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 THE STORY OF A 
 VARIED LIFE 
 
 zAn ^Autobiography
 
 Books by W. S. Rainsjord 
 
 Sermons Preached in St. George's 1887 
 
 A Preacher's Story of His Work 1901 
 
 Reasonableness of Faith 1902 
 
 Good Friday Meditation 1902 
 
 Land of the Lion 1909 
 
 The Reasonableness of the Religion of 
 Jesus {Baldwin Lectures) 1913 
 
 The Story of a Varied Life 1922
 
 frrf. ffcuU* frtiL 
 
 /fjs
 
 THE STORY OF A 
 VARIED LIFE 
 
 zAn ^Autobiography 
 
 BY 
 W. S. RAINSFORD 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FROM 
 
 PHOTOGRA PHS 
 
 GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 1922
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
 
 INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
 
 AT 
 
 THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 
 
 First Edition
 
 TO 
 
 EMILY ALMA 
 
 (my wife) 
 
 A WOMAN ABLE, LOVING, BRAVE 
 
 HER GIFTS AND HER CHARACTER HAVE EVER 
 BEEN TO HER HUSBAND AND HER SONS AN 
 INSPIRATION, A BENEDICTION, AND A DEFENSE
 
 BX- 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 JNIVERSITY OF CALIFORJVL 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Introductory I 
 
 II. Earliest Memories 9 
 
 III. Father and Mother 22 
 
 IV. Schooldays 36 
 
 V. An Irish Boy in London 44 
 
 VI. I Go Abroad 52 
 
 VII. The East End of London 63 
 
 VIII. The Great Lone Land and the Indian Country 
 
 IN 1869 73 
 
 IX. Cambridge 109 
 
 X. Norwich, First Cure of Souls 122 
 
 XI. Leaving England 140 
 
 XII. An Alien Missioner 151 
 
 XIII. A Dark Night and a Glorious Morning . . 174 
 
 XIV. A Unanimous Call 196 
 
 XV. St. George's, 1883 203 
 
 XVI. The Beginnings of an Institutional Church . 219 
 
 XVII. Avenue A Work Among the Young .... 232
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XVIII. Testing of Men and Measures and John R. . 256 
 
 XIX. My Senior Warden 277 
 
 XX. Our Parish House 293 
 
 XXI. New York, 1890-1906 310 
 
 XXII. Anti-ism 332 
 
 XXIII. The Protestant Episcopal Church .... 346 
 
 XXIV. The Roman Catholic Church in the City of 
 
 New York 360 
 
 XXV. Changes of Belief 370 
 
 XXVI. Preaching 384 
 
 XXVII. Theodore Roosevelt 400 
 
 XXVIII. Four Dinners 411 
 
 XXIX. Holidays and "Sunlight" 428 
 
 XXX. Memories and Good-Bye , 460 
 
 Index 477
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 W. S. Rainsford Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Hunting Party in Rocky Mountains, 1884 .... 278 
 
 " My Boys " 294 
 
 "Life" 358
 
 THE STORY OF A 
 VARIED LIFE 
 
 zAn ^Autobiography
 
 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Introductory 
 
 I am not writing the story of my life for scholars. I can 
 make no claims to scholarship myself. I am writing for my 
 friends, for those I lived among, worked for, and learned to love 
 and who loved me. 
 
 I write now for I shall soon be an old man. I do not feel it; 
 on the contrary, I can truly say I feel more in sympathy with 
 all people round me, I understand them better, I can more 
 readily put myself in their places, than I did when I,too,marched 
 with the Column in the strenuous years that are past. 
 
 Still the young fellows now call me Sir! and that very plainly 
 indicates they think I am growing old. So I shall take the hint 
 and begin to write my biography before I grow any older. 
 
 I write it because I have a story to tell. I have been a very 
 fortunate man. I have lived in great times. I have had a 
 very interesting life. I have seen more of the world than 
 have most men. I have done things I am sorry for and things 
 I am proud of. I can say, I think with truth, that I have tried 
 to serve my fellow men; and the older I grow, and the more I 
 have seen of all sorts and conditions of men, the more pro- 
 foundly I believe that they are worth serving. That is another 
 reason. 
 
 Then for a third reason, I want to write. I have a profound 
 dislike for biographies as they are poured forth on us to-day. 
 Most of them have little value and some of them have no ex- 
 cuse. They are poor, sloppy stuff, and mislead those who 
 take the trouble to wade through them. They say too much 
 and too little. They are not true pictures of life. The men 
 whose life stories they profess to tell would have repudiated 
 them. Most men are written about to-day, as till lately, ac-
 
 2 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 cording to a ghastly custom, they were buried in their dress 
 suits, the most uncomfortable, the most unnatural clothing 
 man ever wore. There is, of course, decency in everything. 
 You can't bury a man naked, nor can you strip him to his skin 
 when you write about him. None of us can tell the whole 
 truth about ourselves, and none of us knows the whole truth 
 about any living soul but ourselves, so decency demands a 
 measure of reticence. 
 
 But, so much admitted, few men stand forth as they really 
 were in their biographies. Alas, it has already fallen to my 
 lot to read the biographies of quite a number of my dear friends. 
 I have not found in any one of them what seemed to me a faith- 
 ful picture of the man I knew and loved. 
 
 It seems a point of honour with biographers generally to rub 
 down a life as an upholsterer rubs down with a lump of pumice 
 stone the surface of a bit of furniture, till it will take a satis- 
 factory uniform polish. The result, as was to be expected, is 
 a smooth thing, pleasant to look at and feel, but the storm-worn 
 surface of the man, his twisted sinews and veins, the tendons 
 and the thews of him that struggled and suffered and sinned 
 and conquered what is left of them ? Were they ever there ? 
 Sometimes you feel you have to go back to the Bible or to the 
 Renaissance, to Plutarch's Lives, or to that incomparable ras- 
 cal, Benvenuto Cellini, for real biography. 
 
 It's not quite as bad as that, I hope; but let us as soon as we 
 can and as far as we can do away with biographic camouflage. 
 It may be necessary in war between enemies; there is no excuse 
 for it in peace between friends; and when a man writes his life 
 story he is surely among friends, and of his friends and for his 
 friends he writes. 
 
 The men you loved to walk with and work with did not 
 carry their hearts on their sleeves, but that they had hearts you 
 soon found out, and as you came to know them you showed 
 them a good deal of your own. We can help each other by 
 trying, heartily, constantly trying, to be in our writings what we 
 have tried to be in our lives, honest friends and kindly com- 
 panions to those who honoured us with their company on life's 
 highroad. 
 
 Such is life, and such should be the quality and complexion of 
 a biography, and doubly so of an autobiography. You quarrel
 
 INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 sometimes, and make up, or part. Sometimes you tell stories. 
 Sometimes life is very gray and sometimes very glad, and often 
 it is neither, but just steady pushing; but always it is real, al- 
 ways interesting, always worth while. Such at least I have 
 found it. And since some of those I have best known have 
 asked me to try to tell my story I shall try to do so, and as 
 truthfully as I can. I shall speak about my friends and ac- 
 quaintances as I would wish they spoke about me, putting them 
 down as I saw them. Men and women, most of them fine 
 and true, stumbling often, falling sometimes, not unreal angels, 
 winged and white and sexless, unpleasant to live with and in- 
 capable of raising a family. I have some interesting stories to 
 tell about my friends and fellow soldiers, but I shall put down 
 nothing so far as I am judge which those who have trusted me 
 would be pained or harmed by my reporting, for from my own 
 experience I have learned that though from a point of duty it 
 may be right to confess when you have done wrong, no one out- 
 side of a novel ever does it without, from a worldly and pro- 
 fessional point of view, making a grievous mistake. 
 
 No man is happy and really successful alone. We are made 
 to work together, to supplement one another. Truly to live, to 
 accomplish anything that lasts, you must do it with the aid 
 of others. You need the stimulus of their support, the re- 
 straint of their criticism. A few, perhaps, the very great of the 
 earth, have stood and toiled and died alone, but there are very 
 few of the very great. I have been more than fortunate in my 
 association with my fellows. In my relation with them I have 
 suffered from some serious faults of my own. I have a hasty 
 and often an unbridled temper. I have never overcome a 
 tendency to act too precipitately. My father truly said once 
 in my hearing, "he jumps first, and looks afterwards." And 
 thus I have offended and repulsed many I had no intention so 
 to serve. 
 
 I never had even an ordinarily good gift of memory. I am 
 occasionally haunted by a face, but never could remember a 
 name. This is a serious handicap to a man who must draw 
 others to him if he would accomplish anything; yet in spite of 
 these two serious drawbacks I have been very happy on the 
 whole in my association with my fellows. I have tried to 
 understand them. I have tried very hard to put myself in their
 
 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 places. Men and women have always been exceedingly inter- 
 esting to me. I have found it easy to get their point of view, 
 and once that is arrived at, oh! how charitable one has to be to 
 the things, even the wrong things, they do. Lack of imagina- 
 tion, far more than of heart, is responsible, I am sure, for our 
 failures better to understand and to aid each other. 
 
 I can honestly say I have tried to serve those that I have 
 tried to understand. One tires of many things in a long life. 
 One tires of all sorts of pleasures. But of helping a fellow 
 marcher, no man tires. To put a half-fledged bird back in the 
 nest, to help a lame dog over a stile, any one can do it, and no 
 one who has acquired the habit grows tired of the job. 
 
 I have implied that to understand people came easily to me. 
 I think it did. On the other hand, to be quite honest, I have 
 been aware of a lack of permanence, of persistence, in my in- 
 terest, a sort of come-easily-go-easily quality in it, of which I 
 have been and am ashamed. That I have never overcome it, 
 I fear. Perhaps we humans have no facile gift without its 
 concomitant weakness. I am not excusing the weakness; I 
 am trying to state the fact, to indicate things that with me 
 made for failure as well as others that made for success. I can 
 truthfully say that I have tried to be true to my fellows, to be 
 worthy of their confidence and affection. Sometimes I have 
 been accused of failing in this, but if so it was not of intention. 
 I have often got myself into very serious trouble in the effort 
 to be absolutely true. I cannot accuse myself of having ever 
 willingly and knowingly betrayed a confidence, though to have 
 done so on more than one occasion would have greatly smoothed 
 my way. People in this world presume sometimes on their 
 belief that, no matter what course they themselves may elect 
 to pursue, those they have been associated with must keep the 
 highroad they left them on. That is an unfair, a one-sided 
 view to take, and some take it pretty successfully. A clergy- 
 man cannot take it, and I have never taken it. So far, then, 
 as I can, I will avoid dwelling in these reminiscences on the 
 few unfair, unkind, and unjust things that have been done to 
 me. I have been more kindly treated than I deserved by 
 multitudes, and unkindly and unfairly treated by very few 
 indeed, and if I had been wiser in my treatment of these very 
 few, no doubt it would have been better for me. In this
 
 INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 world we suffer more severely for our mistakes than for our 
 sins. 
 
 Well, if I am to get on with my story, I must shorten my 
 introduction. If I do not, no one will read it through, and this 
 I very specially desire that all my friends should do. I wonder 
 as I look back on my life from boyhood's days to 1906, when I 
 resigned the rectorship of St. George's, New York, at the 
 sustained and faithful support I received from all sorts of people. 
 Especially do I wonder at my support in New York City. I 
 was very poorly fitted to be the rector of a great parish in a 
 great city. I was inexperienced, very imperfectly educated, and 
 had little knowledge of the world. Many of those I was thrown 
 with disagreed radically with me, and were, owing to training and 
 environment, quite opposed to the theories I advocated and the 
 reforms I strove to effect. Theologically and sociologically 
 they were antagonistic, yet the support they gave me was 
 enthusiastic. Looking back on it all, I am amazed. I suppose I 
 had some quality of leadership that they . recognized, though, 
 frankly, I was not myself conscious of possessing it. I did 
 see things I wanted to do. I did believe they should be done, 
 and I bent such powers as I had to the doing of them. Anyway, 
 it is but the truth to say I ever and always had from my people 
 the most loyal and generous support. 
 
 To call our American people materialistic is folly. They 
 are in everything, in business, in art, in social effort, and re- 
 ligion, too, the most idealistic people of all time. Too idealistic, 
 if anything (see our seventy-six different religious sects). They 
 forgive their leaders' blunders. They ignore and forget their 
 failures. They encourage them to go on and try again. I 
 know England and Ireland, I know Canada, and much as I 
 like the British and Canadian people, I say that our people 
 are the most stimulative, the most long-suffering, the most 
 encouraging people to work with, if only you can convince them 
 you are trying to do your poor best. They prove often to- 
 day the truth of Jesus' splendid forecast, "Give to man and it 
 shall be given to you, good measure, pressed down, shaken to- 
 gether, and running over shall men give into your bosom." So 
 please, dear reader, of this my story, when I speak of things 
 done, aims achieved or partly achieved, remember I do not 
 imply that I accomplished them. It is impossible always to
 
 6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 pause and explain that the credit given was not due to me 
 alone, to my foresight or my persistence, but here once for all 
 let me state it. 
 
 During the four years I was assistant rector of St. James 
 Cathedral at Toronto, during the twenty-four years I was 
 Rector of St. George's, my young clergy, my large and very 
 heterogeneous band of religious volunteer workers, my some- 
 times doubting but always loyal vestry, the old and the young, 
 the rich and the poor, the intelligent and the ignorant, we all 
 strove, we all worked together, and it was unity of purpose that 
 gave us the success, and it was great, that we won. If I had 
 been a wiser and a better man much more might have been 
 accomplished, for no man ever had more loyal or more loving 
 supporters. 
 
 I venture then on an autobiography, because I have a story 
 worth the telling. I have seen things worth seeing. I have 
 known men and women worth knowing, and I have had some 
 small part in accomplishing things worth doing. I have 
 travelled rather far, sometimes in lands not yet well known; 
 sometimes among tribes not known at all, when first I met 
 with them. I have spoken what I believed was the truth, and 
 in speaking of it I have had a real joy. I have come into close 
 and sometimes intimate contact with the poor man and the 
 rich, with the savage and the saint, with labour unionist and 
 multimillionaire, and I can truly say I have loved men of one 
 type and of all types and have found them well worth loving. 
 I had some gift of speaking; I found I could move men when I 
 spoke. I doubt if I have any special gift of writing. Still I 
 shall hope that those who take the trouble to read my story from 
 end to end may find in it some things to interest, some things 
 to amuse, and let me hope, too, that I shall not altogether fail at 
 the close of my life in being of some service to those who, 
 like myself, have been obliged to give up old, well-loved 
 creeds and have only very partially succeeded in finding new 
 ones. I have written much about my religious life. It meant 
 all in all to me. I have dwelt on its changes. They were 
 costly and painful, but as I look back I see that they were in- 
 evitable. I am very sure we are too reticent in speaking of our 
 religious experiences. I shall therefore try to avoid such ret- 
 icences. The clergy fail in leadership because they are too
 
 INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 often afraid openly to own that their own religious views have 
 radically changed. Clergy and laity, we were all brought up 
 that way. Religious matters are packed away, are not aired. 
 The discussion of them is often left to the platitudinarians who 
 have neither studied, nor thought, nor lived. We speak of 
 trivial things, but those nearest our hearts we hide. If we 
 spoke more frankly of what we really feel and believe we would 
 help others and gain help ourselves. The influences that have 
 forced changes on you have been at work on thoughtful men 
 round you. If you have striven hard to retain the creed of 
 your mother, simple, beautiful, all satisfying as it was to her, 
 and have striven in vain; if some dear old belief that had lighted 
 many a dark hour and helped you on many a rough and lonely 
 mile has had to go, and a new sense of loneliness comes over 
 you, oh! my friend, my fellow soldier, speak out, tell your 
 pain, tell your story, and you will find as I have found that 
 you are not alone; others have had the same doubts, have made 
 the same gradual surrenders, and are now groping like yourself 
 toward the same conclusions; for surely we all are as the writer to 
 the Hebrews said long ago, "parting with the things that can be . i 
 shaken, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain." 
 
 Some who read this story of mine will criticize harshly my 
 changes of faith, and perhaps still more harshly my so plainly 
 recording them. 
 
 Coleridge says that the man who puts Christianity before 
 truth will later put what he wants to believe before Christianity. 
 
 Jesus, face to face with martyrdom, summed up his mission 
 in words clear beyond argument (here the record rings true; 
 none dared invent such words for him): "To this end was I 
 born, for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear 
 witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth 
 my voice." 
 
 To me it seems dishonest for one whose life was spent in 
 trying to teach the meaning of that great man's life to practise 
 any evasion when he tells the story of his own changes of creed. 
 Jesus changed his creed. His message to men at the close of 
 those three brief years differed from his message at their be- 
 ginning. So I must write, so far as I am able, truly; and in my 
 biography speak, as I tried to speak when I was younger, things 
 that are true, or rather the truest I see.
 
 8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Mine, then, is the story of an ordinary sort of boy, youth, and 
 man, who sometimes made a success of things, and sometimes 
 made a mess of things, but who, in success or failure, found one 
 golden thread always lying on the earthen floor of even the 
 darkest windings in life's maze. If you have not already found 
 it, I beg you look for it now. It is easy to find. Hold fast to 
 it, and you will never quite lose either your way or your courage. 
 I am persuaded it is the best guide we have to real influence, 
 happiness, and true religion. This is my golden clue: "Try to 
 serve your fellows with all your heart and you will not be far 
 from your God!"
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Earliest Memories 
 
 We lose the proper sense of the richness of life if we do not look back 
 on the scenes of our youth with imaginative warmth. G. Meredith. 
 
 Later pages are sometimes dim in a life's story, but not the 
 opening pages these in mine I remember well. Certain things 
 fasten themselves in the memory, others are uprooted and for- 
 gotten. Is there any rule governing generally their retention 
 or their loss ? 
 
 There are of course vital moments, epoch-making experiences, 
 which no sane mind can forget as when you first looked on 
 that strange cold thing, the dead face of a friend. Or when you 
 first stared death full in the face for yourself. Or when from 
 head to foot your body thrilled at the first kiss of a woman who 
 loved you. Or when in awful expectancy you waited and waited 
 outside the door beyond which love and agony were giving to 
 the world your firstborn. To forget such hours would be to 
 cease to be. 
 
 But for the rest, at least in my own case, the most vital 
 memories I have are associated with some compelling per- 
 ception of beauty. It is Beauty that seems to have the power of 
 stamping an impression on our mind tablets from which pitiless 
 time so easily blots out a multitude of things we would fain 
 remember. 
 
 Let me go back more than fifty years to a day in the late fall 
 of 1869, when, very weary and very hungry, after a long life- 
 and-death struggle through one of the densest and darkest 
 forests in the world, unmapped and untracked in those days, I, 
 staggering to the crest of a great mountain range, looked down 
 and out on a jagged outline, vast, rocky, ribbed with frozen 
 waterfalls, lifting its ramp to the clear winter sky. Somewhere 
 it was in the wilderness of the Canadian Alpine country, north
 
 io THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 of the United States boundary line. I cannot place it exactly 
 now there were then no detailed maps when we two, my future 
 brother-in-law and I, helped by two wavering and very home- 
 sick Hudson Bay Indian guides, struggled through its awful 
 solitudes. Winter was almost on us. Snow very deep. The 
 wild sheep and goats were our only trail makers. Windfalls of 
 pines, sometimes thirty feet in height, had barred our way for- 
 ward and shut us in. Our provisions were almost gone; our 
 horses were skeletons. Each night by the fire, our Indians told 
 tales of starvation and death, or chanted the weird howling 
 song, their homesick song they called it, as they begged us to 
 turn back to the land we had left, of sunshine and of buffalo. 
 
 Weeks we had passed in struggle with the encompassing 
 forest. Not a standing forest only of living stems, but a dead 
 forest cumbering the ground, fallen trees matted together by 
 ages of frost and storm. The living, spreading veils over the 
 dead; gray, pendent veils of moss thirty feet high, that shut out 
 air and sunlight. But we that unforgettable evening we had 
 burst through at last. We had crossed the Rocky Mountains, 
 had done what they said could not be done, crossed them by a 
 trail of our very own. And now, standing on the topmost 
 ridge of the Great Divide, our sun shone in a kindlier sky, and 
 showed us a great sweep of more open country, falling, falling 
 away to the Pacific Sea. 
 
 The iron gates of an iron land closed behind us that evening. 
 The dreadful darkness, the voiceless gloom of the solitudes we 
 had passed through, was beneath our feet and behind us. On 
 the foothills to westward the sinking sun was shining, and 
 the snows were crimson in its light. The forest itself was 
 wrapped in purple, and over all that splendid, lonely mountain- 
 land the penetrating peace of a windless evening fell. 
 
 I stood by my weary horse's head and drank it all in, and I 
 see that glorious panorama now. Surely it was life itself I was 
 gazing on, its fierce struggle almost hopeless at times; no force 
 in our puny selves fitted to grapple with its pitiless, unyielding 
 might. But the thing had to be done, the path had to be cut, 
 the range had to be crossed and when it is all over, then at last 
 some miraculous, transmuting spell of beauty falls on it all 
 and we are at peace; we are thankful for every hour of the 
 struggle, and we know life is good.
 
 EARLIEST MEMORIES n 
 
 But why do we know life is good? Because it is the beauty 
 of it, not the pain of it, that ever lives within us. The beauty 
 we remember, the pain we forget. Marlowe emphasizes this 
 when, in a mighty line, he sums up the story of all the tragedies 
 and losses of the old world's first great venture into a newer 
 time: 
 
 Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
 And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? 
 
 A nation in arms to avenge Beauty, the one thing worth living 
 and dying for. 
 
 If we had ears to hear or eyes to see, we would know that the 
 story of Troy, the song of Homer, are reacted and resung even 
 on the slovenly streets of our great cities to-day. When the 
 Fourth Avenue cars were still towed by horses I had occasion 
 constantly to use them. I came to know some of the drivers, 
 and, I am afraid, sometimes broke the Company's rule of not 
 talking to the man that drove. One man, an Irishman, I came 
 to know better than the rest. Wages were low then, and 
 reports of a change were in the air, and I asked him if, like 
 many others, he would leave the line. "No, sorr," said he, 
 "I would not miss passing that Tower" (we were passing 
 Stanford White's beautiful campanile on Madison Square 
 Garden) "for fifty cents a day." (That was the extra wage 
 the street-car drivers were demanding.) 
 
 Yes, a thing of beauty touching our struggling lives may 
 put heart and hope into the best, yes, and into the worst of us. 
 Into the poor, unknown Irishman who preferred the thing of 
 beauty he had grown to love, to a much-needed raise of wages, 
 quite as truly as into the Captain of Industry who could delight 
 himself in his private gallery. When we learn to love her, 
 Beauty helps us all to believe, not only in the best things we 
 know, but in the best things we dream. Though he could not 
 talk about it or well explain what he felt, or why he felt it, so 
 much had poor Stanford White's lovely tower done for my 
 Irish street-car driver. 
 
 I have a distinct memory of a little cottage, covered with 
 sweet white jasmine, its bay window opening on the ground. 
 Of a small lawn, sloping down to a tiny brook that trickled 
 along with pools in it. In these I saw little black things darting
 
 12 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 about; Father said they were "pinkeens." He caught one for 
 me and, as it lay in his hand, I wondered exceedingly how the 
 black thing I saw in the water as I looked down on it from his 
 shoulder could change into the silvery flat thing that lay 
 broadside in his hand. 
 
 That was my first lesson in natural history, and very vivid it 
 is to me still. I could not have been two years old then, and I 
 am told that reminiscences of so early an age are unusual. If 
 so, I must have somehow used up, when I was very little, too 
 much of what gifts of memory were allotted me, for now, of 
 things that happened only yesterday, my mind is a poor regis- 
 trar. 
 
 That was at Coolock, a modest Dublin suburb, where I was 
 born, October 30, 1850. 
 
 My boyhood story begins in the old town of Dundalk, and it 
 is a beautiful part of it that I most distinctly remember. I see 
 still, as clearly as I saw with a little boy's eyes sixty-five years 
 ago, the graceful sweep of the purple hill line as the Mourn 
 Mountains gradually sank to the sea. It was the view from the 
 old red brick Vicarage window at Dundalk, where we all lived 
 together till I was fifteen years of age. Very beautiful it was, 
 but the foreground was commonplace enough. A gray-green 
 salt meadow, and beyond it, for more than a mile, mud flats 
 through which a shallow river ran, widening and deepening 
 as it formed the little half-deserted port, where at low tide, at 
 every possible angle, the colliers and fishing smacks lay tilted, 
 waiting for the incoming tide to straighten them up. There 
 was no beauty there, just a slovenly port on a muddy coast; 
 but that lovely heather-covered line of mountain, the slopes 
 patched with ripe fields of yellow barley, lifted all the flat 
 marshes on both sides of the river into beauty that was its own. 
 
 I must say a word about these mud flats, by the way, before 
 I leave them. While I was very little, those mysterious moun- 
 tains were a far-off wonderland to me. I came to roam them 
 and claim them later, but the mud flats were near, and had a 
 fascinating interest of their own. Little crabs hid in the edges 
 of the sea grass, and strange small fishes squirmed into the 
 mud at the bottom of the shallow pools of brackish water left 
 there when the tide ran down. They were an awfully dirty 
 playground, and far out from our meadow's edge I could not
 
 EARLIEST MEMORIES 13 
 
 go, for the mud was too deep; but how interesting they were, 
 and what wonderful things they hid ! 
 
 As I grew older I wanted to know the names of the sea birds, 
 too, that came to feed on them: the different wild ducks that 
 fed on the flats as soon as the tide went down; the long-necked 
 diving cormorants that used to perch on the tops of the wooden 
 piles that marked the narrow, twisting channel's course; the 
 plovers and curlews with long curved bills, and the flocks of 
 little, flashing sand-pipers that kept running on the very edge 
 of the salt water as it rose and fell. Father knew the names 
 of them all, and was my willing instructor. 
 
 But I must get away from the flats of the bay and the dreamy 
 mountains, and tell of my boyhood's home, and Father and 
 Mother who made it. 
 
 ANCESTRY 
 
 On my father's side we claim an ancient lineage, and we were 
 taught to be proud of it. I cannot vouch for its complete ac- 
 curacy, but must give an outline of it as it was given to me. 
 Spelling was held to be of little importance in those bygone 
 times, and I am told that in my family history there have been 
 almost seventy variants in spelling the name. The common 
 custom, too, of adding to their own names those of the chief 
 manors they acquired either by marriage or by less legitimate 
 means, adds to the confusion. This makes the accurate work- 
 ing out of a genealogy no easy matter. My great-grandfather 
 did, however, for many years patiently attempt the task, and 
 produced a family tree of imposing height and girth. Alas! a 
 fire consumed it, and a good many other things of interest to us. 
 
 Reduced to a few lines it comes to this: when Rollo the Norse- 
 man swept over Normandy in the Tenth Century, he had among 
 his band one Guy Rainsford. This Guy Rainsford must have 
 amounted to something as a fighting man, for he managed to 
 secure for himself and his descendants a very large share of the 
 conquered province. One of these Rainsfords was Archbishop 
 of Rouen two centuries later. Other of Guy's descendants 
 crossed to England in 1066 with the Conqueror, and very soon 
 seem to have firmly settled themselves in three different parts of 
 England in Essex, in Cornwall, and in Lancashire. From the 
 Lancashire men we claim descent.
 
 i 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Some of them "took the Cross" in the Thirteenth Century, 
 and followed Prince Edward, afterward Edward I, to the 
 Holy Land, changing their older coat of arms for the Cross and 
 their family motto for the Crusaders' motto, "In Hoc Signo 
 Vinces." The family flourished in the times of Edward III 
 one of them then held Calais for the King and seems to have 
 been pretty badly cut up, as were most ancient English families, 
 in the Wars of the Roses. 
 
 During or after those troublous times, some of the Lancashire 
 Rainsfords came to Ireland. They lived within the Pale in 
 Elizabeth's times, and were loyal servants of the English Crown. 
 Under Elizabeth and James and Charles, they prospered, and 
 acquired considerable landed property. When the Stewarts' 
 fortunes fell, theirs fell with them. Some fought on William the 
 Third's side. In those days my direct ancestor was a stout 
 Orangeman, and his name you can see proudly cut on the pedes- 
 tal of the equestrian statue erected to the Conqueror of the 
 Boyne. It stands near Carlisle Bridge, in Dublin, and looks 
 down on the Liffy. The wandering instincts of the family, by 
 the way, had not died down, for in the Seventeenth Century 
 one Robert Rainsford, with others, secured a grant from War- 
 wick House, London, December 2, 1631, to build a town in 
 New England. This was Boston. An island in that harbour is 
 called after him, and many years ago I saw, on the corner of one 
 of the old crooked streets of the lower town, his name. 
 
 One of the strange things about the Irish race has been its 
 power of absorbing those immigrant peoples who cast in their 
 lot with the Celt. The descendants of Strongbow's Knights 
 and Cromwell's Irreconcilable Ironsides have both given to 
 Ireland some of her most resolute champions against English 
 misrule. My forebears, after the days of William III, seem 
 soon to have fallen into the haphazard ways of the country. 
 The family gradually fell from its high estate. It did not, in 
 England or Ireland or in America, produce men of marked 
 ability. The New England branch was deported to New Bruns- 
 wick when Boston surrendered to Washington's army; and 
 hardship and salt codfish together proved so unfavourable that, 
 as one of them told me some years ago, they had not been able 
 to produce a first-class lawyer, doctor, or parson since 1780. 
 
 In Ireland we fooled away our property, and so it was that
 
 EARLIEST MEMORIES 15 
 
 what of it came to my father was a small estate indeed. And 
 with his life the entail ended of Rainsford Lodge, County Wick- 
 low, the modest house in which he was born. 
 
 My mother was the daughter of Stephen Dickson, the Rector 
 of Dungarvan, in the south of Ireland. Her great-grand- 
 father was a friend and schoolmate of Charles James Fox, at 
 Eton. From their school days a life-long affection united the 
 two men, and the Great Commoner made his friend Bishop of 
 Down. I think his was the only Episcopal appointment Fox 
 made. Mother treasured some relics of that great-grandfather. 
 One of them I have still, the only piece remaining of a silver 
 tea-and-coffee service which Fox gave the Bishop. 
 
 Mother's people were a fighting stock, too. Her great-uncle 
 was one of Wellington's Brigadiers, and later was made Gover- 
 nor of Halifax, Sir Jeremiah Dickson. 
 
 DUNDALK 
 
 My father was appointed to the vicarage of Dundalk by the 
 Earl of Roden, the patron of the living, in 1852. The Earl 
 was a kind and constant friend to our family. 
 
 Dundalk was then, and is still, a straggling, untidy town, 
 claiming some ten thousand inhabitants, the great majority of 
 course being Roman Catholics. Its two long, badly paved 
 streets crossed at the market place. Saturday, market day, the 
 country folk for many miles round came to town to sell such 
 things as they had to sell, from pigs, cows, and horses, to apples, 
 potatoes, and fish. You heard Gaelic talked among the 
 market stalls, and the homespun, gray-frieze, swallow-tailed 
 coat, battered stove-pipe hat, stout worsted stockings, and 
 tight corduroy breeches still marked the prosperous farmer. 
 
 Dundalk is an ancient town, well placed. It stands at the 
 head of a considerable bay into which a short river rising in 
 the near-by mountains runs. The ruins of an old castle stood 
 some way back from the water it had no doubt once com- 
 manded the port. Indeed, there are ruins of many old castles 
 in that part of the country; Carlingford Lough, the next inlet 
 to Dundalk Bay, to the northeast, was studded with them. 
 Legend said Cromwell's cannon had pounded them into sub- 
 mission, but then, if all the stories of the great Protector's
 
 16 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 cannon work in Ireland were true, he could never have left 
 that country during his short and stormy career. But plenty 
 of fighting, real enough, there had been near Dundalk. The 
 great Robert Bruce's brother, Edward, was killed in an eventful 
 battle near by; and Danish pirates, Irish kings, and English 
 soldiers, from Strongbow's time till the last tragic, useless rising 
 in 1798, had done what they could to foster in the neighbour- 
 hood the Irishman's love of fighting. 
 
 How hard I tried to get someone to tell me the story of it all, 
 but I never succeeded. Between the Irish peasant and the class 
 that owned the land and administered the law in those days 
 there was "a great gulf fixed." Those who could tell the local 
 stories were silent or had crossed the sea. 
 
 My first recollections of Dundalk were naturally of the old 
 red-brick vicarage, with its row of elm trees facing the moun- 
 tains and the sea; and next, the old church and two unusual 
 things about it: its crooked spire, always threatening to tumble 
 sideways off its base on the ivy-draped stone tower, and the 
 Sunday morning collection, gathered from everyone in the 
 congregation, in great long copper spoons. I never before or 
 since saw such a steeple, nor have I been able to duplicate any- 
 where those copper spoons. 
 
 How the very old tower came to have that wooden, copper- 
 sheathed monstrosity built on top of it no one knew, but there it 
 stood, spite of its tipsy tilt to one side, defying wind and 
 weather; and the weather had given to the copper sheathing a 
 rich colouring that attracted me. Why, too, we had to put our 
 pennies in those long-handled spoons where they rattled loudly 
 no one knew: such was the custom of the church. The church- 
 wardens, having made their rounds, marched solemnly with 
 their several spoons, not to my father and the Holy Table, 
 but to their own seats; only when church was dismissed did 
 they bring them to the chancel and empty them with clangour 
 on the table. 
 
 The first Sunday in the month a great silver salver stood 
 up on the Communion table against the wall, and into it the 
 spoonfuls were emptied, with a still louder clangour. My 
 interest culminated then, for I was allowed to help Father and 
 the churchwardens in counting the collection; in it appeared 
 many strange coins, mostly copper, of course, of many coun-
 
 EARLIEST MEMORIES 17 
 
 tries and of many dates. Coins as to the value of which a 
 more than reasonable doubt existed were apt to find their 
 way into those spoons; more especially since their tops, half 
 covered over, served admirably to hide from the most watchful 
 churchwarden's eye the exact nature of the offering. The 
 money was stacked in little piles of shillings on the Communion 
 table. When there was silver (as on Communion Sundays and 
 Sundays when there would be Missionary collections) in pounds, 
 almost always the interesting question of valuation had to be 
 solved. Were these half-pennies or pennies or farthings? 
 Were these silver bits to be counted as threepenny or four- 
 penny, as sixpences or as shillings? It was all extremely in- 
 teresting. I remember at one time Father had quite a col- 
 lection of strange coins, for which of course he had paid, week 
 by week, what he believed was an honest equivalent in coin 
 of the realm. What became of it I can't remember. 
 
 The church was cruciform in plan; the pews, as was then 
 usual in Ireland, were of different sizes, graded to express the 
 importance of the families that had occupied them for genera- 
 tions. Some were large and square, even having a table, and 
 sometimes a stove, in the middle. If you were not interested 
 in the sermon you might be in your neighbours, for you looked 
 full into their faces as often as at their backs. The Com- 
 munion table, with its blue cloth (any other colour smelled of 
 popery) stood under the ancient and ugly stained-glass window 
 of the chancel. Facing the chancel, at the far end of the 
 church, was the organ loft, and there sat such poor choir as 
 was to be had. In the south aisle was another loft, divided 
 into just two great pews, one for the Earl, the other for the 
 local distiller. 
 
 I can see the old church on Sunday morning, as I write to- 
 day, full to the doors, and not dimly some of the faces rise before 
 me. Many a congregation I have faced since then, but few 
 can I remember as well as this, and I think I am right in saying 
 that those who formed it Sunday after Sunday were no ordi- 
 nary crowd. There was the distiller, his two sons, and three 
 daughters. To them we looked for the fashions. Dundalk 
 whiskey had a more than local reputation in those days, and 
 
 Mr. H had made some money and saved it. The family 
 
 had social ambitions, and since, somehow, this came to be
 
 1 8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 understood, it gave rise to amusement; for a family tree 
 counted for a good deal in Ireland, and the H 's were sup- 
 posed to have none. The curious thing was that one of Mr. 
 
 H 's children, the youngest son, did carve out for himself 
 
 a very unusually brilliant social career. He entered the army 
 and became, to the amazement of the whole countryside, 
 equerry to the Prince of Wales (afterward Edward VII). 
 He began by hard work, too, for he won by sheer ability a 
 commission in the Royal Engineers, passing out of Woolwich 
 near the head of his class; and he certainly made the most of his 
 start. 
 
 Where centre aisle and side aisles met sat John Barton and 
 his family, in a great square pew. John Barton was a very 
 unusually gifted man; and, though he did not seem to know it, 
 and his neighbours certainly did not, a man far ahead of his 
 time. His was the brain that planned the Menai Straits 
 Bridge, a marvel of engineering in those days. And sixty years 
 ago I can remember hearing him argue with heat and at length 
 that there must soon be a tunnel joining England and France 
 rank heresy then. He was intensely religious, one of the 
 band that Father gathered round him as teacher and leader. 
 All day he worked in his office, and most of his evenings were 
 spent preaching where he was invited to preach. He was 
 absolutely sure of his creed, as were all the Evangelicals of that 
 time. The second advent was a certainty and all things 
 pointed to its nearness. 
 
 I was rather afraid of Mr. Barton, for he had a habit of asking 
 us boys straight and awkward questions Were we converted ? 
 Had we accepted Jesus? And since I knew my bones ached 
 during the more than two hours' Sunday service, preceded by 
 a good hour and a half of Sunday School, also with hard seating, 
 I did not feel that I had any right to indulge a settled conviction 
 as to my own religious state. Father never asked us such 
 questions, and Jack Barton, Mr. Barton's eldest son and my 
 chum, fought as shy of questioning as I did. He and I were 
 close friends. We helped each other into, and not always out of, 
 many a scrape in early days. Our paths in life diverged. He 
 became an engineer and, under Balfour's regime in Ireland, 
 did such able work during the '8o's and '90's that he received 
 Knighthood at the hands of the King.
 
 EARLIEST MEMORIES 19 
 
 Near the Bartons' pew sat a very dashing fellow whom we all 
 admired. His father, though he could ill afford it, indulged the 
 family pride by purchasing for him a cornet's commission in a 
 crack cavalry regiment the Carbineers, and lower down, on 
 the same aisle, sat under the shadow of the organ-loft John 
 Murphy. I wish that I were able at all adequately to sketch 
 my true friend, John Murphy. To him I owe a debt. When I 
 first knew him he looked a soldier, straight and strong. He 
 must have been about fifty. He might have been one of Crom- 
 well's Ironside Captains, living in a later day. I saw his bed- 
 room once. It fitted the man. A hard, narrow cot; no cur- 
 tains on the windows, no carpet on the floor. He was an 
 Orangeman and an uncompromising enemy of popery in any 
 shape. His tenants were Roman Catholic to a man, and the 
 local priests had more than once denounced him from the 
 altar; and such anathema too often carried with it very grave 
 consequences indeed. Unmoved, unarmed, John Murphy 
 went his way. There was too often hard feeling between land- 
 lord and tenant then often something worse; but his tenants 
 seemed to like him. He was a magistrate, too, and never missed 
 taking his duty on the bench; and such an office seldom helped 
 a man's popularity; but John Murphy was so absolutely just 
 that he won, on the bench and off, with Catholic and Protestant 
 alike, respect if not regard. He never married, and lived by 
 himself, two miles out of town. His friends told him he was 
 sure to be shot, but he never carried arms and always walked 
 alone. So much for John Murphy's outside. But, oh ! how kind 
 and fatherly and understanding he was to me, a boy. Once 
 one of my boyhood escapades got to the ears of the police (the 
 Irish Constabulary knew everything you did) and the story 
 got to him. So he would have me out to spend the night in 
 his grim, bare house, and advise me what and what not to do. 
 There was a searching quality in his clear, gray eyes you told 
 him the whole truth and trusted him. 
 
 He won my boyish confidence by giving me his own. When 
 he was a young man he had seriously practised mesmerism and 
 found he had unusual mesmeric power. Over one of his grooms 
 he had gained such power that, even when the man was alone, 
 John Murphy noticed he would do unusual things, evidently 
 quite unconsciously and at the bidding of his master's un-
 
 20 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 spoken will. This turn of affairs alarmed John Murphy and 
 he decided there and then never again to mesmerize any one. 
 This happened, he told me, in early days, before his conversion. 
 He, too, took cottage meetings, and, like Mr. Barton, went 
 round the country preaching among the Protestants. He had 
 not Mr. Barton's eloquence, but he knew his Bible by heart, 
 and the pose and carriage of the man won respect and accept- 
 ance among the Orangemen of the north. He never spent 
 anything on himself. I do not think he laid any money by 
 his one purpose was to lead all over whom he had any influence 
 into personal relations with a God and Saviour who were to him : 
 
 . . . closer than breathing, 
 Nearer than hands and feet. 
 
 Another face from the old church's dim interior: Miss Sheck- 
 elton lived in two bare but very clean rooms opposite the parish 
 day school. She was small and old and not especially clever, 
 but where she went she brought sunshine with her. 
 
 "Woe to you when all men speak well of you" has indisput- 
 able authority behind it. This dear old saint proved that to 
 general deductions in morals, even the wisest and most inclusive, 
 there are exceptions. No one ever was known to speak evil of 
 Miss Sheckelton. With inspired tactfulness she went about 
 doing good. She seemed to know what to say, and when to 
 say nothing. Looking back now on my boyhood days, I can 
 see how remarkable a woman she must have been to catch my 
 interest and fasten herself in my memory as she certainly did. 
 She was young, so really young. "Whom the gods love die 
 young" ah, no. It must have been some godly Puritan 
 divine, with scholarship as bad as his complexion, who popular- 
 ized that libel on human nature. What the poet really said 
 was: "Those whom the gods love stay young till they die." 
 
 There are in this loud stunning tide, 
 
 Of human care and crime, 
 With whom the melodies abide 
 
 Of everlasting chime; 
 Who carry music in their heart 
 
 Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, 
 Plying their daily task with busier feet 
 
 Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.
 
 EARLIEST MEMORIES 21 
 
 One more face, old and weatherbeaten the face of a sailor 
 I looked to see on Sunday with more lively expectancy than I 
 looked for any of the others. He lived in a small cottage, 
 only two rooms to it, several Irish miles away on the moun- 
 tainside, but he never missed church. Wherever Father went 
 preaching, he went, though he never attempted an address 
 himself. He loved to talk to the converts, especially the young 
 converts, for with any sort of a boy he could get on. When I 
 grew old enough to walk the distance, I would drop in to that 
 little, honeysuckle-covered cottage by the moorland when I 
 was out for long rambles with my gun. On its wall hung 
 strange dried fishes from far-off seas great sharks' jaws with 
 many rows of teeth, hooked tusks of the sperm whale, and the 
 twisted ivory lance of the narwhal. Story after story I would 
 draw from him of what he called the wild days of his youth. 
 He was a little ashamed of them but I could see he liked telling 
 of them, too. 
 
 The old church held about eight hundred people. These I 
 have written of were leaders in it, and they and many others 
 loved Father and Mother and were broken-hearted when we 
 went away, in 1865, to London.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Father and Mother 
 
 Let us joyfully recognize all men, who, with whatever imperfection 
 of doctrine or even of conduct, contribute materially to the work of human 
 improvement. August Comte. 
 
 I can give no true picture of my father and mother, I can- 
 not explain the atmosphere and environment that surrounded 
 my youth, if the Evangelical revival were left out. It is seldom 
 referred to now, but it is well worth remembering. The one 
 thing, real above all real things in our home, was Religion; 
 and Religion meant the Puritan Evangelicism of the time. 
 What strange banners the good and the brave in all the ages 
 have chosen to fight under! Though long ago these banners 
 have been furled and laid aside, let us reverently salute 
 them still. They were carried by brave men. Those Irish 
 Evangelicals were not, it is true, a great host, but they 
 preached the truth of God as they saw it, and they influenced 
 their time. 
 
 In their band, Father was a leader. He had a fine carrying 
 voice. He had an Irishman's eloquence, and he profoundly 
 believed that he held a commission to declare God's truth 
 to men whether they "would hear or forbear." So he had 
 power with the crowds that for many years listened to him, first 
 in Ireland and then in Belgrave Square, London. 
 
 Doctor Mahaffy, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, has 
 well described the men and the message they bore, and I quote 
 from an article of his in the Hibbert Journal of April, 1903. I 
 do this at some length, for if my own life story is to be helpful 
 to those who find that their creeds are changing, I must make 
 it clear what my boyhood's beliefs were and from what I broke 
 away:
 
 FATHER AND MOTHER 23 
 
 "The great Evangelical Movement" had been working in Dublin ever 
 since the opening of the Nineteenth Century. 1 It was discountenanced by the 
 bishops and the fashionable clergy, and did not become dominant till the 
 very tactless rule of Archbishop Whately threw a vast number of the rich 
 laity into the movement, who built free chapels, not under the Archbishop's 
 control, and filled them with able popular preachers. 2 They emptied the 
 parish churches and monopolized the religious teaching of the Protestant 
 population. 
 
 The popular preachers of Dublin in 1850 differed from the early Puritans 
 in that these thought an accurate knowledge of the original Bible essential, 
 while their descendants were quite content with the Authorized Version. 
 But so convinced were they of the vital importance of scripture, that I have 
 actually heard a clergyman on a platform assert the verbal inspiration of the 
 English Bible, on the ground that the same influence which guided the pens 
 of the original writers could not have failed to guide, in the same manner, 
 translators who were to make known to the English nation the message of the 
 Gospel. Regarding then the Bible, as they understood it, as the absolute 
 rule of faith, they nevertheless acquiesced in the formularies and ritual of the 
 Church of England. They never quarreled with the Book of Common 
 Prayer: they read through the service devotedly even the Athanasian Creed 
 received its due place but the service was but a long prelude to the real work 
 of the day, the sermon. For this purpose the minister retired, and reap- 
 peared in the lofty pulpit in a black preaching gown and bands. 
 
 In his discourse it was his absolute duty to set forth the whole Gospel (as 
 he understood it) so that any stray person, or any member of the congrega- 
 tion in a contrite condition, might then and there attain conversion (which 
 was always sudden) and find peace. These men were all Calvinists, as their 
 forefathers had been; they were distinctly anti-ritualists. The doctrine of 
 justification by faith was the cardinal point of their teaching. . . . 
 They did not hesitate to preach that all those who had not embraced the 
 dogma of justification by faith were doomed to eternal perdition. They be- 
 lieved as strongly as Massilon in "the small number of the elect." They 
 were not afraid to insist on the eternity and very maximum of torture. On 
 the other hand, they had the firmest belief in the future bliss of those who 
 were saved, and upon their deathbeds looked forward with confidence to an 
 immediate reunion with the saints who had gone before. They had strong 
 hopes of seeing visions of Glory on their deathbeds. 
 
 They lived saintly lives, though they inveighed against the value of good 
 works. They controlled their congregations as spiritual autocrats, though 
 they denied all efficiency in Apostolic Succession. They were excellent and 
 able men, proclaiming a creed that has over and over again produced great 
 
 x It is more correct to say since 1780. See "Cambridge Modern History," Vol. vi. 81-89. 
 Doctor Mahaffy also fails to emphasize (probably from lack of space) the humanitarian influence 
 of the movement. To it chiefly was due England's splendid and far-seeing protest against the 
 Slave trade, her suppression of it in her own Dominions, and her protest against it everywhere. 
 W. S. R. 
 
 2 My father was chaplain at one of these, the Molineux asylum in Dublin, before he came 
 toDundalk. W. S. R.
 
 24 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 and noble types of men, though most philosophers would pronounce it a cruel 
 and even immoral parody of the teachings of the Saviour. 
 
 Doctor Mahaffy might have added that the majority of these 
 men believed and preached in the imminence of the second 
 coming of Jesus and the gathering to Him of His saints in the 
 air, which belief indeed St. Paul, in his earliest teachings, held, 
 as we see by the first of his epistles (I and II Thessalonians) 
 a belief he evidently modified if he did not abandon later. 
 
 The Evangelicals had, in the Eighteenth Century, saved the 
 cause of real religion in England. Witfield and Wesley, loyal 
 members of the national church, had, till they were driven forth 
 from her fold, done all that men could do to bring about neces- 
 sary reforms. They had gone to the poor, the neglected masses 
 of the land, and had won multitudes to a real religious faith. 
 In the best sense of the term, they were religious Democrats. 
 The Evangelicals of the Nineteenth Century were their spiritual 
 heirs. They, too, protested against the worldliness, ignorance, 
 and supineness of the national church; and when all preferment 
 was denied them, they went outside Episcopal boundaries, 
 preaching on the streets and in the cottages of the poor. 
 
 The Roman Church usually burned her reformers, but some- 
 times, as in the case of St. Francis, she had the wit to canonize 
 them. The English Church never burned hers, but uniformly 
 she ignored and repressed them; and from a religious point of 
 view, who shall say that repression was not in the end more 
 fatal to her own life than if she had sent them to the stake? If 
 only, when Wesley and his saintly band had risen in protest 
 against her sloth, her gross materialism, and her slavish obe- 
 dience to the corruption of the time, she had listened and re- 
 pented! If, instead of driving Wesley forth from the church he 
 loved, she had given him a seat among the Bishops, and set him 
 free to preach the Gospel from John o' Groate House to Land's 
 End, what new life, what splendid religious and national en- 
 largement might she not have won! What weakness, shame, 
 and division might she not have escaped! 
 
 The revival in the Eighteenth Century had its main root in 
 England. In the Nineteenth, it began in Scotland, spread to 
 Ireland, and, in a modified form, later influenced England pro- 
 foundly. In England, however, its doctrinal forms were modi-
 
 FATHER AND MOTHER 25 
 
 fied. The weakness of the movement lay in its crude dogma- 
 tism; its power in its appeal to the masses of the people 
 neglected by the churches. The Evangelicals offered men 
 "God's plan of salvation." God had done it all; there re- 
 mained nothing for man to do but accept the finished work of 
 Jesus. Lowell put this theory of Grace in the lines: 
 
 Tis Heaven alone that is given away, 
 Tis only God may be had for the asking. 
 
 Salvation was an arrangement entered into between the 
 persons of the Trinity; all man had to do was to believe and 
 accept it. It was a system of theological arithmetic so direct 
 and simple that any could understand it. One of the most 
 popular hymns of the time ran thus: 
 
 Cast your deadly doings down, 
 
 Down at Jesus' feet. 
 Stand in Him and Him alone, 
 
 Gloriously complete. 
 
 And again: 
 
 Doing is a deadly thing, 
 Doing ends in death. 
 
 It may seem strange that a doctrine so crude, so contrary 
 to man's experience, should have been accepted by multitudes, 
 but accepted it was. As a matter of fact, it was not more un- 
 reasonable than was Luther's of Justification by Faith, and both 
 seemed to have the sanction and authority of great names, from 
 St. Paul's time to our own. Good men who had little learning 
 and no knowledge of history saw in it an understandable way of 
 getting rid of their sins and drawing near to their God. The 
 aim was a true aim, the instinct sincerely religious; and since 
 this was the all-important matter, the cause of spiritual religion 
 was for the time being advanced. Men who knew themselves 
 heavily burdened, as was Pilgrim, saw again the great sin-bear- 
 ing brother take on Himself their intolerable load. And like 
 Pilgrim when his burden tumbled from his shoulders, they 
 stepped out bravely on the narrow way that led to the far-off 
 Celestial City. 
 
 Looking back on these days of hope and faith, many who 
 took part in them know, all too surely, that the business of
 
 26 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 saving souls and of helping on the Kingdom of God on Earth is 
 not so simple a matter. Though it had no adequate vision of 
 a Kingdom of God on Earth, though its belief in the end of the 
 "dispensation," the nearness of Christ's coming, and the 
 rapture of the saints tended to make it careless of social reforms, 
 it stood for a real thing, for another effort of poor human nature 
 to "arise and go to its Father." It was followed by reaction, 
 of course; all religious movements have been; but it did good, 
 drew men of all classes together, and as to its experiences and 
 beliefs who shall say? Perhaps to our children's children 
 some of the things we think about God and sin and salvation 
 will seem as crude and unacceptable as does the revivalist's 
 gospel of fifty years ago to us to-day. 
 
 It has become the fashion to belittle those men, the work 
 they did, and the message they delivered. But there is a debt 
 owing to them, and a large debt. In the hymnology of the 
 Eighteenth Century, and the first three quarters of the Nine- 
 teenth, the Evangelicals left us a precious legacy. If poetry 
 is the evidence of vitality in any movement, then those men 
 possessed it. In the hymns of Watts, Charles Wesley, and 
 Cooper in the Eighteenth Century, and of Kelly, Heber, Lyte, 
 and Neale in the Nineteenth, just to name a very few, those 
 Evangelicals gave to our time, and bequeathed to succeeding 
 times, a heritage that is priceless. 
 
 The Roman Catholic Church boasts its Newman and Faber, 
 but the two or three great hymns of theirs that will hold their 
 place for ever owe their inspiration, not to the Hierarchy those 
 men submitted to, but to the spirit of the church and party 
 they abandoned. They wrote them before they left the 
 Anglican Church. 
 
 How much of hymns ancient and modern will live? Just 
 the part borrowed from the Evangelicals. Since their time, 
 neither the English national church nor the Protestant churches 
 in England or anywhere else, nor the "sectlets" that have 
 sprung up mushroom-like in a night, have produced any hymns 
 as good. Nay, they have failed to produce any hymns at all. 
 
 If this seems too sweeping a statement, take the index of any 
 good hymnal; study the names and dates of the authors of 
 those hymns we love ourselves and teach our children, and you 
 will find that ninety-five per cent, of them were written by the
 
 FATHER AND MOTHER 27 
 
 men whose lives were changed and uplifted by the evangelical 
 revivals of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. 
 
 Dogmatism limited the Evangelicals, but their failure arose 
 from also another grave error. They failed to enter into and to 
 sympathize with the spirit of their time. 
 
 The winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the 
 earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is 
 heard in the land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with 
 the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come 
 away. Song of Solomon, ii, 11, 12, 13. 
 
 So sang an immortal lover, three thousand years or more ago. 
 And in the last half of the Nineteenth Century, in many lands 
 in English-speaking lands especially there was a new spring- 
 time in the hearts of men. In scholarship, architecture, poetry, 
 literature, science, a new spirit sought expression. It cared 
 nothing for a religion of "other- wo rldliness"; and the other- 
 worldliness of Evangelism debarred it from understanding and 
 entering into the spirit of that time. 
 
 The general assembly of the Presbyterian churches in Ire- 
 land made, in 1837, a pronouncement: "Amusements and all 
 parties the object of which is simply pleasure ought to be 
 abandoned." With this wholesale condemnation of one of the 
 essential needs of human nature, the men I have been writing 
 of thoroughly agreed; and with the result that a stamp of gloom 
 and unnatural restraint was increasingly attached to evangeli- 
 cal religion. Thoughtful people began to see that it em- 
 phasized the visionary and ignored the actual; that if it had 
 spiritual yearnings, it had no social outlook; that, in limiting 
 the meaning of salvation, it had unconsciously distorted the 
 teachings of Jesus; for nothing about that teaching was more 
 certain than that the Kingdom of God, as He preached it, was 
 meant to have a very real and actual expression here on earth, 
 first in a reformed individual, and then in a transformed social 
 order. 
 
 No one had heard of Nietzsche in those days, but that great 
 radical would have found many of his ideas as to what was due 
 to children practised in our home had he had the good fortune 
 to visit it.
 
 28 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Father and Mother were Law, Light, and Love to us. Home 
 was meant to be everything and it was everything to me. There 
 were no distractions, no amusements, outside it. We were 
 eight children; we formed a sort of unconscious Kindergarten 
 of our own. We had to get together and get on together, for 
 there were no other children to get on with. I remember when 
 there were six of us, we all slept side by side in narrow beds in 
 one big nursery. When the seventh came, I was sent up to the 
 attic, and I did not approve the move, for it was lonely and cold 
 up there. 
 
 What was true of our home was true of many others. Large 
 families were the rule, and the large family has possibilities 
 of education of the greatest value. Like a covey of partridges, 
 the children are dependent on their own crowding for common 
 warmth and comfort. All too soon Life scatters the covey, 
 but the birds can take the better care of themselves, and of their 
 progeny when parentage comes to them, for that earliest ex- 
 perience of communal life. 
 
 Father and Mother ruled our home. Hours were kept 
 punctually; no one dreamed of being late for a meal or for family 
 prayer, with which each day began and ended. Obedience was 
 not a hardship, it was a matter of course. We all had to do 
 things for each other, and did them, especially for Father and 
 Mother, willingly. If I was good I was allowed to help Mother 
 in her morning gardening. She rose at six to do it, as long as 
 she had any health at all. 
 
 I contrast the memories of my home with what I see on all 
 hands in families to-day. Children are taught chiefly to do 
 things for themselves; to express themselves, to find their own 
 true selves. All trash and humbug, half science, pseudo science, 
 nothing else! Of course the aim of every enlightened parent is 
 to help the child to find itself, to be its best self; so only can it 
 succeed. This is the aim of true education. There is not, 
 there cannot be, there never has been any other aim. The 
 vital question is how to attain it. 
 
 If, even in earliest infancy, the very babies are taught to 
 assert themselves, to express their own view of things, to have 
 their own way, one of two things must happen. Either the 
 child wins out and the parent gives in, or parental authority is 
 attained only at the cost of perpetual argument and dispute.
 
 FATHER AND MOTHER 29 
 
 All nature cries out against such an idea of child training. What 
 is the stored-up experience of the parent for? That precious 
 heritage, handed down through the ages, so painfully acquired 
 and retained? What is it but a trust for the child? Acquired 
 knowledge, experience, and care all surround it. These form the 
 nest where the little things are brooded over; where, in warmth 
 and safety, they are housed till flying time comes and life bids 
 the use of the wings that parental love has strengthened and 
 trained. 
 
 Use of the wings comes soon enough, comes inevitably. 
 For pity's sake, for childhood's sake, don't let us be guilty of 
 the folly which no swallow or sparrow could commit; don't push 
 life over the nest edge till you have done your part to teach it 
 life's true values. What possible value has the judgment of a 
 child, say, of four years? Yet how commonly I have been 
 forced to look on the folly, nay, the tragedy, of a poor, ignorant, 
 theorizing mother arguing with her four-year-old little one. 
 Ah, I have so often watched in following years the result in 
 families known to me. There was no "nest" idea in the 
 parents' mind, and so no such idea ever dawned in the children's 
 mind. The fathers were absorbed in business, the mothers 
 had compelling social engagements. Nurses and new theories 
 of child culture, half understood or not understood at all, 
 worked evilly. The growing intimacy of the child with both 
 parents was impossible. And so the divinely intended, supreme 
 value of parent to child and of child to parent was never known 
 to either. 
 
 So far as the communal side of education goes, the children 
 of the poor have an advantage over the children of the rich. 
 Life's actualities, in their case, cannot be escaped; there are all- 
 important things that must be done, and there are definite 
 times for doing them The child falls into the habit of doing 
 them, for it has to, and gains in the doing. The poor man's 
 child cannot stop to argue the point before it has reached the 
 time in its life when its opinions are of value; for if it does, it is 
 pushed on one side by its more intelligent child competitors. 
 It soon finds it must yield to the communal rule in life's school, 
 or its place is at the foot of the class. I do not hesitate to say, 
 and I do not speak as a mere theorist, that in the United States 
 to-day, the poor man's child at ten years old, who has attended
 
 30 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 the public school, is further on the road to good citizenship 
 than is the child of the rich man. It stands to gain a truer 
 view of its place in life, a far better knowledge of other children, 
 and to learn one all-important lesson, the lesson of obedience, 
 by the things it has suffered, if by no other way. It learns 
 helpfulness, too, for all in the household of the poor must help 
 or suffer. Its pleasures can only be had in so far as it guides 
 itself by the laws of association. It must associate with its 
 fellows or go without games. Here, as illustrating what home- 
 making can be among the very poor, I will tell a story that I 
 could not tell in St. George's pulpit, for members of the family 
 I now write of were present in the congregation. I knew one 
 little woman (four feet nine inches) who came to the United 
 States thirty years ago with her husband and five little children. 
 As soon as they landed the man was stricken with blindness. 
 She had to work for all, and she did. They were often hungry, 
 but she brought them all up. The boys have done well. One 
 of the girls is a successful dramatic author. A few years ago all 
 the children and the mother and father dined together on her 
 birthday. After dinner the mother said: "This is my sixty- 
 fourth birthday the first easy year of my life. I thank God 
 that he helped me to bear and bring up good children. I feel a 
 little tired now; I will go and lie down." She went to her bed 
 and did not leave it, dying peacefully in a few days. How sloth- 
 ful and meaningless do many lives seem by contrast with such 
 lifelong heroism ! 
 
 Certain things were not tolerated in our home; on them there 
 could be no discussion. Untruthfulness, disobedience, were 
 first. Cowardice, idleness, and cruelty to animals or neglect of 
 our pets were a good second. 
 
 My memory of those very early years is far clearer than of 
 happenings in later times, but I can only recall one act of 
 deliberate disobedience and one lie I told, and the burning 
 shame of both faults I can remember still. 
 
 You ask, can such relations between parents and children be 
 established and maintained in these days ? Of course they can. 
 I have seen more of our modern life than most men. I have 
 been consulted by many parents, and I know intimately some 
 homes where still the balance of things, as I remember them in 
 my own home, is maintained; where parents live before all
 
 FATHER AND MOTHER 31 
 
 things for their children, and the children begin life under wise 
 and loving discipline. Such are before all others happy and 
 successful homes. The children "rise up to call such parents 
 blessed," though in creed and custom they may have made far 
 departure since childhood's days. They realize that the one 
 thing, the supremely important thing they then learned, was a 
 true attitude to life, and in that they found lasting happiness and 
 usefulness. 
 
 In educational methods, of course, we have greatly im- 
 proved. Young people have a knowledge (sometimes rather 
 too superficial) of things we had no opportunity to know any- 
 thing about sixty years ago. Teaching is better done. The 
 individual capacities of the child are discovered and developed. 
 All fine, and as it should be; but the real thing after all is to give 
 the child a true spirit. Everything else is secondary given 
 that, and ultimate failure is unlikely. Fail in that, and all is 
 failure. Somewhere Stevenson has put what I am trying to say 
 with beauty and power: "A dogma changed is a new error, the 
 old form is probably better; but a spirit imparted is a perpetual 
 possession." 
 
 I suppose I must have been punished sometimes, but I have 
 no recollection of it we certainly were never struck but to 
 dispute for an instant the discipline of the home never oc- 
 curred to us. We were taught to have no secrets from Father 
 and Mother; taught that, in little troubles or big, they wanted 
 to know all about it, and would help us out; and the custom of 
 going to them about everything became firmly established. 
 In these two important respects, little punishment and much 
 cooperation and confidence, I think our home was unlike 
 and in advance of most other homes, and that Father and 
 Mother were the most wise, tender, and patient parents I ever 
 knew. 
 
 The evenings we looked forward to. Then we all sat round 
 the fire in the drawing room. Father and Mother sang to us 
 (Mother had a sweet alto voice) and told us stories. Then, 
 as we grew bigger, Father read to us, except when he had to go 
 preaching (which we resented). And later still we, as well as 
 our parents, sang. My eldest sister, Sarah (afterward Mrs. 
 Herbert Watney), led us. She had a soprano voice. 
 
 Father read delightfully, explaining as he went. What an
 
 32 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 introduction he gave us to "Robinson Crusoe," "The Swiss 
 Family Robinson," and then to "Pilgrim's Progress!" With 
 Bunyan he was specially at home, and long questionings we 
 had, some of them doubtful, as to the fitting parts played by 
 the great and diverse company in that immortal epic of man's 
 religious life. When we were done with Pilgrim, Father took 
 up Christiana; but she and her children never thrilled us as 
 Pilgrim did, though we did love Mr. Greatheart. 
 
 We were poor in those early Dundalk days. I learned 
 afterward that the family income was just $1500 not much 
 on which to feed and clothe and educate eight children but 
 it was so managed that we did not feel poor. There was al- 
 ways money to relieve the distress of our neighbours. We 
 raised our own vegetables, had a cow, chickens, and pigs, and 
 Father and Mother between them did even such rough work as 
 salting down the bacon. I remember we thought Mother a 
 wonderful cook; anything that was unusually nice she made for 
 us herself, and she made most of our clothes. 
 
 Looking back on those years now, from 1855 to 1865, I can 
 see that the strain on my mother was more than even her 
 fine constitution and indomitable courage could endure. She 
 gave her very life for the home. Her babies came too closely, 
 one after the other; her sewing took all her evenings, her careful 
 housekeeping and cooking her days. Her garden, while any 
 vigour remained to her, was her delight and recreation. But 
 when I was about ten years old, she gradually had to give up 
 gardening. Arthritis, that later made her life a martyrdom, 
 began to fasten its grip on her frail little body, and she was 
 never afterward free from cruel pain till she died in 1887. 
 
 My father, Marcus Rainsford, was an unworldly, simple- 
 minded man. Irish schools in his day were inadequate in- 
 stitutions, and one of these in Dublin he attended. In due 
 course he entered Trinity College, and, with some difficulty, 
 achieved a B. A. degree. He was born at Rainsford Lodge, 
 County Wicklow, and inherited that unpretentious house and a 
 small and encumbered estate from my grandfather, Ryland 
 Rainsford. He was a lover of nature, though of natural history, 
 except what he had picked up for himself, he knew nothing. 
 He loved a horse and was an excellent judge of his points. In 
 boyhood, he hunted with the "Kildare," a famous pack then,
 
 FATHER AND MOTHER 33 
 
 and he told me, when he gave me my first mount on a donkey, 
 that he went to his first "meet of hounds" on the same humble 
 steed. He was a first-class horseman, hands and seat of the 
 best, and could, years after, when he had long given up the 
 hunting field as a worldly and sinful amusement, still take a 
 horse over a good-sized gate and hold two pennies, one under 
 each knee, without losing them. 
 
 When Vicar of Dundalk, he would groom his own horse 
 and see to it that I did the same for my pony. 1 
 
 He came honestly by his love for a good horse, and one family 
 story in this line is worth repeating. An ancestor of ours held 
 Brigade rank under Wellington in Spain, and prided himself 
 on his Irish "chargers." At Salamanca his "galloper" had his 
 horse shot under him. The Brigadier had, for the time being, 
 to remount him on his own spare horse. The engagement was 
 very heavy and the French fire close and deadly. Looking 
 through the smoke, the Brigadier saw with fury that his young 
 "aid" had turned sideways to the fire, and so sat his horse 
 broadside on to it. "Damn you, sir," he roared, "what do 
 you mean by turning my horse's flank to such a fire as this? 
 Face the enemy, sir!" 
 
 He loved gardening, too, and was always at work among his 
 flowers and vegetables long before we had breakfast, and we 
 breakfasted early. Later, when our means were not so strait- 
 ened and he could afford a man of all work, he confined himself 
 to his roses. These were his joy and pride. He grew standard 
 roses, budding varieties from England and France on wild 
 hedgerow stock. These I used to dig up and bring to him from 
 the countryside and he would give me a shilling a dozen for 
 them. So the old, neglected Vicarage garden became a beauti- 
 ful thing to see, for no one in Dundalk raised such roses as he 
 did. 
 
 Father had the gift of making and keeping friends. Inter- 
 esting people came to the house; missionaries from far-off lands 
 were always welcome. One of these I specially remember 
 came straight from Abyssinia, and told us stories of lions and 
 
 1 I should say here that Father made himself responsible for some quite large debts incurred 
 by my grandfather, which he was not legally bound to pay. Morally, he felt he was bound, and 
 the payment of these moneys kept us very poor during the early years of his tenure of Dundalk 
 parish.
 
 34 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 elephants. He also left with Father an ancient copy of the 
 Coptic version of the New Testament. To him I owe my first 
 boyhood's yearning to see strange lands. 
 
 Religion was everything to my parents. In daily life they 
 consistently presented its beautiful reality to their children. 
 They lived in the company of a God they loved and trusted. 
 The incongruity of the doctrines they held with the life they 
 lived and the love they gave was of course not apparent to me 
 till long after. To them the Bible was not a "word of God," 
 one among many words, but the Word of God, from the first 
 letter to the last, His inspired and inerrant message to men; 
 and in it we children were schooled as soon as we could under- 
 stand English; and thankful I am for that rule of my home. I 
 never had anything better than a smattering of Latin and an 
 imperfect knowledge of New Testament Greek, but with the 
 greatest religious poetry in the world, given us in an unequalled 
 prose, that cultivates the taste and satisfies the ear, I was very 
 thoroughly acquainted when I was ordained. It was the only 
 thing I did know well, and that invaluable knowledge I owe to 
 my mother. 
 
 Stevenson is everlastingly right: Religion is a spirit im- 
 parted, not a dogma handed down. What misery, hatred, and 
 blood-shedding had been spared the world if the difference had 
 been recognized. 
 
 We children were taught: 
 
 i. That the nature of all men born of Adam was altogether 
 vile; no particle of good in it. 
 
 2. That the world we lived in was under God's curse and 
 
 was to be burned up. 
 
 3. That it was God's eternal purpose to save a few out of it. 
 
 4. That the great majority of its inhabitants were destined 
 
 to suffer eternally in a real hell fire. 
 
 People no longer believe these awful doctrines, you say. Why 
 repeat them? Why dwell on the darker side of a religious 
 movement which you confess had much good in it and pro- 
 foundly benefited its time? I do so because, as I said in the 
 introduction to this life story, one of my chief reasons for writing 
 it is to insist on the comparative unimportance of creeds and 
 doctrines. If true religion is to live, and men cannot live with-
 
 FATHER AND MOTHER 35 
 
 out it, their creeds must change and doctrines once precious 
 and useful perish. 
 
 The God who indwells man the Holy Spirit, ever living, 
 ever in action pushes aside, transcends, finally destroys, those 
 forms of words in which successive generations have sought, 
 piously but vainly, to find a final expression for His voice. So 
 much is inevitable. The Kingdom of good and of God can 
 come by no other way. Jesus said the Gospel he preached was 
 a seed a growing, expanding thing Truth to be sown and 
 re-sown, not to be husbanded in ecclesiastical granaries. 
 
 Not in the doctrines they held lay my parents' power and 
 power they had. Not to one of those doctrines could I sub- 
 scribe now. Yet well I know that anything I am, anything 
 worth while that I have done, I owe to the spirit they imparted, 
 which indeed was a perpetual possession. 
 
 Facing the light, I point above and prove 
 There is a place no storms nor seasons move. 
 So hold I steadfast in their ordered way, 
 The falling shadows of a fleeting day.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Schooldays 
 
 I had poor luck in the matter of schools. I never attended a 
 really good one. My first was the Dundalk Grammar School; 
 there was no other to go to. It was an ancient foundation fallen 
 into decay. The Head was a good classical scholar of Trinity, 
 Dublin, a well-meaning man, but unfitted for his work 
 harassed, too, I fear, by poverty. The assistant masters were 
 gathered from anywhere. Poor devils, teaching boys they 
 did not care for in order to make a bare living, and that was 
 all they made. 
 
 In the matter of punishments we were better off than were 
 most scholars, for in those days caning on hands and back was 
 
 often inflicted to a cruel and nerve-breaking extent. Mr. , 
 
 to his credit, discouraged the cane. 
 
 The Latin master used to wear shoes with very wide, sharp 
 toes to them, and any mistake in answering a question drew 
 a kick in the shin, launched with quite extraordinary prompti- 
 tude and accuracy. The custom was for the class to stand 
 round the master's desk, close up. The head master had very 
 long arms, and instead of a kick he administered a box on the 
 ear. As between the two, the kick was more painful, but the 
 blow drew the attention of the whole school, and I preferred 
 the kick. 
 
 There was one big schoolroom. The Sixth Form had a 
 room of its own; all the rest of us were taught in groups in 
 that big room, and so, if we did not stand close to the teacher's 
 desk, it was impossible for scholar or master to hear what was 
 said in class. 
 
 The English teacher, the man who should have introduced 
 us to the greatest literature in the world, was utterly incom- 
 petent. He was an Englishman, a very high churchman 
 rare in those days and, I am sorry to say, a blackguard. He 
 
 36
 
 SCHOOLDAYS 37 
 
 used to have day boys to meet him outside the school and go 
 for country walks with him alone. What he did or tried to do 
 on such occasions I cannot print. Boys who flouted him had 
 not a good time in his class. There was a Frenchman, a lonely 
 man, very much of a gentleman, who refused to punish us in 
 any way. He taught foreign languages. We did not appre- 
 ciate him, I fear, and his task was a hopeless one. I don't 
 think he knew a single soul in the dull little town, and why a 
 man of his tastes and breeding was reduced to such a method 
 of making a pittance I never knew. 
 
 Irish schools were bad in the '6o's. The custom of filthy 
 talking among both boarders and day scholars was almost 
 universal. Some boys made it a cult. Bullying of the little 
 by the big was a matter of course and was quite brutal at times. 
 The hours were long, seven to eight-thirty in the morning, 
 ten to one, and two-thirty to four in the afternoon; no school on 
 Saturdays after one o'clock. 
 
 To this school I went when I was twelve. I was then very 
 much overgrown for my age, very tall and very thin and in- 
 clined to be a coward; self-conscious and shy when away from 
 home. I had an unusually poor memory; all lessons were 
 learned by heart, and this I found hard. I went to school 
 determined to do my very best, but this first plunge into its 
 waters, cold, strange, and filthy, was more than I had bargained 
 for. I was just the sort of boy, though I did not know it, likely 
 to fail with both master and scholar and fail I certainly did. 
 I had no friend or confidant in the school, no older boy to steer 
 me. Jack Barton had been sent to Repton, and the older 
 boarders found a serious grievance against me in my father's 
 long sermons on Sunday, to which they were obliged to listen. 
 My first days in that school were as miserable as any boy's 
 well could be. 
 
 All new boys had to be "pinched" it was the rule; and 
 pinching meant that a big boy held you fast while another big 
 boy took hold of small pieces of flesh, beginning at your knees 
 and religiously going up to your shoulders and down your 
 arms took them between the bent knuckle of the thumb and 
 the first finger tip, as in a pincers, and with a sharp twist almost 
 drew blood. As a result your body was marked for weeks. 
 
 Then you were forced to fight any boy in your class who
 
 38 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 wanted to fight you. A ring was formed there was no escape. 
 This I refused to do, and though heavily struck in the face 
 several times, would not strike back. Naturally I was voted a 
 coward. My mother told me it was wrong to fight; that was 
 the reason I gave myself for not fighting, but really I had no 
 stomach for it. I half believed myself a coward. However, I 
 hid my bruises and pains as well as I could and said nothing 
 about them at home. 
 
 Seeing that I made no resistance and told no tales, two of 
 the big boarders, the worst of the lot, when early school was 
 over one morning, locked me in, in the school porch, refusing to 
 let me go home to breakfast, and when their breakfast was 
 over poured a bucket of cold water and swill over my head 
 and then let me go. I came home shivering it was in winter 
 and my mother at once found out the truth and drew my 
 story from me. I did not go back to school that day, but 
 Father and Mother together made a formal call on the head 
 master, and I never was bullied again. The incident didn't 
 add to my popularity. 
 
 Gradually things improved. The Latin master found that I 
 really was trying to learn my tasks, but that to get forty lines 
 of Virgil by heart was something I could not do. He cut me 
 down to twenty lines, and I did better. 
 
 So far as school was concerned at this time, life was rather 
 gray. I never made a real friend among masters or boys. 
 But of one day at that time I must speak a red-letter day, an 
 important day in my life, a day with my mother: 
 
 I speak of one from many singled out, 
 One of those blissful days that cannot die. 
 
 It was springtime, and I had had a spell of weakness and bad 
 growing pains at night. I hated my lessons; I hated the dirty 
 talk of the boys. Life was a burden and I was sick of it all. 
 When I came back from early school to breakfast that morning, 
 Mother looked at me and said: "Willie, you shall not go back 
 to school to-day. You and I will go for a walk." Words can- 
 not express what I felt, what amazement, what delight, what 
 delicious peace and rest and joy. As soon as prayers were over 
 she took me out with her. "Let us go to the Demesne," she 
 said. Lord Roden's demesne was a semi-public park. It shoul-
 
 SCHOOLDAYS 39 
 
 dered itself up against the town, and in it was a modest red-brick 
 lodge, the very occasional residence of the Earl whose "chap- 
 lain" my father was. The Demesne meant much to well- 
 behaved Dundalk boys; all such had the run of it. There were 
 acres of wild woodland; thickets that had once been orderly 
 plantations and had fallen into disorder; walks once neatly kept 
 were now half hidden by the brushwood. There was a great 
 fruit garden, the gates always carefully locked, surrounded 
 by a high brick wall on the inside of which wonderful pear 
 and green gage plum trees were trained. A landscape archi- 
 tect of the time of George IV whose equerry the old Earl had 
 been had planned a quite extensive system of artificial waters 
 spanned in one place by a handsome stone bridge, and by the 
 waters grew a tree of wonder a real cedar of Lebanon. Reeds 
 and water plants had choked the canals, and among them water 
 hens and a very occasional wild duck nested. Then there were 
 rabbits and wood pigeons. I once saw a real cock pheasant 
 and more than once flushed a woodcock. Oh, the Demesne 
 was a land of mystery and wonder, a place I dearly loved, and 
 to it, that May morning, Mother and I went. 
 
 On a little knoll, under a beech tree, she sat down at last, 
 and I at her feet. Of what she said to me that morning I 
 remember nothing; but she drew me to her as never before. I 
 felt she understood me. I felt I was not quite a failure. I can 
 see now the first delicate, feathery green of the beech buds, as 
 they came slowly out of their dark orange-brown sticky casings. 
 I can see the blue flowers of the wild hyacinth and the pale 
 yellow of the primroses that grew with them on that little 
 knoll; and I never see a beech tree bursting into leaf in the 
 springtime without thinking of that wonderful holiday morn- 
 ing spent with Mother more than fifty-five years ago. 
 
 She had so many things to do; she was no longer strong; she 
 had eight small children and one maid of all work, yet she 
 gave up the whole morning to me. If she knows anything now, 
 she knows that I can never, never thank her for what she did 
 that day; she put new hope and faith and confidence into her 
 boy that morning. 
 
 We never had been so near each other, Mother and I, and yet 
 ah, the tragedy of things! had we known it, the very new 
 life she gave me then, the first beginnings of a boy's self-con-
 
 4 o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 fidence, were to take me very far away from much she held 
 most necessary and most dear. 
 
 She bade me look forward and upward, and because she 
 helped me as none other could to do both, she all unconsciously 
 prepared me to break from a past that was all in all to her 
 and struggle toward a future of which she always disapproved. 
 
 Oh, the tragedy of ties severed by forces quite beyond our 
 power to measure or control! 
 
 As later years passed, I was much more away from home 
 than were any of my brothers and sisters, and I seemed to get 
 out of touch with my mother. She understood the others 
 better than she did me. She wrote to me once that I was in- 
 clined heedlessly to change my opinions. I have no doubt 
 she was right. When I got to the point of being unable to 
 accept and believe some of the fixed doctrines of Evangelicism, 
 she let me see that she was disappointed in me, that she re- 
 sented my departing from my childhood's faith, and put it down 
 to a boyish instability. She thought I was superficial, and I 
 was; that I would not last. When I was twenty-six years old, 
 after meditation and such honest self-searching as I was capable 
 of, I made up my mind to leave England, at least for a time. 
 It was a cruel wrench, but by far the bitterest part of it was my 
 mother's disapproval. She could see neither sense nor reason 
 in the step. She did not understand; I could not explain with- 
 out causing her more cruel pain, keener disappointment in me. 
 The only thing that held me to my decision was the conviction 
 that I was trying to do the right thing as I saw it. 
 
 I remember well when I knelt by her chair and bade her 
 good-bye, I thanked and blessed her for that May morning so 
 many years behind us, which she gave to her spring-sick boy in 
 the old Demesne. Two years, eventful for me, passed before 
 I saw my mother again. I had faced a new world, without 
 money or friends or influence, and in a modest way had made 
 good. I think I had drunk at least as much of the heady wine 
 of success as was good for me, and when I came back to Mother's 
 bedside, I should have stayed there much longer than I did. I 
 have blamed myself bitterly since for not putting all other 
 things aside and giving myself up to her for a time, as Caroline 
 (my second sister, a very noble woman) did. But it was holi-
 
 SCHOOLDAYS 41 
 
 day time; I was soon to be married; I was drinking great 
 draughts at new fountains; and with Mother, life was even less 
 articulate than it had been. She had never found it easy to 
 express her inner self. So, though I constantly sat by her 
 bedside, our truest selves did not touch. How hard it is for 
 youth and vigour to realize the withdrawal, the enforced lone- 
 liness, that pain and bodily decay so inevitably bring to those 
 who approach death! I can understand at seventy what I 
 could not understand at twenty-eight. 
 
 There is a popular and quite untenable proposition, gener- 
 ally maintained by people in fine health, that suffering is a good 
 thing in itself and makes for holiness. I saw the senseless 
 cruelty of nature gradually beating to earth a beautiful and 
 buoyant spirit my mother. 
 
 No one ever bore agony more heroically than did she. She 
 believed that God sent her suffering, and her faith never 
 wavered, as month by month, year by year, pain crushed her 
 lower and lower. Her frail body was spent, her mind was 
 fading out, but her purpose held. Since God sent her agony, 
 it was her part to endure; and so, resolute to her last breath, 
 no drug that science knows for alleviating suffering should 
 pass her lips. 
 
 And so, a soul triumphant, contemptuous of death and pain, 
 avid of life, my mother passed. What heroism could be greater 
 than hers? Well I know I was not worthy of her, but it was a 
 great thing to have been her eldest son. 
 
 A POOR BOARDING SCHOOL 
 
 If I had poor luck in my first school, in my second, a private 
 boarding school in Shropshire, I had no better. 
 
 That school and its master shall be nameless. It was very 
 popular for a time with the extreme Evangelicals, as its declared 
 purpose was to promote and guide the religious life of the 
 scholars. 
 
 One year's experience of it taught me that its religion was a 
 sham; as non-existent as its scholarship. We were preached 
 at and prayed at, and spied on, but taught absolutely nothing. 
 But it had one or two good points. If you gave signs of spirit- 
 ual development, you were taken four times a year on a whole 
 holiday to some place of interest remarkable for its beauty or
 
 42 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 for its historic associations, some ancient castle or battlefield. 
 Then it was near the "Wrekin," that wooded hill standing out 
 of the Shropshire plain a quite lovely roaming place not yet 
 spoiled by holiday makers, where woodland wonders not found 
 in Irish countryside could be had; where nightingales sometimes 
 sang and real snakes were discoverable. And third, they fed 
 us well. I have never tasted such apple dumplings before or 
 since. 
 
 But, oh! how homesick that place made me! So let me go 
 back again to my home, my real school, where unconsciously 
 I was being prepared for life's battle; where there was no sham 
 religion, but fine purpose and honest faith and love always. 
 
 Here I must tell another story of my mother, the story of a 
 lesson she gave me that no school however good could have 
 given. I did not want to go to a boarding school at all, and of 
 course reasons were not given me at least not detailed reas- 
 ons, for it was not the custom to argue with us children. But 
 the day before the little Dundalk steamer left, that sailed twice 
 a week to Liverpool, my mother took me into her store room. 
 In a corner of that room stood a large mahogany box lined, I 
 remember, with green baize. That box and its contents were 
 precious in her eyes, and well they might be, for in it was part of 
 a fine silver service, presented long ago by a very great man 
 to her great-grandfather the Bishop, who had been his school- 
 mate at Eton. 
 
 The great man was Charles James Fox. Father and Mother 
 had been through hard times together, but the sale of that 
 precious heirloom had never been thought of. To send me to 
 school strained their narrow income, and so she sold her silver, 
 and I remember in that out-of-the-way market, that precious 
 Georgian coffee and tea service fetched just five shillings the 
 ounce. It was broken up for old silver; that was what old 
 silver fetched in Dundalk. 
 
 "Willie," she said, "I am selling this to send you to school. 
 Won't you do your best there?" No poor schooling could 
 make me forget that lesson or fail to keep the promise she 
 asked me to make her, that I would learn my two verses of 
 Scripture each morning when I was away. 
 
 When I was quite little, Mother taught me a verse of the 
 Bible every morning. When I could read, I learned two for
 
 SCHOOLDAYS 43 
 
 her on week days and six on Sundays. In this way she helped 
 me to form a habit that proved of greatest possible value. She 
 saw that my memory was unusually poor, and she took an 
 excellent way to develop the little there was of it. 
 
 People have said to me, when in some sermon or address 
 I have aptly quoted verses from the Bible, or from some poet, 
 "What a memory you have!" It was not memory; they were 
 recognizing the results of habit. I have always had something 
 worth remembering before me, either in book or manuscript, as 
 I dressed in the morning. It takes me days to commit a few 
 lines, but I choose the best, and their digestion and assimilation 
 meant a full man. 
 
 A man can make a better day's march if he has something 
 
 solid inside him in the morning. I commend the habit; it is 
 
 disciplinary, and apart from the pleasure and strength it gives 
 
 you, it very greatly helps to feed and brighten the lives of others. 
 
 Homes made good the defects of schools when I was a boy, 
 or at least homes like mine did. Schools are now expected to 
 make good the defects of homes, and they cannot do it. It 
 is asking too much of the best of them. The trouble with 
 modern child culture is too often that parents are not sufficiently 
 absorbed in the upbringing of their children from earliest in- 
 fancy. They do not realize that no social, no financial success, 
 can in the long last do for their children what it is given them 
 to do. Their children are not the supreme thing in life; other 
 interests shoulder them aside; and when parental ignorance, 
 sluggishness, or inattention beget their natural result, the 
 young things are packed off to some school, where it is expected 
 that early faults and wrong tendencies, which should never 
 have been permitted to harden into habits, shall, by some 
 miraculous influence of hired experts suddenly applied, be 
 quite done away with, and so the past be remedied and the 
 future assured.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 An Irish Boy in London 
 
 When the Christmas holidays were over in 1865, when I 
 bade my parents good-bye on the pier, and looked across the 
 meadows at the old vicarage, as the little channel steamer made 
 its careful way to the open sea, I little realized that I had bidden 
 a last farewell to that dear home. The big garden where I had 
 worked for my mother, my pony, the long tramps by the river- 
 side or across the bogs to the mountain slopes, rambles at sun- 
 rise with my gun in the Demesne, all henceforth to be memories 
 only; yet so it was decreed. 
 
 The wise, self-sacrificing love of my parents and happy cir- 
 cumstance combined to create for me during the most formative 
 years of boyhood that rare and beautiful thing, an ideal home. 
 I do not think that we children were in any special degree con- 
 genial companions to one another. We were singularly unlike, 
 and as years passed we took our own courses in life and drifted 
 widely apart. But I see now, as I look back on those bright 
 happy years, that the secret of real success had been under- 
 stood by my parents, and had, by loving care and leadership, 
 and with a rare consistence, been impressed on us all namely, 
 a lasting happiness, happiness that is worth while, depends on 
 living for others. We had unconsciously but really been taught 
 to live for one another, and though we were poor, and had few 
 or none of the costly distractions that are to-day supposed to be 
 necessary to the making of a happy home, we certainly had in 
 that old vicarage a rare good time. Our next home was to be 
 in a city square. 
 
 I remember with what consternation I received the news 
 at school. Father had been called to a London church, and to 
 London we were all going. I knew the change would be great, 
 but it was far greater than I dreamed. I had, however, one 
 
 44
 
 AN IRISH BOY IN LONDON 45 
 
 immense consolation if it was hard to leave Dundalk, it was 
 delightful to bid good-bye to Doctor C 's. 
 
 Our first abode was 48 Thurlow Square, S. W. There were 
 Squares and Crescents and Terraces and Gardens by the score, 
 as the great city sprawled out to the southwest, the houses in 
 all of them built of colourless yellow brick, the front door of each 
 one of them standing under the shadow of two stucco pillars 
 that supported a small balcony overhead, where families that 
 could afford the luxury stretched an awning, and kept boxes of 
 sickly geraniums. 
 
 Eight country-bred children ranging from fifteen to three 
 years old packed into a narrow city home, old ties wrenched 
 away, no new ones formed as yet, our adored mother sickening 
 in the city air and failing before our eyes it was a gloomy 
 prospect that lay before us children that first Easter, or so we 
 voted it. I looked at my rod and hooks and flies, and thought 
 of the streams I knew so well, where by now in the spring 
 weather the trout would rise if you gave them the right fly. 
 I hated the noisy streets, and our square garden with its half- 
 alive shrubbery, to touch a twig of which blackened your hand 
 with clinging soot. 
 
 The first Sunday in Father's church, St. John's, Halkin 
 Street, Belgrave Square, was an ordeal. All of us sat in one long 
 pew under the low heavy gallery that circled the dismal build- 
 ing. Mother sat next the door. The church was not yet 
 quite full, but was filling rapidly with a congregation as in- 
 fluential and as fashionable as any in the town, though Father 
 had been preaching for only two or three months. In our 
 rough Irish clothes we must have contrasted sharply, that 
 first Sunday, with the very smart people all round us. But if 
 we did, that did not trouble us in those days. 
 
 We had loved the old church across the water, with all its 
 queer nooks and corners, every one of them holding a friend, 
 and we heartily disliked the new. Indeed it had nothing to 
 recommend it but the man who filled its pulpit. Plain and 
 ugly it was, the one attempt at outside decoration about it 
 being four heavy stucco pillars standing in front, and sup- 
 porting nothing to speak of, the plaster on them flaked and 
 threatening to fall. On the inside, nothing to relieve the dull, 
 monotonous ugliness of windows and walls. The shallow chan-
 
 46 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 eel backed up against the dead wall of the Duke of "Some- 
 where's" house, so a chancel window was impossible. On 
 Holy Communion Sunday mornings I used to look for the 
 peeping neck of the extra bottle of wine showing underneath 
 the fringe of the blue cloth covering of the Holy Table that did 
 not quite reach the floor. A deep gallery extended all round, 
 seating quite two hundred and fifty people; the pews on the 
 floor seated some eight hundred and fifty more. 
 
 Many such chapels had been built in London during the 
 Evangelical revival of the past seventy-five years. They 
 were unnecessarily ugly, and of them all I think St. John's, 
 Halkin Street, standing in the middle of the most fashionable 
 part of London, was the ugliest. The music was execrable, the 
 service slovenly, but the preacher won in good part the ear of 
 London and held it for a time. I saw the Prince of Wales 
 there more than once, and he asked that Father should be in- 
 formally presented to him. Gladstone came sometimes, in 
 spite of his avowed high-churchmanship. The Lord Chan- 
 cellor, Cairns, was one of the first to rent a pew. Statesmen, 
 soldiers, bankers, and many members of Parliament, as well 
 as some of the first families in England that had been in- 
 fluenced by the Evangelical revival, attended regularly. The 
 chapel was soon full, every seat rented; it was enough to turn 
 any man's head, but Father was not in the very least changed 
 by it. His sermons praised, his advice sought, his friendship 
 courted by many of the great of the land, he still quietly went 
 about his work with the same earnest regularity he had used 
 in the poor Irish parish. In the mornings he shut himself in 
 his study; in the afternoons he went from house to house visiting 
 the sick and the well, several hours each day. Generally in the 
 evening he dined out, and always went alone; for Mother's 
 health, and her distaste, too, for new surroundings and new peo- 
 ple, resulted in her never accompanying him. At first the 
 callers at 48 Thurlow Square were innumerable, but since 
 there could be none other than a return of cards by way of the 
 mail, this soon ceased. So circumstances that none of us could 
 control changed life for us all completely. Neither Father nor 
 Mother could act differently. But the city had laid its com- 
 pelling hands on us, and home, as we had known it till my 
 sixteenth year, was but a memory.
 
 AN IRISH BOY IN LONDON 47 
 
 The old book says: "Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy 
 cometh in the morning." So it fell out that first Eastertide I 
 am writing of. The very day after our dolorous introduction 
 to St. John's we had a surprise. Two dear discerning women, 
 whose souls Father's sermons had comforted, marked that 
 first day in church, the aspect of that packed pew of young, 
 unaccustomed things, and 48 Thurlow Square had two visitors 
 who would not be denied. The Misses Onslow were aunts of 
 the Earl of that name, very considerable ladies indeed; they 
 lived in a commodious house at Alresford, Hampshire. 
 
 What were we children going to do during the Easter holi- 
 days; were we going to the country? 
 
 Alas, no such luck. 
 
 Then we should go there with them, and go we did, no less 
 than six of us. 
 
 So came my first taste of London's hospitality, and thought- 
 ful and generous and warm-hearted it surely was then and al- 
 ways after to the family of the loved pastor. 
 
 They were old maids, but there was nothing old maidish 
 about them. They were full of consideration for others, with 
 a certain high-bred assurance that made the taking of any 
 liberty with them impossible; charitable, refined, cultivated; 
 in the best sense women of the world, full of genuine kindness 
 and worldly wisdom, as well as Evangelical piety. 
 
 I might say that till then I had only seen England through 
 
 the fence of Doctor C 's school. My brothers and sisters 
 
 had never crossed the water, so to all of us Upton was a revela- 
 tion. Hampshire is one of the loveliest counties in England; 
 at springtime it looks its best, and it gave us a great reception, 
 that Easter of 1865. The old beech trees on the lawn were 
 bursting into bud, primroses and wild hyacinths were aplenty, 
 and there was a river, such a river as I had never dreamed of 
 clearer by far than were the Irish bog-coloured streams that 
 made its leisurely way through carefully tended watercress 
 beds to the Itchen hard by. 
 
 Here let me tell a fishing story that has an interest for trout 
 fishers. I noticed lately, in Viscount Grey's delightful book on 
 fly-fishing in the Itchen that he says he was unable to get any 
 fish even to rise to the wet fly on that river when he was a boy at 
 Winchester School, in 1 877. He tells the history of his repeated
 
 48 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 failure with the wet, and growing success with the dry, fly: 
 one trout in 1878, thirteen in 1879, an< ^ m I 88o, seventy-six. 
 
 Now when I fished the Onslow water on the Itchen in 1 865 and 
 1866, I certainly had only a boy's skill, and did not probably 
 get out any better line than did Lord Grey at the same age. 
 Yet, fishing behind Guilford Onslow, I always got some trout, 
 and he, an excellent fisherman, filled his basket, using nothing 
 but the wet fly. And afterward, fishing by myself, I several 
 times filled a twelve-pound basket without any special diffi- 
 culty. Now the interesting point about my fishing yarn is, 
 what changed the customs of the Itchen trout between 1865 
 and 1 877 ? That they cannot now be induced to take the wet 
 fly is, I think, a fact beyond dispute. 
 
 Upton was comfort, plenty, and hospitality itself, but one 
 thing Upton had very much in common with our own Irish 
 home. Upton believed in and practised order. Its rule was 
 generous, but by rule it ran. And so, to keep us out of trouble, 
 those dear, wise ladies provided an ideal guard and guide, a 
 retired sporting-farmer sort of man, who lived hard by their 
 gate, and worshipped the ground they walked on, who had 
 taught them when they were girls how to handle their first 
 ponies, and their nephew, the Earl, how to shoot. Just the 
 sort of man boys love was old man Jarvis. What walks and 
 confabs I had with him ! And what lore of bird and beast and 
 fish was his! He loved to hand on to an appreciative boy all 
 he knew. There was only one thing the Misses Onslow could 
 not make him do; that was, go to church. He was a dear old 
 heathen. But his little world was certainly the better for his 
 having lived in it. 
 
 In later days many houses, some of them much greater than 
 Upton, were hospitably opened to me, but none of them quite 
 took its place. I went there to skate and shoot at Christmas, 
 and to catch trout in its matchless chalk streams in the spring. 
 Till Mother died, and we all had gone our several ways in the 
 world, some of us went each year to Upton. When I came 
 back from the United States, I went to visit the dear old place, 
 but it held other mistresses and old Jarvis was dead. 
 
 The school problem came up again when Easter holidays 
 were over. I succeeded in convincing my mother that Doctor 
 C 's, in spite of its religious advantages, was a waste of
 
 AN IRISH BOY IN LONDON 49 
 
 Father's money and my time. I begged to be allowed to re- 
 main at home, and won out. My brothers and I went to a 
 good grammar school in old Kensington Square. 
 
 It seemed, however, as though fate was against my gaining 
 even that moderately good introduction to an education ac- 
 corded to boys of my age. In the spring of the next year, I 
 caught a bad cold and developed a persistent cough which, 
 though it did not trouble me much, alarmed my mother. I 
 was taken away from Kensington and sent for a long visit to 
 my godfather's house on Lough Sheelan in Ireland. 
 
 The Hon. Somerset Maxwell, afterward Lord Farnham, was 
 a devoted friend of my father's, and I can never be too grate- 
 ful for his goodness to me. He and Mrs. Maxwell took as good 
 care of me as if I had been their own, and though there were no 
 other boys about, I had a great time swimming and fishing in 
 the lake. Never was a lad more fortunate in his friends or in 
 his holidays than I have been. 
 
 Arley, modestly called a cottage, was really a most com- 
 fortable country home. It stood surrounded by mossy lawns 
 (and nowhere are there mossy lawns like those of Ireland) and 
 quite immense rhododendron bushes, on the edge of the wide, 
 deep, rocky, islanded Lough Sheelan. Opposite the house, 
 perhaps more than a mile away, all that was left of some petty 
 chieftain's stronghold, wrecked by the English in the days of 
 Tyrone's Elizabethan rebellion, stood up boldly from the 
 water. Round its base the herons would stand fishing, silent, 
 immovable; and many a time, in the evening quiet, did I try to 
 stalk them, in vain. Lough Sheelan had its brief season, for 
 there was great fishing in the springtime. Then the May fly 
 was hatched out, and rose to the surface, and fishers from 
 many parts came, putting up at such rough quarters as could be 
 had (for hotels there were none), to catch the famous yellow- 
 sided Lough Sheelan trout. Well I remember their splashing 
 rise. I suppose they are there still, and that you must wait, as 
 I did, hour by hour, watching the bait of natural fly float out 
 bravely to leeward of the fishing boat, well contented if once or 
 twice in the long afternoon the shy denizens of the deep green 
 water flashed upward to the lure. 
 
 I spent several months at Arley, just loafing; doing no study- 
 ing. The truth was, though I did not know it, I had out-
 
 50 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 grown my strength. I was over six feet high at sixteen, was 
 very thin, and my cough still clung to me. 
 
 One memorable visit I made, before returning to London 
 in the autumn; a visit that was destined to influence my after 
 life. Castle Saunderson was the home of Edward Saunderson, 
 nephew of Lord Farnham, and M. P. for the county. Mr. and 
 Mrs. Saunderson became my life-long friends. I owe them 
 more than I can say and I shall try to say part of it later. 
 
 At Castle Saunderson I entered a larger and more worldly 
 social circle than any I had yet known. The tie that bound all 
 the friends of my earlier days together was exclusively a re- 
 ligious tie. In those circles my father's name was everything. I 
 was just my father's son. Castle Saunderson took me on my 
 own showing. My host and hostess let me see they were in- 
 terested in me personally. Naturally, such preference was 
 new and delightful and stimulating. I remember I began to 
 think more of how I looked, and to take an interest in my 
 dressing. What charm, what wit, what delightful freedom 
 from unnecessary convention the best Irish society had in those 
 days, and how sure of itself it was ! It was decaying even then, 
 though it knew it not. It belonged to an order passing rapidly 
 away; but never was there a society more brilliant or that knew 
 better the rare secret of hospitality. Its men were gentlemen, 
 clean and strong and unafraid; its women the most charming 
 and, I still think, the most beautiful I have ever seen. 
 
 The Hon. Helena Saunderson was a daughter of Lord Ventry. 
 She was then a young wife and a very beautiful woman. It 
 was dear of her to take an interest in me. She saw I needed 
 knocking into shape and sometimes she knocked pretty hard. 
 She bossed and chaffed and criticized me unmercifully. She 
 was the first pretty woman who had ever noticed me. She 
 fascinated me utterly and I was her willing slave. Perhaps 
 she did not know, certainly I did not, what a life-long service 
 she did me. 
 
 Not only at Upton and Arley was I made welcome in those 
 days. Many of Father's friends and admirers gave a kindly 
 thought to his children, strange to London, and showed them 
 kindness in hospitable ways, I, being the eldest, getting more 
 than my share of it. Mother had no health, Father had no 
 time to take us round, but volunteers there were who knew
 
 AN IRISH BOY IN LONDON 51 
 
 London, and so parks, and museums, the Zoo, and the river, we 
 enjoyed them all. I had one social adventure among "the great." 
 I will tell the story. A dear old lady, the Duchess of Grafton, 
 took somehow a fancy to me, and nothing would do but I must 
 meet her nephew, a young swell who had just left Eton. He was 
 older than I, and much too great a man to bother about me; he 
 took my measure that first evening and I never met him again. 
 
 The dinner invitation was quite informal and was for the 
 next evening. Father, to Mother's consternation, had ac- 
 cepted for me, and it never had occurred to him that the very 
 limited resources of my wardrobe could not possibly meet the 
 requirements of dinner at the Duchess's. To put it plainly, 
 I had no dining-out suit. Evening dress could be hired if one 
 knew where to go, which none of us did. Then, even if we had 
 known, I believe all Jewry might have been searched in vain for 
 a " ready made " that would have fitted my lanky body. Father 
 had a happy thought why not go in his old evening suit, the 
 one in fact that he had been married in; now, of course, he wore 
 clericals and did not need it. Well, the old broadcloth suit 
 was found (black once, age had coloured it a bottle green), and 
 I put it on. Mother was doubtful, Father hopeful, I miserable, 
 but what better could any one of us do ? It was woefully short 
 in the arms and the back, and so tight in the chest that I was 
 afraid to stand up. 
 
 The dinner was small, my hostess gracious and tactful, bent 
 on putting me at my ease; the nephew much too great a swell 
 to take any notice of me other than politeness to his aunt made 
 necessary. I was beginning to forget my clothes when my 
 very forgetfulness brought about the catastrophe. As I leaned 
 forward in the middle of dinner to answer a question of my 
 hostess, with a dull but quite audible rending sound that 
 wretched coat burst asunder from collar to tail. I really won- 
 der how I did it. I have muddled many a critical situation 
 since then, but this first terrible time I did the right thing and 
 did it at once. "Duchess," I said, "it is my father's wedding 
 coat. I have not an evening suit of my own, and I had to put 
 it on or refuse your most kind invitation." All joined at once 
 in a kindly general laugh, and everyone including myself forgot 
 the coat, and I had a very pleasant evening. Till her death, 
 the Dowager Duchess of Grafton was one of my warmest friends.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 I Go Abroad 
 
 I had left Ireland in early autumn for Thurlow Square, and 
 gone back to the grammar school at Kensington, but indoor life 
 and study were too much for me, and the cough which had never 
 quite left me grew worse. Father was to pay a visit to a Lady 
 Bailey, whose place was on the Welsh border, and he took me 
 there with him. There again I was fortunate in making new 
 friends. Lady Bailey's chaplain, a witty little Welshman, who 
 had travelled much and spoke many languages (he, by the way, 
 was the only man I ever knew who could talk in Latin as readily 
 as he could in French), took me under his wing. I had a right 
 good time, but the mountains were too much for me, and my 
 kind hostess said something to Father about a famous Doctor 
 Quain and the south of France. 
 
 I did not feel really ill, and wanted to go back to Kensington, 
 for I realized I was falling behind boys of my age, but my chest 
 began to hurt when I walked fast or up hill, and I spat blood 
 and had night sweats. In a fortnight Father and I returned 
 home, and I was taken to see the most famous diagnostician 
 then in London, Doctor Quain. A crowded waiting room, a 
 long wait, and we were in the great man's sanctum. Father 
 presented a letter of introduction from someone or other, 
 and I was stripped and examined thoroughly. The doctor said 
 nothing at first, but I did not like his look. He asked Father 
 many questions about his own family and my mother's, and 
 then he said, " Case of phthisis" (I did not know what that 
 meant), "one lung badly congested, the other touched." 
 
 "W T hat medicine do you recommend?" asked Father. 
 
 "Oh, medicine is no good; I only give him six months. Send 
 him to the south of France. It is his only chance." 
 
 I saw that my father was staggered, but I didn't believe a 
 
 l5*
 
 I GO ABROAD S3 
 
 word of it, and this summary doom of Doctor Quain and his 
 heartless way of putting it angered me. I didn't feel like dying 
 and I did not intend to die. On the contrary, I felt a lot of life 
 within me and was sure the doctor was wrong. What I did 
 mind terribly was having to worry my suffering mother. Our 
 home-coming that day I cannot forget. 
 
 Easy to say, "Send him to the south of France," but more 
 easily said than done. Father's means were still straitened. 
 Furnishing the London house had taken all his ready money, 
 and though the seats in Belgrave Chapel were almost all 
 taken, money earned in that way does not reach a poor man's 
 pocket quickly. He owed nothing; he had never borrowed a 
 penny in his life. The bitter result of Irish borrowing he had 
 seen too much of as a boy. But cash he had not and so how 
 was I to go? 
 
 Well, as I shall tell more than once again in my story, the 
 extraordinary thoughtful kindness of my own or my father's 
 friends saved me from disaster. Our late hostess wrote, asking 
 about the doctor's verdict, and by return of mail came a cheque 
 and a suggestion that her chaplain should be my guardian and 
 guide to safe quarters in the south of France. What better 
 chance could there be? what kinder or easier plan? A safe 
 and comfortable journey with an experienced and sympathetic 
 companion; one to whom the needs of a sick boy and the re- 
 sources of a foreign land were equally well known. If I was not 
 rich I surely was born lucky. Further money difficulties were 
 solved just as soon as my godfather and Father's friends learned 
 of the doctor's decree. 
 
 If I had had a scare, it certainly did not last long; and how 
 delightful seemed the French countryside in that beautiful 
 autumn weather! We journeyed by day, indeed by parts of 
 a day, and took horses when we could. We stopped at old- 
 fashioned inns in quaint towns, where landlord and landlady 
 cooked delicious meals for us with their own hands, and drew 
 from hidden underground cellars bottles of wine my Welshman 
 knowingly called for, with unmistakably real cobwebs on them. 
 Oh, it was a journey to be remembered ! Every day of it I grew 
 stronger, and every night of it, though the French feather beds 
 almost smothered me, I slept sounder and longer, and even 
 from the feather beds rose refreshed.
 
 54 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 For we know the world is glorious, 
 
 And the Goal a golden thing, 
 And that God is not censorious 
 
 When His children take their fling; 
 And Life slips its tether 
 
 When the boys get together, 
 With a stein on the table, 
 
 In the fellowship of Spring. 
 
 Richard Hovey's ringing lines were not written for many a 
 day after our escapade, but my little Welshman would have 
 sung them heartily to their splendid tune had he known them. 
 
 So we sauntered through France, and drove through Switzer- 
 land, slipped through a corner of Austria, and so to the wonder- 
 ful Italian lakes and Genoa. 
 
 In Genoa harbour I saw a relic of real war. Part of the sadly 
 battered Italian fleet lay there, Lissa's shot marks on them still 
 unrepaired. 
 
 At Genoa we engaged a carriage to take us along the road to 
 Mentone. Only one other road I know of in Europe is as 
 beautiful; that is the road from Salerno to Sorrento (not, be it 
 remembered, from Sorrento to Salerno). We took four or five 
 days for the last leg of our journey. That land of flowers and 
 fruit, of gray olive trees and old forts, of overhanging mountains 
 ending in red cliffs as they stepped down into that blue, blue 
 sea had not then become the crowded health-holiday resort 
 that junketing Europe knows to-day. And so, by it, without 
 crowding or hurry, we came at last to our goal. 
 
 My friend went boarding-house hunting the day after our 
 arrival, and chose for me a charming room in a comfortable and 
 quite commodious house standing back some hundred yards 
 from the shore, and surrounded on all sides by orange and lemon 
 trees. It was in the east bay of the town, not far from the 
 Roches Rouges, which mark the frontier between France and 
 Italy, and directly back of it rose the mass of the Berceau to a 
 height of over four thousand feet. 
 
 I had a room large and sunny, a big tiled balcony to it all 
 my own; good food, kindly welcome, and constant courteous 
 care from my hostess, Miss Newland, all for the very modest 
 sum of eight francs a day. Next day I wrung my little Welsh- 
 man's hand with a very full heart, and tried to thank him. We
 
 I GO ABROAD 55 
 
 swore lasting friendship, but I never saw him again. I think 
 that though he made very little profession, he was one of the 
 best men I ever knew; full of life, full of consideration for others 
 in a fine, keen, discriminating way. He was not much of a 
 preacher, but he was a mighty good man to be with he wore 
 well. True to a friend, charitable to an enemy, contemptuous 
 of nothing but humbug. He was the first cleric I had come to 
 know who had a dash of broad-churchmanship about him; and 
 I, who had been accustomed to regard all Roman Catholic 
 priests as emissaries of the "Man of Sin," was astonished at the 
 evident enjoyment he had in talking to the priests we met 
 in what he declared was " bog Latin." Whatever its classical 
 value may have been, it admirably served its purpose, and he 
 and the priests seemed to have a good deal in common. 
 
 My first loneliness soon wore off. I found a Frenchman 
 who gave me lessons for a couple of hours in the morning three 
 times a week. My fellow-boarders, Mrs. Trench a relation 
 of the archbishop's and her two daughters, were charming, and 
 I was growing stronger every day, so one could not but be 
 happy in the glorious winter weather we had that year (1867). 
 
 Nice people in London wrote to other nice people they knew 
 who were also wintering on the Riviera, and soon invitations 
 came to me, and donkey rides and picnickings were in order 
 (everyone rode donkeys then) into the beautiful country that 
 lay back of the town, and an occasional peep into the wicked 
 but lovely Casino at Monte Carlo and its gardens. In short, 
 I found life both interesting and gay. 
 
 As I look back on that time now, as I compare my sudden 
 yet steady recovery from the deadly threat of a fatal disease, 
 I see I had a close shave of never reaching my twentieth year; 
 but fortunate conditions saved me, and I took my luck with 
 both hands and a firm grip. Many years after I was to watch 
 one of my "own boys," the ablest assistant I ever had at St. 
 George's and if I am any judge of those qualities of heart and 
 brain that go to the making of a great preacher, the most richly 
 endowed man I have ever known among the younger clergy 
 go down to untimely death, only because the glowing ardour of 
 his spirit and the tongue of fire within him could not brook the 
 hard necessary discipline of long silence. If Alexis Stein 
 could but have given rein to the earthly side of himself (and
 
 $6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 he had a good solid chunk of the earthly in him) and stretched 
 out idly on old Mother Earth's bosom for a couple of years, the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church would have been the richer for a 
 very great preacher indeed. God knows she needs such to-day. 
 However, the probability is she would have unfrocked him for 
 heresy, as Bishop Walker of western New York did Doctor 
 Crapsey of Rochester, one of the very best men that diocese 
 ever had, one of the best preachers, too, and a man who loved 
 and understood the working people. 
 
 But to return to my own doings: Gradually I found my walk- 
 ing powers coming back to me. I used steadily to practise 
 climbing up the steep slope of the Berceau just back of the villa 
 where I lived; at first only up the narrow winding paths among 
 the lemon groves; and later higher, to the rocky boulder-strewn 
 lands above them where in sheltered corners bunches of wild 
 narcissus and white and scarlet tulips grew. 
 
 Two things out of the common happened to me in those 
 life-giving days. I had a bad fall coming down one of the 
 mountains and for the first and last time in my life I got drunk. 
 I will tell of the fall first. I broke two of my ribs and made a 
 most kind and helpful friend. The Earl of Grosvenor (later 
 he became a duke) and his wife were among my acquaintances. 
 They invited me to join their excursions, and as I was a better 
 walker than most, the Earl would have me go with him on 
 some of the longer climbs he delighted in. On one of these we 
 were to try to make the ascent of the Grand Mont, a long way 
 back from the coast and, if I remember, well over five thousand 
 feet high. By this time the patches in my lungs must have 
 mended thoroughly, for I could walk. We started early, for it 
 was a long grind, got to the summit after mid-day, and there 
 rested and ate our sandwiches. There we also met another 
 party as energetic as ourselves; they proposed a race to the 
 bottom, so off we sped. Lord Grosvenor had an alpine stock; 
 I, like a fool, had none. As we neared the base of the long slope 
 I was almost done, but we were well ahead of the others. Al- 
 most at the bottom I caught my foot in a creeper and lurched 
 heavily forward and downward among some rough rocks. I 
 was too much "done" to save myself, and the fall completely 
 knocked me out. When I came to Lord Grosvenor was pour- 
 ing brandy down my throat, and it surely did taste good. I got
 
 I GO ABROAD 57 
 
 on my feet at last, with a cruel pain in my left side. For a time 
 it required every bit of will power I had to stagger along with the 
 aid of an alpine stock and a helping arm. The pain almost 
 mastered me, but gradually I was able to straighten up a bit 
 and managed to keep going. Indeed there was nothing else to 
 do, unless I was to lie out all night, or wait for hours till a 
 stretcher could be had, for villages there were none, and the 
 "terrain" was roadless. 
 
 I remember that the first part of that return march seemed 
 dreadfully long, but pain subsided as we neared the town. I 
 went straight to the office of Doctor Frank, a well-known doctor 
 in those days, who was then taking winter practice in Mentone. 
 He examined my ribs and said I was lucky and young and made 
 of India rubber. He put a bandage on and let me go. The 
 ribs stick out in a queer way to-day, but they bothered me 
 very little and I was soon none the worse for the fall. 
 
 It was another long expedition, and it was my determination to 
 walk on it when I should have ridden that ended in my tempo- 
 rary lapse from sober virtue. The picnic was at Bordighera, 
 and I cannot remember how far that village was from Mentone, 
 but it was a good way, and on the Corniche road the spring 
 sunshine was warm and the dust lay deep. The company 
 drove to the rendezvous; I said I'd walk. I arrived in time 
 for luncheon, hot and thirsty. It was not safe in those days to 
 drink from the wayside rills in that region, for every one of them 
 was used by the natives for washing and other purposes. 
 Thirsty I was, and a good long glass of brown Bavarian beer 
 was a drink to thank the gods for. My experience at that time 
 of the varying potency of stimulating drinks, was limited to 
 what my dear little Welshman helped me to; he and I shared 
 always a bottle, and he always did his duty by at least one 
 half of it. I knew nothing of the dangers attending mixed 
 drinks, more especially the fatal consequences of mixing 
 beer and champagne. We were young and hungry and gay; 
 cool champagne there was in plenty, and I drank more of it 
 than was good for me, and did not realize I had done so till 
 luncheon was over, and I tried to leave the table. Then indeed 
 the horror of it all seized me. My brain was clear but my legs 
 unmanageable. I made some excuse and managed to stay 
 where I was till I could see some way to escape observation.
 
 58 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Then, with the last bit of will power I had, I got out through 
 some back door and, finding the shady side of a great olive tree, 
 was very completely sick. That made matters somewhat 
 better. One good fellow, a friend of mine, saw the misery I 
 was in, and leaving the party, stayed behind to help me out, and 
 so I got started on my return journey without attracting much 
 attention. After a mile or two I was my own man again, but 
 a very contrite one, I assure you. At last I got home, said the 
 sun had been too much for me, and dear Miss Newland put me 
 to bed. 
 
 The months passed all too quickly at Mentone. There were 
 then few hotels and few health-seekers. Villa life was the cus- 
 tomary thing, and there and at Cannes were interesting people 
 from many lands who came together, not to spend a hurried 
 week or two, but to enjoy the winter or the spring. At the 
 Glyns' villa and Lord Grosvenor's one met a charming and 
 clever set. Mr. Glyn's brother was Gladstone's whip in the 
 House of Commons (he was afterward made a peer), and 
 these two houses were gathering places for all that was cleverest 
 and smartest for miles round. If you were lucky enough to 
 have the entree to them, you were not chilled by too much 
 ceremony, and you were sure to have a good time. Blumenthal 
 stayed at the Glyns', and when the nights were calm a small 
 company would assemble on the terrace while he improvised 
 for an hour at a time. 
 
 There was music, too, of another sort, and a very good sort 
 it was. From the little-known country back of the town came 
 a quartet of male voices, and a fifth who played very well 
 indeed on the violin. Some of the country folk-songs they sang 
 have since then become European property, and sound hack- 
 neyed now. Then they were but little known, and to me they 
 seemed wild and sweet and often very moving. These people 
 came from quite a long way back in the hills, and usually on 
 Saturday evenings. They thoroughly enjoyed their own sing- 
 ing, and were not a bit spoiled by our enthusiastic praise. Their 
 audiences grew from week to week, and on the outside of our 
 circle the young men and girls who lived near by came to listen 
 and applaud. One evening our orchestra, during a pause in the 
 programme, burst into a most compelling dance, and Italian, 
 French, and English we were all dancing before we knew it.
 
 I GO ABROAD 59 
 
 That was my first dancing lesson, and my agile and graceful 
 partner and patient teacher, who honoured me that first evening 
 by leading me out, was our waitress at Miss Newland's, a half- 
 French, half-Italian girl. I was awkward as a cow, I know, 
 but she persevered with me that evening, and many an evening 
 afterward, and at last she had me dancing trois temps, deux 
 temps, and schottische pretty well. How I loved it! 
 
 I have often wished that I had been taught to dance when I 
 was a boy, or that even at this time I had followed up the little 
 knowledge I gained by taking lessons; but among my people 
 and in my religious party prejudice was then more opposed to 
 dancing than it is now; and what my parents wished I did not 
 question. They were sure that dancing was worldly and not 
 good for the soul, and when later I suggested lessons they dis- 
 approved and that ended the matter. And so it came about 
 that my only dancing memories are of those few unforgettable 
 nights in the spring of 1867, when I did my best to learn to 
 dance because I just couldn't help it; when the green tree 
 frogs sang in chorus over our heads, and the heavy odour of the 
 orange trees mingled with the faint salt breath of the near-by 
 sea. 
 
 A young thing that wants to dance and has never been 
 taught to dance and dance well misses, I think, much in life 
 that we cannot afford to miss. If he does not care to learn, 
 even then I am inclined to think that unless there is extreme 
 repugnance both dancing and music should be insisted on. In 
 our own case, we could not persuade our sons to learn the piano 
 or take dancing lessons, and to-day they are sorry we yielded to 
 their boyish and valueless opposition. 
 
 Another friend I made at this time, who helped me in many 
 ways, was Theodore Waterhouse, a brother of the well-known 
 London architect. He gave me much of his time, and his 
 society impressed on me my ignorance of almost everything a 
 youth should know. I began to wonder how I had spent so 
 many years in the world and knew so little about it. I craved 
 the open, that I knew; everything in nature appealed to me, 
 and by myself I was never bored. That, as I look back on 
 it now, was something gained. My love of nature was on the 
 way to save me, though I knew it not then, from the grosser 
 temptations that bruise and brand the lives of so many in school
 
 60 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 and college days. But I had not yet got the first beginnings of 
 education the desire to know. Theodore Waterhouse helped 
 me to that all-important thing, and in our long walks together 
 I hung on every word he said. I realized that I had been an 
 idler, and that I could only overcome my idleness by a deter- 
 mined change in habit. 
 
 Let me put down here something that I hope may be a help 
 to some reader of mine who thinks that because a job does not 
 make an immediate appeal to him there is little likelihood of 
 his ever accomplishing it successfully. Hard work did not 
 attract me then in truth, it never has nor have any rules 
 I made, then or afterward, changed my inborn tendency to be 
 an intellectual slacker. Now there is no work that makes 
 more demand on all you have within you than composition, 
 and the only reason I ever composed anything worth listening 
 to was that rigorously I made this rule and kept it. Every 
 week of my life, except when ill or on holiday, I forced myself, 
 on Tuesday morning, to face the weekly task I always looked 
 forward to without any relish whatever, of composing next 
 Sunday's message to my people. This may seem a strange 
 confession to make, but it is the truth and not more than the 
 truth. I am not over-stating my experience when I say my 
 will alone, not my inclination, closed my study door and dragged 
 me to my chair. 
 
 Times without number I produced nothing for hours, or 
 put down stuff fit only for the waste-paper basket. Sometimes 
 I could find no anchorage at all, but till I had got something 
 that seemed worth saying I never left my study any morning 
 in the week. I don't mean to say that ever and always my 
 sermons came so painfully. Sometimes, on the contrary, I had 
 a flash of insight as soon as I shut my door on the outside world. 
 Sometimes, more even than that, I had that interior joy in 
 composition the Bible speaks of: "While I mused, the fire 
 kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue." But this 
 was not often. What I got habitually that was worth getting 
 came by way of grind, long, patient grind. 
 
 Most good preachers I have known, whether they could put 
 their best on paper in a written sermon, as did Phillips Brooks, 
 or commit it to memory, could depend on memory to enable 
 them to reproduce the substance of what they had worked out.
 
 I GO ABROAD 61 
 
 Not so in my case. There my head failed me quite. When I 
 had down on paper the salient points of what I had painfully 
 excogitated; when the frame-work of it had been written and 
 rewritten, I had slowly to commit the whole thing to memory. 
 This end of the business was quite as distasteful to me as had 
 been the halting beginnings of the sermon's composition. In 
 this, the chief work of a preacher, I can say I never consciously 
 eased up on myself. I steadily aimed to do both these things. 
 Unless I had done them I had no right in pulpit or on platform, 
 for I had broken my contract with God, my own conscience, 
 and those who honoured me with their attendance and atten- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 All of which may seem to have little to do with Theodore 
 Waterhouse, but I had to say it now or later, and Theodore 
 Waterhouse was the first to help me to see the instant need I 
 had of resolutely disciplining such brains as were mine, if I 
 was to make any success of my life in any profession whatever. 
 I had not, by the way, at that time the faintest idea of ever be- 
 coming a clergyman. When we parted, Theodore Waterhouse 
 gave me "In Memoriam." It was my first introduction to 
 Tennyson. I had till then read no poetry but Scott and a 
 small volume of verses selected for school declamation. "In 
 Memoriam " set me thinking on many new things. During the 
 next few years I dropped in on my friend constantly. He 
 had chambers near the Temple, but he moved in one circle, 
 and I in another, and the intimacy that grew between us during 
 those long walks that unforgettable spring was never quite 
 renewed. While I was a curate at Norwich, he was stricken 
 with a mortal illness, and on his death-bed I saw him for the 
 last time. He died as he lived, thinking of and for others rather 
 than of himself. 
 
 With one more delightful and unexpected experience these 
 golden days were to come to an end. I received one day a 
 letter from my Duchess enclosing a cheque for fifty pounds, and 
 telling me to spend it in seeing as much of Europe as I could on 
 my way home. I made that cheque go far. I got to Florence 
 in time to see the wedding fetes of Umberto and Marguerita, 
 and there again I fell on my feet, for Colonel Strange Jocelyn, 
 the son of Father's friend the old Earl of Roden, was at the 
 British embassy.
 
 62 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Then I went through the North of Italy Padua, Verona, 
 and made a stay at Venice. I tramped all round the Italian 
 lakes always alone; but in Switzerland I was to meet a youth, 
 Frederick N. Charrington, two years older than I was, who in- 
 fluenced my whole future. 
 
 On some mountain ramble, I cannot remember where it was, 
 but it was soon after I crossed the Swiss border, I had sat me 
 down to eat my bread and Gruyere cheese, when he came up. 
 He also was alone and was abroad for the first time. We 
 talked as we ate, and agreed to keep together for a day or 
 two. He had lately come under the influence of some reli- 
 gious people, and was more than ready to talk about his salva- 
 tion. I tried to help him, and we felt drawn to each other. 
 I was sure I was saved he was not sure at all. I remember 
 before we went on our ways we knelt down there, in that great 
 mountain solitude, and I prayed. 
 
 Fred was the eldest son of the London brewer of that name. 
 Well advertised, it stares at you, or did when I was in London, 
 from the heavy gilded headboards of a goodly number of public 
 houses scattered widely all over the metropolis. In the '6o's 
 the drink trade had become well organized in England, specially 
 in London. The brewers and distillers owned the public houses 
 between them, the first taking two thirds of the value, the 
 second the other third. Their control was practically ab- 
 solute. The city was growing then at a rapid rate, and as the 
 working population spread out, specially to east and south, the 
 "houses" were placed in strategic positions, a gentlemanly 
 agreement existing between the great brewing firms not un- 
 duly to intrude into each other's sphere of the trade. 
 
 Under the licensing system, order was maintained and the 
 laws as to hours of opening, etc., were obeyed. The houses 
 closed on time, and drink was not supposed to be sold to minors, 
 but children came to fetch beer for their parents, and under 
 cover of this and a host of convenient excuses, almost any one 
 could drink to excess. There was, however, none of the black- 
 mailing of the publicans by the police (one of our municipal 
 disgraces), for the laws were liberal and were obeyed. I was 
 destined to see a good deal of what the public houses were, 
 and what they did, during the next year.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 The East End of London 
 
 'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead 
 
 Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green 
 And the -pale weaver \ through his windows seen 
 
 In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. 
 
 I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 
 "III and o'erworkedy how/are you in this scene?" 
 
 " Bravely , " said he; "for I of late have been 
 Much cheered with thoughts of Christy the living " bread" 
 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Toward the close of the '6o's, thoughtful people in the old 
 Land were beginning to have serious doubts of the economic 
 gospel of laissez faire. If it made England rich, it certainly 
 was not making it happy and contented. 
 
 The Evangelicals were so absorbed in saving people's souls 
 that they left the masses to look after their own bodies; and 
 that they certainly did not know how to do without help and a 
 better education. The Evangelical chapels in England had 
 no "cure" assigned to them. They had no parish boundaries. 
 Consequently, a class congregation grew up. The poor could 
 not afford to rent pews, and the chapels lived by their pew rents; 
 and so it was not hard to foresee what must take place: they 
 might reach the rich and the middle class; they certainly could 
 not reach the poor, and they never did. 
 
 Now when a church gets away from the poor, it may make 
 any and every excuse it likes, but the fact remains it has got 
 away from its Master. Evangelicism once had been a burning 
 and a shining light because it went to the poor. Now it was 
 more fashionable. Its leaders, lay and clerical, met once a 
 year at the Mildmay Conference to discuss the need of evan- 
 gelizing England and saving its heathen; but the sad fact was, 
 the party had become a preaching party, not a working party, 
 
 63
 
 64 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 and so was in danger of the fate of the unfortunate Strasburg 
 goose who was so stuffed with prepared food that it was ready 
 to die of fatty degeneration of the liver. 
 
 The Evangelical party in England missed its great oppor- 
 tunity when it turned a deaf ear to the exceeding bitter cry of 
 Labour. That party's failure was of course part of a universal 
 failure. All the churches failed alike. The question is still 
 asked, "Why do you find so small a representation of labour in 
 any Christian church?" The Church's advocates dislike to 
 make the true answer, but only one can be made. It is be- 
 cause organized Christianity took the wrong side in those 
 times of change of which I write. Wholly intent on saving 
 men's souls from a distant Hell, they left them to suffer in a very 
 real present Hell. Had Evangelicism sought to save body and 
 soul as did Jesus yes, put, as He did, the body and the body's 
 wants first then the attitude of Labour to organized Christian- 
 ity could not be what it is to-day. 
 
 There can be no doubt that, in the early centuries of our era, 
 the Church was very generally on the right side, the side of the 
 poor. In much later times, when the liberties of England were 
 threatened, the Bishops had proved equal to the crisis, and 
 had gone to the Tower sooner than bow to the Tyrant King. 1 
 And for the sake of that brave deed, much was forgiven the 
 national church clergy. Now another tyranny, the tyranny 
 of wealth, more insidious, more pervasive, at least as fatal to 
 the nation's well-being, threatened the land. But there was 
 only feeble protest raised in unofficial quarters, or no protest 
 at all. The English Church was on the wrong side. Her 
 prophets were confused, misled, unseeing. Vision had failed 
 England. "And where no vision is, the people perish," says 
 the Bible. 
 
 Politically, educationally, sociologically, there was dreadful 
 need of reform. The housing conditions of the working people 
 were awful, hours of labour intolerably long. In the country 
 things were nearly as bad. Men were expected to work twelve 
 hours a day, for a wage of from nine shillings (in some counties), 
 to fourteen shillings a week in others. At such a wage, a 
 family of five children could not have sufficient nutritive food. 
 
 1 Archbishop Sancroft and his six suffragan bishops defied James II, and were sent to the Tower. 
 All England cheered when even a packed jury said: " Not guilty."
 
 THE EAST END OF LONDON 65 
 
 The cottage they lived in, if sometimes picturesque, was often 
 unsanitary. 
 
 In the great towns millions lived was it living? without 
 joy or leisure or outlook, in miles and miles of slums, sunk in a 
 life as gray and sordid and uniformly ugly as were the crowded, 
 unsanitary hovels they called homes. A sick child, a funeral, 
 or a week's unemployment, and all savings were gone, prob- 
 ably some things pawned, and the wolf at the door. 
 
 On these injustices, on the crime against the child life of 
 England, all the churches officially were dumb. In the coun- 
 try, and very occasionally in the city, the national church still 
 ministered to the poor, chiefly to the retarded, ignorant, and 
 unprogressive poor. Her seats were free and many of her 
 clergy faithfully visited their flocks. But these good men did 
 not understand, much less were they ready to grapple with, 
 the vast changes that were spreading over the land. By long 
 tradition, they were opposed to change. The preparation they 
 had received before taking Holy Orders was really ludicrous in 
 its inadequacy in the things it demanded and did not demand. 
 So the University did not help them before they were ordained, 
 nor did the Bishops they served under help them after. For 
 these got their Bishoprics either on account of their standing as 
 scholars, or more often because they or their families could 
 command influence with the Prime Minister. 
 
 The Methodists and Baptists were losing the poor, for those 
 churches had not organized themselves to reach the factory 
 workers. The Roman Catholic Church was then astutely 
 planning her campaign to win a wider social recognition in the 
 land, and so deemed it wiser policy to leave dangerously radical 
 questions alone. Then lastly, there was the young and vigor- 
 ous High Church party, but it was fighting so fiercely for 
 vestments, candles, and the mass, that as yet it had not had 
 time to notice England's sin against her poor. 
 
 Manchesterism, to coin an ugly word, was essentially un- 
 christian, and had soaked into the national life everywhere. 
 It denied that the Golden Rule had any application in busi- 
 ness. "Do as you would be done by" might apply within 
 limitations to your friends; it had no practical reference what- 
 ever to your labouring people. And so it was that the financial 
 growth of England in those years numbed and paralyzed the
 
 66 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 spirit of all the churches, hid from them the progressive degrada- 
 tion of Labour, and deafened and blinded them to the Command 
 of God and the cry of perishing men. 
 
 Many books have been written to account for the fact that 
 the churches one and all have well-nigh lost the great working 
 class. I have not found this explanation in any I have read, 
 but I think it the chief reason for their lamentable failure then 
 and their lost leadership now. 
 
 The gist of the popular economic teachings of that day was 
 that safety and progress lay in leaving things alone. Then the 
 best would inevitably come to the front, whether the best in 
 men or in manufactured goods. The theory of life at the basis 
 of the Christian religion is the opposite, the antithesis of this 
 it is evolutionary. If you leave things alone they will in- 
 evitably revert no advance, no reform can come by any other 
 road than that of struggle, and what is so won can by struggle 
 alone be retained. 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact, when orthodox religion had been 
 badly defeated in its own chosen field, from a source she had 
 derided and defied help was to come to the cause she had lost. 
 A small and discredited group of scientists were at that day 
 beginning to open to the wide world a new page in the story 
 of the old world. Evolution was to explain how man, nature's 
 last product, emerges from the long welter of cosmic struggle, 
 in order that he should, as leader, guardian, saviour, and 
 brother, change and order nature to his will. Truly a new 
 meaning to life, a new call to service, and the Golden Rule 
 reasserted in new and compelling terms. 
 
 Coleridge said: "What we denounce as error may be but the 
 refraction of some great truth as yet below the horizon." The 
 theory of evolution was a long way below the horizon then oi 
 well-educated people. To most it seemed a degrading and 
 unworthy theory. As for religious people in all the churches, 
 they raged at it. And small wonder, since the most influential 
 of contemporary Englishmen, W. E. Gladstone, who for a 
 time laid on England his wordy spell, had no other greetings for 
 it than fatuously to oppose to it his essays on "The Sure Rock 
 of Holy Scripture." Of course Mr. Gladstone never even 
 dimly grasped the significance of religious evolution, but his 
 attempt to answer it by revamping an exploded theory of in-
 
 THE EAST END OF LONDON 67 
 
 spiratlon illustrates the changes that have passed over our 
 world since those days. 
 
 As for me, I did not begin to read Darwin and his great ex- 
 positor, Huxley, till ten years later. Then I had growing 
 pains. 
 
 Drink, as any one could see, was an immediate cause of the 
 social tragedy; but men and women and even children drank 
 because alcohol and the public house were their one poor ref- 
 uge from an unrighteously imposed toil, and a condition that 
 human nature was not intended or fitted to endure. 
 
 The deeper causes their would-be helpers did not at first see; 
 the root reforms needed they did not know. They went to 
 help the helpless those I went with went to save their souls. 
 And some were saved and helped and cheered, and a little 
 breach at least was made in the Chinese Wall separating man 
 from his fellow. 
 
 The national church had acted the part of "the priest and 
 the Levite" in the tragedy of the wounded man fallen among 
 thieves. And the little band I knew were trying to staunch his 
 wounds and save his life, even though they were not adepts in 
 antiseptic sociological surgery. 
 
 In time there came to England the knowledge of a great 
 wrong, a great need, and a great danger. Then a tardy awak- 
 ening of public conscience, and finally legislative enactment 
 and reform. But neither in England nor in the United States 
 has the gravity of the danger of leaving the labouring masses 
 of the cities to neglect and exploitation been realized yet. 
 
 When I returned home in 1868, full of health and good 
 resolutions, I had never heard of the East Side. I was intent 
 on passing in due time the competitive examination into 
 Woolwich, for a commission in the Royal Artillery. So I 
 settled down to work at Thurlow Square with a coach. 
 
 My father had no district assigned to his church, nor, if he 
 had, was there anything in his training or disposition that 
 fitted him to organize it for church work. He visited in Ire- 
 land, he visited in London; preaching and visiting were what 
 he was consecrated to attend to. Indeed, there was little or- 
 ganized parish work of any sort in those days. Frequent 
 communions and church services in high churches; prayer 
 meetings and Bible readings in low churches and dissenting
 
 68 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 churches : there the function of the Church began and ended. 
 Of course, very great change came soon. But the point I 
 want to make is that in effecting those changes, in the awak- 
 ening of the Church's conscience to the cry of the wounded 
 and abandoned man, those people who attempted to aid great 
 East London broke the ice and led the way, all honour to 
 them. 
 
 A member of Belgrave Chapel congregation, Miss E. Logan, 
 was one of the first of these, and she gathered a little group 
 round her. Lord and Lady Ripon (Lord Ripon was afterward 
 Governor General of India) led another group. I have no 
 doubt there were others like them, but these I knew. 
 
 One afternoon, when my studies were over, a friend of my 
 father's, Admiral Fishbourne, called at the house and asked 
 for me. I did not know him well and was taken aback when, 
 in his abrupt way, he said: "Willie, I am come to take you with 
 me to Bethnal Green. Bring your Bible with you." The old 
 Admiral (he was retired) had a plan. Why he conceived it I 
 never knew, but great things in our lives often spring from 
 trifling things, and in my case the good old seaman's secret 
 unspoken plan was to change all my life. It seemed to me a 
 long journey to that far-off East Side, in those halting omni- 
 buses. I had never been east of the Tower of London before, 
 but at last we arrived, and we stood before a mean little Baptist 
 chapel off the Mile End Road. The place was crowded with 
 young and middle-aged mothers, each trying to take care of a 
 baby while she sewed. A gray-faced congregation, in a build- 
 ing gray and dreary. 
 
 Our arrival was evidently timed to correspond with the close 
 of the working hours, and the welcome advent of tea and well- 
 served bread and butter. Miss Logan and the ladies helping 
 her were passing round the food and giving to each of the 
 mothers sixpence for the three hours' work done. The gar- 
 ments they made they could buy at cost price. When tea was 
 over, all sang a hymn, and the Admiral, evidently known and 
 approved of by them all, took his Bible out of his pocket and 
 made an address for some fifteen minutes. He knew what he 
 could not do, so he spoke very briefly, and when the end came 
 rather suddenly, he sprung on his audience and on me, the 
 scared victim of it, his plot. "I have brought here to-day,"
 
 THE EAST END OF LONDON 69 
 
 said he, "the eldest son of the Rev. Marcus Rainsford, of 
 Belgrave Chapel, and he will speak to you, my friends, better 
 than I can." What his reason for calling on a lad not yet 
 eighteen, all unprepared, to rise and speak before fashionable 
 ladies he knew and some four hundred poor souls he did not, 
 I never knew. But that was what he did; and no protest I 
 could make, and I protested vigorously, could save me from 
 my fate that day. How I got on my feet I don't know. I fum- 
 bled the pages of my pocket Bible, but could not see to read 
 them. I looked with unseeing eyes on the poor, worn gray 
 faces before me, and was just aware that they were as much 
 surprised as I was. Some of them pitied me, I know, forwhen 
 it was over and I made my way to the door they cried, " Come 
 back and speak to us again next Tuesday." 
 
 What happened was this: I stood and gasped and muttered 
 something, while the smoky, unwashed windows grew dark, 
 and the gray faces merged into one colourless mass. I, who 
 knew my Bible from cover to cover, never found a text. I 
 seemed gradually to grow numb from my feet up to the tip 
 of my tongue. No help, no light came to me, no coherent 
 word to my audience that I am sure of and in a few minutes 
 I sat down. 
 
 As I took the long walk home by myself (for the old Admiral 
 kept out of my way), a new resolve came to me. I would not 
 be so beaten. I would go back the next week, I would stand 
 in that poor little chapel and speak to those burdened folk. 
 I would say something to cheer and help them. 
 
 Here let me be honest. The impelling motive to return 
 was quite as much to retrieve myself as to help them. This is 
 a sad confession, but it is the truth. I don't know what 
 psychological effect of so crushing a failure has been in the 
 case of others; I know what it was on me. (My failure there, 
 by the way, was not my last, by any means. I made just as 
 bad a break-down at the church congress in Boston, in 1876. 
 Of that, later.) I determined not to be beaten. I had then 
 no distinct sense of a message to deliver; that came slowly, 
 and later. I did of course mightily want to cheer those poor 
 worn mothers, but far more I wanted to gain control of myself. 
 So back I went the following week. 
 
 Before the next Tuesday I thought a good deal on what I
 
 70 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 intended to say; probably my little discourse was largely bor- 
 rowed from some sermon I had heard or read, but when on my 
 feet the second time, I very nearly lost all control of myself 
 again, and floundered and blundered even in the reading of my 
 text. But soon, from somewhere, there came to me a new 
 consciousness of a new power. I can liken it only to my first 
 sense of conquest when, after choking and floundering and 
 sinking in the Dundalk river, I suddenly felt myself actually 
 smoothly swimming just a few yards. So it was now. Before 
 I knew it I had forgotten W. S. R. entirely, and I was talking, 
 not to the poor draggled bonnets or the mass of wan faces 
 beneath them, but to human souls looking at me out of human 
 eyes. And a newer power fell on me, and a deeper desire to 
 understand and uplift. And out of me went I knew it, I 
 felt it some cheer, some courage, some hope, to that room- 
 ful of mothers in Bethnal Green. 
 
 As I look back now to that day, that momentous day for me, 
 how tangled, how mixed, how inextricably interwoven, were 
 the chains of egoism and self-assertion and those higher forces 
 of charity and compassion, that mingled in the making of that 
 first poor boyish offering of mine. "If thou, O Lord, wert 
 extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who should abide 
 it?" So I became a weekly fixture at Miss Logan's sewing 
 class. 
 
 At this time I met another young man, five years older than 
 I, who became my fast friend, Herbert Watney. Afterward 
 he married my eldest sister, Sarah. He had become intensely 
 religious, and something had moved him to take an interest in 
 the social problems of the city. His people were brewers. The 
 firm in which he was a partner one of the richest in London; 
 and on his own account, very unostentatiously, he had for some 
 time been going round to the public houses that bore his name. 
 The survey profoundly disgusted him. He sought out those 
 who were visiting the East End, and finding Miss Logan at 
 work there, volunteered to assist in any way she desired. He 
 was no good at speaking, so he undertook the heavy job of 
 securing accurate information about hundreds of families that 
 seemed in danger of complete collapse. 
 
 Just then a shortage of employment intensified a normally 
 bad condition, and it was suggested that the best thing to do
 
 THE EAST END OF LONDON 71 
 
 was to help families that were in danger of sinking into helpless 
 poverty to emigrate to Canada. 
 
 Herbert Watney and I were put on the job of searching out 
 and selecting those who were willing to make the great ex- 
 periment, and who seemed likely to make a success of it under 
 new conditions. He gave up everything else, for the time be- 
 ing, and almost alone got together a band of some eight hun- 
 dred men and women and children. Later they gave a good 
 account of themselves in the new land. 
 
 The Canadian authorities were consulted, and we were as- 
 sured that there would be no difficulty in placing these people 
 in the province of Ontario. They all of them had a trade, 
 and out there they were to work at it. Matters moved rapidly 
 then. It was decided to send someone over to see to details 
 and report on results. Watney volunteered to go and asked me 
 to go with him as his guest and assistant. It was a temptation 
 not to be resisted and, having obtained my parents' consent, 
 I gladly agreed to go. 
 
 My story is destined to record many a confession, and now I 
 must make another. It is true I wanted to aid my poor women 
 folk. Many of my weekly congregation at Mile End were 
 numbered in this emigrant band. But quite as much did I 
 want to see that new western land that everyone was talking of. 
 And, having seen it, I had a compelling determination not to 
 return till I had feasted my eyes on that still farther-off land, as 
 yet but little known, where hundreds of miles of rolling prairie 
 stretched on and on to the bases of a mighty mountain chain. 
 The story books Father had read by the old vicarage fireside, 
 the tales of Indians, buffalo, and grizzly bears, all crowded 
 back on my memory; and between my hope successfully to 
 guide my poor people and, after that, to see with my own 
 eyes this land of wonder and romance, I had an exciting time. 
 
 My friend was not as keen for the Indian country as I was, 
 but he proved persuadable. There seemed no reason why, 
 when the business part of our journey was over, we should not 
 at least ride far enough west to see something of Indian life and 
 the great buffalo herds. So on so much we agreed, leaving 
 all details of our plans to be worked out later, as circumstances 
 should dictate. 
 
 What became of the Woolwich scheme and my hope for an
 
 72 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 artillery commission? you may ask. Well, I had not given 
 it up; but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, specially 
 when you are eighteen, and this bird looked like a bird of 
 Paradise to me. 
 
 Enfin, early in the spring of 1869, we sailed in the good ship 
 Nestorian, 2,000 tons, of the Allan Line, for Quebec. We had 
 a rough voyage of fourteen days, and well I remember I was 
 dreadfully seasick.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Great Lone Land and the Indian Country in 1869 
 
 Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight ? Who hath heard the birch- 
 log burning ? 
 Who is quick to read the noises of the night ? 
 
 Let him follow with the others, for the Young Men's feet are turning 
 To the camps of proved desire and known delight. 
 
 Kipling. 
 
 In the early spring of 1869 H. W. and I sailed up the St. 
 Lawrence and anchored under Quebec. I am glad I saw it 
 before the hand of change had made it what it is to-day. 
 Chateau Frontenac was then undreamed of. The ancient 
 fortress frowned on the St. Lawrence grim and bare, just as 
 it had faced Wolf's fleet more than one hundred years before. 
 
 One thing Quebec had, that spring morning when first I 
 saw it, that it has lost, I fear, for ever. Its lilacs ! On the wide 
 terraces that looked down on the river they were in bloom. 
 In rows and thickets they crowded everywhere, masking the 
 batteries of old smooth-bore cannon, and draping with their 
 spring garlands the gray brows of the ancient town. 
 
 From Quebec we went to Toronto. There the Ontario 
 Immigration authorities took our business in hand, 1 and very 
 quickly found work for our East Londoners in that and the 
 neighbouring towns. Canada was greatly in need of workers 
 then. Our people had their trades, and on the whole they did 
 very well, but gradually the greater part of them drifted 
 across the border, where wages were higher and the cities larger 
 and more lively. A born Londoner cannot be happy in the 
 village or even in the country town; the city is in his blood, 
 and he must seek it. 
 
 If I were dead, and some kind friend of mine were writing 
 this biography for me, he would make this first visit of mine 
 
 J Thc settlement of 800 East London Immigrants. 
 
 73
 
 74 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 to this country chiefly important because it afforded me an 
 opportunity for comparing the problems of church and city 
 life in the new land with those in the old, and so laying the 
 foundation for future usefulness. As I am alive and writing it 
 myself, I must confess that as soon as the immigration agents 
 had taken our people off our hands, one idea, one desire, and 
 one alone, possessed me. I longed with a great longing to feast 
 my eyes on that land of wonder that I had read about since I 
 could read at all. The world has changed greatly in these 
 last epoch-making fifty years, changed I believe in most things 
 for the better, but changes great as those that have passed, 
 mean losses, too, and boys of to-day have never had offered 
 them what fortune offered me. We have gained civilization, the 
 telephone, the aeroplane, and wireless telegraphy, but we have 
 lost, at least in part, the fascination of facing the unknown. 
 
 "He was the first that ever burst into that lonely sea." If 
 that is an over-statement, at least it is true that the unknown 
 was larger, closer, more alluring to a youth then than it is now, 
 and never was there a boy worth his salt in any age, or nation, 
 or time, whose dreams and visions were not coloured by it. 
 
 So I longed for that frontier where real Indians roved. 
 Longed to feast my eyes on that great prairie land and the 
 mountains beyond still unmapped, that had lain for untold ages 
 untouched, unchanged. Now by the iron roads of trans- 
 continental railways, pushing fast to the westward, its con- 
 querors were preparing to overwhelm it suddenly. I was only 
 just in time to see its real frontier and the glorious continent 
 beyond it in all their savagery, before they became things of 
 the past. Only just in time to enter into that part of it which 
 was about to pass away. To live in the Indians' tepee, ride 
 side by side with the naked warrior band, as with shrill war- 
 whoop it recklessly charged into the thundering mass of the 
 stampeded buffalo herd. 
 
 As I look back on it I see how ridiculously unprepared we 
 were for the adventure that thrust itself on us. We had 
 planned for a visit to the prairie, and an extended buffalo hunt, 
 and nothing more. Before we knew it we were involved in a 
 serious and in some parts dangerous journey to the Pacific 
 Ocean, and through a region much of which was practically 
 unknown and infested by hostile Indian tribes.
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 75 
 
 As we travelled, my friend and I, as far as the railroad would 
 take us to westward, we made diligent inquiries about the 
 prairie regions, how to get there, and what paraphernalia to 
 take. No one we had the fortune to meet seemed to know any 
 more about them than we did, and our own knowledge was no 
 later or more accurate than that conveyed by Main Reed's or 
 Ballantine's romances. From England we had brought guns 
 and rifles, and in the choice of the rifles, at least, my complete 
 ignorance of what a traveller in our land of promise needed was 
 illustrated. 
 
 The Marquis of Westminster 1 my Mentone friend was 
 an enthusiastic volunteer, one of the most influential promoters 
 of that movement in England. He naturally was an expert on 
 all matters of rifle-range shooting, and when he knew I was 
 going to the West, he loaned me one of his pet rifles, a wonderful 
 weapon for thousand-yard shooting, but about as useless a 
 rifle for the practical purpose of killing your dinner as could 
 well be carried. Before I left London I fear I talked rifles im- 
 moderately to my friends. One of them told me to go to 
 Rigby (at that time the best rifle maker in England) and order 
 from him any weapon I chose. I had a long interview with 
 that great man, who recommended a new weapon he was then 
 turning out called an express rifle. It carried a small bullet, 
 and had behind it a heavy charge of powder. This gave the 
 bullet great pace and a low trajectory, which Mr. Rigby tried 
 to convince me were the essential things in a game rifle. I 
 remained interested but quite unconvinced; and so, seeing he 
 could not make any impression on my ignorance, he sold me the 
 sort of rifle I wanted, or thought I wanted; an excellent weapon 
 for jungle shooting in India, if you had to depend for your life 
 on your straight shooting at twenty yards or under; but for 
 killing game at ordinary open country distances, or for carrying 
 on horseback, my beautiful and expensive "Rigby" was as un- 
 suited as the other rifle. 
 
 I had pictured the American buffalo, after the manner of the 
 story book, as a fearsome beast, requiring a formidable amount 
 of powder and lead to kill, and of buffalo I was of course think- 
 ing when I got my rifle. I was to find him just as easy, if you 
 
 x The Earl of Grosvenor on his father's death had succeeded to the Marquisate was after- 
 ward made a Duke.
 
 y6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 hit him in the right place, and just as hard if you hit him in the 
 wrong, as the domestic cow. But, as I have just said, swayed 
 by the fascination of the totally unknown, I had grossly 
 magnified the terrors of my intended victim, and had insisted 
 on a double-barrel rifle shooting a bullet almost as large as an 
 egg, and taking six drachms of powder. This instrument of 
 death naturally had weight fourteen good pounds it weighed 
 and oh, how my unknit shoulders and back suffered and pro- 
 tested, as mile after mile, day after day, month after month, on 
 level prairie and up precipitous mountain slope; on smoothly 
 gaited and on painfully roughly gaited horses, I toted that 
 rifle! From St. Paul, Minnesota, to the headquarters of the 
 22nd. U. S. Infantry at Kettle Falls, on the Columbia River, 
 more than two thousand miles by the way we went. Carrying 
 that rifle was a feat I am still proud of. For when I started on 
 the long journey I was my present height, but I weighed only 
 one hundred and forty pounds. I certainly could not carry 
 that rifle over the same road now; so much for the toughness of 
 an enthusiastic youth in his teens. 
 
 In St. Paul, we first came into touch with frontier life, and at 
 last met some who could give us information, very imperfect 
 though it was, about the country to westward. As soon as 
 the armies of the North and South were disbanded in 1865, 
 thousands of soldiers whose family ties had been broken, or 
 who had never had any family ties, made their way to the 
 West. Some went because their war experience had widened 
 and stimulated them; they sought new homes and larger life. 
 This the great empty Indian land offered to all who would work 
 and were attracted by its spice of adventure. Besides these 
 there were (especially in those first years after the war) a 
 considerable number of undesirables, the scum, the vagabond- 
 age, of its great hosts. Restless, undisciplined, sometimes 
 criminal, men who had broken with the restrictions of civili- 
 zation, and who sought lands where they could be free to do as 
 they would. Naturally the frontier, from Texas to the Ca- 
 nadian line and even north of it, was to all such a veritable land 
 of promise. 
 
 It has never been fully recognized in the East that it is to 
 this wave of ungoverned and ungovernable men that we owe 
 chiefly the Indian troubles that were so often unnecessary.
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 77 
 
 The truth is, the "plain tribes" never had a square deal. The 
 whites these Indians first came in contact with were the lawless 
 element, the aftermath of war, men who had learned in its 
 red school a light regard for life, and a lighter for property. 
 When you admit the bravery and the immense energy of this 
 class, you have summed up their virtues. Might was right to 
 them; a man took what he could take, and stood as best he could 
 to defend it. The brutal motto they professed and con- 
 sistently acted on was "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." 
 They bested the Indian in trickery and cruelty, and some of the 
 Regular Army officers who directed military operations against 
 the Indians in the '7o's were, it must be confessed, of the same 
 mind. 
 
 As a result of our inquiries at St. Paul, we altered our plans 
 considerably. We determined to take the train as far as it 
 would carry us, which was not indeed very far, and then to 
 travel westward and northward, hoping to strike the buffalo 
 herd that was reported to be some hundred and fifty miles 
 horn railhead. Failing this, we would go still farther north, 
 cross the Canadian line, and get somehow to Fort Garry, the 
 headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company. (Fort Garry after- 
 ward became the city of Winnipeg.) 
 
 Sauk Centre, a railroad shanty-town, was our jumping-off 
 place; and there, in early June, we detrained. Our quite in- 
 adequate outfit consisted of a large wagon, driven by a retired 
 cavalryman who was a stranger to the country, a poor tent, the 
 best we could get at St. Paul, a pair of good horses, and a supply 
 of pork, hard tack, coffee, and sugar. The whole thing was 
 absurd; but we were green, very green, and everyone in St. 
 Paul was so taken up with his own affairs that we had been 
 obliged to go on our uninstructed way if we were to get off at 
 all. 
 
 At the railhead we heard the usual silly talk about Indians. 
 Out of sight of the line they were supposed to lurk everywhere, 
 and no man's life was safe. The Sioux massacre, as it was 
 called, of a few years before, was fresh in mind, and though, as 
 a matter of fact, the marauding bands that had swept western 
 Minnesota in '63 and '64 had been driven far with heavy loss, 
 none of the tellers of these fearsome tales believed it, and they
 
 78 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 made such an impression on our cavalryman that there and 
 then he proposed to give up his job. At last he reluctantly 
 yielded to our persuasion and a promised "advance," and 
 without a map and with only one compass we were actually off. 
 
 Across a gap of almost fifty years I see again that wonderful 
 green world of the western prairie, as yet untroubled of the 
 plough. It is mid-June, and as far as the eye can see long 
 levels of rich grass land, rising now and then into slow waves 
 and scarcely accented ridges, stretched out before me. Where 
 the soil is poorer, wild roses grow in short sweet tufts every- 
 where, and countless flowers are there, many of them new to 
 me. Oh, what a land that prairie land was then ! I had read 
 of it, dreamed of it, but it was wider, opener, more gloriously 
 free than I had dreamed. The vigour, the breath, the beauty 
 of it ! It stirred my blood. You felt you could go anywhere 
 and do anything. 
 
 Life was splendid, and you were young. I never found in 
 any poet a line that reminded me of what I felt that morning 
 till I came across Francis Thompson's "Anthem of Earth." 
 In it he has given a voice to a young man's glory in Nature 
 when, full-blooded, with all the zest of youth in him, he wor- 
 ships her. Later, surely, heavily, her foot is on his neck, and 
 youth's joyous song changes to a sigh of resignation and deep 
 thankfulness, too. But golden boys and girls should have their 
 day. How glad I am I had mine! 
 
 In a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy; 
 
 Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee, 
 
 Children, and the sweet-essenced body of woman; 
 
 Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot, 
 
 But breathing warm of thee as infants breathe 
 
 New from their mother's morning bosom. 
 
 /That lone land is gone, its mystery departed, its secrets all 
 surrendered to man's insatiate searching. But in '69, the 
 thousand miles of prairie and forest, of lake and swamp that 
 stretched from the foot of the Rocky Mountains to the Red 
 River of the North, lay empty, waiting for a resolute people 
 to conquer it and transform it into a new empire. A vast, 
 various country, where millions of buffalo still roamed; where
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 79 
 
 Indians pitched at will their smoke-stained buffalo-skin tepees; 
 where no white man had as yet come, save an occasional band 
 of ill-omened whiskey traders, moving north from the upper 
 Missouri, bringing murder and misery with them wherever 
 they made their lawless round; and now and then the Hudson 
 Bay trader, crossing the Saskatchewan River with his half- 
 breed bands, and their long column of Red River carts, to trade 
 with the Sioux and Blackfeet for "robes" and pemmican. 
 
 That lone land is gone. There were no cattle herds, no 
 ranchmen, no cowboys, and of course no farmers in it then. 
 How glad I am I saw it all before the great change came; saw it 
 from Sauk Centre to old Fort Garry, and from Fort Garry west- 
 ward and southward, over the mountains and down the Colum- 
 bia, its greatest river, to the sea. 
 
 I owe a great deal to that journey. It did more for me than 
 I realized at the time. I started on it an inexperienced youth, 
 having escaped, by a little, serious lung trouble. I was timid 
 and shy, not sure of myself at all, though I doubt that my 
 manner conveyed this to an unobservant person. I had not 
 conquered my own doubts of myself. They had called me a 
 coward at school, and I had more than half believed them. On 
 this journey I was to be tested out in others' sight and in my 
 own. I was to face what I believed at the moment was the 
 certainty of instant death without losing self-control, and so to 
 learn that I really was not, after all, a coward. If I gained 
 nothing else by it, this experience made the long journey well 
 worth while. But I gained far more than this. All my boyish 
 longings for the open, which Father's gift of a gun when I was 
 twelve years old had strengthened, were deepened and re- 
 newed. My boyhood's dreams were to come true. The new 
 land I was entering was to prove more wonderful, more beauti- 
 ful even, than I had fancied it might be, and it was destined to 
 draw me to itself, to rest and refresh and renew me during all 
 the most arduous years that lay ahead. In its solitudes I was 
 to hide me, year by year, while I worked in New York; and to 
 come back from my own little mountain-ranch in northern 
 Montana, one hundred miles from the nearest railroad, a more 
 capable and clearer-headed man. 
 
 All this lay in the future. The start we made toward it was 
 as poor a one as inexperience could well bring about. Of the
 
 80 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 simplest requirements of camping life we were completely 
 ignorant. How to pitch a tent so that it could resist a sudden 
 downpour we did not know. How to start a fire with such 
 materials as were at hand; how to cook the simplest dinner, 
 or sleep in a tormenting swarm of mosquitoes; how to hobble 
 our horses so that the thongs of rawhide did not so cut into the 
 fetlock as to lame them of these and a hundred other neces- 
 sary trifles we knew just nothing at all. And when the show- 
 down came, our hired warrior, who claimed a long cavalry 
 experience on the frontier, seemed to know no more than we 
 did. 
 
 The glories of that first morning, truth compels me to con- 
 fess, faded into the discomforts of a broiling afternoon and the 
 miseries of a first night, when mosquitoes sang to us and 
 feasted on us. Before sundown a sudden thunderstorm burst, 
 and warm rain fell in torrents for half an hour. Seeing the 
 approach of the storm, we stopped and tried to get our tent up. 
 Nothing went right. The poles would not fit, the ropes would 
 not draw, and of course we chose the wrong sort of place to 
 pitch it on a level bit of fat prairie land. When at last the 
 thing was standing, there was water half an inch deep on its 
 muddy, trampled floor. 
 
 I have pitched camp thousands of times since then; when I 
 was young doing it myself; later superintending the business 
 while others did the work; but never again did I pass so dis- 
 couraging a night as the first night on the paririe. The eve- 
 ning fell calm and clear, and having eaten I can't say dined 
 we settled down to make the best of things. We had nothing 
 to sit on, no log fire to warm our soaked clothes and bodies at, 
 and, worst lack of all, no mosquito nets. Now I have fought 
 mosquitoes in many lands, and am in a position to compare 
 authoritatively our native product with his dangerous and 
 persistent relative in Italy and in Africa. But there is no 
 comparison. I state positively that the American mosquito 
 is more effective, is better armed, and has a vigour of attack, 
 that no relative of his possesses! He does not reign now where 
 his rule was absolute long ago. His numbers are as nothing 
 compared to what once they were. But when I, poor ignorant 
 boy, first dared to invade his sanctuary, he held in fee simple 
 during the months of June and July the prairie land for his
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 81 
 
 own. This first night I am telling of we simple mortals did 
 not know enough even to build a smudge in the door of our 
 tent; but later, when I did know how to combat the pest, 
 and did have smudges lit, I have had a tortured mule come 
 during the night to the smudge smoke and stand in it till its 
 slow living flame scorched and destroyed the leg sinews so 
 badly that we had to shoot it in the morning. 
 
 In the warm evening air, this June night, I saw for the first 
 time the cursed insect multitudes actually rising like a thick 
 misty cloud from the lush prairie grass. I am not exaggerating. 
 I am using the best simile I can find to describe what I 
 saw. 
 
 And now having described our start I must cut my story 
 down and content myself with giving some account of a few of 
 the adventures we had as we made our lonely way from old 
 Fort Garry, on the Red River of the North, to where, at the 
 mouth of the Columbia River, the little town of Portland 
 stood. Fort Garry was the capital post of the Hudson Bay 
 Company, from it a few score of hard-bitted Scotsmen man- 
 aged a territory larger than the United States. Their sub- 
 jects were a few thousand half-breeds, that sometimes gave 
 them trouble, and many thousand Indians, who since they 
 were honestly treated and never given any whiskey, gave 
 them no trouble at all. Not one mile of road, not a telegraph 
 line was there then, from one end to the other of that great 
 Lone Land. 
 
 In the Company's magazine we found those necessary things 
 that we couldn't get anywhere else and so at last we were 
 ready as two quite inexperienced young fellows could well be 
 to push our way across the unmapped country we had come so 
 far to see. We had stout horses, good Red River carts (those 
 little two-wheeled wooden affairs, unbreakable and almost 
 un-upsettable, not a nail or bit of iron in them, every fastening 
 made with green raw buffalo hide, shrunk on) English saddles 
 bearing the name of an excellent firm, a waterproof tent, and a 
 sufficient supply of such provisions as the frugal habits of the 
 fur traders approved (no canned goods in those days) to last 
 for months. Flour was the most precious thing, the most 
 difficult to procure; for it we paid twenty-five cents a pound, 
 and our supply was Jimited. No wheat was raised in all these
 
 82 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 vast wheat lands, except in a small and experimental way at 
 Fort Garry and Edmonton. 
 
 The Saskatchewan River rises in the Rocky Mountains, and, 
 as does the Red River of the North, flows into Lake Winnipeg. 
 Near Fort Carlton the stream divides into southern and 
 northern branches. Both rise in the mountains, and together 
 they water what is to-day the fairest region of western Canada. 
 Between these rivers were the hunting grounds of the Blackfeet 
 and the plain Crees. To south of the south Saskatchewan, 
 close to the mountains, were the Piegans, and in the foothills, 
 and as far as the Continental divide, the sheep-eating Assini- 
 boines kept all other Indians out. 
 
 This was our land of promise, our chosen hunting ground. 
 On its wide plains multitudes of buffalo grazed; in its hilly 
 country elk, bear, the wild sheep and Rocky Mountain goat 1 
 were still so common that the Assiniboines lived chiefly on 
 their flesh, and were completely clothed and housed with their 
 skins. 
 
 We really had chosen better than we knew. Here Indians 
 were at peace with the white man, and had been at peace, 
 usually because there was no whiskey, and the white man dealt 
 honestly with them, and left their women alone. 
 
 We had intended making Fort Carlton on the Saskatchewan 
 509 miles from Fort Garry, our starting point for a long hunt- 
 ing expedition to the southward and westward, but there a panic 
 fear of the Blackfoot Indians was at its height. One of the 
 officers of the Company having been shot and dangerously 
 wounded by some lurking "brave" near the "post," and this 
 spoiled our plan. We tried to get reliable men to go with us, 
 men to drive our carts and a guide, who knew the difference 
 between a Cree warrior and a Blackfoot or a Sioux, which 
 naturally we did not; but no one would go. We offered double 
 wages. It was of no use. I could see that the Company 
 officers themselves, instead of aiding us, were so genuinely 
 panic-stricken that they could afford us no help whatever. So 
 long as we kept north, they said, and stuck to the great trail, 
 there was little danger. If we went south we would certainly 
 
 J The goat, by the way, was not a goat any more than the buffalo was a buffalo, but following 
 the usual American custom of misnaming things, we call the bison, buffalo; and the Rocky 
 Mountain antelope, goat.
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 83 
 
 be scalped or captured, and in either of these eventualities 
 there would be trouble for them. So to help us to our destruc- 
 tion they declined. 
 
 This persistent timidity of our hosts began to be a serious 
 nuisance, and my friend and I had long consultations as to 
 plans. As we were debating the future, the fort people were 
 thrown into a still more disturbed state of mind by the un- 
 announced arrival of a hard-looking band of whiskey traders 
 from Fort Benton. There were twelve of them, a tough lot, 
 led by a Jew, as undesirable a rascal as I had ever seen. Such 
 small bands at that time were not uncommon, but they very 
 seldom pushed their way across the boundary line and into 
 the Blackfoot country. I am convinced that these had come 
 so far simply to spy out the land, and satisfy themselves as to 
 what could be got in trade out of the Indians thereabouts. 
 They were unusually well armed, but had used up all their 
 whiskey, if they had not "cached" it. Meanwhile, they asked 
 for flour and pork. The fort people said they could not supply 
 them. This did not satisfy the visitors, and they looked 
 threatening. The end of it was, flour and pork came from 
 somewhere, and the traders, to the immense relief of everybody, 
 moved away. I spent the best part of two days in their 
 company while they hung round. It was a new experience to 
 me. They presented a type I had never seen. No ties held 
 them to the country, or indeed to each other. All but the 
 Jew said they had been soldiers in the great war, some on one 
 side, some on the other. Criminals, I fancy, all of them. 
 Their leader (why he was a leader I could not make out) 
 seemed to take a fancy to me. He said he "had a hard gang to 
 control; that he would go back to honest life soon as he could 
 reach the Missouri. Two of his band he knew intended to 
 murder him, and get the gold he carried in a heavy belt. They 
 had pushed their way right through the Blackfoot country, and 
 had had no trouble with the tribe. They would not have come 
 so far north had it not been reported at Benton that there was 
 good placer mining on the Saskatchewan. They had pros- 
 pected on the south branch, but had found nothing worth 
 while." 
 
 He had come through much of the country we hoped to visit 
 and hunt in, and his first-hand knowledge was of good value.
 
 84 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 His advice was "get into a large village of plain Indians and 
 stay in it. You run some risk getting in, on account of the 
 irresponsible small war parties, composed of undisciplined 
 young warriors who are out on their own, hoping to steal a 
 horse or get a scalp, and so gain credit for bravery. These 
 fellows are not likely to kill you, but they might put you afoot. 
 You face the same risks getting out of the large camps as you do 
 getting in; so stay in the big camp, and hunt with its riders. 
 They are hospitable, you can leave your tent unguarded, and 
 if you give them a present when you go away, all will go 
 well." 
 
 Every word of this we proved to be true. 
 
 As to his own plans, he was frank. He evidently trusted me. 
 "There are two of these fellows who will get me if I don't get 
 them first. The trouble is, I must make the rest of the gang 
 understand that these two are ready to commit murder, or they 
 will not stand for my killing them." So there on the wide beau- 
 tiful plain I had my first real experience of what our poor hu- 
 man nature may come to when it recognizes no law higher or 
 holier than that of its own cunning when man thinks and acts 
 for himself, and for himself alone. 
 
 This meeting with the whiskey trader had a strange sequel. 
 In the spring of next year, as I sat in the public hall of a 
 hotel in New Orleans, I noticed a man whom I did not immedi- 
 ately recognize staring at me. He came up and, holding out his 
 hand, named himself. Still I could recall nothing. 
 
 "Why, don't you remember the whiskey trader and his band 
 on the Saskatchewan?" 
 
 "How did your adventure end?" I asked. 
 
 "Well, I got back to Benton with my belt and my life, and I 
 am settled down here in business. No more whiskey trading 
 for me." 
 
 "What about those two men that you said meant to get 
 you?" 
 
 "Well, I got them. They gave themselves away by trying to 
 have another fellow, a friend of mine, join them in putting 
 me away, and he came and warned me. Then I had what I 
 wanted another witness to their plot. And so we outplotted 
 them." 
 
 "Had you a shooting scrape?" said I.
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 85 
 
 "Oh, no, no use in that; I and my friend lay for them by the 
 water one evening, and they had no time to 'draw.' " 
 
 The longest lane has a turning^and at Pitt, the next post to 
 Carlton, on the Saskatchewan, our luck took a turn. The officer 
 in charge proved a mighty good fellow. He had traded with 
 the Blackfeet for years. Pitt was a Blackfoot post, and the 
 officer confirmed what my whiskey-trading friends had told 
 me that if we could but gain the shelter of any large camp of 
 plain Indians, whether they were Crees or Blackfeet, we would 
 be comparatively safe. Promiscuous killing and horse stealing 
 were going on as usual; they never stopped. But that was the 
 work of small bands of young braves who were out on their 
 "own." They were a sort of unauthorized, unorthodox 
 highwaymen, always troublesome and dangerous, but neither 
 Crees nor Blackfeet were at war with the white man; and so if 
 we were scalped or put afoot, it would be owing to a sort ot 
 tribal mistake. 
 
 I remember well our arrival at Fort Pitt. That afternoon 
 a sudden thunderstorm blew up, and a cold rain drenched one 
 to the skin in a few moments. The men wanted to camp. 
 We were still sixteen miles from the fort, they said, and the 
 downpour was tremendous. The poor, unshod ponies slipped 
 and floundered in the black sticky mud. We bade them do 
 as they wished, but we determined to make the fort that night. 
 
 I am rather proud of those last sixteen miles. We had 
 already ridden and marched over thirty, but we tightened our 
 belts and ran that last lap into Pitt against the downpour. 
 We were unexpected, but they gave us a right hearty welcome, 
 and a supper oh, such a supper ! A great wooden bowl of new 
 potatoes, and all we could eat of roast buffalo hump, the best, 
 the very best meat any man ever put his teeth into. I say the 
 best advisedly. I have tried them all, from elephant foot to 
 moose mouffle. Some of them good, the far greater part very 
 disappointing. But fresh juicy buffalo hump, cut from a young 
 cow, was something to remember as long as you lived. Before 
 a big log fire we dried out, and life seemed pretty good to us 
 that first night at Fort Pitt. 
 
 Our host, it was easy to see, loved the country, and was not 
 scared to death of the Indians he was there to trade with. He 
 put himself in our place at once; he realized we had come a
 
 86 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 long way in order to do a certain thing, and he said that all that 
 in him lay to aid us he would do. 
 
 Next morning men were sent to drive in the Company's 
 horse herd. The plains Indians were well mounted in those 
 days, and as Fort Pitt was their trading post, the Company's 
 herd was an unusually fine lot. We needed a couple of buffalo 
 runners as the horses we were riding were not fitted for the chase. 
 We tested a number for pace, and bought his two ponies at a 
 reasonable rate. The "breed" who rode them for our inspec- 
 tion was the guide chosen to lead us, and one proof of his capacity 
 he gave then and there. He was a finished horseman. Before 
 we left the post news came of some fighting on the plains be- 
 tween Cree and Blackfoot, but as we had never ceased to hear of 
 such things since we had left Red River we were not impressed. 
 One Blackfoot leader, it was reported, was on the warpath near 
 the Battle River, some hundred miles to the south of us. He 
 was said to wear a scarlet robe. 
 
 So at last, after long waiting, much planning, and many 
 disappointments, we turned resolutely away from beaten trails, 
 and faced due south toward the wide plain-land of the Indian 
 and the buffalo. There was risk in the venture, for we were 
 only a small party, just five, and of course were not armed 
 "for any fighting." Any war party could, if they wished, 
 take our scalps or put us " afoot." We had made up our minds 
 that under no circumstances would we shed blood. We were 
 trespassers on other people's lands; and the rightful owners, 
 though savage in their cruelty to one another, had not, so far 
 as we could learn, shown causeless hostility to the whites. 
 They had been systematically swindled, and sometimes slaught- 
 ered, and the wrong was on the white man's side, not on 
 the red man's. Of so much we were satisfied, and so if we went 
 among them we went as friends not as aggressors. The 
 strong point in our favour was that we were coming to them 
 from the Saskatchewan, the country of the "great white 
 Queen," not from the Missouri, the country of the "Long 
 Knives" (i.e., bayonets). 
 
 As we journeyed south, there was more plain, less wood and 
 less water, and wide stretches of sandy soil. For the first time 
 herds of antelope appeared, and there were more wolves. They 
 would sit on the low hilltops round our fire, and call to each
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 87 
 
 other all night long, a wild, weird song. When we had made a 
 hundred miles or more I noticed that our men were growing 
 nervous. " The herd has gone out of the land," they said. " It 
 is useless to follow them longer. We are going right into the 
 Blackfoot country, and never shall any of us see wife or child 
 or friend again." 
 
 At one hundred and fifty miles from the fort we had a little 
 mutiny. They would turn back, and our gallant guide was 
 leader in the "talk". It was heart-breaking work to have to 
 travel with such men, but no better were to be had. "Yes, 
 go back, but you shall go afoot; and never see a cent of wages. 
 We will go on, if we have to drive our own carts, and all the 
 women will laugh at you, as you come sneaking into the fort." 
 So we cowed them, and that night as we sat round our little 
 fire, I heard for the first time a strange, low, rumbling sort of 
 sound, like very faint thunder far away. Our hunter started, 
 and put his ear to the ground. "The buffalo are near," he said, 
 "listen to them marching." And so it was the distant 
 thunder of the hoofs of the great herd. Excitement, expec- 
 tancy, banished for the time being fear. The spirit of the chase 
 arose in the breasts of even the most cowardly, and no one now 
 wanted to turn back. 
 
 Next morning we broke camp early, our guide riding some 
 distance ahead. We were in open plain. Everything looked 
 quite flat, but actually the surface of the prairie had great 
 billowy swells in it. It was as though an Atlantic Sea, after 
 heavy storm, had passed in an instant into a sea of grass. As 
 you rode, you moved up and down over an endless succession 
 of gentle slopes; three or four summits and twice as many 
 declivities you would pass in a mile. It seemed as though you 
 could see all round you, in every direction, that a surprise was 
 impossible; as a fact, a band of men and horses might be within 
 half a mile of you, and be as completely hidden as though you 
 were in a land of brush. 
 
 As I was mounting one of the great prairie waves, what 
 should I see but our hunter riding furiously toward us. As he 
 dashed up," We are lost," he gasped," We are surrounded by the 
 Blackfeet. Red Robe is leading them." What followed was 
 the work not of minutes but of seconds. The cowardly rascal 
 dashed by me, cut with a slashing blow of his knife the leather
 
 88 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 lariat by which the pony I had bought a few days before was 
 tied to the rear of one of our carts, cast his own inferior beast 
 free, and leaping on the back of mine, was off like the wind. As 
 I watched him go there was no mistake at least about his 
 qualities as a rider. Under him that little horse fairly flew. 
 Our two half-breed Crees were now speechless, quite incapable 
 of hearing or understanding any order. We two rode quickly 
 to the top of the rise of ground over which our departed warrior 
 had rushed to us. And sure enough, there were the Blackfeet, 
 more than two hundred of them, led by an Indian in a red robe 
 riding a fine horse. They had evidently seen us before our 
 outrider spotted them, for they moved on us in a long line, 
 curving like a horseshoe. The sides of the horseshoe, as I 
 looked round over my shoulder, were closing fast on our 
 valorous guide, but I saw him, riding for dear life, get through 
 before they closed, pursued by a bunch of riders seemingly as 
 well mounted as he was. But the long line closed in on us, the 
 riders drawing near to one another as they came. "Let's turn 
 the carts up, make a breastwork out of them. Behind them 
 we can stand the Indians off and make a parley. It is all we 
 can do." We rushed back to our men. I see those poor, 
 craven fellows now, kneeling behind the little upturned carts, 
 stammering "Aves," actually paralyzed with terror, their 
 faces distorted, the saliva dribbling from the corners of their 
 half-open mouths. And still the silent line of riders closed 
 in. I noticed specially a young warrior who rode some yards 
 ahead of the Indian in the red robe. Suddenly a wild idea 
 came to me. "I'll grab that man," I said to H. "I'll drag 
 him here. Behind him, we'll make a parley." "All right," 
 said H., cocking at last his double-barrel twelve-bore, and I 
 fear forgetting all about our most honest determination not to 
 shed blood. "The first man that shoots at you I'll kill." I 
 was outside the carts. I pushed my horse at foot-pace toward 
 the man who at the same pace came toward me. As I closed 
 with him he did not raise his gun it lay in the hollow of his 
 arm, as did mine but those others near me did, and as I sat 
 on my horse, I looked right down their muzzles, at a few yards 
 off. I remember I straightened up a bit on my pony, for I was 
 sure this was the end. As I reached my man, I suddenly flung 
 my right arm round his neck, and with all my strength wrench-
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 89 
 
 ing him from the saddle, I had him up against our carts in an 
 instant. As he and I lurched against the carts, he gurgled 
 something. I did not know what he said, but the effect of 
 that first word spoken to me in an unknown tongue! It was 
 magical! The revulsion from terror to ecstasy! My men 
 leaped to their feet, shouting, singing, crying, cursing by turns. 
 They fell to kissing each other; made a grab at me. Then they 
 rushed out among the stolid Indians standing round us and 
 tried to kiss them. These were friends, not enemies. Crees, 
 not Blackfeet. My captive had spoken to them in Cree. 
 
 My own feelings I recall distinctly. I still sat my horse, 
 but I wanted to dismount and pray. Then I seemed to see 
 more in the things around me than I had ever seen. The grass 
 never looked so green, nor the sky so blue, nor the world so 
 lovely. I was alive, and what an immeasurable joy it was to be 
 alive and not dead and I would see Mother again hers was 
 the image that came to me on the instant that day. Then, too, 
 I felt within me a sense of manhood I had never known before. 
 I had looked down the muzzles of those guns, at a few yards off, 
 and had sat straight on my horse as I rode into them. I was 
 not a coward, after all. The boys in Dundalk school had said 
 I was a coward, because I had refused to hit the boy back who 
 had slapped my face, and I had half believed they were right. 
 Now, with a deep sense of satisfaction that thrilled me through 
 and through, I knew I was not a coward, after all. It is a 
 wonderful and potent thing to feel a new sense of manhood. 
 
 The Indians that now surrounded us were the warriors from 
 a large hunting camp, pitched in a hollow of the prairie near by. 
 They had spotted us the evening before; they suspected we had 
 come from Fort Pitt, but as they were not sure, they deter- 
 mined not to take a chance, as, if we went farther out on the 
 plains, the Blackfeet might capture us, and they much pre- 
 ferred that we, our rifles and resources, should be lodged for 
 the time being in a Cree, rather than in a Blackfoot, camp. 
 As to the Red Robe, which had quenched in our valorous guide 
 the last gleam of hope, its present wearer had lately shot in a 
 skirmish the Blackfoot who owned it, and the Cree now flaunted 
 his victory whenever he rode forth. 
 
 We had our cart men ask them for news of our fleeing guide. 
 "The young men will bring him in before evening. He rode
 
 90 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 a fast pony." (So he did; my intended buffalo runner.) "But 
 some of them are well mounted, too, and they will ride him 
 down, perhaps fire a shot or two to make him stop." And in 
 the evening the young men did bring the crestfallen scamp 
 in. He had surely suffered the pains of hell; Death had ridden, 
 as he believed, closer and closer at his heels for many a mile, 
 and he never stopped till my unfortunate pony gave out. I 
 confess I would dearly have liked to thrash that thieving 
 coward within an inch of his life, as he stood quaking before me. 
 He had deserted his charge, he had stolen what he believed was 
 my only chance of escaping death, in an effort to save his own 
 hide but well! The experience of a few hours before was 
 fresh within me. It was not a time to give way to anger, even 
 anger that was just. 
 
 The Indians were evidently satisfied with the day's work. 
 They proposed that we ride at once to their camp. The 
 buffalo were quite near, and in great numbers they told us; we 
 should hunt with them just as long as we had a mind to; they 
 would herd our ponies with their own, and there were no bands 
 of the enemy anywhere in the neighbourhood strong enough 
 to attack their lodge. All of which seemed, after our many 
 disappointments, too good news to be true. 
 
 Things turned out as those poor Indians promised, and while 
 we were with them we had a rare good time. A few miles' riding 
 brought us suddenly to the camp. There was no sign of it till 
 you rode into it. We mounted one of the prairie waves I have 
 spoken of and, at our feet, lay not less than one hundred lodges. 
 They were of a pleasant yellow-white tone of colour, surely as 
 picturesque a form of habitation as has ever been invented by 
 civilized man. 
 
 The buffalo skins that covered the long "lodge poles" were 
 tanned white. The skins, stretched stiffly on the ground, 
 were softened by endless rubbing. The women used marrow-fat 
 on them till they were flexible as buckskin, and something in the 
 process those toiling women used gave all the skins they 
 tanned, deer and elk skins as well as buffalo, a peculiar Indian 
 smell that never left them a very nice smell. I have still by 
 me a war robe I traded from these Crees, a rarity to-day. It 
 is made of two antelope skins, porcupine quill work on its 
 breast and back, and six scalps pendent from the shoulders
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 91 
 
 and arms. That far-away Indian smell hangs round it still, 
 the smell of the wild man at his best, the smell of a past race, a 
 past time. It seems to me to be a gentlemanly sort of smell. 
 I have no other word to describe it, and the poor, brave, 
 hospitable fellow who traded it to me, what of him ? He and 
 his band died in the terrible epidemic of smallpox that de- 
 stroyed whole tribes in the West, the year after I parted from 
 them. 
 
 I am tempted to give more space than I should, in my story, 
 to the things I saw and the lessons I learned in this little town 
 of a vanishing race. I am glad that our perseverance at last 
 brought us to it, and brought us to it only just in time, for its 
 sad end was very near. The plain Crees are gone. Three 
 thousand of them died in one winter of the smallpox. Of the 
 Blackfeet, their hereditary foes, only a remnant is left. (It 
 is settled at last on a good reservation in northern Montana, 
 and there I visited it in 1903. The Indians are doing well.) 
 Before the chance of settlement was offered it, the Blackfoot 
 tribe was first swept by smallpox, and, while the epidemic was 
 
 ravaging its lodges, Colonel , with American troops, 
 
 without warning or cause or excuse, in a night attack, in mid- 
 winter, shot down its men, women, and children, sick and well, 
 in the tepees. 
 
 So the Blackfeet and their allies were driven on the warpath, 
 and between the smallpox and incessant conflict with the wave 
 of immigration then flowing westward, only a remnant sur- 
 vived. They were not bad Indians; they never fought the 
 white man till they had to. 
 
 In the Cree camp we had the place of honour next the 
 Chief's tepee. The camp was well kept and clean, there was 
 good order throughout. There was no whiskey and no quarrel- 
 ling. Everyone went about his own business, and except for a 
 few fellows who pestered us at first by begging, we were per- 
 mitted to go about ours. The braves rose before sun-up to 
 do their hunting, once or twice a week, killing as many buffalo 
 as the women could take care of and no more; and the prepa- 
 ration of robes, dried meat, and pemmican went on daily in a 
 businesslike way. We were welcomed everywhere, and might 
 walk into any of the tepees anytime of the day or night; naturally 
 they claimed the same privilege from us, and at times this was
 
 92 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 awkward, as their visits were inclined to be long. But we got 
 on well together and had nothing stolen during our stay. 
 
 The day after our arrival the war chief of the camp, a fine, 
 upstanding Indian of about forty, came to our tent and in- 
 vited us to join him and his braves next morning, before sun-up, 
 outside the camp. So, at last, my boyhood's dream had come 
 true, and out on the wide prairie-land, side by side with the 
 red Indian, I was to join in the chase that was unlike any 
 other hunting in the wide world. 
 
 That I was to ride with a vanishing race, in pursuit of a 
 vanishing game, and to be present at the closing scene in a 
 double tragedy, I did not realize then. 
 
 A splendid sun-rise greeted the company as we gathered 
 round our leader on the green hill-crest beyond the quiet 
 tepees. Among these a few women were moving about, and 
 here and there the blue smoke of little morning fires rose, but 
 everything was very still. Noise carried far in the quiet morn- 
 ing, and the herd was near. We must have numbered two 
 hundred men, well mounted. Some few were armed with the 
 bow, though the great majority carried the usual Hudson Bay 
 smooth-bore flint-lock musket, the identical weapon the 
 Company had traded to all its Indians for more than one hun- 
 dred years. The wood Indian preferred it with a long barrel, 
 this made for accuracy. But the plain Indian generally 
 sawed off a couple of feet from the barrel, in this way making 
 the weapon handier for work on horseback. Accuracy of fire 
 was in his case immaterial, for his admirably trained "runner" 
 carried him with a rush up on the right side of the lumbering 
 game, and leaning over, at a few feet off, he shot into it, holding 
 the short gun out at the length of his arms, never resting the butt 
 against his shoulder. This required him to attack from the 
 right side, and it was wonderful to see how, amid the smoke and 
 dust, the shouting and wild confusion of yelling men and 
 stampeded buffalo, those clever ponies, no rein to guide them 
 for a lariat looped over the under jaw and lying across the neck 
 was their only bridle never mistook their way, and never 
 failed to carry the rider just where he wanted to be. 
 
 As the rising sun shone on our company it was a thrilling 
 sight. The bronzed riders were naked, stripped to the " breech 
 clout," and they sat their bare-backed horses, not as I had
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 93 
 
 seen Indians sit when travelling, perched on a high saddle with 
 short stirrups, the knees drawn up; but here wild men sat wild 
 horses, each well becoming the other, and the effect was of 
 grace and beauty and speed like the riders on the Parthenon 
 frieze, they looked to me. 
 
 Our leader waved an arm, and the company spread out in a 
 long line on either side of him. He wore a war bonnet of eagle 
 feathers and a fine scalp robe; he directed our movements but 
 did not join in the charge; and so we moved away to find the 
 herd. We had not far to go. In less than an hour's riding 
 scattered bulls on its outskirts came in sight. Our long line 
 moved quietly on at a foot's pace. We were to get as near as 
 possible before making our rush. We must have been within 
 a quarter of a mile of them before the bulls saw us and began 
 to toss their great shaggy heads and stamp the ground. Nearer 
 drew our line; and at last they wheeled and, at a lumbering 
 gallop, fell back on the great masses of the herd, which we now 
 saw stretching to right and left of us and beyond, mile after 
 mile, in countless thousands. Now our pace was a trot, and 
 moving in bunches and columns, slowly at first, the buffalo 
 began streaming away. We were within three hundred yards 
 of them. Now our chief put his hand to his face, out rang his 
 war yell, and we were off. The riding was good, the ground 
 level but full of badger holes, and the dust churned up by the 
 herd blew back in our faces, half blinding us. But it seemed 
 to me that our first furious rush had carried us in a few minutes 
 almost on top of the shaggy throng. ( 
 
 I was urging my runner forward for all I was worth, when a 
 man shot by me, and as he did, his pony put its foot in a badger 
 hole and fell in a heap; the rider, striking on head and shoulders, 
 lay as completely knocked out as his mount. I could just 
 make out my runaway half-breed hunter, and I cannot say I 
 was sorry for him. 
 
 And now all was confusion, Indians yelling like madmen, 
 riding in every direction, buffaloes falling, some staggering and 
 wounded, some standing at bay, but the masses of them 
 steadily streaming away at a pace that was much faster than it 
 looked. Any fairly fast horse could get within fifty yards of 
 their waving tails, but to win these last fifty needed a turn of 
 speed that an ordinary horse was not capable of, and I found to
 
 94 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 my dismay that I could not get it out of my little pony. He 
 carried me up to the herd, and kept me there. Scores of great 
 lumbering bodies showed through the dust cloud only a few 
 yards ahead of me, but alongside of them I could not get. If 
 I quickened my gallop, so did they. The pace did not slacken ; 
 they were going as fast as they could, and so was I; but it 
 seemed to me in my despair that at this rate I might follow 
 them to Mexico before I shot one. My pony had a good 
 record. Many buffalo had been killed from his back, but the 
 trouble was he had been ridden to a standstill two days before, 
 and my long body and fourteen-pound rifle were, in combi- 
 nation, too much for any fourteen-two Indian pony. But one 
 lives and learns ! My fine double Rigby, too, gave me trouble. 
 On a swerving horse that is intent on picking its way at a 
 gallop among deep open badger holes that it could not see till 
 it was within a horse's length of them, to carry fourteen pounds 
 of wood and metal in your right hand does not conduce to 
 comfortable riding. And when you have to keep it up for 
 several miles! well, even a tough lad and a tough pony find 
 themselves at last played out. That was precisely the fate 
 that, under the circumstances, inevitably was bound to over- 
 take me on the eventful occasion of my first run with the 
 plain Crees. 
 
 Disappointed I certainly was, when we both, my pony and 
 I, came to a standstill at the foot of a wave hill in the prairie 
 steeper than usual. His head hung low, and I was dead beat. 
 Where I was I had no idea, nor where the Indians were, nor in 
 what direction camp lay. The buffalo seemed to have settled 
 into long travelling columns 1 (as I have noticed wild game 
 often does in plain country), and in great numbers were passing 
 to right and left of me. Though I had not been able to get 
 pace enough out of my pony to ride into the band I had pur- 
 sued, I had evidently out-distanced and ridden far ahead of 
 these many hundreds of the herd who now were streaming by. 
 The day was not yet lost. Here was my chance, and I took it. 
 A fine bull was lumbering along not more than one hundred 
 yards away. I sat down, rested each elbow on each knee, and 
 took aim. My hand was shaking, my eyes were full of dust 
 
 J The gnu antelope on the African veldt look like smaller buffalo, and travel as the buffalo 
 did, in long columns.
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 95 
 
 and sweat, but I did the best I could, and I heard with infinite 
 relief my big bullet "thud" as it struck him. Buffalo were not 
 hard to kill. An ounce and a quarter of lead, with six drams of 
 good powder behind it, were too much for any bull, and so my 
 first buffalo went the way of all flesh very satisfactorily. I cut 
 off his tail, and, first loosening my spent pony's girth, sat me 
 down to rest. I have often wondered since how we were so 
 foolish as to venture out on those unmarked, endless plains 
 without any method of guidance whatever, save what could be 
 had from undependable and cowardly half-breeds. Maps 
 there were none, but we should have provided ourselves with a 
 compass, and should have taken a few very necessary lessons 
 in reading it and marching by it. There was I, now absolutely 
 in the dark as to where I had come from, and where I should 
 go to. The sky was clear, and the sun gave me the points of 
 the compass. Fort Pitt was north, of course, some one hundred 
 and fifty miles away. But where was the well-hidden Cree 
 camp? To attempt back-tracking was useless, as for miles 
 around innumerable bands of buffalo, fleeing in all directions, 
 had stamped the prairie into dust. After an hour, when my 
 pony had rested and nibbled some grass, I mounted and, feeling 
 rather sober, started to ride north. I rode up and down prairie 
 swells for many miles, it seemed to me, and never saw a soul. 
 How was it possible that I had gotten so far away from every 
 one of those two hundred Indian friends of mine, with whom I 
 had ridden so short a time ago? The buffalo country seemed 
 to me the loneliest country that ever a man rode in. I was still 
 pushing on slowly when close to me, round a low shoulder of 
 ground, came a squaw, driving a traveaux laden with fresh 
 buffalo meat. I had not followed her a mile before I stumbled 
 into camp. 
 
 H. was already in camp when I got in, and was worrying 
 about my non-appearance. He had done better than I had. 
 He was a better rider, and his horse had not been tired out, as 
 had mine. He had killed his buffalo, and thought one enough. 
 That afternoon and evening I watched the women coming into 
 the camp from every quarter. How they did it I did not and 
 do not know. The camp had been but recently pitched; there 
 were no signs by which its site could be marked, that I could 
 make out, though I looked carefully for such signs during our
 
 96 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 stay with the Crees. Yet those Indian women would listen to 
 a description of where their man had killed miles away, take a 
 pony, pick up the poles of the traveaux, and go sailing off, 
 steering straight for that distant carcase, skin it, cut it up, save 
 all the meat, and do all this as an ordinary day's work. Their 
 enemies, the Blackfeet, were not a myth. The night of the 
 day I am writing of they tried to run off our horses, and did 
 kill one of the Crees guarding the herd. Why the Crees did 
 not lose more scalps when the fighting force of the camp was 
 scattered widely over all the country, as of necessity it was 
 when all hands turned out to hunt, I never understood. 
 
 Since these days I am writing of, I spent, for twelve summers, 
 two months in what was, in 1869, exclusively Indian country. 
 I have also read many books about the Indians, and have met 
 hundreds of adventurers of all sorts who came in touch with 
 them soldiers, prospectors, cattlemen, trappers. By far the 
 larger part of these had no good word to say for the red man. 
 I formed a different opinion. I found him a savage, of course, 
 but as savages go, a very decent fellow. I camped and lived 
 and hunted with several different tribes of Indians, "plain" 
 and "wood" and "mountain," and got to like them all. Space 
 fails me, or I could tell interesting things about them. Almost 
 all have perished and none of them had a fair show. 
 
 Before bidding good-bye to my Cree hosts I must tell of their 
 persistency in begging, and of their powers as trencher men. 
 Little begging did not matter, but one thing they wanted I 
 could not give: that was my double Rigby, and I found to my 
 dismay that the chief had set his heart on it. One morning he 
 came round with a fine pony; next day with two. Then he 
 hinted at his daughter thrown in, and things began to look 
 serious. "He had offered us the shelter of the camp." "His 
 braves had guarded our horses." "The white man had many 
 far-shooting guns; the poor Indian few," and so on ad infinitum. 
 What he said was true enough, and what he did not say was 
 equally true: viz., we were completely in their power, and if he 
 wanted the rifle he could take it, and I had no other. A way 
 out occurred to me at last. I have said the rifle threw a heavy 
 ball and took a large charge of powder. It had also a set 
 trigger; i.e., by pulling back a small bolt in the lock, a mere 
 touch on the trigger would discharge the piece. One day,
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 97 
 
 when I was taking a long shot at an antelope, I had set the hair 
 trigger, and having loaded rather too heavily, the shock of the 
 right barrel going off had set the left off at the same time, and I 
 had a kick that wrenched my shoulder. So next morning, 
 when my visitor came as usual, I met him halfway. "We had 
 been well treated, and we would always tell in our far-away 
 home how honest and hospitable were the plain Crees and 
 their war chief. He should have my rifle for two ponies. I 
 could not accept his daughter, for in our country the man who 
 married a girl till his mother first saw and approved her was 
 reckoned a bad man. If he liked my rifle, then it was his. I 
 feared, however, that he would not like it. It was made for me, 
 and my medicine was not his medicine. It shot straight for 
 me, but I did not think he would like the way it shot for him. 
 But he must try it for himself. I was not a 'forked tongue,' 
 as were some of the 'Long Knives.' Let him come round to- 
 morrow morning and bring some of his braves, and he should 
 shoot the rifle and if he liked it have it for his own." That night 
 I loaded that rifle as it had never been loaded before, earnestly 
 praying that John Rigby's good workmanship in barrel and 
 stock would withstand the test. 
 
 Round came my man, bright and early, his braves with him, 
 and the news of the great gift having leaked out, there were 
 quite a lot of onlookers. The plain Indians, as I said before, 
 shoot from horseback and at a gallop. I set the hair trigger 
 and gingerly handed the weapon to my host. There was an 
 open space in front of our tent, and in the middle of it he threw 
 down a bit of hide to serve as a mark. Then riding some hun- 
 dred yards away, he wheeled his pony, came by at a fine speed, 
 and holding at arms' length the rifle, let drive. The effect was 
 tremendous. Both barrels went off with a roar; the heavy 
 gun went one way, the pony another way, the dazed rider 
 another. And the assembly stood speechless for a moment, 
 and then united in a deep "How, how." "Heap medicine," he 
 grunted, and gathering himself up, let the gun lie where it 
 had fallen. John Rigby's work held; the rifle was none the 
 worse, and my stock went up with these Crees. 
 
 I wish I could give more space to my experiences among 
 these Indians of the plain and their enemies of the forest and 
 the mountains. The smallpox epidemic of 1870-2 never
 
 9 8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 reached the white folks of the west, but it wiped out whole 
 camps, almost whole tribes of the red man. The sweat bath 
 that the Indians universally used was a cleanly custom. But 
 the sweat bath and the cold plunge was sudden death to the 
 smallpox smitten. The smallpox came, no one knew from 
 where, the spring after we had travelled through the beautiful 
 country in which the headwaters of the Missouri and Saskatche- 
 wan have their rise. 
 
 So it was my good luck to see the last of these poor people, 
 who were ready to perish. I had dreamed of meeting them and 
 knowing them and their country, and my boy's dream had come 
 true. I had seen the red man in his home, and was not dis- 
 appointed in him. 
 
 In the spring we had intended to go out on the plains, see 
 them and the buffalo, and turn homeward in a couple of months. 
 Now the late autumn found us close to the outlying spurs of 
 the Rocky Mountains, and more than a thousand miles to 
 westward of our starting point. The spell of the new land held 
 us fast, and having come so far, it seemed natural to press still 
 on, pass the great range if we could, and so complete our 
 journey from sea to sea. 
 
 The problem to be solved was a double one: could we cross 
 the mountains before the late autumn snowfall made the higher 
 ranges impassable? And could we get a guide who knew 
 a way through their unmapped main chain ? Far to southward 
 there was an easy and well-known road on which thousands had 
 crossed continuously since 1849, but where we were, near the 
 national boundary and north of it, snowy peaks rose forbid- 
 dingly and the barrier was formidable. None of the Hudson 
 Bay people, their Indians or their half-breeds, that we had met, 
 knew anything whatever about this mountain wilderness, but 
 that there were Indians in some of the forts close to the chain 
 who must know, seemed certain; and with their aid we de- 
 termined to attempt the last and hardest "leg" of our jouruey. 
 
 At Rocky Mountain House, our final starting point, the first 
 thing to do was to convince the Commander that we were set 
 on crossing the mountains and doing so at once. He was a 
 good and capable officer, but had never been himself to west-
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 99 
 
 ward of the stockade, and he said we "were going to our 
 death." In midsummer it could be done; now the snow lay 
 too deep already on the ridges we had to cross. No pack team 
 could travel them. Game there was none. We were sure to 
 be pinned in between the ranges, and when we had eaten our 
 ponies, we would starve. So "for God's sake, put it off till 
 spring, and make a comfortable winter of it with him at the 
 fort." We had had so many scares coming our way via the 
 Hudson Bay Company that we were not now as much im- 
 pressed as we should have been. As it turned out, we did take 
 a very grave risk, and did escape destruction by a narrow 
 margin. 
 
 To make a long story as short as I can, we did get away 
 at last, if not with our host's blessing, certainly with the very 
 best pack outfit he could supply, with carefully chosen pro- 
 visions and, best of all, with a shrivelled-up little half-breed 
 French-Stoney guide who had been with Lord Milton and 
 Doctor Cheadle three years before in their adventurous cross- 
 ing in which they almost perished; who did know the difficulties 
 and dangers ahead, and with a rare combination of fatalism 
 and pluck, declared he would take us to the top of the main 
 divide (not a foot over the other side) or never come near the 
 fort and his family again. 
 
 It was a splendid fall season, and that was in our favour: 
 cold at night, the glass going below zero, and great chunks of 
 ice coming down the rivers, but no snow had fallen, and we 
 turned our backs on the blue line of plain, and faced the fir-clad 
 mountain slopes, a cheery crowd. 
 
 Carts we had no use for, nor for the half-breeds that drove 
 them, and to face new difficulties we had the luck to find new 
 men. Two Indians, the guide I have spoken of and another 
 Stoney, and two roving Scotsmen, who by some mischance had 
 tried prospecting on the upper Saskatchewan and found them- 
 selves stranded there. They had the choice of working for 
 their grub for the Company all the long winter or taking risks 
 with us of reaching the west coast. We made them an offer, 
 which they gladly accepted, and they served us right well. 
 
 The day we left Rocky Mountain House, a nice-looking 
 young Stoney and the girl he married that morning asked if 
 they might travel with us till we reached a Stoney camp, at the
 
 ioo THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 other side of the first high mountain ridge. We said "yes," 
 and they came along. That night we camped by a river where 
 beaver signs were plentiful, and in the evening I shot one on the 
 other side of the stream. I hated to lose that first beaver of 
 mine, and so, to the men's consternation (none of them could 
 swim; I never met a Hudson Bay Indian who could, though they 
 were perpetually on the water) I stripped and swam across. 
 Quite a swim, the current very fast and the water very cold, but 
 I got my beaver. Early next morning, before the sun reached 
 our tent, I happened to go down to the river bank on chance of 
 getting another beaver, when I saw in front of me an amusing 
 illustration of the orthodox Indian idea of the honeymoon 
 duties of bride and groom. The frost was sharp, the shore ice 
 was strengthening; out in it, up to her waist, her pretty buck- 
 skin shirt turned over her shoulders and head, stood the bride 
 of the night before, busily taking up the traps she had set in the 
 evening while her lord and master sat, I suppose admiringly 
 on the bank, dry and warm, smoking his morning pipe. The 
 bride was young and slim and pretty, and did her job gaily, 
 for she laughed at me as I turned away to allow her to come out 
 of the icy stream and dress. 
 
 We now worked steadily into the mountains, sometimes 
 following an elk trail, oftener making our own, and it was 
 very evident that our guide knew his business. We were 
 going against time; every hour counted. It was dark and cold 
 in those pine-clad ravines in the early mornings, but he kept 
 all hands on the job. The horses suffered most, for to let them 
 graze at night meant running the risk of their taking the back 
 trail to the fort. 
 
 In five days' hard marching we made the Stoney camp. 
 We were tired when the flicker of the camp-fire greeted us, and 
 turned in at once. Early next morning I was roused by a 
 strange sound. Indians were trying to sing something. It 
 was not an ordinary Indian song, a sing-song sort of chanting 
 in monotone. There was in this an effort to strike a tune. I 
 went outside, and, in a circle on the frosty grass, knelt over a 
 hundred men and women and children, while a young man in a 
 black coat led the singing and offered prayer. There was a 
 genuineness about that morning worship that was immensely 
 impressive to me. Many years before a Methodist missionary
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 101 
 
 had made a home among that little band of mountain folk. 
 Seventeen years before he had left them, but they had done, dur- 
 ing all those years, what he had taught them to do, and every 
 night and morning they met for singing and for prayer. 
 
 We stayed a few days with these "Stoneys," to rest our tired 
 horses and fit them for the fierce work that lay just ahead. 
 We hunted sheep and goats, which were plentiful, and I tried to 
 find out more about that hero missionary whose work lived so 
 long after his departure; but they could not speak English, and 
 our only means of communication was our guide, who also 
 could speak no English and only a little patois French. So we 
 were barred from talking to one another, yet one had a real 
 home feeling as we gathered, red men and white, round the fire 
 in the evening to pray, or knelt at morning on the frosty grass. 
 If there was not one word we could say' to one another, our 
 hands as they were clasped said many things. 
 
 I have but a confused memory of our final struggle with 
 the mountains. I did not keep up my diary. I was too ex- 
 hausted at night to do so. How we got up and over those 
 ridges, and along those steep slopes of sliding rock, I do not 
 know. We carried plenty of rawhide rope, and with this, as 
 we warped it round rocks and tree stumps, our laden ponies 
 were helped up and lowered down. Still our fortune held, the 
 skies above were blue, and there was no new snow to contend 
 with, only that which had already fallen above timber line. 
 Somewhere near Athabasca Pass, it must have been, where we 
 mounted the first of the great ridges, and beyond it and be- 
 neath, we were swallowed up in the dreary darkness of the 
 forest. How our little Stoney half-breed held a straight 
 course through that forest I don't know. I think I remember 
 correctly when I say that, for fourteen consecutive days, we 
 never had one gleam of sun strike our camp. Yet the skies 
 were cloudless. The chill of the sunless forest struck into your 
 bones. The pines were tall as they stood packed together; 
 heavy growth of gray moss hanging from them everywhere. 
 And where they fell, either because they were old, or because 
 some mountain blast had torn them from their rooting, they 
 fell in long lines and swaths that rose, barrier-like, defying 
 progress. There was no trail, no sound of bird or beast, no 
 sign of man. A dreadful deadly sort of wood, in which men
 
 102 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 had often disappeared and been lost forever. Our Scotsmen 
 were good with the axe, we all did our best; but strive as we 
 might, on some days we did not make two miles' advance, and 
 to keep a consistent course in such a giant tangle needed an un- 
 canny gift of woodcraft. This our man had and it saved us, 
 for now at last we realized what a risk we had taken. Now we 
 knew that if any heavy snowfall came while we were buried in 
 the forest, our chances of ever leaving it were slim indeed. 
 
 In the beginning of my story I have tried to say something 
 of what I felt when at last we burst out of this terrible woodland 
 and looked down on the warmer, more open country that 
 lay beyond. What a change was there! Still the sun shone, 
 and now it sparkled on lovely lakes, fringed with crowded 
 pine woods where the trees, huddled together, pressed and 
 tumbled each other into the water. Now there was room, and 
 spaciousness, and tall trunks arose, spreading great arms out 
 on all sides, and beneath them the sod was clean and clear of 
 debris, and so open that it was as though a great garden of 
 forest trees throve there, and not a chanceful primeval wood. 
 
 On the crest of the divide our brave leader bade us good-bye, 
 as he said he would. He pointed down the beautiful slopes and 
 valleys beneath us to where we would find the long chain of 
 Columbia lakes. These we must follow till their outflow led 
 us to the great river that would take us to the sea. It was 
 years since he had steered a Company's bateau down its rapids, 
 and skirted its great whirlpool at Okinagan Canyon, and now 
 he was old and could never see it again. But the trail for 
 us was straight and plain. Soon we would strike it, and he 
 had done his best to bring us where we wanted to go. A 
 simple, honest, brave, and resourceful man was our Stoney. 
 He was well satisfied with what H. gave him, and somehow he 
 made the Stoney's camp before a snowfall. 
 
 Except for one or two hard falls riding buffalo I had not had 
 a pain or an ache since we left Sauk Centre. I now met with 
 an accident that might have been serious. We had entered the 
 Kootenay region, and leaving the camp I spoke of some time 
 back, 1 were making for Fort Colville, the highest U. S. Army 
 post on the Columbia River. We had camped late, and the 
 night promised to be cold, and after supper I went out to cut 
 
 Account of that camp omitted for lack of space.
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 103 
 
 some more wood for our fire. In the darkness my axe some- 
 how glanced, and the blade cut deeply into my moccasined 
 foot, almost splitting it. I feared at first I had cut an artery, 
 for blood came in spurts, but when kind hands helped me to the 
 fireside, and when H. had bound the wound as well as he could, 
 the heavy flow ceased. 
 
 We knew that Fort Colville was the headquarters of an 
 infantry regiment, and that there must be a doctor there, but 
 how far off it was we did not know. H. said he would start 
 at once for the fort, and bring the doctor. I tried to persuade 
 him to stay till morning. The trail was bad, not easy to follow 
 by daylight, and dangerous to attempt in the dark, for it ran 
 sometimes on the very edge of the rushing stream. But noth- 
 ing I could say would stop my friend, and leading the best pony 
 we had he went off. 
 
 The night became bitterly cold, I was in a good deal of pain, 
 and had it not been for the resourceful kindness of one of my 
 Scotsmen, that night's frost might have complicated my 
 recovery. My men lifted me out of our tent, and built a small 
 fire at my foot, and sitting beside it kept it burning steadily 
 all the long night through. By morning I felt better and had 
 some sleep. Later in the day an Indian turned up. He had 
 been catching trout for winter food, and he took quite an 
 interest in the stranger white man's trouble. He said his 
 squaw could cure that wound, and he would send her round. 
 Soon she came, and very gently unbound the roughly tied 
 bandages. She did this part of the business so well that I had 
 immediate relief from pain, and there was no fresh bleeding. 
 She refused to put the wrappings on again, and went away, 
 saying she would return. When she did, she carried a bundle 
 of twigs of some tree I did not recognize, and with these in her 
 lap, sat down at my foot and began to chew them up. When 
 her mouth was so full she could cram no more sticks into it, she 
 took the chewed-up stuff and laid it on the open cut. Hour 
 after hour she sat there, steadily chewing and poulticing me 
 with the result. All that long day my poor red nurse sat there 
 and chewed, and next morning she came again and chewed, till 
 the pain and inflammation left my wound. She did not seem 
 to expect a present; she certainly did not ask for one, but her 
 stolid face showed satisfaction at what I gave her, and she
 
 io 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 deserved the best I had to give, for in that wild cruel country- 
 she had acted the Good Samaritan to me. I thought of the 
 other poor shrieking mother whose boys, but a few days before, 
 had been murdered in the mining camp not so far away. 
 Perhaps she was just the same sort of a kindly, competent 
 mother as my nurse must have been. 
 
 H., when he got in, was all used up. He had walked and 
 ridden about a hundred and twenty miles, and twice crossed 
 the cold and dangerous stream in those three days and nights, 
 and done it on one meal. 
 
 The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, 
 Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. 
 
 He had reached the post on the afternoon of the day after 
 he had left camp. There they urged him to stay at least for 
 one night's rest, but, very anxious about me, he refused, and 
 started back as soon as he had eaten. The doctor was to follow 
 by canoe. The Columbia was swollen and dangerous, and no 
 canoe appeared for two more days. When it came, I was 
 swept smoothly down the sixty miles to Fort Colville in a few 
 hours. 
 
 I can never repay, any more than I can forget, the kindness 
 of those people of the 22nd U. S. Infantry at Fort Colville. We 
 were strangers to them, and had no introduction or guarantee 
 whatever; but if I had been a near relative, nothing more could 
 have been done for me than they did. Major Egan and his 
 charming and beautiful wife put me to bed in their best room, 
 and all the resources of the post were at our service, and without 
 one penny of cost. Such was hospitality on the far frontier in 
 those days. The only bill we could persuade any single one of 
 them to present was that modest one of the regimental doctor. 
 My wound was now examined, and the efficiency of my Indian 
 nurse's treatment acknowledged, if a little grudgingly. The 
 large tendon had been cut through, and my big toe had a down- 
 ward inclination that looked funny, but there was no inflam- 
 mation, and everything was healing up "by first intention." 
 A shingle was tied under the foot to encourage the drooping toe, 
 and I was promoted to the sofa. 
 
 The question arose, how were we to get on with our journey? 
 Or indeed could we get on with it at all ? I found there was one
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 105 
 
 thing the severed nerves of my foot refused to let me do: that 
 was to have my leg hang down. I made a trial of riding, and 
 was lifted on horseback. I could grip the saddle, but the pain 
 in the wounded leg became intolerable. So riding was done 
 with for the present. (It was years before I could let my leg 
 hang down with comfort.) 
 
 Major and Mrs. Egan urged us to stay till spring at the fort, 
 but we were beginning to feel homesick. We had had a great 
 journey and a wonderful time. I was thinking of Cambridge 
 and the ministry, and H. had made up his mind, after long con- 
 sideration, to give up brewing beer and to devote himself to 
 medicine. So both of us were impatient of delay. But I 
 could not ride; there were no roads; how could we get on? 
 There occurred to us the farewell words of our faithful little 
 Stoney, as he stood by our side for the last time on the Great 
 Divide, and, across many a mile of wooded ridge and valley, 
 pointed the way to the Columbia and the sea. Many a night 
 in the dark forest he had told us of his adventures on the great 
 river; of its roaring rapids, far larger and fiercer than any on 
 the Saskatchewan or the Missouri, and of the salmon that lay 
 stranded in thousands on its shoals, on which the bears came 
 down from the country-side to feed. 
 
 He had floated down it laden with the fur hunter's spoils, 
 floated more than halfway from Kettle Falls to the sea; dashed 
 through many a rapid, swept under mighty cliffs of black 
 basalt that shut out the sun, and skirting the dreaded Okinagan 
 Whirlpool, the supreme danger of the journey, beached at last 
 his bateau where the impossibly wild waters of the Dalles 
 blocked all further way. 
 
 Why, here were the Kettle Falls! Not ten miles from the 
 fort. Why not run down the river, and take the steamboat 
 that ran once a week from the Dalles to Portland? If we 
 could but find a boat and crew, the thing could be done. So, 
 while I lay on the sofa, H. hunted the countryside, and found a 
 two-ton Hudson Bay boat, built the year before, and a tough 
 old voyageur who had made the hazardous trip many seasons, 
 but this year had found himself stranded among the Kootenay 
 Indians at Colville, because the Company had packed their 
 pelts down by land, having given up the river route. He 
 therefore was anxious to go down, though for the week's trip
 
 io6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 (the current was so strong that it was not unusual to make those 
 four hundred miles in that time) he wanted $65 in gold, an 
 exorbitant price! As we went into the matter with him, the 
 trouble leaked out. The last down-river voyage had ended in 
 disaster. Three boats had been lost in the Okinagan Whirlpool, 
 with a large part of their crews of twenty-seven men and their 
 cargoes. Hence the change of route, and the Company's 
 determination to abandon the river. We seemed to be up 
 against it again. However, it was go down now by boat or 
 wait indefinitely till I could ride, and we decided to take the 
 risk. H. had rowed three years in the Cambridge 'Varsity, 
 and he rather fancied himself as stroke. I would sit in the 
 stern with my foot raised up, and shout a translation of our 
 steersman's orders when necessary to the motley band of 
 Scotsmen and half-breed Kootenays that must make up our 
 crew. A new experience is always interesting, and the last 
 leg of our adventure was certainly a novelty. 
 
 H. got his crew together, and for a couple of days took them 
 out for trial spins. The Scotsmen had never rowed, the 
 Indians had only paddled, and two of them had never been on 
 the water at all. I wish I could have seen that crew when H. 
 first got it together, or better have "snapped" it, but there 
 were no "Kodaks" in those days. H., however, was en- 
 couraged. He said they were a sinewy lot and willing to work. 
 
 I got down somehow to the river bank, and the boys helped 
 me aboard. The Kettle Falls roared just above our landing 
 place. 
 
 The splendid weather still held, though it was cold. The 
 men were rowing and did not feel it. I was well muffled up, 
 and that last rush we made to the sea was really fine. H. had 
 his crew of eight husky fellows quite "well together," and they 
 got good "steering way" on our big ship before we reached the 
 rapids. Once in them, oars were tossed in the air, and safety 
 depended on the keen eye and strong arm of our steersman, 
 who stood high above the crew on a platform, steering with a 
 broad-bladed sweep that was lashed to the stern. He, and I, 
 who sat up near him, were the only ones who saw the white 
 tumult of that river. The rowers had their backs to it, and so 
 great was the rush of water that the actual passage of a rapid 
 seemed an affair of seconds only. Our good fortune held when
 
 THE GREAT LONE LAND 107 
 
 we raced between the walls of the dreaded Okinagan Canyon, 
 and literally were shot out between them into sudden calmness 
 and safety. There was no whirlpool there in our day. Once out 
 of the canyon you could have crossed the whirlpool's lair in 
 a birchbark canoe. The dark approach to it was not so much 
 a rapid as a long sloping fall. To the exact length of that fall 
 of water I cannot swear. It was said to be two miles, which I 
 do not believe, but I can swear to the time it took us to sweep 
 down it, for I had my watch in hand. It was a few seconds 
 short of two minutes. 
 
 And what a delightful journey it had been! To bring over 
 and settle eight hundred immigrants we had undertaken it, 
 and now we were leaving them behind us in a new land that, by 
 personal observation, we knew something about. We had seen 
 Canada, the little unexpanded Canada of those days, Canada 
 that could only with difficulty keep her residents and her immi- 
 grants from being drawn across her long frontier to take their 
 place in the intenser life of her great neighbour. 1 Then the 
 greatest domain that had ever been opened to the industry of 
 civilized man we saw. Next, at the other side of the mountains, 
 as by some sudden miracle, we had passed from deadly frost 
 and darkness into fresh greenery and colour and sunlight, and 
 had thawed the winter out of us by the sunny sea. Here, 
 from northern Vancouver to the Mexican border, was another 
 land of promise, rich and beautiful after its own wonderful way. 
 Lastly, over a good part of the devastated, blood-soaked 
 South we had travelled, and the awakening hope and energy 
 of its people was impressive. Surely the South would rise 
 again. 
 
 It was springtime now, just three years after Doctor Q. had 
 condemned me to death in his stuffy office in London, and I was 
 sailing home full of life and hope, yes, and with some purpose, 
 too. I had thought the matter of a life's profession over con- 
 stantly, and as I did so, the work of the ministry appealed to 
 me more and more, and an army life less and less. The idea 
 of "service" had begun to awaken within me, and I feel sure 
 that this desire to serve my fellows had unconsciously been 
 quickened and stimulated by the absorbing interest awakened 
 
 'We made a brief visit to Ontario, before sailing from the East for home, and learned that a large 
 proportion of our East Londoners had already deserted the Dominion for the United States.
 
 108 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 by these many new types and conditions of peoples to whom 
 my journey had introduced me. I began to see for myself the 
 innate possibility of good in people that my boyhood's training 
 had insisted were bad. And, still further, that even social 
 outcasts had within them springs of goodness that proved them 
 to be sons, if prodigal sons, of their Father. I was as yet far 
 from rinding a place for these soul awakenings of mine, in my 
 poor little doctrinal equipment, but these vital experiences I 
 had been through had planted new seeds within me, and they 
 took root and grew.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Cambridge 
 
 I came back to England a young man; I had left it a boy. 
 My chest weakness was a thing of the past. I had gained 
 twenty pounds in weight, and though thin I was unusually 
 tough and well capable of enduring fatigue. I set to work 
 at once to prepare for Cambridge University. I had chosen my 
 profession, and I ardently looked forward to entering the 
 ministry. 
 
 I found my mother weaker and full of pain. Her health 
 had grown worse during my year of absence, and the doctors 
 having advised country air for her, the family had moved to 
 Norwood. As it turned out she gained nothing by the change, 
 nor I think did any of us. We all lost a good deal by leaving 
 London, and Father's work was made more difficult. 
 
 I lost no time in hunting up my friends, Miss Logan and 
 F. N. Charrington. Charrington had bought a little house, 
 No. 2,Bethnal Green, had given up his partnership in his father's 
 brewery, and had gone to live in the East End permanently. 
 If he is still alive he is living there to-day. He, Keith Faulkner, 
 and the band I had left were still working together, but as they 
 were all of them stern Evangelicals, they had no associations 
 with the Oxford men who were by that time firmly established 
 in the same great, gray, desolate field of work. And now that 
 I came back to it, after my plunge into the wide world beyond, 
 now that I saw it again, its crowded misery, its contented 
 hopelessness; the contrast of it all with what I had lately seen, 
 lived in, and rejoiced in, came to me with a power, called to me 
 with a persistence I had never felt before. I began to feel a 
 great desire to bring the church to the poor. When first I 
 worked in East London, I came as one whose world was small 
 and who from babyhood had been accustomed to accept grind- 
 ing poverty as the necessary lot of multitudes. Here I was 
 
 109
 
 no THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 back in it again, after a year spent where poverty was not a 
 necessity, in a wide new land where everyone had a chance, 
 and by contrast East London was infinitely depressing. Its 
 rows of gray yellow two-story brick hovels, cluster on cluster, 
 mile after mile, streets, lanes, crescents endlessly repeated, 
 seemed as if vast insect swarms had spawned there, and fas- 
 tened the houses where they stood. No free space, no greenery, 
 no playground, no beauty anywhere, and ever over them hang- 
 ing a dirty smoke-laden pall. A hopeless place in which to be 
 born and live and die. East London has changed much since 
 then, but it is dismal enough to live in still. 
 
 I was to enter St. John's College, Cambridge, in October, if 
 I could pass the entrance examination. Now it was May, so 
 I set to work morning and afternoon with tutors, to furbish up 
 such little classical and mathematical knowledge as my rickety 
 memory retained from changeful and unsatisfactory school 
 experiences. I find little that is interesting and worth relating 
 in my Cambridge days and as I am pressed for space I shall 
 make but brief reference to them. Cambridge was a disap- 
 pointment to me. I did not gain much by my three years' 
 residence there. I do not, however, think that this was the 
 fault of the University. I was grossly ignorant of most things 
 schools should teach when I went up. I had a mere smattering 
 of Latin and Greek, worse than a smattering of history, 
 and knew nothing whatever of English composition. Math- 
 ematics I liked, but of physical science and natural 
 science I knew nothing at all. Many of my friends could write 
 Latin prose and Greek verse (they had the advantage of me 
 there) ; and some were good mathematicians; but really cultured 
 men I did not meet, or if I met them, did not come to know 
 them while I was an undergraduate. There were scholarships 
 endowed hundreds of years before, and these, as was intended, 
 were still open to the North Country boy who loved his 
 mathematics, or to the poor parson's son whose father gave him 
 a grinding in the classics. Such humble devotees of learning 
 might pursue their unostentatious way, might in time become 
 "fellows" of their college, and live henceforth in slippered 
 ease, but they counted for nothing in our social life. As under- 
 graduates they were unknown, as Dons unheeded. We did not 
 attend their lectures unless we had to, and we seldom had to.
 
 CAMBRIDGE ill 
 
 There must have been a number of brilliant men serving as 
 "Dons" (professors), but I seldom came across them. Be- 
 tween the Dons and the undergraduate a great gulf was fixed 
 in those days, and neither, so far as I saw, had any desire to 
 cross it. 
 
 Apropos of Cambridge Dons, my first meeting with one 
 of the best known of them, Todhunter, was amusing. Every 
 would-be Johnian had to pass a mathematical examination 
 before entering the college. On the day of arrival, you went 
 to the College hall, and there a long paper covering a large 
 mathematical field was given you as a test. You had three 
 hours to work on it. 
 
 The day was lovely. I had had a notice to present myself 
 for a first "tubbing" at the boat house, and if I gave three 
 hours to that paper there would be no "tubbing" for me. As 
 I studied it, I saw that the greater part was quite beyond my 
 very moderate mathematical powers, so I took a chance and 
 had a try at the one or two problems with which it ended. This 
 did not take long and I got to the boat club in time. 
 
 The results of that first examination were posted on the 
 notice board next day, and the names of the would-be John- 
 ians were classified roughly in five or six divisions. To my 
 consternation, I found my name among the very few in the first 
 list, the members of which were directed to report to the great 
 Todhunter for further instruction. 
 
 I made my way at once to the rooms of the famous Don and 
 tried to explain matters. I was not seeking mathematical 
 honours; I was a pass man. I had attempted the problems 
 because I could not do the whole paper, and I very particularly 
 wanted to keep my appointment at the Boats. He was most 
 kind and laughed heartily. "You are a good mathematician 
 spoiled," he said, " but you are right. I should never have 
 been a Don. Young man, there are few more deadly, more 
 killing things than the life of a Cambridge Don. Never be a 
 Don." 
 
 I quote from memory, but I give the spirit of what he said. 
 Later, I found that this half-humorous, half-earnest advice 
 Todhunter gave in his lectures constantly. 
 
 The ancient office of Tutor existed for the excellent pur- 
 pose of helping undergraduates to make the most of their ad-
 
 ii2 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 vantages. Once I suppose it must have functioned. In my 
 time it certainly had fallen into "innocuous desuetude." You 
 found yourself charged two pounds ten a term for tutors' fees. 
 You never saw your tutor except at the hopelessly dull dinner to 
 which, at very rare intervals, he asked you. Your real tutor 
 was paid nine pounds a term and was called your "coach. " 
 
 I was elected to the "Union" and soon after to the "Pitt," 
 this last a rather exclusive club. At the Union there were the 
 papers and debating; at the Pitt, instead of debates we en- 
 joyed college gossip and good tea. There was little or no 
 drinking. I never saw men drunk there, and the members 
 were a clean, well set-up, well-dressed crowd, but in neither 
 
 club was there anything to stimulate study. H , always 
 
 ready to do the kind thing, took me up in October and intro- 
 duced me to my tutor, and what was of immensely more im- 
 portance, to the very great man indeed who was Captain of the 
 Boats. Goldie was a "Johnian," and had done more than 
 any member of the old college had ever done to lift its head 
 high on the River. A long series of defeats had been meted 
 out to us by Oxford. Goldie had toiled with Cambridge raw 
 material till he had succeeded in turning continuous defeat 
 into dazzling victory. For three consecutive years he had 
 stroked Cambridge's victorious crew at Mortlake. The great 
 man looked my slender height over and was gruffly polite. 
 
 Here I must say something about rowing, and what I think 
 it did for me, who, unfortunately, as I shall tell, never made a 
 success of it. My rowing experiences began at once. I was 
 told to report at Lady Margaret 1 rowing club next afternoon. 
 
 H- had assured me some attention there by saying that I 
 
 ought in time to fill out and make an oar. He had given me 
 some instruction in preliminaries, such as how to use my 
 stretcher (this was before the days of sliding seats). The 
 secret of good stretcher work was to get your hips and thighs 
 into the stroke with arms straight. Freshmen were first 
 "tubbed," i. e., were taken out in ordinary two-oar rowing 
 boats by "old oars," to have their first lessons. Sometimes a 
 cox was taken along; oftener there were only the two, the 
 teacher and the taught. You rowed at stroke, he coached 
 
 *Lady Margaret was our Sixteenth Century Foundress. St. John's Rowing Club was named 
 after her.
 
 CAMBRIDGE 113 
 
 you from behind. H said before leaving, "Do your best 
 
 the first time they tub you, a lot depends on that. Remember 
 what I taught you." So it was with my heart very much in 
 my mouth that I made my way to the riverside next day, and 
 was comforted somewhat to notice that the other freshmen 
 
 seemed as much scared as I was. H 's introduction served 
 
 me, and I was taken out by a very great man indeed, who, 
 though not a "Varsity oar," had for three years rowed in the 
 " trials," i. e., the two eights made up of likely men and set to 
 race each other in order to find material for the next University 
 crew. 
 
 We got into the tub, I was given stroke, and we pushed 
 out into old Cam's dirty and unsavoury stream. (The town 
 drainage then ran into the Cam.) Goldie and a lot of old 
 oars were there, interested in seeing what promise of good 
 stuff there might be in the freshmen of the year. As the light 
 blue had triumphed atMortlake,so had Lady Margaret's colours 
 come to the fore in the "May," and Goldie was stroking the 
 second boat on the river, if I remember correctly. So interest 
 was keen that year in the freshmen's turnout. As I sat there, 
 the crowd on the bank and on the club's balcony looking down 
 on us, I felt well, almost as badly as I did when Admiral 
 Fishbourne unexpectedly called on me to speak at that first 
 meeting in Bethnal Green Baptist Chapel. That passed, and 
 I set my teeth and began to get hold of the water. The man 
 behind me weighed ten pounds more than I did (I stripped 
 only one hundred and seventy), and he was a very pretty oar. 
 Rowing bow he had, too, greater power over our course than 
 I had, at stroke, but I steadily rowed him into the bank. Now 
 I felt better. We pushed out again, and this time I could feel 
 that bank and balcony were looking at us. My coach did 
 all he knew, but I rowed him into the bank again. Goldie 
 
 came down to us and laughed loudly at . They let me 
 
 land, and I was glad to, for I was " all in." 
 
 So began my rowing experiences at Cambridge, a good be- 
 ginning. I was envied of many, but it was the undoing of me, 
 and this was how it came about. My college happened just 
 then to be very short of tall, likely fellows who could be coached 
 into useful oars for the waist of the boat, i. e., places at numbers 
 four, five, and six. I had the length of reach and strength of
 
 1 1 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 loin. I was taken in hand at once and given number five in a 
 racing eight. In that boat I was the only freshman, the rest of 
 the crew being men with quite an experience of college racing. 
 They knew how to "sit a boat," as the saying is; I, of course, did 
 not. Then they were a very light crew, and when pushed to a 
 fast stroke they "rowed light," as old oars who are not first- 
 class men generally do. I could not row "light," even if I 
 wanted to, which I didn't, for I had been taught that not to 
 cover your blade was the greatest of a rowing man's faults. 
 If I had been set to rowing with men as green as I myself, I 
 really think I should in time have made a good oar. As it was 
 I rowed myself out with a light crew behind me, the weight of 
 the boat coming on me more than it should have done. And 
 one day I strained my back. That put an end to my rowing 
 for my first October term. In the Lenten term next year I 
 rowed again. I kept rowing during my three years at Cam- 
 bridge, but my back never quite helped me as it should, and 
 much of my time I had to content myself with coaching college 
 racing crews. 
 
 But though I was a failure as an oar, rowing did me good 
 in many ways. There is fierce discipline of one's will in rowing. 
 This may sound queer, but it is the truth. The pain and 
 misery of learning to row in a racing boat is a thing that no man 
 who has worked his way up till he is a good oar can ever forget. 
 The exhilaration of the start is fine the thrilling sense of life 
 when, all the eight blades dipped together, the boat shoots for- 
 ward as a living thing. But soon there is a change. It is half 
 a mile or more before you get your second wind, and a sort of 
 feeling of uncertainty possesses the boat itself. Then if the 
 crew are an even lot, and in good training, the slogging work is 
 not so bad. Every instant is a call on every ounce of strength 
 you have and then ! a gradual change : extreme weariness grips 
 you, chest heaving and muscles aching, every bone and nerve 
 ,and sinew taxed to the utmost and/or what? " I'll never do it 
 again," you say to yourself; . . . " Rowing is all rot," . . . 
 "meant for men with shorter backs than mine," . . . "can 
 I stand it till we reach the bridge?" . . . "Our damned 
 fool of a cox must have missed bumping the crew ahead," or 
 "he has taken all the life out of the boat by giving us too much 
 rudder round that last corner." You do stand it, for you must
 
 CAMBRIDGE! its 
 
 stand it. Others are dependent on you. At last Easy all! 
 and you are at rest. Some fellows are sick; some tumble for- 
 ward on their oars. You have done all you could; perhaps not 
 what was expected of you, and if so with great plainness of 
 speech this is explained to you from the bank, by the great man 
 who has honoured you by riding alongside your boat for the 
 last two miles as you rowed the course. I'll never forget how 
 my own efforts were described by the same Olympian G. 
 "R. does his best, but for the last half mile he looked like an 
 agonized worm." The description was not flattering, but it 
 was accurate. I certainly felt like it. Of course this is not 
 quite an everyday experience, but I do not exaggerate it. It 
 is an experience that must be faced again and again, if he 
 would become an "oar." Pains do subside. The joy of con- 
 test takes you; the rush of the boat; the sense of victorious 
 strength as the well-covered blade is swept through the re- 
 sisting water; and the feeling of unity in that human machine 
 of eight young springing bodies bent on Victory. These are 
 memories that are at least as vivid as those of the trials that 
 precede them. 
 
 There may seem no connection between these experiences of 
 a second-class oar and experiences making for success in after 
 life, but I am certain that my rowing, though sadly shortened 
 by ill luck, was a real help to me. To the normal man there is a 
 queer but actual pleasure in doing something you can only 
 just do. To sip that nectar of the gods you must "train" for 
 the boat race, or the sermon, it matters not which you must 
 train. In cold, raw, unpleasant March days, in sultry summer 
 afternoons, you must stick it out and train. Then, later, Habit 
 comes imperceptibly to your aid, and the prize you are striving 
 for she helps you to win ! 
 
 Theodore Waterhouse had told me three years before that 
 if I did not work and read after some plan I would amount 
 to little. Since then, unexpected things had made planning 
 difficult. But remembering his advice, now that I could do 
 as I wished with my time, I acted on it. I rose early, at six- 
 thirty, went to morning chapel, and then studied for my next 
 examinations till two o'clock. Those hours were pure grind. 
 I did not know enough of the classics to enjoy them. I could 
 not afford a coach. I must pass. So pass I did. Two very
 
 n6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 great theologians were then resident lecturers, Professors 
 Westcott and Lightfoot. Both would rank to-day as emi- 
 nently conservative. Lightfoot was perhaps the more forward 
 looking of the two, and I attended his lectures regularly. He 
 was a great scholar; afterward he became a great bishop. There 
 was a kindly, shy brotherliness about him that captivated one. 
 He invited any who listened to him to come to his rooms and 
 ask questions, so I took him at his word. He knew I was no 
 scholar, but had I been, he could not have been kinder. He 
 would put away the work he was doing, go over his shelves, 
 take down books, find for me an appropriate chapter or verse, 
 make me sit down and talk to him, and insist on my coming 
 again. 
 
 When I left college I could pass a good examination in any 
 of his works on New Testament Greek. 
 
 I never understood why our Cambridge Dons, even the 
 greatest of them, were so shy. Few were public-school men. 
 Was this a reason? I am told that at Oxford the Dons and 
 undergraduates were not so far apart as we were at Cambridge. 
 I can see now, as I look back, that Lightfoot's teaching, though 
 it dealt mainly with the critical examination of the text of St. 
 Paul's Epistles, really suggested, yes, demanded of the scholar 
 that he should approach the problems of religion from newer 
 and more scientific points of view. To follow his line of thought 
 necessitated the virtual abandonment of much that both high 
 churchmen and low churchmen held to tenaciously: (i) man's 
 religious ideas were subject to and were influenced by the 
 laws of growth; in other words, Christian doctrine was an 
 evolution; (2) Verbal inspiration therefore could no longer be 
 defended successfully; (3) With unanswerable learning, he re- 
 futed the claims of the Episcopate to the possession of an exclusive 
 ministerial and sacramental gift. In short, Apostolic succession 
 might or might not be true historically, but if it were true, a 
 good man serving God and his fellows in the Presbyterian, 
 Methodist, or any other denomination could as authoritatively 
 preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments as could the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope of Rome. 
 
 I listened carefully to all he said, and I studied his writings, 
 but their full significance did not come to me till long years 
 after. I did not see then that the revelation of God to man
 
 CAMBRIDGE 117 
 
 was not, and till man ceased to be man, never could be, a 
 finished revelation, its record bound within the covers of one 
 incomparably great book, but must ever be a continuous proc- 
 ess. Moreover, that revelation must be continuously made 
 by men to men, and not by one man only, not even by one 
 Jesus Christ, but by many men in many nations, and in many 
 religions the Lord Jesus being the chief of God's revealers, 
 "the chief among ten thousand and the altogether lovely." 
 
 Small wonder that I did not then see this, for it is only here 
 and there that an accredited minister in any Protestant de- 
 nomination yet sees this axiomatic truth. But a short time ago 
 to preach that view of Jesus' revelation cost a man summary 
 trial for heresy and expulsion from any orthodox Christian 
 church. Let me say here that in 1903 I preached it as well as I 
 knew how, delivering a series of sermons in St. Stephen's P. E. 
 Church, Philadelphia, where my friend, the Rev. Ellwood 
 Worcester, was rector. A large number of the clergy of the 
 diocese headed by Rev. Floyd Tompkins of Trinity Church, 
 Philadelphia (Phillips Brooks's old church), in their zeal for 
 orthodoxy urged the Bishop of Pennsylvania to try me for 
 heresy. 
 
 The old sailor loves his ship; he has weathered many a storm 
 in her, and she has carried for him many a cargo. He believes 
 in wooden ships. None of your iron or steel death-traps for 
 him. Creeds and dogmas take a long time to grow, and a long 
 time to die. It is doubtful if the most effective religious teachers 
 of our day could find even now a place in the orthodox pulpits 
 of our land. Certainly Royce, the greatest Christian philos- 
 opher Harvard has produced, couldn't. But the light spreads: 
 that is the nature of light; and the truth grows a little less dim: 
 that is the nature of truth; and the number of men of "good 
 will" is increasing in our old world. And so approaches a 
 better day, when we shall be judged to have failed or succeeded 
 in our life's task, in so far as we have failed or succeeded in 
 revealing a reasonable, a ruling, and a lovable God to those 
 around us "A power not ourselves that makes for righteous- 
 ness." Once the Church led men to the light. To-day, too 
 commonly, there is more darkness in the Church than in the 
 world she claims to lead and save. 
 
 Through the "Backs" the Cam winds lazily, water plants
 
 u8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 swaying in its sluggish current. It seems, as it slowly creeps 
 along between lawns that have been rolled and mowed for 
 hundreds of years, with ancient trees on either side, and under 
 buildings of warm-tinted Elizabethan brick, to be doing its best 
 to free itself from the soilure of the modern town, and to be- 
 come, as was intended, a river on whose banks a great univer- 
 sity might fittingly stand. These Cambridge Backs form one 
 of the most beautiful parks in England. In May-time every 
 linden tree and hawthorn bush harbours a nightingale. I 
 counted sixty-three one spring morning, each bent on out- 
 singing his neighbour. In the modern town there is no beauty 
 and but few good buildings, but you are outside it in a short 
 mile's walking, and then across what was not so long ago the 
 wide fenland to westward you can see perhaps the finest sun- 
 sets in England. With Wordsworth in my pocket, I often took 
 that westward walk. 
 
 There was a good deal of poverty and many neglected 
 children in Cambridge, and we Evangelicals organized and 
 maintained a rather good Sunday School at Jesus Lane. I had 
 a class in it. 
 
 Till my second year at Cambridge no girl had ever cast her 
 eyes on me, or if she had, I was none the wiser for it. There 
 was a small fast set at Cambridge then, but they did not amount 
 to much. A member of one of these kept a very pretty girl 
 in a cottage some distance out of town. In the middle of the 
 May term King's College throws open its gates for one day to 
 the University. Then, on the beautiful lawns surrounding 
 Henry VII's chapel, everybody comes to look at everybody, 
 and everybody's visiting friends and relations. King's Day is 
 the gala day of the year. 
 
 I was strolling among the crowd when I caught the girl's 
 eye fixed on me, and in spite of myself I returned her look. 
 Hers was a beautiful and not a bad face. I felt strangely 
 disturbed and went to my rooms. Do what I would, I could 
 not forget her, but the term was almost over and in a few days 
 I went home. I had had no girl friends in my life. Boys did 
 not make girl friends then in England as they do now in the 
 United States. Not in Dundalk or London or Mentone had I 
 had much experience of their society. In the October term 
 following I met her again face to face on King Street. I al-
 
 CAMBRIDGE 119 
 
 most stopped, and so did she. That evening it was a full 
 moon, I remember I went down the road where her cottage 
 stood. The way must have been clear for her; she must have 
 been expecting me, for as I drew near the door slowly opened 
 and a hand was waved to me. My heart stood still. I felt 
 myself sway as I walked. I was present with the thing I sought; 
 it was offered me; and take it I could not. I walked on. Then 
 my blood was too much for me, and I came opposite her door 
 again. It stood half open still. Then I passed by once more 
 and walked and walked, I don't know where or for how long. 
 I did not sleep till morning, but I won out that night. I never 
 kissed a woman's lips till I kissed the girl that married me; 
 that was seven years later. If I had been beaten that night, 
 I know I would have been a ruined man. Some will say: why 
 put a trivial thing like this in your story? I do so not for the 
 sake of bragging, God knows, but because it may help some 
 young man in his dark hour. I have been honoured, during 
 my life, with the confidences of very many. I "speak that I 
 do know" when I say all life's future depends on the first battle 
 with passion. 
 
 For in the morn and liquid dew of youth, 
 Contagious blastments are most imminent. 
 
 A man should go clean-bodied and taintless to the arms of 
 his love, the mother of his children. The old Evangelical creed 
 of my childhood did so much for me. This is no impossible 
 ideal for boy or man. The struggle against impurity is hardest 
 at the very beginning. Win then, and victory comes easier 
 with each year. But once begin to sin, and few stop sinning. 
 I was much alone in the succeeding years. Few knew me, my 
 steps were unmarked. I was often thrown into the company 
 of attractive women, and sometimes the ways of pleasure stood 
 wide open. But never again had I to face the fierceness and 
 the pain of the struggle I went through that autumn night at 
 Cambridge. 
 
 My Cambridge life seems unsatisfactory as I look back on it. 
 I did not find in it what I hoped to find. I worked hard and 
 alone, and made few friends, and these I lost when I left the 
 Church of England and came to the United States. 
 
 While at Cambridge, I worked in Bethnal Green a good deal
 
 120 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 during vacations, and was very happy in it. Those I knew 
 there were no slackers, no fair-day workers. They were giving 
 their all, the best they had, to the best they knew. They could 
 say with Paul, "This one thing I do," and none who have grace 
 to stand on that ground with the great Apostle can ever lack for 
 power with their fellow-men, no matter what gospel they 
 preach. But, as I see now, the very nature and scope of the 
 gospel we held and taught tended to weaken and isolate us. 
 It was a purely individualistic message we delivered; good as 
 far as it went, but it did not go far enough; half of a great truth, 
 but only half, Save your soul alive: this the one thing worth 
 doing. Jesus' religion as we held it went no further. Preach- 
 ing that in season and out of season, talking ever and always 
 about it as we did, never sitting next a stranger in the omnibus 
 or railroad car without talking it, never dining at a friend's 
 table and leaving it out I don't exaggerate this was the 
 steadily pursued habit of a considerable body of able and earnest 
 men at the time I am speaking of. Literally an " in season and 
 out of season" appeal "whether they would hear or whether 
 they would forbear," and it meant a power. But this sort 
 of religious zeal, these methods of religious activity, made 
 naturally for Individualism. What we needed, though no 
 power on earth could have induced us to take the medicine, 
 was a good dose of Darwin: something to make us under- 
 stand a little of the cause of things. What we failed to see was 
 that men and women who came of tainted stock, conceived in 
 sin and cradled in dirt, not educated to the inevitable things in 
 life, or educated wrongly, could not get saved at all. Matthew 
 Arnold, with his unequalled critical perspicacity, says of Words- 
 worth, whom he placed among the very great: 
 
 But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken 
 From half of human fate 
 
 Wordsworth idealized Nature. In other words, he saw half of 
 things as he wished to see them, not as they actually were; and 
 that is what the majority of even the best of us have ever been 
 inclined to do. We try to make our little schemes account 
 for the facts of life, and when we fail, we cheerfully and fatally 
 reverse Nature's order; rather than change or give up our
 
 CAMBRIDGE 121 
 
 scheme, we dodge the facts; we adapt environment to organism 
 rather than organism to environment. 
 
 Men like my friends Herbert Watney and Fred Charring- 
 ton, who had given up wealth and friends in order to preach the 
 Gospel as they saw it; General Booth, then beginning to or- 
 ganize his splendid Salvation Army of the future; a few de- 
 voted high churchmen, who exalted their priestly office, aim- 
 ing thereby to help and save the lost; the University clergy 
 and soap-box ranters all of us made the same mistake, and 
 most are making it still. We declared that Religion has to do 
 with the supernatural. Some say a supernatural Bible, others 
 a supernatural Church, still others a supernatural miracle 
 worker. The first says he is God's prophet, the second, God's 
 priest, the third, God's healer all trying to make men believe 
 that God will do something, or help them to do something, 
 supernaturally, if they but pray earnestly enough and believe 
 firmly enough. Anything with a hint of the supernatural is, 
 according to the orthodox, a diviner thing than the merely 
 natural; a supernatural way a holier way than a natural. So a 
 supernaturally working God is proclaimed, and that means a 
 ghostly, changing, and unreal God. For, at the long last, 
 man is face to face with the inescapable truth that there is no 
 such thing as the finally supernatural at all. 
 
 The supernatural of a mid-African nigger or of the Pope of 
 Rome is only the word each of them applies to that shifting point 
 where his knowledge of the actual ends and his yearning to know is 
 balked.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Norwich, First Cure of Souls 
 
 7" would retemper the individual life through communion with the 
 Universal Life. I would dive into the midst of present things in order 
 to draw inspiration from them. I would mingle with men in order to 
 draw strength from them. Mazzini. 
 
 In December, i 873, 1 went up to Norwich to take the Bishop's 
 examination for deacon's orders. I knew a little about the 
 field of work, but nothing about my future bishop or my rec- 
 tor. As matters turned out I was extraordinarily fortunate in 
 both. If I had hunted all England over, I could not have 
 found kinder or wiser friends and counsellors than they proved 
 to be to me. 
 
 Rumour said that the Rt. Rev. the Hon. John Thomas 
 Pelham, Bishop of Norwich, insisted that postulants should 
 pass an unusually searching examination, and I presented my- 
 self at the Palace with trepidation. I hated examinations, and 
 this one worse than any preceding it, for you could not tell 
 what awaited you, or what you would be examined in. The 
 Bishop's examining chaplain was a well-known Cambridge 
 Don, a fine scholar, a deeply religious man, and a gentleman. 
 So much was comforting. I expected to find a room in some 
 hotel, but on calling at the Palace the butler informed me that 
 my room was ready, and that all the candidates were the 
 Bishop's guests. 
 
 A very ancient house a little modernized was the Palace. It 
 stood under the shadow of the spire, the loftiest but one in 
 England, and all round it was an old-fashioned flower 
 garden, with yew trees and spreading lawns. Much of the 
 early work on the Cathedral was Norman, and this part of 
 the great church stood out splendidly, firm and grim. The 
 city wall hugged the Cathedral and its attendant buildings 
 closely. Norwich Cathedral is somewhat out of the line of 
 
 122
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 123 
 
 sight-seeing travel, but after Durham, Winchester, and York, 
 to my mind it is the best thing architecturally in England. Its 
 setting in the spacious gardens, closed in by old flint-faced 
 fourteenth-century walls, is especially fine. 
 
 Nothing was left undone by the Bishop to make his would- 
 be clergy feel at home. We all sat at his table, in an old, 
 wainscoted dining room; he, a tall, very aristocratic-looking 
 old man, but most gracious and fatherly; a Peer of the 
 English realm if you will, but a true and watchful shepherd 
 of the human flock over whom he had been set as overseer. So 
 he seemed to me, that first evening I met him. In the drawing 
 room after dinner he and Mrs. Pelham tried to draw our 
 heterogeneous units together, but naturally we were a difficult 
 lot about fifteen of us. Family prayers soon followed in the 
 great hall, all the servants joining, the Bishop giving out a hymn 
 and leading the singing. After reading the Scripture he 
 prayed. He had a delightful and original way of praying. 
 He laid the whole Prayer-Book under contribution for prayers 
 and bits of prayers. He drew them out from anywhere and 
 from everywhere as he needed them, as only a spiritual artist 
 and a saint could do; and then at times, simply as a father with 
 his children, he would lead us in extempore prayer. 
 
 I was to spend many evenings in that ancient Palace of 
 Norwich, stately and gray in its exterior but warmed with 
 a consistent Christian kindliness that blessed both the giver 
 and receiver. The Bishop of Norwich was the first great 
 ecclesiastic I had ever met, and he made a profound impression 
 on me. He seemed to me a real "Father in God," after the 
 beautiful old phrase. He was a sound scholar; not a great 
 preacher; but I never anywhere met a man who impressed me 
 as living nearer to God, or one who more utterly gave all he had 
 and all he was to the service of his fellow-men. Since those days 
 I have known many bishops and many examining chaplains, 
 but I have never had experience of any methods of testing a 
 candidate's fitness for the ministry that was so natural, so in- 
 formal, yet so searching, as was this first experience of my own. 
 The spaciousness and quiet of the old Cathedral town helped, 
 of course, the plan. In the crush and hurry of a great city it 
 would have been harder to accomplish. But those quiet 
 days in the golden autumn weather, with their walks and talks
 
 i2 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 when the long hours of examination were over, I never can 
 forget, nor can I ever cease to be thankful for them. 
 
 As to the examinations themselves, I did quite extraordinarily 
 badly. I never could write Latin prose, and with that exception 
 most of our examination was oral, and I was no good at that, 
 either. I made every mistake a man not an utter fool could 
 make, and all hope of being admitted deacon just then, I gave 
 up. When the chaplain had finished with us, each went to 
 spend some time alone with the Bishop in his study. When 
 my turn came, I was so really discouraged and upset that I 
 scarcely knew what I was saying. The dear man was very 
 gentle with me. "Mr. Rainsford," said he, "you have done 
 unusually poorly. I cannot quite understand why. Will you 
 now repeat to me the Apostles' Creed?" I began, stammering, 
 the Nicene. And that I could not repeat correctly. He 
 stopped me, gently! Not one harsh word! He saw I wasn't 
 master of my nerves. "I make enquiries," said he, "about 
 my candidates, before they come here for ordination, and of 
 you I have heard things I like. If I now admit you to deacon's 
 orders, will you promise me that during this next year you will 
 work hard, not only in your parish but at your books, so that 
 when you seek 'Priests,' I may know that I have not made a 
 mistake now, in spite of your failure, in admitting you to the 
 Deaconite." I could not answer him, but I looked my grati- 
 tude, and I loved and honoured John Thomas, Bishop of Nor- 
 wich, as a Father in God. 
 
 In December, 1874, I went up for my Priests, and once 
 again in the same study stood alone before my dear Bishop. 
 "You have not failed yourself, nor disproved my opinion of 
 you. You have passed an excellent examination. I am 
 pleased with you, and thankful that a year ago I took the 
 unusual course I did." 
 
 So I went from Cambridge straight into Orders without any 
 seminary training. I had no segregation in the artificial at- 
 mosphere of a theological college. I am glad of it, and with 
 the dim hope that some of our bishops may be influenced a 
 little by what I say I stress the point again. Our bishops have 
 wide power; they can really select and ordain any man they choose. 
 The Episcopate was twice a possibility for me. That, of course, 
 was in the early days of my ministry, before I had had time to
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 125 
 
 say or do anything in particular, and before I was tagged a 
 heretic. And it was just this one splendid power resident in 
 the office that appealed to me. "Oh, Fathers in God, for pity's 
 sake let some men into the depleted ranks of clergy who cannot, will 
 not, should not, become Theologs." Many good fellows get on 
 the wrong track as soon as they become Theologs. They feel 
 they are not quite as other students are, and alas ! other students 
 feel just the same about them. Their views of life, of duty, 
 of sin, of the world, of things you may and may not do, are the 
 views of the Theolog. Life for them "is sicklied o'er with a 
 pale cast of thought." The seminary is not the university, and 
 it is not the world, and when men come out of it they may 
 find they have paid too big a price for the only thing they got 
 there a little doubtful theology. A witty friend of mine 
 once asked, "Why are theological seminaries like Aaron's 
 mysterious fire? Because, like Aaron, you put in gold and 
 there came out this calf." (Ex. xxxii; 24.) 
 
 The Church is out of touch with much, oh, so much,of what is 
 best in the modern world, and for this calamitous fact the 
 separating education of the clergy is largely responsible. 
 
 When I have an attack of the "blues" I find myself some- 
 times wondering if I was right in seeking ordination, and en- 
 tering the ministry of the national Church of England. I was 
 in many ways unfitted for the clerical profession as it was and 
 still is popularly conceived of. Any one can see this who has 
 followed my story. At the time I did not realize this, but how 
 often do any of us realize what we are binding ourselves to 
 when we enter any profession? A sense of my unfitness has 
 constantly grown on me. Yet, by the time one has gauged 
 one's powers or lack of powers, gauged the varying brakes and 
 obstructions, some of them almost intolerable, on freedom of 
 speech or of action, incidental to a clergyman's life, there has 
 arisen to balance it a sense of the loss and hurt to others any 
 surrender of that calling must entail. I suppose it must ever 
 be so. I suppose we cannot work as free men under complex 
 social conditions any more than we can as naked men; that 
 conventions of necessity bind us on every side and in every 
 relation of life. 
 
 But of this I am sure: that easier, freer, more natural ways 
 must be found within my own church and all churches for the
 
 126 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 using of men and women eminently fitted to instruct and stimu- 
 late their fellows, specially those called to preach, without the 
 hampering imposition of old and irrelevant doctrinal tests 
 and creeds. To-day, the tragedy of it is, the little fellows get 
 in> and the larger stay out. Consequently, the clergy of all the 
 Protestant churches are steadily losing the influence they once 
 had. 
 
 My rector, William Nottage Ripley, lived at Earlham Hall, 
 three miles outside the town. I was to stay with him till I 
 secured a lodging in the parish. When I got out of the train at 
 Norwich station there was no carriage to meet me, and for the 
 first time I learned how far away Earlham was. I left my 
 small baggage at the depot and walked out. I had not met 
 either my rector or his wife, and this did not seem a very hope- 
 ful beginning. I had got about two miles on my way when, 
 on the straight empty road, I saw a lady walking at a fast pace 
 to meet me. Right up to me she came, holding out both hands 
 that was ever her way and saying, " I know you are our new 
 curate. Dear! it was too bad the coachman had so many 
 things to do," (that meant, as I soon got to know, that that 
 faithful old family piece had to call with chicken broth here, 
 take a pat of butter there, and a little something good some- 
 where else, and these, his beloved mistress's commands, were the 
 first charge on his time, let trains and curates come and go as 
 they might) "he missed the train altogether." How she knew 
 me I don't know, but soon I came to have absolute and de- 
 lightful confidence in her loving intuitions. She was quite a 
 great lady, was Mrs. Ripley, 
 
 And works of week-day holiness 
 
 Fell from her noiseless as the snow, 
 
 Nor had she ever learned to know 
 That aught was easier than to bless. 
 
 She loved me and believed in me and mothered me. She had 
 been a beautiful woman, and still retained the sweet graces and 
 energy of her youth. Hers was a charity that never thought 
 evil till it had to, for she was of a keen and discerning spirit. 
 Enthusiastic when she gave her friendship, yet not so blinded 
 by it that she was not the wisest and frankest of critics. Cul- 
 tured in her tastes, with an ample income, she and her husband
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 127 
 
 made Earlham, to those privileged to visit it, a home to re- 
 member. 
 
 Earlham was an Early Georgian manor house, spreading into 
 a semicircle on either wing, offering an unpretentious frontage 
 to the north, but having an ample southern face, covered with 
 the longest wisteria in England, and Gloire de Dijon roses in- 
 numerable. It was full of odd corners and unexpected stair- 
 ways, and no one ever seemed to know how many bedrooms 
 there were in it, there always being an extra one for the most 
 unexpected guest. 
 
 Here, when the full day's work was over on Sunday, I came to 
 rest; here encouragement, wise counsel, and unfailing love were 
 ever given me. Had ever a curate a happier introduction to 
 his work? At Earlham I saw what a rector's house should be. 
 I there resolved that if ever I had young clergy to direct, I 
 would try to be intimate with them, try to understand them, 
 making them feel that they were not merely my juniors, my 
 "nethanim," the "hewers of wood and drawers of water," 
 mere parish drudges, assistants to be drilled and ordered 
 about; but my younger brothers who had a claim on all I was 
 and all I knew. It is a strange and a sad fact that but few 
 popular clergy make a success of it with their assistants. Yet 
 no opportunity for the accomplishment of lasting good can life 
 offer to any man greater than that of choosing the right sort of 
 clergy to assist him, and inspiring as well as superintending the 
 opening years of their lives. The parish, rather than the 
 seminary, should be the true training ground for the younger 
 clergy. 
 
 My first sermon in St. Giles', preached to a crowd, for every- 
 one turned out to hear the new curate, was, as all my first ser- 
 mons have been, a failure. It was so in Bethnal Green, so in 
 St. Giles', so in Holy Trinity, 42nd Street, New York, and so 
 on. I had, from the beginning of my ministry, made up my 
 mind not to read my sermon. My best and wisest friends 
 often urged me to read at least one sermon a week, but I am 
 sure my determination was well taken. Yielding to them, I 
 did on occasions carefully write my sermon in full and read it. 
 When I did so I felt a loss of power. I could not grip my 
 audience. That first evening in my new field, after preaching, 
 I walked out to Earlham with my dear lady. I had done
 
 128 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 my very best by my sermon, had thought out carefully things 
 I wanted to say, and arranged them in the order in which I 
 wanted to say them, condensing the subject matter into several 
 pages of notes, which I took into the pulpit. All in vain. I for- 
 got what I had in mind, and was too nervous to read my mem- 
 oranda, and stumbled and mixed things up sadly. Naturally 
 I felt discouraged, for I was sure my kind rector must have 
 been disappointed in me. 
 
 I remember we walked quite a long way in silence. Then 
 she, reading my thought, took my arm for a moment and said to 
 me, as though I were her son: "Do not be disheartened, dear. 
 God has called you to preach to men." 
 
 I began a strenuous life in Norwich. I lived in a tiny house, 
 owned by a little old lady who was kindly attentive to all 
 my wants, and was cleanliness itself. I rose at six, and read 
 my Greek Testament with the best commentaries I could find, 
 for a couple of hours before breakfast; and I formed the habit 
 of reading while dressing, committing to memory a few lines of 
 good poetry. This habit I kept up till I was sixty, and I try to 
 keep to it still. 
 
 After breakfast on Tuesday morning I immediately at- 
 tacked my sermon for the coming Sunday. Mondays, unless 
 some emergency call sounded, I took for myself. 
 
 My father, when he bade me good-bye, gave me a piece of 
 advice for which I can never be thankful enough, and which I 
 have handed on to many others, I hope with profit to some of 
 them: "You are going all your life to have much speaking and 
 teaching to do. Give every single morning in the week, if 
 necessary, to preparing as thoroughly as you can one discourse. 
 Do that, and you will never run dry, even if you have to speak 
 somewhere every day." 
 
 I have proved the wisdom of my father's advice. Enrich 
 your mind persistently on one subject, and you have a sense of 
 security in speaking. Better far repeat a subject several times, 
 if necessary, than fall back on unprepared stuff. If you have 
 anything to say, your listeners do not object to having it re- 
 peated to them more than once. They grow wearied only 
 when you have nothing to say. The fine old Greek proverb 
 always holds true: "A good thing will bear repeating." 
 
 My Sunday work began early and lasted till late at night.
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 129 
 
 Early Communion at eight, Sunday School at nine-thirty; at 
 eleven, morning prayers and sermon. I preached on alternate 
 Sundays with my rector. Afternoon services and sermon at 
 four-thirty I always took. Evening prayers and sermon at 
 seven-thirty, which I took alternately with the rector. Later, 
 another service was added of which I shall tell. I was for- 
 tunate indeed in having William Ripley as my first rector. In 
 his own wise, loving, gentle way, he advised my making cer- 
 tain rules for my clerical life. "To be effective, you must work 
 on schedule; have a daily rule and keep to it." If you do not 
 have a system, trifles will demoralize and defeat you. How 
 many good men have I known who were busy all the time 
 and accomplished little of worth. Specially he insisted on 
 visiting, steady, constant visiting; and he was right. The only 
 way to know your people, the only way to reach into their lives 
 in order to help, and so the very best way to get the right 
 sort of sermons to preach to them, and illustrations to make 
 your sermons clear and interesting, is to visit. All who suc- 
 ceed as visitors of their flock cannot preach. But the man 
 who can preach will very greatly increase the influence he wields 
 in the pulpit if he forces himself to visit, not his pet parishion- 
 ers alone, but all sorts and conditions of people in his parish; 
 not alone the old ladies that adore him, but the hard-headed 
 men who fight shy of him. The clergy do not visit any longer 
 as much as they did forty years ago. Among my own as- 
 sistants at St. George's, I found at times a disinclination to 
 face its drudgery. But I never knew a young cleric yet who 
 faithfully persisted in this duty who was not greatly the gainer 
 thereby. 
 
 I must digress for a little to explain the Church of England's 
 position in the old city of Norwich with its 85,000 people. 
 There were more than forty such churches within the ancient 
 walls (St. Giles' stood outside), some of these were almost 
 empty and some were quite empty, and it was difficult to 
 secure the attendance of two parishioners who were com- 
 municants; so difficult indeed that the Holy Communion 
 could not be administered in them oftener than once or twice 
 in the year. Several of the oldest of these churches were, in 
 my time, University "livings." Now the University "living," 
 however well the plan may have worked long ago, had become
 
 r 3 o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 often little less than a scandal in later days. Celibacy was 
 still enforced by the two great Universities on their resident 
 clerical Dons. While they were teaching they must not 
 marry. As soon as a living in the College's gift fell vacant, it 
 was automatically offered to the senior resident Don. He, 
 poor man, had for long years been looking forward to the day 
 when at last a college living with income sufficient to live on 
 should be open to him. History doth not tell of any Dons 
 promoted from those college livings of Cambridge. Those 
 who held them were slow to die. So the net result was, these 
 city churches, which were intended doubtless by those good 
 men who founded them to be centres of light and leading, came 
 to be ruled by a succession of very elderly Cambridge Dons, 
 who once, long ago, had been great in some field of learning, but 
 were as incapable as honest men well could be of successfully 
 filling the role of City Rector. Thus a rule that had once 
 worked well was allowed to become a cause of pathetic scandal 
 both to the University and the Church. 
 
 Any Cambridge man of my time will remember Betsey R 
 
 I will not give his surname; it is not necessary. Betsey R 
 
 was an extraordinarily dried-up old gentleman, or so he seemed 
 to our unsympathetic youth who had to endure his murderous 
 way of reading morning prayers at chapel through his nose. 
 
 Betsey R was patient; he had waited long; he must have 
 
 been almost seventy when I knew him, but he had, as most of 
 the Dons who were in like condition, made his choice of a 
 maiden years before who had also agreed to be patient. To- 
 gether they waited till the obstinately healthy incumbent of 
 the living he longed for finally gave up the ghost. As soon 
 as he did, Betsey was inducted, and married to his elderly lady 
 in short order. We heartless youths, rejoicing in his absence, 
 had made careful inquiries as to the date of his entrance on the 
 duties of parish priest. His little country church was some 
 miles outside the town, but on that first Sunday morning 
 
 Betsey R looked us full in the face as he again murdered 
 
 the service, and well rewarded us for our long walk by request- 
 ing the congregation, when the proper place in prayers was 
 reached, "to join with him in returning thanks to Almighty 
 God for three weeks' uninterrupted connubial bliss." 1 
 
 1 Absolutely true.
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 131 
 
 One of the most brilliant mathematicians Cambridge had 
 produced came in this way to be rector of a little old church in 
 
 a poor part of the town. Mr. was a curiosity and a wit. 
 
 One Sunday in the year he had a well-filled church. It was the 
 twenty-first Sunday after Trinity, because he then convulsed 
 the younger part of his audience by the liberty he took in read- 
 ing the third chapter of Daniel, the first lesson for that day. 
 In that chapter occurs the passage, "At what time ye hear the 
 sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer 
 and all kinds of music, ye fall down and worship the golden 
 image that Nebuchadnezzar the King hath setAip." This list 
 of instruments is repeated three times in the course of the chap- 
 ter. The first time he would read it as it was written, but 
 afterward he substituted for it the phrase, "the aforesaid 
 gentlemen with the brass band." 
 
 Once a year there was a collection for the choir. His wife 
 was a competent organist and choir leader, and in its own way 
 the music was not bad. I had at the time a large following 
 among the poor people and he invited me to preach the sermon. 
 The pulpit was a very narrow black oak box. The choir sat 
 immediately underneath the pulpit in an immense square pew, 
 surrounded by a rail, along which ran a heavy old red baize 
 curtain. As soon as the singing was over and I entered the 
 pulpit, one of the choir rose and noisily drew the curtain right 
 round the three open sides of the pew. Then he seated himself 
 beside one of the girls, and putting his arm round her waist, 
 drew her head down on his shoulder. She made no sort of 
 objection, and he kept it there. Then he looked up straight 
 into my face and winked. This was too much. So I walked out 
 
 of the pulpit and across the chancel to where Doctor was 
 
 seated. I said, "Your choir are behaving outrageously behind 
 that curtain. I cannot go on with my sermon till it is stopped." 
 The Doctor's answer was as prompt as could be. He rose, 
 walked up to the square pew, tore the whole rotten baize cur- 
 tain away with a jerk, exposing the disconcerted choir, his wife 
 included, to the full view of the highly interested congregation, 
 went back to his seat in the Chancel and sat down. I went 
 back to my sermon, but our adventures were not yet over. 
 The stone sill of the church door was low, the grass-grown 
 graves pressed up close to it, and presently out of the grass
 
 i 3 2 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 came a hen, followed by her brood of chicks. The sleepy old 
 sexton never saw her till she was well up the aisle. Then he 
 made a rush for her. The hen protested loudly and the chicks 
 scattered. "Leave her alone, John," said the Doctor, "she's 
 doing no harm. She knows well there is generally plenty of 
 room in the church." 1 
 
 God forbid that I should criticize harshly the poor, defeated 
 clergy of the old town. Once many of them must have had 
 bright hopes of a life usefully spent among their fellow-men. 
 Many of them must have toiled hard to win that learning 
 which won them recognition in the University, and so enabled 
 them to step out of the order into which they were born. 
 
 Stopford Brook in his diary, with sympathetic insight, out- 
 lines the tragedy often attending such lives: 
 
 How many fine intellects, how many men who have done original work in 
 many paths, have been buried in the grave of the Church of England. It is 
 shocking to think of it. The miserable conventions tied them down. The 
 strong escape the bonds and do what suits them well. There are others whom 
 the atmosphere exactly suits, and they do good work. But there are hun- 
 dreds who, not being strong enough to resist the pressure, never develop as 
 they ought, and year by year they rot and rot. And thereby hangs a tale. 
 Just imagine if William Morris and Burne Jones had gone into the church as 
 they intended, what the world would have lost, and what they would have 
 been. Fancy Morris a fighting Archdeacon like Dennison, and Burne Jones 
 a rose fancier like Dean Hole! 
 
 There is a settled melancholy at the back of the greater number of minis- 
 ters. Most of them have never lived, some of them have never even tried to 
 live. They know little or nothing of the world. Excellent men, but pro- 
 foundly ignorant of any human nature save what they find in themselves 
 and in their wives. How can they preach? The one thing to preach 
 about they do not know. 
 
 And Stopford Brook might have added that in the Church of 
 England they have not, as the Roman priesthood has, the im- 
 mensely educating and quickening aid of the Confessional. 
 
 St. Giles' had always been well attended. It stood outside 
 the walls, and its congregation was largely formed of the pro- 
 fessional class, lawyers, doctors, and small business men. There 
 were, too, many poor. As I went about the town I could not 
 fail to notice that it held a great non-church-going population. 
 The Congregational and Presbyterian bodies had their chapels, 
 
 'Again I am but stating the fact.
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 133 
 
 and able men filled their pulpits, but all their pews were rented 
 and they made little attempt to reach the bulk of the labouring 
 class. These should have been shepherded by the Church of 
 England, but they were not; the problem was how to reach 
 them. I told my rector I wanted to try to do a little on this 
 line. Many difficulties presented themselves, and the chief 
 of them was the most ridiculous. I must not preach, even on 
 the street, in any of the forty-odd parishes, without first ob- 
 taining the permission of its rector. The rector of a parish 
 could not silence a street ranter, but he could his fellow cleric. 
 I had made up my mind that the best and most effective thing 
 I could do was to preach on the streets. In Norwich market- 
 place stood a very lovely Gothic church, empty enough 
 on Sundays, quite empty week-days. The market-place was 
 within its parish bounds, but certain ideas of freedom of con- 
 course seemed to go with a great market, and there I deter- 
 mined to make a start. I made no request for permission to 
 speak for to do so would have brought certain refusal. 
 
 I chose a fine day in the autumn. I put on my best frock 
 coat, and furnished me with a powerful bell. I went quite 
 alone. I told no one, not even my dear lady. I stood under 
 the old church wall. The market square sloped up to me. I 
 rang my bell and then, as from all over the square, full of 
 people at that hour, a crowd gathered, I spoke for some fifteen 
 minutes, not more, and went away. The police did not inter- 
 fere, as I had chosen my stand so as not to obstruct traffic, 
 and there was no protest made by the rector of the parish. 
 One of the farmers living near Earlham said to my startled 
 lady that evening: "Your new curate is a Methody, he was 
 preaching in the market to-day, and he didn't look like a Meth- 
 ody, either." 
 
 So began a work that grew and lasted for the next two years, 
 and I think I am only stating the truth when I say, affected 
 for good the social as well as the religious life of the city. 
 Helpers gathered round me from that day onward. We map- 
 ped the city into districts, and about forty of us preached in the 
 streets all over the town. There was some rough play at first, 
 and some were hurt by stone throwing, but this soon ceased. 
 From the older central parishes of the town complaints were 
 made to the Bishop. He ignored them. In the outlying and
 
 134 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 more populous parishes we received sympathetic if not active 
 support. My band of young assistants had even less experi- 
 ence, less learning, less theology than had I. But then our 
 religious lives had been touched and quickened. We were all 
 dead in earnest and we were not seeking anything for our- 
 selves. Simple conditions to fulfill, but when they are ful- 
 filled, something in the deepest part, the finally permanent 
 part of human nature, quickly responds to those who fulfill 
 them. 
 
 To compare the little with the great, English religious life, 
 decayed almost to death, and a large part of American life, too, 
 had, when Wesley and Witfield were driven out of the church 
 and into the streets and fields, one hundred years before, been 
 mightily moved by the same direct appeal. What those greatly 
 persecuted men and their followers did to save the religious life 
 of the two nations destined largely to lead and mould the 
 civilization of the next century, it is impossible to exaggerate. 
 We knew no other gospel; we preached no other. Our Evan- 
 gelical message of pardon for the sinner who repented, and 
 new strength and hope for the reborn man, was the same as 
 theirs. It uplifted and saved England and America in the 
 Eighteenth Century; I have tried to show some few of the 
 results it had in the Nineteenth Century; and whatever changes 
 may come in the far future, however necessary it may be to 
 modify the methods used in stating it, so as to commend it to 
 the consciences of men and make it fit with the learning of the 
 times,/ am convinced it ever will remain the central core, the living, 
 growing seed core, of the Gospel of the Universal Jesus. 
 
 Some will ask, "How can you account for the religious con- 
 dition you describe in a diocese, ruled by so wise and saintly 
 a bishop; one, too, who took pains to select clergy fitted for 
 their work?" This question I often put to myself. And I 
 asked it of others who knew the east of England better than 
 I did. The Bishop was called to struggle against conditions 
 of unusual and continuous neglect by his predecessors. The 
 ways of the Church of England were strange, as I have illus- 
 trated by my two stories of college livings, and some of the 
 evils of these times have been removed. But still of her and 
 of all the churches it is true that their ordering and machinery, 
 as well as their doctrines, are old and out of date. In them all
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 135 
 
 the new order is not yet born, and all alike need to heed, before 
 it is too late, Tennyson's tremendous warning that 
 
 God fulfills himself in many ways, 
 
 Least one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 
 When I came to Norwich its suburban parishes, all of whose 
 rectors were appointed by the Bishop, were well served, and in 
 many of the country districts there was a change for the better. 
 One good odd old parson, Mr. Haslam, went all over the im- 
 mense diocese, preaching in the churches where he was in- 
 vited, and if the church doors were closed to him, as often they 
 were, in dissenting chapels or schoolhouses. He had many 
 friends and a good many enemies. He told me once of a good 
 but hesitating cleric who asked him to take a mission in his 
 church for ten days. Haslam did, and he filled the old church. 
 When he was leaving, his host said, "How is it you get the 
 people? I work hard. I visit regularly. I write my sermons 
 carefully. And the people go to sleep and stay asleep." "I'll 
 tell you," said Haslam. "Your pulpit stands at the head of 
 the aisle, facing the entrance door. You take your sermon; 
 you go into the pulpit. You read it out carefully and it is 
 like yourself, so straight, so orderly, that it goes down, straight 
 down the aisle and out of the big door. My poor sermons, well 
 they aren't like sermons at all. They are just like a fire- 
 cracker. It goes first in one direction, then in another. It fizzes 
 and cracks in this pew, and jumps into that. No man can tell 
 when it may catch him. So they all stay awake." The clergy 
 had to admit that if Haslam was not much of a preacher, still he 
 certainly did his hearers good and at least kept them awake. 
 And that was accomplishing something in sleepy Norfolk. 
 
 It took time to make any impression on old Norwich, but 
 at last the city moved. A number of the clergy agreed that 
 something should be done, and they invited a well-known 
 Evangelical, Henry Varley, to speak in St. Andrew's Hall for 
 a week. St. Andrew's Hall was the stately remnant of what 
 must once have been a magnificent mediaeval church. It was 
 used for town meetings, and seated two thousand on the floor. 
 The invitation came to Mr. Varley from my rector and a 
 group of Evangelical clergy. The University churches and the 
 High Churches washed their hands of the affair.
 
 136 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Varley was a powerful speaker; he had been a butcher, and 
 looked it; but he was a right good man. Night after night 
 the hall was packed. When he was leaving, he urged the 
 clergy who had invited him, to carry on the work. None of 
 them felt able to do this. So before them all, suddenly and 
 without warning, he turned to me. "Then, Rainsford, you 
 must carry on these meetings on Sunday nights." I said it 
 was impossible from every point of view. "You've got to; 
 these people are hungry and must be fed." Then said I, 
 "So help me God, I'll try." The result was that, till I left 
 Norwich, for almost two years, autumn, winter, and till mid- 
 summer, after I had preached in St. Giles' I went down to the 
 hall and repeated my sermon there. Sometimes the hall was 
 quite full, sometimes not more than half full. But I always 
 had at least a thousand people. Twenty-five years after I was 
 travelling back to New York from my little ranch in the 
 Rocky Mountains. I noticed a man staring at me on the train. 
 "You must be Rainsford." "I am," I said. "I used to 
 listen to you in St. Andrew's Hall, Norwich, in 1875, an d I 
 never have forgotten some of the things you gave me at those 
 services. I live in Dakota now." 
 
 About this time I preached one Sunday morning in St. 
 John's, Halkin Street, for my father, and could not but notice 
 a very considerable falling off in his congregation. There were 
 very few young men there, and some years before these were 
 not lacking. St. Giles' was full of young people. What was 
 the reason? It seems strange to me since then that I had not 
 long before grasped the evident fact that to keep men in the 
 Church of God you must set them at work in the Church of 
 God. "If a man will not sow, neither shall he reap," so runs 
 the everlasting law. And that is just what my dear father 
 and the men of his time and party never did. I had kept my 
 young men because I set them to work, and each worker be- 
 came in turn a magnet to draw others. In this way there came 
 to me a clearer idea of how to make the church a power. 
 
 I am afraid I was not popular among the city clergy, but 
 J. W. Nash, rector of the next parish, and my own dear rector, 
 were staunch friends of mine from the first day I came to Nor- 
 wich till I left it. To two notable Non-Conformist divines, Doc- 
 tor Gould, a Baptist, and Doctor Barrett, a Congregationalist,
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 137 
 
 I also owe a debt. I followed their advice in my reading, 
 and their homes were always open to me. They both had been 
 resident for many years in Norwich, and I was helped and 
 encouraged by them and their people more than by the 
 churches in my own denomination. 
 
 About this time, namely, the second year of my residence in 
 Norwich, I began to read in a wider field. Doctor Barrett in- 
 troduced me to the books of Dale of Birmingham, counted a 
 sound Liberal then, and I discovered somehow F. W. Robert- 
 son of Brighton. He preached for only five or six brief years. 
 Misunderstood and denounced by both High Churchmen and 
 Evangelicals, he was a lonely man, a voice crying in the wilder- 
 ness. Worn out, he died when almost a youth. But the 
 tongue of fire was his, and as a preacher no man in England in 
 the Nineteenth Century compared with him; so Stanley once 
 said. His sermons, and still more his letters, which wisely his 
 biographer Stopford Brook published with brief comment, and 
 so permitted them to speak for their author, I read and reread. 
 When I was tired and preached out, I went to them. When I 
 was discouraged, I found in the letters new courage. They 
 meant more to me than any other books for many years. 
 
 I sent Robertson's "Life" to my little sister in Africa some 
 years after this date. The book never reached her, for my 
 dear good father commandeered it and burned it. 
 
 Mazzini, too, I discovered in those days, and Matthew 
 Arnold's poetry supplemented Tennyson's "In Memoriam." 
 Thus it is evident I was wandering, innocently it is true, yet 
 wandering, into pastures new and full of dangerous noxious 
 weeds. 
 
 But the first growing pain I had was not caused by these 
 teachers. It came to me in studying the New Testament it- 
 self. My earliest morning hour was given to this and to 
 nothing else. Infant baptism first; and next, the utterly 
 mechanical theory of it, so unmistakably stamped on the 
 Church's office for the baptism of infants, unsettled me. As 
 yet I had no glimmering of the great truth of evolution. I 
 never dreamed that man's religious ideas were as truly an 
 evolution as were any other of his ideas on agriculture, 
 or geography, or science, or sociology. Religion was a divine 
 revelation. This I had been taught; to this I held stoutly.
 
 138 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I was to suffer much before I learned that just because man is 
 incurably religious, his religion, his religious beliefs, are the 
 most markedly evolutionary things about him. Meanwhile, 
 failing this clue, I was face to face with the startling fact that 
 infant baptism was not taught in the New Testament. 
 
 Looking back on it all, it seems a boyish difficulty, but it 
 meant hard pain to me then. All I had, and knew, and believed, 
 and preached depended on the absolutely verbal inspiration 
 of an inerrant book. And as I read that book, I had no right 
 to use that infant baptismal service. I shall not give much 
 space in my story to the discussion of various doctrines that 
 have become practically obsolete to educated people. Such 
 discussion is no longer profitable. Religious questions that 
 raised an immense pother in the '8o's and '90's who cares 
 to notice them now? But since this, my first serious attack 
 of doubt, changed finally the whole course of my life, I cannot 
 pass it hastily by. And furthermore it enables me to stress, 
 here at the beginning of my clerical life, a lesson, nay, a message 
 rather, I do with all my heart want to give to all who knew 
 me, or who attach any value to what I now write; and that is: 
 
 If you are honest with yourself, and with your fellow-men 
 who honour you with their attention, if you speak out and do 
 not hedge, you will find that you can help and feed and lead 
 and comfort many people. Such a course may threaten you 
 with calamity, professional and personal, but if you follow your 
 Master you must put the Truth first; and in the end you will 
 have both the approval of your conscience and a trustful 
 following of your fellow-men. 
 
 One of the chief reasons why the clergy to-day have not 
 the same influence they had even forty years ago is that they 
 have impressed the keenly discerning spirit of the time with a 
 grave doubt of their intellectual and moral courage. Courage 
 is the one thing surely before all other things a leader must 
 have. Men to-day will forgive much. They will forgive an 
 unbalanced crank and half-instructed reformer; they will be 
 tolerant of a pronounced reactionary; but they have no use for 
 the man who claims the privilege, the superb privilege, of the 
 pulpit, on their one holiday morning in seven, to discourse 
 platitudes rather than unburden his soul. 
 
 I now set myself to read widely the literature of baptism.
 
 NORWICH, FIRST CURE OF SOULS 139 
 
 I studied my own church's literature, and got into correspond- 
 ence with the best men in the country, Mr. Spurgeon among 
 the rest, who sent me a sheaf of books. The stock arguments 
 with which the Evangelical party sought to compromise be- 
 tween the plain teaching of our service and their preaching, 
 I could not swallow. I went to my rector and my father; then 
 to my bishop. All of them were kind and patient, but they 
 could not answer the questions that were troubling me. I 
 could find no evidence that infants had been baptized by 
 Jesus or his disciples, and I never have been able to find any. 
 If the pedo-baptists had frankly said that infant baptism was 
 a natural development of adult baptism, an inevitable change 
 in the custom of the church; that the magical blessings that 
 soon came to be attached to it inevitably induced loving 
 parents and zealous missionaries in those early days to baptize 
 little children in danger of death, the reasonableness of the 
 changed application of the Sacrament would have been evident. 
 But then to make such an admission no party, in the church 
 or out of it, was at the time prepared. High sacramentarians, 
 low Evangelicals, and the Baptists none of them accepted the 
 evolutionary law, and all of them insisted that their doctrine 
 was the only true doctrine based on the impregnable rock of 
 Holy Scripture.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Leaving England 
 
 We cannot kindle when we will 
 
 The fire that in the soul resides. 
 The spirit bloweth and is still. 
 In mystery the soul abides. 
 But tasks in hours of insight willed 
 May be through hours of gloom fulfilled. 
 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 No one can accuse Matthew Arnold of a lack of emotional 
 balance, nor was he hasty in his assessment of moral values. 
 Religious revivals have had large share in shaping the history 
 of our race, and the subject is of importance and needs to be 
 dealt with in a popular way. William James argues "that the 
 whole phenomenon of regeneration and conversion, even in its 
 most startling instantaneous examples, may be a strictly nat- 
 ural process, divine in its fruits (in some cases more, in others 
 less) but neither more nor less divine in its causation and mech- 
 anism than any other process, high or low, of man's interior 
 life." ("Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 230.) 
 
 I quote William James because, several years before I 
 read his brilliant and most helpful book, I had myself come to 
 the conclusion that it was a dangerous mistake to ascribe the 
 various manifestations of religious emotion, which for years 
 I had somewhat unusual opportunities of studying, as being 
 in themselves diviner or more supernatural experiences than 
 other emotional experiences, in regard to which it never occurs 
 to us to claim a supernatural presence. In writing this I fear 
 I shall hurt many, but if so, I cannot help it. To speak of 
 the vivid experiences of conversion and new birth which many 
 have known in this (as it seems to them) cold-blooded way, 
 is not to deny their value by any means. I would be the last 
 to do this. My experience as a preacher, my memories of 
 
 140
 
 LEAVING ENGLAND 141 
 
 home, would make it impossible for me to do so. But on the 
 other hand, I am convinced that to put man's religious nature 
 and all the powers and passions dependent on and springing 
 out of it in a separate water-tight compartment in life's great 
 cargo ship, insisting that in their production and ordering, in 
 their birth and development, other forces, higher forces, forces 
 supernatural, forces peculiarly divine, are necessary forces 
 other than those controlling what we thoughtlessly call our 
 ordinary ways of life that I do not believe. I do believe that 
 our capacity to surrender our wills, not necessarily once only, to 
 the highest we know, means an access of power, a fuller intake 
 of life. And that the phenomena accompanying that self- 
 surrender, in different ages and peoples and religions, though 
 they have been vividly strange, startling, and unaccountable, 
 are natural supernormal, if you will, but natural; and some 
 day we shall understand them as we do not now. 
 
 "Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely 
 natural history point of view," says James, "with no religious 
 interest whatever, we should still have to write down man's 
 liability to sudden conversion as one of his most curious pecul- 
 iarities." 
 
 Alas! orthodoxy at present denies the adequacy of such 
 an explanation, and thinks it does God's service by insisting 
 that the phenomena of conversion and "faith healing" and 
 sacramental blessing are all the supernatural operations of the 
 Deity. 
 
 The startling and unaccountable experiences common in 
 Evangelical revivals, whether you examine those of 1 820-1 840, 
 as Professor C. E. Fanning, the great Methodist missionary, 
 has recorded them; or those so common in Ireland in my 
 youth, or later in the Welsh revival meetings of 1905, are ex- 
 traordinarily alike. Men, women, and even little children 
 were moved to what seemed to be a supernatural degree were 
 wrenched and thrown down as if by an outside force. Eyes 
 were staring, Mouths twisted and spumy, Death seemed near. 
 Then something would give way, and with ease and fluency 
 they would pour forth what was within them in prayer and 
 song. When it was over, they often had no memory of what 
 had passed; it was as though some other self, a deeper, inner 
 self, had come forth at the bidding of the hour.
 
 i 4 2 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 It is interesting to note that these phenomena have com- 
 monly appeared among populations where the distinctively 
 Evangelical aspects of the Gospel have been presented to all 
 from childhood. Where the soberer Church of England train- 
 ing and discipline was customary you did not find them, or they 
 were rare. In the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and in 
 our own Protestant Episcopal Church, this was also true. But 
 of this I am sure: that, as with open mind we study the history 
 of man's religious changes, we must be aware of similarities of 
 experiences among them all. Among the very earliest and 
 coarsest, if you can call them so, as truly as among the saints 
 and mystics of ancient and modern times. 
 
 The medicine man of the Red Indians, the wildly eloquent 
 Negro leading a prayer meeting, the faith healer swaying an 
 educated audience in London or New York, the witch doctors 
 in Darkest Africa, breathless thousands waiting outside the 
 Grotto at Lourdes, the largest audience on earth kneeling at 
 the Elevation of the Host in St. Peter's, or the brilliant scholar, 
 bitterly repentant, holding in the white-hot stove his offending 
 hand till it was burned away 1 what do they all mean ? 
 
 They mean that there are things in man's nature that will 
 find expression, that will out, and are always ready to make 
 answer to the voice, the power, to which they are akin. The 
 glowing eloquence of Phillips Brooks, the fiery appeal of Billy 
 Sunday, the adoration of a relic, or of the Body and Blood 
 of Jesus Christ, offered to the believing under the form of 
 bread and wine what are they ? Keys, call them keys. Some 
 golden, if you will, some of meaner metal; but keys, with which 
 a mysterious power may be and often is unlocked in the soul of 
 the faithful humble or the faithful great. 
 
 Ignorance looks on in wonder, sometimes with a sneer. Ah, 
 no! Mock not, lest you sin against your own Holy Spirit; 
 lest you kill the best and highest within you, or deny the most 
 precious gift in your fellow-man. Our Quaker poet is right: 
 
 All souls that struggle and aspire, 
 
 All hearts of prayer by Thee are lit; 
 And dim or clear, Thy tongues of fire 
 
 On dusky tribes and twilight centuries sit. 
 
 1M If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off." The incident happened in one of our univer- 
 sities to a friend of mine, some years ago.
 
 LEAVING ENGLAND 143 
 
 Nor bounds nor clime nor creed Thou knowest, 
 
 Wide as our need Thy favours fall; 
 The white wings of the Holy Ghost 
 
 Stoop, seen or unseen, o'er the heads of all. 
 
 Why cannot we hark back to the largeness of the spirit of St. 
 Paul, hear him claim all gifts of men as equally divine, for they 
 are given for human service. "Now there are diversities of gifts 
 but the same spirit. To one is given the word of wisdom, to an- 
 other, the word of knowledge, to another faith, to another the gifts 
 of healing, to another the working of miracles, to another, discern- 
 ing of spirits." What a comprehensive and comforting list, what 
 splendid assortment of powers. All he claims the result of the 
 spirit Jesus resident in man. Some of them we have come to 
 regard as commonplace, and others as miraculous. Paul, at 
 least, knew no such distinction. I Cor. xn, 4-1 1. The place 
 to look for God is not in a distant heaven but in ourselves. 
 
 I had a friend of many years. He was a physician. He 
 told me when he was practising in Minnesota, in the early days 
 of harvesting machinery, accidents in the harvest field were 
 common. He found an uneducated Swede, a good man, 
 whose touch would immediately staunch the severest bleeding, 
 even arterial, and he constantly took him in his buggy when 
 called to emergency cases. Surely the churches' business to- 
 day should be to call all human powers to their high use. Such 
 will be the call of the church of the future. 
 
 Few indeed there have been of us who have always walked 
 the hard high pathway of their best; few who have always been 
 obedient to what they knew was their heavenly vision. But, as 
 poor Pilgrim was the better man for even a glimpse of the 
 Delectable Mountains, so "the man with the hoe" or Millais' 
 Kneeling Peasants, or the plainest of plain people, or the great- 
 est of great people, all are enabled better to fulfil life's tasks 
 for seeing, however briefly, their life's best vision. 
 
 But does it last, you say? Does your converted man remain 
 a convert from his baser self? Often, very often, he does; 
 but if he does not! Men may lapse from every level, but 
 even in the Valley of the Shadow they remember that once 
 they stood on the shining heights, and they are the better for 
 the remembrance. 
 
 From 1876 to the autumn of 1878 I was a revival preacher.
 
 144 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Looking back on that time, and reading again the notes of my 
 so boyish sermons, I can see that what power I had came from 
 the "oneness" of my aim. I lived for my work and my people 
 and for nothing else. I had but very few social engagements. 
 I quite gave up the outdoor life of sport I had so loved. 
 My rod and gun I never touched. So far as books were con- 
 cerned, I was a poorly educated young cleric. But my eye 
 was single, and truly I was happy, for my whole body was 
 full of light. 
 
 Then it was that in my first fresh youth I began to taste the 
 sweetness of a new and very real joy. People came to hear 
 me wherever I preached. I began to know the intoxication of 
 the crowd, the strange electric thrill of a mass of people waiting 
 on you! waiting to be won! My preparations came with 
 difficulty, but in the delivery of what I had prepared I was well 
 repaid. If a preacher can but forget himself, if he believes he 
 has a real message, if he feels he is pushing that message home, 
 I think there are few if any experiences like his, few if any finer 
 in life. Usually we walk; to some it is given to run. To the 
 preacher at times it is permitted to fly, and not alone, for he 
 carries his people with him. Of the Greatest it is written that, 
 at the believing touch of a poor sick woman, "he felt virtue go 
 out of him." I speak with reverence when I say that such 
 high feeling, such profoundly happy consciousness of help 
 longed for and whole-heartedly granted, is the spiritual reward 
 of the preacher and teacher, as truly now, with the least of us, 
 as it was then with the greatest. 
 
 Two strangers came to England in these days, each with a 
 message. One spoke to the multitudes good, simple-minded 
 Dwight Moody. The other to a much smaller circle Adolphe 
 Monod, a charming, cultivated, saintly French Huguenot. 
 Moody called men to salvation. Monod pleaded for a complete 
 salvation, an absolute, a perpetual surrender of the will to God, 
 and a profound belief in His power to save those making such 
 a surrender from all sin. Monod's message influenced the 
 best religious life in England. Representative clergy and laity 
 were invited to meet Monsieur Monod at Lord Mount Temple's 
 spacious home, and I as my father's son received an invitation. 
 We lived together in "retreat" for several days, joining in 
 prayer and meditation much of the time, and listening to
 
 LEAVING ENGLAND 145 
 
 addresses all on the subject of holiness, the privilege open to all 
 Christians, the baptism of power, a preparation for all religious 
 work. 
 
 When I joined the devoted band (they came from all over 
 Great Britain), my mind was in a disturbed state. My future 
 was all uncertain : should I remain in the Church of England or 
 resign ? If I resigned, what could I do ? I was fitted for nothing 
 else but the calling I had chosen. It was late in life to attempt 
 another. Thus it was I came to this conference on Holiness. 
 
 Our meetings were singularly free from excitement, but as 
 the quiet days passed, barriers of reserve were quite broken 
 down, and people spoke as freely to each other, in their confes- 
 sions of sin and failure, as they did in their prayers to God. We 
 were expecting good things. We were like the apostles of old, 
 "all of one accord and in one place," and though we heard no 
 "rushing mighty wind," and though we saw no "cloven 
 tongues of fire," there, in English summer-time, under the 
 great trees, we had our Pentecost, too. Men and women then 
 spoke as never they had spoken before "as the spirit gave 
 them utterance." 
 
 I went back to Wandsworth, where my people then lived, a 
 new light in my soul, a new peace in my heart, and within me 
 a still, small but clear voice crying: "Say not I am a child, for 
 thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I 
 command thee thou shalt speak." Truly, I then had need of the 
 spiritual help I received at Broadlands, Lord Mount Temple's 
 place, for no one at home could in the least understand the 
 difficulties I was in, or approve of the way I proposed to myself 
 to get out of them. I felt that I must leave England at least for 
 a time, but both my father and mother could see no sense or 
 reason in such a course. To my difficulty about Infant Baptism 
 was now added that of the Athanasian Creed. I turned from 
 it with loathing. After fruitless discussion at home, I took 
 one day a walk in the south of London. The town suited the 
 mood I was in better than the country. After walking a long 
 way, I found myself standing before a mean little yellow brick 
 Baptist Chapel, somewhere in that wilderness of dingy streets 
 called the Borough. It was tight shut, a dismal-looking little 
 place. "You are coming to that!" I said to myself. "Are 
 you willing to come to that?"
 
 146 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I thought of dear Earlham, of the crowd of expectant faces 
 in St. Andrew's Hall, of my poor Norwich people. I thought 
 of the kind words of a very great nobleman indeed, who, the 
 day before, when I told him I was intending to seek work out 
 of England, had urged me to stay, saying the Church needed 
 all her young men at home, and promising me his influence if I 
 decided to stay. 
 
 Since I am trying to tell all the truth about this, my hour 
 of choice, I will confess to one thing more that made it 
 hard to go away. As I stood there, before that mean little 
 chapel, I saw again a woman's face, a woman into whose face 
 I had looked but a week before, and who had looked back into 
 mine, and as nothing else did, that look of hers held me to Eng- 
 land. 
 
 I don't know how long I stood before that poor little place. 
 I do know I saw my way clearly, and I said to my God, "I am 
 willing to do Thy will, even if it means a little Baptist Chapel 
 in the Borough." Then I took the long walk home to Wands- 
 worth with a great peace in my heart. 
 
 In biographies it is usually taken for granted that the hero 
 always "wills" to do the right thing as he sees it at all costs. 
 I wish I could truthfully say that in my own case I always 
 faced my problems with as "single an eye" as I did this great 
 problem. I can make no such claim, but I am glad I was 
 enabled to do the right thing then, though from a worldly point 
 of view my choice seemed the choice of a fool. 
 
 I linger over the story of these closing days of my English 
 life because I cannot help doing so. I was leaving more than 
 I knew. I was leaving my mother who, do what I could, I 
 felt was fading out of my life. She did not understand me, 
 could not sympathize with my doubts and questionings, put- 
 ting it all down to my restlessness and desire for change. I 
 was leaving my second home, at Norwich, and the hundreds 
 of loving friends and fellow-workers who with me had done 
 something to revive the religious life of the whole city. I was 
 leaving the friends of my boyhood and my youth. Of such 
 friendships Thackeray says: "Cultivate those friendships of 
 your youth; it is only in that generous time that they are formed. 
 How different the intimacies of the after years are, and how 
 much weaker the grasp of your hand after it has been shaken
 
 LEAVING ENGLAND 147 
 
 about in commerce with the world, and has squeezed and 
 dropped a thousand equally careless palms." 
 
 But more even than that, I was leaving behind me, though 
 I did not realize it till long afterward the faith of my boyhood, 
 or rather the mechanism of that faith, when I turned my back 
 on the dear cradle of its nurture. My departure from England 
 was a more resolute protest than I was aware of, against the 
 strangling party orthodoxy into which I was born. I think it 
 is Matthew Arnold who wrote I cannot verify the quotation, 
 for my memory is execrable, but the splendour of the statement 
 rings clearly in my mind: "When shall we learn that what 
 attaches people to us is the spirit we are of, not the machinery 
 we employ?" 
 
 Before I was born, my father and mother had willed and 
 prayed that on their first-born should be poured out the spirit 
 of Him who came to "preach" the gospel. This was their aim 
 and it was to be (so they prayed) their son's aim. Their faith 
 was my faith, their purpose my purpose. 
 
 Life was to us a very simple affair. Any one could under- 
 stand it. God was its author, its Lord, its Saviour, its daily 
 provider and guide. God blessed it in joy here and in glory 
 eternal hereafter. He was also its inexorable punisher. He 
 damned men to everlasting hell as surely as He saved them 
 in a final heaven. Saving souls was not a business of life, but 
 the business of life; for a man was saved here and now, and if 
 not, he was already damned, the wrath of God was resting on 
 him. It seems dreadful to write of such things now; it did not 
 so seem then to us, brought up to believe them as matters of 
 course. We can see to-day the glaring faultiness of such a 
 creed, its shallow and unworthy idea of God, its monstrous 
 misconception of His justice, the pitiful partiality of His love, 
 His gross favouritism, and the tendency to an all too obvious 
 self-complacency begotten of such a creed in us who held our- 
 selves to be His special favourites. 
 
 To pile up unanswerable indictments against that old 
 Evangelical creed is easy enough, but the one mighty thing 
 about it was that the men who held it (and from St. Paul's 
 time down it has been the creed of many of the greatest of the 
 great) laid hold on God, and so were strong. 
 
 Many like myself, now growing old, will remember how
 
 148 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 clear and strong were those early experiences of ours, and 
 will agree with me that with soul hunger we remember them, 
 and would fain, ah, yes, would fain know again to-day if only 
 we could their joy and power. Life was simple and so sure. 
 The world was quickly passing away. If in it things were evil, 
 small matter it made for us, whose home "was not made with 
 hands, and was eternal in the heavens." There all we loved 
 would meet us, all parting would be over, and the joy we al- 
 ready felt, as we worked and sang together, would broaden and 
 deepen into an eternity of living bliss. 
 
 It was a strong, simple gospel, and men lived strong lives 
 and did strong deeds in the power of it, for God was the great 
 Companion. There are some good and able, who think that 
 in its changed conception of God, a conception forced on us by 
 our widening knowledge of ourselves and of the universe of 
 which we are a part, modern Christianity has lost nothing and 
 has gained much. I cannot feel this. I believe there is more 
 real religion in the world than when I was a boy, that it is of a 
 higher type, of a more Christ-like type. But I think it has 
 not been so clarified, so popularized, that the wayfaring man 
 can take hold of it. Its changed emphasis from an outside 
 protecting and saving God to an indwelling, an inspiring God, 
 who slowly, by half-understood and hidden ways, is lifting life 
 heavenward, must take a long time to popularize. The elect 
 sainthood of all ages knew it and lived by it, but the masses 
 of troubled, weary mortals have never found in it the equivalent 
 for the simple certitudes of this cruder faith. 
 
 It hurts dreadfully to change your idea of God, but if you do 
 not, he will surely fade out of your life altogether. Lord 
 Bacon said, long ago: "It were better to have no opinion at 
 all of God, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him. For 
 the one may be unbelief, but the other is contumely." That 
 is unanswerable. 
 
 I can never be thankful enough for the gentleness and wis- 
 dom with which I was treated in those trying days. Once 
 more I went to my bishop. "I ordained you," he said, "I 
 trust you. You must not think of giving up your orders now. 
 Go out into the world and find yourself. You are trying to do 
 right. God will make your path plain. Come back to me in 
 two years, and if you cannot stay in the Church, I will take
 
 LEAVING ENGLAND 149 
 
 your orders from you. Till then I lay my commands on you. 
 Do not resign." I knelt at his knee, and he placed his hands 
 upon me and blessed me. 
 
 In Earlham I had found a home. Mr. Ripley was more than 
 my rector, and my dear lady was a second mother to me. 
 She seemed to understand what I was suffering as no one else in 
 my little world did. I often find myself longing now to tell her 
 that after all these changing years my soul blesses her for her 
 faith in me and love to me, and that I thank my God that I 
 ever knew her. She is real to me now as are but one or two 
 others I have known. She made life better, brighter, purer, 
 wherever she passed. "She went on her way doing good, 
 but men remembered her long afterward." 
 
 I must go away. Norwich was a small city. To stay as 
 curate at St. Giles' and not to use the Baptismal office nor to 
 repeat the Athanasian Creed would not do. Gossip would be 
 busy, and I could not fail to weaken the very work I had 
 been building up. Of course I had not hinted at leaving the 
 church to any but my bishop and the Ripleys. How was I to go 
 away? 
 
 Strangely, quite unexpectedly, this difficulty solved itself. 
 One mid-May morning in 1876 the mail brought me two let- 
 ters, one inviting me to join Henry Varley for a year in an 
 Evangelistic tour in Australia, the other asking me to take 
 charge of a large church in New York for four months. I had 
 not the ghost of an idea where the call from New York came 
 from, and it was not till I landed in the city that I found I 
 owed it to my faithful friend, Miss Ellen Logan, at whose little 
 chapel in Bethnal Green, ten years before, I had made my first 
 stammering start as a speaker. 
 
 Miss Logan's movements were unknown to me. Travelling 
 in Canada and the United States, to look after the emigrants 
 she had assisted in sending over there, she had chanced to 
 
 meet Doctor . He was at the time worn out, and had been 
 
 ordered to take a needed rest. His need of someone to take 
 his church off his hands temporarily he mentioned to Miss 
 Logan. "Why," said she, "I know just the man for you," 
 and named me. (She had no knowledge of my unsettlement of 
 mind, or of my wish temporarily to leave England.) "He was 
 a year in this country and he likes it." New York was nearer
 
 150 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 home than Australia, and so for no other reason, I wrote saying 
 I would come. 
 
 So I bade good-bye to my native land, with a misgiving in 
 my heart that I was doing so for ever. I turned my back on the 
 dearest, kindest friends a young man ever had, and they 
 crowded round me, begging me soon to return. I knew I was 
 doing right, but for all that, leaving England meant sore pain 
 and a wide void to me. It is no light matter to part with the 
 friends of your youth; and I had a presentiment that this was 
 what I was doing.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 An Alien Missioner 
 
 I landed in New York, June 10,1876, in the fiercest kind of 
 
 heat, 103 in the shade. A layman from Church was waiting 
 
 for me at the pier, and he took me to a New Jersey suburb 
 
 where, in his country house, I found Doctor , with his wife 
 
 and one of their children. 
 
 Doctor welcomed me very kindly, told me he was going 
 
 to rest for the summer, as he was completely fagged out, and 
 that he wanted me to take charge of the church. And then he 
 added: "I have opened a tent on Thirty-fourth Street and 
 Broadway; I want you to preach in it every night but Satur- 
 day." I gasped. "My dear sir, I came over understanding 
 I was to preach twice on Sunday, that will give me all I can 
 do. I don't know enough to preach every night in a great city. 
 I am only twenty-six. I am nothing of a preacher; preparing 
 two sermons a week will be the utmost I can do, and that was 
 our bargain." 
 
 "Oh, there are men who will help you in the tent," he re- 
 plied; and, laughing, "anyway, you've got to do it." 
 
 Never was an unfortunate fellow less fitted than I was to 
 undertake a task like this now forced on me. 
 
 Next Sunday came and I preached, Doctor listening to 
 
 me, the weather torrid, the church not one third full, everyone 
 out of town who could get out of town. Everything was new 
 and strange. I was unhappy from the start, never got a hold 
 either of my subject or my audience. I knew when I got 
 through that I had preached as poor a sermon as I had ever 
 
 preached in my life. Doctor was disappointed, he as good 
 
 as told me so, and I did not blame him. "I have got to get 
 away," he said. "You must do the best you can." And so I 
 entered upon my work in New York. 
 
 And now there began for me the hardest time I had ever 
 
 151
 
 1 52 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 had in my life. I had failed in pulpit before, but then I was 
 among my own people who knew me and cared for me and 
 encouraged me. Here I was alone; I was lonely in Spirit and I 
 lived alone. Miss Logan had returned to England, and not a 
 living soul did I know in the great, sweltering city. I had 
 
 only $50 when I landed and Doctor gave me $100 a month, 
 
 nothing in advance. So I had to economize. I took a hall 
 bedroom in the old Rossmore Hotel, 42nd Street and Broadway, 
 and had the use of a study high up in the tower of the church, 
 where the heat and mosquitoes were dreadful. From the mid- 
 dle of June to the middle of September I preached every evening 
 but Saturday in the tent and on Sunday morning in the church. 
 In the latter I also administered the Holy Communion once a 
 week. I got up early, and every day shutting myself in my 
 tower, worked out something as best I could for the coming 
 night. 
 
 It was hard, lonely work at first, but one thing sustained me: 
 I felt I was being tested. I had asked God, as I stood before 
 the little chapel in the Borough, to use me as He willed. I 
 would make no conditions with Him now he was taking me at 
 my word. Here was the answer to my prayer. How came I 
 here? Was I seeking an easy task, an honourable place? I 
 looked into my soul and answered No ! The memory of those 
 quiet days at Broadlands came to me with power, when I with 
 others drawn from all the branches of the Christian Church, 
 meeting with Adolph Monod, had listened to our Lord's love 
 call, and had reconsecrated ourselves to the doing of the 
 Divine will. I was not in New York to please myself, but 
 simply and solely to do His will, and whether I failed or suc- 
 ceeded, that Will I would do. 
 
 So I fought it out alone on my knees, in my hot tower study, 
 and though I was inexperienced and lonely, I grew strong. 
 
 I will speak here of a habit I formed in those first days of my 
 New York work. When I felt lonely, when I could not get 
 on with my sermon, I would walk in the streets for a little, 
 looking hard into the faces of the passers-by as I tried to read 
 their story, tried to see the real man beneath the face's mask; 
 and so, after a little time, I went back to my study with a new 
 sense of the worth-whileness of life, a new sense of men's need 
 for help, and a new determination to do what in me lay to
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 153 
 
 give help. I could work better and preach better for those 
 walks. They often gave me texts. 
 
 I may say here that I never gave up this habit, and sometimes 
 I went so far, when I met response in some unknown face, as to 
 stop and speak to my unknown. It was natural that such an 
 unconventional thing occasionally got me into trouble. Once 
 a charming woman whom, I need scarcely say, I did not speak 
 to, told her husband I had tried to accost her, and I had some 
 difficulty in convincing him that such was not my intention. 
 Some of the best workers I have had were gained in this way, 
 "friends" I had recognized "as I had passed by." 
 
 In 1876, there was an open space on the corner of 34th 
 Street and Broadway, and there the tent, which was well 
 pitched and seated 1,800, stood. At the beginning of my 
 work we had a good sized crowd on Sunday evenings, for the 
 city was filling with visitors on their way to the Centennial at 
 Philadelphia, and most of the churches were closed. But on 
 week days, at first, the attendances were very small. I had 
 
 as assistant workers quite a number of men from Doctor 's 
 
 church, good fellows enough, but as I came to test them, quite 
 unfitted for what they were chiefly bent on doing, viz., speaking 
 from the tent platform. When I had finished my poor little 
 discourse, one or more of these would get on his feet, mount 
 the platform beside me, and deliver a harangue that quite undid 
 what I had tried to say. One of them, a butcher, a very de- 
 termined assistant, was specially difficult to handle. I hesi- 
 tated to break with these good fellows, because I knew well 
 how ignorant I was of New York conditions, and I felt that I 
 had not yet got any hold on my small audiences. Most of 
 those who came at first to the tent services were members of or 
 attendants on Doctor 's church, and if I turned their ex- 
 pectations down it seemed unlikely that I should have any 
 audience at all. So I stood the thing as long as I could, and 
 then telegraphed to the Doctor, who had left the city, that I 
 could not work with some of his lay staff at the tent. He 
 wrote back that I was working with a band of men he had had 
 round him for years, and I must continue to work with them. 
 
 I replied at once by sending in my resignation. He could 
 not come back, nor could he get any one else to take hold of so 
 hard a job as church and tent combined offered for $100 a
 
 154 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 month; so I obtained the undivided authority necessary. But 
 he gave it grudgingly, and I did not blame him. My departing 
 laymen growled and grumbled to the absent Doctor and their 
 friends: but I made a second start, altering choir leaders and the 
 machinery generally. Decision was justified, and the congre- 
 gations began to grow. 
 
 And now to me, in the great city where I was an utter 
 stranger, came again the experience I had first tasted when, 
 with my bell in hand, I stood in Norwich market-place. I 
 began to feel my audiences; we had something in common, I 
 and they. New faces greeted me night after night. As soon 
 as the blessing was given, almost all passed out into the crowd 
 from which they had come. They were unknown to me, but 
 we were friends. And so, in a strange land, I began to taste 
 the joy and strength of my profession. 
 
 The heat that summer I shall never forget. During July and 
 August the thermometer averaged 84, night and day. The 
 mosquitoes, too, were dreadful, and, for the first time in my life, 
 I lost sleep. But I was living on manna, sure enough. I was 
 tasting success. I could see, without self-flattery, that I was 
 putting my heavy task through, and it was sweet beyond words. 
 I had after all a message for these people in New York, as I 
 had had for my poor shoemakers in Norwich. 
 
 I finished my work by the middle of September, and I was 
 about finished myself. When the services were over, whether 
 they were held in church or tent, I always made my way to the 
 door and spoke there to any who wished to speak to me. This 
 good custom I never anywhere or at any time gave up. In 
 the tent, I invited any who wished to remain and talk to me. 
 Many did so, most of them strangers in the city, some others 
 residents of New York. Of these last, a considerable number 
 expressed a wish to become confirmed members of the church 
 
 (of course, Doctor 's). Their names and addresses I 
 
 tabulated and kept. By September I had two hundred of 
 these. 
 
 On September 14th, my engagement with Doctor 
 
 expired, and I waited on him with the list. I might say 
 here, that at this time I received an invitation from the Rev. 
 Hay Aitken, a very well-known missioner in the Church of 
 England, to return and associate myself with him in mission
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 155 
 
 work, but I did not feel ready to go back to England just then. 
 Aitken's offer suggested to me what seemed a wise and natural 
 course: why not, on this side, and in the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church, attempt to do what he invited me to do in England? 
 Was there not a need here for the missioner and his message? 
 I thought there was. The attempt to fill such a role was rather 
 ambitious. I was quite unknown to the clergy, and of the 
 country I knew little. All the same, I made up my mind to 
 try for missionary work in the United States. 
 
 Such was my plan when I went to Doctor 's study with 
 
 my list. Briefly I told him what I wanted to do and asked for 
 letters commendatory to some of his clerical friends. He 
 curtly refused my request. I pressed for a reason. I said: 
 "I have worked hard here; that I have not quite failed, these 
 lists prove. These people want to join your church. Why 
 won't you give me letters?" 
 
 "Well, if I give you letters to different churches, you will 
 preach in them and possibly unsettle the rector. The people 
 may want you and not him, after a fortnight's mission work." 
 
 "But I am not seeking a parish in the Episcopal Church. 
 I am not seeking your place or any one's. I have not un- 
 settled you or your people. Here are two hundred possible 
 new members for your church! All I want is a chance to say 
 what is given me to say and earn my bread on this side. I 
 do not want to return to the Church of England, where I am 
 welcome, till I see my way clearer than I can now." 
 
 It was no use. He refused to give me a line, and I went 
 away feeling depressed and, I think, righteously angry. 
 
 I had very little money. I owed a dentist's bill which I 
 could not pay. I had never taken money from my father since 
 leaving Cambridge, and I did not want to write for money now. 
 
 There lived then in Astor Place Mr. Whittaker. Many years 
 ago he died; the present generation has forgotten him, but a 
 kinder, more brotherly Christian man I never knew. His 
 book-shop was a general gathering place for the clergy, not 
 only for the successful fellows, rectors of established parishes, 
 but for the out-at-elbows clericals, men with no salary and a 
 grievance. 
 
 Clericals wise and clericals crankish all dropped into Whit- 
 taker's shop I should have written "store" and were made
 
 156 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 welcome. He came to the tent sometimes. He took me round 
 and introduced me to dear, saintly, evangelical Doctor Dyer. 
 In short, he did all that a wise, loving, elder brother could do 
 for an alien missionary. 
 
 Sick at heart after my interview, I went down to see Mr. 
 Whittaker and told him of my plight. " Go and see the Bishop. 
 He is a little stiff and cold at first, but he is a good and kindly 
 man at heart, and there has been friction between him and 
 
 Doctor ." I took his advice, went back to my lodging, 
 
 armed myself with the letter given me on my leaving St. Giles', 
 Norwich, by three of the prominent clergy of the city, and 
 countersigned by my dear Bishop: 
 
 We, the undersigned, ministers of the Church of England, beneficed in 
 the Diocese of Norwich, certify that the Rev. William S. Rainsford was 
 personally known to us for the space of about four and a half years, during 
 which he held the curacy of St. Giles', Norwich, and that we had abundant 
 opportunities of observing his conduct. We bear willing testimony to the 
 holiness and consistency of his life and conversation, to the agreement of the 
 doctrines he preached with the Holy Scripture, and the Articles of our 
 Church, to his fervent zeal for the glory of God, and to his devoted and un- 
 tiring labours in promoting the salvation of souls. 
 
 (Signed) Wm. N. Ripley, M. A. Cam. Vicar of St. Giles'. 
 
 Thos A. Nash, M. A. Ox. Vicar of St. Philip's. 
 
 John Patterson, M. A. Cam. Rural Dean. 
 
 The subscribers are beneficed in my 
 Diocese and are worthy of credit. 
 John N. Norwich. 
 
 The Bishop lived in Lafayette Place. Miss Potter opened 
 the door to my knocking. "The Bishop was busy and could not 
 be disturbed." I pleaded my case, said I was an English clergy- 
 man in need of his advice. The lady stood for a time stoutly 
 in my way, but yielded at last, when I said I really did not 
 want money, but was a stranger in the city, with letters com- 
 mendatory from my Diocesan in England, but I did need 
 what the Bishop of New York alone could give me: counsel. 
 
 I had not seen the Bishop before. He was an old man then 
 tall and thin, with an extraordinarily long neck. I remember 
 it struck me that the neck had nothing to do with his head, 
 which turned and bent quite independently of its support. 
 He sat behind his writing table; I stood in front of it. I looked
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 157 
 
 into a face that told me nothing. Briefly as possible, I told my 
 
 story. "I had been in charge of Church since June, and had 
 
 been preaching nightly in a tent on 34th Street and Broadway. 
 I had had during the last six weeks of that time large audiences 
 
 at both places. I had asked Doctor for a letter which I 
 
 could use as an introduction to other clergy, and he had refused 
 to give me any letter whatever. I was a clergyman in good 
 standing in England, but wanted to get, if I could, mission work 
 in the Protestant Episcopal Church for a time, till I saw my way 
 more clearly than at present to use the Baptismal Office and 
 the Athanasian Creed." 
 
 As I told my story and looked at the immovable face before 
 me my heart sank, for I felt how little there was in my plea to 
 appeal to a stranger bishop; and yet on its success my future 
 course must depend, for I was down and out unless I won him 
 over. Then I handed him the letter. He took it and read it 
 slowly, and still as he read his face gave me no hope. Then 
 slowly he always spoke slowly came my answer in his old- 
 fashioned, formal way. "Mr. Rainsford, I have had the 
 pleasur, sir, of attending your services at the tent you speak of 
 from time to time, and not only, sir, have I found in them noth- 
 ing to criticize, but I have been edified by your discourses. I 
 
 like your work, sir, and if Doctor will not give you a letter, 
 
 it will give me pleasure to do so. And I think I may say that any 
 use you may see fit to make of that letter will be of more as- 
 sistance to you than any communication you could receive 
 from Doctor ." 
 
 The revulsion was so great, the surprise caused by these 
 words, slowly pronounced, was so immense, that I almost broke 
 down. 
 
 "Can I publish your letter, Sir?" 
 
 " Certainly; do so in any or all of the Church papers." Then 
 he rose and took my hand, said there was need for such mission 
 work as I aimed to do in the Church, and asked me to stay to 
 luncheon. But I was not then equal to that, and I thanked him 
 and went away. "Come again," he said, kindly, as he took 
 me to the door. 
 
 The letter came next day. I lost it somehow, as I did many 
 other valuable letters, in my later wanderings, but right well 
 it did its work for me.
 
 158 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 That evening I spent with two dear friends, of whom I must 
 now speak. They were the first to open to me their home, at 
 350 Madison Avenue. "I was a stranger and they took me 
 in." Mr. and Mrs. Edward Owen laid me under an obligation 
 which I can never repay. 
 
 One awfully hot night in the tent they waited for me and 
 asked me to return with them and have a cool drink. After that, 
 when the day's work was over, I often went round to "350." 
 The Owens and I had much in common. They were enthusiastic 
 black-bass fishermen. I had never fished for bass, and this 
 evening they proposed that we three should take a holiday 
 and try for the bass on Lake Ontario. Of course I told them 
 of my extraordinary good fortune with the Bishop of New York, 
 and we agreed that my way would henceforth be easier, and I 
 might take a short holiday on the strength of improving pros- 
 pects. And I surely needed it. 
 
 We had rough quarters on a little promontory on the great 
 lake, but it was a blissful time. The clear clean air, the cool 
 green water! We had a tent for Mrs. Owen, a lean-to for 
 Owen and me. Only one farm was there in the neighbourhood, 
 and there we bought milk and eggs, new potatoes and summer 
 apples, and I must not forget, "broilers." But when we called 
 on our farmer to produce what we had paid for, we found that 
 these last had still the run of the country, and that though he 
 had sold them, it remained for us to catch them. We had no 
 gun, and I never chased anything in my life harder than I did 
 those "broilers." Their breasts were not unduly developed, 
 but they certainly had sterling substance in their legs. 
 
 The spirit of the chase is infectious. The farmer at first 
 looked on somewhat critically at our effort, but presently he 
 went to a rail fence and, taking down a top rail, joined in. 
 He swung his cumbersome weapon vigorously enough, but 
 his aim left something to be desired, for aiming at a flying 
 chicken, he nearly broke the leg of his milch cow, who stood in 
 the lot amazed at our goings-on. Then, damning visitors and 
 broilers, himself, and his cow, impartially, he retired from the 
 field. 
 
 I needed that little holiday badly, and, oh, how I enjoyed it! 
 I had worked hard, I had done my very best, I had not sought 
 easy things for myself, I had given the best I had a poor best.
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 159 
 
 but I had no better to the best I knew. Then, unexpectedly, 
 where a door seemed to open before me, it had been slammed 
 in my face; and then again, how unexpectedly! it had opened, 
 and stood wide open, and the work I felt myself fitted for was 
 offered me. 
 
 Before going fishing with the Owens, I had sent copies of 
 the kind Bishop's letter to the church papers, and when I re- 
 turned to New York two responses to it were waiting for me. 
 
 I answered such offers of work always in the order in which 
 they were written. I never made any demand for money, 
 asked only for my travelling expenses, and left the matter of 
 remuneration to the people I served. These rules I invariably 
 kept. If an invitation came from an out-of-the-way church on 
 Monday and another from a wealthy church on Tuesday, I 
 took the Monday church first. 
 
 Much depended on my first mission. It was in St. Peter's, 
 Baltimore. Doctor Grammer, the rector, wrote: "Mr. Rains- 
 ford, will you come and hold a mission? We have heard of 
 your work in the tent. Our people are a church-going people, 
 but we all need to be stirred up. You are just the man we 
 want." I wrote, saying I would be glad to come, and asking that 
 a house-to-house canvass of the parish should be undertaken 
 at once. When I did this, I asked for more than even a well- 
 organized parish could accomplish; for the time was too short, 
 and the majority of St. Peter's congregation had not yet re- 
 turned to heat-smitten Baltimore. By return of mail I had a 
 hearty renewal of my invitation, and an assurance that they 
 all would be expecting me. 
 
 I went down to Baltimore on the Wednesday before the 
 Sunday when I was to begin, telegraphing the hour of my 
 arrival. There was no one at the depot to meet me. I left my 
 portmanteau and made my way to the rectory closed! 
 Going to the church, I found it closed. There was no address 
 of any clergyman on either rectory or church. If I could not 
 find a cleric, there was no difficulty in finding the undertaker, 
 and judging by the prominence given to him, his office would 
 seem to be of more importance than of any other church func- 
 tionary. 
 
 The man who catered for the dead was discouraging. 
 
 "Where is Doctor G ?"
 
 160 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 "At the Centennial." 
 
 "When is he coming home?" 
 
 "Saturday night." 
 
 "Where is his assistant?" 
 
 "There is no assistant." 
 
 "None at all?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Do you know of a mission to be held here next week? " 
 
 "No, don't know anything about any mission. The col- 
 lections were taken some time ago." 
 
 I asked if there was no one in the city who could give me in- 
 formation about the church, and finally he gave me the name of 
 an insurance agent, who he said was a "Deacon." All this 
 was discouraging enough, and I hurried off down town to the 
 address given me. I found the Deacon, and I found a friend. 
 
 "Do you know anything about a mission to be held in your 
 church beginning next Sunday?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Don't you know anything at all about a man named Rains- 
 ford whom Doctor G has invited to take a mission for a 
 
 fortnight in St. Peter's, beginning next Sunday morning?" 
 
 "Never heard of him," he said, cheerfully. 
 
 "Well, then, I might as well go back to New York this eve- 
 ning." 
 
 "What do you mean by a mission?" he said, becoming in- 
 terested. 
 
 I sat down and talked to him as hard as I could for about 
 half an hour. He listened to all I said. 
 
 "That's about the thing we want here." 
 
 "But if there has been no preparation at all, it cannot ac- 
 complish much in a fortnight." 
 
 "Well," he said, "Doctor G has forgotten all about it; 
 
 that's just like him. He'll not be back till the eleven o'clock 
 train Saturday night. But this is God's doing. You stay!" 
 
 "But what can I expect to accomplish without any prepara- 
 tion?" 
 
 "Do anything you like; I'll back you." 
 
 Well, there was not much I could do, but I took the last 
 dollars I had in the world, and, going to a newspaper office, 
 had two hundred large posters printed that same Wednesday
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 161 
 
 night. On Thursday morning I took a great roll of these 
 posters under my arm, and succeeded in getting them placed 
 in the windows of the best shops in Charles Street. Then I 
 tackled the street railroads, and actually had the authorities 
 put them up on the sides of the Baltimore street cars. There 
 they stayed, and it did not cost me a cent, either. I never 
 succeeded in getting such a thing done in any city again, no, 
 not even in Baltimore, when I held another mission later and 
 was much better known. That is one on me. 
 
 At eleven o'clock Saturday night, back came Doctor G . 
 
 Mr. Richardson, the Deacon, and I were in the rectory waiting 
 for him. He was just as hearty as he could be. "Mr. Rains- 
 ford, I am glad to see you. I have not made any preparation; 
 in fact, our people are not back in town yet, and we should 
 have chosen a later date, but we will do what we can and give 
 you a good send-off. I am going to preach Sunday morning, 
 and I have asked the Bishop to preach in the evening, and you 
 will begin Monday." 
 
 I was up against it with a vengeance! 
 
 " Dear Doctor G , " I said, " I have only come here to help 
 
 you, but I cannot agree to the arrangement that you preach in 
 the morning and the Bishop in the evening. I've got to get 
 hold of the people on Sunday if I am to reach them during the 
 week." 
 
 "Mr. Rainsford, you are a stranger in this country; you do 
 not understand. I am rector of this church, and I repeat, I 
 shall preach in the morning, the Bishop in the evening, and 
 you begin Monday." 
 
 "Dear sir," I said again, "I came here to help the church; 
 I have no other aim. I came at your invitation. I do know 
 my own business, and if I begin the way you suggest the mission 
 will be a failure. No doubt you are going to preach to-morrow 
 morning, and the Bishop in the evening, but then I am not 
 going to preach Monday." 
 
 The next twenty minutes were trying. He stormed up and 
 down his study, his hat, a tall silk hat, pushed far back from 
 his forehead. I see him now. I sat on the sofa and did not 
 say one word. The Deacon did the fighting, and right well he 
 did it. 
 
 At the end of quite twenty minutes he rushed out, saying he
 
 1 62 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 had no idea how unreasonable an Englishman could be, woke 
 the Bishop up it was long after midnight and asked him to let 
 him off. The Bishop I fancy was naturally offended; he never 
 came to the church while I was preaching. But I had my way. 
 
 This was not exactly an encouraging way to begin my first 
 mission, and Sunday was wet and stormy; but I preached well, 
 to a congregation of less than three hundred, in a church that 
 held above a thousand. I was not seeking my own, and I 
 felt God was with me. 
 
 When I got through the Doctor said, "You did a great deal 
 better than I expected; you will make a preacher, but you made 
 one mistake: you did not take a text." 
 
 "Doctor," I said, "I am not here to preach sermons. You 
 have been taking texts and preaching better sermons than I 
 can preach all these years. I am only here for a few days. I 
 must work my own way." 
 
 "Be content to go the way other people go," he replied. 
 "Do not do that sort of thing." 
 
 I preached again in the evening, and we had as many as in 
 the morning. The Doctor grumbled again because I took no 
 text. On Monday as many came as on Sunday, and by Wed- 
 nesday, the church was three quarters full. 
 
 The old-fashioned pulpit at St. Peter's then stood looking 
 down on the Holy Table. As I was finishing on Wednesday 
 evening a loud sound of sobbing rose from the Communion 
 Table beneath me, and looking down, I saw the Doctor, his 
 head in his hands, kneeling, crying like a baby. Before I could 
 give the blessing, he hurried down the aisle, stood at the door, 
 his arms spread wide, and in a loud voice cried to the amazed 
 congregation: "Friends, you must come to hear this young 
 man. He is preaching the Gospel to us all." 
 
 After that night the church was full. That was my first 
 mission in the United States and never can I forget it. Thus 
 I became a missioner, and went to many places, and made 
 many friends during the next two years. What kindness I 
 everywhere received! What generous allowances were made 
 for me! I gained invaluable experience, seeing many classes 
 of people, and getting to know the country as I could not have 
 done in any other way. 
 
 From Baltimore I went to old-fashioned Alexandria, held
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 163 
 
 a mission in Washington's church, and, for the first time, tasted 
 Virginian hospitality. Then to Washington with Doctor 
 Addison. There I did not do so well. Then as winter was 
 closing in, to dear old Doctor Newton, at Epiphany, Phila- 
 delphia, father of Heber and W. Wilberforce Newton. 
 
 I had a curious experience here, illustrating the life of the 
 city at the time. I was to begin my work at Epiphany on 
 Sunday, and I reached the town Friday. It was snowing 
 heavily, all the street cars were blocked, and I found that 
 Doctor Newton lived at Chestnut Hill, several miles away 
 from the church. After quite a long walk, through deep snow, 
 I found the house. No response to my knocking! The door 
 was unlocked and I went in. I heard voices upstairs. They 
 sounded as though someone wanted help. I went up and 
 found Mrs. Newton bending over her husband, who, the day 
 before, had slipped, and falling, had broken his arm. Their 
 single servant had been out a long time trying to find a doctor 
 in the driving storm. I volunteered aid and began my mission 
 there and then by hunting in the very scattered suburb for a 
 doctor. I had a long and hard task, but finally dragged a 
 medico to the dear old man's bedside against the storm, and had 
 the satisfaction of seeing the broken arm set. All went well. 
 In a few weeks Doctor Newton was out again, but he was not 
 of much help to me during the next ten days at the church. 
 
 Most of the churches to which I went at this time were in 
 difficulties; that was the reason I was invited to them. A 
 mission was regarded as a sort of religious stimulant, and 
 stimulants go but a short way in restoring health, either in 
 the individual or the organization. No missionary visitor can 
 turn a weak or an inefficient ministry into a strong and suc- 
 cessful one. A mission cannot save a failing church. This of 
 course I knew very well. But, though I could not always build 
 up the churches I ministered to, I everywhere found men and 
 women waiting to be helped, anxious to speak about their 
 doubts and troubles, and trying to get in touch with God. I 
 was specially careful to do all I could to strengthen the hands 
 of the rector whose guest I was, and in my many visitations, 
 to many states and cities, I can say truthfully, I won and re- 
 tained the friendship of every man who invited me, excepting 
 the first, Doctor in New York.
 
 164 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The gain to myself during these two years was great. I 
 learned to appreciate an American audience, learned that 
 American audiences spoil you for any other. They are quicker 
 to respond to you, more charitable to your failures, more ap- 
 preciative of anything worth while you have to offer, than any 
 other audience (at least that speaks the English tongue). Those 
 two years of happy work sowed the seed of Americanism in 
 me. I went to many cities, and never to one that I did not 
 regret to leave. 
 
 Of one other gain I made I must speak. I gained a pro- 
 found belief that, in these times, as truly as in ancient times, 
 preaching the Gospel was the way of the power of God. There 
 never was a time when people were more ready to listen to that 
 supremely compelling message, man's call to his brother-man. 
 Some would have it that the popular magazine has taken away 
 the preacher's job. A thousand times, no! None of them 
 can take the place of "the King's Messenger." He alone it 
 is who, face to face with his fellows, speaks straight from his 
 soul to theirs. He never has, he never will lack a hearing, for 
 his is in all the ages the tongue of fire. 
 
 I will tell a story of a modern King's Messenger, condemned 
 as a heretic, by the way. I was making a forty-eight-hours 
 journey, some years ago, and, by the middle of it, got to know 
 some interesting fellow-travellers in the smoking compartment 
 of our Pullman. (Great places are Pullman smoking cars for 
 informing talk! Many good friends I have made in them.) 
 One of them, an elderly man, a Chicagoan, interested me greatly. 
 It seemed we had a good deal in common. So of course we 
 finally got talking on religion. "I was thrown into the city, 
 almost a boy," he said. "I had to fight, anyway. I received 
 no mercy, and I gave none. I fought and made good, as people 
 say. To-day I am a rich man. I was no worse and no better 
 than the ordinary business man. I did not go to church. I 
 made no religious profession. One night at a friend's table 
 I met Doctor Swing. I knew he had been tried for heresy, and 
 that attracted me to him. What he said was new to me and 
 interested me. So I went to his lectures, Sundays. He had 
 no church then. After I had been going to hear him for a little, 
 I found that well, somehow, I could not do on Monday or 
 Tuesday some of the things in business I had till then done
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 165 
 
 as a matter of course. And later he had a string on me till 
 Wednesday or Thursday. And, Mr. Rainsford, if he had 
 lived, I'd have joined that man's church, and there is no saying 
 but he'd have had his way with me right up to Saturday night." 
 
 I was so impressed with this story and the way it was told 
 that I wrote it down there and then. I cannot on cold paper 
 give the impression it made on me, and on the men in the car 
 who heard it. It was one of the most real things I ever listened 
 to. Surely the King's Messenger had reached the Chicago 
 millionaire! And not to him alone did he deliver his message 
 but to every man in that crowded smoking compartment. That 
 story teller was a preacher, too, and passed on the message the 
 King's Messenger had delivered to him. 
 
 The missioner is the loser by escaping criticism. He leaves 
 before it can reach him, but in my case, I underwent a discipline 
 that was severe enough. I think it did me good, but it was 
 bitter medicine at the time. 
 
 I received an invitation to speak before the Church Congress 
 at Boston, on "Missions." I don't know now how I happened 
 to get it. I did not know anything about Church Congresses. 
 I had never heard of one. I fancied it would be a small gather- 
 ing of clergy and laity to discuss matters of interest. So I 
 accepted. I had something to say; and while I was taking a 
 mission at Randolph McKim's church, 125th Street and Fifth 
 Avenue, New York, I made the best preparation I could. 
 
 The Congress met in the Music Hall, the hour was 8 P. m. 
 I reached Boston in the afternoon. I was rather fagged and 
 had a very bad headache (an unusual thing for me). I went 
 to the Music Hall, and to my terror found a great platform 
 already crowded with religious dignitaries, clerical and lay, 
 and an audience of some two thousand people on the floor. 
 Father Benson, of Oxford, was the first speaker. He was to 
 present parochial missions from the High Churchman's view- 
 point, I from the low. Father Benson was a poor speaker; 
 he did not make much of his subject. I was to follow him. 
 
 What struck me I don't know, but when I got on my feet the 
 world went black! I could see nothing, neither my notes nor 
 my audience. I was a stranger, standing before what was 
 perhaps the most representative audience that had ever come 
 together in the Episcopal Church. I had twenty-five minutes
 
 1 66 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 allotted me. I mumbled and stumbled for less than five, said 
 nothing at all, and in a cold sweat sat me down. I would not 
 wish my worst enemy to have to endure what I went through 
 during the next two hours. At last I was dimly aware 
 that the benediction had been given, and the great assemblage 
 was melting away. I sat on my chair still, in a numb sort of 
 way. Not one soul did I know in the crowd. I had just real- 
 ized that everything was over and that I must go, when I was 
 aware of an immense bulk of a man standing over me. He 
 must have said something before which I did not hear, for 
 now I felt his hand touch my shoulder, and a kindly voice say, 
 "Mr. Rainsford, will you preach for me next Sunday morning, 
 in Trinity Church?" That was my first meeting with Phillips 
 Brooks. I was too numb and prostrate at the moment to 
 realize fully the thoughtful, magnanimous brotherliness of 
 his act, but later he knew that he had won that night a lifelong 
 devotion. I went back to my room in the old Parker House a 
 pretty sick lad, and had it out with myself and God. Had I 
 gone to that Congress seeking popularity? No! I had told 
 my God I was willing to fail if it was His will, and I had failed. 
 That was all about it. So after a time I went to sleep, and next 
 day had no headache. 
 
 Next Sunday morning I preached in the great new church 
 just then finished. There was a crowd. All Boston was then 
 at Phillips Brooks's feet, and the presence of a strange Irish- 
 English youth in his place was manifestly an unwelcome 
 surprise to many. Some got up and went out. A few read 
 hymn-books, and one irate old gentleman, who sat just in 
 front of me, relieved his feelings with a newspaper. I had a 
 bad time. So had they. 
 
 Seldom a year passed after this, till Phillips Brooks became 
 Bishop of Massachusetts, that I did not preach for him, and a 
 good friend he was to me. In those earlier years he had no 
 understanding of, or sympathy with, the free and open church. 
 Later he very completely changed his mind, and, when he 
 visited me at St. George's, shortly after his election, he said, 
 "I will do all that I can to make every church in Massachusetts 
 free. You have been right all along." I shall have more to 
 say about Phillips Brooks later. I grew to love him. He was 
 strangely lonely, a man who found it impossible to reveal, even
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 167 
 
 to his few intimates, his own inner self, and who in consequence 
 of that inability could not and did not draw out the inner selves 
 of those he led and inspired by his preaching. Dr. A. V. G. 
 Allen, his biographer, would make him a great man all round. 
 This he was not. He was no organizer, poor debater, not a 
 liturgist, and he had no aptitude for dealing with the wants 
 and woes of men outside the pulpit. But he did one thing 
 supremely well: he was a great preacher, and that surely is 
 enough greatness for any man. 
 
 Three years after this, when I was in distress and doubt at 
 Toronto, I wrote to him, telling something of my trouble, and 
 asking if I might come to him for a night. I had a kind note 
 by next mail, and I went to Boston and unburdened my soul 
 as best I could, as we sat alone on the night of my arrival. " I 
 wanted you to come," said Brooks, and then he added kindly, 
 generous words of confidence in me, " but I can't help you. Go 
 back and fight it out. You'll win." He could not help me 
 my way; he certainly did help me his way, and I went back glad 
 I had taken the journey to see him. 
 
 On the floor of the General Convention, Brooks was, of 
 course, listened to with the utmost respect, but that he was 
 not at home there any one could see. He had no faculty in 
 reading the temper of "the House." When he spoke "he 
 preached" at it, and did not usually gain votes. 
 
 I sat behind him once when the important matter of the 
 revision and enlargement of the Prayer-Book was under de- 
 bate. A motion was before the house to permit an optional 
 use of the Beatitudes, instead of the Commandments, at the 
 Holy Communion office, once in the month. The motion 
 seemed likely to pass, as very many felt the fitness of prefacing 
 the ordinance with the Lord's Beatitudes rather than Moses' 
 law. Had it passed, it would have been a great boon. Phillips 
 Brooks rose to speak. As he did so, Arthur Brooks, his 
 brother, whispered something. At it Phillips Brooks shook 
 his head and plunged forward in a torrent of words. "Why 
 not trust the clergy? Why ever and always tie up the clergy 
 with unnecessary restrictions? Why not trust the man ap- 
 pointed to lead the flock, to feed the flock?" So on and so 
 on, eloquently. "Why only allow an optional use of the 
 Beatitudes once a month? Why not always an optional use?"
 
 168 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Arthur Brooks, who was an unusually able debater, said in an 
 aside to me, "Phillips has defeated the whole thing," and so he 
 had. The timid majority took counsel of their fears, and 
 promptly left the Ten Commandments where they were and 
 unfortunately still remain. 
 
 When it was not a question of debate, the sheer power of his 
 eloquence would sometimes move and shake his listeners. I 
 remember one remarkable instance of this which has not been 
 printed in the "Life." It was at a Church Congress, and 
 Brooks was pleading for a more elastic conception of the ser- 
 vice. "A clergy muzzled as we were could not effectively 
 serve our time," and then he went on torrentem "I was 
 seated on the floor of the General Convention of our church 
 when the terrible news came to us over the wire, 'Chicago is 
 burning.' The presiding Bishop called the Convention to 
 prayer and, both houses united, knelt before God. The 
 Bishop searched in the Prayer-Book for some office that fitted 
 the occasion, and, after a pause, bade us join with him in the 
 Litany, a noble prayer, consecrated by the usage of ages; a 
 prayer in which the wants and hopes of countless millions 
 have found expression, and yet, sir! perhaps the only woe with 
 with which the Litany does not deal is the woe of a burning city." 
 
 How well I remember the charm of Boston in those days. 
 My mission at St. Paul's meant for me a welcome to much 
 that was quite new in this country. Robert C. Winthrop, 
 then I think representing Massachusetts in Congress, asked me 
 first to dinner, and then insisted that I stay at his house. There 
 I met what was best worth meeting in the city. Mr. Winthrop 
 was the first great citizen that I had come to know. I spent 
 more than one evening alone with him. He paid me the com- 
 pliment of explaining his views on the status of the coloured 
 people, and on what should be the educational policy of the 
 Government, and he did this as an older officer, soon to retire 
 from service, might do it to a younger, only entering on his 
 career. 1 
 
 Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half complete, while millions of freemen, 
 with votes in their hands, are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the states 
 in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise all 
 alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and that 
 the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free. Robert C. Winthrop.
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 169 
 
 I had been living from hand to mouth. Rushing all over 
 the country from one mission to another, giving out, to the 
 point of exhaustion, such poor little stuff as there was in me 
 to give. To sit at the feet of such a man for even a few hours, 
 to feel he liked me, and in spite of my collapse at the Church 
 Congress, where he sat on the platform, believed in me, in my 
 work, and in my future usefulness; and proved that belief by 
 having me meet, at his table, the best in Boston well, it meant 
 more than I can say! 
 
 Mr. Winthrop put me up for the Somerset Club, and Russell 
 Sturgis seconded me. Talk of Boston being cold! I was only 
 a stranger, but Boston surely " took me in," in spite of my, to it, 
 outworn Evangelical theology; and while Mr. Winthrop lived, 
 I was more at home there than in any city in the United States. 
 
 Twenty-eight years after, this letter came to me from William 
 Newton, the then rector of St. Paul's. William Newton had 
 just heard of my resignation from St. George's. I was then in 
 Africa. 
 
 My dear Rainsford, 
 
 My heart goes out to you in that you have had to travel over the same hard, 
 disheartening road that I have trod. Your work and service are monumental. 
 There has been nothing like it in the history of the American Church. But 
 you know "Then cometh the end," and it is given to you at least to live long 
 enough to see and rejoice in the fruits of your labours. 
 
 How well I remember when you first came to Father, a Y. M. C. A., Evange- 
 list, with a big Bible under your left arm. 1 
 
 Do you remember the mission you had for me at St. Paul's, when you preached 
 about the "scrub oaks," and made extempore prayers from the pulpit? Do 
 you remember out two confessional rooms on either side of the chancel, like 
 Zamacoes' picture of the two confessors? you with a long line of fair peni- 
 tents, and I with an old maid or two? Ringold was acting at the Boston 
 theatre in Henry V, at that time, and the same girls came in the afternoon 
 to see " Rainsford 's smile," and then went at night to see Ringold 's kiss to 
 Katherine. 
 
 Let me throw in these pleasantries in the heart of a loyal, loving letter. I 
 do not know when or where, if ever, this letter will reach you, but if it ever 
 does get to you, remember that it comes with a soul full of love and affection 
 from one who is not unmindful of the sweet hours of yesterday. God's bless- 
 ing sustain you and give you calm. 
 
 Ever affectionately, 
 William Wilberforce Newton. 
 
 Feb. 9, 1906. 
 
 ^his refers to the visit to Philadelphia I have spoken of.
 
 170 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 When Randolph McKim of Washington died in July, 1920, 
 the last of the brotherly band I knew in the '7o's passed away. 
 How hospitable, how generous they were to me, a stranger 
 within their gates. In Sandusky in bleak midwinter, or in 
 sunny New Orleans; in Boston or in Richmond, everywhere it 
 was the same. I cannot recall one unpleasant incident or one 
 unkind word during those two full years. And, looking back- 
 ward, for one thing at least I am confidently thankful: I 
 never left one of their churches weaker for my visit to it. 
 
 In the early winter of 1878, I took a mission in London, 
 Ontario, which was unusually successful, and this led to my 
 being invited to Toronto. There my work developed into 
 something more than a mission; it led ultimately to my living 
 in Toronto for four years. I must speak at length of Toronto 
 and my work there, for it decided my future. 
 
 The Cathedral Church of St. James, by the vestry of which 
 I was invited, was a large and unusually fine church very well 
 endowed. It held in Toronto somewhat the same position 
 that long ago Trinity held in New York. 
 
 Dean Grassett was a man of culture, refinement, and con- 
 siderable learning, a graduate of Oxford, and a pronounced 
 Evangelist. He was an old man failing rapidly, and at this 
 time was sometimes incapable of any active work. The vestry 
 was an unusually strong representative body of men. Parish 
 affairs fell more and more into their hands. When the Dean 
 could not preach, they supplied the pulpit, and their insistence 
 it was that brought me to the town. 
 
 There had been no religious movement in Canada such as 
 Mr. Moody had been associated with in this country and in 
 England. The people were ready for such a movement, the 
 time was ripe for it when I went to Canada. I did not bring 
 it, yet it came by me. 
 
 From the very first it was evident that the spirit of God 
 was moving the consciences of men. Nowhere before, in any 
 place or at any time, had I seen anything like it. From the 
 start the crowds were enormous. Several thousands were 
 turned away nightly from the door. There was no undue 
 excitement; masses waited in the deep snow till the doors were 
 opened and then, with an orderliness that was extraordinary, 
 quietly took seats or standing room.
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 171 
 
 Under the circumstances I felt the danger of excitement, and 
 made no attempt to hold any after-meetings, or speak to in- 
 dividuals, till I had been preaching twice a day for a fortnight. 
 There was a large Sunday-school room across the churchyard 
 that would seat six hundred, and to check mere emotionalism 
 I had the first after-meeting there, not in the church. 
 
 I said, one evening after the sermon: "If there are any 
 present who wish to talk with me on matters of personal religion, 
 if they will go into the Sunday-school room I will meet them 
 there." I waited some time, and when I went into the room 
 I found between five and six hundred people on their knees. 
 There was no crying, no excitement, but a silence that could be 
 felt. I may say that the effects of that work were largely 
 permanent. Men known and respected in the city openly 
 professed conversion, lived up to their confession for many 
 years, and are living so to-day. 
 
 One of the first converts became mayor of the city next year, 
 and a right good mayor he made. Some of the dearest friends 
 man ever had clasped my hand and mingled their prayers and 
 praises with mine in that Sunday-school room. 
 
 In large numbers people came forward to join, not St. 
 James's alone, but other churches as well. At the end of a 
 month my mission was over. I had turned my "barrel" in- 
 side out, said my last say, preached my last sermon, and was 
 prepared to return to the United States for a short time before 
 taking a rest that I felt both my mind and my nerves badly 
 needed; but it was not to be. 
 
 The men whose insistence brought me there came to me 
 again, and many others now joined them. "You must not go. 
 Can any doubt that this is God's work? Stay with us. Canada 
 wants you. The doctors have ordered the Dean to take 
 absolute rest in England for four months. For so long a time 
 stay with us, and build up and strengthen the work that it has 
 been given you by God to do." 
 
 I felt that this was indeed a divine call for me. I must trust 
 my Lord for daily bread, and feed as best I could the hungry 
 flock that gathered round me. 
 
 The Toronto clergy, with one or two notable exceptions, 
 were not cordial, and I did not blame them. St. James's itself 
 was not popular with the other Episcopal churches, because it
 
 i 7 2 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 was absorbing, or rather its rector was absorbing, the whole 
 of the very large endowment that was intended to promote the 
 well-being, not of one but of all the Anglican churches in the 
 town. Then the suddenness of the religious awakening, the 
 crowding of the people from other churches to hear the new 
 voice these things could not make for popularity. 
 
 I had then little help or advice from my clerical brethren. 
 But if not from them, I had what I needed from a son of the 
 Dean, George Grassett. He had been a fellow-student with me 
 at St. John's College, Cambridge; we lived indeed on the same 
 staircase. In those earlier days he was rather openly non- 
 religious, and never came to our Evangelical meetings; but he 
 was transparently an honest, clever, and witty man, as well as 
 a sound scholar, and we saw a good deal of each other. He 
 was profoundly influenced by the mission, and being then in 
 poor health, unable to do any active work, he did what he alone 
 could do, and what I sorely needed: he coached, criticized, 
 and helped me. His younger brother, Arthur Grassett, was 
 my companion on the ice and at the tennis net, and the loving 
 friendship of both these men is one of the things I am proudest 
 of in all my life. They saw a mere boy, a stranger, coming to 
 the great church which for forty years (I think) their loved 
 father had presided over; filling his place with great crowds he 
 never had had, for four consecutive months, pushing old 
 habits and precedents aside. And they took this stranger in 
 as though he were a brother. I lived at the deanery with them 
 for those four months, and no unkind word, no taint of jeal- 
 ousy, that I can remember, ever marred our brotherly inter- 
 course. 
 
 There was a clever little weekly comic paper published in 
 Toronto, the Grip. Its chief feature was a full-page cartoon, 
 and before the weekly issue was in the hands of the public, this 
 cartoon was always spread on the wall, before the eyes of all 
 who walked crowded King Street. Shortly before I sailed for 
 England, I was dumfounded one day to see myself as a gigantic 
 Red Indian, on Grip's signboard, an immense row of heavy 
 scalp-locks stretching from the back of my head (Indian-chief- 
 wise) down my back to the ground. Looking closer, the scalp- 
 locks resolved themselves into slippers. Underneath, in large 
 capitals, was printed: "In slippery places" and in smaller
 
 AN ALIEN MISSIONER 173 
 
 lettering at the bottom, "A reverend gentleman is reported to 
 have received 440 pair." 
 
 The whole thing was very funny, but to be accurate, they 
 should have let me off 439, for though my ground was in truth 
 slippery, I had received just one pair. I have often wondered 
 how I managed not to do foolish things then, for I have done 
 them so often since. 
 
 I parted with the people of Toronto at the end of those 
 wonderful four months. And what was my life work to be? 
 That was the question. I felt it was not to be in England; and 
 yet, here I was tearing myself away from Toronto, the place 
 and the people suggesting home to me, who was beginning to 
 grow weary of wandering.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 A Dark Night and a Glorious Morning 
 Toronto, 1 878-1 880 
 
 He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
 
 He would not make his judgment blind, 
 He faced the spectres of the mind 
 
 And laid them; thus he came at length 
 
 To find a stronger faith his own; 
 And Power was with him in the night. 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. The truest 
 state of mind rested in, becomes false. R. W. Emerson. 
 
 I was married in April to Emily Alma Green, third daughter 
 of Frederick Green, of Prince's Gardens, London. 
 
 Neither my wife nor I was in very good health. She had 
 devoted herself to nursing her father, who was blind, through 
 a tedious illness he had died the year before and I was still 
 extremely nervous, and a bad sleeper. We went to Southern 
 Europe for six weeks, and had a never-to-be-forgotten good 
 time. There is only one honeymoon in a man's life. 
 
 My wife and her younger sister had rented a small house 
 in London, and there after our rest we returned to live. I 
 had saved $3,000 during my two years of mission preaching, and 
 so was not hampered for funds. Money went far then and we 
 lived simply. 
 
 I soon felt that England was not for me. There were already 
 gathering a band of men who must have stood about where I did. 
 They grew into the Broad Church Party, but I knew none of 
 them. I had been shut into the narrow enclosure of the Evan- 
 gelical fold, and there was not at that time the mingling of 
 parties, the live-and-let-let-live spirit you find to-day. 
 
 174
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 175 
 
 No one at home approved of my overseas doings, and I really 
 do not think I made a fair presentment of them. I wanted to 
 stop preaching I did not quite know why myself and refused 
 many invitations to pulpits. I did not understand my own 
 condition at all. I was like a crab changing its shell, a ticklish 
 business. All the more so because I did not yet realize that 
 the old shell must go or the crab would die. 
 
 I settled down in my wife's house for a time, but the future 
 was uncertain. I studied the thirty-nine articles of the Church 
 of England again and again, and the more I read them the less 
 I liked them, and the surer I felt that I could not give to them 
 an honest assent. One thing I could do: I could read, and I 
 could study. While missionizing this had been impossible. 
 And I read. 
 
 How strange it is that in our minds, as in our bodies, we 
 assimilate and make part of ourselves only those things that 
 we are ready for. We think we have gained what the teacher 
 in our hand has to give; we may have listened carefully to all 
 he has to say, and yet not have taken one single grain of corn 
 out of his sheaf. And more, what he says we may have un- 
 derstood and appreciated, yet somewhere within us, it stays 
 packed away, quite unused a bundle on top of our backs, not 
 blood and muscle strengthening our backbones. 
 
 How often have I noticed this in my young clergy, or in the 
 people who came to me for help! I would name a book that 
 had been helpful to me; hopefully they would tackle it, study 
 it, remember it, and get no help or light out of it not at the 
 time, anyway. Such experiences I understood in later years, 
 for in earlier days they had been my own. 
 
 A new idea came to me at this time. I suppose it was not 
 my own idea at all, but so far as I was conscious, it came as the 
 result of my own Bible study. "God's Revelation must be 
 more than a Book. No book, however great, could contain it." 
 When I examined the Book itself, I saw in it signs of progress. 
 The God of the Pentateuch, the tribal God of the days when 
 Israel struggled toward nationhood, and dutifully put to whole- 
 sale massacre those opposed to them, was not the God of the 
 greatest of the Psalmists, who sang a nobler song, "The earth 
 is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, the world, and they that 
 dwell therein." (Psalms 24.) And even the splendour of that
 
 i 7 6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 man's vision as he cries, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and 
 be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall 
 come in," lacks the soul appeal of Isaiah, an even greater poet 
 preacher than he: "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, 
 because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings 
 unto the meek. He hath sent me to bind up the broken- 
 hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of the 
 prison to them that are bound. To proclaim the acceptable 
 year of the Lord, and the day of the vengeance of our God; to 
 comfort all that mourn." (Is. lxi, 1-2.) 
 
 Then comes the Master himself, and quoting this passage 
 from Isaiah deliberately leaves out the sentence, "the day of 
 vengeance of our God." Here in the Bible itself, then, the 
 idea of God changes and rises, and the change was continuous; 
 more important still, Jesus was recorded as saying that the 
 continuous and changing quality in it would not cease with 
 him. "I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear 
 them now. But when he, the spirit of truth is come, he will 
 guide you into all truth; he will shew you things to come. It 
 is expedient for you that I go away." (John, xvi, 12, 13, 7.) 
 Here was growth and change indeed. Here was evolution in 
 Religion. 
 
 It sounds so simple now, and some of my readers may ques- 
 tion the need of going over such well-trodden ground, and the 
 repetition here of accepted conclusions; but I would repeat 
 what I said in my introduction: I am not writing for scholars 
 or advanced thinkers, but for the same sort of men and women 
 as those I knew men who worked hard and women who kept 
 the home and such do not even yet, many of them, understand 
 the all-important place evolution takes and must in the future 
 take in forming and reforming our religious ideas. Con- 
 sequently they cannot help their children as they should; and 
 children of religious parents in throngs are going forth from 
 their homes rejecting old forms of the Faith, and unable to 
 formulate new. I shall have more to say later on this subject. 
 I must be forgiven if I often and with many illustrations in- 
 sist on it. Teaching and preaching it I got new light myself, 
 and I found I gave help to others. 
 
 If the ministry of the Christian church is, as St. Paul says, 
 "to commend the Gospel to every man's conscience in the
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 177 
 
 sight of God," then it must be explained in terms of a divine 
 evolution rather than in terms of a divine revelation. People 
 will attach the idea of the supernatural to revelation, and 
 man's mind is increasingly protesting against the supernatural. 
 There is no such thing as the supernatural. The word explains 
 nothing (a moving point in human ignorance). What is super- 
 natural to one age is, to the next, as simple as common arith- 
 metic. 
 
 I was far from understanding all this then, but I had at last 
 got a clue to much that had hitherto puzzled me. If the 
 Bible was the record of a growing, changing idea of God; 
 if Jesus taught that His Spirit would lead men after he was 
 dead into larger and newer truth; then surely it was open to the 
 Church to modify customs and services as the needs of the time 
 required, and the change from an earlier usage to a later was 
 defensible and necessary. Thus the idea of growth in religion 
 helped me out of some of my earlier "growing pains." For 
 instance, infant baptism might not have been the custom in 
 the time of the Apostles, and yet might have become, quite 
 naturally, the custom of the Church at a later time. 
 
 But when I was asked to explain how I justified my change 
 of mind, I found myself in worse trouble than I had been be- 
 fore; for among my friends, indeed among all the orthodox, 
 anything suggesting evolution in religion was, in 1878, double- 
 dyed heresy. I found no living teacher to help me, but one 
 who was dead gave a message to me. The loneliest prophet 
 of our modern time was F. W. Robertson, and, in the English 
 Church, certainly the greatest. 
 
 I had an illustration, many years after this, of how Robert- 
 son had influenced my preaching. At two o'clock one morning 
 the rectory bell rang, and kept ringing till it woke me. A 
 messenger from the New York Hospital, on West 16th Street, 
 was outside, saying that a dying woman wanted to see me im- 
 mediately. I dressed hastily and went with him. I found a 
 woman of some sixty years. There were few signs of death 
 about her or the room she lay in. Beautiful flowers were there, 
 and in her pale peaceful face, and through the undimmed eyes 
 that steadily looked into mine, there shone a perfect peace. 
 " You see," she said, " I lack for nothing. I have been gover- 
 ness for years to (she mentioned important people of New
 
 178 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 York), and the children have been here all the time, and have 
 surrounded me with every comfort. I have been coming to 
 St. George's for a long time, but I did not give you my name, 
 for I did not need your service. Now I have only a very few 
 hours to live, but I could not die without telling you that the 
 man who is an inspiration to you was the man who led me to 
 my Saviour in Brighton forty years ago. I have never heard 
 you name him, but your sermons breathe his spirit, and I know 
 you would love to hear this, so I could not die without telling 
 you. God bless you. Good-night." 
 
 Jesus can make the dying bed 
 Feel soft as downy pillows are. 
 
 I went over my own sermon notes, those I had used during 
 my four months in Toronto. They were good of their kind, 
 carefully worked out and illustrated with telling things in them; 
 and speaking from those notes, which had cost me much 
 thought and preparation, I had been used to help many people. 
 I was not flattering myself. So much was true. Yet the 
 more I read my old sermons the less I liked them. I studied 
 and thought, trying to find out what was the matter with me 
 or with them. At last I saw, and the seeing startled me. 
 My own idea of God was changing. Even the dear Companion 
 God of my mother was changing. He whose chief purpose was 
 the rewarding of His own special faithful ones, He who was 
 partiality embodied^ watching over, guarding, saving some, 
 letting the greater mass rot in ignorance and sin that God 
 I could preach no longer. But what of the Bible's teaching to 
 the contrary? 
 
 I remembered Luther's magnificent challenge: "Verses of the 
 Bible don't make the slightest difference to me; I appeal to the 
 Lord who is King of Scripture." (Erlanger, Ed. 63, 157.) 
 Many will say that the faith I have described as mine, and the 
 Creed I am protesting against as at this time intolerable to me 
 are caricatures of the message and belief which the Evangelical 
 party, and indeed all parties except the Unitarians, held and 
 proclaimed. I cannot agree to this. Though my mind was 
 immature and my scholarship superficial, I had been in con- 
 stant touch, both privately and in public, with many of the 
 leaders of that party. My dear father was one of the most
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 179 
 
 influential of them; and as to my own work, I had for five 
 years constantly addressed large audiences; and when what I 
 preached was criticized, it was on the ground that I was too 
 radical, too much inclined to latitudinarianism. No, I am not 
 caricaturing what was accepted as the popular gospel, either in 
 England or in America, at that time. Doctor Tyng (senior) 
 in New York, and the scholarly Canon Conway of Westminster, 
 Simion at Cambridge, and hundreds of other lesser men, in 
 pulpits and on platforms, all treated the gospel of Jesus in the 
 same way, all held generally to the same sort of a God. 
 
 The fact is that a younger generation finds it hard to realize 
 the cataclysmic change a general acceptance, however partial, 
 of the evolutionary hypothesis has effected in religious belief. 
 Doctrines popularly accepted are no longer thinkable; educated 
 people will not discuss them. But just because they are no 
 longer living issues, we are apt to undervalue the work done for 
 God and man, by the brave soldiers of a less enlightened day. 
 We may know more of nature, and so more of God (I, of course, 
 include man in nature), but have we the fine hardihood, the 
 directness, simpleness, and understandableness of those men's 
 appeal? "This one thing I do." "This one way I go." 
 "This one Master I serve." "He can and will save you from 
 your sins." "Save you from hell, save you for Heaven." 
 "He has saved and does save me." "Give up the world and 
 come to Jesus." 
 
 I was unsettled, my future quite uncertain, when most un- 
 expectedly a call came from Toronto again. "The Dean is 
 failing; there are signs of brain trouble. You have built up 
 the church in this community. We look to you. Come to us 
 as assistant rector of St. James's. We give you our hands, as 
 you know you have our hearts, and we pledge you that on his 
 death you shall be elected our rector." 
 
 I asked my wife if she was willing to go to Canada. She 
 said "yes!" and we went. What a reception we had! What 
 kindness! What gladness! And enormous crowds waiting to 
 hear me at the church. None were heartier in their welcome 
 than the sons of the Dean; and from the bottom of my heart I 
 appreciated this attitude of theirs; for here was a young stranger 
 pushing aside one whose ministry had been, for forty years, 
 most acceptable to his flock, and who was their loved father.
 
 180 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I made no change in the parish at first; waited to feel my way, 
 and gave myself chiefly to the preparations of my sermons and 
 an extended visitation of the large membership of the parish. 
 While Dean Grassett was able to preach, we shared the pul- 
 pit, but his appearances grew necessarily less frequent month by 
 month. After the first six months he scarcely preached at all. 
 
 And now I must tell, as briefly as I can, what befell me dur- 
 ing the next eighteen months. First I shall tell the fact and 
 then the cause. I do not over-state the matter when I say 
 those months were the turning point in my life. Turning my 
 back on professional prosperity in England had been hard. 
 Leaving St. Giles' and Earlham was hard. Going against my 
 mother's wishes and judgment, and feeling that as life closed in 
 for her I was more and more estranged from her by my own 
 deliberate choice and act, was bitterly hard. Now I was to 
 face an experience harder far than anything I had yet known. 
 I was to face undeniable failure in St. James's, Toronto. Great 
 crowds had met me on my arrival. Sunday evenings thousands 
 were turned from the doors. But soon a change came that the 
 casual observer could not ignore. First the crowding stopped. 
 Then empty spaces were to be seen. Then the old members, 
 the stand-bys of the church, began to protest and sometimes 
 to go to other churches. 
 
 I had no holiday in eighteen months. I dared not absent my- 
 self. I took my wife and our first-born to Gloucester, Massa- 
 chusetts, left them there and returned next day. My vestry- 
 men, men I loved and who loved me, men I had helped to a 
 higher religious life during my mission, asked for an appoint- 
 ment; and not merely as friends, but as officers in the church, 
 protested. 
 
 "We love you, we trust you, but what are you doing? You 
 are not preaching as you used to preach, nor what you used 
 to preach." "You are pulling down what you so lately built 
 up, undoing what you did. You are confusing us all. Your 
 friends can't understand you. Give us the old gospel you gave 
 us with such power. For it people are hungry still." And 
 as a final note, rightfully considering the responsibilities of their 
 office, they added, "The collections have fallen greatly." 
 
 Shortly after this terrible visit, the Dean, during a brief 
 return of mental vigour, asked me to come into his study, and
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 181 
 
 as our interview ended, said with emphasis, "Mr. Rainsford, 
 if you respect yourself, sir, you will resign." I replied with 
 equal emphasis that as my salary came from the vestry, and my 
 call to the assistant rectorship from the vestry, till the vestry 
 asked me to resign nothing would induce me to do so. I knew 
 well that the Dean had very naturally a compact following; 
 good men many of them, but all of them reactionary; and that 
 these men had persuaded the old gentleman to act as he did. 
 The question before me was whether I or they knew best what my 
 people needed. Well I knew I was just then a faltering sort of 
 guide. Yet, uncertain as I was of many things, I knew that I 
 was not seeking my own, that I had whole-heartedly given my- 
 self in this matter to my God, and so my duty seemed clear. 
 I had a responsibility for these people. Hungry, they had 
 called me to feed them. I had led them to a certain point. 
 Was I to leave them now? Was the gospel I had brought to 
 them so poor a thing as that? If so, then indeed I had been 
 sadly self-deceived. Then I had failed utterly. I had led my 
 flock not into good pasture but into a wilderness. No, for 
 them I must work and fight and pray; and once again my 
 Master's mighty promise came to me, a promise I had many 
 times before claimed and found true. "If any man wills to do 
 His will eivtic 8Xj) he shall know of the doctrine." (John vn, 
 17.) But to preach what I could no longer believe to be His 
 truth I would not, or to get out of my difficulties by deserting 
 my post I could not. For when I fought for my own Faith I 
 was fighting for the faith of my people. 
 
 Yet in those days mine was a sorry case. I was like a man 
 struggling in black, stormy waters to keep his own lip above 
 the salt sea. How could such a swimmer save others? 
 
 Then it was I went to Phillips Brooks, as I have elsewhere 
 told, and though he did not attempt to answer my difficulties, 
 his kindly confidence cheered me. 
 
 There are few who can realize the agony of this gradual fail- 
 ure of mine. I had felt the intoxication of the gathering of 
 thousands; the stimulus, the spiritual elation, and the joy, one 
 of the purest joys surely given to man to feel, the joy of know- 
 ing that he had helped many to higher and better living. These 
 things I had felt and seen; this joy I had had and known and 
 now all was changed. The very people I had helped cried to me
 
 182 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 not to fail them. " Did you not believe what you preached to 
 us?" they cried. "If you did, oh, preach it again to us now." 
 So the church congregations shrank. Collections melted away. 
 Friends looked doubtful and enemies jeered. 
 
 The greatest man that ever fought his way through darkness 
 was Jesus. Next to him I think stands Paul. The story of his 
 shipwreck and of his rallying the defeated crew is one of the 
 greatest stories ever written. "Driven up and down in Adria, 
 neither sun nor stars for many days appearing," all lesser men 
 abandoned hope. Before the despairing crowd stands forth 
 the little shackled Jew. Hear him! "There stood by me 
 this night the angel of God, whose I am and whom I serve, say- 
 ing, 'Fear not, Paul.' " And I, too, after being driven up and 
 down in my own Adria, and coming near as a man could to 
 shipwreck, had my own angel visitor, who brought me strength 
 to help in my time of need. 
 
 It happened in this wise. I had determined to spend a whole 
 night in prayer. Several times I had done this before, and had 
 not gained any help so far as I knew by it. But I would try it 
 once more. So I prayed and prayed till I must have fallen 
 asleep, kneeling by my bed. It was not far from morning, 
 and I was in a semi-conscious state, when through my mind 
 drifted the parable of the Prodigal Son. "When he came to 
 himself," it ran, "To himself, to his true self," he said, "I will 
 arise and go to my Father." Was it possible? How had I 
 missed it? In the farthest of far countries he was still his 
 father's son. In all the wild riot of youth he was still his father's 
 son. Just as much his son as when he sat at his table at home. 
 Fallen into the gutter and joined to the foreigner, he was his 
 father's son. Everlastingly and indissolubly his son, not be- 
 cause he was converted, not because he turned homeward, but 
 because he was a man-child, begotten of his father. Alive be- 
 cause within him beat his father's life. "Neither life nor 
 death nor things present or to come " could ever make him any- 
 thing else. I had my answer. I got up from my knees, got 
 into bed, and slept till late next morning. 
 
 The message I got that night is the foundation of what I have 
 taught ever since. It altered my whole ministry. It seems to 
 me a greater, more far-reaching, more inclusive message every 
 year I live and every time I try to preach it. An inexhausti-
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 183 
 
 ble gospel. The wayfaring man can understand it, and yet the 
 wisest philosopher cannot exhaust it. 
 
 Next Sunday morning I preached from the text, "He came to 
 himself," and I spoke to my people with an assurance and a 
 power I had not known for many a long day. Two years be- 
 fore, at the close of my mission, I had had the same text, but 
 this was a different sermon. 
 
 The three stories (Luke xv) all told the same emancipating 
 gospel: The lost sheep belonged to the shepherd; the lost silver 
 was owned by the woman; the wandering boy was his father's 
 son. And all three of them were out of place till they were at 
 home. No religious experience conceivable can make me a 
 son of God. I am that already. That is the everlasting 
 gospel proclaimed by Jesus. All Life was to me, that Sunday 
 morning, God's vast cathedral, and the holiest thing, the 
 divinest within it, was Man. I felt I had a new message from 
 God to men, and the people felt it, and that Sunday morning 
 was the turning of the tide. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius tells a story of his pilot, who had for many 
 years, and in many seas, held the tiller of his galley. It was a 
 stormy night and the Emperor came on deck to hearten his 
 crew, for the danger was extreme. The old steersman, lashed 
 to his tiller, was making a prayer to Neptune and the Emperor 
 overheard him. "Father Neptune," he said, "you may sink 
 me if you will, you may save me if you will, but whether you 
 sink me or save me, I will hold my tiller true." To hold my 
 tiller true I had tried hard, and God had given me grace to do it. 
 That was the reason I came through my storm, yes, and carried 
 my people with me. I had won a new sense of my own sonship 
 to God. That sonship did not depend on any religious ex- 
 perience whatever; not because I repented of my sins and was 
 converted was I God's son, but because I was free-born. And 
 seeing this great truth and feeling its power, others felt it, too, 
 and all the church's life and work took new vigour. 
 
 My readers who have followed me understandingly can 
 readily see why I lost for the time being my grip on the com- 
 munity in Toronto. I had won them by infusing new reality 
 into the religious forms of thought to which from childhood 
 they had been accustomed. I could no longer state these 
 well-known doctrines in the terms they knew, and I had as yet
 
 184 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 nothing definite enough to take their place. And so, naturally, 
 it seemed to my people that I was pulling down all I had builded 
 up. I look back myself on those days of darkness with won- 
 der. I do not understand how I accomplished what I did. I 
 was so utterly lonely, and all circumstances seemed against me. 
 George Grassett was perhaps the only man I knew who under- 
 stood something of what I was going through. 
 
 I do not boast when I say that I am astonished that I won 
 through as I did. I am sensible that I have not always walked 
 so steadily the high, hard path, as I walked it during those dark 
 months. Biographers seem to take it for granted that men 
 whose lives prove them good men, always without faltering 
 do walk the high, lonely path. Bible biographers are much too 
 true to nature to support this modern theory. My youth was 
 in my favour. There is a spiritual resilience in one before forty 
 that is not always there after forty. That is what my friend, 
 Professor Osier (who, by the way, was a Torontonian) meant, 
 I take it, when jokingly he suggested euthanasia for older men. 
 When we are young we are more one-sided than we are later. 
 We have not yet learned to recognize the many-sidedness of the 
 questions confronting us in life. Decisions are more quickly 
 made. Then we have time, when we are younger, to correct 
 our mistakes and sins. Like the wound a gardener makes in 
 grafting a young tree, the growing power of the tree hides the 
 scar your grafting knife has made, and the tree's native vigour 
 finds newer and richer vent. "I write to you, young men, 
 because ye are strong and have overcome the wicked one," so 
 writes Paul. 
 
 My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky; 
 So was it when my days began. So is it now I am a man; 
 So be it when I shall grow old, or let me die. 
 
 And Wordsworth agrees with Paul. 
 
 In describing these dark days and the effect my difficulties 
 had on my people, I do not wish to be understood as saying 
 that the bulk of the congregation realized what was the matter. 
 Most of them thought that "the young rector did not preach 
 as well as he used to preach; perhaps the vestry had been rather 
 hasty in its call to him." And there with them the matter 
 ended. I took good care that so far as I was concerned they
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 185 
 
 should have no inkling of what trouble I was in. I want to 
 state my experiences in these days so that they may be perhaps 
 of service to others who find themselves confronted with cir- 
 cumstances similar to mine. In the first place, I spoke to no 
 one; confessed to no one but my friend George Grassett and 
 Phillips Brooks. "You must fight it out by yourself," Phillips 
 Brooks had said, and he was right. 
 
 Had I not preserved strict silence, my state of mind could not 
 fail soon to have become town gossip, and then the sooner I 
 resigned the better for the community. Next 1 watched my 
 words and tried to avoid a negative dealing with great subjects 
 and doctrines. I attacked none; I took back no statements I 
 had made; but at the same time tried to cast the old doctrines in 
 new forms when I preached. Never under any circumstances, 
 however, did I say anything that I did not believe was true. 
 Here, naturally, I was continually blundering and fumbling, and 
 my uncertainty became evident to any who had moderate 
 powers of observation. When I came among them all at first, 
 I came as a man using a well-known, well-sharpened instru- 
 ment, well adapted to its purpose. This I had discarded, 
 though I did not say so, and was laying about me now with 
 a weapon of my own manufacture, which, moreover, I did not 
 use as efficiently as I had the first one. 
 
 I do not wish to dwell too long on those first eighteen months 
 of ministry as assistant rector of St. James's, but not in the 
 years before them, nor yet in those that were to come after, 
 were there any experiences so vital to me. Under God they 
 made me. There is an old Puritan saying about feeling "the 
 burden of souls" that may have gathered to it in our day a 
 suggestion of unreality. There was no unreality attaching 
 to it when applied to me and my people then. I stood to 
 many of them as a father in God. I had brought them the 
 very bread of life. They and I together had renewed our vows 
 of faithfulness to Jesus, and that any changes in my own views 
 of Jesus and His teachings should result in these sheep of my 
 flock growing doubtful of the Great Shepherd, to whom I 
 had led them but a short time ago, was positively intolerable to 
 me. And yet, suffer as I might and I did suffer in those dark, 
 lonely days of one thing I was sure, one duty I saw clearly; it 
 was this: If I, a poor, sinful, ignorant man, was to be true to
 
 1 86 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 myself, to my people, and to my God, I dare not temporize 
 about speaking the truth. The darker the night, the heavier 
 the storm, the greater the reason to hold my tiller true. 
 
 Emerson says: "God offers every man the choice between 
 Truth and Repose. Take which you please; you cannot have 
 both." When I came back from England to my dear people in 
 Toronto, that was just the choice offered to me, though I did not 
 realize it then. I had a delightful home, among more than 
 merely appreciative friends; in a community that was then the 
 second, and seemed destined to become in the near future the 
 first, in influence in a new and great country I was young, and 
 the world was before me, but search it all over and I could not 
 have found a field that offered greater return for work done, for 
 St. James's Cathedral was by long odds the most influential 
 church in the Dominion. I was assured of its rectorship. 
 What more pleasant surroundings than these could any young 
 man want? No! It had not been easy to keep my tiller true, 
 but thank God I had done it. 
 
 And now for me the winter was over and gone, and I preached 
 and worked as I had never done in my life before. I found, too, 
 I had a healthier outlook on things. I came to the conclusion 
 that a holiday now and then was good for me. In fact, I grew 
 in a healthy way quite worldly. I played tennis, and skated, 
 and fished, and shot. If I had laid aside a well-worn coat, I 
 had done so only because the sunshine I stood in made it no 
 longer necessary. I began to feel a new courage, to cease to 
 dread anything, even my own doubts. Plenty of fighting 
 there surely lay ahead still, but new allies I had, new aid had 
 come to me just as I was beginning to lose heart at the odds to 
 which I was opposed. Let the dear childish fables go, if they 
 must. Life itself was good all Life, for it was full of God. 
 
 It is hard to put the change, the enlargement I felt, into words. 
 Out of long-continued turmoil had come my body, far from 
 perfect maybe, but good enough to work with. Out of spiritual 
 turmoil had come my mind and soul, also far from perfect, but 
 capable of receiving the abundant life that now filled the whole 
 of me. If I must slough off precious old things, I should do so 
 only because new life, fuller life, was pushing them off, as the 
 young leaf that comes in springtime pushes off the old one. 
 The frost and storms of winter could not tear the old away,
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 187 
 
 but the pushing of the new life that has come to bloom in its 
 place is irresistible. 
 
 Tis life whereof our veins are scant, 
 T\s life, not death, for which we pant, 
 More life and fuller that we want. 
 
 How I had wanted it ! Now it had come, more life and richer. 
 For I had more of God, more of a greater God, a God for whom 
 I needed not to apologize. 
 
 I noticed now that certain people began to appear at the 
 Cathedral services who had been noticeably absent from them 
 during the mission, and also during the crowded times im- 
 mediately following it. Among these was Goldwin Smith. He 
 was unpopular just then, for he was supposed to advocate the 
 absorption of Canada by the United States. He published a 
 little weekly leaflet called the Bystander, extraordinarily well- 
 written none had a better style than he and of course very 
 clever. I think Goldwin Smith was one of the very ablest men 
 intellectually I ever met. His fund of information was ex- 
 traordinary, but he lacked the gift of making his guests talk, 
 and so at his table, though there was an excellent cook at the 
 Grange, dinners did not always seem to "go," and conversation 
 was apt to be a monologue. He had little sympathy with the 
 extreme evangelicism of my first days' work, but as he saw I 
 was groping my way toward evolutionism he took a kindly 
 interest in me, asking me to dinner, etc. He was not an easy 
 man to talk to then; others felt this as I did. He was very 
 much alone in the town and had no intimates. When I left 
 Toronto, I received several letters from Goldwin Smith, and 
 later I found his company altogether delightful, and visited 
 him more than once. He was brilliant as ever, but he seemed 
 to have won a more understanding, sympathetic outlook on life 
 than he had when he first so kindly sought my acquaintance. 
 He was thought to be a cold man, but I am sure he desired, 
 before all things, to serve his day and generation. 
 
 Here is the last letter Goldwin Smith wrote me. It has not 
 heretofore been published. I wish I had kept the others I 
 received from him. In it appears the clear vision and unmov- 
 able courage of the fine critic of life that he was. How right he 
 was in his adverse judgment of England's action in the Boer
 
 i88 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 War! Few of us saw things as he did then, and his confession 
 of his sense of the need of Christian communion is a fitting and 
 beautiful conclusion to a great critical and scholarly career. 
 
 The Grange, Toronto, 
 
 Jan. 7, 1904. 
 My dear Dr. Rainsford, 
 
 I am very glad to find that you approve my letter to the Sun. No harm, 
 I hope possibly some good, may be done to liberal clergymen like yourself 
 who are trying to set Christianity free from its dogmatic shackles by lay dis- 
 cussion of these questions, with which you can hardly deal unrestrainedly 
 yourselves without provoking angry opposition and imperilling your useful- 
 ness. Irreverent treatment, such as that of Ingersol, or even that of Haeckel, 
 who sneers at the Christian God as a "Gaseous Vertebrate," must of course 
 do harm to you and all of us. Anything like irreverence I do my best to 
 avoid, not that to avoid it costs me any effort. 
 
 Though I am no longer able to profess belief in the creeds, I have not broken 
 away from the spiritual life embodied in the Christian Communion. I at- 
 tend a little Baptist church. The Baptists remained comparatively true to 
 what I regarded as the principles of Christianity during the Boer War, 
 while passion raged around, and the Anglican Synod at this place wound up 
 with three cheers for Lord Roberts. The Methodists were fully as bad as the 
 Anglicans, or, considering their professions, worse. The original enthusiasm 
 of that sect is in great measure exhausted, and its place is being taken by 
 other things. 
 
 I cannot look forward to the pleasure of seeing you at Lakewood again. 
 L. is changed. It is no longer the quiet place which attracted us old people. 
 But indeed I shall hardly leave home again. I wish there were a chance of 
 seeing you here. (Come of the creeds what will, you are keeping the religion 
 of Jesus alive in New York.) 
 
 Ever most truly yours, 
 
 Gold win Smith. 
 
 Whenever he happened to be in Toronto over Sunday, Sir 
 John Macdonald always came to the Cathedral. His great 
 opponent, the Honourable Edward Blake, was a member of the 
 vestry, and many times was I indebted to him for wise advice. 
 Political feeling then ran high. Sir John was compacting the 
 great Dominion. He was looking toward nationhood for 
 Canada, but his "national policy" raised a storm. The event, 
 I think it cannot be denied, proved Sir John right. When first 
 I visited Canada in 1869, the United States was steadily draw- 
 ing to itself Canadian manhood. Even so late as '78 and '79, 
 many of the brightest young men in my large men's Bible class
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 189 
 
 were drifting annually over the border. But before I left 
 St. James's, the tide had turned, and the population of the 
 country, which, in spite of a considerable immigration and a 
 large birth rate, had remained almost at a standstill, began first 
 a slow and then a rapid advance. 
 
 Canadian politics were in my time, and I fear there can be 
 no doubt about it still are, quite unusually corrupt. (If I 
 hurt some old friends' feelings as I write this I cannot help it.) 
 We on our side have still much to be ashamed of in that line, 
 but I have not found in any locality, or in any party in the 
 United States, corruption so universal and unashamed as I 
 found in Canada. 
 
 Sir John Macdonald was an extraordinarily able man, a first- 
 class debater. As a politician he was patriotic to the core. 
 Personally he was incapable of touching a dirty penny. His 
 strength, his brain, his life, he laid on the altar of his country. 
 He lived simply and he died poor. He had an extraordinary 
 command over himself. Before I knew him he had been a 
 very heavy drinker. Perhaps it would be more accurate to 
 say consumer of alcohol, for I was told no one ever knew him to 
 be drunk. But he seemed to me to have quite conquered any 
 craving for liquor that he had had. He had accustomed him- 
 self to do with little sleep. When Mrs. Rainsford and I stayed 
 with Sir John and Lady Macdonald at Ottawa, he would keep 
 me talking in his study till after two o'clock in the morning, and 
 in the morning he was up earlier than the household, brisk, 
 clearheaded, pleasantly witty, facing immense work, and armed 
 at all points to meet the very able opponents arrayed against 
 him in daily conflicts on which depended the fate of his govern- 
 ment. 
 
 He was, I believe, extraordinarily gifted in the management 
 of men. Hence his continued success. I was told he was un- 
 scrupulous in the means he employed to win his way. I can 
 well believe it. But if he was, it was for the land and the people 
 he believed in and loved; never for himself. I think Sir John 
 was a very great man. He was an omnivorous reader; he read 
 not as fast as Theodore Roosevelt, but still very fast indeed, 
 and what he read he remembered. The stories of his ready 
 wit are innumerable. I must give only two. An opponent 
 on the floor of the House of Commons at Ottawa accused him
 
 190 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 of having stolen part of the political programme of the op- 
 position. Said he: "Sir John has stolen the brains of the op- 
 position." Quick as a flash Sir John was on his feet, appealing 
 to the Chair on a point of order. "Mr. Speaker, the Honourable 
 Member has accused me of petty larceny." Sir John's op- 
 ponents were called "the Grits," a popular name for the then 
 Liberal party. Sir John had a severe operation for appendi- 
 citis. The causes of that disorder were not so well known as 
 they are now. Sir Charles Tupper was an intimate friend and 
 a member of his Cabinet. For days Sir John hung on the 
 border land. When the tide slowly turned, Sir Charles was 
 by the bedside, and Sir John, seeing him, whispered: "What 
 did they find, Tupper?" "A small piece of grit." "Those 
 damned Grits! I knew they would be the death of me." 
 
 Of course my opinion, a young outsider then, on the rights 
 and wrongs of the doings of both Conservatives and Grits is 
 of little worth, but I met men on whose actions great things 
 hinged, and who knew what was going on. Some of the best 
 informed of them gave me their confidence, and as a result I 
 became sure that when the Canadian Pacific Railroad had to 
 be put through, it was for more than one man in that deal a 
 question whether he went to prison or to the House of Lords. 
 To-day the corruption tacitly permitted in Canada where great 
 railroads are concerned is as bad, I fear, as it was then. I can- 
 not understand why the Christian conscience of the land toler- 
 ates it. One reason is that the religious people are still fighting 
 over old, worn-out issues "the mint, annis and commin of the 
 Law" while there is a stinking Augean stable there that is 
 breeding a national fever. Their house-cleaning, when it 
 comes, may be costly. 
 
 My wife and I can never forget Sir John's and Lady Mac- 
 donald's kindness to us when we stayed with them at Ottawa. 
 The visit was to have been brief, but Mrs. Rainsford was taken 
 ill, and as she expected soon to be a mother, the doctors did 
 not approve of an immediate return to Toronto. The new 
 national policy was then in debate and excitement ran high. 
 Yet for hours at a time Sir John would sit by a young wife's 
 bedside, read to her, gossip to her, and be the altogether charm- 
 ing, fatherly man that at heart he was. 
 
 Yes, Sir John Macdonald was a many-sided and very great
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 191 
 
 man. He was a man of vision; he had knowledge of the times; 
 he saw what his country needed. And using the instruments 
 he found ready to hand, the only ones available, early and late 
 he bent every energy that was in him to the accomplishment 
 of his task. He has been compared frequently to Disraeli. In 
 features and build there was a resemblance between them, but 
 Macdonald's work was sound, far-seeing, and has finally stood 
 the test of time. Disraeli, Lord Salisbury sadly confessed in 
 later years, in his day of power "backed the wrong horse." 
 
 He was a very clever, but surely not a very great man. He 
 appealed to all that was weakest and worst in the nation that, 
 for a time, his brilliance dazzled. He was like his novels: 
 they are clever, but certainly not first-class. 
 
 My last two years at St. James's were very happy years. 
 I had of course a good deal of opposition from conscientious 
 objectors to what I was teaching and preaching. To the old 
 Evangelicals in the church and town I smelt of heresy. I was 
 eminently unsound on such vital matters as the "Atonement," 
 "Verbal Inspiration of the Scriptures," and "Eternal Punish- 
 ment." They had another grievance, too. The bitterest sort 
 of feeling then existed between Low Church and High Church, 
 and I evidently could not be depended on to take an active part 
 in this civil war. 
 
 Still, these were but trifling matters. The old church was 
 once more packed with congregations, largely composed of 
 young people. I had a splendid Bible class. My people were 
 with me, heart and soul, and the collections were no longer a 
 matter of concern to my worthy vestry. The only drawback 
 to our happiness was my wife's health, which still was poor. 
 
 I read in the mornings, shutting my study door resolutely, 
 trying to make up for the lack of sound reading which my 
 missionary life had made impossible. I discovered Fiske, and 
 he was a discovery. I rediscovered Mazzini. I cannot over- 
 state what I owe to Mazzini. He has to my mind a truer, 
 saner hold on the real scope and meaning of the religion of 
 Jesus as it should be applied to modern life than any great 
 teacher, any great public figure of his time. His faith was 
 profound, not in God only, but in man. He was at once a 
 radical of radicals, a conspirator, working at constant peril of 
 his life, for the union of his beloved Italy, and a preacher of the
 
 192 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 oldest and purest of all gospels that life was a glorious op- 
 portunity, to be resolutely spent in making the world better, 
 and all men in it worthier of their high calling in Jesus, man's 
 Leader and Lord. 
 
 All sorts of men, wise and foolish, learned and simple, offered 
 to the Nineteenth Century their theories of social reform. 
 Mazzini was the greatest figure of them all. Steadily, with an 
 inflexible courage in which there was no taint of egoism, he 
 trod his high and lonely way, his enemies many and powerful, 
 his friends often few, and they but partially understanding him. 
 Ceaselessly he strove for the Christianizing of politics. Re- 
 ligion as he saw and practised it was nowhere more necessary 
 than in so-called secular affairs; for Christianity was no in- 
 dividual matter; it was the very soul of public duty. For 
 man's relations to his fellow-man could never be just, peaceful, 
 and harmonious till in business and politics he based his actions 
 on its law of loving, believing, selfless service. 
 
 I had no teacher to go to in those formative days. If I had 
 been able to sit under the Cairds in Scotland, Sabatier in Paris, 
 or attend the lectures of our own great Royce at Harvard, I 
 would have had the meat and drink I needed. They were not 
 for me then. But my debt to Mazzini I can never exaggerate. 
 The soundest leaders of reform have been inspired by this great, 
 lonely Christian thinker and hero, who died in exile, denounced 
 and misunderstood. His was the inevitable fate of men who 
 are, like their master, far ahead of their time. 
 
 The Dean's failing health now cast the responsibility of the 
 parish on me, and I had been unsuccessful in supplying myself 
 with any really efficient clerical aid. Young clerics could be 
 had, but they were not the sort of men I wanted, nor could such 
 men be readily found. My discovery of this fact gave me quite 
 a new idea of one of the chief functions of a great parish, which 
 later I was to embody in St. George's, New York: It should be 
 a training school for the younger clergy, supplementing the 
 wholly inadequate training which the various divinity schools 
 gave. 
 
 In this Canada was then woefully behindhand; the Episcopal 
 Church was losing ground, but it was a hard matter to make the 
 bishops face the facts. I will quote an instance. I had been 
 staying at Ottawa with Sir John, when an invitation came to
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 193 
 
 me to address a great gathering of bishops and clergy at Mon- 
 treal. An appeal was to be made for the extension of home 
 missionary work. Sir John had told me of some census figures, 
 lately tabulated by the Government. These had been before 
 the public for some time, but had not gained any special notice. 
 They proved that the English Church in Canada had for many 
 years steadily been losing ground. 1 With her was from the 
 first all the influence of the Church in the old land. She had 
 a propitious start, was helped in many ways from overseas, 
 and was very substantially endowed with Government gifts 
 of land. In spite of these unusual advantages over the " sects," 
 she had steadily lost ground to them. First the Roman 
 Catholics passed her; then the Methodists; then the Presby- 
 terians, and now the Baptists. She did not fit herself, she never 
 has fitted herself, to Colonial conditions. She has not done in 
 Australia as well as have other branches of the Christian bod- 
 ies, who have not enjoyed the initial advantages that were hers. 
 
 This was no news to me, but I determined to make it the base 
 of my appeal at the meeting. I would say, let us all, irre- 
 spective of party, face an alarming and shameful state of 
 things, admit before God and men that there has been and is 
 something radically mistaken in our methods, if not in our 
 message, and seek whole-heartedly better to understand and 
 come in touch with the people, rich and poor, of this great 
 Dominion. Standing with the newly published census volumes 
 in my hand, I did this. What response was there made ? The 
 Bishop of Montreal, who had called the meeting and was in the 
 Chair, making no attempt whatever to answer what I said, 
 ignoring the fact that as I spoke I gave chapter and verse for 
 each statement I made, swept the whole matter aside, declaring 
 that I was a newcomer to the country, and that all old residents 
 like himself knew such statements were absurd. His remarks 
 drew applause. After that the proceedings were of the usual 
 monotonous kind so commonly characteristic of missionary 
 gatherings. 
 
 Here again I digress, tempted by a reminiscence of Phillips 
 Brooks. After his funeral, which I attended, I was asked 
 to make a "talk" at our Divinity School at Harvard on my 
 friend. I did so. It was not a lecture, just a talk. Doctor 
 
 X I think in late years the Church of England in Canada has been gaining.
 
 i 94 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Allen, who had already set to work on his Life of Phillips 
 Brooks, and whom I admired as did all who knew him, heard 
 of this talk of mine and asked me to write down what I had 
 said, as he wanted to incorporate it in the "Life." I did so, 
 and in due time received a kind note from Doctor Allen, saying 
 he was sorry that he could not print what I had sent him, as it 
 did not fit in with what he had written. When you hear my 
 story you may agree with Doctor Allen, but I think it a very 
 human story. 
 
 Phillips Brooks had written me, asking me to preach for him, 
 saying he wanted a Sunday off, as he was tired. He was, at this 
 time, visibly beginning to fail in health. 
 
 Phillips Brooks : " Rainsford, there is a big missionary meet- 
 ing in the church to-night, and we must go to it. It is too bad; 
 they will kill it. They are giving us three missionary bishops. 
 One is too much. Three will kill it dead." 
 
 I expressed a certain hopefulness that I didn't feel, and we 
 went together. Up the aisle I followed him. Of course we 
 wore no robes, for the missionary authorities had the church 
 that evening to themselves, and we were of the audience only. 
 
 Phillips Brooks and I sat in one of the front pews. The 
 first missionary bishop made a long talk and said little. Phil- 
 lips Brooks was restless. At the best, he was a poor listener, 
 his great eyes always roving round and round. 
 
 The second missionary bishop followed and said no more 
 than the first. When the third poor man got up, Phillips 
 Brooks's great body showed what he felt, and I, who had often 
 been scared almost out of my senses by Phillips Brooks in front 
 of me, felt heartily sorry for, and in sympathy with, this third 
 successor of the Apostles. When at last the last hymn was 
 sung and the blessing given, Phillips Brooks rose and at once 
 moved down the aisle, everyone making way for him, and I 
 close behind. Not one word did he say as we crossed Copley 
 Square, and made for the rectory on its corner. He opened the 
 door and passed into the big study on the right. It was win- 
 ter, a wood fire burned in the big fireplace, and beside it, close 
 against the wall, stood his own great chair, where in the even- 
 ings when he was not working he always sat. In the wall on 
 his right-hand side there was a wooden bracket; on the bracket 
 always stood a box of big, bad cigars.
 
 A DARK NIGHT A GLORIOUS MORNING 195 
 
 Phillips Brooks had not said one word since we left the 
 church. He sank into his chair with a grunt, and stretching 
 his great bulk slowly, put his hand into the box, felt it from 
 end to end not one cigar! Then he raised himself up heavily, 
 stood before the fire, kicked the empty box into it. "Damn it 
 all! these missionary bishops will make a man lose his soul." 
 How I wished that the boys at Harvard who, though they ad- 
 mired, were afraid to come near him could have been in his 
 study that night! 
 
 I have told this story about the great missionary meeting 
 at Montreal, to illustrate what anything approaching progres- 
 sivism had, in those times, to contend with in the Canadian 
 Episcopal Church. I did not underestimate the power of my 
 reactionary neighbours, either in Toronto or Montreal. In 
 St. James's these were led by a man of very unusual force, the 
 Hon. Samuel Blake, brother to Edward Blake, the Liberal 
 party leader at Ottawa, afterward member for Cork, Ireland 
 (I think), in the Home Rule interest. Sam Blake did all he 
 could to make the Cathedral impossible to me, but I liked him. 
 He was a good man and an honest fighter. If what he believed 
 to be the Gospel of Jesus was the best presentation of it, cer- 
 tainly what I was preaching was, to say the least, a very infe- 
 rior brand indeed. He believed I was on the high road to 
 heresy, and he was perfectly right. So we both played fair. 
 When he came to me and said he would resign his large Bible 
 class, I did not attempt to persuade him to remain, for by this 
 time I began to see my way clearly to build up in Toronto a 
 great free and open liberal church for the people. Not an easy 
 task, but it was a worthy one. I felt like a swimmer with the 
 tide under him. I knew I had with me the youth of the town. 
 I believed that the sort ofchurch I aimed to build up was needed. 
 I had absolute confidence in my people. How could it be 
 otherwise, they who had been so patient with me, so faithfully 
 standing by me in the difficult times now past ? 
 
 There indeed was a work worth doing, and I felt I could do it.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 A Unanimous Call 
 
 In the summer of 1882 I took a long holiday in the 
 Rocky Mountains: it was the first I had had in four years. 
 When I reached Toronto in the autumn, serious news awaited 
 me. The Dean was dead, and I had received two calls, one to 
 England, and another to St. George's Church, New York. Both 
 I refused without hesitation. I had my work cut out for me 
 where I was. In Toronto I had a field important enough to 
 satisfy any reasonable ambition, and I loved the people and the 
 place. The congregation was as anxious to have me stay as I 
 was willing; and with practical unanimity they elected me 
 rector. Then, to the great surprise of both parties, a serious 
 hitch arose. A new bishop had been recently elected. He had 
 been for years a schoolmaster, and took a strict view of what 
 was due to his office under the canon. This required that no 
 appointment should be made to the rectory of St. James's till 
 the Bishop had first been consulted, and the name of the 
 proposed rector submitted to him. 
 
 This canon had not been rigorously applied in the diocese, 
 and the vestry had failed to notify the Bishop before calling me. 
 The Bishop stood on his undoubted canonical rights, and there 
 arose a deadlock. I need not say more. Strong feeling was 
 developed in the church, and vestry and Bishop locked horns. 
 The situation became intolerable. I saw that no good could 
 come of the parish's insistence on a right that was not theirs. 
 It was a bitter pill to swallow, but my duty was clear. In some 
 other field I must try to carry out the plans that I had formed 
 for church reform, since to do so in this dear field that I had 
 won and almost lost and then won back again, was denied 
 me. 
 
 196
 
 A UNANIMOUS CALL 197 
 
 I went to the Bishop and told him that I thought he was 
 making a grave mistake, but that, since he insisted on thwart- 
 ing the admitted wish of the congregation, and since he had 
 a technical right to do so, I would not permit my name to be 
 any longer presented to him as candidate for the rectorship. 
 He asked me if I would consider remaining as assistant rector. 
 I said, certainly not. And so came to a sudden end perhaps the 
 best four years of my life. 
 
 I had not sought Toronto. The church had sought me. 
 How well I remembered the first day in London, Ontario, when 
 I met members of its vestry who came on to beg me to come to 
 them and hold a mission. That was in the winter of 1878. 
 Then the three months' continued preaching, while the town 
 was all astir. Then the parting, and the unexpected call and 
 return. And then those dark days when everything seemed to 
 slip away from me, and I was utterly alone. 
 
 And then at last! after the night, "a morning without clouds, 
 a clear and shining morning after rain" and the people's faces 
 in the big church shining back at mine as I spoke to them. 
 And the new warm companionship that sprung up between us, 
 they listened and I spoke. For though neither they nor I 
 knew it, we both had been passing through the same country, 
 walking side by side. They needed what I needed, and the 
 larger liberty and light I had won for my soul, their souls were 
 hungry for; and as it became our common possession, it bound 
 us together with a new and holy tie. 
 
 Of all this I was just becoming aware when circumstances 
 over which I had no control swept me away to a different and 
 more difficult field of work. My plans were all undone. Ties 
 that had grown very close and very dear must be snapped, and 
 I must leave the field I had but begun to sow long before the 
 time of harvesting. Here was our first home. Here our chil- 
 dren had been born to us. To my wife and myself leaving 
 Toronto was a cruel wrench. 
 
 In the midst of the deadlock between the Cathedral vestry 
 and the Bishop came the second call to St. George's. It was 
 followed by a telegram saying that Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan and 
 Mr. J. Noble Stearns were coming to Toronto to see me and to 
 press my acceptance of the call. I telegraphed in reply that I 
 had rather they allowed me to come to New York to see them,
 
 198 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 and there, in consultation with the whole of St. George's vestry, 
 go over matters. 
 
 I knew already something about the church and its present 
 circumstances. I had preached twice in St. George's, once 
 during Doctor Tyng's pastorate in 1 876. I preached for the old 
 gentleman in July, to a mere handful of people. Again, during 
 the pastorate of Doctor Williams, Doctor Tyng's successor, in 
 1878. Then also to a mere handful. 
 
 Doctor Williams was a whole-hearted servant of God and 
 man; but he was by birth and training a Southerner, and was 
 in lower New York very much of a round peg in a square hole. 
 When I stayed with him he was thoroughly discouraged. He 
 had been beaten, he said. The church where it stood was 
 doomed. The Roman Catholics would not take it over as a 
 mission. Overtures had been made by some members of the 
 vestry, it seems, to the Roman Catholics for a sale of the prop- 
 erty. I could never find that there had been any authoriza- 
 tion for this offer, if it had been made, but Doctor Williams 
 evidently believed the report. I did not think that Doctor 
 Williams understood New York or his vestry, and though I 
 had stayed only two days with him, I came to the conclusion 
 then, that to give up the teeming neighbourhood in which the 
 church stood and move uptown would be an unwarranted 
 retreat in the face of the enemy. I had taken a couple of mis- 
 sions in uptown New York churches and had noticed that 
 these churches had no hold on the working people. Round 
 St. George's, the street and little parks, such as they were, were 
 packed with children. Furthermore, I learned from my own 
 observation and from Doctor Williams, that though St. George's 
 had done more than perhaps any other New York church in 
 establishing missions for these poor folks, old and young, 
 each and all of her missions were either on the high road to fail- 
 ure or had already so palpably failed that they had been 
 closed up. 
 
 Neither Doctor Williams nor any of the clergy I met in New 
 York during these perambulating mission days could give me 
 any reason for such failures as these. They simply said it was 
 hard to get the poor to go to church. To me, the reason of the 
 missionary chapel's almost universal failure lay much deeper. I 
 had seen the very same thing in Bethnal Green when I was a
 
 A UNANIMOUS CALL 199 
 
 boy, and in the large English cities when I was a young 
 cleric. I had not then been able to account for it to myself, 
 but in the intervening years the explanation had come to 
 me. 
 
 The Evangelical revival had saved religious life in England 
 in the Eighteenth Century. It had done lasting good in the 
 Nineteenth Century. But it was petering out at the close 
 of that century, because the churches had not made any effort 
 to enter into or to understand the social needs and aspirations 
 of the masses of the people. The slow filtration of education 
 had enlarged immensely the human outlook of millions. Pain- 
 fully, slowly, but determinedly, these were surging forward. 
 But the Church of Jesus, who came to the poor, understood the 
 poor, and talked to the poor, had let the poor go had lost touch 
 with them. And when the Church's voice did reach them, in the 
 din of the factory or the unhealthful crowding of the slums, it 
 did nothing but call on them to seek a future salvation from a 
 distant catastrophe, and had no word of understanding sym- 
 pathy, nor hands of ready help, to save them or rather help 
 them to save themselves, from the cruel despotism of an unjust 
 economic condition and an environment that made a mockery 
 of all hopes of home. 
 
 In short, with a new purposefulness people wanted two things 
 Justice and Brotherhood. And the churches were giving 
 them neither and yet deceived themselves into fancying that 
 they were giving them both. Just think of it ! The churches' 
 customary method of approach to the poor in New York was 
 to send green, inexperienced divinity students, who had never 
 seen the inside of a factory, or a prison, or a sweatshop, or a 
 mine, to the districts out of which the great churches had them- 
 selves moved, because within them they could no longer fill 
 their pews. And the expectation was that, meagrely supported 
 with funds and helpers, these youths should win to the ugly 
 little mission chapel service the very people that the strong 
 preacher and beautiful service had failed to draw. I am not 
 drawing a caricature. The facts are bad enough as they stood, 
 nay, as they stand to-day. Surely "something is rotten in the 
 state of Denmark." 
 
 As I sat in the railroad car on my way to New York, these 
 things were present to me. I knew that St. George's was a hard
 
 200 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 problem. In every way it was old-fashioned. Doctor Tyng 
 had been perhaps the most uncompromising Evangelical clergy- 
 man in the United States, and what remained of the church 
 bodyguard were undoubtedly his spiritual children. How 
 should I get on with them ? Could I make that great church in 
 any sense homelike to the thousands that were crowding into 
 the houses lately transformed from dwellings fit for one family 
 into tenements fit for none? Better men than I had failed. 
 The thing seemed too difficult. Why, oh, why, through no 
 fault of mine, had I to leave Toronto, and begin among stran- 
 gers the battle all over again ? 
 
 Once again on that journey, so momentous for me, in thought 
 I stood before the ugly yellow brick Baptist chapel in South 
 London. I knew I was not seeking my own happiness or 
 fortune, and peace of mind came to me. Nothing could make 
 me accept St. George's unless I had conditions accorded to me 
 that gave me some hopes of succeeding; and the success I aimed 
 for was an unusual kind of success. I would aim to accomplish 
 in New York what I had laid plans to accomplish in Toronto. 
 I would make my church a great free church, open to all, not in 
 name only, not by profession only, but in actual operation. 
 I would make it a church of the people, a truly democratic 
 church. All well and good. But what probability was there 
 that the vestry had either the will or the power to act with me; 
 nay, more than that, act under my direction in a course so novel 
 and so revolutionary in its change? Was there any likelihood 
 of their coming to my terms ? I concluded that there was not 
 one chance in a hundred of their doing so. If they did not, 
 what should I do then? That lay in the future; one thing at a 
 time. So for the present I blotted the troublesome uncer- 
 tainty as to my own future out of my mind, and gave all my 
 thought to the coming interview. 
 
 I was met at the depot by J. Noble Stearns, one of the vestry, 
 and we went at once to Mr. Morgan's house on the corner of 
 36th Street and Madison Avenue, where the vestry were al- 
 ready assembled in his study. All were more than kind in the 
 greeting they gave me. Mr. Charles Tracy acted as spokes- 
 man. He was senior warden. He did not seek to minimize the 
 serious condition of St. George's. There were very few pew 
 holders. There was a $35,000 floating debt. The church had
 
 A UNANIMOUS CALL 201 
 
 had a splendid endowment, when Trinity set it on its own 
 feet as a parish, in 181 1. Thirty-two lots, excellent property 
 downtown, it had owned. All but two of these lots had been 
 sold during the Tyng regime. In fact, the great church now 
 standing had been chiefly built from the proceeds of their sale. 
 The other side of the picture was rather personal. They had 
 heard of my work. Some of them had been at one or more of 
 my tent services six years before. If I would come they would 
 stand by me. I cannot exaggerate the kindly heartiness with 
 which this was said. 
 
 Then my turn came, and briefly but as clearly as I could I 
 laid before them my plans of what a church situated as was 
 St. George's should be. "Gentlemen," I said, "that is the only 
 sort of church I would care to be rector of, but frankly I think 
 your church has gone too far to be pulled up. In any case, I do 
 not think I am a big enough man to pull it up." 
 
 Mr. Morgan did very little speaking till we reached this 
 point. I think he had scarcely spoken at all. He turned to 
 me. "Mr. Rainsford, will you be our rector? If you consent 
 I will do what I can to help you carry out this plan." Turning 
 to the others, "Gentlemen, do you agree with me?" Then, 
 again turning to me, "Will you accept our unanimous call?" 
 
 At once I replied, " I will, on three conditions." 
 
 "Name them." 
 
 "First, you must make the church absolutely free. Buy out 
 those who will not donate their pews. Second, abolish all 
 committees in the church except the vestry, and only re- 
 appoint such as I shall name. Third, I must have an annual 
 fund of $10,000 for three years, independent of my salary, 
 to spend as I see fit on church work. My salary I leave to 
 you." 
 
 Dead silence followed. I saw Mr. Morgan look round that 
 circle of tense faces. Then he looked full at me and said one 
 word: "Done." 
 
 I don't believe usually in publishing subscription lists but 
 I think that here it is fitting that the names of that small group 
 of men who loved the old church and practically made her a 
 going concern when hundreds had deserted her should be 
 recorded W. S. R.
 
 202 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 New York, January 17, 1883. 
 
 Minutes of St. George's Vestry 
 
 Subscribers to $10,000 annual fund to be used by rector. 
 
 Amounts 
 
 J. Pierpont Morgan $3jo 
 
 David Dows 3>oco 
 
 John D. Wood 1,000 
 
 Charles Tracy 1,000 
 
 Harvey Spencer 500 
 
 Jno. N. Stearns 2,000
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 St. George's, 1883 1 
 
 We were dreamers , dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town; 
 
 We yearned beyond the Sky-line where the strange roads go down. 
 Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need, 
 
 Till the soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead. R. Kipling. 
 
 In Mr. Morgan's study I had the first of many meetings 
 with a right noble band of men. Through years of her failing 
 fortunes, they had stood by a church that all of them had at- 
 tended since they were young, some of them since they were 
 boys. I could see at a glance that they were able, and very 
 much in earnest. They had so quickly accepted my astound- 
 ing conditions that it took my breath away. In no Protestant 
 Episcopal church in the country had any propositions at all 
 like them ever been made before. Their practical result could 
 not fail to be to give the rector an almost autocratic power for 
 three years, and at the same time deny to the vestry itself a 
 voice in those church matters usually placed under its control, 
 such as music, the Sunday School, etc., etc. 
 
 Here let me say I had not spent in vain my years of preaching 
 as a missioner. Long and earnest were the consultations I 
 often had with my clerical hosts. The difficulties besetting 
 them were confidentially poured into my ears. I ought to 
 have known more about the art of managing or mismanaging 
 vestries by rectors from these recounted experiences than if I 
 had had a long parish experience of my own. I had become 
 convinced that the success or failure of a church depends 
 absolutely on the man that steers it. If he is a good helmsman 
 he will carry crew and cargo safely through. If he is a poor 
 one, the crew cannot save him from disaster. And in either 
 case the crew's business is not at the tiller but on the "sheets." 
 
 ^pace forbids my giving at length the previous history of St. George's Church. It will be 
 found in "History of St. George's Church, New York." Rev. Henry Anstice, D. D. Harper 
 Bros. 191 1. 
 
 203
 
 2o 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Now if a church has been steadily going down for many years, 
 as had St. George's, it is inevitable that owing to change in 
 the command, power falls automatically into the vestry's hands 
 which it is unfitted to exercise. And so it comes about that 
 even an exemplary vestry, composed of capable and self-denying 
 men, will run a church into the ground; for a committee 
 cannot run a church any more than it can lead an army. I 
 knew well that an uphill job awaited me whether I succeeded or 
 failed. I had an empty church and an empty treasury, and a 
 vast, unchurched population around me to be won. To reach 
 the neighbourhood would tax to the uttermost any gifts I had. 
 If in addition to fishing for men I must go round, as clergy 
 usually had to, and fish for dollars, I was undone. That was 
 my reason for making the third condition. 
 
 Then I knew that my ideas of the sort of music that would 
 help our worship were well, my own; not quite the current 
 ideas. And if I had to wrestle with a music committee, no 
 matter how competent, in order to have my way, again I should 
 be undone. And thirdly, my whole plan and purpose made 
 an absolutely free and open church a sine qua non. In short, 
 my plans for St. George's future necessitated a complete de- 
 parture from St. George's past. 
 
 As I look back I am really surprised at my own audacity, 
 and as much surprised at the whole-hearted and enthusiastic 
 acceptance of it by the vestry. To them was due, in far 
 greater measure than the public could know, the success we 
 won. My senior warden was Charles Tracy. In his profes- 
 sion of the law few stood as high as he. Others may have been 
 more brilliant, but his fine rectitude and wide culture made 
 him a man apart. He was seventy when I met him, but he was 
 still young. During the first months of my rectorship I used to 
 go round to his house in East 17th Street on Sunday evenings, 
 and he and I counted the envelope subscriptions and the cash. 
 It did not take us long. A kind and wise friend he was to me. 
 He was an influential member of the Century Club, and some- 
 how or other he secured my election to that most delightful of 
 all clubs in an undeservedly short time. 
 
 The junior warden was David Dows, all his life a faithful 
 attendant at church but never a communicant. Mr. Dows was 
 to me a quite new type of man the self-made millionaire. He
 
 ST. GEORGE'S, 1883 205 
 
 seemed a lonely man, growing more lonely as he aged. Most of 
 his friends had gone, and he was not at home among the younger 
 people. Business had been his life. Recreations he had none, 
 and of books he was ignorant; a grizzled veteran of Wall Street, 
 who had, in unscrupulous days, won his place in the front. At 
 that first vestry meeting he had been an absentee, and I had 
 to win him. This I set out to do without delay. I made sev- 
 eral visits to Mr. Dows, and the more I saw of him the more he 
 appealed to me. He wanted to be a Christian, and he didn't 
 know how. For six days in the week, during a long life, he had 
 indefatigably served Mammon. He knew it, and he said so. 
 And on the seventh, he had listened for many and many a year 
 to the extremest, the most uncompromising statement possible, 
 of the Evangelical "plan of salvation." It evidently did not 
 satisfy David Dows, but he knew no other statement that did. 
 One evening as I sat with him in his great new house on the 
 corner of 69th Street and Fifth Avenue, he said suddenly to me, 
 "Rector, why don't you speak to me about my soul?" I re- 
 plied, "I would gladly, Mr. Dows, do so if you wish me to." 
 Said he, "I do wish it. Come down to my office to-morrow; 
 there we can be quite alone." 
 
 What passed next day between us is of too intimate a nature 
 to print even here; but I left my warden's office with a deep re- 
 spect for the fine honesty of soul that he permitted me to see. 
 Some said hard things of David Dows. He said hard things of 
 himself. But what was rare and fine about him was, that 
 he said no single hard thing about any one else but himself. One 
 thing he said was unforgettable: "The Bible says you cannot 
 serve God and Mammon. That's true. Many a time I 
 have gone into this inner office and locked the door and kneeled 
 down and prayed for strength not to grovel; but the Street has 
 always been too much for me." 
 
 I don't know that I was much help to my junior warden, but 
 from that day I most certainly loved and respected him, and till 
 he died, I saw regularly that grizzled face looking into mine, 
 generally twice a day on Sundays in St. George's Church. 
 
 I had called on Mr. Dows on business matters before the 
 visits I have here referred to, and the first of my calls was the 
 only one in which I ever had any difference with him. The 
 church had notes out for $35,000; to meet these was my duty,
 
 2o6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 one I did not relish, but it had to be done and done at once. So 
 I went to my councillor, Charles Tracy. Said he, "Go to Mr. 
 Dows first. He is the only very rich man in the church. Get 
 as much as you can from him. Mr. Morgan will, I think, do the 
 same, and perhaps Mr. Stearns will give half as much." 
 
 Be patient with me, dear reader, if it seems to you that these 
 details are not worthy of record, but this was my very first and 
 also my last experiment in church finance. I had no organiza- 
 tion, remember, but my vestry. I had practically no congre- 
 gation; just a great empty church. And much depended on 
 my ability to meet the sudden problem that had arisen. I had 
 practically told the vestry that I proposed to "run" St. George's 
 my own way. I must now prove to them that I could make 
 good. In later times I never had any difficulties over finances. 
 We always agreed, the vestry and I. When they knew more 
 about a question than I did, they very properly had their way. 
 When it was a matter of church policy, of what St. George's 
 stood for, they let me have mine, and to a man backed me every 
 time (as I shall hereafter tell). 
 
 Well, this was my first meeting with Mr. Dows, and I had 
 to try and get from him a large sum of money. I had worked 
 the matter out in my mind, and had concluded that I must 
 have $10,000 from him and $10,000 from Mr. Morgan. That 
 would leave $15,000 still to raise. Mr. Stearns would prob- 
 ably give another $5,000 and I would have to struggle, and 
 struggle hard, for the last $10,000. 
 
 I laid the matter before Mr. Dows. He listened attentively. 
 "Mr. Rainsford, I approve. You are right that $35,000 must 
 be raised at once. We cannot have the church's name on 
 paper. I will give you $5,000, sir." 
 
 "But, Mr. Dows, that won't do. Where am I to get the 
 other $30,000? If you, the warden, give only $5,000, no one in 
 the vestry will give more than you do. Mr. Morgan will give 
 $5,000 perhaps, and I may be able to scrape together another 
 five, and I am then left with $20,000 still to raise. I can't pos- 
 sibly do it, sir. There is no congregation to raise it from." 
 
 "Mr. Rainsford, $5,000 is a great deal of money. I won't 
 give you another dollar." 
 
 I saw I was up against it with a vengeance, so I rose and said, 
 "Mr. Dows, I have come among you to try and save the old
 
 ST. GEORGE'S, 1883 207 
 
 church. I give you my word that I will do my best, but I 
 have a right to expect the only band of men that remain in 
 St. George's to do their best, too, and this business of paying 
 off debts you have incurred is by rights not mine at all but 
 yours. Won't you give me $10,000? I cannot do with less. 
 If you give me ten, I think Mr. Morgan will duplicate it, and 
 Mr. Stearns will give five, and somehow I'll get the rest." 
 
 "No, sir. I'll give $5,000 and no more." 
 
 "Then, Mr. Dows, I won't take your $5,000." And I went 
 home. 
 
 Next morning there came to me a kind note from Mr. Dows, 
 enclosing his cheque for $10,000, and an invitation to dine with 
 him the first evening I was free. 
 
 J. Noble Stearns was one of the best men I have ever known. 
 He was a man who carried the religion of Jesus into his daily 
 life. Everything he had was at the service of the old church 
 he loved. He alone of the vestry had taken a leading part in 
 religious work. St. George's had been famous for its success 
 in Sunday-school development and J. Noble Stearns had for 
 many years been one of the teachers, and to see the church 
 school and the mission schools fail hurt him. He had been to 
 Toronto months before the second call came to me, and had 
 hoped to go over the affairs of St. George's with me before the 
 formal call came. I was at the time in the Rocky Mountains, 
 but he saw Mrs. Rainsford, and got a fairly good idea of what 
 I had done and was aiming to do. He saw the value of my 
 insistence on free church from the first. He knew more about 
 what St. George's needed than any other member of the vestry, 
 for he had worked among the children of the neighbourhood. 
 And so it came about that in any effort I made to democratize 
 the church, and, what was a much more delicate matter (as I 
 proved later), to democratize my vestry, he stood by me against 
 all opposition, even when that opposition came from those old 
 friends whose support was of vital moment to himself. 
 
 I had more in common with Mr. Stearns than with any other 
 member of the vestry. We had both commenced our religious 
 life believing in the total depravity of all men. As we worked 
 among our fellows, we had discarded this dreadful Calvinistic 
 creed. I never knew a man who was more ready than he to 
 accept and understand the new, beautiful, and hopeful things,
 
 208 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 "breaking forth from God's word," in men themselves, men 
 who were ever rising on "stepping stones of their dead selves to 
 higher things"; men who, though they had come from the 
 animal world, could not be confined to it because in all of them 
 was a bit of God. 
 
 During the happy twenty-four years I was rector of St. 
 George's I had at times some fighting to do; never for myself, 
 I am thankful to say; but for things I thought were necessary, 
 and for right policies in the church's conduct. Sometimes a 
 friend left me; often a friend differed from me; but J. Noble 
 Stearns, my junior warden, never left my side. 
 
 I had two great advantages in coming to St. George's. The 
 first was the emptiness of the church. There had been an 
 interim of two years, after Doctor Williams resigned, during 
 which the church was without a rector. Several had been 
 "called," but the rectorate had been declined. I found about 
 twenty families that were still in partly regular attendance. 
 Among these I knew full well I would discover some who were 
 far from approving of a free church. They resented a policy 
 that called on them to surrender their property rights in their 
 pews. Some might be prepared within reasonable limits to be 
 hospitable to strangers. Others felt as the Scotsman did, who 
 complained to his rector that a gentleman not of his acquaint- 
 ance had been put into his pew. "I would not disturb divine 
 service by putting him out, Sir, but I took the liberty of 
 sitting on his hat." (In those days they wore tall "chimney 
 pots.") And so I was glad that their number was no larger. 
 Some of the twenty soon left, and of this I was glad, for de- 
 partures were less depressing than funerals, and it had to be one 
 or the other. 
 
 My second advantage was that we began very unostenta- 
 tiously and put no advertisements in the papers. I insisted on 
 this, for I wanted to feel my way. I wanted to be sure what I 
 would do and not do; where I had best leave things alone and 
 where change them. Crowds of curious "casuals" are an un- 
 profitable and disturbing element. I wanted first to know 
 pretty thoroughly what material I had ready to hand in the 
 Sunday School and the church. Then I had to study "the 
 plant" of St. George's, making up my mind where I could 
 change, and where it was necessary to discard or create.
 
 ST. GEORGE'S, 1883 209 
 
 The building itself, while impressive outside, specially so 
 long as the open stone-work towers were standing, was sadly 
 ugly and depressing inside; and, in addition to this, was about 
 as hard a building to hear in as an architect had ever devised. 
 Its great flat stone wall spaces made the voice of the preacher 
 rattle from side to side like peas in a shaken bladder. The 
 effect when a great congregation sang was fine. The reso- 
 nance helped the music, but when the preacher spoke from the 
 low pulpit, near the Holy Table, the echo was baffling. 
 
 The change from the warm-hearted crowd of St. James's 
 Cathedral to the empty ugliness of St. George's was at first 
 rather chilling, but my extraordinarily kind and trusting recep- 
 tion by the vestry filled me with purposeful hope and courage. 
 
 St. Paul says that "at Ephesus a great door and effectual 
 was opened unto him, and that there were many adversaries." 
 I saw the great door wide open, in those teeming streets and 
 crowding baby-carriages in the neglected Stuyvesant Park. 
 And as to the adversaries! Why, in my case they never 
 materialized, or if they did there were but few of them. I 
 felt sure that with the backing of such men as I had behind 
 me, we could win to the old, empty, misunderstood church 
 some at least of the thousands who, though they knew it not, 
 needed sorely what she had to give them. 
 
 To put my plans briefly, before all else I wanted to under- 
 stand my neighbourhood, and did not want to draw a curious 
 crowd from all over town, even supposing that I could do it. 
 This was my reason for putting a ban on advertising the ser- 
 vices. I had had experiences, too, while a mission preacher, of 
 the extraordinary twists and distortions to which the sermon 
 is often put when placed before the public on Monday morning 
 in the daily press. I will give an amusing instance of how I 
 suffered at a later time, when St. George's was crowded. The 
 city editor of the New York Herald wrote me a kind note, say- 
 ing that his paper was anxious to publish a full report of a 
 Sunday morning sermon, and asked me, since the church was 
 always crowded, to provide a chair so placed that their stenog- 
 rapher could "get me" accurately. Mr. W. H. Schieffelin, 
 who was then in charge of the delicate job of seating the con- 
 gregation, had the chair ready. It was placed right under the 
 pulpit.
 
 210 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 My sermon was on evolution. I cannot remember the text, 
 but I quoted at length Professor Carruth's beautiful poem on 
 evolution beginning: 
 
 A fire mist and a planet 
 A crystal and a cell 
 A jelly fish and a saurian 
 
 And a cave where the cave men dwell; 
 Then a sense of law and beauty 
 And a face raised from the clod 
 Some call it evolution 
 And others call it God. 
 
 As I preached I had occasion to use many times the word 
 "saurian." On Monday, I had the honour of a long report in 
 the Herald, right enough, but the nonsense I was made to talk 
 may be imagined when I say that in each and every place where 
 I said "saurian" the Herald made me say "Saviour." 
 
 St. George's stands facing the east, looking over Stuyvesant 
 Square, which is cut in two by Second Avenue. Stuyvesant 
 Square had not so completely fallen from grace as had its 
 neighbour, Tompkins Square, where in those days you took 
 considerable chances if you walked across it at night. But it 
 was a dirty, neglected mockery of what a city park might be. 
 Its fountains were waterless, the basins filled with rubbish from 
 the street. I myself saw dead cats and empty tomato cans 
 piled in them. There was no attempt to plant flowers or renew 
 the long-neglected grass, or to protect the park at all. 
 
 One of the first things I did was to visit the families whose 
 names I found remaining on the church roll. Looking over 
 my list, I noticed the name "Croker." I made inquiries, and 
 found that the famous Tammany boss's mother was one of my 
 members, and was then an old woman living on Staten Island. 
 Duty and policy suggested an immediate call. I found a 
 charming old lady, who evidently appreciated my searching her 
 out, and asked me to return and give her the Holy Communion. 
 This I did. Not long after I had a very courteous letter from 
 Mr. Croker, saying that he appreciated my taking the long trip 
 to Staten Island to see his mother, who had not had a clerical 
 call for years, and that he hoped I would remember that at any 
 time he would be glad to pay me any courtesy in his power. 
 
 After that, the change in our park, if not immediate, was
 
 ST. GEORGE'S, 1883 211 
 
 assured; and in time we had quite beautiful flowers grouped 
 round the fountains, and, what was even more important than 
 a restored beauty, we had the invaluable service and coopera- 
 tion of an intelligent and sympathetic park policeman, who 
 greatly helped us for many years. Then I had Japanese creeper 
 planted round the brownstone walls of the church, and this 
 added, specially in autumn time, to the quiet beauty of the 
 square. 
 
 St. George's, in the '6o's, had been successful. Since 1 865 it 
 had slowly fallen down. I found it empty, expensive to run, 
 and very costly to heat; ill-adapted in many ways to the work it 
 ought to do. 
 
 Evidently the old methods were a total failure. New ones 
 must be invented. When I found my vestry disturbed a little 
 at the radical changes I proposed, I told them a story I had 
 heard by the banks of a Canadian salmon river. The salmon 
 had ceased to visit the stream, and the scattered settlers on its 
 banks, who had depended on their salmon nets, were in a bad 
 way for a living. All but one man. He, cannier than the rest, 
 sold his salmon nets and bought smelt nets. He changed the 
 size of his mesh, and soon was better off than he had been before. 
 
 The old methods of all the Protestant churches were adapted 
 to the family. The new must be adapted to the individual. 
 The days of the Individual were upon us, let us deplore it as 
 we might. The essential principle I stood for took shape in 
 what, very inaccurately, came to be called the "institutional 
 Church." 
 
 My first move was to make the outside of the church and its 
 setting in its little park more tidy and attractive. The next, 
 to change as much as possible what was amiss in the inside. 
 Here my vestry backed me up with extraordinary unanimity. 
 We not only declared the church free, but we made men and 
 women and children feel that it was free. We elected Mr. 
 William H. Schieffelin, who lived in the Square, to the vestry. 
 He came to me a few Sundays after my arrival and offered his 
 help. For many years following that day, Sunday by Sunday, 
 rain or shine, half an hour before service time, in the evening as 
 well as morning, he stood at the church door. Patient, good- 
 tempered, always wisely discriminating, absolutely fair and 
 without partiality, never ruffled, always resourceful, no crowd-
 
 212 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 ing affected his nerves. At times his task was a peculiarly 
 difficult one, yet in its fulfillment he always proved himself a 
 courteous and capable gentleman. I felt sure that as long as 
 he was at his post there would never be any unnecessary fric- 
 tion, and regular attendants and strangers would both be made 
 to feel the welcome of a church home. 
 
 Such a man could not fail to gather round him men of like 
 mind, and this Mr. Schieffelin did. I left the whole difficult, 
 delicate matter of seating the crowds that thronged us for 
 years to him. He saved me all care. Mr. Harvey Spencer 
 ably assisted Mr. Schieffelin in very early days. 
 
 On the question of free church I stand to-day where I stood 
 then. There should be one place besides the grave to which 
 all should have a common right: that place is the Church of God. 
 To my mind, as between free church and pew church, there is 
 no choice at all. The one is right; the other is wrong. You 
 cannot preach one thing from the pulpit and practise another 
 in the pew. I do not care how liberal pew-holders may be, or 
 how hospitable they may show themselves. To own or rent a 
 foot of the floor of the house we claim to be the House of God 
 is to contradict and deny in practice the Gospel of Jesus. In 
 theory at least, in this as in many other matters, the custom of 
 the Roman Catholic Church is better, wiser, more apostolic 
 than is the custom of those churches which have broken away 
 from her. 
 
 In the early '8o's the free church ideal was not popular, and 
 many were the arguments I had with clerical brethren on ac- 
 count of it. In the "club," an unusually able body of clergy, 
 to which I had the honour of being elected, I stood alone on that 
 question. I had fallen foul of Phillips Brooks when in Boston, 
 on the question of free church. With him I did not venture an 
 argument. It was not much use arguing with Phillips Brooks. 
 I just held my ground. Years after, when he was Bishop, he 
 visited me, and then said: "We all laughed at your pleas for free 
 church, but you were right, and I was wrong. What influence 
 I have as Bishop of Massachusetts I shall steadily use to make 
 every church in the diocese free." 
 
 Inside the church, Mr. Schieffelin and his band of sides-men 
 stood for a radical change of policy; and in simple and natural 
 ways, there was evident at the church door, Sunday by Sunday,
 
 ST. GEORGE'S, 1883 213 
 
 a spirit of welcome that did great good. I always tried to be 
 there and to greet not only strangers but those I had visited. 
 J. Pierpont Morgan was always there, and his presence meant 
 a great deal even in the remote '8o's. 
 
 Later, when I had a staff of assistant clergy, I made as many 
 introductions as I could during those crowded minutes before 
 service began. Thus it was we wrought a change in the inside 
 temperature of the old church. 
 
 The next change I strove for was in the church music, and 
 here I first encountered opposition. My plans were revolu- 
 tionary nothing less than a new organ, new organist, new 
 choir, and a complete change of the whole plant from the east 
 end of the church to the west end, where stood the Communion 
 Table. I wanted congregational singing. Quartet and double 
 quartet to me were anathema, for with them congregational 
 singing was impossible. I could not pay for good soloists, 
 even if I wanted them. Moreover, I had my own settled idea of 
 what St. George's choir should be. Its front line should be of 
 boys, drawn from its own Sunday School. Back of them must 
 be women, for the quality of an American boy's voice is too 
 thin, too sharp, to serve adequately in soprano parts, and needs 
 the richer support of the female voice tone. I am speaking of 
 course of the material I had, or could hope to have, to my hand. 
 With time and large means the right sort of boys' voices can 
 be found and trained; but I, having neither time nor money, 
 could not hope to have good congregational singing led by male 
 voices alone. 
 
 There was another reason, too. I did dearly want to make 
 the services of the church appeal to a// y not part of my peo- 
 ple. I wanted a chancel choir, but I wanted it of women 
 as well as of boys and men, and this being my aim, that choir 
 must be a surpliced choir. There lay the difficulty. My vestry 
 was divided. Surpliced choir in old St. George's! That was 
 too much, even for them. Hence my first opposition. That 
 was forty years ago (though I can scarcely believe it), and it 
 may be hard for a younger generation to enter into their feeling; 
 but the change I advocated could not fail to seem to some of my 
 vestry a deliberate flouting of what the old church had so stoutly 
 stood for in the days of its strength and glory. 
 
 Over this controversy one or two of my vestry left me, and
 
 2i 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Mr. Morgan took a good deal of persuading before I got him 
 to my view. But he came to it finally, and then headed the 
 list of subscribers that put up the very considerable amount 
 of money my changes called for. 
 
 The congregations at first were small some two hundred 
 and fifty. I had the ushers show all who came to seats well 
 up in front. Propinquity counts for something in worship, 
 and I locked the galleries up for several months. I preached 
 poorly, and I knew it. It has always been so with me. I can- 
 not remember ever having made a specially successful start in 
 anything I attempted to do, except in my mission at Toronto. 
 
 I noted the faces before me morning by morning. (This 
 was not hard to do, for there was no crowd.) One man partic- 
 ularly I saw, who came regularly. In the plates carried in 
 the central aisle there lay a note of considerable amount when- 
 ever he was there. Mr. Tracy and I, who did the counting, 
 talked this over. (Remember, these were the days of small 
 things.) Then one Sunday I asked for $500 to start a lending 
 library for the children of the Sunday School. On the plate 
 
 that day was a cheque for $250, signed "A. C. C ." How 
 
 well I remember it ! It was the very first that had come to me 
 
 on the church plate. I found Mr. C 's address and called 
 
 to thank him for his help, and to explain why I specially wanted 
 that library for my East Side children. There was a little 
 library of sorts oh, such sorts! too goody-goody to interest 
 or help any healthy child. 
 
 Mr. C asked me to dinner, and I saw that he was deeply 
 
 interested in St. George's. He made me tell him my plans. 
 He evidently was prepared to approve them, and was whole- 
 heartedly free church. "Now," said he: "What about your 
 music? It should be first class." I agreed, naturally, and we 
 fell to talking about the music. Alas, I quickly realized that 
 
 here I had one idea and Mr. C another. I wanted a choir 
 
 of my people, and by my people; and as far as possible a volun- 
 tary body. He had in view the best organist and the best 
 double quartet that could be had for money. I wanted a choir 
 formed out of St. George's itself, part of the church's life, an 
 organization so attractive that my prospective East Side boys 
 and girls (I had not got them yet) should plan and study to 
 win entrance to it. A choir where brownstone-housed ladies
 
 ST. GEORGE'S, 1883 215 
 
 and Wanamaker's "shop ladies" should sit side by side. Mr. 
 
 C listened, interested, but I could see that he was not 
 
 enthusiastic over my choir dream. 
 
 Mr. C was one of my audience the very first Sunday I 
 
 preached, and he attended regularly for some months. During 
 that time I saw him several times. We were growing; the 
 morning and evening congregations increasing. But though 
 we were out of debt, we were not yet paying the running ex- 
 penses of the church and there were so many things that 
 might be attempted, if only we had the money! And here was 
 a man who had the money, and seemed to have a hearty will 
 to help us. 
 
 One evening, after dinner at his apartment, Mr. C 
 
 asked me into his study and said: "I am heartily with you. 
 Tell me frankly your plans for the future. I don't ask out of 
 curiosity; I want to stand back of you." So I told him what, 
 till then, I had spoken of to no one. Told of a building I 
 wanted, large, beautiful, commodious, where rich and poor 
 should meet; a building that should be a visible evidence of the 
 church's recognition of the needs and wrongs of the city toilers 
 and their children. It should be a teaching house and a dancing 
 house; a reading house and a playing house; and because it was 
 these, it should be a preaching house, bidding the neighbourhood 
 look for, strive for, and believe in a better manhood and a better 
 day. 
 
 Mr. C expressed whole-hearted approval, and said: 
 
 "Do you not see that to succeed in these radical changes you 
 must depute parts of your work to others? You must find 
 those who agree with you and who trust you; men whom you 
 can trust, men willing to cooperate fully. Now you can count 
 on me as such a helper. I am with you heart and soul. I have 
 now to make to you a proposition. Hand over all the musical 
 matters of the church to my keeping and control; free your 
 mind of them altogether. I will give you the best organ, best 
 organist, and best choir in New York, and will meet all the 
 expenses." 
 
 I did not answer at once, though of course I saw that this 
 tempting scheme would not work. I had not abolished my 
 musical committee, composed of old members of the vestry, 
 to hand over the whole conduct of the church's music to one
 
 216 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 man, however efficient and generous he might be. Mr. C 
 
 saw my hesitation. "Wait a moment," he said, "before you 
 reply to my offer." He rose and went to his desk. "What 
 do you think your parish building would cost?" "About 
 $200,000." He wrote a cheque for that amount, and pushing 
 it toward me, said, "I want to help you; let me." 
 
 Here was my dream come true. The old church securing 
 a clear-headed and most generous helper, and the success of 
 my pet scheme assured. But it might not be. If I was to 
 surrender control of one department of my difficult work to 
 one man it could only be a matter of time till other depart- 
 ments would be surrendered also. I could not hold my vestry 
 together if I permitted any autocracy other than my own. I 
 never tried harder in my life to make my side of a question 
 plain than I did for the next few minutes to this good, head- 
 strong, would-be aid of mine, Mr. A. C. C . But, though 
 
 I did my best, with sinking heart I knew I must fail. He was 
 a very rich man; he had had his own way; he was wholly bent 
 on having it now, and sooner or later he and I were bound to 
 disagree. Then he would leave me. Besides these general 
 considerations, I could not, I would not give up my large chancel 
 choir idea, its members recruited from the congregation, leading 
 that congregation in its worship because they wanted to lead it, 
 not because they were paid. / say I would not give up that 
 ideal for any quartet music, however good. 
 
 Often and often in my Cambridge days I used to sit in the 
 evening gloom of that wonderful Henry VII chapel at 
 King's College, listening as the best choir in the University sang 
 some anthem by the masters of their great art. And music 
 and setting moved me. But when I hear a congregation of 
 all sorts and conditions of men joining with heart and soul 
 in such a hymn as Isaac Watts' "Jesus shall reign where'er the 
 sun," or Lyte's "Abide with me, fast falls the eventide," my 
 whole being, the best that is within me, thrills to what I must 
 believe is the voice of God. Then new hopes are quickened, 
 and old resolutions are reborn. That is worship. A man can 
 give to others only what is given to him. 
 
 Congregational worship I was going to work for in St. 
 George's. That meant a spontaneous congregational response, 
 inspiring in its unison, whether in prayer or in praise. To me
 
 ST. GEORGE'S, 1883 217 
 
 it was too plain that here, at the very outset, Mr. C- 
 
 ideals and mine were wide apart. Mr. C had said, "I 
 
 want to help you; let me." I replied, "God knows no clergy- 
 man in New York needs such help as you can give more than I 
 do, but I cannot have you help me in this way. I cannot sur- 
 render the direction of St. George's music to you." 
 
 "Then I will never put my foot inside your church again." 
 
 I said, "You are doing wrong, sir. You should not have 
 offered me that money." 
 
 I never saw Mr. A. C. C again. He died a few years 
 
 later. 
 
 I was going to Jekyll Island Club, in 1889, for a much-needed 
 rest. I had been very ill. On the little steamer that took pas- 
 sengers from Brunswick to the Island I met Mr. F. B . 
 
 He was, I knew, head of the great concern that Mr. A. C. C 
 
 had been president of. When I knew Mr. C , Mr. B- 
 
 was his secretary. At the club I got to know Mr. B pretty 
 
 well, and he told me that Mr. C often spoke kindly of St. 
 
 George's progress and of me. He had told him all about our 
 falling out, and declared frankly that I had been right and he 
 wrong. 
 
 I will depart a little from the order of events in order to tell 
 the sequel of this story. From earliest days I fell into the 
 habit of breakfasting once a week with Mr. Morgan. Shortly 
 
 after my disaster with Mr. C , I was at Mr. Morgan's 
 
 table, and when breakfast was over, I told him the whole story. 
 He listened carefully to all I had to say, but, as was his custom, 
 he said nothing. The parish building scheme he had not heard 
 of before. Twelve months passed, and of it I said no more to 
 him, nor had he made any reference to the matter. One morn- 
 ing in early spring, a shabby hired coupe stopped at the door 
 of the rectory. In it was J. P. Morgan. In those days he 
 never drove in any other vehicle. He was on his way to the 
 steamer; he was sailing for Europe that day. "I have come 
 to bid you good-bye," he said. Then, pulling a letter out of 
 his pocket. "I think this is what you want, Rector. If I 
 have left anything out, you can tell me when I come back." 
 And he was off. 
 
 On reading the paper, I found that every single detail of 
 what I had said that morning a year previous had deen re-
 
 2i 8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 membered, and was here specified in this sketch of a deed of 
 gift. On Mr. Morgan's return he and I went over the matter 
 again together, and the result was the following: 
 
 To the Rector, Church Wardens, and Vestrymen of St. George's Church 
 
 New York City: 
 Gentlemen: 
 
 On behalf of the family of the late Senior Warden, Charles Tracy, I wish to 
 communicate to you officially, their wish to erect to his memory a church 
 house to be styled, "The Memorial House of St. George's Church." 
 
 My proposition is this: that your corporation shall transfer to me, in fee 
 simple, the plot of ground on East 16th Street. 
 
 Upon receiving from you the deed of the property mentioned, I will engage 
 to have erected upon the entire property a church house, which house shall 
 include an adequate chapel and Sunday-school rooms, rooms for the resident 
 clergy, an office for the Corporation, and rooms for the mission work of the 
 parish, these latter to include suitable accommodations for the Boys' and 
 Girls' Clubs, Girls' Friendly Society, Helping Hand, etc., etc. Also bath- 
 rooms and a gymnasium. 
 
 When completed, the property to be deeded, free of debt, to the Rector, 
 Church Wardens, and Vestrymen of St. George's Church, New York, on 
 condition that they keep the same in good repair, and use the same exclu- 
 sively for the parish work in perpetuity. 
 
 If this proposition meets your approval, I suggest that a committee, con- 
 sisting of the Rector, the Wardens, Mr. Spencer, Mr. Cutting and Mr. 
 Tracy, be appointed, with full power to assist in carrying out the same. 
 
 Yours truly, 
 J. Pierpont Morgan.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 The Beginnings of an Institutional Church 
 
 When shall we learn that what attaches people to us is the spirit we are of, 
 not the machinery we employ? Matthew Arnold. 
 
 The $10,000 fund placed at my disposal provided the 
 means, but where was I to find the men? For the aggressive 
 work I must do, the ordinary Divinity "Theologue" was of no 
 use at all. My greatest difficulty was to find clerical assistance. 
 One good man who had been with me in Toronto, Ralph 
 Bridges, joined me soon. With his aid and some temporary 
 help I kept things going till I could find the material I wanted; 
 but at first this seemed impossible. 
 
 The young clergy, or would-be clergy, who presented them- 
 selves were plainly not of the stamp I required. They were 
 fresh from the seminary. A man may think, and a man may 
 read, and a man may toil, but he will never know life unless he 
 lives; and there the seminary gives him no help at all. 
 
 To improve and modernize clerical education was beyond 
 me; but I could do, or try to do something for my clergy, which 
 was not generally done for clerical beginners. If the seminaries 
 were largely responsible for their clerical inefficiency, the re- 
 lations that were usual between rectors and assistants did 
 little or nothing to remedy a bad start. The assistant clergy 
 I had met in my wanderings all over the United States seemed 
 seldom to have taken any root in the parishes where I found 
 them. They did not get, they did not expect to get, much help 
 from their superiors. They usually read the lessons and 
 prayers abominably, and it was but seldom indeed that any one 
 tried to better either their reading or their preaching. I had 
 known intimately a number of able men, rectors in the Protes- 
 tant Episcopal Church, but so far as I could see, none of them 
 had made much effort to establish intimate relations with 
 
 219
 
 220 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 assistants. Some of the most popular of the clergy never took 
 the trouble to make friends of their assistants at all. 
 
 My sympathy had gone out often to those poor, ill-trained 
 boys making a beginning in the greatest profession in the world; 
 preaching but seldom, and when they did, feeling that the peo- 
 ple they talked to wanted to hear someone else; and even when 
 they visited, made to feel that their visiting was a bore. It 
 might be that no system could be suddenly invented which 
 would change these conditions, but so far as they could be 
 changed or modified, I determined to try to do it in my own 
 case. 
 
 To that end, my clergy should live together in a comfortable, 
 well-found clergy house. There they should find regular hours 
 (which they must keep), good housekeeping, and good food. I 
 would give them teaching and preaching work to do, and would 
 make time to attend the services at which they preached. They, 
 their work, and their preaching I would criticize, openly to 
 their faces, never behind their backs, and I would make them 
 believe that I welcomed their criticism of me, my plans and my 
 preaching, that I was but a learner and an experimenter, as 
 they were, in the great wide field of human service. So to- 
 gether we would aim at efficiency, and strive hard to be brothers 
 in more than name. 
 
 In outline this was my plan for my "boys" so, as the 
 years passed, they came to be called; and so they called them- 
 selves. In all, thirty-six men came to me as assistant clergy 
 in twenty-four years. And the dearest friends I have to-day 
 still so sign their names when they write to me. What the old 
 church came to stand for and what it accomplished was 
 "my boys'" work as truly as mine. God bless them and lead 
 them on forever! 
 
 There is an old proverb my mother was fond of I tried to 
 practise it with my clergy: "Patience, perseverance, and sweet 
 oil will bring a snail to Jerusalem." I believed in sweet oil, but 
 I tried not to engage snails. 
 
 Looking back on it all, nothing I have accomplished gives me 
 a deeper satisfaction than my association with my assistant 
 clergy. They were men of very different stamps and very dif- 
 ferent capacities. One was a saint, one a genius, and only one 
 a thoroughly bad egg (and he, poor boy, had many gifts); one
 
 AN INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH 221 
 
 more, a brilliant man, disappointed me and failed himself. But 
 the average was high. 1 Two became bishops and one a suf- 
 fragan bishop, and the Protestant Episcopal Church would be 
 the stronger to-day if at least five or six more of them had been 
 elected to the Episcopate. 
 
 As a venture of faith, I rented a house on East 17th Street, 
 that backed on to our old Sunday-school building on East 16th 
 Street, next the large and commodious rectory at 209 East 
 1 6th Street. Here I would start my clerical family when I had 
 gathered it. And now I will tell how I got the first of my new 
 band my Saint. I had a letter from an English officer of ar- 
 tillery stationed at Kingston, Ontario, whom I had known when 
 I was in Toronto. "There was a clergyman in Kingston," 
 he wrote, "who needed help from someone badly; brotherly 
 help and counsel." Henry Wilson was born in Peterborough, 
 Canada, 1841. He entered Trinity College, Toronto, where he 
 did more than well, taking two scholarships and an honour 
 degree. In 1883, he received its D. D. Trinity College stood 
 for the High and Dry school of Churchmanship, and Wilson 
 had been of that party. He was chaplain to the Bishop of 
 Ontario, and assistant to the Dean of Kingston. About the 
 time I came to New York, the Salvation Army opened a cam- 
 paign in Kingston. 
 
 At first Wilson stood with the Anglican clergy, who to a 
 man opposed the "Army." After a little it was evident to him 
 that the much-scoffed-at Salvationists were reaching some of 
 his own flock with whom he had for years toiled in vain. Old, 
 bibulous veterans of many years' army service gave up whiskey 
 and began to pray and preach. Never was there a man more 
 wholly given to the service of his flock than was Wilson, and 
 since the evidence of change of heart in the case of many of his 
 own people was inescapable, he went to the Salvation Army 
 meetings and saw what was going on first silently, later re- 
 joicingly. Some of his own people who had been converted 
 called on him to speak, and soon he was preaching side by side 
 with his newly found allies. 
 
 Clerical bigotry in Kingston was extreme. His clerical 
 friends first cut him then denounced him, and the Bishop for- 
 bade his association with the "Army." My correspondent, 
 
 1 Charles Scudding, Oregon; E. C. Acheson, suffragan, Connecticut; H. R. Hulse, Cuba.
 
 222 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 who knew Wilson well and loved him, said it was evident he 
 could not stand the strain he was under for long, and if he 
 decided to ignore the Bishop's instructions, he would be "un- 
 frocked." 
 
 "His rector, the Dean of the Cathedral at Kingston, had in- 
 sisted on his sending in his resignation; and when he begged 
 his Bishop to license him as a lay preacher, and allow him still 
 to work among the poor and non-church-going people of the 
 diocese, where he had laboured for seventeen years, depending 
 on such offerings as they might give for his services, his request 
 was refused. Both the Bishop of Ontario and the Dean of 
 Kingston finally clinched the matter by insisting 'that he give 
 up all connection with the Salvation Army and withdraw from 
 its grotesque performances.' This Wilson refused to do. 
 Could I help?" 
 
 I had never met Wilson, nor did I know anything about 
 him till I received this letter; but the blind folly and ignor- 
 ant cruelty of the thing moved me. I took a leap in the 
 dark. I wrote, asking Wilson to come to me as assistant. It 
 was taking chances, but I never did a wiser thing. When he 
 arrived, I saw that he was a broken man. He had left behind 
 him all he knew and all he loved. His whole ministry had been 
 spent in Kingston, and there his wife and eldest child were 
 buried. He did not look to me like a man who would do much 
 more work anywhere. That was in 1885. I will skip now 
 seventeen years in the life story of my friend. During those 
 years Kingston never saw him. First with me, afterward 
 with Doctor Simpson, he went on his way serving his Master 
 and helping his fellow-men. In 1908 (I was in Africa) they 
 brought back to Kingston all that remained of Henry Wilson, 
 and laid him beside his wife and his little son. The two ec- 
 clesiastics who had cast him out were dead; new men filled 
 their places. By his grave a great crowd had gathered, for 
 fifteen years had not served to blight his memory, or make the 
 people he had loved and served forget their friend. And the 
 new Dean, when he had read the service, speaking not for the 
 English church only but for Kingston town, said: "No man 
 had ever left a deeper impress on the spiritual life of this city." 
 
 I went to meet my future friend, and soon I saw that I could 
 not start my clergy-house idea with him, for he was evidently
 
 AN INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH 223 
 
 on the very borderland of a serious nervous breakdown. I 
 took him to the rectory, and after consulting with my wife, 
 lodged him in a large upper bedroom, at the top of the house. 
 I suggested his seeing a doctor, but here he was adamant. He 
 trusted his Master to keep his body as safe as his soul; and I 
 could do nothing with him on that score and never did. I got 
 him to compromise in the matter of toothache; after a fierce 
 siege of it he was persuaded to go to a dentist. How he dis- 
 tinguished in his own mind between surgery and medicine, and 
 where he drew the line, I never discovered, and indeed, never 
 tried, for his simple childlike trust in a God of goodness was a 
 help often to us all who worked with him, and well, life is 
 more than logic. 
 
 For some weeks my wife and I were much concerned about 
 our visitor. At meal times he did not speak, and he spent his 
 time in his room. While I was naturally exercised as to the 
 balanced possibilities and disabilities of saintship in Wilson's 
 case, the man who was to help us both turned up without in- 
 troduction. The Rev. Lindsay Parker walked into my study 
 one morning and at once frankly said he wanted to be my 
 assistant. He said that he was a Methodist minister in good 
 standing, but he had decided to seek orders in the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church. Would I help him? Parker captured me 
 from the start: an Irishman, traces of the brogue still unmis- 
 takable, but such an honest human soul as looked full at me 
 out of his wide-opened blue eyes! 
 
 If I had taken a leap in the dark in choosing Henry Wilson 
 without seeing him, Parker had leaped more heedlessly than I, 
 for he had already withdrawn from the Methodist body with- 
 out having any idea of the grave difficulties Episcopal legalists 
 had ingeniously pieced together to hedge the door of access to 
 orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church. Doing so, our 
 church, of course, was only following indisputable Scriptural 
 precedent. Had she not the very highest authority for in- 
 sisting on the "narrow door"? Surely she had. So let other 
 "religious bodies" (let no man confuse them with The Church) 
 do as they would. She, at least, would keep her door of en- 
 trance strait and narrow so strait and narrow that she al- 
 ways let in the little man, and usually kept the big out. 
 
 Lindsay Parker promised to be too big a man to push through
 
 224 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 that door, or, to put the matter plainly, I could see small 
 chance of my getting him into Deacon's orders soon enough to 
 enable him to be of practical use to me. Over the pros and 
 cons we went together. He had a wife and children, no money, 
 no home, no scholarship, worst of all no Greek. Then came to 
 me a happy thought. There in my rectory sat Henry Wilson, 
 a first-class Greek scholar; silent, plunged in a deep melancholy. 
 I went upstairs and took Parker with me, and left the two men 
 together. 
 
 I wish I could do justice, or anything like justice, to the com- 
 pelling qualities of Lindsay Parker's charm and bonhommie, 
 allied to an unusually keen wit. He was a second-rate preacher, 
 but one of the best story tellers, and that in many dialects, 
 I ever met. Transparently honest, full of sympathy, but ex- 
 ceedingly wise and shrewd in his judgments of people, rich 
 or poor; the life of the dinner table or the club meeting; always 
 understanding young human nature, and by it understood. He 
 saw the humorous side of everything, and his jokes and stories 
 would draw laughter from a stone. Loving and loyal to me 
 and to all his friends, he brought sunshine and courage with 
 him wherever he went. Who could have foreseen that one 
 who lived "abundantly," if ever a man did, should be doomed 
 to sink for long years into a far more hopeless melancholy than 
 that out of which he rescued his dearest friend? Yet such was 
 nature's cruel decree. 
 
 The two men spent the morning together, and Parker had his 
 first lesson in New Testament Greek, and Henry Wilson had 
 found work for which he was well fitted. Great days those first 
 days together were ! By extraordinary good fortune I had got 
 the men I needed to help me in laying the foundation I re- 
 quired. Each had his own work, loved it and succeeded in it. 
 My vestry was an unfailing support. Every corner in our in- 
 sufficient old Sunday-school building was filling up with young 
 people. On Sunday it was crammed. I took my first men's 
 confirmation class in the laundry of the rectory. The great, 
 dark basement of the church was turned into a bowling alley. 
 At this, some of my "best" were rather concerned, but the 
 spirit of the congregation was well expressed by one of Mr. 
 Schieflfelin's staff of ushers when one Sunday morning he was 
 questioned by a newspaper reporter. The reporter, coming
 
 AN INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH 225 
 
 early, was shown to a seat high up in the church. He noticed 
 that that morning Mr. Morgan had some difficulty in getting 
 any seat at all. When the service was over, the reporter but- 
 tonholed the usher and said: "How do the old St. George's 
 people, like Mr. Morgan there, stand this sort of thing?" "Oh," 
 said the usher, "most of the old stand-bys have gone away long 
 ago, and those that remain will stand anything." 
 
 I am not going to weary the readers of my story with long 
 quotations from my year books of early or later days, or with 
 a history of the things I aimed to do and failed to do; or of 
 those I succeeded in doing. But briefly I must outline what 
 was my aim when I began my work in East Side New York. I 
 do this the more readily because if I were a young man to-day 
 beginning all over again (and I wish I were), I should follow 
 the same policy, though naturally I should not always employ 
 the same machinery. 
 
 The business of the Christian Church is to lead men on 
 and up. A God all men can believe in is a God resident in 
 man himself. If that is so, man's first duty is to help his 
 brother-man to betterment; and that again means that the 
 Christian Church, which is composed of men believing in and 
 standing for what Jesus stood for, must ever be engaged in any 
 and every effort to help men to rise into fellowship with the 
 Great Master Helper and Saviour of us all. 
 
 Putting this philosophy of the Christian endeavour into 
 concrete shape amounts to this: the Church of Jesus should 
 show the way to all sorts of betterment. She cannot do the 
 doctor's work, or the policeman's, or the teacher's, or the 
 mayor's; but she can and should not only protest when these 
 agencies fail in their manifest duty; but further, she must stand 
 ready to illustrate concretely, even in a small way, what should 
 and could be accomplished for good under the circumstances 
 confronting her. That having been done, then let her step out 
 from under, and let her take up some new need, some new re- 
 form. If she persists in saying that religion only (in its narrow 
 sense) is her business, men of sense and sympathy will leave 
 her; or, if they do not leave, will occupy themselves less and 
 less with what she is or claims to be. This is what with half 
 an eye any one can see is happening to her to-day. To her, 
 children are brought for baptism; men and women kneel to be
 
 226 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 married; and when death comes, crowds who have rarely visited 
 her courts are present to express their respectful regard for the 
 bereaved, and their sense of a common loss. She gracefully 
 and most fittingly blesses life's beginnings, and most eloquently 
 would solace those facing its inevitable close. And there her 
 chief function for these multitudes ends. Their names appear 
 on some church roll, but in no real sense are they of her. 
 
 There was a time, and not so long ago, when what the Church 
 said in council had immense weight with men. Who pays 
 attention to-day to the wordy reports of even a Lambeth con- 
 ference, where, gathered from all over the world, two hundred 
 and seventy-two bishops met for weeks, to discuss behind closed 
 doors what are the present duties of the Christian Church? So 
 long as the bishops confine themselves to religious generalities, 
 their pronouncements are in accord with the desires and hopes 
 of good people everywhere. But this is only true of them so 
 far as they deal in generalities. When it comes to speaking 
 plainly on specific ills; to advising courses of action to be 
 pursued, approving some, and singling out others for blames 
 then it is startlingly evident that these Right Reverend Fathers 
 in God are floundering in uncertain paths; in fact, do not know 
 what they are talking about; and are quite unfit to act as guides 
 to society. 
 
 One stands aghast at a group of bishops venturing, as the 
 specially accredited messengers of God, to declare that since 
 syphilis, the most terrible physical curse known to man, may 
 be the result of individual sin, therefore all prophylactic precau- 
 tions taken against it, even when such were taken by medical 
 service of the Army and Navy, must be condemned as mani- 
 festly opposed to the will of a holy and merciful God. 1 
 
 Think of it! This is Episcopacy's ultimatum to doctors, 
 chaplains, and officers, servants of their fellows, facing for them- 
 selves and for the youth of all lands such conditions of prolonged 
 nerve rack and horror as never have mortal men faced before. 
 
 When I showed the report to an eminent physician, a friend of 
 mine, he said: "Is it any wonder that few intelligent men can 
 find time to go and hear such clergy preach?" 
 
 The committee was composed of thirty-six bishops, their 
 Sees scattered all over the world. Doctor Ingram, Bishop of 
 
 'See paragraph 69 of Lambeth Conference report.
 
 AN INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH 227 
 
 London, was chairman, and the Protestant Episcopal Church 
 was represented on that committee by the Bishops of Duluth, 
 Kansas, Texas, and Vermont. 1 
 
 I will tell a story about Bishop Ingram, illustrating the un- 
 fitness of that saintly man for the chairmanship of so vitally 
 important a committee. I cannot go further into the matter 
 here. But the report of that committee on the sex relation of 
 man and wife was silly, impracticable, and untrue. Every 
 sensible man knows the report is nonsense, but so far as I have 
 seen none of the church papers have said one word of criticism. 
 Ingram was a close personal friend of my youngest brother, 
 Rev. Marcus Rainsford, Jr., Rector of Paddington, London, 
 who himself told the story to me. Marcus was, like his father, 
 an Evangelical, and his was one of the very few appoint- 
 ments made by the Bishop of London from the Evangelical 
 party. 
 
 In my brother's parish was a nice boy, son of one of the 
 prominent members of the church. He married the daughter 
 of an excellent citizen, living close to my brother's rectory, 
 who belonged to an old Unitarian family. My brother married 
 the young couple, and they went to Switzerland for their honey- 
 moon. Sunday fell two or three days after the wedding. On 
 Sunday morning the young couple went to church. It was the 
 first Sunday in the month, and, said the bridegroom to his 
 bride, "Let us take the Holy Communion together." At the 
 church door was posted a notice that the Bishop of London 
 would preach that Sunday. 
 
 "Oh," said the boy, "I know him. He is a friend of our 
 rector. I will introduce you to him." They went into the 
 vestry and were cordially received. " Bishop, we were married 
 on Wednesday, and we would like at the beginning of our mar- 
 ried life to take the Holy Communion together." 
 
 The Bishop was most cordial. "Whose daughter are you, 
 my dear?" 
 
 The bride named her father. 
 
 "But your father's family are Unitarians. When were you 
 confirmed?" 
 
 " Bishop, I have not been confirmed, but I want to join my 
 husband's church, of course, and I would like to take the Holy 
 
 ^e Lambeth Conference, 1920, pages 1 1 1112, MacMillan & Co.
 
 228 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Communion with him, on our first Sunday together as man and 
 wife." 
 
 Bishop Ingram was adamant, and refused then and there to 
 give that young thing the Sacrament. 
 
 That is what Bishop Ingram did, and I say his action comes 
 near being a sin against the Holy Ghost. 
 
 There you have the incorrigible spiritual stupidity of An- 
 glicanism at its worst! And such was the man named by 
 Bishop Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, to preside over 
 and direct the councils of a committee whose findings must go 
 forth to the whole world as the last word of wisdom and direc- 
 tion that that great Communion has to give on matters so 
 vitally important to our race as the relations of the sexes. 
 
 But I must get back to my East Side people and tell what 
 applications of the theory I have outlined I was to try to put in 
 practice. 
 
 (i) First, if I would reach the neighbourhood, I must win 
 the children. Neglect of child-life in the city at that time was 
 woeful. The public schools were bad. 
 
 The Roman Catholic Church largely controlled appoint- 
 ments of teachers. There was no provision whatever in the 
 schools for the very little children. There was not one single 
 kindergarten in connection with the city schools of New York. 
 This is hardly believable, but it is the truth. 
 
 (2) Auchmulty's fine industrial school was doing good work, 
 but it stood alone. Boys and girls in our public schools had 
 nothing offered to them but books. There was no teaching 
 for the hand or eye, so I would start an industrial school for 
 my boys. In this, and in many other schemes dear to my heart, 
 the kindly and trustful help of my warden, J. P. Morgan, was 
 given me. I laid my plans before him, and he gave me $6,000 
 a year for many years, and more when I needed it for St. 
 George's Industrial School. It had quite a history, and I 
 shall speak of it later. 
 
 One other practical reason I had for that school. From my 
 entrance on work in the East Side I tried to come into touch 
 with the labour unions, and here I found the strange obsession, 
 that to promote the well-being of the labouring man it was 
 necessary to put limits to his education. In brief, I was 
 pressed into starting my school by the discovery that it was
 
 AN INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH 229 
 
 most difficult, sometimes impossible, to find places for likely 
 lads who wanted to learn a trade. They could only learn it by 
 becoming apprentices, and the unions of each trade rigorously 
 cut down the number of apprentices permitted. 
 
 (3) Then I saw children and growing boys in the schools 
 given nothing or next to nothing in the way of exercise. I 
 went to the schools and looked around for myself. What I 
 saw was tragically absurd. A few minutes' recreation was due 
 in one school I visited more than once. I waited to see it 
 taken, and what I saw was over one hundred boys, from eight 
 to sixteen, lined up in silence, their toes touching a chalk line. 
 In the next room joyous jabber broke out of a sudden. 
 
 "What is going on there?" 
 
 "Oh, that is the girls' room." 
 
 "Are they toeing a chalk line?" 
 
 "Oh, no; they are good; we let them play. But these boys 
 are an unruly lot." 
 
 This was said before the poor, mute, unruly lot. Some of those 
 outraged boys looked their unspoken protest to me, and I 
 think they saw that I understood the wrong done them. Said 
 I to myself, "My boys shall have a good gymnasium." Oh, 
 the wrongs done the children still are many, but we have 
 "marched," as the French say, since those days of corrupt 
 folly. 
 
 (4) I never had forgotten my own first, lonely, dreadfully 
 hot summer in New York, in 1876. Not one holiday in it for 
 me during the torrid period! And I made my plans to do 
 what could be done for the children during the heat. I could 
 send them to the sea; a car-load at first, later two car-loads 
 every day during school vacations. To get this going I went 
 to my ladies and they helped me splendidly. To-day children 
 can go to the country and dabble in the sea. A hundred or- 
 ganizations are busily at work making it possible. It was not 
 so in 1883. I h a d secured the efficient assistance of the Rev. 
 E. F. Miles, M. D., and Mrs. Miles, and to these competent 
 people I turned over our seaside work. 
 
 The first excursion to Rockaway Beach was on June 4, 1883, 
 and every week after that till September 4th a special car 
 went down loaded with children and their parents. Many of 
 those little ones had never seen the sea. This was about the
 
 230 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 first thing I did in New York. I am proud of the date of our 
 beginning. Nothing was settled in the old church then. The 
 galleries were not yet opened, nor the changes our new musical 
 arrangements called for made. I knew well that if we could 
 but win the children we would have the parents, too. And that 
 first summer (and it was a hot one) we went for the children 
 of the neighbourhood and laid the foundations of lasting 
 friendship with hosts of them. 
 
 Besides the daily excursions, we took two hundred sickly 
 children and their mothers to the sea and kept them there for 
 a week or more. By these four ways of approach I would 
 reach the young. I would get on understandable terms with 
 them and their parents outside the church first my expecta- 
 tion being that later they would of their own will seek a place 
 inside it. I was not disappointed. 
 
 Thus it was that during the first few months of my rectorship 
 I laid the foundations for a new kind of church, the Institu- 
 tional Church. As time went on it was copied, and sometimes 
 misrepresented and misunderstood; but I believed then and 
 believe still that both in cities and in country it must super- 
 sede the older form of religious organization. This latter dealt 
 with the family, provided for the family, had its family pew, 
 and depended on patriarchal family ideas. Those ideas 
 worked well in their time, but that time is not our time. The 
 sort of church I was striving for should appeal to the com- 
 munity as well as to the family. It should do this not by pulpit 
 denouncement of evil things only, but by demonstration of a 
 better way, even if the demonstration had to be but a small 
 affair. 
 
 To sum up: My Institutional Church should 
 
 (i) Select its points of attack and education wisely. 
 
 (2) Be positive, not merely negative; not only attack an 
 evil thing, but illustrate a good thing. 
 
 (3) Do this so as to educate the community, not merely 
 to fill the church; and, most important, as soon as this has been 
 accomplished, get from under. 
 
 I would insist on this last point. Here it is that, in nine 
 cases out of ten, churches all over the land fail. 
 
 Hospitals are founded, schools established, dispensaries 
 opened, libraries and a hundred other excellent and necessary
 
 AN INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH 231 
 
 institutions offered to the public; and year in and year out, 
 the patient souls that gave money to found them are pestered 
 to support them, while the fact is, they should not be sup- 
 ported; they should be scrapped, or handed over to lay organ- 
 ization, municipal or state. 
 
 The quotation from Matthew Arnold with which I headed 
 this chapter finely stresses the principle I wish to insist on here. 
 You can help your fellows to better living in many ways, but 
 it is the spirit of sympathy, understanding, and love in which 
 you go about it, and in which all your reforms are adminis- 
 tered, that can alone make them successful. Real religion is 
 not too common on the highway of life. Yet those who tread 
 it are very really hungry for real religion, and quickly recog- 
 nize the real thing and also quickly resent any substitute 
 offered for it. 
 
 From our beginning my bishop, Henry C. Potter, gave me his 
 invaluable counsel. None knew our problems better, and 
 none helped more to solve them. He saw what we were trying 
 to do. I tried him sometimes sorely, I fear. Sometimes I 
 frankly differed from him. More than once he saved me from 
 annoyance by quietly pigeonholing the communications ad- 
 dressed to him as head of the diocese, by good people who re- 
 sented things I said or did. He sent a valuable parcel of the 
 newest books to me when for a year I was in the wilds of 
 Africa. I wish I had not lost the note that accompanied his 
 gift. Ever and always he was my dear friend and wise coun- 
 sellor and if he had lived I certainly should not have resigned 
 my orders.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 Avenue A Work Among the Young 
 
 A great drought afflicted the land of Israel. The heavens were as 
 brass , the earth as iron. Water dried up at the fountains and cattle 
 dropped in the stall. The King called his people together, so that the 
 nation should beseech the Lord to send rain upon the earth. Then the 
 King stood forth and made his prayer, but the sky was as brass and the 
 earth as iron. The priests of the temple made their prayer, but the sky 
 was as brass and the earth as iron. And the lords and great men, the 
 wise men and chief captains, made their prayer, yet still the sky was as 
 brass and the earth as iron. 
 
 Then there stood forth an old man, poor and in mean clothing, and 
 he made his prayer, and lol the sky was black with clouds, and there 
 was a sound of abundance of rain. 
 
 Then the King and his counsellors and his captains, the priests and 
 the wise men gathered round that poor old man, saying: "And who are 
 you whose prayer has availed with Jehovah, to send rain in the earth ? " 
 And he said, "I am a teacher of little children." Talmud. 
 
 The shaping of my work in New York City, whatever was 
 of value in it, took final form from the foundations I laid at its 
 very beginning. I must therefore ask indulgence if I write at 
 some length of our earliest beginnings, and our plannings to 
 win to our church those who had never entered any church, or 
 for long had lapsed from church attendance; and if I dwell on 
 the work done by those dear fellow-soldiers, both clerical and 
 lay, whose loyal aid never failed me while I was their leader. 
 
 I do not think it would be easy in any church to find three 
 men more profoundly unlike than were Wilson, Parker, and I. 
 Nor do I think it would be easy to find three who so completely 
 understood and trusted each other, or who worked better to- 
 gether. To get Parker through his examination for deacon's 
 orders gave Wilson all he could do, even when our understand- 
 ing bishop lent his all-powerful help. It was altogether de- 
 lightful to me to see the way in which my dear saint's melan- 
 choly quickly disappeared, as fog before sunlight. Parker 
 
 ,232
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 233 
 
 gave Wilson something to do that was worth doing, and the 
 close, warm friendship that sprang up between the men was 
 a great good thing for them both. Each had an unusually 
 keen sense of humour, and each admired in the other what he 
 knew himself to lack. 
 
 There is fascination in adventuring into a new field! This 
 fascination I think we all three keenly felt. Each of us had in 
 that field to find his own special work and go about it in his own 
 way. I always left to my assistants large liberty in this, and 
 the test of my policy came when we went to work collecting 
 the first confirmation classes. I took the men's class, depend- 
 ing on my preaching and visiting to reach them. Parker 
 asked to be allowed to gather a class of his own, and in his own 
 way. And Wilson, who adored little children, who understood 
 them and was understood by them, had the youngest class. 
 
 I shall never forget what that first presentation to our bishop 
 of the fruits of our opening work meant to me. We were real 
 fishermen; we had to go out and find and catch our fish. There 
 were by now very few old affiliated families on whose youth we 
 might count to make up our classes. There were not more than 
 twenty such when I became rector, and several of these had 
 sought a more peaceful ecclesiastical atmosphere than St. 
 George's afforded them. 
 
 At the very outset Lindsay Parker showed his quality. He 
 elected to canvass the great stores that were then springing up 
 near Union Square. At meal hours he went through them day 
 after day. In a little while there was not a floorwalker and 
 scarcely a sales-lady that did not know and welcome him. 
 Sixty-five such young people, men and women, all or nearly 
 all over twenty years of age, my as yet unordained deacon 
 Lindsay Parker prepared and presented to the Bishop for con- 
 firmation. And his was the strongest part of an extraordinar- 
 ily strong class. 
 
 So far I have been telling chiefly of our plans for reaching the 
 young. I have had a purpose in doing this. My conviction 
 was then and is still that the true way to build firmly is to reach 
 the young. If you win them, the future is yours. If you fail 
 to get them, then you face certain ultimate defeat, no matter 
 how many signs of temporary prosperity may attend you. I 
 shall have more to say on this point later, but it was evident
 
 234 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 that we must invent some way of reaching the unchurched 
 adult on the East Side, as well as the young people, and of our 
 earliest efforts in this direction I must now give an outline. 
 
 I had a notice board fixed to the stone pillars of the church 
 porch. It read: "Come in, rest and pray." Many such can 
 be seen in New York now. Ours was the first and it did steady 
 work, that notice board! It spoke to the passer-by of what 
 the church stood for. 
 
 One Sunday morning after service I noticed a gentleman 
 and a lady waiting till others had gone, evidently wishing to 
 speak to me alone. "I have come here to discharge a debt, 
 sir," said the man. " I was a physician in Brooklyn, doing well 
 in my profession and happily married. Looking back, I cannot 
 see any reason why we did not continue to be happy, but med- 
 dling friends interfered, we drew apart, and to my shame I 
 confess I began to drink. As I drank more and more we drew 
 further apart. I began to lose my practice. My wife left me, 
 and to make a long story short, in a couple of years I had no 
 home and no practice. I was a lonely man on the way to the 
 pit, and going there as fast as I could go. 
 
 "One hot day in July I was wandering about this part of the 
 city and I saw a notice outside this church which I had never 
 seen on any other church. 'Come in, rest and pray.' I went 
 in and threw myself on my knees. I had not prayed for years. 
 I reviewed my life. I knew my wife was a good woman; I 
 knew I still loved her; I believed she loved me; I saw no reason 
 why I should be beaten. I prayed for strength and I got it. 
 I sought my wife. I regained my friends and my professional 
 position. I owe it all to your open church and to your call, 
 'Come in, rest and pray.' Let me introduce you, sir, to my 
 wife." 
 
 The church did not stand on a thoroughfare. For what we 
 were attempting it was not well-placed, for it faced a quiet 
 square and no great thoroughfare ran near us. But into the 
 square came some of the drifting element of the East Side, some 
 " bums," some tired and disheartened folk, and they read our 
 sign, and sometimes came in. They soiled a few cushions, they 
 stole a few church books, but they were never shown the door. 
 Of course they did not come to the church services. Such 
 beaten folk had got too far from any church for that. But
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 235 
 
 some of them began to show interest in us and on a cold day, 
 to a badly clothed man, it was a pleasant place. On Sundays 
 I stood at the church door till a few minutes before the services 
 opened. I also got back to the door as soon after the blessing 
 was given as I could. 
 
 In August, 1884, 1 rented, at $5 a day, a large room back of a 
 saloon at 253 Avenue A, between 15th and 16th streets. I 
 persuaded some of the small local storekeepers to display 
 placards I had printed asking the neighbours to come to a reli- 
 gious service on Sunday afternoon. The only entrance was 
 through the saloon, where, in spite of the Sunday closing law, 
 an active trade in drinks of many sorts, all of them strong, was 
 always going on, and a rough crowd was smoking and playing 
 billiards and cards. A questionable environment it seemed 
 for a "baby mission," but the thing in its favour that decided 
 me was that there was no stand-offishness about it. Here was 
 a meeting place of the people I was after, a meeting place of 
 their own choosing and making, not one that the church made 
 and thrust on them. I had walked many, many miles in those 
 dirty swarming streets (where women and children hung in 
 midsummer out of windows and doors in a way that made you 
 think they were pushed out from inside), looking for a place, be- 
 fore I found what I wanted. No. 253 Avenue A suited me well. 
 
 Since that beginning in the little Baptist chapel in Bethnal 
 Green almost twenty years before, I had made a good many 
 experiments in the missionary field, but as I made my way, that 
 hot August afternoon, to the saloon in Avenue A, I felt I was on 
 ground absolutely unknown to me. Of what was going to hap- 
 pen I had no idea whatever. I took neither of my assistant 
 clergy. Parker was too fat, and Wilson was as preeminently 
 committed to non-resistance as I was not. I took only two or 
 three volunteer workers, men all. Bryant Lindley was one of 
 them, I remember, and I had more than a suspicion that as he 
 belonged to the church militant he came because he had an 
 inkling we would be in for a scrap. No one could foretell what 
 audience we would get or if we would get any. A friendly 
 policeman begged me to take a cop, but I had thought that 
 over before choosing our ground, and had decided that if I 
 could not carry on this work without the aid of a policeman I'd 
 give up and try something else.
 
 236 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I found the room almost full of children and rough boys, 
 a few poor women, and no men except those whose heads were 
 occasionally thrust through the door dividing us from the 
 saloon, and who were evidently interested only in what a figure 
 these new adventurers into the tenement region would cut. A 
 babel of voices greeted our entering. The boys were on their 
 feet, rushing after each other all round the places a regular 
 " follow-my-leader " scramble. The girls were there too for a 
 lark, and took their fair share in raising a row. It was a youth- 
 ful but an exceedingly tough looking crowd. 
 
 I called them to order and tried to speak. This brought 
 things to an immediate crisis. Those boys formed a flying 
 wedge. It was well and promptly done, and I was knocked flat 
 on the floor. It was all play, rough play no viciousness in 
 it, but play with a definite purpose. They knew the purpose; 
 so did I. It was to decide who was the master in that room, 
 and certainly they won the first round. When I got up from 
 the floor we had a lively time of it, singling out the leaders and 
 getting them outside. 
 
 As you can imagine, after this beginning the rest of the pro- 
 ceedings were somewhat disturbed. When we had locked up 
 the room and turned homeward the neighbourhood gave us 
 another taste of its quality. I had hardly reached the street 
 when I found that behind me quite a procession of youngsters 
 had formed. They fell into line and where I went they went, 
 joining in a sort of chant as they marched which ran: "Won't 
 he be a comfort to his mummy when he's grown up?" 
 
 That first hot afternoon taught me afresh a lesson I was 
 prepared to learn. To the young I must look for my allies. 
 'Tis they who are ready to follow a leader. St. George's future 
 on the East Side depended on its success or its failure in winnng 
 the confidence of its neglected little ones. 
 
 Here I had my first real meeting with the living thing Jacob 
 Riis afterward immortalized as "Tony," 1 and I love to re- 
 member that Riis first saw Tony pasting the ugly old stained- 
 glass windows of St. George's (the lower ones) with mud. If 
 we had things to teach Tony, Tony certainly had much to 
 teach us. His home a slum tenement, no room or little room for 
 him at school, no understanding of him when he did get a place 
 
 x See chapter on "Four Dinners" for the story of how Tony made good.
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 237 
 
 in school, and when he broke from school's unsympathetic and 
 most unnatural restraint, then a bad law, shamefully adminis- 
 tered, which tied his wild, vivid boyhood up with older and vi- 
 cious criminals, in a prison for truants. No place to play but 
 the street, and no peace in the street for the ubiquitous "cop," 
 his natural enemy. Everything that stood for order and for 
 property, the policeman, the landlord, the church, all were 
 against him. Even in the parks he was faced with " Keep off 
 the grass." So there was nothing left him but the gutter. 
 
 Yes, as I got up that afternoon with very considerable diffi- 
 culty and delay from the accumulated dirt of that squalid room 
 back of the saloon on Avenue A, my heart went out to those 
 romping ragamuffins who had thrown me on the floor. What a 
 dirty and neglected crew they were, and yet what infinite possi- 
 bilities! What abundant life was packed away under their 
 ragged jackets! I had started out intending to reach their 
 fathers and mothers, and here the children had pushed in between. 
 Though they may not have been aware of it, they had a purpose. 
 They wanted to see and know if we had anything to give them 
 worth while; if to their so empty and neglected lives we could 
 bring anything better than they had been accustomed to. 
 
 I shook as much of the filth off my clothes as I could and 
 went home with much to think about. 
 
 When I look back on my twenty-four years of service in St. 
 George's, I cannot remember that I ever failed to win a response 
 when I called for volunteers for any work, however difficult. 
 I never asked for aid in any undertaking that required more 
 tact and patience than did this business of the Avenue A Sun- 
 day School, and never did I have aid more efficient. Some of 
 my strongest and best new members came at once. Frederick 
 H. Betts, a noted lawyer and a member of my vestry, and Mrs. 
 Betts, Miss Blandina Marshall, Mr. and Mrs. T. Bryant Lind- 
 ley (now in Africa), Mrs. James M. Ruggles, Mr. H. E. Eggles- 
 ton, and a few more came and, what was even more important, 
 stayed with the school till we could move it up to 16th Street, 
 which finally we did with very little loss of personnel. 
 
 The effect that little school had (we opened it first on Sun- 
 day afternoons, then in the mornings as well) on the whole 
 work of the church was profound. It illustrated and explained 
 our purpose as nothing else could. The place came to serve as
 
 238 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 a common meeting ground, a modest bridge across which East 
 Siders who had given up all church life did seek and find a place 
 in the great congregation composed of all sorts and conditions 
 of men. But to win and hold that meeting ground took in- 
 telligent, self-denying, and regular work; and forgiving it, a 
 debt is due to that first little band of volunteers who so 
 promptly came to my call. 
 
 I will tell another story of those early days. One Sunday 
 afternoon I noticed a big, strong, fine-looking young man come 
 into the room after I had opened the school. He stood at the 
 door looking over the classes. There were a dozen, with about 
 one hundred boys and girls. Presently he picked out a class 
 of elderly boys taught by a good-looking lady and seated himself 
 at the upper end of the form near her. I watched him and 
 presently saw my teacher's face flush as she moved her chair 
 farther away from the man. I suspected what had happened. 
 The man was drunk and was talking smut to the teacher. I 
 walked over and told him to get out. He looked defiance and 
 refused to move. I said, "We are here to help you people, and 
 you know it. This lady only comes here because she wants to 
 help you. She is not paid anything for coming; you know that, 
 too. Now you are enough of a man to respect a lady. Why do 
 you sit here and try by your talk to make it impossible for her 
 to teach her boys or to come here at all ? You are drunk or you 
 would not do so unmanly a thing. I don't want to call a 
 policeman. You get up and go out of the room quietly." 
 
 I was watching my man carefully, meanwhile. He was just 
 drunk enough to be ugly and there was fight in his eye. So I 
 edged my foot back a bit till I felt firmly the iron leg of the 
 form that was screwed to the floor and got a good purchase 
 against it. I had spoken quietly, not raising my voice, and as 
 I said "Go out," he swore at me and jumped to his feet. He 
 was almost as tall and quite as heavy as I was, but before he 
 could raise his hands I hit him on the chin with all the power of 
 arm and body I could put into a right-hand jog. He went 
 down in a heap and lay there. When he began to come to I 
 stood over him and said, "Have you had enough?" He said, 
 "Yes." "All right; now get out," and he went. 
 
 Some weeks after we got into a slight scrimmage outside the 
 Sunday-school room with some toughs, one of whom seemed to
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 239 
 
 want a fight. To my horror I saw, elbowing his way through 
 the crowd, this same tall handsome rascal that I had knocked 
 out, and I began to feel that I was in serious trouble. To my 
 amazement and relief he walked up to the ringleader and said, 
 "The Doctor and me can clean out this saloon; you get out." 
 He got out at once. 
 
 My story has a tragic ending: I think it must have been a 
 year later when the big fellow came to me at the rectory one 
 night. " Doctor, I do want to go straight. I have been a bar- 
 tender; I have been a thief." He linked the two professions 
 together. "I can get a good paying job in more than one 
 saloon round here for I know the boys and they come where I 
 am. But whiskey makes me a brute as you know, and as long 
 as I tend bar I can't keep away from it and I can't break with 
 the gang. I want to quit drink, and I want to quit the 'busi- 
 ness,'" (of a thief, he meant), "and I have tried and tried, but I 
 can't get another job. The cops know me and are against me. 
 If you will trust me with the money I'll work a push cart, and 
 I think I can make it go." 
 
 "How much do you want?" 
 
 "Seventy-five dollars." 
 
 I gave him the money and said what cheering things I could, 
 for here was Tony grown up and I truly longed for that man. 
 He was so fine and well-built, so handsome and strong; vice had 
 not yet spoiled either his face or figure. A splendid bit of man- 
 hood gone wrong nay, more, pushed wrong. He would have 
 made a first-class soldier. 
 
 In a couple of months he paid me back the money. It was 
 some time before I saw him again, but one night he came to 
 my study at 209 East 16th Street. 
 
 "It's no good, Doctor. I can't make it. I did well at first, 
 but these damned Jews are crowding me out. I am going 
 back into 'business,' but I won't do it any longer in a small way, 
 and I'll promise you one thing: I'll never take another man's 
 life." He had made up his mind and I could not move him. 
 
 Not very long after a band of three burglars were cornered 
 by the police in the act of boring the safe of a large bank, I 
 think in Jersey City. One of them, at the point of the pistol, 
 held off the police while his confederates escaped. At last the 
 police rushed him and beat him down. He had held them up
 
 2 4 o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 with an unloaded revolver. It was my poor fine "Tony" of 
 Avenue A. I saw him in prison, where very soon he died of 
 galloping consumption. 
 
 I have said at the beginning of this chapter that we three 
 worked well together. I found that Wilson had above all 
 other desires a passion for trying to reach and save the "down- 
 and-outers." It was its appeal to these that had drawn him to 
 the Salvation Army at Kingston, in the '80's. At that time the 
 East Side was thronged with human failures, advertising 
 their failure to get a meal. There were missions many and 
 bread lines long, and the offer of a hot cup of coffee and a sand- 
 wich would quickly fill any downtown mission hall. In the 
 adult work of Avenue A I gave my dear Saint his head and the 
 best financial support I could afford. He drew round him, as 
 was natural, a following of men and women who also preferred 
 work of this sort to any other. Together day and night, for 
 many years, they sought in street and tenement and in the 
 mission the shifting and most elusive "bum." Gradually I 
 had given up, perhaps more even than I knew, my appeal to 
 that class. I preached on the streets sometimes, and at all 
 sorts of halls and missions, but the conviction grew on me that 
 I could accomplish better work in other fields. The most lost 
 bum was not always a bum. That i$ the tragic feature of the 
 situation. Yet I could not avoid facing the fact that once a 
 man has sunk to real bum-dom, the chance of lifting him out of 
 such a life is small indeed. 
 
 I have known many bums who were not drunkards at all. 
 One extraordinarily clever fellow never came to Avenue A with- 
 out his Horace in his pocket, which he knew from cover to cover; 
 and he was a better classicist than Wilson, and Wilson was a 
 good classicist. Where he came from or how he came to be 
 what he was he would never tell. I do not think that man had 
 ever done an honest day's work in his life. 
 
 I supported Wilson at Avenue A with paid assistants some- 
 times. I think S. H. Hadley was the ablest of these. William 
 James, in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," pages 
 201-03, gives Mr. Hadley 's own account of his conversion. He 
 was an exceedingly good speaker, and had had long experience 
 in dealing with the male wreckage of great cities. No better or 
 more capable missioner could be found. We gave him in all
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 241 
 
 things his own way, and he had back of him an able and en- 
 thusiastic support. 
 
 We put into that mission all our energy. For the time being 
 other church work was regarded as of secondary importance. 
 But its results, so far as I could judge of them, were far from 
 satisfactory. I felt more convinced than ever that the em- 
 phasis was wrong. A down-and-out man, a bum y a drunkard, 
 these are the very last who should be pushed to their feet to tell to 
 others a religious experience that they have had or suppose them- 
 selves to have had. To do so is to strike strings already out of 
 tone, and none I think can attend such services and listen for 
 long to the experiences they produce and attach real impor- 
 tance in permanent value to the one or the other. Dealing 
 with human nature is serious and responsible work, and to 
 suppose that mortal moral wounds that have drained the life 
 blood for years can be quickly cured by a "first aid to the in- 
 jured" sort of religion is a very dangerous error. That is my 
 criticism in a nutshell of the Gospel Mission method of saving 
 a city's "rounders." We have only a short time to work 
 and very limited means to work with. Our duty is to employ 
 that time and those means in the most fruitful way we know. 
 
 There are degrees of lostness in men. It is folly to ignore 
 them. Though we worked long and faithfully at Avenue A, 
 we succeeded in drawing into healthy church relationships a 
 few, only a few, of those adults who had lapsed from all church 
 attendance for a long time. We did not, so far as I can re- 
 member, get one single genuine " down-and-outer " to join the 
 church. But we got children for the asking, and during my 
 twenty-four years' rectorship we received into the church's 
 membership more than three thousand young people from the 
 East Side alone. 
 
 As I read over what I have written I feel that I may seem to 
 criticize unfairly the work of some of the very best men I have 
 known. Such is not my desire. But here again in New York 
 I could not but see that the same mistake had been made, and 
 still was being made, that the Evangelical party I knew so well 
 had made in England long before. The church's emphasis 
 was wrong. Men outside her fold were crying not for rescue 
 but for justice. They called for bread; we gave them a stone 
 a religious stone.
 
 242 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The church's policy was a hand-to-mouth policy; for the 
 contaminating and spreading evil of a bad environment the 
 church had no policy at all. To comfort and help with doles 
 an overworked and "sweated " family was not what was wanted 
 and the sufferers knew it. What was needed was a radical 
 change in those conditions that made such householding possi- 
 ble. 
 
 I have referred to the Evangelical party's blindness to the 
 church's social duty to the poor, but such blindness was not 
 confined to one party. High Churchmen were just as con- 
 vinced as were Low that reforms were none of their business. 
 Certain facts came to my knowledge as to conditions obtaining 
 in some of the houses owned by Trinity Corporation. Not 
 only was the church getting rent from saloons, but at least one 
 brothel I knew of was church property. I laid the facts I had 
 learned before my senior warden, Charles Tracy. He satisfied 
 himself as to the facts, and he and I then called on the rector, 
 Doctor Dix, who referred us to the vestry, the clerk of which 
 body at that time was a personal friend of Mr. Tracy. Mr. 
 Tracy wrote stating the facts, and asking for action by Trinity 
 vestry. Two letters passed between my warden and that body, 
 still nothing was done. Mr. Tracy and I then stated that if in 
 the specific case we named the matter was not attended to, we 
 would be obliged to bring it up before the Diocesan Convention 
 of the Church. Under such pressure at last action was taken. 
 
 There are many who are disheartened as they face the evil of 
 a great city. If they but knew how great has been the advance 
 since the time I speak of they would not be so despondent. The 
 moral advance in the life of the community has been a steady 
 advance. But as an agency for effecting God's will, the 
 churches have lost a great chance. They are not reaching and 
 there is small prospect that they will reach the labouring class. 
 They are not associated, in the worker's mind, with any intel- 
 ligent, persistent effort to gain, for him and his, common justice. 
 They turned a stupid, deaf, unbrotherly ear to Labour's bitter 
 cry, and Labour has now turned away its ear from the Church's 
 appeal. Labour told us what it wanted years ago; common 
 sense should have told us it was only justice it wanted. In 
 the United States as in England Labour wanted a fair show, a 
 fair chance to launch its little boat on life's great sea. In short,
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 243 
 
 sympathetic aid in bettering an unfair, uneconomic, and unjust 
 condition of life. To such a demand "Come to Jesus and be 
 saved" is no answer whatever. 
 
 But though we did not gain the outcasts who came to our 
 mission, the work there done by scores of devoted speakers and 
 teachers and visitors had a widespread and lasting effect on 
 the neighbourhood, and we gained a firmer hold on the growing 
 boys. Doctor Wilson was much more than a mission worker. 
 He was an admirable class leader, and to his call came from the 
 very beginning a number of growing boys and young men. No 
 less than eighty-two joined the Doctor's morning Bible class, 
 and from that class quickly was formed a brotherhood. The 
 effectiveness of that first organization, formed exclusively from 
 the class we were trying to reach, was one of the most en- 
 couraging things I ever saw in my life. They came to us, 
 they were part of us. The class grew to a membership of one 
 hundred and ninety in three years. 
 
 When Wilson left me, the Hon. Seth Low, who had become 
 a member of the vestry, took it over, and with great regularity, 
 amid the press of innumerable engagements, remained its 
 leader for many years. When at last he resigned, Mr. Low 
 said to me, "I have filled a good many positions, as Mayor of 
 Brooklyn, President, of Columbia, and Mayor of New York, 
 but in no position have I had so valuable an opportunity of 
 coming to understand my fellow-men as in this Bible class." 
 And that class had its beginnings in the dirty room behind the 
 saloon, No. 253 Avenue A, August 4, 1884. 
 
 There was soon no more rowdiness in the Avenue A Sunday 
 School. It became orderly, attendance grew from seventy-five 
 to one hundred and fifty. The children came on time and 
 came regularly, and the very poorest brought their pennies. 
 Twenty-five dollars was given by the children to missions, the 
 second year of the school. Think what those pennies represented 
 in actual self-denial to these poorest of the poor. 
 
 Our next venture was a kindergarten in Avenue A. My wife 
 was the first to urge this step. She had a genius for under- 
 standing little children. That kindergarten deserves a chapter 
 to itself. It was the second of its order in the great city. But 
 its little ones were often my best helpers, for they opened to us 
 the door of many an East Side home.
 
 244 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I look back on the first few years of my work in St. George's 
 and the East Side with peculiar pleasure. I had found two 
 most unusual fellow-workers in Wilson and Parker; found them 
 when I was beginning to despair of securing the sort of assistant 
 clergy I needed. Once the parish work had gained head, once 
 it was established on approximately the lines I had decided on, 
 the work itself trained my young clergymen. It rubbed and 
 squeezed excessive "seminarism" (to coin a long word) out of 
 them. They soon found that many of those they were set over 
 knew far better how to reach people than they did; and a 
 mutual spirit of loving fellowship and common service drew 
 clergy and laity into friendships that lasted till death. 
 
 But to establish that sort of education work, to spread that 
 sort of spirit from its very beginning was of vital importance, 
 and it was these two men who made it possible. After they 
 left me I depended largely on my admirable lay workers to 
 "break my young clerics in." 
 
 We formed a habit of walking daily round the park (Stuyve- 
 sant) together after morning prayer; and during that half 
 hour we exchanged experiences and made plans, and last and 
 not least told stories. Stories of Wilson's adventures with 
 his bums, which by the way he always kept to himself at first 
 till Parker, who infallibly guessed at a good story, if Wilson had 
 one, managed to drag it forth. Then the "Holy one" (as 
 Parker laughingly called him) would let his last pet cat out of 
 the bag, and from the windows overlooking the park decorous 
 ladies were scandalized, I fear, at seeing three clergymen fairly 
 contorted with laughter. Here is one of his stories that he 
 succeeded in keeping to himself for quite a time. 
 
 He had begged for an all-night prayer meeting at Avenue 
 A, and he had his way. Bible reading, exhortation, singing, 
 and prayer. The night was well advanced, and the meeting 
 had become, as was inevitable, a sort of religious endurance test. 
 One after another had prayed for anything and everything he 
 could think of. From generalities the petitioners had passed to 
 personalities. They prayed for the mission, for the church, 
 for the clergy, for themselves, and as time passed, the names 
 of many attendants at the meetings came to mind. "O 
 Lord, bless Widow X," prayed one, "send her someone to pay 
 her rent." "Amen." "Send her a barrel of coal." "Amen."
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 245 
 
 "Send her a barrel of cabbages." "Amen." The petitioner's 
 list was giving out and here came a pause. "O Lord, send 
 her send her a barrel of pepper oh, hell, that's too much 
 pepper." After that Wilson thought it was time to go home, 
 which they all did. 
 
 One more story, not of the slums. Wilson was a conscien- 
 tious visitor, and greatly enjoyed that part of his work. We 
 each had a district of our own to visit, and what we learned in 
 visiting was duly reported. 
 
 Among the names Wilson found on his visiting list was one 
 "Potter." Wilson was vaguely under the impression that he 
 had heard that name as belonging to an actress. (The Bishop's 
 niece was an admired actress then.) He entered a charming 
 home and was kindly greeted by his hostess, but neither the 
 interior nor its mistress suggested the theatre. In time the 
 conversation turned to matters of religion, and Wilson asked 
 if the good lady's husband attended any church regularly. "He 
 is a great church-goer, but he wanders round a good deal." 
 Wilson tried to suggest that it might be better to settle on one 
 church, but the lady here put him off, saying that he must call 
 again and talk the matter over with her good husband himself. 
 Wilson agreed and, calling again, was introduced to Henry C. 
 Potter, his Bishop. 
 
 After seven years of invaluable aid, Wilson resigned his as- 
 sistantship in order to become associate pastor of the Gospel 
 Tabernacle Church, 44th Street and Eighth Avenue, whose 
 pastor was Doctor A. B. Simpson. From an ecclesiastical 
 point of view his continuing in Episcopal orders after taking 
 this step was of course irregular, and for a time I greatly feared 
 he would be obliged to resign his orders. But the Bishop's 
 kind patience and wisdom saved a good, and at heart most 
 loyal, servant for our church. 
 
 There are, in this loud, stunning tide 
 
 Of human care and crime, 
 With whom the melodies abide 
 
 Of everlasting chime. 
 
 Of such was Henry Wilson. Wherever they are, our world 
 is the better for their passing, but seldom are they balanced 
 men. They see and feel and believe too intensely to have an
 
 246 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 all-round view of things; and this was my dear friend's limita- 
 tion. When his fine loyalty to me made him unwilling to 
 preach, morning, noon, and night, a gospel of bodily health in 
 St. George's parish, he felt he could no longer stay there as 
 assistant, and in my absence (I was very ill at the time) practi- 
 cally committed himself to Doctor Simpson. When I returned 
 I did what I could to retain my friend by my side, but it was in 
 vain. Failing in this I went to Bishop Potter, but my dear 
 Saint had got ahead of me, and in a letter, dated October 22, 
 1 891, had declared his intention of giving up his orders, and re- 
 signing from the Episcopal Church. 
 
 There was no precedent, so far as I know, for Wilson's course 
 or the Bishop's action in ignoring its irregularity, but ignore 
 it he finally did, and for many years a band of men and women 
 who were trying to serve their Master and help their fellow-men 
 met regularly, at eight o'clock on Sunday mornings, in a little 
 room fitted up as a chapel on one side of the Tabernacle on 
 Eighth Avenue, and there Wilson administered to them the 
 Sacrament he loved, after the order of the old Church he also 
 loved with all his heart. 
 
 Here fittingly I must close the story of my friend. After he 
 left me we seldom met. His path led one way, mine another. 
 Two or three times a year we exchanged letters, and I cannot 
 refrain from printing the last I received from him. It was 
 written a few weeks before he died, almost sixteen years after 
 we had parted, and I received it in Africa, when he was dead: 
 
 June 22, 1907. 
 My beloved Friend, 
 
 Your dear face, in a picture over my bed, looks at me every morning and 
 evening as I rise and retire. But much oftener than that, many times a day 
 and in the night, I lift you up in loving prayer " to Him who ever liveth to 
 make intercession." That is the one thing I can and will do for you, dear 
 heart, for whom I would give worlds, if I have them, to have you back and 
 fit for work. 
 
 As for me and my work, of which you ask. I am well and thoroughly 
 happy in it. Twenty thousand miles travelled last year; meetings in seventy 
 cities and towns, meetings thrice and four times a day, and this with a spring 
 of joy not known in the old days. Hardly an ache or a pain for twenty-five 
 years, and so young and fresh in feeling that I am like a boy at play more 
 than a man at work. You, too, will renew your youth even yours. 
 
 Ever loving, 
 
 Henry Wilson.
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 247 
 
 If we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that it 
 is a rare thing to know a man who, without hesitation or back- 
 ward look, is willing to place his very all on the altar. Such was 
 he. He was wholly given to his Master, mind, body, goods. 
 He was not his own, and " the life that he lived in the flesh, he 
 lived by the faith of the Son of God." Thousands of children, 
 and thousands no longer children but who as children first knew 
 him, thank God that they ever looked into his handsome, 
 kindly face. 
 
 Churches have few honours for holy men; not while they 
 live. Honours do not seek them, and they are too fully oc- 
 cupied with "the King's business" to seek after anything else. 
 But still to-day Christiana and her children, as they set their 
 faces toward the Celestial City, are led and guarded as of old 
 by Mr. Greatheart. His shining armour and holy courage they, 
 at least, are quick to see. And Mr. Greatheart himself was no 
 more stainless soldier than was this humble, fearless man of 
 God, who worked so joyously to the very end. The King's 
 highway will be lonelier to many because he no longer treads it 
 with them. 
 
 Two other enterprises we undertook in those early days. 
 One was a failure; the other a great success. I was urged to 
 undertake a mission in the old Epiphany House, 130 Stanton 
 Street. I found in two or three years' time that it was be- 
 yond our strength, and when St. George's gave it up, Bishop 
 Potter took personal charge. 
 
 I hope I learned things of value by our failure at the old 
 Epiphany House. I had at least an opportunity of measuring 
 difficulties that cannot be appreciated by those who have not 
 had experience in dealing with the massed foreign populations 
 to be found in New York. I can say I know how these people 
 should not be served, and that is the way all the churches, ex- 
 cepting the Roman Catholic (and in her case I can only make a 
 partial exception), have attempted and still are attempting 
 to serve them. There is no true strategy in present missionary 
 effort. The little churches and little men are set to attempt 
 the biggest and hardest jobs. Where our social neglect and 
 selfishness and short-sightedness have resulted in the denial 
 of all beauty and spaciousness to the toilers of our city, there 
 should the Church come, bringing both.
 
 248 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The small mission church, struggling to live, equipped with 
 second-rate machinery, human and material, can never succeed 
 and is a waste of energy. We were facing then and we are 
 facing still the fact that, excuse it as we may, the policy of all 
 the Christian churches has been one of retreat. When prob- 
 lems have increased the churches have solved them by getting 
 out. There was no true courage in leaving the south of the island 
 and crowding to the north of it. If it was inevitable it was on 
 its face an admission of defeat. It was an admission that the 
 churches were institutions intended for and supported by the 
 rich and the well-to-do that they had lost the power of win- 
 ning the poor. I say if the modern city church has got to that 
 point, let her confess it. But to go north and leave a half- 
 starved mission behind her is not only a cowardly policy but a 
 dishonest policy as well. 
 
 Considerations like these I had in mind when the scheme for 
 a great New York Cathedral 1 was laid before the public, and 
 naturally I longed that that great church should stand among 
 the poor. I hope that the Cathedral on Morningside Heights 
 will some day draw within its spell all sorts and conditions of 
 people. But when Bishop Potter set himself to push that 
 enterprise, I pleaded for a downtown Cathedral, set in a great 
 block of open ground where, in the name of Jesus, beauty from 
 without and within, and with beauty breathing space for the 
 smothering millions, might make their appeal to those folk who 
 so sorely needed both. 
 
 I am not now finding fault with the choice of the site made, 
 but I am still convinced that the way to reach the non-church- 
 going un-Americanized masses is to place the great churches 
 where they are face to face with the great social need of men. 
 In such places the old cathedrals were builded, and well they 
 did their work. There is the place for the modern cathedral. 
 
 I learned one thing of great value to me at the old Epiphany 
 House: that was that German and often Jewish parents, who 
 refused to darken a church door themselves, were ready and 
 eager to cooperate with us when we tried to gain their children 
 for our schools and classes. It really seemed that the farther 
 the Germans lived from the church, the readier they were to 
 
 x The Bishop made me one of the Cathedral Trustees, but the present site was fixed on be- 
 fore my election to that body.
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 249 
 
 have their children go there. In short, the old Epiphany 
 House but confirmed what Avenue A had witnessed: you can 
 win the second generation^ if you have failed with the first. I 
 state the simple fact when I say that, from 1885 to 1906, a 
 steady flow of children born of German parents into the active 
 membership of St. George's never ceased. They came into 
 the church and they stayed in it, and they supported it with 
 their work and their money, too, both willingly and liberally 
 given. And to this day, scattered all over the city, they call 
 themselves St. George's folk. 
 
 When I resigned my rectorship in 1906, quite one third of 
 the membership of St. George's was German born. And I will 
 say yet another thing about these German neighbours of mine, 
 who would not come regularly to the church, but who did trust 
 us with their boys and girls. They were, when the World War 
 broke out, with very, very few exceptions, right loyal citizens of 
 the land of their adoption. 
 
 And now I must speak of the second enterprise I referred to, 
 which was a success. St. George's Boys' Club was organized 
 on January 7, 1884, at a meeting held in St. George's rectory, 
 there being present Messrs. Murray, Waterworth, Lockwood, 
 Minturn, and Collins. Evert Wendell afterward joined the 
 group. These young men felt that they were not specially 
 fitted for Sunday-school or ordinary mission work, and pre- 
 ferred to try to reach and help the boys of the neighbourhood 
 by way of a social club. 
 
 I told them to go and look the ground over, and any plan they 
 agreed upon I would support. A crowd of boys was easily 
 collected, and on Monday and Thursday evenings these young 
 men met the lads. At first the aim of the organization was just 
 to give a good time. Later a small house, 237 East 21st Street, 
 was rented, a library was opened, and at the boys' request 
 classes were undertaken. A type-setting class was a success, 
 and the boys themselves organized a debating society. Next, 
 classes in stenography and drawing and modelling and car- 
 pentry all drew applicants. Remember, at this time there was 
 no industrial training whatever given in the public schools. 
 Auchmulty's Industrial School was the one place in the whole 
 city where a poor lad could learn the rudiments of the trade 
 he would adopt for life.
 
 250 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Remember, also, that most mistakenly the labour unions 
 placed limitations on the number of lads that were permitted to 
 seek apprenticeship in the various trades, and there was no 
 other door of entrance open to them. This has been denied 
 vigorously, of course, but from my own direct knowledge I 
 know it to have been true. 
 
 I need not tell at length the ups and downs of our boys' in- 
 dustrial club, nor of the many changes we made in the methods 
 adopted. Evert Wendell, playing his own accompaniments, 
 and singing innumerable songs, was its chief apostle. It very 
 steadily grew into a teaching school. Fun was not absent, there 
 being a gymnasium that was well patronized, and the seaside 
 for its regular members in summer. But a good time, if it was 
 needed by the East Side boy, was a secondary need. Our boys 
 were in danger of starting wrong in life and staying wrong. 
 I said that the parents were our willing allies in doing what 
 they could to induce their children to come to our Sunday 
 Schools and week-day classes; but this aid of theirs was apt to 
 lessen, sometimes to cease altogether, sometimes to change 
 into opposition, as soon as the children were fourteen years or 
 older. After that age, it was pathetic to notice what a large 
 proportion of them thought first of the two and a half or three 
 dollars their children could earn weekly. What their work might 
 be did not seem to matter much. I found parents, not bad par- 
 ents either, who actually did not know what work their children 
 were doing, or even where they were doing it. 
 
 The times were hard, cruelly hard. There were many out 
 of work, but such blindness to life's real values means, in after 
 years, a crop of men and women who are a charge on the com- 
 munity; and any one can see that religious appeals to emotional 
 natures can do little to alter such parents or save for the future 
 the children brought up in such tenement homes. 
 
 The study of these conditions led me to attempt an in- 
 dustrial school, not, as I have repeatedly said, to take the 
 place of any institution already existing but rather as an il- 
 lustration in a small way of what most evidently the East 
 Side needed sorely, though the East Side might prove stub- 
 bornly ignorant of its own need. Speaking to my people of 
 the need of an industrial school and of our aim in starting it, I 
 wrote in 1893:
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 251 
 
 So long as the public schools do not deal with industrial education, and at 
 present, alas! they do not, there is no more important work connected with 
 this parish than this I propose to you. Our whole idea of education needs 
 to be raised and developed. The public schools of New York are lamentably 
 behind the times; and what the Church should do is to set an example of a 
 higher standard for growing girls and boys, and establish kindergartens for the 
 very little ones, until at length this example shall have done something to 
 create a healthier public opinion, and at last our Boards of Education gain 
 light on educational matters seemingly at present denied them. 
 
 If Henry Wilson and Lindsay Parker had set their stamp on 
 the early religious work of St. George's by commending in the 
 right way to the right people the new aim of St. George's 
 Church, I was again to be supremely fortunate in the allies 
 I found for laying on wise and true and broad foundations our 
 industrial work as supplementary to our religious among 
 East Side youth. The Rev. Theodore Sedgwick joined my 
 staff in 1 89 1. He was one of the most faithful and indefati- 
 gable servants of his fellows I have ever known. He loved and 
 understood boys, and so boys trusted him. He won hearts 
 wherever he went. To him I handed over the industrial school 
 a difficult job and splendidly did he discharge his duty to 
 it. 
 
 We had then over five hundred youths, between fourteen 
 and twenty, owning some sort of connection with the church. 
 A large proportion of these lads stood in need of just what the 
 industrial school was founded to give them, but if they were to 
 gain and benefit from it, a regular attendance on their part was 
 the first thing necessary. Open the school and they were ready 
 to crowd in; but if they could not be depended on to come to 
 the classes in which they had been placed and to come on time, 
 no lasting benefit could be had; money would be wasted, and 
 good instruction could not be obtained. Sedgwick divided up 
 the would-be scholars into groups of from twelve to twenty 
 and to each group a gentleman visitor was appointed. It 
 was his business to be present on certain nights at the school; 
 to be present regularly, and then to see which of his lads were 
 absent, visiting them there and then. 
 
 I pleaded in St. George's for more college and business men 
 to offer themselves for this oversight of our East Side lads. I 
 had an immediate response. Among the newcomers I re- 
 member Theodore H. Price and Stewart Wortley.
 
 252 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The worry of providing the needed money had broken down 
 our first attempt. Now my senior warden came to my aid, 
 anonymously as usual, for Mr. J. P. Morgan's name never was 
 appended to any good work when he could avoid it; and free 
 from this care, full of hope, and well organized for the difficult 
 venture into totally new fields, we started. 
 
 In a short while the number of those wishing to attend had 
 shrunk from more than four hundred to about two hundred, but 
 what was of infinitely greater importance than the shrinking was 
 the fact that we were holding the two hundred. (In a couple 
 of years we had many more applicants than we could take in.) 
 But important as was the visiting end of this endeavour, the 
 school's success mainly depended on its teaching staff of trained 
 and paid men. Here again fortune gave me its very best. 
 The first superintendent was Mr. George E. Tuthill, and 
 under him were two assistants, Mr. Arthur Hamerschlag and 
 Mr. Ball. 
 
 Arthur Hamerschlag, himself a graduate of Auchmulty's 
 trade school, took over the management of the school shortly 
 after its fresh start. For many years he worked his will in it, 
 chose its masters, and directed it in matters great and small, 
 and in that narrow East Side house of industrial education 
 showed to those who could see that he understood the true 
 nature of the educational problems that must be solved if, as 
 a people, we are to prosper. 
 
 Of nothing in all my life work am I prouder than that with 
 me he had his first independent job; and I rejoice when I think 
 that in his early and so happy association with poor people and 
 rich people, wise people and foolish people in old St. George's, 
 he gained a knowledge of his fellow-men which enabled him to 
 fill brilliantly the places that were inevitably assigned him 
 among the progressive educators of the United States. 
 
 Many were the talks he and I had, and the plans we made 
 about the boys and for them, in those early days. Nor did 
 we in our theorizing leave the girls out. And so it came to 
 pass that many years after he had taken sole charge of my 
 little school, I came to stand, on a first great Commencement 
 day, before a splendid audience in Pittsburgh, and make the 
 address of welcome to the women graduates of that institution, 
 who then took the first diplomas bestowed for proficiency in a
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 253 
 
 new field of study, woman's own field, "the Science of the 
 Home." 
 
 Women gain what they demand persistently. It is right 
 that they should. Women demanded that the universities be 
 opened to them on the same conditions as they are open to men. 
 Slowly, grudgingly, yet inevitably, those doors have opened or 
 are opening. 
 
 Women demanded that they should compete with men in 
 oral and written tests of knowledge in classrooms or labora- 
 tories. Under such testing they held their own. But women 
 were and still are slow to see, strangely enough, that when they 
 have gained efficiency in co-educational fields they still are 
 not educated; and that no success won in competition with 
 men can be an evidence of a sufficient education for women. 
 The man is a man; the woman remains, for all her masculine 
 accomplishment and learning, a woman. A man cannot have 
 a baby and a woman can, and ought to have several. And any 
 scheme of education, however brilliant and alluring, that leaves 
 out this immense and radical distinction in educating the sex 
 is a totally inadequate plan. 
 
 Mr. Andrew Carnegie gave $2,000,000 to develop women's 
 education in connection with the Institute of Technology, 
 founded and endowed by him at Pittsburgh, 1 and there, for the 
 first time, on a broad and sound foundation, such a scheme of 
 study was offered to the young women of the city. The home 
 is woman's province undisputed, and the first step she must 
 take in order to fill it to the joy and pride of others and to her 
 own lasting happiness is to understand the profound obligation 
 that sex imposes and motherhood entails. Our women have 
 graduated in many classes of knowledge, but, alas ! multitudes 
 of them are sadly ignorant in this. Taking them in the mass, 
 they are not very successful mothers, and quite the worst and 
 most extravagant cooks in the world. 
 
 Mr. Carnegie was always remarkably well advised in the 
 partners and assistants he chose to aid him in his ventures. 
 His great success has been largely ascribed to his judgment of 
 such men. When he sought a man to place at the head of the 
 
 ^The Margaret Morrison Division of the Institute Technology at Pittsburgh was an experi- 
 mental project in the science of the home. It was a leader in that field. For its development 
 Mr. Carnegie gave $2,000,000. Simmons College in Boston and McDonald Institution in 
 Canada offer a similar course of instruction.
 
 254 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Institute of Technology at Pittsburgh as director, he combed 
 the country, and his final choice fell on Arthur Hamerschlag. 
 
 Hamerschlag had been with me for many years, and we were 
 paying him $1,500 a year. When this great work was offered, 
 with its salary of $10,000, he asked my advice. I advised him 
 to accept, rejoicing that to so admirably fitted an educator 
 such a field for usefulness was offered. 
 
 Some three weeks after his acceptance he received a note 
 requesting him to call at Mr. Carnegie's house in New York. 
 The great man received him affably and then said: "Mr. Ham- 
 erschlag, I expected you to call on me when you accepted the 
 directorate of this Institute. It is not every day that a young 
 man is offered a job with $10,000 a year salary." Hamerschlag 
 hesitated and then replied: 
 
 "Mr. Carnegie, I thought it would be more becoming in me 
 to wait first before calling on you. Sir, you are a busy man, 
 and I knew if you desired to see me you would send for me." 
 
 "Yes," said Mr. Carnegie, "but it is not every day that a 
 young man receives a salary of $10,000 a year." 
 
 Soon after Hamerschlag was installed, and at work. I 
 chanced to meet Mr. Carnegie at a men's dinner at a friend's 
 house. There were eighteen guests, and Bishop Potter was of 
 the number. Everyone knows that Mr. Carnegie dearly loved 
 to chaff the clergy, and he was wont to carry his badinage 
 quite as far as good taste allowed. He specially loved to 
 banter Bishop Potter. 
 
 Now our Bishop could generally hold his own in any com- 
 pany he found himself in, and he was on occasion a master of his 
 rapier. Mr. Carnegie's methods, however, suggested the cudgel 
 rather than the sword, and that evening when cigars came and 
 servants left, he seemed to me to go rather far in his raillery. 
 
 I waited my chance and when a pause came said, "Mr. 
 Carnegie, I do not think you are fair in your attack on the 
 clergy." 
 
 "Why not, Doctor Rainsford?" 
 
 "Why, because, sir, when all over the land you were searching 
 for a man to take direction of the splendid endowment by which 
 you wish to be remembered in Pittsburgh, you finally chose, and 
 wisely, a young man who has been for many years head of St. 
 George's trade school and a member of St. George's Church.
 
 AVENUE A WORK AMONG THE YOUNG 255 
 
 I congratulate you on your choice, sir, but it's not good taste 
 to rail at the church that gave him to you." 
 
 "Well, Doctor Rainsford, I'll pray for you, sir; I'll pray for 
 you. 
 
 Then I had my chance. "Thank you, sir; but I'd rather 
 you paid in a coin you were more accustomed to." 
 
 Many years after I suddenly almost jostled Mr. Carnegie 
 one afternoon on Fifth Avenue, as he feebly made his way 
 to his carriage. He recognized me instantly, and holding out 
 his hand said, "I won't cross swords with you again, young 
 man." All of which may sound egotistical, but it is worth 
 telling. 
 
 How I hate to turn away from Avenue A and its memories! 
 I think they are perhaps the best in my life. Avenue A 
 brought to me some of the truest friends I have had, and one 
 of the best of them was Jacob Riis. A lover of, a believer in 
 the East Side boy was Jacob Riis. He cried: 
 
 Save Tony, and you save the future. He is himself the to-morrow. It 
 matters less what tongue he speaks, or which he is spoken to in, than that he is 
 spoken to at all. He is yours for the asking, if you will but ask. Were it not 
 so, our immigration problem would be a problem indeed not to be endured. 
 Tony is the really important member of the family. The rest will follow 
 where he goes. I have said enough to show the way all this is tending, which 
 to me means the mission of Christianity in the world. If it has not that, if 
 it is not here to make men better, to make them brothers, if it lack the power 
 to do that, it were better that every lofty church spire in the land be laid low 
 until the lesson be learned. 
 
 So wrote Riis nineteen years ago. As I write, millions of 
 defeated folks are turning to our land as a land of refuge 
 and of hope. There is a greater need than there was, even 
 when Jacob Riis wrote, to go after Tony. It can be done; 
 it must be done, but it is not being done yet, as Christian love 
 and national safety and honour cry to all good men and women 
 to do it.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 Testing of Men and Measures and John R 
 
 The spring of 1889 f un d St. George's prospering exceed- 
 ingly. Not only was the church packed at the eleven o'clock 
 service Sunday morning, but at the early Communion Service 
 there were present more than a thousand communicants, 
 the vastly larger portion being young wage workers. The at- 
 tendance at the Sunday School and the various young people's 
 classes connected with it had so grown that the rectory, the 
 church basement, the deaconess house, the clergy house, the 
 Avenue A mission house, as well as a hall we had hired near by, 
 were all filled to overflowing. One of the unusual features of 
 this youthful crowd was that in it there were more males than 
 females. From the first beginnings of our work this was true. 
 
 We had "cast out nets on the right side of the ship," and we 
 had on our hands "a great draught of fishes." There was no 
 denying that. Now I was anxious to better the apostolic ex- 
 perience, and to see to it that our nets did not break. 
 
 Suddenly all we had done and all we planned to do was 
 tested quite severely tested. 
 
 Before the beginning of Lent, I had gone to Princeton for a 
 short mission, preaching two or three times a day in a little 
 church in the village, or in some college building. I stayed 
 at the house of my friend, Professor Fairfield Osborne, and 
 when the day's work was over, men from the University, after 
 the pleasant custom of Princeton, drifted in and we talked till 
 all hours, and it was earnest, interesting talk. 
 
 I had worked as hard as I knew how during those first six 
 years of my rectorship, going to bed late and rising early; 
 getting little exercise except during my autumn hunting trips 
 to my little ranch in the Rocky Mountains. But I felt well, 
 and though my hours of sleep grew shorter (and when I did 
 get to bed my head was so full of things I wanted to do and to 
 
 256
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 257 
 
 say, that I lay awake half the night), it did not occur to me that 
 I was overdoing it. Nothing in my body warned me, so far as 
 I can remember, of a coming breakdown. On the contrary, 
 my mind seemed unusually alert and clear. 
 
 Specially was this true during my stay at Princeton. Speak- 
 ing to the college was an honour and a delight, and at night, 
 when professors and students dropped in, and we talked round 
 the fire, anything and everything I had ever read or known 
 seemed to be at my command. For me this was an unusual 
 experience, as my memory was always one of my weak spots. 
 
 I went home the night before Ash Wednesday, and had to 
 preach twice that day in my church. In the morning I preached 
 as well as I ever preached in my life, having the same illumi- 
 nated and illuminating feeling about me (I cannot find a better 
 word), and in the afternoon rose to preach again. I gave out 
 the hymn. It was one I love above others: "Jesus shall 
 reign." As I joined in the singing, I felt a soft, warm, foggy 
 sensation in my head, as if someone was watering it with 
 tepid water, and felt my knees bending under me, so that I 
 must grasp the pulpit sides to keep myself standing. So much 
 I clearly remember, and not much more. I did not fall; some- 
 how I got to the vestry, and from the vestry up the steps to my 
 study in the rectory next door. But of life for the next few 
 weeks I remember very little indeed. I do remember that it 
 cost effort to settle in my mind which of my little sons was 
 which. 
 
 Mr. Morgan, always to the fore when there was trouble, came 
 round at once with Dr. Alfred Loomis; and that great man said, 
 "No more St. George's for him for six months." And he 
 might have said "a year." So here was a testing time indeed 
 come on us unexpectedly. We were like a crab caught changing 
 its shell. We were off with the old, but not yet on with the 
 new. Our old nest pulled down, our new, our parish house, 
 rising but not risen. Our organizations were all in process of 
 change; growing change, it is true, but still change; not yet with 
 fitted parts working harmoniously. My clerical staff had been 
 weakened by the departure of some of its members to accept 
 parishes of their own men I had trained. This was as it 
 should be, but of course the newcomers were not as yet at home 
 in their work. Two clerical assistants I had that were in-
 
 258 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 valuable, Henry Wilson, mentioned in the preceding chapter, 
 and W. T. Crocker. Crocker took up the work Charles Scad- 
 ding 1 had surrendered, and during my long absence, with rare 
 tact and faithfulness, did all one man could do to keep things 
 going. It has never been my good fortune to have as an 
 assistant one on whose faithfulness, fairness, and common sense 
 I could better depend. 
 
 Wilson's presence as head of my clergy house was a source 
 of abiding strength. To preach to the thronging Sunday 
 morning congregations was a task he was not specially fitted for. 
 He knew this well, and always got someone else to preach for 
 him when he could. But his gentle spirit, his unselfish devo- 
 tion, spread round him an atmosphere which drove strife and 
 jealousies far away. Nothing petty or mean or uncharitable 
 flourished where Henry Wilson had rule; and in our little 
 clergy house his quiet but firm discipline was a blessing and a 
 power for good that leavened St. George's work from top to 
 bottom, and set a standard for what that sort of establishment 
 ought to be. 
 
 At my first coming, I had been most kindly welcomed by the 
 city clergy, more especially by Rev. Arthur Brooks and Henry 
 Mottet. Everyone knew that if we were to succeed where 
 others had signally failed we must work hard and faithfully; 
 so of criticism there was little. However, as the church filled 
 and the parish grew, it was evident that St. George's stood for a 
 new departure in the Protestant Episcopal Church's work in a 
 great city. There was no denying this, and the public saw it. 
 Now you cannot advocate new methods, methods so new that 
 many called them revolutionary, without by implication criti- 
 cizing and sometimes condemning old and approved ones. 
 
 If the free church, the church open to all, is right, then the 
 pew church owned by a few who can pay for and control its 
 floor is not right. In practice we asserted this; and in the 
 pulpit, in season and out of season, I have preached that the 
 very genius and spirit of Jesus' religion was denied and out- 
 raged by the modern Protestant closed pew church. Naturally, 
 therefore, we reckoned on criticism, and by 1889 were beginning 
 to get it. 
 
 But not on grounds of polity chiefly did we incur criticism. 
 
 'Afterward Bishop of Oregon. He did excellent work among the poor.
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 259 
 
 In the subject matter of my sermons and in my treatment of 
 doctrinal questions, many protesting voices began to be heard. 
 For a time what we accomplished in reaching out to the un- 
 touched East Side, and in filling our nets with old and young, 
 rich and poor, caught the public eye; and few outside or inside 
 the church cared to be too critical of what might be passing 
 peculiarities of a voluble Irish- American preacher. The oc- 
 casional listener, "the church itinerant," does not criticize, and 
 if he does, no one pays much heed to him. But as a congrega- 
 tion draws together and assumes solid shape, criticism is of 
 more importance, is listened to, and has weight. Now St. 
 George's had, after these first six years, got to this point. 
 There were some mere visitors still, but already a solid body 
 of worshippers had drawn together because in the ugly old 
 church they had found what they wanted. 
 
 Some came because religion to them had come to be chiefly 
 the service of their fellows. They wanted to give that service, 
 and St. George's was a working church. Some, because the 
 warmth and fervour of a great congregational response drew and 
 uplifted them. Some, because my preaching helped them to 
 get a fresh hold on old truths that they feared they might be 
 forced to abandon. One able business man told me years after 
 why he came. " I came as a stranger," he said, "and the usher 
 put a poor coloured woman alongside me. That is the church 
 for me, I said to myself." 
 
 Now the criticism of outsiders I cared very little for, but that 
 of my own people was at this time often serious, and, let me 
 say here, continued to be serious during all my ministry. I 
 think my sudden illness had the effect of silencing for a time a 
 good part of it, but certainly it grew in seriousness as the years 
 passed, and many of the friends I valued found my teaching 
 so "unsettling" that they went to other churches. 
 
 It was hard to part with some of these people. I remember 
 one of them whose departure I specially regretted, for he was 
 a man of a fine spirit and of sound learning Admiral Mahan. 
 However, I had learned my lesson in Toronto, and knew well 
 that no organization is the stronger for half-hearted members. 
 It is a mistake to raise so much as a finger to keep any one in 
 your church who thinks he ought to get out of it. If you can- 
 not help him and lead him on a little, someone else probably
 
 2 6o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 can. And you certainly cannot help him or any one else by 
 being untrue to yourself. Your business, if you believe you 
 have any business in the Church of Jesus at all, is to speak 
 out the truth as you see it, and never, never "hedge." 
 
 To the best of my ability, this I had been trying to do during 
 these first happy, eventful years in St. George's. In New 
 York, therefore, as was natural, I was given a place among the 
 "dangerous men." (See the cleverly drawn skit from Life.) 
 In other states than New York, where there still occasionally 
 lingered some memory of work done in my earliest missionizing 
 days (in them, remember, I was quite averagely orthodox), I 
 still stood well, and my unsoundness in the faith had not drawn 
 general remark. So much so that once, certainly, and I think 
 probably a second time, the Episcopate was open to me. But 
 after those early years were over, so was all chance of the Epis- 
 copate for me. 1 
 
 At the time I had, of course, no choice as to what was my 
 duty. In later years, I would have accepted the Episcopate, 
 if for one reason only, namely: the opportunity it offers in our 
 church to a Bishop who refuses to be a slave to modern pre- 
 cedent (I say modern advisedly), to gather round him and to 
 ordain men he believes to have been called of God to preach the 
 Gospel. This immense power is part of the unused and so 
 decaying treasure of the Protestant Episcopal Church: her 
 talent, laid away in a most correctly embroidered and folded 
 ecclesiastical napkin, and not put out to interest, as the Master 
 demanded that it should be. (See Matt, xxv, 25-26.) 
 
 I said that the lesson I had learned in Toronto I practised in 
 New York. I resolutely tried never to "hedge." Let me ex- 
 plain that in saying this I do not mean that I took an ag- 
 gressive, denunciatory attitude as to doctrines I believed to be 
 outworn or false. Rather did I try to present the old doctrines 
 in such a way as to commend, if not their form, yet surely their 
 meaning and purpose and spirit, to men's conscience. For I 
 do not believe that any old doctrine, however crude and even 
 cruel it sounds in our ears to-day, but has some moral sanction, 
 some far-away spiritual truth behind it, that gave it the vital 
 energy necessary to its survival. 
 
 ^ere I find I am mistaken/ there was a movement to induce me to allow my name to be 
 presented in Colorado several years later.
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 261 
 
 Nothing is ever lost, and much may be gained, if such are 
 dealt with reverently, as costly things; consecrated by the blood 
 and tears of those who formulated them and fought for them 
 the signals, watchwords, battle cries by which they had 
 marched and fought and conquered. Title deeds to our spiri- 
 tual estate, to be remembered and honoured, not forgotten. 
 Fine metal in them, worthy of recasting; eternal truth in them, 
 worthy of restating. But if they are to help and not hinder us 
 to-day, if they are to inspire our vision, not blind and confine it 
 then restated and recast they most certainly must be. 
 
 The banian tree's down-thrusting branches root themselves 
 slowly, firmly, round the parent stem. After a long time, 
 the central stem decays, but its function well done, its children 
 prolong its life forever. So with our dear old beliefs. We owe 
 all to them, we are what we are because of them. Yet in their 
 former shape they exist for us no longer. 
 
 I have outlined some of those things we did that were worth 
 while in my first six years at St. George's, and I dwell on this 
 quality in my preaching because I believe that in it chiefly lay 
 what value my preaching had. I tried to do as well as I could, 
 with such faulty educational and mental outfit as I possessed, 
 what most of the clergy were afraid to attempt at all. I tried, 
 and kept trying, to recast, to restate, the church's orthodox 
 doctrines. For such restatement intelligent lay people were 
 everywhere hungry, and to satisfy that hunger I did my poor 
 best. It was this quality in my preaching, more than any 
 other, that drew to me my people. Of this I had constant 
 proof. 
 
 The cultured laity are not giving up religion, though of this 
 they are often accused. But they are ceasing to look to the 
 churches for it. There is a real danger that public worship 
 may be left to the uneducated, to women, clergymen, and re- 
 ligious cranks. 
 
 In another chapter I will write more fully of the changes my 
 theology was undergoing, and of the effect these changes, 
 frankly confessed from the pulpit by me, had on my hearers. 
 I can best illustrate my position with my people by here quot- 
 ing a very few of the large number of letters I received at this 
 time from regular attendants at my church. I have just named 
 one, a man of weight and influence, who felt obliged to leave us.
 
 262 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The writers of some of these letters I cannot name, for reasons 
 that are obvious, but for one letter of withdrawal I had scores 
 written in the spirit of the following. 
 
 The extraordinary experience told in the first of these would 
 in other days have been claimed as miraculous. In every 
 particular, it is the statement of things as they occurred. The 
 writer was a well-known citizen of New York, honoured in his 
 profession, loved by all who knew him: a sober-minded Chris- 
 tian gentleman. His letter shows what an act of Faith can 
 accomplish. The second letter, so touchingly, bravely beauti- 
 ful, speaks for itself, and for many another soul who found 
 "daily bread" with us. 
 
 These letters were written about the time of my return to 
 my pulpit, after my first breakdown. 
 
 You will be very much interested in knowing that your sermon last 
 Sunday produced a wonderful effect upon a man who, with the exception of 
 Sunday, February ioth, had not been inside a church for twenty-five years. 
 
 If it were not for a most extraordinary circumstance, that you really ought 
 to know, I would not tell the story, because it looks so much like self-glorifi- 
 cation; and as my own heart is full of thankfulness, I may write in too egotisti- 
 cal a manner. 
 
 Four Sundays ago I was teaching my class in Sunday School the lesson of 
 the man stricken with the palsy, whose friends brought him to Jesus. I 
 told them that no one living was so wicked that Jesus would reject him, 
 if he went to Jesus as this man went, taken by his friends. And as I made 
 the statement I stopped a moment to think whether I really meant what I 
 said, and if it was really true; and if so, why did I not make an effort to bring 
 my eldest brother to a realizing sense of what Jesus could do for him. 
 
 My brother has been the black sheep of the family through drink, and his 
 mental and moral condition was as bad as words can describe. In your 
 sermon that Sunday, you said that if God created, He must redeem or He is 
 no Father of men; and you asked those present to go among those they knew, 
 or even those whom they did not know, and bring them to divine service. 
 
 Then the thought came to me again, "How absurd for me to ask a stranger 
 to come with me, when I do not ask my own brother." The rest of that day 
 was one of great mental excitement, and although my brother was living five 
 hundred miles away, I determined to go at once to him, and see what I could 
 do in the direction indicated in the Sunday-school lesson. 
 
 I wrote to his wife I was coming, and then started. His wife telegraphed 
 me not to come on any account, and followed it up with a letter assuring me 
 of the utter hopelessness of my doing any good. Thank God, I had already 
 started and did not receive them until my return. 
 
 I got there and found him sober for the first time in a long while. I told 
 him my story, and told him of the Sunday-school lesson that it was the
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 263 
 
 man's friends who took him to Jesus. That it was their love and' faith 
 that made them act as they did. Because of their act his sins were forgiven 
 and he was cured. 
 
 I cannot tell you all that occurred, but hasten on to the point. I brought 
 him to New York, took him to my own house, clothed him with the best, 
 treated him as I would the most loving friend I had. And then on Sunday 
 last took him to your church. When you gave out your text, "The man 
 whose friends brought him to Jesus," in my astonishment at the coincidence 
 I exclaimed, "It is marvellous," so that those around me heard, and the 
 effect on my brother (after being assured that there was no collusion between 
 us) was stupendous. Being an agnostic, he was superstitious, and the sudden 
 visit, the sudden change of living, and your sermon, have done a work whose 
 effects will, I think, never be effaced. 
 
 I have sent him on a sailing ship to Australia, and his wife declares that the 
 change in the man is as great a miracle as was the case of the man with the 
 palsy. 
 
 I have not told you all the things that were said and done, because every- 
 thing cannot be written. 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 No, the days of miracles are not over; only be it remembered 
 that miracles are not supernatural happenings, things we over- 
 persuade God to do for a favoured few. They are the exercise 
 of the divine powers slowly growing to fulfillment in man him- 
 self; powers Jesus thought of when he said, in his parting words 
 to his disciples: "And greater works than mine shall ye do be- 
 cause I go to the Father." (John xiv, 12.) 
 
 I remember that exclamation. In the silence of the church 
 it came to me distinctly, from my friend's seat under the 
 gallery on my left hand. 
 
 Would you admit as a communicant one who cannot honestly subscribe 
 to the Apostles' Creed? I worship a divine Christ, yet am hampered by an 
 awful doubt that he may have been disappointed in his Father, when, for the 
 sake of what he conceived his Father to be, He 
 
 " Struck singly out, and dashed against the rocks." 
 
 Did he find His God beyond the grave? 
 
 I was born and nurtured under sweet church influences whose memories 
 still hold my deepest affection, and I am a widow forty-seven years old. 
 
 Life and critical reading led me to Unitarianism. Bitter, tragic, despair- 
 ing sorrow brought me to feel only "God, if there be a God, have mercy on 
 my soul if I have a soul immortal." Ethical culture seemed the best that 
 remained, until it was condemned out of its own mouth, to my mind through 
 the confession of one of its choicest spirits, "that it is only a sect among 
 sects, making Popes of its teachers."
 
 264 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Then I knew I loved the Lord Jesus, and could not side with those who dis- 
 honour Him and disown Him, from Whom they get all the light they have 
 to work by: who ridicule the gropings of the past after God, as though wis- 
 dom were just born. 
 
 Close upon this, as I drifted homeless, hopeless, sore bestead, I "happened" 
 to attend at St. George's the first Good Friday Passion Service I had ever 
 heard. 
 
 The religious experience of a lifetime was concentrated in those three 
 hours. Every word probed to the depths of my being, and answered to 
 my own experience of life and longings of soul. I never knew the Lord 
 Jesus till then. Henceforth, I cannot live without Him. 
 
 If in my mortal heart-break and alone-ness, weighted with heavy re- 
 sponsibilities concerning my children, which I must carry yet cannot meet, 
 I have finally put my trust in a beautiful dream "Here I stand. I cannot 
 do other. God help me." 
 
 Pardon my intrusion on your valuable time, and whether you admit 
 me or not, accept the gratitude of one more soul, lifted by your words into 
 new and hopeful living, through glimpses, at least, of the mind of Christ. 
 
 During these years, the tragic dualism of our nature grew 
 clearer to me its beast inheritance and its divine possession. 
 In my preaching, I constantly emphasized it Man 
 
 A cripple of God, half true, half formed, 
 And by great sparks Promethean warmed 
 
 his salvation a slow business, yet an assured business, since the 
 Promethean spark is inextinguishable. Man rising out of the 
 beast man into the God man. Out of the first Adam man 
 (for Paul and Darwin are finely agreed) into the second Adam 
 man. 
 
 I found that my own beliefs, however imperfect and un- 
 satisfactory, had yet always had, from boyhood up, enough real 
 life in them to allow of growth and development. If I found 
 I had to give up some things, some cherished opinion, those I 
 ministered to were in just the same state of mental flux as I was; 
 and the struggle I was going through for my faith was just the 
 experience that enabled me to strengthen and establish their 
 faith; and that in this lay the mystic power of man's influence 
 over man. 
 
 The real preacher is a little ahead of his flock. If he is not 
 a little ahead, he is no guide. If, on the other hand, he is too 
 far ahead, then is he also no guide; he is lost to his following in 
 the mist.
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 265 
 
 After that Ash Wednesday afternoon it was many months 
 berore I entered my pulpit again. The doctors ordered me 
 complete rest and change. For six months no church news of 
 any sort whatever reached me. I was not even allowed to read 
 the printed report of the year's work, when our year-book came 
 out. Then it was I proved fortunate in my friends. I had 
 no care. Others planned my life and saved me all expense and 
 all trouble. Of course the strongest arm under me was that of 
 my senior warden. He was ever a man to lean on in time of 
 trouble. You differed with him, and he with you, but when 
 a helper was needed, you turned to him, you leaned on him, 
 and you leaned hard. He had a great heart, had my senior 
 warden, J. Pierpont Morgan. 
 
 Junius Morgan, a nephew of J. P. Morgan, was my most 
 kind and cheery companion during the first dark months of that 
 time; and great is the debt I owe to him. To help me and save 
 me from darkness, he gave up his work and his friends for the 
 time being. It took no small self-denial to watch and care for 
 me, depressed in mind and weakened in body as I was, but he 
 travelled with me for months, till I was almost my own man 
 once more. 
 
 Thus wisely and completely was I eliminated. So far so 
 good, but what of the church? There was no denying that 
 church and people were facing a trying time. How splendidly 
 they came through, and why they came through as they did, 
 I must try to tell. 
 
 Each Sunday morning there met at the church door a little 
 group of men. Some were there quite half an hour before 
 service began. Some joined the company a little later. The 
 group is worth looking at, for those composing it represent 
 what St. George's is standing for; what it has done and is trying 
 to do. The rector is away; when he may return is uncertain. 
 These men are holding together things as he left them. St. 
 George's is their church; they have had great part in making it 
 what it is, and if they were regular in attendance, and liberal 
 in their offerings, and dependable in the various services they 
 rendered, while things were running smoothly, it is doubly im- 
 portant that they should not fail now. And so they do not fail. 
 
 They are standing for great principles. They are undis- 
 turbed by divisions or jealousies. They are practising, as
 
 266 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 they meet at the church door, what was from the pulpit 
 preached: a welcome to all sorts and conditions of men. 
 
 Prominent in that group are J. Pierpont Morgan and J. Noble 
 Stearns, the vestrymen. All attendants at the church know 
 these men by sight, and as they stand welcoming all who come, 
 they represent a large band; a band made up of the known and 
 unknown, of the rich and the poor, who, one and all, are in their 
 own places keeping up steadily the work to which they believe 
 themselves called, and to which they had been appointed. 
 
 While I was away from my people, the parish life went on 
 regularly and prosperously, undisturbed by divisions or jeal- 
 ousies or any breath of strife. I walked into the Sunday 
 School in our new parish house, unannounced and quite unex- 
 pected, one Sunday morning in the December following my 
 illness. There were present, by actual count, more than eleven 
 hundred children, and of the band of teachers, then numbering 
 one hundred and twelve, just two were absent. 
 
 From top to bottom in all our organizations this was the 
 sort of service rendered by my people during my long absence. 
 From the wardens down, no one failed to do what he or she 
 had undertaken. This was in a church, remember, where no 
 one owned or rented a seat. 
 
 William Foulke was in that Sunday morning group, and to 
 him and William H. SchiefTelin fell the very delicate duty of 
 convincing the heterogeneous mass that crowded the church 
 on Sundays that one and all of them were welcome, and yet 
 that our welcome did not necessarily include the right for each 
 of the visitors to select just such a seat as pleased him best. 
 
 In that group, too, stood William Chester, my organist 
 young and tall and fair and handsome, an enthusiastic musi- 
 cian, and, unlike many who have a genius for music, not hard 
 for a non-musical or semi-musical man like myself to get on with. 
 Chester grasped my ideas of the relation I strove for between 
 the free church and the choir, and most loyally and ably, for 
 many years till his death, he did what in him lay to give effect 
 to them. 
 
 He drew his choir of volunteers round him and made them 
 his loving friends; and, what was much harder, as all who have 
 had choir experience will admit, loving friends to each other. I 
 can only recall, in all those years, one serious commotion in my
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 267 
 
 white-robed company. That was on the memorable occasion 
 when, without warning (for this course I thought the wisest), 
 I broke the news to them that I was going to have for soloist a 
 Negro, Harry Burleigh. Then division, consternation, con- 
 fusion, and protest reigned for a time. I never knew how the 
 troubled waters settled down. Indeed, I carefully avoided 
 knowing who was for and who against my revolutionary ar- 
 rangement. Nothing like it had ever been known in the 
 church's musical history. The thing was arranged and I gave 
 no opportunity for its discussion. When the question is one 
 of church policy, I held, and hold, that the decision lies with the 
 rector and with none other. Some one man must command. 
 Popular vote should be able to displace incapable command; 
 it can do so in all Protestant churches except ours; but no vote 
 should be able to halt an order. 
 
 To my friend Daniel G. Elliot I owed much. At choir meet- 
 ings he seldom spoke, but from them he never was absent, and 
 he set a standard of courtesy and loyalty that was not without 
 influence on each one of its ninety-one members. 
 
 Well, my choir held together! I don't think I lost a member 
 of it, even if I forced into it a black brother. And oh! how 
 glad I and the choir were afterward that I had acted as I did. 
 That was many years ago, and very, very many of the dear 
 friends who helped so effectively to lead and inspire their 
 fellow-worshippers then can no longer take their place in any 
 earthly choir. But Harry Burleigh's sweet baritone voice, 
 worn a little, it may be, still leads the choir which he entered 
 against much protest then; and St. George's is proud of him, 
 proud of what he has accomplished as a musician, and loves 
 and honours him for what he has proved himself to be as a 
 Christian man. 
 
 Of one more, an inconspicuous figure in that group at the 
 church door, I must write before I close the chapter on our 
 time of testing. As you looked at him, there was nothing 
 especially distinguishing in the appearance of John Reichert 
 a short, rather stocky figure, suggestive of Germany. 
 
 In 1883, Lindsay Parker said to me one day, "I have got 
 hold of an unusual sort of boy to black our boots and do odd 
 jobs round the clergy house." We had to save the pennies then, 
 and I had to provide them, so I said: "What are you paying
 
 268 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 him?" "Three fifty a week/' said he, "and he will soon be 
 worth more." Two or three days before, a hungry, weather- 
 beaten boy, almost sunk into the ranks of trampdom, as he 
 told me afterward, knocked at the clergy-house door in East 
 17th Street and asked for work. John Reichert's story can be 
 duplicated in many cities of our land, but it can never be told 
 too often. Of his life in Germany I know nothing, nor have I 
 ever asked him about it. When he came to us he presented 
 to Lindsay Parker his credentials a passport with an attach- 
 ment stating that he was a sailor on the bark Astronom^ sailing 
 from Hamburg in 1883 the trip lasting over ninety days. 
 After being twenty-five years in this country he made several 
 trips to Europe, but no visits to his home touching Germany 
 only on the western frontier, so I fancy his trouble was military. 
 When he landed in New York, times were very hard, and try 
 as he would he could get no work. He had a German school- 
 boy's knowledge of English, speaking it a little, with a very 
 foreign accent. Soon what little money he had was gone, and 
 he slept where he could, and begged what he ate. When the 
 clergy-house door opened to him, he had been sleeping for three 
 weeks in one of the ice wagons that stood in those days, for re- 
 pairs, on a downtown pier of the North River. It was Novem- 
 ber, and nights were cold. John Reichert has often told me of 
 those experiences of his, and some of the poor fellows who 
 shared them with him; and he always declared that he could 
 well understand how easily, under such circumstances, a would- 
 be honest man became a "bum." 
 
 "I had done my very best," said he. "I had called on 
 every German organization I knew of or could learn of. I had 
 knocked at thousands of doors. I never asked for money; I 
 always asked for work, but pitiful people gave me food often, 
 and offered me clothes sometimes; and gradually I found that 
 even in an open wagon on the river side the cold did not prevent 
 my sleeping at night. I could live, somehow, at the very worst. 
 I could live off the city. I was slowly but surely sinking to that 
 point where I could be contented so to live, since I had done 
 all a man could do, and no other sort of life was possible to me. 
 Once to sink to the point of accepting as inevitable such a life 
 is to be a 'lost bum.' I almost became a bum. I understand 
 how the bum is made."
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 269 
 
 John Reichert told me this story thirty-seven years ago, and 
 since the days he spoke of he and I have, one way or another, 
 had a good deal to do with poor beaten folk, of whose number 
 he had so narrowly escaped being one. But a keener, kinder 
 helper bums never had than he. When I crossed the threshold 
 of St. George's Church, I determined I would reach the poor 
 people, the defeated people round me, or I would give up the 
 ministry. If this resolution had brought me nothing more than 
 the friendship of John Reichert and the assistance he and 
 those he drew round him were to give to St. George's, I would 
 not have failed as its rector. 
 
 We had gone to the East Side, and the East Side had come 
 to us. Why? Because we had spoken in terms it could under- 
 stand. The people of the East Side knew me by sight and re- 
 pute. This was natural, but I was not one of themselves. 
 They did not know or care much about my vestry. What 
 they did know did not impress them. They were accustomed 
 to the idea that rich men were all-powerful in all churches, 
 perhaps excepting the Roman Catholic, and that was one of the 
 reasons why they kept away from the churches. Mr. J. Pier- 
 pont Morgan's name they knew, as did all New York, but 
 great names made as small impression on the packed masses of 
 lower New York then as they do on Greater New York to-day. 
 A man like John Reichert was a very different proposition. He 
 went day by day, hour by hour, in and out of the crowded 
 houses where our young people slept (I can't say lived). He 
 spoke their German tongue, and did more to make them feel 
 that the old church really cared for them than did all the ser- 
 mons we preached on the street, or the dinners and teas and 
 clothes the ladies gave at the mission. 
 
 Moreover, John Reichert soon drew round him his kind. 
 
 He did not long walk alone. As the full and happy years of 
 my life rolled by, I was blessed and helped by many friends and 
 assistants. Few have been as fortunate; but not to any one of 
 them do I owe as great a debt as to that friendless German boy 
 who came knocking at the clergy-house door in 1883. To me 
 he became eyes and ears. He saw what I could not see. He 
 heard the things I wanted to hear. And, oh, so often, when, 
 owing to my impetuous tongue and temper, I hurt people's 
 feelings or was too harsh in my judgment of individuals, John
 
 270 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Reichert would lay facts before me that I had not known or had 
 forgotten, and wisely pour a little kindly oil on some heated 
 "bearing" in life. My memory was bad; his never seemed to 
 fail him. I could rely on it always. He knew everyone, and 
 more about each and all of them than all the clergy put to- 
 gether. Yet he never was known to gossip. How such multi- 
 farious information ever got into John Reichert and never, 
 except to me, got out of John Reichert, puzzled me then, and 
 puzzles me still. Confidences he had beyond number, and 
 yet he never was known to give any one away. 
 
 John Reichert became a quite admirable secretary, first to 
 me, afterward to the vestry as well; and Mr. Morgan often 
 said he was worth 15,000 a year. "If you let him go," said Mr. 
 Morgan, "he may call at 23 Wall Street at once." My as- 
 sistant clergy got in the habit of consulting him. Shy of a 
 raw German lad at first, they soon realized, as I did, his value; 
 and the truth is that they went often to John Reichert for 
 advice as to what had best be done in a matter before they came 
 to me. Needless to say, I encouraged the habit, and a certain 
 German beer-garden round the corner of Third Avenue (be char- 
 itable, dear reader; we had not passed the Eighteenth Amend- 
 ment then, and John Reichert was not so long over from Ger- 
 many) witnessed many an innocent and merry consultation 
 when the day's work was done, that was none the less truly 
 Christian because it was had in an atmosphere of tobacco 
 smoke, and the councillors drank moderately of good German 
 brown beer. 
 
 Man after man of those "boys" of mine, after they left me, 
 or when they spoke at leaving of what the church had been to 
 them, in words strangely similar, would say they thanked God 
 that they had known John Reichert, and they were the better 
 able to minister to their fellows because they knew him. 
 
 It was part of my plan to have my laity help train and 
 develop what was best in my assistants, and to get rid of what 
 was worst in them: Seminary product often, the mannerisms 
 and affectations, mental, moral, and physical, which so com- 
 monly afflict and limit the clergy. Contact with John Reichert, 
 not excluding the quiet beer-garden he favoured, was very 
 effective. 
 
 I took chances when I engaged Henry Wilson and Lindsay
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 271 
 
 Parker as my first clerical assistants. The result of my chance 
 taking I have told. I have referred to a third chance I took 
 the same year. In it I had again good fortune. I handed over 
 my scheme for summer seaside work entirely to Doctor and 
 Mrs. Miles. They asked me for John Reichert and so John 
 left the boots and other sundry jobs for good, and under Mrs. 
 Miles's quite extraordinarily capable instruction learned to 
 handle railroad people, ferry boats, and from twelve to sixteen 
 thousand people in the summer. Mrs. Miles's energy and 
 force of character was wonderful. Doctor Miles was her faith- 
 ful and competent echo. She had only one limitation an 
 occasionally impossible temper. But John Reichert says his 
 debt to her is great. I left this first summer appeal of mine to 
 the mothers and children of the East Side entirely to Doctor 
 'and Mrs. Miles. I told them what money I had to spend, and 
 bade them do the best they could with it. And they certainly 
 accomplished marvels. The plans they made then we worked 
 on, virtually without change, for more than twenty-five years. 
 But the greatest thing they did was "to start" John Reichert. 
 
 A cheap cottage at Rockaway Beach was my starting point. 
 Rockaway was easy of access; its beach then was not foul as, in 
 later years, our wasteful methods of dumping city refuse made 
 it; and the local railroad gave us reasonable rates and facilities. 
 We had our own reserved cars, running daily at fixed hours, 
 and for many years we drew from twelve to sixteen thousand 
 people to the cooling sea for the day. There they rested and 
 bathed and lunched and had a good time; and six hundred who 
 were ailing, or had sick children, we fed up and made com- 
 fortable for a week. 
 
 In church, Sunday School, and mission, the usual hours of 
 service did not change, winter or summer. During the heated 
 term, the number of those attending naturally fell off. But 
 Rockaway never showed signs of slackening, and instead of 
 finding each autumn that ties with your people had to be 
 reknit, we found that the summer bettered our knowledge of 
 each other, and strengthened and unified our parish life. 
 
 It was John Reichert who built up Rockaway work from 
 its first beginning under the admirable management of Doctor 
 and Mrs. Miles. My young clergy gained as much by it as 
 did those they went there to serve and entertain. They got
 
 272 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 nearer to the people; they learned to know them under natural 
 conditions. 
 
 Charles Scadding, afterward Bishop of Oregon (he died in 
 1914), in a report he made to me in 1887, truly and cleverly 
 draws a picture well worthy of study. Said he : 
 
 A clergyman visits a family in a tenement house. If they are under the 
 ministration of St. George's, they will probably be found in the rear house, 
 top floor back. He enters, finds the mother bending over her wash- 
 tub, three or four children playing or quarrelling on a dirty floor, and as many 
 more eating at a side table not much cleaner. Everything is in confusion, 
 and the clergyman concludes that it would be more Christian to offer to 
 assist in the washing, or to relieve the tired mother for a few hours of the 
 worry of the children, than to suggest the reading of the Scripture or 
 family prayers. Not being prepared to do the former, he withdraws, feeling 
 that his pastoral call has been more or less unsuccessful. Change the en- 
 vironments and all is different. Invite the whole family to spend a day 
 at Rockaway. Give the children a wholesome mid-day meal and a bath 
 in the ocean, and while this is going on, give the mother one of the com- 
 fortable rocking chairs for which St. George's is famous. Let the clergyman 
 now approach her. She has forgotten all about her washtub. She is no 
 longer awed by his long black coat and high hat. She sees that he is in sea- 
 sonable flannels, that he is interested in her children, and she becomes at 
 once friendly and communicative, and in ten minutes that clergyman knows 
 more about her home life, her spiritual condition, the dispositions of her 
 children, etc., etc., than he could know by many visits to her in her 
 tenement rooms. Morally and spiritually, then, the good that can be done 
 by this seaside work is incalculable. The physical advantages of such a work 
 are so excellent and so evident that nothing need here be said about them. 
 
 Scadding might have added that the clergy and deacon- 
 esses welcomed the sea breezes and the kindly company as 
 much as the people did. And white-faced city boys, who were 
 taught to love the sea and brave a little surf in bathing suits 
 by young parsons, got into the way of coming of a week-day 
 evening or Sunday morning to Bible or confirmation classes 
 taught by these same young men. 
 
 There are many ways now by which wage-earners and moth- 
 ers with little children can get away from the stifling city 
 heat in summer. It was not so then. I am proud to think 
 that we helped to show what could and should be done; and it 
 was a German lad who had almost sunk to the ranks of the lost, 
 whose ability, resourcefulness, faithfulness, and character en- 
 abled the church to lead the way in this new field.
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 273 
 
 I have tried to tell in part what one stranger in our land did 
 for thousands. What a blessing one German boy, saved, and 
 barely saved, from shipwreck, became to St. George's and to 
 me. It is the story of one youth's Americanization; not a sud- 
 den work by any means, for nationhood is too toughly rooted 
 a plant for sudden change. (The great war should have taught 
 us that.) John Reichert and I have some points of difference 
 still. I tell him he is only half a democrat. During the war 
 he threw over (very gradually) the Kaiser, but I never could 
 get him to embrace the Allies. 
 
 John Reichert is not one to be " blown about by every wind 
 of doctrine," not even when the doctrine comes from one he 
 loves and admires. Absolutely truthful, intensely, intelli- 
 gently industrious, and, once his intellect has been convinced 
 and his confidence won, unswervingly loyal, John Reichert 
 seems to me to embody what is finest in those national qualities 
 that won for the German fatherland a foremost place among 
 the nations before that fatal day in August, 19 14. 
 
 When I resigned from St. George's, it was by many deemed 
 advisable that the plans and machinery of an Institutional 
 Church should be outlined for that part of the public interested 
 in such a development. My friend, the Rev. George Hodges, 
 Dean of the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massa- 
 chusetts, and John Reichert together undertook the by no 
 means easy task of compilation and comment. The result 
 was a handsome volume that has had an extended circulation, 
 not in the United States alone, but also in Europe: "The Ad- 
 ministration of an Institutional Church." The book was 
 awarded the Diplome de Medaille d'Or at Paris in 1907 at the 
 Exposition International du Livre. To this work Theodore 
 Roosevelt wrote an introduction. Few could better estimate 
 than could he what I had aimed to do; few better the need of 
 doing it. 
 
 The immigrant's case requires something more than alms 
 or even friendly greeting. He needs, he craves, he should re- 
 ceive, a place at our fireside, a welcome to our home. It is 
 evident beyond contradiction that the prosperity of the country 
 and the advancement of the whole nation depends on the as- 
 similation of the new and vigorous blood that he is pouring 
 into its veins. Furthermore, it is evident that prosperity and
 
 274 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 progress are ours in so far as this is accomplished. We are not 
 (for all the ignorant talk to the contrary) 1 receiving a poor 
 quality of immigrant. Taking him all in all, he represents fine 
 energy and purpose and capacity. If he had not these qualities, 
 he never would have overcome the pains and penalties that 
 barred his adventurous way westward. In Ireland or Scan- 
 dinavia, in Germany or Czechoslovakia, in Italy or Russia, the 
 facts are the same, and those on the spot and who know bear 
 similar testimony. These countries have sent, and still are 
 sending us, a great deal of their best. 
 
 There is no finer, no truer definition of the immigrant spirit 
 than you find in Genesis xiii, i, 2. God's voice calls on the 
 dissatisfied Abram. It is no merely human spirit of push and 
 energy: he believes that it is a divine inspiration that bids him 
 leave in Ur of the Chaldees all he is heir to and seek for himself 
 and his unborn children a new home It is the voice of God 
 that drives him forth crying "Get thee out of the country and 
 I will make of thee a great nation." 
 
 We believe in the Pilgrims of the past, from Abraham's 
 time till the sailing of the Mayflower in 1620. Let us not be so 
 blind, so infatuate, as to forget that at our doors to-day are 
 standing the pilgrims of a later time, in whose souls are calling 
 the self-same voice. Our own national destiny, as much as 
 theirs, depends on our wise and kindly reception of them. 
 
 Two years before the great war, I landed in a small Dalma- 
 tian port where some mountain folk had assembled to take 
 ship for the United States. I saw a tall, patriarchal man stand- 
 ing on the old stone pier, with a worn-looking woman and small 
 children round him. All they owned they carried in a few poor 
 bags. The immortal story of the pilgrim from Ur came to 
 mind, and I got an interpreter and approached the Albanian. 
 "Why do you leave your beautiful country and take this long 
 voyage with your wife and small children across the sea? You 
 are going to strange people, a different climate. Have you 
 any friends in America?" 
 
 "I have none." 
 
 "Why are you going, then, so far from home?" 
 
 1 Please recall the fact that since the Immigration tide first grew to large proportions, after 
 the Irish Famine in the early middle of the last century, the cry has been raised as against the 
 incomers of each nation: "They are flooding our land with the ofF-scourings of Europe."
 
 TESTING OF MEN AND MEASURES 275 
 
 "I am going because I want to see that land where men are 
 free and all have a chance." 
 
 Thus spoke a spirit as truly divine as was the impulse that 
 fired Abram's resolve four thousand years before. We are 
 blind and unbelieving indeed if we fancy that the little ships of 
 long ago held nothing but what was of human promise, and 
 that the great ships of to-day hold nothing but human trash. 
 There are clever writers, casual observers, who say so, but they 
 are wrong. They are usually those hasty critics that cannot 
 visit us for a few weeks or months without inflicting on us a 
 book. The spirit of purpose and adventure, the wistful, 
 hungry, hopeful spirit, is the same in all the ages, so far as we 
 can solve history's riddle. The passion of the human heart for 
 life, and yet more life, and freer life, is the same. The great 
 words of the Master are eternally true: "Man cannot live by 
 bread alone, but by every word of God." And it is that word 
 that in all ages since man rose from the beast to manhood, has 
 impelled, has inspired the child of man to the Pilgrim's Ad- 
 venture. 
 
 An autobiography is not the place for an essay on the Amer- 
 ican immigrant, but I have lived long enough and travelled far 
 enough in our land to have an informed opinion of the process 
 of his assimilation during the last forty-five years. I have seen 
 the change in the thronging crowd of my own East Side children, 
 and no children in the land had to endure a more discouraging 
 reception than did they. I speak what I know when I say that 
 there are nowhere to-day any more industrious, intelligent, and 
 patriotic citizens in the United States than are those children. 
 They have more than made good. There was no hyphenated 
 Americanism among them when the war came. They live no 
 longer in lower East Side New York; or very few of them do. 
 They have moved into healthier, less crowded, more prosper- 
 ous neighbourhoods. And when they can find a reasonable 
 and liberal Protestant Episcopal Church not always an easy 
 thing to do they will join it and work in it. 
 
 It must always be so. The young lead the old. They see 
 what older eyes cannot. They are inspired by hopes that their 
 parents cannot adjust themselves to. I have watched one 
 generation of them, and am convinced of the truth of what I 
 say. Give the children half a chance, and they will not only
 
 276 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 become stalwart Americans, but they will Americanize their 
 parents Italians, Swedes, Slavs, Jews, Russians so much is 
 true of all. 
 
 Unwillingly I bring to a close these notes of mine on those 
 early testing years, and on some of the good things and good 
 people they brought to me. The thing that troubles me to- 
 day, as I look over the field of Christian endeavour, is the utter 
 failure of the Protestant churches to understand and help the 
 immigrant. It is a hard and unpopular thing for an Episco- 
 palian to say, but say it I must, for it is the truth. There is 
 only one church in the United States to-day which even par- 
 tially is holding its own: 1 that is the Roman Catholic Church. 
 One reason for this is, she succeeds better than any Protestant 
 church in holding the immigrant. 
 
 The church that takes in the stranger will live, and the 
 churches that lose him will wither. 
 
 X I am not ignorant of Church statistics presented to the public. They are misleading. 
 There are three sorts of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 My Senior Warden 
 
 For like a child, sent with a flickering light. 
 
 To fight his way across a gusty night, 
 Man walks the world. Again and yet again. 
 
 The light must be by gusts of passion slain. 
 But shall not he who sent him from the door 
 
 Relight the lamp once more and yet once more! 
 
 Omar Khayyam. 
 
 I thought my people and my work would hold together, 
 even during the long absence that followed my collapse in 1889; 
 but what I found when I returned to New York amazed me. 
 I had left my flock scattered in many corners of a wide field. I 
 found it drawn closer together. 
 
 In that remarkable band that held things together one man 
 stood forth. Round him, while its membership scarcely knew 
 it, St. George's gathered, and when with absolute regularity, 
 Sunday morning by Sunday morning, half an hour or more 
 before the service began, Mr. Morgan stood at the church 
 door, welcoming those he knew and did not know, church mem- 
 bers and strangers alike felt that St. George's, without a rector, 
 was still a going concern. I am not exaggerating the stimu- 
 lating influence of my senior warden. He had extraordinary 
 powers of inspiration and encouragement about him when 
 he chose to exercise them. 
 
 I think I could have made a success of my rectorate in any 
 case. The time was ripe for what I attempted, the fields stood 
 ready to be sown and reaped. But without Pierpont Morgan 
 I certainly could not have made the success I did; and seeing 
 how widely different in many important matters were our 
 views, the mighty help he gave me, the confidence he showed 
 in my judgment, are matters worth dwelling on. It would be 
 impossible indeed to tell my life story and leave them out. 
 
 277
 
 278 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The time to write his life has not yet come. Great men (and 
 he must finally be numbered among the great) rouse our pas- 
 sions; and while these boil within us, the time for history writ- 
 ing is not yet. But of some things about him I must write, 
 for, better than most, I knew him, and I loved him, and what 
 is here put down I feel very sure he would confirm and approve. 
 
 First I mention a purely personal matter. I do it because it 
 seems to me a plain duty when you know of a kind good thing 
 done to tell of it, to pass it round. If our faulty nature needs 
 criticism, let us give it praise when we can and criticism when 
 we must. 
 
 I was never again as strong after 1889 as I had been before. 
 I did not show it. I do not think my friends noticed it, but I 
 knew it. I had lost vitality somehow. Work tired me, and 
 preaching, as they never used to. I could not sleep as well, 
 nor could I walk as far. Mr. Morgan saw most things he 
 wanted to see, and he noticed the change in me. Soon after 
 my return, in his quiet way, he drew me aside one day and, 
 slipping a paper into my hand, said: "Don't work too 
 hard; you ought not to have to worry about money. Don't 
 thank me, and don't speak of it to any one but your wife." He 
 had created a modest trust for me and mine. So he lifted from 
 my shoulders a burden that has crushed the life out of many 
 a good soldier; worn out not so much by the fighting, as by the 
 intolerable weight of the personal pack he had to carry in the 
 long marches between and after his battles. 
 
 When again in 1902 I was much run down in health, he said 
 to Mrs. Rainsford: "He cannot do much longer what he has 
 been doing. You have not a home of your own; don't you 
 want one?" She said it was what we both longed for. "Go 
 and build it." That was Pierpont Morgan. When Mrs. 
 Rainsford lay for many long weeks between life and death at 
 Roosevelt Hospital, he, who at that time was carrying a load 
 of responsibility heavier, perhaps, than any other man in the 
 United States carried, except its President, found time again 
 and again to bring roses to her sick room, and would wait out- 
 side her door till the nurse permitted him to lay them by her 
 bed. That, too, was Pierpont Morgan. 
 
 I have told one side of my warden's character. I will now 
 tell of another. Both went to make the man. I never had but
 
 MY SENIOR WARDEN 279 
 
 one serious falling out with Mr. Morgan, but that difference 
 strained for a time the relations between us. Of it I will now 
 speak. J. P. Morgan, if a democrat in theory, was sometimes 
 an autocrat in practice. No sane, strong man is always con- 
 sistent. Consistency is a second-class virtue. He would have 
 been more than human if the power he wielded, and the adula- 
 tion it brought to him, had not on him their inevitable result. 
 He grew I think to believe that as the rector was autocratic 
 in the pulpit, where it was the warden's duty to support him 
 in the vestry the senior warden's will should, at least on mat- 
 ters financial, be supreme. There is much to be said for such 
 a theory. 
 
 Now my aim had ever been to make St. George's increasingly 
 democratic. Mr. Morgan had pledged himself to aid me and 
 stand back of me in this. He had never forgotten his pledge to 
 me, that memorable first night in his study, when he looked me 
 in the face and said: "Done!" and he had never shirked that 
 promise. But when, in the pursuance of this policy, I began 
 steadily to attempt an alteration in the make-up of my vestry, 
 he balked. 
 
 Legislation lately passed at Albany permitted certain very 
 needful elasticities in the organization of vestries in the Prot- 
 estant Episcopal Church in the state. I wished to take ad- 
 vantage of this to increase my vestry, at this time consisting 
 of the usual eight vestrymen and two wardens. Of these 
 vestrymen I have spoken again and again. They were an un- 
 usually capable body of men, but efficient and loyal as they had 
 proved themselves, they in my opinion but very partially rep- 
 resented St. George's extraordinarily heterogeneous congrega- 
 tion. In my weekly talks after breakfast with Mr. Morgan, I 
 had many times brought up this subject, but in vain I tried 
 to get a response from him. He had nothing to say, and that 
 meant, I knew well, that he remained quite unmoved by my 
 arguments. 
 
 This being the situation, I made up my mind to wait a 
 while. I had never found it necessary, since 1884, to bring up 
 in the vestry a matter in which my warden and I were opposed. 
 I always strove to settle such divergency of views "out of school." 
 In 1884, when I insisted on putting the choir into surplices, he 
 almost had a panic, and for a time opposed the move fiercely.
 
 28o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Since then we had been a unit at all vestry meetings, and in- 
 deed, I usually got him to propose at vestry meetings such 
 measures as I desired carried. 
 
 However, it was not so to be in this matter. The vestry 
 met at 8 : 30 p. m. in the Corporation room in the Parish House. 
 There, one night, I had the surprise and the fight of my life. I 
 had no hint of what was coming when, ordinary business being 
 over, Mr. Morgan rose and said: "I have a motion to make, 
 Mr. Chairman, and I think that the vestry will agree with me 
 it had better be passed without debate." He then read his 
 motion. It was that the vestry be reduced from eight mem- 
 bers and two wardens to six members and two wardens. Hav- 
 ing read it, he said: "I think the vestry will agree with me that 
 when I get a seconder it had better be passed without debate." 
 
 I was fairly stunned. I am not, I have never been, quick 
 to act on the occasion, but I saw that as chairman I must 
 dominate the situation instantly, or I was undone and my 
 vestry divided. I said: "Mr. Morgan, before I ask for a 
 seconder to your motion, I must say that I think on a mat- 
 ter so important as the alteration of this vestry, you surely 
 should have said something to me of this radical policy you 
 propose before you advanced it here. Since I stood in 
 your study that night when you called me to the church, I 
 think you will bear witness that I have never advocated any 
 important matter in this, our church's counsel, without first 
 discussing it with you. Here now you spring this revolutionary 
 proposition on me, and on the vestry, without any warning 
 whatever; and you ask that we should proceed to pass it with- 
 out any discussion. This I cannot agree to, and I must ask 
 you, before you get a seconder, to explain to me and to this 
 vestry your reasons for proposing so important a change. We 
 have done good work together, constituted as we are. If a small 
 vestry is for St. George's a better vestry, there must be reasons 
 for it. What are your reasons ? " 
 
 Very unwillingly Mr. Morgan got on his feet. What he 
 said was what I feared he was going to say. In brief outline, 
 it was this: "Rector, we are all more than satisfied with what 
 you have accomplished. You have done your part well. We 
 are glad and proud to have aided you. But this, your vestry, 
 has its part to do. Yours is a spiritual responsibility. Your
 
 MY SENIOR WARDEN 281 
 
 part is to teach the Christian religion, and all that implies, to 
 the congregation. The vestry's part is fiduciary. Our ob- 
 ligations are financial. I am its senior warden and responsible 
 officer. I am ageing. I want at times to have these vestry 
 meetings held in my study. This vestry should be composed, 
 in my judgment, of men whom I can invite to my study, and 
 who can help me to carry the heavy financial burden of the 
 church. Surely all will agree that such responsibilities as ours 
 can best be discharged in this way and by such a body of men. 
 The rector wants to democratize the church, and we agree 
 with him and will help him as far as we can. But I do not want 
 the vestry democratized. I want it to remain a body of gentle- 
 men whom I can ask to meet me in my study." 
 
 The issue was plain; no evading it. If my senior warden 
 was to have his way, St. George's vestry would pass under his 
 control. It would not, it could not be, in any true sense, 
 representative of the congregation. In the long fight, for fight 
 it was, which began shortly after nine o'clock and did not end 
 till almost midnight, I did all I could do, all that love for my 
 friend and love for my people prompted, to turn him from his 
 purpose, but I failed completely. And as I opposed that 
 purpose unflinchingly, his anger at opposition rose. Seeing I 
 could gain nothing there, I spoke over his head to my vestry: 
 "Yes, your obligation is fiduciary, as my warden says, but I 
 protest with all my soul that the main purpose you have 
 been elected to fill is not fiduciary but spiritual. A few years 
 ago, you thought I would never stand in the pulpit and preach 
 to you again. If that had been so, on whom would have fallen 
 responsibility of choosing someone to teach and help this multi- 
 tude of young people that, with your aid, has been gathered 
 here? Is there one of you to-night who will say that any ques- 
 tion of finance can be as important as that duty? To-night, 
 for the first time since I have been your rector, I find myself 
 in opposition to my senior warden. Mr. Morgan has laid 
 his plan for what this vestry should be before you, and you 
 must vote on it. Before you do so, I will as frankly tell you 
 mine. I do not want a smaller vestry. I want a larger one. 
 For here in our parish council, I want men who are actually 
 representative of St. George's membership, men who know 
 what that great body wants and feels. I will be specific. Our
 
 282 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Sunday School of two thousand is a church within a church. 
 One man in that school has done more for its efficiency than any 
 other. For many years he has been practically its head. He 
 knows the hundred and sixty men and women who form a band 
 of teachers the like of which, I make bold to say, cannot be 
 found in any church in our Communion in this land. He has 
 had more to do with choosing them than have I or my clergy. 
 I want that man on my vestry, and I want him because one 
 who has done what he has done, and knows what he knows, 
 should have a voice in deciding the policy of a church into which 
 he has helped, more than any one other man, to bring over 
 fifteen hundred new young members in ten years. But others, 
 too, I want in this vestry, who would represent fittingly the 
 very great number of wage earners that are now regular members 
 of St. George's. These should be represented by one of their 
 own number and class." 
 
 I could feel that, as I pleaded with all my soul for a demo- 
 cratic and more representative vestry, I had the support, as yet 
 unspoken, of a majority of those present; but I wanted to win a 
 verdict if possible without a division. I would have done al- 
 most anything to save my warden from pushing to certain 
 defeat his motion. "Will you not withdraw your motion?" I 
 said. "Do not let us divide; we never have had a division on 
 any serious question in this vestry since I sat at your head." 
 
 Here Seth Low, Mayor of New York, who had for years 
 been the teacher of the senior Men's Bible Class in our Sun- 
 day School, appealed to Mr. Morgan in a moving speech to 
 withdraw his motion. Mr. Morgan remained immovable. 
 Then a dramatic thing happened. A member of the vestry, 
 one of his oldest friends, one to whom in these financially trou- 
 blesome times through which we were then passing Mr. Morgan 
 had been of immense service (I did not know this till later) 
 slowly rose. He was white to the lips, and, turning to Mr. 
 Morgan, he said: "Mr. Morgan, I am compelled to agree with 
 our rector fully in this matter, and I move that this vestry be 
 increased to eleven." Mr. Low seconded the motion at once. 
 Mr. Morgan would not withdraw but could get no seconder. 
 So I put the second motion, which was carried. The vote 
 stood seven to one. 
 
 For a moment we all sat in intense silence. What would
 
 MY SENIOR WARDEN 283 
 
 this man whom we all loved and honoured do ? How take this 
 cruel rebuff, so unwillingly given him ? Not one in that vestry 
 but felt he had been honoured in sitting in it with him. 
 
 He rose and, speaking slowly, said: "Rector, I will never sit 
 in this vestry again." Then, as all still sat in silence, he walked 
 out. I gave the blessing, and everyone went home. It had 
 been a hard night for the vestry, a harder one for me. And 
 hardest of all, I believe, for my warden. 
 
 Next day I had Mr. Morgan's written resignation, with a 
 request to submit it to the vestry without delay. I acknowl- 
 edged his letter, and nothing more, going to breakfast next 
 week at 219 Madison Avenue as usual. As I expected, he was 
 very grumpy, and at the breakfast table conversation was 
 limited to the weather. Next week I went again to breakfast. 
 He had nothing to say to me at the table. 
 
 As I asked for a cigar, in his study afterward, he said, "Have 
 you submitted my resignation?" 
 
 "I have not, and I will not." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 " Because I will not now or ever put you in the position of 
 going back on your pledge to the rector and the vestry of St. 
 George's Church." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "You know what I mean. When I first came to you I came 
 because you gave me your hand and your promise to stand by 
 me in the hard work that lay ahead. I told you I was a radical. 
 I told you I would do all I could to democratize the church. I 
 am only keeping my word. I certainly shall not now, nor at 
 any time, do anything to help you break yours." 
 
 Dead silence. So I lit my cigar and walked away. 
 
 I think after that I went to breakfast three times before Mr. 
 Morgan sailed for Europe. He never made another allusion to 
 his resignation, nor did he enter into any private conversation 
 with me. The day he sailed, I did what I had not done before, 
 I went to the dock to bid him good-bye. On this occasion, in 
 the days I am writing of, the late '90's, a rather miscellaneous 
 crowd was wont to gather to bid him good-bye. It had become 
 quite a function, and I did not usually care to take part in it. 
 As I went up the gangplank, I saw Mr. Morgan standing at 
 some distance surrounded bv his friends. At the same instant
 
 284 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 he saw me, and coming out of the group, signed to me to follow 
 him. He made for his cabin, entered quickly, without saying a 
 word, and shut and bolted the door behind us. We never had 
 another falling out. 
 
 When he chose to exercise it, there was an extraordinary 
 and winning charm about J. Pierpont Morgan. It has been 
 my fortunate lot to meet many who had power to draw to them- 
 selves the affection and loyalty of their fellows, but I have 
 never known a man who could make people love him for his 
 own sake more than could he. He was a lavish giver, but it 
 was not for his gifts that he was loved, and he was loved by a 
 very great many people. I have never seen any eyes quite 
 like his. They had penetration and kindliness combined to an 
 extraordinary degree. When he said a thing, and looked full 
 at you as he said it, to doubt him was impossible. That first 
 night of our meeting, I thought him a wonderful man, a man 
 quite in a class by himself, unlike any one I had ever seen; and 
 I am of that opinion still. 
 
 Mr. Morgan was a man of faith. His faith was threefold: 
 Faith in himself and his business judgment (when I first knew 
 him I should say that outside of his office, where he was king, 
 he was singularly self-distrustful and diffident. This diffidence 
 passed as years brought him power and flattery) ; faith in the 
 religion of Jesus, as formulated by the Puritan Calvinistic 
 divines; and faith in the stability and greatness of the United 
 States. He was intensely and unselfishly patriotic. 
 
 In religious matters, and he was deeply religious, he had no 
 vision of reforms, and generally little sympathy with reformers. 
 On the religious side of his nature, he was intensely conserva- 
 tive. His beliefs were to him precious heirlooms. He bowed 
 before them as the Russian bows to the "ikon" before he 
 salutes the master of the house. The Evangelical "Plan of 
 Salvation " was to him what the Ark of the Covenant was to the 
 ancient Judaism. Of how that "plan" grew, what other 
 earlier plans were merged in it, he knew nothing. So Mr. 
 Morgan had the peace and power of religious assurance, while 
 the very nature of his assurance precluded in him the possibility 
 of spiritual development. His religion was a talent to be 
 wrapped in its own napkin and venerated in the secret place 
 of his soul; laid aside in safe disuse, rather than passed from
 
 MY SENIOR WARDEN 285 
 
 man to man in life's great barter. To treat religion as an ikon 
 is so much more natural than to put it out at interest. It is 
 commonly done, but Jesus said it was a mistake. To many- 
 good men, their religion has become a water-tight compartment 
 in life's ship, separated quite from the miscellaneous cargo 
 which it carries. Perhaps it may keep the ship from sinking. 
 If so, that is all that can be said for it. 
 
 I have noticed that most of us, perhaps unconsciously, are in 
 some part of our nature resentful of change. In ordinary mat- 
 ters, wherein we are constantly in touch with the lives of others, 
 we must change or we suffer; must adapt ourselves or fail of 
 gaining what we strive for. But religion we think we can af- 
 ford to treat as an individual matter only; while the truth is, 
 it is above all other interests in our lives the one part of our- 
 selves that so treated withers in disuse. It was meant to be 
 leaven, not a gold brick. Its very nature and property is ex- 
 pansion. This divine property Mr. Morgan found it hard to 
 see. His mental qualities drew him strongly to the ecclesias- 
 tical side of the Episcopal Church's life. Its very archaic 
 element, its atmosphere of withdrawal from common everyday 
 affairs of men, answered to some need of his soul. The floor 
 of the convention, the association with men who were, by 
 virtue of their office, guardians and exponents of a religious 
 tradition, beautiful and venerable, had for him an attraction 
 stronger than any other gathering afforded. 
 
 He would cast all other duties aside and sit for hours, atten- 
 tively following the details of the driest of debates, on subjects 
 that could interest only an ecclesiastic. And this quality in 
 him was all the more remarkable since he had never read general 
 church history. On the history of the American Protestant 
 Episcopal Church, however, he was thoroughly well informed. 
 And its successes or failures, in all parts of the United States, 
 he watched carefully from year to year. 
 
 He thoroughlydisliked and distrusted ritualism and ritualists. 
 Yet even here, his intense respect for the offices and ordinances 
 of his church was ever modifying his opinion. 
 
 But there was a quality in Mr. Morgan that tended to place 
 him among those who stood for advance and reform in religious 
 matters; a quality that balanced the hyper-conservatism of 
 his religious nature his constant habit of trusting men who
 
 286 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 did things. He was always looking for men fit to lead. He 
 believed more in men than in measures. Once he found the 
 man he was looking for, or thought he had found him, he gave 
 that man large freedom of action. He was willing to trust him 
 far, and stood ready to defend him bravely and long. 
 
 Many said and say that Pierpont Morgan was a great judge 
 of men. That was not his opinion of himself. Once he 
 said to me: "I am not a good judge of men. My first shot is 
 sometimes right. My second never is." Mr. Morgan ac- 
 cepted and was completely satisfied with the extremest evangel- 
 ical doctrine in common currency when he was a boy. Now 
 from the very first I made it plain that, though I had been 
 brought up in such beliefs, they were mine no longer; that on 
 all ecclesiastical matters I was a radical; and that if I were 
 elected rector, I should do all that in me lay to make St. 
 George's Church stand sociologically, ecclesiastically, and 
 theologically for reform. 
 
 At the bottom of his heart, he could not have liked this. 
 But right here the practical and always dominant side of the 
 man asserted itself. He was ever in support of any one who 
 could do things that had to be done. He loved the old church. 
 He would do anything to save it. Its salvation was quite 
 beyond anything he or the vestry could do. So much he knew, 
 for he was ever quick to size up accurately a situation. If 
 another man saw, or thought he saw, a way to success, that 
 man in the prosecution of his endeavour should have every bit 
 of trust and support that he could give him. 
 
 Such a support Pierpont Morgan ever gave me. And at 
 times it was cruelly hard for him to give it. As I slowly came 
 to know him for he was a hard man to know I saw that what 
 he had given me he gave to others. It was his way. Having 
 once made up his mind to trust any one, man, woman, or child, 
 he trusted largely, trusted till they failed him, and sometimes 
 after they had failed him. He seemed sometimes to exact a 
 great deal from those he thus trusted. But the truth is that his 
 unequalled power of making those he cared to attract love him 
 often made hard work done to gain his approval a pleasant 
 task. 
 
 From the first, I formed the habit of going to him and telling 
 him my plans. I tried this first at his downtown office, but
 
 MY SENIOR WARDEN 287 
 
 soon found that would not do. He suggested that I come to 
 breakfast at "219" instead, and thus a habit was formed, 
 which I kept up till 1905, of breakfasting with him for a good 
 part of the year once a week; sometimes even oftener. 
 
 I soon found out two things: First, that I could not convince 
 him of the advisability of most of the changes I was bent on 
 making. So I had to go ahead and make them anyway. And 
 secondly, that even when he particularly disliked them, he 
 liked the confidence I showed in him by telling him all about 
 them beforehand. For all the throngs of friends surrounding 
 him, for all the love and fire of personal devotion to himself 
 which he, all unwittingly sometimes it seemed, kindled in his 
 very nearest, he was more reserved than any man I ever 
 knew. When under life's stress that reserve broke down, then 
 the profound emotionalism of his nature had its way with 
 him. The great deeps were broken up, and he called aloud for 
 help. 
 
 Three times in thirty years all shadow of reserve between 
 us was thus swept aside. I do not know that as he thus clung 
 to me, I was able to do him any good, but at least I told him 
 what I thought was the truth; and if love and longing could 
 help a man, he ought to have had some succor from me. 
 
 As everyone knows, he hated writing letters, and to the 
 newspapers he never wrote. But I find one long letter among 
 my papers, put aside in 1891. It was not necessary to publish 
 it. The criticism it aimed to answer was silly and shallow, and 
 died of itself. Briefly it was this: I had asked a number of 
 clergymen of other denominations than Episcopal to speak in 
 George's Church on Friday evenings in Lent. There arose 
 talk of presenting me to the Bishop. Mr. Morgan heartily 
 disliked my plan of offering St. George's pulpit to any other 
 than Episcopal clergy. It was a new idea, and in matters 
 ecclesiastical old things were good enough for him. But the 
 rector proposed doing it, and his business was to support the 
 rector. Thus, without so much as a hint from me, he did what 
 all who knew him will remember he never did: he wrote the fol- 
 lowing letter to the New York daily papers, defending my ac- 
 tion. 
 
 The letter was written at two o'clock at night, and in its 
 wording shows evident signs of weariness.
 
 288 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 1 A. m. Wednesday. 
 Dear Rector: 
 
 I have done what I could. Show this to Bishop Potter and use it as you 
 think best. 
 
 J. P. M. 
 
 The attacks in the daily press upon the Rev. Dr. Rainsford and the work 
 in which he is engaged are most unwarranted, and certainly are based upon a 
 misunderstanding of the facts, and are calculated to do injury to the great 
 work of St. George's Church, which, I do not hesitate to say, has no 
 parallel in the United States. 
 
 Let those who would be hypercritical visit St. George's Church, and 
 witness the services held there. The thronged Church at the regular ser- 
 vices. Let them see the Confirmation of over two hundred, who were last 
 Sunday presented to the Bishop for that rite, and then say whether there are 
 any signs of want of loyalty to the Episcopal Church, or any evidence of 
 disregard of the laws of ritual or worship. 
 
 I state without fear of contradiction, that there is no church in our com- 
 munion where greater care is exercised by the Rector, Warden, and 
 Vestrymen to avoid anything which might be open to criticism in the ser- 
 vices than in St. George's, for, independent of their loyalty to the Church, 
 they recognize the fact that any other course would jeopardize the greatest 
 success and sympathy with their work. 
 
 As regards the particular services to which exception is taken, they are 
 nothing new. Several years ago, Dr. Rainsford instituted a course of lec- 
 tures on Friday evening in the Church, upon subjects which are engrossing 
 the thought of the Christian world. 
 
 Dr. Rainsford called to his aid the best writers and thinkers he could 
 secure, both clerical and lay. The lectures were, and now are, delivered at 
 no regular service, but at one arranged for this special purpose; they are 
 largely attended, and have doubtless been of great benefit to many. 
 
 I do not think any one inclined to be just could for one moment think that 
 there was any want of loyalty to the Church or its Ministry on the part of 
 Dr. Rainsford or his Vestry, and under these circumstances, and upon this 
 statement of facts, I feel I can consistently ask fair treatment at the hands 
 of those inclined to question what has been done. 
 
 Signed, 
 J. P. Morgan. 
 
 Never once in all my twenty-four years of rectorship did 
 he criticize any single statement I made from the pulpit; he 
 always gave me that practical evidence of his belief in the 
 liberty of the pulpit. That he did disagree with many of them 
 strongly any one could see. At times I noticed he even had 
 recourse to his hymn-book while I preached. But I came to 
 judge pretty accurately the seriousness of the disagreement
 
 MY SENIOR WARDEN 289 
 
 between us by the hour of his appearance at the church door 
 the following Sunday. If he liked the sermon, he was sure to 
 be on time. When he was late, I made a point of being early 
 at his breakfast table on Monday. 
 
 Many love to bow themselves before the strong. And so 
 an environment of almost universal flattery and adulation, 
 sometimes gross and fawning, sometimes charming and refined, 
 moved with him wherever he went. Most men would have 
 been debased by it. It hurt him, of course, for he was human. 
 But how great a man, how true a friend he remained, in spite 
 of it all, some who have loved and watched him for many years, 
 loved him for his great selfhood alone, know well. 
 
 Pierpont Morgan's was too emotional a nature to escape 
 depression. At times he deeply doubted himself. He had 
 hours, and more than once they were prolonged, of despairing 
 despondency. But such experiences were the result of over- 
 strain and nervous collapse, not of intellectual conviction. 
 Intellectually he was an optimist. As he aged, he suffered from 
 those tragically mistaken, self-chosen falsities of environment 
 that many of the most brilliant men of his time were limited by. 
 He was no scholar, no reader, and he had not learned to care for 
 nature, or find any rest or companionship in her high company. 
 So unrest and ennui were sometimes his. Loyalest of friends, 
 he was intemperate and sometimes unjust in his oppositions. Of 
 President Roosevelt he would hear nothing good. Yet the two 
 men were made for a fine cooperation. 
 
 I came to understand how it was that my warden was, in 
 some of his antipathies, so unreasonable. His own aims were 
 absolutely honest and patriotic. He knew, when he was trying 
 for some big thing, that it was not primarily in order to gain 
 fortune for himself out of it, but chiefly to advance thereby the 
 public good. I do not flatter him in this. / state what I be- 
 lieve to be but the truth when I say that, in his determination to 
 fulfill what he believed to be his obligations to those who 
 trusted him, and to the land he loved, there did not, in all 
 New York's multitude, live a man more single-eyed than Pier- 
 pont Morgan. No venom of attack, no malicious slander 
 poured on the man, made him deviate by one hair's breadth 
 from this his life purpose. 
 
 Then he had full occasion to gauge the moral rottenness
 
 290 
 
 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 of much of the political life of the time. He saw men he knew 
 who, by alliance with Tammany in New York, or by purchased 
 legislation at Albany or at Washington, were doing things he 
 would rather die than do. Yet these men had no United 
 States Government against them, and he did. He came to think 
 that the immediate future of the country was safer in the hands of 
 business men like himself than in those of its politicians or chosen 
 representatives. Remember, he was not alone at that time 
 in so thinking. Many thought with him that, for the country's 
 good, it were well to have business methods master political. 
 That such a programme was mistaken is clear enough now, 
 but it took a leader as fearless of personal consequences as 
 Theodore Roosevelt to make the country see it thirty years ago. 
 
 Mr. Morgan had been reared in New England, and like 
 others prominent in business a generation ago, suffered a heavy 
 handicap in consequence. Those were days of sectionalism. 
 (Read the two autobiographies of Charles Francis and Henry 
 Adams.) Boys went to school in the East, and if they went to 
 college, went to an Eastern college. 1 
 
 The same mistake is still usually made. An Eastern school- 
 boy needs a Western college life. In college life, something 
 more important than building up school friendships should 
 be aimed at. There was little in the boys' lives, during these 
 formative years, which fitted them to understand any social 
 class but their own, and still worse, their own, as it was illus- 
 trated to them by Eastern men only. What did they know 
 of the mighty people across the Mississippi ? 
 
 Mr. Morgan and his business associates were dependent for 
 their knowledge of the West on occasional junketing expeditions, 
 hurriedly taken, in well-found Pullman cars, over thousands 
 of miles of railroads that they controlled. Such expeditions 
 were scarcely, an adequate introduction to the millions whose 
 well-being depended largely on those roads. Those magnates, 
 when they left New York or Chicago, were, though they knew 
 it not, like the water beetle you can see in summer time in a 
 brook. It is a little, perambulating diving bell. Wherever it 
 goes, it carries its own atmosphere with it in a silvery bubble. 
 
 But I must not ramble further. To sum up, Mr. Morgan 
 
 1 Mr. Morgan studied for two years at the University of Gottingen, Germany, where he gave 
 evidence of unusual proficiency in Mathematics.
 
 MY SENIOR WARDEN 291 
 
 was ever a builder, not a wrecker. But he was handicapped by 
 a lack of knowledge of the country he lived to serve. He did 
 not know the man in the street, the man on the farm, or in the 
 mine or factory. How should he? He never read himself into 
 their lives, and he never met them. 
 
 To bring my warden to a better understanding of Theodore 
 Roosevelt, the man, and his policies, I did my poor little best. 
 I quite failed. The President wanted to get on with Mr. 
 Morgan. The misunderstanding was all on the latter's side. 
 
 The last time I saw my friend was in 191 1. We had, as 
 was common, a sharp difference about President Roosevelt. I 
 lost patience and said: "If you live long enough, you will fall 
 on your knees and pray Almighty God to give you him again 
 as President of the United States." 
 
 By the great silence they are set apart, 
 From all the restless longing of the heart 
 That beats in us so passionate and strong; 
 Are passed beyond the evening Angelus, 
 And Memnon's morning song. 
 
 I wonder if they have met ! 
 
 As I bring to an end this poor tribute to a great man and a 
 great friend, I want to repeat what I have said: that no political 
 measure proposed by any party, however disastrous it might 
 prove to his own plans, shook for one moment his faith in the 
 future, the great and honourable future, of these United States. 
 He really had a profound belief in the wisdom, goodness, final 
 common sense, and fair-mindedness of the ordinary citizen 
 of the country; and he was willing to trust his reputation and 
 his fortune to their keeping. 
 
 One morning, in his study, he spoke to me about the need of 
 more publicity in the conduct of business. There had been 
 some financial flurries in the West, and I asked why it should 
 be, since business seemed good. 
 
 J. P. M. "The fools won't show each other their books." 
 
 W. S. R. "But you would not show your books to any one." 
 
 J. P. M. "Well, Rector, the time is coming when all busi- 
 ness will have to be done with glass pockets." 
 
 His nature was conservative. He was inclined to resent 
 change of any sort unless he inaugurated it. But there came
 
 292 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 to Pierpont Morgan now and again those flashes of insight 
 long ago they called it prophecy a rare quality in our nature, 
 which, however it expresses itself, moves profoundly the souls of 
 men. He combined, in religious matters, a stubborn con- 
 servatism with a wide and deep tolerance. 1 He held stoutly 
 by his favourite dogmas, finally stating them in his will. And 
 yet, strangely enough, he was too keen sighted to think that 
 of them could be builded a platform on which all Christians 
 could stand and work together. In later years, the necessity of 
 uniting all Christian churches in common effort was very 
 present to his mind. In one department of the industrial life 
 of the time he had been the foremost exponent of the need of 
 association. The need of like action in religious affairs he 
 clearly saw. 
 
 Pierpont Morgan gave a whole-hearted allegiance to the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church. He supported it for he loved it. 
 But he had also a vision of a Catholic Church, embracing all 
 faithful men, and of a Holy Communion no less wide than the 
 Communion of Humanity. 
 
 Year by year, till Mr. Morgan died, wherever I was, there 
 came to me this New Year greeting 
 
 "Dear love and best wishes for New Year. 
 
 "Commodore." 
 
 J I do not believe that any or all of my teachings or preachings, in the pulpit or out of it, moved 
 him by so much as one inch from the " plan of Salvation," the tradition of his youth, which he 
 held with vise-like tenacity. Of every radical proposition I advanced ecclesiastical, social, re- 
 ligious he disapproved; yet back of me, ever and always, was his firm loyalty. Without it 
 I couldn't have accomplished what I did.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 Our Parish House 
 
 In all time of our Wealth, Good Lord deliver us. 
 
 The Litany. 
 
 The new St. George's was a success. We had done what few 
 believed could be done. A free church stood, prosperously 
 paying its way, where a pew church (though one of the most 
 forceful men in the community occupied its pulpit) had lost 
 ground gradually and finally failed altogether. 
 
 We had won first the attention and then the respect of the 
 neighbourhood and of the city. We had paid our debts and 
 laid a foundation for an endowment. In free-will offerings on 
 Sundays we were receiving three times as much as the pew 
 rents of the church had ever yielded in its palmiest days. St. 
 George's membership was learning to give as a privilege, as an 
 act of worship. 
 
 Illustrating this : I had a request sent me by a number of my 
 East Side poor. They wanted to know if they could have five- 
 or ten-cent Sunday envelopes. Twenty-five cents had been 
 our lowest figure till then for weekly gifts. The times were 
 cruelly hard, and twenty-five cents a week they could not prom- 
 ise. John Reichert and his helpers went round and we added 
 $1,000 a year to the church offerings, and what was better, 
 helped those people, as they joined in the common worship, 
 to feel as they had not done before that they were part and par- 
 cel of it, that they supported it. 1 
 
 Wages were low and work scarce. We made no special ap- 
 peals to our East Side friends, yet the steady stream of their 
 
 HDne hundred and ninety-five new envelopes were taken by people living on First Avenue 
 and east of it, a very poor district. My letter was put into German by John Reichert, with the 
 result that they thought the rector could speak German as well as English. And nothing 
 would do for them but that I must preach to them in their own loved tongue. 
 
 293
 
 294 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 giving never dried up. Mr. Morgan had undertaken for three 
 years to double any gifts made for the endowment fund of St. 
 George's. One Monday night a poor woman came to me at 
 the Parish House. I did not know her; her name was not on 
 our books. "I am a lonely woman," she said. "St. George's 
 has been a great help to me. I have saved fifty dollars. I 
 know how important it is to keep the church here where it is. 
 Take it for the endowment." 
 
 The Girls' Friendly Society was composed exclusively of 
 working girls, and remember, twenty-five years ago the condi- 
 tions most of those girls worked under were bad, and in some 
 cases were intolerably bad, and their wages low. St. George's 
 branch of the Girls' Friendly Society raised among themselves 
 alone and sent to me on Christmas Eve $1,042.15; the product 
 of three years' saving. That, with Mr. Morgan's gift, added 
 $2,084.30 to the endowment. Think what that money cost 
 those girls! 
 
 What the Girls' Friendly Society did every organization 
 housed in the building did also. One and all turned in and did 
 their share. They gave $7,500 a year to the support of our 
 work, and this money, much the greater part of it, came from 
 young people between fourteen and twenty-five years old. It 
 was money that was saved at cost to themselves. It stood for 
 actual self-denial. 
 
 When I planned the Parish House, I could find no precedent 
 to follow. I had in my own mind to build a nest for the thing 
 I was trying to hatch out and rear. I knew there must be 
 many mistakes, many things left out. 
 
 When I had been suddenly ordered to leave my work, the 
 building had risen. When I returned, it had filled up. I had 
 great expectations of what it would enable us to do. I came 
 back to find every corner of it crammed with young people. 
 The need of the thing was even greater than I knew. 
 
 Some who read my book will remember our parish building 
 on East 16th Street. Others may have no such memories, 
 and if they are interested in sociological Christianity, must 
 know many buildings far larger, far superior in every way, to 
 this venture we made so long ago. But surely what we aimed 
 to do was needed, and if we had had little experience, we were 
 going the right way to get it.
 
 OUR PARISH HOUSE 295 
 
 The Parish House was my own hobby, and I will try not to 
 ride it too far in my book, but as I turn to my notes of long ago, 
 I find some things I cannot leave out. 
 
 It was evident to me that "mission work," as it was then, and 
 indeed as it is now, carried on by the Protestant churches of 
 all denominations, does not reach the best class of our working 
 people: the self-respecting class, the class most important to 
 reach, for it is sure to dominate the labour movements of the 
 future. 
 
 That class was largely lost to the church. But here I would 
 say that in our Parish House I began to see signs of the presence 
 of a section of our East Side folk, just the people I wanted to 
 know. Ordinarily mission work not only does not reach these, 
 it sometimes puts another barrier in the path of their approach 
 to the church. 
 
 The reason of this is plain, though it escapes the observation 
 of the churches. The mission appeal is to the least deserving, 
 the least independent to those who will come partly "to get." 
 You cannot merge the women and children of such households 
 with the women and children of labour union workers, any 
 more than you can socially join together the labour union man 
 and the "scab." Many good Christians deplore this fact, but 
 it is not a thing to be deplored at all. The lower you go in 
 the financial scale of living, the more important is the obser- 
 vation, yes, the rigid observation, of the laws of class. They 
 are costly and persistent things, these laws; we break them at 
 our peril. 
 
 The Parish House was open on Monday nights to everyone, 
 and meet there we did, from Pierpont Morgan to the last 
 adopted Armenian refugee. The big reception room upstairs, 
 off which were my assistant clergy rooms, was the place where 
 strangers were welcomed, and from which they were conducted, 
 if they so desired, round the many classrooms. If the old 
 Avenue A folks of the early 1880's seldom put in an appearance 
 here, their children did in throngs, and as they did so, insensi- 
 bly they changed class; for here all were in their own house, 
 for all did something to support it. 
 
 One Monday night, to my intense surprise and delight, who 
 should turn up but Phillips Brooks. I took him all round. 
 The place was buzzing with young spring life from basement
 
 296 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 to attic. The youngsters gazed with awe at the immense man, 
 the boys in the Gym doing their best stunts for his benefit. 
 As it grew late he came back with me to the rectory. Phillips 
 Brooks seemed to me to show signs of failing even then. After 
 a while he said, "I must have a parish house alongside Trinity 
 Church. It would be a splendid thing. I can get the thing 
 done"; and the dear Great Man grew quite enthusiastic. 
 
 Said I: "But whom are you going to get to create the organi- 
 zation and then run it for you?" 
 
 "Why, Rainsford, you could do that for me; you could find 
 me a man." 
 
 "But such men are not easy to find. What sort of a man do 
 you want me to look for?" 
 
 "Why, a likely deacon." 
 
 "Ah," said I, "I wish we could find likely deacons or likely 
 priests, either, who could do what you long to see done, dear 
 Doctor Brooks. Don't put up a parish house near Trinity 
 just yet; go on preaching." 
 
 Phillips Brooks was quiet for a little time, and then said 
 simply, "I think you are right." 
 
 On the first Sunday morning in the month we had a little dy&xri 1 
 of our own. Then the young communicants of the church came 
 together; all the class leaders and Sunday-school teachers met 
 their scholars at the Holy Table, and the old church was some- 
 times filled to the last seat in the gallery. I always preached to 
 them for a few minutes, and I believe that those morning hours 
 of worship many of us will remember as long as we live. 
 
 Sunday School followed soon after this service, but as many 
 came from a great distance, and the number of these increased 
 year by year, they had to go without breakfast or bring sand- 
 wiches with them. 
 
 We do not know the exact usage of the Church of the First 
 Century, nor how the large number who must have sometimes 
 partaken received the bread and wine. But we may be very 
 sure the custom of the time differed widely from the stupid, 
 wearisome one which the growth of a sacerdotal concept of the 
 Eucharist has forced on Episcopalians to-day, making some- 
 
 1 Aydirr) was the meal taken with or after Communion in the first century of the Christian 
 Church. See I Cor., xi, 21. The custom died out. St. Paul here says it was leading in 
 Corinth to disorder.
 
 OUR PARISH HOUSE 297 
 
 times what should be our most beautiful service a weariness to 
 the flesh. To communicate fifteen hundred or more people, 
 as was common at St. George's, was a slow matter; but since 
 ours was the Greek fashion, and our rail was semi-circular, we 
 were better able to deal with a large number than if our Holy 
 Table had had but one narrow front. 
 
 Even with the advantage of the semi-circular rail, when fifteen 
 hundred persons communicated, my people stood ranged be- 
 fore me, row on row, for over an hour, waiting their turn to 
 kneel. This long wait gave me a good opportunity to study 
 their faces. One spring Sunday morning I saw a tall over- 
 grown boy of eighteen who had been in my confirmation class. 
 He was leaning against the chancel wall, and his face looked 
 white and drawn. I watched for him after the service, got him 
 into the Parish House, and drew the truth out of the lad. 
 
 The times were very hard. His father was out of work. He 
 was earning $3.50 a week, and this money he brought to his 
 mother, who each day gave him ten cents for his luncheon. His 
 mother was suffering from some internal trouble, and longed 
 for the advice of a doctor known to her years before, when she 
 lived in another part of the town. To have him visit her would 
 cost three dollars, and under the present circumstances, this was 
 an expense out of the question. Yet he wanted his mother to 
 have that doctor, and how much he wanted, the white face of 
 that thin eighteen-year-old, half-fed boy told. He had taken 
 each day that ten cents luncheon money from his mother for 
 five weeks, and saved it, going without his luncheon. Then he 
 had himself fetched that doctor to his mother's side. 
 
 Pretty fine, I call that ! That boy gave me the idea of our 
 Sunday morning agapae, the first Sunday in the month. The 
 deaconesses got the coffee ready in one of the lower rooms of the 
 building, and all who lived at a distance and had work to do in 
 the schools before the eleven o'clock service met there for a 
 simple breakfast. 
 
 We do not make enough of the beautiful things we find in 
 each other. We permit them to be hidden under the drab sur- 
 face of daily life. We treasure the writings of any one who can 
 make us see something of that light "that never was on land or 
 sea." But what beautiful thing is as lovely or as lasting as the 
 vision of the great intention of God, visible in some obscure
 
 a 9 8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 child of His ? When we see such a thing we catch the meaning 
 of Emerson's greeting to his friend, 
 
 All things through thee take nobler form 
 And look beyond the Earth. 
 
 I have nothing to leave behind me, to the people I worked 
 for and worked with, more worthy of remembrance than such 
 stories as these. I wrote them down at the time, and as I go 
 over my records of long ago, they come back to me with fresh 
 beauty and power. Here is another worth remembering: 
 
 Every organization that had headquarters in the Parish 
 House had a system of visitation. Those who dropped out 
 were visited. I cannot over-emphasize the value of this 
 work. The two men who, more than any others, made this 
 department a success, were W. H. SchiefFelin and William 
 Foulke, both members of the vestry. They were among the 
 very first who came to my side when I stood alone in the empty 
 old church; they always understood and they never failed 
 me. Both have gone to their rest, but the brotherly spirit, the 
 outstretched hand and welcoming smile, the kindly, unflagging 
 patience and Christian tact of these two faithful servants of 
 their fellow-men, scores of the poorer members of St. George's 
 will never forget. 
 
 This is Mr. Schieffelin's story. A young mechanic, holding 
 a well-paid job, was missed from the men's club, missed from 
 his tenement house, missed from his workshop. He was 
 found at last living in a single room with his mother. The man 
 was under thirty, the mother quite old, smitten with a sudden 
 mental decline, passing rapidly into complete imbecility. She 
 was helpless; could not without assistance do for herself the 
 common offices of life. I asked him why he did not get a nurse. 
 Without the least bit of pretentious self-consciousness he made 
 me see that since all he was he owed to his mother, he was quite 
 unwilling to trust her, in her utter helplessness, to any hired 
 stranger. 
 
 "But," said I, "in her case she needs care hourly, day and 
 night." 
 
 "I will give her care day and night." 
 
 "What about your work? You were earning high wages, I 
 hear."
 
 OUR PARISH HOUSE 299 
 
 "I gave up my work." 
 
 "What are you doing now?" 
 
 "Basket work." 
 
 "And you have given up your trade?" 
 
 "Yes; I must watch over my mother, and I can work at bas- 
 kets in this room." 
 
 So, night and day, for two years, while a flickering spark of 
 life remained, he tended the poor wrecked imbecile thing he 
 knew and loved as "mother." In one poor room, half fed, half 
 warmed, that fine soul gave the best he had to the best he knew. 
 
 Those who despair of human nature do not know the poor, 
 I say. All my life long, in Ireland, England, Toronto, and 
 New York, I constantly came across the same sort of poor peo- 
 ple that Jesus seems to have so well known. The poor who be- 
 lieve in, even when they cannot explain, the Kingdom of 
 Heaven in men. 
 
 I love to look back and remember what a rarely good time 
 we all had together in that parish house. The aim I pursued 
 as steadily as I could was to trust everything to the manage- 
 ment of the young people themselves; not unduly to multiply 
 organizations (a common fault), but when there was some- 
 thing that needed doing, choose a fitted leader or two for the 
 job, and give him or them liberty and responsibility at the 
 same time. 
 
 Such dance halls as there were then in our neighbourhood 
 were not places where respectable young people should attend, 
 yet dancing was as natural and necessary as eating to thousands. 
 When I said I was going to have dancing in my parish house, 
 I scared many of my friends. But if I did, I drew closer to me 
 than ever the young people I wanted to win. For a little sea- 
 son my good deaconesses could not (all of them, at least) see it. 
 I frankly told them they should exercise as free a judgment as I 
 claimed, and if they could not conscientiously help me in this, 
 I could not blame them in the least. All I should ask would be 
 that they should carefully avoid appearing in any way to criti- 
 cize what was to be the liberal policy of the church in the mat- 
 ter. 
 
 There was no evading the fact that among the mass of young 
 people who clamorously applauded the very idea of the Parish 
 House being opened for dancing, there was a rough element.
 
 3 oo THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 It could not be otherwise. This needed not so much watching 
 as guiding and helping. Their intention was good. We had 
 won their interest. They wanted to avoid doing any unseemly 
 thing, but they did not know how. A cigarette end hang- 
 ing out of their mouths as they danced, or a surreptitious 
 squirting of tobacco juice into a quiet corner of the room, 
 surely such things no lady or gentleman could object to. Loud 
 talking, coarse laughing, rude buffoonery these were the 
 invariable accompaniments of any social pleasure they had 
 known. In short, the situation was delicate; it needed careful 
 handling, and the one thing above all that had to be avoided was 
 any appearance of disciplinary suppression. 
 
 Well, we made a great success of our dancing. I had noth- 
 ing to do with it. My clergy had but little. We were busy in 
 other ways. But Mrs. W. H. Schieffelin, with her gentleness 
 and charm, Miss Elsie Marshall, one of the most competent and 
 successful organizers of working girls our church has ever 
 known, Mrs. Herbert Satterlee (then Miss Morgan), Mrs. 
 Randolph, Mrs. R. M. Bull, Miss Rhett, and so many others, 
 I wish I had space to name them, by their cheerful, patient 
 presence launched triumphantly our scheme of most necessary 
 and helpful pleasure. 
 
 In an astonishingly short time the scheme took a natural 
 shape, and quickly, intelligently, and with complete success, 
 St. George's young working people issued their own invitations, 
 being responsible for those invited and their behaviour when 
 they came. I was calling on an old lady who kept a small 
 tenement rooming house near the old gas works, one of the 
 poorest districts on the East Side. I asked her if she noticed any 
 change in the neighbourhood. " Indeed I do, Doctor. Round 
 here they used all to be toughs and bums. Now there is three or 
 four gentlemen to every block." She seemed conservative 
 in her estimate. 
 
 To turn from dancing to our Sexton Hanlon 1 may seem an 
 unnecessary study in contrasts, yet in all of that band of co- 
 operators whose united work and spirit made our parish home 
 a power for good, none helped me more loyally than did he. 
 
 He was not simply an efficient official; he was a warm-hearted 
 and gen erous friend, and his strong, manly personality was an 
 
 'Hanlon came of an old North of Ireland family. They breed fine men and women there.
 
 OUR PARISH HOUSE 301 
 
 influence always making for good among the young people that 
 daily flocked in and out of the house when he had charge. A 
 good man and a true, faithful in the discharge of his office 
 and wonderfully patient toward all men was Hanlon. He 
 knew what we stood for, and he believed in it. He knew the 
 boys and girls, and none had a truer eye for the bad and the 
 good among them. He knew the city and, what was important, 
 he knew our Albany Assemblyman, and the police captain of 
 the precinct. He was not only the greatest possible help to me; 
 on occasion he was a wise councillor. When he suddenly died, 
 the whole parish missed and mourned Hanlon. 
 
 I will tell a story showing the sort of man he was a story 
 heretofore known to only two now living, John Reichert and 
 myself. We thought it best to keep it to ourselves. It is a 
 story of nearly thirty years ago. 
 
 One Sunday morning, as Hanlon was standing in his usual 
 place in front of the Parish House, a young man who had been 
 a member of the men's club, but had left New York two years 
 before to drive a locomotive on one of the big railroad lines, 
 came up to him. Hanlon at once recognized and welcomed 
 him, for he had been a favourite with all. For some time they 
 talked, and as they did so, Hanlon realized that there was 
 something wrong, and that the man was insane. We had 
 always an arrangement with the police permitting an officer to 
 be within call on Sunday mornings. Hanlon bided his time 
 till the man of order should be at his elbow, and then, like a 
 flash, clasped in his powerful grip the engineer, falling on him 
 as he did so. He was secured in a moment, and quietly taken 
 away in a cab. The thing was done so quietly that few saw it, 
 and those who did thought that a stranger had fallen in a fit. 
 
 What aroused Hanlon 's suspicion first was that the engineer 
 wanted to see me, insisted on seeing me at once. "But the 
 Rector is preaching," said Hanlon. 
 
 "Well, I must talk to him in the pulpit," and suspiciously 
 he kept his hand in his pocket. Our poor clubman had a loaded 
 45-calibre revolver in that pocket. He was violently insane 
 before the officer got him to the hospital, and he died a raving 
 lunatic in a couple of weeks. 
 
 Surely I had a fine group of people round me in those days, 
 and Hanlon did not lower the average !
 
 3 2 
 
 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 It would be delightful to me to begin at the top of our build- 
 ing and, passing through it all, room by room, try to tell the 
 story of what those who met in those rooms strove for. Alas, 
 space fails me. 
 
 Athletic work among the boys and girls I pressed in every 
 way possible. The gymnasium occupied a whole floor, and to 
 exercise wise rule and governance here I found a man after my 
 own heart, Ernest Reinhardt. Mr. Morgan loaned a large 
 vacant lot at Weehawken to the men's club: a rough, rocky 
 place enough, but all hands turned in to smooth it, and a rea- 
 sonably good running track, cricket crease, and baseball ground 
 were proudly achieved. 
 
 We fought for healthy bodies, and we fought against the 
 chief danger, I hold it, of our American athleticism profes- 
 sionalism. We produced some first-class champions in their 
 various classes at the Metropolitan Association A. A. U. But 
 more important far, we did something to raise the physical 
 standard (which was low) of our neighbourhood. And we 
 made thousands believe that the religion we believed in had 
 works as well as faith behind it. 
 
 Then there grew up in the large church reading room an 
 unusually strong men's club, and it busied itself with the in- 
 tellectual and social side of the parish life. Concerts, plays, 
 "socials," "smokers," all such things the club produced. The 
 members knew what was wanted, and in providing it, took an 
 immense lot of work off the hands of my assistant clergy, and 
 did the thing far better than they (the clergy) could have done. 
 
 The all-important question of membership I settled myself. 
 I said I would have no man, woman, or child a member of any 
 organization in our parish house who was not a member (I 
 don't mean communicant) of St. George's Church. I had op- 
 position at first. To some, such a drastic limitation seemed 
 both narrow-minded and unwise. It was neither, I hold. As 
 the event proved, we had none too much room for those who 
 wanted to come into our church life and stay in it, and we 
 avoided the state of things that I saw round me in the later 
 years of my ministry: fine parish buildings whose influence on 
 and connection with the membership of those churches whose 
 name they bore seemed negligible. 
 
 I need scarcely say that my one aim above all others, as I
 
 OUR PARISH HOUSE 303 
 
 planned our parish house, was to stimulate and develop sound 
 religious teaching for our young people. If we succeeded in 
 that, other failures were unimportant; if we failed there, no 
 success won elsewhere could be permanent. 
 
 The officers of the school were first class. H. H. Pike was 
 an extraordinarily efficient superintendent; and the faithfulness 
 of the rank and file was illustrated when, unexpectedly, one 
 winter morning, I had a roll call of teachers taken and out of 
 a total of one hundred and sixty-four, one hundred and sixty- 
 two were in their classes. 
 
 Sunday-school teachers must know something to teach, and 
 must know how to teach what they know. A good teacher is 
 made as well as born. Here I long to preach a sermon on the 
 need of the twentieth-century child for religious teaching. I 
 shall say simply that from the day I became rector of St. 
 George's till the day of my resignation no aim or purpose in all 
 our parish seemed as important as was our ministry to the chil- 
 dren. The Sunday School must come first. 
 
 My "senior clerical assistant," being only human, was in- 
 clined to arrogate to himself certain rights that were not al- 
 ways good for him, or his juniors, or the parish. In a happy 
 hour I got the idea that each of my assistants should be "sen- 
 ior" one week at a time. While officer of the week, everything 
 in the parish came to the senior for decision before it came to 
 me, even emergency calls. Each man was thus constantly 
 put on his mettle, and was pretty severely tested as to his 
 capacity. Another good result of the system was that his 
 colleagues had more leisure in the morning hours to study for 
 three weeks in the month. 
 
 Another good plan in regard to my assistant clergy I de- 
 veloped. I made my assistants select their successors. I 
 found if a man had worked with me for two or more years, he 
 was immensely interested in securing another fitted to take his 
 place. He naturally knew a number of young clerics that I had 
 never heard of, and of their qualifications he was apt to have a 
 better knowledge than I. In short, in every organization, the 
 one thing I did was to trust those under me. 
 
 If you want to help men themselves, trust them! If you 
 want to get the best they can give you, trust them! No man, 
 no matter how gifted, can finally succeed if he will not trust his
 
 34 
 
 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 fellow-men. And it was because he never could trust any but 
 his inferiors, and not even his inferiors for long, that Woodrow 
 Wilson made, at home and abroad, probably the greatest failure 
 in our country's history. Never did fortune shine so persist- 
 ently for any man. But he would not trust his fellows, so they 
 came not to trust him. 
 
 I look back on my relations with the thirty-five assistant 
 clergy who worked under me at St. George's, and my heart 
 warms within me as I remember what a good time we had to- 
 gether. Never did a rector have better assistants than did I ! 
 And I know that often I tried "my boys," for my temper was 
 hasty and unreasonable, specially in later years of my ministry, 
 when I was sometimes quite worn out. 
 
 I can only remember one row we had, a disagreement, rather, 
 and I am inclined to think on that occasion my clergy were 
 wiser than I. I knew there was trouble in my clergy house, and 
 I guessed the cause, but I was rather taken aback when, one 
 morning, one of the staff who was whole-heartedly given to his 
 work walked into the study and said that after deliberation he 
 had concluded to resign unless I dismissed one of my assist- 
 ants, a very brilliant fellow. I asked how the other clergy felt. 
 He said they agreed with him, but did not wish to speak out. 
 
 If I had ridden a high horse that morning I would have hurt 
 the church and wronged "my boys." I came close to them and 
 asked them to trust me. I said that if after a talk with the man 
 they objected to I felt that he could not be trusted, I would cer- 
 tainly do as they wished. threw himself on me; was evi- 
 dently sincerely repentant at the time, and for a season, at least, 
 gave proof to his fellows that he was so. But I think I would 
 have done better by the man himself and by St. George's if I had 
 taken his colleagues' advice and bidden him seek work elsewhere. 
 
 I have written only of a few of the organizations that grew 
 in our Home. Of one, an inconspicuous but valuable little 
 agency for good, I must tell a story. Remember, libraries 
 then were not common. 
 
 Place: our Sunday-school library at front door. 
 Time: winter evening. 
 
 Books kept out over a fortnight had one cent a day charged on 
 them. Postcard sent one week after book due for return
 
 OUR PARISH HOUSE 305 
 
 by Miss Bays, our volunteer librarian. Receipt of postcard 
 means pennies owing. 
 Little ragged lad about eleven years old comes in. Bitter 
 weather, no stockings or shoes (this is rare). Produces 
 his book and postcard. 
 
 Little ragged lad: "I owe four pennies." 
 
 Miss B. (relenting): "Well, Charlie, you can pay one this 
 
 week and one next week." 
 Little ragged lad: "No; I have got them here. I worked for 
 
 them, and what is four pennies for all I have got out of 
 
 this book!" 
 
 It was "Robinson Crusoe." How old DeFoe would rejoice! 
 
 From the first idea of it, I had a hope that our parish building 
 might help me to win labour unionism to see that there were 
 those in the Protestant Episcopal Church who believed in the 
 aims of the best labour leaders, who saw clearly, as they did, 
 that to win mere justice labour must unite, and as a unit present 
 its claim. "Homestead" had removed for me all doubts on 
 the need of labour unionism men must cooperate if they would 
 secure the simplest of human rights. I am not uncharitable 
 nor yet inaccurate when I say that the ignorance of the clergy 
 and the indifference of the religious press to labour's cry for 
 justice was dense and inexcusable. 
 
 It is not a grateful task recalling the blindness of those who 
 are gone, but when I find people all round me full of pessimism 
 to-day, I know no better way to encourage and correct them 
 than by reminding them of conditions that obtained twenty- 
 seven years ago, which they are too young to have known, or 
 have forgotten. 
 
 The Hon. John Burns (member for Chelsea in the British 
 parliament, 1895) visited New York. He was welcomed at a 
 great meeting in Cooper Union, where I was invited by the 
 labour unions to speak, and afterward entertained at a din- 
 ner, where I was by them asked to speak to the toast, "The 
 Church and Labour." 
 
 As everyone knows, John Burns was leader in the great 
 London Dock Strike. More than one hundred thousand men
 
 3 o6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 were behind him. There were misery and want in London 
 then, yet John Burns so kept his head, so led and controlled 
 that mob of hungry and despairing men, that not one pane of 
 glass was broken in London. England never forgot that strike 
 or that strike leader. In after years he was a member of the 
 English Government. 
 
 The Churchman, the chief paper in our Protestant Episcopal 
 Church, took me to task for what I had done, and with extraor- 
 dinary ignorance and folly described Mr. Burns as a "foul- 
 mouthed agitator." I wrote the following letter to the editor: 1 
 
 To the Editor of The Churchman: 
 
 I feel very sure that many of the readers of your paper regret and deprecate, 
 as sincerely as I do, the article in The Churchman, Jan. 12, on "The Return of 
 Mr. John Burns." What ground you have for styling Mr. Burns a "foul- 
 mouthed" agitator, who has no respect for the institutions even of his own 
 country, I cannot think. To say again, as you do, that " as labour agitator 
 he has been trying to rebel against the British Government more or less 
 covertly," is to say what is untrue, grossly untrue. His own party op- 
 ponents in England would smile at such a way of stating the case. . . . 
 
 He is an extremist, of course; as such he naturally holds many views that 
 at present give rise to fierce divisions of opinion. But no one who knows 
 anything about the man or his career is likely to agree with the verdict of your 
 editorial. . . . 
 
 Church papers make a mistake when they pour abuse on such men. 
 
 W. S. Rainsford 
 St. George's Rectory, 
 Jan.14, 1895. 
 
 Old Mr. Dana, of the Sun, in those days was bent on proving 
 that what New York wanted in a paper was witty blackguard- 
 ism. At the end of a long editorial he summed up my social 
 usefulness thus: "Dr. Rainsford is a shallow, harumscarum 
 thinker, and is a conspicuous representative of a school of un- 
 wise and mischievous social agitators." 
 
 Several years later, I was asked to write editorially for the 
 New York Sun. 
 
 I would like to go on for many a page telling in poor part 
 the story of our parish life a generation ago in that Home. Fine, 
 full years those were, and God knows, as I look back on them, 
 
 J'The Return of Mr. John Burns," The Churchman, January 12, 1895.
 
 OUR PARISH HOUSE 307 
 
 I am ashamed I did not do more with the golden opportunities 
 that were mine. In our Home were gathered a most unusual 
 band of workers. What each did deserves a chapter, and I 
 have but space to write a name. But from Pierpont Morgan 
 to John Reichert, and from Alexis Stein to Charles James Wills, 
 I had with me whole-hearted men of purpose and power. They 
 bettered my counsels and forgave my faults. 
 
 Unwillingly I must end my so imperfect sketch of our Parish 
 Home. Our critics and our friends, when they visited us, said 
 we had a wonderful organization. But few saw that organiza- 
 tion was not the secret of our unusual success. That lay in the 
 living spirit that animated all; the spirit of service that dear 
 Jacob Riis had so well named "Salvation by human touch." 
 Nothing new in it, for it was Jesus' way. 
 
 That "radium quality" in a man enables him to sense where 
 a great need exists. I think we were among the first to see 
 that the crowded portions of our modern cities need, above 
 other needs, community houses. We tried to make one. 
 Lots of mistakes we made, of course. But the aim was good. 
 The people saw that it was good, and they came to us. Came 
 not only as needing what we had to give, but as bravely anxious 
 to help us to the utmost of their ability. They crowded the 
 place (and always there were more males than females), and 
 they crowded the church, too. 
 
 In 1899, we had a regular housecleaning. We cut out all 
 the dead timber we could find, removing from our roll all doubt- 
 ful members, with this result: 
 
 St. George's Members and Attendants 
 
 Living in tenement houses 5>34 
 
 In boarding houses 891 
 
 In flats, apartments, hotels 834 
 
 In private houses 537 
 (this included domestic servants) 
 
 Only forty-nine families were then living in houses of their 
 own of fourteen feet frontage and above. The majority of the 
 537 were domestics, living with people who did not attend St. 
 George's. 
 
 In the sixteen years, between 1883 and 1899, our communi-
 
 3 o8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 cants had increased from less than two hundred to over four 
 thousand. 
 
 Including gifts to the church endowment, we had raised 
 $2,000,000. On Sunday our collections were not quite so large 
 as formerly, as the rush of strangers had ceased, and few very 
 rich people joined us. But even so, in 1898 and 1899, each 
 year our gifts to foreign and domestic missions amounted 
 to nearly #8,000. 
 
 We had made good in local missionary work, for we had 
 won the confidence and support of the best element among the 
 youth of the neighbourhood. The boys and girls we had set 
 out to reach years before had grown to men and women, and 
 now thronged our gymnasium and athletic clubs, and very 
 many of them were whole-souled members of the church. 
 
 Ernest Reinhardt, my indefatigable assistant, gave special 
 attention to training wrestlers, and in that field the clever 
 medium-sized East Sider developed a quite extraordinary 
 proficiency. So much so that several times, and in several 
 classes of competitors, we won not only a Metropolitan cham- 
 pionship, but also the championship of the United States. Mr. 
 Reinhardt wrote without exaggeration in his report to me in 
 1899: "We are now looked upon as having in our club the best 
 wrestlers up to 125 pounds in America." 
 
 And just think of it! Some of those dear fellows in our 
 "gym" were in that crowd of little "toughs" that, on August 
 4, 1883, laid me flat on the floor in our Avenue A saloon. Yes, 
 the church made the Parish Home, and the Home remade the 
 church. All classes of people who made up the city's life 
 met in our Parish Home, and so met that they came to know 
 one another better and to respect and understand one an- 
 other more. 
 
 What was accomplished a generation ago, by inexperienced 
 if whole-hearted people of all classes and of many creeds, can 
 be, should be, must be done in every city and town, if our 
 American democracy is to survive. "Getting" cannot bind 
 men together. Nothing but men of "Good Will" whose lives 
 are a "giving" can. Many mistakes we made, and I, the 
 leader, made more than my share. But we had all of us an 
 honest and self-sacrificing spirit of service, and it was that 
 which won.
 
 OUR PARISH HOUSE 309 
 
 The old altars are falling. Let us build the new, and over 
 them let us place the everlasting name of Jesus, the Supreme 
 Servant of Mankind. 
 
 He chose His own altar. It was a cross; and at that altar 
 mankind will worship long after it has ceased to believe in or to 
 honour the impossibly partial, unworshipful God that all the 
 orthodoxies still persist in presenting to it to-day. 
 
 Oh, King of Earth, thy cross ascend, 
 O'er climes and ages 'tis thy throne. 
 
 James Martineau.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 New York 
 1890-1906 
 
 The ten years from 1890 to 1900 were the fullest years in my 
 life. If a man can do any solid work, he should be able to 
 accomplish it between forty and fifty. 
 
 In those years I was more free to take part in extra parochial 
 matters than had been possible during the first years of my 
 rectorship. 
 
 The machinery of the parish was now in good order. My 
 people were extraordinarily faithful and efficient. I can recall 
 no jars or jealousies within or without. Clerical antagonism 
 to what St. George's stood for, if still visible, was a party affair, 
 and the larger number of the clergy the country over gave us 
 an enthusiastic support. Even the General Theological Semi- 
 nary students no longer shunned us. They came constantly 
 to the parish building, and once a year I invited the whole 
 student body to spend the evening with my assistant clergy. 
 Then I gave them a good supper and a good cigar, and after 
 having by such means sugared my pill, filled them as full of 
 sociological and ecclesiastical heresy as I could at one sitting. 
 All over the country clergy have kindly reminded me of those 
 evenings. 
 
 I had by this time, too, succeeded in gathering to my aid a 
 very superior class of assistant clergy, picked out in the way 
 I have spoken of. These young men, living together in the 
 comfortable and spacious quarters Mr. Morgan had provided 
 in the upper story of the Parish House, were able, in an 
 unostentatious way, to entertain young clergy visiting the 
 city, as well as the assistant clergy of New York parishes. 
 Apropos of this pleasant privilege of ours, I remember what a 
 happy laugh we had, when one morning a young Canadian 
 
 310
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 311 
 
 Evangelical parson, Dysor Hague, a friend of mine, a good 
 fellow, staying in the Parish House over night, came in to 
 breakfast at the rectory a few minutes late, to find to his 
 evident amazement the rector seated at the breakfast table 
 with Fathers Maturin and Osborne, of course in the dress of 
 their order, seated beside him. The amazement of the Cana- 
 dian was so evident that I burst into a roar of laughter, and 
 after that we had a most pleasant time together. 
 
 Thus the clergy house helped to give the things we stood 
 for a very widespread recognition indeed. 
 
 I saw a good deal of Doctor Huntington, rector of Grace 
 Church. We were near neighbours, and once I gave him help 
 in a rather amusing way. 
 
 A sweet-faced lady of middle age called on me with a note 
 from Doctor Huntington one day. The note said, "The 
 bearer is known to me. She is a lady of Christian character 
 and wishes to be confirmed. I have advised her to go to your 
 confirmation class." 
 
 This was mystifying, but my visitor gave me at once the 
 explanation. She had attended Grace Church for years, and 
 Grace Church confirmation class for two years, but she could 
 not, try as she would, accept the dogma of the Virgin birth of 
 our Lord. Failing to accept it, Doctor Huntington said he 
 could not recommend her to the Bishop for Confirmation. This 
 distressed her extremely, for she greatly desired to join the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church. In no other did she feel so much 
 at home. "Well," said Doctor Huntington, "I cannot send 
 you up, but I will give you a letter to Doctor Rainsford." So 
 she came to me. I had taught for a long time that the theory 
 of the miraculous birth of Jesus was evidently not known to 
 St. Paul, and was in all probability a later and most natural 
 approximation of the early Christian thought to that Eastern 
 conception of divine incarnation, which had obtained wide ac- 
 ceptance before Jesus was born. Moreover, I contended, a 
 half man could never be example and guide, be tempted in all 
 points as we were. Complete manhood the Son of Man claimed 
 for himself. I could not ascribe any other to Him, or dare to 
 give Him less, and if he was not Joseph's son he was not wholly 
 human, etc., etc. Well, the dear lady was in due course con- 
 firmed, and after that communicated at Grace Church. So I
 
 312 
 
 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 made it easier for her to have what she longed for, and from 
 the hands she would have chosen. 
 
 The prosperity of our own work and the peace and good 
 will reigning in our organizations made it possible for me to 
 take some interest in matters that had no direct relation to my 
 church. For eight years I had set myself to a task that re- 
 quired all I had to give to it, my own local business. If I 
 could not make a success locally, I could not succeed at all. 
 (i) Could the poor, the unorganized poor, be reached by the 
 church and helped? (2) Could the organized and semi- 
 organized wage earners be drawn back to the church? 
 
 These two problems had been faced. If we had not solved 
 them we had at least shown that they were solvable. 
 
 So long as the success of St. George's was uncertain, I felt I 
 had no right to go outside my own "bailiwick." Now I was 
 freer to take a wider view of the city's needs and to urge on 
 those who would listen the best ways of meeting them. 
 
 If I had to face criticism not always just when I was doing 
 my own parish work after my own ideas, it was certain I must 
 be prepared to meet more criticism and harsher when I ven- 
 tured into a wider field. However, I was young and successful 
 and had many friends and a great body of convinced workers 
 behind me who trusted me, so it did not require much courage 
 to go forward and I went. 
 
 Poverty then in New York was dreadful. In the April 
 Forum, 1891, I wrote an article, "What Can We Do for the 
 Poor?" It was quoted widely. I must here content myself 
 by quoting one sentence from it only: 
 
 The whole aspect of modern Protestant churches in our large cities, into 
 which the tide of workers flows steadily, is neglectful of and repellent to the 
 self-respecting wage earner. The best churches, the strongest organizations, 
 have deliberately deserted the field when the battle is hardest, and have 
 sought comfort and ease in the society of the rich. As organizations stimu- 
 lating Christian culture for those who choose to attend and support them, 
 they answer their purpose well enough. But as embodying in any real sense 
 the comprehensive and aggressive mission of a living Christian body to these 
 times and conditions of ours, they are hollow mockeries and an utter failure. 
 
 So much was true when I wrote it. And so far as the Prot- 
 estant Episcopal Church is concerned, it is generally true 
 to-day, in 1922. A few there are, Bishop Williams of Michi-
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 313 
 
 gan for instance, and a small, well-informed, resolute band of 
 clergy who, in spite of misrepresentation and abuse, are doing 
 all that brave men can do to save our church from the curse of 
 social respectability. 
 
 In the early '90's I was practically alone among the clergy 
 in the Protestant Episcopal Church in attacking the social 
 conditions among the poor and the rich, too in New York. 
 It seems strange now, but the fact was that the clerical mind 
 was then occupied with other things, trifling in their importance 
 when compared with the momentous thing that was slowly 
 being enacted before eyes that could not, would not see. The 
 wage earner on one side, the capitalist and the professions on 
 the other, were ceasing to understand each other. A truce of 
 ignorance might be followed by a war of hate. The Church 
 was God's "daysman" between them, but she shirked the job. 
 Her hour of opportunity came and went. I doubt that it will 
 ever return. It cannot till she has a great house-cleaning. 
 
 Marshal Foch says that the army that loses the initiative 
 is already beaten. The Church in America and England lost 
 the initiative between 1830 and 1890. 
 
 Ever since I left Cambridge, I had read rather widely on 
 Cooperation as a possible move in the Industrialism of the fu- 
 ture. Sedley Taylor, brave, brilliant pioneer that he was, had 
 moved some of us to undertake some study of it in 1870. Think- 
 ing the subject might offer some variety to the occasionally 
 rather monotonous fare of clerical discussion, I read a paper 
 on Cooperation at "the Club." I don't think it was a bad 
 paper, but it fell flat. The truth was, no one knew enough 
 about the subject even to start a discussion of it, except 
 Doctor Henry. My Forum article, however, drew fire, and 
 from the quarter I expected. Doctor Dix of Trinity came out 
 with a public letter in which he said, "I have no confidence in 
 the judgment or wisdom of those who tell us that the Church 
 must reach the masses, purify politics, elevate the labour 
 classes." 
 
 My relations with Doctor Dix were always pleasant, and at 
 this time, though I did not know him well, I quite understood 
 that there was nothing whatever personal in his criticism. He 
 was but defending a view of the Church's duty that was then 
 held by ninety-nine clergy out of a hundred and by most of its
 
 3 1 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 prominent laymen. Admiral Mahan, who had been a help 
 to me at St. George's from the first, whose kindly and exceed- 
 ingly able criticism of my sermons and doings generally I wel- 
 comed, told me that, feeling that I placed both in my work 
 and my preaching an excessive emphasis on the humanitarian 
 side of religion, he thought it better to go with his family to 
 another church. 
 
 Speaking of Doctor Dix, I like to recall that, as time went on, 
 he modified his views as to the Church's social obligations in 
 New York. Certainly he very warmly praised St. George's 
 work some years after the letter from which I have quoted ap- 
 peared. I had just returned from a visit to Nashville, where I 
 had been holding a fortnight's mission in Doctor Manning's 
 Church. I was breakfasting with Mr. Morgan, as I did gen- 
 erally once a week. 
 
 J. P. M. "Doctor Dix is looking everywhere for a vicar for 
 St. Agnes's Chapel; he cannot find the man he wants." 
 
 W. S. R. "Well, I think my host at Nashville might fill his 
 bill admirably. He is a moderate High Churchman, but he is in 
 touch with men." 
 
 J. P. M. "Well, why not go to Dix and tell him of the 
 man?" 
 
 W. S. R. "Why, Doctor Dix would not listen to any sug- 
 gestion of mine for a place so important." 
 
 J. P. M. "You are quite wrong. I know for certain he will 
 be thankful for any suggestion you may make. Go down to 
 the rectory right now." 
 
 So I went. Doctor Dix received me. He had not heard, he 
 told me, of my friend, Doctor Manning, of Nashville, and I 
 told him why and how I had come straight from Mr. Morgan's 
 breakfast table. He was most polite in thanking me for my call. 
 Shortly after, my friend became vicar of St. Agnes's Chapel. 
 
 I made a public appeal to the authorities for the opening of 
 the Metropolitan Art Galleries on Sundays, free to the people. 
 That got me into trouble of a superficial sort. Then Heber 
 Newton and I were to be presented to the Bishop of the Diocese 
 for breaking canon law inasmuch as we had invited clergy of 
 denominations other than our own to preach in our pulpits. 
 That, too, blew over. My friends at the General Seminary 
 drew up a list of things done amiss and things undone, but the
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 315 
 
 Bishop must have pigeonholed it. These trifling matters are 
 not worth dwelling on. How strangely far away they sound 
 now! But I do want to give some account of the life of the 
 city as I saw it and moved in it then, and of some few of the 
 very many who helped to make working and fighting finely 
 worth while. 
 
 To a casual observer things had a discouraging look in New 
 York City. The standards of right and wrong in public duty 
 were low. The man who made money was listened to and was 
 popular. How he made it did not matter. Abram Hewitt, 
 who had served his country in Washington and his city in the 
 City Hall, with singular ability and utter disinterestedness, 
 was, when his term of office expired, as completely forgotten 
 as though he lived in Europe. For what he had done few 
 thanked or honoured him. 
 
 William C. Whitney, who used his many gifts and his im- 
 mense influence, social and political, to grasp the surface 
 railroad system of the city, and, having squeezed for himself 
 a great fortune out of it, handed it back to its owner, the tax- 
 payer, full of dirty water, was a citizen whom the despoiled 
 municipality delighted to honour. 
 
 Yet even then, the common folks, the multitude, seemingly 
 so inert, so voiceless, so misled, were waiting for a leader, a 
 teacher, and a guide. 
 
 When he was most needed, he came one of those preachers 
 of righteousness that men have always believed in and will 
 always believe in because they are so made and cannot help 
 it. His voice was not beautiful, but it carried. His message 
 was not eloquent, yet it was rarely inspiring and conclusive 
 He was destined to lead not only his own party but all parties. 
 It is but simple truth to say that for twenty years Theodore 
 Roosevelt was the paramount influence in the United States. 
 
 He was more than a great president, he was the greatest 
 preacher of righteousness this country had known. Who that 
 watched his steady conquest of the hearts and judgments of 
 his countrymen could remain pessimistic as to the future of a 
 people he led and taught ? Men followed and trusted and loved 
 and bitterly mourned Roosevelt because he was good. At the 
 long last nothing draws, nothing succeeds, nothing pays like
 
 3 i6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 goodness for men long to be good, and only in goodness can 
 we find happiness and peace. In the days I am writing of 
 Theodore Roosevelt had not yet found himself, and I must not 
 branch off on that part of my story here. 
 
 I tried to go to the Century on Saturday nights, ' for the 
 old Century in East 15th Street was the best, the most interest- 
 ing club I ever put my foot in. When Clarence King was in 
 New York, he reigned there without a rival on Saturday nights. 
 Never anywhere or at any time have I heard a conversationalist 
 so versatile, so brilliantly clever, and with so complete a com- 
 mand of himself and his subject under all circumstances of 
 verbal exchange. I give an instance of his wit. A group of 
 men were watching a game of billiards. E. L. Godkin was 
 one of the players, and King was looking on. Godkin and 
 King were friends; but like most, Clarence King often took 
 exception to Godkin's policies in the Evening Post, and of his 
 treatment both of his friends and of his enemies in that paper. 
 
 Presently Godkin fumbled a stroke. Quick as a flash, 
 Clarence King said quietly: "A regular Evening Post shot, 
 Godkin; too much English, and on the wrong side." 
 
 Lawrence Godkin told me long afterward that his father 
 loved to repeat the story. 
 
 When Clarence King crossed swords with Mr. Hitchcock, 
 of the Sun, who, like Charles Dana, its owner, was wont to 
 assume the role of a political Mephistopheles, a circle would 
 gradually gather round, till the room was full of silent men 
 listening to Clarence King. It was a unique tribute paid to a 
 quite extraordinary brilliancy of wit, wisdom, and learning. 
 
 Charles Tracy, my senior warden, got me into the Century 
 before any one but himself knew anything about me, and I 
 was most fortunate to get into it as early as I did. It was an 
 uncertain club; a man might be eligible in every way, and not 
 get past the committee on admissions for years. I was of 
 course only a listener on Saturdays, but I went because it was 
 the only place I knew of where no one hesitated to say out 
 what he felt about anything, and where questions of the hour 
 were freely debated. 
 
 At the Players you also met men worth meeting, and at times 
 the talk was good. There I met Augustus St. Gaudens, and 
 was attracted to him, though I never had the good fortune to
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 317 
 
 know him well. His youth had been a hard youth, and he 
 showed it. Some early influence had given him a set against 
 all churches and the Christian religion. To him that faith 
 was but the statement of a lying creed. Once I asked him if he 
 had ever read the words of Jesus. He said no. 
 
 When Phillips Brooks died, all Boston, delighted with St. 
 Gaudens's Shaw Memorial, would have him do Brooks. Now 
 St. Gaudens had never seen Brooks, and had never, I think, 
 been in a church since he was married. He hated churches, 
 and said so. Moreover, Brooks's figure and face did not lend 
 themselves as a ready subject to a sculptor who was a realist 
 as was St. Gaudens. However, St. Gaudens accepted. Hav- 
 ing done so, he had to get acquainted with Brooks and the 
 Brooks tradition and setting. He had to visit Trinity Church, 
 Boston; had to visualize the great preacher. All this he con- 
 scientiously tried to do. But the result did not satisfy him. 
 Then a new idea came to the artist. He would place in the 
 setting of his subject the token of that subject's inspiration. 
 He would place the Master's suggested face near his great ser- 
 vant who preached of Him. Thus it was that St. Gaudens 
 came to look for some actual possible idea of Jesus, the leader 
 and inspirer of Phillips Brooks. 
 
 So, for the first time, he read the words of Jesus; read them 
 with wonder, and with profound admiration. Thus St. Gau- 
 dens, the true artist, the lover of truth, came to see by the good 
 way of his own professional honesty that Jesus who claimed 
 all truthseekers as His kin. He saw and believed, but life's 
 tragedy lay heavy on him, and mortal disease crippled a hand 
 that could no longer do its master's bidding. 
 
 When he was dying at Cornish, N. H., they carried him out 
 to a place he loved, from which he used to see the sun set. He 
 said: "It is very beautiful, but I want to go farther away." 
 
 New York's fashionable life was rapid, inert, uneducated, and 
 quite without purpose, a mockery of what society might be in the 
 growing metropolis of a nation. The more socially prominent 
 people were the more anxious they seemed to be to avoid doing 
 or saying anything out of the most ordinary, ordinary. Con- 
 versation was confined to trivialities. People chattered, they 
 did not talk. If a real topic came up, the timidity of the dinner
 
 318 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 table was amusing. Nine out of ten hemmed and hawed, 
 waiting to see what way the host or the biggest man present 
 felt about it before venturing to commit themselves. Big 
 things were being planned and done, but it was bad form to 
 speak of them. 
 
 So, as I say, dining out among the Four Hundred or those 
 whose aspirations lay that way, unless you had some special rea- 
 son for going, was a waste of time. 
 
 But there was one hospitable corner, in the top story of an 
 old house on Fifth Avenue, near 31st Street, where once a 
 month I was lucky enough to meet some of the choicest spirits 
 of the town. The apartment belonged to Bobby Russell, and 
 he seemed to know all the young fellows, and the old fellows 
 always young, best worth knowing in the city. Alas! he is dead 
 and has left no competent successor that I know of. Story 
 telling was the special feature when we met, and such stories! 
 Hopkinson Smith generally had the chair, and well he filled it. 
 Jim Barnes ran him close. We all brought our own tobacco, 
 and our genial host supplied the beer. Nothing stronger, was 
 the rule of the house. 
 
 There was no club. Those who met were of Russell's choos- 
 ing, and we seldom were more than a dozen. But such nights 
 I never had or heard of anywhere else. Celebrities from other 
 cities and other lands sometimes came. Here I first met 
 Kipling. The post card calling us together said he was to be 
 there. Kipling's "Seven Seas" was just out to my mind the 
 best volume of poetry he ever wrote and we were all perhaps 
 just a little sore over his smashing poem on the "American 
 spirit" in it. The little Great Man came late, that was his 
 way, and made no apology. He was gruff, almost to rudeness, 
 I thought. Said he could stay only twenty minutes, as Mrs. 
 Kipling was expecting him. Then he sat down on the sofa, 
 tucking his legs up under him. After a little general talk, he 
 told a story. Someone capped it. Kipling told another, and 
 then the best fellows there got off their best, but in so quiet, so 
 unostentatiously modest a way, that I was filled with admira- 
 tion at the way the thing was done. Not one bit of bragging 
 in it, and a fine suggested deference to the acknowledged great- 
 ness of our guest. 
 
 Kipling fell silent, and sat there on the sofa, rocking himself
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 319 
 
 slowly backward and forward, till the night was far on. It was 
 late when we broke up. Kipling forgot the appointment he had 
 with his wife, and as at last we separated, he said whole-heart- 
 edly to Russell: "You fellows have given me a great time. I 
 don't think I ever had an evening like this in my life." 
 
 Later Mrs. Rainsford and I met Mr. and Mrs. Kipling at our 
 friend Lockwood de Forest's house on 16th Street. Mrs. de 
 Forest had a very fine cat. Cats always love my wife, and this 
 one leaped on her lap as she sat on the sofa by Mr. Kipling 
 after dinner. As the cat leaped up Kipling shrank back. 
 
 "Why," said my wife, "you don't like cats, Mr. Kipling, and 
 you write so much about them." 
 
 "No," said Kipling. "I don't like cats, and I don't care for 
 animals at all; that is why I write about imaginary ones." 
 
 I paid two visits to England in the '90's, and things looked to 
 me in Europe as in America. Vast fortunes sprouted like 
 mushrooms out of the earth suddenly, and an unscrupulous ac- 
 quisitiveness worked its will, not in individuals only, but in na- 
 tions. Parliaments as well as societies worshipped those who 
 did things. They were the kings of the hour. Cecil Rhodes 
 was the most unscrupulous man in England and the most 
 popular, because he was an "Empire builder." When Doctor 
 Jameson, who led the raid Cecil Rhodes had planned, and the 
 Jewish mining magnates of the Rand had financed, a rush of 
 five hundred cavalry across the frontier of a peaceable colony, 
 having as its object the capture of its legislature, all England 
 crowded the Criminal Court where he was on trial, to do honour 
 to a buccaneer who, according to all rule of civilized govern- 
 ment, ought to have been shot. The fashion and beauty of 
 London joined in that unparalleled exhibition of immoral 
 hysteria. 
 
 But England, the true England, lived, as the peace terms she 
 gave to the conquered Boers proved to them and to the world. 
 
 And then happened something that had never in the history 
 of free nations happened before. The very Boers who so 
 valiantly had defied her when she was wrong rallied to her, 
 fought for her, and died for her only a few short years after, 
 when she was right. 
 
 We are sinful men, all of us, but the God in us is hard to kill. 
 
 England's special brand of materialism did not tempt us in
 
 3 2o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE' 
 
 New York. With us Jameson raids were impossible. We 
 were not tempted to conquer outside countries. The bounds 
 of our own splendid land were empire enough. But in those 
 years we were worshipping in our American way that same 
 dirty god of the material. 
 
 Yes, big, bad things were being put through in New York. 
 Vast fortunes were made by means which, if they were em- 
 ployed now, would land their makers in jail. But New York 
 bowed to the men who did big things. She drew the line at 
 Jake Sharp, and put him in prison because he bribed with cash. 
 She had nothing worse than silence for the Whitneys, Widen- 
 ers, Ryans, Havemeyers, etc., who were Jake Sharp's more 
 clever successors in the business of grabbing public utilities 
 and squeezing fortunes out of them. 
 
 Here I will tell a story which explains partly why then and 
 why now, when leaders are needed dreadfully, those naturally 
 fitted to serve as such are not always on hand and, consequently, 
 your always ready crank, or your half-experienced, half-trained 
 reformer goes to the front, and does as much harm as good. 
 
 I was asked to speak at a great meeting in Cooper Union: 
 a meeting of protest against city conditions Tammany condi- 
 tions they were then called. This was at the beginning of the 
 campaign to elect William L. Strong, 1895. I had won a hear- 
 ing on the East Side, and in my church membership were 
 hundreds of "regular" Tammany men. They were Demo- 
 crats. They had to belong to some political organization, and 
 so they joined Tammany, and I did not blame them. It was 
 the fashion to denounce Tammany then, but everyone who 
 knew anything of the inwardness of city politics knew that, as 
 between the two political machines, Senator Piatt's and 
 Croker's, there was nothing to choose. 
 
 There was a great crowd. J. E. Parsons was in the chair, 
 Joseph Choate, Mr. James Carter, then head of the New York 
 Bar, and others whose names I have forgotten, were speakers. 
 From start to finish, the meeting was an attack on Tammany 
 Hall. There was great applause. I happened to come on near 
 the end, and what I said won no cheers. 
 
 We would accomplish nothing by merely abusing voters of another party. 
 Your cheering proves to me that you are largely Republicans. Well, if so,
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 321 
 
 you know that your Piatt machine is just as much out for the officers, just 
 as corrupt, just as inefficient, as is Croker's. There is nothing to be gained 
 by abuse of enemies. You must go to the city with a cause, something to 
 fight for, some definite good to win. Nothing of this sort has been named here 
 to-night. But I tell you there is such a prize to be won something that 
 every voter here is interested in winning. Your property is in danger, 
 your own property, as much yours as the dollars in your pocket. The street 
 railroads of this city are of great value to-day. As the city grows they will 
 enormously increase in value. Their income should be used to reduce the 
 rents and taxes you people must pay. They are being taken from you to-day. 
 
 I spoke for only fifteen or twenty minutes, and catcalls and 
 jeering in plenty greeted my close. 
 
 Mr. Joseph Choate was very kind to me in those days. His 
 son used to spend an occasional hour in my study. We walked 
 uptown together after the meeting. Presently he put his 
 arm through mine and said (I wrote his words down at the time), 
 "You are perfectly right. What you said to-night was true. 
 The campaign for reform should be fought on that issue. But, 
 Rainsford, you cannot count on John E. or Carter or me to help 
 in it, for we are all retained." 
 
 Each profession needs to do its own reforming. Each of us is 
 inclined to tell the man of another profession how to reform 
 himself and it. Lawyer, doctor, banker, clergy, merchant, 
 business man, and labourer, our democracy will not be stable 
 till each in his own house admits the need, and faces the dread- 
 fully difficult task of drastic professional reform. Here I make 
 but this note: When a good man more, a great and patriotic 
 American admits that his native city's government is so 
 rotten that under it the property of its citizens is being mis- 
 appropriated, but that, obeying the custom of his profession, 
 he and the leaders of the New York Bar have allowed them- 
 selves to be retained by those men who they believe are robbing 
 the city, and so by their own professional action have made it 
 impossible for them to take any part in publishing this wrong- 
 doing, or opposing the wrong-doers, then, I say, it is high time 
 that the leaders of the great legal profession put their own pro- 
 fessional house in order. 
 
 I am far from wishing to single out Mr. Choate for criticism. 
 No man in his profession was, so far as I know, so outspoken in 
 his condemnation of predatory wealth, whether in individuals 
 or corporate hands. I tell the story to illustrate how even the
 
 322 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 best men in the law may, by acceptance of its unreformed 
 usages, bar themselves from that very service of the public they 
 are particularly qualified to render it. 
 
 At a public banquet given to Doctor Parkhurst, in Decem- 
 ber, 1894, Mr. Choate said "he knew of his own knowledge that 
 there were in this city and state great institutions and corpora- 
 tions that paid immense sums for protection to the legislature." 
 I was riding in Central Park one day with William C. Whit- 
 ney, when he put the view that he and some very powerful rich 
 men then held as to what great lawyers were for, with as much 
 brevity as wit. 
 
 I had been of some little service to Mr. Whitney in securing 
 a very capable lady to act as governess to his daughter. Mr. 
 Whitney was quite devoted to his children, and he let me see 
 that he appreciated what I had done. I rode constantly in the 
 Park; so did he, and when we met there we often rode for a time 
 together. The next Democratic nomination for President was 
 then on the knees of the gods. Many thought it was Mr. 
 Whitney's, if he wanted it. 
 
 W. S. R. "Mr. Whitney, I suppose you will be our next 
 President." 
 
 W. C. W. "Oh, no. I am done with politics. I must make 
 some money. It is time I did. Mrs. Whitney has money; I 
 have none. I am going into New York Street Railroads." 
 
 W. S. R. "Well, they are in such a tangle you will need a lot 
 of legal work. Whom will you engage?" 
 
 W. C. W. "Well, I have engaged Carter. He is of course 
 good and able, but I am going to engage Root." 
 
 W. S. R. "Why are you changing?" 
 
 W. C. W. "Well, Carter tells me what I cannot do, and 
 (laughing) Root what I can." 
 
 Years after, one night when I was staying with Theodore 
 Roosevelt, I said to him, "Why in the day of your power did 
 you not put your strength behind Elihu Root rather than 
 Taft?" He looked at me and said, "You know. Root 
 would make a fine President of the United States, but no man 
 with his Corporation record could be elected." 
 
 The time is coming when the social conscience will expect 
 good men everywhere to regard their profession as quite as 
 much a means to serve the public as to enrich themselves. That
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 323 
 
 time is not yet. Nothing I had heard among labour people 
 depressed me as did what Mr. Choate said to me that night 
 when we were walking home. 
 
 I prefaced this chapter by saying that in it I would tell of 
 things attempted outside my parish, but attempting to follow 
 this plan I am at a loss what to take and what to leave. 
 
 A mission I took in 1892 deserves some mention. I went to 
 Pittsburgh for a fortnight, and as it happened, it was just before 
 the Homestead strike. 
 
 I cannot remember the name of the church where I preached; 
 but interesting services I had in a large theatre for half an hour 
 at mid-day. The theatre was packed with business men, and 
 some wage earners. 
 
 I walked all over Pittsburgh, as was my custom when I took 
 a mission, trying to size up the place and its people, for I still 
 looked for my sermons on the street, and found the habit pro- 
 fitable. I had heard no warnings of coming disturbance, so 
 was surprised and angered when I was halted by a man out of 
 uniform, as I crossed one of the city bridges, on a wide public 
 thoroughfare, and then and there was pawed all over by him 
 to see if I carried a pistol. My protest availed me not. I was 
 told he was a private detective in the employ of Mr. Carnegie. 
 Why people in Pittsburgh should be expected to submit to such 
 a condition of things I could not understand, nor could my 
 friends or my host give me any satisfactory explanation. In 
 New York we had lain down to men who did things; that I 
 knew. But we had not yet gone so far as to submit our per- 
 sons to the searching of their private detectives. 
 
 A day or two after this, when my "constitutional" had taken 
 me well outside the city, I had another startling experience. It 
 was late on a dreary afternoon; rain was beginning. The road 
 was narrow and muddy, a track rather than a road; it ran be- 
 tween hills small and steep. Down their slopes tumbled 
 irregular lines of cottages, all built to pattern, and mean and 
 cheap the pattern was. The doors of these miserable dwellings 
 stood wide open, and the people that had been in them were 
 now huddled by the roadside. There they sat in whole fami- 
 lies, men, women, and children, several hundreds in this one 
 place. Their poor little belongings, all they had, from beds to 
 crockery, were piled in disarray on the ground.
 
 3 2 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I can still see the pinched, despairing faces of the women, 
 the sullen anger in the faces of the men, as they sat homeless, 
 night coming on, in the mud. The Steel Company owned 
 everything in sight. The mills, the houses they lived in, the 
 stores they were forced to trade in, and not one corner could 
 they find where mother and child could shelter for the night. 
 
 The faces of these dispossessed people were stranger faces, 
 and their language I could not even name. I tried to speak 
 with them, but we seemed to have no word in common, nor 
 could I find an interpreter. Job's tremendous protest, hurled 
 against the nature of things, came back to me. "Neither is 
 there any daysman that might lay his hand on both of us." 
 (Job ix, 33.) 
 
 It was an amazing spectacle. It was not Christian, and it 
 did not look even American to me. Next day in the church and 
 the theatre I said so, and gave my reasons for saying so. 
 
 While in Pittsburgh I was the guest of Henry Kirk Porter, 
 then in control of the Kirk Porter Co. works. Mr. Porter 
 was an honest, outspoken Christian man, respected and be- 
 loved in the city. Before I left he gave me a dinner, and asked 
 a dozen or more of Pittsburgh's leading citizens to meet me. 
 When dinner was over, Mr. Porter said nice things about my 
 mission. "Doctor Rainsford, you have used strong language 
 in describing the social condition of this town. You have 
 denounced things you have seen here. I believe what you have 
 said to us, and of us, has been true and just. I am going to 
 , add to what you said a statement of my own, and if I am wrong, 
 you, my friends and neighbours who have come to my table to- 
 night, are the men who can and should correct me. I am going 
 to tell Doctor Rainsford we thank him for coming, and for 
 preaching to us the truth of God, and for his demand that 
 unitedly we work for social reform. I say we need reform, for 
 within a radius of twenty miles of the table at which we are 
 sitting, no working man can obtain justice in the local courts as 
 against a corporation. If I over-state, gentlemen, correct 
 me." 
 
 No one of the company criticized Mr. Porter's statement. 
 That was nearly thirty years ago. Since then great changes 
 have taken place. The schools that the children of the steel 
 workers of the United States Steel Corporation attend seem
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 325 
 
 to me as good as any in the land. But I would like to see the 
 labour unionist and the Master clasping honest hands in 
 Pittsburgh to-day. I think there can be no lasting peace and 
 prosperity till they do. No social welfare programme can take 
 the place of a man's rights. 
 
 I went back to my people more than ever a convinced labour 
 unionist. I had seen for myself the tragic helplessness of un- 
 organized labour. 
 
 Those dumb, defeated strangers, who were denied the right 
 to make any intelligible bargain for the one thing they had to 
 sell, showed me, more clearly than I had yet seen, two things: 
 
 (1) The sin of the treatment some, at least, of the strangers 
 in our land were subject to at the hands of corporations. 
 
 (2) And the danger of it. For if those who should lead and 
 help these people balked their duty, then nothing could be more 
 certain than that unfitted and unscrupulous leaders would 
 quickly undertake the leadership which they refused to take up. 
 
 My labour unionism got me into hot water, and into plenty 
 of it. 
 
 In 1895, the street-car strike convulsed Brooklyn. I said 
 then to my people: 
 
 Every strike increases the army of the discontented. Every man in whose 
 bosom burns a flame against what he honestly believes is a cruel wrong is an 
 element of unrest. I say then that every principle of common sense, as well 
 as of patriotism, bids us stop strikes. The only way to do this is to be before- 
 hand with them prevent disputes between Labour and Capital reaching that 
 point where, in blind fury, the strike begins. 
 
 Diffused public sympathy with one side or the other cannot do this. Pub- 
 lic sympathy is not organized, and does not act quickly or effectively. 
 Compulsory arbitration won't do, for once passion has become inflamed, it is 
 hard to force either side to accept the decree of arbitration. 
 
 There is another plan that, though it may not meet all the cases of differ- 
 ence, could be made to meet that large number of them in which disputes 
 arise between corporations engaged as public carriers, or in quasi-public cor- 
 porations and their employees. If it succeeded with these, it might be more 
 generally employed. Why not insist that all public charters contain a clause 
 providing for a joint board, in which men and corporations should be equally 
 represented, and that all questions at dispute should be discussed and settled 
 by that board? [I think Mrs. Lowell was the first to suggest this plan.] 
 
 In some trades this plan is working to-day, and masters and men say it 
 works well.
 
 326 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 There is no stability, no steady progress for us, as long as force is the basis 
 of settlement in industrial controversies. . . . To cry out for enforce- 
 ment of law is right; every good citizen joins in the cry. But what we want 
 in this city is a square enforcement of law on all, not merely on some. 
 
 Law was not made for poor men only, but for poor and rich alike. In this 
 strike, the companies seem in many ways to have broken the law. I protest, 
 heart and soul, against anarchy. But it is against all sorts of anarchy that I 
 protest. 
 
 The man who bribes the "boss," or the legislator, or the policeman to give 
 him more than the law allows him is a dangerous anarchist, the worst of all 
 enemies of his country, the most dangerous conspirator against the public 
 weal, because he is the hardest anarchist to detect. Easy to detect and shoot 
 down the anarchist with the brickbat in his hand, but your corporation 
 anarchist, who hires a brilliant lawyer to enable him to break the law by 
 evading it, is the most dangerous anarchist we have to deal with to-day. 
 
 I have quoted from my own manuscript, written in 1895, at 
 length here, and I confess that I am a little proud, to-day, 
 twenty-seven years after I wrote it, of what I said then: 
 
 The Seventh Regiment was called to serve in Brooklyn. In 
 it was then serving the son of a good friend of mine, a 
 member of my vestry. My sermon quoted above was more 
 than he could stand, and he came to see me, quite angrily 
 protesting that I had no right to use St. George's pulpit for 
 discourses on subjects non-religious, and on which I was ig- 
 norant. 
 
 Now Mr. W. L. B. had been very kind indeed to me; and 
 
 I greatly desired to have him remain my friend. I said what I 
 could to mollify him, but of course to give up the principles that 
 I stood for was out of the question. 
 
 "Let me tell you a story," I said. "A few weeks ago I was 
 strolling home from upper New York, and I noticed two brick- 
 layers in front of me, also on their way home. As we came 
 near Doctor McArthur's church on West 57th Street, one of them 
 looked up at its new face and said to his fellow: 'God damn the 
 Church/ His companion made no reply, and they passed on. 
 What are you going to do as a Christian man to remove that 
 spirit from the hearts of thousands? That man honestly, 
 fervently believed that the Church of Jesus Christ had gone 
 back on him and his cause. You blame me for speaking out. 
 What are you prepared to do? I don't profess to be a financier. 
 You are. And one of great influence. I will ask you a ques-
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 327 
 
 tion : Did you read Judge Gaynor's public statement about the 
 financing of the transit companies in Brooklyn ? " 
 
 He said, "I did." 
 
 "Do you think it a correct statement?" 
 
 "I think it is." 
 
 "Then, in God's name, how do you, a Christian man, hold 
 your tongue on a subject on which you are a trained authority, 
 and then turn round and blame me for doing imperfectly a job 
 that you know you, an able financier, should do that is, pub- 
 licly protest against crooked finance, which, if it is persisted 
 in, will get all the land into trouble. That bricklayer who 
 damned the church knows its true duty better than you do. If 
 you won't protest, don't blame me for protesting for you." 
 
 Well, W. L. B. was not convinced, but I had hope of keeping 
 him on my vestry, and at my request Mr. Morgan did a rare 
 thing for him: he called and urged him to remain. My warden 
 said that "personally he disapproved of my stand and my ser- 
 mon, but it was wrong to attempt to muzzle the pulpit of the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church, and he would not be a party to 
 any step by any church official that could be so interpreted by 
 the public." This was my warden's invariable stand and it 
 was of quite immense help to me and, I might add, a most 
 unpopular stand among his intimates. 
 
 W. L. B.'s son, who had been on duty in Brooklyn with the 
 Seventh during inclement weather, came down with pneumonia. 
 That settled the question, and W. L. B. resigned from St. 
 George's vestry. 
 
 The truth was, then as now, the classes hang together. It 
 was practically impossible to get any man of high financial 
 standing to come out in the open and denounce financial 
 crookedness that he strongly disapproved of privately. People 
 gird at the pulpit, cry to us clergy " Shoemakers, stick to your 
 last!" But those who criticize the clergy steadily refuse to 
 take the pulpit and denounce wrongdoing themselves. The 
 capitalists stand together, right or wrong. They who de- 
 nounce class action in the wage-earning class are themselves 
 ruled by the same spirit. The labour unionist who will not 
 denounce his class even when palpably wrong is but imitating 
 the man who employed him. The bonds of class must even- 
 tually weaken, but they are very strong still.
 
 328 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Kipling, as usual, drives straight to the point: 
 
 Now this is the Law of the Jungle as old and as true as the sky; 
 
 And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break 
 
 it must die; 
 As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and 
 
 back 
 For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the 
 
 Pack. 
 
 Yes, that is the Law of the Jungle. It is not the Law of the 
 City of God, and man's face is not set toward the Jungle, 
 thank God. 
 
 In those days, as I tried to look dispassionately at the work- 
 ing of this class feeling -jungle law in both classes a differ- 
 ence in its results, and on those entertaining it, seemed evident. 
 Class feeling among the rich or would-be rich, or that part of 
 the intellectual class who moved with them, was a peculiarly 
 narrowing and limiting spirit. These, as they clung together 
 round their fortunes, actually and literally illustrated the tre- 
 mendous prophecy of Jesus when he cried to men of the same 
 class in His own day, "With how great difficulty can you 
 understand or enter the Kingdom of Brotherhood and of God, 
 which is coming on this earth?" 
 
 Class feeling among the poor, while it was often narrow- 
 minded, misjudging others, and inflicting cruel wrong, had yet 
 one saving quality in it that was lacking in the other. Its 
 aim was to uplift the weak, and its spirit was not devoid of self- 
 sacrifice. It aimed to help the "under dog." 
 
 I did not then, I do not now, believe in enforced labour union- 
 ism. The labour movement has made great advances since 
 those days some in a totally wrong direction. There was no 
 limitation of output then, and little of the trickery, bribery, 
 violence, and crime that have played so large a part in the 
 modern labour movement. Capitalism sought to force its 
 will on the nation: it failed. Labour unionism faithfully fol- 
 lowed its example, as was natural for it to do. It, too, must 
 surely fail. 
 
 Of the problem of to-day, others younger than I can better 
 speak. So I am not dealing with a present situation; I am
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 329 
 
 describing a past situation. I am not writing as a theorizer on 
 what happened in the 'go f s. I am writing from personal ex- 
 perience. I had the honour of knowing some of the men most 
 prominent in the Labour Party. It was from their lips that I 
 learned their aims, and the means they would employ to ac- 
 complish them, and without hesitation I declare that all they 
 asked was a square deal and justice. And they got neither. 
 What they did get they had to fight for, bitterly and long. 
 
 Powderly, the much vilified leader of the Knights of Labour, 
 was as brave and unselfish a worker for the public good as I 
 ever met. More than once, in those bitterly hard days, he 
 turned a large slice of his salary back into the treasury of the 
 organization he led. 
 
 John Mitchell was one of the ablest men I ever knew. He 
 never worked for his own advancement. Roosevelt had a 
 great opinion of both his character and capacity. Lawrence 
 Abbott has a delicious story of the President's own telling. 
 When disputes grew hot at the meeting of owners and labour 
 unionists called by the President to settle the anthracite coal 
 strike, said the President, "there was only one man in the room 
 who kept his temper, and it was not I; it was John Mitchell." 
 
 The President later told me that but for one unfortunate 
 contretemps John Mitchell would have been in his cabinet of 
 1904. 
 
 If things looked dark in New York, there was another city 
 whose white, classic loveliness stood, for one summer, as a 
 world wonder to those who saw. I went for a three weeks' visit 
 to the World's Fair, and while there was doubly fortunate in 
 staying at the house of one of its creators, Mr. Burnham. I 
 first saw that city of the ideal as the sun sank behind it, on a 
 glorious evening in early summer, and the utter beauty of it 
 entered my soul. By no people before or since had anything 
 like it been attempted. The unity of it amazed me. The utter 
 idealism of it! Arid this the product of a material age, of a na- 
 tion of dollar worshippers ? Nonsense ! 
 
 That wonderful white city stood there for six months. The 
 Old World, having made up its mind what it must be, since it 
 knew what Americans were, never came near it, never knew 
 anything about it. But to those who came and could see and 
 understand, that white loveliness told an unforgettable story.
 
 33 o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The story of the soul of a great and efficient people, at root as 
 intensely idealistic as they were efficient. 
 
 When Chicago feted the men that made the Fair on her great 
 anniversary night, I was among the fortunate to be invited to a 
 seat at her table. I happened to sit next poor Stanford White. 
 There on the Peristyle, round a beautiful table, spread under 
 the stars, were gathered the men who had planned, financed, 
 and built what we looked on. I heard each man of them speak 
 of his fellows' work, not of his own, praising it in fine self-for- 
 getfulness. 
 
 I never spent three more profitable weeks than those at the 
 Chicago Fair. I lived near the Fair gate. I studied and 
 wondered. The people drew me, amazed me, inspired and 
 taught me. Plain America in a classic setting! Was there 
 ever anything so incongruous? But somehow the whole thing 
 succeeded marvellously. The buildings were beautiful, but the 
 millions that thronged them were the real exhibit America was 
 making to herself and to the world. 
 
 Order reigned everywhere. But to say so is not enough. 
 Something more than order was there: the evidence of a high 
 sort of national self-respect; no boisterousness, no unseemly 
 merriment. It seemed as though the beauty of the place 
 brought gentleness, happiness, and self-respect to its visitors. 
 There was no drunkenness. (I saw one drunken man in 
 three weeks.) I never saw a quarrel nor heard an oath, and 
 from morning till late at night I mingled in the throng. 
 
 When dinner was over, that unforgettable night in Chicago, 
 one of the creators of that scene said to me, "Look over that 
 Court of Honour. There is scant standing room in it. There 
 are one million people in it. To-night the dense masses of 
 them are crowded to the very edge of the long water fronts; and 
 within a few feet of where they stand the water is nine feet 
 deep. Any lack of self-control, any undue excitement, and 
 hundreds would drown." Said I, "Why do you risk it ? " (There 
 were no police cordons that night. The throng was too vast. 
 I myself watched an ambulance, as we were at dinner on the 
 Peristyle, making its way from the one end of the Court of 
 Honour to the other; someone was ill, and that brief journey 
 of four hundred yards took three quarters of an hour.) He 
 answered, "You can trust an American crowd." He was
 
 NEW YORK, 1890-1906 331 
 
 right. But I would add to-day, yes, an American crowd, but 
 not a hyphenated American crowd. There was no sign of the 
 hyphen at Chicago. All there were proud of their land, and 
 proud of the Fair, for had not the land produced it? 
 
 I came back to my work more than ever convinced of the 
 innate idealism of Americans.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 Anti-ism 
 
 I never found myself in hearty sympathy with the popular 
 form in which the good intentions of our would-be reformers 
 generally were expressed. I must coin a phrase to express it: 
 "anti-ism." I found I could not work with professional re- 
 formers. They are unbalanced, unfair, impracticable- usually 
 they grow more unbalanced as they age. I never did believe 
 much in the anti principle anti-saloon, anti-woman's suffrage, 
 anti-vice, anti-Sunday opening of museums, anti-vivisection. 
 What a strange list they make as I put down a few of them ! 
 All of them seemed to imply the surrender of a personal political 
 duty into the hands of good people who, obsessed by too con- 
 stant a study of certain evil tendencies in society, were the last 
 persons that should have been trusted to formulate or enforce 
 laws directed against those tendencies. 
 
 There is another serious drawback to your "anti" reformer. 
 He claims power over his fellow-citizens; power deputed to 
 him by a group, rather than by the whole community. Such 
 power is dangerous for any man, and for his sort of man doubly 
 dangerous. Dangerous to the public and hurtful to himself. 
 The more power he has the more he craves. That craving 
 becomes his obsession; and he is on the highroad to be as un- 
 scrupulous in his methods as the most unscrupulous politician 
 he denounces. Here I am not theorizing. I am but stating 
 what I have seen. 
 
 I could not, when I was young, see my way to approve the 
 course reform generally took in New York any more than I can 
 now, when I have unfortunately reached that age at which (if 
 the old Jewish sage is to be believed) life is nothing but "labour 
 and sorrow," though my experience of life makes me differ 
 from him. I am so unrepentant, indeed, that I do not approve 
 the last and cleverest "coup" of anti-ism I mean the forcing of 
 
 332
 
 ANTI-ISM 333 
 
 prohibition on the nation by way of an amendment to its Con- 
 stitution, rather than by an open campaign and deciding vote. 
 
 The last piece of successful anti-ism, prohibition, was "put 
 over" by a clever trick, and a powerful and most unscrupulous 
 "lobby." We may be ready for it or we may not, but the 
 way of its doing affords a bad precedent. The big things in our 
 lives, the lovely things, the things that lift us above our lower 
 selves, are not law-born, but are free loyalties. Not a multi- 
 tude of obediences that are forced, but voluntary compacts 
 that are free. 
 
 This is all old-fashioned stuff, but it is everlastingly true, 
 in spite of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. We 
 were growing soberer we really were! I fear we may, or our 
 children may, regret bitterly this forcing of sobriety on us by 
 the zealots of prohibition. 
 
 I do not admire Disraeli. I think his influence on England's 
 life was bad. He fostered and he flattered what was cheapest 
 and worst in the English character. He truckled to the liquor 
 vote in England, and did much to fasten its grip on the political 
 and social life of the time. But admitting all this, he struck a 
 high and true note when, on the floor of the House of Commons, 
 he said, "I would rather see England free than sober." That 
 is true Democracy! 
 
 Lord Acton, probably the greatest historian of his day, 
 says: "In ancient times the state absorbed authorities not its 
 own. In the Middle Ages it possessed too little authority, and 
 suffered others to intrude. Modern states fall habitually into 
 both excesses. The most certain test by which we judge 
 whether a country is really free is the amount of security en- 
 joyed by minorities." 1 
 
 There he uttered an unanswerable truth, one that our hurry- 
 ing, half-educated legislators and anti-reformers generally 
 would do well to remember. 
 
 On my return from Africa in 1913, I was asked by my old 
 "friend" the Sun, to write an editorial letter (signed), giving 
 my opinion of the value of vice commission work. It seems 
 worth reprinting here. 
 
 For twenty-five years I lived on the East Side of New York. I knew the 
 people there, poor and well-to-do. I knew the officials. I knew well the 
 1 "Essays on Liberty," page 4.
 
 334 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 agents of several such societies, and I had excellent opportunities for estimat- 
 ing the value to the public of what they accomplished. 
 
 I absolutely agree with the position taken by the Sun. We do not want 
 another vigilance committee on morals. 
 
 Without going as far as the Sun in its editorial article of May 8th, and con- 
 demning the agents of such private societies as " notoriously corrupt, unde- 
 pendable and dishonest," I do not hesitate to say that their inefficiency, big- 
 otry, partiality, and lack of intelligence; their incapacity to see and understand 
 what should be and could be for the good of a great city's life, led them often 
 into mistakes of judgment and intrigues so grave as to be almost if not 
 actually criminal. 
 
 When this was the case, the social power behind them shielded them from 
 exposure and often from even public criticism. 
 
 Such organizations have their birth in hours of excitement and popular 
 passion. They never lose their birthmarks. Their direction passes into 
 the hands of unbalanced reformers, good in their intentions, no doubt, 
 but above all things bent on forcing forward their own specially desired re- 
 forms by any means that seem to them allowable. Unbalanced men they 
 were, and are, and must be. They know little of the history of sociology. 
 They have seldom given serious study to the immensely difficult problem for 
 the solving of which they are sure they carry a " cure-all " in their pocket. 
 
 At best they are a species of vigilance committee in morals. Now when 
 society is crude and has had no time to organize itself, vigilance committees 
 may be necessary. I have lived in rude communities where temporarily they 
 did good work. But surely in a great city growing fast toward self-con- 
 sciousness they are quite out of place. 
 
 Welfare commissions and such like are but an application of a superficial 
 plaster to a deep and running sore. They do not reach its infected and in- 
 fecting source. Their tendency, as the old Book has it, is " to heal the wound 
 of the daughter of my people slightly." 
 
 They afford the lazy man or the man who wants to avoid doing his duty to 
 his city or country an excuse for shirking. 
 
 Yes, I agree with the Sun. In the name of all social common sense let us 
 stop creating commissions, stop endowing groups of excited and irresponsible 
 people with power they have not the wit or the training to use aright. Such 
 powers must be finally entrusted only to appointed and responsible officials. 
 Let us aim at orderly government for our great city and do away with the 
 vigilance committee. Even the best vigilance committees sometimes hanged 
 the wrong man. 
 
 Well, having said a small part of what I would like to say on 
 anti-ism generally, and having once more repeated a chief 
 article of my creed, that the Kingdom of Heaven never did 
 come and never can come by way of law, but as Jesus said it 
 would come, by way of "leaven," I proceed with the story of 
 my fallings out with the antis of my time; and the first of them 
 was a very mild and rather amusing affair.
 
 ANTI-ISM 335 
 
 Soon after my coming to St. George's, I was invited to make 
 the chief address at the annual meeting of the Y. M. C. A. 
 Its headquarters then were in the old building on 23rd Street, 
 near Fourth Avenue. A few days before this meeting, I had 
 dined with one of the important officers of the "Y" at his house 
 on Madison Avenue. I had a pleasant dinner, an after-dinner 
 cigar, and a billiard table was in plain sight. 
 
 I determined that when my chance came to speak, I would 
 urge on the "Y" the need of more liberal views in regard to 
 the needs of the city's youth. Urge those controlling it to do 
 pretty much what I was then attempting, viz. : give the boys a 
 chance for the recreation they so much needed. Give them 
 gymnasium room, and let them smoke somewhere, if they 
 wanted to. 
 
 In those days the Y. M. C. A. was far too "goody-goody." 
 It has greatly changed for the better since. But of course it 
 never will do what it might do for the youth of the land till 
 it abandons the archaic evangelical creed test that it still en- 
 forces on its officials. 
 
 Here let me tell of a letter that fine servant of his fellow-men 
 and supporter of the Y. M. C. A., George Perkins, wrote to me 
 not long before his death. I had urged him to use his great 
 influence in the "Y" to shake it free of the creed. Both he 
 and Mr. Cleveland Dodge wrote to me saying that they fully 
 agreed with me in this, but that they feared that in the face of 
 war conditions such a reform would entail a falling off of fi- 
 nancial support. I differed totally. I thought then and think 
 still, that if the "Y" had gone to the country, the whole country , 
 in that hour of national enthusiasm, with the plea that, since 
 the creed-divided churches could not unite to do the vast 
 work our two million boys across the sea called for, so it, 
 the Y. M. C. A., would claim the support of all fathers and 
 mothers in the land, and go after the boys in the name of God 
 and Country; if this ground had been taken and this appeal 
 made, the national response would have amazed the whole 
 world and what a deliverance it would have given the " Y". 
 
 Well, to return to George Perkins's letter. It was written 
 from France, and it told briefly of some of his difficulties in 
 getting the right sort of man to take charge of advanced sta- 
 tions of the "Y." "I began life," said George Perkins,
 
 33 6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 "sorting lemons, and here I am about ending it doing the same 
 thing trying to sort lemons out of the * Y.' " Alas, he did not 
 always succeed. 
 
 Well, to get back to 23rd Street and the early '8o's. I ended 
 my talk with a plea for larger and better gymnasiums, for bil- 
 liard tables, and a roomy and well-ventilated smoking room in 
 every Y. M. C. A. building in New York. 
 
 The feelings of the audience before me were evidently mixed, 
 but in the back of the big hall applause was tumultuous. On 
 the platform behind me were audible sighs of disagreement, 
 and among the opposition sat my host of a few nights before. 
 Here was my chance. So laughingly I turned to him and said, 
 "Well, I am sure that I can count on powerful support in ad- 
 vocating the radical measures from Mr. , for last night I 
 
 dined with him a/id he gave me an excellent* cigar, and also 
 provided a good billiard table." 
 
 Billiard tables and smoking rooms and splendid gymnasi- 
 ums came not immediately, but they came ! And I am proud 
 to have been the first openly to foretell them, at a great an- 
 niversary of the association. But that was the first and last 
 time I was asked to address the New York Y. M. C. A. 
 
 Its creed was an impossibly narrow evangelical statement 
 then, and it has the same creed to-day. Its religious directors 
 were good men. They were of Moody's school. The Bible 
 class was taught by someone trained in the organization itself, 
 and the usual handling of the great Book generally ignored 
 sound modern scholarship, for it knew nothing about it. Its 
 young leaders were men like Mr. Mott able, honest, and 
 sincerely pious and first-class organizers, but not averse to dog- 
 matizing on matters regarding which they were ignorant. They 
 followed good D wight Moody in opposing evolution. They 
 barred all who accepted the evolutionary hypothesis from their 
 platforms. Even Henry Drummond, who, I think, was one 
 of the greatest preachers of his time, was no longer welcomed 
 at Northfield. (Moody finally admitted him, but the spirit of 
 Northfield was hostile, so H. D. told me.) And this policy of 
 religious obscurantism has terribly limited and is limiting the 
 usefulness of the Y. M. C. A. 
 
 My next trouble with anti-ism rose from an effort to liberal- 
 ize the Sunday conditions in New York. These were really
 
 ANTI-ISM 337 
 
 intolerable. I quote from a sermon preached to my own peo- 
 ple: 
 
 Many well-disposed people in the city distrust Christianity, and one of the 
 chief reasons for their attitude is that we go, not to, but at them, in the 
 name of Christ. He went as a brother, but we go with a policeman's club. 
 Nothing can be more un-Christian, nothing more fatal. We say to them, 
 "We will shut you up to church-going by law. If you won't go to church, 
 you shan't go anywhere." Puritanism over again. It never did work; it 
 never could work, even under a Cromwell. We have practically said, "You 
 shall not play, you shall not read, you shall not rest your souls and bodies by 
 the sea or on the green sod of the open country." Some think I am exag- 
 gerating. I wish I were. Who, may I ask, opposed, and are still opposing, 
 the opening of the museums, kept up by the taxes the people must pay? 
 The churches! Who opposed the opening libraries? The churches! Who 
 opposed the running of street cars and Sunday trains the only possible 
 means by which the multitudes can reach the country ? The churches ! Who 
 forbid Sunday games to the young? Insensate folly! The churches! If 
 a boy, forbidden by law "to play on the public streets, gets half a dozen 
 lads to join him in a surreptitious game of ball on some vacant lot, where 
 pickets, placed all around the neighbourhood, give warning of the approach- 
 ing policeman who sets the enginery of the law in motion against him, until 
 all his boyish wit is aroused to avoid that law or to defy it? The churches! 
 That boy pockets his ball and hides his bat, but takes a mental oath that 
 churches, Sunday Schools, and all parsons are his natural enemies. 
 
 In New York there are many wonderful and beautiful things 
 that the poorest may see without cost. And outside New 
 York there is a greater variety of beauty by sea and lake and 
 woodside than in the outskirts of any other city on the globe. 
 But the churches wronged their Master in those days, for 
 they closed the door of knowledge and they veiled the face 
 of beauty from the poor of the city just as long as they could. 
 They had their chance with the working people, and they 
 threw it away; and now they wonder that those people do not 
 come to church. 
 
 It is worth while recording these controversies now long 
 past and dead, because we cannot fit ourselves to meet future 
 obligations if we do not remember something of the struggles 
 and changes by which we have won to any social betterment 
 that now is ours. And for this reason I briefly tell of another 
 reform movement I had a part in suggesting then, and I be- 
 lieve the future will yet see some application of it. 
 
 I was fiercely criticized for advocating the opening of saloons
 
 338 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 for certain hours on Sunday. I stood alone in such advocacy. 
 That was many years ago, but I have not changed my opinion. 
 I had seen, as a boy, more of the drink traffic in big cities than 
 most. I will quote from a sermon in St. George's, preached 
 at this time: 
 
 Let me make my position plain. I am not approving the present saloon. 
 I wish every saloon in New York could be closed and kept closed seven days 
 in the week. But it is as certain as that I stand here and am preaching to 
 you this morning that the present saloon, bad as it is, is the only means of 
 supplying an imperative social need in this city. If you would win people 
 from it, there is only one way to do so. You must give them something 
 better. Until you do this, to close the saloon on Sunday is to do all you can 
 to fasten blackmail and corruption on the city of New York. 
 
 To attempt to close the saloons, when thousands not only want to use them 
 but think they have a right to use them, is something worse than a mistake 
 in policy. 
 
 The chief danger in the conduct of the liquor trade lies in the fact that, 
 as it is now conducted, there is more profit in it than in any other. It is able 
 to pay the Brewer, the Distiller, the Saloon-keeper, the Policeman, and the 
 Politician. Take that profit out of it, and you cut the very sinews of its war. 
 
 The saloon of the future should be run to meet the needs of the city. It 
 should be a real public house. I have again and again insisted on the dread- 
 ful need there is of a well-organized City Public House. The drinking house 
 has gained its grip because the life of its victims is so dull, stale, flat! so de- 
 void of all legitimate amusement and recreation, that they know no other 
 excitement, no other relaxation than the semi-stupor, the grateful forgetful- 
 ness, of creeping inebriation. 
 
 Amusement, variety, aroused interest, these are the truest and deadliest 
 foes of the drink habit. Help such human instincts, such healthy cravings, 
 to a legitimate satisfaction in a Public House, and such places are no longer 
 snares to drag men downward, but kindly hands to help them upward. 
 
 The public house the people need is no mere dram shop, but a cheap, orderly, 
 democratic social centre. It would provide amusement music certainly. 
 It needs no standing bar. Its food supply should be cheap, plentiful, and 
 well cooked. The best soft drinks and milk, coffee, and tea should be as 
 much its staple in trade as beer and light wines. One aim it should embody, 
 the providing of reasonable and orderly social intercourse for those masses 
 of the city's population who are obliged by the unusually restricted circum- 
 stances surrounding their homes to seek some space and entertainment away 
 from them. 
 
 Such was the outline of my scheme in the early 'c^o's of 
 a sensible attack on the liquor traffic of a substitute for 
 prohibition. And some day I believe my dream will come true. 
 
 Charles Booth's great book, "The Life and Labour of the
 
 ANTI-ISM 339 
 
 People in London," had not then been published. When later 
 I read it, I found that Mr. Booth, after going very thoroughly 
 into the whole question of the public house, came to the con- 
 clusion that as things were, they were a necessity. 
 
 My appeal came to nothing then, but as I look back, as I 
 read this endorsement of my plan by the greatest authority on 
 social reform on either side of the Atlantic, I am glad I did 
 what I did. 
 
 As if these protests against popular anti-ism did not get me 
 enemies enough, I was to have a further experience in the gentle 
 art of making them, and with it I shall end the list. The city 
 schools might be a disgrace, and the teachers in them owe 
 their places to ward politicians too bad! But a cheque 
 to Mr. Gerry's society would set their short-comings right. 
 
 The tens of thousands of young women and girls in the 
 growing department stores and places of retail business might 
 be eking out a bare living on an unrighteous wage. If so, be 
 sure and support the anti-vice society, Mr. Comstock's society. 
 
 I find it hard, even now, so long after, to think on the doings 
 of that famous "anti" society under the guidance of that 
 honest, coarse-minded, ignorant, and unscrupulous man, 
 with any patience. The absurdity of Anthony Comstock 
 could not have been possible in any other city or at any other 
 time. His the final decision on what was or was not the bound 
 of moral freedom of what might be printed, or what might be 
 said! 
 
 The Society for the Suppression of Vice had then, as it has 
 now, able and good men on its board of trustees, but they did 
 not in the '90's, nor do they to-day, I fear, take charge of 
 their agents and force them to act with decency and common 
 sense. Comstock had become a moral tyrant. Mr. W. E. 
 Dodge, one of the best citizens we had in New York, was very 
 influential on the board of the society. I sought out Mr. 
 Dodge, who always was most kind and considerate to me. The 
 reasons why I did so I will state as briefly as I can. 
 
 I had come to believe in birth control. How any one con- 
 versant with conditions as they were could fail to believe in it 
 I didn't know. The subject is openly discussed now. Then, 
 few ventured even to mention it. Doctors were dumb where 
 the poor were concerned where the need of advice was great-
 
 34 o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 est but a large fee sometimes won cautiously given advice. 
 The Roman Catholic Church was openly hostile, and all Prot- 
 estant churches discreetly silent. And so steadily the pro- 
 duction of unwanted souls went on in New York. The worse 
 the conditions surrounding East Side infancy the greater was 
 the number of the unwelcome and unfit. 
 
 I had been in close touch with the poor since I was a boy, 
 and the cowardly, wicked horror of English and American law, 
 which still sends to prison for a long term any one who tells 
 an unfortunate woman how she can avoid having a child till 
 she wants and is ready to have one, grew on me. 
 
 But the chief blame was not with the Anti-Vice Society. An- 
 thony Comstock and those supporting him were but enforcing the 
 law as it stood. The blame lay with the American public itself; 
 lay in that spirit of cowardly moral slovenliness which we who 
 are proud of our Anglo-Saxon ancestry have inherited from it. 
 A moral hypocrisy which sometimes will not admit the ex- 
 istence of a moral obligation; that, instead of facing the fact, 
 puts its head, ostrich-like, in a bush. 
 
 When the law was made, it was a sound workable law, for 
 it then expressed the conviction of the best men of that time. 
 In those days men thought that the conception of child life was 
 a divine prerogative; that the begetting of good children lay 
 in the mystery of the Omnipotent and irresponsible Divine 
 Will, and that any merely human attempt at interference with 
 His decree was impious. 
 
 To us who know a little more of human power and unavoid- 
 able responsibilities, the law as it stands is a hideous, savage, 
 immoral law. A farmer would be a fool if he made application 
 of it to his cows. It is a disgrace to the intelligence and hon- 
 esty of Democracy, and yet, neither our lawyers, whose special 
 charge it is to advise us as to needful legal reform, nor doctors, 
 who know the admittedly terrible results that attend unfit and 
 unwilling child bearing; nor clergy, whose professed duty it is to 
 interpret life's duties in the light that shines from a God of 
 Truth, ever revealing to us newer and more beautiful things 
 none of them, I say, though most of them are steadily breaking in 
 their own family life the law, have yet dared to come out into the 
 open and denounce it for what it is: an evil-working relic of 
 barbarism, an outrage on womanhood, a betrayal of the child.
 
 ANTI-ISM 341 
 
 Such conclusions I had come to, but what was my duty? 
 Something I must do. I must help my poor. Among the 
 well-to-do, where the need of knowledge was not so great, 
 knowledge was spreading, and multitudes were practising what 
 the poorest were prevented from learning. 
 
 Public opinion was not prepared to compel a change in the 
 law. I could and did protest against the law from my pulpit. 
 So much was my right and my duty. What I did was this: 
 One day a woman of evident education and refinement came to 
 see me. She had happened into the church and had heard my 
 protest against the enforcement of a bad and unjust law. She 
 impressed me as a trustworthy woman; not a crank, one whose 
 own experience of life had disposed her to spend herself in 
 quietly spreading, among those who needed it most, a knowl- 
 edge of the methods of birth control. She had first-rate creden- 
 tials as to character. She made no public addresses, but did 
 her work quietly, as she lived among the poor. 
 
 This woman I determined to help. She asked for only a 
 living wage, and I gave her money and bade her godspeed. 
 She well understood the risks she ran, and quietly assumed 
 them in order to do the work that she felt she was called to do. 
 She was to come to me for money and advice. More I could 
 not do for her. This was the arrangement between us, and the 
 brave soul kept it. 
 
 After some months she came to me and said that Comstock's 
 detectives were dogging her, and she thought she had better, 
 for a time at least, go to another city. On this I decided I 
 would go to Mr. W. E. Dodge and have a frank talk with him. 
 Up to this point, not a soul but the woman and myself knew of 
 our arrangement. 
 
 Mr. Dodge gave me an appointment, and I laid the facts 
 as I have stated them here before him. I said, "Mr. Dodge, I 
 have given this good woman money; so long as she goes in and 
 out among the tenement houses, I will continue to give her 
 money. You now know the facts. Will you not call Mr. 
 Comstockoff?" 
 
 Mr. Dodge was exceedingly kind and patient with me, for 
 I used as strong language as I knew how in denouncing the law, 
 and the manifest, wicked folly of enforcing it. What he him- 
 self thought he did not say. But I got no promise from him.
 
 342 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The fact was, Mr. Comstock was in the saddle and New York 
 was afraid of him. 
 
 After this talk, Mr. Dodge had a perfect right to drag me 
 into a mess if he and his society so wished. I told him I would 
 
 continue to finance Mrs. as long as she continued to do her 
 
 work. 
 
 How mixed up things are among us poor humans, trying to 
 do right ! I know Mr. Dodge did not think the worse of me for 
 my very plain-spoken criticism of his society, and yet he would 
 do nothing to make Mr. Comstock hold his hand. Perhaps 
 he had not the power to do so. I am not sure of the end of this 
 story. 
 
 I had a sharp attack of rheumatism and was obliged to go to 
 the Hot Springs for a cure. When I returned, I was told in an 
 
 anonymous letter that Mrs. had committed suicide. I 
 
 never was able to verify the report. I went to Mr. Comstock 
 and told him what I had heard. He flatly denied that he knew 
 anything about it. But Mr. Comstock's denials were not al- 
 ways convincing. Alas, silence fell between us, and I never 
 heard from Mrs. again. 
 
 Not long after my difference with Mr. Dodge, a monster 
 meeting of the unemployed was held in Madison Square Gar- 
 den. There were more than 14,000 men present. Speakers 
 had some difficulty in gaining a hearing. The working peo- 
 ple knew I sympathized with them in the great distress then 
 prevalent. They knew I stood for justice and a square deal, 
 which they had not always had. And when I stood up they 
 were silent and gave me a hearing. 
 
 The next morning a letter 1 of warm congratulation came to 
 me from Mr. Dodge, and his writing as he did, under the cir- 
 cumstances he did, not only touched me deeply, but made me 
 feel that Mr. Dodge did not, in his heart of hearts, feel con- 
 fident that he was altogether right and I altogether wrong. 
 
 I look back on those years in the 'qjd's with satisfaction. The 
 small part I took in advocating reforms was taken with de- 
 
 ,,, _. _ Jan. 20, i8q-j. 
 
 'Dear Dr. Rainsford: j ' yj 
 
 I cannot go to sleep to-night without telling you again [he had shaken every hand on the 
 
 platform at the time] how much I thank you for your splendid, earnest, and most sensible 
 
 talk this evening. It was quite a miracle to be able to grip and hold and interest those tired 
 
 people as you did. Gratefully Yours, 
 
 W. E. Dodge.
 
 ANTI-ISM 343 
 
 liberation. Critics said I acted as I did in order to get noto- 
 riety. Of that charge my conscience freed me. I did what I 
 did after a careful survey of actual conditions, and not till I 
 had consulted the wisest and most public-spirited men I knew 
 and first among these was Abram Hewitt. They, of course, 
 did not always agree with me, but by way of this criticism I 
 had the advantage of other men's points of view who were in 
 sympathy with reform. 
 
 Abram Hewitt, after his retirement from public life, was be- 
 yond question the first citizen in New York, and during those 
 years he was an invaluable friend to me. Excepting Theodore 
 Roosevelt, I think Mr. Hewitt was the ablest, most cultured, 
 and certainly most honest politician I ever knew. Some said 
 he lacked tact in dealing with his fellows. Of this I cannot 
 judge. All I do know is, he was mighty kind to me. Why 
 his capacity and character did not receive a wider public recog- 
 nition I never understood. All he had and was, he ever placed 
 at his country's service. And when he chose to exercise it, 
 his personal charm was as remarkable as his erudition. He 
 knew New York from the Battery to Harlem, both its political 
 parties, their leaders, and their rank and file. He knew Wash- 
 ington. He was extraordinarily acute and brilliant in his 
 judgment of men, and at a time when money was sought more 
 persistently than it ever had been, Abram Hewitt cared noth- 
 ing about money. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Peter Barlow were friends of ours in those 
 early days. (Barlow afterward became a useful and popular 
 magistrate.) We dined together sometimes, and Barlow de- 
 termined that I should meet Mr. Hewitt at dinner, which I did. 
 That first night of our meeting, Mr. Hewitt was so kind as to 
 let me feel that he would like to see more of me. "I am a 
 rather lonely old man," he said; "if you are ever free of an 
 evening and could come and spend an hour in my library, I 
 would be glad." 
 
 So rejoicingly I went and sat at his feet, and learned more 
 from him about New York, its needs and dangers, and what 
 might and might not be possible to do for it, than any other man 
 in its two and a half millions could have taught me. 
 
 For reliable information and for cordial and understanding 
 encouragement, I owe much to Abram Hewitt.
 
 344 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 When in company, Mr. Hewitt was often silent. He suffered 
 from dyspepsia and showed it. When alone with him, or in a 
 small and congenial party, he was, with the sole exception 
 of Clarence King, the most brilliant conversationalist I ever 
 listened to. 
 
 One dinner with him stands out in my memory. It was on 
 April 12, 1899, and again Peter Barlow was our host. He, Doc- 
 tor Huntington, and I were the party. I made some notes of 
 what he said at the time, and rewrote them when I went home 
 that night. Here I put them down as recorded in my note- 
 book. 
 
 Mr. H. very brilliant. Told story of Tilden-Hays election. Mr. H. 
 chairman of National Democratic Committee. Mr. H. also on Committee 
 of Thirteen. Eight Republicans and seven Democrats on whose vote and 
 decision the acceptance of the electoral vote for Louisiana depended. 
 
 Mr. H. said, "John Sherman bought the Louisiana return for #200,000, 
 paying #60,000 cash. More cash afterwards; the balance in offices." 
 
 Mr. H. then told of the prayer meeting at Mr. Frelinghuy sen's house, 
 when Mr. Frelinghuysen himself made a long prayer, calling on God to reveal 
 to Chief Justice Bradley that he was raised up of God to give a decision in 
 favour of the Republican party. Chief Justice Bradley had written his deci- 
 sion over night, and had read it to several men. In the morning he added a 
 sentence, viz.: "Notwithstanding, I vote for, etc., etc." "See," said Mr. 
 Hewitt, " the power of prayer!" 
 
 Said Mr. Hewitt, "The wonderful thing was they all thought they were 
 right." "Though," he added, "John Sherman can never look me in the face 
 since." 
 
 "So," said I, "did the Republican party think it was right to spend millions 
 in bribery in order to elect Mr. McKinley!" 
 
 "And so they were," said Mr. Hewitt. "Anything was right to save us 
 from free silver and Populism." 
 
 Strange! John Sherman cannot look Mr. Hewitt in the face because he, 
 John Sherman, has bought Louisiana's election returns for $200,000. But 
 Hanna and crew do nothing wrong in spending millions in buying votes for 
 McKinley. One buys the officers who hold the urns. The other buys the 
 votes before they are placed in the urns. Strange! Strange! I suppose 
 some of the moral conclusions and distinctions we make to-day may seem as 
 difficult of explanation to our children's children. 
 
 With one more short note from the kindest and most con- 
 siderate Bishop a "reckless, radical rector" ever had, I close 
 this poor sketch of my very happy contendings with "anti- 
 ism."
 
 ANTI-ISM 345 
 
 My doctor had ordered me to take some two weeks' rest in 
 mid-winter. I grew to be very tired after preaching. 
 
 My dear Boy: 
 
 I have communicated with Bishop C. If he cannot preach for you, I can. 
 In any case, give yourself no concern. I will see that your pulpit is adorned 
 with a pair of lawn sleeves. Don't worry. Accept cheerfully the discipline 
 of inaction, and rely unreservedly on the love and loyalty of those you have 
 left behind you. 
 
 Ever yours, 
 
 H. C. P. 
 
 When I was in trouble, I always had sympathetic and fath- 
 erly help from dear H. C. P., and a letter of his reached me in 
 the wilds of Africa shortly before he died. With it he sent a 
 large batch of newest books. I carried that precious letter in 
 a little leather bag which also contained my cash. That little 
 bag was stolen (the only thing I had stolen in these years) by 
 a Wakamba porter who slipped away from the other porters 
 while we were cutting our way through a particularly bad piece 
 of forest. Kongoni, my Wakamba gunbearer, was so put out 
 by the faithlessness of his fellow-tribesman, that he asked my 
 permission to take his trail and hunt him down. At that time 
 we were in very wild country many hundreds of miles from the 
 coast. Kongoni went off alone. Two months later he brought 
 me the thief chained. The man still had the bag, but of course 
 cash and letter were gone. 
 
 Many a loving message I had from my dear Bishop, but 
 above them all I valued this last lost letter.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 The Protestant Episcopal Church 
 
 When religion has become an orthodoxy its day of inwardness is over. 
 W. James. 
 
 I have never united myself to any church because I have found diffi- 
 culty in giving my assent without mental reservation to the long, com- 
 plicated statements of Christian doctrine which characterize the articles 
 of belief and confessions of faith. When any church will inscribe on its 
 altar, as its sole qualification of membership, the Saviour's condensed 
 statement of the substance of both law and gospel, " Thou shalt love the 
 Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy 
 mind, and thy neighbour as thyself," that church will I join with all my 
 heart and all my soul. A. Lincoln. (Frank B. Carpenter's "Life.") 
 
 I have some things to say, not of one church but of all the 
 churches, which must be said even if it is a hard thing to say 
 them. Then, further, some things to say about the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church. Not in doctrine, not in practical service, 
 not in social vision, do the churches fit the time. 
 
 To this wholesale condemnation churchmen usually make a 
 reply that seems to them adequate. "The Church was not in- 
 tended to fit the time, but to leaven and reform and Christian- 
 ize it." 
 
 I admit it. But how do you propose to do this? There is 
 only one way an old way, a New Testament way "By com- 
 mending the truth to every man's conscience in the sight of 
 God," and if any one contends that the modern church is suc- 
 ceeding in this duty, I have no time, I fear, to dispute with him. 
 
 All churchmen admit that the church exists for humanity at 
 large, but it is evident that to lead and win humanity, she must 
 fit herself to the advance of human knowledge and human re- 
 quirement. I have stressed in many places in this story the 
 evident reason of her failure to do this. It is because she has 
 left the path her Master trod. She has ceased to follow the 
 example of Jesus, the great Truthbringer. She has failed to 
 
 346
 
 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 347 
 
 grasp the one supreme central idea of His Life. The age we 
 live in is striving toward the ideal of Jesus. The church that 
 claims to explain and champion and represent Him is forgetting 
 it. 
 
 Hear Him, in the gray dawn of His last morning on earth, 
 when, crushed and shaken in body, forsaken and misunder- 
 stood, he faced the final torture of the cross. " For this cause 
 was I born, for this cause came I into the world, to bear witness 
 to the truth." 
 
 Let that mighty challenge ring out once more, and not since 
 he uttered it would the response to it, to Him, be so prompt, so 
 universal. ; 
 
 No observant man can doubt for an instant that, in a pecu- 
 liarly universal degree, our age is truth-loving, truth-seeking. 
 Moreover, in its search for truth, it has an evident and an ex- 
 alted purpose. That purpose is the service of mankind. 
 Offer this and volunteers crowd. No danger holds them back, 
 no difficulties daunt them. Men and women "count not their 
 lives dear to themselves" if they can but open wider the human 
 pathway to happiness and good. 
 
 These people often think they have no religion, yet are willing 
 resolutely to die to perfect some discovery that has just a hope 
 in it of lessening pain or prolonging life. If this is not religion, 
 what is? Truth for truth's sake, and for man's sake, never 
 shone with such radiance of alluring beauty before a generation 
 of seeking, worshipping mankind. Men love her, follow her, 
 serve her, die for her, as never before. But less and less do they 
 heed or care for or believe in the Church, for they do not believe 
 that the Church cares for the truth as she used to care, any 
 longer. 
 
 But I would not deal in generalities only. I point to specific 
 causes of failure in my own church, the Protestant Episcopal. 
 The doctrines supposed to be held by her ministers are ex- 
 pressed in language of a long past. They represented men's 
 reasoned judgment then; they often outrage it now. The 
 clergy have to explain them away, and but few of them have 
 scholarship sufficient to do this difficult thing satisfactorily, 
 even if they wish to do it. Jowett's witty cynicism has truth 
 in it, " You must try to believe in God, spite of what the clergy 
 say."
 
 348 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 But the cause of error and of consequent weakness lies deeper 
 than this admitted inability of the clergy to explain. 
 
 It lies in their mistaken concept of the nature of Religious 
 Truth itself. They view "the faith once delivered to the 
 saints" as a golden brick, not as a living, growing, flowering, 
 fruiting seed, which Jesus said it was. 
 
 They insist on an accurate, complete, final statement of the 
 Truth. If they would but stop and think, pause long enough 
 to read a little history, two things would be evident to them. 
 First, that a "finished" truth is, from the very nature of truth, 
 a lie. And next, that it invariably becomes not a passive, 
 harmless sort of lie, but an active lie; in short, an idol, as the 
 brazen serpent of old was first a symbol of salvation; but when 
 the Jews would make it more than a symbol, and worshipped it, 
 became a deadly error, an idol to be stamped out. 
 
 But the masses of religious-minded people cannot be ex- 
 pected to reason these things out for themselves. They can- 
 not recast old creeds and offices. They must take what the 
 Church puts in their hands, and so we are back again at man- 
 uals of religion, excellent in their own day, and most certainly 
 full of misleadings in the present day. 
 
 The Bible itself, our matchless Book of Common Prayer, 
 our rich Hymnology all full of faults; not one of them a per- 
 fect thing, not one of them anything more than a crutch to help 
 us poor "cripples of God" to hobble toward our Father. If 
 the Church would but offer them for what they are, they are 
 invaluable. But insist on their acceptance as complete and 
 final, and you drive out of the Church the honest and educated, 
 the very people on whose presence within her, her health and 
 growth, yes, her very life, depend. 
 
 Still I am "not specific!" Well, take one of a multitude of 
 instances. When we bring our dead to the open grave, our 
 church orders these words to be said or sung; their sonorous 
 splendour is almost unmatched in English prose: 
 
 Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of 
 misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as a shadow 
 and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death. Of 
 whom may we seek for succour but of Thee, O Lord, Who for our sins art 
 justly displeased?
 
 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 349 
 
 Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful 
 Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death. 
 
 Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. Shut not Thy merciful 
 ear to our prayer, but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O 
 holy and merciful Saviour, Thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, 
 at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from Thee. 
 
 Would it be possible to put in nobler language a more un- 
 worthy estimate of the love and mercy of God? Here is the 
 wailing of a heathen anguish, nothing higher, and nothing 
 more. What an intolerable conception of God! What a 
 travesty of the Gospel of Jesus! What a mockery of the 
 Christian hope! 
 
 I shall not go further into the discussion of doctrinal state- 
 ments, for the subject is unprofitable. The Bible and Prayer- 
 Book are full of things that stated as they there are are no longer 
 true. 
 
 We older people, dwelling on our religious past, are hypno- 
 tized by its memories. We still, at least partially, think and 
 worship in its terms. Old formularies are precious, and we 
 hold to them by reading new meanings into them. But to the 
 younger, keener, more analytical spirit of our children, this is 
 not possible, and they will not tolerate things that seem to 
 them manifestly untrue. 
 
 With that spirit of the children the Church has little sym- 
 pathy. She does not understand it, or know how to meet it. 
 Like the Jewish Church that discarded Jesus, she is so wedded 
 to a past God that she cannot see a present God; so faithful to a 
 past time that she cannot believe in a present time. Her past 
 strangles and gags her. She staggers to battle, weighted down 
 in an intolerably complete suit of armour, every little bit of it 
 guaranteed ancient and genuine. In order to fight, she must 
 strip, but an exaggerated and perverted sense of religious 
 decency forbids her stripping. So, for any radical reform, she 
 is quite unprepared. She cannot remodel her offices or re- 
 state her creeds. To attempt it at present would be suicide. 
 She would be torn to pieces in the process. And yet to do this 
 is a vital necessity. 
 
 The Church is holding back from the complete reinterpreta- 
 tion of all her doctrines that an acceptance of Evolution must 
 involve. But since she must face such a reinterpretation,
 
 350 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 hesitation is disastrous to herself and to the world. The 
 docile and obedient multitudes she once commanded are slowly- 
 melting away, while to other increasing multitudes the forms 
 and phrasing of popular Christian statement are becoming un- 
 satisfactory or intolerable. 
 
 For myself, so far as the Protestant Episcopal Church is 
 concerned, I feel like saying, "I believe in the Church of one 
 hundred years hence." 
 
 There is one thing, however, that I think the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church might do, and it would be a wise and signifi- 
 cant thing to do it. Furthermore, it is idle to propose any 
 real reform measures till it is done, for it must be pre- 
 liminary to any doctrinal reforms. That is, to democratize 
 the Church's governing body. Make it representative, make 
 it akin to the other representative institutions of the country; 
 as at present constituted, neither the Diocesan conventions, 
 meeting annually, nor the General Convention, meeting tri- 
 ennially, are really representative at all. 
 
 To protect minorities is but right. This our church does. 
 But so to gerrymander the Church's representation that her 
 minorities can, and often do, outvote large majorities, is as 
 foolish as it is dishonest. This is the actual, the undisputed 
 condition in the Protestant Episcopal Church to-day. 
 
 The parish is the first unit. The diocese the second. All 
 parishes great and small have the same voice, the same equal 
 voting power, in the Diocesan Convention. All the Dioceses, 
 great and small, have the same voice, the same voting power, 
 in the General Convention, which is the Congress of the Church. 
 
 To illustrate what I say: I am, at the moment of writing, stay- 
 ing in the parish of Lewisboro, New York. Now Lewisboro, a 
 small country parish, that certainly has not twenty-five actual 
 communicants, has exactly the same voice and power in the 
 Diocesan Convention of New York as had St. George's Church 
 when I was its rector, and St. George's had certainly more 
 than five thousand bona-fide communicants. See how this 
 system of unjust representation works in the General Conven- 
 tion. In the Diocese of New York there are four hundred and 
 twenty clergy; in Pennsylvania, three hundred and nine; 
 in Massachusetts, two hundred and fifty. In the Diocese of 
 Marquette there are nineteen clergy; yet in the councils of our
 
 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 351 
 
 church, that diocese has precisely the same power to direct and 
 change the course of our sociological or doctrinal policy as have 
 any one of these great dioceses. 
 
 Let me put it another way. Thirteen of our dioceses have 
 all of them together but four hundred and seventeen clergy. 
 The Diocese of New York has four hundred and twenty. These 
 thirteen cast in convention fifty-two clerical and fifty-two lay 
 votes one hundred and four in all as against New York's 
 four clerical and four lay votes. The system has the extraor- 
 dinary result that dioceses feeble in numbers and resources, 
 dioceses where our church has no real grasp on any class of the 
 population, have an overwhelmingly disproportionate repre- 
 sentation in the supreme legislative body of the Church. The 
 feeble rule the strong. This is a new kind, and a very bad kind, 
 of autocracy. 
 
 I have travelled a great deal in the United States. I have 
 preached or lectured in eighteen universities. And, looking 
 round me everywhere, the absurdity and harm fulness of our 
 church's system of representation grew on me. Till this an- 
 omaly is removed, this first manifestly righteous reform put 
 through, the tail of the Protestant Episcopal Church will wag 
 the body of that church, which is a state of things we are taught 
 is impossibly unnatural, even in the case of a dog. 
 
 During the latter years of my ministry, I discussed this ques- 
 tion of readjustment of the churches' representation con- 
 stantly. But I could not see that I gained anything. The 
 question was regarded as academic. "The smaller dioceses 
 will never consent," was my answer. 
 
 The failure of good men to welcome even a church-wide con- 
 flict to win this reform, if such was necessary, amazed me. I 
 knew my own limitations too well to attempt to lead an attack 
 in our own convention. I had no gift as a debater. I found I 
 could do something with the clerical mind when it was in its 
 very youthful and formative stage, but I never did, and never 
 could, by argument win or influence it to any observable degree 
 once it was mature. 
 
 Doctor Huntington, of Grace Church, was easily the leader 
 in our convention in those years, and I tried to convince him 
 of the immediate necessity of this great and preliminary reform. 
 I had several long talks with Doctor Huntington, and in prin-
 
 35* 
 
 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 ciple he agreed. But the trouble with Doctor Huntington was 
 that his approach to a question was that of a lawyer rather 
 than that of a statesman, and these two so sharply differentiated 
 qualities it is hard to find in one man. 
 
 I remember one day, after a long discussion in his study, I 
 told him the story of Bishop Magee's reply to the man who 
 asked him what it was that the English bishops had been so 
 hotly debating all that day. "Oh," said Magee, "they have 
 been fighting over the papering of the attic, while the basement 
 was on fire." 
 
 I could not flatter myself that Doctor Huntington saw the 
 relevancy of the story. So he gave years of study, and called 
 on all his fine powers of compromise and of debate, to carry 
 through a revision of the Book of Common Prayer. And in 
 truth all that revision even attempted to do was what the dif- 
 fering bishops, as Magee said, had been fighting about just 
 a papering of an attic. 
 
 These are not the first days in which the spirit of the people 
 has got beyond, has gone ahead of, the Church's standards of 
 right and duty. It was a tidal wave of spiritual power that 
 moved and inspired our whole land to break with all the cher- 
 ished traditions of its history, and force the late administration 
 into war. That spirit is not dead. It will take, it is now tak- 
 ing, new forms. It is the same spirit that slowly gathered 
 force in those eventful years of the Eighteenth Century. Then it 
 smote down the divine right of kings. It is the same spirit that, 
 in 1 861-6, at first slowly, and unsure of itself and of its duty, 
 at last' saw both clearly and gave us a slave-free and united land. 
 It is the same spirit again, following just the same course, often 
 poorly led, and so, often stumbling, which only yesterday took 
 a step forward that will have profoundly important results in 
 the future: that insisted on placing its women on a political 
 equality with its men. 
 
 And yet once more. Not satisfied with these triumphs of 
 reform, undismayed it faces to-day another struggle; it 
 pledges itself to another reform. It has broken the power of 
 Kings. It has abolished slavery. It has emancipated women. 
 As surely will it in time insure a newer and better social order 
 in which there will be a fairer division of the proceeds of their 
 industry among men.
 
 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 353 
 
 Every one of these revolutionary changes that have been 
 accomplished the Church herself now accepts as wise and neces- 
 sary. But what share has she had as an organization in win- 
 ning any one of them ? 
 
 On the contrary, she has often discredited and silenced any 
 of her clergy who advocated them. In 1776 she was for king 
 against country, and her blindness then nearly cost her her life. 
 In 1 861-6 she was for slavery and disunion in the South, and 
 in the North she was divided. The freed slave owes little to her. 
 Later, on woman's claim to political equality she was silent 
 when not opposed to it. 
 
 For more than thirty years the struggle between capital- 
 ists and their labour has profoundly disturbed our land. Above 
 the noise and confusion of that conflict, certain things are 
 clear. At first capitalists had their way, and often the things 
 they did were indefensible, unjust, and tyrannous in the extreme. 
 The wrong they were guilty of in their day of power was not a 
 wrong done to their employees alone. It was a wrong done to 
 every man, woman, and child in the nation. Now Labour is 
 steadily gaining power, and still more power; and it aims to do, 
 and sometimes has already done, things just as unjust, just as 
 harmful to the whole land, as the offending capitalists were 
 guilty of. 
 
 What help or guidance to the right cause, what rebuke to 
 the wrong, has the Church given ? She is powerless to-day to 
 rebuke what is sometimes grossly unpatriotic and unfair in the 
 labour unionist. Why? Because, years ago, she turned a 
 deaf ear to the bitter cry of the oppressed and disunited labour- 
 ing people, when they were demanding only what was alto- 
 gether just and right: common justice and a square deal. But 
 she has learned nothing. Her policy still, so far as she has any 
 policy at all, is one of maintaining things as they are. 
 
 She glories in her proved ability to hold a middle course. 
 The one policy she always stands for is safety. Give her safe 
 clergy, safe leaders, safe bishops, and all will be well. She 
 protests she is a soldier of the Cross, but a new sort of soldier, a 
 soldier who seeks safety. She defends her non-committal 
 policy on questions of right and wrong by quoting one text 
 from the New Testament, in which Jesus refuses to settle a 
 dispute between two brothers as to the division of their father's
 
 354 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 estate. As if Jesus ever hedged on a moral question! So, 
 steadily, stupidly, wrapped in a self-satisfied blindness, she 
 pursues an untroubled way, a modern reproduction of the an- 
 cient church of Laodicea. (A church that was neither cold 
 nor hot. See Rev. Ill, 15-16.) A lukewarm church and a 
 tepid message, in a day and to a nation that are contemptuous 
 of both. 
 
 If the Church believes in the promise of her Master, if she 
 believes in the ever-living, inspiring spirit of God, as she pro- 
 fesses to do, let her give some evidence of it that men can see. 
 Orderly services, stately ritual, and persistent declarations of 
 the obvious are not enough. She must show she can guide 
 by having clergy and lay people in her ranks who are guides; 
 that she can teach by having teachers in her pulpits, her colleges, 
 and her seminaries who are teaching. 
 
 If she believes that God is for man and in man, a mighty 
 creative and recreative power, ever pushing all things on 
 the free to a freer , the just to a juster, the good to a better then 
 her acts must show that she believes in a present guidance of 
 the affairs of men, as in the past. In short, a present and ac- 
 tive Holy Ghost. The church that shows signs of this sort of 
 life will not fail either of a hearing or of influence. 
 
 The Church has one duty, one she cannot depute : that is to 
 educate the children of God. To educate she must understand; 
 to understand she must sympathize; to sympathize she must 
 know. What avails it to insist she has divine guidance if, 
 perpetually, she is silent on those things men and women are 
 debating in their inmost souls? If she would show the world 
 any real desire to recast her creeds and dogmas in terms of to- 
 day, frankly recognizing that historic and scientific learning 
 have made a restatement necessary, multitudes would turn to 
 her with fresh hope and a new obedience. 
 
 But this is a difficult thing for any and all of the orthodox 
 churches now to do. They are hampered by their past course 
 of action. The root mistake they have made, and none of them 
 have made it quite so persistently as has the Protestant Episco- 
 pal Church, has been in the diverting of this divinely entrusted 
 work of the teacher into an assumption of a religious control 
 over the taught. Not so much a patient purpose to seek and 
 find spiritual values, as a growing will to impose a doctrinal
 
 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 355 
 
 and sacramental system; an assumption of power, rather than 
 a seeking for truth. 
 
 Such a policy courts rebellion, for it would impose a mastery. 
 It justifies the thoughtful William James's far-reaching protest 
 against the churches of his time: "When a religion has become 
 an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over." 
 
 Shortly before I left New York, I went once more to see my 
 kind friend and neighbour, Doctor Huntington. I took up the 
 old question of reform with him. He listened to all I had to 
 say, again referring to the certainty of a united opposition from 
 the small dioceses as an almost insuperable objection. I could 
 not make him see the profound political immorality of the 
 contention. Some years after, the Rev. Karl Reiland, at the 
 time senior assistant to Doctor Huntington, told me that 
 Doctor Huntington had said to him: "I am going to devote the 
 remaining years of my life to fighting for a constitutional reform 
 of our churches' representation, Diocesan and Conventional." 
 A few months afterward he died. 
 
 I conclude this chapter by quoting from an old sermon I 
 preached twenty-seven years ago that seems to have a meaning 
 for these troubled days of 192 1, and by printing a letter lately 
 written to a friend who since then has become Bishop of New 
 York. 
 
 Look where you will to-day, everywhere men are dissatisfied, uncertain, 
 hungry. The growing pains of life are not easy to bear, and there are few 
 pangs as keen as are the birth pangs of new ideas. Man's aims and hopes 
 he has not yet formulated. It may be he is turning away from the visible 
 forms of Christianity. If so, this does not prove the decay or death of the 
 religious instinct within him, but rather gives proof of its persistent vitality. 
 
 The old altars are falling into decay; the new are not yet builded. Mean- 
 while, man's unquenchable desire for God expresses itself in a vague yearning. 
 
 "The desire of the moth for the star, 
 
 Of the night for the morrow; 
 The devotion to something afar 
 
 From the sphere of our sorrow." 
 
 These hungry souls of to-day our church needs. She needs their criticism. 
 They would modify her theories, change her organization, revitalize her creeds. 
 Let her continue to be mainly the home of the well-to-do intellectually and 
 economically, the support of the self-satisfied part of the community, and her 
 doom, temporarily at least, is sealed. 
 
 Of the well-to-do the church for long has had enough. Her danger lies in
 
 35 6 
 
 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 the loss of, perhaps the expulsion of, the dissatisfied from her fold. Her health 
 and stability, her continuance and development, depend on her ability to 
 assimilate all orders and classes of men. Let one class only be represented 
 within her membership, straightway she will become revolutionary, and 
 break with and lose what is precious in her past. On the other hand, let these 
 depart and the others only remain, and her message is only an echo of a voice 
 once sounding her glory, the record of battles long ago fought, and the very 
 bread of life in her hand has become green and mouldy. A reactionary 
 church is worse than a revolutionary one. 
 
 Yet it seems to me our duty to-day is plain, God's voice for us distinctly 
 sounding. However difficult and unpopular it may be, the message of the 
 hour is the proclamation of the solidarity of mankind. We are all one 
 in Christ Jesus, one in aim and end of being. We can only attain that end 
 in the understanding of, and striving for, our common brotherhood. God 
 is our Father, all we are brethren all life's strifes, jars, and fitful fevers to 
 the contrary. Our true unity has been revealed to us in the incarnation of 
 our Lord Christ, and slowly, as are all evolutionary changes, it is being 
 wrought out in us by the spirit of Jesus. 
 
 The Church of Christ, spite of all her limitations, sins, and failures, is the 
 only earthly witness to this vast, comprehensive truth the solidarity of 
 mankind, past, present, and to come, and for that truth men are yearning. 
 At the root of some of the movements that seem to threaten society there 
 are aims that are not unworthy, there are aspirations that are true. It is ours 
 to welcome all men who are men of good will; ours to help them to see their 
 high calling in Christ Jesus. This is His gospel. It is not a creed; it is a life. 
 It is inspiration, heavenly direction, and indestructible reward. 
 
 Men are sick of dogmatism, religious or otherwise. For " the old is out of 
 date; the new not yet born." But loving deeds are potent as ever, and they 
 who do them are God's modern angels, bringing "peace on earth, to men of 
 good will." 
 
 I met Doctor Manning first when I took a mission in his 
 church in Nashville, Tennessee. 
 
 Ridgefield, Conn. 
 Dear Manning: December 6, 1918. 
 
 I am moved to write to you you may disagree with what I say very com- 
 pletely, but for old times' sake, I am sure you will read it. I write because 
 most evidently, as you say, you have had a fuller light on God's dealing with 
 us all, during these last momentous years. You have come closer to men, 
 to many sorts of men than you have ever done before. You have touched 
 them and they have touched you. Your life and ministry are surely to be 
 the richer for this experience. 
 
 Dear Manning, there will never be a unity of "Faith and Order" in the 
 ecclesiastical sense in our land or in any other. With the widening of human 
 knowledge it must be less and less possible. But a unity of purpose, a unity 
 of spirit, a unity among vast bodies of people united as we have found our- 
 selves for a real cause (a cause you have so finely stood for), that there may be.
 
 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 357 
 
 These multitudes have lived ordinary lives. They have made few reflec- 
 tions on the great issues of life and death. To claim for themselves any 
 unusual religious experience would be far from their dream yet what they 
 could do and have done has been the outcome of a most real religious feeling 
 and purpose, unrecognized by us and by they themselves. 
 
 They have learned what self-sacrifice means. They have proved equal 
 to that final test of discipleship which the Master himself demanded. They 
 have gladly risked their lives, and more than their own lives, the lives of their 
 loved ones, for distant friends half-known friends. 
 
 That is Christlike that is Christian. Such long ago he received and 
 blessed. To such His arms are open to-day. They are his fellow-workers 
 of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 Go to these followers of Jesus in any of the armies insist on any creed 
 or ritual talk church history or any theory of the contending schools to 
 them insist on their acceptance of orthodoxy as to Jesus' nature the 
 problem of His birth, death, resurrection ! You talk to the deaf. 
 
 I tell you we have to give men Jesus: Jesus Himself in His fine life and pur- 
 pose and death, and not theories penned about Him by dear dead saints and 
 also by self-seeking politicians. Life has got beyond such things. 
 
 It is the man who declared men were brothers. It is the man who taught 
 that the best way to please God was to serve men. It is the man who, living, 
 spoke the truth, and willingly died to back what he lived for. 
 
 It is this man, this whole man, men want and will follow. He ever has, 
 he ever will appeal to and inspire men. 
 
 Ecclesiastical hair-splitting must seem more impossible, mere impertinence, 
 in the face of such a life. 
 
 For want of unity the Allied cause came to the very brink of defeat. 
 
 For want of unity the churches stand inefficient before the most simple and 
 evident problems of war and of peace. 
 
 As organizations they were totally inefficient. The Red Cross and the 
 Y. M. C. A. took on their job. 
 
 For want of unity they are to-day failing to accomplish the simplest, most 
 evident duty of the hour, viz., give some simple real Christian teaching to the 
 youth of our dear land. 
 
 What teaching is there to-day in our schools about Jesus, the one leader of 
 men? 
 
 Our lack of united action means no religious teaching to the young of our 
 land. A crime against God and the State. 
 
 Get together and outline a new creed? No, no. Twenty years hence it 
 would satisfy no one. But the life of Jesus counteracting materialism, God 
 in human nature, standing for justice, mercy, peace, and reverencing loving 
 service these things are the very essence of Christianity, and the only stable 
 foundation of democratic government as well. These a united church 
 could preach, and the land would listen. 
 
 With warm greetings and good wishes to Mrs. Manning and the child, 
 
 Always very sincerely yours, 
 W. S. Rainsford. 
 
 Dr. W. T. Manning, D. D.
 
 358 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 The Protestant Episcopal Church is to-day making proposals 
 to the churches looking toward unity. Meanwhile, in none 
 of these other churches are there such bitter divisions as in 
 herself. She imports into her family quarrels a spirit that 
 makes a joke of unity under her leadership. If she her- 
 self cannot include in her fold men who do not see alike, no 
 church can. But partisanship has weakened her. The extent 
 to which the clerical partisan will go amazes the layman. Some- 
 times he seems to lack not only all grace of God, but the in- 
 stincts of a gentleman. 
 
 A peculiar acrimony attaches itself to religious debate. In 
 the supposed interests of God's truth, party leaders have 
 stooped to methods of attack at least as unbrotherly and unfair 
 as those we have grown accustomed to expect among a certain 
 class of political tricksters who make no professions of brother- 
 hood. As notice of this is forced on the outside world, the 
 very word priest has become a synonym for Jesuitry as 
 Jesuitry has become an equivalent for conduct no honest man 
 can allow himself. 
 
 The fresh scandal of these battles breaks out, to our shame, 
 again and again, working inexpressible harm to the "Cause." 
 The modern clerical combatant often wins what his forebears 
 won in olden times, honest men's contempt; for he develops 
 both in the religious press and in debate a quality of malignant 
 untruth, an intentional aim not to fight fair. The party call- 
 ing itself Catholic, an aggressive and insolent party, is chiefly re- 
 sponsible for the state of things I refer to. 
 
 And yet, when all is said, so long as man is man, he needs and 
 will have the Church. For the vastly greater part of us must 
 take our religious beliefs, just as we take all our other beliefs, 
 on hearsay. Few have time or mental balance or learning to 
 take them any other way. Opinions on history, science, 
 economics, are borrowed by nine hundred and ninety-nine out 
 of every thousand. The sum total of the matter is, that man in 
 the mass has needed and will need some church to tell him what 
 to believe. 
 
 In a large and unconscious way, we all feel this, and so we 
 go to the church of our fathers, and listen to its liturgies and 
 lessons, and try to repeat its creeds. We honour its teachers, 
 and support its fabric, just as long as we can. Then, as it
 
 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 359 
 
 happened before to other men in other times, so it now hap- 
 pens to us. New continents of truth loom out of the mists. 
 New ideas are born. History begins to have a real meaning. 
 Even economics ceases to be the "dreary" science, for it has 
 become the science of applied brotherhood. New visions and 
 new hopes are everywhere. We respond to them and welcome 
 them. Ah! not everywhere not in the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church. Old bottles she believes in, and old bottles only, and 
 so for her there flows no new wine. 
 
 The Protestant Episcopal Church is fast on the way to become a small 
 fantastic sect; getting more and more out of sympathy with the great life of 
 the country. Look at the West! See what our church means there! Well, 
 the work will be done, even if our church refuses to do it. But what a chance 
 we had!" "Phillips Brooks, Life of" by A. V.G.Allen, Vol. ii, 668.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 The Roman Catholic Church in the City of New York 
 
 They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin. 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 We believed in 1895 that the election of William L. Strong 
 meant the beginning of a new and better era in the life of New 
 York City, and it did. Many reforming elements managed to 
 combine (only temporarily, alas!) to elect him, and I did what 
 I could in his cause. 
 
 The one thing before all others some of us strove for in that 
 campaign was better schools. New York schools, indeed all 
 charitable institutions supported by municipal taxes, were in a 
 terrible state. There were no proper provisions for separating 
 childish offenders against the law from older, hardened crimi- 
 nals. Blackwell's Island was a disgrace to any civilized city. 
 The vastly greater proportion of those employed in these in- 
 stitutions were practically appointees of the house at the corner 
 of 50th Street and Madison Avenue, the residence of the Roman 
 Catholic Archbishop of New York. 
 
 In 1 894 I made my way, as I often did, into one of our public 
 schools on the East Side, where some of my children were at- 
 tendants. I found one teacher, a young woman, in permanent 
 charge of seventy-five children. Their ages ranged from seven 
 years to sixteen. They spoke five different languages, and 
 only eight of them spoke English. 
 
 Very briefly I must restate some things all should know, but 
 many do not know, about religion in our schools. The free 
 schools on which the education of the nation depends are sup- 
 ported by state and municipal taxes. Education is a govern- 
 ment function. Now our government supports no church, but 
 protects all churches, and therefore the government cannot 
 teach religion in the schools, if by religion is meant the dogmas, 
 rites, ceremonies, and catechisms of any of these churches. 
 
 360
 
 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN NEW YORK 361 
 
 It is not so long ago that religious teaching meant just this 
 sort of teaching and no other. This old-fashioned sort of 
 religious teaching has quite ceased in our public schools. Of 
 course, in denominational church schools and in Sunday Schools 
 it is still given. 
 
 Now children must have religious teaching. They will not 
 grow to worthy citizenship without it. They cannot get it from 
 the State. They do not get it from their parents. Many 
 parents are confused and ignorant. I am speaking of con- 
 scientious parents, parents who themselves were brought up to 
 church beliefs. Consequently, millions of children are getting 
 no religious teaching at all, and though their parents see the 
 danger of this state of things, they do not know how to provide 
 against it. 
 
 So I come back to the public school itself. In it a real reli- 
 gious teaching should be provided. How can this be done? 
 
 The religion of Jesus means (all Christians will agree to this) 
 before all else, two things: First, obedience to, reverence for the 
 Truth " For this cause was I born, for this cause came I into 
 the world, to bear witness to the Truth. Every one that is of 
 the Truth heareth my voice"; and second, a life of self- 
 sacrificing service " If any man will come after Me, let him 
 deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me." 
 
 He who lives for himself alone is a bad man. These two great 
 truths are the gist of the teachings of Jesus. These two great 
 simple things are the bases of all noble living, of all personal 
 and national greatness. Jesus taught them and died for them. 
 Why not give that sort of religious teaching to the children of 
 all nations and all religions assembling in our national schools? 
 
 It is not necessary to make them repeat a creed. Plant in 
 their young lives these two everlastingly beautiful truth seeds, 
 and much has been done to lay deeply a foundation for a love 
 of truth and of beauty. Something done toward winning for 
 every child what good Bishop Jeremy Taylor pleaded for, 
 almost three hundred years ago: an education that made for 
 "minds apt to noble choices and hearts capable of mighty love." 
 
 Goodness does not always come to children by nature. What 
 goodness most of us have has been won by hard fights. It 
 is a crime to fail to lead the children toward goodness, beauty, 
 and truth. We leave them money, our hard- won money; oh,
 
 362 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 let us be sure to give them that which has cost us far more than 
 money, the Treasures of our soul ! 
 
 The teachers of the young in our land and in all lands are 
 and ever have been men and women much above the moral and 
 spiritual average of their day. The New York school teachers 
 of thirty years ago were not nearly so well equipped for their 
 task as are their successors; but a paralyzing fear greatly limits 
 the efficiency of the public school teacher in the United States 
 did then and does now: that fear is the fear of teaching any- 
 thing that any small-minded directing authority on a school 
 board may choose to consider "proselytizing." The inevitable 
 result of this state of things is, the children are growing up 
 secularists. 
 
 If the Protestant churches, divided and uncertain, are doing 
 nothing to save the childhood of the land from this calamity, 
 one great church steps forward declaring that she can do this 
 great work, can teach the child a needful religion, and more, 
 she declares that she has exclusive authority to do so. 
 
 To criticize any church that seeks to give religious instruction 
 to the young is an ungracious task; and since I feel obliged to 
 do so, I would preface my criticism by stating clearly as I, 
 that I am whole-heartedly an admirer of the fine, self-sacrificing 
 faithfulness of the Roman Catholic parish priest and sub- 
 ordinate clergy in our own and in other lands. Their single- 
 eyed devotion sets to all other churches an example hard to 
 emulate and impossible to surpass. They spend and are spent 
 for their flock. They live nearer their people than do any other 
 clergy. Here celibacy greatly aids them. They are of the peo- 
 ple, with the people, for the people, sharing their inmost lives. 
 
 But this beautiful social relation, if it has its advantages, 
 has also concomitantly one disadvantage. Such a ministry 
 is apt to be lacking in uplifting quality. Any one who knows 
 the facts of Irish life, or of the "Habitant" life of Eastern Can- 
 ada, cannot fail to note this loss. I might illustrate my point 
 from conditions in other lands, but I confine myself to the case 
 of the two peoples I know well. Almost exclusively drawn 
 from the peasant class to which they minister, the Roman 
 Catholic clergy in these countries too generally set their faces 
 as resolutely as do their parishioners against all social, economic, 
 and political reform. The priest is proud of the docility of his
 
 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN NEW YORK 363 
 
 flock, and docile, priest-worshipping flocks remain impervious 
 to change. 
 
 Gladly admitting so much that is admirable in the great 
 Roman Catholic Church, I must go on to speak of what I hold 
 to be the danger to the Christian religion in an unreformed 
 Catholicism. If Rome should change, should widen her 
 gospel appeal and cast from her all fatuous dreamings of tem- 
 poral power, then might the unity that Jesus foretold become 
 something near. But now I must face facts as they are, and 
 speak of them as I saw and see them. The Church of Rome 
 has a record, and no clerical denials can wipe it out or alter its 
 significance. 
 
 ( 1 ) She has always been afraid of freedom. 
 
 (2) She has always opposed Democracy. 
 
 The multitude forgets this; but she cannot change, for the 
 nature of her claim commits her inevitably to such oppositions. 
 The Roman Catholic Church claims to bring to men the only 
 accredited Truth of God. To the casual observer she is only 
 one church among many. Often he is won to her by the beauty 
 of her ritual, by the discipline and faithfulness of her clergy, 
 and above all by the fact that in these days of confused specu- 
 lation, these days of many preachers and many creeds, she alone 
 offers to those who obey her certitude and peace. 
 
 "Leave doubts behind you when you come to me. Cast fear 
 away when you kneel at my altars. / know, and to all poor 
 troubled souls I offer rest in the Name of the Father, the Son, 
 and the Holy Ghost." 
 
 So, seeking peace, millions have come to the great Roman 
 Catholic Church. And many more millions are coming; for 
 unquestionably she offers the highest sort of religion many in 
 man's present stage of social and religious development are ca- 
 pable of understanding. The trouble is that what she offers is 
 not the religion of Jesus, and it is not true. The God she offers 
 to our worship is not a good enough God for honest and in- 
 telligent men long to continue worshipping. He is a God who 
 must be persuaded, and propitiated, and bought off. He must 
 have intermediaries in heaven, and an intermediary on earth. 
 That is the priest. A priest to confess you, a priest to absolve 
 you, to give you the Eucharist, and feed you, to teach you what 
 to believe, how to live, how to die. And, after death, a whole
 
 364 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 system of priestly go-betweens to watch and aid your suffering 
 soul toward final heaven. 
 
 The priest and all his ways and interferings must perish, he 
 and his God together. 
 
 For ages and ages, not in the Roman church alone but in all 
 religions, in the darkest and dimmest of them, in the very first 
 poor mumblings of the half-animal savage, man's instinct has 
 been to create him a priest. And his priest has turned on him 
 and fooled him, cheated and degraded him. So much is history. 
 In other forms of the Christian religion, man is getting rid of 
 the priest. The trouble with the Roman Catholic Church is: 
 she cannot be herself and rid her of the priest. For Roman 
 Catholicism is built on the priest. 
 
 To claim to be the one supreme, accredited mouthpiece of 
 God to men is a terrible claim to make. It is the declaration 
 of imperialism in religion. Such is what Roman Catholicism 
 and its Pope stand for. Imperialism was once an effective form 
 of human government. To-day it is out of date, and so blights 
 mankind. 
 
 Once give Rome what she claims, and ever and always she 
 blocks reform. She does so logically, for she alone knows what 
 reforms there should be. This she has not done openly here, 
 for she is but one church among many, denied the autocratic 
 power that she assumes and always must assume when to grasp 
 it was possible. Where her control in Ireland is undisputed, 
 progress ceases. So in Eastern Canada. In Paris, during the 
 early years of this century, I met those great Frenchmen who 
 saved the life of the French Republic. From them directly 
 I learned how the very foundations of republican government 
 in France were threatened by Rome's most astute and unscru- 
 pulous politician, Merry Del Val. 
 
 Some day the true story of France's then struggle with 
 the Vatican will be told. I heard both sides at that time. I 
 had the good fortune to meet some of the great priests and 
 bishops of France, good men, torn between their love of country 
 and obedience to the Roman See. They admitted that the 
 Jesuits (whose acts and policies they were unable to control) 
 had made an extensive and well-conducted campaign to sub- 
 vert the children in the many schools and institutions they con- 
 trolled from Republicanism to the white Flag. The French
 
 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN NEW YORK 365 
 
 Government was aware of this movement, and appealed to the 
 bishops of France to stop it. The Bishops met, and made en- 
 gagements satisfactory to the Government of the Republic. 
 The matter was practically settled, when imperative orders 
 from Rome bade the bishops, one and all, mind their own busi- 
 ness, and let the Vatican mind hers. The Vatican insisted on 
 dealing directly with the French Government. As all know 
 now, Merry del Val's orders were defied by the French Govern- 
 ment, but as Rome had a wider control of the European press 
 than had the then somewhat shaky French Republicans, these 
 were published to the world as the atheistic opponents of all 
 religious teaching in France. 
 
 For their failure to support the Jesuitical policy of the Pope's 
 Foreign Secretary, the unfortunate bishops suffered discipline, 
 discipline of a pitiful and a spiteful sort. One of the best- 
 known and best-loved bishops in France himself told me, as he 
 took me through the beautiful Fourteenth-Century palace where 
 he had been wont to have his clergy meet with him, "I cannot 
 to-day invite my clergy to drink with me so much as a cup of 
 coffee or smoke a cigar." 
 
 There is Roman policy, there Roman tyranny, there the 
 working of the temporal power, not in the far past, but in our 
 own century, when a puppet Pope allowed a bigoted and reac- 
 tionary Spaniard to formulate the policy of the Holy See. 
 
 It was a lie to say that the French Republic was opposing the 
 teaching of religion. No, it was not doing so, but it was, for 
 its own safety's sake, determined to drive out of France the 
 great organization of men and women who were drawing French 
 money to teach French children that if they would be true to 
 God they must pull down the Republican government of 
 France. The Jesuits were packed out of France. Many of 
 them went to Spain. Some came here, and had not the French 
 Government acted as it did, France could never have presented 
 to the German onslaught of a few years later that united and 
 heroic defence that saved the world. 
 
 I am not writing as I do to make little of the good the heroic 
 Catholic Church has done, but I cannot hide from myself the 
 fact that it is now, in some ways, a practical danger. Con- 
 vinced of this I write as I do. If she would reform, if she 
 would give up her spiritual imperialism, if she would admit, as
 
 3 66 THE STORY. OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 all churches must, that she has failed and sinned in the past, and 
 is unsure of many things in the present, then, indeed, might the 
 lesser and younger churches gather round her and a new bright 
 day would dawn for the religion of the Lord Jesus on our earth. 
 
 As it is, and I am speaking of things as they are, stead- 
 ily, persistently, unscrupulously, she seeks political influence; 
 and she is consistent and logical in doing so. But let us re- 
 member that if she succeeds, so far as success is hers, democracy 
 perishes. She crushes her opponents; yes, and her dutiful 
 children as well, when they attempt to oppose even her locally 
 expressed will. Right here in New York, a couple of years 
 ago, she defeated the best mayor New York ever had, John 
 Purroy Mitchel, because, as a trustee for the city, he held him- 
 self in honour bound to see to it that those charities in New 
 York and Brooklyn and the Bronx receiving city money for the 
 support of city children should be honestly and efficiently con- 
 ducted. These charities had evaded the city's examination. 
 Mitchel, himself a loyal Roman Catholic, named a capable 
 and unbiased examining committee. Their report was star- 
 tling. Protestant as well as Catholic institutions had made 
 worse than poor use of the city's trust funds. Shamefully 
 filthy conditions were brought to light. There was neglect of 
 common sanitary measures; inexcusable filth; lice in children's 
 hair, etc., etc., etc. 
 
 Against the committee's findings the Bishop of Long Island 
 made a most untimely protest. That was bad enough, but 
 the Roman Catholic press (in large part) and some of the in- 
 fluential priests bitterly and semi-publicly denounced the 
 Mayor as a traitor, and the weight and influence of his own 
 church (and it was great) was thrown against him too suc- 
 cessfully when he sought reelection to the office he had so 
 honestly and so brilliantly filled. 
 
 That is the Roman Church in New York to-day. She runs 
 true to form. It is folly to forget it. I see signs of a new and 
 very cleverly suggested Roman propaganda in New York. 
 Rome is more than willing that those timorous wealthy people 
 who see dreadful danger from socialism on the political horizon 
 should have it suggested to them that she stands ready to offer 
 a refuge and defence against any and all of the "Red threaten- 
 ings" of the land.
 
 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN NEW YORK 367 
 
 To Capitalism, always timid, Rome suggests alliance and 
 support. The editor of the Wall Street Journal, a paper claim- 
 ing a wider circulation than any other financial paper in the 
 country, lately went out of his way to attack two of the best 
 known clergy in New York by name, because, as its editor, Mr. 
 Hamilton, asserted, "they offered open hospitality to enemies 
 of Christianity," and then goes on to let the cat out of the bag 
 by adding: "It would almost seem as if the age-old consistency 
 of the Roman Catholic Church remained as the nation's last 
 barrier against Bolshevism." 1 
 
 When editorially such a paper dares to suggest that the 
 stability of the United States, financially and politically, may 
 depend on the rule of a church that demands in the Name of 
 God obedience to a foreign potentate, the Pope obedience 
 in things temporal as well as spiritual surely it is time for those 
 who still believe in that form of government the Fathers es- 
 tablished to protest. 
 
 Churches that claim national control are, and always have 
 been, reactionary. Why is Russia cursed by the bloody 
 tyranny of Bolshevism? Because a corrupt, ignorant, and 
 utterly subservient church joined hands with the autocratic 
 government of its Czars, first to debase, and then to betray, the 
 fatuously faithful millions of "Holy Russia." The Czars 
 supported the church. The church put the Czar's picture 
 alongside the household icon in every peasant's home, bade 
 the faithful kneel to both, and doomed the faithless to Siberia. 
 
 As I said, all religious imperialisms are alike. When Rome 
 has won, she has benumbed the souls of men as did the Greek 
 Church in Russia. Religious tyranny is worse than temporal 
 tyranny, for it is tyranny over the soul. Where populations 
 yield to it, certain results inevitably appear. In Russia, Spain, 
 Italy, Mexico, or Ireland there ensue an incapacity for orderly 
 self-government, an inaptness to the exercise of corporate 
 freedom, a numbness of soul, that ever have doomed such peo- 
 ple for long to mental, moral, and political inferiority. 
 
 So much is history. The peoples Rome has ruled at her will, 
 when her yoke is broken, are not fit to be free. I shall be ac- 
 cused of being an alarmist. I cannot help that. I speak of 
 what I see. I see a very real danger from Romanism to the 
 
 Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1921.
 
 368 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Christianity of our land, a danger that the careless optimism of 
 the Protestant churches ignores. They cannot permit that 
 church to win a political influence which would enable her to 
 spread her teachings among the young (in schools, reforma- 
 tories, etc., etc.) and more particularly to halt in her quiet but 
 most effective way any effort to give to the public school life 
 of the United States, in simple form, the religion of Jesus. If 
 the Protestant bodies would act together, this could be done. 
 
 In 1890, Charles Stewart Parnell had practically won for 
 Ireland that modest measure of Home Rule which she then de- 
 manded. The stupidity of English politicians (they can be 
 stupid), the extraordinary narrow vision, morally, of Mr. 
 Gladstone, the hypocrisy of the non-conformist conscience, all 
 united with a folly that to-day, to us looking back, seems un- 
 believable, to defeat Parnell. But well Mr. Parnell knew that 
 the defeat of Ireland's cause was not mainly owing to these 
 causes. It was priestly interference that defeated him. "The 
 Irish must obey their bishops. The bishops have to obey Rome. 
 That is why the whole system of the priests' influence in politics 
 is so infernal." 1 No truer summing up is possible. To forget 
 this is folly. 
 
 My friend, Dr. Leighton Parks, lately sounded a warning 
 against Roman Catholic political influence in our city's life. 
 He was answered by an official of that church, in the New York 
 Times, and to the casual reader the answer would seem effective. 
 Very cleverly Doctor Parks's antagonist evaded the issue 
 Doctor Parks had raised. I quote his words: "To do as God 
 commanded, whatever the world may say or think, is to be free. 
 Not by human allowance, but under the approval of Him whose 
 service is perfect freedom." High-sounding generalities, but 
 they amount to nothing at all, if the Roman Church is the one 
 church on earth authorized by God to tell men what God does 
 command. 
 
 What clever fooling with liberty is here? One is reminded 
 of Macbeth: 
 
 And be these lying fiends no more believed, 
 Who palter to us in a double sense, 
 Who keep the word of promise to our ear, 
 And break it to our hope. 
 
 ^'Life of C. S. Parnell," by Mrs. Parnell, Vol. II, page 154
 
 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN NEW YORK 369 
 
 I was consulted lately by a doctor friend with large practice 
 among children. He told me of a lady he was attending who 
 had just had her fifth child. He found her recovery retarded 
 and herself in a state of mental distress. " My husband is a 
 good man, but he is a Roman Catholic, and one terrible thing 
 clouds my life. Even before I am able to get up and go out, 
 at the fourteenth day they take my babies from me to the 
 church, and baptize them. And from that day forward they 
 teach my babies that they must not believe what their mother 
 teaches them about religion and God." 
 
 I have written at length on this ungrateful subject because I 
 felt I had to. And as I end I would say that I think I can see 
 in the Roman Catholic Church in this country the signs of a 
 reforming spirit which may, I hope, go far. 
 
 Many profoundly religious people who are in touch with all 
 that is most liberal in the nation's political and educational 
 life have sought peace for their souls with her. For this cause, 
 in days of religious unrest, they have bowed to her spiritual 
 authority. But they are, I think, increasingly disinclined to 
 accept from her any other authority. May not this lead to 
 a liberalizing of American Catholicism? 
 
 In closing this chapter, critical as it is of the New York 
 Hierarchy, I would remember that among the parish priests 
 of the city there have been and there are many noble examples 
 of the best that the Church has given to the world. I had the 
 honour of knowing Father McGlynn, a true democrat, a lover 
 of the poor, and one of God's saints. Never was a greater 
 honour done me than when, by request of his people, I addressed 
 them after his death. No Roman Catholic prelate in New York 
 dared to do so. As a faithful priest, Father McGlynn put the 
 command of God and the rights of men, as he saw them, be- 
 fore all else. And to the shame of the men ruling his church, he 
 was hounded out of his parish because he protested against 
 unrighteous discipline which would have tongue-tied him. I 
 happen to know that when he died, they could not find in his 
 denuded wardrobe a suit of underclothing to bury him in. All 
 had been given away. 
 
 Father McGlynn was a saint, a crusader born ahead of his 
 time. He and Jacob Riis knew the poor of New York, and 
 were loved by them more than any other men in my time.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 Changes of Belief 
 
 Christianity, as it has been proclaimed by its orthodox and accredited 
 teachers, can no longer hope to win world-wide influence. It has mani- 
 fested to all thinking men its incapacity. Prof. Josiah Royce. 
 
 Christian morality will not either suddenly or gradually conquer the 
 world. But if Christianity, conceived in its true spirit, retains its hold 
 upon mankind, humanity will go on, creating new forms of Christian 
 morality. Prof. Josiah Royce, Hibbert Journal, 1913- 
 
 Any one reading this story must see that a considerable part 
 of it has to do with those inevitable changes of belief that must 
 come to everyone who believes in evolution. I have changed 
 radically in many of my beliefs, moral, social, and religious, 
 and I have not done changing. I hope to go on changing till 
 I die, and greatly I hope and long to go on changing afterward. 
 
 I have tried to write with frankness about those changes. I 
 make no excuse for them. They were healthy and inevitable. 
 
 In his essay on Intellect, Emerson says: 
 
 God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which 
 you please; you cannot have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man 
 oscillates. He in whom love of repose predominates, will accept the first 
 creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets most likely his 
 father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation. But he shuts the door 
 of truth. 
 
 He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all 
 moorings and float. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the 
 opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits 
 to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate 
 for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being. 
 
 That is fine. I did try ever to be a "candidate for truth," 
 as Emerson says. My earliest convictions, to borrow the usual 
 and most misleading word, were first the unconsciously bor- 
 rowed opinions of others. We are unconscious borrowers to 
 
 370
 
 CHANGES OF BELIEF 371 
 
 the very end, but in early days we are more immediately im- 
 pressionable. I have heard a tree frog calling within a few feet 
 of my head, yet his coloration was so truly that of the delicate 
 green leaves he sat among that for long I searched for him in 
 vain. He was part of his environment. So is any healthy- 
 minded youth. He takes his colour from those surroundings 
 that gave him life. 
 
 This is specially true of our religious beliefs. Just because 
 they are the realest, deepest part of us, they are least of all our 
 own. I took mine as I took the clothes my mother bought 
 for me or, as in my mother's case, made for me and wore 
 them as a matter of course and without question, till later the 
 suit wore out, and in the wider, less friendly world outside the 
 dear home, I had to fit me with other clothes as best I might. 
 Originality is not for us. Who shall say what is or is not orig- 
 inal to him? Thoughts of others, wiser, stronger, enter and 
 reform themselves in us. Originality is as rare, as potent, and 
 as difficult to collect as radium. 
 
 I think all men who make their mark pass through radical 
 changes of belief. I do not mean religious belief because, as 
 a matter of fact, some of the most forceful men I have known 
 have succeeded in not changing their religious beliefs one iota, 
 and boasted of the fact; totally ignorant, of course, that by so 
 boasting they were directly contradicting the very essence and 
 spirit of the Christianity they honestly intended to champion. 
 
 Some of those I have intimately known, and whose religious 
 life was real and living, have mistakenly remained silent as 
 to its changes because they held to the old idea that a man's 
 religion was in a peculiar sense his own affair; that to discuss his 
 religious ideas was to be guilty of a certain degree of indelicacy. 
 They would as soon have discussed the details of their "wills." 
 How this false though commonly received concept of a Chris- 
 tian man's duty came to be so generally accepted I have 
 no idea. To me it seems peculiarly and inexcusably false, for 
 it is nothing less than the thwarting of a healthy instinct and 
 the denial of a plain duty. 
 
 The greater the question confronting us, the greater the need 
 for its expression. Waking, dreaming, rejoicing, suffering, 
 these questions of the soul are with us ever. 
 
 Yes, our poor little visions are dear to us, because they have
 
 372 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 cost us dearly, and when we are obliged to give them up, and 
 change them for others, we only relinquish them with sorrow 
 and bitter pain. This I know to be true. Why, then, when a 
 life's story is told, should it deal with a man's adventures in 
 every field of endeavour and make no record of the conflict of 
 his very soul? What is God? Is there anything in us that 
 shall survive death? What is and is not sin? What is real 
 righteousness? What does the life of Jesus mean? How much 
 of our record of it is true ? How do the other supermen of our 
 race stand related to Him? These are the realest and most 
 pressing of all questions, and all men who think are ever de- 
 bating them inwardly. Why then be silent as to that debate? 
 
 Change and renewal are our law. The creeds of manhood 
 are no more the creeds of boyhood than the body of us at sixty, 
 wounded, scarred, twisted, with many an adventure and many 
 a sin, is the clean, untried, unwounded, supple thing that was 
 ours at twenty-one. Every man worth listening to knows this 
 to be true. Then why not say it ? 
 
 The changes in my own teaching and preaching were not 
 wrought in me by study of books, though of course I tried to 
 read of the best, but rather were the result of what I saw and 
 felt in the world life around me. In my very early life, as I 
 have said before, I was very much alone. I daresay this was 
 my own fault, but be that as it may, I never got any help from 
 any living voice that I can remember in England. Robertson 
 and Mazzini I fed on, and they were good food. During my 
 life as a missioner I did not grow intellectually. I gained ex- 
 perience of men and of the country. But I was a popular 
 preacher only, delivering popular discourses; doing good be- 
 cause I was not working for myself. But I made little spiritual 
 headway. 
 
 In Toronto I found a firmer foothold for my faith. I found a 
 larger and lovelier God. Of this I have told in the chapter on 
 Toronto. 
 
 In New York, the difficulty of the task I had set myself to 
 accomplish, and the novelty of it, served to shield me during 
 those first years from clerical criticism. But it was inevitable 
 that as it came to be understood, the radical nature of the 
 doctrine taught in St. George's should draw fire; and for many 
 years I was pretty close to a heresy trial at any time.
 
 CHANGES OF BELIEF 373 
 
 You must remember that in the 'oo's some of the best men 
 in the land were flung out of the churches. Bishop Gore, then 
 of Birmingham, England, unfrocked a good man, turned him 
 out of his parish and out of the Anglican Church without a 
 trial, not because he could not say the creed, but because he 
 could not accept the Bishop's interpretation of it. One of the 
 best men I ever knew, Algernon Crapsey, of Rochester, was un- 
 frocked by the Bishop of Western New York. So were several 
 other good men in other dioceses, and in most instances these 
 suffered expulsion because they were thought to be unsound on 
 the doctrine of the Virgin birth. On that doctrine I was as 
 unsound and as outspoken as any of them. 
 
 I will digress a little here, and briefly outline my own way 
 of approach to what I believed and taught about this much- 
 disputed doctrine, as I find it in a sermon of mine, preached at 
 the time. "As belief in the spiritual power and miracle-working 
 power of Jesus spread, as his unique goodness and greatness 
 came to be accepted, his followers very naturally came 
 to think of him as conceived and born as was no common 
 man. He was without sin. How could this be possible if he 
 came into the world as sinful men come? So round this nat- 
 ural idea first myth and legend gathered, and finally the hard- 
 and-fast dogma came to be demanded, under pain of persecu- 
 tion by the faithful." 
 
 Thus the true concept, the real significance of the Incarnation 
 was replaced by barren scholasticism. And mark the result! 
 The real Jesus, so understanding, so approachable, so really 
 revealing man's nature and God's, was no longer so approach- 
 able. He must be aided, supplemented, in his mediating work, 
 by a host of other intermediaries, beginning with the Virgin his 
 mother, and running away into a host of insignificant saints. 
 
 We all of us inherit, as is not wonderful, the results of this 
 materialistic spirit of past time. Orthodoxy has, as is usual, 
 made the truth of God semi-ridiculous with its traditionalism. 
 Jesus was realest of the real. He shared the beliefs of his time. 
 He believed- in the nearness of the parousia as did Paul and 
 was mistaken. He was under all the conditions not only of 
 humanity but of the humanity of his time and place. So much 
 was essential to a true incarnation. Incarnation meant condi- 
 tions. He did not know any more about philosophy or philol-
 
 374 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 ogy, about history or natural laws, than did any Jew about 
 Him, except in so far as a pure heart helps knowledge. 
 
 The more convincedly we believe in the incarnation, the more 
 strongly must we hold to the conditions and limitations of it; 
 without them the Incarnation is not real. Where, then, is the 
 Divineness? It is in the perfection of his obedience, and the 
 resulting absoluteness of his moral and spiritual verdicts. 
 
 Inside the Protestant Episcopal Church things looked stormy. 
 I needed the help and guidance of someone older, wiser, and 
 more experienced than I. Such an one I found in Dr. T. T. 
 Munger, of New Haven, and to him I owe a great debt. His 
 book, "The Freedom of Faith," helped me greatly; more than 
 any book I had read for years. But he was more than his books, 
 admirable as they were. I found in him a sympathetic friend, 
 a man wise in council as he was clear in vision. In person and 
 by letter, when I was in a difficult place, I consulted him, and 
 what he advised my doing or saying, I did and said. 
 
 He carried his learning lightly, and had a way of putting him- 
 self at your service that was all his own. There was a gentle 
 graciousness about him rarely winning. There may have been 
 others like T. T. Munger in those days, but I doubt it. I never 
 knew any clergyman, in any church, on either side of the 
 Atlantic, that seemed to me as wise and holy a man as he. He 
 was a great heretic and a great Christian. 
 
 I am quoting at some length a letter he wrote to me, an- 
 swering the despairing cry of a friend of mine. This man was 
 off with the old and had not found the new. Nothing in Doc- 
 tor Munger 's books goes deeper, is finer or more helpful. No 
 answer I could make then or now to this so common need of 
 good men is as valuable. So I quote the letter at some length. 
 
 It is evening, and I hope I shall not be interrupted until I have at least 
 tried to tell you what I think of your friend's letter. I have read it three 
 times, and have tried to read between the lines. All the ordinary symptoms 
 are present, but in rather unusual force: the prognosis is favourable unless 
 the patient loses courage or acts rashly sinks into despair or jumps out of 
 the window. The latter is the greatest danger. I am not treating the sub- 
 ject lightly. 
 
 Do we not, do not all earnest souls who come into freedom, know just what 
 your friend is passing through? I mean exactly what I say, when I say that 
 he seems to me to be undergoing the pains of spiritual birth. He is coming
 
 CHANGES OF BELIEF 375 
 
 out of the world of traditionalism and formalism and intellectualism, and is 
 feeling his way into the world of the spirit. 
 
 We all begin our ministry, and our religious life as well, under a great load 
 of traditional and formal doctrines. It is necessarily so; it is the school mas- 
 ter era in life. Many never get beyond it. Some partially escape it. A few 
 are called and ordained to pass through it, and reach the stage of realities. 
 
 So far as I can read your friend's mind, he is throwing off the material 
 forms of truth, and, if he but knew it, has come to the borders of the spiritual 
 world. He calls it "facing an abyss." He is mistaken; he has come out of 
 one world and his eyes are not used to the light of the other. St. Paul hit the 
 matter exactly when he said that " henceforth he knew Christ no more after 
 the flesh." Christ became a spiritual fact and force to him. 
 
 I verily believe that in his higher and more spiritual moods, the outward 
 forms of Christ's life vanished and the spiritual realities and verities that lay 
 behind the forms became the only things he regarded. It is not a new ex- 
 perience, but it is repeated in every man who finds himself. Now the trouble 
 with your friend is that the higher criticism, natural science, and his own 
 thought, have together broken up his old world and swept away his former 
 beliefs, and he therefore thinks he is on the borders of the abyss. But at 
 the same time he says he is willing to be alone with God. Where could he 
 better be? 
 
 And here I would beg a special attention to what this wise 
 and deeply taught teacher adds: 
 
 For my part, I do not care how much the higher criticism and science 
 sweep away. I believe the whole process is in the order of evolution. It is a 
 destruction of the formal and an introduction into the spiritual which is the 
 goal of man. 
 
 I believe that just as science and criticism and thought take away from 
 us what we have deemed the supports of our faith, will spiritual facts and 
 truths and laws come to us. And they come, as to your friend, through 
 darkness and struggle at first. . . . 
 
 What we all need is to understand our day, and what is going on in it. 
 That it is the beginning of the transfer of faith from forms to realities. I think the 
 forms are necessary ', but always in a lessening degree. The power by whish we 
 are carried from one to the other is the truth. This truth makes us free. What 
 I cannot understand in your friend's state of mind is his unhappiness over his 
 loneliness. The truth can work no harm to any one. If Harnack upsets the 
 Apostles' Creed, what of it? If untrue, it ought to be upset; the air is so 
 much clearer. 
 
 I can see no rational thing to do but to trust the universe that is God and 
 trust and rejoice in Him. A man should smite himself and pull himself to- 
 gether, when he finds himself growing timid and anxious. 
 
 More and more do I think that Christ looked at things as they are. This 
 is natural and intellectual and high. To shove everything over into the end- 
 less future is not intellectual, nor high, nor spiritual. . . .
 
 376 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I quote from this letter of my dear teacher and friend, italiciz- 
 ing words and sentences that he underlined, knowing well that he 
 would have approved of my doing so. Doctor Munger wrote 
 hastily, after a long day's work and late at night. But nothing 
 within the covers of my book has, to my thinking, a higher 
 spiritual value. I had forgotten this letter of Doctor Munger's, 
 and now, on reading it again, I think it had far more effect 
 on my own thinking than I knew at the time. 
 
 It is a profound satisfaction to me that perhaps unwittingly, 
 but none the less really, I had, in stumbling, fumbling way, 
 managed to get where he had got; managed to see that the 
 only way to get near the God of Truth was to look straight at 
 things as they are, and so find in the universe as it is the only 
 knowledge of God as He is, the only knowledge that we poor 
 gazers through dark glasses can gain at all. The deluding day 
 of belief in the supernatural is past. In it man worshipped the 
 changeful God of his fancy and his dream, and some truth there 
 ever was in his fancies and his dreams. But as the fields of 
 reality slowly open their wonders to man's searching, fancies 
 and dreams take their truer subordinate place. It may be 
 hard to give up our fancies and dreams about Jesus, but do it 
 we must. By so much as Jesus is pronounced to be supernatural, 
 by His birth, or death, or rising from the dead, by so much are 
 we robbed of our elder Brother, robbed of a real son of man who 
 is a real practical guide and example; one we can follow and 
 imitate down here on earth. 
 
 The reason for belief that Jesus was supernatural lies in the 
 deep human longings common to us all. We would find some- 
 where, somehow, an inerrant authority, an authority speaking 
 with unmistakable clearness on those deep questions our un- 
 satisfied hearts are forever propounding. Such a mode of 
 self-revelation does not consort with a God of things as they 
 are, and more it does not agree with the picture of Jesus given 
 us in the New Testament. Jesus himself refused to occupy any 
 such place. He did not claim oracular knowledge then, and it 
 is a vast mistake to ascribe it to Him now. 
 
 What He did claim was that the spirit of his Father God, 
 which had enabled and inspired Him, would continue to lead 
 into new truth those who followed Him while He lived on earth, 
 and that when He lived on earth no longer, the guilding of God
 
 CHANGES OF BELIEF 377 
 
 would be given to those who continued to seek for and obey the 
 Truth. Science will appeal to truth seekers as long as men 
 have brains, and the Religion of Jesus as long as they have 
 hearts. 
 
 Yes, the God of the supernatural 1 must fade, replaced by 
 the God of things as they are. 
 
 This profoundly important change in our idea of God neces- 
 sitates, of course, change in each and all of our conceptions of 
 our relations to Him. Churches, creeds, dogmas, Bibles, all 
 remain. All had and have their uses, but none of them can 
 rightfully call on any man for an absolutely authoritative obe- 
 dience. For man's religious beliefs are as truly and directly 
 an evolution as is his body. Many good people fancy that 
 they worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but they 
 do not. The Jews regarded themselves as the favourites of 
 their semi-heathen God Jehovah. They made him say: 
 "Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated." The modern boy 
 reading the story of Jacob and Esau is sure to register his first 
 protest against Jewish orthodoxy and verbal inspiration. As 
 between Jacob and Esau, he profoundly disagrees with Jehovah, 
 and the modern boy's opinion is the result of man's moral evolu- 
 tion upward, and is altogether right. 
 
 Puritan evangelicalism did a great and good work. Per- 
 haps it made our own type of Anglo-Saxon democracy possible; 
 but it proclaimed a divine partiality that is now unthinkable. 
 
 It is time to face the truth about ourselves and God. Look- 
 ing round us, steadily looking, it is a hard thing to believe 
 in God at all. A god whose chief or sole revelation of himself 
 is made in nature can no longer satisfy the craving of man's 
 soul for righteousness. He is not worshipful. Nature is 
 brutally partial. She sides with the strong and crushes the 
 weak, and the strength she approves is no criterion of moral 
 excellence. 
 
 But a few years ago we knew little about Nature and her 
 ways. Of her gross cruelty, her dreadful wastefulness, men had 
 not taken note. An illustration of this in literature is Words- 
 worth's poetry. The nature god he worships is wholly the 
 deity of his own dream. He does not actually know that the 
 
 'I use the word in its commonly accepted sense i. e., interference with the established order 
 of nature.
 
 378 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 scenes which enchant him by their loveliness, the sunset glory 
 that bids him kneel, are what man brings to nature, are a crea- 
 tion of his own. It is man's eye that lends colour to the rain- 
 bow, and sees in the pageantry of the sunset a fitting garniture 
 for God. Yes, you come back to man as the only justification 
 and explanation of nature, and God as the justification and ex- 
 planation of man. For myself I would say the only way I 
 know of loving God is loving men. 
 
 I have fought a good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the 
 faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the 
 Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but 
 to all them that love his appearing. (2 Tim. iv, 7-8.) 
 
 So wrote Paul, about A. D. 70. Here a hero sings his death 
 song. Its numbers thrill us still, but it is frankly egotistic. So 
 was the early Christian faith. The Christian martyr often 
 sought death, even so late as in the Twelfth Century. The 
 brave Albigenses could scarcely be kept back from the flame. 
 They longed for martyrdom. So much their very extermina- 
 tors tell us. There shone before them the victor's crown, and 
 an immediate entrance into the city of the Great King. All 
 their powers of mind and heart and will were set on winning a 
 personal immortality. 
 
 Could the men of those and still earlier days have made the 
 fight they made (and it was for us their descendants they made 
 it), had they been inspired by a less certain, less egotistic 
 vision? Surely they could not. They had the bread they 
 needed; strength and vision adapted to their own need and 
 time. But on their bread we cannot march to-day. Their 
 vision is not ours. Try as we may to catch at and hold their 
 great dream, its exclusively personal quality moves us not. 
 Even while we wonder at their courage, we cannot blind our 
 eyes to the true and necessary things that their vision failed 
 to show them. 
 
 They were not merciful or pitiful or loving to their fellow-men. 
 High as was at times their sense of obligation to one another 
 to the faithful, the chosen, the elect for outsiders, for unbe- 
 lievers they cared little or not at all. The saints, confessors, 
 martyrs, lived, stood, fought, and died together. To them the 
 sacred group was all in all. For the mass of humanity they had
 
 CHANGES OF BELIEF 379 
 
 no love or sympathy. Hate was repaid with hate, and scorn 
 with scorn. They suffered torture gladly, and were quite will- 
 ing in their hour of power to inflict on their enemies what their 
 enemies inflicted on them. There was little in them of the 
 spirit of brotherhood as we find it in Jesus: that high and holy 
 spirit which comes but slowly to men. Of this, it is but simple 
 truth to say, the world has more, far more, in this Twentieth 
 Century, than it had in the first. 
 
 In one of the quotations with which I have headed this 
 chapter, Josiah Royce, whom some good judges believe to have 
 been the greatest philosopher of our generation, with courage 
 and candour says: "Christian morality will not either suddenly 
 or gradually conquer the world." His hope is that "Humanity 
 will go on creating new forms of Christian morality." Surely 
 that is just what we are doing; just what Jesus foretold we 
 should do. Royce says: "These new forms of morality must 
 be conceived in Christ's true spirit." I think that there are 
 abundant signs that gradually they are so being conceived. 
 
 As to belief in personal immortality, for instance, Dostoi- 
 evsky, a social reformer and a genius, with that frankness and 
 clarity with which the modern Russian spirit is endowed, states 
 for himself and for the masses of the Greek and Catholic 
 churches, the common orthodox forms of belief in immortality 
 and the grounds for that belief. 
 
 Surely I have not suffered, that my crimes and struggles may but manure 
 the soil, for the future harmony of somebody else. ... I want to be 
 there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for. . . . 
 All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. 
 
 So much is true. Uncounted millions have lived and died 
 nobly holding it fast, but it is frankly the faith of the religious 
 egoist. There are some who have reached a faith greatly 
 higher than Dostoievsky's, and it is to the teachings of Jesus 
 they feel that they owe that higher faith. 
 
 As the Master's words have been handed down, inevitably 
 tinged by the beliefs of His and succeeding times, a heaven of 
 personal reward for believing souls is promised. So much is 
 certain. But it is no less certain that Jesus Himself widened 
 His message even in the short space during which He taught. 
 The message He delivered was primarily one to His own time.
 
 380 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 It was wholly impossible for His disciples, perhaps for Jesus 
 Himself, to tear from heart and mind the idea of a Rewarding 
 God. Even the best of men could not then have set their faces 
 toward the lonely wilderness path that must be trodden by one 
 and all of them, if they entertained a doubt of their final public 
 and personal vindication before the throne of their all-ruling 
 Master. So they faced unflinchingly what lay before them, 
 because.they "reckoned that the sufferings of this present time 
 were not worthy to be compared with the glory which should 
 be revealed in them." They had their own task, and they had 
 to feed and fortify them for it, the daily bread they needed. 
 Our task is not theirs; ours is an easier, if perhaps quite as dan- 
 gerous a road. Our religion has not brought us imminent peril 
 of death. We are not counted as public pariahs, "the off- 
 scouring of all men for the sake of Jesus." 
 
 These things, if we remember them, will help to explain to us 
 how it comes about that a faith which, in their case, was as- 
 sured of an unspeakably glorious personal hereafter, has, in our 
 day, shrunk to a sort of hopeful orthodox complacency that, 
 after this life is done with, we may expect an even better time 
 in the next. This and nothing higher is the faith of millions 
 to-day. 
 
 I cannot see in this later popular form of orthodox belief 
 in immortality much that is truly akin to the spirit of Him who 
 steadily faced His cross.' 
 
 It is a long way from St. Paul to Huxley, yet in a real sense 
 both followed the same Master, for both might have worthily 
 worn the shining armour of Mr. Valiant or Truth. Ultra-mod- 
 ernism in Huxley did not quench in him the human yearning 
 that so mightily wrought in St. Paul. In 1883, Huxley wrote 
 to John Morley: "It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to 
 the thought of extinction increasing as I grow older and nearer 
 the goal. It flashes across me at times with a sort of horror 
 that, in 1900, I shall probably know no more of what is going 
 on than I did in 1800." 
 
 Morley answers that he was "not plagued that way." But 
 many of us are plagued just that way. And because ortho- 
 doxy's reply to the cry of the hungry for life beyond the grave 
 is inadequate (and when I use that word I use the mildest word 
 possible, for to listen to the usual Easter sermon is enough to
 
 CHANGES OF BELIEF 381 
 
 make any man doubt the Resurrection), men are turning to 
 man himself, and from the "abysmal depths of his personality" 
 are seeking to draw forth proof that he must survive the grave. 
 Such searching is natural we cannot rebuke it but to me it 
 seems the treading of a backward path. 
 
 What answer the future may yield us, who can tell? But 
 I find myself, as I grow older, sharing Huxley's experience, or 
 as Young, in his "Night Thoughts," puts it: 
 
 Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines. 
 
 I greatly, increasingly, long to "go on and still to be." The 
 longing for life, greater and more abundant than I have known 
 or can know here, increases. I cannot satisfy myself, however, 
 that this soul passion for immortality is a wholly religious and 
 unselfish thing, or that it must of necessity win the sort of 
 satisfaction it demands, in a universe back of which is justice 
 and right. Nothing so clearly proves to me the unconquerable 
 religiousness of our human nature as does the growth within us 
 all of the spirit of unselfishness which is the spirit of Jesus. To 
 me it is quite certain that every great testing time that comes 
 to us proves that our acts are less marked by selfishness and 
 self-seeking than were those of our fathers. A personal salva- 
 tion is no longer a righteous and legitimate aim. 
 
 Rewards offered to us for holiness achieved pall on us. We 
 see, if we look squarely at life, men and women everywhere, 
 outside religious organizations quite as commonly as within 
 them, gladly giving their lives to advance the cause of truth, 
 or to better the condition of others, whose claim on their self- 
 sacrifice is but that of a common humanity. This immense 
 and irrefutable spiritual advance of man I take to be the evi- 
 dence of the coming of the Kingdom of God on this earth. 
 
 It is the spiritual work of a spiritually free people, striving 
 for the best they know. Once again I quote my own definition of 
 religion, as specially applicable here: "// ij the giving of the best 
 we have to the best we know." And this not done for reward. 
 
 Now personal immortality may be ours, but to claim it as a 
 reward for good work here won't do. It will not satisfy, for it im- 
 plies a moral retreat. No one more truly voiced the widening 
 religious vision of the Nineteenth Century than did Tennyson. 
 Yet in his poem "Wages," he stoutly maintains that man must
 
 382 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 have the assurance of "Wages" for the doing of highest duty; 
 a special reward for special goodness. Tennyson would rewrite 
 "Wages" to-day. Our moral concept of duty is manifestly 
 higher. Tennyson discards older forms of moral reward. 
 "Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song," these are 
 evanescent rewards. Neither do "The isles of the blest, the 
 seats of the just" content onward marching man. But one 
 thing he has a right to; one thing he shall have. Tennyson 
 insists: "Give him the wages of going on and still to be." Does 
 not the very idea of any wages revolt us just a little ? The slave 
 served under the lash, the hireling for his pay. But just as 
 the hireling is an advance on the slave, so is the son and brother 
 relationship an advance on the wage taker. The hireling ser- 
 vice is not the final form of man's relation to what he feels to be 
 his duty to himself, to his brother, and to his God. 
 
 Ah, no ! For striving to be what we feel and know we should 
 be, wages are not paid. There are things not purchasable, 
 and the first of these is doing right. 
 
 For ages, philosophers have debated these questions, but in 
 our own wonderful days we have seen the resolution of them 
 with our eyes, and not in fields of fancy need we discuss them 
 any longer. We have seen an ennobling, an inspiring thing: 
 we have seen that not in the few and the great and the highly 
 educated alone, but in the quite ordinary boy and man and 
 woman, there is a vision, there is a power, great and noble; a 
 holy and a saving capacity driving him to give his poor and so 
 inadequate all " to the best he knows." In the revealing gleam 
 of the battle light we have seen it. In that light, so terrible, 
 certain moral values became plain to us as never before. Self- 
 seeking, in all its forms, was the one damnable thing no soldier 
 could allow himself to be guilty of. To seek his own meant to 
 desert his comrade and betray his cause. So it was that, when 
 the minute hand of the wrist watch at last put an end to sicken- 
 ing suspense, the youth of Europe rose and went "over the top" 
 to die. Into the shell storm, into the sleet of the machine gun, 
 they went. And then, out in the mud, in thousands, crumpled, 
 sprawling things lay that lately had been men. 
 
 There human will triumphed over human frailty, and it was 
 not done for pay, not even for the wages of "going on and still 
 to be."
 
 CHANGES OF BELIEF 383 
 
 So fell a French lieutenant of infantry. Some of the sur- 
 vivors of his company, beaten back, carried him to the shelter 
 of the trench whence he had led them. A comrade on whose 
 shoulder he died heard his last message: "To a child in a game 
 it is a fine thing to carry the flag. It should be enough for the 
 man to know that the flag will be carried." 
 
 That spirit won the great war, and because it burns in the 
 heart of man, the victory of the Truth and the Kingdom of the 
 Lord of Truth are sure. 
 
 The supreme wonder of life is man himself man, a little 
 child of God. What he has done, and is, and knows, is but a 
 poor hint of what he shall do, shall know, and shall be; man, 
 God's last, best, and, so far as we know, final expression of 
 Himself. To realize the greatness of ourselves is not to minify 
 God, but to magnify Him.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 Preaching 
 
 When a first-hand religious experience proves contagious enough to 
 triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a 
 religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over; the faith- 
 ful live at second hand exclusively, and stone the prophets in their turn. 
 The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can 
 be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the 
 spontaneous religious spirit, and stop all later bubblings of that fountain 
 from which, in purer days, it drew its own supply of inspiration. 
 William James, "Varieties of Religious Experience" p. jj/. 
 
 One of life's deepest mysteries is man's influence on man. 
 The older I grow the more marvellous and inexplicable it seems 
 to me. Books, schools, services, churches cannot supply it, 
 nor can Beauty, Music, or Art. It is not something man 
 produces, but something he is; it is increased and developed by 
 use; but it is born, not made. They who possess a grain of it 
 should be searched for, encouraged, trained, and used. Such 
 are, in all ages, the divinely called fishermen of Jesus. They it 
 is who lead in all revivals of true religion. 
 
 The preacher in 1920 has the self-same task as the preacher in 
 A. D. 23- His it is to make the multitude who are spiritually 
 blind and deaf and lame and dumb, to see and hear and walk and 
 speak. 
 
 In the voice of the preacher, God becomes authentic and 
 audible to the preoccupied masses of everyday folk. 
 
 When the tides of spiritual progress ebb, then religious 
 organizations fall back on the mechanical methods of the 
 schools. Organization makes a great showing. Things are 
 mechanically perfect, look well, sound well. But the product ! 
 It is what the railroad man calls by a significant name a "Dead 
 Engine!" It has everything but the one all-important thing 
 Fire! 
 
 384
 
 PREACHING 385 
 
 When Madame Curie discovered radium in 1898, all natural 
 science was shaken, and theories of almost universal acceptance 
 had to be abandoned. Man's marvellous and inexplicable in- 
 fluence on man is a sort of human radium. Difficult to dis- 
 cover, most difficult to capture or confine, but once possessed, 
 with it goes power. The preacher has it. There come times 
 when he is no longer aware of himself. Bodily consciousness 
 almost ceases. His listeners, too, forget outside things. At 
 such rare moments it is not merely the words they hear that 
 move them. Some intense relation, deeper than words, 
 unites preacher and listener. The ideas born within him 
 flash, radium-like, with extraordinary penetrating power from 
 mind to mind, and a mysterious accord is established. 
 
 Surely there is a tiny grain of spiritual radium in everyone 
 who has it in him to preach. At the bottom of successful 
 church organization there must be a capacity to feed and in- 
 spire the workers. Organizing ability is very important, but 
 it is a quite different thing from the subtle quality I have been 
 trying to catch at and explain. 
 
 Energy fades. Enthusiasm, so essential to success in reli- 
 gious work, falters, when it is not revitalized by this kindling, 
 persistent, undying spiritual force. 
 
 The old explanation, of course, was "The Presence of the 
 Spirit of God." I am not faulting that explanation. I am 
 only trying to find a way of putting the same thing so that it 
 shall have a little more understandableness in it. I'll do here 
 again what I have often done before tell a story to give point 
 to my plea for a fuller recognition by the Church of the spiritual 
 mystery of man's influence on man. 
 
 "The Club" in New York was a small but strong body of 
 clergy, all Episcopalians. I had the honour to be elected to it 
 in 1884. One of the last meetings of the club I attended before 
 resigning St. George's was somewhere about 1904. At each 
 meeting the host read a paper and entertained the club at 
 luncheon. It was my turn to read and entertain, and I chose 
 as my subject "Faith." The paper led to a long discussion. 
 I tried to make clear that Faith, as Jesus saw and demanded it, 
 had nothing to do with a creed, but had everything to do with 
 man's inherent power to recognize and yield himself to supreme 
 goodness. I said: "Faith is that divine quality in man which
 
 386 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 moves him to recognize, love, and surrender himself to, the 
 highest when he sees it." 
 
 I could see that Doctor Huntington, who sat near me, was not 
 at all pleased with the direction of the debate. As was usual 
 with him when he disagreed, he waited till nearly everyone had 
 said his say. This also, I knew from .long acquaintance with 
 my neighbour, boded no good to my paper and its contention. 
 When at last Doctor Huntington's turn came, he got to his feet, 
 which was unusual with us, and began (what I could instantly 
 see was going to be an adverse criticism of the paper, which had 
 seemed to gain the approval of the majority of those present) 
 by saying: "In the paper and the discussion of it, one all- 
 important thing, the ultimate basis of authority, has been 
 forgotten. The ultimate basis of authority is the Throne of 
 Almighty God." 
 
 This sentence Doctor Huntington pronounced with great 
 emphasis. Silence! for a moment. 
 
 Then, very slowly, the Rev. P. S. Grant said, "Yes, Doctor 
 Huntington, but where is the Throne of Almighty God if not 
 here [touching his breast] in the heart of man?" 
 
 Doctor Huntington stood without speaking for a moment. 
 No one uttered a word. And then, still silent, Doctor Hunt- 
 ington sat down. The chairman pronounced the blessing, 
 and we broke up. 
 
 We often hide our ignorance under sounding phrases that 
 have come to have a hollow and unreal meaning in the ears of 
 our listeners, if not in our own ears. If we cannot find God 
 in ourselves and in our brothers, we surely will find Him no- 
 where. So much is the meaning of the tendency in all world 
 religions to emphasize Incarnation. Instinctively man feels 
 that the only God he can ever know much about is a God in 
 himself and in his fellow-men. The universe is inexplicable 
 without man, and man a futile tragedy without God. 
 
 Those who fancy that the day of the preacher is past are 
 singularly unobservant. A church without real preachers is 
 without aggressive life. The Church can collect and approve 
 teachings of her preachers (prophets), but she cannot either 
 create or commission them. As a matter of historic fact, she 
 has usually stoned them first and canonized them afterward. 
 But whether they are stoned or canonized, in such are the
 
 PREACHING 387 
 
 chief among the sources of divine authority we know. They 
 voice the spirit of God to men. All the Church can do, all she has 
 ever done, is to gather the sermons, the prayers, the poetry, 
 the writings, of these prophets and teachers for the uses of 
 the future. 
 
 We know more psychology than Paul did, but no substitute 
 has been found for that transforming spiritual power he spoke of 
 when, writing to the Corinthians, he said: "It pleased God by 
 the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." True 
 wisdom it is to get back to the practices of Jesus and of Paul. 
 
 Nothing, to my mind, wiser, truer, or more needed, has been 
 addressed to the churches in our time than the warning with 
 which I have headed this chapter. Professor James's words 
 are, I believe, as truly inspired of God the Holy Ghost as are 
 any pronouncements coming to us from anybody clerical claim- 
 ing divine authority. James is on the side of the Preacher, 
 and, being so, he is in good, if often unpopular and unorthodox, 
 company. 
 
 Writing so much about preaching, many will count me as 
 an egoist, perhaps pushing aside what I say as of little worth. 
 Yet in all I have herein set down in my life story there is noth- 
 ing of more importance than this appeal of mine to my friends 
 with whom I may still have some influence to face fully the 
 danger to real religion, if we allow ourselves to follow the prec- 
 edent the churches, some more than others, but all of them, 
 have so steadily pursued, in discouraging rather than encourag- 
 ing the preacher. 
 
 Ecumenical Councils may call from Rome; Lambeth Con- 
 ferences may plead from Canterbury the thinking, feeling, 
 working, hoping millions, who live for the future (and it is 
 theirs) do not even hear Rome's thunder or Canterbury's call. 
 To them the priest speaks no longer. They are through with 
 him. One man, one sort of man alone, can reach them. That 
 is the man who has the same qualifications that those plain men 
 had who, two thousand years ago, started forth from a tenement 
 house in Jerusalem to turn the Old World right side up. (1) 
 They were part of their time. (2) They had the tongue of 
 Fire. Or, put it another way, they understood men and knew 
 what they were longing for, and they were indwelt by the 
 Holy Ghost, that uplifting power in man.
 
 388 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 People would take anything from such men, and people will 
 take anything from a real preacher still. You can say almost 
 anything to one you would help, if you hold his hand and look 
 him in the eye. 
 
 My conviction is that men will eagerly listen to the preacher 
 who says right out what their own hearts are whispering to 
 them. Men never felt the need of the Gospel of Jesus as they 
 do to-day. To uplift our land; to better mankind; to inspire 
 and enable us to live as brothers together, not as mere competi- 
 tors apart. This was the aim of Jesus, and right now no re- 
 former worth the name has any other aim. 
 
 This sacred cause, holy above all other causes, can and does 
 inspire to unselfish, self-sacrificing effort, not a few very great 
 souls alone who greatly lead our race, but multitudes of less 
 gifted, whose work is just as essential to the common salvation 
 as is the work of the greatest of the great. 
 
 If the present church is to live, it must find courage and 
 prescience to seek out among those thousands whose aim is 
 Christlike, men and women, too, born with the preacher's 
 spirit within them. Such too often drift into the ranks of 
 crankdom because they have not been fortunate enough to 
 find someone like Saint Philip of long ago, who expounded the 
 way of God more perfectly to the Ethiopian eunuch, as he rode 
 back to his distant country all uncertain and dissatisfied with 
 what orthodoxy at Jerusalem had been able to give him. 
 
 Preachers who can help in these truth-seeking, truth-loving 
 days of ours, should have some education in the field of com- 
 parative religions, for we nowhere make solid gain in any field 
 of knowledge unless we build on what has been won for us by 
 those who in the past have proved themselves loyal to the truth. 
 Even inspiration needs education; neither can succeed without 
 the other. 
 
 As I look back on my life, I see more clearly than I did that 
 we poor differing mortals need differing forms of the religion of 
 Jesus. But more firmly than ever I believe that, within the 
 wide bounds of that religion, all healthy, growing religions can 
 find comfort, inspiration, and peace. It is their blind in- 
 sistence on uniformity of creed and order that has robbed ortho- 
 doxies of their very life. 
 
 We must have widely differing forms of religion if we are to
 
 PREACHING 389 
 
 worship in spirit and in truth. The same uniform coat cannot 
 be made to fit us all, nor can each be satisfied with the same 
 vision of God. 
 
 Billy Sunday's preaching will reach and uplift some to whom 
 Phillips Brooks's inspired storm would have been sheer non- 
 sense. How long Billy Sunday's influence will last, or, indeed, 
 Phillips Brooks's, either, will depend on how worthy or un- 
 worthy of man's worship is the vision of God those preachers 
 presented to their time. 
 
 Dwight Moody, simple, honest, wholly consecrated Dwight 
 Moody, shook religious life in England partly out of its Victo- 
 rian lethargy, but not out of its quite dreadful self-complacency. 
 Moody believed in an inerrant, infallible, inspired Bible a 
 quite impossible creed. But since he loved the Lord Jesus and 
 his fellow-men and could preach, he was a blessing wherever he 
 went. 
 
 Henry Drummond joined Mr. Moody when first Mr. Moody 
 came to Scotland. His was a message to those who needed a 
 gospel not lacking an intellectual appeal. Drummond, unlike 
 Moody, was a scholar, and he was the first preacher I listened 
 to in those days of my youth with real delight. Somehow he 
 seemed to bring with him a freer air, a wider vision, than other 
 popular preachers of the time. 
 
 I had my inerrant Bible, and my "plan of salvation," both 
 "received by tradition from my fathers," both gripped fast, for 
 I knew nothing better. Yet instinctively I felt they did not 
 meet the needs of my own soul. 
 
 My feeling about Henry Drummond was more instinctive 
 than reasoned; and it was not till twelve years after I first 
 listened to him, and I read his "Natural Law and Spiritual 
 World," that I understood the naturalness of the power he had 
 had over me when I was a boy. 
 
 Henry Drummond had been brought up as I had been in the 
 narrowest of narrow schools. (The two Cairds and the men 
 of their school had not yet won the ear of Scotland.) 
 
 Being a scholar and an ardent naturalist, Henry Drummond 
 was certain to become an evolutionist, and the "Origin of 
 Species" and the inerrant verbally inspired Bible were mutually 
 destructive. "Natural Law in the Spiritual World" was per- 
 haps the best attempt at proving they were not mutually
 
 39 o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 destructive that appeared. The popularity of the book was 
 immediate and immense. I remember well the first time I 
 heard of it. I had occasion to visit one morning my good 
 neighbour Henry Y. Satterlee, then rector of Calvary Church, 
 New York, afterward Bishop of Washington. Satterlee was 
 not usually an excitable man. This morning I found him pro- 
 foundly moved. Walking up and down his study, holding the 
 book in his hand, he said, "Rainsford, here is the book the 
 Church of God has long been waiting for. This man shows 
 the way to the reconcilement of science and religion." 
 
 I bought the book at once and read it. I remember I sat up 
 almost all of the next night reading it. It seemed to me that 
 much in it was good. Some part of it deserved to live, but its 
 main contention was quite evidently untenable. Briefly it 
 was this: "Till man is converted, he is in the inorganic world 
 spiritually. When he is converted and born again, he enters the 
 organic world spiritually." 
 
 In his own way, clothing his thought as he always did in 
 beautiful prose, Henry Drummond had worked out this new 
 presentation of the old doctrine of the need of new birth. It 
 was very clever, but there was this finally fatal flaw in the argu- 
 ment: If man, before entering the family of God by conversion 
 and new birth, was in the kingdom of the inorganic, then he 
 was not responsible for his action a stone cannot sin. 
 
 The book won the ear of orthodoxy everywhere. The Church 
 praised it, the scientists tore it to pieces. But Drummond had 
 henceforth the ear of millions, and wisely and humbly, too, he 
 spoke for his Master to men. Hundreds of thousands read with 
 delight his " Greatest Thing in the World." To say it is worthy 
 of its text (I Cor. xui) is not too high praise. 
 
 We corresponded occasionally, but did not meet again till 
 in 1892 we met at Harvard. He was Lowell lecturer, and I 
 was Baccalaureate preacher. I can never forget that Sunday 
 evening when he preached for the last time in this country. 
 Henry Drummond held the great audience that packed the 
 chapel in the hollow of his hand. I can see him now, standing 
 with one arm behind his back, in the ugly pepper-box pulpit. 
 He spoke without notes for forty-five minutes, seldom raised 
 his voice, seldom made a gesture, never hesitated for a word or 
 changed a sentence; and on his listeners fell the power of God.
 
 PREACHING 391 
 
 As Baccalaureate preacher that day, my place was next 
 President Eliot, in the President's pew. The President came 
 to chapel that night in a grumpy mood. He was no lover of 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church, as everybody knows, yet for 
 three successive anniversaries an Episcopalian had, by the 
 vote of the graduating class, been thrust on him Bishop H. C. 
 Potter, Bishop Wm. Lawrence, and myself. Drummond's 
 theology, too, he disliked, and his scientific knowledge he dis- 
 trusted. But as the blessing was given and all rose to go, I 
 heard my neighbour murmur to himself, " I never heard any- 
 thing like it." 
 
 Already Drummond's health was failing, and all too soon, 
 for the youth of both our land and England's empire, he was 
 to lay down his great and faithfully kept charge. 
 
 Immediately at the conclusion of his lectures at Harvard, he 
 came up with Mr. W. E. Dodge to the Restigouche Salmon 
 Club, of which I was a member. I saw that he was very much 
 tired and greatly needed a long rest. But alas ! it was not to be. 
 Said he to me one day, " Can you find me a quiet place by this 
 lovely river where I can work?" I urged rest, not work. 
 "No," said he, "I am all on fire with this subject. My lec- 
 tures are full of things I must alter. I cannot afford to do 
 again what I did in 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' I 
 am going to rewrite these Lowell lectures, and I must do it now." 
 
 I urged delay. He could weigh things better when he had 
 had a rest and had returned to his home and library. "I 
 cannot wait. I don't even care for salmon fishing till this 
 thing is done." 
 
 So we got him rooms in the one quiet, comfortable riverside 
 farmhouse (Dawson's) that there then was in that lonely, 
 beautiful country, some miles up river from the club. And 
 there, working on into the autumn, he rewrote the "Ascent 
 of Man," and when he had finished it, went home to die. 
 
 Ah! So young! So human, so natural, so honest in his 
 religion, so profoundly catholic in his understanding and love 
 of his fellow-men ! Surely it was just as true of him as of John 
 the Baptist, "There was a man sent from God, whose name was 
 Henry Drummond." 
 
 I saw a beautiful thing lately that finely illustrates the real 
 purpose and value of preaching. An amazingly beautiful
 
 392 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 thing, yet almost unknown. Another strange thing about it 
 was, it was the work of the much-abused State of New York. 
 
 My son Kerr and I just happened on it no guide book we 
 had read said anything about it, nor was its near-by presence, 
 as we motored, flaunted in our faces by one of those common, 
 highly coloured boardings that both illustrate and outrage 
 American taste. It bore a secular title enough, "Aerating plant 
 of the Ashokan Reservoir." No one claimed for it artistic 
 merit. Yet, when all unprepared, we suddenly looked down on 
 it from the height of the Great Dam that shut in the gathered 
 waters of the Catskills, the wonder of its utter beauty struck us 
 both for a moment dumb. 
 
 Imagine all the famous fountains of Europe, Versailles, 
 Rome, Vienna, London, assembled in one ample basin, all in 
 full play, and they are shrunken and yellow dancers of the 
 long past beside this, our own virgin dancer of the mountains. 
 
 Hundreds and hundreds of snowy columns of silver spray, 
 clear and clean, rising, ceaselessly rising, in rejoicing power. 
 Never failing, never pausing, in rush and play and watery roar. 
 It was as though the spirit of the lake there unveiled her fresh, 
 pure beauty to the eyes of men. 
 
 As my son and I had motored among the foothills of the 
 Catskills, we had seen the sources of those brooks and rivers 
 that fed the great reservoir. There, behind its mighty dam, 
 they were assembled to assure the health and comfort of the 
 distant city. Thence they would flow into every palace and 
 tenement house of New York. But why the wild beauty of the 
 great basin we had been looking on ? 
 
 Ah, experience had decreed that even those clear mountain 
 waters needed to be aerated, purified for the use of man, by 
 the mighty fountain play that had fascinated us. 
 
 As I leaned over the dam wall and watched the myriad sil- 
 very columns rising, the thought came to me: the creeds and 
 dogmas and beliefs we have inherited and lived by and still 
 hold dear they are like the great reservoir behind me, things 
 of proved good, needed by the life of men. They, like these 
 waters, have been slowly gathered from many sources and 
 many springs. Far away people in the mountains, in cottages 
 in scattered villages, have lived by them, have used them. But 
 if they are to be of fullest service to the great world of thought
 
 PREACHING 393 
 
 and of action, they must be recharged, shot through afresh 
 with the new hopes, new discoveries, new aims, of the present 
 they are created to strengthen and to serve. 
 
 From the old lake life of the ancient mountains they must 
 pass in the collective life of the reservoir, and then through the 
 newer, searching cleansing of the fountain, before they are 
 finally fitted to cleanse and comfort the home of modern man. 
 
 Ah, yes, the very best of the old doctrines need aerating 
 to-day; need the entrance, the penetration, of the living spirit of 
 the time to vitalize and purify them. What the fountains 
 are to the reservoir, the preacher-teacher is to the church. 
 
 Some say to me, "Why harp on so axiomatic a thing? Of 
 course what you say is true, but what of it?" 
 
 I harp on it because, wherever I look, in my own church and 
 in all churches, I see a failing to win and hold the attention of 
 the people. I harp on it, for the reason of their failure is as 
 plain as the fact. The churches, through their organized and 
 recognized ministers, are serving out to the world unaerated 
 doctrine. And the world won't have it. Not because the 
 world does not want Christianity; not because the world does 
 not know that it wants Christianity, but because the world is 
 slowly becoming convinced that the sort of Christianity served 
 out by bishops and priests and ministers is an utterly inade- 
 quate Christianity, and has lost its power to save men from 
 their sins. Their real sins I mean; not perhaps the sins they 
 talk about. 
 
 The churches are saying: "Listen to the Gospel. We guar- 
 antee its purity. We know where it comes from. The source 
 was pure. We have kept it pure. It saved the soul of man 
 alive in the past. It will save you now. We offer you in the 
 name of the Trinity, the old, old Gospel, mediated by our an- 
 cient and divinely appointed order. Come, drink, and live." 
 
 And millions, unconvinced, are turning away, saying (perhaps 
 under their breath): "We don't want an old, old gospel. We 
 want a gospel of our own. The times have changed. We are 
 in a new world. Everything in it is new. We want a new 
 gospel." 
 
 And this demand of the unsatisfied is sound. The cravings 
 of man's soul are sound. If visibly the Lord Jesus walked on
 
 394 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 earth again, to these multitudes He would go, and to Him they 
 would listen. And with the churches he would have just 
 the same fight all over again, that He had with those orthodox 
 orderly priests in Judea long ago. 
 
 The Gospel of the Lord Jesus is never an old gospel but ever 
 a new. And those good but most mistaken people who talk 
 of the old gospel are grievously misstating the message of 
 Jesus to our age. They it is who are making the "Truth of 
 God of none effect through their tradition." They may rail 
 at the priests and the Sadducees of the New Testament times, 
 but they are their lineal descendants in our own. 
 
 The really great things that are done to-day (and immensely 
 great things are being done) are done by the preacher. Oh, I 
 don't mean the man in a surplice or black gown. I mean the 
 man that wins multitudes to see a great opportunity for service; 
 as Mr. Hoover did, when he taught us how to hold out bread 
 to a hungry world, or as Theodore Roosevelt did, when he 
 preached in season and out of season, all up and down our land, 
 till he made men see that the cause of humanity was the cause 
 of the Allies and we were forever dishonoured if we did not fight 
 for it. 
 
 If this claimof mine that God the Living Spirit, God the Holy 
 Ghost, filled such men, and wrought His Holy Will by them and 
 in them, sound little short of blasphemy to some, I can't help 
 it. If I am sure of anything, I am sure I am right. 
 
 I lunched with Mr. Roosevelt the day before he sailed on 
 that most ill-advised South American adventure of his, where 
 he got his death. He said to me, when I again urged him not 
 to go: ^ 
 
 "Rainsford, the American people are tired of me." 
 
 I told him he had never been more mistaken in his life; that 
 he did not realize where he stood with the people; that they 
 loved him and trusted him and would follow him anywhere, 
 as they would no other man in the land. 
 
 Well, the future proved me even more right than I knew. 
 But why did they love that man ? Why did they follow him ? 
 Why did the very chiefest of his political enemies of the past, 
 led by William Barnes of Albany himself, one of those men 
 who, using every unscrupulous political trick, in 191 2, robbed 
 Roosevelt of the Presidential nomination why did they, one
 
 PREACHING 395 
 
 and all, beg him to accept the Republican nomination for 
 Governor of the State of New York in 1918 ? 
 
 Because, as William Barnes himself admitted, when it was 
 too late: "We required above all else, in the highest affairs of 
 trust and power, not only men of integrity and character, 
 but primarily men who can see into the future men of 
 vision." * 
 
 The professional politician owns at last the preacher's power. 
 Roosevelt had no party then, no organization back of him, 
 yet without the aid of either he had the confident love of the 
 nation. And more, he had turned his chief enemies into 
 friends. It was in truth the hour of his supreme victory, and 
 he thought the people who loved him were tired of him, and 
 needed him no longer! 
 
 Roosevelt's story is a message for all time. We may not see 
 it now, but our children's children will read it, and be proud of it. 
 He made old things, old good things, real, vital, present things 
 to millions. 
 
 A clever cynic said, "Roosevelt discovered the Ten Com- 
 mandments." 
 
 Well, they were a pretty good thing to discover, and 
 they needed rediscovering just then. And if, as the major- 
 ity of his party wished, he had been their candidate for Presi- 
 dent in 191 2, who shall say what vast benefit to mankind might 
 not have resulted? 
 
 Some reader, I doubt not, is saying by now, "This sermon of 
 yours on preaching is like one of the sermons you used to preach 
 in St. George's much too long." I plead guilty, but in my 
 defence I say, the starting of our work in St. George's, its con- 
 tinuance, its progress, and its influence, were dependent primar- 
 ily on preaching on my own preaching first of all, and full of 
 shortcomings and mistakes it surely was. But it was good 
 enough to catch men, all sorts of men, and to retain and inspire 
 some of the best so caught. 
 
 Thousands of men in the land would have made better 
 preachers than I, but somehow they have not been discovered, 
 welcomed, and commissioned by the church. And more, so 
 long as the unreformed theological seminaries, Protestant 
 Episcopal, Roman Catholic, most of the Presbyterian and 
 
 1 "Roosevelt, Life," by Bishop, Vol. ii, p. 454.
 
 396 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Baptist and Methodist seminaries, are conducted on their 
 present lines, and are the usual and the normal way a man must 
 take to reach the pulpit, so long the churches will continue to 
 shut out of their pulpits the very men who alone can save them 
 from falling to pieces with dry rot. 
 
 The letters a preacher receives from those he has helped are 
 multitudinous. A part of one such from Alexis Stein I must 
 print here, for in it he has defined a quality in preaching too 
 generally overlooked. It was his last letter to me, written 
 shortly before his death. 
 
 It is hard for me to write of Alexis Stein; for nothing in my 
 ministry am I more thankful than that I was able to be some 
 help, to give some guidance, to that rarely gifted, rarely beauti- 
 ful soul, during the first years of his so brief ministry. Alexis 
 Stein came to me as assistant in 1895, and left me to take, with 
 his friend, Rev. Frank Nelson, charge of Christ Church, Cin- 
 cinnati, in 1898. He was shy and self-conscious, a man born to 
 suffer; much within himself to struggle against. But he had a 
 heart of gold, and a little of that transmuting thing, Genius. 
 If he had lived Alexis Stein would have been the greatest 
 preacher in the Episcopal Church. 
 
 Little more than a year after he had entered on his work at 
 Christ Church, I dined with Mr. Taft the evening before he 
 sailed for the Philippines as Governor. Mr. Taft knew Cin- 
 cinnati thoroughly. I asked him how Stein was getting on. 
 Said Mr. Taft: "He is on his way to be the first citizen of Cin- 
 cinnati." 
 
 Just fourteen months after Stein and Nelson took charge, I 
 unexpectedly looked in on "my boys," on my way back from 
 Nashville, where I had been holding a mission in Doctor Man- 
 ning's church. I found Stein coughing and feverish. He took 
 no care of himself, and had to be dragged to a doctor. The rest 
 was a protracted struggle with disease. At one time tuber- 
 culosis seemed defeated, and he was called to a field he longed to 
 occupy, and none in the land could have better filled it than he: 
 the chaplaincy of Columbia University. It was not to be. 
 Tubercular trouble reappeared, and the end was near. 
 
 Thanks for your long letter. I have read and reread it. It recalled you 
 to me, and the things you used to do and say. And I sit here, and again
 
 PREACHING 397 
 
 you are back in the old pulpit, floundering and stammering and preaching the 
 Word of God as I have never heard it preached from any other mouth. . . . 
 
 I think it was your great human-ness that did it. You were to me so real, 
 so close to fact, so earthly and fleshly. I would feel the divineness easily and 
 naturally when you spoke of the Great matters. I have heard others talk 
 better than you, but they were trumpets; you were a voice, a living Voice. I 
 think it is to that quality in you I owe the most of what you gave me. I think 
 of you a great deal. 
 
 A. W. S. 
 
 Too many allow their profession to master, enslave, and 
 finally kill the real man in them. The cleric has no monopoly 
 of such gradual self-murder, but unfortunately he is an adept at 
 it. To all ministers it is a danger. But, taking it all in all, in 
 spite of some manifest drawbacks, no other profession is com- 
 parable to the clerical for the opportunity of service it offers. 
 
 One of my friends, a bishop, asked me lately if I had to do it 
 over again, would I be a minister? Of course I would! 
 
 It is sixteen years since I resigned from St. George's pulpit. 
 Far the larger number of my old friends are dead. Those re- 
 maining are widely scattered, and I have no way of reaching 
 them. But at the annual dinner to which they invited me in 
 May, 1 92 1, we sat down, three hundred and forty, and what an 
 unforgettable evening we had together! 
 
 If I were beginning again, and I wish I was, I would be a min- 
 ister in the Protestant Episcopal Church, that is if they would 
 let me into it. There is no profession so well paid, for no other 
 draws fees so rich, or receives its fees in such imperishable coin. 
 The joy of serving and of helping, the response of soul to soul, 
 of fire kindling fire these call forth all that is best in the man. 
 Then the fine freedom it offers to the preacher who wills to be 
 free! 
 
 I speak the simple truth: there is no platform in all the land 
 to-day where such freedom of utterance is expected and wel- 
 comed as the pulpit of the Christian church. People have al- 
 ways crowded, and always will crowd, to hear that man who 
 realizes the immense opportunity of the pulpit and does his 
 best to be worthy of it. 
 
 The pulpit can be free. The pulpit must be free. If it is not 
 free, it is not the fault of the people in the pews; they will back 
 ever the teacher who reverences the truth and speaks his mind, 
 even if he may be, and he is sure to be, unwise and mistaken in
 
 398 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 some things. It is the inner circle of the vestry that at times 
 threatens the freedom of the pulpit, and before these conser- 
 vative and often reactionary gentlemen, who hold the purse 
 strings, the timid or peace-loving clergy fail to make a stand. 
 
 The custom of appointing to vestries men rich and socially 
 influential rather than men more truly representative of the 
 congregation has done, and is doing, the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church grievous harm. 
 
 I was always supported by my vestry, partly because my 
 senior warden, from the very first year of my rectorship to the 
 last, supported my policies; not with his vote only, but with 
 his money. And also because my vestrymen, all of them, knew 
 that if they could not support me officially, their reelection to 
 that body would be impossible. 
 
 As years pass, I increasingly appreciate what I owe to my 
 people. Not to a few, but to thousands, many but slightly 
 known, I owe a debt of gratitude quite unpayable. They 
 trusted me, they unburdened their hearts to me, and often it 
 was from those unburdenings my best sermons grew. 
 
 Better and more lasting than books or plays or pictures is 
 the work of the preacher who lives among his people, though 
 to the unobservant it seems to have little permanence. He 
 reaches hosts of people who, for one or another cause' want of 
 time, or want of education, or want of taste are not greatly 
 influenced by them. The writer offers them facts; the drama- 
 tist, life; and the artist, beauty in vain. But the preacher, 
 himself susceptible to the most vital currents of his time, re- 
 ceives and gives forth. It is as natural and necessary to him as 
 breathing. And with what he gives goes a certain subtle 
 something; something of himself he gives to those he reaches. 
 He may not know it, nor may his hearers, but long after he has 
 passed on and is forgotten, that seed of his own life grows and 
 yields fruit in the lives of other men. Is that not worth doing ? 
 
 I say you can do more good, you can see more good, yes, and 
 in a not unworthy sense you can have yourself a better time in 
 the ministry than in any other profession on earth. 
 
 And now one short closing word about my own dear church. 
 In spite of the fact that it has become a class church, try to 
 enter its ministry. The Protestant Episcopal Church was not 
 intended to be a class church. In spite of its safe policies and
 
 PREACHING 399 
 
 safe bishops, in spite of its system of representative government 
 that makes a farce of representative government, press into 
 it, stay in it, and from within fight to reform and liberalize it. 
 
 We are in but "the morning of the times." We are on the 
 eve of great events. I long to see that church which should be 
 most comprehensive of all Christian churches, for she repre- 
 sents a main current of the religious evolution of the most com- 
 prehending and comprehensive of the world's great races , take the 
 place that, by right of her great past, is hers. She should in- 
 spire and guide the hearts of men in the great new days coming 
 as she did in the great days of old. 
 
 But if she would do so, she must find, equip, and commission 
 the preacher.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt 
 
 By time, I du like a man that ain't afeard. 
 
 HOSEA BlGELOW 
 
 Nothing I have to leave my sons do I so highly value as a 
 photograph, and a few words written in a shaky hand under- 
 neath it. Shortly before he died, Theodore Roosevelt sent it 
 to me: 
 
 To Dr. W. S. Rainsford, 
 
 From his old friend, fellow worker, and admirer. 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 He was hated by some and feared by some, as a good 
 man if he is brave (which good men too often are not) ever 
 must be. But he was the most loved and trusted man of our 
 time. 
 
 He honoured me first with an acquaintanceship, and later 
 with a friendship, for which I can never sufficiently thank 
 him. 
 
 He had faults, of course. These stood out on the surface of 
 the man. He was at times intemperate in his advocacies as 
 well as in his oppositions. I do not think that his judgment 
 of men was unusually good, though he had confidence in his 
 judgment of men. He was impetuous, a trifling fault. He 
 was ambitious, a second-class virtue. As father and husband 
 there could be none more tender or more true. 
 
 To the land he ruled and loved, his highest faith and an al- 
 most religious devotion were given. For her sake "he counted 
 not his life dear unto himself." 
 
 To me he was the kindest, most charitable, most faithful 
 
 400
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 401 
 
 friend a man ever had. When I resigned St. George's, a sick 
 and broken man, a friend of mine told him of the book Dean 
 Hodges and John Reichert, my secretary, were jointly bringing 
 out, describing the sort of church I had striven for the Insti- 
 tutional Church. He said he would write an introduction to 
 it. Here is what he then wrote : 
 
 BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM 
 
 The Church must be a living, breathing, vital force, or it is no real church; 
 and therefore not only all good citizens, but especially all earnest Christians 
 are under a real debt of obligation to the Rev. William S. Rainsford for what 
 he has done with St. George's Church in New York. Every serious student 
 of our social and industrial conditions has learned to look with discomfort 
 and alarm upon the diminishing part which churches play in the life of our 
 great cities for I need hardly say that no increase in the number of fashion- 
 able churches and of wealthy congregations in any shape or way atones for 
 the diminution in the number of the churches in the very localities where there 
 is most need for them. If ever the Christian Church ceases to be the church 
 of the plain people, it will cease to be the Christian Church. 
 
 Dr. Rainsford has stood preeminent among the clergymen to whom it has 
 been given to prevent this condition of things from obtaining. His remark- 
 able physical and mental equipment, and the appeal that ethical considera- 
 tions make to him, put him in the forefront of those both able and eager to do 
 the task. He was keenly alive to everything that appeals to men as men, 
 and his broad and deep sympathies made him keenly sensitive to the need of 
 others, no less than to the way in which these needs could be effectively met. 
 With such an equipment, he took an empty church and filled it. He filled 
 it with the men and women of the neighbourhood. He made these men and 
 women feel that whether they were rich or poor mattered nothing, so long 
 as they were Christians who tried to live their Christianity in a spirit of 
 brotherly love and of sane, cheerful helpfulness toward themselves and 
 toward one another. He brought the church close to the busy, working life of 
 a great city. With his strong human hand he felt the throbbing pulse of the 
 people among whom he worked, and he fired their hearts with the spirit that 
 was in his own. As a preacher, as an executive, as a citizen among his 
 fellow-citizens, Dr. Rainsford made St. George's Church the most notable 
 institution of its kind in the world. He did lasting work for social and 
 civic righteousness. Not only New York City but the Nation as a whole 
 owes him a debt of gratitude for his moulding of American citizenship in 
 the form in which it should be cast. The kind of citizenship for the up- 
 building of which he laboured, is that which rests its sense of duty to city 
 and country on the deep and broad foundation of the eternal laws of spiritual 
 well-being. 
 
 I keenly regret Dr. Rainsford's retirement from active duty, and I 
 welcome this book as giving a record of a life work full of inspiration for
 
 4 o2 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 his fellow-men. To Dr. Rainsford can be applied the words of the German 
 poet: 
 
 Wer nicht gelitten, hat nur halb gelebt; 
 Wer nicht gefehlt, hat wohl auch nicht gestrebt; 
 Wer nicht geweint, hat halt auch nur gelacht; 
 Wer nie gezweifelt, hat wohl kaum gedacht! 1 
 
 (Signed) Theodore Roosevelt. 
 The White House, 
 
 Washington, D. C. 
 April 7th, 1906. 
 
 The first time I spent an afternoon and evening alone with 
 him was in 1904. His letter of invitation is characteristic: 
 
 Dear Dr. Rainsford, 
 
 Is there any chance of your being in Washington at any time within the 
 next few weeks? I should particularly like to see you. If you can come 
 down, will you not let me know in advance, so that I can arrange to have you 
 to lunch or dinner? Moreover, if you will bring some rough clothes, and if 
 you are willing to take a slow walk with a President who, like Mr. Tracy 
 Tupman, has become both old and fat, I should like to take you down Rock 
 Creek, where, if you go on the footpath, and not on the carriage road, the 
 scenery is really beautiful. 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 Feb. 12, 1904. Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 I answered, saying I could go to Washington on the 23rd, 
 and place myself at his service. That I feared I was in no con- 
 dition to join him in a "Tracy Tupman walk," but I would do 
 my best. There came a reply. 
 
 Feb. 15, 1904. ; 
 Will you dine with me on the 23rd, and spend the night? Can you get here 
 early enough to go for a walk with me, say about 3:30? And then after din- 
 ner we will have the evening to discuss matters. I think I shall get Taft to 
 come to dinner. 
 
 Faithfully yours, 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 (Mr. Taft could not come.) 
 
 I arrived on time, and found the President and Senator 
 Lodge ready for a walk. We drove to the park in a light wagon, 
 
 Who has not suffered, has lived but half; 
 Who has not failed, has sure not striven; 
 Who has not wept, has forsooth but laughed; 
 Who has not doubted, has hardly thought!
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 403 
 
 left it at the gate, and made for the bed of the ravine, down 
 which, in moderate flood, for there had been a semi-thaw, the 
 stream ran. It was a clear, cold winter day, and here and there 
 new ice fringed the bank. 
 
 Presently the gorge opened, the stream widened, and in 
 front of us, on the opposite bank, the cliff rose precipitately, 
 presenting a face of rock ribbed with ice and snow. 
 
 "Can we do it?" said the man who had proclaimed himself 
 "both old and fat." 
 
 I was not at all sure that I could do it, and a side glance at the 
 Senator showed me very plainly that he was even more un- 
 certain of his powers than I was. However, I had not come 
 from New York to go back on my host's challenge (for that was 
 what it was) so I said I'd try to continue a habit I had con- 
 tracted for some years past of following him, and waving an 
 adieu to the Senator, we waded across that icy stream. 
 
 The cliff is a scrambling climb in summer time. In winter, 
 with slippery surface, and hand and foot-hold very uncertain by 
 reason of frost and thaw, it required care and effort. I can- 
 not remember the exact height. The President, of course, 
 chose the highest and steepest face, but I do know that when 
 at last I gained the top, it was with a sense of genuine relief. 
 
 There was small opportunity for conversation during the next 
 two hours, for we went straight across country at a slashing 
 gait, and the pace was altogether too fast for talk. We got 
 back to the White House just in time for dinner. 
 
 I have in all thirty-nine notes and letters received between 
 1899 and 1 91 8; a few are, I think, important enough to enter 
 here. 
 
 In December, 1902, most of the men of influence I knew were 
 bitterly opposed to the man and his policies. The future 
 proved Theodore Roosevelt to have been absolutely right and 
 wise in what he did and tried to do. His stand was that of a 
 great man who saw the nation's danger, and taking his political 
 future (which was rightly dear to him) in his hands, unflinch- 
 ingly, without one particle of compromise, he faced the storm. 
 It is a sad thing to have to confess it, but it must be con- 
 fessed with all plainness that many good men, patriotic in 
 intention, up to their lights, were by their action undermining 
 the very foundations of democratic government. Some con-
 
 4 o 4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 fess now, who could not see it then, that a number of those who 
 controlled the wealth of the United States had persuaded them- 
 selves into the habit of belief that what they wanted to do they 
 could do, and that they were advancing their country's for- 
 tunes, as well as their own, by doing it. 
 
 They were law-abiding, according to their own belief, but 
 when the law thwarted their purposes, they depended on astute 
 lawyers to steer them round the law or venal politicians to 
 tamper with it. Some such men I knew. Moved by what I 
 heard and saw among such, I wrote a long letter to the Presi- 
 dent, in December, 1902. It is not worth quoting the whole of 
 it here; its plea was that he should force on Congress the issue 
 of "publicity of Trust accounts." I said: 
 
 Some of the strongest men financially in the East believe in the reasonable- 
 ness and the great need of this, but the trouble with them is that, while they 
 hold this opinion individually, they are loath to break line, and they won't 
 go back on each other. Give them a lead. It is the business of the Presi- 
 dent of the United States to give them a lead. I don't think you realize how 
 superb are your chances of leadership, and how faithful to that leadership 
 multitudes of people, great and small, are at this moment prepared to be. 
 
 It seems to me there was an element of ebb and flow in your "message" a 
 talking round the question, that somehow missed the point. ... It 
 seems awfully conceited of me to talk in this way. I only venture on it be- 
 cause I know you to be a man so big of soul, so kind of heart, that you will 
 not misunderstand even a blundering effort to help the Great Cause. . . . 
 
 With affection and respect, 
 
 Dec. 18, 190a. W. S. R. 
 
 My letter was marked "Personal and Private." I promptly 
 got the castigation I deserved. I was ignorant of those proce- 
 dures that control the Executive. 
 
 December 27, 1902. 
 Personal. 
 My dear Dr. Rainsford: 
 
 I thank you for your letter. You say it is difficult for the politicians in 
 Washington to understand what is needed and not to be timid. I agree with 
 you. But one of my main difficulties arises from the fact that thoroughly 
 good outsiders do not understand what is possible to do, or indeed what is 
 done. I am glad you wrote frankly about my message. I know you expect 
 me to write with equal frankness in return. Your letter was a genuine dis- 
 appointment to me, because it showed you had misunderstood what most 
 emphatically no man has a right to misunderstand. My message was ab-
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 405 
 
 solutely clear. I spoke of the need of publicity. But are you aware that to 
 make publicity an issue is mere nonsense unless Congress frames legislation 
 which will give us a chance to get it? Are you aware aiso of the extreme un- 
 wisdom of my irritating Congress by fixing the details of a bill, concerning 
 which they are very sensitive, instead of laying down the general policy? 
 I said in my message just what I had said in my speeches, only I used the 
 phraseology appropriate to the occasion. I went over every word with 
 Attorney General Knox, and went just as far as I thought we could with safety 
 ^o. He and I are now in close consultation with the Congressional com- 
 mittees having the legislation in charge. 
 
 Don't you think that you will get a better idea of what I am after if you 
 remember that I am seeking to secure action by Congress rather than to 
 establish a reputation as a stump exhorter? The latter is a good course, too: 
 follow it at times; but the first is the main thing now. 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 Dec. 29, 1902, 
 Dear Mr. President, 
 
 I know you are rightly seeking to secure action by Congress " rather than 
 to establish a reputation as a stump exhorter" of how best to secure such 
 action you are a good judge, and I no judge at all. All the same, I hold it 
 can do no harm for a sincere friend to point out, as I tried to do, the even larger 
 work that has been entrusted to you: the leadership of the youth of this 
 nation. 
 
 That leadership you have won not by "stump exhortation," but by a fine, 
 high-minded consistency, and the following of a moral purpose evident to all. 
 
 May God grant you now and always, courage and a "sound mind." May 
 you and Mrs. Roosevelt and all your children have the best and happiest of 
 New Years. 
 
 Very sincerely and obediendy yours, 
 
 W. S. Rainsford. 
 
 Dear Dr. Rainsford, 
 
 Of course it is always a pleasure to hear from you. I am glad to have you 
 write to me with entire frankness. 
 
 Faithfully yours, 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 One letter written during the rush of the campaign of 191 2 I 
 must here give. During that campaign Theodore Roosevelt 
 rose to a greater height than any he had yet attained. So those 
 of his friends believed who stood by him. So the majority of 
 the Republican voters of the country believed, and proved their 
 belief by voting for the man they trusted, though behind him was 
 no party, no machine, no organization. In his own downright.
 
 4 o6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 straightforward way he stood up before them, and won out 
 against the regular machine. Some good men in the Republi- 
 can party "stood by the ship," so they described their action, 
 choosing a shaky party instead of a steadfast man. 
 
 Many of us who are not politicians but who have tried to do 
 our political duty by our country, who have tried to see straight 
 and go straight, find it hard to forgive "these choosers of an 
 old ship"; and hardest of all to forgive one of the chief leaders 
 of that party, Elihu Root. 
 
 Surely the man makes the ship, rather than the ship the man. 
 Consequences tragic beyond words, world-wide in the misery 
 and loss they wrought, resulted from the fatuous choice that 
 preferred to stand by a cranky ship rather than a great captain. 
 If Theodore Roosevelt had been elected President of the United 
 States in 1912, as was the will of a majority of the Republican 
 voters expressed at the polls, the whole history of the world 
 might have been different. There might have been no war; or, 
 if there had been, most surely it would have been shorter and 
 millions of lives would have been saved. 
 
 In his great Carnegie Hall address in April, 191 2, he made 
 perhaps the finest appeal he ever made to his countrymen. 
 After it, I wrote him a little line. Here is his answer, written 
 from the Outlook magazine office: 
 
 I am glad you liked my address. I think you would have liked my ad- 
 dress at Boston, the other night. In this campaign I have been able to take 
 as pronounced a stand for an ideal as it has ever been my good fortune to 
 take at all. In a wearyingly large number of cases in politics, one has to 
 accept the best possible, when it is far short of the best. In this campaign, 
 however, I have been able to place the questions just as they ought to be 
 placed, and I think we have conducted it upon as high a plane as ever a 
 campaign in America has been conducted. 
 
 In great haste, faithfully yours, 
 
 April 30, 1912. Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 In 191 5 there was the Barnes trial, and I felt called to write 
 a letter to my leader that I was sure no one among his many 
 friends would venture to write. Not that I was intimate with 
 him as were some others, but that, ever since he had been Gov- 
 ernor of the State, I had consistently tried to help him in the 
 only way I could, by letting him see what enemies or half- 
 hearted friends were saying or doing. From experience I know
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 407 
 
 well that this sort of help is the hardest to get or to give, and 
 is often misunderstood and resented. But by now I knew that 
 my friend knew that I might be stupidly mistaken or wrong- 
 headed, but that I loved and honoured him. 
 
 The only important thing in my letter I here briefly state: 
 
 You are going to meet a hostile crowd. Your enemies will be there. They 
 will catch at any opportunity to hurt you. They will do what they can to 
 make you appear to the world to be the sort of man they have always de- 
 clared you to be. You know what they accuse you of being. Let me re- 
 mind you. As you face them remember it well. 
 
 (Then, categorically, I named three popular accusations.) 
 
 (1) You call all men who differ from you liars. 
 
 (2) You want everything for yourself. 
 
 (3) You never admit you are wrong. 
 
 W. S. Rainsford. 
 
 The answer touched me to the heart. It is humble and beau- 
 tiful and true. It should find, it will find, a place in the his- 
 tory, at some future day to be written, of Theodore Roose- 
 velt: 
 
 Oyster Bay, 
 April 10, 19 1 5. 
 My dear Dr. Rainsford, 
 
 That is an awfully nice letter! I must thank you for it, and I am going 
 to try to show my appreciation by not using the hard language of which you 
 complain any more. 
 
 It is awfully difficult to strike just the middle between a sappy refusal, 
 even to condemn wrong in the concrete, which is one of the failings of our 
 public men, and the overstrained violence that defeats its own ends. 
 
 With renewed thanks, 
 
 Always faithfully yours, 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 Years after that trial, see William Barnes's own plea to 
 Theodore Roosevelt to accept the nomination of the Republican 
 party to be Governor of the State. There is nothing more re- 
 markable in our political history: 
 
 I signed a call addressed to Theodore Roosevelt to enter the Republican 
 primary as candidate for Governor because we require, above all else, in the 
 highest affairs of trust and power, not only men of integrity, but men who
 
 4 o8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 can see into the future, who could not be content with doing only these things 
 which become obviously necessary. Had this nation been led by vision the 
 war would have been already won. Statement by Wm. Barnes, July 19, 
 191 8. See "Theodore Roosevelt and His Times, " Vol ii, page 453. 
 
 In 1916, I begged Roosevelt not to go to South America. I 
 had had personal knowledge of one or two who had travelled in 
 its wilder regions. I dreaded for him its fever. Theodore 
 Roosevelt had never spared himself. His physique had been 
 magnificent, but he had made heavy draughts on his superb 
 stores of vitality. He was reckless in the use of himself. No 
 persuasion would make him take common care of himself. 
 This I knew too well, for Cunningham, a good friend of mine, 
 who had been his guide in Africa, explained to me what trouble 
 the President put him to during those months. Ordinary 
 precautions he would not bother to take. From a very ex- 
 tended experience of my own I knew how much depends, in a 
 country where climatic conditions are bad, on taking not only 
 ordinary, but extraordinary, precautions planning beforehand 
 for the right sort of food, etc., etc., etc.; going to considerable 
 expense, if necessary, to secure things that, to the careless 
 or ignorant, might seem scarcely worth troubling about at 
 all. 
 
 Even if he had been well, he should not have gone to South 
 America. And he was not well. The fierce campaign had 
 worn him down, and he was temporarily discouraged. He was 
 very far from realizing the immense impression he had made on 
 the whole country. I don't think that to the very end of his 
 life he fully understood that it was he who had led the people 
 to war. No! What he felt he said to me: "The people are 
 tired of me." 
 
 When it seemed likely that we would enter the war, and there 
 was a possibility of his raising (not commanding; he never 
 asked for or expected any command higher than Brigadier) a 
 a special volunteer division, I wrote, asking to be remembered, 
 saying I wanted to go as a chaplain. 
 
 In March, 191 7, I received the following letter. It is in his 
 own handwriting. Most of his letters were written by a secre- 
 tary, and signed by him :
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 409 
 
 Sagamore Hill, Mar. 6, 1917. 
 Dear Doctor, 
 
 As usual, your letter gives me real pleasure. Indeed, if I am allowed to 
 raise a division, I should peculiarly like to have you as one of the chaplains. 
 But, as you say, I fear there is no such luck ahead. 
 
 Wilson prepares for war with Germany essentially on the principle of the 
 school boy who prepares for trouble with his teacher by putting a geography 
 in the seat of his trousers. 
 
 I am glad you find a growth in the national spirit. But it is a very slow 
 growth. The hideous wrong that Wilson has done the American spirit has 
 been to drug it, to stultify it. I make no apology for our lamentable spiritual 
 falling off, which has permitted him to do this. But after all, good, simple, 
 hardworking people, such as those who necessarily compose the immense 
 majority of our population, cannot be expected to think out international 
 questions for themselves. They must have a leader; and normally they will 
 accept the President as that leader. When, by a multitude of adroit and 
 shifting speeches and gestures, he bewilders them until they do not know what 
 has really happened, it is hard to blame them for following his lead into what 
 they are told is safety. 
 
 The men I blame are the professional intellectuals, the professional moral- 
 ists of the Evening Post, Springfield Republican, New Republic, and Atlantic 
 Monthly type. 
 
 I hope Mrs. Rainsford gets some benefit from the quiet. 
 
 Always yours, 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 Congress voted Theodore Roosevelt his division. It is no 
 exaggeration to say all Europe cried out for the presence of the 
 man they had learned to trust and honour. Clemenceau wrote 
 a long personal letter to President Wilson. "Your troops are 
 coming, but where is Roosevelt? My poilus are crying to me, 
 'Give us Roosevelt.'" 
 
 The sending of the Roosevelt Division was blocked by Presi- 
 dent Wilson. 
 
 In May, I wrote, trying to say partly what I felt, for I knew 
 well that the refusal of his services pretty well broke his heart. 
 His message to the men who wanted to follow him to France 
 was fine as anything he ever said or wrote in its manly dignity 
 and its utter unselfishness. It was worthy of a great leader on 
 a great day. 
 
 (In his own handwriting ) Sagamore Hill, 
 
 May 24, 1917. 
 Dear Rainsford, 
 
 I have received many, many letters I valued during the last few days 
 but none I valued more than yours. Well! You and I did our best to be
 
 4 io THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 allowed to render service which we could have rendered; we were denied 
 the privilege, and now we must do the best we can anyhow. 
 
 It is not pleasant to try and fight a great war under the lead of a Buchanan; 
 but there is no alternative, and of course our country is all that we have in 
 mind. 
 
 Ever faithfully yours, 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 When his son Quentin was killed, I wrote to him: 
 
 Ridgefield, Conn. 
 Sept. 20, 191 8. 
 Dear Leader, 
 
 I must thank you from my heart for your article "The Great Adventure." 
 There you strike, may I say, a deeper, holier note than in anything of yours 
 so far as I know, written. The iron has entered your soul, and you are speak- 
 ing to the millions whose souls it has entered, or must enter, before this can- 
 cerous thing, threatening the race's life, has been cut out. 
 
 The supreme mystery and tragedy of life you face, and, facing it, you speak 
 to all of us. Not to those only who still retain the vastly comforting assur- 
 ance that at the other side the veil their loved ones, glorified, are awaiting 
 them, but also to the multitudes of thoughtful men and women who, having 
 surrendered at least certitude on that point, still, with a self-sacrifice and faith 
 in the worth-whileness of life, as high and as holy as this poor world has ever 
 seen, "go forth to their work until the evening." 
 
 The Master of us all said, long ago, that "the Comforter had many things 
 to say to us." His message changes as the ages pass, but he is with us still. 
 
 May he abide with you, dear friend, and with your wife. 
 
 Gratefully yours, 
 
 W. S. Rains ford. 
 
 The Kansas City Star, 
 
 Oct. 3, 1918. 
 My dear Doctor, 
 
 Your letter touches me. I thank you for it. In it you show, I think, that 
 you and I have really at heart the same creed, a creed I never have spoken to 
 you about. Give my heartiest regards to your gallant boy. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 One last short line I had, just before the end, dated Janu- 
 ary 1, 1 91 9. He said he had had much pain, but he was getting 
 better, and then added: "Well, our boys did their duty, as their 
 mothers and fathers would have wished them to do." 
 
 Well! We loved him, that Greatheart of our time! And 
 many, many of us would have gladly died in his place, if by our 
 dying he might have lived on, once more to guide and rule the 
 land he loved.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 Four Dinners 
 
 Love will put a new face on the weary old world, in which we have dwelt 
 as pagans and enemies too long. R. W. Emerson. 
 
 We climb like corals, grave by grave, 
 That have a pathway sunward. 
 
 Gerald Massey. 
 
 Gerald Massey, whose fine brave insight into the ways of 
 God the two lines I quote illustrate, is known to few. He was 
 one of that great little band whose faith and courage saved 
 England in the early years of the Nineteenth Century. He 
 was the poet of the poor. "I worked," said he, "in a silk mill 
 when I was eight years old, from five in the morning till six- 
 thirty in the evening, for a weekly wage, beginning at nine- 
 pence, raised to one shilling and threepence. That was in 
 1830. Happily a fire destroyed that mill, and I and a number 
 of other children stood for hours in wind and sleet and mud, 
 watching joyfully the blaze that set us free. I had no childhood. 
 Ever since I can remember I had an aching fear of want throb- 
 bing in heart and brow." Yet this was the man whose splendid 
 faith is certain of the "pathway sunward." 
 
 The "aching fear of want," its deadening, hope-destroying 
 power in the home life of many millions of the poor, I began to 
 realize when I was a boy. I saw it in crowded East London. 
 It followed me in the less huddled but scarcely less poverty- 
 stricken courts of old Norwich, where thousands of beaten 
 shoemakers were making a last vain effort to compete with 
 modern machinery-made footwear. And after a few years' 
 interval, I faced it again, in the intolerably wicked conditions 
 of New York sweatshops and tenement house life. 
 
 Any intelligent man must see that such poverty must de- 
 
 411
 
 4 i2 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 base and degrade. I ask myself the question : How was it that 
 every decent man and woman did not see this; see it so clearly 
 as to feel compelled to leave other things that interfered, and 
 set themselves to the undoing of the horror of it ? There is an 
 answer. Christians had not realized that in the scheme of their 
 universe man is his own saviour. Most do not realize it now. 
 We somehow pictured to ourselves a complacent sort of God 
 that approved things as they were. We were the fortunate 
 ones; and if so, noblesse oblige naturally was our motto. But 
 that was a very different matter from "bearing other's bur- 
 dens in order to fulfill the Law of Christ." (Gal. vi, 2.) A 
 very different matter from raising our fellows on the low 
 mounds of our forgotten graves, as Gerald Massey saw man- 
 kind raised. 
 
 Yes ! Massey was a truer prophet of God, when he wrote for 
 the Chartist rioters of the 1830's, than all the bishops and all 
 the priests of the Church of England. The spirit of human 
 progress and salvation was with the Chartists rather than with 
 His Majesty's government and the English Church. The 
 Chartists made mistakes. All reformers are human, or they 
 would not be effective. They were the first beginners of 
 modern labour unity. They claimed a larger share in the 
 product of industry for the rank and file of labour's great 
 army. 
 
 The mistakes of early Chartism have been forgotten. The 
 mistakes of our labour unionism will some day be forgotten, too. 
 But the aims of neither will be forgotten nor baffled, for they 
 are just and righteous and certain to be achieved. Labour must 
 have a far larger share in the profits of its industry. Assure it 
 of this, and it will be more efficient and industrious. And so 
 the twin curse of stunted childhood and undeserved want, 
 that have for so long scarred the lives of the poor, shall no 
 longer, like the sword of Damocles, hang suspended over the 
 labouring man's home. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt had filled President McKinley's unexpired 
 term for three and a half years. In those years he had made 
 history. He had spoken to the coloured citizen the first word 
 of honest, straightforward encouragement that his race had 
 heard since Lincoln was shot. He had carried through the 
 "Taxing public franchise law" against fiercest opposition
 
 FOUR DINNERS 413 
 
 T 
 
 opposition in which, alas! many of the rich men in the coun- 
 try joined. And he had won the Northern Securities suit. 
 In 1902, he took the unprecedented step of forcing a settlement 
 of the coal strike that threatened the nation with dire calamity. 
 Everyone, friend and enemy, told him he was committing 
 political suicide. But Roosevelt saw the matter through, 
 and the nation blessed a great leader. 
 
 In 1903, he broke up the political gang of land thieves in 
 Oregon, made open warfare on the two Senators of that state, 
 and his policy, relentlessly pursued, sent one of them to the 
 penitentiary. 
 
 In the beginning of 1904, Elihu Root came to New York, 
 to speak in defence of the administration. As everyone knows, 
 Root for very many years had been Senator Piatt's admirer and 
 henchman, and had performed a similar office for others, whom 
 it is not necessary again to name, but, alas! still in our city, 
 (though happily "they rest from their labours,") "their works 
 do follow them." 
 
 Everyone was glad to welcome Mr. Root back to New 
 York. "Glad to see you, but leave the Administration alone; 
 if you don't, you will raise hell." "Well, then, I am come to 
 raise particular hell," said Root. For in two speeches, one in 
 Chicago and the other in New York, he defended Roosevelt's 
 policy and practice as no other advocate in the United States 
 could have defended them. 
 
 Judge John Clinton Grey gave Mr. Root a dinner the night 
 after his New York speech, and I was honoured by an invita- 
 tion. The dinner was both pleasant and good, as were all din- 
 ners where Judge Grey was host. As I remember, we sat 
 down about twenty. I waited for a chance, and when it came, 
 late in the evening, I said: "Mr. Root, I want to say that 
 though I have been fortunate in hearing many good speeches 
 since I lived in New York, I think last night's was the very best 
 I ever heard." 
 
 "Thank you, Doctor Rainsford; that is kind of you." 
 
 "Now let me say something else," I persisted, and I felt 
 silence round me. "Mr. Root, I don't think you could have 
 made that speech a few years ago." 
 
 Mr. Root met my challenge finely. "I am more glad of 
 your second statement," said he, "than of your first. You are
 
 4 i4 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 right. I could not have made that speech if I had not worked 
 with and worked under Theodore Roosevelt." 
 
 It was nobly said, but so bitter was the feeling against Roose- 
 velt then, among the crowd of rich men and Republican poli- 
 ticians in the city, that it drew forth no applause whatever at 
 Judge Grey's dinner table. 
 
 In November, shortly after Roosevelt's election, Mr. John 
 Morley came as a visitor for some days to the White House. 
 On the last evening of his visit the President gave him a dinner, 
 and to it I had the honour to receive by telegram an invitation. 
 I reached Washington in the evening, and got to the White 
 House only half an hour before dinner time. The President 
 met me in the hall. "We will have an interesting time; you 
 will enjoy your company." Naturally I had not the least idea 
 what shape the dinner would take. My invitation simply ran, 
 "to meet John Morley." 
 
 All the company, fourteen or fifteen, came in pretty well 
 together. One of the first was a tall priest, one of the Paulist 
 Fathers from New York; I cannot remember his name. Then 
 Carrol D. Wright, Commissioner of Labour, with whom I had 
 served on the Committee of Fifty on the liquor question for 
 many years; Secretary Morton, Sargent, Commissioner of 
 Immigration, Stone, Hannahan, Clark, Morrisy, chiefs of the 
 following Brotherhoods respectively: Locomotive Engineers, 
 Firemen, Conductors, and Trainmen; Fuller, who was legisla- 
 tive agent of those Brotherhoods; James R. Garfield; and 
 Joseph Bucklin Bishop, then editor of the Commercial Adver- 
 tiser. I think John Mitchell was there, too, but I am not sure. 
 (Mr. Garfield has kindly assisted my poor memory in making 
 the list.) 
 
 The dinner was soon over. The President hurried things 
 along. He had, by the way, one bad dinner habit. He was a 
 big, careless eater. He persistently "rushed" his food. I 
 remember, years after, Cunningham, whose devotion to the 
 President, whose wide knowledge of African conditions (and, on 
 one occasion, whose fine courage and equally fine shooting 
 saved Mr. Roosevelt in a moment of great peril) made his trip 
 the great success it was, said to me: "Why, Doctor, he eats 
 twice as much meat as an ordinary man, and twice as fast, and 
 then he sits up half the night writing."
 
 FOUR DINNERS 415 
 
 Well, the table was cleared, and the Secret Service man placed 
 outside the dining-room door. Then the President rose and 
 said, as nearly as I can remember: 
 
 "I have wanted to give this dinner for three years. I could 
 not give it before, because people would say I was seeking votes. 
 They can't [with his own chuckle] say that now. Mr. Morley 
 has been staying with me. I told him of my desire, and he has 
 kindly allowed me to give the dinner as a courtesy to himself. 
 Now you, each one of you, are my friends. You are each of 
 you men who have, in your own several ways, won some special 
 knowledge of our country. You are men I trust. To- 
 night, I have called you together, not merely to meet Mr. Mor- 
 ley, whom we all wish to honour, but to help and advise me." 
 
 Then, with evident and deep feeling, the President said: 
 "Gentlemen, I have great problems before me. We are living 
 in momentous times. And God is my witness, I want to do 
 what is wise and right by the people of this country, who have 
 elected me their president by so great a majority vote. Spe- 
 cially, I must face three problems: 
 
 " 1. Control of the Trusts. 
 
 " 2. How to increase the powers of the Railroad Commission 
 and stop rebating. 
 
 "3. Government by Injunction. 
 
 " I will not speak to-night on any of these. But I have asked 
 you men whom I know and trust to come here and tell me what 
 you think the President of the United States can and ought to 
 do to solve them for the public good. Let each man speak out 
 his mind. Do not hurry; you have the night before you." 
 
 The President did not rise till after one o'clock. Now and 
 then he asked a question, or called on someone to speak. Ex- 
 cept to do these, he never opened his lips. I thought the dis- 
 cussion was very able and very frank; and though there was 
 wide difference of opinion, no one lost his temper. 
 
 The invitation to that dinner was the greatest honour ever 
 done me. It was an extraordinarily interesting and inspiring 
 occasion. When it was over, I was so tired that I did not sit up 
 as usual and make notes. What was said was important, but 
 the real significance of that night was the revealing light it cast 
 on the great President's way of going about his tasks. All he 
 had and all he was, was at the service of mankind.
 
 4 i6 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Nothing written about Theodore Roosevelt since then is 
 truer or finer than Kipling's lines: 
 
 Hard-schooled by long power, 
 
 Yet most humble of mind 
 Where aught that he was 
 
 Might advantage mankind. 
 Leal servant, loved master, 
 
 Rare comrade, sure guide . 
 Oh, our world is none the safer 
 
 Now Great-Heart hath died! 
 
 Mr. Morley and I were the only men of the party who slept 
 that night in the White House. The President breakfasted 
 next morning in his own room, and Mr. Morley and I break- 
 fasted together. Of course I had to put to Gladstone's great 
 lieutenant the usual questions. 
 
 "How do you like what you have seen of us?" 
 "Have seen two wonderful things: Niagara Falls and Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt." 
 
 "And how did last night's dinner impress you?" 
 
 "Well, I would to God we could have it in Downing Street." 
 
 Between this dinner and the next I shall tell of eight years 
 elapsed. Meanwhile, the spirit of utter fairness and the policy 
 of a square deal for both Labour and Capital, that, in season and 
 out of season, Theodore Roosevelt had preached and practised 
 in the face of day the spirit that made that night in which he 
 called a few of his friends to council an unforgettable night 
 had begun to leaven the whole land. 
 
 One quite extraordinary instance of its working I had in- 
 timate knowledge of. It is well worth recalling. Our memo- 
 ries are too short, and events that should be unforgettable are 
 too often swallowed up and smothered in the mass of stuff with 
 which the daily press is gorged. 
 
 During the garment workers' struggle for better condi- 
 tions, I came into touch with an inconspicuous sort of man, J. E. 
 Williams, who impressed me as being singularly clear headed 
 and clean hearted. I received a letter from him, giving details 
 of the Cherry Mine disaster, on November 13, 1909, in which 
 two hundred and fifty-eight persons, including ten rescuers, 
 were killed in a few minutes, suffocated, sealed in a burning pit.
 
 FOUR DINNERS 417 
 
 One hundred and sixty women were left widows and four 
 hundred and seventy children fatherless. Of these, four 
 hundred and seven were under fourteen years of age by law 
 too young to work. 
 
 The mine was owned by the St. Paul Coal Company. That 
 company was practically dependent on the Chicago, Mil- 
 waukee & St. Paul Railway Company, to which company 
 the Cherry Mine yielded coal. So, apart from the railroad 
 company, the mine had small value. 
 
 J. E. Williams was no longer a labour leader. He had re- 
 tired to Streator, 111., where the Cherry Mine was, and was 
 manager of the Plum Opera House there. He had himself 
 been a miner; he knew thoroughly the facts; he sized up the 
 extent of the disaster, and quietly, this one man, a self-ap- 
 pointed mediator, went to work to save the half-crazed camp. 
 What followed is a great story, but too long for me to tell here 
 except in outline. 
 
 Williams went directly to Chicago, and sought an interview 
 with President Earling, of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul 
 Railway Company. He actually asked for two hours of the 
 President's time, I believe! That time was given. Mr. Earl- 
 ing listened with attention and sympathy, and at the end said: 
 
 "I admit a moral obligation. What I can do with my di- 
 rectors I do not know." 
 
 Mr. Williams wrote to me, asking me to ask Mr. Morgan to 
 use any influence he might have to induce the directors of that 
 railroad to do what of course there was no legal claim on them 
 whatever to do, viz. : give money out of the funds of the great 
 railroad company of which they were directors to pension the 
 widows and orphans of the men who had met death in a mine 
 whose fortunes they absolutely controlled but did not legally 
 own. 
 
 I met Mr. Morgan a few days after I had received Mr. Wil- 
 liams's letter. He recalled at once the names of the directors, 
 and as quickly said: 
 
 " Mr. Earling will get nothing out of them, for W. R is 
 
 about the strongest man of the lot, and he won't give a cent." 
 
 "I acknowledge a moral obligation." With that fine answer 
 of the President of the St. Paul, an epoch-making settlement 
 was finally arrived at. The English workmen's Compensation
 
 4 i 8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Act of 1906 was proposed as a basis, and almost half a million 
 was paid in settlement of claims, one quarter of which could 
 not have been met by the liquidation of the coal company itself. 
 This brave, simple-hearted servant of his fellows lived long 
 enough to see the task he had undertaken finished, and was 
 later appointed United States Fuel Administrator for Illinois. 
 I heard he was in poor health and wrote to him. He answered 
 that he had to go to a hospital to undergo a severe operation, 
 and of it he died, a few days later. I print part of the last 
 letter I had from him: 
 
 Dear Dr. Rainsford: 
 
 Pardon pencil, but I am on a sick bed, and want to acknowledge your kind 
 letter before I leave home for the hospital, where I go to-morrow to be oper- 
 ated on. 
 
 My dear Sir, your praise is very precious to me indeed but I am over-paid 
 already. It was a privilege to have been permitted to engage in it. It was 
 an inspiration to come in contact with human souls as I did, in those supreme 
 moments when they are put to the test, and to find nobility and grandeur 
 where common report would lead us only to expect selfishness and greed. 
 It seems worth while to have lived in this obscure place for the better part of 
 a life time, that so I might command the confidence that enabled me to be- 
 come the instrument for this work. In the atmosphere of suspicion and 
 jealousy that was aroused, no one could have succeeded as a mediator whose 
 life was not open and free from taint of false motive, political or other. 
 
 So it seems providential that my long and uneventful years were turned 
 to such profit, and that I was enabled to capitalize my quiet life into an as- 
 set that nothing can take from me. 
 
 Very cordially yours, 
 
 J. E. Williams. 
 
 Albert J. Earling, President of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. 
 Paul Railway, writes to J. E. Williams: 
 
 No one could have gone to Cherry in its hour of disaster without being 
 profoundly impressed with the futility of mere legal remedies. At such an 
 hour, the question of legal rights and duties becomes insignificant, as com- 
 pared with the impelling call of humanity. 
 
 I am glad that the Cherry settlement bids fair to be an epoch-making event 
 in the relations between employers and employed in this country. All who 
 had part in bringing it about must have their share of credit. But above and 
 beyond them all, no single factor is of as much importance as your own un- 
 daunted persistence in the presence of circumstances that so often seemed 
 hopeless. 
 
 If, out of the wreckage of property and tombs of men at Cherry, there shall
 
 FOUR DINNERS 419 
 
 come forth a permanent betterment of the relations of employer and em- 
 ployed, it shall stand as a monument to your unfaltering effort to establish 
 among men a lasting principle of equity and justice. 
 
 That dinner in the White House foreshadowed the work of 
 these two great men, a miner and a railroad president, so unlike 
 in many things, but so finely united in one. 
 
 Shortly after my return from Africa in 1913, where I had been 
 conducting a small scientific expedition in the interests of the 
 American Museum of Natural History, I ran against an old 
 friend on Fifth Avenue, Herbert Taylor. In the '8o's, he had 
 been often good enough to play tennis with me. Good enough, 
 I say, for I was a poor player, and he a "crack." We had not 
 met for years. 
 
 "You must come and dine with me to-morrow. I am giving 
 a dinner to celebrate my own birthday, and a group of men 
 whose lawyer I have been are coming. I want you." 
 
 I protested that I was a back number, and would be out of it 
 in such company, but since Herbert Taylor would not take a 
 refusal, and said that he really wanted me there, I accepted, 
 without having the least idea of the shape my host had planned 
 that this dinner should take. 
 
 Next evening the company was on time, and I found myself 
 one of an unusual crowd. All there had done things, and some 
 of the things some of them had recently done had been de- 
 clared illegal by the courts of the country. All present I can- 
 not remember, but there were Judge Gary, President of the 
 United States Steel Company; G. W. Wickersham; F. W. Whit- 
 ridge, President of the Third Avenue Railroad; Duke, tobacco 
 magnate; Hamilton Fish, and a western railroad president 
 whose name I cannot recall; and Judge Lacomb, then almost 
 seventy years old, of the Circuit Court of Appeals. 
 
 Our host was genial and tactful. The dinner was good; 
 and when it was over, everybody was in a good humour. Then 
 came a surprise to me, and I could see to the company as well. 
 When Herbert Taylor had thanked his friends for accepting his 
 invitation and drinking his health, he said: 
 
 The hurrying life of New York does not make it easy to gather together the 
 sort of company met here to-night. Suppose we do not waste our evening. 
 Here are men whose circumstances have compelled them to look at life from
 
 4 2o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 different points of view. Let us be frank with each other. Let us say what 
 we think of the present conditions and tendencies of to-day. I drink to the 
 Judge. 
 
 The Judge spoke at length and with emphasis. He deplored 
 the flood of legislation that was pouring forth from state legis- 
 latures and from Washington. He thought too much of it was 
 ill-considered and rash, and would prove ineffective. His chief 
 objection to it, however, was not on these general accounts, but 
 that it seemed to him to be an effort made at the instigation of 
 the masses of our people to despoil the rich. 
 
 In short, the Judge feared that to-day ninety-five per cent, 
 of the citizens of the United States were trying to see how far 
 they could despoil the other five per cent. Judge Gary followed 
 Judge Lacomb. 
 
 The trust magnate spoke impressively. There was a note of 
 deep feeling in his voice when he said: 
 
 Gentlemen, no man can have any idea how bitter and intolerable a thing it 
 is to a man trying to do right, trying to direct a vast business in such a way 
 that it can be reasonably prosperous and keep within the law, to find himself 
 in conflict with the government of the land he loves and wants to serve. I 
 am responsible to my stockholders; there are many thousands of them. I am 
 responsible to my working people; there are many thousands of them. As 
 president of the United States Steel Company, I have honestly, openly, 
 sought direction from the very highest legal authorities of the United States 
 as to what I might and might not do. 
 
 Here he turned to Mr. Wickersham and said: "Is this not so?" 
 Mr. Wickersham nodded his head. 
 
 I could get no clear answer; I could only go on my way publishing fullest 
 reports, improving machinery and life-saving devices in the works, and the 
 condition of my employees outside of them. 
 
 He, too, deplored the flood of legislation, and held it useless 
 and dangerous. 
 
 At this point, at the bidding of our host, we took a rest. 
 
 Mr. Whitridge was noted for both his ability and his mordant 
 wit. What barred him from the widest fields of social useful- 
 ness was his persistent despair of the institutions of his country, 
 and of the capacity and honesty of all men, great and small, 
 elected or appointed to public office in it.
 
 FOUR DINNERS 421 
 
 The going, as our host had said, had been heavy, and he 
 would suggest a lighter vein, and so turned hrs glass to that of 
 the "gentleman whose letters amused, even when they did not 
 inspire, New Yorkers." 
 
 Old New Yorkers will remember that Mr. Whitridge was a 
 constant publisher of letters in the daily press. Extraordinar- 
 ily clever they were, each like a scorpion with a sting in its tail. 
 
 But round our dinner table the atmosphere was still heavy. 
 The letter-writer was in a gray mood. The commissioners, 
 politicians, ignorant masses, were playing the devil with the 
 country, according to him. Public officials were either stupid or 
 corrupt. As he prepared to sit down, the company was startled 
 by his final statement: 
 
 "Nothing can save us from national calamity but a revival 
 of religion." 
 
 Now, coming from the quarter it did, this was startling; 
 and had he remained he would doubtless have been induced to 
 tell what sort of religion he hoped to see revived. But having 
 made this Parthian thrust, the letter-writer fled the company. 
 I may say that this was a well-known habit of his. 
 
 Next to speak was a representative of one of New York's 
 oldest families, Mr. Fish. He agreed fully with the previous 
 speakers. 
 
 "The trend of legislation was highly dangerous. It looked 
 only to the despoiling of the rich, but it must be remembered 
 that this was nothing new. He had had occasion years ago to 
 present before a congressional committee his views of the 
 matter. On that occasion he pointed out that ever since the 
 first quarter of the last century an organized campaign had 
 been on foot by the 'have nots' to rob the pockets of the 
 'haves.' This wholly unrighteous and unpatriotic movement 
 was gaining ground, and he saw but one means of finally de- 
 feating it. The last speaker had named that means a revival 
 of religion. Nothing else could save the country, for when 
 men ceased to believe in God they would cease to respect property ." 
 
 At this frank statement, which fitted in exactly with the 
 letter-writer's views, everyone sat up. Then Herbert Taylor 
 called on me. 
 
 "I have an old friend here to-night who, I know, will defend 
 the ninety-five per cent."
 
 422 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE ~ 
 
 I felt rather alone in the crowd, but the last sentence of the 
 Judge's talk gave me an opening. As he sat down he had said, 
 with some feeling, "We judges, gentlemen, are lonely men." 
 So I began my brief defence of the ninety-five per cent, of 
 my fellow-citizens by accepting his statement and enlarging 
 on it. 
 
 From the nature of the case the judiciary cannot always be expected to be 
 in sympathy with the masses of our people, or always sympathetic with their 
 aims. 
 
 The judiciary expounds the law. 
 
 The law expressed the will of the past the efforts of other generations to 
 defend man's rights as those generations conceived of them. 
 
 The judges have neither time nor opportunity to mingle with the people. 
 There is a certain necessary aloofness about the atmosphere of the Bench. 
 
 Neither from the bar nor the dock can they get an unbiased view of con- 
 temporary life. 
 
 When it comes to weighing and calculating the meaning and value of 
 popular movements, the judges are sometimes poorly equipped to do so. 
 
 A ripe and final judgment should not be expected of them. 
 
 Nor can the very rich man be expected to judge fairly. He is, at his best, 
 human, and subject to his environment, as we are all of us. 
 
 In short, no one class in the community is really Christian enough to be 
 entrusted with the fortune of another class. Almost all men vote in favour 
 of their pockets. 
 
 The fate of the fortune of the rich cannot be left to the poor, nor can the 
 fate of the poor be handed over to the tender mercies of the rich. 
 
 The man whose judgment is most likely to be fair and balanced is the man 
 whose life brings him in intimate acquaintance with both rich and poor, and 
 such men, I assert, are never pessimists on these great questions we are dis- 
 cussing. 
 
 You cannot persuade them that ninety-five per cent, of the people of our 
 country are seeking to take what is not rightfully their own. 
 
 Those who know anything of history, those who have studied other lands 
 and peoples, will be ready to assert that in no other land and at no other times 
 have the masses been so intelligent, so fair-minded, as are ours. 
 
 Let us admit that the democracy is making law; admit there is too much 
 of it; admit it is often unwise and hasty that does no more than prove that a 
 fair-minded majority want a square deal, and are taking the only way they 
 know to get it. 
 
 I heartily agree that we need a religious revival, but a religious revival is 
 not coming; it has come, and the big men won't see it. 
 
 It is not, it can never be, a revival of the sort of religion that they look 
 for and hope in, namely, a revival of the religion of a God of property. That 
 God is dead as a Juggernaut. 
 
 But a revival of a real religion is on us; is vitalizing our land, is changing
 
 FOUR DINNERS 423 
 
 our habits; is revolutionizing our ideals of justice and right. It is leavening 
 our people as never before. It is the religion of the God of men. 
 
 Property is all right. Property is so necessary that we are not likely 
 to make too little of it, but before, far before the rights of property, come the 
 rights of men, and women, and little children. 
 
 Then spoke the man whom all wanted to hear, the chief guest 
 of the evening. Said the Cabinet Minister: 
 
 No, the ninety-five per cent, are not trying to despoil the rich; they are 
 only trying, by mistaken methods it may be, to get a fair deal. 
 
 You blame them for this flood of ill-digested legislation. How could 
 any one with his eyes open expect them to take any other course? For 
 twenty years what have they seen? They have seen the vastest fortunes the 
 world knows of poured into the pockets of the few. How? By legislation. 
 I speak what I know, and no man in the land is in a better position to know 
 than I. Those fortunes, swollen and unrighteous, could not have been made 
 except by unfair legislation. Legislation sometimes obtained by dishonesty 
 and even crime. 
 
 These are the facts, gentlemen. They are facts of record. They cannot 
 be denied. Who then shall blame the masses of the land if by legislation 
 they seek to undo some part of the wrong that by legislation has been done 
 them? 
 
 Mr. Wickersham spoke with absolute frankness of the great 
 fortune that was not represented at the table, the Rockefeller 
 fortune, and a great fortune that was Mr. Duke's, and ended: 
 "Neither of them can be defended in morals or in law." (I 
 cjuote his exact words. I wrote them on my shirt cuff at the 
 time !) 
 
 There was no answer made to Mr. Wickersham's masterly 
 statement of a plain case. 
 
 After some further talk, the last speaker, the railroad presi- 
 dent, rose to his feet. Very slowly he spoke, but no one had 
 addressed us more impressively than he now proceeded to do: 
 
 I fully agree with the late Attorney General. For many years it was my 
 special business to make railroad rebates, as some here know. I had to visit 
 many parts of the land. I did as others did. I did what at the time all 
 approved. Every man tried for rebates and vast numbers got them. 
 Rebates were defended as but the exercise of a constitutional right to use 
 your own money as you pleased. Mr. Wickersham spoke of vast fortunes 
 mainly gotten by such means. I will add to what he said, and I will say that 
 there is not a city of 100,000 people in the United States where I could not 
 put my finger on an ample fortune made by rebating. Gentlemen, it was all 
 wrong. It was demoralizing and unfair. It was playing with marked cards,
 
 424 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 but it is over. No man in the United States can get a rebate to-day, and 
 every honest man is glad of it. 
 
 But mark you, this great, far-reaching, and highly just reform was won in 
 one way, and one way only. It was won for the people, and by the people, 
 by legislation. 
 
 No one present at that dinner will, I think, forget it. I do 
 not think such talk would have been endured, I do not think 
 that dinner party would have held together, ten years earlier. 
 And more, I think that to Theodore Roosevelt's influence and 
 example, more than to any other cause, or all causes put to- 
 gether, was due the spread of so fine and frank a spirit of fair 
 dealing as was then displayed. I should add that the fine old 
 Judge, as we bade each other good-night, said: "This dinner 
 has done me good, gentlemen. I have had a new light to- 
 night." 
 
 A great honour was done me when I was asked to be present 
 at the fourth dinner of which I now speak. In May, 1919, 
 some time after its demobilization, a company of the 307th 
 Regiment of the 77th Division, New York, met for a farewell 
 dinner. It was not a charitable affair. After a long service 
 overseas, the company's fund had something left over, and so 
 voted itself a farewell dinner in a large New York hotel. 
 
 Officers and men came on time to the rendezvous, and at the 
 appointed hour we sat down. 
 
 Some were in uniform, some in mufti. There were only two 
 other civilians present beside myself. One of these had lost 
 his son, a lieutenant in the company, who was killed in action; 
 the other had devoted his energies during the war to keeping to- 
 gether the wives, parents, and friends ofthe boys who had gone 
 overseas. My son had captained the company during the first 
 days of its fiercest fighting in the Argonne, and had turned 
 over his command when severely wounded. I was an outsider, 
 of course, yet long residence in New York and an intimate 
 knowledge of its East Side had given me more than a fair knowl- 
 edge of the material of which this band of men was composed. 
 
 Men demobilized in New York scatter quickly, and it said 
 much for the strength of the new tie, which a common cause and 
 a common danger had created, that over one hundred men of 
 that company, and all of its officers remaining alive, gathered 
 round the table for their farewell to one another that night.
 
 FOUR DINNERS 425 
 
 As I looked down the long table something of the wonder of 
 that gathering, something of its immense significance, came to 
 me. As the evening passed (we met at seven-thirty and did not 
 separate until after midnight) this feeling deepened. Less 
 than two years before I had seen these very men taken almost 
 without notice or warning out of the great city's life of which 
 they were a part. 
 
 Raw and most unwarlike were they then, many of them un- 
 derstanding little of the great world movement that was laying 
 such violent hands on their bodies and their souls. Some of 
 them not wanting to understand it, going to Camp Upton only 
 because they had to go. Some were American in name only, 
 some were not even American in name, and many of them could 
 not speak English. 
 
 The company officers, on whose young shoulders had de- 
 scended the extraordinarily difficult task of making soldiers of 
 them, were most of them Plattsburg men. They brought little 
 military experience to their task, it is true, but in my judgment 
 they had brought something more than that. Generally speak- 
 ing they were men of some culture. Good schools and universi- 
 ties had given them some knowledge of men, and very many 
 of them had already won a moderate success in the profession 
 of life. 
 
 Our hastily raised army had of necessity to be a democratic 
 army. The iron discipline of an army of many years' training 
 could not be given it. It was lacking in many things that the 
 professional soldiers consider indispensable. But three things 
 it had to have, if it was to win at all: a fighting spirit, confidence 
 in itself, and belief in its good cause. 
 
 I spent some unforgettable days, shortly after we declared war, 
 with Colonel Wolff, Commandant at Plattsburg. Here I saw, 
 and had the high honour of speaking to, the two most wonder- 
 ful bodies of young men any man ever faced in this country. I 
 felt their spirit, I realized their mighty power. I knew then 
 that America could draw from her sons, officers capable of 
 training and inspiring in peace, and leading in war, her demo- 
 cratic millions of drafted men. 
 
 This was Colonel Wolff's conviction, and he was right. But 
 let me get back to our dinner. 
 
 It was the last gathering of a company of men who had
 
 426 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 trained, toiled, suffered, conquered, and died together. Army 
 discipline for them was now over, many were already back in 
 civilian life. Few were in uniform, and every man there might 
 say his say this night. And say it they did, not officers only, 
 but non-coms and buck privates. We had a right good din- 
 ner, with plenty of tobacco and light beer. The bars were 
 down, and it was time for joke and story and song. 
 
 As the evening grew later my amazement grew. Many a 
 dinner had I attended in my varied life and in a good many 
 lands college dinners, racing dinners, club dinners, dinners of 
 all sorts. If at such gatherings here and there a man drank too 
 much and showed it, or told a questionable story; if now and 
 then there was noisy talk no one resented it, no one was sur- 
 prised. But here at this company dinner of disbanded soldiers 
 there was nothing of the sort. I speak the simple truth, amaz- 
 ing as it is. Not one vulgar story (and scores of most excellent 
 stories were told). Not one unkind story, though there were 
 plentiful jokes on men by officers and on officers by men. 
 
 I had thought that such things might be, but as I sat there 
 and tried to realize what was passing before me, I found it hard 
 to keep the tears from my eyes. I was seeing the actuality of 
 human brotherhood, born and grown to power and high effi- 
 ciency, finding its fine selfhood in unselfish service for men. 
 
 The hour was growing late. Officers had praised men, and 
 men had chaffed and praised their officers and one another. 
 There had been wit aplenty, and fine, unconscious pathos, too, 
 for the brave fellows left under the sod in France had not been 
 forgotten. 
 
 Some had to go far that night. The company had to do what 
 it had never done in France: break up. 
 
 A big fellow who had not spoken during the evening raised 
 himself up at the foot of the table. He leaned on his crutches, 
 for he had lost a leg near the hip, and one side of his face was 
 still covered with plaster. Said he: 
 
 I've got to get back to the hospital, but before I go I want to say some- 
 thing. When I was drafted and went to Upton I could not say one word of 
 English, and I was only twenty-five per cent. American. I have lost a leg 
 and part of my face, and my people say I have lost a lot, but I do not say so. 
 I have gained a lot. I am glad I went to the war. I am one hundred per cent. 
 American now.
 
 FOUR DINNERS 427 
 
 And so came to an end a wonderful evening. The boys 
 themselves could not realize how wonderful it was; but to me it 
 seemed the greatest dinner I have ever attended in my life. 
 
 As I lay awake that night, old scenes rose before me, and the 
 faces of men I loved who were dead. I thought of the sullen, 
 angry men and despairing women I had seen seated in the 
 Pittsburgh mud, thirty years before, no kinder, juster influence 
 near them than the soulless grip of a corporation. I thought of 
 my friend, the greatest preacher of our time, who, without fear 
 or favour, whether men cursed him or flattered him, had, in 
 season and out of season, preached the "square deal" for all 
 men, home-born or foreign-born, black or white, wherever the 
 flag flew. 
 
 And I thought of how "the heat of that spirit had shed 
 warmth through many lands." I thought of Williams's appeal 
 to President Earling, and of President Earling's appeal to his 
 millionaire directors, as he said: "I acknowledge a moral obliga- 
 tion." And of the answer made at Cherry Mine by the five per 
 cent, to the plea of the ninety-five per cent. Such an answer 
 had never before been made in our land. 
 
 And oh, how I wished that every preacher in every church 
 in New York and out of it could have seen what I had seen and 
 heard what I had heard that night! And for one of the 
 bravest and truest prophets of God I ever knew, I longed I 
 wanted Jacob Riis at that dinner. I wanted him to know how 
 "Tony," whom he loved and believed in, had made good. 
 
 There are new tasks awaiting us, and new and great prob- 
 lems to solve. But God has given to us a new power and a new 
 unity with which to meet and conquer them. Of this I felt sure 
 as I fell asleep.
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 Holidays and "Sunlight" 
 
 For oh, he stood beside me like my youth, 
 Transformed for me the real to the dream, 
 
 Clothing the palpable and the familiar 
 With golden exhalation of the dawn. Schiller. 
 
 "Wallenstein." 
 
 The night gives back that double day 
 Which clothed the earth when I was young. T. Burbridge. 
 
 The best way to do your work well is to keep young while 
 you do it. The spirit of youth is the best antidote to the spirit 
 of materialism. Youth means faith in yourself, joy in your 
 work, trust in your fellows, and enthusiasm for the old world 
 you live in. So, say I, keep young. 
 
 Wallenstein was one of the grimmest figures in perhaps the 
 grimmest period of European history. The Sixteenth Century 
 abounded in hope; the Seventeenth yielded to despair; but 
 Schiller, in his fine tragedy, makes his hero declare that it is the 
 visiting spirit of his lost youth alone that enables him to brave 
 fate. 
 
 When first I read the play long ago these lines I have put at 
 the head of the chapter fascinated me. I say, then, it pays to 
 keep young; pays yourself, your family, your friends, your 
 work. And the best way to keep young is to take every holi- 
 day you reasonably and unselfishly can; and even if and when 
 the tough door of opportunity closes on you, and your holidays 
 are but a memory, then still I say in the memory of them 
 you can regain enough of their hope and joy and courage to 
 enable you to live them over again. 
 
 Such being my conviction, I want it understood that in 
 this chapter I am on holiday-making bent, and nothing shall 
 induce me to hurry. Holidays are leisurely times or they are 
 
 428
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 429 
 
 no holidays at all. I shall travel at will the world over, visit 
 places now changed beyond recognition, and once more keep 
 happy company with fine fellows who, almost all of them, hunt 
 and fish and trap and march no longer among the mountains 
 and woodlands we explored together. 
 
 I never could see any incongruity between sporting and 
 preaching; on the contrary, I am sure I never preached so well 
 as when I returned from a rest in the wild. By the way, I will 
 quote a story worth repeating, a story of old Castle Saunderson 
 days, just to prove that in my sporting activities, at least, I had 
 what I fear sometimes in other matters was lacking: Episcopal 
 precedent for what I loved to do. 
 
 The Bishop of Peterboro, Doctor McGee was, in his day, the 
 ablest preacher in England, and as a debater he had few equals 
 in the House of Lords. Before he became Bishop he was Dean 
 of Enniskillen in Ireland, and was well known in County 
 Fermannah. The Earl of Erne was his friend, and when at 
 Crom Castle they had a big "shoot," McGee was among the 
 invited. The Earl's head keeper was a dour North of Ireland 
 Presbyterian and had the placing of the guns. As in duty 
 bound, he gave the Bishop a good stand, but could not resist 
 the temptation of firing a parting shot at the worldly successor 
 of the Apostles as he left him at his place. 
 
 Keeper: "I never heard, my Lord, that the Apostles went 
 pheasant shooting." 
 
 Bishop: "No, John, they did not preserve game in Pales- 
 tine, so they had to content themselves with 
 fishing." 
 
 Yes, take holidays while you may, and do what in you lies to 
 pass the holiday spirit on. My debt to my father and mother 
 in this matter I have tried to repay by giving my sons what 
 they gave me. 
 
 The delicious smell of bacon frying in the early morning, even 
 when it rises to me from a civilized, prosaic kitchen, brings 
 crowding memories of blessed out-of-doors. It is far more 
 than a mere call to the satisfaction of healthy appetite; it 
 brings memories of golden days that cannot be forgotten. 
 Again I am suddenly awakened by the shouting of my com- 
 panions to meet another day in the wild. Silvery steam is
 
 430 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 rising from the lake, and through it bursts the level beams of 
 the rising sun, bathing the world in morning glory. 
 
 " Look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," 
 
 cries Lorenzo to Jessica, as Shakespeare's lovers greet the 
 morning. 
 
 Blankets are cast off, and into the clear cold water all hands 
 rush with shivering joy. A plunge, a few rapid strokes out and 
 in, and then the second call of the waiting frying pan, and the 
 joys of camp breakfast. 
 
 What variety of beauty, what warming memories of adven- 
 ture, what clean, honest friendships, the sizzling of that odorous 
 pan recalls ! What golden days of early youth, when weariness 
 of the flesh was sheer pleasure, when feeling was supremest 
 and reflection scarcely begun! And even fuller days in later 
 years, days of well-earned rest and change, days of refreshment 
 and renewal, "far from the madding crowd!" Frying bacon to 
 call up so much bygone life and beauty! Tush, you say. 
 There is no shallow sentimentality about it, I assure you, dear 
 friend reader. The actual fact is that the smell of bacon frying 
 for my breakfast has often helped me to begin a difficult day's 
 work with grateful memories of what it has been given me to 
 see and feel and know in a world at least as full of joy and 
 beauty as it is of sorrow and of death. 
 
 I have told in earlier chapters how the love of the open 
 world, especially in the very early morning, came to be an 
 important part of a little boy's education in the old vicarage 
 at Dundalk. My mother in her garden inviting my aid, and 
 my father denying himself in order to give me a pony and a gun. 
 A high brick wall, heavily draped with ivy, shut out the vicarage 
 from the rambling street of one-story straw-thatched cabins 
 in which it stood. A narrow door in that wall gave entrance 
 to its modest grounds and gardens. Right opposite that door 
 stood the cabin of William Ogle, my first "extra family" 
 instructor in the mysteries of the wild. Most little Irish towns 
 in those days had their local fisherman and shot; sometimes I 
 fear, inclined to poaching. From such men much was to be 
 learned, and William Ogle was the first to take a kindly notice 
 of me and teach me the a-b-c of out-of-doors.
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 431 
 
 The chase and study of wild things always fascinated me. 
 Some philosophic pacifists will have it that this is but the 
 undesirable unworthy survival of a savage instinct in us, an 
 instinct destined to shrivel to a vestiguum like our vermiform 
 appendix. It may be the remnant of the beast part; I suppose 
 it is. But I do know that its immense usefulness has not 
 passed away. It may be the surviving form of what was once 
 a savage instinct. If it is, I hold that still it plays a healthful 
 and most desirable part, and leads to the formation of habits 
 that are essential to happy homes, healthy children and 
 plenty of them. 
 
 But again I must insist on the difference between the real 
 hunter, fisherman, and woodsman, and the mere killer of game. 
 The first must be a man of self-reliance and quick decision. He 
 must be a trained observer. I have known him in many lands 
 and of many tints of colour; and I say he has not only these 
 qualities, but is apt to be the best of his breed, and a resourceful, 
 brave, unselfish, and faithful companion. The killer of game I 
 have known, too, or the man who hires another to do his hunt- 
 ing, and contents himself with killing. Such a man (and over- 
 sudden wealth has made him common) is not a sportsman, but 
 a destroyer. His house may be full of hunting trophies, which 
 he may or may not have shot; but of wild life, of the habits of 
 wild things, of things that should be preserved, and things that 
 may without loss be captured, he knows nothing. He may 
 have travelled in many lands, and lived among many tribes of 
 men, but if he has done so, they did not interest him, and he 
 has gained little from them. The wonder, the mystery, the 
 beauty of the wilderness that has not as yet bowed her neck to 
 man, her lord these mean nothing to him. Whether shooting 
 into the herds of big game in Africa, or bragging of his bag of 
 ducks or quail in the Carolinas or Mississippi, he remains a 
 mere destroyer, not a sportsman. He is surrounded by and 
 dependent on men hired to make his sport. He sits in his 
 canoe reading a novel, till his Indian, who has extra pay be- 
 cause he casts the best line on the river, hooks his salmon. 
 Then your millionaire, who has taken up sport in a patronizing 
 way, lays down his book and plays his fish, and enters it in the 
 club record book as duly killed by him. A stranger trains 
 and keeps his dogs. He does not know anything or care
 
 432 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 anything about dogs, and naturally the instructive intimacy 
 between master and dog, one of the pleasantest experiences 
 that outdoor life yields, is to him a thing undreamed. 
 
 But I am holiday-making, and so must not give way to 
 scolding temper not though memories will rankle of good 
 fellowship broken, and one's own discoveries of hunting and 
 fishing region barred by the intrusion of the very modern 
 would-be sporting autocratic millionaire. Him I will leave to 
 his novel and his hired fisherman, and go back to William Ogle, 
 who used to make his own rods out of lancewood he bought 
 and a stout ash he himself cut and seasoned; wonders of skill 
 they seemed to me, as they lay on the cabin rafters, and no 
 expensive split-cane salmon-rod ever laid out on the river a 
 better line than did they when William Ogle handled them. 
 
 When my father gave me my first $2.50 trout rod, I took it 
 to Ogle for approval. He said it would do, and one warm 
 spring afternoon, a Saturday half-holiday, I remember it well, 
 he did a rarely unselfish thing. He took me three miles up the 
 little river, and then revealed to me the secret place where he 
 had caught many a sea trout. Sea trout were not common 
 thereabouts. They were worth even in Ireland ten pence a 
 pound. (Labourers' daily wages were but a shilling then.) 
 And Ogle was a poor man. On Saturdays I haunted that spot, 
 but for weeks and weeks no silvery sea trout looked at my line. 
 
 "Who is the best fisherman?" said someone at the Resti- 
 gouche Club. "The man who keeps his fly longest in the 
 water," answered poor Stan White. I kept mine in that little 
 pool in the Irish river, and at last the lightning struck; my 
 reel screamed, my rod bent, and my heart stopped beating. 
 I was ahold of a fish and such a fish! Could any tackle 
 woven by the skill of man curb and capture such a monster? 
 How I played and did not lose him, I don't know. I had no 
 landing net, and the bank was slippery, but in a very agony of 
 apprehension and delight intermingled, I played that fish till 
 he was stone dead, and then, drawing him to the bank, I slipped 
 my finger into his open gill and he was my very own. 
 
 I started away at a run for home, and had covered a good 
 third of the three-mile distance before I realized that I had left 
 my rod lying on the bank on the scene of my victory. So back 
 I went, and at last home I got. Just under three pounds my
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 433 
 
 "wonder" weighed, and my dear Daddy, almost as glad and 
 proud as I was, promptly gave me half a crown. 
 
 When I was forty-four I had a message from Harvard that 
 "the class" had elected me Baccalaureate preacher. It was 
 an immense surprise. When I saw my first great lion dead at my 
 feet I felt proud and happy. I had worked for him night and 
 morning for more than a year, and had never fired a shot at a 
 lion before. On my first African expedition I had not killed 
 a lion, and my sons said, as I started on my second, "Get a 
 lion before you come home, Daddy." When I saw my first 
 great bull elephant totter and fall with a thud of eleven tons, 
 weight I felt profound relief as well as surprise. But for keen, 
 stinging triumph, no hunting experience in all my life quite 
 came up to the taking of my first sea trout in Ogle's pool, when 
 I was eleven years old. 
 
 Kindly, unselfish old William Ogle, you did more for that 
 boy than you knew when you trusted him with the secret of the 
 best pool in the little river. You confirmed him in his longing 
 to be a sportsman; but more than that, a sportsman unselfish in 
 his sport like you. You were not a regular attendant at church, 
 but you were a right good man. 
 
 The real man comes forth at the call of the wild. I cannot 
 explain it, but surely it is so. Checks and disguises are cast 
 aside. If you would test your friend, take him on a good long 
 camping trip. If you want to retain his friendship, be sure of 
 yourself before you set forth. By the way, a happy thought 
 comes to me. Now that girls wear knickerbockers and play 
 football and smoke, why should not young engaged couples 
 take a good long camping trip together before the irrevocable 
 ( ?) knot is tied ? It might check divorce. 
 
 When the imperative call of East London first sounded for 
 me I was only a backward country boy, very emotional, having 
 as yet few if any settled purposes of my own. In a boyish way 
 I was fully purposed to do right, and so, pushing away from me 
 the things I loved, I quickly resolved that for me bricks and 
 mortar must shut out the open country. As Father said, I 
 always jumped before I looked. This being so, such balance of 
 purpose as I succeeded in gaining came to me slowly. 
 
 Very gradually did I learn to win to conclusions of my own. 
 Very gradually did I dare to differ in any particular from the
 
 434 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 autocratic teachers among whom I had been brought up. I 
 was like a young horse, tugging as best it knew how at its load 
 in a harness that did not fit. I was willing to work. I was 
 more; I was in love with my work, but the pinching harness 
 galled cruelly now and then. And as I looked round at other 
 horses, far longer in the traces than I had been, it grew in- 
 creasingly evident to me that they, too, had been galled, working 
 even as I was at the self-same load. And galled so badly that 
 whole parts of them had "calloused," as it were grown in- 
 sensible to feeling and had lost vigour, lost something of 
 freshness and of life. They were grinding along. They 
 marched bravely, with a fine purposefulness, but there was little 
 of joy of life in their tread, and they seldom sang as they 
 marched. In short, I began to see that if I was to continue to 
 love my work I must never be its slave, and that was just what 
 it seemed to me nine clergymen out of ten, if they were really 
 good men, finally sank into being. 
 
 From 1869 to 1880 I never touched a gun but once, and I 
 had in all that time only one brief, soul-saving outing with 
 my rod (I have told of it) when my first fight in New York 
 (1876) was won. So, friend reader, you will understand why, 
 between William Ogle and my first big trout, and David Ken- 
 nedy, my next companion amid the domains of the Red Gods, 
 there intervenes so wide a gap. A better specimen of the 
 Canadian frontiersman than David Kennedy it would be im- 
 possible to find. A grizzled veteran of the woods, about five 
 feet ten, splendidly built; still a young man in all but years, and 
 one of the best smooth-bore shots I ever saw. I had been 
 three years in Toronto before we met. 
 
 He lived west of Toronto, on the Humber River, and on one 
 of those rare Saturdays when I was able to get off for a long 
 walk, I stumbled on him directing his men and working himself 
 at his last "folly," a great trout pond. (Gossip said D. K. was 
 always working on some "folly," and that he and his wife and 
 children would all end in the workhouse. I was destined to 
 lead him still further, I fear, along the road he already so 
 stoutly trod. So I may, in justice to both of us, say that, wild 
 as some of his schemes were, there was a method in D. K's mad- 
 ness, and I believe when he died he left his people quite well 
 off.)
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 435 
 
 There never was a man more obstinate than D. K. He 
 must have been a trying husband to live with, but as a com- 
 panion in the wild, or a comrade in a tight place, he was in- 
 comparable. David was a heathen, so people said. He was 
 supposed never to have entered a church door since his wedding 
 day. Naturally I was immensely pleased, therefore, when on 
 our first expedition together after quail I saw in front of me, in 
 the village church where I preached on Sunday, his grizzled 
 head. If there was any pride at having won his attention, it 
 soon had a fall a sudden and dismal fall. Here is the story. 
 D. K. knew well the country we were shooting in, and usually 
 all the farmers gave him leave to hunt. One large land owner, 
 however, told him to keep off. This man was a prominent 
 Baptist. I was by this time pretty well known in western 
 Canada, and when the news got out that I was in the neighbour- 
 hood, there was quite a competition among the village churches 
 to have me preach. Naturally all hands approached me 
 through D. K., whom they already knew, and shrewdly he saw 
 that he held winning cards. Never said he a word to me, but off 
 he goes to the afore-mentioned Baptist and strikes a bargain. I 
 would honour his pulpit Sunday morning if on Monday his 
 woods and cornfields were open to us two. Heaven only knows 
 how far D. K. made me responsible for this bargain. I never 
 got any satisfaction out of him in regard to that. I tried in 
 self-defence to get the facts out of the Baptist brother with no 
 better success. D. K. was laughing and slapping him on the 
 back, and I doubt if he believed one word I said as I protested 
 that I was in no way responsible for my "heathen's" intrusion 
 into church matters. Anyway, the Baptist had my morning 
 administrations while I should have been preaching to the Epis- 
 copalians, and we first-class shooting on Monday. 
 
 By the way, D's success with the Baptist came near ruining 
 my holiday. Not content with turning my Sundays to ac- 
 count, he wanted me to take up preaching of a week night, and 
 without a word to me, booked me for a ten-mile drive in the 
 winter dark (after a day's tramp), to a Methodist church, this 
 time. Some similar scheme up his sleeve he no doubt had, but 
 I wanted some rest, and struck. 
 
 David Kennedy, from boyhood, had had one great desire. I 
 could sympathize with him, for I had shared it. He longed
 
 436 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 to know the wide prairies and the mountain chains beyond 
 them before he died. Great good fortune enabled me to 
 gratify this one wish of my old friend's heart. Mr. Morgan 
 would have me to take his son into the mountains for a hunting 
 trip, and the idea came to me that my friend's presence with 
 us would add very little to the expense account and might, on 
 occasion, be of great use, for he was a tower of strength in a 
 tight place, and it was not always possible to know much about 
 the character of the men you had to hire in those days. 
 
 Well over one hundred miles we had marched and struggled, 
 sometimes cutting our way through wearying down timber, 
 and then getting above all timber lines, and camping in little 
 mountain prairies, where a carpet of wild flowers sprang up 
 just as soon as the heavy snow mantle they carried from 
 September till the following July melted away. It was mid- 
 August. The weather had been glorious, but now a change was 
 coming. The wind came in gusts from the north, and before 
 you realized what had happened all Nature was blotted out by 
 such a blizzard as only can blow at 10,000-feet altitude in our 
 Rocky Mountains. Fortunately there was a hollow in the long 
 ridge we had been riding to leeward of the storm, and in it a 
 grove of nut pines. I will be held to exaggerate if I say that in 
 five minutes after the first blast of sleet a horse or man were 
 invisible at twenty yards, but such is the truth. I shouted 
 to Kennedy to find a place to put down the packs, and we each 
 of us grabbed and held as many of the scared ponies as we 
 could. Instinctively, he fixed the right spot; it was under the 
 upturned root of a fallen pine. With its sheltering aid, we 
 stoutly fastened our lean-to (I never carried tents), piled the 
 ponies' loads, and turned them loose. Some idea can be had of 
 what such a mountain blizzard means when I say we did all that 
 eight hefty fellows could do to find those horses and tie them, 
 but during the next three days we never saw a horse, and when, 
 suddenly as it had come, the blizzard passed and the sun shone 
 on us again, we found our horses had never been at any time 
 two hundred yards from the lean-to under which we and our 
 belongings, though buried in deep snow, had lived just as 
 comfortably as possible. Kennedy had a good eye for a camp. 
 Under fierce August sun the heavy snow pall melted, but 
 the going was slippery and treacherous, and we elected to let
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 437 
 
 our ponies feed up, after their three days' enforced fast, and to 
 hunt the splendid region around us on foot. We were in the 
 heart of the Shoshone range, and from our blizzard camp made 
 daily excursions lasting, in Kennedy's case and mine, from 
 sun-up to dark. 
 
 The upturned rocks under which bear searched for beetles 
 and larvae; the big, almost human foot-mark, often showed that 
 large grizzlies were about. Still none of the party had yet seen 
 a bear. It was mid-day, and we had made a good many miles 
 since we left camp, climbing up and sliding down the high 
 ridges; carefully scanning with our glasses the ground in front. 
 Several thousand feet below wound the rushing Shoshone 
 River (it was called Stinking Water then, on account of some 
 sulphur springs on its bank). Just below, when we stopped to 
 lunch, a narrow promontory jutted out of the steep mountain- 
 side. Nut pines grew thickly on it; it ended in a sheer precipice. 
 Where the nut pine grows, 1 the mountain squirrels swarm; and 
 where the squirrels store their winter granaries, there the 
 grizzlies come to steal, and take a last and plentiful feast before 
 turning in for their long winter sleep. Many such colonies 
 rudely wrecked we had seen, but so far had never gazed on the 
 wrecker. The little grove, with its storm-twisted pines growing 
 close together, was a likely place, and very quietly we slipped 
 down the mountainside and into its shadow. 
 
 Surely enough, a big bear had been there just before us. 
 The squirrels' hoards, though buried deeply, were scattered, 
 and the work of a large grizzly was evident. The pines covered 
 but a little space, and less than one hundred yards in front the 
 precipice yawned; so very slowly we crept toward the brink. 
 Then, suddenly, a loud Ugh, ugh! It was but an instant's rush 
 and we were out of the gloom of the wood and in the clear 
 space beyond. There, at last at last 1 On the very edge of the 
 great gulf the splendid creature stood, reared to his full height. 
 For an instant he bends over, looking into the gulf below; then 
 full round he wheels and faces the intruders whose presence had 
 tainted the air of his undisputed domain. 
 
 The sun shone full on his dark silvery coat. Such a picture ! 
 
 1 Our nut pine is, I should say, first cousin to the Italian tree, so common in the Apennines, a 
 beautiful, long-lived tree, capable of great resistance to the storm, and bearing a seed that tastes 
 very much like a small almond. Excellent little cakes used to be made from these in Italy. 
 In our mountains, the branches are often much contorted. The fruit is similar.
 
 438 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 And such a setting! It was as though the very incarnate spirit 
 of that savage mountainland stood visible before us. Then, 
 growling defiantly and showing his teeth, he came on, gathering 
 pace as he came, with a fine free stride, more like a horse than 
 a bear, looking full at us, with open threatening jaws as he 
 galloped by. He had to pass us at a few yards' distance. The 
 whole thing was dramatic. Not if we had hunted the wild 
 Shoshone for a hundred years could that glorious land have 
 afforded to my old friend or to me a finer picture of what for 
 years we both of us had longed to see. 
 
 As the bear charged for safety, Kennedy's pent-up soul at 
 last found vent. He dashed his old hat on the ground, and, 
 utterly beside himself, yelled with all his lung power: "Look 
 at the elk! Look at the elk!" His wild glee did not shake his 
 aim. Both our rifles rang out together, and without a shiver 
 his first grizzly fell dead as a stone. You could cover both 
 bullet holes with a silver dollar. I had to give my dear old 
 friend the skin. 
 
 In years that followed I shot many other grizzlies twenty- 
 five in all, three of them on that same trip. But never again 
 had I the good fortune to stand face to face with such a beast in 
 open day. And, though two of them were larger, nothing I ever 
 saw in those young days, amid those still lonely Shoshone 
 Mountains, quite came up to that morning's work with my old 
 friend. The scenery, the fine reckless bearing of that king of 
 the mountains, and the utter and complete satisfaction of my 
 old friend, all taken together, made it a day always to stand by 
 itself. 
 
 I have not quite finished my story yet. We were many 
 miles from camp, and the country between us and it was too 
 rough for even one of my hardy cayuses. So we must carry 
 the head and skin home as best we could. Both of us could use 
 our skinning knives, and we had a rope with us. Skinning took 
 more than an hour, for a large grizzly is a tough proposition 
 even to two well-sharpened hunting knives. At last the job 
 was done, as much of the heavy white fat removed as possible, 
 and the skin rolled tightly into a solid pack. A stout stick 
 thrust through into the fastening, D. K. took up his burden 
 with grim joy, and we faced the hard climb home, I carrying his 
 rifle.
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 439 
 
 After a mile or so of hard going D. K. paused, and the dead 
 iweight slipping from his broad shoulders, he sat down. He 
 was white and trembling. I, leading the way, had not noticed 
 his state. We were climbing at an altitude of nearer eleven 
 than ten thousand feet, the head and skin weighed over sixty 
 pounds, we had no yoke to spread the weight; and a stick 
 thrust through the bundle pressed cruelly on the shoulder as you 
 carried it. I sat down by my old friend and did what I could 
 to comfort him. This was the first time in a long life that the 
 failure of his natural force had made him relinquish a task he 
 had set himself to accomplish. It went hard with him. Then, 
 in spite of his protest, I shouldered the burden. 
 
 I was "fit" in those days, but that afternoon I had my test- 
 ing time. I knew that if I stopped to rest I could not possibly 
 make camp before dark, and no man could travel the ground 
 we were on even in the twilight. So I gritted my teeth and 
 didn't lay that load off for four hours, till at last I stumbled into 
 our lean-to. I ate no supper that night, and I slept all the next 
 day in my bed. 
 
 Kennedy was of an earlier time. Our modern life touched 
 him not. He did not believe in God; if he did, his was the God 
 of the storm and the flood and the earthquake the only sort of 
 God who would fit into his scheme of things. He was slow 
 to believe in any man, but once given, his friendship was un- 
 alterable. If he was slow to forgive his enemies (and he 
 counted a good number of them) he was slower to doubt his 
 friends. He owned a fine faithfulness to his own narrow rule 
 of right. When he saw the right thing to do, nothing could 
 swerve him from doing it. He had lived among a rough crowd, 
 but never was drunk, and always stood ready to share his last 
 dollar with one he trusted. There was heroic quality about old, 
 battered Kennedy. I think he was the most utterly unafraid 
 white man I ever knew. I like to think of him somewhere, 
 somehow, leading one of the multitudinous "Forlorn Hopes" 
 of God. He would do it well. There was that in him which 
 deserved to live on. Could he hear it, he would surely answer 
 the challenge of the Everlasting, Browning so splendidly utters: 
 
 Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
 Strive and thrive; cry speed, fight on, fare ever, 
 There as here.
 
 '440 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I am holiday-making still, and so have not much time to 
 spend in those jumping-off places where I parted from the 
 railroad and mounted my cayuse. Yet since I visited many 
 of them I must say something of those pitiful lost places, the 
 railroad shanty towns of the '8o's. The recklessness and vile- 
 ness of the life lived in them is forgotten now. The buffalo 
 were gone; the cattle herds were pouring over the plains, push- 
 ing even as far as the foothills of the "Main Chain," and every 
 little town on the Union Pacific or Northern Pacific road was 
 fighting all competitors for its future life. I can write more 
 freely if I leave out names, but as a matter of fact, as soon as 
 you got into the cattle country, these towns were all alike. 
 Every other house was a gambling den or a brothel, and when 
 you got off your Pullman car, you literally fell into the arms of 
 poor, faded, outcast women of New York or Chicago, and some 
 of the poor souls had been beautiful women once. 
 
 Your hotel was a clap-boarded shanty. The noise inside 
 it and outside made sleep difficult, sometimes impossible. 
 More than once I was awakened by shooting. In one place 
 where I came down in the morning to breakfast, a dead man, 
 with uncovered face, lay on the billiard table. 
 
 After cattle round-ups hundreds of cowboys would come 
 in, hard-earned money in their pockets (a cowboy's wage was 
 only $40 a month) all bent on having a good time. Nothing 
 in those lost places for these poor boys to do. They came to 
 sell; they stayed to spend yes, to spend more than their 
 money, even life itself. In a few days money was gone, and, 
 alas, health and youth too often gone with it. And not one 
 good woman or man to lend a helping hand or cry a warning. 
 Those fine young things were a forgotten folk. 
 
 At one of the worst of these cattle towns I found a mission 
 of the Protestant Episcopal Church. A nice, ignorant, inno- 
 cent young boy, just ordained, fresh from the General Theo- 
 logical Seminary in New York, had been given this hell on earth 
 for his first "charge of souls." Think of it! 
 
 I looked him up and asked him how he was getting on. 
 (He did not lack courage, that poor lad! but as for understand- 
 ing what he was up against, he knew better what was inside the 
 moon.) "Oh, finely," said he. "I have cloths for all the 
 seasons, and a bell."
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 441 
 
 I had ridden into the town a few hours before, with the best 
 part of an antelope I had just shot tied on my cow saddle. I 
 was bringing some fresh meat to a household in the town where 
 I knew it would be welcome. Everybody was interested in 
 everybody, though nobody liked to appear interested in any- 
 body in those places; and as I sat behind a newspaper in the 
 shanty hotel, I heard a cattle man say to the landlord, "Who 
 are those two men I saw riding into town awhile ago; one of 
 them had meat on his saddle?" 
 
 "One's a lawyer and one is a preacher." 
 
 "Which is the preacher?" 
 
 "The big one." 
 
 "Why, he looked big enough to work for his living." I 
 took the hint. I went out and hired on my own account the 
 theatre (sic) for the next afternoon, which was Sunday. Then 
 I went to the local paper and put in an advertisement: 
 
 The preacher who came to town yesterday seemed to some gentlemen 
 "big enough to work for his living." He will preach to all who care to hear 
 him in the theatre, Sunday, 3:30. All seats free. 
 
 I had a crowd, and one of the most attentive and interesting 
 crowds I ever addressed. I made some friends that afternoon. 
 I preached in the same place for three successive years, and 
 always had the town. 
 
 Oh, a man; just a level-headed, sympathetic, understanding 
 man, could have done immense good among a class of fellows 
 who, as they said to me, "didn't have a great show." The 
 shanty cattle towns soon passed. Some of them prospered 
 and are now pleasant places to live in. Livingston, Montana, 
 used to be one of the worst of them, and when I visited it with 
 my sons, some fifteen years ago, I found three fine schools and 
 one of the very best normal schools I ever set my foot in. 
 
 I had for eight years a little log cabin in the heart of the 
 Rocky Mountains, on the headwaters of Crandle Creek. 
 That region was then, and is still, one of the least visited parts 
 of our beautiful mountain land. The lonely prospector who 
 "located" there could not have been of quite the ordinary type, 
 for instead of following the custom of his clan, and choosing the 
 cheapest and ugliest name to describe what he saw around him,
 
 442 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 he called the lovely spot "Sunlight," and Sunlight it remains 
 to-day. Several mountain trails go by there now. 
 
 We had climbed for hours the dark, precipitous sides of a 
 pine-clad valley which suddenly opened out into a little green, 
 flower-decked prairie, with an immense red sandstone cliff 
 closing in the upper end of it. This was Sunlight. At the 
 cliff's base, clear and sparkling, ran the stream. After the 
 hard, rough climb, I thought this unexpected Alpine garden 
 one of the most beautiful spots I had ever seen. All round it 
 Nature was in savage mood, but here her face was gentle and 
 her rough garments had been laid aside. 
 
 Above it, almost inaccessible, steep snowy summits stood 
 sentinel, and barring all progress up the stream, the great red 
 cliff called on us to halt. The day's march had been hard. 
 Both horses and men were fagged. Here were our necessaries, 
 feed for beast and fuel for man, and what a camping place! 
 
 We were making a trail of our own toward the centre of the 
 range. Once already we had been beaten by down timber and 
 snow, and had to turn backward. Now it seemed we had come 
 to the end of the way again. The great red cliff looked pro- 
 hibitory. But what did anything matter this lovely evening? 
 The sun set and a new moon rose and looked down past the cliff's 
 edge into our sheltered resting place. The day's work was over, 
 and the immediate duty of the hour was to rest and eat. 
 
 We had not seen a soul since we had left the rail ten days 
 before, so it was a surprise when a stranger came quietly out 
 of the gloom and squatted on his heels, as mountain men 
 always did, at the fire. He had pushed up the creek prospect- 
 ing, some years before. An early storm had snowed him in, 
 but he found good feed for his horses in the "Basin," so he 
 built him a log shanty, stayed all winter, and preempted the 
 place. He was tired now of loneliness and wanted to sell out. 
 I had then no idea of buying, and when next day he showed us 
 the narrow trail round the base of the great cliff that led up to 
 the "divide," he begged me to remember his desire and help 
 him out. 
 
 The visit of the owner of Sunlight was not the only surprise 
 we had. Some little time after another and a wilder sort of 
 man turned up at the fire one evening. As it turned out, 
 Frank C. was to be my trusted guide and teacher in mountain
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 443 
 
 ways on many a trip and for many a happy day. He was only 
 a lad, just twenty-one, but hardship had told on him; he 
 looked years older. He could stride up a mountain slope at 
 an altitude of over ten thousand feet, and keep his pipe alight 
 as he did so (an almost impossible thing to do). I have seen 
 him race up such slopes for several hundred yards to get a 
 second shot at wounded game; and finally, he was the best 
 rifle shot I ever shot with. He had run away from his home in 
 Nebraska at sixteen, and had worked his way to the land of his 
 dreams. When he had cash enough to buy a rifle and a pack- 
 horse, he started to make a living by hunting "meat" for a small 
 mining town on Clark's Fork, in an out-of-the-way corner of 
 Montana. 
 
 When Frank struck our outfit he was in bad luck. Clark's 
 Fork was a failure as a mining camp, and the increasing dis- 
 tance he had to travel to kill and then to sell the meat made a 
 usually precarious business a hopelessly bad one. Thus it 
 came about that Frank was open to an offer, and since he 
 seemed to be just the sort of man I needed, I made him one 
 promptly, and it was as promptly accepted. 
 
 I wanted a "mountain man," a man who, before all things, 
 loved to live in the mountains. Such hermits of the wild were 
 not rare, but they hugged their solitary independence, and 
 would seldom consider an engagement. Loafers round the 
 railroad who could "rope" and "pack" and ride there were 
 a-plenty, but you had no guarantee that they would stay with 
 you, or that the first time they were full of whiskey you might 
 not have a dangerous fight on your hands. In short, the 
 difficulty I had to overcome, if my mountain wanderings were 
 to be a success, was that of finding reliable men. They were 
 indeed hard to find, and one bad fellow could spoil the trip for 
 all the party. A good reason for taking my sturdy David K. 
 along, when J. P. Morgan, Jr., came, with me, had been to have 
 a stout arm to rely on if any difficulty arose with hired men. 
 Later, outfitting parties who wished to camp in the mountains 
 became a recognized business, and at many points men and 
 pack-trains could be engaged; but for serious mountain travel 
 it always was difficult to procure men and beasts fitted for work; 
 and success in any wild land depends on, first your knowledge of 
 what you want, and next on the care you take in procuring it.
 
 444 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 After a short trial I found I had in Frank just what I wanted. 
 I made him an offer. He was to go back to Sunlight as soon 
 as he left me at the railroad, and try to buy the place. If he 
 got ranch and ponies reasonably, I would send him the cash. 
 The offer delighted him. Sunlight was just the sort of place 
 he longed for, well situated for trapping. I would "grub 
 stake" him till spring, and next July he would meet me at the 
 railroad with saddle ponies and pack-train. 
 
 In due time I had an excellent account of his stewardship. 
 He bought the place and forty ponies, some of them excellent 
 saddle ponies, for $400. I never made another bargain like 
 that in my life. 
 
 Frank knew the mountains by heart. He never got into 
 inextricably bad places, either with horses or on foot; he was 
 a wonderful man on bad ground. He knew where to look for 
 game, and how to track it. He so completely exterminated the 
 bears round Sunlight (he shot one hundred and four, in all, 
 while in my employ) that I never killed one near the ranch my- 
 self. 
 
 Let me say here, he exploded for me the commonly received 
 opinion that the grizzly was a wilfully dangerous customer. 
 He declared that he never had been charged by one. Grizzly 
 bears have habits (better say had, for the grizzly has passed), 
 it may be admitted, that are not readily understood by those 
 who have not studied them. One of the strangest is, that if 
 shot at from below, when they are travelling a mountain, turning 
 over stones as they go in order to feed on the larvae beneath, they 
 will roll head over heels, literally in a bear ball, down the steep 
 slope toward the safer cover far below. If a man is in the way, 
 as they roll and rush past, he might be hurt. I once saw Frank 
 almost wiped in that way by a bear that came rolling, tumbling, 
 growling (literally, it looked more like a great football than 
 anything else) at an amazing pace, right down the middle of a 
 steep mountain washout. 
 
 Frank had Junius Morgan out with him that day. They 
 saw through their glasses a grizzly a good way above them 
 feeding among the loose stones of the high slope in the usual 
 way. They went up after him, and J. M. was a fairly good 
 climber, but having got within shooting distance of the bear, 
 J. M. could not get any nearer. The going was hard, and it was
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 445 
 
 shoot then or not at all. He shot and missed. The pace that 
 bear came at, down that gully, was really scaring. There was 
 no time for a second shot. Both men leaped up the sides of 
 the gully, and promptly and most wisely gave that bear the 
 right of way. But to say that bear charged them would be 
 untrue. 
 
 I was charged, and not charged, by a fine bear on my next 
 trip. I had shot an elk at a distance from the main camp, in a 
 very likely looking place, as bear bait. I did not go near it for 
 a week. Then, starting early one morning, I rode off to see if 
 I had had a visitor. The carcass lay in a dark, steep valley, 
 where pine trees stood close together, and blazes on the trees 
 marked a path to my "kill." As soon as I got among the 
 pines, there were bear signs. And when I came in sight of the 
 spot where my elk lay, I was confused for a moment by the 
 changes that had taken place. In the dim light I saw an im- 
 mense mound of earth and stones, even one tree stump was 
 there, piled on top of the bait. I drew near it, one foot at a time, 
 and looking everywhere for some sign of the author of this up- 
 heaval, who I knew must be close by. I could see nothing. I 
 was only a few feet from the mound when, from the earth itself 
 it seemed, came a grunting roar, and right over the mound, from 
 the off side, rushed a great beast and threw himself on me. Or 
 he would have tumbled on me, whether he wished to or not, for 
 he could not possibly have stopped himself in the short space, 
 if I had not shot and shot quickly. 
 
 What had happened was this: the grizzly heard our soft 
 treading as he lay dozing behind his "cash." He was sure 
 another bear was threatening his store, and so hurled himself 
 forward to defend his treasure. I thought was it fancy? 
 that in that fraction of a second of time I could see in his face 
 surprise more than fury. But the circumstances did not favour 
 further analysis of motive, and I shot just as quick and straight 
 as I knew how. He was only some few feet from my rifle 
 muzzle, and he tumbled down the mound to my very foot, 
 stone dead. 
 
 Another fine grizzly I got in an unusual way; the largest 
 I ever saw in the mountains save one that, of course, I missed. 
 
 Frank and I had gone, as we often did, away from the main 
 camp for a couple of nights, prospecting for new country. At
 
 446 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 evening I left him to get our little fire going and cook supper 
 and went along a high ridge for a mile or two before sunset. 
 When it was growing dark I turned back. I had gone farther 
 than I intended, and was going carefully along the ridge toward 
 camp, when, in the darkness, which by now was complete, a 
 great black shape suddenly reared itself up in my very face. 
 There was no breath of wind; I had made no noise, nor had the 
 bear. I had not even time to put my rifle to my shoulder,, so 
 close was he, but shot into him without raising it. The flash 
 blinded me; I could see nothing, and on the instant I made a 
 jump forward to clear my own smoke and get another shot, for 
 I took for granted that he had rolled down the steep incline. 
 As I did so a heavy blow knocked both my legs clean from 
 under me. When I hit the ground I took no chances, but rolled 
 just as fast as I could for quite a bit. When I got up, I still 
 had my rifle, but I could neither hear nor see any sign of the 
 bear. A wounded bear in pitchy darkness was something I 
 had no interest in just then, and so, with many a look into the 
 blackness, I made my way to camp. My leg was bruised but 
 usable. 
 
 Soon I made out the welcome spark of fire, where amid the 
 nut pines Frank had made camp. And wasn't I glad to see it ! 
 Frank: "What were you shooting at up there on the divide?" 
 W. S. R. : "I ran right up against a big bear, a very big bear, 
 
 in the darkness." 
 Frank: "No, you didn't?" 
 W. S. R. "I tell you I did. I hit him, too, and he knocked 
 
 me over." 
 This was too much of a bear story. I didn't blame Frank 
 for not believing one word of it. Knocked down by a big 
 grizzly, and yet able to walk quite a way back to camp. Frank 
 said nothing more, but went on getting supper ready. Before 
 sun-up next morning he brought in the hobbled ponies. We 
 packed our few things, had our breakfast, and were ready to 
 start back to camp. Frank, of course, always led the way, lead- 
 ing our pack-pony, and I had hard enough work now to make 
 him wait till I could go to the ridge above us and look over the 
 site of my evening escapade. Frank remained rather sulkily 
 waiting my return, resenting what he fancied was an effort to 
 fool him. When, after a scramble, I reached the spot, I could
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 447 
 
 scarcely believe in my luck when I saw it. There lay the 
 biggest grizzly I had yet seen. Indeed, he was the biggest I 
 ever saw, except one. He was nine feet three inches between 
 pegs, 1 and must have weighed seven hundred pounds. 
 
 What had happened was that when I jumped forward the 
 bear gave as he fell a convulsive kick with his hind legs, and 
 these swept my legs from under me as though I had been swept 
 out of my saddle by a branch. 
 
 It is thirty years since I saw Sunlight, but as I sit before 
 my fire in the evening, or as I look at some of the big Wapiti or 
 sheep heads I brought back from it, I can see it still. 
 
 The night gives back the double day which clothed the earth when I was 
 young. 
 
 If I were an artist, I could draw the outline of cliff and canon 
 now. It is thirty years since I sat at the little cabin door and 
 watched the shadows fill the valley in the evening, or looked at 
 sunrise for the Big Horn, who would show against the skyline 
 as they looked down on the cabin from the edge of the great 
 red cliff. 
 
 The last trip we had together I saw a change in my friend. 
 He was restless and morose at times, not like himself. At 
 Clark's Fork camp, as we passed through, he introduced me to 
 a woman friend. Poor thing, the class she belonged to was too 
 evident. Next year I was ill. There was no Rocky Mountain 
 trip for me, but my friend Doctor Nevin of Rome wanted to go 
 hunting, so I loaned him my riding ponies and "packs," and 
 told him to hire Frank, which he did. 
 
 When he came back after the trip he told me that Frank 
 had married, and had insisted on taking his wife along, and 
 that they quarrelled perpetually. I also found Frank had 
 charged him for the use of my ponies. This was not honest, 
 and I felt things had indeed gone utterly wrong at Sunlight. I 
 wrote to Frank the best letter I could. It was of no use. I 
 had in reply a disjointed scrawl, saying that after these years he 
 thought he had a right to the ranch; he had had it surveyed, 
 and now claimed it as his own. A few months later came one 
 
 J The correct method of measuring the length of game requires that a peg be driven into the 
 ground at the nose, another at the heel of an animal. The distance between such pegs is the 
 height or length. To run the tape along the line of the body is not an accepted measurement. 
 Of course skin measurements are wholly useless. A skin can be stretched.
 
 44 8 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 more pitiful scrawl. "He was very ill, feared he was dying. 
 He had done wrong. Would I forgive him?" 
 
 So, at twenty-seven, only twenty-seven, Frank died. Died 
 of that strange disease which, lacking a better name, they call 
 mountain fever, and under the great cliff at Sunlight they 
 buried him. He had fine stuff in him, but he was one of those 
 many who lived in hard luck. He never knew but one woman, 
 and she ruined him. "Who maketh thee to differ, or what hast 
 thou that thou didst not receive?" (I Cor. iv, 7.) 
 
 I have tramped through the best mountain scenery in Europe. 
 I have camped among the rugged peaks of the Dolomites in 
 Austria, where I hunted chamois, the hardest hunting I ever 
 did. I have followed the rare moufflon among the lovely 
 valleys and heather-clad slopes of snowy Girgenti in Sardinia, 
 where great fields of crocuses are purple and golden as they 
 push their hardy heads out of the snow in spring. But give 
 me our own mountain land before any other. 
 
 The lavish splendour of its flowers, the unmatched, rugged 
 grandeur of its canons and cliffs! Europe was nothing to 
 compare with them. Many now make holiday among our 
 Rockies, but still the best is unknown. Few leave the beaten 
 paths, contenting themselves with hasty visits to the Yellow- 
 stone or Glacier parks. 
 
 Of many places wonderful in their beauty I recall two that I 
 sometimes went out of my way to visit, when pushing up from 
 the Northern Pacific Railroad to my little ranch. I choose 
 them as they are comparatively easy of access. 
 
 On the road to Cook mines (I believe they are now aban- 
 doned), a long valley of some twenty-five miles leads easily up 
 to the divide from the east fork of the Yellowstone, narrowing 
 as it rises. Some eight miles from the mines, on the left hand 
 as you ascend, a vast wall of basalt rises sheer from the bed of 
 the stream. It cannot be much less than four thousand 
 feet in height, and is a long mile at its base. 
 
 When first I looked up at it, its great dark breast was braided 
 all over with a hundred milky, wavy, flashing waterfalls. For 
 a week we had had almost continuous rain, and these warm 
 showers, for it was July, had hastened the destruction of the 
 snow beds on its crown, and down to the valley fell or trickled
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 449 
 
 literally hundreds of streams, separating, spreading, uniting, 
 and spreading again, as they crept or thundered downward. 
 
 No words can convey any idea of the mingled beauty and 
 grandeur of falling water and immovable basalt when smitten 
 by the glory of the setting sun. 
 
 One autumn evening, two years later, we camped at the same 
 spot. We were smoking the last pipe of peace before turning 
 in when one of our party noticed a clear light falling on the 
 summit above us. As we watched, the light crept slowly down- 
 ward. At first we scarcely realized that it was the moon. 
 We were down, remember, in a veritable . chasm, one side of 
 which, the side facing us, was three thousand feet higher than 
 the other, and thus the moonbeams lit up its edge long before 
 they reached the little prairie at its foot, where our camp lay. 
 A great belt of clouds lay on the rocky ridge at our back, and 
 athwart these the moonlight passed, casting their moving 
 shadows on the great gray mirror we were looking up at. 
 What grotesque shapes they took as they wound and unwound 
 their long folds! There we sat and watched them, till at last 
 such moonlight as you can only see on the desert, or when you 
 are thousands of feet above the damper, denser air in which 
 ordinary life is passed, fell full into the gorge. 
 
 I recall another bit of Rocky Mountain scenery. I single it 
 out of a possible many because, like the first, it is accessible 
 to the traveller. I refer to the mouth of Clark's Fork Canyon. 
 This canyon, in my judgment, is in every way finer, deeper, 
 grander than the Canyon of the Yellowstone, and, though but 
 sixty miles from the Northern Pacific railroad, is seldom visited. 
 
 Sheer from the water, without one break on its face, a silvery 
 cliff, looking almost south, rises five thousand feet into the sky. 
 I do not know the nature of its formation, but in the sunlight 
 its sheen is most silvery. Right opposite it stands a mountain 
 so rocky and precipitous that no man or beast can ascend it. 
 And this is as dark as her brother sentinel is fair. 
 
 I saw these one early morning in September, when I had 
 turned unwillingly homeward, resisting the strong temptation 
 of a first tracking snow. Saw them all crusted and crowned 
 with their first winter icing. As we rode, we were not a mile 
 from their bases, yet these were absolutely invisible, shut out 
 by a dense white wall of mist. But their heads, for the top-
 
 450 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 most thousand feet or so, stood out clear as morning sunlight 
 could make them. 
 
 An ordinary hill of a couple of thousand feet looks Alpine 
 when you are near its base, if that base be hidden in fog and 
 the crown be clear. Many who read this can doubtless recall 
 experiences on misty mornings when, from canoe or on lake 
 shore or river bank, they looked up at cloud-girdled mountains 
 that, when thus seen, seemed so vast in their proportions that 
 they could scarcely believe them to be the old companions of the 
 night before. But these rocky sentinels, seen as I saw them 
 that morning I can liken them to nothing I know of. We 
 were not an especially emotional party, but they did seem to us 
 that morning, as they towered aloft into the limitless ether, to 
 belong to another "land that is very far off." 
 
 Hunting the grizzly fascinated me. I found him the hardest 
 of all animals to approach, excepting perhaps the sheep, and 
 the extreme difficulty of seeing him, and the lonely haunts he 
 had retired to, made him more difficult to bring to bag than 
 even the Big Horn. I shot twenty-five grizzlies in all, but not 
 one after 1891. In 1903 (I think), I took my sons on one last, 
 grand hunt, our last camping out together before duty called 
 each to take up his profession, and so bid good-bye to boyhood's 
 holidays with his father. I took them through the very best of 
 the hunting country in the United States. We had a fine 
 "outfit," and right up the centre of our mountain land we went, 
 from the Wind River Mountains to northern Wyoming. 
 
 We had splendid weather, and often good tracking snow; and 
 yet, in those two months, none of us ever even saw the track 
 of a reasonably large bear. 
 
 I got some of my bear by watching near a bait in the late 
 evening. Sometimes I sat up all night, wrapped in my buffalo 
 robe. Of such evenings and nights I retain vivid memory still. 
 One such experience I have especially in mind. What an 
 evening it was, both for its beauty and its good fortune! 
 
 My watching place was on the edge of a little mountain 
 prairie. Fully two thousand feet below the head waters of the 
 Snake gathered themselves, and in its infancy the great river 
 sent up its baby murmur. Behind me the giant heads of the 
 Teton cut the rosy evening sky, sharp and clear as does the
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 451 
 
 last thousand feet of the Matterhorn. I was comfortably en- 
 sconced in the warm brown pine-needles that smothered up 
 the great knees of a gnarled nut pine whose roots offered me an 
 armchair. Round me, for the space of two or three acres, 
 the short, crisp greensward that is only found where snow has 
 lain for months was spangled and starred all over with such 
 blue and white and red mountain flowers as are nowhere else 
 seen. 
 
 There is nothing quite so beautiful in any other Alpine land I 
 know of. I have counted in one long day's ramble very nearly 
 one hundred different flowers in bloom. I have tried to equal 
 that accounting in the Austrian Dolomites, whose flora is 
 the richest in Europe I believe, but have never been able to 
 approach my Rocky Mountain record. 
 
 Amid the lush green of the upper mountain prairies great 
 masses of harebell and borage and gentian carpet the ground. 
 Here and there, contrasting with their vivid blue, wide plots of 
 yellow, purple-centred sunflowers, stoutly hold up their 
 heads, while on the borderland of these natural flower-beds, 
 where the grass shortens in blade and deepens to an intenser 
 green, the delicate mountain lily, with its three pure-white 
 petals fading to a tender green at the centre, reaches its modest 
 height of some nine inches. 
 
 This evening my armchair not only commanded this prairie 
 garden, but the heads of two deep ravines leading to it; where 
 these met lay my bear bait, an elk shot some ten days before. 
 Hour after hour passed peacefully by. I had a pocket volume 
 of Tennyson, and I tried with poor success to read it, so gave 
 myself up to the beauty of the scene. At such a time one 
 realizes what a blissful thing it is just to be. Such hours do 
 not come to any of us often, but when they do, with them 
 surely may come an overmastering sense of that Presence 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning feels when she writes: 
 
 Earth's crammed with heaven, 
 And every common bush afire with God; 
 But only he who sees takes off his shoes. 
 
 Without cant, I think that evening I took off mine, as the 
 old prayer came to mind: "We thank Thee for our creation, 
 preservation, and all the blessings of this life."
 
 452 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 I was in a state of stable equilibrium, bodily and mental, when 
 a mighty rumpus arose at the edge of the dark woods below me, 
 where Frank's horse and mine were lariated. On his way up- 
 ward from the gulch a big grizzly had been joined by a relative, 
 and both, drawn by the scent of the dead elk that I have already 
 mentioned, came suddenly on the horses, hidden and securely 
 tied in a little hollow. The horses shrieked in terror as they 
 found themselves face to face with the bears. 
 
 I could see nothing from where I sat, but running down a few 
 yards I came in sight of two sturdy fellows sitting up on their 
 haunches, and surveying our plunging nags. For a moment 
 they evidently held a hurried consultation. The conclusion 
 they arrived at was that they were out for venison, not for 
 horse-flesh; more especially as there was a dangerous smell 
 around. In brief, they struck our trail, and scented our sad- 
 dles, and so, without loss of time, were off up wind. 
 
 Frank was a quarter of a mile away, at the other side of the 
 prairie, so the chance was mine. As they made good time 
 quartering up hill, they gave me a long running shot. Sit 
 down when you shoot, if it is possible. No position so good; 
 an elbow on either knee. You can shoot fast and straight, 
 and the position is high enough to carry head and rifle above 
 small irregularities of the ground. I let drive and missed 
 shot too far ahead. Always shoot too far ahead rather than 
 too far behind. Sometimes a bullet plumped in front of 
 running game will halt it for a moment, and so it now turned 
 out. The leader reared up for an instant, and the pause was 
 fatal. The next bullet took him fairly in the heart. He had 
 just time to give his solicitous companion a wipe with his paw 1 
 that would have come near wiping out a strong man, when he 
 rolled over, dead. 
 
 Bear number two I got with my third shot. There they lay, 
 not fifty yards apart, two in one evening. Honestly it must 
 be confessed that such shots were more than ordinarily lucky. 
 
 Skinning such tough hides is very trying work, but how 
 willingly was it undertaken! And then what time we made 
 down the mountain, tying first our splendid trophies, heads on, 
 
 *I have seen a wounded bear do this more than once. I have seen a wounded wolf do the 
 same. Lions I have never seen do it and of course wounded elephants will court danger to help 
 their wounded.
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 453 
 
 securely on the cow saddles. What cannot a good "bronco" 
 do when he wants to get back to the herd, and when he is getting 
 out of a dark wood where he has suffered the scare of his life? 
 For a couple of thousand feet we led our horses down the steep 
 incline. Then more than three miles of heavy down timber, 
 and not a ghost of a trail. The sure-footedness of a well- 
 trained pony in the midst of such going is only less wonderful 
 than the way in which, with his head now and then stretched 
 to the very ground, he smells out the trail he has come over like 
 a well-trained hound. All ponies cannot do this, but the one 
 I always rode never in eight years failed me. He would 
 steadily travel an unmarked trail, in dense wood, and amid 
 slippery rock, that he and I had forced way through or over 
 weeks before. Many an evening did I race him home. Knot- 
 ting my reins on his neck, and covering my face with arms and 
 hands against the sharp branches of the forest, we passed 
 rapidly through. (And I gave $25 for that bronco !) 
 
 Once out of the timber we could sober down, for all was plain 
 sailing. Three or four miles more, among beaver meadows 
 where, every now and then, we heard, as loud almost as a 
 pistol shot, the beaver smite the water with broad tail as he 
 went down into his own quiet clear pool and then the wel- 
 come blaze of the camp-fire, promising rest as well as good 
 companionship. 
 
 Not a great many marches from Sunlight, we had stumbled 
 on an interesting discovery. We found the place where Chief 
 Joseph succeeded in hiding what remained of his Utes, till 
 exhausted people and ponies won a brief rest before making 
 their last dash for the Canadian border. The story of the last 
 Ute war is a story shameful to the United States. The 
 Utes were the best Indians we clashed with. They kept 
 their promises as regularly as the United States broke hers. 
 They were made the victims not only of the shameful corrup- 
 tion and incapacity of the Interior Department, under Presi- 
 dent Grant's administration, but of a still less excusable breach 
 of faith by the Government itself. 
 
 Chief Joseph's march from the barren reservation assigned 
 his tribe to the Canadian border, the best military authorities 
 agree, was a first-class feat of war. Three columns of United 
 States troops were in pursuit of the Indians, and each column
 
 454 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 outnumbered the fighting force of the Utes. The famous 5 th 
 Infantry, General Miles's regiment, had been called into the 
 field as mounted infantry, and their part was to cut off the 
 Utes from the Canadian line. I had had the great good for- 
 tune to be welcomed by the officers of this regiment, and had 
 been their guest on several occasions. So on my way East, 
 after the discovery I have referred to, I was anxious to tell my 
 friends at Fort Keogh about it. 
 
 I stayed at the quarters of Major R., whom I knew well. 
 He was a silent man, seldom speaking of himself, or of the many 
 battles during the Civil War in which he had been engaged; 
 but one night, as we sat up late and alone, he told me the story 
 I greatly wanted to hear: the story of the last stand the Utes 
 made, and of his almost mortal wounding. 
 
 The regiment was mounted, and it pressed the retreating 
 Utes so fiercely that, once more, they stood at bay, in terribly 
 cold and snowy weather. There was scarcely time given 
 them to throw up a low line of cover when they were charged. 
 With admirable discipline, the Indians held their fire till the 
 mounted men were close to the rifles, and then, with one ter- 
 rible, accurate volley, they emptied sixty saddles. 
 
 Before the shaken squadron could reform, night fell. R., 
 leading his men, was shot through the lungs, and lay in front 
 of the Indians' line, too far from his command to receive aid. 
 How long he lay, almost unconscious, he did not know, but 
 as the first shock of his wounding wore off, he realized where 
 he was, and believing himself dying, commended his wife and 
 children and himself to God. The cold was awful, but the 
 burning thirst, caused by the loss of blood that had poured 
 from the wound of a 45-calibre bullet clear through his lung, 
 was worse. And so paralyzed was his whole body that he 
 could not even moisten his lips with the snow. 
 
 He was fast lapsing into unconsciousness when he was aware 
 of something crawling toward him through the snow. He 
 could not move an inch, but he could see it coming, nearer and 
 nearer. Was it a wolf? The terror of it brought him partly 
 back to life. Still nearer it came. And now he saw it clearly. 
 It was a crawling Ute. 
 
 Then he knew his last hour had come. He made a prayer 
 and closed his eyes, waiting to feel the steel at his throat. He
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 455 
 
 thought that he had bidden good-bye to life; that he was ready 
 for death; but the horror of that moment, the Major said, 
 passed all his power to describe. He felt the Indian touch him. 
 He could not plead for his life. He could not even moan. 
 Then he felt an arm passed under his head; it was lifted 
 gently; a cup of water was pressed to his lips, and he drank. 
 Then his saviour crawled away, silently as he had come. 
 
 "Then I knew I would live," said my friend, "and life 
 seemed very sweet to me." 
 
 When at length Chief Joseph surrendered, some time after, 
 Major R. did everything possible to find out something about 
 that Indian. "I could learn nothing," said the Major, "but 
 that Ute was a better Christian than I." 
 
 That same night, it was the last time I saw him he also 
 told me the story of his wounding in the Civil War. "I don't 
 think that in all the army of the Potomac another man was 
 wounded in the same way I was. It was at Fredericksburg. 
 You remember we were thrown back across the river, the 
 Confederates pressing after us in some places right up to the 
 bank. In the confusion some units of my regiment were left 
 on the farther side. There they held on, sheltered by the steep- 
 ness of the slope, and had not surrendered. At dark I was 
 ordered to take a detail and drag a boat down our side and 
 fetch them over. I had the bow, the rest of my men were 
 hanging on to the sides. The boat was heavy, and as we were 
 getting it down our side an enemy's picket on the far side saw 
 what we were doing and fired a volley into us. The men hold- 
 ing back the boat let her go, and as it slipped from the holding, 
 it knocked me down and ran over me, crushing me severely. 
 My ribs were broken and wrenched, and I was invalided for a 
 year. It was a mean sort of wound; there was no glory in it. 
 I don't think there was another man in the whole army wounded 
 just as I was." 
 
 Some years after that night, at the headquarters of the 5th, 
 I was invited by a friend of mine, Lanman Bull (the President 
 of the New York Stock Exchange) to go with him into the 
 Adirondacks for a few days' trout fishing, after Easter. When 
 we left the railroad there was a long thirty-six-mile drive to his 
 camp. A wagon from his place met us. His overseer drove it. 
 We put our traps on board, and Bull said to me, " Captain is
 
 456 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 an interesting man, for he was all through the war. You know 
 something about the war. Get on the seat beside him, and get 
 him yarning. It will pass the time." 
 
 Some of the friends of my boyhood, for the pure (or impure 
 rather) love of scrapping, had volunteered into the Confederate 
 army. I had read most of the histories of that struggle, and 
 in 1869 had gone over all the battlefields in the Eastern and 
 some of those in the Western campaigns. My companion 
 proved to be all that my host said he was a most interesting 
 story teller. 
 
 "Were you ever wounded?" said I. 
 
 "Yes," said he, "and I don't think that another man in the 
 army was wounded in the same way I was." 
 
 "Tell me." 
 
 " It was at the battle of Fredericksburg! My lieutenant was 
 ordered to take a boat, etc., etc." 
 
 "Do you remember his name?" 
 
 "I can't. I have tried. It was an uncommon sort of 
 name." 
 
 "Was it Romanes?" He nearly fell off the seat. 
 
 "That was the name," he said. 
 
 I had the great pleasure of putting the two men in touch with 
 each other. 
 
 I am glad the wilderness was not tamed in my time. Glad 
 of the long days of earned rest I have had within it under the 
 sky and the rain. Glad of the men I met, in wild places and in 
 lawless days. Bad men undoubtedly some of them were, ready 
 with knife and pistol, given sometimes to drinking vile whiskey; 
 but all of them brave, and very few of them mean. One of 
 them, Carpenter Jackson, was a man who bore a name for 
 desperate courage wherever mountain men met. He had lived 
 many years at that famous outlaw retreat of long ago, Jack- 
 son's Hole at the foot of the Tetons. I won his confidence. 
 I found him the best guide and all-round mountain man, 
 excepting poor Frank, I had ever known. His father and 
 mother had perished in an Indian attack on a baggage train. 
 He had been saved by a band of outlaws, whose doings ended 
 in bringing down on them not only the law forces of the Terri- 
 tory these they defied but finally the United States Cavalry.
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 457 
 
 The band was broken up; many of them killed. Jackson was 
 cornered in a canon, and with an empty rifle held up those 
 who attacked him, till, in the dark, he slipped away. Carpenter 
 Jackson never boasted of his own deeds, so I learned this part of 
 his story from others, not from him. 
 
 The outlaws had saved him. He lived with them for many 
 years. Circumstances almost forced him into acceptance of 
 their code, and he had so bad a name that, when I engaged him 
 (in my usual reckless way), to be a guide to my sons, who were 
 with me in the mountains at the time, the other three men I 
 had hired refused point-blank to come along. Finally, I per- 
 suaded them, and we had a good time, all of us together. Of 
 course, C. J. was worth the rest of the outfit. 
 
 I camped alone with him for several days and nights, and he 
 told me much of his life's story. He said that one good woman, 
 a half-breed Indian, had made him a good man. It was no 
 boast. 
 
 One year after I bade him good-bye C. J. did one of the most 
 desperately brave and self-sacrificing things recorded even in 
 those regions where courage and endurance are common virtues. 
 He was in the mountains making his hunt for winter meat 
 when he happened on a sergeant and a trooper from Fort 
 Washakia, who also were hunting elk or rather he happened 
 on their camp as a sudden blizzard burst. As night drew on 
 the trooper got in, but the sergeant failed to make camp. In 
 the blinding storm C. J. went out alone to look for him. That 
 night and all next day he searched, and at night of the following 
 day found him with both feet frozen. He tied him on his 
 own horse (the sergeant had lost his) and got him back to 
 camp. 
 
 The cold was intense, so that, do what they would, they 
 could not thaw out the frozen feet. So again that night, C. 
 J. tied the poor fellow on his horse, and started alone with him 
 for the post. He got there the evening of the second day, his 
 own fourth day without rest, and just managed to save the 
 sergeant's life, but not his feet. Four days without rest or 
 sleep, two of them in blinding storm, two in heavy, clogging 
 snow. C. J. was old for a mountain man (over fifty) when he 
 performed this extraordinary feat of courageous endurance. 
 
 The sergeant's comrades made a collection for Jackson. Of
 
 458 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 course he would not touch it, but passed it on to the crippled 
 man. 
 
 Jackson rested for a couple of days, and then prepared to 
 go back to the Indian reservation where his wife and children 
 lived. Then something unprecedented happened to the man 
 whom my men refused to camp with; who was so notorious an 
 outlaw that I was held crazy to trust myself and my sons in his 
 company. 
 
 This happened: an honour guard of the United States Army 
 was ordered out by the Commandant at Fort Washakia to 
 salute that once outlaw, a poor squaw-man, as he rode out of 
 the Post. 
 
 "Once a preacher always a preacher," is, I fear, true in my 
 case. Though I am holiday-making, I cannot help scrambling 
 into an extemporized pulpit and preaching a short sermon. 
 Remember I have not been preaching for a long time, and 
 though it has been said before, the hurrying, driving days we 
 are living in makes it worth while to say it again. Rejoice with 
 your children. Make much of those early golden days, gone 
 ere you know it. Take holidays; make holidays; and spend 
 them together. Too often I noticed in city life, as boys grew 
 to manhood, fathers and sons had less and less in common. 
 Many fathers acknowledged this and deplored it to me. Some- 
 times the results were apparent; but even when no harm 
 seemed done a good thing was lost that should not have been 
 lost. 
 
 The years between twelve and twenty are years when no 
 one thing in any father's life is so vitally important as that he 
 should know his children, and the boys should prefer the 
 company of their father to that of any one else in the world 
 their mother excepted. If habits of mutual confidence are not 
 formed then, they seldom are ever formed. 
 
 While we have time, let us cultivate our children. They 
 are our first responsibility and our last delight. Perhaps 
 our only immortality. In few of the families to whose intimacy 
 I have been admitted did it seem to me that the boys were as 
 close to, as understood by, their fathers as they might have 
 been. I do not say this of careless or irreligious people only. 
 It was too generally true of that class of business and pro- 
 fessional men, the clergy by no means excepted, who had won
 
 HOLIDAYS AND "SUNLIGHT" 459 
 
 success. Yet as years weigh one down, what reward has even 
 a kindly world to give compared to the sympathy and under- 
 standing of your own child? 
 
 These things I turned over in my mind; and warned by 
 common parental failures round me, I made a plan for my own 
 future holidays. This plan I proposed to my wife, and it won 
 her unselfish approval. When each of my sons was thirteen 
 years old I would take him away from her for weeks into the 
 wild, and half of the summer holidays we would spend there 
 together. 
 
 And so it fell out that from 1892 to 1904 my sons were my 
 companions. In Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, 
 I sought out the best woodsmen and guides that could be had, 
 and a very fine set of men they were. When we had together 
 explored these near-by wild lands, I went back into those 
 mountains I knew and loved, and together we camped and 
 hunted the Rockies, from the Canadian border to the Union 
 Pacific Railroad line. 
 
 These trips cost money, sometimes more than I could well 
 afford. Especially was this true of our long journeys, all four 
 of us together, while my sons were at Harvard. But no money 
 was ever better spent. I thought so then. I think so now. 
 
 I gave my sons a taste for the wild. It is a purifying taste. 
 I taught them to camp, to fish, to shoot. In staying power and 
 in woodcraft two of them certainly learned to better their 
 father. The only thing that saved my pride was that none of 
 them shot so well. 
 
 And so, looking back on it all now, I am deeply thankful 
 for those halcyon days of youth we spent together, my boys 
 and I. I owe them much, for their company kept me young. I 
 feel that I am privileged in sharing with them memories that 
 the years, as they come and go, will make not less but more 
 delightful. 
 
 Now I must fold my tent and hie me back to the great city. 
 But perhaps I can persuade you, dear reader, before I quite 
 finish writing, once again to go forth among the beautiful 
 wild places, with an older if not a wiser lover of camp-fire and 
 gun.
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 Memories, and Good-Bye 
 
 0, beautiful is love, and to be free 
 
 Is beautiful, and beautiful are friends, 
 Love, freedom, comrades, surely make amends 
 
 For all these thorns through which we walk to death. 
 God, let us breathe your beauty, with our breath. 
 
 John Masefield. 
 
 This last chapter must differ from any that have preceded 
 it. In it I try to find space for some record of things I cannot 
 quite leave out, incidents I think worth recording. I can give 
 them only in outline, and the dates of their happenings are wide 
 apart. So it must be a scrappy chapter, I fear. 
 
 And first, as to how this autobiography has been put together. 
 It is my own work entirely. I have sought advice from no one. 
 I have showed nothing but the first chapter to any one, and 
 that to but a few friends, before the manuscript was accepted by 
 the publisher. I am therefore responsible, and I alone, for any 
 mistakes that it may contain. I had planned to write at greater 
 length of the out-of-doors side of my life. It has meant a great 
 deal to me of my interesting journey through the Indian 
 country in the '6o's, and forty years later of my stay in equa- 
 torial Africa. But if my book is to reach the hands I want 
 it in, it must not be too expensive, and I cannot find space 
 for an account of these adventurous days. I have devoted 
 most mornings for five years to writing and re-writing it, 
 and for the last half year I have closed my study door on all 
 comers for several hours daily. Ever since my return from 
 Africa, I have spent all my leisure sorting and annotating a 
 large mass of correspondence, and my notebooks, kept since 
 1873, when I began my clerical life as curate of St. Giles', 
 Norwich, England. I had a mass of material to choose from. 
 I formed the habit of making daily notes of occurrences, of 
 
 460
 
 MEMORIES, AND GOOD-BYE 461 
 
 things I heard, or saw, or said; usually I made them the night 
 of the same day. I kept important letters, and after 1886, I 
 had the invaluable assistance of my dear friend and admirable 
 secretary, John Reichert. 
 
 These things being so, my field of choice was embarrassingly 
 wide when I searched for material for this book. 
 
 For two years before and for some months after my resig- 
 nation from St. George's, in 1906, I was in no condition to 
 write anything . I did not have much of a grip on life or on 
 myself. Do what I would, I could not sleep. What helped me 
 most, I think, in those days was that I never under any cir- 
 cumstances touched any form of sedative. 
 
 I spent six months quite alone in Africa, moving quietly 
 about in a beautiful and accessible country, and with no com- 
 panions but my black porters and one unusually good and 
 capable missionary-trained boy, who spoke English and several 
 native dialects: John Connop. (A famous name, his, in that 
 little known land, for his father, with great and faithful courage, 
 had brought from the far interior to the coast the body of his 
 loved master, Livingston.) 
 
 Marching till I was tired every day; caring for the hurts 
 and needs of seventy-five native porters; seeing no one, and 
 receiving letters and newspapers but rarely, I partly got back 
 my powers of sleep. 
 
 When I had finished my first African journey, my wife met 
 me in England, and we rented a tiny cottage on the slopes of 
 the Grampians, in Scotland, where we spent many happy, 
 peaceful days. 
 
 I fully expected, during all this time that I remained abroad, 
 to take up again clerical work of some sort, under the direc- 
 tion of my friend, Bishop Greer. This was his promise to 
 me. So much was distinctly understood between us. When 
 I was disappointed in this, I determined to write this story, 
 and began the long business of going over my material and 
 sorting out from the mass of it what seemed of interest and of 
 value. 
 
 I have found great pleasure in the work. It has renewed 
 for me what is best worth in the past. Dear faces of those 
 who are gone have looked in on me; and I have not felt the 
 loneliness that so often is the complaint of people no longer
 
 462 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 young. While I and they worked together, I thought that 
 what we were doing or trying to do was worth while. I am 
 still surer of it as I renew a poor memory in the perusal of its 
 record. 
 
 After 1 901, I began to be a tired man. In earlier days I 
 came back to work with joy as soon as my holidays were over. 
 I laid aside my hunting gear without a sigh. After 1901, I felt 
 a difference. I did not have the spring of life within that, for 
 so long, I had rejoiced in. I loved my preaching. I could 
 hold my audiences. But speaking began to tire me dreadfully, 
 and if I spoke in the evening, it was often hard to sleep after- 
 ward. I was forced to admit to myself that I must modify 
 seriously my plans. I must secure assistance of a sort that till 
 then I had of purpose foregone. 
 
 I had planned to help my people; more than that, in a small 
 way I had planned to help the church by showing that a large 
 parish could accomplish something in educating the younger 
 clergy: supplementing the worse than inadequate preparation 
 the seminaries provided; and my plans had not been quite a 
 failure. Now I could no longer hide from myself the fact that 
 I myself needed help in carrying a load that had grown beyond 
 my strength. 
 
 And this meant a change in my relation to St. George's; 
 meant taking a step that I found very hard to take. I went to 
 my faithful friend and senior warden, and opened to him my 
 heart. "I want," said I, "a senior assistant. One not under 
 me but beside me. One who can gradually step into my place. 
 I find I cannot much longer 'carry on' alone." 
 
 Mr. Morgan's response to this was like himself. He assured 
 me of his full support, and more than that (and I want to em- 
 phasize this), he gave me no hint even of wishing to have one 
 word to say in the momentous matter of the choice of a senior 
 assistant. As my senior warden he would have been well 
 within his rights had he suggested to me that such a man as I 
 proposed to look for would naturally fill the place of assistant 
 rector, and in his choice the vestry had properly as much if not 
 more to say than I had; I went to him, recognizing this right. 
 I was willing to act on any suggestion as to conference he 
 might make. But in his own great generous-hearted spirit of 
 confidence, which he always showed me, he made no suggestion
 
 MEMORIES, AND GOOD-BYE 463 
 
 in that direction at all. He was deeply moved by what I had 
 told about my feeling of incapacity. "Rector," he said, "you 
 know what you want. You know what St. George's wants. 
 Think it over. Look round, find your man, and I will guar- 
 antee if necessary a liberal salary." No wonder I had suc- 
 ceeded in some difficult things when I had that sort of backing! 
 
 A week later, after breakfast at 219 Madison Avenue, I said: 
 "I have thought it over. I think I have found the man, and I 
 have reason to believe that he will favourably consider a call, 
 but I am afraid you will be scared by my suggestion. If you 
 do not approve of my choice, tell me so. You have a perfect 
 right to disapprove, and I will not try to over-persuade you. 
 I think Charles H. Brent, of the Society of St. John the Evan- 
 gelist (otherwise known as the Cowley Fathers), of Boston, 
 is the best man for the place. He is, of course, a High Church- 
 man, but he is not as high as he was when he sought 'the order.' 
 He is a man of God. He is in sympathy with the present time. 
 His eyes are in the front of his head, and not in the back. He 
 can preach. He loves men and understands them, and he is a 
 democrat." 
 
 Sure enough, as I named Brent my warden sat up. But I 
 went on quietly with my brief statement of his fitness for our 
 work. After a short silence, he said: "Yes, he is a good man, 
 and a strong man. Would he consider it?" 
 
 I said I had reason to think he would. 
 
 "Then," said my dear friend, "go ahead, Rector. I will 
 back you. I'll be responsible for his salary." (And without 
 one word from me named an ample sum.) 
 
 In the next few days the missionary bishopric of the Philip- 
 pines was offered Mr. Brent, which of course he regarded as a 
 first call. 
 
 If I failed as I did to find the help I needed, I had the satis- 
 faction of knowing that, as the Bishop of the Philippines made 
 his mark in the land, my dear warden did not think any the less 
 of the wisdom of my choice in suggesting his name as that of 
 one eminently fitted to step into my place as rector, and carry 
 forward the work in the old church, the success of which always 
 lay so near his heart. 
 
 I must now tell of one very unexpected and delightful thing, 
 a visit from my father. He had been invited to attend the
 
 464 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 Northfield Conference, where his friend Mr. Moody still 
 gathered the evangelical revivalists together. Father ac- 
 cepted, for he and Moody were close friends, and had worked 
 together for years on the other side. Father was by then an 
 old man. He rarely left London. A visit to the north of 
 Scotland was as far as he got from home. Of the social and 
 religious conditions on this side he knew nothing at all, and 
 I do not think he had a very high opinion in general of things 
 un-English. 
 
 Of my heresies, my wide strayings from the old ways in which 
 he still resolutely trod, he had heard from many quarters. I 
 planned to give Father the time of his life, and a reception 
 he would not forget. I took Mr. Morgan into my confidence, 
 and he was immensely pleased with the idea. "You make 
 him preach in the morning, and I'll send the Corsair down the 
 bay, and we'll take him off at Quarantine." (I am afraid 
 there was something of a pull necessary here.) 
 
 Everything worked splendidly. In fine weather the liner 
 came up the bay, and the Commodore's yacht came alongside. 
 And, for the first time in his simple, unassuming life, Father 
 had done him, in a foreign harbour, far from home, distin- 
 guished honour. 
 
 No real preacher, as was my father, could fail to be moved 
 by the splendid congregation and inspiring service at St. 
 George's on Sunday morning. I had the hymns I knew he 
 loved sung by such a choir and such a congregation as he had 
 never seen assembled before in an Episcopal church, and when 
 it was over, and my people crowded round him to welcome him 
 after his sermon, Father was quite overcome. 
 
 After that visit he believed and rejoiced in the work we had 
 done; and my people would, when they visited London, go on 
 Sundays to the old shabby chapel, St. John's, Halkin Street, 
 and give him greetings from St. George's. Of such visits he 
 used to write me with evident delight. 
 
 The chapel he preached in for almost forty years has been 
 pulled down long ago. It was unsightly enough, but in its 
 day it, and many more like it in England and Ireland and Wales, 
 did a lasting and a good work. From those chapels went forth 
 the only protest then made against that deadening materialism 
 that threatened the life of English Christianity. And more,
 
 MEMORIES, AND GOOD-BYE 465 
 
 what was best in that old Evangelical message lives and works 
 still. 
 
 The best leaders, the most trusted, in the Labour movement, 
 the men of courage and character and vision, who to-day in the 
 old land are her best bulwark against revolution: men of the 
 stamp of Robert Smillie and Henderson and Thomas these 
 men are what they are because they went to Sunday School in 
 those old dingy chapels, and have not forgotten the lessons of 
 Christian democracy they learned in them. 
 
 One of the fascinations of the clerical life is the opportunities 
 it gives for insight into the strange and often surprisingly beau- 
 tiful inner chambers of our human nature. As I turn back 
 the leaves of old notebooks, I find story after story that is 
 worth the telling. By way of illustration, I will here copy the 
 record of parish happenings I find recorded in a single week, in 
 December, 1898. I have been asked where I got my sermons 
 from. Here is my answer, in part, at least. 
 
 A lady of my congregation, whose charge was a class of 
 boys in the Sunday School, was paying an evening visit to the 
 home of one of them, in a tenement house. When she called, 
 the lad was out. While waiting for him, his sister, whom she 
 did not know, came in. At first glance the girl's appearance 
 did not seem very promising. She was rather showily dressed 
 in a fur collar and blue-satin waist. The visitor noticed that 
 though it was past six o'clock, the girl made no move to take 
 off her out-of-doors dress. Conversation began. Where did 
 she work? She was a saleslady in a high-class store. Was 
 she not through with her work for the day? yes, she was, but 
 she had to go out again. 
 
 Here her mother chimed in. "She ought to be done with 
 her work." The visitor did not understand, and the girl said 
 nothing, so her mother went on with the story. Her daughter 
 had a girl friend who lived in Harlem, and who worked in a 
 downtown store that was open till ten. Her daughter did not 
 want her friend to take the long trip home after ten at night, 
 and so she had made an arrangement to take, herself, her place, 
 from seven to ten during the rush season. 
 
 I got on with boys. I always pushed aside other arrange- 
 ments, when I could, to talk to a school or visit a college, male 
 or female.
 
 A 66 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 J. P. Morgan, Jr., came camping with me for three consecu- 
 tive years, when first I took St. George's, and when he went to 
 Harvard, he asked me to visit him and meet his friends. In 
 much the same way I came to know several universities from 
 the inside, not merely as a visiting preacher. Indeed, I told 
 hunting stories as well as preached when I could. So boys 
 came to see me a good deal in their own shy way. Sometimes 
 they came to me when they were in trouble. 
 
 I knew the son of very rich and fashionable parents. When 
 he went to college he fell into bad, fast company. At the out- 
 set, he had a revulsion, as many lads have, and went straight 
 to his father and told him all. His father said, "Oh, I expected 
 that, Jack. I always went with women when I was young. All 
 men do. Only keep away from actresses, for one of them may 
 try to marry you." This in the afternoon. The boy had to go 
 back to college that night, but before doing so, he went to his 
 mother. He did not feel at ease. He wanted a heart-to-heart 
 talk with his mother, since his father's acceptance of the situa- 
 tion did not satisfy him, and the boy waited till strangers had 
 gone, and he could see his mother alone. When he saw her, 
 she was too drunk to talk sensibly to him. So far as I know, 
 that lad never amounted to much. He surely was in hard 
 luck. He was full of remorse and good resolution at the 
 time. 
 
 This next story seems scarcely believable, but the father told 
 it to me himself. Mr. A., a noted New York lawyer, sent his 
 boy to a good boarding school that I knew well. I should say 
 that Mr. A. was not a member of my congregation, but I had 
 frequently met him socially, and he came to me to ask my ad- 
 vice. The boy at first took no interest in his lessons, nor did 
 school sports appeal to him. During the second term a change 
 set in, and the lad began to come to life. At the end of his 
 second year, the school had such a hold of him that during the 
 summer holidays he counted the days till he could go back. 
 After one more term, Mr. A. took his boy away from that 
 school, his reason being I quote his own words: "He enjoys 
 the school too much, and enjoyment in a lad is destructive of 
 any true progress." That poor, outraged lad never took any 
 interest again in anything, and he died three years afterward. 
 It may sound unbelievable, but Mr. A. was a man of weight
 
 MEMORIES, AND GOOD-BYE 467 
 
 and of character, and the head of a large and prosperous legal 
 firm. 
 
 We did not look on the New York Speedway, or on the 
 drivers of fast trotters, racing home on Sunday afternoons, as 
 specially likely to provide us with evidence of Christian living. 
 Yet on that speedway, in this same week in December, there 
 was a thing done by a sporting man named McDonald that 
 would have made a text for a sermon, and I took it. McDon- 
 ald deliberately threw his runaway horse to save his dashing 
 into four people jogging homeward in a buggy. He killed his 
 horse, and was instantly killed himself died that others, 
 unknown to him, might live followed a greater example, 
 perhaps, than he knew. 
 
 One swallow does not make a summer, or one act a Chris- 
 tian; but there is some of God in every man, and a great deal of 
 God in many men who are ignorant of the fact. 
 
 A parish happening, and an amusing one, I will tell of here. 
 
 It takes me back to earlier years, but is worth entry. Mrs. 
 
 was one of the first rich people who joined St. George's. 
 Her husband did not come to church; she came regularly she 
 and two sons, the eldest a rascal; the younger, her darling, a 
 wild but not an altogether bad boy. Her husband's confidence 
 in his son's character was shown in his will. He named his 
 wife as his sole legatee, leaving the disposition of his comfort- 
 able estate entirely to her. He suddenly died; and when, but 
 
 a few weeks after his death, Mrs. 's younger son also died 
 
 suddenly, the poor old lady suffered utter collapse. Tempo- 
 rarily she was totally incapable of attending to the business 
 thrust on her, or indeed of attending to anything. 
 
 I visited her almost daily for a week, and did what I could 
 to calm and steady her poor shaken mind. Calling early one 
 morning, I was met at the door by the old manservant, who 
 had served the family for many years and who knew me well. 
 He was white and trembling. I noticed a large covered carriage 
 that stood at the door. As he opened the door for me, he said, 
 
 in a whisper: "Doctor, they are taking Mrs. to an asylum. 
 
 She cannot stand it." As I passed from the door, I was met in 
 the hall by the doctor, at that time a very famous alienist, 
 whom I knew slightly. He said: "I am sorry to say, Doctor 
 Rainsford, that I find I must take Mrs. to my sanitarium.
 
 468 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 She is quite incapable at present of looking after herself." 
 
 As the doctor said this, I noticed that Mrs. 's eldest son 
 
 was in the drawing room standing behind him. 
 
 I looked the doctor full in the eye and said: "Dr. , 
 
 Mrs. is naturally utterly broken down by this sudden 
 
 calamity, but if you take her away from her home, away from 
 her old servants and the surroundings she is accustomed to, you 
 will increasingly unsettle and depress her. She is no subject 
 for your private sanitarium. She will do better where she is." 
 
 Said the doctor: "That, sir, is a question for me to settle, not 
 for you." I did not answer him at once, but turning to the 
 old butler said out loud: "Don't wait to put on your hat, but 
 go just as fast as you can to 242 East 15th Street, and ask 
 
 Mrs. Jay to come to Mrs. at once. Say that Doctor 
 
 Rainsford sent you, and that he is waiting for her at this house." 
 
 The old man dived down the steps and was gone. I then 
 turned to face an angry alienist. 
 
 "Do you know what you are doing, sir? Do you know the 
 responsibility you are taking?" 
 
 "I do, sir, know just what I am doing, and the responsibility 
 
 I am taking, and I say that you shall not take Mrs. out of 
 
 her home this morning to your private asylum. And you will 
 find that Mrs. Jay, who, as you know, has considerable social 
 influence in New York, and who has been since girlhood a close 
 
 friend of Mrs. here, will back up what I have said. No, you 
 
 cannot take this poor old distracted lady from her home." 
 
 He looked at me for a minute, and then he and Mrs. 's 
 
 son went down the stoop and into the carriage and drove away. 
 Presently Mrs. Jay came, and she camped in that house by the 
 
 side of Mrs. for some days. In the kindly company of a 
 
 very strong personality, the poor lady soon recovered from the 
 results of shock. 
 
 Now for the sequel! About a year afterward I had a 
 
 letter from Mrs. . It ran, "Dear Dr. Rainsford I find 
 
 that your preaching is becoming so unsettling that I have de- 
 cided to join another church." Of course the poor old soul 
 never had even an inkling of what I had saved her from. None 
 knew that but Mrs. Jay. 
 
 The case of Mrs. was not the only unpleasant experience 
 
 I had with alienist doctors. Some, like Dr. Allan Starr, were
 
 MEMORIES, AND GOOD-BYE 469 
 
 a tower of strength in time of need. Some were most un- 
 reliable. Perhaps the alienist has not yet quite found his 
 place, his balance in the medical profession. Some of them are 
 too much inclined to act as though, in their treatment of their 
 patients, they were a law unto themselves, and not bound to 
 guard strictly their patients' confidence. 1 The peculiar mental 
 disturbance of a patient who needs an alienist doctor may seem 
 to serve as an excuse for such laxity, but I have known cruel 
 and widespread harm to be done by some who allowed them- 
 selves to transgress the ancient and necessary obedience to the 
 universal medical rule of honour. 
 
 Mr. Justice Holmes says: "To act with enthusiasm and faith 
 is the condition of acting greatly." I cannot say I acted 
 greatly. I can say I certainly found that in contact with life 
 it was natural to feel an enthusiasm for its service. I took 
 pains to meet and to know people; not only the attractive kind 
 of people, but all sorts of them. My study door stood open to 
 all. I even had a visit from Mr. Hearst, who asked me to write 
 a signed article for the American a few days after Mr. Roose- 
 velt's scathing attack on him, when President McKinley was 
 shot. And by the way, though I refused of course to write, 
 he printed an article of mine, the next day, on the first page 
 of the paper, my name at the foot of it in heavy type. Some- 
 thing I had written somewhere was laid hold on for his purpose. 
 I went to my lawyer, Judge Howland, and asked what I could 
 do. He said: "Nothing." 
 
 So, as I say, my study door stood open to all. It was a 
 proceeding wasteful of time, but I found it paid. To-day I 
 notice it is often hard for the laity to reach the clergy. A new 
 clerical adjunct, "the Secretary," comes between. One of 
 our reasons for loss of power, I am persuaded, lies here. The 
 clergy are not accessible enough. I have known a man to call 
 twenty-two times on a city rector. Real business he had, and 
 a claim to be heard, and he never succeeded in seeing that 
 rector. It is all wrong! One of the chief sources of power of 
 the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church is the accessi- 
 bility of its clergy. The poorest parishioner can usually gain 
 access to his parish priest at any hour of the day or night. 
 
 Somet imes I was asked, "How do you gain the ear of people? 
 
 1 From the breaking of such a rule I have myself suffered.
 
 4 7o THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 How do you get texts ?" I have here turned but a few leaves of 
 my life's daily notebook. Here, surely, are subjects enough 
 for a month of Sundays. "Give, and it shall be given to you, 
 by man." Any good teaching or preaching I did, I got chiefly 
 from the faces that looked into mine. 
 
 I formed a habit as a boy that I found helpful. I carried a 
 paper and pencil always, and when faces or scenes, phrases, 
 fragments, pointed ways of stating things, anything, anywhere, 
 appealed to me, I noted down there and then my impressions. 
 Sometimes I carefully polished up these fragments in my study, 
 I found I could use them as nails to hang a picture on, or as 
 arrows that, though they seemed shot at a venture as I talked, 
 had polished points to them that went home. When I used 
 them in the pulpit, they may have seemed happy extempore 
 productions, appealing to the listener as quite spontaneous, the 
 flashings of the moment. They were seldom anything of the 
 sort. In this story of mine many of these are set. They rep- 
 resent the poor best I have to give. They are in a way to me 
 precious stones, not of the first water, I know; but again I know 
 they are not " paste.' ' 
 
 Still be patient, dear reader, while I say one or two more 
 things about the best ways I know of preaching and helping. 
 You must tear up red tape. You must keep on tearing up red 
 tape if you are to accomplish anything, and this applies to every 
 man's work. The teacher who is positively hurtful to his 
 public is the well-meaning, self-satisfied acceptor of the status 
 quo. He bows before a god of custom, not a God of Truth. 
 Reform's chief enemy is self-complacent persistence in unen- 
 lightened custom. To get things done, you must not only at 
 times disregard it, but deliberately flout it. Weak brethren 
 abound. They are sure to be worshippers of red tape. Do 
 not, I beg, pay too much attention to them. Fear of offending 
 the weak brother is responsible for a good deal of weak preach- 
 ing, of compromising with Truth. 
 
 The light that shines through fog and night sends its warn- 
 ing, saving gleam to the uncertain sailor. It fulfils its purpose 
 in guiding him. But the light that saves a ship and crew plays 
 havoc with the gulls. We must be sorry for the gull's broken 
 wing, but surely we cannot on their account close up the light- 
 house.
 
 MEMORIES, AND GOOD-BYE 471 
 
 And now one more story and the last. In telling it I keep a 
 promise, made by me to one of the nearest and dearest friends 
 I ever had, one whose loving trust never failed me from the 
 first day I knew him till the night when I bade him good-bye. 
 It was then he told me this story of his boyhood, and charged 
 me: "When I am gone, tell what I now tell you to the people of 
 St. George's." 
 
 My people were poor, and the first job I had was at $1.50 a week, in a bank- 
 ing house, where my work was to close and open doors, clean the place, and 
 do as I was told. The head of the firm took a fancy to me, trusted me, and 
 advanced me. And before I was twenty, I had the key of the cash drawer and 
 safe. I cannot even now account for what I did, but I got into the way of 
 taking small sums of money from the till. I had no vices. I did not drink, 
 did not go with women, did not even smoke. But I did love to give boys, not 
 so well fixed as I was, a good time, and this was how the money I took was 
 usually spent. The habit grew on me. I took larger sums, and after this 
 had gone on for almost a year, I aroused myself one day, and to my horror 
 found I had stolen more than $i,aoo, and that soon I must be found out. 
 
 That night I could not sleep. The disgrace, the ingratitude, the cruelty 
 to my parents, came home to me, and I almost went to the river. Next morn- 
 ing, when my friend and employer came to business, I went into his private 
 room. I made no excuses. I told the truth: said I was a thief; said how 
 much I had taken, and what I had spent the money on. My employer 
 looked at me, said nothing, and for a moment put his head in his hands. Then, 
 still saying nothing, he took oat his cheque book, wrote a cheque for the sum 
 
 I named, and said, " Soon as the banks open, go to , and cash this cheque, 
 
 and put the money in the till." 
 
 Then he rose, put out his hand and took mine, and looking at me, said, 
 "J , trust your fellow-men." 
 
 How any American can be skeptical of the innate goodness 
 and firm, self-sacrificing courage of the people of our land as a 
 whole, after the spectacle that the last great years have given 
 to all observing men, I cannot fancy! If men, common men, 
 all sorts of men, are not worth working for and working with 
 are not worth trusting then the universe, so far as we know 
 anything about it, is an abortion. If God is not resident in the 
 hearts of men here and now, He certainly is not hidden away 
 from us as somewhere beyond the stars. If, in the order of 
 the world we live in, He is not observable, He is not a God we 
 can believe in, love, or obey. 
 
 That He was in men's hearts, that He was observable and
 
 472 THE STORY OF A VARIED LIFE 
 
 lovable, that He was revealed in things as they are, Jesus taught 
 if He taught anything. As we look steadily at life, in spite of 
 the sometimes black and pitiless appearance of things, we see 
 that Jesus' faith in a God resident in man his child is justified. 
 Man has grown in grace. Love for his fellows, and a deepening 
 and widening appreciation of possibilities of good in all men 
 do influence our lives, are visible in our laws, as never before. 
 
 Let us fix our minds and wills on this great fact; grasping it, 
 living in its light, we, too, find ourselves touching the garment 
 hem of our Master, and realizing anew the healing virtue of a 
 faith in Him who says: "One is your father, even God, and all 
 ye are brethren." 
 
 That banker, when he forgave the young thief, and took him 
 back to his confidence, "saved a soul from death, and covered 
 a multitude of sins." He did more: he saved for the city a 
 great citizen. Why did he do it ? Because he believed in, and 
 tried to obey, Jesus. Perhaps you say: "I cannot believe in 
 Jesus; something, I know not what, has prevented his appealing 
 to me." Many are in that case to-day. Our orthodoxies have 
 misstated and disguised the great Lord Jesus Christ. But if 
 you cannot take Jesus as your Master, there are two things 
 you can do. 
 
 First: believe in the Truth. Try to find it, and when and so 
 far as you have found it, obey it. 
 
 And second: believe in your fellow-men, and try to serve 
 them. 
 
 Make obedience to these two rules the main purpose of your 
 life, and though you see not Jesus, you are of His high company. 
 You may deny Him. He will not deny you. Of Him, long 
 ago, it was said, "He knew what was in man." He still towers 
 above all the great and all the good that, in all times and in 
 all religions, have called on their fellows to go onward and 
 upward. "He is the chief among ten thousand, and the alto- 
 gether lovely." 
 
 At certain times in my life I have achieved a sense of conse- 
 cration which brought with it indifference to praise or blame, to 
 personal fortune, or to the winning or losing of the most cher- 
 ished desires I knew. On that high level I have lived for a 
 time, and peace always, and power sometimes, were mine. 
 Again, I have slipped slowly down, or fallen suddenly down,
 
 MEMORIES, AND GOOD-BYE 473 
 
 from that serene mountain land of life, and found myself chin 
 deep in the valley bogs, struggling to keep my lips above the 
 muck. 
 
 Some seem to think that once a man has climbed to the high 
 mountain slopes, he can never descend, but must ever breathe 
 that higher air; that slipping and falling are impossible to those 
 who have so striven, and won. And some others think that no 
 poor trudging soul who wearily shuffles along the valley road to- 
 day could ever really have stood among the high, sun-bathed 
 lands so far above him, or could ever win to their heights again. 
 
 I think if we were more frank when we spoke of our religious 
 experiences, we would agree that life in religion, as in every 
 other department of it, has been for all, or almost all, a very 
 up-and-down business dark days, and much stumbling, and 
 now and then a gleam of the light that never was on sea or 
 land. A smooth path, a steady, uninterrupted stride forward, 
 an unchanging purpose, high and pure ! Some few may have 
 attained to it. To judge by modern biographies, one would 
 suppose it was an affair of everyday occurrence. But in our 
 hearts we know it is not so, and from the expurgated and emas- 
 culated reports of such lives, we turn away, uncheered and un- 
 helped. Life is life, a broken and imperfect affair at best. 
 If, at the end of it, we are not altogether ashamed to show the 
 Master our hands, then have we lived not quite unworthily. 
 
 The hardest part of life, as I have experienced it, is not the 
 failures of other people, but my own failures. The failure 
 steadily and always to thread those high levels which, at times, 
 I clearly have seen. My own sinnings have been the most 
 disheartening experiences I have known. May God, in His 
 mercy, forgive me! 
 
 One stone the more swings to its place 
 
 In that dread temple of thy worth 
 It is enough that through Thy grace 
 
 I saw naught common on Thy earth. 
 
 Take not that vision from my ken 
 
 Oh what so 'ere may spoil or speed 
 Help me to need no aid of men 
 
 That I may help such men as need. 
 
 THE END
 
 INDEX
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abroad, visit, 52 
 
 Acton, Lord, 333 
 
 Adirondacks, trout fishing in the, 455 
 
 Agape, 296 
 
 Allen, Dr. A. V. G., 167, 194; quoted, 
 
 359 
 Alpine mishap, 56 
 Americanization, 275, 276 
 Americans, idealism, 5, 331 
 Amusements, Presbyterian view of, 
 
 in 1837, 27 
 Ancestry, 13 
 
 Anglicanism at its worst, 228 
 Anti-ism, 332 
 
 Anti-Vice Society, New York, 340 
 Arley on Lough Sheelan, 49 
 Arnold, Matthew, 63, 120, 137, 140, 
 
 219 
 Author, birth and birthplace of, 12 
 Autobiography, reasons for writing, I, 
 
 6; quality of, 2 
 Avenue A, New York City, 235, 243 
 
 Bacon, Lord, on God, 148 
 
 Bailey, Lady, 52 
 
 Baltimore, curious experience at, 161 
 
 Barlow, Mr. and Mrs. Peter, 343 
 
 Barnes, Jim, 318 
 
 Barnes, William, 395 
 
 Barrett, Dr., 136 
 
 Barton, John, and Menai Straits 
 
 Bridge, 18 
 Bays, Miss, 305 
 Belief, changes of, 370 
 Beliefs, old, 261 
 
 Bethnal Green, sewing class at, 70 
 Bible, the, 2; inerrant, 389 
 Biography, real, 2 
 Birth control, 339-42 
 Blackfoot Indians, 82, 88 
 Blake, Hon. Edward, 188, 189, 195 
 Blumenthal, 58 
 Boarding school, 41 
 Book of Common Prayer, 350-1-2 
 Booth, Charles, "The Life and Labour 
 
 of the People of London," 339 
 Booth, General William, 121 
 
 Bordighera, picnic at, 57 
 
 Boston, grant to build, 14; opinion on, 
 169 
 
 Boyhood days, 20 
 
 Boys' Club (St. George's), organiza- 
 tion of, 249 
 
 Brent, Charles II., 463 
 
 Bridges, Ralph, 219 
 
 Broad church party, 174 
 
 Brook, Stopford, 132 
 
 Brooks, Rev. Arthur, 258 
 
 Brooks, Phillips, 117, 166, 167, 185, 
 193, 212, 295, 317, 389 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, quoted, 
 
 439, 4SO 
 Buffalo herd, American, 75, 87 
 Bull, Lanman, 455 
 Burbridge, T., quoted, 428 
 Burleigh, Harry, 267 
 Burnham, Mr., 329 
 Burns, John, 305 
 
 Call to St. George's, 196; second, 197 
 Cambridge University, England ; life 
 
 and experiences at, 109, in, 113 
 Canada in 1869, 73 
 Carnegie, Andrew, 253-5 
 Carruth, Professor, on evolution, 210 
 Carter, James, 320 
 Castle Saunderson, 50 
 Cathedral, [P. E.] New York City, 
 
 248 
 Cellini, Benvenuto, 2 
 Century Club, 316 
 Changes, in St. George's, 209; in 
 
 belief, 370 
 Charrington, F. N., 62, 109 
 Chester, William, 266 
 Chicago Fire, 168 
 Chicago World's Fair, 329-30 
 Choate, Joseph H., 320 
 Choir, surpliced, 213 
 Christian endeavour, 225 
 Christianity, Coleridge on, 7 
 Church at Dundalk, 17; institutional, 
 
 219, 230; free, 259; man's need of 
 
 the, 358 
 
 477
 
 478 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Church Congress at Boston, 163 
 Church of England, Stopford Brook 
 
 on the, 132 
 Church of one hundred years hence, 
 
 350 
 Church policy lies with rector, 267 
 Church's one duty, the, 354 
 Church's standards of right and duty, 
 
 352 
 Church work in absence of rector, 266 
 Class feeling, 328 
 Clergy forty years ago and to-day, 
 
 influence of, 138 
 Coat of arms, family, 14 
 Coleridge on Christianity, 7; on 
 
 error, 66 
 Columbia River, 206-7 
 Colville, Fort, 104 
 Community houses, 307 
 Comstock, Anthony, 339 
 Comte, August, 22 
 Congregational worship, 216 
 Coolock, suburb of Dublin, 12 
 Cooperation in industrialism, 313 
 Crapsey, Algernon, 373 
 Cree Indians, 89 
 Creeds and dogmas, 117 
 Criticism, 259 
 Crocker, W. T., 258, 320 
 Croker, Richard, 210 
 Crowds, American, 330 
 Curie, Madame, 385 
 
 Dale of Birmingham, 137 
 
 Dana of the Sun, 306 
 
 Dancing, value of, 59; at the Parish 
 
 House, 300 
 Darwin, Charles, 67 
 Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 228 
 Daysman, the Church God's, 313; 
 
 quotation from Job, 324 
 De Forest, Lockwood, 319 
 Demesne, the, 38 
 Democratic, aim to make St. George's, 
 
 279 
 Dickson, Sir Jeremiah, 15; Stephen, 
 
 IS 
 Dinners, four notable, 411 
 Disraeli on Prohibition, quoted, 191, 
 
 333 
 Dix, Dr., of Trinity, 313 
 Dodge, Cleveland, 335 
 Dodge, W. E., 339, 342, 391 
 Dogmatism, Evangelical, 27 
 Dons, Cambridge, m 
 Dostoievsky quoted, 379 
 Doubts and difficulties, wrestlings 
 
 with, 145 
 Dows, David, 205 
 
 Drummond, Henry, "Natural Law 
 and Spiritual World," 336, 339; 
 "Greatest Thing in the World," 
 390; "Ascent of Man," 391 
 
 Dundalk, old town of, 12, 15 ; mud 
 flats of, 12; Gaelic in, 15; in history, 
 16; church at, 17 
 
 Earlham, 127 
 
 Earling, Albert J., 418 
 
 East End of London, then and now, 
 no 
 
 Eliot, Charles W., President of Har- 
 vard University, 391 
 
 Elliott, Daniel G, 267 
 
 Emerson, R. W., 174; on Truth and 
 Repose, 186; greeting to a friend, 
 298; on Intellect, 370; on Love, 411 
 
 England, leaving, 140, 146 
 
 Epiphany House, old, 247 
 
 Eucharist, the, 296 
 
 Evangelical Party in England, 64, 199 
 
 Evangelicalism, Puritan, its work, 377 
 
 Evangelicals, Irish, 22 
 
 Evolution, in religion, 176; sermon 
 on, 210 
 
 "Faith," paper on, 385 
 
 Fanning, Professor, C. E., a revival 
 
 preacher, 141 
 Farnham, Lord (Somerset Maxwell), 
 
 49 
 Faulkner, Keith, 109 
 Fish, Hamilton, 419 
 Fishbourne, Admiral, 68 
 Fiske, John, 191 
 Foch, Marshal, quoted, 313 
 Foulke, William, 266 
 Fox, Charles James, 15, 42 
 France, journey through, 531 
 Frontier experiences, 74-6 
 
 Game, correct method of measuring 
 length of, 447 
 
 Garry, Fort, 77 
 
 Gary, Judge, 420 
 
 Gaynor, Judge, 327 
 
 Genoa, 54 
 
 Girls' Friendly Society, 294 
 
 Gladstone, William Ewart, 66 
 
 God, concepts of, 121; idea of, 148; 
 in ourselves, 143 ; sonship in, 185 ; 
 in us hard to kill, 319; His Revela- 
 tion, 175 
 
 Godkki, E. L., 316; Lawrence, 316 
 
 Gospel, strong, simple, 148 ; preach- 
 ing the, 164; of Jesus, need of to- 
 day, 388 
 
 Gould, Dr., 136 
 
 Grafton, Duchess of, 51
 
 INDEX 
 
 479 
 
 Grammer, Dr., of Baltimore, 159 
 
 Grant, P. S., 386 
 
 Grassett, Dean, 170 
 
 Grassett, George, 172 
 
 Green, Emily Alma (Mrs. W. S. 
 
 Rainsford), 174 
 Greer, Bishop, 461 
 Grey, Judge John Clint n, 413 
 Grizzly, hunting the, 450 
 Grosvenor, Earl of, 56, 75 
 
 Habit, not memory, 43 
 
 Had ley, S. H., 240 
 
 Hague, Dysor, 311 
 
 Hammerschlag, Arthur, 252 
 
 Hanlon, Sexton, 300 
 
 Happiness, lasting, 44 
 
 Haslan, Mr., 135 
 
 Hewitt, Abram, Mayor of New York, 
 315 ; "first citizen in New York," 343 
 
 Hibbert, Journal, article in, 22 
 
 Hitchcock, Mr., 316 
 
 Hodges, Dean George, 273 
 
 Holiday and "Sunlight," 428 
 
 Holiness, Conference on, 145 
 
 Holmes, Justice, 469 
 
 Holy Spirit, 35 
 
 Home life, 28 
 
 Home and school influences, 43 
 
 Hospitality, London's, 47 ; on far 
 frontier, 104 
 
 Howland, Judge, 469 
 
 Hunting experiences, 438 
 
 Hunting the grizzly, 450 
 
 Huntington, Dr., 311, 351, 355, 386 
 
 Huxley, Henry, 67; on Extinction, 380 
 
 Hymnology, in. Eighteenth and Nine- 
 teenth centuries, 26 
 
 Ideal, realization of an, 216 
 
 Illness and rest, 257 
 
 Immigrant, treatment of the, 273 
 
 Immigrant spirit defined in Genesis, 
 
 274 
 Indians of the Plains, 77, 97 ; "Stoney," 
 
 singing of, 100 
 Ingram, Bishop, 227 
 Irish race, its power of absorbing 
 
 other peoples, 14 
 Itchen River, fishing in, 47; Viscount 
 
 Grey on fly-fishing in, 47 
 
 Jackson, Carpenter, 456 
 
 James, William, 140, 240, 346, 384 
 
 Jameson, Dr., of "Jameson Raid," 319 
 
 Jarvis, 48 
 
 Jesus Christ, words of, 5, 7; ideal of, 
 374; the gospel of, 356; religion of, 
 361; realest of the real, 373 
 
 Jowett, Dr., 347 
 
 Kennedy, David, 434 
 
 Kettle Falls, 105 
 
 Khayyam, Omar, quoted, 277 
 
 King, Clarence, 316 
 
 King's messenger, the, 164 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 73, 318, 328, 416 
 
 Labour in England, the Church and, 
 
 64 
 Lacombe, Judge, 419 
 Lawrence, Bishop William, 391 
 Life, golden clue in, 8; is good, 10; 
 
 worthwhileness of, 152; full of God, 
 
 186; and its levels, 472 
 Light out of darkness, 182 
 Lightfoot, Professor, influences of his 
 
 teachings, 116 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 346 
 Lindley, Bryant, 235 
 Lodge, Senator, 402 
 Logan, Miss, 68, 149 
 London, removal to, 21 ; an Irish boy 
 
 in, 44; East End of, 63 
 Lone land, adventures in the great, 
 
 73, 108, 243 
 Loomis, Dr. Alfred, 257 
 Lough Sheelan, 49 
 Low, Seth, and the Vestry of St. 
 
 George's, 282 
 Lowell quoted, 360 
 Luther, Martin, 178 
 Lyte's "Abide with Me," 216 
 
 Macdonald, Sir John, 188-9-90 
 
 Magee, Dr., 352 
 
 Mahaffy, Dr., 23 
 
 Mahan, Admiral, 259, 314 
 
 Man's influence on man, 384 
 
 Manchesterism unchristian, 65 
 
 Manning, Dr. William, 314, 356 
 
 Marriage in London, 174 
 
 Martineau, James, 309 
 
 Masefield, John, quoted, 460 
 
 Massey, Gerald, 411, 412 
 
 Maxwell, Hon. Somerset, 49 
 
 Mayflower, the, 279 
 
 Mazzini, Joseph, 122, 137, 191 
 
 McGee, Bishop, 352, 429 
 
 McGlynn, Father, 361 
 
 McKim, Randolph, of Washington, 
 
 170 
 McKinley, President, 412 
 Memorial House of St. George's 
 
 Church, 218 
 Memories, earliest, 9; and good-bye, 
 
 460 
 Memory, gift of, 3 
 Men of vision, 395 
 Mentone, 54 
 Meredith, George, 9
 
 480 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 314 
 
 Minutes of St. George's Vestry, 20a 
 
 Miles, Dr., 229, 271 
 
 Miracles, day of, not over, 263 
 
 Missioner, an alien, 151, 173 
 
 Mitchell, John, 329 
 
 Mitchell, John Purroy, 366 
 
 Monod, Adolphe, 144 
 
 Moody, Dwight, 144, 336, 389 
 
 Morgan, J. P., stimulating influence 
 of, 277 ; traits of character, 278 ; 
 disagreement with, 280; reconcilia- 
 tion with, 284; charm of, 284; 
 faith of, 284; characteristics of, 286, 
 292; emotionalism of, 287, 289; 
 letter from, 288 ; builder, not 
 wrecker, 291 ; tribute to, 291 ; New 
 Year's Greetings from, 292; mis- 
 cellaneous references to, 197, 201, 
 213, 217, 218, 225, 265, 266, 277, 443 
 
 Morgan, Jr., J. P., 466 
 
 Morgan, Junius*, 265 
 
 Morley, John, letter from Huxley to, 
 380; dinner to, 414 
 
 Mother, 15, 28, 39 
 
 Mottet, Henry, 258 
 
 Mountain scenery in America and 
 Europe, 448 
 
 Munger, Dr. T. T., 374 
 
 Murphy, John, 19 
 
 Nash, J. W., 136 
 
 Natural history, first lesson in, 12 
 
 Nelson, Rev. Frank, 396 
 
 New York, a message to the people 
 
 of, 154; Herald, 209 
 Newland, Miss, 44 
 Newton, Heber, 314; William Wil- 
 
 berforce, letter from, 169; Dr. and 
 
 Mrs., 163 
 Nietzsche, 27 
 
 Norwich, Eng., Ministry in, 128 
 Norwich Cathedral, 122-3 
 
 Ogle, William, teacher of the out-of- 
 doors, 430 
 Old creeds and doctrines, 34 
 Ontario, Lake, vacation on, 158 
 Open, love of the, 430 
 Osborn, Fairfield, Professor, 256 
 Osier, Prof., and euthanasia, 184 
 Owen, Mr. and Mrs. Edward, 158 
 
 Parents and children, relations be- 
 tween, 30 
 Parish House, 293, 294, 300, 308 
 Parker, Lindsay, 223, 233, 267 
 Parkhurst, Dr. Charles H., 322 
 Parks, Dr. Leighton, 368 
 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 368 
 
 Paul, St., 184, 378 
 
 Pelham, Rt. Rev., the Hon. John 
 Thomas, Bishop of Norwich, 122-3 
 
 People, the spirit of the, 352 
 
 Perkins, George, 335 
 
 Pike, H. H., 303 
 
 Pitt, Fort, on the Saskatchewan, 85 
 
 Piatt, Senator, 320 
 
 Players' Club, 316 
 
 Plutarch's Lives, 2 
 
 Poor, 63, 65, 298 
 
 Porter, Henry Kirk, 324 
 
 Potter, Bishop, 157, 231, 245, 246, 247, 
 248, 254, 255, 345, 391 
 
 Poverty in New York, 312 
 
 Prairie, the Western, 78 
 
 Preacher, the, must be ahead of his 
 flock, 264 
 
 Preaching, 128, 154, 180, 384 
 
 Price, Theodor H., 251 
 
 Prohibition, 333 
 
 Protestant Episcopal Church, 346; 
 Bishop Brooks on, 359; not in- 
 tended to be a class church, 395 
 
 Purity, 119 
 
 Quain, Dr., 52 
 Quebec, 73 
 
 Race, a vanishing, 92 
 
 Radium, discovery of, in 1898, 385 
 
 Rainsford, ancestry, 13 ; Archbishop of 
 Rouen, 13; family motto, 14; Guy, 
 13; Robert, 14; Marcus, 32, 227; 
 Kerr, 392 
 
 Rainsford, Rev. W. S., ancestry, 13 ; 
 birth, 12; early life, 9, 36; early 
 education, 36-44; life in London, 44- 
 52 ; youthful illness, 52-63 ; preach- 
 ing in London slums, 63-73 > trip 
 to Canada, 73-110; college days at 
 Cambridge, 110-22; ministry at 
 Norwich, Eng., 122-51 ; missionary 
 work in U. S., 151-74; marriage, 
 174; success and failure in To- 
 ronto, 174-203 ; rector of St. 
 George's, 203 ; resignation in 1906, 
 461 
 
 Reading, leisure for, 175 
 
 Red man, a decent fellow, 96; in 
 his home, 98 
 
 Reichert, John, 268, 269, 461 
 
 Reiland, Rev. Karl, 355 
 
 Reinhardt, Ernest, 308 
 
 Religion, definition of, 381; evolu- 
 tionary, 138; cause of real, in Eng- 
 land, saved by Evangelicals in 
 Eighteenth Century, 24; Stevenson 
 on, 34; thoughts on, 179
 
 INDEX 
 
 481 
 
 Religious doubts and difficulties, 137; 
 
 experiences, 6, 273 ; life in England, 
 
 decay of, 134 
 Renaissance, 2 
 Resilience, spiritual, 184 
 Riviera, stay at, 55 
 Revivals, religious, 141 
 Rhodes, Cecil, 319 
 Riis, Jacob, 236, 255, 369 
 Ripley, Mr. and Mrs. William N., 126 
 Robertson, of Brighton, 137 
 Robinson Crusoe, a boy on, 305 
 Rockaway Beach, 229, 271 
 Roman Catholic Church in New York, 
 
 360 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, 189, 290, 315, 
 
 322, 395, 400, 409, 415 
 Root, Elihu, 322, 413 
 Rowing at Cambridge, 114 
 Royce, quotation from, 117, 370 
 Russell, Bobby, 318 
 
 St. Gauden's, Augustus, 317 
 
 St. George's, 5, 196, 197, 203, 208 
 
 St. Giles's, Norwich, 132 
 
 St. James (Toronto), the Cathedral 
 of, 170 
 
 St. John's Church, Halkin Street, Bel- 
 grave Square, 45 
 
 St. Paul, quoted, 184, 378 
 
 St. Paul, Minn., 76-7 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 191 
 
 Saloons, 337-8 
 
 Satterlee, Bishop, 209, 397 
 
 Sauk Centre, 77 
 
 Sanderson, Edward, 50 
 
 Saunderson, Hon. Helena, 50 
 
 Scadding, Bishop, 272 
 
 Schieffelin, W. H., 209, 211-12, 266, 
 298 
 
 Schiller quoted, 428 
 
 School, industrial, 251 
 
 Schooldays, 36 
 
 Sedgwick, Rev. Theodore, 251 
 
 Sermons, first efforts at, failures, 127; 
 extempore, 127 
 
 "Service," awakening desire of, 107 
 
 Sheckelton, Miss, 20 
 
 Simpson, Dr. A. B., 245 
 
 Smith, Goldwin, 187, 188 
 
 Smith, Hopkinson, 318 
 
 Somerset Club, 169 
 
 Spring, Richard Hovey's lines on, 54 
 
 Spurgeon, Charles Haddon, 139 
 
 Starr, Dr. Allen, 468 
 
 Stearns, J. Noble, 197, 207, 266 
 
 Stein, Alexis, 55, 396 
 
 Stoney Indians, 100, 102 
 
 Story, Richard, quoted, 54 
 
 Strong, William L., 320, 360 
 
 Sturgis, Russell, 169 
 
 Sun (N. Y.), 306 
 
 Sunday, Rev. William ("Billy"), 389 
 
 Taft, President, 322 
 Talmud, the, 232 
 Tammany Hall, 320 
 Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, 361 
 Taylor, Herbert, 419 
 Taylor, Sedley, 313 
 Tennyson's "In Memoriam," 61; 
 "Wages," 381; other quotations, 
 
 135, 174 
 Test of men and measures, 256 
 Thackeray on Friendships of Youth, 
 
 146 
 "Theologs," 125 
 Theology, changing, 261 
 Thompson's, Francis, "Anthem of 
 
 Earth," 78 
 Todhunter, Professor, 111 
 Tomkins, Floyd, 117 
 Tony, 236 
 
 Toronto, call to, 179; failure in, 181 
 Tracy, Charles, 200, 204, 316 
 "Trust your fellow men," 471 
 Tyng, Dr., 190-1 
 
 United States, author's first mission 
 
 in, 162 
 Upton, 48 
 Ute war, incident of the, 453 
 
 Varley, Henry, 135-6, 149 
 Visit from father, 464 
 
 Waterhouse, Theodore, 59, 115 
 Watney, Herbert, 70; Mrs., 31 
 Watts, Isaac, 216 
 Wesley, John, 24 
 Westcott, Professor, 84 
 Whiskey trading, 84 
 Whitney, William C, 315 
 Whitridge, F. W., 419 
 Whittaker's shop, 155 
 Wickersham, G. W., 419 
 Williams, Doctor, 198 
 Williams, J. E., 418 
 Wilson, Henry, 221, 245, 246, 258 
 Winthrop, Robert C., on slavery, 168 
 Wolff, Colonel, 425 
 Worcester, Rev. Ellwood, 117 
 Wordsworth on Nature, 120 
 Working class, the Church and the, 
 
 66 
 Worship, 216; among the young, 23a 
 Wortley, Stewart, 251 
 
 Young, work among, 232
 
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