LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY of ILLINOIS. 
 
AN ADDRESS 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 WILLIAM SEYMOUR TYLER, 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE 
 
 COLLEGE CHURCH AT AMHERST, 
 May 29, 1898, 
 
 BY 
 
 SAMUEL EDWARD HERRICK, D. D., 
 
 OF MOUNT VERNON CHURCH, BOSTON. 
 
oaa Igt'lv aXrjdrj, ova aepvd, oca di^aia, oca dyvd ? oaa Ttpoff- 
 <pikrj, offa evcprjpa^ ec tic; dperij xai el' rig ezacvoq, radra ’KoyiZ.eade. 
 
% c.oU fel 
 
 I approach, the pious duty of this hour, my 
 friends and brothers, with feelings of mingled re- 
 luctance and alacrity. My heart is in conflict with 
 my judgment. I do not choose this service and 
 yet I cannot decline it. The life and character of 
 Professor Tyler deserve portrayal by a hand no 
 JJess skillful than his own. The man, the scholar, 
 the teacher, the Christian, all the aspects under 
 which his life may be viewed, demand, for their 
 just and adequate appraisal, a manhood, scholar- 
 ship, devotion and faith, approximating at least to 
 those of the subject. As we recall the charac- 
 terizations which he gave to the world of so many 
 of his illustrious contemporaries — Sabin, Dickin- 
 son, Stearns, Hitchcock, Humphrey and a host of 
 others — and think how true and just and beauti- 
 ful these characterizations were, one is tempted to 
 wish that we might have Professor Tyler as 
 sketched by himself. Only that, as Dr. Bartol 
 
said of Edwin P. Whipple “his singular lowliness 
 would have hidden the equally rare splendor of 
 his own gifts.” 
 
 But while I may not hope to “'apprehend that 
 for which I have been apprehended,” I may claim 
 at least one qualification for the service to which 
 you summon me. Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh 
 said of one of his old teachers, “He had that 
 quality of primary minds of attaching permanently 
 those whom he had relations to. His students 
 never ceased to love him and return to him 
 from all regions of the world. He was in this 
 a solar man, and had his planets pacing faithfully 
 round him.” Professor Tyler was such a solar 
 man. It became my good fortune to fall within 
 the sway of his paternal and gracious influence 
 when I was a boy but fifteen years of age. And 
 thereafter, for more than forty years, he stood 
 to me as the lawyers say “in loco parentis.” For 
 that solar relation of his was not only luminous 
 and genial, but it was far-reaching and perma- 
 nent. It extended to the very aphelia of his 
 
 pupils’ careers. Once mutually established, no 
 distance of space and no lapse of time was suf- 
 
fered to rupture it. I can bring you, therefore, 
 an appreciation of our old master. A biography 
 you will not expect, and I shall not pelt you 
 with dates. 
 
 Alexander the Great, it is said, held his copy 
 of the Iliad in such honor that he set apart a 
 jewelled casket from his Persian booty to keep it 
 in. I wish I could do something like that for 
 the story of this noble life. But “ silver and 
 gold have I none.” I can offer only the simplest 
 tribute of a profound admiration and a life-long 
 affection. I shall not care even if I may seem 
 to any to be partial and prejudiced. I know I 
 shall hear in imagination at many a period of 
 this discourse, the “ Pause there ! ” with which he 
 was wont to arrest us in Homer and Demosthenes 
 and JEschylus and Plato ; but I shall not heed 
 even that imaginary injunction of his modesty as 
 I try to tell you Amherst men of the nineties 
 what Professor Tyler was to us of the fifties. 
 Many of you I presume would say that you knew 
 Professor Tyler. And yet you did not know him 
 as we of forty years ago knew him. You knew 
 him as the venerable sage, the ripened saint, the 
 
hero who had fought his battles, run his course 
 and kept the faith. We saw him in the heat of 
 the conflict, under the mid-day burden, wrestling 
 with principalities and powers, not always “ in 
 heavenly places/’ though always with a heavenly 
 purpose and a holy energy. 
 
 When a nobly strenuous life comes to its close, 
 it is generally discovered, I think, by those who 
 have witnessed any considerable portion of it, to 
 have had a large element of pathos in it. When 
 it comes to its close, I say : for the glory of the 
 
 cross is ever posthumous. Only retrospect can 
 give atmosphere, proportion, true tone, to an ac- 
 tion or a career. Thirty-five years Boston has 
 waited for St. Gaudens to tell the story of Rob- 
 ert Shaw and his colored troops at Fort Wagner. 
 She has done well. Row it is told fitly and 
 
 finally. The heroes themselves could not have 
 told, did not know, what they were doing, nor 
 how they were doing it. Heroes never do. Her- 
 cules never felt when he was slaying the Re- 
 mean lion and plucking the apples of the Hes- 
 perides, what the sculptor of the Farnesan statue 
 has put into that pathetic face, and into the se- 
 
 6 
 
renely patient attitude, with the apples held mod- 
 estly behind the back, as acquisitions after all of 
 small account. And so Professor Tyler, I think, 
 never realized the pathos or the strenuousness of 
 his own life. It was a life of great hardihood, 
 and mighty courage from the beginning. He 
 gathered his apples, put them behind him, and 
 took the next labor. 
 
 He was born amid the simplicities and asperi- 
 ties of Puritan and Colonial life. He has pic- 
 tured for us the Arcadian scenes of his boyhood, 
 in his semi-centennial address given at his birth- 
 place, Harford, Pa., some twenty years ago. To 
 journey back in thought and imagination to the 
 time and place of that boyhood is like going 
 back into some dim, almost legendary region. 
 The little colonies that were going west from Hew 
 England at the beginning of the century to sub- 
 due the forests of Northern Pennsylvania and Cen- 
 tral Hew York, were repeating the earlier experi- 
 ences of Plymouth and Salem and Haverhill. The 
 wolves were intimately acquainted with their farm 
 yards. Their fires were kindled in their rude 
 stone fire-places from the flint and the steel, or 
 
by coals brought from some neighbor's house 
 half a mile away. It was a time of no carpets 
 on the floors, and no pictures on the walls. The 
 sofa was unknown, save as Cowper had just sung 
 it in “ The Task." Michigan with its furniture 
 factories as yet was not. Kitchen, dining-room, 
 living-room, were one. The good man Tyler, 
 
 Justice of the Peace, transacted his business, and 
 conducted neighborhood trials in the same apart- 
 ment where the good wife baked her own pies, 
 and washed her own dishes. Books were few ; 
 so few that a new accession to the family libra- 
 ry made an epoch. The whole collection would 
 be stored in one of those nondescript pieces of 
 furniture which was book-case, escritoire, and 
 chest of drawers, all in one. The clothing of 
 the household was made from wool raised on the 
 farm, spun in the house, and for the most part 
 by the mother's own hands. The children of the 
 family milked the cows and drove them to and 
 from the pasture. The one old white horse took 
 the father and mother, and an indefinite number 
 of children upon their infrequent journeys through 
 the obscure wood-paths. And when William 
 
 8 
 
came to Amherst in mid-winter of 1829, there Was 
 no other way but to pack the boy with his 
 books and clothing, bed and bedding into a sleigh 
 behind the old white horse and drive from Mon- 
 day morning before day, nntil Amherst was 
 reached on Saturday at noon. 
 
 And yet the strennousness of this frontier farm- 
 er’s life was not without its abundance of cheer. 
 It was softened, moreover, and glorified by dig- 
 nity, intelligence, fine feeling. “ Strength and 
 beauty were in the sanctuary ” of the Tyler 
 home as they have ever been. Hard work and 
 lofty thought. The parents sought the best things 
 for their children, and taught them to desire the 
 best things for themselves. Their pride and am- 
 bition all ran to virtue, integrity, good learning. 
 They belonged to the aristocracy of old New Eng- 
 land’s religious and intellectual life. And it would 
 be an interesting speculation, were there time to 
 entertain it, to consider how far and how deeply 
 in the life of our country, spread the influence 
 of the moral and intellectual atmosphere of that 
 one Puritan household. That influence, as it was 
 incarnated in Professor Tyler, — especially as it 
 
 9 
 
mellowed, and softened, and grew gracious through 
 the years when his own children were growing 
 up around him — made itself felt upon generations 
 of plastic students, who carried its undying im- 
 press to all lands under the sun. 
 
 In the middle of the century Amherst was 
 poor. There were few students here from wealthy 
 families — one or two perhaps upon every row of 
 benches in the old Greek room — just enough to 
 suggest to the rest of us what a pleasant and de- 
 lightful thing it must he, to always have money 
 in the pocket, and never have to wear thread- 
 bare clothes. But there sat the teacher, who, as 
 we all knew, thought never of the clothes, but 
 only and always of the man. We all knew just 
 what things were at a premium in that class- 
 room, and just what coin would not be current. 
 He dearly loved neatness, accuracy, adequacy in 
 a boy’s rendering, but he loved more an honest 
 endeavor, even though it were accompanied with 
 dullness in the intellectuals. The moral element 
 was uppermost in all his judgments. There was 
 what one of his old pupils called “ a genial in- 
 tolerance of slovenly rendering,” when he knew 
 
that there was a good intent. But when there 
 was any shamming, or any unreality, the intoler- 
 ance was no longer genial, but satirical and with- 
 ering. There was no deceiving him, nor did 
 he allow us to deceive ourselves. We knew at 
 the end of a recitation just what marks would 
 go upon the faculty records, and we knew that 
 they would be righteous ; righteous and kind. I 
 remember once when we were reading the Iliad, 
 one of our number had translated a passage with 
 a fluency, and at the same time with an adequacy 
 which in his case were altogether unaccountable, 
 save upon the supposition that he was reading at 
 sight from an inserted page of his “Bohn.” 
 Things went swimmingly until he came to the last 
 sentence, which began with the Greek name of 
 Juno, simply transferred, instead of being trans- 
 lated. Sublimely audacious, he read on, “ Here 
 the goddess interposed,” etc. “Pause there !” said 
 the Professor. “He-re, the goddess interposed, 
 isn’t it? Next!” That glib translation, like 
 Achilles, was vulnerable only in its heel ; but no 
 need to further puncture it with question or un- 
 mask it by comment. It was all as kindly as a 
 
flash of white light, and as thorough. There was 
 the swift, electric illumination ; the immediate and 
 automatic condemnation of a day of judgment, 
 without the possibility of extenuation or appeal. 
 
 And yet his severity was much like the coat of 
 a russet apple. It was well understood that be- 
 neath the austerity of his seeming there was an 
 immense fund of paternal feeling that could be 
 relied upon. He “dealt justly, and loved mercy.” 
 He was humane to a degree. He loved to find 
 some point of view from which peccadillos might 
 be regarded as excusable. He was a favorite me- 
 diator therefore upon those occasions of conflict 
 which would now and then arise in the college 
 community, between the conduct of the students 
 and the judgment of the faculty. If he held a 
 brief from us youngsters, we felt sure that the 
 case would go well at Court ; if he refused to be 
 retained by us, we were equally certain that the 
 decision of the Court would be righteousness tem- 
 pered by his leniency. 
 
 As a teacher, he brought his own personality 
 to bear upon his pupils in a very remarkable 
 way. The university method insulating to all 
 
 12 
 
personality had not so much as knocked at the 
 door of his class-room. What he taught was all 
 unconsciously and yet profoundly saturated with 
 the spirit of the man himself. First and fore- 
 most- a class-room exercise was with him an act 
 of religion. Professor Agassiz once said, “ I 
 never make the preparations for penetrating into 
 some small province of Nature hitherto undiscov- 
 ered, without breathing a prayer to the Being 
 who hides His secrets from me only to allure me 
 graciously on to the unfolding of them.” Pro- 
 fessor Tyler might have said the same concerning 
 his daily excursions with his class into the domain 
 of Greek Literature and Philology. There was a 
 certain reverent humility in his entering upon 
 the exercise of the hour, as of one who is enter- 
 ing a temple to worship. As Charles Lamb 
 would have had “a grace before Milton, a grace 
 before Shakspeare, a devotional exercise proper to 
 be said before reading the Fairy Queen,” so Pro- 
 fessor Tyler approached a reading from the Iliad, 
 the Phsedo, or the Prometheus Bound. He was 
 not more earnest, or more reverent in reading the 
 Hebrew prophets and the Christian Apostles on 
 
Sunday than he was in interpreting -ZEschylus or 
 Plato on Monday. With him these also were 
 prophets and apostles, though lacking it might 
 be some higher and finer degree of inspiration. 
 Their teachings were true theological preliminaries 
 — threshold matters. With them he felt himself 
 to be treading the outer and more ancient pre- 
 cincts of Christian Theology. In their moral and 
 religious teachings, he saw the projecting lines of 
 a divine intent. These were not merely the “un- 
 conscious prophecies of heathendom/’ but Jehovah 
 was there, “ laying the beams of His chambers in 
 the waters.” If we may not say that in those 
 early days he had actually seized, yet I am per- 
 suaded that he was already glimpsing, that large 
 and profound conception of the religious develop- 
 ment of the race, of the God- ward struggle of the 
 human soul, by which the scientific study of com- 
 parative religion has in these later times thrown 
 into solution the old theological systems prepara- 
 tory to some new crystallization. He made us 
 feel that these old Greeks were vitally a part of 
 our world of to-day — not only that they were en- 
 dowed with the same human nature as ourselves 
 
 1 4 
 
— but that as the growth of a thousand years 
 ago still abides in the substance and beauty of 
 some venerable oak yet vigorous, so their speech 
 still vitalizes ours ; their wisdom and experience 
 are in our institutions and philosophies ; and even 
 their ethical and religious thinking must be taken 
 account of to-day by any who would understand 
 our own. He made us feel that Greek History 
 and Greek Literature were a most precious and 
 vital contribution to the providential education of 
 the world, and that Plato and JEschylus, no less 
 than Moses and David, were “school-masters unto 
 Christ.” To be in his class-room and to catch his 
 thought was to be liberated and liberalized, and 
 made expectant and ready for all progress. Ho 
 knew how to collate a page of Demosthenes with 
 a column of yesterday’s newspaper ; Socrates with 
 Horace Greeley. I take it that not much is 
 known to-day of the finical way of studying Greek 
 which generally prevailed in the college class-rooms 
 of forty years ago. That is largely thrust back 
 into the preparatory school, as it should be. But 
 at that time it was necessary for the professor’s 
 desk to be more or less of a dissecting table. A 
 
good deal of time liad to be taken up in the 
 minute analysis of orthographic forms. It was a 
 “house of bondage, both for the teacher and the 
 pupil. But notwithstanding this, Professor Tyler 
 always managed to deliver us* from the thraldom 
 of the letter into the freedom of the spirit. How 
 his rugged face would light up as if the teacher, 
 the class, the whole hour, were redeemed when 
 some bright pupil, like Mather or Ward, seized 
 upon the spirit of a sentence of the Gorgias, and 
 rendered it with idiomatic freedom into a bit of 
 contemporaneous slang, or into a phrase from 
 some recent speech of Wendell Phillips, or of 
 Rufus Choate. And so he made us feel that the 
 old world was still the living world, and that we 
 were not so much walking and talking' with the 
 Greeks, as that the Greeks were walking and 
 talking with us. His course with any single 
 class was in itself a generous curriculum. He 
 tau'ght us rhetoric with Demosthenes, philosophy 
 with Plato, logic and ethics with Socrates, litera- 
 ture with Homer, theology with JEschylus and 
 Euripides and Plutarch. 
 
 Since these words were written I have been 
 
favored with the sight of an autobiographical 
 sketch of his life, left in MS. by Professor Tyler, 
 which, in a single paragraph, so illustrates this 
 spirit and temper of his class-room work that I 
 must quote it. “ In all the changes of teachers 
 and the times for more than half a century ; in 
 required and optional studies ; in regular lessons 
 and in reading at sight ; by recitations and lec- 
 tures : in the text-books which I have edited, and 
 the Socratic conversations by 4 question and answer ’ 
 which I have habitually held with my classes, 
 my end and aim has been one and the same, — 
 not to teach words only, but words in their in- 
 separable connection with things, and thoughts, I 
 take it, are the greatest and best things ; not to 
 teach the lesson only, or the language only, or 
 the literature only, or the life of the Greeks 
 only, but the lesson and the language, and the 
 literature, and the life ; and that not of the 
 Greeks only, but of mankind as illustrated by 
 that of the Greeks ; not only that I might make 
 Grecians but scholars, and not scholars but men, 
 and not only men but Christians, for ‘ the Chris- 
 tian is the highest style of man.’ So may Greek 
 
always be taught in Amherst College. ” To which 
 prayer of our dear old master, I am sure, every 
 true son of Amherst will fervently say Amen ! 
 
 As a teacher Professor Tyler was thus a true 
 prophet — a John Baptist — the herald and fore- 
 runner of a better day for Greek learning ; pre- 
 paring the way for, and making possible, Mather 
 and his broadening work. We may be thankful 
 that he was permitted to see so much of what 
 he longed for, — the superstructure whose founda- 
 tions he toiled so strenuously, so humbly, so mag- 
 nanimously to lay. He saw it without jealousy 
 and with great delight. The thought, “He must 
 increase, but I must decrease/’ brought nothing 
 but joy to the humble old scholar’s heart. In 
 this last third of the century, speaking roughly, 
 an era of great expansion in all directions, a 
 period of great fortunes, great industrial corpo- 
 rations, great mercantile trusts, great gifts to 
 causes of religion and literature, great institutional 
 churches, great universities, great libraries, and 
 perhaps we may add, great learning — under the 
 stimulus of specialization — it is easy to forget or 
 undervalue the prophet who “ stood crying in the 
 
wilderness, with garment of camel’s hair, and 
 leathern girdle about his loins, feeding upon 
 locusts and wild honey. ” But whatever gospel 
 of more generous culture may have dawned, or 
 may yet dawn, upon Amherst College, she can 
 never forget the one life which more than any 
 other made such a new day possible. The time 
 will come, if indeed it has not already come, 
 when Amherst will be said to have had an He- 
 roic Age ; when men will point to the megaliths 
 of her foundations, and discuss the stature and 
 character of her early builders. What name will 
 then be likely to have gathered to itself more of 
 high renown than that of our great Greek teacher 
 through well-nigh six decades ? Then will be 
 seen as we cannot see it, something of the power, 
 the use, the beauty, the pathos of this heroic life. 
 Many of his specific labors will doubtless be for- 
 gotten. This or that great blow by which he 
 wrought may not be in evidence. His classical 
 editions may become obsolete. The learning — mar- 
 vellous for his day, — with which he entered into 
 the great fight over the Homeric question, and 
 beneath which he buried, as it seemed forever, 
 
tli© paste-pot and scissors theory, and satisfied us 
 all that “Homer wrote the Iliad, the whole Iliad, 
 and the Iliad as a whole ; Homer wrote the Odys- 
 sey, the whole Odyssey, and the Odyssey as a 
 whole,” will likely be lost sight of in the vast 
 advances of criticism and philology. But that 
 huge stretch of foundation work — binding into it- 
 self four complete administrations of college .his- 
 tory — that work done on a meager salary — always 
 for love and not for pay — work done under lim- 
 itation — far from libraries — with great difficulties 
 and almost.no facilities — often thankless, but al- 
 ways patient, generous, faithful — that work, I say, 
 will be seen in coming time, as the most moment- 
 ous fact of our Alma Mater's first century. Pro- 
 fessor Tyler may not have been the most conspic- 
 uous figure of any particular decade, but he has 
 been by all means, taking the life of the college 
 as a whole thus far, its most essential factor, the 
 commune vinculum which has bound that life 
 through all its administrations and eras into 
 unity ; I fear he would hardly forgive me for say- 
 ing which has bound its separate hero-songs into 
 a single epic. 
 
 2 o 
 
There can be no fair estimate of his work here 
 which does not take account of Professor Tyler 
 in the College pulpit. As I have already inti- 
 mated, he was greatly in demand as a preacher 
 of occasional and memorial discourses. His pro- 
 tracted and intimate relations with great educa- 
 tional interests, especially in Central Massachu- 
 setts, his personal acquaintance with those who 
 founded, patronized and tilled the chairs of super- 
 intendence and instruction, and especially his in- 
 sight into character, and his rare skill in present- 
 ing, not an outline nor a profile, but an all-round, 
 stereoscopic, and at the same time an interior 
 and sympathetic, view of his subject, made him 
 4he favorite literary biographer of the whole re- 
 gion. He was known to have great store of myrrh 
 and nard, and amber and byssus, and so he be- 
 came a sort of embalm er-general for the schools 
 and churches of Franklin and Hampshire and 
 Hampden counties. The bulk of his published 
 discourses are probably of this character. But 
 
 these were not the discourses which revealed his 
 power. We remember him not as an orator, but 
 as a prophet of Grod, and a preacher of right- 
 
eousness. He was to Amherst, and about the 
 same time, what the great President James 
 Walker was to Harvard. In their literary quality 
 his sermons were fine and strong ; of great com- 
 pactness and without redundancy; clear and sharp- 
 lined ; often epigrammatic, with shot-like sentences 
 whose impact was felt and remembered. But their 
 chief charm and power lay not so much in their 
 distinctly literary and scholarly character, as in 
 their profoundly ethical and spiritual force. He 
 would seize upon some great fundamental princi- 
 ple in morals — he would take some short and 
 pithy text, like “Let integrity and uprightness 
 preserve me,” and flash it like an illuminat- 
 ing search-light all around the horizon, penetrat- 
 ing with it successively the realms of individual, 
 social and national life, until every soul within 
 the hearing of his voice knew what was the evil 
 of the time, and what its anti-septic and its cure. 
 
 And his presentation of his theme was charac- 
 teristic. It was synthetic and cumulative. His 
 conception did not grow up before us as by some 
 self-moved process from within — but it was built 
 up ; wrought, not cast ; now by touches as grace- 
 
ful as though he were a Benvenuto Cellini carv- 
 ing a hanap, and now by blow on blow like Sieg- 
 fried forging his sword. When he had finished, 
 the result was a work, massive, concrete, full of 
 “strength and beauty.” Often indeed, it was 
 what the old Hebrew prophets, — whom he closely 
 resembled in spirit and method — called “a bur- 
 den.” A burden carried first in his own soul, 
 and then by this simple, earnest, cumulative pro- 
 cess of disclosure, — revealing its righteousness and 
 its reasonableness — it became a burden rolled 
 upon the souls of his hearers. So he used that 
 day of judgment — the great financial crisis of 
 ’57 — as an occasion for settling his pupils in fun- 
 damental righteousness. So he used those days 
 that quickly followed, when rebellion was being 
 incubated at the South, and men at the North 
 were divided and wavering, to hold Amherst Col- 
 lege to loyal and patriotic integrity, and prepare 
 her for the loving sacrifice which was so soon to 
 be demanded of her — which was so soon to be 
 demanded of himself, in the offering of his own 
 first-born. And so, in a sense I suppose hardly 
 contemplated by the author of the Epistle to the 
 
Hebrews, in his use of the phrase, our Professor, 
 from the College pulpit “wrought righteousness” 
 and “turned armies to flight.” His words, robust 
 and brawny, did make righteous men, and fashion 
 patriots. 
 
 But quite as patent in his pulpit-work as the 
 spirit of the Hebrew prophet, was that of the 
 Christian Apostle. The history of Amherst 1 Col- 
 lege has been marked throughout by frequently 
 recurring periods of deep religious feeling. Such 
 periods he looked for. He recognized what James 
 Martineau calls “the tides of the Spirit.” He 
 was keen to detect the signs of their approach, 
 and when they came he was in full readiness 
 for them. It can hardly be said that he was first 
 of all to be seen riding upon their crest. He 
 was no drift-wood, sporting on the surface-motion 
 of the hour. His nature was too deep and strong 
 to curvet and caracole upon the eddies of emo- 
 tional excitation. Homer and Plato must hold 
 their steadfast place in the class-room through the 
 week. He did not believe that men were to be 
 saved by neglecting their appointed work. There 
 was, it may be, some touch of tenderer light 
 
upon the monotony of the curriculum, some gen- 
 tler and quite indescribable feeling suffused “the 
 dull dream of sense and custom.” But when the 
 Sunday came and it was the Professor’s turn to 
 preach, it was as though our John the Baptist 
 had become St. John the Apostle. Not that his 
 grand customary ethic was laid aside or forgotten, 
 but the moral motive was suffused by some- 
 thing distinctively more personal and affectionate. 
 “ That which was from the beginning, which we 
 have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, 
 which we have looked upon, and our hands have 
 handled of the Word of life; that which we have 
 seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also 
 may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellow- 
 ship is with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus 
 Christ.” There was the same synthetic, cumulative, 
 method, the same upbuilding of his theme by tender 
 touches and by mighty strokes on this side and 
 that, until his sermon had become like a bed of 
 his own Pennsylvania anthracite thoroughly on 
 fire, and his conception was all before us, glowing 
 with the steady ardor of the love of Christ, and 
 we were made to realize that the Christian motive 
 
 25 
 
transcended in its grandeur all other motives to 
 scholarship, to manhood, and to all virtue. 
 
 But great as Professor Tyler was in the func- 
 tions of teacher and preacher, he was greatest of 
 all as the man and the friend. I have often 
 thought, since I left College, that the feeling of 
 many of his pupils while under him erected an 
 imaginary harrier between him and themselves, 
 which, unreal as it was, neither could quite break 
 through. He certainly did his best to annihilate 
 all distance and all fear. But it was when the 
 pupil had gained his independent footing, and was 
 doing his own work in the world, and the eyes 
 of each looked level into the eyes of the other, 
 and each greeted the other as a fellow-worker in 
 the kingdom of God on earth, that we his old 
 pupils realized what he was and what he always 
 had been to us. Distance sometimes does more 
 than lend enchantment. It rectifies our judg- 
 ments. By some inexplicable paradox it discloses 
 sympathies, and reveals in their true significance 
 relations that have been but half apprehended and 
 imperfectly utilized. Professor Tyler, great as he 
 
 had been in the Greek room and in the chapel 
 
 2 6 
 
pulpit, became still mote to his pupils, ag 
 they thought of him from the banks of the Or- 
 egon and the Tigris, by the Golden Gate and 
 the Golden Horn, in the cities of the East 
 
 and on the prairies of the West, in the camp 
 
 and in the kraal, in their pulpits and profes- 
 
 sors’ chairs, in their editorial sanctums and courts 
 of law. He has been the fixed star to which our 
 eyes have turned from whatsoever quarter of the 
 world, — the star of perpetual apparition in the 
 old Amherst sky. To think of Amherst, has 
 
 been, first and foremost, to think of him. The 
 picture of “the elder brother” in our Lord’s 
 parable interprets his life, not by its likeness, but 
 by its contrast. He has been our elder brother 
 who has staid patiently at home, working the old 
 farm, training the younger children, the stay and 
 comfort of the venerable parent, the curator of 
 our family history, keeping up the home feeling 
 and the home traditions, and when we prodigals 
 have returned from our wanderings, who so ready 
 as he to kill the fatted calf and make merry 
 for our home-coming ? Never once thinking of 
 any poor kid which had been denied him, or of 
 
all that he had denied himself, but, with all his 
 heart, rejoicing in the prosperity, or sorrowing in 
 the adversity of his far-roving brethren, — true 
 imitator and counterpart of the great Elder 
 Brother of us all ! 
 
 Venerable and beloved Master! Thou hast 
 taught us by thy self-denial and patience ; by thy 
 courage and humility ; by thy faithfulness and 
 true manhood : — ‘ 4 Whatsoever things are true; 
 whatsoever things are honorable ; whatsoever 
 things are just; whatsoever things are pure; 
 whatsoever things are lovely ; whatsoever things 
 are of good report, — if there be any virtue, and 
 if there be any praise ” — ra xald xa) ra tiyadd — these 
 things thou hast taught us — in all fidelity to thy 
 Master and ours !