LAWRENCE J. GUTTER 
 
 Collection of Chicogoono 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 AT CHICAGO 
 
 The University Library 
 
IN MEMORIAM 
 
 DAVID SWING 
 
 BORN AUGUST 23, 1830 
 DIED OCTOBER 3, 1894 
 
 Chicago Literary Club 
 1894 
 
THIS MEMORIAL of our late fellow- 
 member, David Swing, was read at 
 the meeting of the Chicago Literary Club 
 on Monday evening, October 29, 1894, and 
 ordered printed and copies sent to the mem- 
 bers of the Club. 
 
 Frederick W. Gookin, 
 
 Recording Secretary. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Arciiive 
 
 in 2010 with funding from 
 
 CARLI: Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/inmemoriamdavidsOOchic 
 
DAVID SWING. 
 
 SIXTY-FOUR years ago, in the city of 
 Cincinnati, David Swing was born. His 
 father died soon after, and when David was 
 five years old, his mother having married 
 again, the family settled on a farm near Wil- 
 liamsburg, on the Ohio river. Until he was 
 eighteen years of age he lived upon the farm 
 and did the ordinary work of a farmer's boy, 
 attending the village school and academy 
 during the winter months. In the academy 
 Greek and Latin were taught, and when he 
 was eighteen years old, by his work at the 
 academy and at home, he was fitted for col- 
 lege and entered the Miami University at 
 Oxford, Ohio, from which he was graduated in 
 1852. In most departments of college work 
 he was a student of simply average ability, 
 but was at the very front in literary work 
 and the classical languages. After his grad- 
 uation he studied law for a year in the office 
 
of an uncle in Cincinnati, but, becoming sat- 
 isfied that the work of a clergyman was his 
 proper vocation, he exchanged the study of 
 law for that of theology, and in due time was 
 graduated from the Lane Theological Semi- 
 nary. He then returned to Oxford, and for 
 the next twelve years taught the Greek and 
 Latin languages, and preached every second 
 Sunday in a small country church near Ox- 
 ford, and frequently in the village churches. 
 In this early day his sermons had many of 
 the characteristics of the work of his maturer 
 years — the breadth of view, the profound 
 scholarship, the exquisite mastery of lan- 
 guage, the literary touch, the dainty wit and 
 sarcasm and the sovereign poetic fancy which 
 irradiated all. Four years before he came to 
 Chicago he received and accepted a call to a 
 Chicago church, but two or three weeks later 
 he withdrew his acceptance, stating that he 
 felt himself unqualified to permanently inter- 
 est a city audience. He received three or 
 four subsequent calls to Chicago, which were 
 declined from the same distrust in his own 
 abilities, but in 1866 came his final accept- 
 ance from the insistence of some of his 
 
early friends, who more correctly gauged 
 his powers. His first church was presently 
 consolidated with another, forming the 
 Fourth Presbyterian, for which he preached 
 with constantly growing success until 1875. 
 Meantime the church had been burned in the 
 great fire, and until it was rebuilt services 
 were held in Standard Hall and McVicker's 
 Theatre. Charges of heresy were preferred 
 against him, upon which he was tried and 
 acquitted by the local Presbytery, but when 
 an appeal was taken to the General Assem- 
 bly, he severed his connection with the 
 denomination rather than to be embroiled in 
 a controversy, which to him seemed infi- 
 nitely distasteful and profitless. Central 
 Music Hall was built by those sympathizing 
 with his views, and from its platform he 
 preached to great and appreciative audiences 
 until the end of his labors. 
 
 Such, in brief, is the outline of the life 
 and work of the man who is to-day so widely 
 and profoundly mourned. From boyhood 
 he seemed to have a special facility in the 
 acquisition of languages, and mastered the 
 Italian tongue for the purpose of reading the 
 
poems of Dante. His knowledge of the 
 classical languages was phenomenal ; his 
 study and teaching of these languages made 
 them seemingly as familiar to him as his 
 mother tongue. His library contained the 
 works of nearly all the Greek and Latin 
 authors, and he usually read several pages 
 daily in each of these languages. This 
 familiarity with the classical authors gave him 
 an inexhaustible fund of anecdote and illus- 
 tration for the work of his life. 
 
 His first national recognition came with 
 his trial for heresy. As we look at this inci- 
 dent after a lapse of twenty years, when the 
 smoke of conflict is cleared away, we can see 
 clearly and without prejudice the merits of 
 the issue between Professor Swing and his 
 principal prosecutor. The Church had a 
 confession of faith, formulated more than two 
 hundred years before, which was supposed 
 at its date to embody the teachings of the 
 New Testament, points, however, which 
 many of the Church members had come to 
 question or quietly to ignore. 
 
 Professor Swing formulated his dissent 
 from these certain points upon the ground 
 
that they did not truly represent the teachings 
 of Christ. Dr. Patton's position, in substance, 
 was, that the Presbyterian Church was organ- 
 ized upon this confession of faith ; that the 
 question was not whether Professor Swing 
 was right or wrong in his interpretation of the 
 New Testament teachings, but whether he 
 could remain the pastor of a church founded 
 upon formulae which he in part disbelieved. 
 From a purely technical standpoint, we may 
 concede that Dr. Patton's position was cor- 
 rect, although this position makes the rea- 
 soning of past centuries absolutely final in 
 matters of theology, and cuts oif all possibil- 
 ity of growth, progress or development, re- 
 garding the most vital question pertaining to 
 human life. 
 
 The decision of Professor Swing to sever 
 his relations with his chosen denomination 
 was for him the beginning of a fuller and 
 freer life. He bore no feeling of bitterness 
 toward his former associates, but held them 
 ever in cherished and loving remembrance. 
 He felt, however, that disputes upon ques- 
 tions of doctrine were worse than a waste of 
 time and brain ; were, as a rule, regarding 
 
questions outside the domain of human 
 knowledge and tended to keep apart millions 
 of the good and pure, who should work in 
 harmony for the salvation of men. 
 
 From the broad platform of the Central 
 Church thenceforth doctrinal dogma and the 
 religion of despair were banished, and a faith 
 was taught full of love and gentleness and 
 charity ; full of a serene and tranquil belief 
 that the history of man is ever the history of 
 progress ; that goodness and virtue will ever 
 rise triumphant in the end. 
 
 From his pulpit, too, he reached the 
 widest audience yet accorded to any Ameri- 
 can preacher. His Sunday's discourse was 
 printed in full the following Monday in one 
 or more of our most widely circulated jour- 
 nals, was copied wholly or in part into other 
 newspapers in every part of the country, and 
 his weekly audience was thus numbered by 
 the hundreds of thousands. The effect of 
 these discourses cannot be over-estimated. 
 The thinking world was ripe for the modifi- 
 cation of the earlier and sterner tenets of 
 theology, as it emerged more and more into 
 the light of modern civilization ; was hungry 
 
for the teaching of one who should dwell 
 more upon the love and less upon the rigid 
 justice of the Supreme Father of us all ; of 
 one who should bring us more into touch 
 with the life of the world in which we Uve, 
 and less into the discussions of those abstract, 
 dogmatical questions, which have been de- 
 bated from the dawn of the historic period, 
 and which, from this very fact, are seen to be 
 incapable of solution by the human intellect, 
 or they would have been settled long ago. 
 
 All persons who have reached middle life 
 realize the marvelous change which has come 
 over the teachings of our pulpits within the 
 last thirty years, the most notable change 
 since the Reformation ; see the broader 
 charity in matters of abstract belief, the 
 wider recognition of the fact that all the 
 great religious faiths of the world are based 
 upon certain common, fundamental princi- 
 ples, but which, by long processes of growth 
 and evolution, are specially adapted to the 
 varied needs of the widely separated and 
 differently constituted peoples. No one in 
 our country has done more to promote this 
 kindly change than Professor Swing. No one 
 
so grandly paved the way for the great Parlia- 
 ment of Religions, which met in our city in 
 1893 — a gathering which would have been 
 impossible a generation ago — and the benefi- 
 cent consequences of which will be more 
 and more appreciated as the years go by. 
 He was ever ready and eager to recognize 
 the truth, wherever found. Early he had 
 realized fully, as Whittier phrases it, that 
 
 " In Vedic verse in dull Koran 
 Are messages of love to man. 
 The prophets of that early day, 
 The slant-eyed sages of Cathay, 
 Read not the riddle all amiss 
 Of higher life evolved from this. 
 
 Wherever through the ages rise 
 The altars of self-sacrifice, 
 Where love its arms has opened wide, 
 Or man for man has calmly died, 
 I see the same white wings outspread 
 That hovered o'er the Master's head." 
 
 Born in the Presbyterian Church, his work 
 bore the abiding fruits of wisdom, of a gra- 
 cious and tolerant spirit, and a beautiful and 
 intellectual life in all the Churches. He was 
 a herald of the dawn, and to him all men 
 
were brothers, who aided in ways however 
 diverse, in the bringing of the better day. 
 
 In the great movement of the religious 
 thought of the nation in the direction of 
 charity and toleration toward those who see 
 not the truth as we see it, the quiet and 
 unassuming preacher of the Central Church, 
 utterly devoid of the graces of oratory, but 
 with a heart full of love and tenderness, with 
 the poet's grasp and the prophet's vision, and 
 with his glowing sentences, which linger in 
 our memories like an exquisite melody, was 
 perhaps the most potent factor. 
 
 His sermons abound in paragraphs, epi- 
 grammatic in their concentrated wit and wis- 
 dom — pure and sparkling gems of thought, 
 from which some loving hand will some time 
 compile an anthology rivaling that of Shakes- 
 peare, Franklin or Emerson ; phrases musical 
 with the majestic resonance of the psalms; 
 pages where the orator may seek for meta- 
 phors and the poet may find his inspiration ; 
 and maxims which the eloquence of genera- 
 tions yet unborn will crystallize into the 
 common and permanent speech of people to 
 whom his very name may be unknown. He 
 
held his vast audience, not by the rheto- 
 rician's art, but because he had a message to 
 deliver for which the world was waiting and 
 had waited long. 
 
 Outside his pulpit work, the most valuable 
 literary efforts of Professor Swing were his 
 papers read before this club, of which he has 
 long been the most loved and honored mem- 
 ber. Of late these papers have been largely 
 relative to the leading men of Greece and 
 Rome : Socrates, Cicero, Demosthenes, Pliny 
 and others. From his familiarity with classi- 
 cal literature, these papers have been most 
 graphic and admirable pictures of these 
 antique heroes, bringing them before us from 
 the mists of time with the picturesque vivid- 
 ness of the portraiture of a man of to-day. 
 A volume of these essays was published some 
 years since, and enough others are extant to 
 make two more similar volumes, which it is 
 hoped may soon be published and thus made 
 accessible to his wide audience. 
 
 Professor Swing, notwithstanding he was 
 never a man of robust health — being for the 
 greater part of his life a partial invalid — yet 
 led an exceptionally sunny and happy life. He 
 
 14 
 
appreciated and keenly enjoyed the good and 
 beautiful things of this world. Beautiful 
 scenery, flowers, pictures, music, the drama, 
 and, above all, the society of his countless 
 friends, were to him sources of perpetual 
 delight. Dining with a friend on the after- 
 noon of the last Sunday on which he preached, 
 in speaking of his summer's vacation, he said : 
 " The rest, the pure air, the trees, the lake, the 
 birds and flowers were delightful, but men and 
 women are more than all else ; all those 
 things were as nothing when compared with 
 the welcoming faces of my congregation and 
 the greetings of the friends of my soul." His 
 sympathetic nature brought him many 
 friends. To him came those who were bowed 
 down under the burden of their sorrows, who 
 were weary and heavy laden, for words of 
 encouragement, of cheer and of consolation, 
 which were never wanting. He was an opti- 
 mist in his views of the future of his country- 
 men, whom he believed would be the manly 
 and heroic citizens of the ideal common- 
 wealth which was to come in the fulness of 
 time, and which was to be the realization of 
 the dreams of our civilization. Especially 
 
was he hopeful of the growth of the religious 
 idea by the garnering of all that was good in 
 the foregone times and the addition of new 
 truth from our better knowledge of the laws 
 which govern the universe. He quoted the 
 words of Emerson : 
 
 " The word by seers or sybils told 
 In groves of oak or fanes of gold, 
 Still floats upon the morning wind, 
 Still whispers to the willing mind. 
 One accent of the Holy Ghost 
 The heedless world has never lost." 
 
 The approach of old age caused him no 
 unhappiness. To one who recently offered 
 him birthday greetings he said : "As age 
 comes upon us we must console ourselves 
 with the words of Browning : 
 
 Grow old along with me, 
 The best is yet to be, 
 
 The last of life for which the first was made. 
 Our times are in His hand. 
 Who saith a whole I planned. 
 
 Youth shows but half. Trust God, see all, 
 nor be afraid." 
 
 Few more impressive scenes have been wit- 
 nessed in our city than on the occasion of 
 
 i6 
 
Professor Swing's funeral. His audience room 
 was filled with those who had long listened 
 to his teachings. With none of the heralding 
 of a public burial, the body of the great 
 preacher was borne to the platform of Central 
 Music Hall, and everywhere surrounded with 
 the flowers which he loved. In the beautiful 
 autumnal afternoon, from all parts of the 
 great city, the saddened multitudes gathered 
 in reverent silence until the streets were filled 
 with the mourning thousands, who, with low- 
 ered voices, tremulous with tender feeling, 
 spoke of the graces and virtues of the de- 
 parted, and of the city's remediless loss. 
 Most impressive, however, was the scene 
 upon the platform within, where sat some 
 seventy clergymen, representing nearly every 
 sect and denomination finding a home in our 
 city. There sat the priest of that church 
 which, among the Christian sects, in point of 
 time is the oldest, in point of numbers in 
 the nation is the greatest, and as a business 
 corporation, the most ably managed in church 
 history. There sat the representative of the 
 extreme liberalism of the modern days, reck- 
 less of all the ancient landmarks, side by side 
 
with those who feel that the ancient land- 
 marks are as the laws of the Medes and 
 Persians, which alter not. There were those 
 representing the various Christian sects, 
 divided upon questions of technical construc- 
 tion of some passage of Holy Writ, or some 
 point of church government, and whose 
 points of difference the great divine had by 
 his teachings lovingly sought to obliterate, 
 side by side with the learned Jewish Rabbi, 
 representing the nation from which Chris- 
 tianity itself had sprung, and which Christian- 
 ity had since ceaselessly persecuted. There 
 sat many of those who, twenty years before, 
 in his time of trial, had criticised his course, 
 and spoken of him words of bitterness, but 
 who, in the intervening time, had in great 
 measure reached the point where he then 
 stood, their views modified largely by his 
 pure and sinless life, his wisdom and loving 
 kindness, his gentleness and abounding char- 
 ity. All these were met together, bound by 
 the ties of a common sorrow, to testify by 
 their presence, by their reverent bearing, by 
 their hardly subdued grief, their realization 
 of the nation's loss, and of the lovable 
 
qualities of him whose death to our vision 
 seemed so sudden and untimely. 
 
 To the large circle of his closest friends, 
 great as was their admiration for his intel- 
 lectual endowment, it was his heart that was 
 greatest. These knew most the breadth of 
 his love and charity, the purity of his thought 
 and life. They saw most of the genial wit 
 and sarcasm, exquisite and unique as that of 
 Charles Lamb, but ever without sting or bit- 
 terness. For them a great light has gone 
 out, and the world which has been enriched 
 and made beautiful by this benignant pres- 
 ence can to them be never more the same. 
 How many have applied to him within the 
 last few saddened weeks the lines of Tenny- 
 son's In Memoriam : 
 
 " Yet in these ears till hearing dies, 
 One set, slow bell will seem to toll 
 The passing of the sweetest soul 
 That ever looked with human eyes. 
 * * * * 
 
 Whereof the man that with me trod 
 This planet was a noble type, 
 Appearing, ere the times were ripe, 
 
 That friend of mine who lives in God." 
 
 19 
 
One of the tenderest and most apprecia- 
 tive tributes to the memory of Professor 
 Swing was that of his and our friend, Dr. 
 Gunsaulus, from which, in conclusion, we 
 quote a stanza : 
 
 " Our poet preacher in his words of prose 
 Made hfe a lyric and its dreams subUme 
 Far from his musing and his hope there goes 
 Eternal music for the sons of time." 
 
 Franklin H. Head, 
 Abram M. Pence, 
 John H. Barrows, 
 
 Committee. 
 Chicago, October 29, 1894. 
 
BX 
 
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 153