lOfllDB HISTORICAL .._._. 
 
 iH* .
 
 IIUIHKS HKTJtfiCAL SURVEY
 
 Swing, 
 
 BORN, CINCINNATI, OHIO, 
 AUGUST 23, 1830. 
 
 INSTRUCTOR IN GREEK AND LATIN 
 
 AT MIAMI UNIVERSITY, OXFORD, OHIO, 
 
 1853 TO 1866. 
 
 PASTOR OF WESTMINSTER, NORTH PRESBYTERIAN, AND 
 FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCHES, 
 
 CHICAGO, 
 1866 TO 1875. 
 
 PASTOR OF THE CENTRAL CHURCH, 
 CHICAGO, 
 
 1875 TO 1894. 
 
 DIED, CHICAGO, OCTOBER 3, 1894.
 
 DAVID SWING: 
 
 (WXemoriaf Q?ofume. 
 
 TEN SERMONS, 
 
 SELECTED AND PREPARED FOR PUBLICATION BY HIMSELF ; 
 
 TOGETHER WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, TRIBUTES CALLED 
 OUT BY His DEATH, THE LAST SERMON HE EVER 
 PREACHED, AND His UNFINISHED SERMON; ALSO, 
 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CENTRAL CHURCH, 
 THE EVENTS WHICH LED TO ITS ORGANI- 
 ZATION, AND THE FIRST SERMON 
 PREACHED BEFORE THAT 
 CONGREGATION. 
 
 COMPILED BY HIS DAUGHTER, 
 
 HELEN SWING STARRING. 
 
 P. TENNYSON NEELY, 
 
 PUBLISHER, CHICAGO. 
 MDCCCXCIV. NEW YORK.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1894, 
 
 BY 
 
 HELEN SWING STARRING.
 
 BeMcation. 
 
 IN LOVING REMEMBRANCE OF MY FATHER, 
 DAVID SWING, 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
 
 TO 
 ALL WHO KNEW AND LOVED HIM. 
 
 His DAUGHTER, 
 HELEN.
 
 OF THE ONE THOUSAND COPIES OF THIS BOOK 
 ISSUED TO SUBSCRIBERS THIS is 
 
 No..
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 POEM Consider B. Carter, 10 
 
 PBEFACE, 11 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Frank Gilbert, 13 
 
 HISTORY OF THE CENTRAL CHURCH Thomas S. Chard, 23 
 
 TEN SERMONS 
 
 The Simpler and Greater Eeligion, 29 
 
 The Modern Christian Faith, . 48 
 
 Phillips .Brooks, 68 
 
 New Times Make New Men, 88 
 
 Things and Men, 108 
 
 Immorality, 127 
 
 Devotion and Work, 147 
 
 Radicalism Root and Branch, 167 
 
 The Gentleman of the New School Rutherford Jl. 
 
 Hayes, 185 
 
 Our New Era 205 
 
 TRIBUTES 
 
 Poem Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, . 225 
 
 Funeral Sermon Dr. Barrows, 228 
 
 The Poet Preacher Sermon by Dr. Emil G. Hirsch, 247 
 
 Sermon Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulns, 278 
 
 Sermon Dr. Thomas Hall, 304 
 
 Sermon Dr. H. W. Thomas, 310 
 
 Sermon Dr. F. A. Noble, 325 
 
 Extract from Sermon Bishop Fallows, 355 
 
 Extract from Sermon Kev. H. A. Delano, .... 358 
 
 Extract from Sermon Rev. J. P. Brushingham, . . 361 
 
 Extract from Sermon Rev. T. W. Handford, . . . 366 
 
 RESOLUTIONS OF FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, . . 368 
 
 REASONS FOR WITHDRAWAL FROM FOURTH PRESBYTE- 
 RIAN CHURCH, 370 
 
 REASONS FOR A CENTRAL CHURCH, 373 
 
 LAST SERMON DELIVERED BY DAVID SWING, .... 391 
 
 UNFINISHED SERMON, 412
 
 S>av>ib Swing, 
 
 His noble soul passed with the fading year 
 
 When all the flowers he loved, with drooping heads, 
 
 Had laid them down to sleep in winter beds, 
 
 The poet fell asleep upon his bier. 
 
 Oh, steadfast friends, with grieving hearts draw near, 
 
 And bear all gently to his dreamless sleep 
 
 The faithful pastor, minister and seer, 
 
 While men of all religions pray and weep. 
 
 Large was his faith and hope his very name 
 
 A synonym for pure and noble deeds; 
 
 The passion of his theme a kindling flame, 
 
 His Christian spirit greater than all creeds 
 
 Thus, loving men of every clime and name, 
 
 He fell asleep in death and rose to fame. 
 
 CONSIDER B. CARTER. 
 
 10
 
 preface. 
 
 THE great Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed 
 every sermon which David Swing had written up 
 to that date. He always insisted that he was glad 
 to have them put forever beyond the reach of 
 publication. To his thinking, a sermon was 
 nianna for a day, or, at least, a sermon might be 
 excellent in itself, yet unsuited for publication in 
 book form. For a long time he positively refused 
 to have his sermons published in book form 
 except as essays; but, fortunately, in the spring of 
 1 94, he consented to prepare a volume of sermons 
 for publication. Those sermons, ten in number, 
 form the main feature of the volume herewith 
 presented to the public. As Moses gave many 
 laws and precepts, but put upon a plane apart 
 from all others the Ten Commandments, so these 
 ten sermons stand quite apart from all the rest. 
 They were selected from many hundreds which 
 had been published entire in newspapers. The 
 original intention was to publish these sermons 
 alone; but the death of the great preacher has 
 made desirable a few additions: a brief sketch of
 
 12 
 
 his life, a short history of the Central Church, 
 the last sermon which the great preacher deliv- 
 ered, the one which he was writing when the 
 Angel of Death bade him shake from his wings 
 the dust of his body, his farewell to the Fourth 
 Presbyterian Church of Chicago, his first address 
 to the Central Church, and selections from the 
 tributes paid to his worth and genius by his fellow 
 clergymen of Chicago. With the exception of 
 these added features, and the portrait, this volume 
 is precisely as it was prepared by Professor Swing 
 himself.
 
 Bioorapbical Sfcetdb. 
 
 36s ffranfc Gilbert. 
 
 DAVID SWING was of German ancestry, but, 
 by a long line of descent, an American. The 
 first of the name sought and found personal lib- 
 erty on this side of the Atlantic before the name 
 of the United States had ever been spoken. The 
 best characteristics of the land of Goethe and 
 Kant, blended with those of the land of Franklin 
 and Emerson, found pre-eminent embodiment in 
 the great preacher, whose prose was poetry, 
 whose reflections were philosophy, and whose 
 teachings were philosophy and religion applied 
 to the conduct of life. 
 
 David Swing was born in Cincinnati, August 
 23, 1830. The father, whose baptismal name 
 he bore, was in the steamboat business on the 
 Ohio River, then one of the great highways of 
 the nation. 
 
 The senior David Swing fell a victim to the 
 cholera of 1832. This proved a turning point in 
 the life of his son. Instead of spending his boy- 
 hood in what was then the metropolis of the 
 
 13
 
 14 
 
 West, he was destined to nourish a youth sub- 
 lime in the comparative solitude of a farm in a 
 thoroughly rural district; for, when he was five 
 years old, his mother married again and became 
 a farmer's wife. This was the only notable 
 change in the general atmosphere of his boyhood. 
 The father, although a truly Christian citizen, was 
 not a member of any church, while the stepfather 
 was of the strictest sect, a Presbyterian. 
 
 There was nothing in the boy life of the great 
 preacher which was especially noteworthy. He 
 attended the public schools of his neighborhood, 
 acquiring the rudiments of education, and show- 
 ing no unusual taste for reading. It was not 
 until he was fourteen years of age that the 
 flower of his genius began to blossom. The 
 State of Ohio was dotted over with small col- 
 leges, the policy of the early settlers being to 
 distribute institutions of higher learning, instead 
 of attempting to build up a great university. 
 Still more numerous were the academies. As a 
 consequence of that policy, almost any lad of that 
 period and State, who was really eager for knowl- 
 edge, could acquire a liberal education. The 
 remarkably long roll of Ohioans who have risen
 
 15 
 
 to distinction attests the wisdom of that policy. 
 It is Miami University, at Oxford, which can 
 claim David Swing as one of its graduates, Pres- 
 ident Harrison being a classmate. From college 
 he went direct to the city of his birth, and, under 
 the especial theological guidance of Dr. N. L. 
 Rice, then one of the most eminent preachers and 
 theologians of the more conservative branch 
 of the Presbyterian Church, he studied for the 
 ministry; but his thoughts turned to his col- 
 lege home. The life at Oxford, with its oppor- 
 tunities for enjoying the society of the high 
 thinkers who made Greek and Latin literature 
 so rich, and, to David Swing, so delightful, had 
 special attraction for him. For twelve years he 
 was instructor of Greek and Latin at Miami Uni- 
 versity, preaching in the meanwhile in some 
 neighboring church. Those were the great years 
 of his preparation for what was to prove his life- 
 work. He settled to his duties at Oxford, expect- 
 ing to remain there permanently. He had gone 
 there a farmer lad, a stranger, and alone. He 
 married Elizabeth Porter, daughter of the leading 
 physician of the town, and it was there that his 
 two daughters who survive him were born. Mrs.
 
 16 
 
 Swing, it may be added in this connection, died 
 August 2, 1879. The husband never married 
 again. During those years at Oxford he enjoyed 
 an enviable reputation as a preacher, but, when 
 called to Chicago to accept a pastorate, he declined 
 it, distrusting his ability to permanently interest a 
 city audience. He had no conception of his own 
 genius. But, finally, after repeated urgings, he 
 accepted the pastorate of the Westminster Pres- 
 byterian Church of Chicago, and left the home 
 of his youth and early manhood. 
 
 The success of David Swing was marked from 
 the first. He always retained the title of Pro- 
 fessor, a fit recognition of his classic culture. 
 Soon after his removal to Chicago came the 
 union of the old and new school branches of 
 the Presbyterian Church. Out of the incidents of 
 that union came the consolidation of the West- 
 minster with the North Presbyterian Church, 
 under the new name of the Fourth Presbyterian 
 Church, Professor Swing being the pastor of the 
 two made one. 
 
 The great Chicago fire of October 9, 1871, 
 destroyed the Fourth Church edifice and all the 
 homes of all the parish, including the pastor's.
 
 17 
 
 In common with nearly the entire North Divis- 
 ion of Chicago, the Swing family were obliged 
 to flee for their lives, taking almost nothing with 
 them . Professor Swing was accustomed to say that 
 there was one comforting reflection, his old ser- 
 mons were burnt up and could never tempt him to 
 draw on his barrel instead of his brain. As an 
 illustration of his genial wit and unfailing hope- 
 fulness, I give the following extract from a letter: 
 
 "On Monday morning of the big fire of '71 
 I overtook Professor Swing, his wife and two 
 daughters, going up Clark Street ahead of the 
 fire, and took him to my room in the school on 
 North Halsted Street. Professor Swing had the 
 baby's hand in his left, and with his right hand 
 pulled the child's express wagon with a few pieces 
 of table silver. 'Hello! Donald,' he said, 'these 
 are all I have left. Gold' (pointing to his wife 
 and children), ' silver and hope.' This hope never 
 left David Swing, for the last words he ever wrote 
 were : ' We must all hope much from the gradual 
 progress of brotherly love.' ' 
 
 At that time the most available audience room 
 not in regular use upon the Sabbath was Standard 
 Hall, in what was then the best residence portion
 
 18 
 
 of the South Division, and there Professor Swing 
 resumed his preaching. Many of his flock gath- 
 ered about him, and others, who had never 
 attended his services, were attracted by his deptli 
 of thought, beauty of diction, and unique elo- 
 quence. Soon the Standard was too small to hold 
 the audience, and when McVicker's Theater was 
 rebuilt and it was one of the first large structures 
 in the burnt district Professor Swing preached 
 there regularly every Sunday morning. Here also 
 the house was too small to hold the people who 
 wished to hear him. During that brief period 
 between the destruction and reconstruction of the 
 Fourth Church, rebuilt, as it was, on its old site, 
 David Swing gained general recognition through- 
 out the three divisions of Chicago as a pulpit 
 genius, and began to be recognized throughout 
 the country at large. 
 
 Putting aside all inducements to continue his 
 services in the center of the city beyond the time 
 necessary for his old parish to restore itself after 
 the dispersion of that night of burning, Professor 
 Swing resumed the regular pastorate as soon as 
 practicable. Everything was moving smoothly, 
 until April 13, 1874, when Professor Francis L.
 
 19 
 
 Patton, of the McCormick Theological Seminary, 
 and subsequently President of Princeton Univer- 
 sity, arraigned him for heresy. It is unnecessary 
 to dwell upon that trial. No man was ever less 
 inclined to spend his strength in controversy than 
 David Swing. It was abhorrent to his whole 
 nature. But, being forced to defend himself, he 
 did it in a masterly manner, and was acquitted. 
 His church, and the community generally, rejoiced 
 exceedingly that the modern Daniel had come out 
 of the lion's den unharmed. But Professor Pat- 
 ton had no thought of stopping. The case could 
 be appealed to the Synod, and from the Synod to 
 the General Assembly, and then, perhaps, be 
 remanded to the Presbytery, the court of original 
 jurisdiction, for a second trial, with a second 
 series of appeals. The prospect of wasting so 
 much of his life in the mere defense of his per- 
 sonal orthodoxy was so unbearable that David 
 Swing quietly severed his connection with the 
 Fourth Church and the Presbyterian denomina- 
 tion. There were no sensational features. His 
 withdrawal was devoid of everything, so far as 
 possible, that would savor of notoriety. But so 
 large a place had Professor Swing already come to
 
 20 
 
 occupy in the religious world, that his loss to the 
 Presbyterian ministry occasioned a great deal of 
 public discussion and contributed perceptibly to 
 the liberal tendency of the period. 
 
 There eagerly rallied around Professor Swing 
 at this period of his life a large constituency, 
 drawn from all parts of the city, rejoicing in the 
 opportunity of resuming, on a more suitable basis, 
 the down-town services begun in McVicker's The- 
 ater. Central Music Hall was built for that pur- 
 pose, and there, until his death, the beloved 
 pastor of Central Church continued to discuss 
 the high themes of religion and ethics. There, 
 also, at stated intervals, the pastor administered 
 the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, to which all 
 were bidden who were in sympathy with the 
 service. The customary mid-week evening serv- 
 ice was maintained in Apollo Hall, the small 
 upper chamber of Central Music Hall. 
 
 The Central Church organized and sustained 
 for many years a Mission School Sabbath and 
 Industrial in the northwestern part of the city, 
 besides taking a large part in the general chari- 
 table and humane work of Chicago. Personally, 
 Professor Swing was specially interested in the
 
 21 
 
 work of the Humane Society, to the efficiency of 
 which he very largely contributed. 
 
 With the opening of the pulpit year of 1879, 
 Professor Swing began his largest pastorate. From 
 that time until his death, his sermons were regu- 
 larly published each Monday morning precisely as 
 delivered. For fourteen years he occupied that 
 press pulpit. There was not a State or a Terri- 
 tory where his voice was not heard. Even Alaska 
 contributed to that vast audience. Nor was that 
 all. Many newspapers throughout the country 
 frequently made liberal extracts from those 
 sermons. Thus the power and' influence of David 
 Swing became a distinct and important factor 
 in the higher life of a multitude which no 
 man could number. When, at last, with only a 
 few days' warning, the end came, not only did 
 Chicago mourn the truly irreparable loss, but 
 that larger congregation shared keenly in the 
 sorrow. 
 
 Without lingering by the deathbed of this 
 second Erasmus, nor yet trenching at all 
 upon the ground so well covered by the tributes 
 herewith published, this sketch can not better 
 elose than by reproducing the poem written by
 
 22 
 
 David Swing in memory of Garfield, and the 
 tribute verse from the pen of Frances Cole: 
 
 Now all ye flowers make room, 
 Hither we come in gloom, 
 To make a mighty tomb, 
 
 Sighing and weeping. 
 Grand was the life he led, 
 Wise was each word he said; 
 But with the noble dead 
 
 We leave him sleeping. 
 
 Soft may his body rest, 
 As on his mother's breast, 
 Whose love stands all confessed, 
 
 Mid blinding tears. 
 But may his soul so white, 
 Rise in triumphant flight, 
 And in God's land of light 
 
 Spend endless years. DAVID SWING. 
 
 When some beloved guest takes scrip and staff 
 For further journeying, or- our heart's son, 
 Conscious of pleasant days of childhood done, 
 Girds up the loins of manhood with a laugh 
 And goes forth full of courage ; then we pace 
 A little way with each the upward slope 
 Till the hill's brow hides him, and we trace 
 Our way alone back to our lonely place. 
 So now, benignant teacher ! that the cloud 
 Hath hid thee closely from our straining eyes, 
 This planet's air grows chill; our hearts are bowed 
 With sense of evening shadows in the skies; 
 In unknown tongues the page of life seems writ, 
 Our friend is gone who should interpret it. 
 
 FRANCES COLH..
 
 1bi0ton> of tbe Central Cburcb. 
 
 JBt? Gbomas S. GbarD. 
 
 [This paper was read to the Central Church on the first Sunday 
 after the funeral of the beloved pastor, together with the unfin- 
 ished sermon, which is also given in this volume.] 
 
 In the year 1866, Professor David Swing, then 
 hardly known beyond the confines of his own 
 native State, was called from the Miami Univer- 
 sity, of Oxford, Ohio, to the pastorate of the 
 Westminster Presbyterian Church of Chicago, 
 which then occupied a small wooden structure in 
 the North Division of the city. Accepting the 
 call, Professor Swing began his pastoral work, 
 and, by the breadth and originality of his views 
 and the beauty of his literary style, soon drew a 
 large following of those who loved liberal 
 thought, when held in balance by spirituality 
 and reason. In those far-away years his bril- 
 liancy of mind was astonishing. One expression 
 I recall, among the many like thoughts which 
 
 28
 
 24 
 
 adorned his discourses: "How precious in God's 
 sight must be this star, for out of its very dust 
 he made a man." Search where we will in lit- 
 erature, such gems are found elsewhere only in 
 Shakespeare, and they were sown thick in every 
 sermon he delivered. The congregation soon 
 grew too large for its small building, and 
 united, under Professor Swing, with the North 
 Church, occupying the more commodious edifice. 
 The great fire of 1871 swept away this church, 
 with all others in that part of the city, and scat- 
 tered the homeless congregation. It reassembled 
 at Standard Hall, and, later, re-enforced by a mul- 
 titude of persons of all shades of religious belief, 
 bound together by a common love for their leader, 
 met for a while in McVicker's Theater. On the 
 completion of the present Fourth Presbyterian 
 Church, Professor Swing occupied its pulpit as 
 pastor. Here, as elsewhere, David Swing was a 
 lover, follower, and teacher of the truth as God 
 gave him to see it. With that happy commin- 
 gling of profound philosophy, delicate poetic 
 sentiment and large humanity, enlivened by a 
 wit which left no bitterness, he charmed and con- 
 vinced men, and held within the influence of the
 
 25 
 
 church many of our ablest thinkers, who, but for 
 him, would not have enjoyed the gentle ministra- 
 tions of the sanctuary. 
 
 Of the heresy trial I need hardly speak. It 
 removed David Swing from the Presbyterian 
 Church and gave him to humanity. 
 
 In November, 1875, Professor David Swing, 
 enjoying the confidence and affectionate regard of 
 the Chicago Presbytery, and beloved by his own 
 congregation, resigned his pastorate of the Fourth 
 Church. Immediate arrangements were made to 
 organize a new church society, with Professor 
 Swing as pastor. An agreement Avas executed as 
 follows : 
 
 "We, the undersigned, believing it to be de- 
 sirable that David Swing shall remain in the city 
 of Chicago and continue his public teachings in 
 some central and commodious place, and having 
 been informed that the annual expense of such 
 arrangement can be brought within the sum of 
 $15,000, including an acceptable salary to Pro- 
 fessor Swing, do hereby severally agree to pay the 
 deficit, if any there shall be, arising from the 
 conduct of such services, to the amount above 
 named, for the term of two years. 1 '
 
 26 
 
 To this agreement fifty names were signed, 
 each subscribing $1,000. These names are as 
 follows : 
 
 J. D. WEBSTER, 
 N. K. FAIBBANK, 
 JOHN S. HUNTER, 
 WILLIAM BROSS, 
 W. W. KIMBALL, 
 SAMUEL BLISS, 
 C. I. PECK, 
 H. A. JOHNSON, 
 E. L. SHELDON, 
 C. A. SPRING, JR., 
 W. S. HENDERSON, 
 A. T. HALL, 
 G. B. CARPENTER, 
 PERRY H. SMITH, 
 J. G. SHORTALL, 
 ROBERT HARRIS, 
 EUGENE S. PIKE, 
 
 LEONARD SWETT, 
 FRANKLIN MAC- 
 
 VEAGH, 
 
 WALTER L. PECK, 
 O. F. FULLER, 
 A. L. CHETLAIN, 
 A. T. ANDREWS, 
 H. I. SHELDON, 
 V. C. TURNER, 
 FRANK M. BLAIR, 
 O. W. POTTER, 
 P. C.. MAYNARD, 
 
 W. E. DOGGETT, 
 
 C. B. HOLMES, 
 CHAS. H. LANE, 
 ENOS JOHNSON, 
 Jos. MEDILL, 
 
 WIRT DEXTER, 
 ALFRED COWLES, 
 A. M. PENCE, 
 A. N. KELLOGG, 
 
 R. N. ISHAM, 
 
 FERD. W. PECK, 
 
 J. H. McVlCKER, 
 
 JOHN B. DRAKE, 
 W. R. PAGE, 
 HENRY POTWIN, 
 EDMUND BURKE, 
 F. M. CORBY, 
 J. V. LEMOYNE, 
 MURRY NELSON, 
 GEORGE STURGES, 
 
 H. M. WlLMARTH, 
 J. C. DUNLEVY. 
 
 The guarantors of this fund were not called 
 upon, as seats were rented for a sum amounting 
 to about $15,000 annually. 
 
 The creed adopted by the church was short, 
 simple and evangelical. Without raising nice 
 metaphysical distinctions, it dealt mainly with 
 the practical side of Christian life.
 
 27 
 
 From McVicker's Theater, where the society 
 was first called together, the congregation re- 
 moved to Central Music Hall, January 1, 1880, 
 and has continued to occupy this hall until the 
 present day. 
 
 The history and noble work of Central Church 
 since that time are well known. Its Sunday ser- 
 mons have been read each week, from the Pacific 
 to the Atlantic Ocean, in numberless Christian 
 homes, and they have most powerfully contributed 
 to mold, sweeten, liberalize and elevate the relig- 
 ious thought of the day. 
 
 David Swing died Wednesday evening, Octo- 
 ber 3, and his funeral services were held in Cen- 
 tral Music Hall on the following Sunday. Here, 
 where his eloquence so often inspired your nobler 
 thoughts, you covered that which was mortal with 
 the flowers he had loved so well, and gave to him 
 the tribute of your tears. He has left you, as a 
 father leaves his children not forever, for "be- 
 yond the smiling and the weeping" we shall meet 
 him again. 
 
 He once repeated some beautiful lines, with 
 that tenderness of feeling which so characterized 
 him, and you may wish to listen to them now:
 
 28 
 
 Life! we've been long together 
 Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 
 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear; 
 Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh a tear; 
 
 Then steal away, give little warning; 
 Choose thine own time; 
 Say not "Good night," but in some brighter clime 
 
 Bid me "Good morning."
 
 Sermons
 
 Simpler ant> Greater IReligion. 
 
 I fear lest your minds be corrupted from the simplicity and 
 purity that is toward Christ. II Corinthians, xi. 3. 
 
 Many who live and think in our age are long- 
 ing for a simpler religion. This desire is heard 
 in sermons, in common conversation, and is seen 
 in the volumes and essays of public men. It 
 may well be a matter of wonder what is meant 
 by a simpler religion. It may be these longing 
 minds are thinking of a more rational Christianity 
 a form in which reason is more visible than 
 miracle. It may be they are thinking of a life as/ 
 distinguished from a belief. It would seem a 
 good time for making a morning study out of this 
 oft recurring public desire. If we are at some 
 time to have a simpler form of Christianity, or are 
 to work for such a result, we ought to map out 
 our wish and study it, that we may know when 
 it is gratified. Perhaps such a religion has 
 already come. We have all heard of the "simplic- 
 ity of Christ." What is it? What was it? Will it 
 have any merit and beauty when it shall appear ? 
 
 Events are defining for us this new term. 
 Each year is pointing out to us that the past
 
 30 
 
 Christianity was too complex. It was easily put 
 out of working order. Often machines are made 
 which involve so many movements, so many 
 changes of the direction of power, that it is almost 
 impossible for the instrument to do a continuous 
 work for a single day. 
 
 Genius has labored long to make a type -setting 
 machine, but the task to be done has been so com- 
 plex, so full of motions and choices, that the wish 
 of the publishing men has not yet been fully grat- 
 ified. It was for a long time difficult to make a 
 good watch which, besides keeping time perfectly, 
 should strike the hour and minute and should 
 continue to work only in one hour until another 
 hour had come. Theoldtall eight -day clock had less 
 difficulty in finding its field of service. A pendu- 
 lum, a couple of weights, and a few wheels, and all 
 was ready for a performance of duty for a hun- 
 dred years without any stop for repairs. 
 
 In the material pursuits of man it is often nec- 
 essary to have complex machines, the demand 
 being imperative, but in his spiritual kingdom 
 there is no such inexorable demand. Complex- 
 ness is never unavoidable. Indeed it is purely 
 gratuitous. There is no more demand for a com-
 
 31 
 
 plex religion than there was for the literary style 
 of the poet Browning. It would have been quite 
 an increase of fame and fortune to that talented 
 man had he possessed a style as clear as that of 
 Shakespeare or Lord Byron. He had noble pur- 
 poses and great power, but his words always 
 became entangled like a skein of fine silk. 
 
 His thoughts were indeed silk, but it was dif- 
 ficult to pull quickly out of the tangle a long 
 needleful of good thread. The greatest of all 
 thoughts can be best expressed in the utmost 
 simplicity, because the idea, like a mountain, must 
 stand forth all alone that it may be the better 
 seen. But when a mountain is mingled with a 
 long group and is modified by foothills which 
 reach away in all directions for a half hundred 
 miles, there is the most sublime Alp or Apennine 
 injured by a complexity. Christianity is much 
 like an author or a piece of art: it can rise up in 
 its own grandeur and express its divineness, or it 
 can be almost hidden and ruined by surroundings 
 in w T hich there are no traces of greatness. 
 
 When Pascal lived and created such a sensa- 
 tion in the Romish Church of the seventeenth 
 century, his power lay in his ability to raise a
 
 32 
 
 laugh over the obscure metaphysical inquiries so 
 dear to that period. Born a geometer and a 
 mathematician, his reason could strip all ideas of 
 their false side, and could detect instantly a piece 
 of bad logic. He loved to ridicule the absurdities 
 of the middle ages and to plead for the simple 
 gospel of the first four centuries. His influence 
 came chiefly from his power to lift up a great idea 
 until by its altitude it made all other ideas con- 
 temptible. He turned the morals of the Jesuits 
 into contempt and the name of God into sub- 
 limity. 
 
 One of the last lessons learned by mankind is 
 this: that simplicity may. be power; that it is 
 nearly always the most powerful element in 
 thought and art. The most intricate and sense- 
 less of all philosophies are those of the earliest 
 and most ignorant races. The religions of India 
 are unreadable in our age. No modern mind 
 could find the courage to work its way through such 
 wonderful admixtures of fact and invention. 
 Many of the absurd inquiries which attracted the 
 school men and held them captive up to the 
 sixteenth century came into Christianity from the 
 old East. Nearly all of those questions about the
 
 33 
 
 size of a spirit, about its ability to travel fast 
 from star to star, its ability to dance on a needle's 
 point came into the Christian period from the 
 heathen world which had nourished long before 
 the birth of Christ. All semi-barbarian races 
 have loved a pomposity of speech and style. As 
 some of the African women in the interior of 
 the Dark Continent wear 100 pounds of iron rings 
 on arms and ankles, assuming that, if a ring be 
 an ornament, then, the more rings, the more 
 beautiful the girl who wears them, so, in the old 
 theologies, the more abundant the notions, the 
 richer the creed. So rich was the Hindoo phil- 
 osophy at last that it would have filled volumes^ 
 had the conglomeration ever been fully expressed 
 in writing. 
 
 This fondness for entanglement we see in its 
 better days in the Apocalypse of Saint John. 
 There is no doubt John was one of the most 
 beautiful characters of all who have lived, but 
 this moral beauty did not save him from being 
 led away by the prevailing charm of excessive 
 figure and of wide labyrinths of thought. In the 
 first chapter of his gospel he exults in the enigma 
 of the Word; and in the Revelation he hands his
 
 34 
 
 mind and soul over to the cause of a bottomless 
 mystery, and no doubt drank in much sweetness 
 from thoughts which are bitterness to this cen- 
 tury. John had in his heart some great poem to 
 be inscribed to Christ, the church and heaven, but 
 the past ages had shaped for him his form of 
 expression, and the result was a poem which, 
 instead of standing sublime and simple, like the 
 words of Jesus, lies before the modern world like 
 the wreck of some royal galleon, all marked from 
 sails to anchor with the splendors of the kings of 
 Spain. Over such an ornamental ship the ocean 
 sighs and the suns of summer shine, but the 
 beautiful boat will never sail the sea. So the 
 Apocalypse is a gorgeous barge that will never 
 be under full sail again. 
 
 Should any one, curious over the past and fond 
 of comparisons, wish to compare the Jesus and 
 the disciple he loved, he will find much of that 
 difference contained in the mental simplicity of 
 the Master. With Jesus, the greater the truth,the 
 simpler its expression. As his ideas grew in vast- 
 ness,they diminished in number. As our earth 
 has many little lakes but only a few oceans, 
 because there is no room for many, so Christ
 
 35 
 
 offered only a few truths, because each truth had 
 to be thousands of miles in length and breadth. 
 What Christ said is as clear, as rich, as divine 
 to-day as it was eighteen hundred years ago, 
 whereas much which John wrote is now as faded 
 as the flowers which bloomed around him at Pat- 
 mos. We see in those two faces the Master and 
 the gentle disciple. John was all the more be- 
 loved because he was only the companion planet 
 of the flaming sun. The central sun did not need 
 help; it needed only a companion in the realms of 
 space. St. John was this companion, and Christ 
 and he will journey onward forever, hand in 
 hand, the greater and the less. 
 
 The many shades of Christianity having 
 reached this period of reason are compelled to 
 halt for a time. All these modern churches have 
 come through many a tribulation, but, above all, 
 they have come through one long jungle which 
 had thickened ever since the times of the old 
 Aryan tongues. They all halt now because our 
 period asks them what all their enigmas are 
 worth ? The age does not seek the money value 
 but the moral value of their stuffs. A priest in a 
 large city is having hymns printed in English, to
 
 36 
 
 be sung by all his congregation, as hymns are 
 sung here, for, he says, if the English language 
 can speak our wisdom, our wit, our love, our 
 friendship, can it not utter the emotions of our 
 religion ? What a sad blunder of society if Car- 
 dinal Newman can compose such a hymn as 
 "Lead, Kindly Light," and then must have a 
 little choir sing some Latin words for his congre- 
 gation, whose hearts and tears are, in his English, 
 living thoughts ! Often highly educated persons 
 are able to lend their soul to two or three differ- 
 ent tongues; but, with the millions on millions of 
 people, there is only one language in and around 
 their spirit. It is the arms, the feet, wings, and 
 senses of their mind. In it is light; out of it all 
 is midnight. In that one language the people 
 live and move and have their being. Coming up 
 to the English tongue the church must throw 
 away its Latin, and talk and sing and pray along 
 with the living heart. 
 
 We must throw aside childish affectations and 
 live real lives in a real world. When a Christian 
 church crosses the line and enters Germany it 
 must use the language of Goethe and Schiller; 
 in France it must use the language of Paris; in
 
 37 
 
 America it must use the language of Webster and 
 Clay. To use the Latin tongue is only an affec- 
 tation like that of many of our youth who love 
 nothing unless it lies over the sea. What a 
 wretched blunder had Schiller attempted to write 
 in French, and Ernest Renan attempted to com- 
 pose his books in German ! Dante began his poem 
 in the Latin tongue, but it was too dead a speech 
 for the living Florence. Thus the Latin of the 
 church is only a colossal act in the long history 
 of affectation. 
 
 But what the Romanists are guilty of in lan- 
 guage the Protestants have been guilty of in their 
 relations to doctrine, for they are attempting to 
 carry onward a bundle of ideas which are fully as 
 dead as the kings who built the Pyramids. Even 
 were they not dead, they are only expressions 
 which pleased generations which are no longer 
 here. There is no public here which cares to dis- 
 cuss the natural inability of the sinner, or the 
 totalness of an infant's guilt, or the inability of a 
 saint to lose his piety, or the worthlessness of 
 morality, or the efforts of Christ in behalf of a 
 few, or that a general and endless punishment 
 of mankind is for the glory of God. There must
 
 38 
 
 be a half hundred of ideas which once possessed 
 the power to thrill the public heart, but which 
 now lie dead and friendless. The fashion of this 
 world passeth away. The love of doctrine has 
 declined. 
 
 There used to be recognized several kinds of 
 faith. There was a faith in miracles, a faith in 
 the divinity of Christ, a faith which even devils 
 might cherish, and last and best of all came a 
 saving faith. This kind would come only by the 
 intervention of miraculous power. What kind of 
 faith an inquiring soul might have found or might 
 find was exceedingly uncertain. The soul might 
 be mistaken and be like the men, who, in digging 
 a well on their farms, have come upon iron pyrites 
 and have held a feast and invited in all the neigh- 
 bors to rejoice with them over the discovery of a 
 fabulous vein of gold. It is within living mem- 
 ory that many a young person has longed to have 
 a saving faith, but has been uncertain whether 
 what he had was the purest of gold or only the 
 cheap sulphide of iron. All these old shadings 
 of faith have melted into one a faith in Jesus 
 Christ as man's beloved friend. If we had asked 
 the poet Cowper whether he had faith in his
 
 39 
 
 mother, and whether it was a faith in miracles 
 or in testimony, or a faith which a devil might 
 possess, he would have scorned all our theolog- 
 ical chemistry and have said: "I shall love my 
 mother forever." Behold in Cowper's reply the 
 coming simplicity of Christianity! It will rear 
 at last a sentiment which will make earth beauti- 
 ful and heaven near. 
 
 The old theologies were a kind of exhaustive 
 chemical analysis of man as a religious creature; 
 they were a physiology of the religious nerves 
 and tissues, a microscopic study of the cellular 
 structure as affected by the religious emotions. 
 Among its conclusions one will find the deduc- 
 tion that if a babe should die unbaptized it 
 would be punished in perdition forever by a God 
 of infinite love. Many centuries were thus dom- 
 inated by a scientific Christianity. Repentance 
 was analyzed and quite an assortment of repent- 
 ances were found. There was a repentance with- 
 out sorrow and one with sorrow; one without 
 reform and one with reform; and then came the 
 chase after that kind which itself needed to be 
 repented of; and then came the search for that 
 sin over which repentance was utterly useless.
 
 40 
 
 Equipped with such a scientific religion, the many 
 churches did their work for many centuries. 
 Under it wars, murders, persecutions and tor- 
 tures were most common. The spirit of Christ 
 had little to do with the case, because that spirit 
 was not an easy victim to such a theological lab- 
 oratory. When our vivisectionists cut to pieces 
 a living dog or a living horse, they report on the 
 creature^ bones and sinews; they never report 
 on the animal's friendship for man. 
 
 The vivisectionist sustains no relations to 
 mercy or goodness or justice; his world is made 
 up of weights and measures and times, causes 
 and effects. In Africa, a negro chief, having 
 been presented with a rifle by Captain Speke, 
 and seeing no bird or animal upon which to try 
 the instrument, fired at a slave who was at work 
 in a field. The chief went to his palace proud 
 of his gun. What a marvelous combination of 
 lock, stock and barrel ! How bright the iron and 
 steel! how polished and how carved the wood! 
 As for the slave, he lay dying in agony . Such 
 is the science of vivisection a science of knives 
 and saws, with the human soul and the animal 
 soul left out. It is the African rifle, with the 
 dying slave omitted.
 
 41 
 
 Thus has theology been too scientific. A year 
 or two ago a railway car was thrown over, and a 
 priest who was not hurt in the least, but who was 
 compelled to wade out of deep water and mud, 
 came up the bank swearing in an anger and with 
 oaths which consigned to future pain all the rail- 
 way men who had ever lived in any land. And 
 yet the theology of that priest was a most com- 
 plete science of salvation. It contained all the 
 dogmas of the church as discovered between St. 
 Augustine and Cardinal Richelieu. Nothing was 
 .absent from the theology except religion. 
 
 From this elaborate science our age desires to 
 break away and to enjoy more of religion itself. 
 We all perceive that the millions of people do 
 not need the theories of Dr. Briggs or of those 
 who opposed that theologian they need a great, 
 deep friendship with the man of Galilee, who 
 held in his soul all that is great in human prac- 
 tice or belief. Having had eighteen centuries of 
 analysis of religion, how ready the world is for a 
 taste of the good analyzed so long! Newman 
 and Fenelon possessed it; so Calvin and John 
 Knox carried it in their hearts; Paul and Apollos 
 were full of it when the world was young; it
 
 42 
 
 sprang up in the soul of John Wesley and came 
 to Whitefield; it inflamed the bosom of Mme. 
 Guion, and away it went to live with the mission- 
 aries who traversed these snows in winters long 
 since melted into summers, which also are gone. 
 But if minds so scattered through two thousand 
 years met in one Christianity, then there must be 
 a religion which lies apart from the hundreds of 
 doctrines and which cares for none of them any 
 more than the sea cares for the artists who sit on 
 the sand and attempt to paint its picture. We 
 can imagine the ocean saying to the artist: "Are 
 you trying to make a picture of me ? Me ! Why, 
 I am ten thousand miles wide, and am not even 
 in your sight! Paint me! Why, I am not here 
 for you to paint. I am washing the shores of 
 England, America, Spain and France!" 
 
 To John Calvin we can imagine Christianity 
 saying: " What! are you delineating me? How 
 can you paint me when I am not in Geneva 
 alone? I was with Magdalen when she prayed; 
 I was with Joseph who asked to furnish the tomb 
 for my crucified Christ; I was with the mother of 
 Augustine more years than I was with Augustine 
 himself; I was with all the little children whom
 
 43 
 
 Christ held in his arms; I was with John when 
 he was preaching in the wilderness; I was with 
 the five thousand once and gave them all the 
 bread of two worlds; I was with the disciples 
 when they sang a hymn, and I was with all the 
 martyrs when they died. Oh, thou citizen of 
 Geneva, thou canst not express me in articles, 
 for I am measureless; I am not a science of plants 
 not a botany. I am the blossoms themselves 
 the color and the perfume! " 
 
 The Christian religion often seems like that 
 vast structure in Rome to which many architects 
 carried their deepest and most serious genius. 
 Bramante came first. He died, and the great 
 Raphael took his place among the arches and 
 columns. The grave soon called Raphael. Then 
 came Perruzi to stay by the stones for a half of a 
 life-time. Angelo then came and gave the great 
 sanctuary twenty-two of his precious circles of 
 the sun. Genius followed genius for one hun- 
 dred and twenty years. 
 
 In that long procession of Italian summer 
 times these great architects hated each other and 
 quarreled, each with his neighbor. Castelar says 
 that Bramante and Angelo, separated by the things-
 
 44 
 
 of earth, are now united in immortality. While 
 the builders were often enemies, the temple grew 
 in its grandeur, because its arches and columns 
 and dome could take no part in the quarrels of 
 daily human life. The great basilica arose each 
 year toward the sky, and each year left fur- 
 ther below, down among the marble chips, the 
 many quarrels of the workmen. It absorbed 
 from the architects their love and their genius, 
 and left all else behind. Thus Christianity can 
 make use of the hearts and powers of genius, 
 but it remands back to oblivion all the discords 
 of fretful minds. It can extract something from 
 a Cardinal Newman, something from John Wes- 
 ley, something from each cathedral and each 
 little, chapel in town or field, but in its vast life 
 which is to follow the human race forever it will 
 work its way up toward its God long after we 
 shall have gone away from our quarrelings among 
 the useless chips around the base. It will rise a 
 single shaft, sublime but simple. 
 
 Christ was so essentially a life that His relig- 
 ion must follow closely the plan of its Founder. 
 There are many intellectual inquiries upon which 
 the church does not know what was or would
 
 45 
 
 have been the Nazarene's opinion, but the life of 
 Christ admits of no doubt. The demand of the 
 whole earth is expressed in a few words a life 
 like that of Jesus. With such a piety before 
 man and in man, his present and his eternity will 
 be one wide field of blessedness. 
 
 It must be remembered that a simple Chris- 
 tianity does not mean an unadorned religion. 
 Mount Blanc is simple, but it is wondrously 
 adorned. Coleridge saw it rising majestically 
 "forth from a sea of pines; " he saw on its sides 
 "motionless torrents" and "silent cataracts;" 
 he saw "flowers skirting the edge of eternal 
 frost;" he heard there "a thousand voices prais- 
 ing God." Rising up thus in all the matchless 
 beauty which eternal winter could heap upon its 
 summit and which eternal spring could weave 
 around its base, yet is that gigantic pile impress- 
 ive in its central simplicity. It holds no enig- 
 mas. It appeals to all the human family and 
 speaks in a language all minds can interpret. 
 So, by a simple Christianity one must not mean a 
 desert. Around a simple creed may be grouped 
 the rich details -so much loved by the human 
 heart.
 
 46 
 
 In the simple religion there is a greatness 
 which only the greatest music and eloquence can 
 express. The grander the doctrines of the church, 
 the more impressive may be the beauty which 
 they may wear. It was often the misfortune of 
 Europe that it had to place a royal crown upon 
 the forehead of some young idiotic king, or of a 
 royal leader in only the infernal realm of vice. 
 Happy Europe could it have placed its crown 
 jewels upon only those foreheads which were 
 broad with 'wisdom and power and white in 
 purity ! 
 
 Thus has the church often attempted to attach 
 its gorgeous service to a little and false thought. 
 It has waved its silken banners at the burning of 
 a heretic, or has compelled its organ and choir to 
 chant a "Te Deum" over fields soaked with in- 
 nocent blood. When a simple greatness shall 
 come into the creed, then can a new beauty come 
 into the service of God's house; for, since all the 
 arts are only so many languages of the soul, they 
 will rise in impressiveness when at last the soul 
 shall have great truths to follow and express. 
 
 Man does not live in a desert. It pleased the 
 Creator to make wondrously beautiful the world
 
 47 
 
 of His children. All that these children make 
 and have shall catch something of ornament 
 from the very planet on which they dwell. 
 
 When Christianity shall teach its simplest 
 forms of doctrine, it will still be in the world of 
 music and color, and all sweet and rich beauty. 
 It will ask ten thousand voices to join in its 
 song; it may ask all instruments to accompany 
 the multitude in their hymn; it may invite more 
 flowers to its altars, and then to the material 
 emblems of what the heart loves the simplified 
 church will add a pulpit which can have no 
 themes but great ones, and which can easily find 
 that eloquence Avhich, as aroma lies hidden in 
 sandal, wood, lies high and deep in the being of 
 God, in the life and deeds of Christ's, in the rela- 
 tion of man to man, and in the mysterious flow 
 of our race toward death and the scenes beyond.
 
 Gbe flDofcern Cbrtetian jfaitlx 
 
 These all died in faith. Hebrews xi. 13. 
 
 The term "faith" has resembled many persons 
 and ideas in having alternately enjoyed and suf- 
 fered an eventful history. It sounds always the 
 same to the ear, but it has passed along among 
 the nations and among men with many a change 
 of signification. Often the term has stood for a 
 deeply religious feeling which had God for its 
 object, and often it has stood for the Christian's 
 attachment to his Master, and often it has im- 
 plied a mind's loyalty to the doctrines of a sect 
 or a state. 
 
 When our Puritan colonies gave signs of with- 
 drawing from England, there appeared at once 
 two parties the Royalists and the Whigs. The 
 former clung to royalty, the latter desired to found 
 a republic. When in early times the Church of 
 Palestine began to array itself against the other 
 religions of the many races, faith was a political 
 term and implied loyalty to a great political in- 
 strument. In all those latter centuries, in which 
 the church and state were united, the faithful 
 
 48
 
 49 
 
 man was simply a loyalist, while the man who 
 opposed the religious state was an infidel a 
 Tory, a Whig, an incipient traitor. When the 
 Mohammedans speak of the situation, they desig- 
 nate the Christians as "infidels." When the 
 Christians carried on those amazing crusades, 
 reaching from England to Palestine, their motive 
 was to rescue the tomb of Christ from the do- 
 minion of the infidel. 
 
 There was a time in the history of the English 
 establishment when Quakers and all independ- 
 ents were infidels, because, in differing with the 
 state church in some one idea, these persons 
 threatened the throne of the state. In Calvin's 
 day "faith" was a matter which imperiled the 
 state. If a party should spring up around a 
 Servetus,it might so expand as to become a rival, 
 not in piety or good works, but in politics. In 
 these political surroundings and perils it was 
 deemed best to put Servetus out of the world. 
 He may have possessed the faith of Abraham or 
 St. Paul, but such a condition of things would 
 be of no value in that particular period. So 
 Mary Stuart entered Scotland as Queen, but she 
 carried with her the Roman Catholic faith, and,
 
 50 
 
 however valuable it might be at the gates of 
 heaven, it was not highly prized at Edinburgh, 
 nor was it afterwards admired by Queen Eliza- 
 beth. 
 
 While our United States was fully bound by 
 its constitution to protect the property called 
 slaves, the abolitionists were all called infidels. 
 Their faith was most useless because it did not 
 include the idea of the subjection of Africans to 
 the white race. In those long years the true, 
 pure faith included the doctrine that the slaves 
 must be obedient to their masters. In those days 
 one of the most beautiful of all moral scenes was 
 that of a "believing master." He sat in his pew 
 in sweet accord with revelation; while afar north 
 the infidel was hoping a great day of liberty 
 might soon come. 
 
 Thus for many centuries was the word "faith" 
 bent hither and thither by the political exigencies 
 which lay around it. Those in power were the 
 faithful, those out of power were the infidels. 
 And after a time the many sects came to subject 
 the word " faith " to further twisting and distor- 
 tion. The Episcopal Church of England held 
 the "faith ; " the other sects had no religion. The
 
 51 
 
 houses where they met were called meeting-houses. 
 In Scotland the Presbyterians held the faith. It 
 was not long before the Baptists got possession 
 of it, and would not commune with the Church 
 of England or the Church of Scotland. In this 
 continent the same scene was enacted. It has 
 been now just about forty years since a Presby- 
 terian clergyman published a series of articles to 
 prove that the Methodists did not hold the true 
 faith, and could not hope for salvation. It is still 
 quite common for some of the most proud and 
 distinguished sects to confess that independents 
 may be saved by some special mercy of God, but 
 that there is no visible provision made for their 
 comfort beyond the grave. 
 
 Whoever will now scan the horizon will not 
 fail to note that the grand cardinal word in re- 
 ligion is making its escape from both the state 
 and the sects, and is beginning to enjoy the lib- 
 erty and the fullness of itself. 
 
 Epictetus was for twenty years a slave. He 
 possessed a mind equal to that of Plato. He was 
 learned, just, patient, deep -thinking, but he was 
 for half a life-time the servant of some classic 
 nabob. He had his leg broken by one master. At
 
 52 
 
 last he gained his liberty, and at once began to 
 receive the friendship of scholars and thinkers, and 
 began to bless Rome with his morals and phil- 
 osophy. Not otherwise, " Faith," a being of a 
 divine genius and of a noble ancestry which ran 
 back to Abraham, having a philosophy deeper 
 than that of Greek or Roman, and being more 
 poetic than many Homers, was long a slave, and 
 was scourged with whips in many a land. At 
 last this beautiful slave has found liberty, and 
 hails now the new arena of labor and joy. For 
 a long time she was a slave of the State, and 
 was compelled to fill all mean and cruel offices. 
 Then she was the slave of many sects, and was 
 compelled to obey instantly the mandate of a 
 hard master. At last this most noble slave has 
 found liberty. It is not her first taste of free- 
 dom. She was free when Abraham was trusting 
 in God, and when Christ was saying, " Our 
 Father who art in Heaven." 
 
 In late months many distinguished persons 
 have gone from the world, and " all these have 
 died in the faith." Time was when we could not 
 have enjoyed such a thought. Once Tennyson, 
 Whittier, Mr. Hayes, Mr. Brooks, would have
 
 53 
 
 been looked upon as living wholly outside the 
 bounds of a saving belief. Tennyson's creed was 
 exceedingly brief. To a life-long friend he said: 
 " There is a power that watches over us, and 
 our individuality endures. This is all my faith." 
 He said: "My greatest wish is to have a clearer 
 vision of God." In a moment of irony, not 
 badly founded, he said: "The majority of 
 Englishmen think of God as an ' immeasurable 
 clergyman.' : The idea in religion which this 
 poet loved with most passion was that of a life 
 after death. Our age does not know in what 
 details of religious thought any one of these men 
 lived and died. A local high -churchman inti- 
 mates that Phillips Brooks was a Unitarian. It 
 is not generally known what was the religious 
 creed of Mr. Hayes. It would thus seem that 
 not only is the special creed not vital, but it has 
 ceased to be a matter of common curiosity. The 
 life of each one of these men was plainly seen, 
 and the religious nature of each was plainly vis- 
 ible. In the faith they lived and died. In 
 them we see a faith that was free free not 
 from its own intrinsic worth, but free from the 
 chains of a slave.
 
 54 
 
 What a misfortune should some potentate 
 catch you and twist your thumbs or arms to make 
 you a Catholic, or, if you were a good Catholic, 
 to make you a Protestant! To what a blessed 
 freedom has faith come! The emancipation of 
 our slaves is a scene scarcely more impressive 
 than this emancipation of faith. It will never 
 return to the old bondage, because that advance 
 of intelligence which gained this liberty will 
 keep the prize it has won. The contest of the 
 present is between faith and atheism. The sects 
 were but little against each other, because all 
 the phases of Christian faith are of one essence, 
 the antagonist of which is atheism, or that other 
 unbelief which abandons all inquiry as hopeless. 
 
 The modern faith stands forth a new creature. 
 Like many other ideas, it has been deeply affected 
 by the study of human rights. The knowledge of 
 right no more comes to man without study than 
 astronomy or geography comes to him without 
 his research. Ignorance of rights is as natural as 
 ignorance of mathematics or of languages. 
 Olden times used to speak of the divine right of 
 kings. The modern nations have taken away 
 the divineness of that right and have placed a
 
 55 
 
 king's right alongside that of a carpenter or a 
 blacksmith a right that depends upon the wish 
 of the people. 
 
 Along with this divine right of kings came 
 the divine right of a white man to enslave black 
 men, and along with these moral notions came 
 the divine right of a husband to whip his wife. 
 In the old economy the wife and daughter were 
 at the mercy of the great masculine head of the 
 house. It has been fully two hundred years since 
 civilization began in earnest the study of the 
 rights of humanity; and the progress mankind 
 has made in inventions and discoveries is not 
 greater than the advance it has made in unveil- 
 ing the privileges of each soul. All human be- 
 ings suddenly find themselves in a larger world. 
 Each pursuit, each honor, each office, each pleas- 
 ure is open to all. There are a few criminal laws 
 which come between a bad man and his fellow 
 creatures, but the forbidden field is small com- 
 pared with the field of personal liberty. Men 
 like Tennyson and Whittier have lived a long life 
 in the world without being aware of any limita- 
 tion of their freedom. The only compulsion from 
 which they suffered was from the world outside
 
 56 
 
 of man. Death came and commanded them to 
 go away from earth. They obeyed in sweet sub- 
 mission ; but as for this world, it overflowed with 
 the full tide of emancipation. 
 
 This deep study and love of privileges have 
 affected religious faith, because, in confessing the 
 liberties of the individual, society has taken away 
 the right of society to touch a Quaker, or a Cal- 
 vinist,or a Methodist, or a Baptist. In the name 
 of all great principles, all are one, because these 
 variations of thought and belief do not affect 
 character or conduct. As soon as the highest 
 forms of law began to tolerate all forms of relig- 
 ious opinion, then society began also to smile at 
 those differences of views which once seemed so 
 great. It was necessary for law to run on in ad- 
 vance of the church and announce the harmless- 
 ness and the right of opinion. The church had 
 not the courage nor the motive that gave promise 
 of a democracy. It desired to urge onward its 
 peculiar form of thought. It was necessary for 
 a heroic politics to come, and, after the State had 
 made many names and many forms of thought all 
 lawful in one republic, the church could not but 
 follow and admit a large group of sects into one
 
 57 
 
 religion. If a nation could contain many forms 
 of politicians and join them all in the one name 
 of patriot, so the church could follow such a 
 path and designate as Christians the members of 
 a hundred sects. Thus had liberty and politics 
 soon created a liberty in religion. 
 
 As a republic assembles human beings in the 
 name of all the wants that are general, assembles 
 them in the name of those places where all the 
 paths of action and being meet, so religion could 
 not but imitate a republic, and make its " faith " 
 expand so as to include many millions of minds 
 which, differing in many lesser ideas, were all one 
 in some great principles. Thus the power which 
 shattered the thrones of the old kings shattered 
 also the thrones of the Calvinist and the Catholic 
 and permitted Faith to go free. Faith is free, 
 because it is a time of wide emancipation. 
 
 To the influence of republicanism must be 
 added the power of increased reason. That was 
 only a feeble intellect which could once assume 
 that the infinite Deity would make a belief in a 
 certain astronomy essential to the salvation of the 
 soul. Yet when Galileo announced that the earth 
 went around the sun,his soul was imperiled. The
 
 58 
 
 modern reason can not suppose that a form of 
 baptism plays any part in the future destiny of 
 an adult or infant soul. The modern reason can 
 not find this final salvation located in any one 
 church, for as you would not require of a candi- 
 date for the Presidency that he should be born in 
 a frame house, or a log house, or a brick house, 
 so you can not possibly assume that a candidate 
 for heaven must have been reared in the Episco- 
 pal or Methodist society. 
 
 It has been claimed by the Catholics and high 
 churchmen that the soul could reach heaven only 
 through their walls, but all the great Romanists, 
 at least, have abandoned this thought, and the 
 recent Popes and Cardinals claim only that their 
 sanctuary is the best way to Paradise, but no 
 longer the only road. All the old exclusiveness 
 of the churches thus falls to the ground. Reason 
 is a new earthquake under these old miraculous 
 walls, and, while they are crumbling to the dust, 
 human souls are flocking to heaven from the fire- 
 side of many a home and from those woods and 
 fields which were so full of the presence of God. 
 Modern intellects can no more connect the word 
 "Salvation" with the word "Episcopacy," or
 
 59 
 
 " Catholic," or " Calvinism," than they can make 
 it depend upon Gothic churches or upon the pres- 
 ence of a great clock in the church tower. Church 
 chimes are indeed beautiful to hear in a summer 
 evening, but beautiful also is the sighing of the 
 great boughs of the oaks and elms, and the In- 
 finite cares not which sound the heart chooses 
 for its vesper tone. Once, when a Greek village 
 was burning, the farmer saw a philosopher pass- 
 ing out, but carrying nothing. He said to him, 
 "Have you lost everything?" and he said: "I 
 have lost nothing, for there was nothing of me 
 except myself." Thus our age is rapidly hurry- 
 ing to that point when religious persons can wor- 
 ship in any sanctuary or grove, because they are 
 carrying their divine sentiment and obligation in 
 their hearts. They carry nothing in their hands. 
 They can place the left hand upon the bosom 
 and say: "This is all there is of me." Such is 
 the modern faith free, great and loving. 
 
 Within the borders of Christianity its objects 
 are God and Jesus Christ; in the rationalized 
 religions its supreme object is God alone. In 
 either field faith is adequate, for if, as we are 
 taught by the present Christianity, God and Christ
 
 are one, then the utterance of Jesus is doubly 
 true, and they who have seen the Father have 
 seen the Son. In this logic the Unitarian and the 
 Jew can not escape the worship of the Trinity, 
 because the Father and the Son and the Spirit are 
 inseparable forever. Such ought to be the ortho- 
 dox estimate of the objects of faith. It remains 
 more real and true that either of these faiths is 
 the glory and safety of man's being. If we claim 
 that a personal faith in Christ is essential, we take 
 away not only the piety and hope from the pagan 
 lands, but we overthrow the worship of that vast 
 Hebrew republic and empire which was as full 
 of faith as our prairies in summer are full of 
 flowers. And,furthermore,if looking to Christ is 
 essential, then comes the inquiry: "Whither did 
 Christ, himself, look?" Richter asks this delight- 
 ful question: "Whither do those sunflowers point 
 which grow upon the sun ?" To whom did Jesus 
 pray? Oh, ye Jews! Ye Unitarians! Ye de- 
 vout ones in all the pagan lands ! Hesitate not to 
 pass in silence all the theological schools on the 
 earth and pray to our Father in heaven! Jesus 
 of Nazareth did not come to destroy such a wor- 
 ship, he came to make faith grow more powerful
 
 61 
 
 in all the generations which should come after 
 his appearing. He did not come to limit the 
 beauty of earth or to make faith difficult, but 
 rather he came to make an intelligent and simple 
 trust in God the grandest sentiment in man's life. 
 Had Christ been present when each martyr was 
 bound to the stake for some deviation in the paths 
 of theology, he would have unfastened every cord 
 and have bidden each prisoner go free; had he 
 been present in authority in the fourth century 
 when the pagan Hypatia was lecturing on the 
 gods and the high spirituality of Plato, he would 
 have been a rapt listener to such a spotless life 
 and to such a high eloquence; and the Christian 
 Bishops would not have dared butcher such a 
 worshiper and stain the streets of Alexandria 
 with the blood of a bosom so religious, so learned, 
 so white. 
 
 Our age having thus emancipated faith, it 
 clothes it each year with new dignity. The 
 age which simplifies it makes it more sublime. 
 That power which detaches Christian belief from 
 the Gothic windows, from the candles on the 
 altar, and from the chimes in the towers, hands 
 it over to society as a philosophy of the human
 
 62 
 
 career. When an atheist utters his negatives and 
 deduces all forms and all life from only dust, he 
 has no outlook for himself, and can offer noth- 
 ing to mankind. Not only does each individual 
 life cease wholly at the grave, but it is without 
 great impulse while it is passing its days in this 
 world. Having come without a cause it wanders 
 causelessly onward. It has no errand and needs 
 no inspiration. 
 
 Contrasted with such a negative mind, faith 
 comes to man as a philosophy. Faith in God, 
 faith in the Son of Man as God in the flesh, rises 
 up in all the dignity of a sublime science. Under 
 the United States lies a group of great laws. 
 They are gathered up into a constitution, and this 
 day all the States which lie in such a large num- 
 ber between the two seas, and all the citizens in 
 these States extract from those principles their 
 progress and happiness. Faith in God is a simi- 
 lar constitution under the soul. It is a vast the- 
 ory which permeates the bulk of man's years. It is 
 with man wherever he goes. As each day he sees 
 the sun forever coming back into his childhood, 
 his youth, his middle life, his old age, the same 
 sun sprinkling the fiftieth year as it sprinkled the
 
 63 
 
 first, so each day man goes forth in this faith a 
 strange encompassment from which he can not es- 
 cape. Often, indeed, is this faith clouded, and 
 days come and go without the brilliancy of noon, 
 but even then a diffused light filters down through 
 the clouds, and the heart full of sadness carries 
 still a blessed hope. 
 
 It is an error of many pulpits that they make 
 faith only a means of saving the soul from God's 
 wrath. There is in our East a preacher who de- 
 clines the invitation to meet next summer in any 
 congress of religions. He asks if he is expected 
 to mingle his pious books and truths with those 
 of Swedenborg and Mozoomdar and Channing ? 
 In his words one may note at once that he thinks 
 of "faith" as a machine for performing a singu- 
 lar task. His machine is inseparable from robes, 
 holy water and thirty-nine articles. Such a mind 
 would be out of place indeed in a congress of re- 
 ligions; for such a congress would love to see 
 faith, not as being a sectarian potency, but as be- 
 ing a philosophy which encompassed Jacob's pil- 
 low with a vision of angels thousands of years 
 before the little candles were lighted by this 
 eastern altar, and which made Christ look to God
 
 64 
 
 and Heaven long before this modern priest made 
 himself comely in vestments. 
 
 The congress of religions must be an effort to 
 teach all clergymen and the thinking millions 
 that there is a faith which has been and is and 
 will be the philosophy of man's coming hither and 
 of his going hence. As Bishop Keane, the Cath- 
 olic, could leave his Roman College for a day to 
 talk to the Unitarians on the being of God, as he 
 possessed the intelligence which could think for 
 an hour away from the ideas of transubstantiation 
 and a Holy Father- at Rome, so can all minds 
 which possess any traces of greatness find in a re- 
 ligious congress some life-like portrait of religious 
 faith. As a thousand voices can in music join in 
 the "Hallelujah Chorus," and make the holy 
 song beat upon the listener's heart as the sea 
 smites its rocky shores, so can a thousand re- 
 ligions combine in eloquence which can make 
 faith in God stand forth as the matchless phil- 
 osophy of our race. Grand congress, to which 
 each one coming will leave behind him his little- 
 ness, and journey, carrying with him only the 
 greatest truth of his hours of worship a con- 
 gress which will ask from each man only those 
 moments which are great!
 
 65 
 
 What form of philosophy is this modern faith ? 
 Is it an entangled web of thought like that of 
 Hegel? Is it a problem, an enigma, like the 
 theories of Berkeley and Locke ? It is nothing of 
 such nature. It is something so simple that 
 even optimism is a name too learned for its daily 
 wear. The earliest youth casts its young heart 
 into it; the missionaries have taught the Indians 
 to sing its hymn. To teach simplicity, Isaac 
 Newton became a child. To illustrate its sim- 
 plicity, Christ used the humblest of all speech, 
 and wore the simplest robe, and took little 
 children up into his arms; and when lately 
 our great men were dying, one of them said: 
 " I shall soon be with my loved one ;" the other 
 said: " I am going home." 
 
 Let us, indeed, call this modern faith the op- 
 timism of our world the most roseate optimism 
 which has yet emerged from the heart of the 
 common man or from the porch of philosophy. 
 Strange to say, it issued from all human con- 
 ditions at once. While the philosopher was 
 framing its agreement, the negro and red man 
 were chanting its psalm; and while the divine 
 Jesus was preaching its hopes and promises,
 
 66 
 
 a group of fishermen became inspired and a com- 
 mon womanhood baptized it with happy tears. 
 It is the optimism of earth. It shakes the poison 
 out of all our wild flowers. In eloquence,it sur- 
 passes all the orators; in poetry, it transcends all 
 the poets; it is time's greatest music; it is man's 
 greatest gallery of art. Happy the young per- 
 sons who are just entering this arena of a free and 
 vast faith. Happy fate,to live where many creeds 
 mingle into one, and where many denominations 
 meet in one love for mankind and God! The 
 young heart which can appreciate such a sim- 
 plicity of belief need not stand aloof from the or- 
 ganic churches; for a denomination is nothing 
 but a brotherhood organized for both the duties 
 and pleasures of religion. No soldier should 
 love to march or battle alone. His heart wishes 
 to hear the tramp of a regiment, and to see at 
 times the flag of a great cause. Thus the relig- 
 ious heart should never attempt to march the way 
 of salvation alone. It can, indeed, all alone, un- 
 baptized, find piety, and find heaven, but the 
 highest usefulness and the highest happiness 
 come,when hand is joined with hand, and when 
 the heart feels the presence of a host of glori-
 
 67 
 
 ous comrades, and when the ear catches the 
 hymn of high worship sung by many voices. The 
 fields and sky inspire, spring inspires, summer 
 inspires; but man extracts most of his inspiration, 
 not from skies and oceans, but from what is 
 greater than all else the mysterious God-like 
 humanity.
 
 Brooke. 
 
 Honor all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. I Peter ii. 17. 
 
 It would be an act of ingratitude were this 
 congregation to pass in silence the death of 
 Phillips Brooks. Our church lay on the outer 
 border of his bishopric. When, two or three 
 years ago, in a loftiness of body which was only 
 an emblem of a loftiness of mind, this preacher 
 walked down this aisle to join you in worship, 
 you all felt as tho'ugh he were an elder brother 
 in your religious family, and had come to visit 
 his kin. Many of you, when spending a Sunday 
 in the city where this modern apostle spoke, went 
 joyfully to hear words which you knew would 
 fall like manna from the sky. At last each of 
 you seemed to hold some personal interest in 
 Phillips Brooks; and now to-day we must all 
 come up to his memory bringing our tears. 
 Chosen Bishop in 1891, the new title could not 
 make much headway against the name of Phil- 
 lips. In instances not a few, when the title of 
 "Bishop" is conferred upon a preacher, it does 
 not take the previous name of the man more
 
 69 
 
 than a few minutes to get out of the way. If 
 large bodies move slowly, the converse ought to 
 be true and tell us why, of ten, when a common 
 preacher is made Bishop, his name as a human 
 being instantly disappears. In the case of this 
 great friend who has bidden us "good-by," the 
 human being could not be easily displaced by 
 any office in the gift of the church. As the 
 names of Edmund Burke and William Pitt and 
 Daniel Webster never needed any decoration 
 from the catalogue of epithets, thus the name of 
 Phillips Brooks did not take kindly to any form 
 of prefix or supplement. If the peculiar duties 
 of the office could have gone without carrying a 
 title with them, the scene would have been hap- 
 pier; but to attempt to confer upon Phillips 
 Brooks a title was too much like painting the 
 pyramids. 
 
 William Pitt was called the "Great Com- 
 moner" not only because he was a member of the 
 "House," but because he was by nature a dealer 
 in the most universal of ideas those ideas which 
 were good not only for royal families but for all 
 mankind. When the Colonies attempted to se- 
 cure their right from the Crown, Mr. Pitt gave
 
 70 
 
 his eloquence to the cause of the Colonies, be- 
 cause his mind could see the human race more 
 easily than it could see the little group of gran- 
 dees with the King at their head. Into the mind 
 of Pitt all the human rights which had been de- 
 tected and expressed between the Greek period 
 and the time of the Earl of Chatham crowded to 
 be reloved and respoken. As science deals in 
 the universal truth about trees or stones or stars, 
 so William Pitt dealt in the propositions which 
 held true in all lands. 
 
 In the vast empire of religions Phillips Brooks 
 was the " great commoner." Whether his mind 
 passed through the pages of the gospel, or read 
 as best it could the history of the primitive 
 church, or read the confessions of Augustine and 
 saw him pick up a psalter or heard him pray for 
 the dead, or if he read all over the dogmas and 
 practices of the Roman Catholic fathers, he al- 
 ways emerged from the study infatuated with 
 only those truths and customs which seemed most 
 needful to the character and salvation of the hu- 
 man multitude. He never possessed the power 
 to turn a little incident into a great doctrine. 
 He could not by any means mistake a piece of
 
 71 
 
 the cross for a potency which could heal disease; 
 nor was he able to look upon a lighted candle as 
 playing any part in any form of natural or 
 revealed religion. He stood at that point where 
 all the Christian sects meet. No preacher could 
 go to Christ without seeing this brother as being 
 in the same path. All denominations walked 
 with him and enjoyed a conversation which made 
 their hearts burn on the way. He was like that 
 lofty arch in Paris toward which all the great 
 streets seem to run. When we think of the dis- 
 cords which are now sounding all through the 
 field of both the Catholic and Protestant denom- 
 inations, we must recall Phillips Brooks as the 
 reconciliation of the nineteenth century. 
 
 But no one who loves war can fill the office of 
 such a "great commoner." That fame must rest 
 on an intellect which is wreathed with the gar- 
 lands of peace. This man did not fight the 
 ritualists or the Romanists; he came forward 
 with the large and positive truths of religion and 
 permitted all that was false or little to die of 
 neglect. His pulpit was so full of light that his 
 people forgot to bring candles to the chancel; 
 the fragrance of the gospel was so exceeding
 
 72 
 
 sweet that no acolytes were needed to swing 
 smoking censers in front of the holy altar. We 
 have all sat before him when the light was all 
 in his forehead and the incense all in his heart. 
 
 In the late generations the Episcopal Church 
 has been producing some great men. When the 
 clergy of that denomination in England had be- 
 come remarkable for the absence of learning and 
 piety, and remarkable for the presence of igno- 
 rance, indolence and vice; when few who wore the 
 name of clergyman possessed education enough 
 to compose a sermon, and had not piety enough 
 to care for the parish whose taxes they consumed, 
 the Wesleyan reform sprang up. That effort 
 was wholly a contempt for a dead sanctuary and 
 an ardent longing for a religion like that of the 
 Savior of men. It was a new effort to rescue the 
 tomb of Christ from the hand of the new infidels. 
 Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne had divided 
 their time between the writings for the pulpit 
 and writings for the promotion of depravity. 
 
 Sterne published a few sermons-, but his liter- 
 ary books were so disreputable that the sermons 
 were soon forgotten in the pleasure which the 
 vulgarity of "Tristram Shandy" gave to that age.
 
 73 
 
 It was the prevalence of such churchmen that 
 compelled Wesley to rise up in behalf of a Chris- 
 tian life that bade fair to be forgotten. Wesley- 
 ism did not contemplate a new church; it was an 
 uprising against ecclesiastical infamy. Awakened 
 by Wesleyism, the National Episcopacy under- 
 went a great reform and ran boldly forward. 
 
 A pulpit paid by national taxes easily falls 
 from virtue, and, as often there were parochial 
 schools where the teacher regularly drew a sal- 
 ary from the state but had an empty school-house, 
 so there were pulpits which gave a living to some 
 man in holy orders, who seldom read a service 
 and still less frequently wearied himself or an 
 audience with a discourse. It is now about fifty 
 years since there came to the English Episcopal 
 Church a second great impulse. It was not wholly 
 a reform, but it poured into that old sanctuary so 
 much new piety and enthusiasm that it can not 
 but be called a marked part of a forward move- 
 ment. It passes now in history under any one 
 of several names: the " tractarian movement," 
 or the "high -church movement," or the "ritual- 
 istic movement," or " Puseyism." A few minds, 
 deeply religious, men who in the seventeenth
 
 74 
 
 century would have been the companions of Fen- 
 elon began to study the far-off church of the 
 fathers. They longed to rebuild their plundered 
 and razed Jerusalem. In the long reign of vice 
 and neglect even the beautiful buildings of God 
 had become battered ruins. The house was as 
 fallen as the heart. 
 
 These men, sons of Oxford, went back in his- 
 tory to find that day of splendor at which the wor- 
 ship of God began to sink. They shoveled away the 
 earth from their buried Pompeii and soon found 
 the rich old colors upon the long hidden walls, 
 It was a most valuable labor of history and love, 
 for out of it came the rebuilding and repairing of 
 the churches and chapels of England; and came 
 also a living religion which joined a pure belief 
 to a holy life. Hundreds of millions of dollars 
 soon went into the rebuilding of the houses of 
 religion ; but there is no money which can express 
 the new Christianity which began at once to 
 re- adorn the soul. 
 
 The men who came back from that historic 
 study, and who joined in this pious renaissance, 
 soon divided into two classes, the high ch.urch 
 and low church, the former comprising those men
 
 75 
 
 who brought back all the rites and emblazonry 
 of the earlier times, while the low church be- 
 came eclectic, and, feeling that the present had 
 outgrown the emblematic period, asked England 
 to accept the simple religion of Jesus and his 
 apostles. The high church became enamored of 
 all they discovered and made valuable old atti- 
 tudes, old positions, a facing the east, showy 
 vestments, priestly offices, candles, incense, con- 
 fessional, and many a genuflection. 
 
 These were the ritualists,with whom the sandal 
 of a Christ was the essential part of the Savior of 
 mankind. The low church became equally en- 
 amored only of that part of the New Testament 
 which they found in the old lava beds, and, mak- 
 ing of little moment the robes and motions and 
 incense of the remote yesterday, they espoused 
 Christianity which reached out a kind hand 
 toward the sects which had filed down from Cal- 
 vin and Wesley. The high church used it 
 relics for building a wall around itself. And 
 thus it stands to-day,walled in,and as exclusive as 
 though it feared that its friendship might escape 
 and be wasted upon a Presbyterian or a Wesley an, 
 and as though the love of God might escape and
 
 invade some meeting -house which did not make 
 the sign of the cross, or might escape and save 
 some infant that was dying at midnight without 
 being baptized. 
 
 It can not in reason be charged upon the rit- 
 ualists that they make religion too ornate. Man 
 has not lived in this world long enough to enable 
 him to say that any part of life can hold too much 
 of real beauty. The temperate zone from the 
 Gulf to the St. Lawrence is beautiful in June, but 
 it has never dared laugh at the more abundant 
 blossomings of the tropics. Many of us have had 
 happy moments in those sanctuaries where grand 
 choral music has marched up and down and in 
 and out. 
 
 There may be other minds which love to face 
 the east, and other minds which love to see 
 incense rising as though it were carrying heaven- 
 ward the burden of human prayers. Persons of 
 little or much culture must be eclectics in the 
 realm of beauty for the church, or city, or the 
 home. If the ritualists feel proud of a pictured 
 religion, and ask that many texts of scripture be 
 uttered in material emblems, and that the candles 
 of Solomon's Temple reappear in the modern
 
 77 
 
 house of God, they have a taste we are all bound 
 to respect. We concede the same right to those 
 Christians who love the rite of washing each other's 
 feet. We confess the ritualism of the Salvation 
 Army, which pictures Christ as the Captain of 
 their host and which follows Paul in the dream 
 of being a good soldier of the Lord. Let ritual- 
 ism appear where it may, in the high church, or 
 the Roman church, or in the Salvation Army, it 
 must pass along as a lawful form and variation 
 of human taste. Its harmfulness has of late years 
 come from minds, which, instead of admiring and 
 enjoying ritualism, have descended to the worship 
 of it the worship of such fugitive and unim- 
 portant accessories which made it difficult for 
 a Bishop's crown to reach a forehead which 
 loved the sublime spirituality of Jesus more than 
 it loved the fleeting pageantry of perfumes and 
 colors, and which loved the face turned toward all 
 the sects in their hour of prayer more than he 
 loved a genuflection or a face turned toward the 
 east. 
 
 In the east we see only the sun. but all around 
 this man lay the hopes and griefs of the human 
 soul, more tremendous than a thousand suns. If:
 
 78 
 
 any proof were wanting, to show that ritualism, 
 when idolized, turns men who might have been 
 scholars and thinkers and orators into half child- 
 ish natures, busy in the ornaments of an altar,like 
 children around the Christmas tree, that proof 
 may be read in the difficulties which lay between 
 Phillips Brooks and the high office for which he 
 seemed to have been born. In itself, ritualism 
 may be a lawful form of religion, but history 
 shows that it may be cultivated until it excludes 
 what it once ornamented, and ends by becoming 
 only the tropical efflorescence of human vanity. 
 A deep attachment to ritualism may be taken as 
 a good-by bidden by the young preacher to the 
 height and depth of thought which belongs to the 
 pulpit in all the great period of church life. A 
 high ritualism is a most perfect and most alluring 
 means for keeping the mind of the clergyman 
 within the limits of a perpetual childhood. A 
 ritualist ought to admire his ceremony as a man 
 loves flowers happy when the blossoms are near, 
 but happy also in the barren fields of winter or 
 in Sahara's leafless sand. 
 
 If one thinks of the high churchmen and the 
 low churchmen as visiting the old past to find
 
 79 
 
 once again the lost church of the fathers, one 
 must see the ritualist entering our age, not only 
 bringing much of the apostolic doctrine, but also 
 as having his arms full of candles, of priestly 
 robes, of curtains fastened by "loops of blue each 
 to its sister," and full of " badger-skins dyed red" ; 
 and the same spectator must see the low church- 
 man coming from that act of exhuming, carrying 
 in his hands the words and deeds and life of our 
 Lord. You may all, if you wish, admire many a 
 high churchman acting in his peculiar office, but 
 for this absent Bishop you can not but cherish a 
 greater admiration and a deeper love. He reached 
 out his hand to all men, and so sincere was he 
 that his hand always pointed out the path of his 
 heart. 
 
 When the heart studies the bygone years, it 
 ought to esteem great in the past that which it 
 wishes to come true in the future. We ought to 
 look deeply at the yesterday in order to catch the 
 image of to-morrow. And, as the soul of Phillips 
 Brooks longed to see a Christian unity and equal- 
 ity, longed to see a civilization which should re- 
 semble the life of the Son of Man, he gathered up 
 from the fathers the doctrines which tended to
 
 80 
 
 make noble men and to join them into a wide 
 brotherhood. The ritualists seem, by some error 
 of locality, to have exhumed the Mosaic age; the 
 low- churchmen seemed to have laid open to view 
 a more recent arena that of Jesus. 
 
 In his wanderings in the old religious world, 
 this lamented mortal recalls that Dante who, in 
 his great dream, drew near a holy mountain, 
 which lifted up its form not far from the paradise 
 of his God. The devout wanderer did not see 
 any candles or vestments or studied posturing; he 
 saw no apostolic succession. The world around 
 him was too great to be in harmony with the rites 
 and emblems of some fleeting year. One by one 
 the angels came over him, but each one was chant- 
 ing some benediction which had once fallen from 
 the lips of the Master. No sooner had the words 
 sounded, " Blessed are the pure in heart," than on 
 came some other winged choristers saying," Blessed 
 are the merciful." To the same Italian worshiper 
 at last a great chorus chanted the Lord's Prayer, 
 all amplified like a tune in music which breaks 
 up into four parts: 
 
 U Oh Thou Almighty Father! Who dost make 
 The heavens Thy dwelling, not in bounds confined, 
 But that with love intenser there Thou viewest
 
 81 
 
 Thy primal effluence, hallowed be the name. 
 
 Join each created being to extol 
 
 Thy might, for worthy humblest thanks and praise 
 
 Is Thy blessed Spirit. May the Kingdom's peace 
 
 Come unto us, for we, unless it come, 
 
 With all our striving thither tend in vain. " 
 
 These are the words which our great American 
 "commoner" heard chanted in the lofty cathedrals 
 of the past, and these are the words he wished to 
 hear sounding in the greater aisles and corridors 
 of the future. He extracted greatness from the 
 past because he wished history to be only another 
 name for his soul's hope. His mind conceived of 
 a service and an anthem too great to be read or 
 sung by his limited sect. His ritual must include 
 a hundred Books of Common Prayer; his vest- 
 ments must include the robes of a Louis XIV, 
 the habit of an exiled Quaker, and the seamless 
 coat of Jesus. He found his universal and per- 
 petual harmony in the words: "Blessed are the 
 pure in heart." 
 
 If you would find a reason for the confessed 
 eloquence of this eminent Christian, you must 
 begin by studying the advantage found in a mind 
 which loved the whole human family, and then 
 loved all the great truths which hold the people's
 
 82 
 
 happiness. Eloquence is the utterance of great 
 truths in a manner worthy of the truths. But 
 there can be no such utterance without passion. 
 This man was capable of loving even the negro 
 slave. When those old days of trial were brood- 
 ing over the nation, Phillips Brooks flamed up on 
 the slaves' side. After the slaves were free he 
 traveled a thousand miles to plead in this city for 
 the cause of the education and full citizenship of 
 those homeless Africans. Only a little group of 
 our citizens appeared in the large hall, for the 
 orator was young in his fame and the city was 
 young in its power to appreciate such an appeal 
 from heart to heart. None the less did the speech 
 run like molten iron from a furnace, thus teaching 
 us who listened that oratory is great truth uttered 
 with great passion. Gesture and tone are insig- 
 nificant. 
 i 
 
 It is necessary for this truth and passion to 
 enjoy the noble accessories of language and style. 
 It is difficult for a great mind, great heart, great 
 language, and good style,all to meet in one human 
 being. The distance between orators is therefore 
 very great. Only a few come to us each hundred 
 years. In Bishop Brooks, all these ingredients
 
 83 
 
 mingled. He had by nature and by study mas- 
 tered the one language of his race. It became at 
 last the hundred gates of his soul's Thebes. At 
 these portals the riches of his age passed in and 
 out. He used no dead words, no old, worn- out 
 phrases, at which the brain of the listener sinks to 
 sleep. His words were all alive, and they came 
 singing like the string and arrows of the won- 
 derful bow of Ulysses. His words came too 
 rapidly indeed, but his ideas were instantly seen 
 and instantly felt to be true. Each word was dis- 
 tinct, like a single note in some rapid melody, an 
 inseparable part of a beautiful song. 
 
 What a simplicity there is in all such high 
 speech ! because the theme is so large and so ab- 
 sorbing that it shames away the most of artifice, 
 and makes the little art of the piece wholly invis- 
 ible. If those final words ascribed to the Bishop 
 were indeed spoken, his mind was not greatly 
 under a cloud, for the simple sentence whispered 
 to a servant: "You need not care for me longer; 
 I am going home," is made of the kind of words 
 which earth needs when it is fading, and which 
 the final home asks for when it is opening its 
 gates to a noble spirit, once a pilgrim here. Death
 
 84 
 
 always asks for simple language, because its mys- 
 tery and sadness and hope are all the ornamenta- 
 tion the speaker or listener can bear. Ah! sad 
 loss such a being to all the churches of our 
 country! He was a man so symmetrical and so 
 fitted to all the hours and need of our land that 
 the office of bishop went to him, not to add any- 
 thing to his fame or power,but to be itself hon- 
 ored and exalted. It was the office that went to 
 be crowned. As an Episcopal bishop he was 
 much less than as the great, free orator of the 
 Christian philosophy. But the terms " bishop " 
 and "commoner" are both made sacred now by 
 the sudden advent of death. 
 
 It is certain that this name will long remain 
 the center of a magic power. The Baptist, with 
 his close communion, can not but be impressed 
 with that scene of brotherhood which lies so out- 
 spread in this churchman's life; the Unitarians 
 can also look towards Phillips Brooks, to know 
 how rationalism of a high school may be joined 
 to the most marked spirituality and piety; the 
 restless and debating Presbyterians may study 
 him, to learn what peace and usefulness they can 
 find in a Christianity many times simpler than
 
 85 
 
 their confession of faith; to him may the low 
 church look for perpetual vindication; and to 
 him should all the young ritualistic clergy turn, 
 not to abandon their pictured and highly colored 
 worships, but to mark how the pulpit of a Chris- 
 tian teacher and thinker towers above the swing- 
 ing of censers and the adjustment of robes and 
 the graceful bowing of the body in its acts of 
 devotion. He should warn them against the folly 
 of a half wasted life. 
 
 While we are thus standing by such a grave, 
 the inquiry comes from many whether ritualism 
 and Romanism are to displace the simpler 
 churches and come into almost despotic power . 
 Of this result there seems little probability. The 
 broad church is young, but ritualism is as old as 
 the world. It ruled in the Mosaic age. It ruled 
 in India, Egypt, and in all great nations before 
 the Son of Man came, and then entering Chris- 
 tianity it filled with its pageant all temples up to 
 the days of Luther. 
 
 The broad church has been in the world only 
 half a century. In that brief period what mas- 
 ter minds it has produced ! It is nothing else than 
 the old Christianity of rites and doctrines smitten
 
 86 
 
 by the deeper thought of these later generations. 
 That reason which has created the modern world 
 will most surely drive religion toward a holy life, 
 a simple piety and a wide brotherhood. Roman- 
 ism will be smitten by the same hand, and one by 
 
 one shall fall from it the follies and vices which 
 
 
 
 that church gathered up by passing through the 
 middle centuries of ignorance and sin. That new 
 thought, which has transformed despotisms into 
 republics and slaves into the citizens of England 
 and France, will notr spare the old life and ideas 
 of the temple of prayer. The antiquity of Ro- 
 manism and ritualism will not protect them. 
 Many things thousands of years old have died in 
 this century. It is the great graveyard of 
 antiquity and the beautifully draped cradle of 
 a new youth. 
 
 - When it is said that reason will smite the old 
 churches, it is not meant that any violence will 
 come. Heaven keep violence far away from all 
 those Roman and Protestant altars where our 
 parents said their prayers! Reason will smite 
 them only as it smote the valley of the Missis- 
 sippi and covered it with civilization ; smite them 
 only as the sun smites the fields in April and
 
 87 
 
 makes them bloom ; smite them as reason touched 
 Phillips Brooks when he was young and made 
 his heart warm with love and his forehead white 
 with pure truth.
 
 Iftew Gimes flDafce IRew fIDen. 
 
 And the child grew and became strong in spirit. Luke i. 80. 
 
 We should all be glad at the return of those 
 days which ask us to study the life of some great 
 man. It is a maxim in the old books that youth 
 is taught by nothing so much as by example. 
 All the philosophies and theories of human life 
 are dull reading when compared with a simple 
 history of some actual heart. Some abstract 
 writer, like Hegel or Herbert Spencer,might have 
 told the world what a single human being might 
 do were he left alone upon an island far from all 
 the paths of the ships, but a simple story, like 
 that of Selkirk, outweighs all the a priori reason- 
 ing that could be written. Should some professor 
 offer to lecture to us upon the vocal cords, nerves, 
 lungs and ribs that are used in producing the 
 eight tones, very light would be our interest in 
 the lecture should Parepa Rosa or Jenny Lind 
 offer to us, instead of the learned paper, a great 
 throat full of sweet song. Thus biography comes 
 to us with an unequaled charm. It is not a talk 
 about life; it is life itself. In the realm of the 
 
 88
 
 abstract we are all half infidels. We do not 
 believe half you say. When you come back 
 from great scenes and attempt to tell us of the 
 vale of Tempe,or of Yosemite, or of the canons 
 of the West, the words fall dead in our ears. 
 
 A half day in a wonderful spot of mountain 
 or sea, a half day where the pyramids stand 
 silently, or where the Acropolis mourns over 
 her scattered marbles, takes all unbelief out of 
 the soul and lifts it far above all indifference. 
 Thus great names like those of Washington, 
 Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln are 
 the realities of the great scene, and while we are 
 in their presence the theoretical has all stepped 
 aside and we seem gazing at real faces and to 
 hear real voices. 
 
 Mr. Emerson says that we all love to read 
 history because we make it' personal and are full 
 of the feeling as to what we should have done 
 had we been there. When we read of the dome 
 of St. Peter's, we feel that it is the kind of a 
 dome we should have thought of had we been in 
 Rome at the time; and when we read the speech 
 of Demosthenes on the Crown, we feel that, had 
 we been in Athens on that day, we should have
 
 90 
 
 been glad to utter similar sentiments. It is prob- 
 able Emerson's thought is defective ; for the great 
 beauty of history comes from its power to lead 
 the mind away from the abstract and over to the 
 actual. Philosophy may describe a nightingale! 
 history is the bird singing in the hedge of blos- 
 soming thorn. Each object, be it religion, or 
 patriotism, or faithfulness, or love, is best seen 
 in some human being; expressed in a life. The 
 popularity of a novel comes chiefly from its being 
 a book in which two or more human beings act 
 out the poetry, joy and sadness of a great senti- 
 ment. A high novel is the biography of an 
 attachment. 
 
 When, each winter, the day of George Wash- 
 ington comes back to us, it sends the mind off in 
 contemplation of some part of the past landscape. 
 In no one year can we study and enjoy all the 
 picture. The birthday has passed by before we 
 have feasted fully upon the foreground or back- 
 ground or central part of the impressive canvas. 
 How can we exhaust in an hour a soul which it 
 required centuries to create ? How can we exam- 
 ine in a day a life that was in length sixty-seven 
 years? Those years were all full of events of
 
 91 
 
 great interest, for the latter days rolled back 
 their splendor upon the early life and made the 
 school-house, the surveyor's compass and chain, 
 and the adventures among the Indians, all full 
 and active partners of the times of battling for 
 liberty, and of the times of peaceful sway over a 
 happy republic. Should our children come once 
 a year to the study of this birthday, there would 
 be at the end of a long life fields of direct or 
 cognate truth over which their traveled feet 
 had not yet passed. After the childhood of 
 Washington had been reviewed there would 
 come the school-book scenes. Washington and 
 his mother would be a theme. Washington and 
 the army, Washington and England, Washing- 
 ton and France, Washington and victory, Wash- 
 ington and religion would be mighty subjects 
 for reflection of our youth or old age. Sad 
 thought that we shall all die without having 
 seen in all lights our nation or those who laid 
 its foundations! 
 
 Each age is always busy making men out of 
 the material it may have on hand. The child 
 must possess all these mental powers which can 
 be taught and expressed. Given natural genius
 
 92 
 
 and sensibility, the age then shapes the drift of 
 all powers and gives color to thoughts and 
 emotions. That must be by nature an extraor- 
 dinary mind that can catch all the good of a 
 period and can reject all its evil. As to a devotion 
 to liberty and the power to express all the argu- 
 ments in behalf of a republic, Thomas Paine 
 equaled George Washington; but in picking up 
 the qualities of the age Mr. Paine seized upon 
 too much evil and omitted too much good. We 
 must always be thankful to Thomas Paine for 
 the great help he rendered the infant nation; but 
 we can now see that he did not become a full 
 utterance of the eighteenth century. He could 
 not hold his own mind in a beautiful equipoise. 
 ^Ie could not treat with respect men of all shades 
 of religious opinion. He was restless, aimless, 
 intemperate, more like the wild Rousseau of 
 France than like the symmetrical man of Mt. 
 Yernon. It was not to the injury of Mr. Paine 
 that he was not orthodox in Christianity, for his 
 deism abounded and took in many of those who 
 were greatest in that day. He absorbed too 
 many frailties and omitted too many of the great 
 attributes of mankind.
 
 93 
 
 When, long ago, the ax-men went into the 
 woods to find among the trees one suitable to be 
 shaped into a mast for a large clipper ship, thou- 
 sands of trees had to be passed by with only a 
 glance. One tree had been twisted by the wind ; 
 one had been creased by the lightning; one had, 
 when young, been bent down by some playing 
 bears; one had been too near to its neighbors, 
 and had been dwarfed in the top; one had been 
 too near a stream, and had had too much sun and 
 air on the side next the water, its trunk had bent 
 toward its greatest limb; one had in youth been 
 scorched by the fire of a hunter. At last a tree 
 is found from which all defects are wanting, and 
 up, straight as a draftsman's rule, runs the wooden 
 shaft for a hundred feet. The woodsmen all re- 
 joice, for the mast is found. The tree is elected 
 from amid its fellows, and soon, instead of wear- 
 ing its verdure in the forest, it goes careening on 
 the ocean, holding up white sails to the journey- 
 ing wind. Not otherwise when some weak col- 
 onies need a chieftain for war and peace; they 
 must pass by many a name great in fame before 
 they find the citizen who holds all the virtues 
 they know and love. No one dare say that
 
 94 
 
 Washington was the only man who could have 
 performed the needed task. There may have been 
 one other or many others who could have led the 
 people to independence. The one man having 
 been found, the people did not pursue longer the 
 search. Such a search would be a foolish task 
 for an historian. Having found the mast, the ax- 
 men left the woods. 
 
 There are few scenes more attractive than the 
 picture of a new age making new men. The 
 eighteenth century was a new era. Its new life 
 did not take the direction of railways and tel- 
 egraphs, or of physical implements and machines; 
 rather did it make a study of new principles in 
 politics and religion. It was a logical storm, and 
 the storm centers were monarchy and the Roman 
 Catholic Church. England and France were 
 storm- swept districts, England studying politics 
 and deism, France studying both politics and re- 
 ligion. The thirteen colonies were upon the bor- 
 der of the disturbance, and, while men like Burke 
 and Pitt intlamed their love of liberty, Boling- 
 broke, Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire undermined 
 the Roman Church, and, under deism and repub- 
 licanism, monarchy fell in France and freedom 
 arose on both sides of the sea.
 
 95 
 
 Hume's life-long home was Edinburgh. Thus 
 the attack upon orthodoxy reached from Edin- 
 burgh to Paris, and was violent for nearly a 
 hundred years. The political churches in Eng- 
 land and Scotland were almost as deeply hated as 
 the one in France, and at the close of the cen- 
 tury there were few statesmen that paid any great 
 deference to any orthodox form of Christianity. 
 Deism and republicanism traveled together. 
 
 This was not a logical necessity ; it followed 
 from the fact that in both France and England 
 the church and despotism had long been full 
 partners. To fight against the miraculous claims 
 of the church was to make a path for freedom. 
 The history of the Church of England was the 
 history of all forms of wrong; the Scotch Church 
 had been less cruel because it had been less pow- 
 erful; the Puritans in New England had shown 
 terrific violence; the Roman Church had surpassed 
 all because it had reached over more millions 
 and over more centuries, and thus had trampled 
 upon humanity with a malignant cruelty which 
 now surpasses all modern powers of belief. 
 Statesmen created in such a period had to become 
 cold to orthodoxy when they became ardent for
 
 96 
 
 liberty ; and we can not wonder that when at last 
 they drafted the fundamental law of the land 
 they left all religion wholly outside of the con- 
 stitution. Many of these framers of law carried 
 in their hearts a simple Christianity, but they had 
 seen enough of the union of church and state. 
 They were men of a new era. 
 
 Society is not merely an eating, drinking, feast- 
 ing throng not merely a student, a worker, but 
 it is also an assemblage of ideas. It is a common 
 storehouse, to which the past wills its thought 
 and to which the present adds its accretions. 
 But society is made up of men and women. 
 These persons, then, are the final massing of truth, 
 and when we examine the close of the eighteenth 
 century we find each being who was sensitive 
 and who moved about in his time, laden with all 
 the wisdom which lay exhumed between his birth 
 and death. 
 
 Thus it comes to pass that Voltaire, Boling- 
 broke, Hume, Pitt, Burke, Franklin, Washing- 
 ton, Lafayette, Jefferson, Paine and Hamilton 
 moved along in a wonderful unity of belief, both 
 political and religious, each one wearing some 
 little beauty or deformity of disposition, but all
 
 97 
 
 marked by one religious rationalism and one love 
 of a republic. They all had come up out of the 
 destruction of a great past and were all carrying 
 the weapons which had driven the church from 
 crime and vice to virtue, and had driven kings to 
 a hasty but deep study of human rights. It is a 
 beautiful sight to see all those great foreheads 
 and mark them grow radiant in the increasing 
 day of the eighteenth century. 
 
 The kind hearts now living recall with regret 
 that George Washington owned and used slaves. 
 That fact can not be justified, but it can be par- 
 tially explained. Sympathy with black slaves 
 had not yet come in the days of our great chief- 
 tain. All eyes were turned toward the despotic 
 church and the despotic throne. The eighteenth 
 was the white man's century. White men had 
 been worked, whipped, burned, murdered, exiled, 
 tortured for many generations. On one occasion 
 sixty thousand men and women had been murdered 
 in a single night. All the pages of history were red 
 with innocent blood. France was on the eve of 
 the greatest revolution of all times, and the thir- 
 teen colonies were about to rebel against the most 
 powerful kingdom on earth.
 
 98 
 
 We must not rudely demand that the Wash- 
 ingtons thus watching the European sky should 
 feel the wrongs of the negroes in Georgia or Vir- 
 ginia. The mind has always assailed evils one at 
 a time. Washington all through his manhood 
 carried enough of care and even acute pain. It 
 was no light thing to sunder the ties which bound 
 him to the mother country. His ancestors were 
 over the sea. English rule had honored him. To 
 rebel against country and church and help win 
 and secure independence were subjects enough to 
 iill up a mind and heart for a score of years. 
 
 When the great leader did touch upon African 
 slavery, his w r ords were in harmony with the great 
 emancipation which came in the next period. 
 The men around Washington did not reach the 
 rights of women, because, noble as those men 
 were, they could not be infinite. It seems enough 
 that they created the greatest of all republics. 
 They reaped the peculiar harvest of their pe- 
 riod, and stored its yellow sheaves. Other ideas 
 must wait for some other day to come. 
 
 The "other idea" did not delay long its 
 coming. When the thrilling events in France, 
 England and the colonies had become the prop-
 
 99 
 
 erty of history, and all the men who made them 
 had fallen into their graves, then in the nineteenth 
 century came slowly the wave of a new senti- 
 ment. Early in the new era the Breckinridge 
 family in Kentucky began to advocate the re- 
 moval of the negroes to Africa. The coloniza- 
 tion scheme was the first form of this sympathy. 
 At times some master would break over all 
 barriers, and remove all his slaves north and 
 set them free. Many a group of slaves found 
 themselves moving toward liberty, their master 
 leading them towards the promised land. Abo- 
 litionism as an idea, as a political truth, and as an 
 evident form of humanity, followed the coloniza- 
 tion, and had all its orators in all the border 
 slave States before the North had burst out into 
 a flame. Memory can easily recall Cassius M. 
 Clay and John G. Fee, who made the interior of 
 Kentucky hear, from first to last, the pathetic 
 story of the slave. Kentucky women shed tears 
 over slavery before you were born. 
 
 As the years came the number of orators 
 and essayists increased, and sermons, orations, 
 novels, stories and poems began to fall like 
 autumn leaves, only not in the world's autumn,
 
 100 
 
 but in its spring. In 1833 England set free all 
 her slaves; and by 1838 the song sung too soon 
 by Cowper had become true in all the wide em- 
 pire over which the girl -queen Victoria had just 
 begun her sway. That noble girl of nineteen 
 years, just crowned, might have chanted the 
 words of Cowper, then just fulfilled: 
 
 " Slaves can not live in England; if their lungs 
 But breathe our air, that moment they are free; 
 They touch our country and their shackles fall." 
 
 If the eighteenth was the white man's cen- 
 tury, the nineteenth was the century of mankind. 
 Within its -richer years a wider justice and a 
 greater kindness were to come, and no color or 
 sex, or youth or age, or wealth or poverty, were 
 to affect the play of human rights. From 1820 
 to 1860 there was but one eloquence for the 
 nation, and but one great song the one theme was 
 the release of the slave. There was no elo- 
 quence or song against the black man, for he who 
 opposed liberty could not be eloquent, and the 
 song which would uphold shackles could not be 
 sung. An argument runs rapidly when it ha 
 but one side.
 
 101 
 
 But who was present in those years when the 
 young Queen Victoria was looking over a mighty 
 empire which held no slave? What sensitive 
 mind was studying and feeling all truths and 
 sentiments in those days when the songs of free- 
 dom were rolling over this republic as rolls the 
 melody of the song birds of spring? Who was 
 living his early thoughtful years when all the great 
 principles taught by Washington and Jefferson 
 were blossoming into sentiment and filling the 
 whole air w r ith a new perfume? The Lincoln 
 child was born in February, 1809, and thus all that 
 life lay in those years which had dismissed France 
 and Voltaire, Thomas Paine and the Church, 
 England and Europe, that the American public 
 might see in all its details the cloud of negro 
 bondage. Going to New Orleans with his flat- 
 boat the young Lincoln saw the slave auction 
 where mother and son were parted, and where a 
 fair woman was sold like a dumb animal. His 
 heart made a vow. 
 
 Thus each age creates a form of manhood, and, 
 as a group of noble men came up out of the 
 eighteenth century, so another group was cre- 
 ated in the nineteenth; the former were mighty
 
 102 
 
 in their battle for the white man, the latter, 
 mighty in their battle for the race. O thou brief 
 month in midwinter! For all thy days of phy- 
 sical sorrow, days of suffering poor, of dark 
 storm and drifting snow, Nature has given thee 
 compensation in thy perpetual nearness to two 
 names, the greatest in human history ! Thou 
 dost not need leaves and blossoms for thy joy, 
 for when thou wouldst think of things beauti- 
 ful thou canst point to two men who are the 
 eternal decorations of our fatherland ! 
 
 That was a singular association of names made 
 recently by Mr. Ingersoll. He linked together in 
 greatness Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. 
 Never before did that orator utter such a strange 
 sentiment unless it was when he said that Dante 
 and Milton were not poets. Charles Darwin de- 
 duced all animals from a primitive cell, and offers 
 us a theory not valuable but curious. His teach- 
 ings sustain no relations to church or state. They 
 are so unimportant that few care whether they 
 are true or false. So a naturalist discovered 
 that the swallow spends its winter in the bottom 
 of marshes and ponds. But he and Darwin can 
 never be named along with the men Avho have
 
 103 
 
 made a free nation for many millions, and who 
 are sweetening the hearts and intellects of mill- 
 ions of young men who are living their awakened 
 life under freedom's flag. Darwin and the oys- 
 ter! Lincoln and justice! The chief theme of 
 these remarks is not Washington and Lincoln, but 
 rather the spectacle of an age creating its master 
 intellects. Each period loads its clouds until 
 they move in a storm; it nourishes its blossom- 
 buds until they burst. March, April, and May 
 carry water and air and sunshine to the plant,, 
 until at last the passing school -girl shouts with 
 joy, for the plant has bloomed. Later on the farm- 
 er lifts his eyes and says: My wheat has come! 
 Thus we gaze at the ministry of the years and 
 see the mind of the public yielding to the mighty 
 powers of the air. When the school-girl plucks 
 the wild-flower she is not a part of its cause. 
 Nature would have made it had she never passed 
 along that path; but when an age makes great 
 characters, all youth, all girlhood, all woman- 
 hood, all manhood, are melted to compose the new 
 compound of greatness. Washington was the 
 utterance of many millions of souls. Each woman 
 who is thinking and acting nobly, each man who
 
 104 
 
 is discarding all the vices and exalting all the 
 virtues, is helping compose the omnipotence of his 
 century. One noble man utters us all. He is 
 the speaker of the age. 
 
 The present Pope is perhaps the most wise and 
 tolerant of all who have ever held the highest 
 office of the Roman Church. Like Mr. Lincoln, 
 he had to garner up the lessons of his time. Born 
 in 1810, this Catholic lad, acute, sensitive, and 
 moral, had to see all the followers and all the 
 theories of myriads of Voltaires; his ears had to 
 catch all that rationalism which issued from the 
 French Revolution; he was in the midst of the 
 political tumult which reached out twenty years 
 from Mazziniof 1840 to Garibaldi of 1860; he saw 
 the revolution of 1848; he lived on to see Victor 
 Emanuel separate the old church from Italy; he 
 saw stones and mud flung at the funeral cortege 
 of Pius IX; he heard shouts of laughter rise 
 above the solemn dirges chanted by the priests; 
 he had long heard the eloquence of Cavour and 
 Castelar, and had felt the breeze of liberty blow- 
 ing from France, America, and England, and his 
 heart must follow the law of nature and take the 
 color of the adjacent world. His proud spirit
 
 105 
 
 can not make a full surrender. It hates the new 
 breadth of religion, but it flings out to science 
 and to new customs many a kind word. 
 
 A new century leaves us children little option. 
 Its arms are strong; if we will not walk forward 
 it carries us. Pope and king and queen, student, 
 toiler, man, woman, all are carried by the tide of 
 years. Of which sublime movement the explana- 
 tion is that God is dwelling among His children. 
 The Pope, Leo XIII, shrinks from the world -wide 
 friendship demanded among the disciples of piety, 
 but the touch of that friendship has fallen upon 
 his heart and will fall there while he shall live, 
 not only in a new Italy, but in the world's new 
 civilization. 
 
 In its power to make men, society can not go 
 back and make again the shape of intellect it 
 once fashioned for the public use. Neither the 
 Romanism nor the Calvinism of the past can ever 
 come back. Nothing that divides humanity into 
 parcels, and which makes one group kill another 
 group by God's altar can ever return. Exclusive- 
 ness has died ; inclusiveness has come. The little 
 Romanism, the little orthodoxy has been suc- 
 ceeded by humanity. An acorn may turn into
 
 106 
 
 an oak, but the oak can never go hack into the 
 acorn. 
 
 Naturalists and poets used to ask us to note 
 that the evening clouds never repeated their mar- 
 shaling and colorings in the west. The winds, 
 the vapors, the temperature, the atmosphere, the 
 sunshine can not all meet twice in one power, one 
 bulk, and one quality. Thus the elements which 
 made the old church and the great men of the 
 past can never meet again in Italy, or France, or 
 America. But the moral scene excels that of the 
 sunset clouds, for the moral changes are all made 
 in more and more of beauty. Old Romanism and 
 old orthodoxy must die to make way for some 
 more divine assembling of religion's beauty on 
 the morning and evening sky. 
 
 When one thinks of society as shaping a sensi- 
 tive soul, one can not but pass from Leo XIII and 
 Washington, and Lincoln, to him whom Pales- 
 tine cradled and reared and crucified. Accord- 
 ing to the sacred biography he grew as a human 
 youth grows, but he surpasses all the names in 
 history, because he drank in the highest truth of 
 all times and all races. He was more universal 
 and perpetual than the great moderns whom we
 
 107 
 
 love. His laws were for the great kingdom of 
 which Italy and America are only small states. 
 Washington and Lincoln absorbed and expressed 
 man's love of rights and liberty, but the greater 
 one of Palestine, after expressing the most sweep- 
 ing and delicate justice, uttered the world's feel- 
 ings of piety and its hopes of a second life. To- 
 the nations of man He added that vast Father- 
 land to which all earthly greatness moves with 
 solemn steps. To him all the great statesmen 
 and philanthropists look. He is the universal 
 ideal and guide. These great names of February 
 are the children of one continent, the leaders of 
 one people, but the Nazarene surpasses them, for 
 he leads all the multitudes of many periods, and 
 was not the son of a nation, a state, but the Son 
 of Man.
 
 ftbincje anfc 
 
 What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken 
 of the wind? A man clothed in soft raiment? Matthew xi. 8. 
 
 The Columbian Fair began in the contem- 
 plation of physical things. The growth of man- 
 ufacture, art, and science had for a century been 
 so prodigious in quantity and quality that it 
 seemed best to sum up all the fairs of counties 
 and states and nations in some display for the 
 world. The people of this continent, as often as 
 they contemplated the many shapes of its arts, 
 inventions and products, felt disposed to thank 
 Columbus for having been so kind as to discover 
 such a valuable piece of idle ground. By slow 
 degrees this gratitude to Columbus spread, and 
 instead of saying as is customary, " Let us build 
 a statue of that navigator," it said: "Let us hold 
 a gigantic fair in his memory." This was the 
 sentiment which at last prevailed, and each day 
 that now passes brings us nearer the opening of 
 the grates and doors of that unusual exhibition. 
 
 o 
 
 The present year itself is, in this continent at 
 least, to be made memorable by the event." Our
 
 109 
 
 century has seen many great years, and this one, 
 differing from all in its color and essence, will 
 take its place in the group of those destined to 
 be historic. It will not be associated with any 
 fields of battle, nor with the sad questions of dis- 
 union and slavery; it will stand forth gay and 
 brilliant, but valuable and impressive. 
 
 The conception of the work was large in the 
 outset, but not many months of public discussion 
 had passed by before all first thoughts became 
 inadequate, and grounds, buildings, contents, 
 beauty and cost doubled the size in which they 
 were first seen. Like the Fama of Virgil, they 
 gained forces by going. " Viresque acquirit eundo." 
 
 In the very outset all was materialistic, but 
 the country had not thought long before it be- 
 gan to say, "Let us have not only material things, 
 but let us have also spiritual things. The age is 
 not wholly composed of inventions and discov- 
 eries, of pictures, statues, architecture, railways 
 and electric lights and powers ; it is composed in 
 part of mental phenomena. Let us add these 
 things to the Columbian memory." This idea ran 
 swiftly, and now when the year is just opening
 
 110 
 
 we see a picture never offered the world before 
 a fair to be held in the name of both dust and 
 spirit. If a flower or a tree or a ship or a car 
 is organized dust, then education, politics, social 
 philosophy and religion are organized soul. We 
 may well all rejoice that jewels and machines 
 and robes of silk and velvet are to be here next 
 summer, but we may also be glad that the hu- 
 man soul is to be here here in its science, its 
 ethics, its eloquence, its education, its religion 
 and philanthropy. All the material things will 
 indeed be the work of the human mind. The 
 strain engine, with its self-acting valves and with 
 its enormous power, is only a form assumed by 
 man's thought. Recently, when a ship -load of 
 people found that in mid-ocean the shaft of the 
 ship's great wheel had become shattered, they 
 must have felt like children who had lost a 
 father or a kind guardian. Out in the ocean in a 
 floating palace ! but in the palace lay this dead 
 giant whose power, ten thousand times greater than 
 that of Hercules, had been day and night on their 
 side. Thus all instruments and machines are in- 
 carnations of man's mind; but, after these have 
 #11 been seen and studied, there is much of mind
 
 Ill 
 
 left, and man out of his machines is greater than 
 man in them. Our age can construct a marvel- 
 ous steam-engine of which Watt little dreamed, 
 but the instrument would be of little value had 
 not man possessed great errands over land and 
 sea. The rail-car is great in itself, but it is often 
 made greater by the souls of the travelers. Men 
 going upon great errands of mercy or justice or 
 goodness confer honor upon the ship that bears 
 them from shore to shore. When Franklin 
 stepped upon the shores of France ; when Lafay- 
 ette stepped upon the shores of America, each 
 man would have been greater than his ship had 
 its hull been made of plates of pure gold. Thus, 
 after the mind has invented and made all the 
 buildings and the objects that shall be within 
 the buildings, it will still contain within itself a 
 great residue of beauty and power. 
 
 One of the blessings of the year ought to be 
 found in the fact that such a congress of nations 
 ought to lead all minds to think the world's 
 thoughts thoughts good for the world and for 
 all time. If literary men from all lands shall 
 meet here, they ought to unite in demanding a 
 universal purity of style and in making a cov-
 
 112 
 
 enant to deal only in the most high and noble of 
 truths. They should band together to make 
 greater and greater the most powerful agent at 
 work among men. All the arts are dwarfed 
 by the power of literature. Each other art can 
 express only some part of the mind music a 
 part, architecture a part, painting a part; but 
 literature can express all the thoughts and emo- 
 tions of the entire spirit. And this art one can 
 carry with him when he travels, it can flourish 
 in one little room, it depends not upon wealth 
 or house or gallery, but where the mind has a 
 common education, there this art can find its 
 home. A poor girl's heart may be the gallery 
 of this form of excellence. In one hand she 
 may hold a volume which may contain more 
 truth and beauty than can be found in any col- 
 lection of art. 
 
 If she may hold only some of the immortal 
 books of the world, she has near her heart some- 
 thing greater than all the canvases in the magnif- 
 icent rooms of the Louvre. These books travel 
 like wind and light. They do not wait for the 
 poor boy to grow rich that he may make a long 
 journey to them. They pity his poverty and go
 
 113 
 
 to him. A few books went to the Lincoln lad 
 in Kentucky and Indiana; a few volumes went, 
 to the young Henry Clay, a few to our Washing- 
 ton when he was a lad; but when these books; 
 went they carried the soul of the world, for lit- 
 erature means the mind and heart of our race. 
 Humanity thinks all the time. Thoughts are as 
 countless as the grains of sand upon the shores 
 of all oceans; but as, of those sands, only some 
 of the grains are gold or sapphire or pearl, so 
 of all the thoughts of all time, only a part are 
 
 rich in value and beauty. Literature is the final 
 
 
 
 collection of these scattering jewels. Whether 
 gathered by Plato or Cicero, or by the Man of 
 Nazareth, or by John Milton, they stand for all 
 that is great and good in mankind. It is one of 
 the greatest attributes of our earth that it scat- 
 ters its greatest works with the most generous 
 hand, and enters the door of the cabin and offers 
 to the boy without coat or shoes the use and joy 
 of the highest of all the arts. 
 
 In the presence of such a full, powerful and 
 wide-spread influence how can we avoid wishing 
 that our coming congresses of scholars and stu- 
 dents may vow to make literature cut loose from
 
 114 
 
 vulgarity once and forever? What the students 
 of the world did in the recent exposition in Paris 
 has had a marked effect, for it is now confessed 
 that France is rapidly moving toward a literature 
 which appeals to only the highest taste of the 
 enlightened world. It ought to be easy for our 
 literary congress to lend a new impulse to a char- 
 iot which is already in motion. 
 
 The reform of literature would imply a reform 
 of the drama, for when the public learns to love 
 one pure art it will ask that all kindred manifes- 
 tations of the intellect shall be high in their 
 style. The low drama, for many of the dramas 
 are still disgraceful to all concerned, will never 
 lack for friends in a nation which could praise a 
 poet whose vulgarity was simply infinite. We 
 must appeal to the congress of nations to aid us 
 in the suppression of immoral books and in 
 building up a new world of letters into which 
 slang and vulgarity can not enter. The gates of 
 literature should be, like those of heaven, made 
 of pearl. The world from Germany to America 
 is growing ready for such reform. May all the 
 scholars and students who ever assemble vow to 
 magnify literature that art of all arts!
 
 115 
 
 Our fathers in the church erred by their efforts 
 to expel the drama and opera from the face of 
 the earth. The tendency of their practice was 
 to make the world a desert. They were deep and 
 wide in their hates. The fiddle itself came in for 
 a large share of their displeasure. Nearly all 
 games were suspected of wickedness. Assuming 
 that the earth had been cursed by Adam, they 
 were inclined to think that all the earth produced 
 was full of depravity. Of course, the drama 
 and opera, and the fiddle and the dance, were 
 wicked, for otherwise the earth would not have 
 produced them. All good came through the 
 church; the earth was the kingdom of Satan. 
 Such teachings were equivalent to a robbery, for 
 thus was society to be robbed of many and beau- 
 tiful goods. The old theory of total depravity 
 has failed. The depravity was at least total in 
 its failure. It remains now to assume that the 
 earth is prolific in goodness and beauty, and that 
 this beauty must be separated from deformity, 
 just as literature must be rescued from the slums 
 and the gutter. We do not wish to mow down 
 the wide expanse of flowers under the pretense 
 that they are weeds. The church said they are
 
 116 
 
 all weeds and nettles. We have lived to know 
 better. Our world is a rich valley, made by the 
 Almighty to yield flowers, and we must help the 
 Creator in his wish that the plant should blossom 
 and the birds sing. 
 
 There is one "hobby" which no age has yet 
 ridden. The Greeks and Latins rode upon 
 Pegasus, others rode upon the war-horse, the 
 church made a hobby of its creed, many different 
 times have mounted many different things ; but 
 there is one idea to which society has never yet 
 given its hand and heart, and that "hobby" is a 
 beautiful decency. When language came to us 
 from the sky, we were not satisfied till we had it 
 filled with oaths and gibberish and slang; when 
 art came, society said, " Let us make it indelicate;" 
 when literature came, great minds said, "Let us 
 write its pages that all who read will blush for 
 shame;" when the drama offered us the sublime 
 pictures of human life, the play-makers said, " Let 
 us make our plays and scenes infamous;" when 
 the drama came in the name of the greatest song, 
 then our leaders again said, " Let us invent an 
 absurd and silly ballet and hang it like a hun- 
 dred mill-stones on the neck of a divine music."
 
 117 
 
 Thus our world has never made a hobby of honor 
 in literature or art. But we may be on the ev 
 of a great change. We may infer from the unrest 
 of civilization that it has grown weary of the 
 past. It has become convinced that the world 
 was made for greatness, beauty, and goodness. 
 
 In the moral department of the World's Fair 
 the officers have invented the motto, "Not Things, 
 but Men." This motto must have reference only 
 to a division of labor-that some days will show us 
 things, other days will show us men. The motto 
 for the whole exposition may well be " Things 
 and Men;" for we love to think of things as the 
 products of man's genius and the servants of his 
 wants. Nearly all things are the expression of 
 man's power. The steamship is only a form 
 assumed by Watt and Fulton. When the tele- 
 graph speaks to us, it is Morse that speaks. Thus, 
 things are men. Now the argument is this that 
 if man can pour his power into a steamship which 
 will carry a thousand persons over an ocean, so 
 this man, this thinker, this creator, can pour a 
 similar power into religion, or politics, or art, or 
 life, and make them all the most faithful servants 
 of the race. Can not the congresses of men help
 
 118 
 
 lift up a suffering world? If the genius of man 
 can make things, can it not make men ? Sad day 
 for us if we can build a beautiful house for men 
 to live in, but can not fabricate a noble man! 
 Shall we tear down the house ? Oh, no ! Let us 
 rebuild the occupant. The genius that fabricates 
 an exposition can fabricate a society. 
 
 It is confessed now that the architectural scene 
 on the fair grounds is perhaps the greatest the 
 world has ever seen. We can not go back to 
 Babylon to see how it looked in the day of its 
 hanging gardens, nor to Carthage to mark its 
 wonders in the time of Hannibal, but, compared 
 with all existing emblems of the builder's art, 
 this new picture is most impressive. It was cre- 
 ated not by one city, but by the whole age, for 
 ideas are there from the Greek, the Roman, the 
 Gothic, and the Oriental lands. In that piece of 
 ground the great builders, dead and living, all 
 meet. Rome is there with her arches, Greece 
 with her columns. But the inquiry which that 
 enchanted field raises is this: Can not such an 
 age build a wide and pure civilization ? Can not 
 our times build up a richer spiritual realm ? Can 
 not the assembled men bear witness against the
 
 119 
 
 disgraceful passion of war? Can they not make 
 reason and justice seem grander than battlefields ? 
 Can they not cover with perpetual infamy the day 
 when one Frenchman and one German exulted in 
 the slaughter of half a million of their brothers? 
 Can not the congress of moralists utter against the 
 drinking habit some word which will encircle the 
 world ? 
 
 Shall such congresses of men leave to Avomen 
 alone the conflict with the greatest vice upon 
 earth? The existing spectacle is singular at 
 least that of ten million women attempting to 
 close the gates of death which ten million men 
 help to keep open. The temperance reform may 
 well remind us of that scene in the classic Inferno, 
 where a man was doomed to make a rope of hay 
 to reach to the outer world of light and liberty, 
 but, while he was busy twisting his life -rope, a 
 flock of wild asses stood behind a wall eating up 
 the grassy string with a calm and perpetual de- 
 light. Thus womanhood twists her temperance 
 rope in vain. She will never find the longed-for 
 light and liberty. There is too much consuming 
 ability at the other end of the rope. It is to be 
 believed that our ethical congresses will tak'3
 
 uo 
 
 some action that may make the war against dis- 
 tilled drinks the war of manhood and womanhood 
 alike against a destructive vice. In the face of 
 all the temperance work of the past few years 
 Boston sent more rum to Africa in the past year 
 than it has sent in any one season of recent times. 
 With the Christians on the one side of Africa 
 stealing men and women for slaves, and with 
 Christians on the other side sending the negroes 
 cargoes of rum, the scene is one worthy of the 
 thought of a world's congress worthy of its de- 
 bate, its tears, its action. 
 
 It is now true that the continent of Africa is 
 to lie for eight days before a Columbian assembly 
 next summer. The fact was made the theme of a 
 pamphlet in November last. The essay was writ- 
 ten by Mr. F. P. Noble, of the Newberry Library 
 of this city. In those eight days eminent men, 
 from many parts of the world and from Africa 
 itself , are to state all the sad and joyful facts in 
 the great case, and are to outline some policy for 
 civilization to adopt and pursue. Africa is three 
 times as large as all of Europe, three times as 
 large as our republic, it is one-fifth of all the land 
 on the globe, and yet it has been the historic scene
 
 121 
 
 of desolation, and the place whither the Chris- 
 tians have repaired when they wished to contra- 
 dict every teaching of their Divine Master. It has 
 sustained two hundred millions of blacks whose 
 ignorance made a market for rum, and whose pov- 
 erty and docility made them valuable as slaves. Mr. 
 Noble estimates that only one in two hundred ever 
 met a Christian teacher acting as such in the name 
 of God's love, but it needs no mathematical figur- 
 ing to teach us that few of those millions are stran- 
 gers to the white man as a bloody warrior and as 
 an unfeeling thief. The slave trade and the rum 
 trade have made all Africa fully aware of the 
 existence of a white man's world in the North. 
 They know it by our depravity. 
 
 It is a blessed thought that this Africa is to lie 
 in her mangled and bleeding form for eight days 
 before the eyes of cultivated people convened 
 from all parts of the enlightened land. There 
 will be cheering facts to be set forth, facts which 
 will kindle pity into hope; and there will be 
 plenty of that wisdom which can come from men 
 who have lived in the land of which they will 
 speak. We all want music to sound all through 
 those summer months, and machinery to speak,
 
 122 
 
 and art to speak, but do we not also wish for an 
 Africa to stand forth and plead her cause with an 
 eloquence born out of her centuries of bitterness ? 
 Our rail -cars will seem greater if they are going 
 to penetrate the Dark Continent, our telegraph 
 will grow wonderful if it is thought of as holding 
 Africa in its net-work and making noble words 
 pass quickly to and fro in that area of prolific nature 
 which reaches in length or breadth five thousand 
 miles. And all music will sound nobler when it 
 shall offer rest and peace to hearts that have been 
 made tender by sympathy with the needs of our 
 race. 
 
 " Men and Things 17 make the best motto, but 
 with the men exalting the things and the things 
 empowering the men. 
 
 The fine arts and music and literature, great 
 as they are, are not the end and measure of human 
 life. The fact that society lives by political truth, 
 social truth, religious truth, and scientific truth, 
 marks out for us the place for all the beautiful 
 things. Were it not for music we should live a 
 less happy life, but were it not for agriculture we 
 should all die next summer. Painting is a 
 delightful art, but were it not for political science
 
 123 
 
 we should all be savages. Sometimes young 
 people of an extreme style boast of taking no 
 interest in the social sciences, they are so fond of 
 music and society; but had not science come, 
 their music would now be .a tom-tom and their 
 elite society a band of Digger Indians. It takes 
 utility to make a world, and beauty to adorn it. 
 Neither is utility the aim and measure of 
 human life. To live for politics or agriculture 
 or social science alone is to commit a sin against 
 nature. This is to use only one half of the soul. 
 If we are to plow a furrow to grow bread , we 
 ask to be permitted while we plow to hear the 
 morning bird and to see the blossoming orchard. 
 The plowman is to be greater than his furrow. 
 As the girl must be greater than her music,so the 
 farmer must be greater than his plow. The girl 
 must reach up her hand and touch the realm of 
 utility ; and man must turn from his labor and 
 visit the kingdom of beauty. To despise either 
 social science or beautiful art is to pass through 
 life with only one half of a soul. As the great 
 Columbian buildings are made of iron and then 
 adorned and shaped by art, they stand as the sym- 
 bols of man's life, for it must possess both delicacy
 
 124 
 
 and iron, plenty of high music and the iron of 
 deep thought. As artists and art lovers the 
 world's public may journey thither next summer ; 
 but the many ought to come hither as men, and 
 be both the world's iron and the world's taste. 
 
 Here, where common sense is to deal with pol- 
 itics, with labor, with capital, with the pure in 
 letters and art, it will make a review of religion. 
 Would that such a congress could make religion 
 simpler and ask the church to sum up Christian- 
 ity in an imitation of Jesus Christ! The whole 
 length and all the centuries of Christendom have 
 been deeply injured by a religion of forms. The 
 creed has always been greater than virtue. The 
 Roman Catholic Church has groaned for cen- 
 turies under a load of crime and vice; the Church 
 of England was but little better. Dean Hole, of 
 Rochester, England, wrote recently of days not 
 far past when many an English rector lived far 
 away from his parish and simply drew his living 
 from the church rates paid by his neglected 
 people; that one of those absent and fashionable 
 pastors resolved at last to go and see his flock in 
 some mild and gentle weather; but on the edge 
 of the village he met a woman with a basket full
 
 125 
 
 of such old, spoiled fish that the servant of God 
 ordered his carriage to face about for home. In 
 the meantime the Presbyterians drank heavily 
 and waited for God to choose converts through 
 the mysterious art of election. Such was the 
 Christian church all through those years when 
 a scheme of doctrine displaced a Christlike char- 
 acter. If a congress of religions can do anything 
 in favor of a simple imitation of Christ, they will 
 change the whole quality of the world. Bishop 
 Ireland would evidently welcome some reform 
 that would prevent his foolish people from watch- 
 ing for miracles on church windows, and should 
 lead them to seek for pictures of Christ and 
 angels in their hearts. The only miracle of any 
 value to the church of to-morrow is a miracle of 
 a righteous and benevolent life. Toward such a 
 final miracle the Christian church is slowly turn- 
 ing. May the congresses about to convene make 
 the movement universal and rapid. 
 
 Never before lay before our civilization ques- 
 tions so many and so great. It seems that many 
 of the largest themes of reflection waited for 
 this period to arrive. The themes of poverty and 
 riches, woman's mission, universal education, com-
 
 126 
 
 munion in its good sense, war or peace, pure or 
 low art, temperance, government of cities, humane 
 laws and religion, are all here waiting for a 
 hearing in the high court. It is the greatness 
 of the court that has evoked the hisrh cases. 
 
 , O 
 
 This is the first century which has been bold 
 enough and thoughtful enough to be worthy of 
 presiding over debates which once would have 
 been argued with blood and fire. 
 
 Let us all listen to all the pleadings which 
 gifted counselors can make. That was a much 
 smaller day when the two Greek orators debated 
 about the price of honor a golden crown for 
 then the city of Athens lay in doubt between two 
 kings; but now the whole of Christendom lies in 
 doubt between religions worthless or divine, 
 between acts low or pure, society trifling or great, 
 between awful wars or sweet peace. 
 
 What went ye out to the wilderness to see ? 
 A reed whistling in .the wind? Ah, no! We 
 went to see the holy face of a prophet and to hear 
 the last years of the nineteenth century pour out 
 its many -voiced eloquence.
 
 "(Immorality 
 
 My brethren, these things ought not so to be James iii. 10. 
 
 We need not attempt to find the origin of the 
 feeling of obligation. All agree with the far- 
 off Saint James that there are many things that 
 ought not to be so, and there are many things 
 that ought to be so. The ancient moralists used 
 to wonder whether this feeling of obligation 
 came from the gods, or whether the gods were 
 themselves bound by it. Differ, as many think- 
 ers may, as to the origin and warrant of morality, 
 morality itself is felt to be here and to be the 
 hope and ornament of society. Cicero uttered re- 
 grets that morality could not assume a personal 
 form, and be visible to the eye. In his essay on 
 ethics, he exclaims: "What affection would vir- 
 tue call forth could she only become a visible per- 
 sonage ! " He was, perhaps, thinking of the 
 Camillas and Dianas who had been seen in wheat - 
 field or forest; he also remembered the Venus 
 who had often been visible in some form more 
 beautiful than life. He lamented that the idea of 
 morality could not sweep along before society, 
 
 J27
 
 128 
 
 and take away from all hearts all doubt as to the 
 matchless beauty of her form and soul. Plato 
 preceded the Roman essayist in this wish, for he 
 said: "Could this supreme wisdom be visible to 
 the eye she would call forth a vehement affection 
 by her charms." 
 
 The term "morals " must signify that form of 
 conduct which most regards al] rights, and which 
 leads each and all to the highest welfare. Many 
 definitions might be given, of which each might be 
 good and all imperfect. A convenient definition 
 may be this that morals are the best moral ways 
 to the best ends. It is declared by many that 
 perfect morals might be found and followed in a 
 nation where there was no religion, in a nation 
 which might have rejected the idea of a God; but 
 such a proposition is rendered purely theoretical 
 by the fact that no nation has existed without a 
 religion. In those countries which have produced 
 a few atheists the civilization has been made by 
 the overwhelming majority. We have never 
 seen in any land a public virtue that had never 
 been touched by a religion. 
 
 Men who may differ greatly over the tenets 
 of Christianity and natural religion, all meet in
 
 129 
 
 the department of morality. Morality is the hope 
 of our race. To oppose virtue is to declare one- 
 self a pirate, and is to merit a sentence of out- 
 lawry. Morality is a word that stands for the 
 common weal. It surpasses in significance the 
 word "art" or "beauty" or "culture," because 
 society might do without those blessings, but it 
 <?an not exist without morality. 
 
 An event occurred not long since which gave 
 all local moralists a thrill of delight. Thought- 
 ful men of name and fortune were asked to ex- 
 press their views as to the merit of a fashionable 
 park at which horse-racing for money was an an- 
 nual and fashionable pleasure. It was an inspira- 
 tion to hear from great capitalists and public,fash- 
 ionable citizens a plain condemnation of all such 
 forms of sport and gain. They lamented that their 
 beautiful piece of ground had become disgraced by 
 the gambler's art; they had ceased to visit the once 
 pleasant resort; they would delight in the death 
 of a " club " whose happiness and gains must 
 come from such a degraded and degrading 
 source. 
 
 All these men had been in the world long 
 enough to have their minds fully made up as to
 
 130 
 
 what paths lead to the best ends. They had seen 
 young men and young women, too, allured to 
 ruin by the betting mania, and had reached the 
 conclusion that a racing and betting park could 
 not take any part in any of the games and pur- 
 suits of a decent civilization. That part of our 
 public which wishes well to humanity had not for 
 years heard words that surpassed in truth and 
 goodness these few sentences from our public 
 men. 
 
 Men, old and young, thrown into the betting- 
 fever of this aristocratic race -course, soon went in 
 their delirium to a field some miles away where a 
 lot of innocent animals were whipped and spurred 
 over frozen ground or through deep mud to grat- 
 ify the passions of persons who had become at 
 the same time insane and brutalized. When a 
 Washington Park can live by gambling, it can 
 count upon having plenty of more infamous 
 parks as its degrading offspring. 
 
 If such race-tracks constitute an immorality, 
 all newspapers are immoral, so far as they adver- 
 tise the disgraceful events. Every newspaper 
 ought to be a moralist. It need not be a preacher 
 of some dogma that may save a soul, but it ought
 
 131 
 
 to be a preacher of all that will save humanity. 
 As society asks for a pure art and a pure drama 
 and a pure literature, so it demands a pure news- 
 paper. The men who are capable of writing ed- 
 itorials for great journals ought to be unwilling 
 to join their essays to an advertisement for some 
 coterie of infamous men and women. It ought to 
 be unpleasant to a great writer when he has read 
 over his own column on literature, or honor, or 
 benevolence, or the progress of the age, to find 
 some other column of his sheet all devoted to the 
 advance of vice. 
 
 A newspaper can not be divided into two 
 parts an editorial part and a business section. 
 The proprietors can not be half villain and half 
 saint. If there is any virtue on the editorial 
 page, it must color the business section. In the 
 dissolute years of the church, archbishops made 
 a distinction between their conduct when in their 
 robes and their conduct when in citizens' garb; 
 but the thinking world soon abolished this divis- 
 ion of the high official, and the whisky section 
 of the archbishop was at last suppressed. So 
 the modern editor can not fashion himself into 
 hemispheres an editorial page that resembles
 
 132 
 
 the essays of Addison,and the business page that 
 delights the gambling and fighting fraternity. A 
 newspaper possesses just as definite a personage 
 as belongs to a president or a bishop. No soul 
 can make a moral distinction between its literary 
 hours and its business hours. As the English 
 bishop or rector can no longer appear in two 
 roles, those of the prayer-book and the bottle, so all 
 editors and "proprietors and all men must live 
 and act in orrly one part, that of morality. Life 
 means morality. 
 
 It should also be stated here that nothing 
 immoral is business. Business implies an honor- 
 able industry or trade. We do not reckon foot- 
 pads and burglars among our business men. The 
 maxim, " Business is business," is very much of 
 a falsehood as it is used, for it means this: that 
 an archbishop is an archbishop, even if he is 
 drunk. Such a use of language our world has 
 outgrown. The men who once used it will soon 
 all be dead. 
 
 If we interpret the word " immorality " as 
 meaning that which always injures the body or 
 the mind or both, then we have a field of thought 
 quite distinct from that of orthodox Christianity,
 
 133 
 
 and no one need fear that in giving his heart to 
 morality he is supporting the church. 
 
 Not a few men are afraid to be moralists for 
 fear they may be mistaken for clergymen. Not 
 long since a clergyman attempted to reason on 
 our streets with an inebriated man, but the 
 staggering gentleman said to the preacher: "I 
 am not one of your white cravat fellows. I take 
 whisky when I please." He was only one among 
 millions who connect morality with some church 
 creed; whereas morality belongs to the profound 
 study and welfare of society. England sells to 
 China each year sixty millions of dollars worth 
 of opium. Such a transaction is simply immoral. 
 There is nothing of virtue or honor in such sale 
 of goods. As a result China has millions of 
 men who are mental and physical ruins; but the 
 scene has nothing to do with church or creed; it 
 is simply a scene in the history of the human 
 race. The man who can not separate morals 
 from the church has an intellect not calculated 
 to excite envy. Religion ought to make its votary 
 a more ardent student and lover of morals, but 
 the welfare of man ought to make morality an 
 aim of being.
 
 134 
 
 If we examine those laws which the Christian 
 Church calls the laws of God, and which it al- 
 leges were taught through inspired men, we find 
 that they are taught also by human welfare. 
 Thou shalt not kill, steal, lie, covet, are all laws 
 of common human happiness. Thus when Christ 
 says, "Blessed are the pure in heart; blessed the 
 peacemakers," he is passing along among the 
 people letting fall those benedictions which rea- 
 son repeats in all her sober hours of reflection. 
 Thus there is a morality upon which even the 
 highest religion bases all its rules of conduct. 
 Christ came not to invent or create a code of 
 morals, but to teach and adorn the one universal 
 and everlasting code. He said with others, but 
 more eloquently than all others: "Oh, that vir- 
 tue were a visible personage, that mankind might 
 stand amazed and entranced at her beauty." 
 
 The unpopularity of the Sunday idea comes 
 from the foolish sensibility of many about being 
 imposed upon by the church. They fear it is the 
 clergy that make whisky a forbidden drink. 
 Thus many associate Sunday with the orthodox 
 religion, while the real truth is, the abrogation of 
 that day would be an act of immorality. And it
 
 135 
 
 would be a more immoral act in our period than 
 it was in past times, because our age is,beyond all 
 ages, labor-ridden, care-ridden and gold-mad. 
 
 We are indeed so gold-mad and pleasure-mad 
 that we are often stone-blind to virtues and vices. 
 We have come to a time when, instead of having 
 our work lessened by machinery and inventions, 
 we perceive that it is doubled. All our leisure 
 hours are gone. In an inventory of our minds 
 and hearts it is uncertain whether we should all 
 be classified as fools or slaves. Our names are 
 hidden away somewhere in the neighborhood of 
 these two terms. If there is anything we need 
 it is a Sunday of rest and reflection. On all the 
 Saturdays of summer all shops, stores, offices, and 
 factories should be closed at noon, as a confession 
 that machines have lessened labor and that our 
 nation is inhabited by men of thought and kind- 
 ness. On each Saturday afternoon all toilers 
 should have the liberty of air and sunshine, play 
 and beauty, and on Sunday they should taste 
 again the sweetness of rest arid peace. 
 
 We should all entertain a high regard for 
 steam engines, telegraphs and electric railways, 
 but we should not permit our souls to be swin-
 
 136 
 
 died by those elegant things. They must not 
 come between us and our books, our churches; 
 our homes, our benevolence, our friendships. If 
 Sunday possesses a moral quality and contains 
 something good for each soul upon earth, let us 
 not sell out the day for so much gold. Let us 
 turn Saturday into a holiday and keep Sunday 
 for rest and peace. It is Highly immoral to ask 
 what gate-money a Sunday would bring. 
 
 Our city is not so glutted with goodness that 
 it feels constrained to unload. Our nation at 
 large has no ideas to sell. It would much better 
 enter the market as a purchaser. And if what 
 we want is gate -money, we would better buy all 
 the Saturdays of next summer; for our Sunday of 
 peace and rest may be more beautiful and more 
 noble than the Columbian Exhibition itself. 
 Among the articles of exhibition next summer we 
 ought to point the world to a Western civiliza- 
 tion. Our fame as a howling bedlam is complete. 
 Our fame as a noble home for morality and cult- 
 ure is yet to be won. The opportunity is near. 
 That fame might be secured in the space of one 
 rich summer-time. Saturday is the day we want 
 for the pleasure and profit of all the laboring
 
 137 
 
 classes of the coming days. Let us even enter 
 our sweat-shops and set free our slaves. 
 
 Let us return to the general study of immo- 
 rality. A French thinker and writer has pub- 
 lished a little volume upon a form of vice little 
 discussed. Moses passed the vice by when he 
 made the decalogue, and Plato and Cicero over- 
 looked this shape of public injury. The name of 
 this evil is luxury. The first Latin writer who 
 made a paragraph out of this sin came in the last 
 days of the empire, and said over a dead friend: 
 "Thou wast never betrayed by that sweet curse 
 called luxury. With a pleasing face that enemy 
 surrounds body and mind with a cloud, and 
 weakens man with drugs more powerful than the 
 poison of Circe." It is singular that no one can 
 define the term. 
 
 This Frenchman says: "Luxury is something 
 that costs much and is of no value." " Man does 
 not need it." But it is not necessary to define 
 the word. The fact is here, that there is some 
 power or passion sweeping over our country and 
 touching millions who once lived in simplicity 
 and under divine law. One of our states is 
 attempting to pass an act to suppress the manu-
 
 138 
 
 facture and use of a kind of poison smoked by 
 young men. Not only does the article cost much 
 and contain no value, but it carries an injury. 
 But it would take many laws, indeed, were the 
 State to attempt to turn the money of the work- 
 ingmen and of the upper classes along channels 
 of lasting value. Perhaps one-fourth of the earn- 
 ings of the laboring man 'goes in the direction 
 of some curse, as the Latin says, " some sweet 
 curse." Many laborers confess that their drinks 
 cost thirty cents a day, while many men of small sal- 
 ary and small means spend two hundred dollars a 
 year on the luxury of smoke. Great sarcasm is 
 hurled by the poor laborer at the rich man who 
 buys a costly diamond for wife or daughter; but 
 the poor laborer who is so sarcastic, instead of 
 buying a diamond for ornament and investment, 
 buys one hundred dollars' worth of beer each 
 year, thus robbing self and wife and daughter; 
 for beer is nothing but a dead loss to the con- 
 
 O 
 
 sumer, even when it is not an injury. 
 
 When we pass from the malt to the distilled 
 drinks, the havoc caused by luxury becomes im- 
 measurable. All the folly of earth diminishes 
 when compared to this attachment to drink. The
 
 139 
 
 opium habit in China is a small local disease 
 when compared with this epidemic. People are 
 now wondering whether cholera will come next 
 summer. Whisky has come. The cholera makes its 
 call once iii about eighteen years, and slays a multi - 
 tude. Whisky comes every day in every year, and 
 by its ravages makes the epidemic from Asia a mere 
 weakling. Englishmen spend five hundred mill- 
 ion dollars a year in drinks; Americans certainly 
 not less. And yet the laboring men, who help 
 make this evil, will complain at the human race 
 for having diamonds and carriages. The cholera 
 is a mystery of the air ; drink is one of man's own 
 home-made luxuries. The savages got along quite 
 well when their luxuries were feathers, beads, 
 paint, and great feasts of corn bread and venison, but 
 when the white man's luxury came to them they 
 staggered and fell. Wonderful invention of the 
 white man a drink that will quickly turn a 
 statesman or an Indian into an idiot! These 
 drinkers will laugh at the Roman Emperor who 
 was so sensual as to make a dinner of birds' 
 tongues, and will then draw a bottle from their 
 pocket and take a drink. It need not require 
 much reflection to decide whether the Roman or 
 the modern were the greater fool.
 
 140 
 
 Luxury as a general rule is the displacement 
 of real life. It does not tell us where man and 
 woman are, but rather it points out the place 
 where they used to be; or it suggests by sorrow- 
 ful contrast the moral beauty which they might 
 have reached. As some of the savage tribes in 
 Africa ornament their women with rings and 
 accouterments until the decorated beings can not 
 walk or even stand, thus in civilized lands luxury 
 points out not life's triumph, but the place where 
 it sunk. Luxury is not the throne of manhood 
 or womanhood, but its grave. As men who are 
 to run a race, or to engage in the physical arena, 
 dare eat and drink only in simplicity, as the 
 college athletic clubs must live near to nature's 
 simplest lines, as great singers will not ruin their 
 voices by gluttony, as orators must live simply 
 when they are to make a great argument, thus all 
 the forms and hours of human life must look to 
 simplicity for its triumph and to luxury for its 
 defeat. How often, in the street or in society, do 
 we meet the early ruins of both forms of beauty, 
 that of the body and that of the soul! They 
 touched modern luxury and sank. 
 
 In the long history of man there have come at 
 regular intervals tears of both religion and phi-
 
 141 
 
 losophy over the ruins made by this immorality. 
 Socrates in his simple garb was a protest against 
 the age which at last put him to death. Christ 
 is the most sublime and thrilling protest the earth 
 ever had or saw. His gospel was that of a life, 
 simple on its physical side, but on its mental side 
 rich to a divine magnificence. At regular inter- 
 vals society has become so besotted with its vices 
 that loud and hot protests have come as though 
 even the stones must speak. 
 
 It comes to memory now that an early Chris- 
 tian, Lactantius, published in the fourth century 
 a letter which he pretended a Hebrew patriarch 
 had written before the time of Moses. These are 
 a few of its words: "I know, my children, that in 
 the latter times you will forsake simplicity and will 
 cleave unto money, and leaving innocence you will 
 cleave unto guile. * * * I am one hundred and 
 twenty years old, and have never drunk any wine, 
 to be led astray thereby; I have never longed for 
 anything that was my neighbor's. When men 
 have wept, I have wept with them. I never have 
 eaten alone. I have shared my bread with the 
 poor. True simplicity broodeth not over gold; 
 it defrauds not a neighbor; it does not long for
 
 142 
 
 manifold dainties for the table; it does not delight 
 in varied apparel." Thus runs this long letter, 
 and whether it came down from the old Hebrews 
 or was written by Lactantius, it points out fully 
 one-half the wrongs and sorrows of our century. 
 Our times must face this old fact; give an age 
 money and the age will sink in luxury. Such a 
 charge should soon cease to be true. If intelli- 
 gence and true taste are being amassed rapidly, 
 these new giants ought to filter the immorality 
 out of society and make all its pursuits noble and 
 all its pleasures high and everlasting. Taste and 
 money ought to border all our old race-tracks 
 with a tropical wealth of trees and flowers. Make 
 the boughs of trees meet over them. Make the 
 noble animals march in a floral cavalcade, and 
 charge us all for seeing such a splendor of nature. 
 Let gambling die, let beauty live! Long, long 
 ago all this weak immorality ought to have been 
 in its grave, and true Beauty on her throne. Why 
 do we so long and patiently labor to make our 
 world too vile to be man's home? One sentence 
 is distinctly audible : it is full time for immorality 
 to cease its ravages. This sentence comes not 
 from the church, but from the millions of human
 
 143 
 
 hearts that ache and bleed. We put in the bal- 
 ances against all immoralities the hot tears of our 
 
 O 
 
 race. 
 
 Such is that argument which society here in 
 this world weaves against all harmful vice. But 
 not even the deist or atheist ought to complain if 
 the Christian adds to this argument drawn from 
 society that additional influence or persuasion 
 that comes from the teachings and sentiments of 
 a high religion. It will not take away from the 
 repulsiveness of immorality if, in addition to the 
 hate cherished toward it by good men, it is 
 thought that there is a God who hates it. It 
 will not harm the law of simplicity and honor if 
 besides issuing from the welfare of our race it 
 
 O 
 
 comes also from God's central throne. Can it be 
 blamed upon the religious man that he fights sin 
 too earnestly ? Is it a reproach to John the Bap- 
 tist that he preached too loud against the Herods 
 of his day? Is it a reproach to Jesus that he 
 made his faith an inspiration against all wrong 
 and a motive of goodness? Is it a reproach to 
 Xavier that he sailed upon seas too rough and to 
 help men too savage? Is it a reproach to Mar- 
 quette that he taught men who were too red and
 
 144 
 
 passed his winter in snows too deep? The irre- 
 ligious man who sees the awful depths of vice in 
 city and town must look only in admiration upon 
 those who make the belief in God and immortality 
 an inspiration to labor and die in behalf of our 
 race. The church admits that the laws of society 
 are found in society itself, but it claims the right 
 to think of God as the maker of society and as 
 the Being, faith in whom will make social laws 
 all shine as though written in letters of gold. 
 The moral men of this world only ought to con- 
 fess the assistance they receive from the minds 
 that believe in a life to come. When the atheists 
 of America perceive the vices which ought to be 
 checked, and the millions of men who ought to be 
 lifted to a higher character, they may well wel- 
 come the help of those who feel that humanity 
 did not come from dust but from a God. Each 
 moral atheist ought to welcome the assistance of 
 a man who believes in heaven. 
 
 The more divine society is, the greater are the 
 laws which encompass it. Honesty, simplicity, 
 kindness are noble even if they sprang from the 
 realm of only earth, air, water,and heat, but they 
 are nobler if they be also the voice of a Supreme
 
 145 
 
 Mind, just as the nightingale would sing more 
 sweetly to us if we knew that God put the song 
 in its heart. 
 
 It is not only true that the heavens declare the 
 glory of (rod, but it is also true that God enhances 
 the glory of the heavens. It is this dream of the 
 worshiper that makes the distances of the stars 
 so appalling and the whole mystery so profound. 
 The star-depths speak out in sublime poetry when 
 man makes them a part of a creator's empire. The 
 stars sing to us: 
 
 "A million torches kindled by God's hand 
 
 Wander unwearied through the blue abyss; 
 They own God's power, they move at His command, 
 
 All gay with life and eloquent with bliss. 
 What shall we call them ? Piles of crystal light ? 
 
 A glorious company of golden streams? 
 Lamps of celestial ether burning bright ? 
 
 Suns lighting systems with their happy beams ? 
 But God to these is as the noon to night. " 
 
 This Deity which so ennobles the heavens, 
 ennobles also the moral laws which encompass 
 mankind. They seem no longer the relations of 
 dust to dust but the advice of an infinite friend, 
 the conclusions reached by the Supreme Wisdom, 
 the sweetly -rolling eloquence of the sky. An 
 economist may teach us law, but Jesus Christ
 
 146 
 
 makes the law beautiful. He loves it, he weeps 
 over it, he dies for it. Reason can teach, but 
 religion can inspire. 
 
 It is the new glory of the modern church that 
 it has begun to assail immorality. It has grown 
 weary of seeing a beautiful world trampled down 
 by a degraded manhood ; it beholds for the first 
 time the length and depth of a needless desecra- 
 tion; it hears the Supreme Judge say to the 
 Christian: " If you will make this world beauti- 
 ful I will take care of your immortality." In a 
 few years more the church will deeply love the 
 laws of this terrestrial kingdom, and, dying in a 
 redeemed and adorned earth, will be ready to pass 
 with joy through the gates which open into a 
 world free from all immorality and adorned by 
 countless virtues.
 
 Devotion ant) Worfe. 
 
 I must work the works of him that Bent me. John ix. 4. 
 I passed along and observed the objects of your worship. 
 Acts ii. 23. 
 
 Man is the only animal whose condition is 
 dependent upon work. All creatures must in- 
 deed seek food, but we can not designate the lion 
 or the bird or fish as a working animal. The 
 relations of man to work are without any paral- 
 lel. Man and work are inseparable. When an 
 individual passes along from infancy without 
 meeting anywhere a task to be performed, that 
 individual dies young or makes a most wretched 
 career for both his mind and his body. 
 
 When the Creator gave man a growing, infi- 
 nite nature, He annexed to the gift an endless 
 amount of industry, because this expansive mind 
 could not reach any of its desires without work- 
 ing for them. If this gifted creature longed for 
 music, it had to work for it, and the man who 
 would be a musician had to work like a farmer 
 or a carpenter. If the heart longed for skill in 
 any language or art or science, it had to pass over 
 the field of toil. The Latins discovered this pe- 
 
 147
 
 148 
 
 culiarity of man's life and summed up the fact in 
 their popular sentence that: No excellence is pos- 
 sible without labor. Plautus says: " Success is 
 like the meat in a nut, surrounded by the hard 
 shell of labor." Terence says: "Industry will 
 give man what he seeks." 
 
 The vast number of things wanted by the 
 world shows how universal and varied must be 
 the public industry. As civilization grows, the 
 human wants increase, and, therefore, there must 
 be a growth of labor with each growth of the 
 public culture. If the mind can secure some 
 assistance from instruments and machines, it may 
 do so, but there must always be a growing indus- 
 try of the mind itself, which no machine can ever 
 supplant. The inventions and discoveries made 
 by Fulton and Morse did not leave those men 
 idle afterward, nor generate leisure ; they changed 
 only some of the forms of work. The machines 
 of England have not created any new leisure for 
 either the statesman or the poet or the average 
 citizen, for the civilization which brought the new 
 machines brought a new activity of the mind 
 and heart. The telegraph and railway have not 
 made Mr. Gladstone a man of more leisure. Man
 
 149 
 
 and work are inseparable, and the more he en- 
 larges his world, the more quickly will he have to 
 take steps in its confines. The only problem is to 
 find exactly the quantity of work that shall be 
 most in harmony with the perfect health of mind 
 and body. Each art, each science, each emotion 
 of benevolence, each new friendship means an ad- 
 dition to the work of the age. 
 
 When you hear that some man becomes at- 
 tached to trees or dogs or flowers or music, you 
 must give him credit for industry, for no lazy man 
 ever formed an attachment. An indolent mind 
 can not form a friendship for trees, plants, or 
 music, or nature, because a friendship implies ac- 
 tion. An attachment means work. It makes 
 the work sweet, indeed; but the Creator, when 
 He ordered man to be a toiling animal, ordered 
 the toil to be a source of happiness. Labor is 
 much sweeter than idleness. 
 
 When one states that man was made for work, 
 there should be made also the companion state- 
 ment that work is a great, uniform source of 
 happiness. To see a farm assume beauty under 
 one's care, to behold a statue assuming elegant 
 shape, to see a temple or a home rising according
 
 150 
 
 to one's plans, to see a rose blooming which 
 one has planted and cared for, to see a fire burn 
 brightly which we have built, to have the people 
 applaud our music all these ends are ordered by 
 Him who ordered the days of labor and solici- 
 tude. With most minds their work is their in- 
 spiration. When work. is painful to body and 
 soul, then despotism and cruelty have displaced 
 nature. When young children work in the shops, 
 and when men and women work like whipped 
 slaves, and for a few pennies a day, then God's 
 laws are as far away as they were from the bloody 
 ships of Captain Kidd. We do not call the 
 career of Captain Kidd "mercantile life." 
 
 So the toil of that woman who sung Hood's 
 "Song of the Shirt" did not fall under the head 
 of human industry, but rather must it take its 
 place among the results of the world's crime. 
 When one would make up an estimate of indus- 
 try one must assume that the toiler enjoys the 
 air, the light, the food, the clothing, the rest and 
 sleep demanded by the man, woman or child. When 
 a woman works fifteen hours a day for ten or twelve 
 cents, we must not call that labor. It must be 
 alluded to as torture, and in history must be
 
 151 
 
 written down in the story of the inquisition. As 
 Kidd was not a merchant, but a pirate, so much 
 of industry is not labor it is martyrdom. 
 
 Away from the wrongs of an age, labor is 
 one of the glorious things of our world. Man's 
 mind is dormant until he goes to work. When 
 the lawyer, or statesman, or writer, or thinker, or 
 artist of any rank or pay gets once fully at work, 
 then does his mind come to him, his sleep and 
 clouds vanish, and his life's flood sets in. An 
 idle, lazy person has no brains; for sleepy brains 
 are not a positive quality. In the new science 
 and art of r electricity the workmen recognize 
 two kinds of wires the live wire and the dead 
 wire. The men are very careful when they 
 have to work around a live wire. In the realm 
 of mind these two terms may well be used. 
 
 The idle, lazy brain is a dead wire. As a 
 promoter of sleep it has no equal. It was diffi- 
 cult in his late years to arouse Mr. Webster; but, 
 could he by some means be once awakened, then 
 all his deep insight, his grasp, his language, came 
 back to him, and for an hour or a half day he 
 and those who were listening to the orations 
 were all in the world of intense and happy life.
 
 152 
 
 When Theodore Parker uttered his funeral ora- 
 tion over the dead Webster, no listener moved in 
 his seat or became tired or restless in the two 
 and a quarter hours. The work of thought made 
 life and made happiness, and changed the two 
 hours into a time of blessedness. 
 
 Thus work is not simply a doing, it is also a 
 being. It is an awakening. When Sir John 
 Lubbock was traveling among the South Sea 
 natives, he found 'them so averse to any kind of 
 action that they did not love to talk upon new 
 subjects. They had been asleep so many genera- 
 tions that the idea of a new truth became painful 
 to them. Lubbock's happiness was their mis- 
 ery. They were dead men. Work, thus, is 
 not a source of income only, but it is also an 
 arousing of the soul. Often when the reader 
 closes his book after having read for an hour in a 
 great work, the question, What has he learned? 
 'is not half so valuable as the question, What 
 has he been ? He has been a live wire for the 
 time. His language, his wit, his pathos, his rea- 
 son, his virtues, have all been back and at home 
 in his soul, and he can say to the book: " I thank 
 thee for an hour of life."
 
 153 
 
 It is rather strange that, when the curious are 
 going among the world in search of the reason 
 why so few persons attend church, they should 
 omit one cause, like that of the South Seas the 
 indolence which can not endure the idea of hear- 
 ing or doing anything. There are, indeed, many 
 good and bad reasons for the absence of many 
 from the world's church, but the enumeration of 
 causes will not be complete until we have in- 
 cluded that mental indolence which does not want 
 to encounter any person or any thing or any 
 idea or any music or any motion of any form 
 whatever an indolence which hates, not only a 
 sermon, but everything except a full supply of 
 nonentity. There are times when many a laborer, 
 of high or low grade, needs an absolute isola- 
 tion from all activity, but, after all these deduc- 
 tions have been made, one must still confess the 
 existence of a multitude who are absent from 
 everything, because of an absolute torpidity of 
 spirit. The thought of any form of action is 
 oppressive. The church is only one of the suf- 
 ferers. These Asiatic souls could not water a 
 dying rose bush, nor throw out crumbs to a 
 .sparrow.
 
 154 
 
 Our country has pushed work forward as a 
 revenue, but not as a happiness. When society 
 shall think of work as a mental awakening, as 
 an inspiration, we shall at once have a better 
 world. 
 
 In that golden age, men and women will 
 engage in great works, because such tasks will 
 bring the greatest happiness. When we make 
 out a role of amusements, such as drama, opera, 
 concerts, dinners, games, visiting and travel, we 
 should not end the catalogue without adding 
 the word "work; " for only recall for a moment 
 the happiness man extracts from his pursuit. 
 If the conditions of civilization were what they 
 should be, there would not be an adult mind 
 living, that was not in love with some form 
 of industry, and there would not be a black- 
 smith, who would not laugh at times over his 
 anvil, and not a farmer, who would not hum a 
 tune along his rich furrow. 
 
 The perpetual satirists of modern womanhood 
 make daily flings at its fondness for lunches, par- 
 ties, lectures, readings and literary clubs; but these 
 critics ought to confess the promise and virtue in 
 a social world,which has ceased to extract happi-
 
 155 
 
 ness from sleep and an endless nothingness. 
 Given a womanhood fully awake, and the transi- 
 tion becomes easy from ordinary aims to aims 
 much nobler. A heart once alive can move from 
 sphere to sphere. The modern womanhood can 
 in an instant show power as the world needs. 
 We are happy in the thought that it lives. 
 
 In speaking of the nobleness of work, John 
 Ruskin said, years ago, that a part of the beauty 
 of a column, or a statue, or a picture, is found in 
 our admiration of the quantity of work which it 
 contains. " The column of the Apprentice," 
 which attracts so many visitors to Rosslyn's 
 Chapel, of Scotland, is made admirable by the 
 quantity and detail of the carving. 
 
 It is as rich in work as the book of Dante or 
 the book of Milton. The column holds up a vast 
 number of thoughts and emotions and would 
 seem erected in memory of labor. A theory of 
 Mr. Ruskin long ago was that no painter should 
 ever throw in a foreground or a background care- 
 lessly. If his purpose is to paint -a, ship on the sea, 
 the artist must paint the pebbles on the shore just 
 as perfectly as he must paint the ship. Nothing in 
 any part of the canvas must be slighted. Wherever
 
 156 
 
 the eye falls it must see the beauty of labor. It 
 must see that man, the thinker, actor and lover, 
 has been in each inch of the painting. Work is 
 the utterance of the soul. 
 
 If we ponder a moment, we shall conclude that 
 Mr. Ruskin spoke truly and that his principle is 
 of universal application. We love to hear a 
 speech all full of thought and truth, and to read 
 a poem whose thoughts, words and rhythm have 
 all come through the shop of the finisher. When 
 we read the " Elegy" of Gray, or the " In Memor- 
 iam" or " Virgil," we feel that here some work- 
 man has toiled over his task and has turned 
 mixed and crude ore into pure gold. A stack of 
 last year's straw is not so delightful as the reapers 
 at work in a new field of waving wheat. 
 
 We all, indeed, live in a working age, but this 
 industry is poured out too exclusively upon one 
 subject the making and securing of property. 
 Young men hasten through college, skipping over 
 great books and great years, that they may the 
 sooner reach the busy scenes around money. It 
 is a sad blunder to hasten by the lands where the 
 Greeks and Romans exhausted centuries of work 
 upon language, sentiment, eloquence, and all
 
 157 
 
 beauty ; sad to dash by these charms, that we may 
 get to the market-place the sooner. Work is not 
 only an accumulation of money, it is also a being. 
 It is a color of the human soul. 
 
 Our energetic city has suddenly come upon a 
 form of its weakness; its energy is all in one 
 direction. It can pursue business, but it can not 
 govern and adorn itself. It can not execute a 
 law. It can not clean a street or superintend a 
 contract, because there are no minds or hearts 
 that are running in those directions. The gen- 
 eral industry is all towards the affairs of the 
 individual. But the streets would all fall under 
 the general law of Mr. E-uskin, and can be made 
 more beautiful only by an enormous quantity of 
 labor and devotion. The homes of this city are 
 neat and beautiful, because each home comes un- 
 der the care of some personal soul; but all that 
 part of the -city which is public catches no love 
 or care from anybody. It is more friendless than 
 the old blind horse turned out to die on the com- 
 mons, for the humane society will carry that 
 horse a bucket of water and a bundle of hay; 
 but as for the city, it has not even the humane 
 society for its friend.
 
 158 
 
 It is a neglected orphan, deaf, dumb, blind, 
 and poor. If fault -finding could save it, we cler- 
 gymen could make it a New Jerusalem in two 
 days; if resolutions could make the place beauti- 
 ful, the woman's movement last summer would 
 have made untidiness a matter of history. What 
 the city needs is some men who have the disposi- 
 tion and the power to be its friends. Somebody 
 must come with love, to make the foreground and 
 the background, and to reveal painstaking work. 
 As the picture, the statue, the book, the poem, 
 are made by work, so the city must be made by 
 devotion. To ask our city to be any thing, under 
 the existing apathy, is like asking a Virginia 
 contraband to take a whitewash brush and repro- 
 duce " The Angelus." 
 
 It is in vain to double our taxes. Money will 
 not make a beautiful city. Three hundred mil- 
 lion dollars were spent on the name of ' Pam na," 
 but there is no canal. New York City is in debt 
 a hundred millions, but its condition is little bet- 
 ter than our own. The power of money depends 
 upon the men who direct the money. Can money 
 paint a picture? No, but a gifted soul may. 
 Can money write a poem? No, but a Milton
 
 159 
 
 can. Can money clean a city? No, but a Gen- 
 eral Butler can beautify a New Orleans, and a 
 Baron Haussman can create for France a new 
 Paris. Haussman was to Paris, what Angelo 
 was to sculpture, and what Homer was to poetry. 
 Whenever Haussman flung the people's money, 
 beauty grew up where the coins fell; and now, 
 France has a city, because it was able to produce 
 .a soul. 
 
 All of our cities are about alike in weakness 
 -and repulsiveness. This city equals any in 
 merit. The theory of each is bad. The rulers 
 of a city should be composed of men who can 
 make deformity turn into beauty, and weakness 
 turn into power. Millionaires having reached 
 the fixed limit of five or ten millions should then 
 become the creator of the city or the State. 
 Their minds and gains should go toward some- 
 thing greater than a private fortune. How ab- 
 surd it is to elect a saloon-keeper or saloon 
 loafer to help govern a city! Why did we 
 select a great art lover to collect and arrange 
 our pictures for the World's Fair ? Had we no 
 chimney-sweep whom we could have employed ? 
 Why put educated ladies on the Woman's
 
 160 
 
 Columbian Board? Could not an employment 
 office have furnished a group of girls? When a 
 city shall conclude that, like a piece of art, it 
 needs skill, industry and love, then will it begin 
 to meet the ends of its being. 
 
 Some of the States are drafting laws by which 
 they may secure a part of the millions which 
 the richest citizens leave behind when they die. 
 But who is to spend this enormous income from 
 great estates ? Unhappy millionaires, if at death 
 a part of their gold is to pass into the hands 
 of a city council! The truth is, what a city 
 needs generally is the help of the powerful man 
 long before he dies. The men who are endowing 
 our university with libraries, telescopes, laborato- 
 ries, are as powerful in their mind and taste as 
 they are in their gold. The services of these men 
 are as valuable as their money. When the peo- 
 ple of Paris found out the merit of Baron Hauss- 
 man,they said: "If he will make a new city we 
 will give him the gold;" and a new $50,000,000 
 was subscribed toward the great reconstruction. 
 
 Thus all over this planet, and in all its ages, 
 the law of devotion and intelligent labor has held 
 its sway. No person and no State has ever been
 
 161 
 
 able to escape the grasp of this law. Its meshes 
 seem like silk, but they are iron. Nature scorns 
 and punishes all apathy. Nothing has ever come 
 by way of indifference, and so old is the world 
 now that we may assume that no good will ever 
 come by that gate. It is indeed not a gate by 
 which man comes, it is rather a swamp, a marsh, 
 where he sinks. 
 
 Would that the heavy veil of nature could be 
 lifted that we might all see the eternal Father at 
 his work! Could such a vision be granted us, 
 we should see an infinite Mind acting into all space, 
 slighting nothing, but devoted and potent where 
 an ocean rolled or a lily bloomed. In the absence 
 of such a face-to-face interview we have to speak 
 of the power of the sun and tell each other how 
 its heat made the forests which, waving in the 
 air a million years ago, are now seen crushed 
 into beds of coal, and how that heat made all 
 that life and verdure which bedeck our globe 
 to-day. But the sun explains nothing. It sim- 
 ply tells us that there is a mind somewhere which 
 is making the universe burst forth into beauty and 
 tremble into life. Could we look back of the 
 ocean, we should see some hand holding it; could
 
 162 
 
 we gaze back of the coming cloud, we should see 
 some loving heart pouring out great streams of 
 color in the west. Sublime and mysterious as 
 the universe is, one fact is clear it is at work 
 under the loving care of somebody. There is 
 some angel painting the apple blossoms, and there 
 is some angel carrying perfume to the rose. The 
 man or woman who is indifferent is already dead. 
 Nature hates such a loveless heart. 
 
 As man must bring his wisdom and devotion 
 to bear upon his city, state and home, so must he 
 bring it to bear upon his religion. The religion 
 which prevailed five hundred years ago may not 
 be noble enough to meet the need of the races 
 which now live. Our times are restudying all 
 the Christian and moral problems. It may be 
 the past did not bring out fully the morality and 
 philanthropy of Jesus Christ. It may not have 
 seen clearly the relations of religion to common 
 conduct. It may have thought the earth to be 
 under a curse, as were the companions of Ulysses 
 in the Island of Circe. We know that each new 
 era is born to a new industry and a new affection, 
 and that the passing religion must catch some- 
 thing of this new toil. As man must send art
 
 163 
 
 onward more perfect than he found it, so must 
 each epoch send religion onward in garments more 
 beautiful than those in which it came. Man's 
 labors will never end, not only because the tasks 
 are each infinite, but also because labor is always 
 an awakening of life. Labor is the hand which 
 strikes the strings of the mental harp. Devotion 
 is only another name for life. It is the tie that 
 binds man to his calling. It is the chain of gold 
 that bound Newton to the stars, the chain which 
 bound Washington and Lincoln to our Republic. 
 The relations of all young minds to their 
 life should be those of laborious devotion. It 
 should be deeply felt that the sweep of years is 
 the arena of a care and a labor that shall make 
 the natural marble show its tints, and the crude 
 gold its purity. Intemperance, the race-track, and 
 each form of vice and dishonor, must be discarded 
 as simply a quick ruin; and then one's language, 
 one's taste, education, breadth, depth, kindness, 
 and religion must be made the objects of an un- 
 changing regard. Nothing equals life in the 
 power to absorb work and devotion. It absorbs 
 all and destroys nothing. The soul catches all 
 this attention, and runs with it out into this world
 
 164 
 
 and into immortality. Whoever cares little how 
 he lives is already lost. 
 
 This is the birthday of an American, who, 
 when a boy, began to lavish care and labor upon 
 his visit to this world. Born in a mental desert 
 he began to reach out like a palm tree toward 
 riches, soil, and springs of water. We can now 
 look back and mark his devotions. He worshiped 
 his handful of books; he paid homage to all the 
 greatness which had gone before him; he made 
 reasoning an amusement and a pursuit; each year 
 which brought new blossoms brought him a new 
 survey of his world; each yellow autumn added 
 to his pensiveness, each spring reawakened his 
 hope; the time which slowly changed lonely for- 
 ests into populous states, changed his young 
 thoughts into great principles, and by the day 
 when middle life had come, he stood up encom- 
 passed by doctrines of right and humanity which 
 the world now sees were divine. 
 
 He attempted to mingle reason, sentiment, honor, 
 justice, love and happiness, not only in his own 
 spirit, but in the heart of the world; and seldom 
 in human history have so many strings of the 
 soul sounded in such perfect harmony. Never,
 
 165 
 
 perhaps, was a better manhood created out of 
 such unpromising material; but this man cared 
 for his life ; and, as the great pictures of art carry 
 the labor of the artist, as the column in Rosslyn 
 Chapel arose, carved in all its extent by loving 
 care, this man carried with him to a noble grave 
 all the rich mental details which could be worked 
 out in a single lifetime. 
 
 There is one kind of selfishness that is admi- 
 rable. It is not, indeed, a selfishness, but rather 
 it is a kindness to the race that self-love which 
 leads the mind to take care of all its faculties and 
 its liberties. This care is not an egotism, it is 
 only a confession that the world and its God are 
 great. When man says, " Let me see the flowers, 
 let me hear the music," his heart is full,not of 
 himself, but of the universe. All this self- 
 developrnent is a worship of the empire which 
 encompasses the spirit. All egotism is thus dis- 
 placed by the presence of the infinite. 
 
 This long argument over work, care and devotion 
 leads to a conclusion which carries us beyond the 
 boundary of time. If man is ordered by his 
 Maker to pour out care day by day, and if he 
 makes and occupies his years with such devotion,
 
 166 
 
 it follows that He who made man is also pouring 
 out upon his empire an attention, a love, a thought, 
 that are infinite; and that, if not in these years, 
 then beyond the grave, all the eyes of mortals 
 that close here will open again upon a human 
 family all worked up into a perfect finish and 
 inwrought with the many images of all virtue and 
 all happiness.
 
 IRatncaltem IRoot anfc Brancb. 
 
 For behold the day cometh; it burneth as a furnace, and all 
 the proud and all that work wickedness shall be stubble; the day 
 cometh that shall burn them up ; that shall leave them neither root 
 nor branch. Malachi iv. 1. 
 
 In one of the reading books which lay in 
 many homes and cabins when our century was 
 young there was a thrilling story called " The 
 Rising of the Waters." A Canadian gentleman 
 had built a little board hut on the upper bank of 
 a river. It was to be the home of himself and 
 two little sons while some workmen were survey- 
 ing some forests and were felling some trees. 
 At daybreak on a summer morning a rain began 
 to fall. For a time it was a pleasant sight. The 
 pattering on the board roof was good music to 
 be heard. As the puddle's began to form, the 
 delight of the boys grew steadily. When, hour 
 after hour, the darkness and downpouring in- 
 creased, and awful lightning and thunder began 
 to play a frightful part in the growing tempest, 
 the boys grew silent and hid themselves under 
 the cloak of their father. To this alarming 
 gloom night set in and its terrors, and, fed by a 
 thousand hill-torrents, the river began to roar 
 
 167
 
 168 
 
 and to carry whole trees along as though in wrath. 
 Toward morning the woodmen had to leave all 
 their huts and betake themselves to the hills. 
 This piece of prose, equal in power to Hugo's 
 chapter on the battle of Waterloo, was called 
 " The Rising of the Waters," and often it comes 
 back to the memory of those who mark the slow 
 rise and advance of reform. First come a few 
 rain -drops, and after long time the skies grow 
 darker and the flood begins to roar. 
 
 The certainty of ultimate victory keeps most 
 great hearts from despair. They do not expect 
 all things to act at once on the line of their wish. 
 They are capable of grasping long periods, and 
 of picturing a future, few of whose beauties have 
 yet come. It is probable most great reformers 
 have been men of powerful imagination, not of 
 that imagination which composes poems and 
 romances, but which can detect a great moral 
 landscape lying beyond the actual scenes of 
 to-day. We have no right to assume that the 
 poetic faculty can do nothing but make verses or 
 assist in art. It is needed in the daily life of 
 the citizen, for it draws for him an outline of the 
 rewards and works to which his labors are bear-
 
 169 
 
 ing his heart. Poetry is only one of the forms 
 assumed by this mental quality. It has a wider 
 office that of creator and guardian of man's 
 life and man's world. It is necessary for the av- 
 erage man and woman to be hopeful, and to plant 
 their hopes upon the gradual advance of intelli- 
 gence and goodness. 
 
 It is said that our Legislature is drafting and 
 reading a law to limit horse-racing and betting 
 to sixty days in the year, and those must be days 
 in the summer. We do not dare laugh at a group 
 of philosophers who look upon gambling as a 
 wrong so great that it ought to prevail only a 
 part of the year, and then only in the summer- 
 time. Instead of laughing at the Legislature we 
 may well rejoice that the feeling against the old 
 popular vice has grown so large as to become vis- 
 ible so large as to extend its goodness toward 
 some months of the twelve. 
 
 In the Mosaic laws a man was not to be 
 whipped beyond forty stripes. The mercy of 
 that period lay in limiting the blows which might 
 be inflicted. Many died from the effect of the 
 forty blows, but more would die if the flogging 
 champions could keep up the lashing indefinitely.
 
 170 
 
 A few centuries afterward, when Paul was living, 
 lie was beaten with forty stripes save one. Mercy 
 had given the lash another backset. It had to 
 cut the flesh only thirty-nine times at one whip- 
 ping. But there was no law to prevent Paul 
 from being lashed five times. Thus creeps the 
 progress of an age; and,if our philosophers per- 
 mit gambling to reign and ruin for only two 
 months of the year, we must " thank God and 
 take courage." The prize -fight has been forbid- 
 den in all the States where intelligence has 
 reached any degree of popularity, 
 
 It is a blessed day in morals when men make 
 a beginning toward the study of a wrong. It is 
 the first suspicion that is so difficult. In 1700, Sir 
 Thomas Brown, M. D., discussed the question 
 whether the Englishman should get drunk once 
 a month. He gathered up the data with all the 
 patience of an astronomer. He thought the nau- 
 sea of drunkenness a medicine equal to calomel 
 in virtue. 
 
 It was difficult for slavery to make its first 
 appearance as a violation of rights. It was seen 
 as a great convenience to the white man, then as a 
 necessary result of climate and race ; then it turned
 
 171 
 
 into a missionary movement, and, at last, into a 
 fraud. The rising of the waters became at last 
 deeply impressive, and the slave-holders waded 
 out. 
 
 One of our excellent local clergymen preached 
 recently against such an amusement as shooting 
 birds for a prize. All would have been well had 
 not the clergyman entered into a sweet defense of 
 the gentlemanly hunters who bring down a few 
 birds for table use. He rejoiced in the sport of dog 
 and gun. The sermon showed how difficult it is 
 for a moral principle to make a start. The 
 pigeons which fall at the shooting matches are all 
 sold for the table. It remains for the pulpit to 
 prove that to shoot a bird out in the weeds and 
 pond lilies is any nobler than to rob it of life 
 within the limits of a city. 
 
 Thus morality crawls along like a wounded 
 snake, and reduces the stripes inflicted upon the 
 birds from forty to thirty-nine. But morality 
 advances, although at a snail's gait. The pulpit 
 of Christ must stand upon the truth formulated 
 not long since, that " the death of an animal may 
 be a necessity, but it can never be an amusement." 
 With this sentiment in the public soul, all slaugh-
 
 172 
 
 tering of birds and game will be left to those men 
 who are not touched by any tenderness of heart. 
 As the whole thirty-nine stripes have passed away 
 from the shoulders of our negroes, and from what 
 Saint Pauls we possess, so the day is sure to come 
 when the gun will give no pleasure to a true 
 gentleman, and he would sicken at the thought of 
 killing the dove which stands as an emblem of 
 the soul, and of bagging the quail which sung 
 " Bob White" in the harvest field of last summer. 
 These remarks are not those of fault finding. 
 We all are, or all have been, in the same old bloody 
 happiness. We all used to shoot, but we should 
 all in our later years make a new survey of our 
 old morals, and should gladly eliminate any lurk- 
 ing remnant of the old savagery. If there are men 
 who have not yet reached any kindness of nature, 
 men who can kill a deer or a fawn or a dove as 
 cheerfully as they would pick up a ripe apple 
 from the ground, let those men do the killing for 
 the length and breadth of the land. It is high 
 time for you all to go up a step higher in your forms 
 of pleasure. Heliogabalus ate a plateful of night- 
 ingale tongues. The birds were slaughtered 
 that he might show Rome how great a king he
 
 173 
 
 was ; that his divine body was superior to all those 
 little angels which in Italy made the plaintive 
 midnight music. Would you not all have said : 
 Let those birds live and sing in the hedge ; bring 
 me on a plate some bread and honey from the 
 fields of Virgil, some ripe figs from the gardens 
 of the Caesars. 
 
 In the long course of events it will come to 
 pass that there will be no insensate men to act as 
 butchers for the world. What then ? With the 
 coming of that day the eating of meat will also 
 cease. With many thousands in our land already 
 that form of food has lost its charm. As the last 
 thousand years have wrought great changes in 
 man's thoughts and being, so the years to come 
 will bring changes greater still, and it is almost 
 certain that the far-off tables will groan with all 
 the riches of the orchard and the fields. In the 
 golden age man will eat amid breads, fruits, music 
 and flowers. The dove, the quail, the nightin- 
 gale will not be there in death to mar man's 
 sweetness of life. 
 
 Much as Ave admire the modern human race, 
 we can not but perceive that man stands here 
 to-day much encumbered with his inheritance.
 
 174 
 
 He eats meat because such was the practice of 
 his more savage ancestors. Education is not 
 good only as a means of learning the branches 
 called reading, writing and arithmetic. One of 
 its greatest forms of usefulness lies in the fact 
 that it helps us escape from our ancestors. It is 
 well, indeed, that we had ancestors, and one may 
 recall with gratitude the art and literature and 
 law that came down from antiquity; but this 
 gratitude need not make us forget that we in- 
 herited egotism from the classics, pugilism from 
 the Spartans, murder and war from the Saxon, 
 mendacity from the Arabs, and business habits 
 from the Pirates. It is one of the holy offices 
 of education to pass the modern mind through 
 a fire which may burn out this old dross and 
 send man onward in a greater purity. 
 
 And some one will say: Did not the God of 
 nature command the animals to feed upon each 
 other? The lion kills the dog; the dog the rab- 
 bit. Yes, but the answer is: Man was not 
 made to be a brute. His problem is to find how 
 far he can drift away from the brute forms of 
 life. An ancient discovered that the spirit of 
 the brute tendeth downward, while the spirit of
 
 175 
 
 man tendeth upward. Man must not rely upon 
 the brute world for his lessons in virtue. He 
 must look into his own soul and evolve his career 
 from his own time and divinity. 
 
 The last charge against these humane and 
 spiritual ideas is that this teaching is all poetry. 
 The charge is true. It is all poetry from first to 
 last. But this also is true : Our world is founded 
 upon poetry. The globe itself floats in a sea of 
 ether. As it turns over, on one side it sparkles 
 like a crystal ball, on the other side it is dark in 
 shadow. On the brilliant side men work, on its 
 darkened side men sleep. While the ball rolls 
 it passes under the poetic sun, and asks that orb 
 to make for it a poetic spring, summer and 
 autumn. Out of this request came the forest, 
 the fields, the grains, and the fruits; and, after 
 years have passed by in this excess of beauty, 
 man appears in these woods and fields and adds 
 to the sublime aggregation that awful and rich 
 mystery of life which no science can describe and 
 no history contain. Out of the beautiful woods 
 and mountains of Judea comes a Christ, chanting 
 a group of beatitudes which surpassed in sweet- 
 ness all previous eloquence and song. All poetry,
 
 176 
 
 indeed! but the quick impulse to a new civili- 
 zation. Ah, poetic world! thy light is composed 
 of a thousand colors, thy scenes are all a mys- 
 tery, thy sounds are all music. Touch thee 
 where man may,his eyes are full of wonder, and 
 the greatest truth seems only the greatest dream. 
 . The poet Statius, whom Dante so loved, at- 
 tempted to describe only one little fact of the 
 human career, and he stood amazed by one sim- 
 ple phenomenon that of sleep. He says : " Sleep 
 is a hidden grotto in a dense woods. Man passes 
 into it. Motionless figures stand all around his 
 couch. The silent clouds envelop it and keep 
 away the roaring of the sea. The angel of 
 silence goes about with folded wings and forbids 
 the winds to move the branches rudely. She 
 forbids the foliage to rustle. She softens the 
 distant thunder. The mountain streams all move 
 more silently. The god of sleep is in the bower. 
 One hand is under the hair of his left temple, 
 the right hand falls and lets go the horn which 
 it held in the long day." Poetry! Of course; 
 our world is all composed of poetry, and the 
 words "benevolence," "civilization," "education," 
 are only the names given to man's best pictures
 
 177 
 
 and his grandest song. Poetry is not the over- 
 statement of the truth, it is the effort of the soul 
 to reach the reality. The crossing of the Dela- 
 ware by Washington, the inauguration of Lincoln, 
 are scenes as poetic as any in the works of Milton 
 or Shakespeare. Into much more of such poetry 
 our world is hastening. It is carrying us all 
 with it in its grand flight. Manhood and poetry 
 are one and the same. 
 
 Radicalism is the final philosophy into which 
 we must all empty our hearts. The word is de- 
 rived from the Latin term for the root of a plant 
 or tree. The farmer and gardener know that of 
 many noxious plants it is a waste of labor simply 
 to mow off the tops. They must be taken out 
 by the roots. This is radicalism. A legislature 
 may temporize and may take away one stripe and 
 leave thirty -nine to cut into the shoulders of a saint, 
 or it may make a part of the year free from the 
 gambler's art; but the individual citizen need not 
 wear a legislature about his neck, nor a city 
 council. Burdened by such mill-stones he can 
 not do otherwise than sink. He must within his 
 own soul be a radical and make his whole year 
 poetic. He must follow a divine dream all day
 
 178 
 
 and all night. It is much to man's honor to be 
 up with his age, but it is more to his fame to be in 
 advance of it. To be behind the age is infamous. 
 That is the perfection of barbarism. If our State 
 feels that gambling ought to cease a part of the 
 year, it is well to keep up with the State; to fall 
 below such a State would be a moral calamity. 
 In going below the State one might find himself 
 in an unhappy country. 
 
 In our age and in all times the most beautiful 
 of all things is the individual. Our age ought to 
 excel the entire past in the creation of the noble 
 individual. Education, climate, industry, and 
 freedom are his to be used and enjoyed. He 
 need not wear any chain upon his spirit, except 
 that gold fetter which God fastens to every wrist. 
 We may be, indeed, helped by a party in politics, 
 or by a church in religion, but we must not be 
 fettered by such organisms. It used to be said 
 that a party has no soul. Each party has a soul, 
 but that soul is not as sensitive and noble as that 
 heart possible to the individual. The soul of a 
 party is always diluted in intellect and sentiment. 
 In forming our government there was a difficulty 
 in finding any principles that would suit the
 
 179 
 
 whole thirteen colonies. It was easy to find the 
 great soul of a Washington or a John Adams, but 
 it was difficult to find the soul of the whole thir- 
 teen colonies from Boston to Charleston and 
 Richmond. When a half -score of artists differ 
 as to the color which should cover a wall or a. 
 ceiling, at last they all agree on a tint. Thus all 
 the old parties, unable to be adorned by a com- 
 plete soul, are often seen to wear a mental tint. 
 In the great Middle States when the hard maple 
 trees had not fallen victims to the all- destroying 
 ax, the farmer and his sons were wont to count 
 much on the sugar and nectar they would extract 
 from the trees in the days between winter and 
 spring. But often when the bright sunny morn- 
 ing had contributed a pint of sweet sap to each 
 crock and trough and bucket, a shower of rain 
 would fall and fill the vessels to the brim. With 
 sad faces the family would go out after the shower 
 to taste the contents of the* trough or bucket, to- 
 learn whether they would better attempt to boil 
 down the compound or throw it all out. Thus 
 the little soul a party possesses soon becomes so- 
 weakened by successive dilutions that the whole 
 compound should be emptied out. The attenu-
 
 180 
 
 ation lias become infinite. The individual must 
 make his escape and study truth once more in 
 root and branch. 
 
 T^e one great hope of our times lies in the 
 advance of the individual. These isolated minds 
 are unencumbered; they are so light-armed that 
 they can soonest reach a height. On a certain 
 night in Greek history it was necessary for the 
 army in a hostile land to pass through a long 
 ravine. Woe to the troops if the enemy should 
 be on the crags above! The Greek captain sent 
 far in advance some of the light-armed soldiers, 
 and these had soon preoccupied all those heights. 
 Thus in our day of trial and great danger there 
 must spring forward the unencumbered indi- 
 viduals who can outrun the heavy crowd and hold 
 all the moral heights. 
 
 After these advanced individuals have multi- 
 plied in number and have grown in courage, they 
 create a new party in Church or State. The 
 party will, in morals, be less, indeed, than they, 
 but its merit will be of a deeper tint. Having 
 issued from many individuals of marked good, 
 the new party will be like a national currency 
 from which the state has taken away more of
 
 181 
 
 rags and silver and into which it has poured more 
 of "gold. Thus each free and lofty individual is 
 the poem of his day; not running in advance of 
 its truth, but only in advance of its stupor and 
 its vice. Being free of foot, lie has outrun his 
 creeping race. The individual must wear but 
 loosely all party ties. It is said that many men 
 drink because they dislike to be so unsocial as to 
 decline to touch glasses with a friend. Singular 
 age, in which a man will become a drunkard by 
 general request ! Often a political party is only 
 a request which has become so swollen with office 
 conceit and vice that it orders the weak minds 
 around like a heartless tyrant. It charms like a 
 serpent; "it stings at last like an adder. " 
 Against it the isolated individuals must arise as 
 against a foe to all that is good upon earth. 
 
 All good begins in some one individual. Many 
 persons were wont to gaze at the stars, but forth 
 came the one Galileo. Each cause, each science, 
 each reform, starts in some solitude, and then 
 gradually expands toward society. Galileo must 
 have been thankful for his first friend. Over his 
 grave now the human race bows in friendship. 
 Thus individualism is the fountain of the river.
 
 182 
 
 Radicalism is the gate through which the indi- 
 viduals all come. In its good meaning it is 
 infinite goodness and happiness the place where 
 wrongs are torn out by the roots. It is the line 
 where earth joins Paradise. 
 
 One cause of our city's unrest lies in the fact 
 that so many individuals have been reared who 
 can now feel deeply its vices and follies. Thus 
 far the children of degradation and wrong can 
 outvote the men of the new era. Not a few 
 whose minds and hearts are in the new, are 
 standing with their feet mired in the political 
 mud of the past. There are thousands of others 
 whose virtues are not a positive color, only a tint. 
 We must wait until the individuals shall have 
 become more numerous and more intense. The 
 radicals must never be disheartened, for if they 
 can not shape the world external they can enjoy 
 that world that is in their own thought and prac- 
 tice. If the individual can not close the saloons, 
 he can have the happiness of saying: "I do not 
 drink.'-' If the law permits thirty-nine stripes,he 
 can say: " I abolish them all, both as to man and 
 beast." Thus, while the world is creeping toward a 
 better condition, the individual can fly to it on 
 dove's wings. While the church is full of false
 
 183 
 
 doctrines, he can, simply by shutting his eyes in 
 some solitude, be instantly with God; and while 
 the earth, all in all, is black with its vices, he can 
 breathe the aroma of the better land. Inasmuch 
 as the individual, having only a few years, can 
 not wait for the world to become humane and 
 just, he must adorn his own days with those vir- 
 tues, and thus create his own beautiful civiliza- 
 tion, just as the traveler at twilight enjoys his 
 own song. As the world will not die with you, 
 it must not live with you. It moves too slowly; 
 you must hasten, for your time is short, You 
 are light armed. You can climb the mountain 
 and see the morning while the valley is still dark. 
 The Christian Church is fortunate in the fact 
 that it stands attached to a person whose radical- 
 ism attacks vice and wrong in root and branch. 
 In Jesus of Nazareth all wrong dies and all love 
 lives. In him tears cease. There politics turns 
 into poetry, as life turns into immortality. But 
 the Church could carry only a little of him, 
 because a party can not carry a deeply- colored 
 virtue, but only a tint. But there stands the 
 Christ perpetually, and the society which once 
 came from him, bringing thirty-nine stripes, soon 
 went back to him, and returned with thirty-eight.
 
 184 
 
 Thus it went and came, until the stripes were all 
 gone from Paul's shoulders. It came away from 
 the Master once with a contempt for the black 
 man. It kept going and coming until the black 
 man was free. It once was but a little kind to 
 the children; it went back to its origin until at 
 last it took all the little children into its arms and 
 joined the Master in the words, "of such is the 
 kingdom of heaven." Thus, under the repeated 
 touches of Nazareth all poisonous plants die, root 
 and branch. 
 
 This moral scene resembles that story about 
 the "rising of the waters," only it reverses the 
 feelings of the heart. In that night in old Canada 
 the waters silently rose to man's alarm and danger, 
 but in civilization this flood rises to man's joy. 
 All good and true hearts exult in the long moral 
 storm. As we lie on our pillow at night, we wish 
 the rain drops would grow in size and number. 
 The fainting heart needs the help of the tempest. 
 The river which creeps onward hour by hour is 
 the stream of human happiness. The lightning 
 is welcome, the rolling thunder is music. The 
 father and the two sons need not fly in terror from 
 these waters. All human feet should hasten to 
 touch this healing, peaceful wave.
 
 "Gbe Gentleman of tbe IRew Scbool, 
 IRutberforfc B 
 
 The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, 
 gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without 
 changes and without hypocrisy. James iii. 17. 
 
 The gentleman of the old school no longer 
 proves satisfactory; his place will soon be filled 
 by a man of the new school. The word "gentle" 
 has added much to its import since it came into 
 duty in the Latin times. The word gcntilis then 
 stood for the best kind of manhood of that period, 
 but then the best manhood was often very 
 poor. In almost all times and places before the 
 Unites States came into being the most of oppor- 
 tunity for education, culture, and politeness lay in 
 the family. The family implied the school -house, 
 the best manners, and the highest religion. All 
 the commonest people and the enormous multitude 
 of slaves were outside of refining influences. To 
 belong to a gens, a group of families, was to have 
 more advantages than a slave could enjoy. To 
 be attached to the family of Abraham, Isaac, or 
 Jacob, was in the old Hebrew world more than 
 equal to having in our day a diploma from Oxford 
 
 185
 
 186 
 
 or Cambridge. So in the Latin times it was a 
 great advantage to be born a member of some 
 Tarquinia gens or Claudia gens, or Julia gens. It 
 was, much like saying in our day, "He is an 
 alumnus of Yale or Princeton." 
 
 Such membership in early or late times has 
 never made the worth of the members absolutely 
 certain, but it has always made it probable that 
 the person thus related was superior to the 
 wild man of the woods. Cicero defined the 
 gentilis man as "one belonging to a family 
 which had never been in slavery, and which 
 had received no injury from its remote ancestry." 
 The presumption followed that education and 
 good manners had run along in the channel in 
 which the family had flowed. 
 
 The family power and fame reached a won- 
 derful dominance in the Roman period, and it 
 reappeared in Europe after the disintegration of 
 the Roman Empire. All the old castles in Eu- 
 rope and England tell us how the family or the 
 gens went onward, carrying what there was of 
 literature, education, reason, and good manners. 
 The massive walls, the moat, the drawbridge, 
 bear witness to the efforts of old ancestors to
 
 escape overthrow and subjection. In Dante's 
 day this war of families was still raging, and 
 was busy in making war, confiscating old castles 
 and ordering enemies into exile. A gens man 
 in those years was not much like the gentle- 
 man of modern times, for the world has since 
 become spiritualized, and now the gentleman 
 has* actually the many virtues in the large which 
 once were admired even in the small. In Eng- 
 land the word remains much as it stood in the 
 times of Cicero, and a drunkard or a glutton or 
 a gambler may be a gentleman, because he may 
 be a member of a high gens', and not be a man 
 whose ancestors lived by hard toil or were men 
 of the woods or slaves of a lord. 
 
 In our republic the term has been spiritual- 
 ized, and now the word gentleman means one 
 who acts as though his family had been noble 
 for a thousand years; he acts as though long 
 time had emptied its experience and goodness 
 into his heart. He is the son of many a noble 
 race which has acted nobly. As Jesus was called 
 the Son of Man because he stood for the ideal 
 youth of our world, a son because he held the 
 power, the enthusiasm, the righteousness, the
 
 188 
 
 kindness, which attach to the ideal manhood, so 
 the modern gentleman is that ideal soul which 
 seems in Caesar's day to have absorbed all the 
 good from the Julia gens, and from the Fabia 
 gens of earlier days, and to have stolen rich 
 colors from the Capulets and Durantes which 
 gave the world its Dante, and to have passed 
 through the castles of Germany and England 
 only to extract the virtues which bloomed within 
 those walls. He did not pause amid those high 
 opportunities that he might emerge a rake or an 
 idler, great in the fox chase and in vice, but that 
 he might gather up all the qualities which make 
 a perpetual goodness and a perpetual beauty. Of 
 such souls our age can now show a large number, 
 because a republic is a field favorable for their 
 growth. An enlightened republic is a kind of 
 nation favorable to the production of gentlemen. 
 But it must also be said that the Western mon- 
 archies have become so similar to republics that 
 they, too, can grow a kind of soul not easily 
 possible in the older times. 
 
 A republic is made the better soil for this 
 form of manhood, because no soul can be ideal 
 unless it grasps the rights of all humanity.
 
 189 
 
 Many of the so -named gentlemen of the old 
 school were such only by comparison. They 
 showed a little white, but only on a very black 
 background. When the wife had to keep silent, 
 and at times was the recipient of a blow or a 
 kick, when a serf was soundly flogged at the 
 caprice of the master, when war was a regular 
 pursuit, then the term gentleman possessed no 
 deep spiritual import, for that import is impossi- 
 ble where there is no tender appreciation of 
 human rights. Cicero loved his daughter ten- 
 derly, but his wife had no rights that he felt 
 bound to respect. Dante was an intense friend 
 to his friends, but he was bitter toward political 
 opponents. Shakespeare gathered up all kinds 
 of conspicuous personages which had run across 
 the world between Caesar and Henry VIII, but 
 he did not make the perfect gentleman conspicu- 
 ous in his drama. Shakespeare was a central 
 point in which all paths met, and if the path of 
 gentility is not seen on this Shakespearean map it 
 is because it had not yet been opened up through 
 the woods. In those plays the perfect gentleman 
 was almost as rare as was a steamboat upon the 
 Thames.
 
 190 
 
 The human race has been unfortunate, not 
 only in its efforts to create a noble manhood, but 
 also in its efforts to keep Avhat it has gained. 
 
 By the time the Greeks have reached some 
 moral worth, like that found in the characters 
 of the Platonic school, the Persians are seen on 
 the border, ready to trample the Greek flowers 
 under foot; by the time Rome has become able 
 to point to a Pliny and a Tacitus, the northern 
 barbarians are beginning to move southward to 
 trample all the Latin pearls into the mire. In the 
 meantime the savages are overthrowing in Britain 
 the civilization begun by the enlightened Julius 
 Caesar. Not only was the progress of the higher 
 manhood arrested, but the old grand languages 
 were broken up into wretched dialects, which had 
 to be made into the new tongues or jargons which 
 are now spoken in Europe. To find a good has 
 been in all times difficult, to retain a good, a task 
 equally arduous. 
 
 The coming of the actual manhood could not 
 but wait for the advent of human rights. There 
 must always be a wide intelligence before there 
 can be a noble character. The mind must be 
 able to make a survey of the world, and see the
 
 191 
 
 whole net-work of human rights. It is not essen- 
 tial that a gentleman be a good judge of art and 
 music. He may be color-blind, and in an art 
 gallery mistake "The Autumn on the Hudson" 
 for "The Springtime in England;" he may be 
 tone-deaf and not know " Home, Sweet Home," 
 from the "Marseillaise," but his intelligence of 
 men must be broad, and his feelings kind in an 
 infinite degree. 
 
 The present Emperor of Russia is, perhaps, a 
 sincere man, but his sincerity does not aid him in 
 this contest for the fame of gentility. He ha& 
 not moved in the high families of the human 
 race and garnered up the splendors of the widely 
 scattered genies. He has not come through all 
 the Athenses and Florences and Londons and 
 Americas. He came to his throne by way of 
 fanaticism. He felt called by God. He perse- 
 cuted Baptists, Catholics, Stundists, and Jews, 
 because God wishes them put out of the way of 
 the true church. It is said that he did not wish 
 to be Emperor. He lamented that he had to be 
 Emperor. He would have declined the crown 
 had not his spiritual advisers made him believe 
 that God had called him to take tender care of
 
 192 
 
 the Greek Church. Out of this one mental cloud 
 come all the cruelties which so disgrace the Rus- 
 sian dominions. Alexander III thus stands not 
 a gentleman loved the world over, but a character 
 torn and shattered like a tree riven by lightning. 
 He wants to be a noble man, but no wide study 
 of human rights draws for him an ideal; the 
 path thitherward does not run near his palace. 
 
 If we compare with that King of the North 
 the ex-President who, a few days ago, passed from 
 this country, we shall see at once how the teach- 
 ings of our land help the mind toward an actual 
 gentility. To a taste for all art, all education, 
 Mr. Hayes added a most delicate sense of human 
 rights. Intelligence as to where justice lay, and 
 then a tender love for that justice, helped him to 
 reach long ago the spiritual import of the word 
 gentility. When a perfumed air drifts over a 
 southern road along which the traveler rides at 
 nightfall, he does not know from what special 
 flowers the odor comes. It may be many a variety 
 of flowers has combined with the grasses and with 
 the forests of gloomy pines in making the over- 
 hanging world all fragrant. It may be the far- 
 off ocean poured the first ingredient into the cup,
 
 193 
 
 and then passed the compound onward to receive 
 other forms of sweetness from all the scattered 
 chemists of Nature. Thus in the formation of a 
 heart like that of Mr. Hayes many elements were 
 poured in by many hands. We can not name 
 them, nor count them, but chief among these 
 fashioners of the soul must be reckoned that jus- 
 tice which does the right by each form of life. 
 
 Without this sensibility of rights, the true gen- 
 tleman is impossible. Calvin may have desired 
 to do his duty; such may have been the wish of 
 many a Roman Catholic persecutor; such may be 
 the wish of Alexander III, but all these desires 
 are inadequate. Gentility comes, not when a man 
 desires to do his duty, but when he also knows 
 what his duty is. It is a beautiful combination 
 of intellect and heart. 
 
 No sooner had ex -President Hayes died than 
 Southern men met in council and hastened to con- 
 fess that the ruler of the North had always done 
 the best possible by the men and the homes of 
 the South. He had not only cherished good de- 
 sires, but he had so studied the world, so thought, 
 that his desires were not made bloody by fanati- 
 cism, but they were made beautiful by intelli- 
 gence.
 
 As soon as this citizen had been relieved from 
 his duties as President, he accepted places of duty, 
 but only of that duty which pertained to the bet- 
 terment of human conditions. Great educational 
 movements and great humane movements called 
 him to new tasks, and he always accepted the 
 calls. His life began well; it continued as it be- 
 gan; it ran evenly to the end. It was free from 
 fanaticism, from indifference; free from the ego- 
 tism which loses the public in the universe of one's 
 self; full of sympathy with the many-sided prog- 
 ress of mankind. 
 
 An approach to such a character has always 
 been possible, but it was easy for John Milton 
 and Lord Bacon and Shakespeare to come short 
 of it, because they were .encompassed by all the 
 hardness of a despotism. An enlightened repub- 
 lic makes the character more attainable, because 
 a republic is founded upon the nobility of man, 
 woman and child. In this republic there is im- 
 mense respect shown to woman, because that 
 study of rights which has been preserved here 
 for a hundred years has created a taste for all 
 the equities of social life. It would be a misfort- 
 une if study could develop a taste for literature
 
 195 
 
 and pictures and music, and could not enlarge 
 the taste for the equities of society. That cen- 
 tury which has led our people along in many of 
 the common forms of taste has led them forward 
 in their sense of human rights, and has turned 
 many a man from the pain of being an animal 
 into the happiness of being a gentleman. 
 
 And beyond a 'doubt the same republic, work- 
 ing in its second century, will create an army of 
 gentlemen greater than all the standing armies of 
 Europe. In that far-off day when these charac- 
 ters shall throng the Legislatures and fill Presi- 
 dential chairs and assemble in Parliaments and sit 
 down upon thrones, the standing armies of the 
 world will be dissolved. 
 
 When we were all young and at school the 
 dear teachers were wont to tell us that a gentle- 
 man was a youth or a man who walked softly 
 and who shut a door without making a noise. He 
 was gentle like a dove. The inference drawn 
 was in favor of a nature not very far removed 
 from ordinary stupidity. The definition was true 
 as far as it went, but it did not go very far not 
 more than one step in the long way of man's be- 
 ing. Man's footstep on a floor is of no conse-
 
 quence when compared with his footsteps among 
 men. If the Russian Czar would only walk softly 
 among the rights of the Jews and Stundists; if he 
 would only not shut all the doors of liberty and 
 hope, what a gentle soul he would indeed become! 
 Gentle ! not like a harmless dove, which can wing 
 the air like an arrow, but gentle like an intellect 
 which has flown through all the great homes of 
 earth and has extracted from all the great fam- 
 ilies their wisdom and their goodness. 
 
 All terms are elastic. The word Christian is 
 often used to distinguish an Englishman from a 
 Mohammedan or an American from a Turk, but 
 the word Christian is not thus exhausted. It 
 moves on until it may describe for us the fervor 
 of John Bunyan or the peace of Mme. Guyon. 
 
 So the word scholar may apply to a hundred 
 shades of attainment between that of a common 
 schoolmaster and that of the two Scaligers. 
 When the younger Scaliger was only eighteen he 
 knew several languages, and was soon called "The 
 Colossus of Learning." Thus all great terms 
 will hold little or will hold much. As the Nile 
 river runs low or runs high, so great words run 
 feebly or run full. Among these terms which
 
 197 
 
 are subject to such vicissitudes must be placed 
 the word " gentleman," it being, indeed, appli- 
 cable when a man speaks in a low tone and 
 respects the laws of the drawing-room and all 
 social laws, and applicable also when a mind 
 studies the happiness of mankind, and when the 
 heart feels as though it were a loving mother of 
 the human race. If we ponder over things, we 
 can not but conclude that the Nile of gentility 
 has not enjoyed its great June rise, that flood 
 which shall pour untold wealth into the valley of 
 mankind. We hope the rain is now falling in 
 the mountains which will make this rich inunda- 
 tion. 
 
 Our Western race seems to have come to an 
 era of enlarged terms. All the cardinal nouns 
 and verbs of our language are swelling like the 
 lily-buds in spring. 
 
 The word "liberty" has opened so as to admit 
 all complexions and conditions; the word " relig- 
 ion" has expanded so as to admit millions once 
 shut out from the arena of love; "power" has 
 expanded so as to add the steamships to the oar 
 of the galley slave; the word "benevolence" has 
 expanded until it implies good will everywhere
 
 198 
 
 and forever. Into this transmuting and purifying- 
 age the word " gentleman " has been tossed, and 
 soon it will not mean a man who could ride well 
 after the hounds in old Virginia or in merry 
 England, or could write a love letter in the style 
 of Addison or Cicero, nor will it stand for a 
 modern graduate who can handle an oar or a bat 
 like a Greek athlete, but it will burst its old con- 
 fines and mean a perfect body occupied in each 
 drop of blood by a great and beautiful intellect. 
 Is this to expect too much of our race ? The drift 
 of all things compels us to see a great future for 
 man. The advent and reign of a new manhood 
 is not only possible, but it is near. 
 
 Whoever recalls the whole life of ex -President 
 Hayes, sees the lad in his first years, sees him at col- 
 lege, sees him on the banks of the Ohio in schools 
 of the law, sees him afterward at home, as perfect 
 there as any domestic picture earth can show, sees 
 him in power and afterward in private lif e,can not 
 but feel that it is not difficult to be a gentleman. 
 
 It is only to run in one of those ways of wis- 
 dom which are full of pleasantries and peace. 
 Our literature helps point out the new path, our 
 art helps, our religion helps with its tender love r
 
 199 
 
 our Nation helps with the eloquence of its great 
 ideas. If mental and moral progress moves on 
 through the next century, persons then living will 
 possess and behold a more delicate and more 
 widely spread nobleness that can be seen in these 
 times; for although our earth and our race are 
 old, a high nobleness is yet young. If so beauti- 
 ful in youth, what will this gentility be in the 
 high noon of its career ? 
 
 Inasmuch as public men are the lawful themes 
 of remark and the lawful objects of study, it is 
 not necessary for us to close our eyes to the high 
 nature of that resolve which led the President- 
 elect to make a long journey that he might stand 
 by the fresh grave of a faithful servant of the 
 nation, and might help lament that goodness, 
 however marked, is always moving toward the 
 tomb. To the call of friendship, the call of 
 humanity was added. A sensitive ear could not 
 easily be deaf to such a pathetic invitation. In 
 the Florence of Angelo's time all men paused a 
 moment on the street when a funeral cortege was 
 passing. Death was greater than business or 
 pleasure. It was the king whom all must salute. 
 When the President-elect journeyed across states,
 
 200 
 
 when he commanded all the work around him to 
 hush while the coffin of a public man was being 
 borne toward its place in the snow and grass, he 
 acted within the borders of that high gentility 
 which long, long ago began to draw its richly 
 colored line between the refined citizen and the 
 barbarian. 
 
 Few are the young men who yet realize what 
 a power and what a happiness are contained in 
 the simplest ideal, manhood. The reason of man's 
 being is sought iu wealth or in notoriety or in 
 what is called by the fascinating name of pleas- 
 ure. But it is quite certain that those reasons of 
 existence are poor when compared with the pos- 
 session of a character which is beautiful to have 
 and to reveal, and which is an ample passport 
 to the world on either side of the grave. Not 
 many can be poets, not many can be orators, but 
 millions can have what poetry and eloquence can 
 only express. After an orator has expressed the 
 genius of a country, others must come to live and 
 act the nation's life. Orators, therefore, need not 
 be numerous. One man can utter a sentiment, 
 but it is worthless until the millions have planted 
 it in their hearts. The Scottish chief blew his
 
 201 
 
 liorn in the mountains, and then out of every 
 ravine and thicket and cave came the brave 
 soldiers of Wallace and Bruce. How empty the 
 bugle-call, were there no rush of troops! How 
 empty the oratory of a nation, if there is no rush 
 of men to obey its high mandates! The men 
 who utter eloquence must divide honors with the 
 men who obey it. What our age needs is not that 
 each public man be an orator, but that the state, the 
 city, the church, the home, shall contain the men 
 who are living a life befitting so advanced a period. 
 The New Testament writer known as St. James 
 could delineate a high manhood. It was " pure, 
 peaceable, gentle, full of mercy, not fickle nor 
 false." But, after a few years had passed, none 
 came to live the higher life. The savages rolled 
 down upon the cultivated races, and when Chris- 
 tians and Romans emerged from the ruins, they, 
 too, had lost the moral worth of St. James, and 
 of that One who had created and inspired a group 
 of saints. In the late years of our nation so 
 many noble men have lived and gone down into 
 noble graves, gone in such a richness of character, 
 that the heart may well hope that an age of a 
 liigh humanity is about to come. The remem-
 
 202 
 
 brance of many who have recently left our world 
 is the memory of lives well lived lives in which 
 kindness and intelligence and action were grandly 
 mingled. These lives have not resulted from 
 Christianity alone. Religion alone may create 
 only a fanatic. To explain them we add to relig- 
 ion the wide learning of the age and the sense of 
 light born of the republic. Religion alone is a 
 poor outfit for a traveling soul. The barbarous 
 tribes are deeply religious. Knowledge alone 
 will leave the heart poor. Liberty alone France 
 possessed in her reign of terror. It is when a 
 religion like that of Jesus joins a wide and deep 
 intelligence, and when both act in a nation domin- 
 ated by all the rights of man, the highest type of 
 character becomes easily possible. The present 
 time may forgive an American if he should fail to 
 become a Methodist or a Presbyterian, but there 
 can be no forgiveness for him should he fail to 
 become a gentleman. In defense he can not plead 
 the inadequacy of evidence, the mystery of doc- 
 trine, the old cruelties of the church, or the errors 
 of the holy books. The arguments in favor of 
 gentility are clear as the sunbeams and are un- 
 answerable forever.
 
 203 
 
 It is well known that our land is producing 
 more noble characters than any other nation ever 
 produced, yet it is also well known that a vast 
 swarm of young men are extracting nothing from 
 our education or our religion or our profound 
 study of human rights. Their ideals are low. 
 They study the laws of the toilet, they become 
 skillful in their judgment of liquors, they know 
 all the paths of vice; if there is anything dis- 
 graceful they find it, if there is anything infamous 
 they love it. This crowd, although large, is not 
 as overwhelming as it was when it sunk Rome. 
 Then all the sons of statesmen and scholars and 
 orators became gamblers and drunkards and glut- 
 tons. In our day it is necessary for a youth only 
 to wish to see moral excellence and, behold, it rises 
 up all around him like the beauties of land and 
 sea on the horizon. We stand encompassed by 
 beautiful lives and impressive graves. The mu- 
 sical voices of- the living are joined by the musical 
 memories of the dead. 
 
 The youth who has high aspirations must close 
 his eyes to the littleness of an age and save his 
 mind and heart for the vision of goodness and 
 greatness. As artists on their noble studies of
 
 204 
 
 nature do not sit down to sketch a malarial bog, 
 or some piece of deadness or repulsiveness, but 
 go to where a mountain of pines rises up from a 
 flowery field, or to where the smiling ocean lifts 
 the soul toward infinity, thus the youth who hopes 
 to make high use of his stay upon earth must 
 look long and with rapture upon those fields of 
 human life where humanity unfolded itself in 
 more colors than a whole summer-time can contain, 
 and in a breadth and depth which no ocean can 
 equal. .
 
 <>ur IKew jra. 
 
 And he that sitteth upon the throne said: Behold! I make 
 all things new. Rev. xxi. 5. 
 
 When Paul was making a sojourn in Athens, 
 he marked this peculiarity of all those citizens 
 and visitors who enjoyed any leisure they spent 
 their time in hearing or telling some new thing. 
 They would meet daily in the public temples or 
 common resorts and spend hours over the facts 
 or theories of the time. A recent traveler in 
 Greece says that the higher natives will surpass 
 all other races in their willingness to sit early and 
 late at a table to discuss the morals and politics 
 of the whole world. The passion for political 
 thought seems to link modern Greece with that 
 of Socrates and Plato. 
 
 It may be that Paul in his zeal for the young 
 Christianity felt a little contempt for those Ath- 
 enians; but he should have admired their mental 
 drift, for, if he had just espoused a new religion, 
 he ought to have commended that Greek spirit 
 which was always looking for the newest thought 
 and truth. The Athenians soon gathered around 
 Paul and persuaded him to go up to the hill 
 
 205
 
 206 
 
 of Mars, and in that quiet place tell them all 
 about his new Galilean theology. Great changes 
 have come since that conference took place, but 
 all these changes have come through that longing 
 of the mind after new things. 
 
 We must not forget to make a distinction be- 
 tween the world's childish delight in novelties 
 and its hunger after new truths and new things. 
 It is always easy for a virtue to become a vice. 
 A little child, eager for a new toy each day, is an 
 object at which we may laugh or complain; but 
 we can not complain or laugh at a Newton, who 
 was eager to 1 learn something new regarding the 
 stars; nor at Columbus, who was eager to 
 learn something new about the ocean which 
 rolled at the West. In the conduct of the play- 
 ing children we see only a foolish fickleness, but 
 in the longings of the astronomer and the nav- 
 igator we see one of the noblest qualities of the 
 human mind. It is better, perhaps, not to desig- 
 nate the rapid changes of childish taste as a vice ; it 
 is rather the infant stage of a love for the new. 
 Later years temper and guide this passion, just as 
 the poets of the world are nothing else than the 
 dreaming children of the earth carried onward to
 
 207 
 
 a high standard of thought and language. When 
 the little child rushes to its mother and tells her 
 that it saw some lions and bears in the back 
 yard, or saw some Indians stealing children from 
 the park, that child is not wholly out of har- 
 mony with the John Milton who saw angels fir- 
 ing guns in Heaven, or with John Bunyan, who 
 saw Giant Despair making life so sad for Chris- 
 tian and Hopeful. 
 
 Bunyan's giant caught these two travelers 
 sleeping on his ground. He locked them up in 
 a dark dungeon from Wednesday until Saturday, 
 " without one bit of bread or drop of water or 
 ray of light." At times the old giant went into 
 the den and beat his captives with a crab-tree 
 cudgel. On Saturday Christian remembered a 
 key he possessed, called "Promise," and with 
 that he opened the door, and away they both ran. 
 This is a childish dream carried up toward a 
 mental perfection a dream full of truth, for all 
 older ones know that the key of promise will 
 help them away from the old Giant Despair. 
 
 The fancies of young children and much of 
 the fickleness of early life are the seed or the 
 promises of that love of new things which at last
 
 208 
 
 is the glory of our race. Man was created and 
 placed in a very imperfect world. It must have 
 contained little indeed. Could we reproduce the 
 far-off scene which lay between the two poles a 
 million years ago, we should see a spectacle of 
 human poverty of which we know little. To 
 reach some faint hint of that old emptiness we 
 might even to-day repair to the African bushmen 
 and see a picture of the human creature before 
 his fancy had begun to work. 
 
 Those bushmen do not assemble like the Ath- 
 enians, to tell and learn some new thing. They 
 would not lead a Paul away to a Mars Hill that 
 he might regale them with a sketch of a new 
 Jesus and a new faith. They have only a small 
 language. They deal most in gestures and must 
 build a fire when they would talk at night. 
 Their language is to be seen rather than to be 
 heard. They have not reached the power to 
 build a house. They have not yet reached the 
 intellect that can dream of wonderful things with 
 our little children, or with our old Miltons and 
 Bunyans. With them life is not infinite. It is 
 very limited and very small. They do not make 
 any progress, because they are incapable of think-
 
 209 
 
 ing of any new condition. Many of them eat to 
 the uttermost, and then attempt, by some nar- 
 cotics, to sink into sleep. They love unconscious- 
 ness more than they love the vexation of thought 
 and life. 
 
 Could we go back and see the human race 
 through its whole extent in time, we should find 
 one of its great turning points to be in that day 
 in which men first began to inquire of each other 
 about some new thing, and in which the heart began 
 to dream of vast and blessed changes. Happy day 
 to the primitive human race when some angel 
 came and sung out from the sky: "Behold! I 
 will make all things new!" With that voice in 
 the sky, humanity began to toss itself forward. 
 Its heart turned toward the new. 
 
 Those evolutionists who make man a natural 
 result of other animals, and who identify man 
 with the fish and bird, leave us all bewildered by 
 the fact that no animal except man ever dreams 
 of a new thing, a new surrounding, a new happi- 
 ness. Man is the only form of life that loves the 
 new. Before man there is always rising the pic- 
 ture of a better world not of heaven only, but 
 of a better earth. All dumb brutes are finite; 
 man struggles with the infinite.
 
 210 
 
 There is a bird in Australia that makes a little 
 garden, that plants seeds, that makes a sitting- 
 room in which birds may assemble; but this dear 
 little creature has no dreams of a home better 
 than the one it builds; it has no dreams of an 
 America beyond the sea; it is never troubled 
 with any thoughts of the beyond. You can not 
 even ask it about God, or life, or death, because 
 its mind is not capable of an inquiry. Man is 
 the only animal to which you can speak of the 
 future. His world reaches backward and forward ; 
 and thus he separates himself from all other crea- 
 tures and touches the infinite. If you speak to the 
 horse about eternity the words are all lost ; speak to 
 man about it and he weeps. Thus between man 
 and all other creatures a gulf lies which materi- 
 alists have not bridged. 
 
 Modern civilization comes from a source far 
 more hidden than the fountains of the Nile. At 
 least the source of the enlightened humanity is 
 more hopelessly hidden, for Africa could be ex- 
 amined mile by mile and foot by foot until it 
 should be compelled to give up the secret; but 
 it is impossible now to traverse the realms of old 
 races, and find what stages it passed through on
 
 211 
 
 its way to its historic condition. In this absence 
 of fact we are permitted to believe that when 
 man had advanced so far as to dream of new 
 things, then his progress set in in a full power. 
 Man's civilization has slowly emerged out of his 
 mental superiority in this one particular the 
 power to project a new future. The human 
 race has been created by its dreams. In its 
 poverty it has been able to think of wealth; 
 in its slavery it has been able to lay plans for 
 liberty; in its taste it has been able to think 
 of more and more beauty; in its many tears it 
 has been able to think of more happiness. Thus 
 the dreams of which we often make sport are 
 the dearest hopes of our race. Even if man's 
 individual "ship" does not come in, the ship of 
 his race comes. "The Castles in Spain" hide in 
 those playful words the real and noble mansions 
 of many a nation. Man's dreams reveal his 
 power. They are the early dawning of his bril- 
 liant day. 
 
 Go back along any of the great paths and we 
 soon find the human mind growing eloquent over 
 its future. The result is the same whether you 
 open a holy book or only a volume in common
 
 212 
 
 literature. At some page it breaks out into a 
 rhapsody over human progress. Isaiah stands for 
 the Hebrew commonwealth and empire: "Ho 
 every one that thirsteth! Come ye to the waters, 
 even he that is without money. Come, take wine 
 and milk without money and without price. 
 * * * My promise shall not return unto me 
 void. It shall accomplish what I please. Ye 
 shall go on with joy and be led forth in peace. 
 The mountains and the hills shall break forth 
 before you into singing, and all the trees of the 
 field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn 
 shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the briar 
 shall come up the myrtle." Isaiah went so far as 
 to picture a day when all -the wild beasts should 
 put aside their ferocity and be led along by a 
 little child. 
 
 The substance of such a vision is all to be 
 found in the philosophy of Socrates and Plato. 
 In Virgil it springs up again in nearly the words 
 of Isaiah. Virgil sang: " A great age will come. 
 A high quality of years will be born. A more 
 divine race will appear, and iron will yield up 
 its place to gold. The serpents and the poison- 
 ous weeds will perish. The fields will grow yel-
 
 213 
 
 low with the ripening corn, and the sap of the 
 oak will be honey." 
 
 In the Dream of Scipio, written perhaps by 
 Cicero, all this triumph of man is seen beyond 
 the river of death: There Scipio sees his parents 
 and friends and loved ones in an image grander 
 than life and in a nobleness that made earth seem 
 humble. These and many similar passages all 
 united in declaring man to be a child of destiny 
 a mind that can urge its world always onward and 
 can make all things redouble their value. 
 
 O 
 
 Against Henry George's theory of non -owner- 
 ship of land, some one quoted a sentence from a 
 writer of the former century: "Give man the 
 secure possession of a bleak rock and he will 
 turn it into a garden; give him a nine-year lease 
 of a garden and he will turn it into a desert." 
 This old sentence illustrates the fact that man did 
 take his desert world and did make a garden out 
 of it. It stands all beautified in Greece and 
 Italy and France, beautified everywhere because 
 man, the dreamer, has lived in it and with it. 
 Although life has been too much like a lease for 
 man's perfect peace for all hours, yet nearly all 
 talent and love have acted as though they were to
 
 214 
 
 dwell here forever. When man is in his full 
 power his heart acts as though it were to beat for- 
 ever. Owning this world he turns the barren 
 rock into a garden, and all this great change 
 comes through his perpetual dream of a new 
 greatness and a new beauty. 
 
 There was given to man in the beginning a 
 very simple world, but its possibilities were infi- 
 nite. We must, therefore, conceive of society as 
 marching from one to infinity. New ideas must 
 come each day. There can be no such thing as a 
 fixed politics, or a fixed social life, or a fixed 
 religion. When the sun sets each evening we 
 bid farewell to the world of that day. It will 
 never return. The rising sun of the next morn- 
 ing says: "Behold! I shall make all things new." 
 The world will waken to new thoughts. The 
 kings nave attempted to make the human race 
 stand still, but not all the power of empires has 
 availed to keep crowns from falling and liberty 
 from springing up from the dust. The Calvin- 
 ists attempted to make their creed perpetual, but 
 what flourished so triumphantly in a past century 
 dies suddenly in this period. The Roman Cath- 
 olic Church is carried along by the same irrepress-
 
 215 
 
 ible growth of the race, and, boasting of being 
 founded upon a rock, finds that its rock moves. 
 The laws of the universe do not know any differ- 
 ence between the Protestant and the Catholic, the 
 republican and the democrat. It cries out to all: 
 March from A to B ; and soon the ground trembles 
 beneath the footsteps of men. All the known 
 powers of money, church and state can not keep 
 humanity still. One might as well put a heavy 
 stone on the shadow of a tree to keep the sun 
 from moving. 
 
 What, then, is conservatism? Conservatism is 
 the desire to keep society from moving to a worse 
 condition. It is also a desire to keep man from 
 running madly when he ought to move slowly. 
 It is also a desire to remain in a safe place while 
 in great doubt. It is often a sending out of a 
 dove to see if the deluge has ceased. Conserva- 
 tism has no meaning whatever when it is arrayed 
 against progress. It is, in such cases, only a dig- 
 nified name for stupidity. Much of modern con- 
 servatism is only a profound satisfaction taken 
 by a man in a selfish or stupid life. If you 
 would find the lawful arena of conservatism, read 
 in the "Vicar of Wakefield" that chapter in
 
 216 
 
 which Moses was sent to town to sell the family 
 horse. The family was in great poverty, and 
 had to part with its domestic pet. In the 
 evening Moses returned. He had sold the animal 
 for 3 15s. and 2d. This price was low enough to 
 make the family weep. But the worst had not 
 been told. Moses had not received cash for the 
 noble pet, but he had taken a box of green spec- 
 tacles which were said to be worth the alleged 
 sum. Moses ought to have possessed conserva- 
 tism enough to make him bring back the horse 
 unsold. Thus, conservatism is a wall between 
 society and the insanity of crime or blind 
 folly ; but when a new and true idea comes, this 
 wall is to be torn down, and we must all move 
 out and move on. The sweetly new is a voice 
 from the sky. It is the dove returning with an 
 olive leaf in its mouth, thus telling us to leave 
 the old, dark ark and move out into the fresh, 
 sunlit world. 
 
 The early phrenologists found in the brain a 
 department wholly devoted to wonder. Impelled, 
 by that quality of the mind, the little child is for- 
 ever asking questions of its patient mother. It 
 wonders : What are the stars ? What is on the 
 moon? What makes the thunder and the light-
 
 217 
 
 ning? What makes the snow? What makes 
 night? Who taught the birds to sing? Who 
 painted the flowers ? Who made God ? What is 
 sleep? What is death? Oh, marvelous and divine 
 island in the soul's ocean! Oh, enchanting land 
 beyond any described in fable or history ! Long 
 after man has passed out of childhood his won- 
 derment runs on and on, and, should he live a 
 hundred years,he passes all his last days in deep 
 wondering. The scene becomes too great for 
 him. In his limited circle he struggles with the 
 infinity around him. If he climbs a height he 
 sees more, indeed, but this new height makes the 
 horizon more sweeping. The questions which 
 childhood asks increase in all after years. The 
 heart simply does not utter them because it has 
 no longer a mother to whom to run. In an in- 
 finite and silent wonderment mother and son at 
 last meet. 
 
 This is the corner of the brain which at last 
 makes poetry and then baffles it. One of the 
 poets says: 
 
 ' ' Where lies the land to which our ship must go f 
 Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. 
 And where the land she travels from ? Away, 
 Far, far behind, is all that they can say."
 
 218 
 
 Another poet asks: 
 
 " Oh, where will be the birds that sing 
 A hundred years to come ? 
 The flowers that now in beauty spring 
 A hundred years to come? 
 The rosy lip, the lofty brow, 
 The heart that beats so gayly now ? 
 Oh, where will be the beaming eye? 
 Joy's happy smile and sorrow's sigh 
 A hundred years to come ? " 
 
 Out of this perpetual wonderment of the mind 
 comes much of the fact and splendor of humanity. 
 Armed and inspired by this wonder, man starts 
 out as a barbarian and comes in at last with a 
 civilization. The Greek wondered if there were 
 not a more perfect face, a more perfect form, and 
 out of his longings came a high art. The Greek 
 woman wondered if woman must be a slave for- 
 ever. Out of her anxiety came a Sappho, a poet- 
 ess and writer to rival the fame of Pericles. 
 Christ wondered if there might not be a nobler 
 human career, and to-day his name is worn by all 
 the greatest nations. A sailor once wondered if 
 there might not be a hemisphere to the west. 
 His wonder at last secured three ships and after- 
 ward pulled the old thick veil off two continents.
 
 219 
 
 Encompassed by such a long series of scenes, 
 we can not but conclude that the highest duty of 
 society is to compel its flagging soldiers to march 
 on toward a better future. We must always 
 appeal to our fainting hearts and tell them that 
 God and nature have ordered an advance. We 
 must be young even in old age, because, when a 
 man is ninety, his church and state and city are 
 still young. Each day they begin a new life. A 
 new socialism is here, a new orthodoxy is here, 
 new books are here, new. art, new songs, new 
 prayers, new beauty. The man of white hair 
 must live and die in a new world. Only his body 
 can be old. All of the great things longed for 
 come, and, being noble, they take their place 
 among the treasures of civilization. America 
 is the land which Columbus longed for; and 
 its freedom to-day is that of which the Wasli- 
 ingtons all dreamed. In our country are to be 
 found now the garnered longings of years. 
 
 There is a vast difference between a great 
 new age and an age of novelties. There are 
 young men who keep up with the age by order- 
 ing a new kind of coat. Its corners are more 
 rounded than they were yesterday. These youths
 
 220 
 
 carry a lighter walking stick and hold it in a 
 new way. So are there ladies who keep up 
 with the age by purchasing a new kind of hat. 
 Of these matters and persons civilization takes 
 no note. It does indeed remember that the 
 Greek men and women did not change their 
 style of robe, head-dress and girdle once in a 
 thousand years. This release left them time to 
 become great in intellect, and the important 
 fact is, that,in that land of manhood and woman- 
 hood, changed a poor body for a better one, 
 and a common mind for one more gifted, low 
 art for high art, and the mutterings of savages for 
 a language and literature rich beyond all descrip- 
 tion. The heart fond of novelties is only an 
 infant's heart when compared with a soul that 
 gathers up the mighty truths and feelings of a 
 new period. 
 
 On the coast of the German Ocean women and 
 children, and men also, are constantly walking 
 to and fro looking in the sand for the lumps 
 of amber cast out by tide and storm. Here, in 
 this great republic, a large company of minds 
 has walked to and fro on the shores of a new 
 ocean, and valuable is the wealth they have
 
 221 
 
 found. It has come from both war and peace. 
 Never walked the wondering, longing mortals 
 upon sand so rich. They have found liberty, 
 education, rights, a religion of deeds and love, 
 all the arts in beauty beyond those seen by 
 Phidias or Zeuxis, music far beyond what the 
 past ever heard, and then a public taste for 
 a goodness and beauty higher still and much 
 more abundant. The divine voice, " I shall 
 make all things new " has been sacredly kept 
 to our age. A new civilization has come rap- 
 idly, as though weary of its long delay. 
 
 To you who live in this part of the noble earth 
 much of these material and mental riches has 
 come. You have not strolled on life's shore in. 
 vain. You have found amber in the sand; but 
 whom will you elect as guardians of these treas- 
 ures and longings of the new West? What men 
 will you choose to execute your ideas of well 
 being and well doing? What men will you 
 appoint to utter all your noblest thoughts and to 
 embody them in the city's public and private life ? 
 What men will express your taste or your elo- 
 quence? Can the depraved take care of the 
 splendor the noble have created? The answer is
 
 222 
 
 loud and distinct. A new and splendid age needs 
 a new politics. It is a crime to gather up good- 
 ness and beauty from all places and times and 
 then ask the saloons and city bedlams to fashion 
 our politics. More than we need new statues, 
 new pictures, new music, new temples, new 
 parks, we need a new municipal life. A great 
 age must create a great politics. The men who 
 make an era must save it and love it. A 
 party should rise up out of the new time, 
 that the new time might stand guardian of its 
 own mental treasures. We early perceive two 
 large religious groups in religion the Protest- 
 ants and the Catholics, and two large political 
 groups, each of which four groups could contrib- 
 ute some mind fully adequate to speak and act 
 for the time. Civilization does not indeed know 
 anything about the lines that divide men into 
 parties in church or state. Civilization can take 
 note of only intelligence and virtue, but human 
 brotherhood sees and feels these lines, and, there- 
 fore, the new politics would best look upon human 
 friendship as being one of its latest and best 
 principles. Each of the great groups should 
 contribute its most noble and typical mind, and
 
 223 
 
 these minds, working together, should take care 
 of the civilization they love and have helped 
 to create. 
 
 This angel of the sky having said to all the 
 races which have come and gone, "I will make all 
 things new," having said these words to the first 
 artist who attempted to carve or paint beauty, 
 having repeated them to the first orator who 
 wished to speak, and to the first poet who at- 
 tempted to be the mouthpiece of the human 
 heart, having flung the rich promise to the first 
 full soul that ever attempted to express a senti- 
 ment in song, having cheered the first citizens who 
 ever dreamed of founding a republic this kind 
 angel, crowned and loving as the Creator himself, 
 comes at last to each faithful man when he is 
 dying, and while earth is receding whispers to 
 him in that moment, when all the dear things 
 seem passing away forever, and says, "Behold, 
 dying heart, I will make all things new!"
 
 ^Tributes
 
 tribute IDerses, 
 
 JBs ffranfc "M. (Sunsaulus. 
 
 Where gentle waves come slowly into shore, 
 
 Beside the sea-green splendor, loved and praised, 
 
 Sleeps his last sleep the poet-priest who bore 
 Man's soul to heaven, in dear hands upraised. 
 
 He swung no censer fragrant with sweet fire; 
 
 His was the incense of God's fairest thought; 
 He held the chalice of the soul's desire; 
 
 His faith with jewels all its gold enwrought. 
 
 His priestly robe, all beauteous with gems, 
 Was holy eloquence, and truth, and love; 
 
 He knew how poor are earth's best diadems; 
 His were the riches of the life above. 
 
 Our poet-preacher, in his words of prose, 
 Made life a lyric, and its dreams sublime; 
 
 Far from his musing and his hope there goes 
 Eternal music for the sons of time. 
 
 No son of thunder, with a lightning stroke 
 Smiting an ice-field in his furious blast; 
 
 His was the sun-burst, as from heaven it broke, 
 Sure of its triumph when the noise had passed. 
 
 Light, white as Heaven, warmth, as soft as tears, 
 Came from his genius like an April day. 
 
 So, melting dogmas with their twilight fears, 
 Summer hath conquered in the breath of May. 
 
 225
 
 226 
 
 Hard were the bands that held the feet of Truth, 
 
 Weary of cold, and frozen into creeds; 
 His sunny soul hath kissed her lips and youth; 
 
 Lo, Truth comes bearing harvestings of deeds. 
 
 His was the fragrance when the storm is done 
 Breath of the lilies when the sky is clear. 
 
 Through all the tumult, God had this strong son 
 Telling our doubtings: " The Divine is here.' 1 '' 
 
 One to this prophet were the good and true 
 One with all beauty in the earth and sky; 
 
 His was the faith that gave this world its due; 
 His was the love that laid its honors by. 
 
 He loved the Christ whose beauty was more dear 
 And sweeter far than strains of angel's lyre; 
 
 For this alone Christ filled life's deepest tear 
 With God's own glory and divine desire. 
 
 Far on the edge where seas of doubt roll high, 
 
 This soul was calm, 'midst surf and storm un vexed; 
 
 Far o'er the waves, beneath a clouded sky, 
 
 Moved a fair soul with doubtings unperplexed. 
 
 Ye called him vague? What soul, who stands and knows 
 All man would feel and all that man may find, 
 
 Waits not in silence? For truth's morning rose 
 Opes leaf by leaf within the faithful mind. 
 
 INever did he with trumpet call the brave 
 
 Round some rush-light that soon must die away. 
 
 He spake: " 'Tis dawn!" when o'er the earth and wave 
 Quivered the promise of a new-born day.
 
 227 
 
 His was John's Gospel of the love divine; 
 
 His was the logic of -the human heart. 
 His was the sight, intuitive and fine, 
 
 Finding the Savior in life's common mart. 
 
 Where, asking questions, Socrates had found 
 Wisdom and silence in the open mind, 
 
 There, in old Greece, he lived in thoughts profound; 
 Near the JEgean was his hope enshrined. 
 
 What hours were they, when on the streets of Rome, 
 Walking with him, philosopher and seer, 
 
 Horace or Virgil led our poet home, 
 
 Nor asked a verse to make his presence dear. 
 
 Both Greek and Roman, intellect and law, 
 
 Found in his Christ their whole demand fulfilled. 
 
 O for the Vision and the Face he saw, 
 
 When adoratipn bade the creeds be stilled ! 
 
 Moan, autumn winds ! His autumn-time was here; 
 
 Ruddy and golden all the fruit he bore. 
 'Midst harvest sheaves and leafage brown and sere 
 
 We say: "Farewell, but not forevermore."
 
 Sermon 
 
 Delivered bs 1Rex>. 3obn f>. JBarrows, D. S>., pastor of tbe 
 
 ffirst presbgterian Cburcb, Cbicago, at tbe 
 
 ffuneral Service belfc in tbe 
 
 Central Cburcb. 
 
 The power of an endless life. Hebrews vii. 16. 
 
 The grieving multitudes gathered in this beau- 
 tiful hall the monument and memorial of the 
 love which David Swing inspired in your hearts 
 are only a small part of the greater multitude 
 who cherish his name and his life in affectionate 
 and grateful remembrance. But we do not mourn 
 for one who has gone out of existence. He has 
 rather just entered into life, the full and endless 
 life, whose ennobling, inspiring, restraining and 
 consoling power he so beautifully proclaimed. 
 It might have been said of him, as was said of 
 Agassiz, that, "to be one hour in his company 
 was to gain the strongest argument for the immor- 
 tality of the soul." And these flowers, children 
 of that beauty which he loved, the sweetness of 
 music, these words of tender prayer and the tears 
 which may not all be kept back, also speak, now 
 that he has gone, not only of our affection but of 
 our faith in the rationality and goodness of this 
 
 228
 
 229 
 
 universe, created and governed by him who has 
 brought life and immortality into full light 
 through the Gospel of Christ. 
 
 Sometimes, in life, Professor Swing gave to his 
 friends an impression of pensive loneliness, as if 
 his heart -hunger for affection, which years and 
 sorrows only increased, had never been satisfied. 
 Enough of love is expressed in this meeting, at 
 his burial hour, to content any soul. Our thoughts 
 at this time might be: "Forever silent is that 
 voice which, with its magic like that of the fabled 
 music of old, built those modern walls for the 
 service of God and man." The good gray head 
 which all men knew, is gone from our sight. The 
 deft spinner and weaver of the brain will offer 
 no more fabrics for our delight. The beautiful 
 home by the lake shore, where the father and 
 grandfather was the center of love, is darkened, 
 and the library in which he found companion- 
 ship with Plato, and Dante, and Milton, and all 
 the chief sages and poets, will miss the master's 
 hand. 
 
 But these shall not be our meditations, but 
 rather, how thankful we are for such a gift kept 
 for us so long; how many and good are the les-
 
 sons of his character, and ' how abiding the fruits 
 of his wisdom. When great men have died, ii 
 was his wont to speak of them from this pulpit. 
 He not only surveyed the wide world of letters 
 and of action, enriching other minds with his 
 thought, but how tenderly he always spoke of 
 the illustrious dead, as one by one they sank 
 from sight Sumner, Garfield, Phillips, Beecher, 
 Elaine, Phillips Brooks, Tennyson, Whittier, 
 Browning, Dr. Patterson, and the rest. What a 
 genius he had for appreciating the good and 
 great, and how little disposition to believe evil 
 and to point with snarling criticism at supposed 
 imperfections ! 
 
 We covet his skill and his temper in speaking 
 our thoughts to-day. No one in our city was 
 more esteemed by all classes of men for his 
 humanity, which reached not only to the poor of 
 his kind, but to the dumb animals. His modesty, 
 his wisdom, his scholarship, his gentleness, drew 
 to him men and women of many types. Old con- 
 troversies had worn themselves out, and men val- 
 ued him for what he was. He was our most 
 famous citizen, or, with Mr. Moody, the evangelist, 
 and Miss Willard, the reformer, he was one of
 
 231 
 
 our three most famous citizens, and he is mourned 
 to-day by devout and loving souls throughout the 
 Northwest and all over America. It was to this 
 place that other men of fame, coming to our city r 
 flocked on Sunday, somewhat as they used to go 
 to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, or as they are 
 now found in Westminster Abbey. Our friend, 
 your pastor and teacher, will be mourned beyond 
 the seas, by good men in London, and in other 
 lands, and even in far-off Calcutta the tears will 
 fall in Peace Cottage when Mozoomdar learns 
 that his friend has gone before him. 
 
 But here the Catholic and the Methodist, the 
 Baptist and the Congregationalist, the Presby- 
 terian and Episcopalian, the Unitarian and the 
 Jew, feel that a brother has been taken, and the 
 city will seem impoverished to many thousands , 
 even though they feel that his life on earth will con- 
 tinue, since he has joined "the choir invisible of 
 those select souls whose music is the gladness 
 of the world." 
 
 It is natural for us. in comparing him with 
 other men, to say that he ranks with Frederick 
 W. Robertson and -Dean Stanley, with Bushnell 
 and Beecher, in the temper of his mind and the
 
 232 
 
 quality of his thought ; but I prefer, without any 
 comparison, to think of David Swing as a genius, 
 unique, original, doing faithfully the work to 
 which he believed he was called in the peculiar 
 circumstances of his life. That life is very familiar 
 to those whom I address. We call before our 
 minds his early career his father a pilot on the 
 Ohio, a man of stern temper but of strict integ- 
 rity, on whose tombstone are written the words, 
 "He was an honest man;" the meager advantages 
 of his younger years, his going up to [college 
 from the farm at Williamsburg, where he had 
 read a few borrowed novels and Calvin's Institutes, 
 and gained a good start in Latin; his successful 
 student career, his companionship with men who 
 became famous, his success as a teacher of the 
 classics, his call to this city, and the pastorships 
 of the Westminster and Fourth Presbyterian 
 churches, the breadth and originality of his 
 preaching, the heresy trial, his acquittal by the 
 presbytery, the renewal of the charges before the 
 synod, his withdrawal from the Presbyterian 
 Church, the organizing of the Central Church, 
 the building of this hall, the widening of his 
 fame and influence, and the twenty years of his 
 faithful preaching.
 
 233 
 
 At the Miami University he roused the enthu- 
 siasm of all, and whenever he lectured or preached, 
 the college and village poured out their throngs 
 to hear him, as the great cities did in later years ; 
 and those who heard him at the beginning remem- 
 ber well that his ideas were as unconventional and 
 broad from the start as in later times, and the 
 temper of his mind was the same, while his liter- 
 ary style, fashioned by his genius and his famil- 
 iarity with the classic poets, was the same Virgil - 
 ian prose as that which has captivated so many 
 thousands. 
 
 He will be remembered as a preacher of a new 
 type. He stood before you luminous with a 
 heavenly light, his features made lovely by his 
 thought, discoursing of the life of man, "the life 
 of love, the divine Jesus, the blissful immortality." 
 He found in the Bible, to use his own words, 
 "the record of God's will as to the life and salva- 
 tion of his children." He did not preach like 
 others, but according to the bent of his own 
 genius. His discourse might not harmonize with 
 Professor Phelps' definition of a sermon ; it was 
 not always a popular speech on truth derived 
 directly from the scriptures, elaborately treated
 
 234 
 
 witli a view to persuasion, but there was a quiet 
 power which moved many minds, as fiery exhorta- 
 tion or elaborate exegesis does not always move 
 them. With ethical enthusiasm, with luminous 
 intelligence, with gentle sympathy, he made 
 known his faith in God's goodness and man's 
 possibilities. His intellectual refinement was 
 extraordinary, and it seems almost an irony of 
 fate that this rude city of the West should have 
 held the most cultured and aesthetic of American 
 preachers, as it certainly seems strange to millions 
 that out of Chicago one year ago there blossomed 
 the fairest flower of art the earth has ever seen. 
 
 And here, through all these years, David Swing 
 taught the people to love God and man. " We 
 find in the Christian church," he said, "the ideal 
 service of our Heavenly Father. It is one among 
 ten thousand, and, in its leading head, Christ, it 
 is spotless." He had a zeal for righteousness, 
 and this came with his blood, for he was 
 descended from the Protestant Germans who 
 were driven out of the Palatinate. He was a 
 reformer who did not come over in the May- 
 flower. But, though not of New England parent- 
 age, he knew the meaning for liberty of that
 
 235 
 
 little ship which, as he said, carried " a continent 
 and a republic. 11 
 
 But he was no fanatic, demanding impossi- 
 bilities or advocating any rigorous asceticism of 
 conduct; he loved all the humanities and the 
 gracious pleasures of life, while he denounced 
 with quiet earnestness all public and private sins. 
 His civic patriotism, was not less marked than his 
 genuine Americanism, and his last sermon, given 
 here only three weeks ago, told what he thought 
 of the recent troubles which have imperiled our 
 liberty. And we shall do well to listen again to 
 the last words he ever uttered in his pulpit: 
 
 " Oh, that God, by His almighty power, may 
 hold back our Nation from destruction for a few 
 more perilous years, that it may learn where lie 
 the paths in which, as brothers just and loving, 
 all may walk with the most of excellence and 
 the most of happiness." 
 
 It was excellence and happiness which he 
 strove to advance in every way, and he helped to 
 teach us faith in ourselves as we are brought 
 under the power of truth and goodness. By his 
 life and words he showed that the art of Athens 
 and the diviner art of Jerusalem may have a
 
 236 
 
 home among us. As lie felt deeply that men are 
 to be aided best through hope and through gen- 
 erous praise, he would not fix his mind on the 
 evil only. He said: " If we come to think that 
 all are worshiping gold, we, too, despairing of all 
 else, will soon betray ourselves by bowing at the 
 same altar." 
 
 He seemed free from the greed of gain him- 
 self, and stood and shone as a beautiful intellect- 
 ual light in our city. You who are members of 
 this congregation are glad that you furnished the 
 golden candlestick from which his life streamed 
 out, and that you were yourselves the medium 
 through which that light first passed to others. 
 He called our thoughts away to the better aspects 
 of the age, and while men were scanning with 
 eager envy the deeds of the millionaires, he bade 
 us mark " how our scholars hurried to the far 
 West to study the. last eclipse of the sun, and 
 how a score of new scientists met on that mount- 
 ain-top to ask the shadow to tell them something 
 more about the star depths and the throne of the 
 Almighty." Who else in our times has preached 
 more continuously and persuasively the gospel of 
 a kingdom of God on earth ?
 
 I need scarcely analyze the qualities of his 
 mind, they were so palpable to the community. 
 His extraordinary mental resources are well 
 known, the poetic and, perhaps, mystic cast of 
 mind, his love of music, his love of art, his 
 delight in beauty, his familiarity with all that 
 is best in literature, and, I may add, his good 
 judgment of public men and measures, his level- 
 headedness and lack of that foolish credulity in 
 believing almost every evil of successful men 
 which marks a certain narrow, fastidious, and 
 pessimistic type of character. After the great 
 fire he proved himself in practical ways a most 
 efficient helper of the needy, giving himself, in 
 company with a dear friend, to the work of caring 
 for the destitute. He had a faculty of drawing 
 to his side the men of civic might and influence, 
 and if you will read his declaration and argu- 
 ment made during his trial for heresy, you will 
 discover in him a power of clear, discriminating 
 statement, and of forceful reasoning, which may 
 surprise any one familiar only with the more 
 imaginative workings of his great mind. 
 
 Professor Swing was not aggressive and 
 belligerent, but if any human brother was ill-
 
 238 
 
 treated, whether the Jew in Russia, or the negro 
 at the South, his voice was quick in protest. He 
 was not belligerent, I say, but he was splendidly 
 persistent, holding to the truth as he saw it with 
 a loving but invincible tenacity. It was not 
 the noisy persistence of Niagara, but the quiet 
 persistence of the sun and the punctual stars. He 
 appeared to be without any ambition in the ordi- 
 nary sense; he did not husband his literary 
 resources, but poured out his thoughts with mar- 
 velous facility, never rewriting or repeating a 
 discourse. What he wrote came from his pen 
 without interlineation; and his memory was so 
 tenacious that he required no memorandum book 
 for thoughts and facts. He always knew where 
 to find what he required. He deemed it a bless- 
 ing that his old sermons were burned up in 
 the fire, since he was delivered from the temp- 
 tation to fall back on what he had done. 
 
 And you will know that he was a man of 
 deep and quick sympathies; many of us will 
 cherish the words he wrote to us in sorrow as 
 among the sweetest and most comforting that 
 ever came from a Christian heart. He was deeply 
 attached to his old friends, and especially to this
 
 239 
 
 city, where for nearly thirty years his voice has 
 been heard in behalf of righteousness and love. 
 He, whom we mourn, loved Chicago as it loved 
 him, and though he once made a European jour- 
 ney, his heart never traveled, and he always 
 preferred to see the Old World through the 
 eyes of the poet and historian, and to dwell 
 here among his old friends. 
 
 And you all remember how his wit and humor 
 were as remarkable as his affection ateness and 
 his imagination. He may have been tempted to 
 satirize too keenly at times, and too frequently, 
 the theological conservatism against which his life 
 was a protest; but surely here is a weapon which 
 good men have a right to use, and he employed 
 it as the friend of God and man. I scarcely 
 know of anything better in its way than his recent 
 picture of the slowness of the human mind, 
 even in this age of express trains and telegraphs. 
 " Our moral world," he said, "is dragged by oxen. 
 It has no railroad speed. The railway carries 
 men's bodies rapidly, but it never interferes 
 with the old slow speed of intellect. The intel- 
 lect of the church always travels in the oxen's 
 cart." But we bless God that it does travel, and
 
 240 
 
 an ox cart in twenty years will make the circuit 
 of the globe. 
 
 And what shall I say of our friend's perma- 
 nent influence? If tolerance in religion be the 
 best fruit of the last four hundred years, accord- 
 ing to the words of President Eliot, written on 
 the vanished Peristyle, then David Swing's con- 
 tribution to the tolerant spirit was a large addi- 
 tion to our civilization. Who has done more to 
 make us love those who do not think with us, and 
 to eradicate the notion that one's own form of 
 goodness or faith must be accepted by others, if 
 they are to share our hope in God and immor- 
 tality ? He was acute and broad enough, as some 
 are not, to perceive that the truest spirit of toler- 
 ance nourishes, not only among those who 
 believe but little, but also among Christians 
 who believe very earnestly the general creed 
 which Christendom has proclaimed through more 
 than eighteen centuries. This man helped to bring 
 us out of the backwoods theology, which was 
 extremely useful in its time, but was contentious 
 and fitted to a rougher generation, and was not 
 sufficiently ethical, and was not just either to God 
 or man.
 
 241 
 
 He suffered, and younger men have breathed 
 freer air because of wha,t he endured in behalf of 
 spiritual breadth and freedom. Thousands of 
 Presbyterians will now applaud what he said at 
 his trial. "Much as I love Presbyterianism, a 
 love inherited from all my ancestors, if, on 
 account of it, it were necessary for me to abate in 
 the least my good will toward all sects, I should 
 refuse to purchase the Presbyterian name at so 
 dear a price." He helped forward the movement 
 for revising the Westminster Confession, and the 
 more logical and important movement for displac- 
 ing it by a shorter, simpler, more scriptural state- 
 ment. He helped to make possible such an exhi- 
 bition of the grandeur of religion and the broth- 
 erhood of all religious men, as that which last 
 year, in his own words, made this lake shore 
 " almost roseate with the passing chariot of the 
 Infinite." - 
 
 Professor Swing is lovingly praised by many 
 who do not share his theological views; and his 
 influence was large, and will grow larger, over 
 many thoughtful minds that prefer to remain 
 closer than did he to historical Christianity. They 
 have learned, in part from him, to look on the
 
 242 
 
 other side, on what I may call the ethical and lit- 
 erary side of Christian truth. He was influenced 
 more by the poets than by the theologians. It 
 has been said by Dr. Hunger that the greater lit- 
 erature is prophetic and optimistic, it is un- 
 worldly, it stands squarely upon humanity, its 
 inspiration is truth, and it is corrective of poor 
 thinking, of that which is crude, extravagant, 
 superstitious, hard, one-sided. This influence 
 will continue to emancipate and illuminate the 
 Christian mind. More men will yet feel that 
 they will live a truer and more Christly life by 
 cherishing gentler thoughts of other good men, 
 and by a larger faith that the spirit of God is 
 working everywhere. You love to hear his voice, 
 and, therefore, listen to him once more. " We may 
 love our garden and home tenderly, but we must 
 not trample doAvn the field of another; but each 
 morning when th,e dew hangs upon our vines, we 
 must confess that it glistens as well in the parks 
 of our neighbors, and sparkled before we were 
 born, and will be full of sunbeams after we are 
 dead." 
 
 Now that he has gone, how many of us wish 
 that we had known him better! And yet, many
 
 felt that he was their friend, and that they knew 
 him well, though they may never have sat at his 
 table or conversed with him familiarly of high 
 themes. Their souls have had sympathetic com- 
 munion with his spirit, and every Aveek they have 
 talked with what was best of him. For several 
 years it was my fortune to live within a few 
 miles of the poet Whittier, and I never thought it 
 needful to intrude myself into his home in order 
 to know him ; for had he not spoken his choicest 
 thoughts to me for twenty years? Had I not 
 fallen in love with his "MaudMuller" in the 
 hayfield? Had not his "Barefoot Boy" been my 
 friend ? Had I not pitched my tent of imagina- 
 tion on the Atlantic beach with him, and had 
 I not felt his summer-heart even when snow- 
 bound in the icy solitudes of winter? Had I not 
 watched with the "Quaker Poet " on election eve, 
 when the fate of freedom was in jeopardy, and 
 with his childhood's playmate had I not felt the 
 Mayday flowers "make sweet the woods of Folly- 
 mill," and had I not heard " the dark pines sing 
 on Ramoth Hill the slow song of the sea ?" Had 
 not his psalm been to me like David's ? And why 
 should I look at the features of the " Hermit
 
 244 
 
 Thrush of Amesbury " to know the music of his 
 soul? 
 
 All this is true with many of our friends. It 
 was true of David Swing, and it will remain, 
 peculiarly true now that he has gone. He still 
 speaks to us, and we may know his inmost heart; 
 his soul lies open before us on the printed pages, 
 and if that which is keyed to universal truth is 
 not to be outgrown, why should not men and 
 women read for generations the thoughts of David 
 Swing? Why should they not read him as theydo: 
 Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor and Em- 
 erson? Who can hope to clothe in more beauti- 
 ful garments the sweetest forms of heavenly 
 truth? Who will ever write of the goodness of 
 God in language more lucid and melodious than 
 his? His "Truths for To-day" are truths for the 
 twentieth century, and his "Motives of Life" are 
 more lasting than Karnac and the pyramids. 
 Though his greatness was literary and ethical, 
 rather than theological, still he has influenced 
 the popular creeds more than many theologians. 
 
 We bid farewell to a gracious spirit whose 
 outward form we shall not see, and, while we 
 mourn an irreparable loss, we count also his ineff-
 
 245 
 
 able gain. He has crossed the bar, and it was 
 peaceful and beautiful. He has met his Pilot 
 face to face, and has entered the haven and found 
 the heavenly shore in the great mystery beyond, 
 many-peopled with those whom he loved and 
 who were glad to welcome him. The happy 
 immortality which he preached is a dearer delight 
 to him than to most men. He has found selectest 
 company there, whose thoughts were sweet to 
 him on earth. If we could have followed his 
 spirit's flight we might have seen something to 
 remind us of the vision which King Arthur's 
 friend had of his passing out of sight 
 
 ' ' Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint, 
 As from beyond the limit of the world, 
 Like the last echo born of a great cry, 
 Sounds as if some fair city were one voice, 
 Around a king returning from his wars." 
 
 He has had a choral welcome there. All the 
 chief friends who stood by him at the time of 
 his sorest earthly discipline greet him yonder, 
 and what multitudes besides! May the power of 
 that endless life into which he has entered abide 
 with us! A leader of thought, a prophet of the 
 gentle humanities of Jesus, has fallen, and the 
 old places which he loved here are desolate.
 
 246 
 
 The October leaves will cover paths where he 
 used to walk, winter will spread her white man- 
 tle over the earth, and spring, which he so loved, 
 will come again and clothe the field with grass 
 and blossoms; but he will not see them, nor the 
 summer flowers, which seem to live in his speech. 
 But we believe that his is an eternal springtime, 
 or a beautiful, unending summer, and that more 
 than all the loveliness which he knew on earth 
 shall be his forever. A still living master in 
 Israel has written: "There is only one gathering 
 place of the great and good which shall never be 
 left desolate; only the shade of the Tree of Life 
 shall be always refreshing; only the stream, from 
 the Fountain of Life shall flow on without end."
 
 poet preacber. 
 
 B Sermon Delivered b 2>r. Bmil (3. Dirseb, "Rabbi of 
 Sinai temple. 
 
 Among Biblical heroes, none has whetted the 
 imagination of later generations to the degree 
 that Solomon has. The bare outlines of his life 
 as given in the Biblical record seem but a shadowy 
 fringe to the glory of the sun which loving fancy 
 dreamt had risen with this monarch's reign to 
 bless Israel. He was accredited with wonderful 
 gifts. He understood the whispered speech of 
 the stars, the soft pleadings of the forests; he 
 knew the secrets of the birds as they were war- 
 bled forth from bough to bough ; what the ants in 
 their council of war buried in the deepest of their 
 hearts, Solomon was believed to have unraveled; 
 the rivers ran but to tell him of their message 
 and their ambition, and to inform him of the 
 commission with which they were charged; he 
 understood all the languages that were spoken 
 under heaven's dome, and had power to command 
 energies generally jealously guarded from the 
 possession and ken of human minds. And more 
 than this, it is said in the legends recording the 
 
 247
 
 248 
 
 wonder-deeds of this Jewish king, that when he 
 brought the holy ark into the temple, the very 
 cedar wood which clothed the walls began to 
 bloom again, and, as long as Solomon reigned, 
 the freshness of this transplanted denizen of the 
 heights never waned or even gave signs of 
 withering. 
 
 All comparisons, of course, halt; and still, for 
 one who knows these legendary and fanciful 
 portraits of the Eastern monarch, the suggestion 
 is ready at hand that one who had like gifts has 
 departed from our midst. Solomon, famous for 
 his wisdom, had powers not greater than in the 
 providence of God were given unto him to do 
 honor to whose memory we are gathered here 
 this morning. Like unto Solomon he knew the 
 speech of the trees and the tongues of the running 
 brooks; like unto Solomon of the fable when he 
 entered the temple, the very cedar wood began 
 to bloom, and as long as he was present in the 
 sanctuary the freshness did not pale and the per- 
 fume did not grow less. A miracle was wrought 
 by his very tongue, and stone gave response, as 
 it were, to the pleadings of the softer human 
 heart.
 
 249 
 
 The first hours of pungent grief always are 
 heavy with the dull sense of a great loss. But 
 perhaps the loss is but apparent, and the gain is 
 all the more permanent. Ours, then, is the duty 
 :to measure our loss and balance it over against 
 the permanent possession left in sacred trust with 
 us by this life now closed. And yet we must 
 confess that none there is who can do justice to 
 its fullness of gifts and powers. Yea, we must 
 be modest and remember that perhaps posterity 
 alone can gauge the influences for good this life 
 sent forth in this large country. While we 
 merely may lay the finger on the roots, our chil- 
 dren will find shade and refreshment under the 
 crown of the tree developed into beauty. 
 
 Is not genius like those mighty rivers whose 
 sources are the constant anxiety of geographical 
 explorers ? However far we may penetrate into 
 the caverns of their icy birthplaces, the actual 
 spot whence they bubble out and the real secret 
 of their mighty sweep eludes forever the grasp 
 of the diligent searcher. 
 
 Who has laid his finger on the cradle of 
 Rhine or Danube? None. Who can tell us 
 why the Nile carries its strength ? None. Who,
 
 250 
 
 why and how Congo was ushered into life? As 
 yet, none. Like these rivers, genius forever is 
 an unread riddle. However far we may push 
 back in our climb up the heights to the sources, 
 there remains mystery unsolved, for genius is 
 powerful reflection of light divine, is revelation 
 of God himself. 
 
 And so, in this our search for the mighty 
 sources of that river which has given refreshing 
 waters to many thirsting lips, and has wooed 
 forth flowers along many a bank and strand, we 
 are confronted with the old despair, if despair it 
 be, that genius' birthplace is curtained off from 
 the eye of man; it is in the holy of holies where 
 God's presence abideth and into which even high 
 priest can not penetrate except with downcast 
 face and in humble and unknowing reverence. 
 
 None can tell whence the power came to our 
 friend gone from us. Nevertheless, there is boot 
 in the expedition up the heights; although the 
 actual source be forever withheld from our 
 knowledge, we can trace the progress of the 
 river after it has freed itself from the mother 
 embrace of the Alpine range. We would not 
 presume to lay bare the curtained cradle of his
 
 251 
 
 strength and might and beauty we would mod- 
 estly inquire into the currents contributory to 
 his reservoir of power and might for good in our 
 generation. 
 
 The law seems to be well nigh universal that 
 genius, at birth, is not beckoned to broad road- 
 beds, but has to thread its way, a narrow rill, 
 down rough and steep mountain slopes. Our 
 old Talmudic sages proverb this observation 
 when they say: "Have ye heed unto the chil- 
 dren of the poor, for from them shall go forth 
 the light of truth." The exceptions to the rule 
 prove the law. It is generally from the gloom 
 of poverty that the brightness of genius shines 
 forth ease and affluence are not necessarily 
 adverse to the formation of character and unto- 
 ward to the steeling of ruder metal into elas- 
 ticity, but certain it is that, where the divine fire 
 is slumbering, the fans of poverty woo the blaze 
 to break forth, while the softer zephyrs of afflu- 
 ence seem more frequently to be fated to lull 
 to sleep the smouldering ember underneath the 
 ashes. So many of our greatest men in Israel 
 were kissed awake by the light, midst the dusk of 
 contracted outward circumstances. And outside
 
 252 
 
 of Israel, in America, the galaxy of fame is stud- 
 ded with stars whose first beam fell not from 
 vaulted window of palace, but from the low 
 opening of cottage and hut. 
 
 As a rule, it is not the city, again, with its 
 luxurious wealth of refining influences, but it is 
 the country, apparently poor in all those things 
 which make for culture, that wings to flight 
 innate poetic inspiration, and voices to preach and 
 prophesy natural, sturdy, ethical enthusiasm. 
 Most of the poets of America were children of 
 the open country held communion in their early 
 days with the laughing brooklet and the growing 
 flower, the green meadow, the sweet-scented 
 clover, the struggling corn, the swaying wheat, 
 the waving forest, the singing bird, the silence of 
 wooded dell and the mystery of the tangled 
 ravine; not in the bustle and din and confusion 
 and distraction of town, where commerce drives 
 her chariots and selfishness celebrates her tri- 
 umphs, does it seem possible to nursery these 
 tender children of light and love, of budding 
 song and burning righteousness. In the purer, 
 even if poorer, surroundings of country hamlet 
 in its hard school of struggle, in the farmer's
 
 253 
 
 experience, appear to lie the conditions favorable 
 for the growth of wider sympathies and the 
 quickening of the mind toward truth and beauty. 
 Our lamented friend and teacher adds another 
 name to the long roster of men come to eminence 
 from self-respecting poverty, who had slaked 
 their thirst for refinement, though the wells of 
 their early country home promised but a scant 
 flow of these living waters. He had indeed the 
 gift of Solomon. He understood the speech of 
 tree and the sermon of running brook. The dia- 
 lect in which the queen bee marshaled her golden 
 cuirassed host was not a foreign tongue to him, 
 as was not the jargon of the ants legislating for 
 their busy clan. He was the bosom friend of. 
 flower; he had mastered the secret of nature's 
 changing robes; he had often been a guest in the 
 chamber where are stored the garments, lacy or 
 fleecy or ermine-seamed or flower-garlanded, of' 
 the seasons. Whence to him such wonderful 
 knowledge? From his early days, from the 
 schooling of the hours when he, a farmer's boy, 
 followed the plow and handled the hoe and the- 
 rake. Yea, no academy in town could have given; 
 him this understanding; to the last of his days,
 
 254 
 
 in all that lie uttered and in all that he thought, 
 breathed the fresh fragrance, the purity of the 
 country sky. Here one of the sources, though 
 not the source, of his power; for behind this 
 knowledge of the language of nature was his 
 mind, a revelation of the divine and, therefore, 
 mystery shrouded from human analysis forever. 
 
 The farmer's boy, reading and interpreting 
 nature's signs and symbols, became a poet. Hard 
 science reads the inscription of the stars in terms 
 of a fearful struggle each planet whirled along 
 by the impulse of self-preservation, opposing 
 with all of its volume the attraction of other 
 heavenly wanderers and as the planetary system 
 is kept agoing by the lubrication of struggle and 
 strife, so science, wherever her torch lights up the 
 nooks and corners, points us to a battle field a 
 warfare that knows no truce a bristling camp 
 deaf to the sweeter carol of peace, or the consol- 
 ing choral intoned after the fray and fight is o'er. 
 For the sciences can only analyze, and analysis 
 is dissolution decomposition. A flower before 
 the bar of the sciences is calyx, pistil, stamen, 
 anther, pollen, carpel. The flower as a whole, 
 with its message of beauty and of peace, science
 
 255 
 
 knoweth not and regardeth not. Where this 
 scientific spirit of analysis prevails exclusively 
 and points the compass for life's ocean, the mean- 
 ing of world necessarily is set in a minor key. 
 War unending, never eventing into peace, 
 should this not burden a human soul ? What is 
 this universe then but a vast machinery without 
 purpose, without harmony even a chaos spinning 
 along, we know not why and we can not tell to 
 what issue? 
 
 But what the scientist disregardeth, for it is 
 not his concern to pay it court, that the poet 
 remembereth, and where he, whose eye is weap- 
 oned with telescope or spectroscope or microscope, 
 sees but the fearful scars of an endless struggle 
 for existence, the poet, his eyes turned inwardly, 
 beholds beauty and harmony. The love-tipped 
 tongue of the poet sings the anthem of peace. 
 The world is not enfolded in darkness, but is 
 afloat in an ocean of light. Love's tokens abound 
 everywhere, we need but open our eyes to its 
 beaming, playful, helpful and hopeful beckon- 
 ing. 
 
 The farmer's boy who had learned in the 
 schooling of his poor home poor in externali-
 
 256 
 
 rich in the eternalities of life to read 
 aright by the key of love and light the hiero- 
 glyphics of sky and soil, could not become the 
 exponent of a creed of despair, nor the messenger 
 of the call that we are doomed. He had to herald 
 that view of life and of nature which exults that 
 man from good proceeds to better, and that the 
 heavens are constantly unfolding new miracles, 
 as the fields are intoning new melodies, in 
 swelling chorus praising a just and good God 
 who leadeth all unto peace and final harmony. 
 
 Professor Swing's creed was that of an opti- 
 mist, and one of the roots of his unshaken and 
 unshakable optimism is his early life that led him 1 
 to know nature, as few are privileged to know 
 her, in the glory of the flowers in the garden and 
 the greatness of that mysterious goodness which 
 awakens from the seed the blossom and fruit, and 
 again husks in the bud and fruit the seed for a 
 new life an unending life. And if his farmer- 
 boy days thus led him to solve the equation of 
 world in terms of ordered beauty, his book studies 
 later confirmed the impression of his early years. 
 Know ye that there was not in the whole of 
 America a greater classical scholar than he upon-
 
 257 
 
 whose lips Sunday after Sunday the thousands 
 hung with hunger of soul and in reverential 
 admiration. The farmer boy of our western Ohio 
 valley was a great student of Athens and of 
 Rome ; knowing his Virgil as but few knew him, 
 and his Plato as but few understood him; at 
 home in the Roman senate as in the Greek areop- 
 agus ^Eschylus his daily companion and ^nea& 
 the bosom friend of his hours of study! A mir- 
 acle, this, almost, and yet truth and fact. Not 
 that there are not greater philological scholars in 
 this country or elsewhere, but philology is always 
 busy with the dry bones. It construes and scans. 
 It compares broken syllable with fragmentary 
 accent. This " dry-as-dust" method has been the 
 curse of classical studies in Germany, and is 
 beginning to stretch forth its octopus-like arms 
 for new victims in our own schools. For soon 
 will arise those among us to trumpet their find of 
 an abnormal dative whereto to moor a new phil- 
 ological system ! I am afraid lest, while they are 
 rattling these dry bones, the living spark of classic 
 culture be hidden from their blind eyes. 
 
 Among this tribe of word anatomists Swing 
 can not be reckoned. For him classic culture was
 
 258 
 
 an organic whole, and in the temple of this many - 
 mansioned Nautilus he was a reverent minister. 
 Greece, the people of beauty, had won his affec- 
 tion, and if any there ever was that appreciated 
 the graces of the Greek muses, it was he. Beauty 
 he had found in furrowed fields, and beauty's echo 
 set ahumming his heart's harpstrings, through 
 Homer and ^Eschylus and Sophocles and Demos- 
 thenes and Plato and Aristotle. This universe is 
 a cosmos, beautiful harmony, is their jubilant 
 affirmation. His studies in literature confirmed 
 and complemented what the impressions of his 
 early days had suggested. His mastership in 
 classic lore is the second root of his optimism. 
 
 Poets are always optimists. Pessimism never 
 yet has found a poetic voice. Perhaps one or the 
 other may have enriched literature with dirge or 
 lament. But even benighted Lenau in Germany 
 and Leopardi in Italy do not disprove the con- 
 tention that the poetic temper is essentially hope- 
 ful. The true poets have always clarion ed forth 
 the creed that through the apparent strife events 
 harmony, that night is prelude and pledge of more 
 radiant day. Beauty, and the creed that all 
 things are for the good, are factors of one equa-
 
 259 
 
 tion. Our friend who was at home in "the gar- 
 den," and "the academy 1 ' of that wonderful 
 people to whom we owe most of the elements of 
 our culture indeed found corroborated by the 
 genius of art what the rougher touch of rustic 
 tool had before taught him to read in the dia- 
 logues of the heavenly company, in the epos and 
 lyric written in flowers and in ferns on the 
 stretching and waving slopes of his home valley. 
 
 Student of antiquity as he was, Professor Swing 
 could not become a pessimist. The farmer boy, 
 greatest of classical scholars, had been touched 
 by the live coal from the altar dedicated to a 
 belief in progress toward ultimate harmony, and 
 in the intrinsic essential goodness and beauty of 
 life, and in the unfolding purpose of God through 
 individual experience, and His guidance of the 
 nations across the span of the ages. 
 
 That as a theologian the man so prepared 
 would not make of religion a mere archaeological 
 museum of antediluvian specimens stands to 
 reason. Loyal he was to the last to the church 
 of his early days. Not that he treasured the 
 dead formulae of creed as unbroken vases of truth, 
 but he became the mouthpiece and translator
 
 260 
 
 for thousands of what is and was the most 
 valuable possession of his sect. Strange it is, but 
 nevertheless one may say it without fear of con- 
 tradiction, it was the suspected heretic who 
 brought about the recognition by an ever-increas- 
 ing multitude of thinking men and women of 
 the best his mother church had been the guar- 
 dian of. 
 
 Say whatever you will about Calvinism ; say 
 that it is somber and suspicious of men ; that it is 
 narrow and uncharitable, this one pretension 
 history verifies, and those that are free from bias 
 must own that Puritan texture is woven of a strong 
 moral fiber; that in the hard discipline of life, of 
 self -discipline, curbing alike his love and his pas- 
 sions, the Puritan trains himself to be true to the 
 supreme and eternal law "Thou oughtest." In 
 the ungainliest garble of the Calvinistic creed, 
 there is, to him who looks beneath the surface, 
 stored away a wealth of ethical dower which softer 
 creeds and less cramped definitions lack, or at 
 least are not as insistent to emphasize. 
 
 In this sense, the farmer boy of the Ohio valley, 
 the student of the Miami University, the classical 
 scholar, the poet of the world of beauty, devel-
 
 261 
 
 oped to be perhaps the most loyal son of the church 
 which first led him to God's altars and taught him 
 to stammer the sacred words: God, love and 
 immortality and Savior. Through all of his later, 
 as of his earlier sermons, rings and runs an ethical 
 spirit, bold and deep and sweet withal. And 
 when he found that his church was apt to cling 
 to externals and sacrifice the eternal verities of its 
 historic mission, of his own resolution he left his 
 parental communion, but it was with a heavy 
 heart. He himself, perhaps, was not fully con- 
 scious of the gap, which widened as the years 
 lengthened, between him and his early religious 
 affiliations. It was not he, at all events, that 
 delighted in the breach. Swing is the exponent 
 of the inner forces quickening within the Puritan 
 form of presentation, and as an iconoclast, if 
 iconoclast he be, he belongs to those, as Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes said of Emerson that have no 
 hammer. He removed the idols with such tender 
 touch that the very removal seemed an act of wor- 
 ship and of reverence. The prophet may be 
 weaponed with hammer the poet is with harp. 
 Which will succeed ? Who knoweth ? Each one 
 has mission and scope and duty and call, but cer-
 
 262 
 
 tain it is that the harp's invitation will be more 
 readily accepted than the hammer's clank, and 
 that the softer transmission and the tenderer transi- 
 tion will be less of shock than the bold surgeon's 
 knife which cuts atwain the new-born child from 
 the old yet loving mother. 
 
 The poet sang the fulfillment of the prophecy 
 of his own religious youth in tones so sweet that 
 none knew, and perhaps he not himself, that idols 
 were falling and altars were crumbling, that a 
 new world was rising and still it was he who 
 sang the birth song of this new world which nec- 
 essarily is the burial song of the old, but in the 
 angel's measure, " Gloria in Excelsis, peace on earth 
 to men of good will! " 
 
 As a theologian, Swing merely carried out his 
 poetic mission; he was the reformer who con- 
 ciliated, led on but did not estrange he was 
 the focal point where two worlds met, each 
 receiving from him rich tribute of love, rever- 
 ence, light, but each hearing from his lips the 
 call for new and higher possibilities. It is often 
 thought by many who are thoughtless, that lib- 
 eralism, to be liberalism, must be negative; that 
 the true liberal must deny God, Providence,
 
 263 
 
 immortality. And it is often deemed strange, if 
 not an inconsistency, by men who are not Chris- 
 tians and never have been under the influence of 
 an early Christian education, that liberal men in 
 the Christian pulpit will continue to speak of 
 the Christ and will not cease laying the immor- 
 telles of reverent affectionate love at the feet of 
 the thorn-crowned prophet of Nazareth. Such 
 pseudo-liberalism of mere denial betrays only 
 the ignorance of him who professing it in self- 
 sufficient conceit would criticise as inconsistent or 
 disloyal the positive assertions of others, who, to 
 say the least, are as liberal as he yea, more lib- 
 eral than he, because, Avhile he does not under- 
 stand, they do understand that the pathway of 
 progressive truth is evolution and not revolution. 
 Is there so much new truth, after all? The 
 unfolding process of liberalizing is, indeed, but a 
 process of deepening and broadening the old 
 river, which at first, indeed, was a narrow rill r 
 but is, even in the moment of its juncture with 
 the ocean, still the child of the earlier days and 
 of the distant mountain peak. The Rhine is one 
 from his Gothard birthplace to the Holland 
 burial place is one, if narrow at first and broad
 
 264 
 
 .at last is one throughout the length of his 
 winding course. And so is the current of truth 
 and liberal unfolding of truth but the sweep of 
 one stream. Truth digs its own new channels 
 and feeds them from the parental stream. 
 
 We do not announce a new truth we preach 
 the old truth, if possible deepened and broad- 
 ened and burnished and purified. But before 
 we were, the prophet had professed. It was not 
 we that found or formulated the announcement 
 of the better life ; Isaiah and his school had 
 sounded it before we were born. All the prin- 
 ciples of society to be re-constituted to-day are 
 contained in the sermon of Isaiah and his like. 
 
 Historical continuity is the condition of lib- 
 eral, truly liberal, work for fruitage. This con- 
 dition the liberal may not disregard if his labor 
 be other than the mere removing of ruins and 
 the making of room for others. In this spirit 
 our poet preacher of beauty plowed and planted. 
 Asa poet he could not make the universe equal 
 to a tantalizing zero, or a negative. He read its 
 higher value as the revelation of God ; without 
 attempting to define God or to confine him, he 
 found him in the play of those wonderful forces
 
 265 
 
 round about us. And in the steps by which 
 humanity scaled the heights and arrived at its 
 present position, he recognized the working of 
 him, not ourselves, making for righteousness. 
 He 
 
 " Doubted not that thro' the ages one increasing purpose 
 
 runs, 
 And the thoughts of men are widen' d with the process of 
 
 the suns." 
 
 The po'et must be God-intoxicated, and God- 
 intoxicated was Swing. His liberalism therefore 
 was of true fiber. Atheist is not liberal. Atheist 
 at best is the scavenger that removes mud and 
 dirt and filth. But to plant the flowers more is 
 needed than the dung-hill and what the dung- 
 hill holds. To woo the flower into beauty there 
 needs much more than the phosphates there 
 needs the seed of the flower. Has atheism ever 
 scattered seed or ripened fruit? It owns what 
 the garbage box can furnish and nothing more. 
 
 Yea, the truest, the most liberal men are God- 
 intoxicated. Many churches may idol a God that 
 is not God. If atheism is content to be protest 
 against this fetichism one may bear with it, 
 though not with its illiberal arrogance ! But when
 
 266 
 
 atheism would lay its heavy hand on the altar of 
 nobler truth and on the truer service unto the 
 living God, shall sound forth the warning: " Stay 1 
 lest thy hand be paralyzed," as was the hand, in 
 the story of the Bible, of him who touched impi- 
 ously God's own ark. God is. Such is the wit- 
 ness of the ages, their song and prophecy. And 
 this God the liberal this God our Professor 
 Swing did preach Sunday after Sunday. This 
 beautiful world is not the play-ground of blind 
 chance, but is the symbol of a mind all engrasp- 
 ing, and the sign of a love all enfolding. 
 
 And this life can not be the end, is the second 
 stanza of the poet's lay of hope. This is also the 
 assurance of the thinker whose philosophy would 
 complete the segment visible into the whole 
 circle ! Kant, a second Columbus, in his discovery 
 of a new continent in the ocean of thought, a new 
 world conception, vaticinates, for all his pure 
 reason, of the immortality of soul; as indeed 
 every poet has sung it from the heart; every 
 troubled and perplexed mind crying out in the 
 night for the light has found in this hope comfort. 
 Our immortal friend, messenger of beauty, could 
 not believe and did not believe that after this life
 
 267 
 
 there would be less of beauty or less of light; 
 that sun and day would issue into primeval dark- 
 ness and gloom. If thought alone had not whis- 
 pered the brighter conception, his sense of beauty 
 would have led him on to know and feel that the 
 stars will twinkle on and the sun will shine on in 
 the beyond, wherever we may be. 
 
 But as in his God belief he did not dogmatize, 
 so in his immortality belief he did not presume 
 to draft the architectural design of that heavenly 
 home or to regulate the details of admission or 
 exclusion. He was impatient of all such arro- 
 gance. His poetic soul uttered its deepest convic- 
 tions, and in imparting them to man and world 
 he found stay and staff and satisfaction. 
 
 And he believed in Christ. Why should he 
 not? Who would deny that that name tokens for 
 millions the best that world has ever seen or will 
 see? But the Christ he taught was not a fact so 
 much as a force. It was not a Christ that once 
 had risen from the grave, but a Christ that is still 
 rising from the sepulchre. His gospel was not a 
 redemption that once had taken place, but a 
 redemption that is to take place now, every day. 
 The Christ, as preached by Swing, is one way of
 
 268 
 
 stating the belief, which is certainly ours, in the 
 continued life of love in man and through man in 
 humanity. Christ to the Christian is the sublime 
 formula hallowed by age and haloed by reverence. 
 The sterner reformer, perhaps, wielding the ax 
 which Abraham laid to the fathers' idols, might 
 not have used the old term. But blessed be his 
 use of the old term, for had he used another, many 
 ears would have been deaf to his message that 
 now were opened to the sweeter call of the better 
 future through the Christlike life and the Christ- 
 like power for all the eternities. And he believed 
 that in the personal Jesus was foreshadowed the 
 peace of all good to be; he was certain that the 
 words which fell from the lips of the prophet of 
 Nazareth contained in an intensity shared by the 
 words of no other mortal the essence of the 
 divine, that the one life in Jerusalem and the one 
 death on Golgotha were type of the life of 
 humanity and its death unto a newer and nobler 
 life. 
 
 Christ is, after all, an ideal. Each one has 
 his own God, and each one builds his own Christ. 
 I have a Christ in whom I believe, and so have 
 you. We may perhaps not call it with a Greek
 
 269 
 
 name, "Christ" we may use the old Hebrew 
 word " Messiah 1 ' ; but whosoever would from the 
 imperfect proceed to the perfect, must be filled 
 with the messianic spirit! Swing construed for 
 himself his Jesus. The critical scholar of the 
 German school may, perhaps, have shaken his head 
 and had this to object to and that to find fault 
 with; arid the old orthodox, perhaps, may have 
 joined the liberal of the Dutch and German uni- 
 versities and pointed out here want of logic and 
 there want of definiteness. What mattered that 
 to the poet ? The artist painted a Christ so per- 
 fect that whoever beheld his face was lifted up 
 and inspired. The Christology of Swing, as 
 much as anything that he did, belongs to the 
 domain of the arts, and Canon Farrar, writing 
 his book on Christ, as conceived by artists, might 
 add a chapter on the Christ conception of Swing. 
 Happy the age that treasures his Christ con- 
 ception. Happy the generation that is eager to 
 behold this bright ideal outlook and uplook into 
 the possibilities of a redemption of man as 
 pointed to by the poet whose harp is, alas! now 
 broken, and whose song is, alas! now hushed in 
 silence.
 
 270 
 
 The theologian was but the frame of the man, 
 and the man eclipsed in his glory the theologian. 
 Not that Swing was not yeoman or did not take 
 yeoman's part in attack or defense. His rapier 
 was sharp at point and at edge, but so good a 
 fencer was he that when he thrust the opponent 
 felt no pain. 
 
 He was a great humorist, and withal a 
 keen satirist. The poet of beauty makes light 
 of the faults of men, of the small touches 
 of black that at intervals discolor a beautiful 
 field of glow. The world is beautiful, and life 
 is unto beauty, and God leads the world unto 
 justice, and Christ rises from the grave to free 
 men from the shackles of slavery. Why, then, 
 lose patience with the faults and follies of men ? 
 Let us laugh them away. This is the natural 
 conclusion of the poet temperament, and so our 
 poet preacher laughed the faults of men away 
 and the frailties of women. In his polemics, his 
 humor and his satire, keen and sharp, and yet 
 unoffending, stood him in good stead. Who has 
 characterized the ingrained stolidity of current 
 theology better than he did even in his last utter- 
 ance? It travels in an ox -cart when all other
 
 271 
 
 thought is whirling along in an electric chariot. 
 An ox -cart may be said to circuit the world in 
 twenty years but an electric chariot covers the 
 distance in eighty days perhaps, and we would 
 rather go with the electric chariot than with the 
 slow and steady ox cart. So might be piled one 
 upon the other countless quaint but telling effects 
 of his humor, all classic in construction and 
 barbed to have results which the bolder attack 
 of passion can not boast, even in its greatest suc- 
 cesses. 
 
 It almost goes without saying that our lamented 
 guide and teacher was never so eloquent as 
 when he pleaded for justice; that his sympathies 
 bubbled forth a crystal spring to refresh those 
 that were down-trodden. As Jews, especially, 
 owe we a debt of gratitude to his memory. He 
 spoke for us when there were but few to speak. 
 He pleaded with those who degraded their Chris- 
 tianity, who, professing to be Christlike, were 
 demonlike, robbed human beings of all that could 
 help their humanity. When the tidal Avave of 
 misery, sent on its errand by Russian cruelty, 
 swept across the ocean to our shores, he bade the 
 refugees welcome, denouncing with flaming tongue
 
 272 
 
 a system of church and statecraft which could 
 rob of home and almost of life millions of our 
 brothers. 
 
 And so he pleaded for the negro in the South r 
 for the evicted in Ireland ; wherever persecution 
 raised her hydra head and from serpent tongue 
 hissed forth its poisoned message of distrust, he 
 pleaded for the larger love. 
 
 He was a patriot. His sympathies embraced 
 the world, and yet he understood full well that 
 the large universe is a great stellar family in 
 which each planet has its own orbit and its own 
 elliptic, the ideal being the center, the sun, around 
 which each one in its own path, but in company 
 with the others, doth travel. So humanity is not 
 made up of bare men it is made up of men in 
 historic communities and under historic condi- 
 tions; is made up of men that have a family, 
 that belong to a town, that are gathered in a 
 state, is made up of men that belong to a nation. 
 And we belong, this he felt, to the American 
 nation one of the missionary nations of the world 
 if she were true to her divine appointment the 
 ensign bearer of liberty and of love. Ah, he 
 loved this America and gave the best he had to
 
 273 
 
 give of thought and of passion to the glorious 
 banner of the Union. 
 
 His sermons may not have been models of 
 theological construction. They may not have 
 passed muster where the professor of homiletics 
 reviews the exercises of pupils; but children of 
 beauty, they carried conviction and thus directed 
 aright the better inclinations of the human heart 
 to love humanity and still not to forget country, 
 family, state, nation and city. 
 
 And he had also a peculiar mission and posi- 
 tion among us in these days of social distrust and 
 social strife. We are all inclined to believe that 
 the rich man, as such, has been and is in unholy 
 league with all the satanic powers of hell. In the 
 middle ages it was current superstition that stone 
 might be turned to gold by alchemistic practices. 
 There may be many to-day that argue that one who 
 scales the height where money and wealth are 
 found treasured, must be the confederate of Meph- 
 istopheles or an adept in Mephistophelian arts and 
 sciences. It was his mission to show the other 
 side of the picture; that not necessarily with wealth 
 goes want of character; that wealth is an oppor- 
 tunity to which some are true, as poverty is an
 
 274 
 
 opportunity to which some alone are true. He 
 had been schooled in the hard college of a hard 
 struggle in early days struggle for bread, a 
 struggle for the bread of life, physical, mental 
 and moral, and certainly his sympathy was with 
 the stragglers; but as he had risen why should 
 not everyone rise ? He believed in energy of self. 
 He believed in the saving power of sobriety, in 
 thrift, and in economy. He did not believe, and 
 no one believes, that there is a royal road to ease 
 and to peace, which 'we need but travel to make 
 the goal; and thus, as the speaker of a society 
 representative in its composition of the best in the 
 city, he spoke to his friends of their duties to those 
 outside of their circle. But to those outside he 
 emphasized the knowledge, too, that not, as their 
 distrust would lead them to believe, was the mill- 
 ion always emblem of want of character or slug- 
 gishness of sympathies and of heart. His last 
 message to us is indeed an appeal to be true to 
 the American principles of liberty, of right and of 
 duty of regard one for the other. Perhaps in 
 the din and in the confusion of the battle now 
 raging, so sweet a voice as his would have been 
 drowned. Perhaps a sterner clarion note is needed
 
 275 
 
 to stir the rich to action and the poor to reflection ; 
 to despoil the impostors that now shame the sun- 
 shine of our liberty, perhaps a stronger light is 
 needed than that soft beaming beacon of love and 
 of beauty which was his; but in his swan-song is 
 undying accent of truth. It is for us to translate 
 that note into the louder appeal of duty and obli- 
 gation, would we save our institutions in this hour 
 of danger. By those who heed Swing's words 
 our country will be lifted on the road to its final 
 triumph the solution of the social problem on a 
 basis of equity and justice. 
 
 Is, now, his going from us a loss ? It is, and 
 it is not. I saw a picture this very summer in 
 honor of a great sculptor, charmed on canvas by 
 as great an artist of the brush. Surrounded by 
 his very works, lies on the bed of glory, the 
 couch of death, the sculptor who framed into life 
 in chaste marble the children of his genius. His 
 breaking eye is kissed in the last lingering light 
 of the setting sun by a fair nymph, the latest of 
 the artist's productions. What did the painter 
 intend when in this wise he gathered around the 
 death -bed of the sculptor all the works his fertile 
 chisel had executed? Certainly this: the author 
 of these children of the muses their father in
 
 276 
 
 .the flesh may be transplanted, but they that 
 with kiss send off him who made them, the 
 nymphs, remain to beautify and inspire, to lift up 
 others by informing them of him who hath gone. 
 The great and good man's love remains and his 
 works abide. Swing is not dead to us. 
 
 He does not belong to that long procession of 
 the great and the glorious that I beheld this sum- 
 mer on a canvas made prophetic by the imagin- 
 ation of a great painter a long procession of the 
 mighty of earth Alexander, Napoleon, Frederick 
 the Great, all riding on in stately pageant over 
 the bodies of dead and dying, and above them 
 these monarchs and despots who sent unto death 
 the thousands, the very flower of their nations 
 'over them with averted face and weeping eyes 
 stands the Christ. In this procession Swing has 
 no place. He was a man of peace. How beauti- 
 ful on the mountain tops are the feet of him who 
 announces peace on earth. He belongs to another 
 procession over which the Christ hovers, but to 
 'bless and not to weep; to those that made man 
 better, not by the baptism of blood, but by the 
 waters of purity and love and devotion and 
 beauty. His works remain. He has not gone 
 from us, and the immortality he so often put
 
 277 
 
 into sweet rhythm he himself is proof of. Is 
 he not immortal? Some one has said, and has 
 said it rightfully, Swing is the great gulf stream 
 a gulf stream of influence. This influence will 
 travel on as does the gulf stream, speeding be- 
 calmed ships, warming cold climates, tempering 
 the winds for those in the grasp of a torrid sun, 
 but preserving his individuality in the mighty 
 flow in the ebb and the tide of the ocean. A 
 gulf stream of influence for the best, for the 
 truest, the liberal thought of religion was he; a 
 child of the muses, son of beauty, translating the 
 speech of nature unto us, and transmitting the 
 messages of the ages unto us, foretelling the 
 glories of the future, speaking of the rising love 
 of redemption, of the beauty of the household of 
 God the Father, the unending life of each and 
 all, he is now, as he was in his life, the torch- 
 bearer of a better outlook into life, and of a 
 broader love to bind man to man, the children of 
 one God rising into the glories of one messianic 
 kingdom. "Thy kingdom come" was oft his 
 prayer. He has helped make that kingdom 
 nearer, more real to us. Blessed be his name. 
 row p-nx -or. "The memory of this righteous 
 one is a blessing." Amen.
 
 flDemorial Sermon, 
 
 preacbefc at plsmoutb Cburcb, Gbicago, bg TRc\>. Dr. 
 ffranfc "M. (Bunsaulus. 
 
 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that 
 bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good 
 tidings of good, that publisheth salvation, that sayeth unto Zion, 
 Thy God reigneth. Isaiah lii. 7. 
 
 WE need a line from the most rich and liter- 
 ary of the poets of the Hebrew nation to initiate 
 in our hearts, and especially in our speech, any 
 fitting recognition of the unique and precious 
 treasure which our city and our land have lost in 
 the death of David Swing. It is necessary, also, 
 that it be a verse of that poetry which describes 
 the ministry, not so much of a great ecclesiastic 
 clad in pontifical robes, or that of an urgent con- 
 tender for some revered proposition of belief, as 
 that of the prophet who, in the echoes of yester- 
 day and the din of to-day, perceives the soft and 
 chastened eloquence of to-morrow, if in any way 
 the passage may serve as a prelude to our thought 
 of him who, for a quarter of a century, stood in 
 the twilight, in the name of the ample dawn. 
 
 The words that will accord with our grief and 
 harmonize with our grateful sense of what God 
 
 278
 
 279 
 
 gave this city when he gave us David Swing 
 must also be full of a sincere and calm optimism. 
 They must radiate with that rapturous faith in 
 the triumph of goodness which rang like a vital 
 note through all his music. They must carry his 
 glowing assurance that the history of man is the 
 history of a divine progress. For this faith was 
 the sky under which his eye beheld the contest 
 of energies divine and diabolic, the eddies in the 
 stream of man's life that so often appear to testify 
 to a receding river, and, beholding them all, he 
 never faltered and never feared. 
 
 Words from any literature that may suit the 
 hour when we strew rosemary on the grave of 
 David Swing must open the mind toward that 
 gateway into the realm of ideas which is called 
 the beautiful, for, with him, as with the great 
 novelist, "beauty is part of the finished lan- 
 guage by which God speaks." And so I have 
 chosen the passage from Isaiah which I have 
 read: " How beautiful upon the mountains are the 
 feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that pub- 
 lisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings of good, 
 that publisheth salvation, that sayeth unto Zion, 
 Thy God reigneth."
 
 280 
 
 He himself has said: "There is no tribe or 
 race which is not aware of such a something as 
 the beautiful." Every race whose stream of 
 blood entered or influenced the veins of this prose - 
 poet contributed its highest aesthetic instinct 
 and commandment unto him. To his spirit, as 
 to Emerson's, "beauty was its own excuse for 
 being." He allowed no argument in favor of 
 what was ugly ; that which w as beautiful for him 
 needed no apology or praise. All his mind's 
 powers ceased to question the right of the beau- 
 tiful to be and to rule, at the moment this unfail- 
 ing eye found it beautiful ; and, at the instant of 
 his discovery that a thing was not beautiful, all 
 his own beauty of soul, with playful irony, 
 stinging sarcasm, and wealth of moral enthusiasm, 
 set itself for its destruction. He went through 
 our work -a- day world with a serene faith, like 
 that of Keats, that " a thing of beauty is a joy 
 forever;" and his vision of the immortal life was 
 the seer's picture of the survival of the beautiful. 
 Throughout his childhood, youth, and for twenty 
 years of his public career, he lived in the valley of 
 the Ohio, of all valleys the most sure to stimulate 
 and enrich this aesthetic sense. All through his
 
 281 
 
 sermons and essays we find pictures of what 
 nature gave to this singularly rich and suggestive 
 mind. They were criteria for years to come by 
 which beauty might be recognized. They were 
 facts so fair, and the fancies they inspired were so 
 glorious, as to make his pages of essays and ser : 
 mons true to nature and the soul in their truest 
 moods. The aching seed and the April shower, 
 the rich, black valley loam opening its wealth of 
 motherhood for the seed, the rose that hesitantly 
 met the earliest hour of June Avith fragrant kisses, 
 the bees, gold-corseleted, that live on the lips of 
 clover bloom, the long, green lines of corn, the 
 yellow, wavelike valley of wheat, the rosy fruit 
 of autumn, and the white snows of winter all 
 these come and go, as we think of the youth sit- 
 ting by the old fireplace and watching the play 
 of splendor in the flame, or, as in the brilliant 
 day, he labors or dreams in the field, or, at night 
 Tie broods beneath the white magnificence of stars. 
 It was all culture of the sentiment that says, 
 " life and conduct must be beautiful." At col- 
 lege, this child of Athens, who had been born 
 nearer the Ohio than Ilyssus, found his own 
 native Greece and wandered along the edge of the
 
 282 
 
 blue JEgean with Socrates and Plato, heard 
 Sophocles recite his tragedies and beheld Phidias 
 carve the Parthenon frieze; for he had a singu- 
 larly inspiring teacher who, then and there, gave a 
 new life and career to this soul who loved the 
 beautiful. In his own childhood's home with 
 those he loved, he had learned what his whole 
 life illustrated, and what Mrs. Browning has so 
 often repeated on his lips: 
 
 " The essence of all beauty, I call love; 
 The attribute, the evidence, and end; 
 The consummation to the inward sense 
 Of beauty apprehended from without, 
 I still call love." 
 
 But the Greek youth, nursed on Hellenic food, 
 was predestined, and now he was reinspired by 
 his study of Greek literature and Greek art to be 
 the apostle of the beautiful. To him evermore 
 the beautiful became good. He found the ethical 
 side of beauty. Professor Swing's spirit was too 
 spacious and too nearly full- orbed, not to find 
 within itself the experience which responded to 
 and identified itself with the ebb and fiow of the 
 tide of life and thought and achievement in all 
 the great nations. He had too sincere and truth- 
 ful a sense of the imperial value of righteousness,
 
 283 
 
 not to reflect, at some times very vividly, at all 
 times quite faithfully, the quality and message of 
 the Hebrew people to mankind. Yet the quality 
 of his nature, the attitude of his mind, the method 
 of its approach to truth was that of the Greek, 
 rather than that of the Hebrew. None knew bet- 
 ter than he that God had called these two peoples, 
 each to an unique task, in the bringing in of the 
 kingdom of God, which, to David Swing and to- 
 us, means the consummate achieving of the dream 
 of civilization. The Hebrew wrought for right- 
 eousness ; for this the nation was called to be a 
 royal priesthood. In quite another manner, as 
 characteristic of God's providence, as truly em- 
 phasizing the gift of the genius of the Greek, did 
 Jehovah call the Greek to a royal priesthood also. 
 He called the Greeks to be an intellectual aris- 
 tocracy, as he called the Hebrews to be a spiritual 
 aristocracy, and both did he call to minister unto 
 all humanity. In each case the unique and 
 precious stream flowed between banks of patri- 
 otic conviction. 
 
 The Greek was called to be an artistic nation; 
 his Sinai revealed the law of beauty. God called 
 the Hebrew to be "an holy nation;" his Sinai
 
 284 
 
 revealed the laws of righteousness. It is certainly 
 true that David Swing was a preacher of the mes- 
 sage of the Hebrew righteousness; but he ap- 
 proached it, lie loved it, he championed it as a 
 Greek. To him righteousness was the moral side of 
 beauty, and, looking upon his career and its gra- 
 cious influence, we repeat the Hebrew's words: 
 u How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of 
 him that bringeth good tidings." It was this Greek 
 spirit that made him able to so speak the "good 
 tidings" that his preaching was literature. He 
 knew the holiness of beauty. 
 
 So great, however, was the moral uplift of his. 
 nature toward a perception of and a yearning for 
 the supreme beauty " the beauty of holiness," as 
 the Hebrew poet names it that he was always 
 telling us: "It must be inferred that there is a 
 moral aesthetics which outranks the physical 
 forms of beauty. The moral kingdom does not 
 destroy the other empire. It is the old story of 
 i empire within empire,' ' wheel within wheel,' but 
 with this caution that moral beauty is the greater 
 of the two kingdoms. Moral aesthetics is what 
 our age now needs." This is what the Hebrew 
 singer had in mind, when he sang: "O worship
 
 285 
 
 the Lord, in the beauty of holiness." To this 
 the heart and eloquence of David Swing re- 
 sponded for eight and twenty years in our great 
 materialistic city; but it was a Greek, clad with 
 the splendor of a Christian knight, who uttered 
 his plea with all that sobriety of statement, that 
 artistic regard for the beautiful which made him 
 the finest essayist who has stood in the pulpit of 
 the nineteenth century. As we hear some more 
 Hebraic gospeler utter his Ezekiel-like oracles to 
 some valley of dry-bones, or listen to some evan- 
 gelist or reformer hurl his warnings or maledic- 
 tions against iniquity, remembering this sane and 
 refined soul, we say with that most Grecian of 
 recent anthologists: 
 
 " Where are the flawless form, 
 The sweet propriety of measured phrase, 
 
 The words that clothe the idea, not disguise, 
 Horizons pure from haze, 
 
 And calm, clear vision of Hellenic eyes? 
 
 " Strength ever veiled, by grace; 
 The mind's anatomy implied, not shown; 
 No gaspings for the vague, no fruitless fires, 
 Of those fair realms to which the soul aspires." 
 
 The unique and unimagined value of such a 
 man, holding so high a place in the moral culture
 
 286 
 
 of this community from 1867 to 1894, can not be 
 overestimated. When he came hither, filled with 
 the results of years of scholarly investigation, 
 alm with the vision given only to men of genuine 
 idealism and cultured faith, fearless in the superb 
 equipment of his learning, and trusting the whole 
 world and its interests to .the influence of truth, 
 as only the scholar and the Christian does, we 
 were just out of the thunder and moral dissipation 
 of a civil w r ar; huge fortunes had come as by 
 magic to men who scarcely considered the ideal 
 values in opportunity and influence which lie in 
 a single dollar; we were at the beginning of a 
 movement, in an industrial age, which has reaped 
 enormous profits by the employment and direc- 
 tion of human beings along the ways of material 
 progress; a city, draining its unexampled vitality 
 from a vast empire, was rising like a huge vision 
 before the cupidity and greed, the hope and 
 reason of the West. What a gift of God it was 
 that then there came to you a soul, a human heart 
 cultured to the perception of the valuelessness of 
 mere money and the supreme value of great ideas 
 and noble sentiments, a brain that was certain of 
 nothing so surely as that righteousness is moral
 
 287 
 
 beauty, and that this beauty is, or ought to be, 
 supreme! David Swing, at the opening of an age 
 of gigantic material advancement, through years 
 of persistently regnant materialism, in a city of 
 tremendous practicalism,has been one of the most 
 heroic and noble figures of our time ; for he has 
 been the scholar in the pulpit, the Christian in 
 society, the philosopher in our literature, and the 
 beloved citizen of the ideal commonwealth in all 
 our public and private policies. He has em- 
 bodied in himself the mission of the Christian 
 scholar. 
 
 What is the Christian scholar ? The Greek en- 
 souled with the genius of Hebrewdom. 
 
 He is the one being to whom life must always 
 appear both as a vision and as a duty. The order 
 of progress, now and ever, is, first, " the new 
 heavens," and then, " the new earth, wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness." Life, as a vision into 
 which have been gathered every noble idea, every 
 true sentiment, and every worthy purpose, with 
 all their victory and their hope a vision awfully 
 grand with the announcement that it hangs in the 
 heavens to be obeyed, glorified with the assurance 
 that it is to be realized on the earth this is the
 
 288 
 
 truest gift which years of instruction and study 
 may give to the scholar's soul. The scholar is 
 the deliverer of men. He is the sworn acquaint- 
 ance of something still more venerable than their 
 revering age, something more ancient than their 
 prudence, and into their solemn cautiousness con- 
 cerning tradition it is his to introduce the per- 
 manent which declines, because it needs not, their 
 endeavor to preserve its pedigree or to enforce 
 silence. The scholar sees the reality beneath all 
 appearance, and it is his prerogative and fortune 
 to furnish to the untrained his trained eye, that 
 they too may know that there is a sky above and 
 a river-bed beneath the flow of things. Where- 
 ever such a soul goes, there goes hope. He has 
 had the experience of nature in his science, the 
 experience of man with ideas and principles in 
 his study of history, the experience of man with 
 himself in his fearless study of the soul; and " ex- 
 perience worketh hope." To the hopeless man 
 who has seen his flag go out of sight as it fell 
 beneath the feet of wrong, he comes, to lead him 
 out of the atmosphere of momentary defeat to a 
 larger induction, and to bid him up and on. 
 Wherever such a soul goes, there goes resolute-
 
 289 
 
 ness and self-respect. Such a man, prophet and 
 oracle, has been David Swing. 
 
 It was the Christian scholar's message of the 
 infinite beautifulness and desirableness of truth 
 which he came to give. 
 
 His very manner and voice, his presence and 
 attitude, made his message more powerful as a 
 rebuke to our pretentiousness and self-satisfac- 
 tion, and a stimulus to our affection for high ideals 
 and God-like sentiments. He seemed to brood 
 wistfully, and often, with the whole statement 
 before him, carefully written out, he paused, hes- 
 itating to handle truth which had cost so much 
 and was so dear, with anything but reverent 
 care. He had worked an immense deal of ore 
 into coin before he rose to speak, and he knew 
 its worth too well, and man's need too surely, to 
 jingle it before human cupidity as a common 
 thing. But before he concluded his address, it 
 was all our own. 
 
 " He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
 Brought the age of gold again." 
 
 That voice filled its strange stops with the pecul- 
 iar quality of his view of life, the "sweet rea- 
 sonableness" of his message, the native music of
 
 290 
 
 his melodious soul ; and no melody of earth 
 ever seemed so varied in harmony or so increas- 
 ingly beautiful as its utterance. When I heard 
 him, I confess myself to have been under such a 
 spell as only the finest orators may create, while I 
 was saying to myself that this is not oratory at all. 
 His was the eloquence of self-command, of affec- 
 tionate confidence in his latest-loved truth, whose 
 beauty he was then showing to us, lit up by a per- 
 fect faith that the angel he modestly championed 
 would easily make her way in the world. 
 
 In the hour of his supreme power what re- 
 sources he had, what forces came into his grasp! 
 He had a finer humor than Beecher; it was radi- 
 ant atmosphere, never tumultuous with stormful 
 glee, but kindly, genial, an air in which the 
 laughter rippled o'er the soul as the water moves 
 when a swallow flies close to a quiet pool. In 
 that radiance, buds of thought opened, seemingly 
 without his touch, and unripe purposes grew 
 golden in the warmth and glow. He 'had per- 
 fect mastery of sarcasm and irony. They never 
 mastered him. In these rare moments of super- 
 lative power his good humor kept the sharp 
 edges from cutting a hair, while the blades
 
 291 
 
 flashed everywhither. Just at such an instant 
 in his appeal, sober common -sense, the strongest 
 faculty, or set of faculties which he possessed, 
 uttered its behest, while fancy and memory 
 played about the message as sweet children 
 about a gracious queen. More than any or all 
 of these, was the man who stood so quietly there 
 the dear friend, the high-minded advocate of 
 the good, the true and the beautiful urging us to 
 a security of faith, a sanctity of life, and a rea- 
 sonableness of conduct, like his own. Thus he 
 became his own best argument. It was the elo- 
 quence, not of speech, but of beautiful character. 
 What Lowell quotes to describe the speech of 
 the Concord seer may be quoted to describe him : 
 
 ' ' Was never eye did see that face, 
 
 Was never ear did hear that tongue, 
 
 Was never mind did mind his grace, 
 That ever thought the travail long, 
 
 But eyes, and ears, -and every thought, 
 Were with his sweet perfections caught." 
 
 It is often said that Professor Swing was not 
 a reformer, and that he possessed none of the 
 qualities and, therefore, had nothing of the career 
 of those heroic men who root up ancient and 
 wide-branched wrongs and create a reign of right-
 
 292 
 
 eonsness. He was a philosopher, not a trans- 
 former of institutions and laws. The fact is 
 that such a soul's contribution to the evolution 
 of goodness in the world is always of the high- 
 est importance. Ideas will always gather cham- 
 pions. Such a service as his is too likely to be 
 underestimated, because it is so fundamental and 
 so great. With a strange hesitancy as -to accept- 
 ing the conclusions of Darwin, our preacher's 
 mental method was that of an evolutionist. He 
 trusted the development of involved ideas. The 
 revolutionist always attracts more attention and 
 offers the picture of a more easily understood 
 courage. But there would never be a revolu- 
 tionist, if the evolutionist, whose plea is reason 
 and not a sword, whose appeal is to ideas that 
 render battles useless, were heard. 
 
 In the thick of the fight for some instantly 
 demanded righteousness, David Swing was not a 
 Luther, fiery-tongued and dust-covered as the 
 fray went on; he was rather an Erasmus, the 
 temperate, calm scholar who had already whetted 
 the sword for a Luther's strong hands and held 
 its fine blade ready for his service. But he was 
 never beset with the cautiousness of Erasmus.
 
 293 
 
 No Erasmus would ever have lield the moral sense 
 of the same community for all these years. He 
 was Erasmus and Melancthon in one*. His shy 
 and clear- eyed soul reminds one of our own 
 Emerson, whom Wendell Phillips, in the angry 
 warfare where he was using Emerson's ideas as 
 fine Damascus blades, called " that earthquake 
 scholar at Concord," of whom also Lowell has said : 
 " To him more than to all other causes together did 
 the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sus- 
 taining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so 
 touching in every record of their lives." From his 
 benign place of culture David Swing has sup- 
 plied epigrams which have become battle cries to 
 many souls, who, in the turmoil, are fighting the 
 good fight, to w r hose successful issue he made the 
 contribution of victorious ideas. He lit the bea- 
 con and has kept it burning, so that, in the con- 
 test of right against wrong, of intelligence against 
 ignorance, of nobility of character against the 
 vulgarity which exhibits its coat of arms or its 
 wealth, the soldier of truth might not mistake a 
 foe for a friend, or lose the path of triumph. 
 His was the thinker's heroism the finest in the 
 life of man. He feared not the consequences of
 
 294 
 
 any truth ; he feared only a comfortable lie, or a 
 popular blunder. He was more than a Falkland 
 with a Matthew Arnold to praise him, and to for- 
 get the lonely hours of Sir John Eliot and Hamp- 
 den. He never cried peace where there was no 
 peace. He always, somehow, got his word of 
 cheer to the beleaguered army of truth, even if he 
 were not with them at the hour of their captivity. 
 With the thinker's courage he trusted to the 
 predestinated dominion of ideas, not only the 
 fortunes of society, but also the future of the com- 
 monwealth and the hope of man. Not the light- 
 ning that smites and cleaves, still less the thunder 
 that rolls and amazes, his was the soft and per- 
 vasive sunshine, bearing the secret fate of the 
 summer and traveling with the molten snows, 
 
 O ' 
 
 falling silently upon the icefields that gleam and 
 shimmer as they slowly drip into the harvests of 
 the future. 
 
 He has lived for living ideas and generous 
 sentiments, the exquisitely true statements of 
 which are so generously left on his pages that 
 they are sure to be in the hearts and on the lips 
 of the men of to-morrow, and all this because of 
 his serene faith in the native supremacy of the
 
 295 
 
 good, and the true, and the beautiful. This 
 exalted and broad faith has given him breadth of 
 interest and largeness of theme, and an unerring 
 touch, as he has dealt with life's variety of prob- 
 lems. Above controversies, he has been so lofty 
 as to provide for controversialists who would fain 
 find the truth, the keys which unlock her treasure- 
 houses. Our text describes him " beautiful on 
 the mountains," where a large view enabled him 
 to see valleys of life running into one another, 
 roadways, seemingly opposed in direction, gradu- 
 ally and surely tending toward each other. Often- 
 times he would come down close to the hearts of 
 the mistaken and debating searchers for truth, 
 and usually he came to show them that each pos- 
 sessed some truth or ideal needed by the other, 
 and that the pathway to righteousness and God 
 was wide enough for them both. 
 
 Such a supreme faith in the good and the 
 true and the beautiful made his eye quick to dis- 
 cern its presence or absence in all places. He 
 was therefore a wise appreciator of art, in which 
 this Greek loved to behold a Hebrew lesson on 
 righteousness, a penetrative and comprehensive 
 critic of literature, whose treasures lay at his
 
 296 
 
 feet, a patriotic and sympathetic thinker in pol- 
 itics, which he would have baptized with Chris- 
 tian idealism, a true and broad-minded champion 
 of religion, which heknewto be the noblest concern 
 of all human life. One could not read with him 
 "The Grammarian's Funeral" of Robert Brown- 
 ing, and see the face of David Swing, as he lived 
 and toiled with the scholarship which made the 
 renaissance victorious, without thinking, if he 
 had actually been one of that age, he would have 
 found such a grave also. But our Professor was 
 more than one who "ground at grammar." 
 
 The mighty renaissance with which he had 
 to do, and in the study of which the importance 
 of his personality, its spirit and its gentle strength 
 appear, has proved itself the greatest event in 
 the history of religious thought since the Refor- 
 mation. The Oxford movement, under the fascin- 
 ating leadership of Newman, never reached 
 beyond the English and American Episcopal 
 churches and the Roman Catholic church, in 
 whose fold the leader found a home. At that 
 hour there was afoot, under Maurice, Kingsley 
 and Stanley, a movement in England, inspired 
 by Coleridge, fast putting on robes of poetry in
 
 297 
 
 the lines of Tennyson and Browning, which, at 
 a later hour, was sure to find responses here in 
 the hearts and minds of such men as Beech er, 
 Phillips Brooks, and David Swing. Earlier than 
 either of his great contemporaries, Professor Swing 
 saw that this was the renaissance of the Greek 
 spirit in theology. 
 
 A lover of that ancient Rome where Greek 
 literature still ruled her orators and poets, our 
 Professor never could sympathize with mediaeval 
 and theological Rome. The Almighty God and 
 his government, as treated by the theologians of 
 Rome, for nearly two thousand years, whether 
 Catholic or Protestant, were only a huge Roman 
 emperor exalted to omnipotence and an empire 
 where Roman justice and power alone were 
 supreme. Orthodoxy had been partial to these 
 thinkers, for Rome had been the seat of ortho- 
 doxy. Orthodoxy had, therefore, been fragment- 
 ary; outside of her accredited formularies were 
 other truths quite as necessary for a full statement 
 of Christianity. For example, the view of the 
 atonement called orthodox was sympathetic with 
 ideas of divine government borrowed from the 
 Roman government; and as that government's
 
 298 
 
 view of justice and humanity was not exhaustive, 
 so that theory of the atonement was partial, if 
 not untrue. Against this, as well as against 
 views of the inspiration of scripture and the the- 
 ology which dogmatized as to the fate of the 
 wicked, the Greek spirit rose in him to utter its 
 word; not to fight, for this is not the business of 
 ideas, but to utter its life as a flower expresses 
 itself in fragrance and beauty, to initiate a gen- 
 uine renaissance, a re-birth of hidden and for- 
 gotten truth. The whole movement of theology 
 in the nineteenth century has been a re-uttering 
 of this Greek spirit. Augustine, Athanasius, and 
 Cyril of Jerusalem have yielded to Origen, Chry- 
 sostom, and Clement of Alexandria. Our Greek 
 poet-preacher, uttering his too long delayed truth 
 in preachers' prose, has proved himself a worthy 
 successor of him who was called " golden - 
 mouthed " at Antioch, and him who was named 
 by Jerome, "the greatest master of the church 
 after the Apostles." 
 
 As Emerson left the church whose life he 
 inspired as has no theologian of our age, so David 
 Swing retired from what was a battlefield, to give 
 all sects the benignant and untroubled illumina-
 
 299 
 
 tion which was the radiance of his soul. With- 
 out the impulsive eloquence and massive move- 
 ment of Beecher, but with more than I^eecher's 
 calm and propriety of utterance ; without Phillips 
 Brooks' vision of the whole human heart and his 
 abounding religiousness of devotion to Jesus of 
 Nazareth as the revelation of God, David Swing 
 performed a service like theirs, to all religious 
 interests, in emancipating the mind of our time 
 from the establishments of piety and the formu- 
 laries of a partial faith. 
 
 Such men are always called heretics. The 
 truth is, they are the men of faith. They are 
 those who do not believe less than the reactionary 
 who would try them, or the conservative who 
 distrusts them; but they believe more not the 
 same things and more things beside but they 
 believe more. When David Swing denied that 
 God was limited to the methods of government 
 mentioned by the Westminster Confession, he 
 had a larger and more truly evangelical belief in 
 God than his opposer. To-day the church of his 
 boyhood comes to his grave, and one of her most 
 eloquent orators embalms with odorous spices the 
 heretic of yesterday. Intolerance is the only rad-
 
 300 
 
 ical unbelief. No man has so little real faith as 
 he who believes that God's truth needs his police 
 duty to *keep it alive, or to protect it from being 
 stolen. 
 
 When these men first spoke, critical wiseacres 
 were pointed to the ruddy east; but they answered 
 that some one's house was on fire, and forthwith 
 they sought to extinguish the flame. It was the 
 dawn inextinguishable and glorious. Fear- 
 lessly, that movement which reddens the whole 
 Orient may be trusted. It will journey on to 
 complete the noontide. Looking at it, one sees 
 that it is God's presence in man's deeper, larger 
 faith. 
 
 "And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn, 
 God made himself an awful rose of dawn." 
 
 His interest in theology sprang from such a 
 root as gave him a profound interest in the prob- 
 lem of society. He confronted it with the same 
 principles, asked of its dogmatists the same ques- 
 tions, and answered its demands with the same 
 faith. Just as he declined to believe in and 
 preach a gospel of despair which left a less lov- 
 ing God than Christ on the throne of the universe, 
 so he declined to believe that the best civilization
 
 301 
 
 will permit capital to grow rich by child -labor, 
 and lawlessness to destroy public order. His 
 unmoved faith in God, and man under God's love, 
 is at the basis of a dream of a better society, just 
 as it was at the basis of a truer theology. 
 
 The idea of God was Christianized in his 
 deeper confidence; the same transformation must 
 come to the life of man here below. As the vis- 
 ion of Christ, saying: "He that hath seen me 
 hath seen the Father," changed the conception of 
 God, and made man a worshiper of the uni- 
 versal Fatherhood, so Christ in the life of man 
 will change methods and bring about a universal 
 brotherhood. What makes for a true theology 
 makes for a true, sociology. "No Christ-like 
 soul," he says, "will consent to walk along 
 through life or to heaven without wishing to 
 drag all society with it to the sublime destiny." 
 
 This deep faith made him the lover of men 
 whose personal creeds were divergent from his 
 own and whose methods he could not have 
 adopted. It was enough that they were bringing 
 in the better day. Full of admiration for the 
 philosopher and scientist, he nevertheless said: 
 "It is not Comte or Tyndall who must plead
 
 302 
 
 Avith the begrimed miners of England; it is 
 Moody and Sankey." He could trust any man 
 whose soul was acquainted with the large truths 
 of the Nazarene, because he trusted them. " The 
 truths of Christ's reform," he said, " possess that 
 impulse which comes from their lying outspread, 
 not only in the light of earth, but in that of 
 eternity." 
 
 Perhaps his proclaimed vision of Christ was 
 not inclusive of all the lines which love and wor- 
 ship have made for yours; but I never heard 
 him more earnest than when he said to one who 
 wished to substitute a paganism for Christianity: 
 "Even could we draw from the classics or Hindoo 
 world a complete definition of manhood, we 
 would seem to need a Christ to enable the human 
 race to realize the dream betrayed in the defini- 
 tion." "The cross is only an essential prelude to 
 the new life." Perhaps his humor lit up the true 
 features of some doctrine so dear to you that you 
 mistook the kindly light for his repudiation of 
 truth. Doubtless he saw more clearly those 
 truths of which little is said in creeds; but this, 
 at least, is true: the confession of faith he per- 
 petually uttered and preached is made up of the
 
 303 
 
 sweetest hopes and the most frequently spoken 
 commandments which moved the lips of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 Of unique and pervasive beautifulness of 
 nature, of large and living scholarship, of most 
 thorough religiousness of mind, of genuine Ameri- 
 can fiber and faith, he lived with us and died 
 among us, the most beloved of our citizens, if not 
 the most distinguished; the most poetic of the 
 prophets who has not left his life in his verse; 
 the most genial and philosophical of American 
 essayists, who was always a priest of goodness ; 
 our soul's friend, to whom we say: "Hail and 
 farewell."
 
 IRev, Gbo0, C. 1baU'0 tribute, 
 
 A great sorrow has fallen upon many hearts 
 this week. A former pastor of this church has 
 been taken to his rest. A beautiful and sunny 
 life has come to a peaceful close, and the memo- 
 ries and sweet associations of a long ministry now 
 gather about an open grave. Professor David 
 Swing was too well-known a figure among you to 
 need any description or eulogy from my lips ; but I 
 would not do justice either to my own or to 
 your feelings, were I not to pay a tribute to the 
 love and gentleness of the life that has passed 
 away. It is most striking, that, in all that is 
 being said of Professor Swing, the remarkable 
 intellectual gifts which were his are passed over so 
 largely, in order that men may emphasize again 
 and again his love and sweetness. These quali- 
 ties of his were not born of ruddy health and 
 prosperous condition. Pain was his familiar 
 companion, and carefully had he to watch him- 
 self that his work might not suffer, but he seldom 
 spoke much of himself. His high classical attain- 
 ments and complete familiarity with the Latin
 
 305 
 
 poets are rarely met with to-day, but he spoke 
 very modestly of them, and they were only means 
 to the end he had in view. His message was 
 of a full sweet forgiveness through a Father's 
 redeeming love, and he couched that message in 
 words of singular beauty, and illustrated it from 
 an imagination quick to all the perfect in nature 
 or in art. There was Christian refinement in 
 every finished product of his pen, and the glow 
 of a loving heart was felt through all his periods. 
 No one was more adept in the art of gentle satire, 
 but it was chastened and controlled as few men 
 so possessed succeed in controlling their gift. A 
 charming humor played over much that he wrote, 
 but it only seemed to enhance the seriousness 
 and depth that will make his writings a fund 
 of moral inspiration for all time. 
 
 Professor Swing saw clearly. His mind worked 
 rapidly and thoroughly. He did not permit him- 
 self to become entangled in his own explanations. 
 He saw many things a good while ago that men 
 are only now dimly perceiving. He gave his 
 message, found his place, and leaves now a great 
 city incalculably poorer for his departure. He was 
 a splendid citizen, and loved Chicago. In a con-
 
 306 
 
 versation with him, had not long ago, I lamented 
 some things that make our streets unattractive. 
 He acknowledged the weakness, but with that 
 characteristic hopefulness that made him so 
 strong in doing his work, he said: "You are 
 young. You will see our work tell on these 
 streets as it gradually tells on the character they 
 iigure forth." He had great faith in the power 
 of love and in the receptivity of the human heart 
 for its healing power. He believed in love lived 
 out, not simply professed, and, if sometimes impa- 
 tient with creeds, he seldom lost his power of 
 sympathy with the heart behind a creed, no mat- 
 ter how distasteful the creed might be to him. 
 
 Nothing was more noticeable about Professor 
 Swing than the extreme quietness and unobtru- 
 siveness of his manner. He did not seek notori- 
 ety, nor did he seem much to value praise. He 
 desired only opportunity to give his message and 
 to serve. And he served faithfully. He was a 
 pastor to many hundreds who had no more claim 
 upon him than that they had read his sermons or 
 knew his name. 
 
 Into many houses of mourning he came with 
 his own personal message of love and hope and
 
 307 
 
 confidence. He thought kindly of all, and his 
 gentle judgments were the sincere outcome of 
 his charitable view of life and men. This quiet 
 confidence in the real underlying goodness of 
 humanity was no mere sentiment with him, but 
 was born of a profound conviction that God was 
 really redeeming humanity, and that into the 
 poorest, meanest life there was being inbreathed a 
 diviner and a nobler being. This was the ground 
 conception of his philosophy and his theology. 
 Not that he overlooked sin or underestimated 
 unrighteousness and wickedness, but that he fixed 
 his eye upon a redeeming love shed abroad in 
 the hearts of men through the message of Christ's 
 gospel. Indeed, his heart was often stirred by the 
 treachery and unrighteousness that surrounded 
 him, but he would soon find rest again in the 
 hope of the future and his confidence in the final 
 outcome. In speaking of this to me one day, he 
 said with much impressiveness: "Why should 
 one judge life by its lower phases, or one meas- 
 ure your faith by its low water-mark of depres- 
 sion? I may lose confidence in humanity for 
 one hour out of the twenty-four, but it is the 
 other twenty-three hours of faith inhumanity, 
 in which I will do any work for it."
 
 308 
 
 He often spoke of the necessity of living on 
 the level of our nobler inspirations, and, amidst 
 the trials and difficulties, many of which were 
 unknown to all but an inner circle, he wonder- 
 fully succeeded in keeping his teaching keyed 
 up to a very high pitch of lofty inspiration born 
 of a divine faith. In his later days he had a 
 certain sense of loneliness. Many, of those whom 
 he had known, and known intimately, had passed 
 before him through the silent portals that have 
 closed forever on his own spirit. And he had 
 planned to associate with him, this winter, a few 
 of the younger men, who gladly would have 
 gathered about him to share his experience and 
 learn from him. But the Great Master desired 
 it otherwise, and his spirit is lonely no more, 
 but rejoices in the fellowship of unnumbered 
 believers and is ever present with his Lord. 
 
 The lessons of his life are many and very 
 sacred. Many of you will lay them to heart as 
 you learn them from lips more competent than 
 mine to interpret them to you, but the broad, full 
 message of a saving, redeeming love, working 
 out, in sacrifice and praise, its mission and its 
 task, is the lesson he would most have you, mem-
 
 309 
 
 bers of the church to which he once ministered, 
 lay most to heart. He believed in Christ as the 
 friend of the friendless, the teacher of the igno- 
 rant, the Savior of the lost, and the hope of a 
 despairing world. It was as Christ was formed 
 in him the hope of glory, that he became a teacher 
 of his time, and a prophet of a -fullness of salva- 
 tion to be worked out through Christ.
 
 {Tribute of IRev, 2>r. 1b, TO, Gbomas, 
 
 Ipastor of tbe people's Cburcb. 
 
 In whose heart are the highways of Zion, 
 
 Passing the valley of weeping, they make it a place of springs. 
 
 Ps. Ixxxiv. 5-6. 
 
 It can never cease to be a strange and impress- 
 ive fact, that the years of man on earth are so 
 few. He comes not to stay ; but to " pass through " 
 this wonderful world. He would gladly linger 
 beneath its skies, rest by its streams, work and 
 study longer upon its great tasks and problems. 
 
 But he is hurried along from youth to age; 
 from cradle to tomb. The countless generations 
 of the past have looked out upon the same conti- 
 nents and oceans wandered and wondered 
 beneath the same stars; have laughed and wept, 
 loved and sorrowed "passed through" this scene 
 and mystery profound passed on to the infinite 
 beyond; and of all the millions living now 
 soon all will be gone, and other lives will have 
 come to fill their places. 
 
 Such a strange order and conditioning of the 
 conscious life of man, naturally, necessarily, gives 
 to his thought and work a forward looking and 
 
 310
 
 311 
 
 movement. He can not, if he would, go back; 
 the path behind him is cut off; closed to himself, 
 but open for others. Only in memory may one 
 live over the years that are gone. History may 
 prolong the backward vision of what has been in 
 the long past; but one can not be a child, a youth 
 again can not stand again in the glad years that 
 are gone. The only path upon which the feet 
 can move lies before, stretches on into the ever 
 strange and new of the coming to-morrow. 
 
 Not alone is it impossible to recall the years 
 that are gone, but impossible to change them, to 
 do anything to make them other or different from 
 what they were. When one reads of the wars, 
 the slaveries, the persecutions, the wrongs and 
 sufferings of centuries ago, the soul rises up in 
 protest, and would gladly go back and fight the 
 battles over again; rescue a Joan of Arc or a 
 Bruno from the stake, or change the sad ending 
 of a William of Orange. But man stands pow- 
 erless to undo the sad yesterdays of his world; 
 he can atone for his own nearer wrongs only by 
 making better each to-day. 
 
 This cutting off of the past, this impossibility of 
 going back and undoing what was, holds man's
 
 312 
 
 whole life and being in what is, and projects it 
 into the larger possibilities of what may be, 
 gives a forward looking to those " in whose hearts 
 are the highways of Zion," that, "passing through 
 the valley of weeping, they may make it a place 
 of springs." 
 
 And when the mystery of this strange fact of 
 the few passing years of man on earth is studied 
 more deeply, whilst it is still true that one can 
 not go back and undo what has been, there arises 
 the larger thought and fact of the continuity of 
 individual and world life in which the good is 
 conserved, the evil left behind. 
 
 In the individual life and consciousness, child- 
 hood and youth are not lost, but carried forward 
 into the years and strength of manhood and wo- 
 manhood. Our childhood, our youth, is still a part 
 of ourselves; play has changed to labor; the "a, 
 b, c's," the "one, two, threes," are with us in the 
 books we read and the numbers we calculate; 
 lisping speech has become a language; obedience 
 in the home has opened the way to the larger 
 world-order; lessons of truth and right have 
 become great principles in the life of morals and 
 religion.
 
 313 
 
 And what is so evidently true in the indi- 
 vidual experience is true, in another sense, in the 
 larger life of our one human family. Each 
 passing generation leaves to those who follow in 
 its steps the paths over which it has journeyed, 
 the work it has done in conquering land and 
 sea, its progress in the industries, arts, sciences, 
 language, literature, and the institutionalized 
 forms in which these have taken shaping. The 
 childhood of the world was carried forward into 
 its youth, and this into its manhood. The mill- 
 ious who "passed through" this strange scene 
 of learning, doing and becoming, "had in their 
 hearts the highways of Zion,"and helped "make 
 the valley of weeping a place of springs." 
 
 Civilization has been carried along the great 
 "highways" of all industrial and business pur- 
 suits; homes, cities, schools, temples of justice 
 and religion have arisen; the great inventors 
 have facilitated labor and travel; the lovers of 
 liberty have toiled to make men free; the lovers 
 of art have filled the world with the beautiful; 
 the lovers of music have filled the world with 
 song; the lovers of justice have tried and are try- 
 ing to adjust the inequalities of the social order;
 
 314 
 
 the lovers of reason have striven to make this a 
 rational world; and the lovers of religion have 
 toiled and are toiling now to make the earth a 
 vast world-home of souls, of brotherhood, of 
 love and prayer and hope immortal. 
 
 Whatever may be the thought or hope of man 
 about a life beyond death, race -continuity of the 
 millions in this world for ages to come is not 
 doubtful. So great is the rejuvinescence of the 
 life forces of our human world, that its youth is 
 ever rising out of its age. War, famine, pesti- 
 lence have carried away countless millions; the 
 earth has to be re -peopled nearly three times in 
 each century; but, through all, race -continuity 
 endures, and with ever increasing numbers. 
 
 It took Germany one hundred years to recover 
 from the "thirty years war," but Germany is 
 greater to-day than ever before; and, with Alsace 
 and Lorraine gone and forty thousand German 
 soldiers camping in her midst, France rose up and 
 paid a billion dollars in gold. In the third of a 
 century since the rebellion a new generation of 
 men and women, young and strong, have come 
 into the great life of our own country. 
 
 Facing this fact of race -immortality, a great 
 and near motivity comes into the life of man.
 
 315 
 
 He "passes through" the strange scene; but he 
 lives on in the life of children and country. 
 Men die; institutions live, industries live, thought 
 lives, truth lives, right lives; love, hope can not 
 die. Hence there is the great inspiration, the 
 altruism of the continuity of race life, race im- 
 mortality; the othering, the enlarging, the pro- 
 longing, the re-living of self as a conscious part 
 of world or race life. 
 
 Nor is this larger vision poetic, speculative. 
 How can reason cease to be reason, or love cease 
 to be love ? How can they drop out of or cease 
 to be a part of the true, the good that is eternal ? 
 Oh ! not for a day, but forever, is the thinking, lov- 
 ing, hoping life of man; and not far away are 
 the blessed dead, but more deeply and divinely 
 than ever alive, and living in the deathless reali- 
 ties of the real, and, like Moses and Elias with 
 the transfigured Christ, coming back and sharing 
 in the great events and interests of the world in 
 which they once lived and toiled. 
 
 "Are they not all ministering spirits sent 
 forth to minister to the heirs of salvation?" 
 "Seeing, then, that we are compassed about with 
 so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with 
 patience the race set before us."
 
 316 
 
 It should not seem strange that in this forward- 
 looking of a world there are those, "in whose 
 hearts are the highways of Zion," and that, " pass- 
 ing through the valley of weeping they make it 
 a place of springs." All nations and religions 
 have journeyed to some ideal of the better. With 
 the Jews it was embodied in their Zion, their 
 Jerusalem. The prophets hastened on before to 
 climb the mountain tops and catch the light of the 
 greater years; the priests lingered behind to 
 organize, to build temples and minister at altars, 
 to found and conserve institutionalized forms. As 
 the prophets caught the larger truths and life of 
 the spirit, the highways of Zion were in the soul, 
 not in ritual observances; and they would make 
 of all the earth a Zion, a Jerusalem, a vast empire 
 of souls filled with righteousness. To such a Zion 
 all the paths of a noble loving life were great 
 "highways" along which all souls might gladly 
 journey; but the Scribe, the Pharisee, the narrow 
 dogmatist would close all the shining highways 
 of a great rational religion of humanity in this 
 tearful world, and leave open only one narrow 
 dark way to a little walled -in heaven for a few 
 little souls; and for these, not because of any per-
 
 317 
 
 sonal worth or merit, for what they had tried to 
 be and do, but saved by a divine decree, and 
 imputed merit and righteousness of another. 
 
 A great preacher and prophet of God, one 
 "in whose heart were the highways of Zion," 
 and who " passing through the valley of weeping 
 made it a place of springs," has gone from our 
 city and our world. No more will he stand in the 
 pulpit to which the many thousands have gladly 
 gathered in the last twenty years. Our dear Pro- 
 fessor Swing has " passed through the valley of 
 weeping." This is his first Sabbath in the tearless 
 land. His poor body, that can suffer no more, will 
 be carried by those who stood by him in life to the 
 church where he has so long taught the great 
 truths of a great religion; but that voice is silent 
 now. 
 
 Of this great preacher it can be truthfully said, 
 " in his heart were the highways of Zion; " not the 
 little Zion of priest or sect ; not the highways of 
 narrow dogmatists; but the Zion of God, and the 
 highways of the true, the beautiful, the good. 
 
 He saw the great truths. To this man of God 
 was given the clearer vision. He saw the great 
 truths of Christianity, hidden and almost lost in
 
 318 
 
 the maze and obscurity of the old Latin theology. 
 He saw the doubts that were burdening the faith 
 of his age. He saw the highways of reason and a 
 rational religion. He heard the voice of God say- 
 ing: "Son of man, prophecy, speak, teach;" and, 
 prophet -like, he was true to the vision, counted 
 not the cost, thought not of the trouble that 
 was to come that the old vessels could not hold 
 the new wine, and that he must go out from his 
 old church home and find a free pulpit in which 
 to be a free man free as the truth makes free 
 and lovingly to preach the truth as he saw it. 
 
 The prophet is always far in advance of the 
 priest. Standing on the mountains, he sees the new 
 morning, while the priest stands down in the shad- 
 ows, and is trying to make fast, and to bind relig- 
 ion to the thought of some long ago. Professor 
 Swing was the prophet ; Dr. Patton was the priest. 
 The one stood for the "truths of to-day;" the 
 other for the mistakes of yesterday. 
 
 The prophet stood in the clearer vision of the 
 divine; the priest stood for a confession of faith 
 formulated two hundred and fifty years ago, when 
 the church was busy, burning witches. The priest 
 had back of him these old interpretations or
 
 319 
 
 declarations of what the minds of that time 
 thought to be true. These were held up as author- 
 ity, and the statement was boldly made that the 
 question of their truth or falsehood was not in 
 debate. The only question was, Did Professor 
 Swing believe them? If not, the doctrine was 
 that he had no right to remain in a church built 
 upon them and pledged to their support. 
 
 Technically, legally, such a position may be 
 well taken ; but it makes the thought of the past 
 a finality, cuts off the possibility of progress, 
 leaves no room for the growth of ideas, no place 
 for the new and larger faith of man in all the 
 great and better years of the future. In every- 
 thing else there may be progress; religion alone 
 must stand still. And, more than this, such a 
 position not only binds the reason of man to a 
 special interpretation of the- Bible in effect puts 
 it in place of the Bible but it emphasizes this 
 special form of faith as the essential thing in 
 religion makes creed greater than life. 
 
 And thus the great trial for heresy came had 
 to come. Standing in the light of truth, the 
 prophet could not unsay what he had said. Stand- 
 ing by the altars of creed, of authority, the priest
 
 320 
 
 demanded strict conformity to law. Good men 
 sought the mediation of larger toleration and per- 
 sonal liberty, but in vain. With all his greatness 
 of intellect, sweetness and beauty of life, Professor 
 Swing was pushed out of the Presbyterian Church 
 as a heretic, and Dr. Patton was honored, extolled, 
 petted and rewarded as the " defender of the 
 faith." 
 
 And each, from his standpoint, was right. The 
 true man can be true to himself and to truth, only 
 as he stands by what to him is true. The great 
 preachers can not be bound by majority votes and 
 decisions. They must be free in the world of truth, 
 and stand with open face before God. Such was 
 Professor Swing, as simple, as honest, as humble 
 as a child, and utterly incapable of mental trickery 
 or duplicity. He could not deceive himself as to 
 his own real beliefs, and he would not deceive 
 others. Judged by the standards of orthodoxy, he 
 was not orthodox. He did not claim to be. He 
 did not accept as literal the story of the fall of 
 man, did not believe in the doctrines of original 
 sin, substitutional or penal atonement, and endless 
 punishment ; but he did believe in the great truths 
 of the new theology, lived in the great spiritual
 
 321 
 
 verities of religion, and felt that a great Christian 
 Church should be large enough to hold the think- 
 ing of its children, and tolerant enough not to 
 oppose their highest conceptions of truth. 
 
 From Dr. Patton's standpoint the church had 
 the truth had all it ever could have. Orthodoxy 
 was the only and final statement, and this it was 
 the duty of the church, at any and every cost, to 
 defend. If really sincere in this, there was only 
 one thing to do. That one thing he did do, and, 
 in doing it, if his theory be accepted, he per- 
 formed a high and sacred duty and was worthy 
 of all praise. 
 
 But is the theory correct ? Is there no truth 
 outside of orthodox churches ? Will these churches 
 continue to claim a monopoly of salvation ? Great 
 changes have come in the world of thought in the 
 last twenty years. The new theology is taking 
 the place of the old. The heresy of yesterday is 
 becoming the orthodoxy of to-day, and the larger 
 and better faith is finding its way into nearly all 
 the great pulpits. Will the churches turn out 
 these prophets of the new age ? Will the prophets 
 be true to the voice and vision of God and the 
 growing thought and need of a world? These
 
 322 
 
 are the questions that are still troubling the ortho- 
 dox churches. They have claimed too much. 
 They hesitate to make concessions, and yet are 
 powerless to stay the great world -movement of 
 the new truth and life. Even the conservative 
 Gladstone, seemingly not knowing what others 
 have written and said along the lines of his 
 own thinking, has come to the higher view of 
 the atonement. 
 
 Professor Swing has helped to make plainer 
 "the highways of Zion " the highways of a great 
 reasonable religion; helped to make easier the 
 path for other feet, and to bring nearer the great 
 church of humanity, in which all minds shall be 
 free to learn and to grow, and all hearts shall 
 rejoice in the blessedness and joy of a religion 
 of love and hope. In that great soul there was 
 room for Jew and Christian, Catholic and Protest- 
 ant, Orthodox and Liberal; for he saw all as 
 children of the one Father, and saw a good life as 
 the meaning and end of all these forms of faith 
 and worship. Hence he had only kind words for 
 all. 
 
 In the heart of this great preacher were the 
 highways of the beautiful. He loved nature and
 
 323 
 
 art, loved continents and oceans, mountains and 
 valleys, lakes and rivers, flowers, trees, the sky and 
 stars above. He saw, in all, the presence and 
 goodness of God. To him the vast world was a 
 beautiful home. He loved pictures and statuary, 
 music and literature. In that great soul were all 
 the highways of love and kindness. He bowed 
 down at the altars of life, and could not harm 
 or hurt the meanest creature. He loved bird 
 and animal, friend and stranger, man and God. 
 
 " Passing through the valley of weeping," such 
 a noble, toiling life has helped "make it a place 
 of springs." From a mind, clear as crystal, have 
 poured forth streams of purest thought and liter- 
 ature; from a heart of love, springs of kindness 
 have made gentler the life of man, and flowed on 
 down to bless the poor brute world, and fountains 
 of life have risen up to the throne of God. He 
 has lived and pleaded for everything good; has 
 been light in darkness, comfort in sorrow, hope in 
 despair, to minds and hearts unnumbered, un- 
 known. 
 
 Great preachers add honor to cities and nations. 
 Milan had an Augustine, Florence a Savonarola, 
 London a Spurgeon, Brooklyn a Beecher, Chi-
 
 324 
 
 cago a David Swing. That name, stricken from 
 the pages of a Presbytery and Synod, was written 
 quickly and forever in the heart of humanity. 
 We are lonesome, the world is poorer, that he is 
 not here. It was so unexpected. We hoped he 
 might live and work on to the end of the century. 
 He belonged to us all. There is such a feeling of 
 absence, of vacancy, of something gone, as if 
 some sun -crowned height on which we had often 
 looked had suddenly dropped from its place 
 among the mountains; but, in form transfigured, 
 glorified, he will not be far away, but near, in the 
 deathless world of memory, of love and hope, till 
 the valley of weeping is passed through. 
 
 We sorrow with his family and with his church, 
 and pray that some one will run forward and lift 
 up the banner carried so long, but dropped in 
 death by this great preacher and teacher. Noble 
 friend, prophet of God, caught up to the heavens, 
 farewell, till the night is passed and the morning 
 dawns.
 
 an Estimate of the Cbaracter ant> Work 
 of E)avifc Swing. 
 
 JBg "Rev. Jfre&ericfc B. Hoble, 2>.2>. 
 
 'Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live 
 forever?" Zach. i. 5. 
 
 For a period of more than twenty years David 
 Swing has had a conspicuous place in the life of 
 Chicago. Like the merchant princes who have 
 grown up here, and the manufacturers of wide 
 renown, his name and fame have come to be 
 closely identified with the name and fame of our 
 city. Few are the intelligent men, especially in 
 this land, who have known of the activity and 
 growth of this vast metropolis, who have not 
 known something also of the celebrated Music 
 Hall preacher. He spoke to large numbers from 
 Sunday to Sunday, and the printed page pro- 
 longed his voice and carried his words afar. 
 
 Now that his remarkable career is ended, and 
 his work is done, save in such subtle and abiding 
 influences of it as death has no power to arrest, it 
 seems good to pause long enough by his closed 
 casket to acknowledge his excellencies and to 
 pay such tribute as is his just due, and to come 
 
 325
 
 326 
 
 to some well-grounded conclusions touching the 
 value of the services he rendered to religion and 
 society. So much was done in this pulpit when 
 announcements reached us, in turn, that Beecher 
 and Spurgeon and Brooks had ceased from their 
 labors and passed into the heavens. Pursuing 
 a similar course with reference to Professor Swing, 
 I shall attempt this morning to tell the story, in 
 brief, of his life, and to make as intelligent and 
 candid an estimate as I may of his character and 
 work. 
 
 Many things in the make-up and method of 
 Professor Swing are much more readily under- 
 stood when it is known that he was of German 
 descent. Like all of the higher type who are 
 Germans, or who have German blood in their 
 veins, he was cosmopolitan in his appreciations 
 and sympathies, and could easily enter into fel- 
 lowship with the representatives of every nation- 
 ality; but there was a peculiarity in the working 
 of his mind and the expression of his thoughts, 
 which differentiated him from the pure Scotch- 
 man, or the pure Englishman, or the pure French- 
 man, and indicated kinship with the marvelous 
 people whose modes of apprehending and pre-
 
 327 
 
 senting truth are at once searching and pictur- 
 esque, subtle and poetic, and whose genius has 
 illustration on the one side in the mystic creations 
 of Jacob Bohme, and on the other in the sublime 
 productions of Goethe. 
 
 But the German strain which left its impress 
 on his intellectual and moral nature brought him 
 neither social distinction nor wealth. Like Car- 
 lyle, like Livingstone, like Paton, like Garfield, 
 he was born to poverty. Not to abject poverty. 
 For as Mr. Blaine showed, in his great oration in 
 commemoration of his murdered chief, there is a 
 wide margin of difference between the poverty of 
 those who, while straitened in outward circum- 
 stances, are yet self-respecting and intelligent and 
 virtuous and aspiring, and those who, not having 
 anything, are quite content to remain as they are, 
 and who from generation to generation live on in 
 a state of dependence and often of degradation. 
 
 To add to the embarrassment occasioned by 
 limited means, his father was swept away by the 
 scourge of cholera which visited Cincinnati, the 
 place of Swing's nativity, in 1832; and the child, 
 so full of unknown promise, was left a half- 
 orphan while only two years of age.
 
 328 
 
 It calls for no extraordinary exercise of the im- 
 agination to picture the struggles through which 
 this mother, said on all sides to have been an 
 exceptionally earnest, faithful, and devoted Chris- 
 tian woman, must have passed in order to keep 
 her home unbroken, and her two cherished boys, 
 David and his brother, comfortably sheltered and 
 clad and fed. God is on the side of such mothers, 
 because such mothers are on the side of God; 
 and somehow they are led through their trials, 
 and in due time society sees them emerging from 
 darkness into light. Like another Cornelia look- 
 ing into the upturned faces of the two Gracchi 
 and declaring them to be her jewels, one can 
 think of this Ohio mother as often looking out 
 upon the breadth and splendor of wealth about 
 her, and then taking these two sons by the hand 
 and exclaiming in quiet triumph, "These are my 
 possessions." 
 
 At the end of five years, the Cincinnati home 
 was abandoned, and a new one was formed out 
 in the country. Three years later, or when young 
 Swing was ten years of age, there was still 
 another change of location, and, in virtue of this 
 change, the lad was to have eight consecutive 
 years of experience on a farm.
 
 329 
 
 Farming in the West is so unlike farming in 
 the East that one brought up on a hillside of 
 New England can not be sure that handling tools, 
 and managing cattle, and sowing and reaping, and 
 building fires, and mending fences, and going to 
 mill, mean exactly to him what they mean to one 
 whose agricultural training was on the prairies or 
 in the river valleys of this wide and fertile interior 
 of our land. But all that is best and most signifi- 
 cant in the experience they share in common. 
 East or West, the boy on the farm lives the larger 
 part of his active life out under the broad open 
 sky. He grows familiar with the varying hues 
 and shapes of clouds and the sweep of storms. 
 He smells the fresh odor of the mold when 
 the furrow is turned, or the hoe finds its way to 
 the roots of weeds. He observes with delight 
 the unfolding of vegetation from the time when 
 the seed swells and bursts through the crust of the 
 earth till maturity has been reached. He watches 
 the procession of the flowers, and very soon is 
 able to predict what new beauty in each succeed- 
 ing spring day will greet the eye, and what new 
 fragrance will be in the air, as he goes forth to 
 his toil. He gets on good terms with the birds,
 
 330 
 
 and quickly understands in what order swallow 
 and bluebird, and sparrow and thrush, and robin 
 and oriole and bobolink, will make their appear- 
 ance in tree-top and glen. He becomes familiar 
 with the moods of horses and sheep and cows, 
 and in instances not a few comes to have a deeper 
 insight into human nature from what he knows 
 of brute nature. The whole realm of the exte- 
 rior world, with its suns and its stars, with its 
 revolving seasons and growths, with its varied 
 forms and forces of life, is open to a youth whose 
 daily tasks take him to field and pasture and gar- 
 den, as to hardly any other youth. Some of the 
 sweetest and most pathetic of his songs Robert 
 Burns would never have left us, had he not fol- 
 lowed the plow, and seen daisies ruthlessly turned 
 under the sod, and poor, timid little mice scam- 
 pering away in fright, because their nests were 
 invaded and destroyed. Those eight years on 
 the farm meant much beside mere physical health 
 and strength to the live brain of David Swing. 
 
 The eight years of farm life, however, came ta 
 an end, and at the close of these years, in addi- 
 tion to the other things he had done, and the 
 other benefits he had gained, the young man
 
 331 
 
 was found to be fitted for college. The work 
 had been done by a Presbyterian minister, who, 
 quite likely, had put the thought of going to col- 
 lege into the boy's head, as well as helped him to 
 realize it. Miami University was the institution 
 chosen for pursuing a classical course. It is 
 needless to say that the college at Oxford forty 
 years ago was not what it is now. When this 
 boy entered it, it had been a college only six- 
 teen years. In the nature of the case it could 
 not afford such amplitude of facility for educa- 
 tion in all departments and branches as some 
 of the older and more richly endowed institutions 
 of the East ; but people who decry colleges because 
 they are small and young, and think it foolish to 
 have attempted to establish so many of them, 
 especially in states and territories west of the 
 Alleghanies, know little of what they are saying. 
 Had it not been for this small college, or for 
 some other small college not far away, where 
 expenses were light, and with teachers in its sev- 
 eral chairs well able to go to the heart of ancient 
 learning, and to deal intelligently and courage- 
 ously with the modern problems of life, it is a 
 question which hardly admits of more, than one
 
 332 
 
 answer, whether this active-minded and aspir- 
 ing young man would ever have found his way 
 into academic halls. It is certain that all about 
 us there are men by the score and score, who are 
 eminent in their professions, and who are making 
 splendid records of usefulness, who never would 
 have got their start without the aid of the small 
 colleges. Perhaps there is no moral which the 
 life of our dead preacher points more distinctly 
 than this. 
 
 In the way of early biographical details, it 
 remains simply to say, that after young Swing 
 had graduated he studied theology, for a couple 
 of years, under the direction of the Rev. Dr. 
 Rice, of Cincinnati. Before completing full 
 preparation for the ministry, however, he was 
 called to occupy the chair of Greek and Latin in 
 his Alma Mater. This chair he filled for some- 
 thing like a dozen years. He might have re- 
 mained there to the end had he been willing to 
 stay; for his teaching was exceptionally suc- 
 cessful. He reproduced ancient scenes, and 
 handled the grea.t thoughts of the great minds 
 of the old Greek and Roman nations, with an 
 appreciation and an enthusiasm which kept his
 
 333 
 
 own soul aglow, and fired with high heat the 
 souls of those who waited on his instructions. 
 
 Twenty-eight years ago Professor Swing came 
 to Chicago. From the day he arrived and took 
 up his work, till the day he died, his name has 
 been a household word in this community, and 
 his sayings and doings have been recognized fac- 
 tors in the development of our common life. For 
 almost three decades he has been a voice in the 
 midst of this people, giving out the truth in such 
 form and manner as he conceived it to be truth, 
 sometimes expressing and sometimes molding 
 public opinion, but always commanding attention. 
 Among his adherents -his popularity never waned, 
 and the interest strangers took in hearing him 
 increased rather than diminished. His career 
 was unique, and his success was phenomenal. It 
 is easy to recall the names of men who have main- 
 tained themselves on independent platforms, but 
 there is no case exactly parallel to this. 
 
 What now is the secret of this unique career? 
 In what quarter shall we look for the explanation 
 of a success so marked ? 
 
 We shall miss it. immensely if we attribute it 
 all to his liberal views, and to the interest which
 
 334 
 
 the outside world, through its newspapers and 
 platforms, and otherwise, is wont to take in one 
 who is supposed to be at irreconcilable odds 
 with orthodoxy. This was one element, and a 
 very controlling element, of the esteem in which 
 he was held in the popular heart and of the 
 attachment with which multitudes clung to him. 
 But it was only one. He had merits quite outside 
 and beyond all those which men are in the habit 
 of associating with that courage of conviction 
 which is sufficiently defined and robust to dissent 
 from commonly accepted views in religion. He 
 was a man of rare gifts and rare acquisitions. 
 
 1. To begin with, much is to be set down to 
 the purity and loftiness of his character. He 
 was not sweet-tempered merely, and loving and 
 kind and helpful merely; but he was a man so 
 clean and elevated in his life, so ideal in his 
 thoughts and words, and habits, and tastes, and 
 associations, that it seems almost like an imper- 
 tinence to commend him for the possession of 
 high moral qualities. These qualities were so 
 much a part of him, they entered so vitally into 
 his personality, that one can not think of the man 
 without thinking of him as the embodiment and 
 expression of an imposing uprightness of soul.
 
 335 
 
 Such character, as a certificate of sincerity, and a 
 re -enforcement of what one says and does, can 
 hardly be over-estimated. When William M. 
 Evarts was once asked to account for the strong 
 hold Dr. John Hall had taken on the people of 
 New York, his prompt answer was, "His superb 
 character." Character tells. The loftier the char- 
 acter, the more positive and far-reaching the 
 influence of the man who possesses the charac- 
 ter. If the character be defective, especially if it 
 be defective to the point of falseness, the words 
 one speaks, though they be brilliant as flashes in 
 the northern sky, will be wingless, and as weak 
 as the chatter of a group of imbeciles. One can 
 think of a man in an eastern city, who had excep- 
 tional abilities and a large following, and who 
 broke away from the old faith and set up on an 
 independent basis, but who came to quick col- 
 lapse because his character was discovered to be 
 bad. One can think of a man in a western city, 
 who has marked capacity of thought and speech, 
 and who has sought to make of his free opinion 
 a working capital; but his questionable charac- 
 ter has wrecked him. Professor Swing had an 
 unimpeachable character.
 
 336 . 
 
 2. In addition to this high type of character, 
 Professor Swing was magnificently equipped for 
 the kind of pulpit work he was to do. He had a 
 cast of mind peculiar to himself, and to many 
 people exceedingly interesting; but this was not 
 all. He had a well -disciplined mind, and a full 
 mind. He knew things. Science had brought 
 him treasures of knowledge. History had poured 
 her vast wealth at his feet. Literature had 
 opened its choicest pages to his eager search. 
 Philosophers and poets and quaint and unheard- 
 of authors had taken him into their fellowship 
 and whispered their secrets in his ear. Remem- 
 ber, he had his early out- door training, of which 
 he made much, and his college preparation, 
 which was exceptionally good because he made 
 it so; and his four years in the university 
 were years of golden opportunity coined into a 
 splendid record; and his two years of special 
 theological study and training with an eminent 
 minister; and then, plus all this, he had twelve 
 years of life in a professor's chair, which he used 
 to such advantage in his own discipline and devel- 
 opment, that Greek and Latin came to be to him 
 almost like a mother-tongue, and Homer and
 
 337 
 
 ^Eschylus and Vergil grew well-nigh as familiar 
 to his thought as Shakespeare and Milton and 
 Whittier. His sense of the value of these old 
 classics was cropping out continually in his ser- 
 mons. His fondness for the Greeks and their 
 tongue was the fondness of a mother for her 
 children. Here is a paragraph from one of his 
 tributes of admiration : " The Greek language is 
 still almost an unsurpassed tongue. Eighteen 
 hundred years have added only a small area to 
 the scope of that vast speech. There is scarcely 
 a question of the present day discussed, that was 
 not reviewed by the Greek thinkers and stowed 
 away in their manuscripts. Their essays upon 
 education, upon health, upon art, upon amuse- 
 ments, upon war, read almost as though they 
 were written yesterday. Even that question 
 which seems our own, the creation and property 
 of this generation whether women should vote 
 and follow manly pursuits is all fully discussed 
 in 'Plato's Ideal Republic.' " 
 
 His information was both thorough and wide, 
 and he was master of it. He knew what had 
 been the achievements of thought in Egypt and 
 India. He knew the art of Italy. He knew the
 
 338 
 
 story of inventors and explorers. He knew the 
 triumphs and problems of modern research. He 
 knew what all the great writers of romance have 
 said and taught. 
 
 These vast stores of knowledge he turned to 
 account in his preaching. In a single discourse 
 one might often detect contributions of fact, or 
 reference, or incident, brought in from almost all 
 the lands and ages, and from almost all the realms 
 of. investigation and study. In this way, he 
 maintained an unflagging interest, and kept what- 
 ever he was saying bright with the flash of jewels 
 gathered from afar. He did not attempt to illus- 
 trate his speech with touching anecdotes, like 
 Spencer and Guthrie ; nor to punctuate his writing 
 with over-many crisp, sharp sentences, like Spur- 
 geon and Parkhurst; nor to create dramatic situ- 
 ations with which to surprise the mind, like 
 Parker and Talmage; nor to force all the vary- 
 ing moods of the heart, and all the wide experi- 
 ences of life to aid him in impressing his 
 thoughts, like Luther and Beech er; nor to bring 
 forward the stories and characters and striking 
 events of the Scriptures to point his periods, like 
 Hall and Taylor; nor to put a torrent of energy
 
 339 
 
 into his words to sweep them on from source to 
 sea with the irresistible and awful might of a 
 swollen river, like Robertson and Brooks; but, 
 for all this, he kept his utterances so alive with 
 present-day interest, and so illuminated with 
 light of star and reflection of flower, and so warm 
 with a half-suppressed passion, and so fresh and 
 beautiful with the garments of fancy which he 
 wove and threw over all his forms of thought, 
 that nobody ever grew weary or dull of mind 
 under his presentation of a truth. If his ser- 
 mons were not so much sermons as essays essays 
 on the model of Aurelius, or Plutarch, or Emer- 
 son, or Lowell it is still true that the wonderful 
 fascination and power of them, or a share of it 
 at any rate, must be sought in the masterly skill 
 and wealth of learning and poetic coloring he 
 was able to give them. 
 
 There is a lesson here for all who contemplate 
 entering the ministry. It is the lesson of thor- 
 oughness of preparation for the great work. If 
 a man has nothing in him, and no capability of 
 having anything put into him, and is nevertheless 
 determined to engage in the ministry of Jesus 
 Christ, let him rush into it. The quicker he goes
 
 340 
 
 in, the better; for the quicker he goes in, the 
 quicker he will get out. But just in the ratio in 
 which men have natural fitness for the high busi- 
 ness of preaching the Gospel, and are sincere 
 and earnest, and consecrated, do they need to 
 take time to discipline their minds and fill them 
 with knowledge. Had I the ear of theological 
 students, I should say to them: Read, read, read. 
 Read the great histories. Read the great poetries. 
 Read the great essays. Read the great biogra- 
 phies. Read the great romances. Read the 
 great results of science. Read other things ? Of 
 course. This goes without saying. But read, 
 read, and still read. 
 
 3. Professor Swing won the confidence of 
 large numbers of the best people of the commun- 
 ity, and brought them into close affiliation with 
 his teachings and suggestions, by the profound 
 and wise and helpful and unremitting interest he 
 took in social and ethical questions. His word 
 stood for pure, manly living in the individual ; for 
 sweet homes; for refinement and culture and noble 
 aspirations in social circles; for good schools and 
 good books and good music and good pictures, 
 and good habits; for high standards in business
 
 341 
 
 spheres; for clean politics and patriotic devotion 
 to the welfare of the state; for temperance, and 
 liberty, and humanity, and justice; for a fellow- 
 ship which should bind into one, as with cords 
 braided out of the love of God in Christ, the 
 weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, the 
 low and the high, and make them all feel the 
 sacredness and beauty of human brotherhood. 
 
 In no crisis in our city or commonwealth, 
 when sharp, ringing voices were needed on the 
 right side to keep men level-headed and stanch, 
 did he ever falter. When the red fla^ was lifted 
 
 o 
 
 up, and mad agitators wrote what amounted to 
 " divide or die" across their banners, and the 
 authorities were thinking more of the votes they 
 might want in some coming election than of the 
 peace and order they had solemnly promised to 
 maintain and the protection they had sworn to 
 afford, he threw the influence of his own name, 
 and, so far as he could, the influence of the con- 
 gregation he represented, into the scale against 
 anarchy. When waves of poverty and distress 
 suddenly rolled in upon us, a year ago, and 
 threatened to whelm us under their weight, he 
 uttered the most searching and courageous and
 
 342 
 
 helpful words which found expression in any of 
 our pulpits. He went to the root of the matter, 
 and, while urging the people to whom he spoke 
 to give of their abundant wealth to help the 
 needy, he did not hesitate to tell these wretched, 
 starving people just why they were wretched and 
 starving. . They had been sowing to the wind of 
 idleness and unthrift and self-indulgence and 
 intemperance, and they were reaping the whirl- 
 wind of want and woe. In the discourse deliv- 
 ered by him only a few weeks ago, from his desk 
 in Central Music Hall, his first for this new year 
 of work, and his last forever, he handled the 
 whole subject of our recent strike and riot in a 
 way to show how clear was his insight into pres- 
 ent conditions and perils, and how firm his grasp 
 on the principles which must be accepted and 
 followed, if peace is to be preserved, and labor 
 and capital are to be reconciled for good. 
 
 Whatever he did not find in it, Professor 
 Swing found in Christianity these two things: 
 He found the highest rule for the government of 
 individual conduct, and he found the highest 
 system of political economy which the world has 
 ever known.
 
 343 
 
 Here is a passage from a sermon in "Truths 
 for To-day:" "It would seem that Paul, in his 
 chapter upon Charity, was expressly describing 
 the perfect gentleman. 'Charity suffereth long 
 and is kind. Charity envieth not. Charity 
 boasteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not 
 behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is 
 not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth 
 not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth ; bear- 
 eth .all things, believeth all things, hopeth all 
 things, endureth all things.' ' 
 
 Having said this, he goes on to show that our 
 philosophers and political economists and states- 
 men have made, not only a very grievous, but a 
 very foolish mistake, in permitting their preju- 
 dices to come in and interfere with turning to 
 the Bible to find the foundation-stones on which 
 to erect a system for the regulation of the rela- 
 tions of man to man in society. "It has long 
 been a custom," so he says, " of philosophers, to 
 pass in silence any lessons of civilization upon 
 the pages of scripture, and patiently to seek and 
 deeply to love everything in Aristotle or Plato 
 a blossoming of prejudice only paralleled by the 
 Christians who despise everything from Plato or 
 Aristotle." This conviction deepened with him.
 
 344 
 
 He saw no rules to guide individuals and no 
 basis of good citizenship at all comparable to 
 those furnished by Christianity. 
 
 By his identification with moral causes, and 
 Ids uniform and earnest advocacy of righteous- 
 ness in all the relations of life, this man helped 
 to create a wholesome public opinion in Chicago, 
 and to keep thought and life at a higher level. 
 Immorality has been made to seem grosser, and 
 meanness meaner, and selfishness more contempt- 
 ible, and official corruption more criminal, because 
 of words spoken by this great and scholarly 
 preacher. What is not less to his credit, he has 
 had the courage to look men of wealth in the 
 face and tell them what, in virtue of their wealth, 
 they owe to education, to art, to philanthropy, 
 to the state, and to the uplifting of the masses 
 of ignorant and degraded and vicious humanity 
 with which they are daily jostled on the streets. 
 The tonic energy of this teaching will be missed 
 in the days to come. 
 
 4. Beyond all this, Professor Swing held with 
 a tenacious grasp to some articles of faith which 
 must have a place in any system of Christian 
 theology, and some of which, indeed, are vital 
 and fundamental to any system of religion.
 
 845 
 
 Like all men who have any intelligent thought 
 and convictions on the subject of their own exist- 
 ence, and their relation to the universe and the 
 powers of the universe which are about them, 
 he had a creed. It was not so long a creed, and 
 it did not comprehend so much as the creeds of 
 some other men. On the other hand, there are 
 creeds not nearly so long and not nearly so com- 
 prehensive. To accept one of his own latest 
 statements, he believed in God, and in the 
 immortality of the soul, and in the love of 
 Christ. This is not all there is to believe, nor 
 all that it is rational to believe; but when a man 
 accepts God in his personality and fatherhood, 
 with all these conceptions imply, and the great 
 doctrine of immortality as something inherent in 
 the soul and necessary to any exalted and worthy 
 idea of our natures, and the love of Christ as 
 being the purest and warmest and most trans- 
 forming love which ever finds its way into the 
 human heart and mingles with the currents of 
 human life, he has a basis of truth on which he 
 can stand and do a certain kind of very effective 
 work. Such a man, at least, can be a break- 
 water against incoming floods of materialism,
 
 346 
 
 and possibly hold back some doubting soul from 
 rushing on to the extreme limit and plunging 
 over the awful abyss of absolute and utter nega- 
 tion. There is no age and no condition in which 
 the assertion of things spiritual is not worth 
 much to mankind. We are of the earth, earthy; 
 but we are also of God, and may be godly. 
 
 This man who has just gone out from us never 
 wearied of avowing his faith in things unseen and 
 eternal, in mind over matter, in a soulhood 
 superior to the body, in God immanent in nature 
 but above and behind nature, and in realms of 
 existence which are invisible and everlasting. 
 Even here and no\v, he sees, just as the New Tes- 
 tament winters one and all saw, that one may 
 enter on this life of the inner over the outer, and 
 have foretastes of the ever- enduring. " Spirit- 
 uality!" he says: "This is nothing else than a 
 divineness of soul, a rising above things material, 
 gold and bonds and raiment, and living for the 
 soul in its relation to time and eternity. God is 
 called a spirit because there are characteristics in 
 all material things which separate them from 
 perfection. The word spirit is the ideal for the 
 everlasting. It is an embodiment of love, and of
 
 347 
 
 thought, and of truth, and of life, and hence is 
 felt to be immortal. The spiritual man is, hence, 
 a soul not wedded to dust, but to truth and love 
 and life. To be spiritually minded is life." 
 
 These are some of the excellencies to be dis- 
 covered in the teaching and life of Professor 
 Swing. In these excellencies lie some of the 
 reasons why the community at large put such a 
 high estimate on his services, and why so many 
 men and women were bound to him in bonds of 
 admiration and trust and love. 
 
 Why, then, not accept his system and method, 
 and make it the system and method for all? 
 Simply because, holding and uttering whatever he 
 did of truth, there are, as appear in reports of 
 his discourses, and in the popular apprehension 
 of his teaching, omissions of elements which are 
 central to Christianity as a method of redemp- 
 tion, and which enter essentially into the whole 
 scheme of truth which gathers about the cross, 
 and makes it a working force intent on the sal- 
 vation of all humanity. 
 
 The largest fact which it is possible for the 
 mind of man or angel to contemplate is God. 
 The largest fact of which we can conceive in con-
 
 348 
 
 nection with God is love. The most obvious 
 and obtrusive fact to be discovered in connection 
 with man is sin. This sin of man is everywhere 
 apparent, and it takes along with it a train of 
 unutterable vices and miseries and woes. In 
 Jesus the infinite love of God and the inexpressi- 
 ble sin of man are brought face to face and set 
 down at close grips. We have it all in the 
 matchless passage: "For God so loved the world 
 that he gave his only begotten Son, that who- 
 soever believeth on him should not perish, but 
 have everlasting life." Jesus the Christ is there on 
 the cross because man is a sinner and God loves 
 him and wants to save him. But Jesus is there 
 on the cross, not as a wholesome influence merely, 
 but as an expiation. Jesus Christ did not come 
 into the world to condemn men. He did not 
 need to do this. Men were condemned already. 
 They had condemned themselves by their own 
 alienations and transgressions. He came to 
 deliver them from their condemnation and save 
 them. He did this, so he himself tells us, and 
 so the inspired apostles tell us, by atoning 
 for men in a sacrificial and vicarious death. He 
 catne to be the ransom of men, their Redeemer,
 
 349 
 
 their High Priest, as well as their teacher and 
 example and brother. 
 
 On these two facts, sin and the awful guilt 
 and consequence of sin, and salvation through 
 the death of the Son of God on the cross, stress 
 must be laid. Not in the interest of a system 
 merely is this to be done, but in the interest of 
 the vitality and aggressiveness and saving power 
 of Christianity. Otherwise Christianity has no 
 energy in it to cope with the conditions of the 
 problem which confronts it. For it is not a few 
 refined people alone, a few cultivated and select 
 circles with their philosophical troubles and 
 doubtings, who are to be ministered to and saved; 
 but it is the people who are down at the bottom 
 as well, the people in the alleys and slums and in 
 the midst of the far-away barbarians, full of sin, 
 and ignorant and wicked and vile; and our system 
 of help must be one which will enable us to deal 
 effectually with the raw material of a wayward 
 and disloyal humanity. The problem is to get 
 men, men of all sorts and conditions, men of all 
 races and climes, out of sin into holiness, and 
 then to fire their breasts with the zeal of holiness. 
 In the long run, it will not do to leave out of our
 
 350 
 
 system the features and elements which exactly 
 suit it to this end. We shall not reach the end 
 if we do. 
 
 Twenty years ago, Professor Swing himself 
 said, "The impulse [to a good Christian activity] 
 is faith in Christ as the soul's Savior. It has 
 always been the power that has carried the Pauls 
 over the vEgean, or the pioneer Methodist to the 
 wilds of America. It has been the earthquake 
 force that has heaved up from a bitter sea a con- 
 tinent of unfading flowers and perpetual spring. 
 Each heart busy in any pursuit moves by a natural 
 impulse. You know what the love of pleasure 
 does, and you know what is accomplished by 
 Avhat the Latin poet calls ' accursed love of gold.' 
 Beneath all activity lies an impulse, a motive. 
 Under the vast movement called salvation, that 
 movement which to-day gathers the Laplanders 
 to a worship, and makes the Sandwich Islanders 
 join with the angels in sacred song; beneath the 
 movement which to-day is the best glory of all 
 civilization, under this vast renewal of the heart 
 lies faith in Christ, the impulse of all this pro- 
 found action. The least trace of infidelity lessens 
 the activity; unbelief brings all to a halt, and
 
 351 
 
 damns the soul, not by arbitrary decree, but by 
 actually arresting the outflow of its life. Unbelief 
 is not an arbitrary, but a natural damnation. 
 Faith in the Infinite Father, faith in Christ the 
 Savior, faith in a life to come, lifts the world up 
 as though the direct arms of God were around it 
 drawing it toward his bosom." These are great 
 words. They were true on the yesterday when 
 they were uttered. They are true to-day. They 
 will be true to-morrow and to-morrow. The 
 
 v 
 
 vital and aggressive force of Christianity lies in 
 souls redeemed by faith in a living Christ, and in 
 the propulsive energy derived from him. 
 
 In that same period of twenty years ago, Pro- 
 fessor Swing, in a sermon in which he felt called 
 upon to assert and defend a positiveness in Chris- 
 tianity as against the negation and emptiness of 
 what calls itself "free religion," spoke in this 
 strain: "The 'free religion,' so-called, which 
 denies our idea of prayer, dissuades from hymn 
 and from hope in a future life, does nothing but 
 empty the mind and the heart, and hence can 
 never build up a great life, unless emptiness of 
 soul is one of the foundations of greatness. All 
 the moral greatness of the past is based upon the
 
 352 
 
 assumption of such motives of God and worship 
 and immortality and benevolence and virtue and 
 duty. The great names all grew up out of such 
 soil. These propositions filled the old hearts 
 that made this great world we enjoy with its 
 education, its liberty, its morals, its religion. It 
 is too late, it seems to me, to ask mankind to 
 empty its mind of all these old, grand ideas, and 
 then expect a grandeur of character to spring up 
 from nothingness as a soil, and to grow in a space 
 which has no rainfall, no dew, no sunshine, but 
 which is only a vacuum. To expect a great 
 soul to germinate in a soil of negation, and grow 
 in a vacuum, is to cherish a frail hope; and yet 
 this is the prospect to which what is called ' free 
 religion ' is itself hastening and inviting us." 
 Words again which were true on the yesterday 
 on which they were pronounced, and which are 
 true to-day, and which will be true to-morrow 
 and to-morrow. It is a positive faith in a posi- 
 tive Christ, however the statement of it may be 
 phrased, which secures the soul in salvation, and 
 fills the heart with great aspirations, and stirs to 
 unselfish and heroic endeavors to brin^ the world 
 
 O 
 
 into reconciliation to God.
 
 353 
 
 But our talk must cease. A conspicuous figure 
 has disappeared from our streets and our circles. 
 One whose words were an inspiration to many 
 minds, and a guide to many feet, and a comfort to 
 many troubled hearts, will utter words on earth 
 no more. A loving and lovable man has gone 
 hence to his reward. He will be missed, amongst 
 large numbers sadly missed and mourned, in our 
 city, and far and wide. When some question of 
 vital moment has been up, and each has been 
 eager to know the opinion of the ripest minds on 
 the matter, it has been one of our first thoughts 
 to turn to the Monday morning papers to see 
 what Professor Swing said on the subject. But 
 this we shall do no more. Like others, here and 
 elsewhere, whose views helped to enlighten and 
 guide the popular mind, he has passed on into 
 the immortal spheres. 
 
 In a sermon of his on St. John, Professor Swing 
 makes these words the closing paragraph. Re- 
 peating them after him we say our farewell, and 
 bid him joy in the light and glory of the larger 
 world into which he has entered: "In the nat- 
 ural world we perceive that the Creator has pre- 
 pared a golden bed, into which, every evening, the
 
 354 
 
 sun sinks. * * * But God loves the human 
 heart more than he loves the stars. Hence, the 
 Savior came. St. John points out to us the 
 beautiful horizon where the soul goes down. 
 And when our friends who have loved God die, 
 when a humble child or a Christ-like statesman, 
 when beautiful youth or venerable manhood, 
 bid farewell to earth, and our tears fall upon 
 their dust, we behold best, in John's gospel and 
 dream, the golden couch that receives into its 
 peace these stars sinking down from the sky of 
 this life."
 
 Btsbop Samuel jfallowe. 
 
 t>e Speafes jf cclingl^ of bis association witb tbc XamenteJ> 
 preacber. 
 
 The death of Professor Swing is a personal 
 loss to thousands of people who were not identi- 
 fied with him in matters of religious opinion. 
 His broad sympathies united him with all classes 
 of his fellow men. His voice was always heard 
 on the side of charity, philanthropy, and reform. 
 He was always in the front rank of advocates, 
 when the interests of the people were concerned. 
 The w T arm words of cheer and prophetic utter- 
 ance, when the People's Institute was begun, will 
 not soon be forgotten by those who heard them. 
 His sermons were constructed according to no 
 isornetrical rules. They were beautiful, poetical, 
 moral essays, permeated with a spirit of religious 
 devoutness, adorned with the graces of a refined 
 rhetoric, and enriched with wonderful wealth of 
 literary allusion. His satire, though keen, was 
 never malignant. A kindly humor relieved it of 
 all bitterness. From conversations with Professor 
 Swing I believe that he was, in the main, orthodox, 
 in the comprehensive sense of the term. His 
 
 355
 
 356 
 
 passionate love of the doctrine of the freedom of 
 man, and its consequent liberty of individual 
 thought, threw, perhaps, out of its due relation in 
 his teachings, the complementary truth of the 
 sovereignty of God. But the great cardinal 
 tenets of the orthodox faith I feel sure he person- 
 ally held. But, as I have said, his discourses 
 were elevated essays rather than the usual style 
 of sermons. Doctrinal discussions he could not 
 bear, and did not present. Outside of the pulpit, 
 he was a fine, discriminating critic, and an accom- 
 plished litterateur. He was a man of contem- 
 plation rather than of action. But, by pen and 
 voice, he aided, with mighty words of well- 
 winnowed wisdom, the men of deeds. He was a 
 Melancthon and not a Luther. 
 
 Although occupying, by the force of circum- 
 stances, an independent position, he yet craved 
 the sympathy and fellowship which come with a 
 congenial ecclesiastical home. When a course of 
 sermons was being preached by leading divines, 
 in St. Paul's Church, on the distinctive tenets of 
 their various denominations, I requested Professor 
 Swing to preach one on the -subject of "Independ- 
 ency.' 1 In a very kind manner, but with a great
 
 357 
 
 deal of earnestness, he replied, "I do not believe 
 in independency and, therefore, can not defend it. 
 I am an independent not of my own choosing. I 
 would much prefer to be in harmonious affiliation 
 with others, in a church organization." Whatever 
 doctrinal differences there might be between us, 
 there was no abatement of uiy love and respect 
 for Professor Swing. The longer I knew him, 
 the deeper and stronger grew my affectionate 
 regard for him. A great and good man has gone 
 from us. Tender and gracious memories will 
 ever be cherished in my heart of his genial pres- 
 ence, inspiring words and uplifting li
 
 1Re\>, 1b* H. Delano, 
 
 Simplicity of "Religion as Eaugbt bs a (Steal Disciple. 
 
 I hesitate not to speak in terms of strongest 
 eulogy of this great disciple. The question 
 to-day of any man is not, did he deny the faith, 
 but did he live the life of God among men? 
 Professor Swing's life interpreted his faith. 
 
 As the Pike's Peak of our Rockies rises in 
 lofty and monarch -like grandeur above the range 
 of which it is a part, far above all the inferior 
 and vaunting or vaulting summits, so this man 
 rose among us alone, isolated, silent and majes- 
 tic, above us all. The ideal of a great future for 
 mankind marched before his mind constantly, a 
 cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, lead- 
 ing him, as Moses was led, toward the land of 
 promise. 
 
 His was a vision of a divine, though invincible, 
 hand, regulating all the vast laws of the universe 
 to splendid harmony, and insuring a divine con- 
 tinuity of history and events, all tending to man's 
 final good. His mind was full of dreams of the 
 things to come, things not yet seen, and, from out 
 
 358
 
 359 
 
 his visions of God, visions of man redeemed from 
 his littleness, he was always making the new 
 heaven and the new earth. 
 
 For the prosy and leaden interpretations of a 
 Puritan theology, for a harsh, vindictive and 
 exasperating Calvinism, for the narrowness and 
 bigotry which drew their line through every fair 
 garden and predestinated one half to woe, this 
 man had no taste, no fancy, and no sympathy. 
 And yet those who will read that memorable ser- 
 mon upon " Paradise Lost " will find the evidence 
 of his belief in a law of penalty and tears and 
 wretchedness for those who willfully run against 
 the edge of thorns binding every flowery path. 
 Against injustice, hardness, cruelty, and crime 
 his face was sternly set, yet, with a heart that 
 always took the offender's place, considered his 
 temptation, and weighed the circumstances. How 
 great, how magnanimous, how tender he was! 
 Like the bird that tarries long and sings sweetly 
 on till captors are very close upon him, this man, 
 knowing he had wings to fly, could afford to be 
 indifferent to all the little agitators who swing 
 their weapons and shout.
 
 360 
 
 He saw God in the Bible and had read and 
 copied his law into that stainless, beautiful life 
 of his, which sunned and shamed us all. But he 
 saw him, too, in suns and storms, in clouds and 
 sunsets, in forest and on lakes, in woodland and 
 in meadows fair, in June days of bloom and 
 beauty, and in autumns rich with haze and mist, 
 aster and golden-rod. He saw him in limping 
 beggar and forlorn mendicant, in the faces of 
 little children, in homes made happy by his love, 
 and in all the order, beauty, grace, and design of 
 the universe. He loved art, not for itself, nor its 
 money value, but for what it expressed to him. 
 He loved poetry, and the songs of all the great 
 poets were upon his lips. Do not forget that 
 while we need men to earnestly contend for 
 faiths, we have the greater need of men whose 
 lives will interpret and unfold their faith. There 
 is war enough, clamor and debate enough. This 
 great, true man has left to us all an example 
 which rebukes the hot contention and the acrid 
 strifes of the hour.
 
 IRev, 3* IP* Brusbingbam 
 
 page an Bloquent tribute to tbe flfoemors of a <3reat 
 
 /fcan. 
 
 Strength of character and a love for the beau- 
 tiful were blended in splendid proportions in the 
 life of him for whom a city mourns to-day. Alas! 
 There is no strength nor beauty in this earthly 
 life, able to resist the stern reaper. 
 
 Although the great and good man, who has 
 gone out from among us, was as gentle as a child, 
 he was none the less heroic and manly. Although 
 a "prince and a great man in Israel," he never 
 impressed one as at all conscious of his own 
 greatness. The charm of true greatness lies 
 in the spirit of humility, which says with David 
 Swing: "My Ego is no more than your Ego. n 
 I met him frequently among the shelves of rare 
 and ancient volumes, of which he was such a 
 competent and discriminating judge. At such 
 times he seemed pleased to converse concerning 
 the merits of favorite authors with a fellow stu- 
 dent whose place was but a humble one com- 
 pared with his own. There be great preachers 
 and teachers who seem almost to say: " I am 
 
 361
 
 362 
 
 Sir Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog 
 bark." How differently with him, 
 
 " Whose life was gentle, 
 And the elements so mixed in him 
 That nature could stand up and say to all the world, 
 ' This was a man.' ' 
 
 I remember a conversation between Professor 
 Swing and several of us younger men in the Meth- 
 odist ministry, in the course of which he magnani- 
 mously sought to explain away his own promi- 
 nence as compared with that of other men in the 
 same profession. 
 
 " For example," he said, " Dr. Hatfield, of the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church, is among the great- 
 est preachers of America." 
 
 " Why does he not have as large an audience 
 as yourself, Professor Swing? " 
 
 " Oh, he is at work under a different system," 
 was the reply. " Dr. Hatfield has a very large 
 following, but it is distributed throughout the 
 whole country, some in Brooklyn, some in Provi- 
 dence, others in Cincinnati, and in the differ- 
 ent cities where he has labored. I have been 
 in Chicago for over twenty years, and have 
 personal friends enough to fill any ordinary 
 place of worship."
 
 363 
 
 He seemed anxious to impress us that his great 
 influence was due to fortunate circumstances, and 
 not to any special ability which inhered in him- 
 self. 
 
 That last sermon which he preached was so 
 typical of his public ministry, and so filled with 
 prophetic meaning. Its deep significance and 
 rare beauty so impressed me at the time that I 
 clipped it from the printed page and kept it as a 
 treasured legacy, little thinking that it was his 
 last. He saw clearly the great conflict in our 
 present social and industrial life, and besought 
 the clergy of the land to harmonize the contend- 
 ing forces. To him, love was the great gravity 
 principle in the moral universe. To him, there 
 was more power in a single sunbeam of love than 
 in a thousand anvils of strife and hatred. He 
 was the gentle Melancthon, to stand amid the 
 upheavals of these rugged times and always coun- 
 sel moderation. With that mournful headline in 
 the public press, "Professor Swing is Dead," 
 there came a feeling as if the morning dawn had 
 died away; as if the sweetest zephyrs had ceased 
 to whisper aught but his sad requiem. 
 
 His was a unique personality. America has
 
 364 
 
 produced none like him in pulpit or rostrum. 
 His public utterances were original, versatile, 
 broad in spirit, and beautiful in diction. He 
 never repeated himself, yet never copied any 
 one else. All literature was to him a garden of 
 flowers whence he drew the honeyed sweetness of 
 pure, persuasive speech. His sympathies were 
 so broad and tender that even the brute creation 
 found in him a genial and kindly friend. 
 
 Too broad and catholic for dogmatism, he 
 could be confined to no pent-up Utica of any one 
 theological system. He was a poet-preacher, who 
 saw all things good and beautiful in God and 
 man. To him 
 
 "There was one faith, one law, one element, 
 One far-off divine event, 
 Towards which the whole creation tends." 
 
 But how shall we speak of him who was wont 
 to speak in accents so tender and pathos so sub- 
 lime at the open grave, when others died? Not 
 only the family of David Swing, and the Central 
 Church, his throne of power, are bereaved to-day, 
 but all Chicago and the great Northwest suffer 
 loss. Literature and art, poetry, philosophy, and 
 religion, may all bow their heads in grief. A
 
 365 
 
 community cau ill afford to lose its great scholars, 
 its noble philanthropists, its patient reformers, its 
 lofty moral teachers. 
 
 The great, modest, kindly scholar and friend 
 is not dead. He is even now crowned with the 
 immortality of the good and true. He will live 
 in grateful memory. The truth which he lived 
 and taught will immortalize his name. 
 
 From the throne of Central Church there will 
 flow on and on a stream of living truth, "clear as 
 crystal," broad and deep and beautiful.
 
 IRev, G. W. Ibanfcforfc, 
 
 The broad and generous charity, the large r 
 hopeful, all-enduring love, that formed the theme 
 of David Swing's ministry, became incarnate in 
 his life. Beautiful and pathetic, eloquent and 
 inspiring as his sermons were, he was the grand- 
 est sermon of all. And he, though dead, will be 
 eloquent for many a day. Thousands whose 
 hands he never grasped, whose faces he never 
 knew, will feel sad to the center of their hearts 
 that death has borne away so wise a teacher, so 
 gentle a friend. He has served his day and gen- 
 eration, and has "fallen on sleep," as did that 
 other David of the kingly race. His sun went 
 down at eventide; it went not down in, darkness 
 and in storm, but melted in the pure light of 
 heaven. We need not trouble about the future. 
 Prof. Swing will have no successor. Such men 
 can not be succeeded. Beecher, and Spurgeon, and 
 Swing, have done their work. The men are few 
 and far between, who could gracefully wear the 
 mantle of these ascended saints. Other men and 
 other methods will be able to do grand work in 
 the old places. To follow in a procession is one 
 
 366
 
 thing, but to succeed a great man is quite 
 another. 
 
 There have been many poets only one 
 Milton; many preachers only one Swing. He 
 has gone from us, and yet we can not think 
 that that busy brain has ceased to act, or that 
 that large heart has ceased to love. Milton is 
 not dead. Hampden is not dead. Washington 
 and Lincoln are not dead, nor is David Swing. 
 He has entered the silent land, and we stand by 
 that gate of death that leads to life, silent, and 
 solitary, and sad.
 
 IReeoluttone fl>a00efc b the jfourtb 
 Presbyterian Cburcb. 
 
 Resolved, That the news of the death of the 
 Rev. David Swing, formerly pastor of this church, 
 has filled us with deep sorrow, and we desire to 
 express to the family and the friends our deepest 
 sympathy in this severe bereavement; and we 
 desire also to record our high appreciation of 
 Professor Swing's services, while a pastor for 
 nearly ten years, to many in this church, and our 
 constant love and respect for him. With feelings 
 of thankfulness we recognize his many services to 
 the community as a whole, and rejoice in the 
 record of labors so manifold and so fruitful. The 
 memory of his life and work will long linger 
 among us. We recognize his great talents, and 
 his life will be an inspiration, as an example of 
 sweet and gentle service, and of untiring devotion 
 to the cause of righteousness. May the comfort 
 and strength his words have often brought to 
 those in sorrow and distress now be the portion 
 of those who see a beloved form laid to his rest, 
 and follow through the unseen portals the immor- 
 tal spirit that has entered into its eternal home.
 
 369 
 
 Resolved, That the session of the Fourth Pres- 
 byterian Church attend the services in a body, 
 and that a copy of these resolutions be sent to the 
 family.
 
 prof. Swings IReasone for Mitbfcrawal 
 
 from tbe Presbyterian 
 
 Cburcb, 
 
 letter to tbe jfourtb ipresbgterian Cburcb. 
 
 My Beloved Congregation: During the past 
 three months our relations have been disturbed, 
 almost daily, by new rumors and new facts, indi- 
 cating an approaching end of our ties as pastor 
 and people. It has hitherto been impossible for 
 me to address to you any words that might put 
 rumors to rest and cast any light upon the future. 
 Neither you nor I desire to break up associations of 
 long standing associations peculiarly pleasant, 
 and even sacred. It was human, at least, in us all, 
 to await the command of the ecclesiastical court 
 that presides over such affairs and that is sup- 
 posed to issue its decrees with sufficient prompt- 
 ness. At last, the court to which this society is 
 amenable has formally expressed its belief, or 
 rather its hope, that, after the close of this year, 
 this church will place itself in a position less 
 irregular will find a pastor among the Presbyte- 
 rian clergy in good standing. The session, neither 
 
 370
 
 371 
 
 as a session nor as individuals, has said any- 
 thing to warrant the hope or conviction expressed 
 by the Presbytery, bnt has waited the simple 
 movement of the cold church-law. 
 
 In this crisis, the session has, in the hope of 
 saving the relations mutually pleasant, urged me 
 to return to the Presbyterian brotherhood; but, 
 as the most precious thing to one who has dared 
 stand up to preach is his capital of truth and his 
 intellectual liberty, the kind wish of the session 
 could not for a moment be entertained. I would 
 therefore announce to-day that, on or before the 
 close of the year, I shall cease preaching to the 
 Fourth Presbyterian Church. It is due to the 
 Presbytery, composed for the most part of my 
 own faithful friends, that I should hasten to con- 
 fess their authority over this society. 
 
 As my heart has always been unequal to 
 speaking above a whisper any words that affected 
 it deeply, this separation will come without any 
 farewell sermon, or any other words that lie near 
 the land of tears. As to the old friendships, 
 some of them will run on under some other roof ; 
 none of them will be broken by any act of mine. 
 In this matter of friendship, I hope it will not be
 
 372 
 
 very undignified if I confess here that my mind 
 recalls the song we used to sing in the days of 
 romance and tenderness: 
 
 " Here's a sigh for those who love me; 
 A smile for those who hate." 
 
 But, thinking of the sacred duties of a minister 
 of Christ, a holier hymn comes to memory: 
 
 " While place we seek or place we shun, 
 The soul finds happiness in none; 
 But with our God to guide the way, 
 'Tis equal joy to go or stay." 
 
 Though I am unable to rise to the sublime 
 height of such words, their spirit will cheer me, 
 and will soften the good -by of 
 
 Your devoted friend, 
 
 DAVID SWING. 
 
 Oct. 31, 1875.
 
 IReaeons for a Central Cburcb. 
 
 It is not my purpose to-day to preach a dis- 
 course, but to state some of the reasons which led 
 me to begin a public service in this place, and to 
 commence it with great pleasure and with great 
 hope. In the opening up of all new enterprises, 
 of either a secular or religious nature, it is custom- 
 ary for some one to utter inaugural words, that 
 the enterprise may lie before all in its full scope 
 of business, or pleasure, or duty. It seems quite 
 necessary that now, when we are about to enter 
 upon a series of services in such new surround- 
 ings, some words should be spoken by way of 
 introduction, words of explanation, and of con- 
 gratulation, too. Many of you attended the 
 religious services held for a time two years ago in 
 this very house. Many of you left the room then 
 with regrets, and to-day you come back with joy. 
 The reasons for such a return need reviewing. 
 
 That there may be some method to my re- 
 marks to-day, I shall speak of certain arguments 
 in favor of such a central church as we here found 
 to-day, and shall classify the arguments as mate- 
 rial and spiritual. 
 
 373
 
 374 
 
 The material argument is quite large. In an 
 age when all other branches of life study con- 
 venience and comfort, religion must imitate the 
 other paths of action and being, and hence will 
 not dare be difficult and inconvenient in her style, 
 when the wicked world, in its method, is studious 
 of public comfort. It is all vain to say that our 
 fathers, in other times and countries, walked five 
 miles to church, in summer's heat or winter's 
 storm. So they walked also in journeying over 
 the world. All things were equally full of toil 
 and vexation. The hotels, where they passed the 
 night, were only barns; the beds on which they 
 slept were hard as the road on which they had 
 walked, and the food on the table was as full of 
 toil and vexation as were the dusty journey and 
 the miserable tavern. Men walked five miles to 
 church, because they knew of no such thing as 
 convenience or comfort. Men exhausted in that 
 day, upon roads and hills and against sun and 
 storm, strength of body and mind which should 
 have been turned along more useful paths. 
 
 When the gate was opened to let in the new 
 idea of convenience and comfort, it had to be 
 opened toward religion as well; for when man
 
 375 
 
 has learned that he need not be miserable as to 
 his table, as to his hotel, as to his bed, and as to 
 his home, he will no longer be miserable as to his 
 worship. When a bad idea has become exposed, 
 it is routed everywhere. When Champollion found 
 the clue to the Egyptian stones, he soon read every- 
 thing in rapid succession. Thus, when man dis- 
 covered that he need not be miserable in some 
 one thing, he at once sprang to the conclusion 
 that he need not make any part of life more 
 burdensome than fate itself should demand. 
 
 There is a tendency in the world to utilize its 
 forces. The modern age will surpass all former 
 times in the quantity of labor it will, in a given 
 time, bring to bear upon a useful task; but it 
 will not waste time and power. It will not walk 
 all day to church and home again, if it can go 
 to church in a few minutes, and in comfort as it 
 goes. It reserves its force for needful ends. 
 Now, when all the places of worship that stood 
 near the center of this great city were torn down 
 and removed, the destroyers of these temples took 
 worship away from the place where all the car- 
 riage-ways meet, and again asked a large popu- 
 lation to do as our Scottish and Puritan fathers
 
 376 
 
 had done face the storm and exhaust the day 
 for the kirk. And this central population has 
 declined the invitation. The meeting-house must 
 come to them. It must be located where paths 
 converge where the public carriages meet. There 
 must be some sanctuary near each multitude. 
 
 A second material argument may be found in 
 the peculiar shape of our city. Its business is 
 not spread out for miles along some one street. It 
 is massed into one solid square mile; and hence, in 
 that square mile, there are thousands of business 
 young men, who are quite far removed from the 
 family churches, and who would be quite near to 
 some central church or churches. On account of 
 this peculiar massing of business, the magnificent 
 hotels of this city are located in a most unusual 
 manner. Instead of reaching along for five miles 
 in a straight line, they are in a circle, about a 
 dozen strong, and all within three or four squares 
 of this theater. Owing to recent destruction of 
 dwelling-houses, and to the marvelous beauty and 
 comfort and quiet of these hotels, they are the 
 homes of hundreds, almost thousands, of persons 
 who once lived along the avenues, and who once 
 attended the old churches of the former city.
 
 377 
 
 These statements will give you an outline of 
 the material argument that not only justifies this 
 opening of a new central church, but which 
 entreats us all to enter upon this work with zeal 
 and without delay or misgiving. To have a 
 church to which so many can come so easily, not 
 only from the central portion of the place, but 
 from the three divisions of the city, is an idea 
 that should long ago have touched your hearts 
 and have swept your judgment. It is impossible 
 to postpone this enterprise. 
 
 Let us now come to the moral aspects of the 
 case. Here our chief task will be to meet objec- 
 tions ; for, in the brief statements already made, I 
 have absolutely given positive reason enough for 
 the existence of this new society. 
 
 First, this need not be called an "experi- 
 ment." It is a service to which most of us come 
 back after a few years' absence. In this very 
 room we sang our hymns and sent up our prayers 
 and examined into the high truths of life for 
 almost two years, and those two years confirmed 
 all I have said about a church accessible to the 
 public. So great a success were those two years, 
 that the best men of the Fourth Church debated
 
 378 
 
 with many of you as to the propriety of holding 
 a central service on the Sunday mornings, debated 
 about some method by which this service here 
 could be continued. They themselves went off 
 to their little church, an inaccessible church, with 
 misgivings as to duty, and for months debated 
 with you and with themselves as to the duty of 
 the future. 
 
 Thus we return here, cheered by two years of 
 experience, an experience which even a North 
 Side interest could not readily conceal or erase. 
 The same gentlemen who stand as responsible 
 friends of this movement stood for it two years ago, 
 thus showing that there is nothing of mere impulse 
 or novelty in their conduct, but that their action 
 is based upon the experience of two years, and 
 the reflection of two years more. This would 
 seem sufficient answer to any who may feel that 
 here we are to .make an "experiment." It is not 
 so. Here we resume, to-day, a reasonable, most 
 wise union of hearts, that was interrupted by an 
 accident, a beautiful and beloved little accident 
 called the Fourth Church. And now that Pro- 
 fessor Patton has removed that accident by his 
 twenty -eight tears shed before the synod, I am
 
 379 
 
 free, not to embark upon an untried sea, but to 
 return " home again from a foreign shore. 1 ' We 
 know all about this channel and this ship. You 
 heard these hymns before sung in such chorus; 
 you have seen these faces, all happy here, in other 
 days. This is the sober second thought of a 
 thousand persons. 
 
 You will please remember, too, that these 
 other two years of worship in this house ended 
 while your minister was still in full communion 
 with the Presbyterian Church. No trial for 
 heresy had ever shown any signs of coming. 
 Hence, into these meetings there entered no sen- 
 sational element, and they drew their life from 
 no party heat. Hence the return of us all to 
 this place has not in it the least element of a 
 rebuke to Professor Patton, nor of a vindication 
 of me. This service began before any war 
 between that brother and me began, and I believe 
 a central church will go forward, near where we 
 are now, after Professor Patton and I shall have 
 passed away from life and memory. To me, and 
 to all with whom I have conversed, this move- 
 ment seems to have sprung only from a public 
 need, and contains in it almost no element of the
 
 380 
 
 experimental and sensational. A city of half a 
 million people needs this central society. 
 
 Let me now allude to another objection : " You 
 will have no church social life, no prayer-meet- 
 ings, no church socials, no sewing societies, no 
 fellowship with each other." First, let us deny 
 this gentle charge. Out of this certainly must 
 come, and Avithin a year or two let us hope, a 
 regular church, Independent or Congregational, 
 with its own hall for worship, and with its rooms 
 for all kinds of church life. There are no reasons 
 whatever against the formation and success of a 
 
 O 
 
 church where all these highways meet. It can 
 easily come, and will soon come. We deny the 
 charge. 
 
 But let us make a second answer to the objec- 
 tion. It is these words: The value of a congrega- 
 tion depends upon the number and the righteous- 
 ness of the people that attend its Sunday morn- 
 ing service. When, out of a thousand or two 
 thousand people in a congregation, some sev- 
 enty or a hundred gather at a "church social," 
 you must not point me to that scene and call it 
 " church life." Our opinion as to the value of 
 the piety and intelligence of the vast congrega-
 
 381 
 
 tion is such, that, in estimating the moral worth 
 of a church, we should rather look to them of a 
 Sunday in their pews, than to this little playing, 
 feasting group, laughing the happy hours away. 
 The people who assemble Sunday morning 
 determine the value of the sanctuary. If they 
 are good, righteous citizens, then that two thou- 
 sand are a noble church, aside from ".church 
 socials." And when, out of one thousand persons, 
 twenty ladies meet to sew for the orphans, you 
 must not point us to that scene and call it " church 
 life.' 1 Our thought will still run after the one 
 thousand persons not there, and with the feeling 
 that in that one thousand lies the work of the 
 society. The service that blesses the most is the 
 chief service. 
 
 And not much should be said about the fellow- 
 ship and friendship that springs up in the regular 
 house of God. We know all about this. We 
 know that the congregation upon the avenues 
 meet only for the' worship of God, and do not 
 stand heart to heart and hand in hand, away from 
 the altars. Each city is full of strangers. We live 
 next door to each other and remain unknowing 
 and unknown. Here, where you will all have
 
 382 
 
 jour regular seats, and where some of the stiffness 
 of the more formal churches will be wanting, you 
 will soon reach an acquaintance with your neigh- 
 bor and a final knowledge of all, not to be found 
 in churches, which would seem to promise more. 
 Hence, while at some not remote day we may 
 have what is called " church life," we must not 
 overrate the market value of that "life " and feel 
 that the church's glory lies in that direction. The 
 grand churches of the seventeenth century, that 
 transformed Christ into a friend and made God 
 to be Love, had no sewing societies and no church 
 festivals. They had religious men in the pulpit 
 and in the pews. This is the aim that should" lie 
 before us all, religion at the desk and down in 
 the cushioned seats. All else will be insignificant, 
 if we can reach, at last, intelligence and religion. 
 Thus have I alluded to the objections proposed to 
 you and me. I pass now to advantage and inten- 
 tions. 
 
 In our independent and congregational rela- 
 tions, we, from preacher to people, expect to enjoy 
 freedom of thought. I desire and fully intend to 
 preach the religion of Christ, but in a liberty of 
 thought not accorded me in my former relations.
 
 383 
 
 Congregationalism will afford you and me all the 
 liberty we desire. With that sect there is a con- 
 centration upon Christ as a sufficient Savior, and 
 upon the idea of rewards and punishments, that 
 leaves Christianity pure in its principles and 
 power, and leaves the Christian mind free. The 
 denomination that can welcome Storrs and Bud- 
 dington and Alvin Bartlett and Helmer is liberal 
 enough for all Christian purposes. We do not 
 ask for a church broad enough to permit us to be 
 atheists. In Congregationalism, if at last it should 
 receive us, we shall find liberty enough. Those 
 denominations in which the church property is 
 held by the congregation offer sufficient liberty of 
 opinion. It is where the meeting-house and the 
 lot and the organ belong to a certain creed that 
 thought is enslaved. There pulpit and pew con- 
 tinue to repeat shibboleths because property fol- 
 lows certain formulas of doctrine. Congregational 
 property secures freedom of thought. While 
 property represents dead ideas, men will bow in 
 meekness to the ideas. As Independents or Con- 
 gregational ists, there lies before us a beaiitiful pros- 
 pect of intellectual freedom. As, when Xenophon 
 and his companions after a long wandering in the
 
 384 
 
 mountains of Armenia, lost, starved, home-sick, 
 and harassed by barbarians, at last, from a moun- 
 tain, beheld the sea, they wept for joy and 
 shouted, " The sea ! the sea ! " for it was to carry 
 them home; so you and I, coming out of the wil- 
 derness where we were lost and starved and sore 
 pressed by barbarians, may well look out toward 
 the wide expanse of liberty and cry out, " The 
 sea! the sea!" It will now carry us all home. 
 The ocean of freedom is broad and deep and beau- 
 tiful. It washes all civilized shores. All the 
 balmy and fragrant breezes come from its depths. 
 The light of heaven smiles on its face. 
 
 This ocean of liberty is the true consolation 
 and inspiration of all who write or speak. He 
 that speaks only by rote, or only to a line marked 
 down by another, can only be a slave. His heart 
 can never be the home of any love or earnestness. 
 I do not speak of this vista of liberty on my own 
 account alone. Not only must a speaker be free, 
 but the audience also loves to feel that they are 
 free minds, and are sitting in a sanctuary where 
 the flag of liberty waves over them. The rigid 
 details of the more iron -like creeds do not oppress 
 the clergy only, but the church membership also.
 
 385 
 
 For the membership of the modern church has 
 risen in intelligence and in the power of its logical 
 faculty, and, as deeply as the clergy, it feels 
 oppressed by the dogmas to which it once sub- 
 scribed, and from which it knows not just how to 
 escape. Much of the time of the clergy and of 
 the higher order of laymen is now spent in declar- 
 ing how they do not believe in denouncing it; thus 
 showing with what joy they would hail spiritual 
 freedom, were it placed within their grasp. In 
 that theological war which was waged in this city 
 two years ago, the liberal clergymen did not sur- 
 pass the laity in the quantity of indignation 
 aroused by such an inquisition held over words 
 and sentences. Clergymen, from their theological 
 studies, often endure, or forgive, or even enjoy, 
 a certain amount of theological skirmishing and 
 conflict. They look sometimes upon such trials 
 as matters of course. But the laymen, trained to 
 the useful in religion, and thinking more of Christ 
 than they do of theologians, often feel very deeply 
 the private and public wrong done by such 
 arraignments for heresy. Their cheeks burn with 
 shame that ministers should degrade their calling, 
 and that, in a skeptical age, Christianity should be 
 so exposed to new criticism and new contempt.
 
 386 
 
 Not alone, then, am I in the power to appre- 
 ciate a church where the discord of a " trial " 
 can not come, but you all equally rejoice that here 
 freedom of opinion pours around you its health- 
 giving and joy-bringing atmosphere. We all 
 desire to escape a repetition of certain foolish 
 processes brought by hasty men. 
 
 Our age, in its Christian department, is attempt- 
 ing to find broader grounds in doctrine, upon 
 which a larger multitude may stand in a sweeter 
 peace. That there are a hundred sects, and that 
 these war with each other must result from some 
 defect in the mind or in the sentiments of the 
 heart. Such discord can not but come from either 
 ignorance or selfishness. There must be some 
 one religion in which men might meet; for God 
 is one, and heaven is one, and virtue is one, and 
 vice is one. Our age is attempting to find the 
 ideas that separate men and the other ideas that 
 bring them together. It wishes to destroy the 
 former, and crown the latter. It is seeking a 
 higher unity of thought, that there may be a 
 deeper unity of sentiment and love. The Calvin- 
 ist and the Arminian, the Baptist and the Epis- 
 copalian, and even the Catholics under the lead
 
 387 
 
 of Hyacinthe and Dollinger, are seeking this 
 wider ground of faith and love. As rapidly as 
 this noble truth is found, the ideas that have 
 separated hearts and have torn the church to 
 pieces will be cast out and despised, and toward 
 the better central truth the public will turn with 
 a new affection. 
 
 In assembling here to-day, we come only in the 
 spirit of the Christian age, seeking the higher 
 truth that will bind more nearer together and 
 bring more of peace and goodness to society. We 
 all come, not to contradict and complain, but 
 to affirm all the precious truths of the Gospel, 
 and to love them the more because of our perfect 
 freedom. Not as an enemy do we appear on the 
 horizon, but as the fast and firm friends of all the 
 churches of whatever name. I know the spirit 
 of this audience. Ten years have mingled us 
 much together, in public and private, and I feel 
 free to say that I know your hearts; and, knowing 
 them, confess with joy that our combined desire 
 is to hold, not an unhappy, negative religion, but 
 one full of positive devotion to Jesus Christ, and 
 to all the precious interests of humanity.
 
 388 
 
 We come, not as iconoclasts, but as lovers of man, 
 We do not desire to be a rude force, like lightning 
 or a storm, but to be a gentler influence, like sun- 
 shine and dew, under which the gentlest plant 
 may grow and reach its own peculiar blossoming. 
 If we shall wish to deny certain doctrines, once 
 believed, it will be that Christ may not be injured 
 by the inventions of men. If we shall ignore 
 or slight other ideas, it will be that they may 
 not hide from us that Way, Truth and Life, in 
 whose presence is noonday, in whose absence is 
 night. Setting forth each day from Christ, as the 
 radiating point of our system, we desire to apply 
 his life to human life, his pardon to human sin, 
 his hope to human hearts. Believing that Chris- 
 tianity underlies, not only a heaven beyond the 
 grave, but all good homes and cities and empires 
 here, we all wish from Sunday to Sunday to seek 
 out these adaptations with our intellect, that 
 we may obey them with our soul. 
 
 And, besides the words of Christianity, there 
 remains its spirit, something above delineation 
 in language. Those who assemble here desire, not 
 only to deal in the morals and theology of 
 Christ, but to live in the midst of that divine
 
 389 
 
 charity that enveloped our Lord in all hours. 
 Toward even Pilate and all the adverse throng, 
 Christ was full of tenderness. From Christ 
 comes the lesson that ill-will, anger, self-worship, 
 are only painful blemishes upon the soul, and 
 that, until man can deal in perfect kindness with 
 those who differ with him in thought, he is yet 
 far down in the depths of barbarism. One of 
 our public men, who had lived a long and serene 
 public life, confessed, lately, that in early manhood 
 he had felt that he could not afford to get angry 
 at a fellow, for anger was such a disgrace to 
 the soul. 
 
 There is a spirit of Jesus Christ more Godlike 
 than even His words; a spirit which all may feel, 
 but which none can express, just as one may feel 
 in his bosom the beauty of a day in June, but can 
 never embody the heart-beat in language. But 
 such a spirit there is. It will sit down and talk 
 with the skeptical scientist as Jesus talked 
 with the woman at the well or with the ruler 
 at nightfall. The wider the difference of 
 opinion, the more eager this spirit of Christ to 
 show us benevolence. It leaves the ninety and 
 nine in the fold of truth, and goes forth with
 
 390 
 
 a smile and a benediction toward the one infidel 
 or atheist or skeptic who may seem to be wander- 
 ing in the mazes of entangled thought. To this 
 doctrine and spirit of Christ, we, the Central 
 Church, would subscribe anew, this day. We 
 would renew the vows of former years. We ask 
 all the great circle of churches around to extend 
 us their good will. We omit no one, not even 
 the Catholics. We shall love to offer them 
 all the help of our right hand and our heart's 
 best wishes and best love.
 
 of tbe ffwlpit in tbe flxwr of 
 Social Tttnre0t 
 
 2>avl> Swing's last Sermon. 
 
 While men slept the enemy sowed tares among the wheat. 
 Matt. xiii. 25. 
 
 It would be a happiness to all of us, could we 
 meet to-day having in our hands branches from 
 the woods or shells from the shore where we may 
 have recently attempted to find pleasure and rest ; 
 but the events of the last few months, and the 
 gloom of the future, have stolen from prairie and 
 seacoast their long-found charm. 
 
 The trees and the waters have for many weeks 
 past sighed over the infirmities of our country. 
 
 To find the images of greatness, we have been 
 compelled to look into the past. When President 
 Cleveland intervened, and, perhaps, saved this 
 city from being plundered and burned, some men 
 feared to thank him for such a quick interven- 
 tion. July must deal very gently with criminals 
 who are to vote in November. 
 
 Not since 1861, has the sky been as dark as it 
 is to-day. We have unconsciously built up within 
 
 391
 
 392 
 
 this generation two black passions the one, 
 the feeling that money is the only thing worth 
 living for, and the other, that work must hate 
 capital. Thus the level of all society is lowered 
 the moneyed class by its worship of gold, the 
 other class by its life of hate. While wealth has 
 inflamed its possessors and worshipers, there has 
 lived and talked an army of angry orators, whose 
 purpose has been to make the men who work in 
 the vineyard hate the men who pay them at 
 nightfall. In such circumstances, the vineyarjfL 
 will soon be, first, a battle field, and then, a desert. 
 It would seem that all the Christian clergy, 
 Catholic and Protestant, and all the ethical teach- 
 ers should, this autumn, enter into a new friend- 
 ship with these two discordant classes, and preach 
 to both alike the gospel of a high humanity. 
 The churches and pulpits of all grades possess a 
 vast influence. They do not hold any "key to 
 the situation," or any "balance of power"; they 
 can not open and close the gates of the earthly 
 heaven and hell for America ; but they possess an 
 enormous moral force a power that should no 
 longer be exhausted upon little theological issues 
 and practices. All the intellectual and spiritual
 
 393 
 
 resources of the pulpit should be exhausted in 
 the effort to advance human character. Society 
 needs speedy and large additions to both its 
 righteousness and its common sense. 
 
 What saved the country from a great calamity 
 last July, was the fact that the school-house, the 
 church, and the press, of the last fifty years had 
 quietly created an intelligence large enough to 
 stand between the people and their ruin. When 
 the new kind of autocrat ordered all the railway 
 wheels between the two oceans to stop, and had 
 sat down to enjoy the silence of locomotives 
 and iron rails, there were so many noble and 
 educated men in the railway service that the 
 voice of the autocrat was the only noise that died 
 out. It was not President Cleveland alone that 
 came between us and a great calamity. He was 
 aided by the high common sense of a large 
 majority of the railway employes. The railway 
 union of working 'men was not formed for a 
 career of mingled cruelty and nonsense, but that 
 men might help each other in honorable ways 
 and in hours of great wrong and need. The 
 union was not formed in order that railway men 
 might become beggars, at a time when their work
 
 394 
 
 was bringing almost a barrel of flour a day for 
 each family. With wages at two dollars a day 
 and wheat at half a dollar a bushel, the strike 
 and trouble of July were not only unreasonable 
 but malicious. 
 
 Nearly all clergymen stand close to the people. 
 They are reared in the philosophy that gives 
 bread to the hungry. " The gospel of Christ is 
 one of infinite sympathy. Men who from choice 
 enter the ministry of the Judean religion are 
 never so happy as when they see the laborer sit 
 down under a good roof to a table spread with, 
 abundant food. In the life of the average cler- 
 gyman, a large part of his thought and public 
 utterance, and actual labor and sympathy, is 
 given to what is called the common people. The 
 upper classes need little. There is nothing in 
 the millionaire that appeals to the heart. The 
 rich are so self-adequate that they may draw 
 admiration and esteem, but not sympathy. The 
 heart of the pulpit is freely given to the middle 
 and lower classes. In all time, the common peo- 
 ple have attracted to themselves the most of both 
 philosophy and poetry, but the attention and the 
 affection, they won in the former times seem weak,
 
 395 
 
 compared with the love that has been flung to 
 them in this passing century. Under the influ- 
 ence of this sympathetic philosophy, wages have 
 been advanced, humane laws have been passed^ 
 the facts of health and disease have been studied^ 
 and new action has come with new light; and 
 when into such an age of both inquiry and 
 action there is projected such a scene as that of 
 last July, the spectacle does not belong to reason 
 or humanity, but only to despotic ignorance and 
 ill will. 
 
 Labor may, and even must, organize, but the 
 laborers must organize as just and law-abiding 
 men, country-loving men, and not as bandits. 
 The depressing memory of last July is not to be 
 found in the fact that labor was organized, or 
 wholly in the fact that it " struck." The strike 
 was, indeed, perfectly destitute of common sense, 
 but the chief disgrace of the hour lay in the will- 
 ingness of free men to obey a central despot and 
 join in such acts of wrong and violence as would 
 have disgraced savages. Benevolence is humili- 
 ated that it must feed and clothe men who will 
 break the skull or kick to insensibility the brother 
 who wishes to earn bread for his hungry family.
 
 396 
 
 It was discovered last July that some of the 
 labor unions employ fighting men to go to and 
 fro to hunt up and knock down those who do 
 not join in the folly those who are satisfied with 
 their wages or who must work. Not every work- 
 man is a trained pugilist. So men are hired to 
 spend the day or the week in pounding men who 
 are noble and industrious. The cry " I am an 
 American " does not avail as much in Chicago as 
 the words " I am a Roman " availed Paul in Jeru- 
 salem. When Paul said he was a Roman, the 
 mob fell back; but when Mr. Cleveland said, 
 " These pounded men are Americans," it was 
 thought by some that he was not the proper per- 
 son to make the remark. And yet, our pulpits 
 have, for fifty years, been trying to make Chris- 
 tians, and our schools and printing presses have 
 been trying to endow these Christians with sense. 
 
 Quite a number of clergymen have banded 
 together to preach the gospel of personal right- 
 eousness; that Christianity is Christ in human 
 life, Christ in society, Christ in money, and Christ 
 in work. We preachers must all come to that 
 definition of the church. This height of thought 
 will make all dizzy for a time ; but the quality of
 
 397 
 
 our old Christianity will not meet the demands of 
 a republic. A despotism may be sustained by 
 Catholics or Protestants, but a republic must be 
 sustained by men. 
 
 Labor guilds are as old as work and capital; 
 but one kind of labor guild is new, and let us 
 all pray that it shall not live to become old. 
 In the darkness of the fourteenth century, the 
 young workingman looked happily forward to 
 the day when he could be admitted into the guild 
 of his craft. His mother and sisters looked after 
 his habits, that his character might be above 
 reproach. The approach to the initiation day 
 was much like a youth's approach to his first com- 
 munion. New clothes, a feast, new conduct, new 
 inspiration, new hopes came with the hour that 
 placed this new name upon the noble roll. But 
 this was in the dark ages. In the close of the 
 nineteenth century, when the heavens and earth 
 are ablaze with the light of Christ, when love for 
 man is written everywhere in letters of gold, 
 when congresses of religion meet to teach us that 
 all men are brethren, then the men who join a 
 guild shake a bludgeon at their brother and are 
 advised by a reckless king to buy a gun. Some
 
 398 
 
 men call this phenomenon a commercial disturb- 
 ance. It is nothing of the kind. In the South 
 Sea Islands it is barbarism; among the carnivo- 
 rous animals it is called ferocity; in our civilized 
 land it is infamy. 
 
 It seems evident that Christianity asks laborers 
 to be organized into societies. If a church may 
 be organized that Christians may help each other 
 and confer with each other about all things that 
 pertain to the church, why may not carpenters 
 and railway men form a union that many minds 
 and many hearts may find what is best for the 
 toilers in their field? The word "Church" means 
 a gathering of people, but if the exigencies of 
 religion may demand an assembly, so may the 
 exigencies of a trade. But none of these assem- 
 blages can sustain any relations whatever to 
 violence or any kind of interference with the 
 liberty or rights of man. For a vast group of 
 railway men to sign away their personal liberty 
 and permit some one man to order them around 
 as though slaves, is a spectacle pitiful to look 
 upon ; but to band together for interference with 
 the rights of man is, not a mental weakness, but 
 a crime.
 
 399 
 
 It is a great task for a labor guild to study 
 and fully learn what are the facts and the needs 
 of itself. Before men quit their employers, they 
 should all know the reason of the move. After 
 men have been idle for a winter and have come 
 to regular work and regular pay, if they hasten 
 to strike, their reason ought to be so large that 
 the whole world can see it. But we do things 
 differently in enlightened America. Our men 
 hasten to throw down tools and their wages, and, 
 at last, when starving, they ask some committee 
 to make a microscopical search for the reason of 
 the distress. And, before this reason is known, 
 eminent men express themselves as in full sym- 
 pathy with it. All the railway wheels in America 
 were ordered to stop out of sympathy with a 
 reason which a committee was looking for with a 
 microscope. The railways were giving work to 
 four millions of people. This work was all 
 "called off" by a man with some telegraphic 
 blanks, and the poor families supported by the 
 Northwestern lost two hundred thousand dollars, 
 the workmen of the Illinois Central one hundred 
 and sixty -four thousand dollars, of the Milwaukee 
 and St. Paul one hundred and seventy-five thou-
 
 400 
 
 sand dollars, and thus on to the millions all 
 which loss was ordered from sympathy with men 
 who were getting six hundred dollars a year. 
 
 Labor unions will waste their work by the 
 millions of dollars' worth, and will soil their 
 name and ruin the sympathy of literature, art and 
 religion, as long as they trust their cause to hot- 
 headed, ignorant, illogical men. Labor should 
 have for its chieftains our Franklins or our John 
 Stuart Mills. These should be its guide. If our 
 land possesses no such minds, then are we on the 
 eve of untold misfortune. When labor shall have 
 Franklins for its walking delegates, it will enter 
 upon a new career. Capital will confer with it, 
 congresses of workingmen will meet, and men 
 will find the wages of each toiler and of each new 
 period, but nothing can be done by a foolish des- 
 pot with a club. Yes, something can be done 
 the Republic can be hopelessly ruined through a 
 ruined manhood. 
 
 The wages and whole welfare of the laboring 
 man have been much advanced in twenty-five 
 years, but the gun and club have taken no part 
 in this progress. Conference, thought, reason, 
 benevolence, have accomplished the blessed task,
 
 401 
 
 and they will do much more when they are invited 
 to help our race. Moral power makes laws. It 
 shames the guilty. It dissolves adamant. It 
 founded the Christian Church. It has civilized 
 whole races; it has emancipated the mind; it has 
 freed slaves. 
 
 It may easily be remembered that a London 
 man a few years ago unveiled the wrongs inflicted 
 upon poor young girls. This injustice did not 
 need to be examined by a microscope. The heart 
 of London became aflame with indignation. The 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Archbishop 
 of Westminster, Cardinal Manning, the Bishop 
 of London, Sir William Harcourt, and Sir Robert 
 Cross, flung their minds and hearts into the cause, 
 and the parliament passed a new law for a longer 
 and diviner protection of girls. 
 
 To many labor unions all talk of moral power 
 carries the weight of only nonsense. The moral 
 influence theory is indeed defective, but it is the 
 only one within human reach. If a dozen men 
 should resolve that they have rights to seats in a 
 street car, their theory seems good; but, on getting 
 into one of these vehicles, if they find the seats all 
 taken, unless they can club those persons out
 
 402 
 
 of those seats, the theory of those dozen unionists 
 is very defective. When a man resolves that he 
 ought to sit down and then stands up, his resolu- 
 tion is defective. But what makes it defective ? 
 The rights of the man who is sitting down. So 
 when a set of men resolve that they will work 
 only for four dollars a day, they hold an imper- 
 fect platform, because of the rights of the men 
 who will work for three dollars. Should a cler- 
 gyman resign his pulpit because his people will 
 not pay him six thousand dollars a year, his 
 theory is incomplete indeed, unless he can kill 
 the preachers who will come for five thousand 
 dollars. But he must go to and fro with his 
 imperfect theory. It is spoiled by the rights of 
 other preachers. Thus, against all labor unions 
 not strictly moral, the laws of the human race 
 rise up. The rights of mankind oppose them. 
 All society is founded upon the rights of man- 
 not of the man who works for three dollars a day, 
 but of the man also who works for one dollar or 
 for any sum whatever. Any force in a labor 
 union means anarchy. A guild, without vio- 
 lence, may be imperfect, but, with violence, it is 
 infamous.
 
 403 
 
 Where would our city and perhaps our nation 
 have been in this September, had not the laborers 
 in the town of Pullman and in the whole land 
 been for the most part law-abiding ? The churches 
 may confess the rashness of the strike, but we 
 must forgive the mistakes of those who respected 
 the rights of mankind and the laws of the land. 
 Many toilers were so patient and law-abiding as 
 to give promise of being worthy citizens of a 
 great country. What all those workmen need 
 is a leadership worthy of their cause or their 
 flag. 
 
 The flag of labor is a perfectly glorious one 
 too grand to T^e carried by a fanatic or a simple- 
 ton or a criminal. Capital is nothing until labor 
 takes hold of it. A bag will hold money, but a 
 bag can not transform that money into an iron 
 road, a bridge, a train of cars, an engine. An 
 armful of bonds did not fling the bridge over the 
 arm of the sea at Edinburgh ; the bonds of England 
 did not join the Mediterranean to the Red Sea; 
 gold did not erect St. Peter's at Rome ; nor did it 
 lift up any of the sublime or beautiful things in 
 any art. Money came along and attempted to 
 buy the canvases of Angelo, but it did not paint
 
 404 
 
 them. The millions of people who came here last 
 summer did not come to see the millions of money, 
 but to see what labor had done with money, and 
 they saw a great spectacle. What domes ! What 
 arches ! What " Courts of Honor ! " What canals ! 
 What statues! What machines! What pictures! 
 What jewels! What thought! What taste! What 
 love! And yet the whole scene was the match- 
 less emblazonry of labor. As God manifests him- 
 self in the external objects of earth and in the 
 millions of stars, thus man speaks by his works, 
 and in our world labor sits enthroned. Capital 
 is a storehouse of seeds; labor is their field, their 
 soil, their rain, and their summer-time. Over a 
 potency so vast and godlike, only Wisdom herself 
 should preside. If our age has any great men- 
 men whose hearts are warm and pure, and whose 
 minds are large as the world, it should ask them 
 to preside over the tasks and wages of the laborer. 
 Anarchy, crime, and folly should be asked to 
 stand back. Those three demons may be called 
 to the front when our laborers are seeking for 
 poverty and disgrace. 
 
 You have all heard of the hostility of capital 
 to labor. But there is no special truth in the
 
 405 
 
 phrase. Labor is just as hostile to labor. The 
 whole truth is this: Man is not anxious to spend 
 his money. There is a saying that " the fool and 
 Iris money are soon parted," but we have not 
 reached the maxim that labor loves to make pres- 
 ents to labor. Did you ever know a blacksmith 
 who was happy to pay large bills to the plumber ? 
 Are the carpenters anxious to have their tailors 
 advance the price of a suit of clothes ? Are the 
 " walking delegates " for the plasterers anxious 
 to pay the farmer a dollar for wheat? If reports 
 be true, there are laboring men in the West who 
 are so hostile to the labor of their brothers that 
 they are going to buy most all needful things in 
 the shops of England. 
 
 Thus labor is as great an enemy of labor as it 
 is of capital. The hostility between labor and 
 money is a mischievous fiction, gotten up by 
 dreamers and professional grumblers, who wish to 
 ride into office or fame by parading a love for the 
 multitude. This false love ought soon to end its 
 destructive career. Last June and July it cost 
 the workingmen many millions of dollars. Had 
 some walking delegates of Christianity told these 
 men that labor and capital are eternal friends
 
 406 
 
 that labor is the language of money, the body it 
 assumes, the life it lives, our summer would have 
 been full of industry and honor. How could 
 Krupp hate the men who are doing his will 
 in massive iron ? How could Field hate the men 
 who were laying his cable in the ocean? The 
 church must help stamp all our industrial false- 
 hoods into the dust, and must wave over all men 
 the flag of brotherhood. 
 
 So rapidly has friendship grown between 
 capital and labor, that a law is now before the 
 British parliament looking to a compensation to 
 each laborer or his family for injuries the work- 
 ingman may have received in the execution of his 
 task. When passed, this law will each year give 
 ten millions of dollars to the working class of the 
 three islands. This law is not coming from the 
 "club" or "gun, 11 but from the Christianity of 
 England. 
 
 This new humane philosophy has counted all 
 the toilers who have been injured in their toil. 
 It saw fifty-seven men killed while building the 
 Forth bridge, and 130 die among the wheels and 
 machines used in digging the Manchester canal. 
 This new kindness has studied longer and found
 
 that of each ten thousand men employed on the 
 railways, fourteen are killed in a year and eighty 
 badly crippled. In the long past there was no love 
 that counted these dead or injured men. A dead 
 laborer was as a dead horse or a dead dog. The 
 riots and destruction and barbarity of last 
 July set back all this new friendship, and made 
 brotherly love despair of the present and future. 
 The evil one hath done this. Endless abuse, 
 endless complaint, endless violence, openly taught 
 anarchy, have succeeded in making work the 
 enemy of money. You can recall the Bible 
 story of the person who came at night and sowed 
 tares among the springing wheat. 
 
 The fact that the United States army had to 
 hasten hither to save life and property can not 
 all be charged upon the immigrants in our land. 
 We have of late years been producing a group of 
 Americans who care nothing for right or wrong, 
 and who have become the masters of all the 
 forms of abuse and discontent. It is evident that 
 the influx of anarchists ought to cease, but we 
 must not forget the crop our nation is growing 
 out of its own soil. All the cities seem uniting 
 to make law ridiculous. The alien who will sell
 
 408 
 
 his vote for a few shillings is not so low as the 
 American who will prefer these votes to princi- 
 ples. The immigrant may act through the absence 
 of patriotism for his new land, but the American 
 acts through total depravity. 
 
 The foreigners are generally manipulated by 
 political confidence men, who are home-made. 
 
 The general theme of this morning is too large 
 for the narrow limits of an essay, but it is possi- 
 ble for us to feel that our great Christian organ- 
 ism ought to be applied, from these dark days 
 onward, to the making of the Christlike char- 
 acter. The church, Catholic and Protestant, has 
 lived for all other causes; let it, at last, live for 
 a high intelligence and for individual righteous- 
 ness. Literature and science and the public 
 press will help the church. All these wide-open 
 and anxious eyes must perceive clearly that our 
 national and personal happiness must come from 
 the study and obedience of that kind of ethics 
 which became so brilliant in Palestine. Our 
 Jewish friends need not call it Christian, and 
 our rationalized minds need not call it divine. 
 What is desirable and essential is, that its spirit 
 shall sweep over us. Called by any name, it is
 
 409 
 
 a perfect salvation for our country and for each 
 soul. The time and money the church has given 
 to a metaphysical inquiry and teaching have 
 been a total loss. In the great college courses, 
 there are studies in classic language, and in high 
 mathematics, that strengthen the intellect; but no 
 such virtue has ever been found to flow from 
 the theological studies of the church. For hun- 
 dreds of years the mind has found in these 
 enigmas its slow doctrine. There, thousands, 
 even millions, of thinkers have found their grave. 
 There, the colossal mind of even a Pascal grew 
 confused and weak. There, great men have lost 
 their blessed earth while they were fighting 
 over the incomprehensible. God did not give 
 man this globe that it might be made a desert 
 or a battlefield, but that it might be made the 
 great home of great men. 
 
 As often as creeds and dogmas have detached 
 the mind from humanity, literature and art and 
 science have rushed in to save the precious things 
 of society. But these agencies have done this 
 only by carrying, in prose and verse and science, 
 the laws of love, duty and justice, by delineating 
 man as a brother of all men and as a subject in
 
 410 
 
 the mighty kingdom of law and love. In an age 
 and in a republic marked by an amazing effort to 
 turn all things, all days, all life, into gold, our 
 pulpits must make a new effort to reveal and create 
 man the spiritual being, man temperate, man stu- 
 dious, man a lover of justice, man the brother, man 
 Christlike. The same science that is seeking and 
 finding the sources of wealth, and that is filling 
 the young mind with longings to become rich, can 
 find and teach all the worth of man as a spiritual 
 being, and can compel a great nation and a great 
 manhood to spring up from the philosophy of 
 the soul. 
 
 To reach a result so new and so great, the 
 pulpit must select new themes. It must cull 
 them from the field where the mob raves, from 
 the shops where men labor, from the poverty in 
 which many die, from the office where wealth 
 counts its millions. Even so beclouded a pagan 
 as Virgil sang that when the mob is throwing 
 stones and firebrands, and is receiving weapons 
 from its fury, if wisdom will only become visible 
 and speak to it, it will listen, and at last obey. 
 We have the mob; it is high time for a divine 
 wisdom to speak to it.
 
 411 
 
 Our planet not only rolls on in the embrace 
 of the laws of gravitation, of light and heat, 
 vegetable and animal life, and the strange encom- 
 passment of the electric ether, but it flies onward 
 amid spiritual laws far more wonderful laws 
 of labor and rest, laws of mental and moral pro- 
 gress, laws of perfect justice and of universal 
 love. Oh, that God, by his almighty power, 
 may hold back our Nation from destruction for 
 a few more perilous years, that it may learn 
 where lie the paths, in which, as brothers just 
 and loving, all may walk to the most of excel- 
 lence and the most of happiness.
 
 IRefcemption of a 
 
 2Davi> Swing's TUnfinisbed Sermon. 
 
 Who redeemeth thy life from destruction. Psalm ciii. 4. 
 
 The theological form of redemption is no 
 longer clearly understood. The term passed 
 through many centuries without having its im- 
 port much questioned. All the Christian myriads 
 assumed that there was a heavy account standing 
 against each living soul and that Christ had come 
 to redeem those who were lying in jail under this 
 debt. He had paid off the old claim and stood 
 forth in the light of a kind redeemer. At last 
 came the Calvinists to teach that this floating 
 debt was paid for only a part of the debtors. 
 The Arminians taught that arrangements had 
 been made by which all debtors could arrange 
 to have their old account erased. In the long 
 meanwhile, the import of the word "redemption" 
 was a commercial meaning. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone has recently written an essay 
 against Anna Besant's memories of her early the- 
 ology. It would seem that Anna Besant does 
 injustice to the intellect and faith of the modern 
 
 412
 
 413 
 
 churches at large; but there are many congrega 
 tions in England and our land to whose member- 
 ship her delineation of a doctrine would sound 
 like the purest truth, while that of Mr. Gladstone 
 would come under the old terrible phrase of 
 " philosophy falsely so called.' 1 The ideas of the 
 statesman are almost those of the new school of 
 Presbyterians. 
 
 The word redemption sprang up when men 
 first began to fight and take prisoners on land 
 and sea. To kill these prisoners was not always 
 the best manner in which to dispose of them. 
 Perhaps rich families would pay much money or 
 many camels or kids for their release. From 
 such a source the word soon passed to a spiritual 
 meaning, and we hear Job saying: "I know that 
 my Redeemer liveth ; he will at last appear and 
 buy me back from my cruel captors." We hear 
 the psalm singing of the kind God who buys us 
 aw r ay from destruction. Thus, step by step, came 
 the thought and sentiment that named Christ the 
 Redeemer. 
 
 As the word is older than the formal theology 
 of the church, it may be thought of as one of 
 the great general terms of all languages. We
 
 414 
 
 are all captives. In the great war of man's life, 
 some armed ignorance or vice has taken us pris- 
 oners, and we are all waiting for some redeemer 
 to come. It is not only on account of heaven 
 the captives are waiting. Earth enters into all 
 their longings. They wish to be brought back 
 and set free in these continents and years. Hav- 
 ing no money of their own, they hope for help 
 from their friends, and they recall the dream of 
 Isaiah, when men would be redeemed without 
 money or without price. The wealth of the 
 world would be offered to each poor heart. In 
 the galleries of Europe there is often seen a 
 beautiful picture of a Magdalen, reading. She 
 had been redeemed. When some unseen hand 
 drew back for St. John the curtain of heaven, he 
 saw in one happy field one hundred and forty- 
 four thousand of the redeemed. They had once 
 been prisoners, but the quality of our world had 
 made them, like the captives of Zechariah, "pris- 
 oners of hope." Earth has no hopeless islands 
 or continents. It may be all swept over by the 
 winds and melody of redemption. Christ did 
 not create all this work of rescue, but, bringing a 
 large part of it, he expressed the whole fact. As
 
 415 
 
 one summer-time does not contain all the magical 
 working of the sun, but only illustrates millions 
 of past and coming years, so Christ did not bring 
 all of redemption to our world, but rather did 
 he teach us that all the human host has marched 
 or may march through an atmosphere beautifully 
 tinted with redeeming grace. It is not all the 
 grace of God; much of it is the grace of man. 
 It comes from God, indeed, but it comes through 
 humanity. 
 
 Our age is moved deeply by the study of 
 ideals in art. Each generation is amazed at its 
 own progress. In the great Field Columbian 
 Museum, one can see the history of many an idea; 
 the boat-idea, beginning at three logs bound 
 together with a piece of bark, and passing on 
 toward the ocean palace; the transportation-idea, 
 beginning with a strap on a man's forehead, 
 passing on, through the panniers on a goat or a 
 donkey, and reaching to the modern express train ; 
 the sculpture-idea, moving from some stone or 
 earthen or wooden outlines onward toward the 
 angelic forms that seem about to live and speak. 
 There you will see the wooden eagle that marked 
 the grave of some Indian. And what a creature
 
 416 
 
 it is! Nothing but the infinite kindness of civil- 
 ization could persuade us to call it a bird of any 
 known species. And yet perhaps the Indian, 
 when dying, was happy that such a wooden bird 
 was to stand on his grave and keep his memory 
 green. 
 
 Into our age, so full of new and grand concep- 
 tions in art, there must come the marching ideals 
 
 1 O 
 
 of human life. Man is moving through a redemp- 
 tive world. All lips should sing each day the 
 song of the old harpist, "Who redeemeth thy 
 life from destruction." What our age needs 
 is a rapid advance of the ideals of life. A Catho- 
 lic priest who has spent thirty years in the tem- 
 perance cause said, last week, that the saloon is 
 the greatest enemy that 'Rome has left in the 
 world; that the criticisms we Protestants make of 
 Rome's dogmas were harmless, compared with the 
 ruin of mind and soul wrought by the saloon and 
 its defenders. No one will deny the truth of 
 the priest's complaint, and all are glad to mark 
 the new effort of the Romanists to set up new 
 ideas. Protestants should not, can not, hate a 
 Catholic; but all good citizens must cherish little 
 regard for any one who has not yet gotten beyond 
 the saloon idea.
 
 417 
 
 Such are not churchmen they are saloonmen. 
 They have not been touched by the new redemp- 
 tion of the new age. When they die, they ought 
 to sleep under that wooden eagle of the museum, 
 because the bird and the man stand equally far 
 away from any known shape of terrestrial beauty. 
 May great success come to the Civic Federation, 
 which is attempting to redeem this city from the 
 grasp of those men, in office and out of office, who, 
 being Romanists, disgrace Rome's altar, or, being 
 Protestants, disgrace all humanity! Nothing is 
 so beautiful as the face of the Redeemer; but each 
 man and woman who leads toward a higher life 
 is a redeemer of our race. Christ was a fountain 
 of redemption, but humanity at large composes 
 the great flood. Each noble soul, each good book, 
 each great picture, each piece of high music, is a 
 redeemer, and when the soul, young, or mature, 
 has once started toward its salvation, then, each 
 field, each forest, becomes a page in its divine 
 book, and each bird-song, a revival hymn, sweet as 
 those of the old Methodists. 
 
 For many centuries, the Christian estimate 
 of man's life was inadequate. Solemnity was 
 never a full justification of the human family.
 
 418 
 
 Solemnity is neither a virtue nor a vice. One 
 can not live for it. Weeping can not possibly be 
 a human goal. God would not create a world 
 that it might weep. Nor is self-denial an explan- 
 ation of rational life on this globe. We admire 
 the self-denial of a poor mother who toils hard, 
 arid eats and sleeps little, that her children may 
 the better live, but we all regret that that poor 
 mother could not have enjoyed t'en times as 
 much sunshine as fell upon her heart. Christ 
 was the man of sorrows, but not because self- 
 denial is the reason of being. Times may be- 
 come so dark and oppressive that the salvation of 
 the many can come only through the sufferings of 
 the few, but the universe was not made for the 
 general display of dark and oppressive times. 
 Self-denial is not, therefore, the ultimate ideal of 
 man. Self-denial assumes the misfortunes of 
 other people, but the "other people" must finally 
 rise above those misfortunes, and thus end the 
 empire of self-abnegation. Self-denial must fol- 
 low us through infancy; but what is to be with us 
 and stay with us after we have become men i 
 Nothing, therefore, will explain the human 
 race, except the many-sided greatness and happi-
 
 419 
 
 ness of each individual. The former Christian 
 times all came short of finding adequate aims of 
 society. The three years of Jesus were not a 
 perfect picture of human life. They were a sub- 
 lime picture of man, as caught in a storm, and 
 as saving ship and crew, but in the uncounted 
 years of that Son of God there is no crown 
 of thorns. He wept for one night in a gloomy 
 garden, but in the matchless sweep of his exist- 
 ence there are no tears. Thus we perceive that 
 the existence of man is to be explained only by 
 the greatness and completeness of his ideals. It 
 is not enough for a man that he is a good judge 
 of pictures, for it may be that he drinks twenty 
 glasses of beer in a day, and pays the family ser- 
 vant girl only two dollars a week. How strange 
 it is that a Catholic will belong to both a 
 church and a saloon ! The human ideas must 
 grow more numerous and more adequate, that 
 they may make a complete manhood and woman- 
 hood. 
 
 The redeeming process must go forward until 
 we are wholly free. It was once enough for a 
 man if he were a Presbyterian or a Catholic; 
 but such a goal is no longer adequate. This
 
 420 
 
 kind of person must now add to his name a new 
 group of virtues. He must be intelligent, tem- 
 perate, just, kind, lofty. The human beauties 
 have grown more rapidly than the beauties of art 
 have advanced. 
 
 It is seen how music has run forward from the 
 old monotony of the Hebrews and Greeks to the 
 wonderful compositions of the Italians and Ger- 
 mans. The modern soul would almost die under 
 the old music. It would not be high enough, 
 nor low enough, nor wide enough, nor sweet 
 enough. But morals have advanced by the same 
 path, and yet this city, encompassed and inspired 
 by ideals many and great, permits itself to be 
 governed by the abandoned classes. It is as 
 though the orator, Daniel Webster, had asked 
 some African ape to speak in his stead; it is as 
 though Jenny Lind had asked some steam fog- 
 horn to sing her part. When, from the splendor 
 of this city, from its high people, from its intelli- 
 gent and sunny homes, from its churches, from its 
 immortal summer of 1893, one passes to the cen- 
 tralized government, the heart cries out: Alas, 
 Jenny Lind, why did you suppose that a fog-horn 
 could take your place and sing for us that mighty
 
 421 
 
 song, "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth." In 
 the midst of the discord it is difficult to believe 
 that a redeemer lives. 
 
 It was hoped by many, before Mr. Stead pub- 
 lished his book on Chicago, that it would contain 
 some full and fair estimate of the virtues and 
 vices of the new and large city. But the volume 
 was not what was needed. It was full of all 
 kinds of trifling and injustice. It made sport of 
 men who founded institutes and universities, and 
 made no important distinction between a business 
 man and a swindler. The book was written 
 most recklessly. But it revealed one fact, the 
 great need of a treatise whose theme shall be this 
 one city. It ought to be written by a calm and 
 just mind some Dryasdust, perhaps, whom no 
 fact could escape. It would need no literary 
 decoration. Its facts would be all the paint it 
 could bear. We need a perfect picture of our 
 mental and spiritual shape. In this long tempest, 
 some bearing must be taken of the valuable ship. 
 If the people could know all the facts in the case, 
 they would fly to the ballot box as to their only 
 refuge, and would make every election day a 
 great day of redemption. Why should such a
 
 422 
 
 city, so situated, so vast, so intelligent, go to the 
 simple for its philosophy and tax gamblers for 
 the spread of such midnight darkness? Money 
 would come from noble people, could it only 
 come for good purposes. 
 
 The redemption of such a city is a great work. 
 They who gird themselves for such a task, and 
 who toil to the end, will reach more laurels than 
 can be worn by one forehead. The new era calls 
 them and will inspire them and the future will 
 reward them. 
 
 The ills of a city will not all vanish when it 
 shall become well governed. A most perfect and 
 most honest government will not bring a perfect 
 salvation; for intemperance and idleness and 
 extravagance will remain, and those two great 
 forces called labor and capital will still be here. 
 They are both one, only capital is larger than 
 labor. When a man's labor is worth six hundred 
 dollars a year, he is worth several thousand dol- 
 lars. It would take quite a sum invested at six 
 per cent, to equal such a man. Capital is con- 
 densed labor labor crowded into a package of 
 bills or gold, like the air crowded into a Westing- 
 house cylinder. The living laborer sets free the
 
 423 
 
 condensed labor and makes it assume the form of 
 some external object. Both are one, only capital 
 is the larger. They will draw nearer to each 
 other as the world advances in intellect and good- 
 ness. 
 
 In this widening of human ideals a large part 
 of the community has outgrown the law of 
 demand and supply. The Rossis and Ricardos, 
 who stated that law so clearly a hundred years 
 ago, were not thinking of the welfare of the 
 workingman, but only the causes of a price. The 
 study and the law were cold blooded. A work- 
 ingman received fifty cents a day or less, because 
 the need was not great and the workingmen were 
 numerous. In our age there is a vast multitude 
 of employers who pay something to a man 
 because he is a human being. An element 
 undreamed of by the last century enters into the 
 wages of to-day. Mr. Childs did not regard the 
 law of demand and supply. His heart made 
 some new laws, and he paid as much to the 
 human being as he did to the trade of the man. 
 He could have secured labor at a low market 
 price, but he hated the calculations of the last 
 century, and paid men what pleased his own
 
 424 
 
 benevolence. Few of you make any effort to 
 secure help at the lowest rates. The human 
 being man, woman or boy steps in and draws 
 a few additional pennies. The sweat shops are 
 places where love has not yet come. There, the 
 law of demand and supply works in all its old- 
 time barbarity. 
 
 In our largest mercantile house there are clerks 
 who receive twenty thousand dollars a year. In 
 one of our music houses we can find the same 
 kind of fact. Great salaries are following labor's 
 nag, but it is vain to say that those salaries come 
 from demand and supply, for we know that these 
 fortunate clerks could be procured at a much 
 lower rate. Wages are being modified by the 
 sentiment of human brotherhood. It must not be 
 raised as an objection that this sentiment is not 
 universal. Perhaps the man who raises the objec- 
 tion has not yet become perfectly redeemed him- 
 self. We should all be conscious of the slowness 
 with which perfection spreads over the mortal 
 heart. 
 
 When the town of Pullman was projected, two 
 or more members of its small but rich syndicate 
 opposed the construction of such a beautiful vil-
 
 425 
 
 lage. They said, "beauty of streets, of houses, 
 library, theatre, market-place, church, lakes, and 
 fountains will yield no interest on the investment. 
 Plain, cheap huts will do as well." But the higher 
 ideal carried, and three million dollars were thus 
 flung away. |3ome of the founders remembered 
 the sweat shops of the world, and some remem- 
 bered also the black slaves who had. received 
 from capital neither a home nor wages. There 
 may be defects in the Pullman idea, but, viewed 
 from a hundred gambling dens and five thousand 
 saloons, it looks well. Seen from our city hall, it 
 looks like a group of palm trees waving over a 
 spring in the desert. While traveling through 
 hell, Dante was cheered when, looking through 
 pitchy clouds, he saw a star. 
 
 We are not to assume that the town of Pull- 
 man has reached its greatest excellence. It is 
 injured by the unrest of the Nation. Perhaps many 
 of our greatest employers will, like Mr. Brassey, 
 of England, decline to accept of us profits beyond 
 five per cent. We must all hope much from the 
 gradual progress of brotherly love. * 
 
 fcerc tbc professor's last manuscript cnoco.