready at his bidding to "post o'er land and ocean." This must suffice for what we may call the softer side of a noble character. We must now turn for a moment to the more valorous elements, one of which is certainly Magnan- THE NOBLER ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER 273 imity, a virtue which, as well as the large mouth-filling word which so well expresses it, we derive from Roman sources. To be magnanimous is to set such a supreme valuation upon the really great things of life as to have a noble disdain for things that in comparison are petty and paltry. One of the finest exemplifications of it in history was the spirit which prompted the Pilgrims to say, "it is not with us as with those whom small things can discourage." It breaks out hi the exultation of Tennyson in view of the fact that the curled darlings of England had shown in the Crimean War that they had stuff and mettle: "We have proved we have hearts in a cause: we are noble still." It is one of the mitigations I do not say justifications of war that in all noble minds it fosters the spirit of magnanimity as was so abundantly shown in our own war, and on both sides, because it is one of the sad facts of history that noble spirits and illustrious actions have been arrayed against each other in all great conflicts. But it is not necessary to go far afield for illustrations of magnan- imity. I do not know a more beautiful form of it than would come out to view if the history of any college class were un- folded before us; the history of struggles with poverty and hardship, the temptations to an easier and perhaps more luxurious life resisted, the self-denial in humble homes, the selection of some one in a family to whom this great boon shall be conceded by all a history like that the recollection of which broke down Daniel Webster in his great argument before the Supreme Court in the Dartmouth College case, and broke down the whole Court with him all this struggle and sacrifice because of sublime faith in the supreme value of character and of the condition of education as one of the elements which go into its make-up. For when we trace it back to its sources, magnanimity is found to have its spring in faith, faith in things unseen, in the realities, in the eternal verities, in God, in righteousness, in the supremacy of love, in these as the only great things, beside which all else is second- is 274 THE VERY ELECT ary. If you will think of it, the strong men, the men who are so strong that they are calm and steadfast in their strength, are men who have set over them, and over their lives, a few great guiding principles, not always the same, but always great, of which they are sure, absolutely sure, and in the security of which they ever abide. And so content and calm are they in this security, that they are, as Horace says, fearless amid crash and ruin; like St. Paul, none of these things move them; they are careless of slights, indifferent to affronts, unruffled amid calumnies, hopeful in defeat, loving with a noble whole- heartedness, hating with a noble rage, willing with an energy which disdains obstacles, acting with a volume and momentum of being which almost always wins victory and always deserves it. And now the crown, the consummation of these nobler qualities, is that transcendent virtue which we call Heroism, transcendent as to its quality but not impossible, not super- human, and, thank God, not rare in human life. Heroism is a composite virtue, made up of idealism, courage, and the capacity for suffering. The heroic stage of life is the youthful stage, because only in this stage does the heart cherish those ideals which old age calls illusions. The same is true of nations. The time was when knighthood like that of the Round Table, when the Crusades for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, aroused a sentiment, even a passion in the general mind. But now when similar appeals are made, for the lib- eration of Poland, or for the release of Armenia from Turkish oppression, little or no response comes back. Popular en- thusiasm must yield to national policy. Nations are too old to be sentimental. But let the young beware of this subtle and dangerous infection which in our times is all abroad, this proscription of idealism, this affectation of senility, this skepticism and mockery of heroism. Beware especially of that flattering but malignant artifice which puts the boys in the front but puts into their mouths and on their banners THE NOBLER ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER 275 maxims worthy only of cynics and roues. Youthful idealism, youthful courage, youthful endurance, these make up the heroism which is honorable' in the sight of all men and to which men will accord leadership in the coming time. But the element in heroism that is most of all heroic is capacity for suffering, or to give to it its Christian name, Sacrifice. He would be a prophet of deceit and lies who should sing to these young hearts the siren song of ease and sloth, who should wish for them the life of the monks of Theleme, who should pretend to them that the prizes of life can be won, the responsibilities and duties of life met, without suffering and sacrifice. To be able to make a great sacrifice for a great object, and not feel it to be a sacrifice, that is, not to grudge the pain, or struggle, or loss, but to give it willingly, joyfully, that is as high as human character can reach, and I say it reverently, the divine character can go no higher. To endure the cross for the joy that was set before him, this is evidence enough of Christ's divinity. It is easy enough to say all this, and to feel the force of it, on this beautiful June day amid the perfume of flowers and the singing of birds, and to be honest in hoping that we are what we think and feel, but it will need something stouter and braver than summer sentiment to make us really heroic when the need comes. And if we are really heroic when that need comes, we shall not know it. Others will, but we shall not. God will know it, but we shall not. Perhaps you have seen lately what purports to be a soldier's description of an action memorable for the splendid bravery exhibited. "A magnificent charge, do they call it? Well, to us it seemed rather warm work," and then he loses himself in the incidents of the conflict, and is utterly unconscious of having done anything remarkable. No man was ever a hero who said to himself, "I will be a hero," or who said, "I am a hero." A man does his duty, does what in some crisis he sees and knows to be his duty, does it because he always does his duty, does it under the influence of a feeling more elevated, 276 THE VERY ELECT more inspired than he is aware of, but does it calmly, as master of himself, and with no thought beyond doing the thing that is to be done, and lo, the whole world appreciates and applauds and adds one to its list of heroes; and the divine verdict, un- heard as yet, is recorded, "Well done, good and faithful servant," and all the while the man himself has nothing to say of himself but this, " I could not possibly have done otherwise." Does any one ask, where are these impossible heroes? The answer is, they are all about you. They may be found in your own household: one of them may be your own mother or brother; possibly, though you may not think it, it is your- self at least that self of which you have now the potency; for what the grace of God can make of a man, because he is a man, only the Son of Man can know. 1897. THE DOOR OPENING OF ITSELF The gate opened to them of its own accord. Acts xii: 10. A BRILLIANT writer some years ago published an essay on "the total depravity of inanimate things." It was good material for wit; for doctrine it was faulty. We have ceased to believe in human total depravity; we are coming to believe that there are no inanimate things. Even the crystal, we are asked to believe, has vital force within. And herein, as in so many things, science is but lagging behind faith. To the eye of poetic faith there never were any inanimate things. Trees and rocks and rivers and fountains were animate with divine or semi-divine life. Religious faith saw still more clearly the floods clapping their hands, the valleys shouting for joy, the mountains and the hills breaking forth into singing, the sun going forth as a bridegroom, and the stars in then- courses fighting for the Lord's people. The spirit of the universe which is in what we call things, the spirit of God which is in all forces, all laws, all events, works with and for him who is on the Lord's side. In this plain, quiet, prosaic statement that the gate opened to them of its own accord I seem to see man approaching the obstacles, the threatening dangers of life in company with his attendant angel the Angel of God. When the time has come for the servant and the angel of God -walking together to go forth on their mission, doors and bars and walls are in league with them. Even the huge, frowning, sullen, iron gate of the imprisoning city feels, as they approach it, a sudden thrill of sympathy, and of its own accord turns on its hinges and invites them outward to freedom and opportunity. I see here a picture of youth going out to meet its oppor- tunities youth, which for seclusion and safety has been 277 278 THE VERY ELECT girt about with walls of protection, of watch and ward, of discipline; but now when the fitting hour has come, bravely going forth to confront responsibilities, obstacles, dangers, not knowing how these formidable and frowning things are to be got out of the way; but, with the spirit in youth which is miscalled audacity and is really faith, believing that they will be removed: and I see with him, perhaps to him invisible, the Angel of God, whom all things recognize and obey, and I see under the spell of his pervading presence, things become persons, matter become conscious, obstacles crouch into submission, forces hasten to proffer their services, bars fall, bolts slide, gates open of their own accord, and the very spirit of the world kneel to him and offer him the freedom of the Material Universe. The gate opens first to Freedom. There are few sensations in life so delicious as the first sense of freedom, few moments so memorable as those in which this sensation first comes to one. To be rid of the stifling sense of confinement; to have the consciousness of being one's own self, and not some other self within and over one dominating his very self; to have the feeling of sovereignty over one's own time, pursuits, choices, opinions, actions Oh, this is sweet, and satisfying, and god- like; and it is what the Creator intended that we should have and enjoy, when we are ready for it and are equal to it. But freedom is not something we are born into or have inherited; it is something to be won, and that by the hardest. For what is freedom? It is opportunity for all our powers to act according to their true nature. It is the nature of the kite to mount diagonally upward under the resultant of two forces, the horizontal force of the wind and the vertical force of the string. The small boy thinks till he tries it that if this tether- ing string were cut, the kite would soar above the clouds; but instead it drops to the ground. It has lost all the freedom it had. The wild horse of the wilderness is not as free as the winner of the St. Leger, the last product of subjection to man; THE DOOR OPENING OF ITSELF 279 but how much this subjection has added! what beauty, what swiftness, what grace of motion! what almost human qualities! Daniel Boone in the remote forest was not as free as Daniel Webster in the capital, to whom all the arts and forces of civilization ministered, giving him leisure and scope for the development and exercise of his nobler faculties. The small- boy view of life is that by severing the restraints of duty he gains freedom; he does not; he only collapses. Young men chafe under the irksomeness of training, not realizing that in the end it enlarges freedom; the great secret of what we call civilization is that it makes things serve man, and gives the human larger scope and freer play. No man is free whose mental and moral balance is disturbed by the existence within him of undeveloped powers. He is hampered by his limita- tions. No man is free until he is intelligent and virtuous and religious; then appetite, passion, and prejudice no longer have unchecked control over him. So then school, college, experi- ence, life, are training for freedom. When a young man is ready to be freed, he is free. Shackles fall from him; bolts and bars move aside for him; all doors open to him. Having learned in the school of discipline and subjection the use of his powers, having learned self-control, modesty, deference, obedience, he has won the first, in some respects the greatest, opportunity of life; he is a free man, God's freeman. We look next through the gateway into Opportunity. The gate which opened to Peter and the angel was not a gateway leading outward to the solitudes but into the city, into the great city where men congregate, where thought is in ferment, where ideas are shaped, whence influences go forth to help or hurt mankind. Certain men in our time are styled "oppor- tunists," men who study events and conform to them. Christian thought goes further than this. It believes that events create opportunities and offer them to the man that can use them. The gates open to him of their own accord. In common speech we call it his luck; in loftier language we 280 THE VERY ELECT call him a man of destiny. Bullets shower round him but avoid him. Winds blow him on his way and dash his enemy on the rocks. Seas open before him and overwhelm his pursuing foe. Harvests ripen or fail, tides rise or fall, frost or sunshine comes, a great man dies or a new great man appears, just as though all were bent on doing the best possible for him. But it is not luck; it is not destiny. It is the man and his opportunity meeting together. It is the little Monitor appearing in Hampton Roads just in the nick of time to save a nation's fleet and to revolutionize the naval systems of the world. It is the timely word in a hot debate which turns the scale toward peace, or justice, or honor. Life is full of these critical opportunities. Who would not wish to be the man of the hour, of the moment, to know how to do or to say, just the right thing when so much depends on the doing or the saying of it? to be able to say the Open Sesame, or whatever may be the countersign mutually understood by the Angel and the spirit of the iron gate, which unlocks the mystery, releases the power, and sends it forth on its beneficent mission! The gate opens, next, the passageway to Power. Freedom is merely the negative side of opportunity; it is of no avail unless it passes on to power. Men should not be blamed for loving power. It is one of the marks of the godlike in us. It was the Creator's first gift to man. "And God said, let man have dominion." The young man should not be warned against coveting power. "Covet earnestly the best gifts," and power is one of them. All men instinctively admire the man of power. They cannot always withhold their admira- tion, even when the power is abused, but it is the power they admire and not the abuse of it. That which makes youth admirable, that which attracts crowds to see athletic sports, is the spectacle of power, or at least of potency, power in the promise. But what is the source of power, what is its secret? One very marked characteristic of all great manifestations of power is calmness. When nature performs her great feats, THE DOOR OPENING OF ITSELF 281 she never has to try very hard; her great work is not done by storms and earthquakes, but by sunshine, and dew, and frost, and "the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath." The great men of power never seem to try very hard. We cannot imagine Shakespeare perspiring over Macbeth, and we know that Newton was lying on the grass when he thought for the first time the greatest thought of the modern ages. And what a majestic calmness was that of Jesus himself when he uttered those mighty words which were to upheave this whole planet ! If it had been necessary, I suppose Peter's attendant angel, doubtless one of those angels of God that excel in strength, could have poised a huge bar upon a solid fulcrum and with tremendous force and great crashing noise have wrenched the ponderous gate off its hinges. But what was such power compared with that which went forth silently and gently, in obedience to which the gate opened of its own accord! Power comes to one from his being in such alliance with things, with forces, with hearts, with wills, that they will all serve him of then* own accord. It is a pretty conceit of Emerson's that when man wanted a messenger swifter than wind or steam to carry his messages, the lightning came to him and said: "I will take your message for you; I am going your way and would just as lief as not; no trouble at all; am glad to oblige you." And so man has got this great, silent, swift, million-handed, million-tongued, million-penned power. And so it is through all the realms of power. A man must know how to get the powers of the universe to serve him of their own accord, or rather, he must be such that they will be glad to serve him. Scripture speaks of one who is in league with the stones of the field, and poetry goes but a step farther when it represents them as following to his music. The secret then of power is that a man must be such a man, such in knowl- edge, in integrity, hi sympathy with all truth and all reality, that power will come to him from all the sources of power and go out from him in all ways of beneficence. 282 THE VERY ELECT And this prepares us to see that the open gate leads next to Service. This universe has no place and no use for any fact, or force, or being, that has not an end beyond itself. The term " altruistic" is now in common speech; the principle is as old as the first protoplasmic cell created. Prof. Drum- mond has shown, if it needed any showing, that evolution involves altruism. When this principle rises into the sphere of free-will we call it service the best possible answer to the old question, "What is the chief end of man?" Service; power used beneficently. Our thought now approaches the supreme question, the question of all questions. Hitherto we have been thinking of the spirit of the universe: the question now comes to the heart of the universe, to the heart of God. Has God a heart? Is the supreme being in this universe supreme force, supreme will, or supreme love? Does God take highest delight in having his own way, or in devising and operating beautiful mechanisms, or in maintaining celestial judicatures; or in creating, and inspiring, and helping, noble and beautiful beings, intelligent and good and happy, like himself? Is God also altruistic? As we have seen that the highest attribute of man is the spirit of service, shall we find its counterpart and antitype in God, and say of him that his highest attribute is the spirit of blessing? To deny this of God is the worst atheism; to doubt it is despair; to believe it is to get the true inspiration of life. Because if the Omnipotent Spirit of the Universe, that spirit which is in all things, all forces, all events, is the spirit of blessing, in full sympathy with the spirit of service, then, of course, to him who is going forth on his mission of service, all doors will open of their own accord. This will not dispense with strenuous exertion on his part. Not without toil, and conflict, and blood does service reach its ends, because temporarily sin can and does impede and thwart the omnipotent spirit of blessing. Man suffers, and the heart of God suffers too, in this stress and strife. But the issue of THE DOOR OPENING OF ITSELF 283 every such crisis is that great and effectual doors are opened and service goes forth to new achievements. The Redeemer is crucified, but the Cross draws all men to the Crucified. The disciples are persecuted, but persecution scatters them over the world and opens a thousand new doors to them. It is hard to be a slave, but slavery opens the door for Christ- ianity into Caesar's palace. So it was in the beginning, and so a thousand times since. The spirit of service is never finally baffled because he that is with it is greater than he that is in the world. The one thing which in this world is always sure of success, real if not apparent success, is a good deed, service, power beneficently used, because the omnipotent spirit of blessing, the very heart of God, goes out with it. Finally, the thought comes to us of the open gateway to that fair prospect which includes all we have seen and is larger and grander than all the gateway into Me, that larger, fuller, richer, more abounding life which our Lord said he came to earth to bring to us. What we live for is life; what we study for, and labor for, and pray for, is more life. Life is not in order to salvation, but salvation is in order to life. What the heart of the young man and the young woman is saying to teachers and books and experience is: "Open to me wider the gate of life." What is life? What makes life larger and richer? First, knowledge. When the poor freedman slowly spelt his way through his first sentence by the light of his pine knot in his cabin and read, "Thou God seest me," and then jumped to his feet and shouted, "John Simons, you can read; John Simons, you are a man!" and when Kepler, after working out his problem in astronomy, with uplifted head and solemn voice exclaimed, "0 God, I think thy thoughts after thee," it was one and the same thrilling consciousness of being greatened and glorified by knowledge. It is sometimes said that knowledge begets pride. Let us hope that it does; not the silly pride that puffeth up, but the noble and solemn pride of being privileged to see and think, and enjoy and 284 THE VERY ELECT impart those great realities on which all true life depends. Secondly, life is action. Life comes to the consciousness of itself, of its powers and capacities, by action. He who has learned the joy of glorious activity has no sympathy with that conception of life which deified ease and sloth in the gods of Epicurus. He sympathizes rather with that exhilarating utterance of the Lord Jesus, "The Father worketh hitherto, and I work." The true man does not ask the world to excuse him from work: he is all the time saying to it, "Give me more work: give me more inducements to work." Often the world does not see, often the man himself does not see, that he is working not for the money, or the fame, but for the work itself, the joy of it, the sense of power, and of mastery it brings to him. Few things are more pitiful than the envy the man who cannot work feels for the man who can. Only give me back, he feels, the great privilege of activity, the delight of planning and executing and succeeding; give me even the pain of a strenuous failure with the hope of succeeding at the next trial, and you may have all else the world has to give. And highest and best of all, life is love, friendship, society, com- munion of mind with mind and heart with heart. It is sometimes painful to think of the solitude of God, but this pain is relieved when we think of God as having created beings in his own image and likeness on purpose that he might have the pleasures of society, of communion with them. Is it too much to say that we defraud God, that we frustrate his purpose, in so far as we refuse him that communion which all genuine souls yearn for, divine or human, and for the sake of which he gave us our being? But for God or man life is love, living in and with and for other beings. I said at the outset that freedom is sweet to be one's own self and not another's self; but it is sweeter still to devote this self to the welfare of another to be mother to a child to be a Doctor McClure to all who need him in three parishes to be a Sister Dora to the sufferers in a hospital. Strange and pitiful waste THE DOOR OPENING OF ITSELF 285 of life this seems to some! "Oh, you need not pity me," is the reply of the true man or woman! "Life offers few such ecstacies as I feel, when I see my poor ministrations conferring health and hope and joy, in place of pain and distress and despair. I have some faint conception of how God feels, who is over all blessed for ever; blessed, I am sure, in the main, because he can confer blessings so liberally and so magnifi- cently." And this must have been in the heart of the apostle James, the practical and prosaic James, when he called the law of love, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, the royal law, as though the regal splendor of it had for this once quickened his pulse into a throb of admiration. Does the gateway into this larger and richer life open to the youth of its own accord? Yes, if the angel of God is with him, leading him, and if he follows his leading. If the other angel, the bad angel who walks also by his side, and whispers in his ear seductive words, tempting to sloth, and vice, and folly, if he prevails over him, then to him another gate opens, just as easily and spontaneously, the gate to bondage, to feebleness, to lethargy, to death, the gate over which Dante read, "Aban- don hope, all ye who enter here!" But if the youth shuts his ear to those false voices, and puts his hand into the hand of God's angel, he will find a way prepared for him which no gates nor bars can obstruct a way which for him is the best way, because divine wisdom has chosen it for him a way which may lead him through green pastures and by still waters, or may lead him, as it led Peter, to toil and conflict and martyr- dombut will infallibly lead him to freedom, to power, to service, to life, to victory, to the life that is real because eternal, to life eternal, to life victorious and triumphant and divine. To the Graduating Class: There is always a strong temptation to use such an occasion as this for studying and discussing some one of the great open 286 THE VERY ELECT questions of the day, but I like rather to look upon it as the closing class-room exercise, in which it is permitted to me in behalf of all your instructors, and under conditions which help to deepen impressions, to give you our final counsel and cheer. We wish you to look out upon the world before you as a fair field for your honorable ambition. Our tuition has been all lost upon you if your hearts today are not full of ambition, of high hopes, of noble faiths, of lofty resolutions. You have no right to appropriate all these years of exemption from the world's work and then drop to the level of a commonplace, purposeless life. It makes us impatient sometimes that the undergraduate should seem in some things to set before him- self a standard of conduct lower than that of other young men, but no college sentiment, and no outside sentiment tolerates in a young graduate any standard but the highest. What a reflection it would be on us, on the intellectual and moral tone of our college, and of college work and college life personally, if on commencement day, for example, the style of the graduat- ing addresses should be low-keyed, flippant, lacking in serious- ness and depth. But nobody would ask more of you, I believe God himself would be measurably satisfied with you, if you carry the true college ideal of manhood and womanhood into practical life. What is that ideal? What special obligation rests on college men and women because they are such? That is the question I have tried to answer for you today. A college career is at once an opportunity and an obligation. It is an opportunity in that it opens wide to you the gate of life of a large, free, rich life; it is an obligation in that it calls on you to enter with all your heart and soul into this life in order that you may not only enjoy that life for yourselves, but may enrich the life of others and glorify human life itself. And now, as you pass on to a new stage in this life, you will come under conditions which are at once more severe and more generous. There is no surer evidence of a wise superintending providence than that this universe does not favor the laggard THE DOOR OPENING OF ITSELF 287 and the weakling, but offers splendid reward to the patient and strenuous. To all appearance a great, frowning, sullen, iron gate shuts against you every entrance into life. Some see only this, and life to them is one long, whimpering complaint against the hard conditions with which they are beset. Even if God's angel should offer to them his guidance and he does not usually come to such as these they would complain that he came too early in the morning. But such, I trust, are not you. Your very presence -here today means to you and I congratulate you on your honest pride in view of it means that you have well learned some of life's hard lessons, and tasted some of the sweets of life's conquests. And now, if I may, I want to hearten you for your future. I know of only one way of doing this. " God is in his heaven: all's right with the world." God's angel, God's Holy Spirit is in the world, ever ready to attend and guide those who have set their hearts on doing the work which God and all good men are interested in. Go with him; put your hand in his; and as you go on together, all the gates of life will open to you of their own accord. WHO WILL SHOW US ANY GOOD Who will show us any good? Psalm iv:6. THERE are few so interesting or so beautiful sights as the face of youth in a mood of thoughtful reverie, such as I have sometimes seen of a morning in the college chapel, such as I have often seen on Baccalaureate Sunday, such as I may be looking down upon at the present moment a face and a look that make one feel at once his opportunity and his incompe- tency. It is a query in flesh and blood, a soul yielding itself to the workings of wonder and doubt and fear and hope and aspiration and limitless possibilities, taking shape and vanish- ing, beckoning and eluding, in the dim vision of the future. It is the mind and heart of youth confronting, confronted by, the mystery of life, yearning to know, eager to meet, impatient to realize, what life has to offer. Sometimes the eagerness of the look is dashed with a tinge of dread, as though a not always happy experience had made one a little timorsome. Some- times I trust seldom one sees the face of the cynic, indicat- ing that even thus early some one has learned the bad lesson which satiety teaches, the passionless indifference to which there is " nothing new and nothing true, and it's no matter." Usually the look is open-eyed, frank, fearless, as of one who should say, "Tell me all, the good and the bad, the bright and the dark; it is torture to be ever watching the lips of the sphinx who knows and will not speak; tell me, ye men of knowledge and of experience, ye men of light and leading, what this mystery is which so beckons and fascinates me, which so eludes and mocks me." Now the first answer which these men are bound to make to this youthful query is that it is good that the mystery of life be not for you wholly removed, good rather that human life 288 WHO WILL SHOW US ANY GOOD 289 be always and for all, more or less a mystery. It is good that human life be deep, and varied, and intricate a river, not a brook; and therefore that it be sometimes dark, and tumultuous and fathomless; that life should not be the pretty story a child tells to her doll, but something that grown men may find worth their while, something that the angels desire to look into, something that God himself is interested in. There is for man education in the mystery of life. It teaches him modesty and reticence and awe and reverence. It compels him to blend reserve with his daring, to temper his aspirations with humility. If with too audacious step, he starts forth into life, pride ruling his will, loving to see and choose his path, he is sometimes moved to pray with Newman "Lead Thou me on; I do not ask to see The distant scene, one step enough for me." Sometimes, I say; not always, not habitually, not in his best moments. This hymn of Newman's is good comfort in moments of despondency; it is not good stimulus and incentive in times of outlook and high purpose and consecration. For this query in the face and the heart of youth is a divine query evidence that the soul is not dead nor slumbering, but awake to its high destiny. Christ came that we might have life life in all its abundance and the first natural instinct of a healthy soul is a desire to know its opportunities, to take account of the inheritance into which it has been born and to which it has a divine right. The most pressing and the most momentous question a youth can ask is, "How can I know the resources of life while they are still possibilities and not yet experiences?" sad experiences, perhaps, when with better knowledge and foresight they might have been different. Are there any solutions of the problems of life, or any helps to working out these solutions of which I can avail myself? All through my college course I have been thinking other men's thoughts after them, availing myself of other men's 19 290 THE VERY ELECT wisdom sometimes in results, sometimes in methods. Who in my quest respecting life will show me any good? Where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding in this the most important of all subjects of human learning and research? Will science give you any available help in this quest? Herbert Spencer in a valuable and in many respects an ad- mirable essay on Education propounds the question, "What kind of knowledge is of most worth," and answers it in a single word, "Science." And in the main he is right, for science is the sum of the knowledge which man can attain by obser- vation and reasoning. Science is much more than physical science that, and much more. All knowledge becomes scientific when it becomes large and exact and rationalized. In this sense science has added much to the resources of life and to the mastery of life itself something by its contents, much more by its methods. The scientific spirit which is entering into the conduct of life, even into the domains of morals and religion, is banishing guessing and haphazarding and blundering, and is substituting therefor discernment and vigilance and method, and the organization of success. A great treasure-house of wisdom to the student of life is in biography. I do not say history, because we are now con- cerned not with the corporate but with the individual life of men. And by far the most important part of biography is autobiography; not what some observer or compiler may say about a man but what the man himself reveals of his own inner life. In most biographies that are worth the reading there are brief passages perhaps only one or two in a volume which are so significant, so eye-opening, that not only does the volume get its right-to-be from them, but the man himself seems to have lived just to get these few words uttered. Such were Walter Scott's well known words on his death-bed, that there is nothing worth living for but to be good ; such was Darwin's confession that by long neglect of his spiritual WHO WILL SHOW US ANY GOOD 291 faculties they had become atrophied and he had lost the use of them. This is why the thinking world waits impatiently for the lives of such men as Tennyson and Phillips Brooks, and why when they appear their letters and conversations are what we read most eagerly ; for there we get nearest to the soul-life, to the secret of individuality and power. This too reconciles us to the providence the unequal and unfair providence, it may seem which permits some men to tower so far above the level of the rest of us, that out of their ampler endowments and richer experience, great, helpful influences may come to us for the guidance of life. But by far the most fruitful biography is that which we get by personal acquaintance with men who have a deep experience of life. Not seldom one hour's contact with a greater soul, more richly endowed, and of wider experi- ence, has made life a wholly different thing to a soul that came under its influence. How we all yearn to meet, or wish we could have met, certain men, of whom we have the feeling that they could help us out of some of the perplexities of our thought and life! It is more than eagerness over a celebrity which makes one say, "I saw Virgil," and another, "And did you see Shelley?" and which makes us envy above all men living or dead those who heard the Master himself, or St. Paul, or St. John; and sympathize with those who crowded and jostled each other that they might but touch the hem of Jesus' garment, or get within the shadow of St. Peter passing by. And again, the lessons of life are enshrined in literature; in the best literature of the ages, and especialty in the best poetry; and let no one be surprised if I say the best fiction, remembering that in all the ages holy men of God have spoken as they were moved by the Holy Ghost in fiction, in symbol and parable, and drama. That which gives literature its chief significance and value to man is that it is the recorded experience of the noblest natures. Matthew Arnold has de- 292 THE VERY ELECT fined poetry as the criticism of life; perhaps if he had lived now he would have adopted a newer and happier phrase, the ap- preciation of life. The older literature is largely tragic; the soul struggling with the deep problems of life without a clear voice from heaven to assure us that God is love and that it is eternally well with the righteous. The later literature leads into the promised land by the pillar of cloud and fire, searches and illumines the darker places of life, and floods all the spaces of human experience with the light of a hope that is full of immortality. The deepest thought on human life now finds expression in poetry, just as in the older time it found expres- sion through prophecy which after all, was but one form of poetry, the impassioned utterance of truths so deeply felt that to declare them was a mission. If today a man feels that he has a message to deliver, some new solution of the old, hard problems of life, some new and brighter conception of life's possibilities; or if the growing thought and enlarging experience of mankind in general gradually evolves some new conviction or faith, how does this new thought get currency and access to the mind and heart of men? Sometimes, though rarely, by means of the pulpit, when a great preacher like Robertson, or Beecher, or Bushnell, or Phillips Brooks persuades the people to listen and ponder and appropriate and disseminate the great truths which they utter. But usually the great epoch-making truth gets its utterance through a poem or a story. The men who have done most to give to nineteenth- century life its peculiar shape and tinge, have been Walter Scott, Wordsworth, and Tennyson; the first by lifting common life out of its prosaic dulness and imparting to it zest and romance, and a breezy, healthy activity; the second, Words- worth, by restoring the long-lost but ever natural connection between man and the nature which surrounds him and is in sympathy with him; and Tennyson, by adjusting thought and feeling and life to the new and deeper philosophy which is the product of our age. To how many persons, for example, WHO WILL SHOW US ANY GOOD 293 has 'In Memoriam' brought comfort to perplexing doubt, the larger hope with the larger horizon, and a reconciliation of inquiry and faith, which for them changed the aspect and relations of everything in the life that now is and in that which is to come! But the Psalmist's answer to his own question brings us still more into the heart of things. " Who will show us any good? Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us." Life's paths may have the light of God upon them, and then, though not always clear and bright, they are safe, and they lead up to brightness beyond. Here we reach the principle of faith in the conduct of life. When science and history and poetry have done for us all they can, they still leave untold much of the mystery of life; we are still often tempted to say " Behold we know not anything. We are but children crying in the night." And yet we believe that outside of us, above us and beyond us and all around us, is an infinity of wisdom, of just the kind of wisdom we need and crave, if only we could draw upon it. And so we reach out toward it, we send up longing desires after it, we open our souls to receive it, and we believe it comes to us, and we call this attitude faith. We believe that we have a natural affinity with higher intelligence and nobler feeling, and grander will, and we believe that it is possible to get into a sort of electric connection with this diviner life, and to have our own being filled, and greatened, and exalted, and glorified, by the inflow of this divine wisdom and power and love. All the great souls of our race have believed this, and have felt and known that the life which they lived, the life of intellect and heart and will, was something beyond their own, something which they have described by different words, but all in a way which recognized a divine inflow of knowledge and power; and they have said, "I think thy thoughts after thee, God;" they have said, "I hear a voice ye cannot hear, I see a hand ye cannot see;" they have said, "I have heard the word of God," and "I stand here and cannot otherwise God help me!" 294 THE VERY ELECT The man of faith believes that this world is very dear to God; that however many other worlds he may have made and peopled, he certainly loves this world and the human creatures who live in it; that he yearns over his children here like as a father; that he has always been and still is in constant com- munication with them; that he has inspired holy men to reveal something of his power and wisdom and love in such a way as to help and cheer them in the way of life; and chief est of all his proofs of interest in us, he has put all of himself that our human nature could bear in co the person and life of him who was Son of God and Son of Man. And in this faith, in the belief that he may have and does have God's true and very guidance and help, in the Bible, in the work wrought by Jesus Christ, in the present help of God's Holy Spirit, he thinks, and plans, and works, every day, and always, and everywhere, throughout his earthly life. As distinguished from men who do not have, and live by, this faith, he is sometimes called a mystic: and in so far as this term implies that he believes, and acts on the belief, that things unseen, and intangible, and unverifiable by sense or understanding are real, are the most real of all things, and do really afford the best light to walk in by day, and the best stars to steer by at night, then he is indeed a mystic. And if we will think of it, the best men we know are mystics; and all the great souls are mystics; and the natures and the lives that have this mystical quality in them in large measure, mingled duly with the more prosaic and terrestrial elements, but yet dominant and supreme in the conduct of life, are the men whom we all admire and honor and would gladly follow if we could; the men who dare grandly, the men who do the things other men call impossibilities, the men who make up the list, and are always adding to the list begun in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, men of whom the world is not worthy, but who have made the world what it is, and are making and are going to make the world more and more the world God had in mind when he WHO WILL SHOW US ANY GOOD 295 made it, and the world Christ thought it worth his while at infinite cost to redeem. Have I implied in all this that the wisdom needed for the conduct of life is something profoundly difficult, so difficult that life is a great hazard, so that only a few exceptional souls can get so much of the secret of life as shall enable them to live worthily? Yes, as I have already said, life is a problem to be mastered, is an equation of many unknown quantities to be solved; is and always will be, a most profound, and most baffling, and partly for this reason a most intensely interesting, mystery. But life as a philosophy to be studied is one thing; life to be humanly lived is another thing. Say not, Who shall ascend into heaven, or descend into the deep to fetch us this wisdom; it is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and hi thy heart. In a German tale a youth goes out from his home into the wide, unknown world, carrying all his effects in a little bundle into which a stray leaf has got, containing three verses of Scripture, and amid all his wanderings and troubles one or another of these three always brings to him the warning, the cheer, the guidance which he needs. There are a few great and com- prehensive Christian principles which thoroughly believed in and lived by will infallibly ensure the success of life. If I were to name them you would exclaim: "Why, every child knows these. We didn't need a four year's college course and a great academic function at the end of it, to teach us these truisms." For all that, they are, I can assure you, the last attainments, the height and flower of human knowledge. And do we, do any of us, do the best of us, really know them? The first is that the supreme good in life is to be good; that not to be rich, and strong, and wise, and happy, but to be good, is the best of all things, better even than to live forever; better to be good for a short life here or hereafter than to be not good for a longer time here or hereafter; that goodness is better than everlastingness. Secondly, that the ideal and model of goodness is God, the Being we look up to and worship; that 296 THE VERY ELECT to love and worship the perfect Being is to put life in its right relations to the supreme life, and so, and so only, to make its higher possibilities actual, to bring the divine into the human and so transform the life which were otherwise merely animal and sensual into the spiritual and the divine. And thirdly, that the way to do this, the only way by which it is feasible, is to have the help of God himself, of God's Holy Spirit bring- ing us into living relation with Jesus Christ, our Teacher, Re- deemer, Saviour, Friend. And in this light we see the merit of faith and of the life of faith. It is not a mere shrewd calculating of probabilities and casting in our lot with the probably winning side. It is such a sympathy with the good, and with God as the personification of the good, and with Jesus Christ as the manifestation of the eternal good, that we are willing to risk everything, and if need be surrender everything, for the sake of that with which we sympathize. A man cannot in this chequered life believe that all the advantages are with goodness, unless he is in full sympathy with goodness, come what may. " Whosoever," says Jesus Christ, "is willing to lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it;" and he means thereby that the only way in which to find and get the fullness of a human life is to give it, to give ifc away if you please, for his sake and as he wills. ADDRESS TO THE CLASS Life, at twenty-two years of age, with a college course fairly well improved behind it, and a future radiant with possibilities before it, is well nigh the most interesting moment in human experience. Perhaps you have looked forward to graduation as a gladsome and frolic time. You find it otherwise. Unless I overrate your depth and sincerity you find these passing hours among the soberest of your lives. The choice of a call- ing; the spot of earth on which your life will be lived; the plan of your life, its spirit, its altitude, its range, its meeting with other lives, especially with one other life all these queries WHO WILL SHOW US ANY GOOD 297 vaguely and subconsciously present to you, make thought in these days half a delicious dream and half a sense of over- powering responsibility. It is not a time when one can follow Sydney Smith's advice to "take short views," or with Newman "not ask to see the distant scene." I am sure you would rather stand tiptoe on the misty mountain tops and see as far and as clearly into life as human vision, even as far as human faith can penetrate. My message to you today is, that you can see the great realities of life if you will only look earnestly for them, as clearly as you might have seen Mount Mansfield this morn- ing as clearly as you might have seen Arcturus last night. The accidents and incidents and circumstances of life we may not foresee, the great outstanding features of it we may we can foresee them because we can determine them. We can foresee lives made up of fidelity, and courage, and service, and faith in the eternal verities and the fruits of such faith, because we can determine by God's gracious help they shall be such lives. That they shall be bright and serene and filled with content and joy we cannot foresee, because we cannot by our own wills make them so. Your classmates, who have gone to posts of hardship and danger, and whom with those from other classes we remember with our affectionate regard today, can be, and we believe they will be, brave and loyal and faithful to duty, but we cannot be sure that they will escape bullets and shells and pestilence and come back to us safe and sound. We can only commend them to God and leave them in his hand. But the best thing in life is not to be safe and comfortable and jocund; it is to be true and faithful, and high-minded, and to love God and do good. Now I deem it a great satisfaction that I can stand before you this day, and speaking in the name of the University and for all my colleagues, can say with all confidence and with your full assent, that we have taught you to put your confi- dence in the things that are real and true, the deep and the 298 THE VERY ELECT high things of life, and not in the things that are false and triv- ial and superficial and scenic. It is one of the greatest bene- fits of a course of liberal training that it teaches this distinc- tion and confers the habit of making it to discriminate, to appreciate, to pursue the things that are really praiseworthy the things that are really worth living for and striving for with all one's might, and I have tried to show you in what kind of a life these studies and activities culminate, in a life of faith in the highest and the best, and in the virtues and services and consecrations in which such a life is fruitful. If it should be which God forbid that this state of war should continue and broaden out into a condition which would lay a great burden upon the heart and conscience of our people, then as in former times, we should expect that students' patriotism and students' heroism would show what virtues, what ideals, college life generates and fosters. But whether in peace or war, in the home, in the professions, in the industries, life is, and should be regarded by us as being an opportunity for living, for entering more and more into the fullness of life; the life of knowledge, of faith, of power, of service; the life of God's children and Christ's friends and fellow-workers, the life which partaking of his life is at once the life truly human and the life divine. LEADERS OF MEN Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people. II Samuel, vii: 8. THIS is so frequent an occurrence in human experience, the calling of men from the sheepcote to national leadership, that it has become a commonplace of moralists. But it never ceases to be an impressive fact, and may well be studied for the instruction . with which it is charged. The callings of Divine Providence rest on good reasons which we may well seek to discover. Why are shepherds of sheep so often called to be kings of men? I. Let us try to get the essential out of that which is incidental in the fact under review. The pastoral calling stands for much in itself. It is human life as first organized, social life in its freshness and simplicity. Idealized in after ages it inspires the poetry of the idyl and the pastoral. When life becomes luxurious and corrupt, a Tacitus or a Rousseau recalls the pastoral life to men's imagination, and it becomes the fash- ion to mimic its simplicity and innocence. But that which is good in the pastoral life takes on a larger good in the more developed agricultural life with its fixed homes, its seedtime and harvests, its granaries and fruits. God calls men to leadership also from the furrow, from the harvest field, from the garden and the vineyard. And we cannot stop here. From every humble calling in life men have been advanced to high station from fishing and tent-making, from typesetting and rail-splitting, from the tanner's vat and the shoe-maker's bench, from the sailing craft and the ferry boat, from opening and shutting of a steam valve, from a hundred arts and industries. And was not the world's supreme leader taken from the bench of the carpenter? 299 300 THE VERY ELECT But we would make a great though common mistake, if we should conclude from these facts that the larger life is a soil in which the masterful virtues cannot grow. This life also has furnished to mankind its share of leaders. The noble families of the nations have had their representatives in the fields where great deeds have been wrought. Noblesse oblige has been not only a cry but a power. We look espe- cially to this life for certain qualities essential to the highest manhood, for what we call the chivalrous qualities, courtesy, refinement, a delicate sense of the respect due to others, toleration, frankness, charity. But these are counsels of per- fection, not fundamental principles, flowers rather than roots of character. A man can have them and not be a leader. The prime, essential, indispensable virtues and qualities which make strong and prevailing manhood and womanhood are of another order. What are they? Why do we look for them, why does God himself seem to find them more frequently, in some callings than in others, and how can we retain them as life becomes more complex and artificial? II. We shall very soon in this quest, I think, reach the conclusion that what we call character depends largely on the existence and paramountcy of a few simple primordial virtues which are within the reach of all, not dependent on special gifts or opportunities. They are: 1. The Economic virtues: industry, thrift, sobriety, includ- ing also an instinctive and persistent horror of waste, waste of substance, of time, of opportunity, of life, of self. A teacher, an employer of men, can usually pick out those who are fore- ordained to promotion and success. They are those who are toiling upward while their companions loiter and dawdle and sleep. One great advantage which the shepherd lad and the boy from the artisan's family have is that these are virtues of necessity to them and having been once acquired are available in other and higher affairs. 2. Next are the Domestic virtues: love of kin, fidelity to LEADERS OF MEN 301 home and friends and neighbors, the respect of the sexes for each other and for the sanctity of marriage. Not only are these virtues hi themselves, but they safeguard all other virtues. One who keeps himself in close touch with father and mother and sister, who feels that everywhere kind eyes and kind hearts are following him and that to bring gladness to those dear eyes and hearts would be the greatest joy to him, will never go far astray and may even for their sake do things beyond himself. 3. Again, the Patriotic virtues. We have seen in this country and have read the same story over and over again in the history of other countries how strong a force hi the development of character is the principle of patriotism; how it sobers, steadies and enlarges manhood, and womanhood too; how, when the emergency comes which rouses patriotic feeling, it suddenly, in a single day, changes a boy into a man, a girl into a woman; how it pushes aside with a Dante-like contempt those who can only carp and jeer while others do the fighting and the work, and steps out into the arena of strife ready to dare all and do all for some just and holy cause. 4. And, crowning all, the Religious virtues, those which have their source in religion, and especially hi what the Scriptures call the fear of God, which does not mean dread of God, terror in the thought of God, and yet is not the same as the love of God, which is a high attainment, the outcome of experience and reflection and prayer; but that primary right feeling toward God which is made up of awe and reverence and devoutness, the feeling toward God which men have who get their religion from nature and much personal thought and the spirit of God, rather than from books and human teachings. Other environments are favorable to other types of religion, beautiful types some of them the ascetic, the contemplative, the mystic; but the religion which tends to make men staunch, robust in practical affairs, good at need, good in all winds and weathers, is the kind which comes through the experiences of shepherds and tent-makers and fishermen. 302 THE VERY ELECT III. But the youths that have had this training in the pas- toral and home-bred virtues, can they keep it in the larger life which opens before them? No doubt the life of freedom and opportunity endangers these virtues. They were never more sympathetically portrayed than in the "Cottar's Satur- day Night/' and yet Burns went out from such a home to encounter the temptations of luxurious society and to fall before them. The son of the man whom God called from the sheep cote to leadership lost the fundamental virtues of which we have spoken, lost his strenuous manhood and became a voluptuary, lost domestic virtue, lost national pride and loyalty in a lax cosmopolitanism, lost the fear of God, and in consequence descended from the high place he ought to have kept to be a roue*, a cynic, a trifler, a virtuoso in " ivory and apes and peacocks." Men doubtless moralized on it as men do now, and said, "See what has befallen the son of the man whom God called from the sheepcote to be leader of Israel, and know that wealth and prosperity and power are not good for man; they ensnare and corrupt him; it were better for him to have followed the sheep." But is this so? Is such moralizing just? Were it not strange that God has made this life full of things of beauty and made us eager to get them, has made us capable of manifold lovely arts and high adornments and enrichments of life, and made these things the rewards of virtue, of earnest striving and patient well-doing, and then has put his curse on them and made them agencies for our corruption and undoing? Shall we bid the shepherd lad remain in his sheepcote, the blacksmith stick to his forge, the poet live on in his cottage, lest in the great world they come to grief? No; but we will say, "Be the King if you can, but be the Shepherd King. Be the United States Senator if you can, but keep the virtues of the blacksmith's home in the senatorial life. When you feel that the society around you is growing artificial and intercourse is insincere and everything sophisti- LEADERS OF MEN 303 cated and unreal, go back and get in touch again with the sim- pler and more genuine life out of which you came. As the Queen used to go to Balmoral and sit by the ingle of her humble cottagers and learn useful lessons of life; as Mr. Lin- coln loved to have a chat with one of the plain men from among whom he came; as every wise statesman consults with his constituents back in the country homes; as the divine, learned hi rabbinical and patristic lore gets some of his best divinity and his best sermons by talking with his sexton or his gardener; so it is good, it is wholesome to the mind, and sanitary to the soul, for every one to keep connection with that life, whatever it may be, which is nearest to nature and reality. Again, we will bid our young aspirants cherish the spirit of youth and cling to the best things gained in youth. Words- worth wished that his days should be joined each to each in natural piety. It were good for us all that the best of each period of life should pass on to the next. It were good to keep as long as possible the ideality of youth. There is for instance the college idealism. One who has had the great privilege of being a member of a college has a tie which binds him to the conception of life for which a college stands. And then there are one's church relations. Most right-minded young persons in these times enter into church relations. They do this in those youthful years when conscience is tender and active, when the heart readily responds to the appeals of divine love, and the will rejoices in acts of holy obedience. It is good to hold fast to this early faith. It is not a sign of superiority to lose it, for it is usually lost by neglect. In these stirring times when the trumpet is ever ringing out the challenge, Who is on the Lord's side? it is good to feel that this question is decided, that one is committed, and pledged, and can be counted on in the good enterprises in which the Christian Church is leader. And this brings us to say finally, let us cultivate a religion which puts due emphasis on the ethical and practical side of human life. I do not plead for an undue emphasis on this 304 THE VERY ELECT side to the disparagement of the imagination, the emotional, the mystic elements in the religious life, those which make men devout and unworldly and saintly. But, strange as it may sound, these are the easier attainments in religion. It was easier for Solomon to make that sublime prayer at the dedication of the temple than to live a blameless life. It is easier for any of us to be pious than to be honest. But hard as it is to be honest, to be true to that in us and above us which is deepest and highest and best, it is easier with religion than without it. To bring heavenly motives down to help us in the discharge of earthly duties is one of the holiest offices of religion. Therefore let the man whose integrity is in danger of being overborne by conventionalities seek aid in a religion which is strongly realistic, which never gets away from the fear of God, which can sing and soar with St. Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians and the thirteenth of First Corinthians, but never lets go of the Sermon on the Mount and the Epistle of James; which so requires hard work during six days, that Sunday will be welcomed as a day of real rest; which sym- pathizes with and blesses men who use tools and ply manual arts: which mellows and sanctifies the cares and troubles, joys and sorrows of family and kindred, friends and neighbors; which calls no human art or relation common which it can fill with its blessing and so make holy. Thus in great cities, amid civilization however splendid, in society however luxurious, ministered to by all the arts, beset by all the corruptions of modern life, young men and maidens may keep themselves as simple, and pure, and true-hearted, and strong as in the days of antique virtues, and may add thereto the new powers and facilities for living which the new civilization, essentially a Christian civilization, has put into their hands for the adorn- ment and enrichment of their lives. Members of the Graduating Class: I suppose it would be regarded as a bit of baccalaureate flattery to assume that college graduates are foreordained to LEADERS OF MEN 305 be leaders of men. As individuals, of course, they are not all so destined; as a class they are. More and more in our time and country they are coming to be, and are expected to be, leaders in the communities in which they live. Some leaders of few, some of many. When a man emerges into public prominence and his biography is given, we expect to be told at what college he was graduated. This implies the acknowl- edged potency of a liberal education in life. But it implies much more than that. Graduation in a college of high grade selects men and women by their moral more than by their intellectual qualities. Many are called but few are chosen. Many start but few arrive. A hundred enter a class ana fifty are graduated. Not that all who fall out by the way fail because they are unworthy to reach the end. That we could noc say, remembering those who have been with you for a time and whom you miss today. But in general in our American communities the struggle for survival to the end of a college course, the struggle with poverty and hardship and the chances of life, is a moral struggle, and success means the survival of the qualities that make up strong masterful character. And the same law holds all through life. Success in any high sense is moral superiority, the ascendency of virtue. And the virtue which here prevails is the aggregate of the simple and elemen- tary virtues which all men may have if they will. What I have been trying to do for you today is to glorify in your minds these simple virtues, to help you to see that they make a plain, humble life bright and strong and even noble, and that no other qualities however brilliant can in any life supply the lack of them. You will be quite likely to meet men who are not college men and who yet may be your superiors men who will do more for your art or profession, more for invention, or statesmanship, or philanthropy, or religion. It may be because they will have more genius than you; but more prob- ably because they will have more industry, more resoluteness, a higher purpose. 20 306 THE VERY ELECT Revolving very often in my mind during my many years of college experience the question of the relative importance of the moral and the intellectual factors in the product which we call success in life success of a high order, I mean I have come to the deliberate conclusion that they stand in the ratio of at least three to one; that saying nothing about heaven above and the life hereafter, the worth of a man or a woman here and now is one part intellect and three parts affection, conscience and will. Has one a brilliant mind? With adequate moral force behind it and within it, it becomes a mighty power; not so consorted and energized, it avails little. Are you conscious of having only moderate intellectual gifts? You can triple their momentum by aid from the moral side of your nature if that is true and strong. But some of you may say, "I do not aspire or care to be a leader of men. I am con- tent to slip into an easy place and go through life without ambition or struggle or prominence." It is too late for you to choose that position. It is shut against you. In accepting the great trust of a liberal education, in consenting to receive from society this loan of leisure and seclusion, and the costly appliances of study, you have undertaken a great responsibility which you cannot now throw off. Noblesse oblige. You are hereby called of God to service, to influence, to the labor and dignity of leadership. Your college expects this of you. It will be disappointed if you do not, in some sphere, do some effective, helpful, honorable work. Your Alma Mater will rejoice with the great joy at once of self-congratulation and of sympathy when she hears of such good work done by you. Go with her blessing and prayers and come again to receive her felicitations and to join with her in thanksgivings. THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF LIFE Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God. Luke iv : 4- THE Baccalaureate Discourse, now a universal function in American colleges, permits itself a choice between two offices, either of them appropriate and pertinent. The first, the more alluring to the speaker and perhaps the more approved by the general college public, is a deliverance from the college stand- point upon some subject which for the time being has wide- spread public interest, using the vantage point which on this one day of all the year, the college pulpit enjoys for making college idealism heard and felt in the great world of affairs. In this view it will not be difficult to forecast the themes of this day's baccalaureates that they will sound the note of alarm in view of recent disclosures in the realm of finance and business, and taking their tone if not their text from John the Baptist in the wilderness or from the old Prophets of Israel, they will avail themselves of remonstrance, invective and appeal to awaken a new passion for righteousness among our people. While this species of address could hardly be overdone if done in the right temper, yet considering the sufficiency of it which is assured, and the possible plethora which might be wearisome and reactionary, we may not be thought recreant to any public duty, if we turn our thoughts in the other direction permitted on such an occasion, and try to help these young persons, whose interests are uppermost in our minds, to get some helpful views of the life which stretches so hopefully before a young graduate on his baccalaureate Sunday. Let us take for our theme The Spiritualization of Life. This idea is just what the college once stood for. It is what Oxford and Cambridge, after which our older colleges were 307 308 THE VERY ELECT modeled, still stand for; what a few New England and a few western and southern colleges, mainly because of their poverty, still stand for. But the invasion of the time-spirit into college life, the large infusion of technical and utilitarian studies into the curricula, and the consequent change of the whole college atmosphere and spirit, raise the question whether it can be said any longer that our colleges are the refuge of idealism and the guardians of the spiritual life. That science has an outlook upon the infinite, that the arts minister to liberal thinking and living, we most thankfully recognize. No instructed man thinks that we should or could have retained the old hierarchy of studies, or the old methods in any studies, but it is a serious question whether we are losing the idealism, the humanizing and vitalizing factors of education; if we are not, how we can make ourselves secure in the retaining of them ; if we are, how we can restore and perpetuate them. What do we mean by the question? Is the lack, which is so much lamented in certain quarters, a fact, or only a danger; a calamity to be deplored, or only a theme for the alarmist? Is human life in general, among civilized, educated, and Christian peoples, actually growing harder, coarser, or at least less refined, less intellectual, less spiritual than it was? As resources multiply, does a relatively equal amount go into the enrichment of life? We read on one day that Congress has voted five millions of dollars for a battleship, and we think how many colleges, or libraries, or hospitals, or parks, this sum would have provided; but on the next day we read that a single millionaire has invested five and a half millions in a collection of pictures and we are partially comforted. Then again we bethink ourselves of the lavish expenditure which in times of comparative straitness was bestowed on the great cathedrals, on the art treasures of Rome, and Florence, and Venice, and again we wonder whether we really care as much for the higher and finer things of life as these peoples did. And even if we do not, with some prophets of evil, see our THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF LIFE 309 civilization fast tending toward the moral standards of Imperial Rome, and Pompeii and the Paris of the Jeunesse Doree, there can be no doubt whatever that the lines of least resistance tend that way ; that if we are going to keep the best things of life predominant we must do valiant battle for them; that the men of light and leading among us must hold perpetual levy of their forces; that the Church must summon to the work all who will be on the Lord's side; that the prophets must cry aloud and spare not; and that institutions of learning and all educational forces shall stand and work and sacrifice, and if need be suffer, for giving primacy and supremacy to the things of the spirit and the claims of the highest human think- ing and living. Now to bring these generalities hi respect to which we are all of one mind down to more definite form, what are some of the influences which we may summon to our aid in the spiritualization of life, the life of the individual and of the community. First, we should rightly estimate and wisely use the sense of Beauty, which is an integral and universal (even where latent) attribute of humanity. There is no surer sign of God's presence and touch in creation than beauty a quality in- definable, but as real as extension or color. Two classes of persons set themselves against God's ordinance of beauty; the ascetic, who denies himself of it because it brings pleasure, and pleasure to him means sin; and the dullard, because he has no eye to see it and no heart to enjoy it. Both are not only mistaken ; both are guilty of wrong. One English poet, Beattie, goes so far as to question whether one who renounces beauty may hope to be forgiven! And the reason why such renuncia- tion is both a mistake and a wrong is, that because the sense of beauty adds something to life, to both its quantity and its quality, to its zest and its fulness, and that he who foregoes or refuses it, robs life of something of its contents and its perfection. Beauty as it comes from God's hand and heart 310 THE VERY ELECT is the expression of his love for, and his pleasure in 7 the thing he is making or doing. What pleasure God must have had in making this fair earth and all its possible beauties, to him present and actual! the trees, the flowers, the birds, the clouds, the mountains, the starry heavens, and above all, strong men and fair women, and beings of a higher order, if any such there are. This beauty is God's sign manual by which he says to all beings in his image, "See how I love my works, and my children, and all the operations of my hand and my mind! " And the spirituality which we put into life from this source must come from the same feeling that we see in God, the desire to put delight and the expression of it into our creation, that is, into our work, and all our doing. It is possible and it is the secret of a joyous life, to make everything we do, and even life as a whole, a work of art. The true idea of art is well summed up in one sentence of Ruskin's: "The moment we make anything useful thoroughly, it is a law of our nature that we shall be pleased with ourselves and with the thing we have made, and become desirous therefore to adorn and complete it in some dainty way with finer art expressive of our pleasure." We spiritualize work, we dignify the commonest work, we make sweeping fine, as Herbert says, when we do anything and everything, first with conscience, and then with love, and with love because with conscience, and with beauty because with love. That which is made with joyless, loveless work, is sure to be ugly. No good work will ever be done by those who hate their work. Such a spirit will always shirk and defraud and befoul what it does. In his noble address to Labor Unions in Faneuil Hall, President Eliot told the men that they were degrading labor by presenting it to themselves as something to be loathed and avoided. Their answer was, "We work to live we do not live to work." Woe be to any of us if we do not live in part at least to work, as the Father worketh hitherto, and Christ works; and if like them we do not find THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF LIFE 311 one of the chief satisfactions of life, in loving and moralizing and spiritualizing our work. Every true man is, with respect to his total life, a poet. Every true life is a work of imagina- tion, and inspiration, and of that finest and noblest art in which God and man are workers together for perfection. Another influence, refining life and elevating it, is Liter- ature; I do not say books, for the large mass of books is not literature, and not all literature is in books. In our day some of the best literature is within paper covers, and with no covers. One of the great spiritual needs of our day is that fine instinct which like the magnet among grains of steel can detect and appropriate the true literature scattered among books and periodicals and even daily newspapers. Every reader of biog- raphy must have remarked the effect of a few great books in the formation of moral ideals, an effect produced partly because the books were great, and partly also because they were few. Where did Mr. Lincoln get that fine appreciation of what is becoming in thought and expression which he showed in his Gettysburg address and his second inaugural? Where did many other men without classical training learn to think and write in what Matthew Arnold calls "the grand style," simple, strong, reserved, effective? Biography almost in- variably tells us that in youth they had access to a few books which were great literature, the Bible, Shakespeare, Bunyan, Johnson, Milton, Addison, and to few or no others. These great books were spiritualizing influences. They kept the mind intent upon the greater things of life. They did not revel in the mean and paltry and belittling themes and per- sonages of the world. They did not crowd the few hours spent in reading with scenes and actions which were best forgotten or never known. The high thoughts and pure imaginings were not diluted or debased or excluded by a lower order of associations derived from inferior books. An old Greek poet says that they are fools who know not that the half is more than the whole, in literature we might say the 312 THE VERY ELECT tenth. Ten books, the Bible heading the list, turned with daily and nightly hand, always at one's elbow for filling idle moments, near one's pillow for sleepless hours, companions of our journeyings, conned over and over, got by heart, assimilated into our blood and tissue this is one of the most potent means of spiritualizing life. And this is so because literature, the record of the best thoughts of the best men in the best words, is vital; is as Milton says, the life-blood of the master spirits, and as such conveys life to those spirits which have any kinship with it. It is a great day in the life of a youth when the right book finds him, and begins to inspire him, and to start him on a new road of attainment and pur- pose. Happy is he who has a relay of such books waiting for him one by one, as he can overtake them in his intellectual and spiritual progress. No dull days need he fear; no questionable pleasures need he resort to for keeping up an interest in life. He has one of the best safeguards against the disillusions to which enthusiasm is subject in a scoffing environment, one of the most steadfast supports of that charity which believeth, endureth, hopeth all things. Another influence which nourishes the nobler life, is choice Human Fellowship. Only in some despondent mood, or as the protest of a transient vexation, will any one but a shallow misanthropist say with Hamlet, "Man delights me not, nor woman neither." For every seeker after the best things for study and for delight, men and women are perennially inter- esting. Not only humanity in the abstract but actual men and women will repay the profoundest study. Even the men who to superficial observation are commonplace and unin- teresting, have within them the possibilities of doing and suffer- ing, of heroism and of tragedy, which cannot be foretold. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, psychologically as well as physically. Psychology is only just beginning to claim the prominence it deserves is beginning to find out that of all created things human personality is the most mysterious, THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF LIFE 313 the most interesting, the most fruitful of surprises, of admira- tion, of a kind of awe. The most famous ode of the Greek drama is a confession of awe in view of the capabilities of man worthy to make a trio with Hamlet's exclamation, "What a piece of work is a man!" and with the Psalmist's paean, "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels (or the gods.)" All the old tragedians and the Shakespeares and the Goethes and the Hugos and the Brownings have but shown us how much more joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy, pathos and ecstacy, are yet in the human heart, unrevealed and waiting for other Shakespeares and Goethes yet to come. And it is not at all necessary to go far afield to find men and women whose fellowships would ennoble and enrich and sweeten our lives. Every community has in it some unique manhood or womanhood which it were well worth our while to cultivate and to annex to our human experience. There are kinsmen and neighbors, there are those whom we are shy of and who are shy of us because they work for us, or trade with us, or go to a different church, who have traits of charac- ter, ranges of thought and affection, which would endear them to us and make our fellowship a mutual blessing, if we knew each other. Often after men and women have died we find ou: that we have been living in close neighborhood with poets and heroines and saints, and knew it not, and so have lost much that might have been. On our own street or the next one, around the nearest corner, may be living a man or a woman, whom to have known, as to have known Lady Eliza- beth Hastings, were a liberal education. While I am saying this, some who hear me, I hope many, are saying to themselves, "That is true and I know it, and I thank God for it, as for one of the greatest blessings in life." And we who know all this so well say to these young persons that to discover these choice souls, to know how to appreciate them, to be willing to cul- tivate the virtues and the graces which will make us worthy of them, this surely is one of the things which make life worth 314 THE VERY ELECT living which spiritualize and ennoble life here, and make the life hereafter to be a perpetuation and enhancement of the best we have here and now. Bringing together these two influences in soul-culture, books and men, let us say that the best of all reading is biography, and the best biography autobiography; not that kind which is written large for the world's reading, but that which comes out in letters and in confidences treasured in the memory of friends, heart revelations, uttered with no thought of public review. If in this or any other way we can get in a few mem- orable words a good man's secret of life and can learn what in God's providence that life was lived for, we have made a real accession to both the philosophy and the conduct of our own life. And this brings us to say naturally, and finally, that the most effective of all agencies for the spiritualization of life is Religion. This effectiveness we can readily appreciate when we consider that for certain large classes of people it is almost the only source of the influence of which we are speaking, and that through this influence these people do actually attain to a high degree of spirituality in their lives. Take for example the Scottish peasantry. Their country is poor, the resources of living are scanty, their lives are lives of hardship and struggle, but what people have more of the comeliness and grace of life? Romance hovers over every purple heath and sparkles in every tarn and lingers in every glen. Though their bread is gotten by the hardest, they do not live by bread alone but invoke the grace of hospitality and the charm of high thinking upon the meal of barley bannocks. Out of the stern- est Calvinism they have extracted the beautiful home life of the Cottar's Saturday Night. And all this is because they are essentially, through and through, a religious people. The same is true in varying degrees of the Tyrolese, the Savoyards, the peasantry of France. The poetry everywhere underlying the Puritan character, in the little brothers of St. Francis, in the THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF LIFE 315 Moravians, and the Cameronians, and the Huguenots, was the offshoot of religious faith. Did the Cavalier type of piety, which also had its glorious expression in a splendid national character did it, though possessed of all the advan- tages for noble living, did it produce any finer spiritual temper, any more beautiful lives, than the annals of Scottish, and Huguenot, Dutch, and New England Puritanism can show? If one were to ask where, among what class of people in history and in actual life, you would look for the finest humanism, in distinction from the mere conventionalisms of culture and conduct, I think you would seek in two places, not among the classicists of the Rennaisance and their modern dilet- tante representatives, not among those who cultivate the most luxurious art in their homes and in their lives, not among those who array the scientific spirit against religion in the name of a freer and larger spirit, but among two classes : first, those who, however busy their lives, give a large place to the intellectual, the religious and the philanthropic elements, each in due proportion: the men and women of culture who are deeply religious and whose religion is not selfish but diffusive and benignant, men and women quite likely to be in the pur- lieus of universities and churches, but found also in the thick- est of the business and political world; and a second class made up of the simple and humble souls, strong, too, and valiant when need arises, whose study is much upon the Bible, whose chief social entertainment is in the prayer-meeting, whose main inspiration comes from the prayer-book or the breviary. Bring me a man whose life has been enriched by the learning of the ages, whose taste is refined by association with the purest thoughts and noblest imaginings of the poets of all time, whose moral ideas have been chastened and ele- vated by the contemplation of the true, the beautiful and the good, and I will bow my head in acknowledgment of the beauty of such a character. But if the element of religion has been entirely left out, if there is no reverence, no awe, no 316 THE VERY ELECT adoration, no love for the Supreme One as Father, Friend, Judge, Redeemer, Saviour, there will be something which I shall miss, and the absence of which will go far toward spoil- ing the character; there will be some grossness, some hardness, some unloveliness, for which nothing else can atone. A char- acter which lacks the religious elements wants that which all other traits need in order to come to their best. It is the one thing needful for making along with other necessary things a good workman, a good neighbor, a good citizen, a good friend, a good lover, a good physician, a good lawyer, a good writer for the press, a good business man, a good politician, a good teacher. That which religion gives to all these char- acters is the element we are considering, and which in a large and vague way we have called spirituality. Is there a man in all history without this element in his character whom any of us would for a moment think of proposing as a model for oneself or for others? We will not be narrow in our concep- tion of what religion is; we will make its scope large enough to include every influence which comes into thought and life from the highest moral source which is to us conceivable; but to set up over us anything lower than the highest con- ceivable standards, even though we are far from attaining them, is to idealize something less than the best, and that were our reproach and our shame. If there is, if there ever can be, any humanity higher and finer, more lovable, more admirable, than the humanity portrayed hi the Gospels, com- mended and urged in the Epistles, reproduced in the saints of all the Chri&tian ages, exemplified in one or a dozen or a score of good men and women in every church, whether in Christendom or heathendom, let us search for that as men of old sought for the Holy Grail; but until that vain illusion becomes a reality, let us try to learn from the Beatitudes, and from Calvary, and from the Mount of Olives, and from the thirteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians and from the eleventh of the Epistle to the Hebrews, how to make THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF LIFE 317 this life pure, and gentle, and loving, and brave, and resolute, and faithful unto death, and so ready for such life, the same in kind and higher in degree, as may await us hereafter. Members of the Graduating Class: In fulfilment of my promise at the outset I have tried to present some views of life which may be helpful to you in what we hope will be the long future of your own lives. And now I am not sure that I could have better discharged the public duty of the occasion than by the role I have chosen. The question being how to promote public virtue, to raise the ethical standard, to purify the social conscience, what after all is our main reliance for attaining this end? Legislation has reached the limit of its efficiency when it has prevented some of the worst evils of society. The courts define and punish, and thus in a measure restrain, wrong doing. But laws and courts and even executive vigilance cannot generate honesty and honor and high-mindedness. "An honest man's aboon their might." Let legislation and jurisprudence and admin- istration be perfect in their place, and still human well-being will depend mainly on other forces and other influences. Law, as the great apostle says, makes nothing perfect. What then does make humanity perfect? The same apostle says it is "the bringing in of a better hope," the attraction, the per- suasive vision of a noble and beautiful life shown as feasible, not easy but possible, and worth striving for. This is the secret of Christianity. It shows us what human life may be. It shows us by example fundamentally, essentially and in the large, in Jesus Christ, evolutionally in characters growing purer and finer and richer as the years and the ages go by; shows us how divine a thing human life may be, and in propor- tion as men and women get this vision and realize it in them- selves and in the social groups which they form, does public virtue grow from good to better, and the body social and the body politic and the body human become spiritually better, and therefore socially and politically better. 318 THE VERY ELECT It is therefore no egotism to say that for the moral better- ment we are so clamoring for today, society is more dependent on homes and schools and colleges and churches than on Congress and the courts and the executive. What they do, with much more self-consciousness and e*clat than would seem to be necessary, is important, and we hope they will do it thoroughly and well. What we do in our quieter way, in the many thousand schools and in the five hundred colleges and universities in America, is a thousand times more import- ant. One good, pure, strong sweet life of man or woman in a community does more for virtue and character and human well-being than all "revised statutes." To put, then, the lesson of the hour into a word let us all, each in his own sphere, try to spiritualize life to convert the crude and gross elements which are delivered unto us, into life's finer products into thought and sentiment, and beauty, and love. To the physician, the human body should appear as a marvel of divine art, to be studied with reverence, to be handled with a feeling next to worship, to be valued not only as the treasure house of soul but as in itself supremely admirable and precious. Law should be held, not as a mere contrivance for foiling wrong-doers, but as a formulation of the ideal relations between man and man. The church is the home and nursery of spiritual brotherhood. The school is the guardian and transmitter of the reverence due to youth. The home is the sacred resting-place of all the primitive and essential loves and virtues. Business affairs, public office, are so many agencies for the exploitation of the higher and finer virtues, if only the finer spiritual temper is in the men themselves. There never was a time when there were more such men never a time when still more of such men were so needed. The measure of the success of this University is the number of the men and women of this stamp whom it sends out. It has not been wanting in its quota in the past. May you all help it to keep up its standard and its effectiveness in the future. NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFIL "I came not to destroy but to fulfil." Matt, v: 17. ON THE northeast coast of Scotland stood in the sixteenth century one of those stately Gothic cathedrals which were the contributions of Christian faith to the Christianity of their age. It was of vast dimensions, fitly embodying the national spirit of worship when Scotland was a great nation. It had nave and aisles, transept and choir, groined arches and foliated capitals: it had rood-screen, and tabernacles, and niches filled with figures of patriarchs, apostles, and martyrs, such as the piety of those ages had approved. But there came a time, and a spirit, and a man, hostile to what all these things were supposed to stand for, and on a certain day, amid a vast con- course of the people, a fulmination went forth from the cathedral pulpit which roused the passions of the crowd to such a fury for destruction that in a few hours one of the most imposing cathedrals of western Christendom, with all its structural and decorative and devotional parts and appoint- ments, was a mass of ruins. For centuries since, men of all creeds have regretted and wished undone the mischief of that mad hour. But in vain. The age of cathedral building had forever gone. There remain to this day the ruin, the regret, and the lasting resentment. This was not an isolated transaction. It was only one outbreak of a general movement. And the general movement of that time was not anything unique in human experience. Image-breaking has been a recurrent event all through history. Abuses present themselves in affairs social, economic, political. These abuses call out reforms and reformers, some remedial, some destructive. There is that hi human nature which instinctively inclines it to the latter to the destructive method 319 320 THE VERY ELECT of reform. Passion is much more easily aroused on this side. The fruits of effort seem to be nearer, the rewards of success to be greater. Impatience is a motive which always lies near the surface of feeling, and is open to easy appeal. To super- ficial observation the abuse, the wrong, seems to go down with the overturn of what may be merely incidental. Destructive changes will always be in favor with a certain large social group, and in a certain grade of social development. Indeed it is a possibility and a menace at all times. The only thing lacking at any time to make it a power and a terror, is effective leader- ship a leadership which is in sympathy with the spirit of destruction rather than with that of remedy. There are never lacking the abuses out of which this spirit can get material for a blaze. The time when things are at their worst is always at this time. If things are allowed to go on as they now are this is the universal language, the esperanto, of agitation irretrievable ruin is immediately before us. This is no time for caution, for conservatism, for reaction it is time to strike, burn, overturn, destroy. And as Cassius said when he saw the tumult arising: " Mischief, thou art afoot; take thou what course thou wilt!" Let us give the destructive reformers the praise which is their due. They have their place and it is a place of useful- ness, but of a subordinate and humble kind. It has not the exalted merit which they think it has. It does not need, or display, talents of a high order. It required more ability to carve one leaf of one foliated capital in that St. Andrew's Cathedral than to topple down a whole aisle of foliated col- umns, or to arouse the rage which did the down-toppling. It does not require so much courage as it sometimes seems to attack abuses. It is a bid for popularity which rarely fails of more or less success. The demagogue knows this and counts upon it. Newspapers some newspapers thrive upon it. Have you some scandal to air; would you assail some repu- tation; attack some man in high place; assault some institu- NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFIL 321 tion in good standing; you may have a large place in "OUT crowded columns." But still the fault-finder, the accuser, the procurator-general for society, is useful. Too much praise of good men and good institutions, too much admiration of things as they are, would induce indolent content, and would result in stagnation and reaction. If only these image- breakers knew what images should not be destroyed, and if they had the courage, and the ability, to make sure that in spite of clamor and demagogism they be not destroyed! If John Knox could but have stopped that destruction when it had reached due bounds ; if those virtuous and amiable Giron- dists could have stayed the French revolution within the safe limits they would have chosen; if Pym and Hampden and Falkland could have recovered the liberties of Englishmen without letting loose a band of fanatics who destroyed liberty faster than it was gained, how much better had it been for France, for England, for Scotland, for law, for liberty, for religion! But alas, that is just where destructive reform shows its weakness. Anybody can start an iconoclastic fury; not even John Knox could stay it. Anybody can start a run on a perfectly sound bank; it takes financial skill to quiet it. Jack Cade can start a great social riot; a small vine- grower can raise a rebellion that throws France into a turmoil; but to bring back peace and order requires a statesman. If men ever get so far with their inventions as to be able to raise storms and tempests in the heavens, the harder task will be to quell the storms they have raised. It is a perilous thing to have dealings with the destructive forces of nature or of society. Reflection comes haltingly into the arena when the conflict is on : repentance comes too late. I came, said Jesus, not to destroy, but to fulfil. It would seem that if Jesus were the reformer he is sometimes thought to have been, if his method and secret was to discard all that was, and to begin all over again, there never was a better time for that method. Abuses were abundant, and shameless, and 21 322 THE VERY ELECT defiant. What an awful story of human corruption, individual and social, is set forth by St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans! If we did not know, we should have said that a divinely commissioned reformer of mankind in the reign of Tiberius Caesar would have made short work of every institution known to men. Preachers often tell us what Jesus would do if he came to Chicago, or San Francisco, or Paris, and they always imply that he would not leave one stone upon another of the moral, social, and political fabric. He would overturn, and overturn, and overturn, till society was like the debris of St. Andrew's Cathedral. But we know that whatever he would do, this he certainly would not do. He came not to destroy but to fulfil. He came to seek out the good that is in essential humanity, the humanity which was his own and which he believed in to seek it out, to discover it to itself, to encourage it, to revivify it, to fulfil it, till by infusing his own divine energy into it, he should enable it to overcome, overmaster, dominate and finally expel and annul the evil and all its belong- ings and accessories. He was in fact so patient in the midst of abuses and wrongs, he used so little of the destructive forces at his command, that men of the reforming temper are apt to be disappointed with a certain amiable weakness which they think they discover in him. So slow are we to discern power, except when power asserts its presence by violence not seeing that violence is a manifestation of weakness and not of strength of force which soon spends itself and lapses in contrast with the calm, sustained, continuous potency which has time and eternity at its command. The history of mankind seems to show that, from time to time, under the workings of evolution, or, which is the same thing, under the leadings of divine Providence, great social changes are due and must come. When the time is ripe for any such change, the great question is, whether it shall come normally, by a process of fulfilment, or abnormally by a process of destruction and restoration. Is social progress NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFIL 323 necessarily violent and wasteful? Is it necessary to destroy a magnificent cathedral with all its embodied history, and its aids to true worship, in order to utter a protest against some abuse which a more patient zeal might correct? May it not be well for us at a time when we seem to be threatened with social changes more or less revolutionary, when the most popular measures are the most startling, when men are outbidding each other for popular favor by out- clamoring each other for changes which upset and disintegrate long established principles and institutions, may it not be worth while to cool and quiet our minds by looking for a little into the other method the method which aims to accomplish its work not by destroying but by fulfilling the method in accordance with which I. In the first place, we seek motive and inspiration rather from the possible good which is before us than from the evil which is behind us. Anger against wrong does not furnish so good a motive as enthusiasm for the right. Indignation may be a sharp stimulus, but it is not a sure guide. It is safer to steer by a star in front than by a smoke in the rear. What the world is always wanting, certainly always needing, is more appreciation, more admiration, more inspiration. There is a place in the world of ideas, and in the social world, for the satirist, but to have too much of him, or too many of him, is to get distorted and morbid views of things. I could name a widely read newspaper on which to be a constant proof-reader would endanger not only good temper, but sanity. More if possible than even a poet, a reformer needs imagination a sane and wide-viewing imagination. True reformers are poets, or as we call them Utopians, men who have visions of what is desirable, and can make it desired and persuade men that it is feasible. How to preserve St. Andrew's Cathedral from desecration and, by well-ordered and magnificent wor- ship, make it tributary to the greater glory of God and the elevation of man's heart and life what a triumph had that 324 THE VERY ELECT been for a Scottish reformer ! How to make the human tem- ple more glorious without and within how to build together the varieties of human abilities and aptitudes into an organism which would at once perfect the parts and complete the whole how to utilize the immense wealth-producing power of our civilization so as to make it an accumulation of energies wait- ing and willing to be sublimated and spiritualized, how much better than the repressive and vindictive measures which destroy and do not fulfil! Waste is not merely the wanton destruction of values which exist; it is also, and more effectually, the prevention of values which might be. To induce in society a general feeling of timidity, of apprehension, a dread of what may come next, is as bad, it may be a thousand times worse, than actual destruction by fire, or flood, or earthquake. To paralyze the agencies which make for good is the most fatal and widespread destruction. Hope and not terror, good promised rather than evil doomed, a fair prospect rather than an escaped gloom, these are what quicken the pulse and warm the heart and give the zest and inspiration which make progress at once safe and continuous and permanent. II. The movements, secondly, which fulfil without needless destruction, are characterized by a fine and comprehensive sense of justice. A fine sense of justice, I say, because an ordinary, rough and ready, well-meaning but unintelligent sense of justice in these difficult and complex matters, may work more wrong than that which it sets about remedying. A police justice in a great city will decide a dozen or a score of cases in an hour, and decide them with an average degree of fairness, by applying first one and then the other of the two polar maxims to "assume innocence till guilt is proved/' and to "let no guilty man escape." But in great social affairs this extempore justicing will not do. It is too rude, too impulsive, too temperamental to be entrusted with the decision of ques- tions involving great and high and far reaching interests of communities and nations. The justice which alone meets the NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFIL 325 needs of problems such as arise in our time and people, is a justice which is comparable to the scales in a chemical labora- tory, which weigh the thousandth part of a gramme a fine, discerning justice not subtle, not losing itself in fractional distinctions, but always sensitive, always clear-eyed, always true to the shekel of the sanctuary. But it is equally important that the sense of justice be comprehensive that it take into its view all the interests involved in the question before it. A spirit of right-doing, or right-judging, if it is narrow and one-sided, is liable to issue in gross wrong and incalculable mischief, and all the more so in proportion as it is honest and intense. When a surgeon sets about excising an ulcer he takes into account all the rest of the body and sees to it, so far as he can, that the healthy part does not suffer from the operation. I suppose it will be conceded that nine-tenths of all the business done in the United States is honest business, including therein the work of the professions, in law, medicine, divinity and literature. If this is so, surely it is bad policy and bad morals to do justice upon the one-tenth peccant part so as to punish most severely the nine-tenths honest and honorable business. The justice which punishes, which destroys, is of course necessary, but it overvalues itself is overvalued in compari- son with the justice which protects, defends, relieves, or indemnifies. Ordinary human nature does not enjoy a white assize: it wants to see punishments inflicted: that is its test of the court's efficiency. In the parlance of old New England to justify a man was to punish him. In our time we want at least one corporation indicted and one condemned every day and it seems to make no matter if all the innocent ones are punished also. There is abroad a kind of Herodian vengeance against all industrial agencies. As the surest way in King Herod's mind for getting rid of one dangerous child was to kill all the children, so in order to punish a few corrupt corpora- tions, let us strangle all corporate enterprises. In order to punish the modicum of ill-gotten and ill-used wealth, let us 326 THE VERY ELECT minimize all wealth-producing agencies. There is no justice so essentially unjust, as an indiscriminating justice, a justice which with eyes bandaged smites, and sees not and cares not what it smites. In saying this I am not disparaging our courts of justice they in my judgment are our last refuge from the ambition of executives and the precipitancy of legislatures, from the tyranny of mobs, and organizations. I am speaking of the justice or the injustice which finds expression in popular verdicts, extra-judicial judgments, incendiary har- angues, and all that mass of pronouncements on public affairs which, like the cry of "On to Richmond," are pushing the pub- lic officials into attitudes which are bordering on frenzy, and which threaten to demolish and destroy some of the costly fabrics of our civilization. III. And, again, the progress which moves on with the least possible destruction is actuated by good will and not by ill will, by love and not by hate. One of the characteristics of Charity as described by St. Paul is that it rejoices not in iniquity but rejoices in the truth. It does not gloat over the discovery of foulness and wrong and evil, but delights in finding what is fair and wholesome and good. There is a psychologic truth of large meaning involved in the phrase "the will to believe." The real inwardness of character is more revealed by what it wills to believe, than by what it expressly believes. Indeed a man really believes only what he wills to believe. Note the way in which the same fact coming with the same evidence is received by different men. Is it some crime or scandal? One man is loath to believe it cannot believe it will not believe it does not believe it: another is eager to believe it and believes it. Is it some surprisingly great and good action? "Incredible," says one man. "There is some sinister some depreciating fact or motive hidden somewhere." The man of another mind says exultingly, "It is just the fine and noble act which I expected from such a man!" Charity rejoices not in iniquity hopeth and believeth all good things. NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFIL 327 That was a beautiful word indicative of a beautiful spirit which the Greek poet put into the mouth of Antigone, "My nature is to love with those who love, not to hate with those who hate." In this avowal the Greek virgin anticipated the spirit of Jesus himself: "I came not to destroy, but to fulfil." His was not the spirit which suspects and gets its greatest pleas- ure in seeking out evil, and destroying it even when this needs to be done. To hunt out the evil in human life, in human institutions, to destroy it, to excise it, to topple it down that may be a good work or it may not be. It may be well to let the tares grow with the wheat; to trust to inward forces of vitality to expel the imposthume; to let the sculptured saint remain to teach us a real kind of sacred history; to purify corporate industry rather than to throttle it; to moralize wealth rather than to prevent it. But surely, to find the good anywhere and everywhere, to encourage it into vigor and mastery, to find the nucleus and norm of an institution and nourish its true interest and spirit, to clear away from it the evil that stifles it, and do any destroying that may be called for carefully and patiently, but to get the chief satisfaction and joy in seeing and helping the good to grow and bud and blossom and bear fruit, that is the spirit of Jesus and the spirit of all good and lasting work in and for mankind. Let who will glory in destruction, and waste, in the discomfiture of craft and graft: we will rejoice rather when truth is discovered and will join in its eureka: we will applaud when good men come to the front and the high places are filled with men of unpurchasable virtue; when health and manly vigor and womanly beauty are becoming the prevailing marks of our race; when the competent are becoming rich and the poor are becoming competent and only the paupers are poor; when we see more and more the spirit of universal peace prevailing over the spirit of dissension and war; when amid all the glamours of a luxurious civilization, and all the falsehoods and shams which would here and now, if ever in history, justify icono- 328 THE VERY ELECT clasm, our people, the people of this United States, of all sections and creeds, still give their hearts' admiration and love to the things that are lovely and pure and of good report. In all this there is one fundamental question to settle: Is our civilization essentially a Christian civilization not in all its details, that we know it is not but essentially? Chris- tianity has been a social force for nearly two thousand years. Are the foundations rightly laid? Or must we destroy the whole fabric, and lay other foundations, and call in Fourier and Proudhon, and Tolstoi and Karl Marx and Lassalle, to lay better foundations for a new social order? Not if we believe that human evolution and divine Providence are one and the same, working along the same lines to the same end, different names for the same agency. We have already enough history of Christian civilization to make prophecy easy. The task before the great Christian nations is not to destroy but to fulfil; to destroy only the dead and decaying branches in order that the trees may have fuller opportunity of growth; to topple down and replace the age-worn and crumbling buttresses, and dislodge the hideous gargoyles and leering demons, and not disturb the praying apostle and the sleeping saint: to make not suspicion, jealousy, envy, hate, the principle and motive forces of social, economic and politi- cal life, but religion, the spirit of Christ, law, freedom, brother- hood, love the righteousness that exalteth a nation, and cannot endure but must punish and destroy, all iniquity, whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie, yes, but controlling and animating, restoring and empowering all, the justice which strikes when it must, but would rather spare than smite, and the charity which suffereth long and is kind, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity but in the truth, believeth, endureth, hopeth all things. Members of the Graduating Class: There is never a more hopeful time, and never a more dangerous time, than when the people take in hand seriously NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFIL 329 the vital questions which concern the body social and the body politic. And such a time is this time. The time is hopeful because amid profound and widespread restlessness, both the mind and the heart of the people are believed to be sound without any bias toward wrong thinking or wrong doing in any direction. It is a dangerous time, because the questions before us are so far reaching that serious mistakes would entail a long and formidable train of evils upon our own and succeeding generations. The problems are funda- mental, and the results for good or evil will depend on whether the issues are met fundamentally or superficially. The debate is not between conservatism and radicalism both principles will be in demand and both will enter into the settlement it is rather between destroying and fulfilling, between methods of getting rid of evil and installing and maintaining the good. The present danger is that the people, because of certain flagrant wrongs, will punish themselves vindictively, and will make this retributive and punitive mood permanent in laws and institutions. It is no uncommon thing for an individual to be so awed and cowed by some unusual revelation of evil as to go bowed and humbled all his days, his nerve lost, his faith, hope and charity irrevocably gone. From such a danger, understood and foreseen, the brave man will rouse himself, and like the patriarch Job will stand up and assert his own integrity and that of the system of things. Society in our country is just now facing this danger. It is to guard you against it that I have spoken as I have today. You have come to full manhood and womanhood in a time of general condemnation. There are many who tell you that business is fraudulent that politics are corrupt that wealth js ill- gotten and ill-spent that social life is demoralized that the besom of destruction must go through our whole social order before we can begin to be in right relations one with another. I warn you against coming under the spell of this spirit of ill-will, of suspicion, of depression. I would rally you to the 330 THE VERY ELECT ranks of the reformers for our age certainly needs reforms but of those who would reform by fulfilment rather than by destruction. In every profession and calling there are new truths waiting to be discovered, new methods to be put in operation, old truths and methods not yet half realized. There is unbounded wealth before you which may be as honestly got and as rightly spent, as were the meagre returns of labor in former times. For a while doubtless the good people of San Francisco must give their main energies to the extermina- tion of plunderers. But the reason why one should want to live in San Francisco is not to police it, but to build up a transcendently beautiful city. Nature in her wild and way- ward mood came to destroy it will be the glory of man to fulfil. In this respect San Francisco is a type of the whole world of civilized mankind. St. Andrew's Cathedral will never be rebuilt San Francisco will be. It is more glorious to build than to destroy. But I must not dismiss you in this our last meeting together, without saying a few words which will be less individual, more what the entire body of your instructors would wish me to say for them. The sum of it would be that they have put their best of toil and love into you, into your minds and characters, in the confident hope that in so doing they have done a good work not for you only, but for ends higher than those which affect either you or themselves work which will make for the health of many communities; for the prosperity of many industries; for the prevalence of justice in many districts and circuits; for good instruction in many schools; for love and happiness in many homes; for the maintenance of true religion in many churches. The rewards of this our academic life are not in money, or in what money will buy, but in what you and such as you are, as compared with what you were when you came into our hands and still more in what you will be and will do hereafter. When one of you shall hereafter do a fine thing in your calling or in your life NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFIL 331 even though it be not so great a thing if it is a fine thing, something worthy of a scholar, and a gentleman or a gentle- woman and a Christian, it ought to add to your own joy to think that it will bring special delight to some one o your old professors: and he, on his part, will get one of the supreme joys of his life in thinking (perhaps he cannot in his exultation keep from saying) "I taught him, or her, to do that!" And so God be with you in your callings, your public services, your struggles, your triumphs, your homes, your whole lives, till you come back to tell of them to each other, and to us, in the many, many happy and fruitful years to come which we hope and pray may be yours. THE SIMPLE LIFE "O, that I had wings like a dove; then would I fly away and be at rest." Psalm lv: 6. THE cry I had almost said the fad of the hour, is the Sim- ple Life. The phrase has a glance in different directions. It is a protest, we may say a satire, levelled against certain prev- alent forms of social life. As such it recalls with ominous suggestiveness other protests and other satires, how Tacitus depicted the simple life of the Germans in order to throw into strong contrast the corruption of Roman society how Rousseau idealized the noble savage against a background of French decadence how "the Austrian" and her dames would fain have taken out the taste of the spiced wines of Versailles with the fresh milk of the Hermitage. As a reaction from extravagance, and artificiality, and sybaritism, the cry for the simple life is an expression of that sanity in the social body which instinctively loathes and throws off whatever is stale and putrescent. On another side this familiar strain is but an echo of the world-old cry for a refuge from the weariness of life; the old wail of fatigue; the old sigh for a place where the wicked cease from troubling, for Nirvana, and Nepenthe, and the asphodel meadows. It is the lyric of disappointment, and disillusion, and of the tired evening of life. In all these mean- ings of it there is nothing new to our times, and nothing specially significant or alarming. The world has always had, and probably always will have, its nights of riot and revelry, followed by days of repentance, and lassitude, and self-con- demnation, out of which comes a virtue too severe to be lasting. But when, as in our time, what is called the simple life is deliberately set up as the ideal human life to which individual and social standards should conform, it is pertinent to challenge 332 THE SIMPLE LIFE 333 the specious phrase and to inquire what of truth and what possibly of error it involves. We note in the first place that the true human life is essen- tially and inevitably complex, and that any simplicity which it may legitimately have must be consistent with this essential complexity. Life is essentially complex. It is richly endowed with possibilities which, to an extent unknown and undreamed of in earlier and especially prechristian times, have become great and wonderful actualities. He who for us readers of English and not for us only has sounded its depths and shoals, can express himself best by an exclamation: "What a piece of work is a man! " And one of those inspired to express, for all time, the best thoughts of the best souls, has said, also with exclamation: "Thou madest him a little lower than the gods!" Life is somewhat less than life it is at best primitive and rudimentary life, unless it calls out, and employs, and gratifies all the human capabilities, all the natural appetites, affections, powers, of the being who in his potentialities at least is but little lower than divine. To simplify human life by foregoing its higher reaches, to be content with what comes easily and can be lost without much regret not to try very hard nil admirari this is to live not a human life but a sub-human life. The hermit to avoid gluttony reduces nourishment to roots and water with a result which is not temperance but a bloodless existence. In a fit of morose virtue we cut off art and music, and sports, and laughter and all the embellishments of life, and think to make life truer by making it narrow, and meager, and dull in other words less vital. It is a pleasant vacation relief to wear homespun and go barefoot, but for a permanency, it would be simply a renunciation of the good things which the new times have brought to us. And not only is life essentially complex, it is ever growing more and more complex. Whether or not we are expanding into a fourth dimension of space, we are developing new facul- 334 THE VERY ELECT ties, acquiring new sensibilities, utilizing new powers, accumu- lating new knowledges, are relating ourselves to a new universe by ever increasing lines of contact and influence. And with all this increasing complexity of life comes its perpetual enrichment. In every century humanity becomes a nobler inheritance to be born into. Every successive generation of children comes into a patrimony of more truth knowable, more power available, greater wonders to study, nobler characters to admire, truer souls to love. But along with the inevitable and increasing complexity of life comes the heavier responsibility of life, the greater capacity for, and the greater liability to mistake, and pain, and suffer- ing. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow as well. A sensitiveness to the higher enjoyment of life involves also sensitiveness to its deeper sorrows. We may imagine a candidate for human existence confronted with an exhibition of its possible good and evil, and given his choice for or against. "These are the possibilities of an earthly life large, rich, expansive beyond comprehension its liabilities to mistake, and trouble, and failure equally great, possibly greater. Will you take the risk of the one for the possibility of the other? Or rather, in addition to a very certain amount of discomfort and suffering, how much possible and probable pain will you venture upon, in order to realize the manifoldness of human life in its nobler possibilities?" We cannot imagine any other decision than that we are all virtually making when we trust the whole matter to the will of God, which, when all is said and done, is what we mean by Faith, a belief that in the matter of our human life God is good and loving, and that in compelling us to accept life, whether we will or no, he thereby guarantees to us the balance of good, actual or potential. But in the prac- tical answering of this question men divide themselves into two classes first, those whom we will call the refusers, those who shrink from the responsibility of too much life. Let us be just and not put into this class those who have honestly and THE SIMPLE LIFE 335 faithfully taken account of themselves, of their powers of achievement and endurance, and have quietly and modestly left the great field of life to the more ambitious, and have retired into a shady nook where they ask nothing better of life than that its monotony be undisturbed and its simplicity be pre- served from fear and apprehension. Not all souls are planning for the simple life some already have it the great majority of the human race perhaps. They till a few paternal acres, pursue some handicraft, live quietly within the little round of activities which cluster about home, and school, and parish, and village politics, and by sheer quietude, not to say immo- bility, keep the rest of the world from going far out of the safe and wise beaten track. Of these we will not say anything more scornful than that the human race was not created for them as a finality. But the question concerns those, few or many, who in our time are preaching and practicing the simple life because they will not respond to the calls of the larger and truer life. Dante has eternalized one who committed the great refusal. They commit the great refusal who are so dis- mayed by the necessary struggles, and possible perils, of the full human life that they flee away, or in plain prose run away, and hide themselves from life itself, into some of the negative places which life least invades into retreats and hermitages, into social individualism, and political independ- ence, and religious indifferentism, and, in general into irrespon- sible and non-committal positions and attitudes. If there is misery in the world, these avoid the pain of it by passing by on the other side and not seeing it. If there is high-handed wrong which calls for valiant redress, they are so much im- pressed with what can be said on the other side that they shrink from taking a stand. If there is hard work to be done, a fire to be put out, a drowning man to be rescued, a nuisance to be abated, a campaign to be fought, they are sure never to be there or thereabouts they are somewhere in hiding, pro- tecting their sensibilities from rude and dangerous shocks. 336 THE VERY ELECT But the whole scheme of things under Divine Providence works against those who would seek the simple life by the process of isolation, and voluntary insensibility, and artificial abridgment of life. If a man will not have care, if he ride off into the desert to escape care, then, in Horace's figure, Care, black Care, mounts behind him and rides with him. "Keep far off, ye profane," says the dainty epicure, but essential realities will not keep off and will not down at his bidding. He may bar the doors and bolt the windows, but the cry of humanity will come to him through thickest walls, and will not let him sleep in his solitude and seclusion. So long as he is human he is vulnerable, open to assault in spite of all the palisades by which he has secured his serenity and repose. Any trivial incident, as our great optimist poet has said, the odor of a flower, a line of poetry, a knock at the door, a peep from the window, a call from the postman, may bring in the eternal human to spoil the whole flimsy and false pretense of seclusion and peace. The solution of the problem which comes out of the storm and stress of human existence is then not the simple life in the sense of the life of refusal and refuge and peace. No doubt the temptation is often great to adopt it for the strain of the larger life is severe, sometimes terrible, and the flesh cries out with the psalmist for relief. But the human heart is too large to accept mere relief as the final solution of its troubles: it is too brave to give up the conflict with necessary difficulties. This cry of the poet for the flight and repose of the dove, as we saw, is the sigh of fatigue and of the evening. When the morning comes with its new strength, the wail of languor is repudiated. The heart finds in its psalms of life a new strain, even this: "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint." We long not for the wings of the dove that we may fly away and be at rest, but for the wings of the eagle that we may mount and THE SIMPLE LIFE 337 soar: we would have the elevation that is better than repose, and the strength that is better than relief. I. That will mean for one thing that we will be rid of the fever of life. It is not the complexity of life, not its fulness, its manifoldness, that fatigues, it is the fever of it. That which really fascinates in the contemplation of the so-called simple life is its coolness, its calm. The habitat of the longed-for life is "the cool, sequestered vale." The real grievance in many dissatisfied lives is that they are too intense, too passionate. The dogma of this kind of life is that one must ever and always " do things," and that it is better to do wrong than to do nothing. Pascal's famous saying that "half the calamities of the world come about because men are not willing sometimes to sit still in a room," would do for a Port-Royalist, but if acted on by an American in the twentieth century would mark him as a reactionary. The ideal set before our generation is to be strenuous in season and out of season. But unmitigated strenuosity leads to what physiologists call the hysteric passion, and to the breakdown for which the simple life is the supposed remedy. A Friend once asked Robert Southey how he spent the day, and the man of many learnings told how he parceled out all the hours of the twenty-four. "But friend Robert," she asked, "when dost thou do thy thinking?" A man, in an age which does more acting than thinking, which puts doing things above reflecting how to do things, which leaves no hour in its day and no day in its week, for calm, brooding thought, inevitably comes to a crisis in which like Tacitus and Rousseau and Marie Antoinette it calls for a return to a primitive and savage life, whereas what it really wants is the meek and quiet spirit, the willingness to enter into one's closet and shut the door, and pray that, not the passionate will of the time-spirit, but God's will, may be done. What our time needs, and does not know that it needs, is a saner judgment, a dynamic that like other modern forces is more effective the less noise it 22 338 THE VERY ELECT makes a spirit which is serene and unshaken because of its faith in the things that cannot be moved. II. Again, we counteract the tedium of life by dignifying in our minds its tasks. It is of some consequence to make the world respect us for tasks well performed, but it is vastly more to have them ennobled in our own minds. If it is any part of this desire for the simple life that we may rid ourselves of life's tasks and burdens, the desire is in so far an ignoble one, because a large part of the merit and the reward of life consists in conscientiously performing well these tasks and bearing bravely these burdens. Life without difficulty, the easy- going life, the life of the gods of Epicurus, would not for a being capable of great things be worth living. Life is never so interesting, the present is never so satisfying, and the future never so exhilarating, the repose of the dove never so little coveted, the eagle's flight never so envied, as when we are conscious of having performed a hard duty creditably, or when we feel able to face a difficulty or a danger confidently. Then life seems worth living. Then we feel the thrill and joy and glory of life in its fulness and power. This is the secret of a true and happy life to dignify life's tasks, to conquer them to surmount them to rise from them shall I say with the poet, to higher things yes, to higher tasks to meet and surmount new and greater difficulties and to turn all tasks and difficulties into triumphs. Of course this is no picture of life to offer to the feeble, or the blase*, or those who have the senile temper either of age or youth. It is not for those who cherish the facile, or the gay, or the frolic view of life. Let these seek the simple life they are capable of nothing better the life simple in its shallowness, its emptiness, its worthlessness. But to those who are capable of aspiring and acting, the secret of perpetual joy in life comes, and abides, with the conscious- ness of power to overcome which is gained by overcoming, and which is never satiated, but rather ever renewed as it goes on from strength to strength and from victory to victory. THE SIMPLE LIFE 339 III. We come finally to see that what we want of life is not on the one hand simplicity, at least not meagerness, not reduc- tion of life to its lowest term; not to make a solitude of life and call it peace; and, on the other hand, not life under high pressure, "the restless will that moveth to and fro," the life that frets and fumes till in sheer exhaustion it sighs for the wings of the dove that it may fly away and be at rest; but the unity of life life whole and complete and consistent, whether it be large or small a unity which is consistent with infinite differentiation, which integrates each whole life into a social whole which also has a unity and completeness of its own. The humblest life has no need to fret and pine and tire itself out in emulation of a life larger than itself, if only it is true to its own vocation and opportunity; and the largest and most strenuous life need not make its own stress and its own dimen- sions the standard of all other lives. But this unity of life for which I am pleading is just now broken in upon and seriously disturbed by two conditions of which I will say a word. One is the disproportionate and overweening attention absorbed by politics in the totality of life. There are certain great segments, great zones of life, together making up its main expanse, one of which is politics. Its absolute importance cannot be exaggerated, its relative importance may be and I think is, in our country and our day. Fifty years ago Harriet Martineau, visiting our country, com- mented unfavorably on the same tendency among our people. If you see three men or a dozen talking together on the street corner or on the veranda or in the meeting-house shed, you know it is politics they are talking, you know it is not sanitation, or education, or morality, or literature, or religion. The consequence is that men's interest in life becomes one- sided, whole zones of life equally important are neglected, and thus our total life lacks balance and symmetry and healthy interplay of functions, and so becomes an easy prey to dis- orders that attack the distorted and unhealthy body. 340 THE VERY ELECT And secondly, under modern conditions and under an influence which is speciously termed "publicity" which is good and right when applied to things properly public our social life is in danger of becoming what I will call casuistical, by which I mean a temper and habit of fretting ourselves, and twitting one another, over the details of life, holding per- petual censorship over our own and our neighbor's mode of living, and in so doing forfeiting the great claims and offices and joys of life itself. One thing that makes so many long for the wings of the dove that they may fly away and be at rest is that in this day we have so much ill-will sedulously propagated in our communities so much suspicion of our neighbors disseminated so much said and done to make Ishmaelites of us, every man's hand against every man. We are losing the joy of living in this splendid day and this glorious generation because some men's happiness is dependent on other men's undeserved fret and worry and fatigue. Oh, that we might once again enter into the joy of living as men once lived, even the joy of enduring and suffering as they did, and be freed from this life of mutual bickering, of distrust, and objurgation! "Father," said a pragmatic youth, "reprove my brother for his indolence, sleeping as he is, while I am thus early at work." "Better, my son," was the reply, "that you should be asleep than rise early to revile your brother." What is it then, for a last word, that we are blindly and yet really seeking under the guise of the simple life? It is a life of peace with God and of charity toward men. The former, peace with God, we can have as really, I do not say as easily, in a large life as in a meager one, and the larger the life the deeper may that peace be. Elijah had more of it when he was fighting the priests of Baal, than when he was sighing and groaning under the juniper tree. And this social unrest, this jealousy and antagonism and strife of classes and interests, this wearisome clash of claims and counter-claims, which fill the air with din and hearts with suspicion and hate; Oh, that we had, not wings like a dove that we might fly away from it all THE SIMPLE LIFE 341 and be at rest, but the spirit of the dove, the spirit of God descending like a dove upon us, calming our fever, cooling OUT passion, making us to be kindly affectioned one to another, to be peacemakers and therefore children of God, and to put on above all things charity which is the bond of perfectness. Members of the Graduating Classes: If I were preaching in a hospital, like Ugo Bassi, or if I were talking to veterans in a Soldiers' Home, or to those who like Prometheus on his rock had more leisure than they wanted, I should do my best to make a simple life seem a satisfactory one. I should know where to go in poetry and fiction and scripture for the true idyllic touch and charm. It is always fascinating to imagine one's self mooring his small shallop under friendly stars in some little winding creek and viewing the storm ashore. But as I am speaking to those in the heyday of youth with all the possibilities of a full and complete life before them, surely the note should be one of inspiration and urgency. Of two errors, the one which takes life too easily, and the other which takes it too hard, I have tried to guard you against both. The main lesson of the hour is that haste, rush, intensity, pas- sion, in the estimates and choices of life, are weaknesses; that calm, deliberate, continuous, persistent, soulful energy, that, only that, is power. If we are to believe the voices most commonly heard in our time, the rushers are in the ascendant. The current preachment is against "the mad rush for wealth." If this is the case, it is not to us in the quiet retreat of college life obvious. I should have said, looking over the field as we see it, that the refusers are in the majority that those who are shirking and shamming work, who are letting the sons of strangers come in and take all the best prizes and get all the best places, and the many who are making life too much a bluff and a trick, are very much in evidence. But be sure you come into neither of these classes. Take hold of the work with a purpose of continuity, and persistence, and unity. You may pardonably long for the wings of the dove when the tired day 342 THE VERY ELECT is over, when the campaign has been fought out, when the dragon has been slain; but when the new morning comes, rise again on the wings of the eagle into higher soaring and farther visions. The older ones among us are growing very envious of you as we see the splendid opportunities of life opening before you. What makes us and the angels weep is to see you aspiring to anything beneath the best, your best at least, in this magnif- icent possibility. One of the phrasemakers of the past was thought to have said something very fine when he heartened his fellow toilers by telling them they would have all eternity to rest in. That was a note of comfort for the weary and heavy laden, but it lacked the note which appeals to normal healthy young hearts. An eternity of rest, no! give that to weaklings. An eternal joy in working, that were better. Not to be permitted to work that is the most awful punish- ment man has ever devised, the punishment of the convict in solitary confinement. To work till we are weary, and to get renewal for work by rest that is our earthly happiness. To work without weariness, perhaps not without stress and pain, for perhaps that is essential to the highest joy of work, to work as the Father worketh hitherto, and as Christ works, happily, zestfully, and without satiety, that is heaven. The graduation from our universities and colleges, in these June weeks, of numbers reaching in the aggregate to the thousands, is an event of great meaning possibly, if we may be so bold as to say it possibly of as much consequence to the country as the much noisier events taking place at the same time. There is no harm whatever in your carrying away with you into your new life a certain amount of self -consciousness, I will even say, of a sense of self-importance. You are the heroes of the hour. But you carry also a heavy responsibility which will inevitably sober you. Come back to us in ten or fifteen or twenty years, with hopes turned into actualities, with promises ripened into fruitage. We will welcome you then, we give you, God speed, now. FOR BRETHREN AND COMPANIONS' SAKES For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, Peace be within thee! Psalm cxxii:8. THESE words suggest two reflections which flow into each other; first, how our personal affections humanize places and events; and second, how these personal affections furnish the motives to what we think and do and are. For my brethren and companions' sakes! It is the heart of Israel yearning toward Zion which here utters itself; it is the universal human heart voicing its interest in places and events because of the human personalities associated with them. Jerusalem was the geographical and political capital of the Israelitish people. As such it was in their eyes impos- ing and august. But it was much more; it was the seat of Israel's patriotism, the center of Israel's religion. Thither the tribes went up; there they held high feast; present to their eyes it was their glory; distant from them ifc filled their im- agination. One of their poets said of it : "Thy saints take pleasure in her stones, Her very dust to them is dear." From these poets all later enthusiasts have borrowed phrases wherewith to express their affection for sacred places. Who that has a human heart in him does not know the spell which sanctifies, glorifies, certain spots of earth, and who, if he stops to think, does not recognize as the chief element in the charm, the personal touch which gives it color and dis- tinction? Scenery, beautiful or grand, has attractions in and of itself for every eye that has a soul behind it. Mountain, lake, forest, ocean; the Valclusa fountain, the blue Danube, Alpine peak and glacier, Niagara, canyon, geyser; wonders and glories innumerable fill this magnificent earth which the 343 344 THE VERY ELECT Creator has given to the children of men. But one gleam of humanity, one touch of human nature, outbids them all in its appeal to the human heart. Once on a time while a throng were gazing enraptured upon the gorgeous scenery of the Yellowstone, a mother eagle was spied circling around her nest on a pinnacled crag, bringing to her young food snatched from the gorge a thousand feet below, and for the half hour during which this daring feat of motherhood was being accomplished, the scenery to the spectators might have been a thousand miles away. When the train stops at Niagara ten minutes to give passengers a sight of the cataract, three-fourths of the men keep on reading their papers. Is it conceivable that there would be any such apathy, even on the part of habitual travellers, if the train passed in front of Mount Vernon, or Gettysburg, or Arlington? The earth has in all its lands spots which have become memorable because of some human incident, some tragedy, some heroism, some supremely interesting event, sad or joyous, which the human in us de- lights to feel over again. It is this that -sends people, not in other respects sympathetic with what is grand and deep in life, roaming all over the world, that they may get into touch with the spirit and sentiment that has made certain places memorable. Why are so many Americans more eager to see Europe than their own country? It is because their own country, new as yet, scantily stored as yet with historic me- morials and associations, affords them comparatively few in- citements to that kind of admiration and reverence, that large sympathy and sorrow, which to feel, gratifies, and we may say flatters, our sense of the humanity within us. The history of the last generation, crowded as it has been with events of tragic and pathetic interest, has added to these memorable places in our country more than all the preceding generations. And thereby is our country enriched emotionally and spirit- ually, even though the enrichment has in it a large heritage of sadness both for us and for our posterity. This profound FOR BRETHREN AND COMPANIONS' SAKES 345 truth, that things memorable in human history are to so large an extent pathetic and tragic, the great Roman poet felt and uttered in that untranslatable phrase respecting the "tears which are in all mortal things." If this is a pagan philosophy which may conduct us through the Inferno of life's experiences but which needs a new guide for its Paradise, be it so! The question is raised, it almost inevitably must be whether it were better for the human race and the universe that this old world, for the sake of its many endeared spots, its bowers of bliss, its trysting places, its sweet cottages and gardens and orchards, its college walks and groves, should be continued on forever; or whether on account of its earthquakes and devastations by fire and flood, its dungeons and battle-fields, its bridges of sighs and morgues and chambers of horrors, it should be blotted out of existence and memory, and a new heaven and new earth be installed for the future abode of mankind. All this of course, in the Greek expression, lies on the lap of God. What is possible for man to do is so to minimize the battlefields and dungeons, and all memorials of wickedness and all removable incitements to tragedy and crime, and so to multiply reminders of virtue and love and patriotism and religion, that if the Lord God should once more as of old walk in his earthly garden in the cool of the day, he would not repent that he had made man and made this earth for him to dwell in. Let us then, whenever and wherever we can, revive in the memory of the new generations the deeds of good and wise men, leaders of thought and enterprise, of morality and re- ligion, and let us place memorials of them where they will proclaim the admiration and gratitude due from our genera- tion to the memory of those whose sacrifices and heroisms have given us our better place in the world's life. We pass on to the larger reflection suggested by our theme what we do for our brethren and companions' sakes. This is not the question which concerns our relations with our 346 THE VERY ELECT fellow men in general, with those whom our Lord has in mind when he says, " Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you" not those he elsewhere calls "others." It is not a question of altruism, it is not concerned with that benevolence which a great philosopher defined as "love to being in general," it is not cosmopolitan good will; it is what we think and say and do for the sake of that select group of souls who are our brethren and companions, those who are dear to us by kinship and those whom we endear to us by choice and wont and who walk the way of life with us. It needs but little reflection to be convinced that what we do and what we are by reason of the mutual influences which pass to and fro between us and these our brethren and companions, make up a large part of all we do and are. How many choices do we make on purely abstract grounds, as being in themselves right, or prudent, or beneficent with regard, as our philosopher said, to "being in general," or any considerations in general? If we put on one side those purely selfish considerations which surely are far fewer than the accusers of mankind aver, and if we first ana- lyze and then group these considerations which come to us from family, neighborhood, friendship, vocation, party, city, coun- try, church, how many are left to be determined by strictly non-personal reasons? How much for instance of the esthetic element of life would be left if we should cease to create and embellish and dignify for brethren and companions' sakes? How many flowers would be cultivated for any one's personal enjoyment, if there were no occasions for expressions of sorrow and sympathy and affection? What would become of half the smiles, of the tears that flow not from pain, of the right hand deeds that the left hand knows not of, the stealthy charities that blush to find themselves fame? Which of the graces and amenities of St. Paul's thirteenth of Corinthians would survive if we had to do only with "men," with "others," and not with brethren and companions? Of course we are theoretical individualists. We are not creatures of our en- FOR BRETHREN AND COMPANIONS' SAKES 347 vironment oh no! We were never in bondage to any man, not even in the dear bondage to our brethren and companions. Nevertheless we do what we do, and we are, largely, yes mainly, what we are, for our brethren and companions' sakes. And this is well, and right, and in accord with the divine constitution of men and things. As Pope says : "God never made an independent man: 'Twould mar the concord of his general plan." Such a one, such an impossible, would be less than man, less even than some brutes, for they are gregarious and do things for each other's sakes. The non-social brutes are at a dis- advantage and die out soonest. If the lions would combine for each others' good they could put Nimrod and all his follow- ing to flight. History shows us how men originally became strong and dominant and permanent by learning to live to- gether as brethren and companions. The personal tie is the germ of social order and furnishes the norm of all tribal and national cohesion and development. Mere mechanical organ- ization does not attain the highest results it needs personal affinities to get its greatest strength. Thereby it secures not strength only not mere solidity, but genius and enthus- iasm what we mean by esprit du corps. The finest humanity comes of it. It is what makes homes out of households. It builds great and noble cities. It begets brotherhoods. It inspires both the human and the divine side of all true religion. The old hymn some of us learned when we were children lamented: "Our nearest joys and dearest friends, The partners of our blood, How they divide our wavering minds, And leave but half for God!" whereas it is one of the sacred offices of dear friends to help our wavering minds to decide all for God. It is this consideration which furnishes the raison d'etre of the Christian Church, 348 THE VERY ELECT and of all true churches. Our Lord brought to men, not a religion for the solitary individual, not for the hermitage and the desert, but for brethren and companions, for the commun- ion of saints, and though his followers will be ultimately a multitude which no man can number, the secret of Jesus and the whole constitution of his Church is set forth in those most precious of all his words, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." And yet on the other hand, let us be frank enough to confess, this same social spirit, this doing things for brethren and com- panions' sakes, is a fruitful source of evil of some of the worst evils that virtue and social well-being have to contend with. It is of the essence of all conspiracy of all confederacy of mischief of all " treasons, stratagems and spoils." In his- tory it is responsible for the League of the Assassins, the dark assizes of the Vehmgerichte, the atrocities of the Jacobins. In our own times it is sponsor for the Camorra, the Mafia, the Black Hand, and the nameless new crimes of our day. The worst is that it is able to maintain its own self-respect and to draw to itself a species of devotion, by its semblance and some- times its reality, of heroic self-abnegation. One contribution it has certainly made to current discussion as to the basis of morals. It upsets the theory that the one essence of all sin is selfishness for here are criminals of the darkest type ready on the instant to immolate themselves out of loyalty to their brethren and companions in evil. May we not borrow the exclamation of one who was victim to a confederation she had herself encouraged and say, "O loyalty, what crimes have been committed in thy name !" or to challenge a still more lofty obligation, "0 noblesse oblige, into what toils of error and wrong hast thou beguiled us!" Shall we then, as some do, jump to the conclusion that the corporate conscience is always and everywhere, in all callings and professions, in all societies, guilds and churches, an inferior conscience, one which upholds a lower standard than the indi- FOR BRETHREN AND COMPANIONS' SAKES 349 vidual conscience? Is the wisest man, and the safest guide in difficult conduct, the man who thrusts aside all social and conventional standards, and evolves in his own conscience a purely impersonal standard, an eternal and immutable moral- ity? We shall not be dealing long with this man, this represen- tative individualist, without finding him to have potentially the merits and the errors of the fanatic, that while he is in- flexibly true to his conviction, the conviction itself is apt to be narrow, intense, dogmatic; that he lacks the charity needed in order that he may be just, and the sympathy with the good which corrects the exaggerations of a hot indignation against evil. If the corporate conscience is lax, opportunist, want- ing in discernment and vigilance, the hermit conscience, the inquisitor's conscience, is too self-centered to be human, too positive to be trustworthy. The individualist conscience, impervious to all considerations of sympathy and humanity, is the Javert, the police inspector of the great French romance. He is at his best in the old Hebrew prophet, seeing only evil to be denounced, speaking only of the wrath foredoomed to follow. What then is our resort in this apparent dilemma? Here are two strong motives to right-doing moving in different though not contrary directions; here are two dangers, one of them threatening us from each side of the moral situation. The answer is as it so often is in life not that the truth lies in media, in compromises and mutual concessions, but in the interplay, the fuller and freer action of both motives, the kind of adjustment which as in the parallelogram of forces, retains the direction of both the competing agents. The individual conscience must not yield up what it approves because friend- ship tempts it with an inferior good, balanced up by its own charm; but the individual conscience is not infallible, and is liable to go very far wrong if it is self-centered and reclusive. The contemplation of brethren and companions, by warming and humanizing the moral judgment, enlightens and clarifies 350 THE VERY ELECT it. And on the other hand the social feelings, if allowed exclusive control, tend to soften the moral nature, to relax its fibre, to tone down its sharpness of discernment, its tenacity of purpose. The social conscience needs now and then to go into retreat and work out its problems, as St. Paul did in Arabia, as our Lord did in the wilderness of Judea. The great decisions and choices of life should be made not by conscience alone, not through the affections alone, but by the whole man, by that aggregate of all the elements of our complex being which our Lord sums up as heart and soul and mind and strength. The popular watchwords are always significant. Not many months ago the word which caught the eye oftenest as it wan- dered up and down any contemporary page was " graft;" the word is now "sane." What men most hated and feared was indicated by the one word; what they are now yearning for by the other. The man wanted for the hour in all departments of life is the "sane" man. And what is it that we want in him? We want the right balance of judgment between the opportunist and the fanatic, between the abstract and theo- retical right and the attainable best, between Javert and the Bishop, between Tolstoi and the pragmatists. Our Lord in de- scribing John the Baptist used a highly significant expression. He said that John was a prophet and more than a prophet, and that he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he that is more than a prophet. What is it that makes a Christian man more righteous than Javert, more righteous than Jeremiah or John the Baptist? It is a new sense of the divine humanity in man which recognizes a like humanity in all men, and for its sake, and their sakes, bears, and forbears, and sym- pathizes, and hopes, and co-operates, and as the new and finer version of the passage in the gospel renders it, "never despair- ing." The one note of truth which socialism has seized upon is this: that there is presumptive good in the association of man with man for a common interest; that it is human, and moral, and every way auspicious, to do and to be for brethren FOR BRETHREN AND COMPANIONS' SAKES 351 and companions' sakes. And that is the direction in which we are tending to the condition in which we respect, and trust, and co-operate with not others not all men indiscriminately, but brethren and companions, those whose lives are bound up with ours by what Wordsworth beautifully terms "natural piety," those of whom the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks as so associated in the one great and continuous faith of the elders and their heirs of today that they without us and we without them cannot be made perfect. What we have been thinking of as an abstract situation has been going on about us in the actual world in recent days. The revival of righteousness of which so much is said has been a vigorous protest from the individual conscience against the laxity of the corporate conscience. It was an effort to replace a conventional standard by one which was impersonal and absolute. It was a movement called for, right in intent and fruitful of good results. But in certain regions it has degen- erated to a vaporing preachment, and a somewhat prevalent holier-than-thou attitude of men who are trying to get the public ear precursors, if not arrested, of a moral collapse. In so far as this campaign for righteousness has separated us into antagonistic groups, critical of each others' standards of right and wrong, suspicious, declamatory, objurgatory, in season and out of season, it is time to come back to simpler relations, to saner judgments, to a more trustful spirit. Our hope is that the time is near when once more men may have some confidence in their fellow men, when the hand of friend- ship may be ungloved and its clasp close and warm, when men will once more do and dare great and noble deeds for brethren and companions' sakes. Members of the Graduating Classes: The baccalaureate pulpit is charged in our day with some- times preaching into the wide air and forgetting its proper audience. But on the other hand it is but a fitting recognition 352 THE VERY ELECT of the new status into which the graduates pass, that they should be regarded as now part of the great public, who are arbiters in all questions of general interest. In any case the theme of this hour is pertinent to you and such as you, to those passing from the secluded into the social and communal life, namely, that you should at once interest yourselves practically in those problems which concern your fellow men, and es- pecially that you should get into close touch and warm re- lationship with those who will be, for their good and yours, your brethren and companions in a common human life. We all owe some duties to all mankind, to men in general, to society, to art, to science, to religion. But within this wide area of relationship there are certain divinely appointed human soci- eties, which demand our primal allegiance and within which our best life will be lived. Altruism is fine, benevolence, "love to being in general," is noble, but kindly regard for one's neighbors, caring for one's own, the cherishing of friends, devotion to the interests of one's city and community, and especially fellowship in one's church, the communion of saints, is to be true to ourselves and to others, to be human, Christ- like. It will be a great loss out of the possible fullness of your lives, if you suffer yourselves to drift into an attitude of independ- ency, of isolation, of superiority, of such a dread of conformity that you make a virtue of nonconformity, of singularity. Do not I beseech you, either by choice or by sufferance, get enrolled in that coterie, said to be fostered by our higher education, of men, who hold themselves aloof, and sulk and scorn, men for whom no party is good enough, no church good enough, no calling or society or relationship so free from blame or danger that they can afford to have part in it. In the world you are going out to meet there are some bad men, but there are more good ones, some vain and frivolous women, but more who are worthy of your admiration and love. Your next greatest test more severe and more telling FOR BRETHREN AND COMPANIONS' SAKES 353 on your future than all the examinations of your past four years will be your choices of fellowships, of those personal intimacies and relationships which will, much more than you now imagine, determine both your own satisfaction and your efficiency in life. One main value of the education you have received is that it has prepared you to make such choices wisely and to carry them into effect with ample resources. You are not shut up to any narrow, predetermined career. But on whatever career you determine let a large consideration in the choice be the personal one, the associations into which you will be brought, the ties which will be formed, the soul unions which will naturally and inevitably come to pass, the brethren and companions who with clasped hands will walk with you in the way of life. Happy, most happy will you be, if in after years you shall find yourselves of the goodly company, that intellectual and spiritual, that human and Christian company of whom it can be said as of old, "Behold how good and how pleasant is is for brethren to dwell together in unity." 23 THE DEVOUT MAN OF THE WORLD Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord. Rom. xiiill. THIS chiefest of the apostles, this man most human and most saintly, who represents to us at the same time supreme good sense and the highest spirituality, appears to think that the same man may be a very active man and a very religious man. He evidently does not think that because a man is very earnest in everyday affairs he is unlikely to be equally earnest in his religion; nor, because he is a man of reverence toward God, a man of faith and prayer, that he is likely to be a narrow- minded man and a hypocrite. In fact our Scriptures through- out seem to imply that to be a busy and prosperous man and to be a man of piety, involve no incompatibility call for no surprise. Far back in history, or in historic fiction it makes no difference which the biblical writer tells us of one who was a great man of the East, that he had vast wealth and was held in high honor, and that he " feared God," which was the writer's way of saying that he was a man of piety. In the first century of our era we are made acquainted with a Roman soldier in Palestine who was "a devout man, and one that feared God, and prayed to God always." And neither writer betrays any surprise that a great sheik or a good soldier should be a devout man. Nor is modern biography lacking in con- spicuous examples of the combination of these two qualities in the same person. There occur to us at once, Gladstone among statesmen, Faraday among scientists, Stevenson in literature, merchant princes innumerable, soldiers many, including Havelock, Gordon, Howard, Lee. But more con- vincing than these examples of distinguished men would be the inconspicuous men whom we personally know neighbors, townsmen, men in the same social circle, in the same church men whom we know intimately and of whom we are perfectly 354 THE DEVOUT MAN OF THE WORLD 355 and equally sure that their secular life is strenuous and their piety genuine and fervid. This is to be our thought and our lesson today that this union of secular activity with the temper and habit of piety is the ideal of human character not one admirable and rare species of excellence, but the normal standard of well-being and well-doing for all. The Christian conception of human life is not intolerant of differences. It can bear with and turn to good account many styles of character. It can get advantage from a few anemic, ascetic saints. It can pardon one who in his zeal to do good works sometimes forgets to say his prayers. But Christianity holds up as the complete man, the complete modern man, the man who is not only diligent in business, but is fervent in spirit, serving the Lord one who now, as ages ago, is a devout man, one who fears God and prays to God always. What is piety? We will avoid any sharp definition lest we slip unawares into the easily besetting sin of intolerance. Let the idea before us be large enough to include all forms of it which are real and genuine. So understanding, we can hardly do better than to borrow Jeremy Taylor's phrase and say that piety is "the practise of the presence of God." Of course as there are gods many and lords many, so there may be a Buddhist, a Confucian, a Mohammedan piety, perhaps even a Positivist, an Agnostic piety, which as piety may be as real and genuine as any other. The devout Moslem certainly in his way practises the presence of his God, and in so far is entitled to be regarded as a man of piety and I suppose John Stuart Mill had his style of piety or substitute for piety. But for us, not begging any question, respecting every right or obligation of individual judgment, what is the conception of God on which the serious-minded man will today find a basis for piety? Is not God for us, the God of the Christian Scriptures, the God of modern science and modern philosophy, the God of the conscience and heart of the great multitude of 356 THE VERY ELECT sober-minded and right-living people, this generalized and composite conception of God, taken into and wrought over by each man's individual thought and conscience and heart? If it be said that this is a vague and infinitely variable concep- tion of the God whose presence we are to practise, the answer is that vague and variable as it is in the statement, the actual substance of it is not only what the necessity of the case absolutely requires, but is in each man's soul a potentiality, which if realized, would irradiate each life with a grace and a glory transcending all good from all other sources. It is nothing less than opening the soul, and keeping the soul open, to those influences which we rightly call divine because they imply that man is truly a partaker of the divine nature. For, if we are indeed made in the image of God, if we in our lower capacity have the same attributes in kind though different in degree, the same reason and moral judgment, the same free will, then we are capable of the society of God, capable of sharing our thoughts with God, capable of understanding what he says to us, of judging the reasoning by which he addresses truth to us, capable of loving and hating, of choosing and refus- ing, as he does. It becomes then perfectly natural, the truly human on our side, as it is the truly divine on his side, that the relation between God and us should be mutual; on his side a gracious, loving, communicating bestowal of himself, of all of himself which he is capable of bestowing, and on our side a frank, open-hearted, reverent, trustful acceptance of himself, of all of himself which we are capable of receiving. In some former times of men's ignorance the uppermost feeling of man toward God, coupled with other feelings, but over- bearing them, was that of fear. Men thought of him as far off and dreaded to have him nearer. Then by degrees, as men knew God better, and themselves better, they began to think of him and were pleased to think of him as near, "not far from any one of us"; and now at last since Jesus manifested God to us as he is, we are coming to think of him as close to us THE DEVOUT MAN OF THE WORLD 357 "nearer than breathing" yes, as within us, sharing with us our human thoughts, feelings, choices. The God with whom we have to do, who was once to men a kind of bugbear, one with whom men had to do, but would rather have had nothing to do, is, when we come to see things rightly, the one being to whom we are so related that without him we were something less than men, wandering in the limbo of unrealized being, living or half living a life imperfect, misshapen, truncated, but in whom and with whom we come to our completeness, to ourselves, to manhood, as God made it to be. If now this language seems to be somewhat vague and visionary, let us come nearer to the practical life of our every- day man who is practising the presence of God, and ask what is the actual dynamic of piety in a human soul and a human life, what does it contribute to character and conduct con- ceived after the highest pattern? I think we may say that true piety contributes to character a certain elevation, a cer- tain nobility, a certain refinement, which naturally grow out of this conscious union with God. This certainly is what it should produce. A man who practises the presence of God should have something of the shining face which Moses had when he came down from the mount. Piety levels all distinc- tions of person and fortune, for in the presence of God all men are equal, or rather it raises all men to a height hi which all rank disappears. The Scottish peasant in his Saturday night exercise, reverently laying aside his bonnet, says, "Let us worship God," and no laird, or prelate, or king, has a higher rank in the universe. The note of piety dignifies all other acts and duties and brings a divine beauty down into ordinary human life. A life without piety may be mathematically correct correct according to arithmetic, but not expansive and illimitable after the manner of geometry. It has no in- finite radii, no asymptotes, no great celestial circles. Or to get a figure from another field, a life without piety may be good prose, accurate, rational, syllogistic, not melodious, 358 THE VERY ELECT not lyrical. The lyrical element conies into life, adding to the good conscience toward God and man, with the three religious graces celebrated by St. Paul, faith, hope, love. Life barely intellectual on ever so high a plane is in danger of becoming, usually does become, cynical; that is, half conscious and half suspicious of its own merit, it looks with disdain upon the imperfect lives of other men, the lives which with all their imperfections God pities and with a great yearning love seeks to redeem and reinspire. One of the great needs of our age is a cure for cynicism, and the only cure is piety, the piety which first breeds humility, and then passes on to Godlike charity, and culminates in a blended love and service of God and man. At this point, if we listen, we shall hear it said, "But sane human life has no place for the mystic, the transcendental, the ecstatic. To live well every day, to be true and kind and public-spirited in all ordinary life, is to be virtuous, and to be capable of heroism and sacrifice in great emergencies is to be religious, and this twofold character fills the whole duty and exhausts the whole capacity of man." Yes, if man is nothing but the highest animal in the animal series of being, if he stands related to God as other animals, as simply a creature, a product, a beautiful and noble piece of workmanship, thrown off by the Creator like a sun or a star, to perform its allotted part in the universe, but no part of God's self. But if man is a being associated with God in the order of the divine universe, if it is not a fancy, but a fact, that in God we live and move and have our being, if we are not produced by him, but born of him, then whatever in this relation there may be of mystic and transcendental is certainly a legitimate part of human experi- ence. To leave out of consideration what the old divines called the Godward side of man's nature, to shut God out of one's thought and one's heart, is an unnatural act, a crime against nature, is not only ungrateful, unfilial, it is unnatural; it represses the instincts of the normal human heart. If theologians had not perverted the true meaning of the word THE DEVOUT MAN OF THE WORLD 359 "nature," and the word "natural," we should not now be in controversy over the statement that the love of God is natural piety, that is, that it is involved in man's true nature to believe in and to rejoice in his fellowship with God. The atheistic attitude, the attitude of hostility or indifference toward God, is a sophisticated state of mind, in its way as perverse as would be the same attitude on the part of a child toward its father or mother. The belief that every child naturally fears and hates God has been overborne by the heart theology of innumerable mothers who have taught the little ones to lift innocent hands and hearts to the Father in heaven, ere a hard and gainsaying world has perverted natural piety into the unnatural state of those who are without God in the world. But here candor requires us to admit and to explain the fact that the pietistic element of religion has not at the present day the prominence it has had in some former ages of human history that it has in fact come into a certain measure of disrepute, especially in certain climates and zones of the social and philosophic spheres. One reason for this is unquestionably the prevalence of counterfeit piety and the ease with which true piety is counterfeited. The worst of anything, we are taught, is the corruption of the best. While nothing is more attractive than genuine piety, so guileless, so modest, so self- effacing, nothing is more repellent, more loathsome than false pride, so assuming, so unctuous, so ugly. Here fiction has found one of its great opportunities and has exploited it; some- times it must be admitted in honest satire, exposing, casti- gating, flaying, where all is deserved; sometimes with a kind of fiendish glee exulting in the havoc it makes. The result of all this has been to create, especially in the quarters indi- cated, a reaction against all manifestations of the religious temper, even in its sanest forms. There exists, and, it is sometimes charged, with special protection and favor in our institutions of learning a cult, not of impiety, nobody charges that, but of a certain frigid avoidance of every feeling and 360 THE VERY ELECT every utterance which verges toward piety a certain high, stoical disdain of any ebullition of religious sentiment. This is a recurrence of a state of things which prevailed in and was characteristic of the eighteenth century, when under the then abjured name of " enthusiasm," all religious emotion was condemned and outlawed, an attitude of mind we cannot say of soul, for soul was in abeyance which was shamed into silence and then won to repentance by the splendid outburst of Methodism. But it is not necessary to believe that the present state of things is so serious as was that in the earlier century. We are not obliged to believe that the men of culture and philosophy are as unsympathetic and indifferent as their reticence would seem to imply, because it would seem to be an affront, which they would rightfully resent, if we were to con- ceive of them as being led in one of the capital concerns of life by mere antipathies, that they are impelled to extremes in one direction merely because some other men are going to extremes in another direction. The poorest possible reason for leaving out of one's plan of life true piety would be the false piety of others. If hypocrites love to pray in the market- places and in the corners of the streets that they may be seen of men, that furnishes good reason for entering into one's closet and praying in secret, but certainly no reason whatever for abstaining from prayer anywhere and everywhere. Who would admit that his religion, or his lack of religion, was forced upon him by the Pharisees, by the Tartuffes and the Peck- sniffs of a human comedy mingled of realism and calumny? No doubt it takes courage in certain quarters to profess the same beliefs and recite the same old familiar words which are dear to simple unilluminated intellects and to humble and con- trite hearts, but let us thank God that there are many who do this with unconscious bravery and genuine simplicity. But on another side it is said that what is needed today is not more religion, certainly not more religiousness, but more righteousness. Yes, we need more righteousness, and in order THE DEVOUT MAN OF THE WORLD 361 that we may have it, we need more religion, yes, more piety. What our fathers meant by the fear of God, which is not very different from what we mean by the love of God for love cast out fear in the hearts of men before it cast it out of their phrase the practise of the presence of God is the highest possible incentive to right living. If fraud and cruelty and wrong still exist in communities where church spires abound, what would those communities be if the churches were abol- ished? What are the communities on the frontier where no churches yet exist? Why do men who do not care for piety, but who do want law, and right, and peace, help to build churches and to establish, not sacred concerts or moral lecture- ships, but divine worship? But now, to bring these thoughts to a close, though I have sometimes used the words "religion" and "piety" inter- changeably, I have meant to emphasize that kind of religion which brings man into face-to-face and heart-to-heart relation- ship with a personal God, which makes much of the paternal and filial society between God and us, which is not satisfied with worshiping him as Creator and Moral Governor, as Al- mighty God, as the Lord God of Hosts, but yearns after him, and joys in him, as the Father of our spirits, as the fountain of our life, as the source from which from whom day by day and hour by hour we draw our life and all that makes life real and satisfying. Is this kind of religion on the wane? Is it a thing of the past? Is the religion of the future to be a thing of abstractions, of metaphysics, which derives life from no central warmth, which offers no divine heart great enough to draw to itself all our affection, tender enough to be affected by all our needs? In place of the living God whom our fathers loved and served, in whose name we and our children have been baptized, are we to be relegated to a stream of tendencies, a system of cosmic forces? May we not rather believe, or at least hope, that all this larger and sounder knowledge of God which has come to our age through the revelations of God in 362 THE VERY ELECT science, in philosophy, in history, in life, and through a more thorough study of God's Holy Word, is not putting God farther from us but really bringing him closer to us, making him more real to us and our relation to him more intimate, more vital? There are signs which point hopefully in this direction. The heart element in religion, the greater prominence given to the feature of worship in public devotions, the popular approval of spiritual hymns and fervid preaching, and above all the warm interest which the unofficial, the lay constituency is taking in evangelical propagandism all this seems to mean that a new era in the religious life of Christendom is at hand, is already here. What an accession of power would come to this forward movement if the universities and colleges would give to it the great momentum of their approval and co-opera- tion! if, never forsaking their proper role of inculcating thoughtfulness and sincerity, of giving out light rather than heat in all religious movements, they should come out from their attitude of aloofness and silence, and take the place of leadership which belongs to them! The universities were once at the front of God's host in all times which called for conviction and courage and movement. Let us hope and pray that they may be so once again and always. Members of the Graduating Class: It will hardly be necessary to tell you, certainly not to tell most of this audience, that my theme for the discourse to which you have listened came to me naturally, almost inevitably. For some time past it has seemed to me that while college men as a class are fully as responsive to the claims of religion as other men, even more so, yet for reasons growing out of current discussion, the central idea of religion, the religion of religion, ought to be urged upon you at every favorable oppor- tunity and especially when on occasions like this your minds are particularly open to the appeal of all the higher things of the spirit. And now in the providence of God, we are all thinking THE DEVOUT MAN OF THE WORLD 363 of a life just closed which most beautifully illustrates and en- forces these considerations a thousand times more effectively than any words can do. An institution which had among its prominent men one whose character and life so finely exem- plified the union of the active and the ideal lives must not lose the force of such an example on all its members, especially its younger members. To have gone forth from this city and this University a poor boy, and to have acquired wealth and public respect and offices of dignity and influence, this is happily in our country not an extraordinary achievement; but with all this to have had the spiritual side of life equally developed, to have lived a life radiant with music and art and social charms leading up to the crown of all in a deep religious spirit and a life of simple piety, to have been fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; this is what compels our admiration and love. Will any one hesitate to say that this element of character was needed thus to command our admiration and love? That the simple, modest, courageous, unashamed piety, lived out in secret and in the face of all men, was what gave to Mr. Converse his unique place in our respect as well as our affection? Some of those present may recall the prayer he made at the baccalaureate service four years ago. It was a prayer that revealed, as free prayer often does, his own religious temper and attitude. It was in part a family prayer, one of household worship, the prayer in which generations of New England piety had expressed itself, and it was also the prayer of one who had for himself practised the presence of God. The last occasion on which Mr. Converse made a public appearance was at a meeting the object of which was to pro- mote the evangelical movement in which he took so deep an interest, so that in a sense his last words were in unison with Christ's last words before his ascension. Among the noble and beautiful things which he did for this University, this example, by which he being dead yet speaketh, is surely the greatest. 364 THE VERY ELECT You who like him will be business men, you who will have to do with the most beautiful work of God's hand, the human body, you who are to teach or write or in any way make life purer and sweeter and stronger in the home or in the great world you all carry with you the obligation and the oppor- tunity of living truer and nobler and holier lives because of your being linked in the fellowship of this University with a life which was filled, as was his, with the Spirit and Life of God. TRUE CHRISTIAN UNITY 1 Is Christ divided ? I Cor. i: 18. THE meaning* of the question as St. Paul asked it of the Corinthians was: Is Christ the head of a party? Is the spirit of Christ the spirit which creates factions? Will you, called to be saints in Corinth, in the name of Christ separate the Church into fragments and start a number of sects into warring strife? Well might the apostle break out into indignant remonstrance when he saw the little flock of believers rending themselves asunder in the very first experiences of fellowship. How would his great heart have been grieved, could he have foreseen what the ages were to bring of disunion and jealousy and schism, and of feelings more akin to hate than love among the brethren of Christ and of each other! Many times during the almost uninterrupted prevalence of this spirit of discord in the history of the Christian church, good men, pained as the apostle was, have had searchings of heart respecting the causes of this lamentable state of things and the possible remedies for it. It is always a hopeful sign when this new quest is once more taken up a sign that the evil is realized and the Christian mind is dissatisfied and more or less awakened to the need and the possibility of remedial action. We have reason to think that our own is such a time, that one more effort is to be made to bring Chris- tian souls and even Christian churches into more harmonious relations with each other if not into organic unity which at times looks farther off than ever, into what may even be better than organic unity, were that possible into relations of fraternity, and co-operation, and mutual helpfulness, into a unity of spirit and of action. i Preached at the First Church, Burlington, December, 1909. 365 366 THE VERY ELECT In addressing ourselves to the study of the situation and of its possibilities, let us first ask what have been some of the mistakes of the past, in order that we may if possible in the future partly avoid and partly undo them. 1. Nothing is plainer from the survey of Christian history than that whenever the church has become a political party she has done so to her harm. Political power the church must exert if she is to do her work in the world, but that power is to be exercised on, not by, political parties. Every time the church has attempted to do her work by controlling political parties as parties, she has become herself a political party, and in doing so has abandoned her spiritual ascendency. Puritanism, for example, as a religion, was a mighty force for good, purifying morals, manners, life, and even politics. But puritanism as a political party ran a downward course and ended by bringing harm upon the cause which brought it into being. Any church which in our day, here in the United States, allies itself with a political party, becomes a sort of political sect, a mongrel organization, for all good purposes less than a church and not a real gain to a party. 2. Secondly, the church has become divisive by making of itself a theological fold, and therefore necessarily creating a number of exclusive and antagonistic theological folds. Over the gateway to the church, which ought to be as open as the morning light and as liberal as the rain and sunshine, the church has written in one place "Let no one enter here who does not say shiboleth as we say it," and in another place "Whosoever belie veth not the Christian faith as we phrase it will no doubt perish everlastingly." Every reflecting Chris- tian, every serious-minded church, will have some theology, for theology is the account which the reasoning man gives of his religion. But the most unreasonable use to make of theology is by means of it to keep out of the Church those who most need its nurture in order to attain to a knowledge of the truth. The great mistake has been in confounding a knowledge of TRUE CHRISTIAN UNITY 367 theology with an experience of saving truth. No doubt the human will is free, or not free : no doubt the Holy Spirit pro- ceeds from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only: both propositions cannot well be true, and it is possible to persuade one's self and perhaps others that important conse- quences depend on which of them is true; but few would deny that souls are saved, and saintly lives are lived and great and good deeds are wrought, by those who hold either or neither of them. There may well be schools of theology, but the church of Christ should include the devout students of all schools and those who are members of no school. 3. Again, and in close connection with this last consideration, the church mistakes when it undertakes to make of itself an intellectual caste. The Christian life well lived, Christian aims thoughtfully carried out, Christian truth well conned, tend to breed an intellectual stock, men and women of superior intelligence. But a church which selects and favors and caters to this class, excludes a great majority of believers, or of those who should be believers, and sends them to form sects of their own, or leaves them outside of all churches. Let us make confession of a great mistake, and a great fault on the part of the New England churches of our own order. The time was w r hen these churches held possession of almost the entire field. These churches no one will deny it bred a stock of superior men and women, a company of souls which would bear com- parison with an equal number bred up in any of the historic churches of Christendom. But they have lost the ground, at least they have lost that good degreee of church unity and conformity which then prevailed, and have seen almost all the sects known in Christendom enter in and contest the field with them. What is the reason? Partly, because they set up a standard which was not broadly human, was too exact- ing on the intellectual side, too inflexible as regards other sides. If religion always interested men through conviction only, or even mainly, the attitude of these churches was right 368 THE VERY ELECT and they would have perpetuated their ascendency. But religion makes its appeal and its legitimate appeal to some men through their emotional or their esthetic nature, or for reasons of tradition and habit, and here there was very meager provision for meeting these real human needs. Other churches came and supplied the missing elements in the religious life, and have left us to mourn our loss and to recognize too late our mistake. 4. A fault on another side which easily turns a church into a sect, and a sect most alien to the true Christian spirit, is to make of the church a social cult I mean the church of a set, and especially of a social set a company called together and kept together by social affinities, by wealth, or position, or style of living, or taste in worldly matters a church four hundred, so to speak. At a service in a certain city church, the minister in applying the doctrine of his sermon first ad- dressed his appeal to those who sat in their own pews and then to those who sat in the charity seats, saints or outcasts accord- ing as you pay an extreme but significant distinction. In the early history of the New England churches, there was a custom more or less prevalent known as "dignifying the meet- ing-house" an annual assignment of seats in accordance with the dignity claimed by, or accorded to, the several families of the congregation. A better custom would have been let us say, would still be to have read in church periodically, the second chapter of the general epistle of James, which begins thus, "My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons." 5. One other form of the schismatic spirit in the church is that temper which induces men to form little groups of "pecul- iar people" sometimes in their self-satisfied and uncharitable estimate of their own piety a perversion of the apostle's words, "Beloved, we know that we are of God and that the whole world lieth in wickedness" a very active and very noxious growth of spiritual pride; sometimes in a very con- TRUE CHRISTIAN UNITY 369 scientious insistence upon some minor difference of belief or conduct exaggerated into a totally abnormal importance. Here we strike the essential evil and wrong of the divisive spirit whatever may be the form which it takes: it is a deficient sense of the value of the whole as compared with the value of some particular part. The true Christian spirit says, "Let us preserve the whole, even if we must submit to some sac- rifice in this or that part." The sectarian spirit says, "Let us insist upon having our will here at this particular spot, even if we have to give away the integrity of the whole," and so we have sects innumerable, no one of which contains or cherishes the totality of the Christian truth, or of the Christian life, because the sects which have broken away have carried with them the emphasis on certain matters essential to the complete- ness of the whole. Some low forms of animal life have the power of reproducing their organisms by fissure: two halves become two complete wholes. But the Christian Church is not so organized : when it is divided it is broken into fragments, each maintaining a maimed and incomplete individualism, so that Christendom has today instead of churches, too many groups, larger or smaller, of "peculiar people" not peculiar in the Scripture sense, specially "zealous of good works," but peculiar in the sense of having characteristics which have not the note of catholicity, of universality, which as Newman truly says is one of the essential notes of the true Christian Church. Now no one has a right in this way to expose the weaknesses and arraign the errors of Christian churches without having some feasible plan to suggest for correcting the evils criticised and bringing in a better state of things. Is it to be expected or hoped or even desired that the various churches, or as we call them denominations, can soon, or ever, be brought to unite into one organization, or even into few organizations? I will confess that to me that prospect seems well nigh hopeless, and for this reason, that any such unifying would require each 370 THE VERY ELECT organization to give up that for the sake of which as an organi- zation it exists, would be in short to belie and to cast reproach upon the entire history and position of the denominations. Can we expect Episcopalians to renounce Episcopal succession in the ministry, and Baptists to forego adult baptism by im- mersion, and Presbyterians to give up the eldership, for the sake of attaining a compromising Christian unity? If it is said that this is being done in pioneer communities, and in rural villages, the answer is that what men do because they are a feeble folk, and as a last resort, they will undo when they are able. Christians are slowly coming to see that organic unity, that is, the church as one great organization, unified, compacted, solidified, by rigid uniformity of creed and discipline, is not only not the Christian ideal awaiting some far off realization, but is not what we hope for or ought to strive for in our en- deavors after Christian perfection. Such rigid organization and discipline would be possible among creatures of limited and inferior capacities or among men in a low state of develop- ment, but among beings so highly endowed, so various and complex as men, it is both impossible and undesirable, It is a failure to realize the diversity of human nature in one humanity which has created sects and which is now seeking to reorganize them. What a dull world, what a stupid life ours would be, if men were all so alike that they could be massed and manoeuvred and exploited in some mechanical or in some military fashion. Men in prison or under prison regime have to learn the lock-step and to get forward by possible inches. Freedom to think and to act upon one's own thinking is one of the prizes of Christian attainment and one of the conditions of true Christian unity. Why should it have ever been thought necessary that men must always think alike on a subject in which all of us together can think only a small part of possible thoughts? But, asks someone, how can men who think differently on the greatest of all questions, those of religion, TRUE CHRISTIAN UNITY 371 live together and work together unless they agree? To that question there are two answers : first, that the fullest life comes to those who live together and do not agree, that is, those who are not just multiples of one another those whose peculiari- ties are mutually complementary, who contribute each to the other's resources, who find their differences helpful; and secondly, that when a group of Christians separate from the main body in order to emphasize that special truth which they hold, they withdraw from the body the value of that emphasis, and by so much make it incomplete. To take an illustration from a distance so as not to be invidious, though there are illustrations much nearer home, the English Wesley- ans in separating from the mother church withdrew from it the spirituality needed, and themselves suffered the loss of the learning and the historic influence which the Anglican church supplied, the result being an aggregate loss to the church at large. What then is the solution of our question? the practical, immediate, feasible solution of it? The way to answer any such great question, one concerning great movements in the Kingdom of God on the earth, is first to ask humbly and in a prayerful spirit, in what way God's Spirit, working in and through God's Providence, seems to be leading the way, and then to follow in that way heartily and vigorously. Can there be any mistake as to what that way is at the present time? Is it not in the way of mutual respect, and sympathy, and fellowship, and brotherhood, and co-operation? And is not the progress making in these directions most gratifying and heartening? In the city of New York, for example, there are scores of churches which a stranger could visit on any Sunday and not be able to tell by anything said or done, whether the church was Presbyterian, Congregational, Reformed, Baptist, Meth- odist, or, if we consider the preaching alone, Episcopal, Uni- tarian or Universalist. The interchange of pulpits now 372 THE VERY ELECT becoming common, is a further evidence of the progress of this spirit. The man today, minister or layman, who maintains that the particular doctrine of his church is not only important that he may rightly do but that it is so essential that he is justified in refusing to all others the name of Christian speak- ing of them as "so-called Christians," is one of a small minor- ity, and is likely to become a lonely wanderer in the desert, crying with Elijah that he alone is faithful, and subjecting himself to Elijah's rebuke of being a traducer of his brethren. Let us have, in the first place, sacramental fellowship, mystical fellowship, in prayer, in praise, in " doing this in remembrance" of Christ, even if we "do this" each in our own way which we think was his way; and in the second place, let us have co-operation in all good works, to help the poor, to raise the fallen, to cleanse corporate and civic life, to increase sobriety, to promote good government, and in all possible ways to advance the Kingdom of God among men, at home and abroad and all round the earth, and we need not sigh and groan and wait for the consolidation of belief into one rigid creed, or for the unification of churches into one ecclesiastical organ- ization. Christian unity will have already come, because all men will be trying to do God's will on earth as it is done in Heaven. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW NIVKRSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY