:^ "NiVERsn^ Of **N 0/£G0 7' REGU LATICN 1. Books may be kept fourteen days up^ss otherwise speci- fied, and may be renewed once if not in^^mand. 2. A fine of two cents a day must'lSe paid for each day a book is overdue, with cost of recovery after twenty days. 3. All injury to books beyond reasonable wear, and all loss- es shall be made good to the-satisfaction of the Trustees. 4. No book or other property belonging to the Library shall be taken from the buildihg without allowing record to be made, or without the consent of the Librarian. 5. Any person intentionally breaking the rules of the Librarj- may be deprived x>f its use at the discretion of the Trustees. "A person who wilfully and maliciously writes upon or injures a book, plate, picture, engraving or statue belonging to a law, town or fSublic library, shall be fined not more than one thous- and dollars and not less than five dollars." — Vt. Statutes vSec. 5031. Class Accession No. MS. Book ris This book wai presented to the Libf ary MRS. JAMES E. McCALL *^*3Sfc OX .''7 7/ THE SCHOLAR AND THE STATE THE SCHOLAR AND THE STATE AND OTHER ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES BY HENRY CODMAN POTTER, D.D., LL. D. BISHOP OF NEW YORK NEW YORK Zhc Century Co* 1897 Copyright, 1888, 1892, by The Forum Publishing Company Copyright, 1891, \>j The North American Review Publishing Company Copyright, 1884, 1897, by The Century Co. The DeVinke Press. TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER The Right Rev. ALONZO POTTER, d.d., ll.d. LATE OF THE DIOCESE OF PENNSYLVANIA SCHOLAR, STATESMAN. BISHOP PREFACE THE publication in this form of the papers contained in this volume originated in a re- quest from its publishers, and not in any proposal or suggestion of mine. I am glad of the oppor- tunity to say this, because it gives me the further opportunity to express my indebtedness to them for a privilege which I am thankful to embrace. There are two dangers to which religious teach- ers, or those holding ecclesiastical office, are liable. One of them is that of disassociating themselves from the life of the communities in which they live, and of cultivating a habit of what seems like indifferent reserve to the civic and social interests of their age and nation. The other is that of ob- truding themselves into such questions in such a way as seems to forget that, in its highest aspect, the Kingdom of their Master is " not of this world." But there is surely a third alternative. A priest or minister does not cease to be a citizen. One whose supreme allegiance is spiritual may not pre- tend that he has no other. His office, his gifts, his learning, his experience, his counsels, such as they are, may wisely be used to serve the State as well as the Church. He may not organize parties, nor devise policies, nor attempt to manipulate a caucus vii Preface or a canvass. But lie may strive to lift all local questions into their highest atmosphere; and he may wisely use such gifts and opportunities as may have been intrusted to him, first to disassociate local questions, movements, or occasions from their merely local aspect, and then to bear witness al- ways to the demands of that eternal righteousness without perpetual reference to which no state or scheme can end otherwise than in ultimate failure and ruin. Along such lines the papers that follow have sought, under varying conditions, to move. Some of them represent occasions where only the most partial and fragmentary treatment of large themes was possible ; and others are the imperfect report of utterances originally wholly unwi'itten, and de- livered without manuscript or note of any kind. Their literary defects therefore cannot be so appa- rent to any other as to their author. The sub- stance of what they afl&rm, on the other hand, stands for what are, in such connections, his stead- ily deepening convictions. He will be glad and thankful if in any way they may stimulate edu- cated men, whether ministers of religion or others, to bear their testimony in the interest of civic righteousness; and to use their gifts and oppor- tunities in willing service for their fellow-men. Heney C. Potter. vui CONTENTS PAOB I The Scholar and the State 1 n Character in Statesmanship .... 33 III The Scholar in American Life . . . .47 IV Scholarship and Service 71 V The Heroisms op the Unknown . . . .97 VI The Relations of Science to Modern Life . Ill VII The Rural Reinforcement of Cities . . . 147 VIII Christianity and the Criminal . . . 165 IX A Phase of Social Science 183 X Nobility in Business 197 XI The Ministry of Music 217 XII The Gospel for Wealth 233 XIII The Christian and the State .... 251 XIV The Higher Uses of an Exposition. . . 267 XV A Hundred American Years 281 XVI The Life-Giving Word 297 XVII The Significance of the American Cathedral . 321 IX THE SCHOLAR AND THE STATE ORATION Delivered Before The Phi Beta Kappa Chapter of Harvard University June 26, 1890 THE SCHOLAR AND THE STATE A STRANGER here, unwonted to these scenes and foreign to this goodly fellowship, must still be greatly moved by an atmosphere unique and by presences so interesting and representative. It is not alone the contrast which this occasion and these interests present to those with which most of us are engrossed — though to that, I imagine, few of us can be insensible — it is that pathetic element here, for surely it is pathetic, which allies this scene with that almost forgotten past that, to- day at any rate, lives again in vivid and tender remembrance. There are men here this morning, as there were yesterday, whose life for a generation, it may have been, has been crowded with tasks and surcharged with impressions to which the scholastic atmosphere is wholly alien. If they had ever any keen enthusiasm for letters, it has been chilled or smothered by interests which they could not ignore, and demands which they could not deny. Out of the whirl and rush of those tremendous forces which have not yet done their march across the The Scholar and the State continent whose wilderness they have peopled and subdued, they have caught, from time to time, the echoes of that other life which some of you have been living here — so calm as it has seemed to them — so happily disengaged from duties and bur- dens which it has been theirs, not yours, to bear, and, if remote from living interests, as they reckon those interests, still enviable for its privileges, and by virtue of its very contrasts only the more im- posing. But, to-day, as they have come back here, there has awakened another feeling. Besides that very natural and proper pride which may well be theirs who are the sons of a university at once so vener- able and so distinguished, the children who, after long absence, have turned their feet this way must needs be stirred by other emotions, deeper, more somber often, and therefore not so easily expressed. No man who has known the joys of coUege life, and has gone out from them into the stress of the larger life beyond, can come back on such occa- sions as these without somehow taking account of himself. With a strange flush of intensity, there awaken in him, as he walks across the familiar campus, or climbs to the room where once he lodged, or stands within the walls where day after day he recited, the memories of that young and expectant life of which all these were a part, and of the hopes and anticipations with which, amid them, he chafed to reach the greater world before him. He knew then, even though dimly, the prizes for which he hoped; and he knows now whether The Scholar and the State he has won them. He can recall to-day the ideals with which he set out, and he is not ignorant as to how far he has succeeded in realizing them. The fine audacity of youth has stiffened into a more mechanical routine, and is bounded by a more con- tracted horizon of expectation ; but underneath all this there is a sense of difference between what then he dreamed and what now he is — a sense which has in it that vision of one's self which, while it must needs humble, may also help to ennoble. But all this is personal and local. The scholar, however, is part of a larger whole, larger than the college, larger than the partnerships, domes- tic, commercial, professional, into which he passes as he goes out from college walls. Does it ever occur to him to challenge himseK, as he comes back here to-day, as to what he has done for that larger — nay, for us who are American citi- zens, that largest whole? He is the child not only of this his Alma Mater, but also of a great republic; and the privileges which, whether here or elsewhere, he has enjoyed have largely come to him because of those provisions for theu' ex- istence and maintenance which come to him from the state. It has been the glory of our repub- lican institutions, whether in this elder common- wealth or her younger sisters, that they have, from their first straitened beginnings, all the way on, done generous things for learning. Nothing is more beautiful in the history of the founders, whether here or elsewhere, than the early eagerness 3 The Scholar and the State with wMcli they wi'ought and contrived that the foundations of our civic fabric might be laid in sound learning. And from those beginnings until now, not here alone, but in those wonderful com- munities westward and southward, where, to-day, there are gathered in the enjoyment of privileges only less than these thousands of youths who are to be the flower of the nation's manhood — what- ever else that was not quite wise or worthy that local or national legislation has done, it has done princely things for the student. To open wide the portals of knowledge and welcome all who would come, this our land has ever striven to do, even when she has not quite achieved it. And we — whose has been so much, so cheaply bought or freely given — what has been our return ? It would be a monstrous conception of learning if any one of us .were to esteem it only as a selfish weapon with which he was to carve his way to personal fame and fortune. Even if there were no sense of personal indebtedness toward that wide- encompassing institution which has at once shel- tered and nurtured those other institutions such as this, which have grown great and strong beneath its benignant protection, one would think that there must needs be at least an intelligent percep- tion of that constant and never-decreasing debt which the educated forces in a state owe, as its better-equipped element, to the state itself. For, as the scholar has his learning, not merely that he may serve himself, but also, in serving himself, his fellow-men ; so not least, if not most, he has it that 4 The Scholar and the State he may serve and strengthen that civic order which underlies all that we call civilization. And so to-day, my brothers, as, amid these fes- tive interchanges, you felicitate yourselves upon the growth of youi* Alma Mater, as you watch with something of wonder if not of awe the stately prog- ress of her later years, as you catch the echoes of those jubilant cheers which have hailed her victories on many a worthy field, may we not wisely scan for a little that wider field which lies beyond these scenes, and ask ourselves what part we have borne, not alone in serving and ennobling the Univer- sity, but in serving and ennobling the state? The Scholar and the State; this is my theme during the few moments that youi* rare favor vouchsafes to me. Forgive me if I speak to it with the plain- ness which, as I am profoundly persuaded, the hour demands, even if your judgments may not quite approve. In the sixth book of the "Republic" Plato makes Socrates say : There is a very small remnant, Adeimantus, of wor- thy disciples of philosophy, perchance some noble nature brought up under good influences, ... or some lofty soul born in a mean city, the pohtics of which he con- temns or neglects. . . . Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a posses- sion philosophy is, and have also seen and been satisfied of the madness of the multitude. . . . Unable to join in the wickedness of his fellows, neither would such an one be able, alone, to resist all their fierce natures; and therefore he would be of no use to the state or to his 1* 5 The Scholar and the State friends. ... He reflects upon all this, and holds his peace and does his own business. He is like one who retires under the shelter of a wall in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along; and when he sees the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content if only he can live his own Life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace with bright hopes. "And he who does this," says Adeiman- tus, " will have done a great work before he departs." " Yes," answers Socrates, " but not the greatest, unless he find a state suitable to him; for in a state suitable to him he will have a larger growth, and be the saviour of his country as well as of himself." ^ Verily, here we have, in words of immortal significance, that situation which is forever tlie scholar's temptation on the one hand and his op- portunity on the other. The skies change, but the nature of man is one, and the culture and learn- ing of to-day are not otherwise allured and beck- oned by the voice of selfish ease than when Greece struggled for her hberties and lost them, not more because of the foes that were without than because of the traitors that were within. There is, in other words, a perpetual danger, in the case of educated men, of becoming the critic of the state rather than its servant. Withdrawn by his occupations from much of the active contacts of life — or seeking them only so far as he is con- strained by the necessities of his cu'cumstances — such an one settles, soon and easily, into the habit, first of the mere observer and then of the indif- 1 Plato, "The Eepublic": Jowett's Translation, vol. ii, p. 330. 6 The Scholar and the State ferent censor. The shouts and struggles of the arena are so coarse and selfish and unintelligent, the influences that move the multitude are so friv- olous or so sophistical, the atmosphere of parties is so largely obscured by prejudice or ignorance, that, after that first generous fever of the enthu- siasm of citizenship which comes with youth, a very considerable, and by far the most potential, element of those who represent the trained thought and ampler learning of the nation withdraws from active concern for its affairs, and contents itself with being lookers-on. I appeal to your own exper- iences to bear me witness whether it is not ordi- narily true that those whose interests are identical with higher culture, and next to them, those who have been trained to think and to reflect, are those who are often most remote from the activities that dictate the policies and contribute to shape the destiny of the nation. Nor is this, indeed, surprising. The qualities that are mainly demanded in public life in such a land and age as ours are not ordinarily those which are bred in the cloisters of learning or nurtured by much study. A certain adroitness of mental qual- ity — a gift of popular expression — the power of attracting and attaching personal followers, a blind devotion to one's party, and a convenient oblivion to finer scruples of conduct, these are character- istics which, far oftener than otherwise, find swift and ardent recognition. But over against such facts we may never forget that there are others, and that there is the scholar's 7 The Scholar and the State opportunity. " In a state which is suitable to him," says Plato, " the man of ideas should have a larger gi'owth " ; and no moment of despondency ought to persuade us to forget that ours is a nation of that larger growth where larger ideas than those of self- aggrandizement have already had no ignoble illus- tration. In a recent monograph upon Chief -Justice Marshall, an eminent Western jmist ^ has called to mind the resplendent wisdom and profound legal acumen with which Marshall once and again vindi- cated the supremacy of the Constitution against the erroneous rulings of State tribunals. But we may never forget that behind the voice of the gi'eat Chief -Justice there were that sound political con- science and that clear mental vision of the great body of the people which, sooner or later, sustained the Supreme Court in positions which, of itself, it was wholly powerless to enforce. For one, I believe m that conscience and that vision to-day as pro- foundly as I believe in the better instincts of humanity everywhere. That they may be tempo- rarily blinded and confused, we have perhaps as painful evidence of late as any which the history of the Republic has given us. But that they have not lost their power there are abundant and cheer- ing signs. What now, I ask you, in such an emerg- ency, is your duty and mine ? The Republic at this moment is confronted by three conspicuous dan- gers, which, while they may not be those which all of us may own as most grave, have neverthe- less a typical and representative character whose 1 The Hon. Henry Hitchcock, LL. D. 8 The Scholar and the State significance it is not easy to overestimate. Let me speak of them briefly for a few moments, and then of those more particular obligations which their existence devolves upon scholars. The mechanism of a government so vast and complex as om's demands a huge army of servants, on whom the responsibility of its efficient admin- istration largely rests. We are perpetually dazzled by the illusion that, if once we can devise a perfect machine, it will go somehow of itself; but there are no perfect machines, and if there were, the very conditions of the existence of that mechanism which we call the state would forbid its perfection in action, since it is contingent at every turn upon the voluntary consent, the more or less trained in- telligence, and above all the personal integrity of the individual. No system of government has won more hearty encomiums from those trained under alien skies and rule than our own, and no one who has read the remarkable review of our political in- stitutions by that eminent and gifted Englishman, the Hon. James Bryee, to whom we owe the two vol- umes entitled " The American Commonwealth," can rise from them without a profound sense of the great possibilities of so nobly conceived and so finely balanced a system of government instituted under conditions so exceptionally favorable to its success. But, as Tocqueville pointed out long ago, the ex- cellence and delicacy of a vast civic mechanism only the more demand intelligent, prudent, and reverent handling. With that rare foresight and 9 The Scholar and the State penetration which will make him for all time a teacher to this people, he wrote, nearly three quar- ters of a centmy ago: "It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men to make things great ; I wish they would tiy a little more to make great men; that they would set less value upon the work and more upon the workman ; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak ; and that no form or combina- tion of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusil- lanimous and enfeebled citizens."^ And yet one would think that no system had ever been devised more effectually to disparage the work, and to degrade into pusillanimous and en- feebled citizenship the workman, than that system of civic service which, for the last fifty years, and never more insistently than of late, has been striv- ing to establish itself among this people. A policy of favoritism which makes partizan service the substantial basis for political prefeiTnent, and a fine disdain for the element of personal fitness, whatever the place or task, which exacts only so much competency as can rescue the place-holder from absolute disgrace — this has come to be the war-cry which treats every office of trust as so much spoil, and every political contest as simply a scramble for personal emolument. That such a view of the service of the govern- ment should be held by some Tuscan bandit es- 1 "Democracy in America," vol. ii, p. 406. Cambridge. lO The Scholar and the State caped out of- his transalpine fastnesses to prey upon our unsuspecting institutions would not be occasion for surprise. But that it has come to be the deliberate conviction of men in high place among us, and that this new gospel of unscrupu- lous seK-seeking is openly proclaimed as the only spell powerful enough to maintain a healthy and active interest in our political institutions — that, in other words, there is no instinct of patriotism strong enough to constrain a man to active par- ticipation in the political life of the nation unless there dangles before him all the while the possible prize which he may snatch out of the sordid and shameless strife — this certainly is a teaching which may well make all honest people flush with keen and indignant shame ! For, in close touch with it, there stands plainly enough the inevitable corollary that no man who serves the state only from such motives will scruple to sacrifice public interests to private ends, when- ever he can safely do so. Once grant that civic place is a private placer^ out of which you and I must first snatch that which shall compensate our- selves for the discomfort and degi'adation involved in scrambling for it, and it is difficult to see how the sequence which puts self or one's party fii'st, and one's country last, does not hold all the way through. And, indeed, that no higher sense of civic obligation than this is widely prevalent is in- dicated by the painful fact (to which one finds it difficult to allude with becoming delicacy and re- serve) that great parties and great personages are II The Scholar and the State able in this matter to affirm, on platforms and in official pronunciamientos, and with such unctuous solemnity, a virtue which, in practice, they find it no less easy with open and brazen impunity to flout and disregard. Such a situation, gentlemen, disguise or dispute it as men may, never can be belittled or ignored as a mere partizan issue. It is an issue of morals, it is a question of common honesty; for men in civic power are simply the servants of the state, and the public service is a pubhc trust, abuse or perversion or malfeasance in which is not a less but a greater crime than unfaithfulness to a private trust. And that brings me to speak of another dan- ger which threatens the safety of the Eepubhc, and concerning which I think the duty of all scholars is equally clear and imperative. Out of the evil to which I have just referred there has grown, not unnaturally, another, which in its en- feebling and corrupting possibilities is a matter of portentous import. Mr. Lecky, in his " History of European Morals," has drawn an impressive pic- ture of the decadence of Roman gi-eatness under the deteriorating influence of Roman conquests.^ Enriched by the wealth wrung from her barbaric neighbors, with a dominant class flushed with suc- cess and debilitated by self-indulgence, the imperial policy soon became one preeminently of profuse indulgence. It was easier to bribe the unemployed to silence than to devise efficient methods for their employment; and powerful citizens provided for 1 See Lecky's "European Morals," chap, ii, passim. 12 The Scholar and the State their trains of dependents by largesses of corn and of money paid dii'ectly from the public treasury. There was thus secured to them a docile and sub- servient constituency; and, as Gibbon shows, the time came when the mercenary spirit so far pre- vailed over every other that when, after the mur- der of Pertinax by the Pretorian Gruard, Sulpicia- nus undertook " to treat for the imperial dignity, the more prudent of the Pretorians, apprehensive that in this private contract they should not obtain a just price for so valuable a commodity as the crown, ran out upon the ramparts, and with a loud voice proclaimed that the Roman Empire was to be disposed of by public auction to the highest bidder." ^ With us there is, you will say, no throne to be bought or sold, and no Pretorian Guard to claim the price or deliver the scepter. But we may not forget that the events of our recent struggle for national existence have left behind them a condition of things which makes possible a situation only less scandalous because less open and notorious. The honorable provision for those who suffered and were disabled in theu' country's defense threatens, — under the selfish and unscrupu- lous manipulation of those who see in the degrada- tion of their fellow-citizens a short and easy road to political supremacy, — to become a pauperizing system, whose least and most innocent consequence is the ruinous burden which it is destined, sooner or later, to saddle upon the public treasury. Never 1 Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," vol. 1, pp. 92, 93. Chandos Library edition. 13 The Scholar and the State was there a phariseeism of philanthropy in which personal aggrandizement more impudently mas- queraded in the garment of a grateful patriotism than om' haUs of Congress have lately presented ; and the unmanly silence with which schemes so grotesque that they should have long ago been laughed out of any intelligent public assembly have been received, is one of the most amaz- ing facts of our political experience. Indeed, far apart in time as are Rome and America, we must needs own that the resemblances of history are at once tragic and significant. It was a huge mili- tary organization, remember, which once put the Roman Empire up at auction and proposed to knock it down to the highest bidder. To-day it is in the air that it is the party which bids highest to a precisely similar constituency that is to be re- warded with the symbols of national primacy and authority. And out of this it has come to pass that not alone some scarred and honorable vet- eran, not alone some brave and maimed survivor of an heroic charge, that not alone the widow and orphan whom death on the field or in the hospital has left bereft and penniless — but every skulk- ing camp-follower and deserter, every fraudulent and tainted claimant who has the effrontery to de- mand his bribe, can have it, if only his vote shall thus become a commodity within the control of partizan dictation, and he himself a lackey to do his political master's bidding. I have nothing to say of those who have devised this infamy and baptized it with the name of civic gratitude; but 14 The Scholar and the State for the manliood. which it is destined to corrupt and deprave, no honorable man can feel, I think, any other than the most profound sympathy and sorrow. This surely is a system of government that deliberately conspires to degrade men, and no deUcacy ought to consent to excuse or condone it. And close of kin to this evil is that other which is surely the gravest of all, because it threatens, and that deliberately, those ultimate foundations upon which alike the safety of the family, the state, the nation must forever rest. There have been eras in the history of our own as of other countries when, in connection with grave issues which involved in their settlement funda- mental questions of morals, a clever casuistry has striven to make the worse appear the better part, and to find in some ingenuity of construction a warrant for doing that which the calmer judgment of mankind has universally condemned. But it has been reserved for our own day to develop a doctrine of morals in connection with the domain of public affairs which even the ingenuity of Al- fonso de' Liguori would have found it difficult to explain or excuse. For this new dogma of con- duct is, simply and in substance, that there are certain acts and relationships in life which have absolutely no moral quality whatever, and in judg- ment of them, we are bidden to understand, an appeal to the ordinary standards of right and wrong as universally existing among all civilized people is simply a bald impertinence. There have indeed been echoes of such a doc- 15 The Scholar and the State trine in connection with the world's estimates of great men. Some of us will remember how ]\Ir. Carlyle, in his somewhat extravagant admiration for Oliver Cromwell, intimates that all eminence is to be judged by a certain moral standard of its own, and that the disposition to probe the motives or unduly criticize the actions of men of power is somehow a stupid absurdity. But such a claim, even as to individuals, must needs be disallowed by every thoughtful mind that recognizes that the disregard of those common and elementary obliga- tions of truth and honor which bind men every- where must most of all be reprobated in those whose gifts, or place, or influence enable them to abuse power to evil uses or turn aside the right for selfish ends. And if this be so, what shall be said of those who go beyond this, who not only consent to maxims but also to policies which are essentially corrupt and corrupting, and who bra- zenly defend them as legitimate elements of a state-craft which they declare is to be dehber- ately emptied of all regard for moral obligation? The life of nations, as I have already pointed out, is continually repeating itself ; but one is at a loss, in any past, to match that insolent candor in this regard to which we have lately been treated. To have it proclaimed amid festivities that commem- orate the birth of the Repubhc that its founders were no better in this respect than the veriest knaves, and that no methods which unscrupulous combinations of wealth and cleverness could de- vise would have been alien, had they happened to i6 The Scbolur and the State need them or to think of them, to men whom we have been taught to revere as the embodiments of civic honor and public virtue — this is an infamy which needed only one other to crown and eclipse it, and that other has not been wanting. For it has been reserved for our times to hear that, in public affairs, moral obligations, as embodied in their most august utterances, and emanating from sources that, to some of us at any rate, are of pre- eminent and Divine sanctity, are simply to be dis- missed as an irrelevant sentimentaUsm. I do not indeed forget that it may be said, and with some semblance of justice, that such utterances have no more significance than may be attached to the sources from which they have emanated, and that there have not been wanting those who have been swift to disown them. But that some things are said and that other things are done among us, by those whose position gives to their actions a spe- cial and exceptional significance, and that neither acts nor words are denounced or repudiated by those whose professions make them the especial guardians of morals — this is a situation which may well awaken both humiliation and alarm. "We are wont to expect much — too much, I think — from the press in this particular, forgetting that, under the very conditions of its existence, a popular press is never likely to do more than re- flect the current opinion of the hour. But it ought not to be possible to expect too much from those other institutions, like the college and the church, whose very position and claims demand that, in all 2 17 The Scholar and the State greater interests, they shall lead and not follow, and that in every crisis of national history they shall have a voice which is the echo neither of the tyrant nor of the mob, but rather a note of that eternal harmony — the harmony of law and order — and the eternal righteousness, " whose seat," as Hooker tells us, " is in the bosom of God." And a patriot who sincerely loves his country will be ap- prehensive most of all when he sees disseminated from whatever source, but preeminently when he sees it disseminated, whether by precept or ex- ample, by those whom we have called to conspic- uous civic responsibilities, as a cardinal doctrine of our republican institutions, that in the strife for power, any party, whether it seeks to rule in a Board of Aldermen or in the high places of the nation, is competent to dismiss from its regard any substantial consideration, whether for the princi- ples of equity or the practices of common honesty. Happily, a situation so gi'ave has in it elements of alarm which cannot easily be barren of some good result. We are at the extreme, wise men tell us, of a drift which became well-nigh inevitable as a result of the vicious forces generated in connec- tion with our great civil war. And if the nation is strong enough to survive that innermost dete- rioration which has threatened and is threatening the foundations of character among us, it will be stronger still because of the victory which it has won over its un worthier self. For one, I rejoice to believe it ; but if it is to be, I am no less per- suaded that it will be because those whose are the i8 The Scholar and the State best gifts among us, the stewardship of the highest truths, and the abiUty to translate those truths in- to a language, in the old English phrase, "under- standed of the people," have recognized their great trust and their obligation to discharge it. In other words, men and brethren of the fellowship of the Phi Beta Kappa, it would be an imposition upon your patience to detain you here while I attempted to point out to you some typical dangers of the state, if I did not make haste to urge upon you the duty of the scholar with regard to them. How far apart — I can easily imagine it — must seem to many a cultivated mind to which I am permitted to address myself this morning, the uninviting lines along which I have ventured to lead you, and this calm retreat, these academic shades, this learned and stately retirement! Why intrude upon us here, it may be asked, a theme so dis- tasteful and facts so painful as those which you have abused our courtesy by reciting? Leave par- tizan issues to partizan strife, and the spots on our national sun to those who care to turn their telescopes that way! Here within this classic horizon let us seclude our little world, from which the noisy echoes and the tainted airs of that other are carefully shut out. The phraseology may seem exaggerated, but not, I think, that attitude of many learned men which it describes. To hold one's self aloof, not alone from contacts, but from questions which imme- diately concern the public welfare, is a temptation to which I fear the scholar is too often wont to 19 The Scholar and the State yield. Amid the noisy clamor of some personal contest for place or power, he pierces the dust of the arena and sees the greater issues that lie be- yond. To awaken interest in these, to secure even an intelligent appreciation of them, he has found so difficult and so unprofitable a task that he has long ago abandoned it in despair. And yet here, I am profoundly persuaded, is a preeminent voca- tion of the scholar in oui' time. There are those who would despair of the people; but no Amer- ican who remembers his country's history will dare to do that. For he never will forget that it was in moments through which many of us here have lived, when the destinies of the Eepublic trembled in the scale, that it was some mighty increment of courage and of resolution cast into it by the voice and hand of the people that tui-ned that scale on the side of duty and of honor. It was a chief greatness of that remarkable man whom God gave to this nation in its supreme hour of danger that he was so sensitive to this; and, believe me, that in which, under Grod, he trusted will not fail us now. But there was never a time in our national history when what I may call the national, as opposed to partizan, or sectional, or personal sentiment, more urgently needed to be not alone recognized and appealed to, but educated. We are grappling to-day with questions which to a great many Americans are unfamiliar, and to many more at first glance only partially intelligible. The remoter issues of policies which are full of spe- 20 The Scholar and the State cious appeals to personal interests, to the senti- ment of national gratitude, to the triumphs of men and measures long associated in many ear- nest and honest minds with much that is noblest in our history — these remoter issues are very of- ten either not recognized at all or gi-avely misun- derstood. And here is the place in our day for the patriot who is a scholar ! For, whatever may be the limitations of other men, three forms of service for the state are equally competent to educated men, and each one of them is of signal importance. It is the function of learning accurately to ob- serve and discriminate. Trained intellectual facul- ties, like highly educated senses, are preeminently of use in distinguishing between appearances and facts. On the bridge of an ocean steamer stands a man whose natural eyesight, it may be, is not so good as yours or mine. But long experience has given to him a facility in calculating distances, in detecting the significance of aspects of the sea or the sky, and, in innumerable ways, of interpreting the warnings of nature which to you and me is simply impossible. In the same way, disparage culture as men may, Matthew Arnold has aptly reminded us that there is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the de- sire for removing human error, clearing human confu- sion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it — motives eminently such as are social, come in as part of 2* 21 The Scholar and the State the grounds of culture, and tlie main and preeminent part. 1 "The desire for removing human error." Do people of trained minds ever stop to realize the misapprehension concerning the elementary truths of political, social, and moral science that exists in minds that are untrained! Year after year the most flagrant heresies in these domains dress themselves up in a new guise, find a new and more daring prophet, and are hailed by multi- tudes as the message of a new Evangel. Con- sider alone the more popular phases of socialism as they have been promulgated in our own day, and the fallacies that have stalked up and down unchallenged by those who should have been the first to detect and expose them. In his "Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith discusses, as some of you will remember, the subject of public endow- ments for education, and indicates his disesteem for such a system by observing that the "discipline of colleges and universities is, in general, con- trived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly for the ease, of the masters." We know that, however ti'ue such a charge may have been in other days, it is not now, nor ever has been, true among us. But when we come to pass beyond both these privileged classes, the masters and the students, to that larger con- stituency of which after all they form, and must for some time to come form, a very inconsiderable part, then the question becomes a very serious one: 1 ' ' Culture and Anarchy," p. 7. 22 Tbe Scholar and the State " How far are our better-trained minds employing their attainments in the service of their fellow- m.en, for the discernment and detection and ex- posure of popular errors?" The subject, as you will see, is a very large one, and I can at this point do no more than barely suggest it. And then, in the interpretation of the truth. No generation, it may freely be owned, has done more than om* own for the popularization of know- ledge. And yet there remains, in this direction, an empire to be possessed of which few of us have any adequate conception. I recall at this moment a distinguished teacher, officially connected, as I may not forget, with this University, to whom not alone the sons of Harvard, but all patriotic Amer- icans will gladly own themselves as at any rate in what may be called the popularization of scientific as distinguished from unscientific knowledge, pre- eminently indebted, and I venture to think that, for a long time to come, in both hemispheres. Dr. David A. Wells will be recognized as, in a depart- ment of learning fruitful in fallacies and half views, a true interpreter and disseminator of the truth. It is the office which such an one performs in one department of those branches of sound learning which have to do with the being and the well-being of the whole country that we need to have performed in all. And still above this, I venture to think, is that highest duty of the scholar to the state, which consists in his active participation, at whatever cost, in all that concerns her highest interests, and 23 The Scholar and the State in his scrupulous discharge, amid whatever dis- couragements, of the duties of citizenship. In the volume by Matthew Arnold from which I have just quoted, the writer finds provocation for much that he has to say in some contemptuous expres- sions by Mr. Frederic Harrison.^ Perhaps the very silliest cant of the day [said Mr. Harrison] is the cant about culture. Culture is a de- sirable quahty in a critic of new books, and sits well on a professor of belles-lettres ; but, as apphed to pohtics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of self- ish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture in politics is one of the poorest mortals ahve. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end too unprac- tical for him. But the active exercise of pohtics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution, and enthu- siasm, qualities which your man of culture has care- fully rooted up lest they damage the dehcacy of his critical olfactories. Perhaps men of culture are the only class of responsible beings who cannot with safety be intrusted with power. To some of us this kind of speech has a curi- ously familiar sound, though I venture to think that taken by itself it would hardly have occurred to us to suspect that it had so respectable a source. But, however that may be, the suggestion which it conveys is as vicious as its substance is untrue. For its suggestion is plainly this : that the man of ideas and of various information, being unfitted thereby for concern for the highest of all present IF. Harrison. Quoted in " Culture and Anarchy," p. 2. 24 The Scholar and the State interests, must take notice that his business is to let all such interests alone. There could not well be a more dangerous or destructive doctrine. It is science, after all, that, when some foul sewer poisons a city's life, flashes its unerring rays into the heart of the festering evil, and reveals it in all its native loathsomeness. And it must be forever the voices and the presence, in all the complex business of making laws, and determining policies, and choosing those who shall enact the laws and shall administer them, of men of trained minds, which alone can sweeten the air and purify the sources of a gi'eat people's life. And so, always and everywhere, carrying as he goes into whatever contacts and enterprises as a sacred trust all best knowledge and all tried wis- dom, it is the vocation of the scholar who would discharge his duty to the state to write, to talk, to vote ; by whatever agency that is legitimate to his calling and his opportunity, to make himself felt as a power on the side of a fearless love of truth and an honest search for light. Rub against other men, my brother who art just emerging from, or hast long lingered in, your cloister and among your books. Learn of human nature, without a knowledge of which no man is greatly fitted to serV'C or help his fellows. But carry with you the Ithmiel spear of fearless challenge with which a genuine culture will not fail to equip you, and never be ashamed to use it. These suggestions point (as it seems, at least, to one who must needs be concerned with the prac- 25 The Scholar and the State tical applications of great forces) to an opportu- nity for this honorable fellowship, which I hope I may at least be pardoned for suggesting. The community of the Phi Beta Kappa is supposed to represent the flower of our American colleges. For now more than a century it has enrolled among its associates those whose gifts and attain- ments have earned for them, during their college life, the highest recognition. Surely such distinc- tion ought to illustrate itself in unselfish service for the state. From this no preoccupation with other cares can wholly excuse any one of us ; and it is impossible not to own that in such a trained force, if once it should arouse itself to its oppor- tunity, the highest interests of the nation might rightly look to find theu- best defenders. It is not criticism, merely, or largely, that we want, nor is it organization. Of the latter, with its easy loss of the sense of personal responsibility, it is doubtful whether we have not too much already. It is in- dividual service, personal influence, the sense of solitary responsibility, the outspoken word, the courageous stand, the helpful suggestion or warn- ing, whenever these may dispel ignorance, or strengthen resistance to evil, or stimulate to hon- est endeavor. There is a great host of patriotic well-wishers of their countiy all over the land who honestly beheve in her great destiny and earnestly desire to serve her. And these are they whom the trained minds of those who, as Bacon wrote, have been trained to master the problems that concern a nation's best life by " thinking through " them 26 The Scholar and the State can often and greatly serve. But to do so they must be willing to sacrifice something of their leisure and something more of their love of ease. They will not always or often, perhaps, find such service a pleasant task, but they will not fail sooner or later to find it a fruitful one. There will be those who will be eager to denounce the pessi- mism of a patriot who has not learned to echo the shameless cry, "Our party and our country, right or wrong." But all thoughtful and ingen- uous minds will own that in the domain of pa- triotism he and he alone is a pessimist who de- spairs, not of bad men, but of the worth of any appeal to good ones, who is without faith in men's nobler instincts of truth and honor, who reckons all manhood as equally base and purchasable and corrupt, who dismisses every regard for those chi- valric aspirations which alone have made men or nations great, as so much irrelevant sentimental- ism, and who would appeal in the strifes of party only to that in human nature which is the most ig- noble and unworthy. Surely this is pessimism, this despair of virtue, and goodness, and of the ob- ligations of duty, the rankest and most faithless. And with such a temper nothing can be more essentially inconsistent than the training and ac- quirements of the scholar. For he knows, as indeed the most superficial student of history may know, the power of ideas in the hearts and on the lips of the few, profoundly believed, courageously uttered, persistently urged, to leaven and lift up the many. There are names enduringly associated 2^ The Scholar and the State with this University, and others bound up with the history of this commonwealth and this Republic, that clamor for mention as I repeat those words. But I need not rehearse them. From Winthrop to Hancock, from Adams to Sumner, all the way on, you know them better than I. And what do they say to you and me, my brothers ? This, this, they say: Yours is the heritage ; your country's best things ; her best gifts, her ripest acquirements, her noblest vantage- ground. Use them worthily of yom* great past and of the promise of a still greater future. The world, and above all our Western world, waits for the voices of men who have learned to love the truth and are not afraid to bear witness to it. And your country, she bids you to remember that all you have and are you hold as a trust for her. The great idea of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, she bids you never to forget, can find its worthy realization only when it is the government of an upright and enhghtened people, by upright and enhghtened servants, rooted in the high purpose of loyalty to duty and to God! For such a nation what service can be too pain- ful, what sacrifice too costly ! Once, not so long ago, she called on some of her sons to die for her, and now she calls upon all of them not to die, but to live for her — witnessing, at whatever cost of scorn and obloquy, for all things pure, and true, and honest, and of good report ! Again I ask, is her demand too large ? Let another, even one of your own poets,^ a jewel in the diadem of Amer- 1 James Russell Lowell. 28 The Scholar and the State ica's choicest scholarship, and a civic servant, hon- ored in two hemispheres, make answer for you : O beautiful, my country ! Ours once more ! Smoothing thy gold of war- dishevelled hair, O'er such sweet brows as never other wore, And letting thy set hps, Freed from wrath's pale echpse, The rosy edges of their smile lay bare. What words divine of lover or of poet Could tell our love and make thee know it, Among the nations bright beyond compare ? What were our hves without thee ? What all our hves to save thee ? We reek not what we gave thee ; We will not dare to doubt thee ; But ask whatever else, and we will dare ! 29 CHARACTER IN STATESMANSHIP THE ADDRESS Delivered at St. Paul's Chapel, N. Y., on Tuesday, April 30, \i Being the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Inaugu- ration OF George Washington CHARACTER IN STATESMANSHIP ONE hundred years ago there knelt within these walls a man to whom, above all others in its history, this nation is indebted. An Eng- lishman by race and lineage, he incarnated in his own person and character every best trait and at- tribute that have made the Anglo-Saxon name a glory to its children and a terror to its enemies throughout the world. But he was not so much an Englishman that, when the time came for him to be so, he was not even more an American ; and in all that he was and did, a patriot so exalted, and a leader so great and wise, that what men called him when he came here to be inaugurated as the first President of the United States the civihzed world has not since then ceased to call him — the Father of his Country. We are here this morning to thank God for so great a gift to this people, to commemorate the incidents of which this day is the one-hundi'edth anniversary, and to recognize the responsibilities which a century so eventful has laid upon us. 3 33 Character in Statesmanship And we are here of all other places, first of all, with preeminent appropriateness. I know not how it may be with those to whom all sacred things and places are matters of equal indifference, but surely to those of us with whom it is other- wise it cannot be without profound and pathetic import that when the fii'st President of the Repub- lic had taken upon him, by virtue of his solemn oath pronounced in the sight of the people, the heavy burden of its Chief Magistracy, he turned straightway to these walls, and kneehng in yonder pew, asked Grod for strength to keep his promise to the nation and his oath to him. This was no unwonted home to him, nor to a large proportion of those eminent men who, with him, were asso- ciated in framing the Constitution of these United States. Children of the same spiritual mother and nurtured in the same Scriptural faith and order, they were wont to carry with them into their public deliberation something of the same reverent and conservative spirit which they had learned within these walls, and of which the youth- ful and ill-regulated fervors of the new-born Re- public often betrayed its need. And he, their leader and chief, while singularly without cant, or formalism, or pretense in his religious habits, was penetrated, as we know well, by a profound sense of the dependence of the Repubhc upon a guidance other than that of man, and of his own need of a strength and com'age and wisdom greater than he had in himself. And so, with inexpressible tenderness and rev- 34 Character in Statesmanship erence we find ourselves thinking of him here, kneeling to ask such gifts, and then rising to go forth to his great tasks with mien so august and majestic that Fisher Ames, who sat beside him in this chapel, wrote, " I was present in the pew with the President, and must assure you that, after making all deductions for the delusions of one's fancy in regard to characters, I still think of him mth more veneration than for any other person." So we think of him, I say; and indeed it is im- possible to think otherwise. The modern student of history has endeavored to tell us how it was that the service in this chapel which we are striv- ing to reproduce came about. The record is not without obscurity, but of one thing we may be sure — that to him who of that goodly company who a hundred years ago gathered within these walls was chief, it was no empty form, no decorous affectation. Events had been too momentous, the hand of a heavenly providence had been too plain, for him, and the men who were grouped about him then, to misread the one or mistake the other. The easy levity with which their children's chil- dren debate the facts of Grod, and duty, and eter- nal destiny was as impossible to them as faith and reverence seem to be, or to be in danger of be- coming, to many of us. And so we may be very sure that, when they gathered here, the air was hushed, and hearts as well as heads were bent in honest supplication. For, after all, their great experiment was then, in truth, but just beginning. The memorable 35 Character in Statesmanship days and deeds wMch had preceded it — the strug- gle for independence, the delicate and, in many respects, more difficult struggle for Union, the har- monizing of the various and often apparently con- flicting interests of rival and remote States and sections, the formulating and adopting of the National Constitution — all these were, after all, but introductory and preparatory to the great ex- periment itself. It has been suggested that we may wisely see in the event which we celebrate to- day an illustration of those great principles upon which all governments rest, — of the continuity of the Chief Magistracy, of the corporate life of the nation as embodied in its Executive, of the transmission, by due succession, of authority, and the like ; of all of which, doubtless, in the history of the last one hundi*ed years we have an interest- ing and, on the whole, inspiring example. But it is a somewhat significant fact that it is not along lines such as these that that enthusiasm which has flamed out during these recent days and weeks, as this anniversary has approached, has seemed to move. The one thing that has, I imag- ine, amazed a good many cynical and pessimistic people among us is the way in which the ardor of a great people's love and homage and gratitude has kindled, not before the image of a mechanism, but of a man. It has been felt with an unerring intuition which has, once and again and again in human history, been the attribute of the people as distinguished from the doctrinaires, the theo- rists, the system-makers, that that which makes it 3^ Character in Statesmanship worth while to commemorate the inauguration of George Washington is not merely that it is the consummation of the nation's struggle toward organic life, not merely that by the initiation of its Chief Executive it set in operation that Con- stitution of which Mr. Gladstone has declared, " as far as I can see, the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at one time by the brain and purpose of man"; but that it celebrates the beginning of an administration which, by its lofty and stainless integrity, by its absolute superiority to selfish or secondary mo- tives, by the rectitude of its daily conduct in the face of whatsoever threats, blandishments, or com- binations, rather than by the ostentatious phari- seeism of its professions, has taught this nation and the world forever what the Christian ruler of a Christian people ought to be. I yield to no man in my veneration for the men who framed the compact under which these States are bound together. No one can easily exaggerate their services or the value of that which they wi'ought out. But, after all, we may not forget to-day that the thing which they made was a dead and not a living thing. It had no power to inter- pret itself, to apply itself, to execute itself. Splen- did as it was in its complex and forecasting mechanism, instinct as it was, in one sense, with a noble wisdom, with a large-visioned statesman- ship, with a matchless adaptability to untried emergencies, it was, nevertheless, no different in another aspect from one of those splendid spe- 8* 37 Character in Statesmanship cimens of naval architecture which throng our wharves to-day, and which, with every best con- trivance of human art and skill, with capacities of progress which newly amaze us every day, are but as impotent, dead matter, save as the brain and hand of man shall summon and command them. "The ship of state," we say. Yes; but it is the cool and competent mastery at the hehn of that, as of every other ship, which shall, under God, de- termine the glory or the ignominy of the voyage. Never was there a truth which more sorely needed to be spoken ! A generation which vaunts its descent from the founders of the Republic seems largely to be in danger of forgetting their preeminent distinction. They were few in num- bers, they were poor in worldly possessions — the sum of the fortune of the richest among them would afford a fine theme for the scorn of the plutocrat of to-day; but they had an invincible confidence in the truth of those principles in which the foundations of the Republic had been laid, and they had an unselfish purpose to main- tain them. The conception of the National Gov- ernment as a huge machine, existing mainly for the purpose of rewarding partizan service — this was a conception so alien to the character and conduct of Washington and his associates that it seems grotesque even to speak of it. It would be interesting to imagine the first President of the United States confronted with some one who had ventured to approach him upon the basis of what are now commonly known as " practical politics." 38 Character in Statesmanship But the conception is impossible. The loathing, the outraged majesty with which he would have bidden such a creature to begone, are foreshadowed by the gentle dignity with which, just before his inauguration, replying to one who had the strong- est claims upon his friendship, and who had ap- plied to him dui'ing the progi'ess of the "Presi- dential campaign," as we should say, for the promise of an appointment to office, he wi'ote : In touching upon the more dehcate part of your let- ter, the communication of which fills me with real con- cern, I will deal with you with all that frankness which is due to friendship, and which I wish should be a charac- teristic feature of my conduct thi'ough life. . . . Should it he my fate to administer the Government, I will go to the Chair under no preengagement of any kind or nature whatever. And when in it, I will, to the best of my judgment, discharge the duties of the office with that im- partiahty and zeal for the public good ivhich ought never to suffer connections of Hood or friendship to have the least sway on decisions of a public nature. On this high level moved the first President of the Republic. To it must we who are the heirs of her sacred interests be not unwilling to ascend, if we are to guard our glorious heritage ! And this all the more because the perils which confront us are so much graver and more porten- tous than those which then impended. There is (if we are not afraid of the wholesome medicine that there is in consenting to see it) an element of infi- nite sadness in the effort which we are making to- day. Ransacking the annals of our fathers as we 39 Character in Statesmanship have been doing for the last few months, a busy and well-meaning assiduity would fain reproduce the scene, the situation of an hundred years ago ! Vain and impotent endeavor ! It is as though out of the lineaments of living men we would fain produce another Washington. We may disinter the vanished di-aperies, we may revive the stately minuet, we may rehabilitate the old scenes; but the march of a century cannot be halted or re- versed, and the enormous change in the situation can neither be disguised nor ignored. Then we were, though not all of us sprung from one nation- ahty, practically one people. Now, that steadily deteriorating process, against whose dangers a great thinker of our own generation warned his countrymen just fifty years ago, goes on, on every hand, apace. The constant importation, wrote the author of " The Weal of Nations/' ^ as now, in this country, of the lowest orders of people from abroad to dilute the quahty of our natural manhood, is a sad and beggarly prostitution of the noblest gift ever conferred on a people. Who shall respect a people who do not respect their own blood? And how shall a national spirit, or any determinate and proportionate character, arise out of so many low-bred associations and cross-grained temperaments, imported from every chme? It was indeed in keeping that Pan, who was the son of everybody, was the ughest of the gods. And again: Another portentous difference be- tween this day and that of which it is the anni- 1 Horace Bushnell. 40 Character in Statesmanship versary is seen in the difference in the nature and influence of the forces that determine our national and pohtical destiny. Then, ideas ruled the houi'. To-day, there are indeed ideas that rule our hour, but they must be merchantable ideas. The growth of wealth, the prevalence of luxury, the massing of large material forces, which by their very existence are a standing menace to the freedom and integrity of the individual, the infinite swagger of our American speech and man- ners, mistaking bigness for greatness, and sadly confounding gain and godliness — all this is a con- trast to the austere simplicity, the unpurchasable integrity, of the first days and first men of our Re- public, which makes it impossible to reproduce to-day either the temper or the conduct of our fathers. As we turn the pages backward, and come upon the story of that 30th of April, in the year of our Lord 1789, there is a certain stateliness in the air, a certain ceremoniousness in the man- ners, which we have banished long ago. We have exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jef- fersonian simplicity, which in due time came to be only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity. And what have we gotten in exchange for it? In the elder States and dynasties they had the trap- pings of royalty and the pomp and splendor of the king's person to fill men's hearts with loyalty. Well, we have dispensed with the old titular digni- ties. Let us take care that we do not part with that tremendous force for which they stood! If there be not titular royalty, all the more need is 41 Character in Statesmanship there for personal royalty. If there is to be no no- bility of descent, all the more indispensable is it that there should be nobility of ascent — a char- acter in them that bear rule, so fine and high and pure that as men come within the circle of its in- fluence, they involuntarily pay homage to that which is the one preeminent distinction, the Roy- alty of Virtue ! And that it was, men and brethren, which, as we turn to-day and look at him who, as on this morn- ing just an hundred years ago, became the ser- vant of the Republic in becoming the Chief Ruler of its people, we must needs own, conferred upon him his divine right to rule. All the more, there- fore, because the circumstances of his era were so little like our own we need to recall his image, and, if we may, not only to commemorate, but to reproduce his virtues. The traits which in him shone preeminent, as our own Irving has described them, " firmness, sagacity, an immovable justice, courage that never faltered, and most of all truth that disdained all artifices" — these are character- istics in her leaders of which the nation was never in more dire need than now. And so we come and kneel at this ancient and hallowed shrine where once he knelt, and ask that Grod would graciously vouchsafe them. Here in this holy house we find the witness of that one in- visible Force which, because it alone can rule the conscience, is destined, one day, to rule the world. Out from airs dense and foul with the coarse pas- 42 Character in Statesmansbip sions and coarser rivalries of self-seeking men, we turn aside as from the crowd and glare of some vulgar highway, swarming with pushing and ill- bred throngs, and tawdiy and clamorous with be- dizened booths and noisy speech, into some cool and shaded wood where straight to heaven some majestic oak lifts its tall form, its roots embedded deep among the unchanging rocks, its lofty branches sweeping the upper airs, and holding high commune with the stars ; and, as we think of him for whom we here thank God, we say, " Such an one, in native majesty he was a ruler, wise and strong and fearless, in the sight of God and men, because by the ennobling grace of God he had learned, first of all, to conquer every mean and selfish and self-seeking aim, and so to rule him- self!" For — What are numbers knit By force or custom "? Man who man would be Must rule the empire of himself — in it Must be supreme, estabhshing his throne Of vanquished will, quelhng the anarchy Of hopes and fears, being himself alone. Such was the hero, leader, ruler, patriot, whom we gratefully remember on this day. We may not reproduce his age, his young environment, nor him. But none the less may we rejoice that once he lived and led this people, like him, that kingly Ruler and Shepherd of whom the Psalmist sang, "with all his power." God give us the gi*ace to prize his gi*and example, and, as we may in our more modest measure, to reproduce his virtues. 43 THE SCHOLAR IN AMERICAN LIFE Published in the Forum, July, 1889 THE SCHOLAR IN AMERICAN LIFE THE place of the scholar in American life is becoming a question of increasing interest and importance. Nothing is more honorable to those who laid foundations in this land than their love of learning, and their unselfish zeal, amid many discouragements, for its promotion. Not to speak of other evidences of this, the history of our earlier colleges is a witness to the far-seeing wis- dom and rare discernment of those who founded them. It is true that "the infection" of their nobleness "doth still remain" in their descendants, and that it is a zeal not always tempered by dis- cretion. There are, in a single western State to-day, some thirty-seven colleges, monuments of well-meant but ill-advised beneficence, no one of which, it is safe to say, will ever be likely to ren- der a tithe of the service to true learning which it might have rendered if, instead of thirty-seven colleges, there had been one or two. For the pur- pose of a college, as we are wont to say, is to make scholars. Yes; but scholars with what aims and 47 The Scholar in American Life for what uses! In a word, what is the place of the scholar in American life % In attempting to answer that question, we want, first of all, to recognize that the conditions of our American life are in almost every respect unique and peculiar. We have, indeed, celebrated the hundredth anniversary of our national exist- ence ; but what, after all, in the history of nations is the brief space of a century ? Still we are raw, crude, unformed, half-grown. And out of this fact there arises a certain necessity which creates in its turn a demand everywhere urgent and im- perious. The first work of a new people in a new land is to possess the earth and subdue it. They are to create a commerce and the arts and manu- factures where before none of these have existed. They are to subdue the wilderness, to plant the valleys, and to people the hillsides. They are to tunnel the mountains for their hidden treasures, and to rear the forges and furnaces which shall convert those treasures into the marketable and serviceable instruments of agricultural and indus- trial life. And all the while that they are doing this, they are forced to recognize the superiority of the man not only of ideas, but of education, over the man without education. Sneer as some people may at the inferiority of the theorist to the man of practical experience, it does not take a great while to teach the least educated among us that he who knows, for instance, something more of metals than may be learned at the mouth of a blast-furnace or in the glare of a rolling-mill has 48 The Scholar m American Life a distinct advantage over him who does not. And so we have a very large class of people who, how- ever little learned themselves, are frank to own that knowledge is power, and that the learning of the schools has its rightful place in the acti^dties of a mannfactm*e and in the triumphs of an art. But at this point we are met by a spirit which it is time, I think, that we recognize, as there is a need that it should be challenged. We Americans are, of all peoples under the sun, supremely a practical people. No mechanism is invented, no book is written, no theory is propounded, but that straightway there is heard a voice demanding: " Well, this is all very interesting, very novel, very eloquent; but what, after all, is the good of it? To what contrivance, to what enterprise, can you hitch this discovery, this vision of yours, and make it work ? How will it push, pull, pump, lift, drive, bore, so that, employed thus, it may be a veritable producer? Yes, we want learning for our young men, our young women; but how can it be converted by the shortest road and in the most effectual way into a marketable product?" "The man of the North," says De Tocqueville, writing of our North, "has not only experience, but knowledge. He, however, does not care for science as a pleasure, and only embraces it with avidity when it leads to useful applications." And the worst of such an indictment is the fact that it is still so often true. But if it is, that surely is a fact greatly to be deplored. Ours is an age of the rapid growth of 4 49 The Scholar in American Life wealth, and with it of luxury and the ever-great- ening lust of wealth. To have money and to build with it a fine house, to drive fine horses, and buy fine pictures, whether we know who painted them, or what is in them that makes them worth buying — this, in our generation, has become the chief am- bition of a larger number of people than ever be- fore. We look back with something of a fine con- descension upon those nations that in other ages spent their time in warfare or the chase, and whose history is little more than a record of territory won and lost and won again, the whole being be- smeared with blood and dishonored, too often, by plunder and rapine ; and we may well deplore the barbarism of such ages and such enterprises. But we may not forget, either, that in these rude struggles great ideas of right trembled sometimes in the balance, and that men rode into battle, of- ten, because there was a clansman's wrong to be avenged or a serfs injustice to be righted. In other words, there were great instincts of liberty, of righteousness, of loyalty to a cherished prin- ciple that struggled thus roughly for expression, and so taught the world that there were men who could prize a principle more than peace or life, and equity more than gain. " We have changed all that nowadays," we say. Yes, we have ; but whether we have altogether changed it for the better or not is a question about which at any rate there may at least be two opinions. We are in the midst of the utilitarian dispensation, in which not only warfares of the older sort are voted un- 50 The Scholar in American Life edifying and unprofitable, but in which also war- fares of another and very different sort are not always looked at with less impatience and distaste. Here is a vast realm of ignorance to be conquered by the assaults of the truth and the right. On every side there open doors of inquiry which lead into regions of the unknown. " But what can you make by entering them ? " This is the cry of the hour. "These studies of youi's in a dead language, these speculations in the domain of philosophic thought, these nightly star-gazings through the small end of a telescope, what is the good of them all ? Tell us that astronomy has a distinct, help- ful relation to navigation, and we can understand that." Make it plain to some rich man that by building an observatory he will ultimately make it safer for a ship loaded with hogs or shovels to sail to Liverpool or Calcutta, and he will put his hand in his pocket ; but, " I am a practical man, and I want a university which shall give the youths who come to it a practical education." This is the pom- pous and plethoric protest that one hears until he is almost ready to declare that of all detestable peo- ple a "practical" man is the most odiously and thoroughly detestable. This is not the place to speak of that spiritual side of a man's nature which, beside all other aspects of it, must needs be supreme; but the conditions of this generation demand that we should be reminded that, beyond bodies to be clothed, and tastes to be cultivated, and wealth to be accumulated, there is in each one of us an in- 51 The Scholar in American Life tellect to be developed, and, by means of it, truth to be discerned, wbicli, beside all other undertak- ings to which the mind of man can bend itself, should forever be foremost and supreme. The gratification of our physical wants, and next to that the gratification of our personal vanity or ambition, may seem to many people at once the chief end of existence and the secret of the truest happiness. But there have been men who have neither sought nor cared for these things, who have found in learning for its own sake at once their sweetest rewards and their highest dignity. Off our coast, as the traveler nears its chief seaport, there is a magnificent light which flashes its clear radiance across the stormy seas and lifts its tall form to be a beacon by day and by night. One can imagine a New York importer scanning its stately outlines with satisfaction that in it he had one more guarantee that his cargoes of silks or teas would find their way safe, to port. But we can imagine another voyager catching its welcome rays for the first time as he neared the longed-for shore, and seeing in it the harbinger of that home of love and peace wherein dwelt the treasures of his best affec- tions. And we can well believe, too, that he who invented that light, when at last he saw the vision of his brain transmuted into that pillar of fire by night, lifted his thoughts in a joy which was not born of the reflection that he was to receive a decoration from the French government, or five hundred thousand dollars, for his invention. For it is Fresnel himself, the inventor of that splendid 52 The Scholar in American Life lamp which gleams from the shores of Fire Island, who once wi'ote : For a long time that sensibility, or that vanity, which people call love of glory, has been much blunted in me. I labor less to catch the suffrages of the pubhc than to obtain that inward approval which has always been the sweetest reward of my efforts. Without doubt, in mo- ments of disgust or discouragement I have often needed the spur of vanity or of emolument to excite me to my re- searches. But all the compliments I have ever received from Arago, Laplace, and Biot never gave me so much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretic truth or the confirmation of a calculation by expeiiment. It is a dark day for any people when they have not among them men who can say that. It is a dark day for any land when, no matter what the institutions that it rears and the libraries that it multiplies, it has not among its students of what- ever department of learning men to whom the re- wards of wealth and fame, and " practical results," as these words are ordinarily used, are wholly secondary and indifferent considerations. Indeed, it might readily be shown that those boasted practical results, of which we Americans make so much, would any one of them have been impos- sible, if, before the ingenious minds that have turned our knowledge of whatever kind into so many utilitarian channels, there had not gone those other and greater minds to whom the utili- tarian instinct has been wholly wanting, but who have been those original investigators who have discovered the hidden sources of truth and brought ** 53 The Scholar in American Life its precious ore to the sui'face. Turn where you will, in literatui'e, in art, in science, you will find those pioneers of inquiry who have asked the primal questions on the answer to which all that came after has turned. "What Cuvier said of science is as true of criticism, of philosophy, of theology, of mathematics: Those grand practical innovations are the mere apph- cations of truths of a higher order, not sought with any practical intent, but which were pursued for their own sake and solely through an ardor for knowledge. Those who apphed them could not have discovered them j those who discovered them had no inchnation to pursue them to a practical end. Engaged in the higher regions, whither their thoughts had carried them, they hardly per- ceived these practical issues, though bom of their own deeds. These rising workshops, these peopled colonies, these ships which furrow the sea, this luxury, this tu- mult — all this comes from discoverers in science, and it all remains strange to them. At the point where science merges into practice they abandon it ; it concerns them no more. It is a question for us, whether in our American life we are to have any place for scholars who shall be the like of these. There are, indeed, those who tell us that to us belongs a task at once vast, unique, and imperative. As in the domain of law we have not invented a system of our own, but contented ourselves chiefly with borrowing from our English ancestors, as they in turn borrowed from that Roman jurisprudence which was ripe and whole before England as a nation had even 54 The Scholar in American Life begun to be, so in the domain of letters, of meta- physics, of scientific investigation, we are bidden to be content to reap when others have sown, and to utilize those abundant resoui'ces which we have neither the leisure nor the learning to originate or discover. Such a suggestion is not merely a libel upon our capabilities, but it forebodes the death of our intellectual life. "The futui-e," says De Tocqueville, "will prove whether the passion for profound knowledge, so rare and so fruitful, can be born and developed so readilj^ in democratic societies as in aristocracies." " As for me," he con- tinues, "I can hardly beheve it." Do we hardly believe it ? Is it not time for us to accept this challenge of one who was no unfriendly critic, and to prove to the world that there is a place among us for a scholarship which does not concern it- self with merely material applications or seek for merely material reward? It is here, one cannot but think, that the vocation of the scholar of our time becomes most plain. He is to take his stand and to make his protest. With a dignity and a resolution born of the gi^eatness of his calling and his opportunities, he is to spurn that low estimate of his work and its result which measures them by what they have earned in money or can pro- duce in dividends. Here, in his counting-room or his warehouse, sits the plutocrat who has amassed his millions, and who can forecast the fluctuations of the market with the unerring accu- racy of an aneroid barometer. To such a one comes the professor from some modest seat of 55 The Scholar in American Life learning among the hills, minded to see his old classmate of other days, to grasp his hand again, and to learn, if it may be, how he fares. And the rich man looks down with a bland conde- scension upon the school-fellow who chose the company of his books rather than the companion- ship of the market-place, and as he notes, perhaps, his lean and Cassius-like outline, his seedy if not shabby garb, and his shy and rustic manners, smooths his own portly and well-clad person with complacency, and thanks his stars that he early took to trade. Poor fool! He does not perceive that his friend the professor has most accurately taken his measure, and that the clear and kindly eyes that look at him thi'ough those steel-bowed spectacles have seen with something of sadness, and something more of compassion, how the finer aspirations of earlier days have all been smothered and quenched. In an age which is impatient of any voice that will not cry, " Great is the god of railroads and syndicates, and greater yet are the apostles of 'puts' and 'calls,' of 'corners' and 'pools'!" we want a race of men who by their very existence shall be a standing protest against the reign of a coarse materialism and a deluge of greed and self-seeking. But to have such a race of men, we must have among us those whose vision has been purged and unsealed to see the dignity of the scholar's calling. One may not forget that among those who will soon go forth from coUege halls to begin their work in life there must needs be many to 56 The Scholar in American Life whom the nature of that work, and in some sense the aims of it, are foreordained by the conditions under which they are compelled to do it. One may not forget, in other words, that, with many of us, the stern question of earning our bread is that which most urgently challenges us, and which we cannot hope to evade. But there is no one of us who may not wisely remember that, in the domain of the intellect as in the domain of the spiritual and moral nature, "the life is more than meat and the body than raiment," and that the hope of om* time, or of any time, is not in men who are concerned in what they can get, but in what they can see. Frederick Maurice has well reminded us how inadequate is that phrase which describes the function of the scholar to be the acquisition of knowledge. Here is a man whose days and nights are spent in laborious plodding, and whose brain, before he is done with life, be- comes a storehouse from which you can draw out a fact as you would take down a book from the shelves of a library. We may not speak of such a scholar disrespectfully ; and in a generation which is impatient of plodding industry, and content, as never before, with smart and superficial learning, we may well honor those whose rare acquisitions are the fruit of painful and untiring labor. But surely, his is a nobler understanding of his calling as a scholar who has come to see that, in whatso- ever department of inquiry, it is not so much a question of how much learning he is possessed of, as, rather, how truly anything that he has learned 57 The Scholar in American Life has possessed Mm. There are men whose acqmre- ments in mere bulk and extent are, it may be, neither large nor profound. But when they have taken their powers of inquiry and investigation and gone with them to the shut doors of the king- dom of knowledge, they have tarried there in still- ness and on their knees, waiting and watching for the light. And to these has come, in all ages, that which is the best reward of the scholar — not a fact to be hung up on a peg and duly numbered and catalogued, but the vision of a truth to be the in- spiration of all their lives. It is possible to sit down before the " Madonna di San Sisto " and dis- course glibly of the school of Perugino and Ra- phael, of the growth of medieval art and its secret of mixing colors, until your listener shall have been smitten dumb with a sense of his own igno- rance and of your phenomenal attainments. And it is possible, too, to stand before that incompara- ble pictm*e, a mere tyro in technical art, but with a soul so full of awe, and an eye so eager for a vision, that the Child of History shall seem to be alive again, and the mother that bore him the mes- senger to your soul of an imperishable truth. The parable is of infinite application and of enduring appropriateness. There must be some among us who are watchers and seekers for a vision. The page of history unrolls its checkered scroll, not that we may arrange its dates and facts in parallel columns and be able to answer glibly when Nero reigned and when the princes in the Tower were murdered; but rather that we may see, in the 58 The Scholar in American Life crimes of kings and the schemes of unscrupulous ambitions, what forces have made or marred the men and the races of the past. Thus wrote one of the most gifted minds of our centmy : ^ I have no hope of acquiring exhaustively even a small portion of the smallest history. But I feel that I want the hght which history gives me ; that I cannot do with- out it. I find that I am connected in my own individual life with a past and a future as well as a present. I can- not make either out without the other. I find that I am connected with a nation having a past as well as a pres- ent, and which must have a futui'e. I am confident that our life is meant to he a whole; that its days, as the poet says, should be "hnked to each other in natural piety." They fall to pieces very easily ; it is hard, often it seems impossible, to recover the links between them. But there comes an illumination to us, ever and anon, over our past years, and over the persons gone out of our sight who worked in them. . . . Thus it is with the ages gone by. Every one of them is telling upon us; every man who has thought and worked in them has contributed to the good or evil which is about us. The ages are not dead; they cannot be. If we hsten, they will speak to us. Yes; if we listen! And here is the calling of the scholar in our time. In an age which threatens only to believe in what it can touch and grasp, his vocation it is to trace the influence of those un- seen forces which, whether in nature or in society, are the mightiest and most enduring of all. But to do this he must first recognize the greatness IF. D. Maurice, "Acquisition and Illumination," p. 358. 59 The Scholar in American Life and the dignity of his calling, and then he must not shrink from its conditions. In an address be- fore the University of St. Andrews, Mr. Fronde declared some years ago : If a son of mine told me that he wished to devote him- self to intellectual pursuits, I would act as I should act if he wished to make an imprudent marriage. I would absolutely prohibit him for a time till the firmness of his purpose had been tried. ... I would remind him that in all callings nothing great will be produced if the first object be what you can make by them. I would show him that while the present rule on which authors are paid is by the page and the sheet, it ought to be exactly the reverse — not quantity, but quahty. I would remind him that great poetry, great philosophy, great scientific discovery, every intellectual production which has ge- nius, work, and permanence in it, is the fruit of long thought and patient and painful elaboration. I would impress upon him that work of this kind done hastily would be better not done at all. "When completed, it will not be large, but small in bulk; it will address itselE for a long time to the few and not to the many. The reward for it will not be measurable and not obtainable in money, except after many generations, and when the brain out of which it was spun has long returned to its dust. Is there not profound wisdom in counsel such as this? Is it not a demonstrated and indisputable truth that Only by accident is the work of genius immediately popular in the sense of being widely bought? No col- lected edition of Shakespeare's plays was demanded in 60 The Scholar in American Life Shakespeare's life. Milton received five pounds for his '' Paradise Lost." The distilled essence of the thought of Bishop Butler, the greatest prelate that England ever produced, fills a moderately-sized octavo volume. Spi- noza's works, including his surviving letters, fill but thi*ee; and though they have revolutionized the philoso- phy of Europe, have no attractions for the multitude. Surely the significance of such facts as these is not hard to read. The scholarship that has moved the world has not been the scholarship that wrought for a guinea a page, or for a thousand pounds a volume. It has been the scholarship that has been content to be poor and to be ac- counted obscure, that has not been in haste to speak or eager to rush into print, but which has reverenced supremely the truth, and has sought for it often with tears. And such a place and rank, lofty, self -poised, and serene, is that which should be occupied by the highest scholarship of our time. Of second-rate learning, as of handbooks and excerpts and labo- rious but mechanical compilations, we have enough and more than enough. To make a book that will sell; to ransack England and Germany and France, and with scissors and paste-pot and scrap- book to produce a volume that will catch the popular eye and allure the vagrant dollars — with all this we are indeed sorely afflicted. And yet every now and then there comes a voice from out some quiet retreat which tells of the scholar who has ascended to his true place and is filling it with equal dignity and power. No noisy plaudits may 6i The Scholar in American Life clamor at his heels. No swelling bank-account may witness to his wealth. But the gift of vision is his, and to such a soul the curtain is parted a Httle and the light streams full upon it. One may not indeed forget that opportunities for these highest tasks of scholarship were, perhaps, never so rare as to-day. The world does not want, and is too ignorant to perceive that it needs, the ser- vices of men who can give to learning its highest place, and make the class-room and the study the fount from which shall spring the pure stream of original thought and profound speculation. "Away with these dreamers," it cries, "and give us a serviceable culture." And so we see every day of our lives the finest gift harnessed to some sordid drudgery and plodding its mechanical round because it can be made to pay. But may we not hope that a brighter day is coming — a day in which scholarship shall have its true place and be lifted to its rightful sovereignty? There lives the story of a slave in a French galley, who was one morning bending wearily over his oar, just as the day was breaking, revealing, as the sun rose out of the gray waters, a line of cliffs, the white houses of a town, and a church tower. The rower was a man unused to such service, worn with toil and watching, and likely, it was thought, to die. A companion touched him, pointed to the shore, and asked him if he knew it. "Yes," he answered, "I know it well. I see the steeple of that place where God opened my mouth in pub- lic to his glory, and I know that how weak soever 62 The Scholar in American Life I now appear, I shall not depart out of this life till my tongue glorify his name in that same place." Those white cliffs were the white cliffs of Scot- land, the speaker was John Knox, and we know that his prophecy was fulfilled. And so he knows who believes in the nobler aspirations and the loftier possibilities of this great land and race of ours, that the time will come when the American scholar will ascend to his true place, and when, re- leased from the toil of the galley-slave, he shall be set free to glorify Grod and speak his illuminat- ing truth, because first of all he has been set free from the sordid drudgery and coarse materialism which make such speech impossible. But, mean- time, it belongs to us to ask ourselves what we can do to hasten such a day and to give our scholars and their work their due and rightful place. Two things we need to do, and they are neither of them beyond our reach. First of all, we can esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake. There is but one true aristocracy in all the world — and it is rather odd that the only place in which that fact is recognized is China — and that is the aristocracy of character enriched by learning. We want an aristocracy in America, and we shall have it whether we will or not. But if we would not have it one of hereditary descent, or of mere ecclesiastic or political rank, let us see to it that, spurning these things, we do not de- scend to that lowest deep and make it merely one of money. And that we may not do this, let us own and honor our aristoi, and give them their 63 The Scholar in American Life true place. As between the clever retailer of other men's ideas, and the silent, undemonstrative origi- nator of his own, let us make a sharp distinction. If we will not always be careful what we buy in the way of literatm-e, let us take care what we prize and keep. There are voices that wait to speak to us nobler truths than yet the age has learned ; but if we would not miss them, we must make a space and silence in which they may be heard, and then we must listen reverently. And this brings us to that other thing which we may do if the American scholar is to take his true place. If the scholar is to have his true place in our American life he must have his true home. It is too soon for us to expect that in a world so new as ours we can have those cloistered nooks which in other lands are at once the retreat of the stu- dent and his reward. But surely the time has come when we may ask ourselves whether enough has not been spent in planting institutions of learning, and whether now something may not well be devoted to enriching them. It is easy to see that, in a land like ours, colleges, both small and great, may have each its place. But we have sufficiently multiplied the outlines of institutions of learning, and may well begin to think about fill- ing them up. The want of our American people to-day in the direction of a higher education is not new institutions, nor more buildings, nor more free instruction. Of all these things experience is every day showing us there is enough and more than enough. But we want place for men who, 64 The Scholar in American Life whether as fellows or lecturers, shall, in connec- tion with our universities, be free to pursue origi- nal investigation and to give themselves to pro- found study, untrammeled by the petty cares, the irksome round, the small anxieties, which are sooner or later the death of aspiration, and fatal obstacles to inspiration. It is with processes of thought as it is with processes of nature — crys- tallization demands stillness, equanimity, repose. And so the great truths which are to be the seed of forces that shall new create our civilization must have a chance first of all to reveal them- selves. Some mount of vision there must be for the scholar; and those whose are the material treasures out of which came those wonderful en- dowments and foundations which have lent to England's universities some elements of their chiefest glory, must see that they have this mount of vision. And it is at this point, therefore, that we may well invite the cooperation of those more practical minds whose place and work I would by no means wish to disesteem. Said one of these not long ago: I want my son to be a classical scholar, not because I can read the classics or ever expect to, nor because I an- ticipate that he will devote his life to classical studies. But I am told by those whose means of knowing are bet- ter than mine, that no drill or disciphne of the mind can be so permanently helpful as the study of these so-called dead languages, which furnish the sterner and therefore more wholesome discipline just because they are dead; 6 65 The Scholar in American Life and I "want my son to have a mental training whicli shall most thoroughly discipline the mind, and so make him fit for the best and most difficult work. There was rare insight in such a remark as that, and it showed that a so-called "practical" man could recognize the relation of the best intellectual opportunities to the best intellectual work. Are there not others who will consent to see the necessity of giving to our American scholar in another way the best opportunities for doing the best work % To create an adequate en- dowment or foundation ; then to place upon it the best man that can be commanded in all the land ; and then — for a time at any rate — to let him alone, not to burden him with conventional tasks, nor to exact from him so much a month or a year, but to leave him conscious that he lias a noble opportunity, and that the eyes of his brother scholars are upon him to see how he improves it — this, I am rash enough to believe, will open the door to imperishable work and to imperishable honor. There are men among us who have come to be like Fresnel. Not indifferent to the approval of their fellows, they are not living for it, and still less are they living for any sordid reward. To them Truth is a mistress so shy and coy, and yet so irresistibly attractive, that they would fain follow her at all hazards. But how can they hope to do so, so long as they are plagued with the anxieties of bread- winning, or tied to the drudgeries of what men are wont to call "profitable employment"? And 66 The Scholar in American Life therefore one can imagine no nobler opportunity than comes to him who has it in his power to go to some such seeker after truth, to take him by the hand and say : " Here is leisure ; here is retire- ment ; here are books and implements. Be at ease here in this scholar's home, and wait for the com- ing of the light. I do not bid you hurry your tasks or force your powers. And, when at length you have a word to speak to your age, come forth, and in the name of God and of his truth, do not be afraid to speak it." And thus we see the place, not only of men of thought — of the scholar — but of men of action in creating that place, in such an age as ours. The wealth that turns with such lavish impulse toward our institutions of learning, let it give itself, not to heaping together bricks and mortar, but to creat- ing foundations or endowments which shall bear witness to the value, not of material structures, but of ideas. It is surely not without significance that the university which, youngest in years, is already among the foremost in American rank, is that which has been careless of the grandeur with which it builds its halls and dormitories, but has chosen rather to make its Chairs so strong and its intellectual furniture so noble that, already, it is compelling to its doors the best mind of our best youths. In such an instance we have a prophecy of the true place and work of the scholar in our American life. May the day be not far off when all thoughtful men, whether scholars or not, shall recognize it. 67 SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE ORATION Delivered at the Centennial Celebration of Union College, June 27, 1895 SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE FIFTY years ago an alumnus and professor of Union College, speaking here in commemo- ration of its first completed half-century, uttered these words : Standing, this morning, midway between the open- ing and the close of the fii'st century of om* collegiate history, we feel most vividly the power we have of trans- lating ourselves into different periods of time, of multi- plying, as it were, our term of life. With our venerable brother [the speaker was referring to the Reverend Joseph Sweetman, the first, and at that time the oldest Hving, graduate of Union College, who had immediately preceded him as one of the orators of the day] we have gone back to the feeble beginnings of our college. We have trembled at the dangers and have sympathized with the toils and trials of those who, through God's good hand, were enabled to bring it into life. We turn in thought to the young men who are here to-day, as he was here fifty years ago, undergraduates, full of youth, and health, and hope. We go forward with them as they leave these halls; as they do battle with the trials and temptations of life; as they fall, one after another, by 71 Scbolarsbip and Service the way ; till, a small remnant, weary and wayworn, with bended form and silvered locks, they come up again, at the expiration of another fifty years, to the great Centen- nial Jubilee; and we mingle with them as they join the throngs which shall crowd these portals and pour along these streets. Thus in the oldest and youngest of our family do we seem to see one hundred years of college life, with all its manifold vicissitudes, brought within the compass of the present hour. We seem to stand at a great cross-road in the journey of life, where travelers come from different and opposite quarters; some pressing forward to assume the burdens and labors of the waj'^, others advancing with slow and feeble step to lay them down. Greetings are exchanged, reports are made, hopes and fears are uttered, and the crowd disperses to lose itself amid the unnumbered multitudes that throng life's ways. ^ The speaker who uttered these words, then in the prime of his strong and stately manhood, has long since fallen asleep; and the venerable presi- dent and the associates and contemporaries who then surrounded him have, with a single excep- tion, vanished one and all from this theater of their common endeavors. The great Centennial Jubilee, which he then beheld afar, has dawned, and children and childi'en's children then unborn are here to-day to keep it. As they gather for this greater festival, one thought must first engross them. We talk of the mutations of time, and in a country still young 1 " Semi-Centennial Discourse of the Eev. Alonzo Potter, D.D,, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Union College and Bishop-elect of Pennsylvania," p. 2. 72 Scholarship and Service and but imperfectly developed, like our own, those changes perpetually challenge us. As in the history of civilization we have the wooden age, the stone age, and the iron age, so in the history of a community or a college fifty years may not pass without bringing with them, preeminently in a generation so energetic and so creative as our own, those external transformations, structural, mechanical, esthetic, and artistic, of which the last fifty years have been so full. We encounter them here to-day, as we meet them all over the land. The Schenectady of this morning, with its mechanical industries, with its vast network of steam communications, with its altered modes of living, is not the slumbrous Dutch survival which some of us remember so vividly fifty years ago. But when we ascend to yonder hill, and, passing the portals of the historic " blue gate," advance to the college campus, no change in the group of buildings that we discover can alter the identity of that wider outlook, so rare and beautiful in the charm of its expanse, and in the picturesqueness and variety of its lovely landscape, which then salutes us. Nature, in its steadfast and immutable characteristics, still remains: the silver thread of the winding Mohawk; the break in the distant hills where, long ago, the sun sank to rest, just as it sets to-day; the corn standing so thick in the valley that, in the words of the Psalmist, it seems to "laugh and sing" — all these are there; and as the thick-thronging memaries that they awaken come crowding back on us, once more 13 Scholarship and Service we are young and blithe again, and the future lies at our feet. I am not sure if it would be well for us if it did ; nor that, if one who has come here to-day with his half-century of memories could by some magic make himself young again and take his place with those who will this morning go forth from their Alma Mater to face the conflicts of the world, he would find himself equal to his tasks or happy in his surroundings. For no sooner are we sensible here or elsewhere of the permanence of nature, than we are constrained to remember the inevit- able and tremendous transformations of circum- stance. This is a centennial anniversary, and our retrospect this morning carries us back, not fifty merely, but one hundred years. A century ago! Do we realize what was the Eepublic of 1795, and how vastly it differed from the Republic of 1895 ? Little more than a decade, then, had passed since our country had achieved its independence. Less than twenty years had then elapsed since these American seaboard States — there were then none others — were colonies of G-reat Britain. A sparsely settled country; a people of narrow means and meager resources of every kind; a life that forbade leisure and equally forbade luxury; a long, hard struggle, in the vast majority of instances, just to survive the hardships and privations of a new country; communities almost wholly without roads, or cities, or libraries, or arts, or manufac- tures, or commerce; social and domestic condi- tions often so primitive and elementary that, if 74 Scholarship and Service "we were to reproduce them to-day, they would seem all but unendurable to the softer manners of our more luxurious age — these were the condi- tions from amid which the youth of 1795 turned their faces toward this home of learning, and sought for the equipment which it offered them. And just because it was so, it would not have been strange if the culture which was offered to them had taken on the characteristics which those more primitive times seemed so imperatively to demand. If, instead of the ordinary curriculum of a college as we are wont to think of it — its classi- cal and Hterary as well as its mathematical and scientific training, — the Union College of a cen- tury ago had set to work to teach its undergi-adu- ates how to plow and sow and reap ; how to build fences and bridges and roads ; how to make tools and use them; how to rear mills and run them; how to create trafific and promote it — how clever such a method would have seemed to the men of this day, however it might have appeared to its contemporaries ! It is, as it seems to me, the glory of your Alma Mater, sons of Union College, that it did not. I do not know how it may appear to others, but there must surely be, to one who looks at it in its wider significance, something singularly noble in the spectacle of those few men who or- ganized this college, and, in the midst of condi- tions as hard and incongruous as those which I have described, set it to teaching that "polite learning," as it was then called, which so wisely included not alone the mechanic arts, the physical 75 Scbolarsbip and Service sciences, and those other branches of learning which are directly connected with the material conditions under which men earn their bread, but always, along with these, those higher branches of learning which unsealed the realm of letters which bridged the intervening centuries between the Republic of America and the Republic of Grreece, and which gave to human life the charm and beauty of art and poetry and literature. They saw, — those men of elder times, — with a fine and unerring perception, that life is always tending, just because of the inexorable and ever-recurring wants of the body, to become sordid and unaspir- ing and material; and therefore, over against the pressure of its lower needs, they would fain set the temple of a loftier ideal, and fill it with the images of the great and good of every age. It may never have occurred to you to consider the fact, but cer- tainly it has in it a profound significance, that, in an age when, far more than in our own, with its ampler resources and its larger leisure, other knowledge than the knowledge how to get bread out of the ground, or ore out of a mine, was not the primary want, such knowledge did not seem to the founders of this college a stupid impertinence. A friend sent me the other day a copy of the ora- tion delivered by the valedictorian of his class on the first Commencement Day of this college, just ninety-nine years ago. I wish the limits of this occasion permitted me to quote from its lofty and eloquent periods. From exordium to peroration they were distinguished by a felicity of phrase and 76 Scbolarsbip and Service an aptness of classical allusion that showed a study of great models and a style instinct with the best learning. And yet the men who were graduated then, oftener than otherwise, took away such fine cultui*e as they acquired here to scenes and tasks which were most unfriendly to it. Un- less they could prize it for its own sake, even as for its own sake they had fii-st of all come to seek it, it brought them no reward. The contrast which salutes us to-day is at once curious and paradoxical. The century that has passed since this college was founded has produced undreamed-of changes in our whole social situa- tion. A single illustration of this, which touches directly the conditions of college life, will answer as well as a hundred. A century ago, the average annual expenditure of an undergraduate in college was, I apprehend, rather under than over two hundi'ed and fifty dollars. To-day — at any rate in the greater colleges — it is, I apprehend, much nearer one thousand dollars; and there are large numbers of undergraduates whose annual expendi- ture is more than twice as much as this. Now, when we have made all possible allowance for the difference between then and now in the purchas- ing-power of money, the fact still remains that such an increase must represent a vast increase in the wealth of the constituencies which are repre- sented in our , colleges. As to this, as a matter of fact, there can be no doubt ; and it would seem as if such a change ought to have brought with it a wider and more general esteem for those depart- 77 Scholarship and Service ments of learning which are the especial distinc- tion of nations in a high state of civilization and prosperity, with vast resources and a constantly increasing cultivated class. But, as a matter of fact, the present tendency in colleges seems to be in quite an opposite direction. More and more is it coming to be accepted as an academic tradition, so to speak, that a man may take a degree as Bachelor of Arts without having acquired even an elementary knowledge of the two gi'eat languages which, more than any others, contain the choicest literary treasures in the world; and this change has come to pass, more largely than for any other reason, because such knowledge is claimed to be of very secondary value, if of any, in the practical business of our modern world. I may not argue that question here, open though it most surely is to argument ; but it suggests an- other with which such an anniversary as this is preeminently concerned. We have come to-day to a point in the history of this college when we may wisely pause and " look before and after." A hun- dred years of collegiate life — to what are they the witnesses — of what are they the prophecy? There is a conception of such an institution as this which is at once prevalent and popular, but which, as I conceive, falls far below its highest use and pur- pose. A college, we are told, is a place where men acquire certain branches of higher learning, and store their minds with certain phrases and for- mulae, which will be of use to them in the various businesses of life. Just as in a school of phar- 78 Scholarship and Service macy the pupil learns of certain substances, their properties, proportions, and relations in combina- tion with each other, out of which come certain remedial agencies used in the science of thera- peutics, so in a college words, signs, facts are to be stored away in the mind, and taken down from time to time from their shelves, as the occasion may require, for practical service. That this de- scription of a widely prevalent conception of the office of a college is not a purely imaginary one is strikingly confirmed by a passage in Schopen- hauer's essay " On Men of Learning," which some of you will doubtless recognize. When [he says] one sees the number and variety of in- stitutions which exist for the purposes of education, and the vast throng of scholars and masters, one might fancy the human race to be very much concerned about truth and wisdom. But here, too, appearances are deceptive. Students and learned persons of all sorts aim, as a rule, at acquiring information rather than insight. They pique themselves about knowing about everything — stones, plants, battles, experiments, and all the books in exist- ence. It never occurs to them that information is only a means of insight, and in itself of httle or no value ; that it is his way of thinking that makes a man a phi- losopher. When I hear of these portents of learning, and their imposing erudition, I say to myself, "Ah, how httle they must have had to think about, to be able to read so much ! " And when I actually find that it is re- ported of the elder Pliny that he was continually reading or being read to, at table, on a journey, or in his bath, the question forces itself upon my mind whether the man was so very lacking in thought that he had to have 79 Scholarship and Service others' thought incessantly instilled into him, as though he were a consumptive patient taking jellies to keep him- self alive? And neither his undiscerning creduhty nor his inexpressibly repulsive style, which seems like that of a man taking notes and very economical of his paper, is of a kind to give me a high estimate of his power of independent thought.^ There may be two opinions about Schopen- hauer's judgment concerning the style and sub- stance of Pliny ; but there can be only one as to the eternal distinction between the two types of students and scholars of which Pliny was plainly one. That distinction which Frederick Maurice somewhere makes between acquisition and illumi- nation lies at the foundation of all learning, and inevitably determines its character. There is a learning which is simply an accumulation of vari- ous and, it may easily be, curious and recondite information. It is of such, learning that Schopen- hauer elsewhere says, "The wig [the full-bottomed, curled, and beribboned wdg, he means, such as judges and bishops wore a century ago] is the appropriate symbol of the man of learning pure and simple. It adorns the head with a copious quantity of false hair in lack of one's own, just as erudition means endowing it with a great mass of alien thought."- The figure is grotesque, per- haps ; but the idea behind it is indisputably true. The scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is one to whom an accumulation of learning is sim- 1 " The Art of Literature," pp. 49, 50. 2 lUd, p. 51. 8o Scholarship and Service ply the storing of his reservoirs for the large and benevolent activities of daily thought and service. And the nature of that service and the character of its influence will be largely deter- mined by the spirit in which the student acquu-es his learning, and the uses which he aims to make of it. Let us try and understand ourselves here ; and that we may do so, let me try and state the situa- tion as it confronts us as clearly as I may. There are between sixty and seventy millions of people In this land to-day, and of these I presume it would be quite safe to say that not five in five hundred are, or ever will be, college graduates. A much larger proportion of them will undoubtedly have had the rudiments of a common-school edu- cation, and a very moderate proportion of these, owing to the pressure of daily events, the dis- abling conditions of their surroundings, and other kindred circumstances, will early have fallen out of the habit of reading any other than the most ephemeral and often mentally debilitating litera- ture, and equally out of the power of thinking into and through the grave social, political, and per- sonal questions which challenge one almost daily. I know that I am saying something here which will be distasteful to many, and which from others will provoke impatient and contemptuous denial. It will be said, for instance, that the aver- age of intelligence among the American people is higher than anywhere else in the world; that the clear vision of the less highly educated classes is Scholarship and Service continually demonstrating itself in its singularly unerring instinct for the right in great moral and political crises ; and that to think or speak of the large and less cultivated majority as at all repre- senting an ignorant European peasantry is at once a slander and a stupidity. I gladly believe it ; but I believe, no less, that the influence of educated men upon men who are but partially educated has never been greater than to-day, and is destined to be greater still. And this is the case, let me add, just because our average American citizen who is not a college gi'aduate, while often unequal to pro- found or acute original thinking, is nevertheless becoming more and more trained to recognize the characteristics and often the force of the processes of such reasoning, and to be increasingly influ- enced by them. Max Nordau says in his striking work on " Degeneration " that to-day every Ger- man peasant who buys a penny paper puts himself thereby in touch with the interests and sufferings and fears and aspii'ations, through its telegraphic columns, of the whole civilized world. Yes; but who is to guide him so to interpret the larger sig- nificance of what he reads as to make him a better citizen and a better man? It is here, as I con- ceive, that the office of the true scholar appears. You may exclaim against social and personal in- equalities as you please. The time will never come when a man who has not merely learned cer- tain chemical combinations so that he can manu- facture a fertilizer, or certain mathematical com- binations so that he can build a railroad, but has 82 Scholarship and Service also learned what made a little peninsula in the Adriatic the mistress of the world, or how Eoman law became the basis of the jurisprudence of Christendom, or how the fall of empires was fore- shadowed in the " Republic " of Plato, or how the growth of a corrupt and privileged ecclesiasticism brought about the transformation of modern Eu- rope — the time will never come, I say, when the man who has learned these things — not a parrot- like learning, but in the length and breadth of their vast and enduring significance — will not be, in every highest sense, the master of him who has not. He may not be as rich, as adroit, as aggres- sive, or apparently as successful. He may be overlooked and forgotten in the mad scramble for place or power, or in the vulgar contentions of po- Htical conventions. But sooner or later will come the moment when inferior men, helpless and grop- ing in their ignorance, will be compelled to listen to him, just as men of meaner mold were com- pelled to listen to Lincoln, graduate of no univer- sity, it is true, but from the hour when, a long, un- gainly lad, he lay before the fire in his father's cabin, reading by the light of a pine-knot, all the way on, a devourer of books, an insatiate learner and student, reader and thinker and seer as well ! And thus, I conceive, we are prepared to see the place which the college ought to fill in our social economy to-day, and the influence which those who are bred in it should exercise. It should be the training-school not merely of learners, but of thinkers; and the men whom it graduates should 83 Scholarship and Service be the leaders not merely in successful enterprise and in purely technical ability, but in those sounder ideas of civic and social and moral order of which the greatest nations have yet so much to learn. I do not forget the fine disdain which exists among us in certain quarters toward the " scholar in politics " (of which disdain, unless I am mistaken, you have here had quite unstinted expression on occasions similar to this) nor the impatience of its criticisms. But the scholar, happily for the betterment of the state, however little the ring- masters and office-holders happen to like it, per- sists in obtruding himself into politics, as into all other burning questions, and turning the eye of his pitiless lantern of truth upon partizan leaders and placemen with equal and searching impartiality. Have you ever thought what would become of us if he did not ? Have you ever dared to sit down and imagine what ignorance and cupidity mated to an unscrupulous lust of power would do with the Republic if it were not for some clear voice of warning which from time to time lifts its pene- trating note, names the insolent defier of the eter- nal equities, paints the infamy of his conduct, and pursues him with relentless denunciation? We have had om' modern Elijah lately, in the gi-eat metropolis yonder, facing the modern Ahab of Tammany Hall as he sneered, "Art thou he that troubleth Israel?" and answering as of old, "I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father's house." And we sleep easier in New York be- cause of his brave and splendid crusade. Does 84 Scholarship and Service anybody think that that crusade was a less effec- tive one because Dr. Parkhurst was a college gi'aduate? Nay, does not every intelligent man know that that clear and vigorous and acute mind, yet to light, I hope, the "back fii-es" that will burn up all the rubbish of "bossism" through- out the commonwealth — does not every one know that this fearless leader was just so much better equipped for his great task because of his wider reading of history, and the finer training of all his mental powers ? Never, indeed, was there an age when the state demanded of its sons, in whatever relation they are to serve it, a larger learning and a riper culture. The dangers that assail us to-day are, after all, as a very limited reading will demonstrate, but the reappearance of old foes in a new guise. There is not a political or social or economic heresy of which you may not find the prototype in the pages of a nearer or remoter past. We break the molds in which society organizes itself ; we dethrone the monarch and fling away his scepter : but the peril of officialism forever remains, and the insolent pride of office needs forever to be taught, sharply and humblingly if need be, all the way from Chief Magistrate to policeman, that our rulers are the servants of the people. And the men who are to lead in these reforms, the men whose right it is to lead, as dealing with a situation which has in it no novelty, are the men who are ordained to be "men of leading " because they are also " men of light." And this not only in the realm of civic and «* 85 Scholarship and Service political problems, but also in that wider realm which includes our whole social order, and touches all the complex relations that bind together a civil- ized society. Here again, as before, we find that a reconstruction of the form under which such a society exists does not free it from the perils which have threatened other and older nations and com- munities. We have no landed aristocracy, for instance, in America; but we have forms of as- sociated wealth which have seemed to many people who are not at all alarmists quite as formidable and dangerous. How to harmonize these, and how, above all, to disseminate a sound social and political economy among people who are easily misled by a doctrine of socialism which, in correct- ing one set of evils, threatens to create others even more dangerous and destructive in thek tenden- cies — this, surely, must be the office of men who have read history widely and deeply, who have in- formed themselves as to the origin and begin- nings of socialistic movements all the way from Athenian communism down through the story of the Hebrew theocracy, — the societies, as we should call them, of the Essenes and Therapeutae, — on through all the monastic life of the middle ages, until in the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More published his "Utopia," and in our own cen- tury Robert Owen and Saint-Simon and Lamen- nais gave to the world their more or less crude conceptions of an ideal state. To be ignorant of these things, of all that they stand for, and of the truths and fallacies, so curiously intermingled, 86 Scbolarsbip and Service which they severally illustrate, is to be largely disqualified even for intelligently discussing, much more effectually attempting to solve, the problems which to-day increasingly challenge us. Here is the scholar's true place, and here, brethren and fa- thers of Union College, will be some of the no- blest opportunities of the men who go forth from yonder halls. And this, most of all, because this college has always stood, and I pray God may ever continue to stand, as the nm'sery not alone of a sound learning, but also as the home of a truly philo- sophic and reflective temper — a temper touched and ennobled by the highest of all sanctions, the person and the message of Jesus Christ. The spirit of the greatest Teacher whom the world has ever known, a Teacher both human and divine, was early invoked here, and has been the dominant spell in the noblest minds and lives that the his- tory of this college has known. It was called Union College, unless I have been misinformed, because in a generation conspicuous for marked denominational differences it was meant to stand for a larger and more comprehensive spirit. The leading institutions of learning in this land a cen- tury ago stood mainly for various partial aspects of Christian truth or ecclesiastical order which it is no disrespect to them to describe as exclusive rather than inclusive. The men who were reared in them were mainly the sons of those who, from strong conviction or inherited belief, held some- what stiffly not merely to a particular faith, but to 87 Scholarship and Service a distinctive order. It was the especial distinction of Union College that it allied itself to no single fellowship in these particulars, but had an equal welcome for pupils of whatever tradition. As little did it disparage strenuous convictions in these directions, or discourage their expression. What has lately and slowly come to be the preva- lent usage of other institutions in this regard was, unless I am mistaken, the rule of this college since the beginning. Each youth was taught to respect the convictions in which he had been reared, and left free to believe and to worship in accordance with them. But as recognizing that greater is the spirit than the form or symbol through which it finds expression, there presided from the be- ginning here a wide-minded and reverent faith, profoundly concerned rather for the fundamental virtues, and constantly illustrating theii* transform- ing power. Such words, you will say, perhaps, are mere generalities, and it is easy to indulge in gene- ralities. Bear with me, then, for a few moments longer, if I attempt at once to interpret and justify them by some illustrative personal reminiscences. I am not, with a single exception, familiar enough with the earlier history of Union College to recall the men who were first conspicuous in determin- ing its character and creating its just renown, nor may I venture to deal with its later annals in any purely judicial spirit. But taking these hundred years as a whole, there are, I venture to think, four names which, if not preeminent among those Scbolarship and Service who have influenced the gi'owth and determined what is most characteristic in the history and de- velopment of this college, are those of men who have largely affected both, and who may at any rate be accepted as typical of what, for want of a better word, I may call the genius of the college — I mean Eliphalet Nott, Alonzo Potter, Isaac W. Jackson, and Tayler Lewis. I am embarrassed, as you readily anticipate, by personal ties connecting me with two of these names; but not thereby, I hope, wholly disqualified from estimating them with at least a moderate impartiality. Concerning the other two, I am happily free to speak without restraint or reserve. One of them carries me back to childish days, — for, alas! I was never myself his pupil, — and has to do with impressions which are among the earliest which the mind can receive. There is no lad within the sound of my voice, there is no man who is not so unfortunate as wholly to have for- gotten the impressions of childhood, who will not tell you that they concerned first of all those things that strike the eye and the ear, and that awaken on the one hand or the other fear or affection. And so I apprehend that no youth who can re- member him at all will ever be able to disassociate Professor Jackson from that impression of sol- dierly precision, and that aspect and manner of almost military brevity and abruptness, which were the first characteristics in him that revealed themselves. They created at once their own at- mosphere, and built up inevitably a fixed tradi- 89 Scholarship and Service tion whicli no less inevitably found familiar ex- pression in a titular designation which will live in the memory of the men who were so fortunate as to be his pupils as long as they remember any- thing. But no less vivid in the memory of these pupils, I am persuaded, as in the memory of all who genuinely knew him, will be the recollection of those other quahties in him, so marked and so engaging, which preeminently determined his character. I remember to have heard it said once, in connection with Professor Jackson's devotion to all that was beautiful in trees, shrubs, plants, and flowers, that it seemed to be a very odd thing that a professor of mathematics should find his chief delight in the creation of a beautiful garden ; but in fact it was this harmony of opposite tastes and characteristics which made him always so delight- ful a companion and so interesting a personality. But not this alone. His fine taste, his scientific knowledge, his rare energy, were all dominated by a singular elevation and nobility of temper, which assm'ed all men of his incorruptible integrity, and which made him a power for all that was best. Like the science he loved so well and taught so ably, he was an exact man; and rectitude, a life ordered upon a right line, distinguished all that he was and did. In a thousand unconscious ways his pupils felt and recognized this ; and so he stood here, dur- ing all his long and distinguished service as a pro- fessor in this college, for that which must forever be a part of the structural foundations of character — the right, and the eternal righteousness. 90 Scholarship and Service Another there was, cast in a different mold, and exercising, by his pen as well as by his voice and presence, an influence felt far beyond these imme- diate limits, and felt increasingly to the end. In Professor Tayler Lewis were united in a rare de- gree the gifts of the thinker and the seer. His clear and luminous mind penetrated always to the heart of things, and a rare felicity of statement made him a teacher in the best sense of the word. All over this land to-day there are men who can look back and remember how, in more than one direction, his acute and vigorous intellect gave to then* best powers their earliest and most distinc- tive impulse, and how the charm of his pictur- esque presence, and the beautiful transparency of his most engaging and lovable personality, made them in love with beauty and goodness and truth, wherever it might reveal itself. Still another there was of whom I may scarcely venture to speak at all, and yet concerning whom you will as little expect me to keep silent. When, in the year 1814, a Quaker lad, no older than the centmy, entered Union College, he Httle dreamed with how large a part of his life it was to be bound up, nor how large a debt he was to owe it. Later generations will declare whether he at all dis- charged that debt ; but none of his contemporaries will be reluctant, I imagine, to own that, what- ever the obligations of Alonzo Potter to Union College, he gave to it in return some of the best years and most helpful services of a rare and noble life. Gifted above most men of his day and 91 Scbolarsbip and Service calling, with a singularly wide range of vision and a very high and sacred sense of the teacher's call- ing, he touched few lives without lifting them to a loftier conception at once of the privileges and re- sponsibilities of educated men. A great teacher himself, he was a greater disciple of the truth, however revealed. Wherever it led, he was ready to follow, and with sympathies as large and gen- erous as were his intellectual endowments. The motto of Terence — '"''Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienwm'''' — was as true of all that he was and did as if it had been his own. He loved this col- lege with a tender and inextinguishable love, and much of its most enduring fame will be bound up with his name and services. And he whose son, if not in the flesh yet most truly in the spirit, he was — the man to whom, more than any other in all its history, this college is preeminently indebted — do I need even to name him? There was a time when "Union College" and "Eliphalet Nott" were convertible terms. There will never come a time when all that is best and gi'eatest in its achievements will not be indis- solubly bound up with his work. He could say of the college, in the highest sense of the words, what a Roman emperor could say of his capital — that he "came and found it of wood, and left it of marble." Step by step, nulla vestigia retrorsum, he lifted it out of its provincial obscm'ity, and gave to it a name and a fame throughout the land. A young man and an old man eloquent, he was with- out the rashness of the one or the acerbity of the 92 Scholarship and Service other. Of singular wisdom and penetration, lie was adorned by a no less singular patience and gentle- ness. Of a humor so delightful and so unique that the traditions of it are as fresh to-day as they were half a century ago, he was as incapable of a word that could wound or malign, as he was of a thought that was base or mean. A teacher of almost un- equaled charm in the class-room, he was a coun- selor of matchless and unerring wisdom for all sorts and conditions of men outside it. The helper and defender of the friendless, the pioneer in every good and noble cause, however despised or forlorn, his heart was as young at fourscore as when he was himseK a stripling, and the love of his " boys," as he forever called them, as tender and inextinguishable at the end as at the beginning. Who will undertake to count the lives he touched and kindled and ennobled, or to reckon the men, in every possible rank and calling in hfe, to whom his counsels and his maxims were guiding princi- ples never to be forgotten! Great teacher, great leader, great administrator, but, greatest of all, true father of all his sons ! My friend and brother, if I may venture to call you so, I congratulate you that yours is the rare privilege of following men like these : the man of rectitude, the man of vision, the man of large and comprehensive sympathies, and, presiding over them all, the man of paternal wisdom and of a child-like and Christ-like benignity. Surely these are types which you and all of us may well be glad to remember to-day. They stand for that 93 Scholarship and Service spirit and purpose which have most of all made this college a power for God and for good. May they never fade out of these scenes ; and may they find in your administration new and nobler illus- tration! You come to your large tasks under happy auguries, and with a wide and generous sympathy on every hand to cheer you forward. May your work here be worthy of the eminent gifts which you have elsewhere revealed, and of the high and unselfish devotion which hitherto has adorned your use of them ! The clouds are past, and a new day begins to dawn once more for your beloved Alma Mater. May it shine more and more into the perfect day ! I end, as I began, with other words than my own. Speaking for the last time amid these scenes, the orator of fifty years ago breathed out of a full heart this aspiration for Union College — it is the prayer of his children and his children's children to-day: Honored Parent, thus far you have been the nursery of free spirits, of a comprehensive and large-minded, but reverent philosophy — be it never otherwise ! And when the term of fif tj' years has again rolled away, and your chil- dren and your children's children shall come back to cele- brate your praise and write up your centennial record, may it be found that this is the home of brave and true men — of men braver, truer, and hoher than we ; that better and wiser spirits have risen to direct your councils ; and that a higher scholarship and a deeper sanctity are send- ing forth from these shrines rich blessings on the world.i 1 " Semi-centeimial Discourse of the Rev. Alonzo Potter, D. D.," pp. 28, 29. 94 THE HEROISMS OF THE UNKNOWN ORATION Delivered July 2, 1893, at the Dedication of the Monument Commemorative of the Men of New York who Fell at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863 THE HEROISMS OF THE UNKNOWN THIRTY years ago to-day, these peaceful scenes were echoing with the roar and din of what a calm and unimpassioned historian, writing of it long years afterward, described as the "greatest battle-field of the New World." Thirty years ago to-day the hearts of some thirty millions of people turned to this spot with various but eager emo- tions, and watched here the crash of two armies which gathered in their vast embrace the flower of a great people. Never, declared the seasoned soldiers who listened to the roar of the enemy's artillery, had they heard anything that was com- parable with it.^ Now and then it paused, as though the very throats of the mighty guns were tired ; but only for a little. Not for one day, nor for two, but for three, raged the awful conflict, while the Republic gave its best life to redeem its honor, and the stain of all previous blundering and faltering was washed white forever with the blood of its patriots and martyrs. 1 "Abraham Lincoln," Nicolay and Hay, vol. vii., p. 241. 7 97 The Heroisms of the Unknown How far away it all seems, as we stand here to- day! How profound the contrast between those hours and days of bloodshed and the still serenity of nature as it greets us now! The graves that cluster around us here, the peaceful resting-places of a nation's heroes, are green and fair ; and, within them, they who fell here, after life's fierce and fitful fever, are sleeping well. And we are here to tell the world to-day that we have not forgotten them. It seems a tardy honor that we come to pay them; but through all the years that have come and gone we have kept their memories green. No single anniversary of their great achievement has returned that they who count it chiefest honor that they may call these men brothers have not come here to bring their grateful homage, and to recite the splendid story of their splendid deeds. Nay, more — in far- off towns and hamlets, north and east and west, in every home from which they came, no year has passed that ardent voices have not sung their valor and iron pens traced upon imperishable pages the story of their sacrifices. It is a long day, indeed, from that in the year of our Lord 1863 to this in 1893 ; but if we seem to be late in raising here this monument, you who behold it to-day will own that it is not unworthy of the men and the deeds that it commemorates. I may not rehearse the story of those deeds this afternoon. Already they have become a part of our common heritage, and have passed by a process of spiritual assimilation into the very fiber of the na- 98 The Heroisms of the Unknown tion's life. There is no school-boy now who has not read the peerless and incomparable story, — read it, and flushed and glowed with the fire of a passionate patriotism while he read it, — all the way along from that first moment when, long be- fore the dawn of July 1st, " Meade himself," as the historian has described him,^ " came upon the field at one o'clock in the morning, a pale, tired-looking, hollow-eyed man, worn with toil and lack of sleep, with little of the conventional hero about him, but stout in heart and clear in mind," — on through that early morning when the heroic Reynolds, grasping the situation with a gi*eat commander's swift intuition, dashed along the Emmitsbui'g road to seize, if he might, the great opportunity that confronted him, and a little later was shot dead by a bullet through the brain, — on through that bloody morning and afternoon when Hancock and Howard came, when Slocum seized and occu- pied his vantage-gi'ound, when our own Sickles, with his dusty and travel-stained veterans, came in haste from Emmitsburg and forced the fighting, — yes, on through all that memorable night that fol- lowed, and that knew no rest or pause of hurry- ing battalions and tramp of armed men, — on, till the morning dawned that ushered in this tremen- dous and never-to-be-forgotten day, — how well, now, we remember its incomparable story, and with awe and reverence recall it! For here, friends and countrymen, the world wit- nessed a battle-field disfigured by no littleness and 1 "Abraham Ldncoln/' Nicolay and Hay, vol. vii, p. 246. 99 The Heroisms of the Unknown spoiled by no treachery. So long as the world lasts men will differ about the best strategy in war, and the schoolmen in arms will dispute concerning the wisdom of commanders, and the quality of their generalship. But though the critics may differ as to what might have been done here, no criticism, however clever, can at all belittle that which was the one supreme splendor of this day and this field. Here the world saw a great army confronted with a great crisis and dealing with it in a great way. Here, for a time at any rate, all lesser jealousies and rivalries disappeared in the one supreme ri- valry how each one should best serve his country and, if need be, die for her ! Listen to the key-note of those great days as the general commanding himself struck it: Headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, June 30, 1863. — The commanding general requests that, pre- vious to the engagement soon expected with the enemy, corps and other commanding officers will address their troops, explaining to them briefly the immense issues in- volved in the struggle. The enemy are on our soil ; the whole country now looks anxiously to this army to de- Mver it fi*om the presence of the foe ; oui' failure to do so wiU leave us no such welcome as the swelling of millions of hearts with pride and joy at our success would give to every soldier of this army. Homes, firesides, domestic altars are involved. The army has fought well hereto- fore ; it is believed that it will fight more desperately and bravely than ever, if it is addressed in fitting terms. . . . By command of Major- General Meade. S. Williams, Assistant Adj.-Gen.i 1 See Greeley's " The American Conflict," vol. ii, p. 377. lOO The Heroisms of the Unknown Sucli words were not wasted. Whatever else was wanting, here were not wanting a high pui-- pose and heroic souls to follow it. And so, as we come here to-day, my country- men, we come, first of all, to honor that which in human nature is the best — unflinching courage, unfaltering sacrifice, and over all, a patriot's pure devotion to the right. Let no man say that in raising this monument to our dead heroes we are setting up one more altar wherewith to glorify the cruel god of war. There is, indeed, no one of us here, I am persuaded, who does not see in war, and its attendant train of evils and horrors, that of which any man or nation may wisely be in dread. There is no one of us here, I am no less persuaded, who, listening to that blatant jingoism that, from some safe retreat, from time to time shoots its en- venomed fang of swagger and of hate to inflame, if it may, a great people to some silly deed of arms alike unworthy of its power and its enlightenment — there is no one of us, I say, who, listening to such foolish talk, does not hear it with equal amusement and contempt. But, all the same, we may not forget that there may come in the his- tory of every nation emergencies when, all the resources of diplomacy and all the cleverness of statesmanship having been exhausted, there re- mains no other arbitrament but the sword, no last court of appeal but to arms. And sm*ely we who have lived, as have many of us here, through that memorable era which preceded the struggle which we are here to-day to commemorate can never for- 7* lOI The Heroisms of the Unknown get that there were ideas which were at war, first of all; and that the life of this Republic was bound up with the triumph of those ideas for which this battle-field must forever stand — yes, their triumph, peacefully if it might be, but with sword and shot and shell if it must be. Believe me, my countrymen, we need to remem- ber this ! Into this sacred and august presence, — the presence both of the dead and of the living, — and amid these gracious and tender ceremonies, I would not introduce one discordant note. It is well that as the years go by the rancors that once divided children of the same Republic should be forgiven and forgotten. But there are other things that may not be forgotten, and it is at our peril that we forget them. We may never forget that the struggle of which these graves are the wit- nesses was a struggle for the eternal righteousness. We may never forget that the cause which was substantially decided here was the cause of free- dom, and justice, and the everlasting equities, as against a despotism which, however amiable its or- dinary exhibitions, had in it, as Sumner said of it, the essence of that "crime that degi'ades men." We may never forget that behind the question of the Union was the question of unpaid labor, of bartered manhood, of a traffic which dealt in human hearts. We may never forget that the greatest victory in the War of the Rebellion was the triumph of gi'eat principles. And, above aU, we may never forget that a nation which has won its freedom from dis- honor with a great price can maintain that free- I02 The Heroisms of the Unknown dom only by struggles and sacrifices equally great. These halcyon seas on which we float, my countrymen, they are not always friendly to a na- tion's best well-being. The institutions which, at such cost, we have rescued from disintegration and ruin will not long survive unless you and I are concerned as to those foundations on which they rest, and unless, above all, we watch with jealous eye whatever alien hand would abuse or pervert them. It was the tragedy of that struggle which we are here to-day to remember, that it was an internecine struggle. They were of ourselves who lifted the flag of revolt and disowned the authority of the government; and it may be — alas, only lately we have been reminded how easily! — that those in high places shall even be the apologists of the red flag of anarchy and of the red hands of its ensanguined followers. This day, this service, and most of all these oui* heroic dead, stand — let us here swear never to forget it — for the sanctity of law, for the endm-ing supremacy of just and equitable government, and so for the lib- erties of a law-abiding people. In their honor we come here, my brothers, to consecrate this monumental shaft. What, now, is that one feature in this occasion which lends to it its supreme and most pathetic interest? There are other monuments in this city of a nation's dead, distinguished as these graves that lie about us here can never be. There are the tombs and memorials of heroes whose names are blazoned upon them, and whose kindred and friends, as they 105 The Heroisms of the Unknown have stood round them, have repeopled this scene with their vanished forms, have recalled their lineaments, have recited their deeds, and have stood in tender homage around forms which were once to them a living joy and presence. But for us to-day there is no such privilege, no such ten- der individuality of grief. These are our un- known dead. Out of whatever homes they came we cannot tell. What were their names, their lineage, their human mien and aspect, of this no less we are ignorant. One thing only we know. They wore our uniform. In one form or another, by cap, or sleeve, or weapon — somewhere upon the scarred and mutilated forms that once lay djdng or dead within sight of these historic hills there was the token of that Empire State whence they had come, whence we have come, and that makes them and us, in the bond of that dear and noble commonwealth, forever brothers. And that is enough for us. We need to know no more. From the banks of the Hudson and the St. Law- rence, from the wilds of the Catskills and the Adirondacks, from the salt shores of Long Island, and from the fresh lakes of Geneva and Onon- daga and their peers, from the forge and the farm, the shop and the factory, from college halls and crowded tenements, all alike, they came here and fought and fell — and shall never, never be for- gotten. Our great unknown defenders! Ah, my countrymen, here we touch the foundations of a people's safety — of a nation's greatness. We are wont to talk much of the world's need of great 104 The Heroisms of the Unknown leaders, and theii* proverb is often on om* lips who said of old, " Woe unto the land whose king is a child." Yes, verily, that is a dreary outlook for any people when among her sons there is none worthy to lead her armies, to guide her councils, to interpret her laws, or to administer them. But that is a still drearier outlook when in any nation, however wise her rulers and noble and heroic her commanders, there is no greatness in the people equal to a gi'eat vision in an emergency, and a great com^age with which to seize it. And that, I maintain, was the supreme glory of the heroes whom we commemorate to-day. Do you tell me that they were unknown — that they commanded no battalions, determined no policies, sat in no military councils, rode at the head of no regi- ments ? Be it so ! All the more are they the fitting representatives of you and me — the people. Never in all history, I venture to affirm, was there a war whose aims, whose policy, whose sacrifices were so absolutely determined by the people, that great body of the unknown, in which, after all, lay the strength and the power of the Republic. When some one reproached Lincoln for the seem- ing hesitancy of his pohcy, he answered, — gi-eat seer as well as gi-eat soul that he was, — "I stand for the people. I am going just as fast and as far as I can feel them behind me." And so, as we come here to-day and plant this column, consecrating it to its enduring dignity and honor as the memorial of our unknown dead, we are doing, as I cannot but think, the fittest 105 The Heroisms of the Unknown possible deed that we could do. These unknown that lie about us here — ah, what are they but the peerless representatives, elect forever by the deadly gage of battle, of those sixty millions of people, as to-day they are, whose rights and hb- erties they achieved! Unknown to us are their names; unknown to them were the greatness and the glory of then* deeds! And is not this, bro- thers of New York, the story of the world's best manhood, and of its best achievement? The work by the great unknown, for the great un- known — the work that, by fidelity in the ranks, courage in the trenches, obedience to the voice of command, patience at the picket-line, vigilance at the outpost, is done by that great host that bear no splendid insignia of rank, and figure in no com- mander's despatches — this work, with its largest and incalculable and unforeseen consequences for a whole people — is not this work, which we are here to-day to commemorate, at once the noblest and most vast ? Who can tell us now the names, even, of those that sleep about us here ; and who of them could guess, on that eventful day when here they gave their lives for duty and their coun- try, how great and how far-reaching would be the victory they should win? And thus we learn, my brothers, where a na- tion's strength resides. When the Grerman em- peror, after the Franco-Prussian war, was crowned in the SaUes des Grlaces at Versailles, on the ceil- ing of the great hall in which that memorable ceremony took place there were inscribed the 1 06 The Heroisms of the Unknown words : " The King Rules by His Own Authority." "Not so," said that gi'and man of blood and iron who, most of all, had welded Germany into one mighty people — "not so; 'The kings of the earth shall rule under me, saith the Lord.' Trusting in the tried love of the whole people, we leave the country's futm-e in God's hands!" Ah, my countrymen, it was not this man or that man that saved om' Republic in its hour of supreme peril. Let us not, indeed, forget her great lead- ers, great generals, great statesmen, and, greatest among them all, her great martyr and President, Lincoln. But there was no one of these then who would not have told us that which we may all see so plainly now, that it was not they who saved the country, but the host of her gi-eat unknown. These, with their steadfast loyalty, these with their cheerful sacrifices, and these, most of all with their simple faith in God and in the triumph of his right — these they were who saved us ! Let us never cease to honor them and to trust them ; and let us see to it that neither we nor they shall ever cease to trust in that overarching Providence that all along has led them. This field, you know, was not the field originally chosen by Meade and his lieutenants whereon to fight this battle. The historian whom I have al- ready quoted tells us that " while Meade was send- ing his advance to occupy Gettysburg, it was with no thought of fighting there. It seemed to him merely a point from which to observe and occupy the enemy's advance and mask his own move- 107 The Heroisms of the Unknown ment to what seemed to him a better line in the rear. . . . But in spite of these prudent inten- tions . . . two formidable armies were approach- ing each other at their utmost speed all through the 30th of June, driven by the irresistible laws of human action — or, let us reverently say, by the hand of Providence." ^ Yes, by the hand of Provi- dence. "Trusting in the tried love of the whole people," said Bismarck, "we leave the country's future " — in the people's hands ? Nay, but " in Grod's hands"! "If I did not believe," said this great leader of his time, " in the divine govern- ment of the world, I would not serve my country another hour. Take my faith from me, and you take my country too ! " Pregnant words, not alone for these times, but for all times. It was God in the people that made the heroism which, in these unknown ones, we are here to-day to honor. It must forever be Grod in and with the people that shall make the nation great and wise and strong for any great emergency. In that faith, we come here to rear this monu- ment and to lay the tribute of our love and grati- tude upon these gi'aves. May no alien or vandal hand ever profane their grand repose who slumber here ! And when the sons of freedom, now unborn, through generations to come shall gather here to sing again the praises of these unknown martyrs for the flag, may they kneel down beside these graves and swear anew allegiance to their God, their country, and the right ! 1 "Abraham Lincoln," Nieolay and Hay, vol. vii, pp. 234, 236. io8 THE RELATIONS OF SCIENCE TO MODERN LIFE A LECTURE Delivered before the New York Academy of Sciences, February 19, 1880 THE RELATIONS OF SCIENCE TO MODERN LIFE THIS is the second of the two courses of lec- tures given dui'ing the current season under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sci- ences. I have been asked to take part in it, not, as must be obvious enough to this audience, because of any scientific qualifications for such a task, but because the presence and the participation here of a layman in science may help to set before the public the wider scope and larger aim for which the Association exists. In pursuance of that purpose, it may be worth while briefly to review the history of the Associa- tion, and to indicate what it hopes to do, by a brief recapitulation of what, thus far, it has done. It cannot be a matter of indifference to us who are New Yorkers that the Institution whose guests we are this evening has sturdy roots run- ning down and back into an honorable, if not greatly venerable, past, and that in a community which is supposed, especially by those wise men 1 1 1 The Relations of Science to Modern Life who come to us from our own East, to be given over to money-making and money-squandering there should be a society which, for more than a generation, has been devoted to the pursuit of sci- ence in its most generous spirit, and to the dissemi- nation of knowledge in its widest sense. In the year 1818 there was incorporated in the city of New York a society known as the Lyceum of Natural History. A few professional men and others then resident in this city had become inter- ested in the study of natural history, and pre- vious to the date which I have just mentioned had associated themselves for that purpose in a some- what private and informal way. The Republic was then not forty years old. New York had been crippled by the War of the Revolution, and again by that of the year 1812; the population of this island was but a mere handful of people compared with its inhabitants to-day; the community was engrossed in the struggle of developing a new life in the paths of trade and commerce, and in repair- ing the losses which had accumulated through its past misfortunes. It is difficult to conceive a con- dition of things less calculated to create the calm and unvexed atmosphere in which the student is born and a love of generous learning bred and nurtured. But the instincts of an inherited cul- ture were strong in the breasts of some New Yorkers; and there were others, through whose an- cestral lineage no glories of hereditary learning trailed, who still looked at life with that native wisdom which sees in the secrets of nature a chal- 112 The Relations of Science to Modern Life lenge to the curiosity and a worthy theater for the discipline and education of the intellect. The meager records still surviving of the Lyceum of Natural History have not preserved the names of these men ; but the memory of them still sui'vives, and must be fresh, I think, in the minds of some who hear me to-night. Among the incorporators of the Lyceum was Professor John Torrey, whose name will long endure as one of the most eminent among all those that have been connected with the history of American science. Professor Torrey was a profound student, an untiring investigator, and in the domains of botany, mineralogy, and chemistry a successful explorer and discoverer. But he was more : for besides the gift of a preemi- nent insight into nature, he had the still rarer gift of communicating something of that insight to others. He was not merely an enthusiast himself, but he knew how to kindle enthusiasm in his pu- pils; and because of this rare power he drew about him hundreds of young men for whom scientific studies acquired an interest which made them in turn students and explorers scarcely less enthusi- astic than their gifted preceptor. It was through the agency of Professor Tor- rey, Dr. John Jay, and others hke-minded, that the New Yoi*k Lyceum of Natural History came to have a corporate existence. The Association speedily attracted to its fellowship large numbers of naturalists and others, who won renown for themselves and for their country. They made these first stirs or birth-throes of scientific life in 8 1 13 The Relations of Science to Modern Life America known to men of science beyond the sea ; and if, to-day, our scientific schools and scholars are both known and honored abroad, we unlet- tered traders of Manhattan may comfort ourselves with the recollection that among the earliest achievements which won for us such recognition were those of the Lyceum of Natural History in the city of New York. It had at one time a mu- seum of its own, filled with interesting and, in many instances, rare and unique specimens. It had a library in which was to be found one of the best collections of books upon subjects relating to natural science then existing in this country. Unfortunately, the former was destroyed by fire, the Lyceum losing at one blow both its home and some of its choicest treasures; and in that catas- trophe the Society received a blow from which it has scarcely even yet rallied. Happily, its library was preserved, and through the courtesy of the directors of the American Museum of Natural History has now a place of safe deposit near Cen- tral Park. The New York Academy of Sciences has become the heir and successor of the Lyceum of Natural History, and to-day, upon a somewhat broader basis, invokes the sympathy and coopera- tion of the citizens of New York. What is it which would seem to entitle it to both? Neither the disciples of science nor its masters are very engaging personages to most of us. A vivacious young person, more fond of the drama than of the school-room, and more inclined to laughter than to scientific investigation, re- 114 The Relations of Science to Modern Life turned from the play one evening "with the ex- clamation that she had " at length discovered the nse of a professor." In her school-gM days that serious and somewhat abstracted personage had appeared to her, she owned, simply as an inven- tion of modern and somewhat mitigated torture. She never could understand his explanations (which, as she never pretended to listen to them, was not surprising), and, owing to the want of something or other in the atmosphere, his experi- ments would rarely " go off," as she expressed it. But when she went to the play she discovered, she said, that the professor had his place, if not in science, then in art. The dramatic author had in- troduced him, with signal success, in very ill-fit- ting garments, green spectacles, and a shocking bad hat. He had an umbrella which he always kept dropping at the most inopportune moment, and he persistently interjected remarks which were deliciously irrelevant and hopelessly unintel- ligible. In a word, declared this gay young crea- ture, " evidently the professor was created to be a foil^ to throw the walking gentleman and the engaging (and generally engaged) young heroine into more conspicuous and taking relief." And thus both the professor and his pursuits became, like a haystack in the foreground, or a bit of moldy leather in a picture, something which by mere force of contrast lent to the rest of life an ad- ditional charm and grace ! It would, perhaps, be unjust to say that all of us think of scientific men and theu' occupations in 115 The Relations of Science to Modern Life that way ; but I think it is true that there are very few people who work so much outside of active and demonstrative sympathy, or who have so largely to content themselves with the reflection that study, like vii'tue, " is its own reward." There is one class of persons, though happily it is growing daily smaller, who regard scientific in- quiries as only a thinly veiled form of downright atheism. To them a student who is simply turn- ing over the pages of one of God's great volumes — I mean the volume of nature (sometimes, I think, more reverently than some of us turn over the pages of that other volume which we call Revela- tion) — to such persons, I say, a student of nature is simply and of deliberate purpose a destroyer of the faith. They have apparently less confidence in the enduring character of God's truth than they have in the power of man's destructiveness ; and it is the shame and dishonor of our modern Chris- tianity that it has too often hurled invective instead of advancing argument, and imputed un- worthy motives instead of disproving facts. I have no wish to be misunderstood here, and I will not be. There has been undoubtedly much in the attitude of scientific men, here and there, that has shown them, as individuals, to be hostile to revela- tion and skeptical as to its Author. But it has not always been considered that, when angry and con- temptuous words have been hurled back from the battlements of science, it has more than once been because they had been provoked by words still angrier and more contemptuous, spoken by those ii6 The Relations of Science to Modern Life who professed to be ruled by a gentler sway and to follow a more benignant Master, I remember at this moment, as some of you may do, some words spoken at an annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held some years ago, I think in Scotland, first by Mr. Huxley and then by Mr. Tyndall. Those utter- ances gave a rude shock to the feelings and behef of large numbers of people ; but it was not known, or if known was not remembered then, that they were provoked by an utterly unprovoked attack made by an English bishop, when neither of the men whom he assailed was present to defend him- self, and when everything in the occasion made it impossible to contradict him. Once more, I say, let me not be misunderstood. I am not here as the defender or apologist of Messrs. Huxley and Tyndall. Men of science lose their tempers some- times, and say hasty and regrettable words, like clergymen and other fallible people ; but they have often had strong provocation, if not positive ex- cuse, in the utterly unsympathetic and even ag- gressively hostile attitude of those whom they are striving to enlighten. And then, again, there is another class of per- sons to whom science is not so much an uninter- esting, or an atheistic, as an unprofitable thing. They can see the use of philanthropy, for the phil- anthropist aims to help the poor, to rescue the de- graded, to instruct the ignorant, and to care for the neglected and the outcast. Charity opens her tender arms, and little children gather at her side 8* I ly The Relations of Science to Modem Life and take shelter beneath her ample robes. The shackle falls from the slave, and the scales from the eyes of the blind. And then, over against all the wealth and enterprise and luxury which are the characteristics of our modern civilization, there rises so vast and so wretched an army of the dis- eased and the uncared for, that some of us think we cannot do too much to succor and relieve it. But the services and the claims of science are less obvious. "We see how it has vexed and dis- turbed the preachers and the theologians, and how it has grappled with great problems which it has not always solved. Both the men of science and their ecclesiastical adversaries, when contending, like the archangel Michael and the devil, about not the body of Moses, but the body of man, re- mind us sometimes, by their worn and jaded as- pect, of that compositor in a Parisian printing- office who, after wi'estling from midnight until morning with the abominable and hopelessly ob- scure manuscript of a great French novelist, was met on his way home in the gray dawn by a fel- low-workman. " Merciful powers ! " exclaimed his companion when he looked him in the face, " what terrible disaster has befallen you ? " " None ! " said his companion grimly ; " none. I have been spend- ing a night with a manuscript of Balzac." After somewhat the same fashion, both the friends and the foes of science, after spending their nights with more than one illegible manuscript of natm'e, return to us so worn and irritated by the strife, that we cannot conceive what all the toil and con- ii8 The Relations of Science to Modern Life troversy can be good for. It might be worth while to remember, however, that, in the intellectual as in .the physical life, exercise and effort may some- times be good, if only for their own sake. The brain works best when the circulation has been quickened, and in the interests of a torpid liver it may now and then be worth while to saw half a cord of wood, even though when the job is done there is nobody else to be warmed by it. But in an age which plumes itself upon being practical, it is perhaps better simply to recall some of those services of science to our modern life which have been in the direction of obvious utility, healthfulness, comfort, and progress; and to this end nothing is more instructive than the contrast between modern life and life in other and earlier times. Let me be understood here as using the term "modern" in its most narrow and restricted sense. Indeed, it would not be neces- sary to go back half a century in order to discover how enormous has been the influence of science, its wonderful discoveries, and its scarcely less won- derful applications of these discoveries, upon the character and the happiness of our modern life. If, in addition to this, we should choose to go back a hundred or two years fm'ther, the contrast be- comes so immense as to be almost incredible. In a clever sketch which appeared a few years ago in one of our American periodicals, a good-natured satu'e holds up for the public amusement our pres- ent craze for the inconvenient and the antique. A youth who is called upon to be from time to 119 The Relations of Science to Modern Life time the guest of a childless and widowed aunt is a good deal surprised, on arriving at her comfort- able mansion for his Christmas holidays, to find that his aged relative has taken up her carpets and taken down her pictures ; that the doors have been wi'ested from their hinges and the ample panes of plate-glass from the windows; that the walls are adorned with old and hideous delf plates, which to the nephew's uncultivated eye seem worthy only of a place in the scullery ; that the f m'nace fire has been put out in the cellar and the gas cut off in the street. His aunt has had a bad cold in the head, and he gives himself a headache and sore eyes by striving to read the evening paper with one candle; but he is admonished that he is assist- ing at a reform in the interests of high art, and he consoles himself with this reflection as best he may. A year passes before he returns to repeat this experience, and then, to his dismay, he finds it much more severe. His own quarters have not hitherto been invaded. But on entering his bed- room, he discovers that its cozy and well-cush- ioned furniture has disappeared completely. A huge and clumsy carved chest does duty for the handsome dressing-bureau, a segment of badly polished steel has been substituted for the cheval- glass, the ample and inviting arm-chairs have van- ished, to be replaced by sundry rather rickety three-legged stools; the Croton has been remorse- lessly cut off and the stationary wash-stand torn out, while in its place there appears a dismal tri- pod which instantly suggests that most unpleasant 1 20 The Relations of Science to Modern Life appendage to a dentist's chair, holding not a basin, but a beggarly bowl, strikingly antique in form and equally impossible to use. Yet another year passes, and the nephew re- turns again. As before, he arrives in the even- ing. Blundering over an oaken settle in the hall, which barks his knees and entraps him into tread- ing on a huge hound that promptly fastens his teeth in the calf of his leg, he finds himself at length in the presence of his eccentric relative. The candles have vanished, and in their stead the walls are hung with iron sockets into which are thrust pine-knots for torches. The smoke is blind- ing, and the ah' is equally frigid and foul ; but the youth manages, in spite of it, to discern his aunt seated in the middle of the room upon a pile of skins. The carpets are gone, and the rugs have followed them. The chandelier has disappeared, and the candelabra have been retired once more to their ancient repose in the garret. On the smoked and dismantled walls, here and there, there hangs a weapon or a drinking-horn, no one of which would the estimable lady in the utmost extremity have known how to use; and over all these broods an odor emanating from some ancient hangings which have come down, the youth learns, from "William the Conqueror, and which, from their vigorous perfume, must have been used al- ternately as horse-blanket and table-cloth by all his long line of descendants. The climax which cures this mania does not con- cern us this evening ; but the moral of such a story 121 The Relations of Science to Modern Life is not far to seek. Could we restore, as under the glamoui* of some transient fashion we are tempted to, those old forms and usages and suiToundings which belonged to the life of our ancestors, we should speedily discover not merely of how much comfort, but of how much breadth and movement and fullness, we had robbed om- lives. The things of which already some of us have grown so weary that we would fain discard them altogether have changed the whole face of modern society and made existence another thing. Take the inven- tions and discoveries of the last forty or fifty years (as I said a moment ago, we need not go farther back), and consider what they have been. Fifty years ago we had no telegraph, no ocean steam- ships, no street railways (no dream even of their more elevated rivals), no aniUne colors, no kero- sene oil, no steam fire-engines, no painless surgi- cal operations, no guncotton, no aluminium, no magnesium, no electroplating, no spectroscope, no positive knowledge of the stellar worlds, no submarine cable, no telephone, no electric light These are some of the things that have been added to our resources during the last forty or fifty years. If I were an expert instead of a neophyte in sci- ence, how almost indefinitely I might add to the list! Meantime, there is something which even the most unscientific observer can do, and that I may attempt for a few moments now. In speaking of the relations of science to our modern life, it is at least easy to indicate how large is oui' indebted- 122 The Relations of Science to Modern Life ness to science in the matter of travel, of art, and of health. Let us look at modern science briefly in this threefold relation. Some one has called a ship the "noblest master- piece of human genius, the most expressive type of man as the conqueror and lord of na- ture."^ But the ship which such a wi'iter had in mind was such a ship as that in which Nelson fought, or on whose deck our own Peny and Far- ragut won their early laurels. Indeed, we call the galleys in which the soldiers of the Roman empu-e crossed the Mediterranean, ships; and still more, the vessels that brought Columbus to the West Indies, and the Pilgrims of the Mayfloiver to Ply- mouth Rock. But what pygmies and cock-boats were all these craft — aye, even the swift-winged merchantmen which forty years ago carried the commerce of England and America — compared with what we know to-day as an ocean steamer ! Once he would have been laughed at who built a ship of iron ; to-day science has taught us how to build not only the hulls, but the masts and rigging of ships of iron. Once he who dared to prophesy that the time would come when a vessel could be driven clear across the Atlantic by some artificial force, in the teeth of adverse winds and currents, would have been promptly dismissed to a lunatic asylum. Not long ago the proposal to reduce the journey from our own shores to those of G-reat Britain to a period of fifteen days was greeted with shouts of ridicule. To-day even the most cautious 1 Dr. A. p. Peabody, "Christianity and Nature," p. 117. 123 The Relations of Science to Modern Life and conservative of steam-navigators is making it in little more than seven. All this is apparent before we have boarded one of these floating monsters. What a spectacle is that which salutes us when we stand upon its deck, or climb down into its hold! Ascend to the bridge while the pilot gets his ship under way, and strive to take in the vast- ness and perfection of this marvelous construction. Go below into the engine-room and watch that perfect mechanism, huge and massive like the columns and arches of some ancient temple, and yet working, when once the motive power has been applied to it, almost with the smoothness and precision of a watch. Descend yet further into the bowels of this leviathan of the deep, and if you have the nerve to do it, run the gantlet of the roaring fires that heat the mighty boilers. Con- sider what tremendous forces are generated and garnered here, and then ascend to the deck again and observe with what instantaneous obedience and absolute docility they are made to do the work. The commander lifts his hand, and straight- way the huge mechanism begins to throb, and the ship has set out uj)on her voyage. Yonder, in the pilot-house, steam has displaced the half-dozen or dozen men who in rough weather were wont to struggle with the wheel, and the touch of a single hand turns the helm hither and thither at its will, and guides the vessel with sure and unerring pre- cision. In all this there is an ingenuity of con- trivance, an adaptation of means to an end, which 124 The Relations of Science to Modern Life so interests us that we do not always look beyond. But a little reflection would teach us that no in- genuity of contrivance can be gi'eatly efficacious unless there be the application of some scientific law behind it. Has it ever occurred to us, now, that it is the study of these scientific laws and theii' mastery, and then their application to prac- tical results, and not capital or enterprise or gov- ernment subsidies, which have built our (well, I believe it is n't ours, but let us make believe for the sake of the argument) splendid steam marine and made the modern steamship the marvel of the world? We talk of the power of capital, but in the highest view, money is the most impotent and unproductive thing in the world. It is mind that creates machinery, just as it is alone the power of ideas that can create an institution; and when we see an ocean steamer, if we would account for its existence, we must go back to that first germ of its triumphant growth, that initial protoplasm of the whole mechanical and marine evolution, which challenged the boyish curiosity of James Watt. Between that initial perception of the power of steam and a modern steamship, what an almost infinite distance! What has bridged it but the toil and patience and almost supernatural insight of scientific study? Wliat difficulties have barred the way, and with what indomitable perseverance science has overcome them! Do we remember that there is no smallest contrivance, no slightest adjustment of compensating forces or movements, valves or pistons, no cylinder or governor or 125 The Relations of Science to Modern Life cut-off, nor any least accessory, that has not been thought out and wrought out in the brain, with endless mathematical calculations, and carefuUest weighing and measurement of the application of force, the laws of resistance, and the like I Do we realize that not merely in the matter of its machi- nery, but in every step of a ship's construction, from keel to topgallant mast, the one indispensable requisite that must preside over the whole pro- cedure is an adequate and accurate scientific knowledge ? Nay, more : do we realize that in this respect the steamship is merely the type and image of eveiy other conspicuous agency in the matter of hu- man locomotion I The gi-ading and engineering of routes of travel, the construction of railways and bridges, the safety and efficiency of the engines that draw us and the carriages in which we ride, the system of signals that lines our path, and that makes a modern railway journey an experience of unintermitted espionage by sentinels who cannot go to sleep, the telegi'aphic flash that signals our departure and anticipates our arrival — do we re- member, I say, that for all this we are indebted not, as we so often think, merely to a clever in- genuity, but to a thorough and scientific know- ledge which has made that ingenuity possible, and so has furnished the capital with which it has achieved its wonders ? The modern traveler, threading the hiUs and val- leys of Palestine, finds traces of the half-disin- terred aqueducts which it is supposed were built 126 The Relations of Science to Modem Life by Solomon himself. The foreigner, riding over the lovely plains of the Campagna in the early spring- time, sees the still imposing ruins of those old Roman roads builded long ago by the emperors. And in such things one finds the clue to what did so much to make the Hebrew Empire and the Ro- man Empire, each of them, great in their time. But what were all these victories over natui-e — these ancient highways that once bound together the elder East and the elder West — compared with those wonderful achievements of civil engineering which have, in our own age, bridged the ocean and scaled the Alps, and belted this mighty continent from sea to sea with its endless iron girdle? As one climbs the steeps of the Rocky Mountains and thunders on through the narrow and yawning canons that lead him to the Pacific, — as he sees no obstacle which is not tunneled or surmounted or circumvented, — as he sees no unforeseen prob- lem which is not somehow grappled with and solved, — as he sees, in one word, the whole round world, by means of the marvelous triumphs of modern engineering and the marvelous agencies of modern travel, made neighbor to New York, — as all this stands forth at once to confront and convince him, one may at least partially realize bow enormous is the indebtedness of our modern life to modern science. But, again : that which transforms this modern world of ours, and more than anything else smooths away its roughnesses, dispels its monotony, and charms equally the imagination and the taste, is 127 The Relations of Science to Modern Life Art. Do we realize, however, as adequately as we ought, the indebtedness of Art to Science? You cannot rear a palace or a cathedral, any more than you can build a bridge, without a constant appeal to the principles of science. No more could you compose a song or a symphony. In a word. All art is mathematical. Music equally with aritlmie- tic is a science of numbers; Pythagoras and Orpheus were equally identified with its early development, and it was better understood by Newton, La Grange, and Euler, than by Mozart or Beethoven or Rossini. The problem of the flute-note is discussed in the " Principia " with the harmony of the spheres. The relative magnitude of the pipes of the organ, the length of their respective vibra- tions, and the quahty of the resulting tones, form a series of numerical proportions no less definite and uniform than those which govern the planetary orbits; and the reason why the reed-pipes in an organ are oftener out of tune than the others is that they involve complex prob- lems which stni lack a complete solution, so that the rules for their construction are but empirical. Musical intervals are rightly designated by numerical names, and might as well be represented on the score by num- bers as by notes. Colors have their mathematical as well as their chemical laws, and as they are separated in the prism or combined in art, they indicate relations which can only be expressed by abstract formulae. Painting has no merit unless the drawing be true, and all true drawing corresponds to one or another mode of mathe- matical projection. ^ The practical rules of even the inferior arts — the rules recognized by the laborer who knows not the 1 Peabody, "Christianity the Religion of Nature," pp. 131, 132. 128 The Relations oj Science to Modern Life multiplication-table — are derived from certain ele- mentary but indispensable scientific laws. Were it not that science has defined and demonstrated those laws, we should still be at the same low point of civilization with our Mohawk and Onondaga predecessors. But let us look at the subject from quite a dif- ferent point of view. A youth beside me in the omnibus the other day drew from his pocket a well-worn envelope, and furtively extracted from that in turn a photograph. Straightway, as a sur- reptitious glance over his shoulder revealed to me, a fair young creature beamed upon him, and the fact that he was being jolted down town to deliver a parcel of samples faded utterly from his young mind. For the moment the omnibus became the boudoir of beauty (I believe that is the correct phrase), and the youthful trafficker was nerved anew for the tedious monotonies of trade by the halcyon visions of "love's young dream." But fifty years ago such solace and inspiration would have been to such a one impossible. A painted minia- ture upon porcelain or ivory would have con- sumed a year's salary, and would then have left the youthful spendthrift bankrupt. What an em- blem thus that tiny photograph becomes of the services of science — to art, do I say? — nay, to sentiment, to poetry, to imagination, to the affec- tions ! For the " artist," as he is wont to style himself, who took the photograph is merely a mechanical workman who has made use of certain scientific 9 129 The Relations of Science to Modern Life discoveries in optics and chemistry. That he can take a photograph at all is owing to that initial experiment long ago of Priestley's, when, with a glass bottle, some chloride of silver, and a piece of dark paper out of which some letters had been cut with a penknife, he produced what was probably the first specimen of sun-printing. And it is be- cause the studies and discoveries of Scheele the Swedish chemist, of Wedgwood, of Sir Humphry Davy and of our own Draper, of Daguerre and Talbot, have enlarged and widened the sphere of knowledge in this direction, that the art of photog- raphy to-day exists. It would be at once idle and vain to attempt to indicate what it has done for modern life. Such achievements are beyond com- putation. In its services and contributions to kin- dred arts, to the popularization of knowledge, to the cheapening and multiplication of forms of beauty and grandeur, to the comfort of the sorrow- ing and separated, to the accurate and truthful writing of history, to the progress of nearly all the sciences, to the cause of justice and philanthropy, its usefulness and influence have been simply in- calculable. Behind the question of a higher and wider culture, however, there is another and primary in- terest which relates to the \igor and well-being of the faculties which we cultivate. At the basis of all human happiness and human usefulness is the question of health. Mens sana in corpore sano is a principle which we cannot ignore or disregard. It is true that Mr. Grreg, in his "Enigmas of Life," 130 The Relations of Science to Modern Life has undertaken to show that "bodily pain and disease are not only compatible with, but may di- rectly contribute to, the loftiest efforts of the intel- lect." According to Mr. Greg, " The effect of some disorders and of certain sorts of pain upon the nerves tends to produce a cerebral excitation ; and the stimulus thus communicated to the material organ of thought renders it for the time capable of unusual effort. Men under the stirring influences of pain are quickened," he argues, "to flights of imagination and feats of reasoning whose excep- tional splendor astonishes themselves and all who have known them only in ordinary moods of com- fort. Extinct faculties," he insists, "come back to them. Torpid faculties become vigorous and sparkling, forgotten knowledge is recovered. Mar- velous gleams of insight are vouchsafed to them." And all this because a man has an affection of the spine, or an acute attack of inflammatory rheuma- tism! It may be so, but even Mr. Greg would not main- tain, I presume, that disease and constitutional ill- health contribute, on the whole, to the efficiency any more than to the happiness of the race. One whose calling it is to work in this world (and, hap- pily, it is the calling of most of us!) wants his powers to be in such a condition that he can work to the best advantage; and scarcely less does he need that his surroundings shall be such as shall contribute most effectually to nourish, to conserve, and to recuperate those powers. Do we realize how largely modern science has contributed to this '3' The Relations of Science to Modern Life end ? There is a cheap ridicule that scoffs at sani- tary science, and that exults in the problems which as yet it has not wholly solved. Who ever claimed that it had exhausted the whole domain of hygienic knowledge, or that its disciples were any less liable than other students (except students of theology !) to lose their way sometimes! But there are cer- tain facts and figures in regard to our modern life which stare us in the face. One is that through the discoveries of medical science the average death-rate in certain zymotic diseases has been de- creased nearly fifty per cent. Another is that the average length of human life has been increased from thirty-three years to considerably over forty years. Our great life insurance companies, whose profits have been so enormous, owe their splendid success to the fact that they have based their cal- culations upon an average death-rate commonly accepted in England fifty or seventy-five years ago. But people live longer than they did fifty or seventy-five years ago, and they are better pre- served and in every way more vigorous while they live. Fewer infants die, and in the struggle from infancy to maturity the risks in every walk of life have been vastly decreased. And why! Simply because science has illuminated the whole domain of life. It has taught us how to build and venti- late, and above all how to drain, our streets and houses. It has taught us how to nourish our bodies and our brains. It has taught us how to take care of our eyes and lungs and every other most vital and sensitive organ. It has done far 132 The Relations of Science to Modern Life more than art or philanthropy, or even religion, to make the home of the poor man and of the rich man alike purer and safer and healthier. It is not a gi'eat while since the prevalence of consumption in certain parts of our country was simply fright- ful. It is stiU a terrible and most destructive scourge. But science has taught us that not only this, but other kindred diseases are almost invari- ably found in connection with imperfectly venti- lated and overcrowded schools and dwellings, — in a word, that bad health means, in such cases at any rate, bad air. It has gone so far as to show just how the centers of life may be poisoned by such influences alike in man and in the lower or- ders. And over against these perils to every-day life it has set its cautionary signals with equal skill and efficacy. In fact, what step is that which we may safely take without first invoking the guid- ance and protection of science ? It is not a gi-eat while since we who live in cities were notified that our foremost domestic necessity was to prove the agent for our wholesale destruction. Croton, con- ducted as it was to our kitchens and pantries, was to be the death of us. Lead is a poison. "Water conducted through lead pipes takes up the poison in the pipes and conveys it to our tea-pot, and thus we were all doomed. But at this point science in- terposed to remind us that while water oxidizes lead, and so produces oxide of lead, which is both a soluble and poisonous compound, there is a still further action which takes place, by means of which this oxide combines with carbonic acid 9* 133 The Relations of Science to Modern Life (which is usually contained or held in solution in most waters), forming thus a salt. This salt is the carbonate of lead, and is insoluble. And the inside of our water-pipes usually becomes coated with a hard, insoluble substance, which, unless there are other disturbing agencies which come in and inter- fere, makes a lead pipe almost safer and better than others. But of all this we only dare to be assured when science has turned its illuminating lamp upon the whole subject, and at once solved our perplexities and silenced om* fears. In our ignorance, we seem to have no other alternative save f atahsm or superstition unless we turn to it ; and if we were without its guidance we should speedily find ourselves paralyzed and helpless. You will easily perceive, from these familiar il- lustrations, how much fm'ther I might proceed in the same direction. But in speaking of the rela- tions of science to modern life, I am reminded that there is one other service which science has ren- dered to our age, which is, perhaps, really gi-eater than all the rest. In his address at the farewell banquet given to him in this city, Mr. Tyndall used the following words : They who are drawn to science as a vocation must, I venture to think, be prepared at times to suffer a httle for the sake of scientific righteousness, not refusing, should occasion demand it, to hve low and he hard to achieve the object of their hves. I do not urge upon others that which I should have been unwiUing to do myself. Let me give you a fragment of personal history. In 1848, wishing to improve myself in science, I went to 134 The Relations of Science to Modem Life the University of Marburg — the same old town in whicli my great namesake William Tyndale, when even poorer than myself, published his translation of the Bible. I lodged in the plainest manner, in a street which, perhaps, bore an appropriate name while I dwelt upon it. It was called the Ketzerbach — the heretic's brook — from a little historic rivulet running through it. I wished to keep myself clean and hardy in an economical way, so I pur- chased a cask and had it cut in two by a carpenter. Half that cask, filled with spring water over night, was placed in my small bedroom; and never during the years that I spent there, in winter or in summer, did the clock of the beautiful Elizabethkirche, which was close at hand, finish striking the hour of six in the morning before I was in my tub. For a good portion of the time I rose an hour and a half earlier than this {i. e., 4:30 a. m.), working by lamp-light at the differential calculus, while the world was slumbering around me. And I risked this breach in my pursuits, and this expenditure of time and money, not because I had any material profit in view, but because I thought the cultivation of the in- tellect worth such a sacrifice. There was another motive also — the sense of duty. There are sure to be hours in the life of every young man when his outlook will be dark, his work difficult, and his intellectual futm'c uncer- tain. Over such periods, when the stimulus of success is absent, he must be can-ied by his sense of duty. It may not be so quick an incentive as glory, but it is a nobler one, and gives a tone to character which glory cannot impart. That unflinching devotion to work, with- out which no real eminence in science is attainable, im- plies the stern resolve, " I work not because I always like to work, but because I ought to work." In science, how- ever, love and duty are sure to become identical in the end. The Relations of Science to Modern Life It is that noble illustration of these words of Mr. Tyndall's which scientific men in our own day and land have given us, which is, perhaps, the grandest service that they have rendered to our time. In an age absorbed in pursuits and enter- prises chiefly because they pay, we have had the inspiring example of men of rare gifts and of indomitable perseverance who have consecrated themselves to science, not for its pecuniary re- wards, but for the love of truth itself. In an age whose first question forever is not, What are the larger laws and inner secrets of the world in which we live? but rather. How can you convert your knowledge or your discoveries into a marketable commodity ? we have had a class of men who, with preeminent modesty and often exceptional self-denial, have devoted a lifetime to unwearying studies and unceasing investigation. While we have slept all over the land, they have watched and toiled, and often starved as well. " They have labored, and other men have entered into their labors." For one man who has reaped any ade- quate pecuniary reward for his discoveries and in- ventions, there have been hundreds who neither have done so nor have sought to ; for them it has been reward enough to pass for a little within the veil that hides the mysteries of nature and of science, and then to return again, their faces shin- ing with the splendors of which they have caught a glimpse. How can we adequately estimate or honor the services of such men ! In a selfish gen- eration, they have taught us the glory of unselfish- n6 The Relations of Science to Modern Life ness. In a sordid and self-indulgent generation, they have been the heroes of a new crusade. Scattered through all our land, in institutions of learning scantily endowed and meagerly equipped, there are men living on salaries that the cook of any New York club would refuse with indignant contempt, who, if they had brought their brains to some great commercial center, and put them to what we call, with our narrow vision, some " prac- tical" use, would have been themselves the mer- chant princes to whom, now, they must sue for patronage. All honor to these, the martyi's, of- ten, of a neglect and indifference as cruel as it is unintelligent. They have given to life a new mo- tive and a loftier ideal. They have given to om' waning faith in human nature a new impulse and a new spring ! And what, in turn, have we given to them ? In their struggles to redeem our common country from that discredit to which de Tocqueville re- ferred when, thirty years ago, he wrote, " It must be confessed that, among the civilized peoples of our age, there are few in which the highest sci- ences have made so little progress as in the United States," ^ how much s}Tnpathy have men of science had from their fellow-citizens? I do not forget the instances of such a sympathy which, here and there, salute us; but, as a rule, is it not true that we have left these slaves of the lamp to be, too often, the victims of a suspicious or indifferent neglect? The history of this Academy is, I fear, 1 " De la D6mocratie en Am6rique," etc., tome ii, p. 36. The Relations of Science to Modern Life hardly a history of ardent and effusive cooperation on the part of the citizens of New York. There has been no such eagerness to throng its pubhc meetings or to pursue its members with insatiable enthusiasm into the retirement of privacy as has made the lives of my friends President Newberry and his associates a burden to themselves. When the professor goes botanizing among the June flowers on the banks of the Bronx, I do not ob- serve that he is followed by quite the same throng of ardent men and women, young and old as well, whom one meets at certain periodical intervals on their way to Jerome Park. In a word, how much of the homage of disciple- ship has science won in our day and in this com- munity ? A friend, to whose courteous but persis- tent urgency my presence here to-night is owing, has reminded me that Lord Derby once told the Edinburgh students that many a young man went to the bad for lack of finding a congenial sphere of intellectual exertion. Sir Roderick Mm*chison was a mere fop, a cornet of the Guards, until the lady whom he married saw the power that was in him, and drew him to that department of study where afterward he reigned a master. There are young men to-day in our colleges, or not long out of them, who have found in a department of scientific study the most genuine happiness, and in the pur- suit of truth for its own sake the most abundant rewards. They have come to know what Fresnel meant when that gifted Frenchman wrote to a friend: "Without doubt, in moments of disgust 138 The Relations of Science to Modern Life and discouragement I have sometimes needed the spm' of vanity to excite me to pursue my re- searches. But all the compliments I ever received from Arago, De la Place, and Biot never gave me so much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretic truth, or the confirmation of a calculation by ex- periment." Why are there not many more young men who can say sol If with the growth of wealth we are to have a leism-e class among us, may not some of these wisely and worthily conse- crate themselves to an earnest and unselfish dis- cipleship to science? Are there not worthier in- terests than a pigeon or a polo match on which the gilded if not golden youth of our generation may expend their energies f It is the ambition of our age to make life rounder and broader and fuller than the life of our forefathers. We smile at their narrowness and compassionate their igno- rance. But what are we doing to widen the hori- zon, not of our amusements and luxuries, but of our pm'suits, and to make the life of to-day not merely more comfortable, but more intellectual? In other cities — and by that word I do not mean merely Boston — I am assured that bankers and lawyers may be met who find their recreation in private cabinets of natural history, and in personal studies in the physical sciences. Is it not worth while to consider whether a more genuine satisfac- tion and a more wholesome enjojonent or recrea- tion may not be found in this direction than in the sports and excitements which too generally en- gross us? U9 The Relations of Science to Modem Life And finally, in view of the enormous services of scientific investigation wherever it has been pros- ecuted and encouraged, is it not worth while for the merchants and capitalists of New York to in- quii*e whether they may not wisely give to science a more generous assistance and a more substantial sympathy than they have yet vouchsafed to it? Said Mr. Tyndall, in the last of those lectures on Light which he delivered in this country in the winter of 1872-73 : When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, and when Penn made his treaty with the Indians, the newcomers had to huild their houses, to chasten the earth into cultivation, and to take care of other and more pressing interests. In such a community, science, in its more abstract forms, was not to be thought of. And at the present hour, when your hardy Western pioneers stand face to face with stubborn Nature, piercing the mountains and subduing the forest and the prahie, the pursuit of science for its own sake is not to be expected. The fii'st need of man is food and shelter; but a vast portion of this continent is already raised far beyond this need. The gentlemen of New York, Brooklyn, Bal- timore, and Washington have aheady built their houses, and very beautiful they are; they have also secured their dinners, to the excellence of which I can bear tes- timony. They have, in fact, reached that precise condi- tion of well-being and independence when a culture, as high as humanity has yet reached, may justly be demanded at their hands. They have reached that ma- tm-ity, as possessors of wealth and leisure, when the in- vestigator of natural truth, for the truth's own sake, ought to find among them promoters and protectors. 140 The Relations of Science to Modern Life Mr. Tyndali's words, I think you will own, are not less true or less pertinent to-day than when he spoke them nearly ten years ago. We have no kings in America, but we have those merchant princes in whose power it is to do for science among us what crowned heads have done in other ages and in other lands. It was Peter the Great who showed himself well named in founding the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg. It was Frederick the Great who instituted the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, with Leib- nitz at its head, thus making Berlin the intellectual focus of modern scientific thought. The most en- during luster of the reign of Louis XIV, and the greatest distinction of Richelieu, is that under their auspices was founded the French Academy; and one of our own scientific teachers suggests that perhaps the only good thing that Charles II ever did was his institution of the Royal Academy. Mr. Tyndall thinks that because science in America lacks this imperial patronage it is doubt- ful whether original research can ever greatly flourish among us. But if we have no grand mon- archs, we have our merchant princes; and it re- mains for them to say whether one of the noblest opportunities for princely deeds does not in this direction invite them. We have had splendid benefactions to religion, to philanthropy, to let- ters, in New York. We have hospitals, and li- braries, and churches upon which wealth and thought have been abundantly lavished. We have, too, here and there, some scanty provision 141 The Relations of Science to Modern Life for the disciples of science. But too often our scientific men are constrained to abandon the pur- suit of scientific investigation for its own sake, for the purpose of such practical applications of it as shall enable them to live at all and others to live more comfortably and luxuriously. Undoubtedly we want the applier of scientific truth even as we want the teacher of it ; but behind and above them both we want the original investigator, unvexed by sordid cares of personal maintenance, whose vo- cation it is to pursue his inquiries and extend the field of discovery for the truth's own sake, and without reference to practical ends. Shall we not have him, and shall not he, in turn, have our confidence and sympathy and support? Let us thoroughly understand that every highest interest and every most sacred truth has nothing to fear and everything to hope from scientific investi- gation. The history of theological controversies with men of science would lead us to imagine some- times that modern science exists only to pull down and destroy the ancient tabernacles of rehgious faith. But the closer we come, not to the guesses, but to the facts of science, the more clearly we per- ceive that this seeming iconoclasm is only a new revelation of the eternal truth. If the last theory of creation be true, it is the revelation of a pre- arranging Intelligence more marvelous and more adorable than any that had preceded it. And thus the language of the poet, as he sings of another progress and revolution, becomes no less true in the domain, not of art, but of science and religion: 142 The Relations of Science to Modern Life Young Romance raised his dreamy eyes O'erhung with dainty locks of gold ; " Why smite," he asked in sad surprise, "The fair, the old?" Yet louder rang the strong one's stroke, Yet nearer flashed his axe's gleam ; Shuddering and sick at heart, I woke As from a dream. I looked : aside the dust-cloud rolled ; The waster seemed the builder too : Upspringing from the ruined old I saw the new. 'T was but the ruin of the bad, The wasting of the wrong and ill ; Whate'er of good the old time had Was living still. In this spirit let us hail and help forward the efforts of science to-day. If it shall attempt to pervert the Book of Nature, we may be sure that, sooner or later. He who is the Author of that book will bring its endeavors to merited confusion. But if, whether in a spirit more or less consciously de- vout, it is in honest and fearless and resolute pur- suit of the truth, we may rejoice in its enthusiasm, and gladly welcome its discoveries. And once more I ask you. Shall we do no more? If the men of science represent the more thoughtful ele- ment in the community, we who are here to-night represent the more active element. And in this cause, as in any other, these two classes must 143 The Relations of Science to Modern Life move forward side by side and shoulder to shoul- der. When they do, believe me, the result will be alike worthy of our powers and our opportunities. And therefore let me leave the subject with those stirring words of Charles Mackay's : Men of thought, be up and stirring, Night and day ; Sow the seed — withdraw the curtain — Clear the way ! Men of action, aid and cheer them As ye may ! There 's a fount about to stream, There 's a hght about to beam, There 's a warmth about to glow. There 's a flower about to blow ; There 's a midnight blackness changing Into graj^; Men of thought and men of action, Clear the way ! Once the welcome hght has broken, Who shall say What the unimagined glories Of the day ? What the evil that shall perish In its ray ? Aid the dawning, tongue and pen j Aid it, hopes of honest men ; Aid it, paper — aid it, type — Aid it, for the hour is ripe, And our earnest must not slacken Into play, — Men of thought and men of action, Clear the way ! 144 THE RURAL REINFORCEMENT OF CITIES Published in the New York Tribune, March i6, 1890 10 THE RURAL REINFORCEMENT OF CITIES WHEN, on March 12, 1888, the memorable blizzard bm*ied New York in snow, it was stated that there was hardly food enough within the limits of the city to last it more than four days. The statement probably needs some qualification, but substantially it was doubtless true. There is never in any great city, unless it is anticipating a siege, enough in the way of food supplies to last it for more than a week ; and a large part of the activi- ties of thousands of people are taken up with this very business. The " Tribune " has been discuss- ing lately the " milk question," and has gathered a mass of most interesting and impressive informa- tion as to the relation of that traffic to the life of a great city, and to the adequate remuneration of those who are engaged in it. One could not help thinking, as he read it, how promptly the question of a " paying price " for milk would be settled if only the farmers could agree upon an efficient and thorough " combine." For we can get along with- M7 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities out some things, but we cannot get along without milk. New York would make short work of the "middlemen" if it found that they stood in the way of the baby's breakfast. But, after all, milk is only one of the things on which a great city depends for its life, and which it must needs re- ceive largely from without. Blood and brawn and brains — it consumes these, too, faster than, in ade- quate quality at any rate, it produces them. On public occasions in New York such as any one of two or three of which the celebration of the cen- tennial of the Supreme Court was a very conspicu- ous and brilliant instance, one looks up and down the tables at the men who are seated about him at some thronged and stately banquet. Where did they come from? Well, they are undoubtedly "native and to the manor born," some of them. There are clever and successful lawyers, mer- chants, manufacturers, and the like, who are the sons of cleverer men who were here before them. But every now and then one catches a glimpse of some face and figure that plainly enough, like young Lochinvar, "has come out of the West," and the derivation of whose stalwart proportions and breezy eloquence there is no mistaking. Or there is a slen- der and somewhat dyspeptic-looking figure, whose nasal tone, struggle as he may to conquer or to con- ceal it, inevitably "gives him away " as a New Eng- lander. Or, yet again, there is that litheness of figure, and prolongation of the vowel-sounds, and slight softening or elision of the consonants in speech, which tell that the speaker is a Southerner. 148 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities None of these people were born in New York. None of them came here because there was an es- tate, bequeathed to them by a benevolent uncle, waiting to be paid over to them. They came here because, in the competitions and rivalries of a great city, they believed that there was the best chance for such gifts as they conceived themselves to have. If some resident cynic answered them, in the words of Daniel Webster when he was asked if there was any room in the profession for more lawyers, " Plenty of room at the top," they believed, though probably they did not say so, that that was just where they were bound. To the top — ah, yes ! that is it. That is the dream of every man and boy, of every young girl, who seeks a chance in New York. And out of that dream there arises a condition of things of which both country and city may wisely take note. The drift from the farm to the town is one of the most marked characteristics of our American life. Indeed, it may be said that almost nobody stays in the country if he can help it, and that that elder love of ancestral acres, and that traditional attachment to the old homestead which was a very real and potent thing with our fathers, and which contributed immensely to the stability and in a very real sense the dignity of rural communities in earlier generations, have largely disappeared. "What is the difference between the civilization of England and America ? " asked an American of an EngUshman. " This, at any rate," said the Eng- lishman : " that in America there is not a foot of "* 149 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities land that is not for sale, while in England there are millions of acres which cannot be bought." In a sense the remark was true, and in so far as it is, it involves an element of permanence in those communities in which it is true which among us is largely unknown. And whether it is the loosen- ing of this tie, or the depressing influence of the isolation of rural life, or the love of excitement, that di'ift of which I have spoken increases instead of diminishing, until it comes to pass that a very- considerable element of the activity of almost any large community in America is composed of those who are not native to it. Well, it may be said, it is not only unavoid- able, but indispensable, that it should be so. The waste of any great machinery is enormous, and of no mechanism is that more true than of that complex social order which makes up the life of a gi*eat city. It is here that we find the explanation of that increasing demand for young men which our modern life, in all great cities especially, so conspicuously illustrates. Most of those who will read these lines doubtless saw a recent paragi'aph as to the relative endurance of the engineers of express and freight railway-trains, in which it was shown how diiving a locomotive at the rate of fifty-five or sixty miles an hour impoverished the engine-driver's nerve, so that in a little while he could no longer run his train on time, and was taken off and put to slower work. It is a veiy significant incident, and indeed may almost be said to be tj^ical. Well-nigh everybody in a 150 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities great city is driving an engine. He is running himself on a schedule, and the demand upon him all the while is to crowd just a little more work or " sport " or excitement into the day than his ner- vous machinery will stand. And so, presently, the machine goes to pieces. The man gives out as to his brain, or his stomach, or some other organ — sometimes gi*adually, oftener suddenly, but almost always before his time. And then (I do not stop now to ask what becomes of him; but here, by the way, is a whole region which, as it seems to me, literary people have scarcely touched — and what tragic realms there are in it!) — and then, the first question is, " Where shall we find somebody, tough, cheap, and with all the fine audacity of youth, to fill his place ? " Cities do not ordinarily breed such people, and so you have the next step in the rural evolution. Here is a lad, a youth, who is burning to get " into the swim " of a great city's life. He is willing to do almost anything for almost nothing, and often he has ambition enough to resolve to do it with all his might. And over against him is the great, restless, omnivorous mon- ster, forever hungry for youth and ardor and en- ergy, waiting to absorb him into its capacious maw, and to convert him into the bone and muscle of the on-rushing civic organism. But at this point there occur the questions. What is the ratio of waste to the whole consump- tion I What is the average " life " (as they say of a car- wheel) of a man who is at work in the city ? and. How far does any one who finds his way to 151 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities town "make," in the largest sense of the phrase, the most of himself ? It cannot be denied, I think, that the waste is enormous ; that the average life is shorter than the scriptural measure of man's days, or than it ought to be ; and that it is only in exceptional cases that its results are such as are greatly to be admired or desired. And this brings me to the point at which I am aiming. Of course the reasons for failure in most instances are largely to be found where the failure was made. There was inadequate oppor- tunity, or indolence, or incapacity, or vice, and the man accomphshed little or nothing because, as we are wont to say, "It was not in him." But why was it not in him I Of course we cannot trepan a boy and put an ounce or two of gray matter into his brain-cavity. And if one has not robust health (an enormous factor in the ordinary success of life), energy, acuteness, cleverness, we cannot purchase these things for him. But estimate the initial differences between boy and boy, between man and man, as highly as you please, there still remains the almost incalculable advantage which one has whose powers, great or small, have been trained, over him whose powers have not been trained. Take, for example, that matter of physical health and endurance. When some one remonstrated with Mr. Ealph Waldo Emerson for eating mince- pie for breakfast, the great Concord philosopher replied gently, "Nay, but for what is mince-pie 152 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities made, if not to be eaten?" One could not wear it (unless as a poultice), or warm himself with it, or even " hitch it to a star " ; and, under such cir- cumstances, it appeared to a person of very gi'eat intellectual gifts a plain duty to eat it. And yet, all the same, it was not — not, at any rate, for breakfast. There are certain rules of diet that no one can long disregard without permanent injury to health and both mental and moral vigor. And as of diet, so of dress, sleep, exercise, and all the rest which have to do with that fine and com- plex instrument which we call the body. And if we could run back the record of many a man who drops dead on 'Change, or totters and falls, stricken with apoplexy or paralysis, in the street, or surrenders to some epidemic disease with scarce an effort at resistance, we should find that the fatal weakness that sapped the foundations of life began long ago in some boyish or youthful indul- gence, or indiscretion, or unbridled license, at the table or elsewhere, which could never afterward be cured by any temperance, or self-restraint, or even total abstinence, however vigilantly main- tained. Now, making every allowance for youthful greediness, recklessness, waywardness, much of this sort of folly is plainly to be traced to original ignorance. The teaching of our American homes as to the laws of health is miserably defective, and it is not less so in the homes of wealth and culti- vated intelligence than in those of ignorance and narrow means. There is an indifference, a pa- 153 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities rental ignorance, a mauvaise honte, — a bad shame, — which is silent and unobservant when it ought to be watchful and speak. And the schools are not often gi*eatly better in these respects than the homes. They are, I gladly own, striving to be better ; but taking our common-school system as a whole, I believe the time will come when we shall look back with amazement at the folly and vicious- ness of a system which, employed in teaching boys and girls a large proportion of whose usefulness, happiness, and success in life depended upon the mens scma in corpore sano, — the sound mind dwelling in the temple of the sound body, — was so largely silent as to the laws of the body, its construction, use and abuse, and the conditions on which its health and well-being depend. And so I think that if I were a public-spirited citizen, with the means to bless and ennoble at once the place of my birth and the city of my adoption, — if I were frank to recognize, as any honest mind must be, the close and vital relation between the better life of our great city and the purifying and enriching of those streams which, from villages and hamlets and homes all over the land, are perpetually pouring into them, — I would stop to consider whether it were not worth while to begin right here. Every now and then we hear of some one who has not forgotten his more mod- est beginnings retm*ning to his native place and enriching it with some generous benefaction. It is one of the finest and most engaging exhibitions of the nobler impulses of our humanity. It is the 154 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities illustration of the spii'it which goes a long way to redeem our modern life from the charge of being only sordid and self-seeking. But it is something which needs not only to be appreciated and en- couraged, but to be wisely dii'ected. And there- fore I would venture to suggest whether it might not be worth while for some successful man who is moved to build amid the scenes of his nativity a monument to his achievements in life, to consider whether he could do a better thing than to erect at some point in the country where men and boys congregate a good gymnasium with a swimming- bath and a ball-gi*ound, and a good-sized assembly- room where, now and then, men could talk to men and boys, and women to women and girls, as these classes are talked to from time to time in the Young Men's and Young Women's Associations, and elsewhere, as to the due and decent care and ennoblement of that matchless and beautiful mechanism, the human body. One is almost afraid to quote the old Greeks in this matter, but he should not be. If it be true that fine physical cul- ture was with them too often associated with moral decadence, it need not be. One may never forget that the most striking figures of the glow- ing rhetoric of the great Apostle to the Gentiles, as he described the struggle and discipline de- manded in the Christian life, were borrowed from the classic arena; and we may be sure that he would not have used them if he had accounted his illustrations illustrations of things evil in them- selves. 155 The Rubral Reinforcement of Cities But in such a scheme as I have suggested, I do not believe that any thinking man would stop at the point at which I have left it, and that just because he is a thinking man. For we may not forget that the body is, after all, but an instru- ment, not an end. The race does not exist, like a breed of Hambletonians or Alderneys, for certain physical results of pace and bone and muscle and production. These are incidental to those intel- lectual and moral achievements which are the call- ing of those who were put into the world not only "to replenish the earth," but "to subdue it," to master its obstinacy, to rend open its secrets, to study its laws — to discover — so far as by discovery they may — its origin, to master its forces, to dispel its barbarism, and so to make ready a highway and a home for the coming of the nobler kingdom that is to be. And that men may do these things requires not only physical culture, but supremely the powers that think and reason and compare, and remember and contrive, and love and hate, and aspire. Now, then, come back for a moment to a lad or a youth who has come up to town from the country. He gets, it may be, sooner or later, a fair foothold. He pushes his way, step by step, till he climbs to the high places of his business or profession. But unless he has had during his youth what are still, in America, exceptional advantages of culture, a man under such circumstances will find himself increasingly plagued with a sense of his intellec- tual deficiencies, his want of general culture, his is6 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities poverty, — no matter what the size of his bank account, which, he learns, is in that direction as well as some others simply and utterly impo- tent, — his poverty in things that give him the easy command of his powers, that give grace and dig- nity to the occupancy of great place, that make him at home among the thinkers and leaders of his time, and that make history and politics, and art and letters and religion, a living unity, in- stead of a bafOing and unmeaning jumble and con- fusion. And here it is that there would seem to be no unworthy opportunity for such a use of wealth as would make both a higher cultm-e and higher as- pirations more easily attainable things. You can- not have a college, or even a high school, in every village or at eveiy cross-road ; but it would not be impossible to multiply centers of illumination such as were typified by the district-school libraries of forty or fifty years ago. It is just here that such an institution as Mudie's circulating library, which sends books in parcels all over England, and col- lects them weekly or monthly, has considerable suggestive value. The smaller centers, country towns and railway stations, from which the ordi- nary commodities of life are distributed, might well be centers of distribution for food and furni- ture of a higher order. And then, in connection with some lyceum erected by the munificence of some native of the neighborhood who has made his fortune in some metropolis, we might wisely revive the lecture course of thirty or forty years 157 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities ago. It has been killed, I know, by deterioration; and the evolution of the lyceum into the minstrel show — Mr. Wendell Phillips and Dr. Chapin being replaced by the "end men" — is not an inviting pic- ture of om* American progress. But the minstrel show has well-nigh had its day. There is a very genuine and prevalent hunger for something more nourishing; and I am disposed to believe that there are many places where something that at once stimulated intellectual curiosity and satisfied it would find a hearty welcome. And so of the highest culture of aU. The re- ligious problem in America is a very grave one, though I am sanguine enough to believe that it has elements of equal promise and hope. In such a paper as this I cannot, of course, undertake to discuss even a mere fragment of it ; but I may per- haps ventm-e to suggest how it is related to the subject which I have thus far been considering. In a general way, religion stands preeminently for the teaching that inculcates and the motives that promote and strengthen good morals. But nobody will pretend that, in the gi'eat majority of cases, it might not, with greater advantages of various kinds, promote them far more efficiently by a higher standard of culture and character in the clergy, by improved conveniences for public wor- ship, by the religious training of children, with a due (not an undue) regard to the influence of the imagination and the poetic sense in connec- tion with such means as are usually employed to awaken nobler aspirations, enkindle faith, and up- 158 The Rural Reinforcement of Cities build, often in the midst of a very coarse material- ism, the spiritual Kfe. In his "Gospel of Wealth," Mr. Andrew Carnegie puts this in a veiy striking and admirable way : Every millionaire may know of a district where the httle cheap, uncomfortable, and altogether unworthy wooden structure stands at the cross-roads, where the whole neighborhood gathers on Sunday, and which, inde- pendently of the form of the doctrine taught, is the center of social hfe and center of neighborly feeling. The administrator of wealth has made a good use of part of his surplus if he replaces that building -with a per- manent structure of brick, stone, or granite, up the sides of which the honeysuckle and columbine may climb, and from whose tower the sweet-toUing bell may sound. The millionaire should not figure how cheaply this struc- ture can be built, but how perfect it can be made. K he has the money, it should be made a gem, for the educat- ing influence of a pure and noble specimen of architec- ture, built, as the pyramids were built, to stand for ages, is not to be measured by dollars. Every farmer's home, heart, and mind in the district will be influenced by the beauty and grandeur of the church. And many a bright boy, gazing enraptured upon its richly colored windows and entranced by the celestial voice of the organ, will there receive his fii'st message from, and be carried under the sway of, the gloriously beautiful and enchant- ing realm which Ues far away from the material and pro- saic conditions which surround him in this work-a-day world — a real world, this new realm, vague and unde- fined though its boundaries be. Once within its magic circle, its denizens Hve there an inner life more precious than the external ; and all their days, and all their ways, their triumphs and their trials, and all they see, and all 159 Tbe Rural Reinforcement of Cities they hear, and all they think, and all they do, are hal- lowed by the radiance which shines from afar upon this inner life, glorifj-ing everything, and keeping all right within. Mr. Carnegie goes on to say that having reared such a building, its builder may wisely leave it to be supported by the people; but I am disposed to think that some partial endowment, made con- ditional upon the maintenance of the ser^dces, would not be amiss. It is certainly not amiss that ministers should be partially dependent upon their people. It is not desirable that any one who is set as a preacher and teacher of righteousness should be absolutely so. There is a painful page of our American religious history, just here, which at this moment I do not care to tm*n. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn": but too often there is no remonstrance when insolent wealth, sitting in the vestry or in the session or in the pews, threatens to " stop the supphes," and so effectually muzzle the mouth of the anointed witness for God and duty and right- eous dealing. We should have a higher type of manhood, of rectitude, of pm*ity, of political and personal honesty in Wall Street and in Albany, if we could have a higher type of truth-speaking and God-fearing manhood for the pulpits of the land. Here is a chance for wealth. Let it endow some rural pulpits, and then leave the trust in wise and faithful hands that will see that it is wisely ad- ministered. Imagine such an endowment com- i6o The Rural Reinforcement of Cities mitted to the wisdom and integrity that to-day- administer so many of our American colleges ! It might even be intrusted to a bishop occasionally ! So much by way of suggestion as to the rural reinforcement of cities, its character and training. Of course I am not unmindful of what has doubt- less been in the mind of my reader all along, " This is all very well," it may be said ; " but it touches a very small part of those who pour in such ceaseless streams into almost any great city like New York. What are you going to do with those sti'eams that come to us, not from within the borders of om' own land, but from beyond them ? The reinforcement of the population of New York comes, a very small part of it relatively, from in- land towns, villages, and homes. The ratio of im- migration to a gi-eat city is as ten to one, more probably as twenty to one, in favor of that which comes from foreign lands. What are you going to do with these I " That is indeed a very large and increasingly grave question. But it is a question by itself ; and all the more because it is a question of exceptional gi*avity, and because at present, under existing laws, we can do little — indeed, almost nothing — to regulate the character and the quality of foreign immigration into New York, is it of paramount importance that we should en- noble the quality of our own. Multum, non multa. This is not so much a question of numbers as of character. Never more urgently than to-day did New York need a nucleus, a saving seed, of right- eousness and integrity to stand the strain of its 11 i6i The Rural Reinforcement of Cities fevered and reckless life. And the men who are to do this, the men round whom, as centers of columnar and immovable civic virtue and upright- ness, their fellows are to rally in times of popular passion, of selfishness, of social and political cor- ruption, are men who have been trained from their youth in upright and manly ways, and in whom vigor and culture and reverence unite to make them worthy leaders of their kind. Happy the city that has the wisdom and the forecasting munificence that conspire to rear such men; and then, when the time for them to serve the city, the State, the nation, shall come, the wisdom to trust and honor them ! 162 CHRISTIANITY AND THE CRIMINAL A PAPER Read before the Church Congress, at Richmond, Va., October, 1882 CHRISTIANITY AND THE CRIMINAL I AM to speak this morning of the relation of Christianity to the criminal classes. With the secretary's hand upon yonder bell, I must needs define my subject, if only to nan*ow its discussion. We are not concerned during this hour, I take it, with Eussian Christianity, nor with the Egyptian criminal. What the Archimandrite of Moscow ought to have done in the matter of murderers of their fellow-citizens in the last Slav insurrection against the Jews, how the congress of the powers should deal with Arabi and Tewfik Pasha, are doubtless interesting and opportune questions ; but not here and to-day. Our concern is with om- own Christianity and our own criminals, and it is time that we awoke to it. For the situation to-day is unique and anoma- lous. On the one hand, in this Anglo-Saxon civili- zation of ours is a vast force, organized, aggressive, reformatory. We may call it Christianity, the church of God, in this new world of ours, or the organized expression of the religion of the New "* 165 Christianity and the Criminal Testament. It is no matter. We all know its aims, its origin, and above all its Master. He an- nounced himself as having a special mission to the prisoner and the criminal. He came into the world to distinguish these by his notice, and to uplift them by his touch. This chm-ch, with its church congress, is his chm*ch a gi'eat deal more than it is yours or mine or anybody else's. And over against this church of his there stands to-day a vast army of men and women, and — God forgive us that it should be so ! — of children, too, who can be designated in no other way so readily and ex- actly as to call them criminals. The criminal classes! How it ought to enlarge that infinite swagger with which we Americans lift ourselves above the outworn civilizations of the elder world, to remember that whatever may be their throngs of convicts and criminals, we can rival, if we cannot outnumber them ; that however many condemned felons there may be in their Bastilles, we can equal them with the multitudes that crowd the cells of our State prisons ! How much it ought to deepen our complacency, too, to remind ourselves that whatever may be their indifference in any other and older land to their criminal classes, ours is as great, if not greater ; that however profound may be European ignorance concerning the condition and prospects of these classes, American indiffer- ence can easily match it ! Here is a vast constitu- ency numbering in America to-day some hundreds of thousands, concerning whom it is safe to say that not one Christian disciple in a hundi*ed thou- i66 Cbristianity and the Criminal sand ever hears from year's end to year's end one word as to his personal duty from Christian pulpit or from Christian press. No ! I am wrong there. The twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew's gospel is still included in the church's calendar ; and un- less the minister tampers with it, he must needs remind those who hear him read the lessons that one test that bars the gateway of the upper sanc- tuary will be the question : " I was in prison, — yes, I, — in the image of some poor lost child of mine. Bid ye visit me f " But, beyond this, what is taught as to the duty of Christian people to the felon? as to the relation of Christianity to the criminal ? I will tell you what is taught, not by precept, but far more eloquently by practice. The instance which I shall relate belongs on the other side of the water; but it describes, as I think you will own, what is no less true on this. Two young collegians started from Oxford one day on an outing, with a hired horse and gig. One of them was a no- bleman, and the other a commoner. They found themselves at length at Bristol, without money, and without means of communicating with their friends. They sold the horse and gig, and started back to college, intending to pay the livery-stable keeper from resources awaiting them on their re- turn. But they were delayed, and when they reached Oxford were arrested and tried for the theft. The nobleman was shielded by his rank, but the commoner was convicted and transported to New South Wales. He served his term, was discharged, went to work in the colony, prospered, 167 Christianity and the Criminal married, and rose to respectability, if not to emi- nence. Forty years later he returned to England. A business transaction brought him into court one day as a witness. His examination was concluded, and he was about to step down, when suddenly the opposing counsel turned upon him and said sharply : " Were you ever transported ? " The wit- ness blanched and quivered, but did not lie. " Yes," he answered; "forty-three years ago, under cir- cumstances which I can — " " Never mind the cu'- cumstances, sir. The fact is all I want to know. I have no further questions to ask this witness, my lord!" said the lawyer, and sat down. The witness sat down too, smitten, speechless, ruined. Denied an explanation, he left that court-room bearing a stigma which society — Christian, com- mercial, fashionable society — could not forgive. It shunned him from that hour as though he had the plague. His credit was gone, his business was destroyed, and in three months he died of a broken heart. Yes, this is what Christianity, our Christianity, the Christianity of week-days and society, the Christianity of deeds, not words, has to say to the criminal classes : " Shave as close as you please to the edge of criminal wrong-doing, and nothing shall harm you. Steal, but don't be found out ; defraud, but put the money back before quarter- day; break your trust, and indulge your greed or lust or illicit ambition, but keep inside of the line of detection, and it is all right. But yield under some strong pressure, and so blunder in your theft, Chmtianity and the Criminal your intrigue, youi* defalcation, that you can't cover it up, and the world, the Christian world, your brethren in the family, whose elder brother is the Lord Jesus Christ, will have no more of you." I am not unmindful, in saying this, that in more than one community there is a Prisoners' Friend Society, in which those noble Christian men who adorn the Society of Friends have always borne a conspicuous and honorable part, nor that here and there in jails and penitentiaries you will find some brave and tender heart trying to lead men out of that living hell into which their sins have cast them. But this I af&i-m: that Christian society stands, as a body, with a front of brass turned inexorably toward the criminal classes. God for- gives, but they will not. The woman that was a sinner he once welcomed, but they spurn her. The man who had fallen he beckoned back into his own loving fellowship, but they repel him. In one word, the criminal and the criminal classes stand to-day, as a rule, in the large, to the Christian Brahman as a Pariah, not to be touched, not to be owned, not to be defiled, if one can help it, by even so much or so little as his passing shadow. The jail-bii"d, this is the fowl turned verily out of the Christian ark, and for whom the deluge never subsides ! It is time that such an infamy were ended. Let us be pagans, agnostics, Mohammedans, what you will; but let the church of Christ have done call- ing itself by his name until it can show that it has not gone barren of his quickening spirit. 169 Cbmtianity and the Criminal In behalf of the prisoner in his cell, of the pris- oner discharged from his cell, of the criminal who has come under sentence of the law, and of the criminal who has served his sentence and who is tm'ned loose to find his footing in a hostile world as best he may, we want the awakening of an in- telligent Christian sympathy, and of some practical expression of brotherly helpfulness and regard. And foremost of all, in behalf of the prisoner in his cell. I have alluded to the hardship of one who has served his time for some penal offense, and who has then to walk the lonely and stony pathway of a discharged criminal. But the moral dangers of one who, for the first time especially, finds his way within the walls of a prison or pen- itentiary are immeasm'ably gi'eater. Our crim- inals and convicts may be roughly said to be made up of two classes. There are, first, those who are in prison for the second, third, fourth, or possibly twentieth time. These are persons who belong to the criminal class by dehberate election, and who spend their time, while serving one sentence, in devising crimes with which they will celebrate their discharge from the custody of the State. I would not seem to describe this class too harshly, and so I will rather quote here the language of one who himself served a term of seven years in a penitentiary, and who has put upon record his impressions and experiences. There are [says this wi'iter] thousands of criminals to- day whose fathers and mothers are as famihar with half 170 Christianity and the Criminal the prisons of the land as they are: Many were born in prison, many more in the ahns-house, and nearly all of them have from their very cradle lived in an atmosphere of vice. A clever professional thief whom I met at Port- land two years ago told me that he got his fii'st lessons in thieving from his mother. His father, he said, " was on the square," " an honest working man," as he called him, in a grocery house. The idea of morality enter- tained by this class may be inferred from the fact that what this prisoner meant by being "on the square " was that his father, though as habitual a thief as his mother, had never been caught. But he and his belonged, of deliberate choice, to the criminal classes. And what impression this writer formed of these classes from seven years' close and intimate contact with them he himself tells us. They are [he says] simply dead to all sense of shame. They approach more closely than before I could have conceived possible to the idea of universal and consum- mate depravity. They think nothing of passing their Hves in inflicting misery upon their f ellow-creatui*es, and they do it not only without remorse, but with a hideous raptui-e. Their social habits are as loathsome inside the prison as in the vilest dens without. They have so fixed a propensity for all horrible vices, that if the sensuality, the poltroonery, the baseness, the effi'ontery, the men- dacity, and the barbarity which distinguish the every- day life of these professional criminals were depicted in the character of a hero in a criminal romance, it woidd be set down as a caricature. I am not exaggerating when I solemnly declare that whatsoever things are filthy, whatsoever things are unjust, whatsoever things 171 Christianity and the Criminal are hateful and fiendish, if there be any vice and infamy- deeper and more horrible than all other vice and in- famy, it may be found ingrained in the character of the professional criminal. Compared with him, Gulliver's Yahoos were refined gentlemen ! Now, plainly, Christian civilization has a duty to such a class as this. If there is anything left in it to which the nobler motives of the New Testament can appeal, it must not be left unad- dressed. But, meantime, a church which repre- sents the moral force in society has a plain voca- tion to say to the State : " You shall not so handle these pests of society, in your so-called puni- tive dealings with them, as to make them pest- breeders! Do your punishments punish? Do your penalties deter? You have banished the scourge and the lash — do you realize that you have thus thrown away the one weapon that can deter mul- titudes from vice?" The question is not one which is any longer open to serious discussion. When, a few years ago, a respectable person could hardly walk through the London parks at night without the peril of being garroted, the authori- ties, after ha^dng tried in vain to restrict this bar- barism by other means, imposed a few sentences of whipping. The thing operated almost with the suddenness of magic. In thirty days the crime had virtually disappeared, and so long as that pen- alty stands over against it, it is safe to say that it will not be heard of again. Such an isolated fact has abundant meaning for 172 Christianity and the Criminal the Christian public. There is a maudlin senti- mentalism that coddles the criminal as though he were the innocent victim of the evil forces of so- ciety ; and there are hardened criminals who trade upon such a sentiment with insolent effrontery. For all such it is the function of the church of God, as representing his outraged moral law, to in- sist that the State, its executive (who so often of- fends a healthy moral sentiment by exercising the pardoning power on insufficient grounds), its high- est and its lowest officials on the bench, in jails, and prisons, and anywhere else that law is admin- istered and crime punished — that all these, our representatives, shall have for the incorrigible and the impenitent a front of brass and a hand of iron! But there is another and a very different class of criminals; and it is for these most of all that our Christianity of to-day needs to be concerned. A vice of om' prison system which cannot be too strongly reprobated or too speedily reformed is that which herds together such hardened offen- ders as I have just referred to with those who from their first false step find themselves for the first time within prison walls. Said one of these : I can forgive the counsel for the prosecution who so cruelly exaggerated my crime, and the judge who dis- missed me to my doom with such cold indifference ; but the State, and the Christian society beliind it, which con- demned me during all those dreary years to the society of hfe-long felons and hardened and infamous offenders — these I cannot forgive ! 173 Cbristianity and the Criminal Nor ought we^ even though the sentence lie against ourselves ! For here, at this crisis in the life of one who has fallen under sentence of the law, is the turning- point of his career. I dismiss for the moment the question whether the penalties of law should be construed as merely punitive or as reformatoiy. But surely it is worth while, if possible, so to administer them that they shall not eventuate almost inevitably in the moral and spiritual ruin of the offender. As it is now, what are the facts in the case ? I give again the testimony of a con- vict on this point, as of incomparably more value than my own. What [he writes] does the present convict system do for those first offenders who do not yet belong to the class of habitual criminals ? It sentences them to the so- ciety of, and thrusts them into close communion with, the abandoned villains and professional thieves whose char- acteristics I have aheady described. It virtually hinds them as apprentices for a shorter or longer time to learn the trade of law-breaking. They are, during the whole term of their imprisonment, under the influence, tuition, and example of miscreants who, from the cradle to the grave, exist upon outrage and plunder. They are by these men initiated into all sorts of tricks and dodges by which they can evade prison disciphne and elude the burden of work during their imprisonment, and at the end of it enroll themselves in the great and yearly in- creasing army of professional criminals. And worse than this. A lad, a young gii-1, a young or middle-aged man or woman, transgi'esses 174 Cbristianity and the Criminal the law for the first time. Behind them and the temptation to which they yielded lies often a re- cord of blameless living and comparative inno- cence. What has become of this last when they leave the doors of a prison after having served the term of their sentence? Condemned day after day to the fellowship of the vile and depraved, it is a moral miracle if any sense of decency or in- tegrity sm'vives ! Said a discharged convict, speaking of this to a friend : There are times now, on my way home and in the presence of my pure young wife, when the memory of the hideous oaths, the vile speech, the infamous themes and schemes, which were forced upon me when I was a prisoner, so rings in my ears that I find myseK shudder- ing at the thought of them, and wondering most of all how I ever escaped the pollution and ruin, both moral and spiritual, with which they threatened me. Go into the women's wards in one of our great prisons or jails, and see how all ages, classes, de- grees of criminals are herded together dming the so-called work hours. Look at some of the faces ; catch, if you can, some of the speech that prevails there; and then take notice of a young girl, a domestic convicted for theft, a woman who has struck an angry blow in some sudden burst of passion, and consider what these who are there for the first time will he after they emerge, at the end of six months or a year, from such society. I arraign the neglect of some scrupulous and dis- 175 Christianity and the Criminal criminating system of classification in dealing with criminals of both sexes, as one of the darkest stains upon our Christian civilization. I arraign it as the fruitful soui'ce of crime, and as the moral mur- der of human souls. Here is our first, our most urgent duty to the criminal. We are to see to it that, in punishing crime, we take at least some reasonable precaution against the permanent de- gradation and ruin of the criminal. I have thus spoken of the way in which so- ciety should deal with the criminal when he re- turns to it, and of the duty of the State while he is still under the sentence of the law. One word more as to the character and responsibilities of those to whose custody the criminal is committed. I confess that here the outlook seems more dis- heartening than in any other direction. Our jails and prisons are in the custody, usually, of those whose appointment is the reward of pohtical ser- vice. Of any question as to their moral and in- tellectual qualifications, except it were asked in derision, who hears? Doubtless, often, there are men and women in such positions who do their duty, or try to. All honor to such for a service so noble, under conditions so discouraging! But what can we expect, as a rule, under our present system ? A prison superintendentship is a pohti- cal prize ; and he who by his services to the party is supposed to earn it must use his power of subordinate appointment to reward his political associates and inferiors. That first — inevitably, infiexibly first; and then if, afterward, he can 176 Chrlstianit/y and the Criminal find an intelligent, a humane, a conscientious dep- uty or assistant — very well. But what shall we say of the prevalence of these characteristics as a rule ? What a grand sphere here for criminal ser- vice reform ! I have done. If I understand its meaning and office in the world, it is the duty of Christianity, our Christianity, in its relations to the criminal, to insist upon — {a) The classification of prisoners. (6) The decent restriction of the pardoning power. (c) The elevation of the character and qualifica- tions of jailers and wardens ; and {d) The helpful sympathy of Christian society with discharged criminals. I should like, if in this scamper of discussion the opportunity had permitted, to have spoken — {a) Of the relations of prison labor to the con- vict and his reformation. (&) Of intellectual culture and rudimentary edu- cation, both mental and physical, in prison ; and (c) Of the large and difficult theme of religious ministrations to the convict. But enough if I have merely torn open this soiled and disreputable page in our social his- tory, that others who are to follow me may read its lessons in clearer and more stirring tones. Our duty as churchmen is surely a very plain one. The message which has been intrusted to us is a message of love, of hope, of redemption, even to the prisoner. Do you remember, in Victor 12 ,^.y Cbristianity and the Criminal Hugo's great picture of "Les Miserables," the meeting of Jean Valjean and the Bishop? Val- jean, having been sentenced to five years' impris- onment for stealing a loaf of bread, is resentenced repeatedly for trjdng to escape, until he has re- mained in confinement nineteen years. At length he is released, and given the yellow passport that describes him as a discharged convict. The paper that liberates him is the stigma that denounces him. Every honest man's door is closed against him until he knocks at the gate of the old Bishop. There, to his surprise, he finds welcome, food, and shelter. But the evil spell of his old life is still upon him. He cannot sleep for remembrance of the silver plate upon the Bishop's table. He rises in the night, robs his benefactor, and flies. Of course he is retaken and brought back. The gen- darmes who have captured him lead him into the Bishop's presence with the convicting bundle in his hands. The old prelate rises to meet the group as they enter, and before a word can be spoken exclaims: "Ah! Valjean, I am glad to see you ! But I gave you the candlesticks too, which are also of silver. Why did you not take them away with the rest?" He tells the gendarmes that they have made a mistake, and may retire; and then, going up to the cowering wi-etch and putting his hand upon his shoulder, the Bishop says: "Jean Valjean, my brother ! you no longer belong to evil, but to good. I withdraw your soul from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and give it to God. Never forget that you are to 178 Cbristianity and the Criminal employ this silver — your silver now — in becoming an honest man ! " The setting of the picture may be exaggerated and French, but the spirit of it is righteous and Christian. Ours is a gospel, not of implacability, but of pardon. Ours is a rehgion, not of damna- tion, but of hope. Let us see to it that we carry its message even to those " spirits that are in prison " ! 179 A PHASE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Published in " The Century," November, 1884 A PHASE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE IN a striking passage in his "History of Eng- land" (vol. i, p. 332, Am. ed.), Macaulay calls attention to the contrast between the social condi- tion of England in the seventeenth century and the nineteenth. He says : There is scarcely a page in the history or lighter litera- ture of the seventeeuth century which does not contain some proof that our ancestors were less humane than their posterity. The discipline of workshops, of schools, of private famihes, though not more eflBcient than at present, was infinitely harder. Masters, well born and bred, were in the habit of beating their servants. Peda- gogues knew no way of imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils. Husbands of decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives. The implacability of hostile factions was such as we can scarcely conceive. Whigs were disposed to mui*mur because Strafford was suffered to die without seeing his bowels burned before his face. ... As little mercy was shown by the populace to sufferers of an humbler rank. If an offender was put into the pUlory, it was well if he escaped wTith life from the shower of brick-bats and paving-stones. If he was 183 A Phase of Social Science tied to the cart's tail, the crowd pressed round him, im- ploring the hangman to give it the fellow well, and make him howl. Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasm-e to Bridewell on court days, for the purpose of seeing the wretched women who beat hemp there, whipped. A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt for a galled horse or an over-driven ox. . . . The prisons were hells on earth, seminaries of every crime and of every disease. At the assizes the lean and yellow culprits brought with them from their cells an atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged them signally on bench, bar, and jmy. But on all this mis- ery society looked with profound indifference. Nowhere could be found that sensitive and restless compassion which has in our time extended a powerful protection to the factory child, to the negro slave, which pries into the stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship, which winches at every lash laid on the back of a drunken sol- dier, which will not suffer the thief in the hulks to be ill-fed or over- worked, and which has repeatedly endea- vored to save the life even of the murderer. It is nearly thirty years since these words were written. It is interesting to speculate how much more strongly and strikingly they might have been emphasized if they had been written to-day. What we call social science, or the study which concerns itself with the elevation of men in their homes and in their social and municipal relations, was then comparatively in its infancy. The wide- spread activity of individuals and associations busying themselves with the condition of the pau- per and criminal classes; the devotion of women 184 A Phase of Social Science of wealth, leisure, and social refinement to the reform and improvement of our jails and hospi- tals and almshouses; the active interest and ex- penditure of capitalists in the improvement of the homes of the poor; the scientific study of questions of drainage and ventilation, of foods and food supply; the whole subject of the rights of women and their emancipation from restrictive and oppressive prejudices ; the mutual obligations of employer and employed, with the closely related questions of strikes and trades-unions, cooperative building and manufacturing schemes, and the like ; the societies for the prevention of cruelty to chil- dren and for the better provision for the education and recreation of the poor, the laboring classes, the crippled, the blind and the deaf and dumb — all these manifold forms of activity in the interest of the advancement and elevation of society are largely the product of the last quarter of a cen- tury. What now is their relation to Christian ethics % or, to put the question, as I prefer to do, in a more concrete and homely way, What has the religion of the New Testament to say to our modern social science % Two things, it seems to me, it has to say with equal emphasis and explicitness, one of them in the way of warning and the other of encourage- ment. And, first, in the way of warning. The moment that men begin to gi-apple with the evils which afflict society, they are in danger of forgetting or 185 A Phase of Social Science ignoring the everlasting principle of personal re- sponsibility. In the face of poverty, disease, un- employed labor, intemperance, and kindred forms of human wretchedness, the fii'st impulse of a hu- mane spirit is to devise some means of relie^dng these various ills, without adequately recognizing the causes which have produced them. Hence we have those public and private institutions of char- ity which are so preeminently the characteristic of our own generation. No sooner does the cry of want arise than some benevolent hand opens the door of a refuge or lodging-house, where men and women are fed and housed without money and without price. No sooner does a man fall behind in the strife of trade or the professions than he turns to the charitable to carry him over the hard times until some rising tide of prosperity shall fill the channels of his wonted calling. No sooner does an unscrupulous father abandon his family, or an extravagant mother prefer to appropriate her means to drink or dress instead of spending them in the decent maintenance of her children, than some institution steps forward to take the custody of the children and relieve the parents of their charge. " Don't you think we had better send such a one's children to the Home for the Friendless?" said a warm-hearted woman to a neighbor. " On what ground ? " was asked. " Be- cause their mother neglects them so habitually," was the answer, as though it would be wiser to disband a family than to educate its head into a wiser and more Christian recognition of her duty 1 86 A Phase of Social Science to her own offspring. A man may make his home a hell and his children congenital drunkards and vagabonds, and the most efficient method of deal- ing with his vices which we seem thus far to have devised is to send his family to the poorhouse and himself to the inebriate asylum. Over against every form of thiif tlessness and prodigality we erect an institution to interpose between the in- dividual and the righteous penalty of his own ex- travagance. It is the bitterest curse of the phi- lanthropy of om' generation that it has created a sentiment among the poor, the reckless, the intem- perate, and the indolent, that, somehow or other, come what may, they will be provided for. I arraign this policy on the ground that it trav- erses the plain teaching of that most helpful vol- ume which has ever been given to men, and which we know as the New Testament. I open the pages of that volume and I read: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap." I open them again and I read : " He that provideth not for his house- hold is worse than an infidel." And again : " If any man wiU not work, neither shall he eat." And yet again : " If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee." I find the great Apostle to the Gentiles setting an example of self- respecting independence which is at once an in- spiration and a rebuke to all subsequent time, by working at his trade as a tent-maker with his own hands. I read in his own letter to the chui'ch at Ephesus : " Let him that stole, steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands the 187 A Phase of Social Science thing which is good"; and in all these various passages I see so many side-lights throwing into stronger relief the gi^eat principle that that social compassion is neither wise nor Christian which lifts the burden of individual obligation or in- terposes to arrest the penalty of personal unfaith- fulness. Nay, more: I arraign our social policy on an- other and still higher ground. A Christian social- ism must needs be based on the commandment, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," and in its practical workings it will think more of the in- fluence of what it does upon its brother man than upon its own feelings. But our ordinary dealing with the social problems of our own time is like that of a weak mother who will not chastise her child nor suffer him to be chastised because of the pain which it causes to her own feelings. It does not occur to her that such a course of con- duct is inspired, not by maternal love, but by per- sonal selfishness. If you loved your child you would deal with him, not as your mere feelings dictated, but as his highest interests demanded; and even so, if you love yom' brother man you will do for him, not what he wants you to do for him, but what he needs to have done for him. But we have cultivated a morbid sentimentalism in re- gard to individual suffering until there must be no form of misery which we cannot straightway hustle out of sight or effusively relieve. It is enough for us that a sturdy personage sits on the curbstone begging. Where did he come from! How long A Phase of Social Science has he been there? What is the truth or false- hood of his story % These are questions for which we have no time and less taste. " Here is a half- dollar, my man ! A plague on those hard-hearted theorists who declaim against the giving of doles in the street! Do you say that you want more? Well, then, here is a ticket for a night's lodging or a free bed in the Home for the Homeless"; and, having buttoned up our pocket-books once more, we pass on with a comfortable sense of our supe- rior benevolence. Here, again, it does not occur to us that we should have done better if we had merely given our brother a kick and passed on. Yes, a thousand times better! For a kick would have been, at most, merely a physical indignity, whereas, as it is, we have subjected this fellow- creature of ours to the keenest moral indignity; for we have said to him, by an act far more elo- quently expressive than any words: "Morally you are already on the way to that most abject degra- dation, a state of chronic pauperism. Well, then, lie there where you are in the gutter and rot. I have no time or inclination to help you to stand upon your own feet. It is easier and more con- genial to leave you where you are, and by what I may do for you to encourage you to stay there." It is high time for men to ask the question whether this is or is not substantially the teach- ing of cm* social beneficence, as we actually see it about us. And here, as I believe, enters the domain of Christian ethics. There is much of human suifer- 189 A Phase of Social Science ing, ignorance, and poverty which is the fruit of misfortune, that it is our plain duty always and everywhere to relieve. There is much more which is the fruit of indolence and thriftlessness and vice. To interfere between this latter and its pen- alty is not, and never was meant to be, the province of our social science ; nor, if I read the New Testa- ment aright, is this the teaching of its pages or of the Master himself. " Give us of yom* oil," cry the improvident and foolish \irgins to their wise and more provident companions, and according to the teaching of our modern socialism, and of much of our modern philanthropy, the answer ought to have been: "Certainly, dear sisters; take the larger share, and so learn how generous we can be to others less forecasting than ourselves"; but in fact the answer is : " Not so ; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye . . . and })uy for yourselves^ But again, the mission of Christian ethics to our modern social science is to speak not only a word of warning, but also a word of encoiu'agement. That branch of science has concerned itself largely in our own generation with the relations of capital to labor, with the improvement of men's homes and streets, of prisons, and almshouses, and hospi- tals. One of the most encouraging features of the social progress of our time has been the hearty and often generous interest which landlords and capitahsts, men of science, and men of the various professions, have shown in bringing every latest scientific discovery to bear upon the practical eleva- 190 A Phase of Social Science tion of the poor, and the physical and intellectual improvement of the less favored. The immense sums of money spent for placing educational ad- vantages within the reach of the masses who spend their lives in daily toil, and the sums, scarcely less vast, which in our mother-country, if not in our own, have been spent in building model cottages and tenements and even factories for the poor, are a demonstration of this. But in all this expenditure of money and wealth there is often involved an experience of discouragement which it is idle to ignore. The classes who are most benefited by these reforms do not care for social science. Model dwellings and rules of hygiene are equally distaste- ful and uninteresting to them. If you appeal to them to conform then* Hves to wiser rules of clean- liness, temperance, frugality, and forecast, too often you appeal to them in vain. Essays on light and drainage and ventilation which laboriously you cu'- culate among them, are left unread. Even the most elaborate and costly schemes for their advantage fail of any practical effect. It is tolerably well as- certained, for instance, that the Peabody lodging- houses have not reached, or at any rate have not greatly benefited, the class for whom they were designed. These have shunned homes involving rules of decency, cleanliness, and self-restraint, which would have been to them intolerable, as they would have shunned a prison ; and the Pea- body model tenements became the homes of the better class of skilled mechanics, and even of cler- gymen and other professional men, by whom they 191 A Phase of Social Science were in no sense needed. In other words, no argu- ment of the science of sociology by itself was strong enough efficiently to reach the class to whom it was addressed. But when social reforms have allied themselves to the spirit and motives of the New Testament, when a woman like Octavia Hill has gone into the homes of the poor to reform the evils of London tenements, not with the power of mere money or mere organization, or merely scientific theories, but with the power of personal sympathy, the sit- uation has been wholly changed. The transform- ing power of His love who " having loved His own, loved them unto the end," has transfused the spirit of scientific reform with the spell of self-sacrificing and Christ-like enthusiasm. It has taught men that highest motive for cooperating in the upbuilding of a higher and purer social law and life, which is to be found in the brotherhood of man and the father- hood of Grod. It has quickened the brain and the hand of science with the magic spell of love. It has enlarged the vision of the reformer to see in human society, here and now, the type and pro- phecy of that diviner society yet to be. And so, when men's hearts have grown cold, and their hands weary, with what has seemed so often a fu- tile struggle, it has bidden them lift their eyes to One who gave himself for his brethren, and so has taught them a lesson of immortal hope and patience ! And this is the message of encouragement which Christian ethics brings to our social science 192 A Phase of Social Science of to-day. How shall we deal with these ui'gent social problems of the hour, — whether they con- cern the reclaiming of our fallen brethren and sis- ters here at our very side, or our fellow-creature, the despised Chinaman, who has found his way to our far-off Pacific coast, — save as we look at each and every one of them in the light that streams from the cross of One who gave himself to lift men wp f In such a spirit is the mighty influence that is to reach and redeem society; and when our whole social philosophy is interpenetrated and sat- urated with that spirit, then and not till then shall our social problems find their final solution. And therefore, when we find ourselves discour- aged — as who of us does not? — with the slowness of that progress which any social reform makes among us, — when we face the obduracy, the prej- udice, the dense and stolid ignorance, which al- most any and every movement in the interests of a sounder social science is sure to encounter, — this becomes at once our loftiest motive and our most lasting encouragement. We are not working for an hour or a day; we are not striving for the advance of a race which was born yesterday and will perish to-morrow. Our faith in social pro- gress is at once part and prophecy of a grander future. Over all that we do to make life cleaner and wiser and healthier, moves the plan of Him whose will it is to make His children immortal. And our social science will be a spell of power and blessing among men just in so far as it is trans- fused by His spirit and ennobled by His love. 13 193 NOBILITY IN BUSINESS ADDRESS Memorial of Anthony J. Drexel, delivered at the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, January 20, 1894 NOBILITY IN BUSINESS THE occasion which assembles us to-day is at once significant and unique. A citizen of Phil- adelphia who, so far as I can learn, never held political office and never challenged public atten- tion, dies in a foreign land after a life of sixty-six years spent in this community in the pursuit of his ordinary business. Of engaging personal quali- ties and of honorable record as a banker, he is moui'ned by his friends and fellow-citizens and borne to his rest amid the various tributes of af- fection and respect. Such men, though not as common as we might wish, are not unknown among you; and the career which I have thus briefly outlined could hardly be regarded, viewed from customary standpoints, as in any way excep- tional or phenomenal. There have been many such men in the history of every commercial com- munity, and we are glad to honor their virtues and to own their beneficent influence. And then the current rushes on. The tide of our modern life is so vast in its volume, so rapid in its pace, so irre- 13* 197 Nobility in Business sistible in its momentum, that we cannot long ar- rest it, nor ourselves. New tasks command us ; new emergencies challenge us ; a new day, with its own large anxieties, dawns upon the night of our grief, and we stanch the tears that blur the eager vision, striving the more clearly to discern its way amid the distracting intricacies of our modern life, and hasten on. But it has not been so here. The larger part of a year has gone since there flashed beneath the Atlantic that sharp electric shock which told us that a friend had ceased to breathe, and we have not forgotten him, nor can we. I do not know how it may be with most of you, but there must be a good many men and women here to whom Philadelphia will never be quite the same place that it was a year ago. We wake, we rise ; from end to end Of aU the landscape underneath We find no place that does not breathe Some gracious memory of our friend. Out of a few lives has gone that which, because it was so dear and close, will leave them stricken and bereaved forever. Yes, but beside this, which comes to all of us when sorrow comes, and has taken from us that which is most dear and pre- cious, out of that larger life which makes the life of a community, a State, a nation, something has gone which leaves a gap behind, wide and deep and ineffaceable. A very striking sketch of our departed friend, by one of your own citizens, 198 Nobility in Business depicted, at the time of his departure, what, not extravagantly, it called his regal traits. He had them. He was a large pattern of a man. He ruled in that financial realm in which he was so potent a personality by virtue of a kingly right of his kingly gifts. Anywhere, under any conditions, his would have been a commanding mind, and his influence a commanding influence. Reverently be it said, God made him so ; and just because his was so dominant and so exceptional a personality, you here have not been able to forget him. This occa- sion, occurring so many months after his departure, finds its final explanation in himself. No simu- lated sorrow has produced it. No labored prepa- ration has ripened it. It simply could not be other- wise. We could not let Anthony Drexel go away without coming together as we have come this af- ternoon, to speak to one another of his knightly and noble presence, and to garner here the im- pressions of his strong and symmetrical manhood. For, in the first place, Mr. Drexel was built upon large lines intellectually. The world of our mod- ern life has its own types of gi-eatness, which are a legitimate product of the age which has pro- duced them. It is the fashion, I know, in some quarters to disparage them because they are not the types which, in other ages, revealed greatness, and because they are neither picturesque, nor he- roic, nor scholastic. There have been ages, we are told, which produced not wealth, nor luxury, nor railways, but men. There have been ages which built not canals, nor steamships, nor commercial 199 Nobility in Business warehouses, but soldiers and States and civiliza- tions. We are all familiar with Mr. Ruskin's bit- ing sarcasms upon our modern life, which finds its worst and most vulgar illustration, as he tells us, in our own America. And this sort of thing has been reiterated so often, with such fine and sting- ing scorn, and with such infrequent challenge or contradiction, that many of us have come to be- lieve it. But of all verbiage that calls itself phil- osophic criticism, it is the thinnest and cheapest that ever deceived unthinking souls, and it is high time that somebody said so. It is high time that, in an age which is wont so often to disparage its best energies and to belittle its own aims, we should understand their true sig- nificance and recognize their ultimate tendency. In what we are wont to call the chivalric or heroic ages, the best energies of men were devoted to warfare, simply because the world was as yet so poorly educated that it had not learned that the ends for which a great many honorable wars were waged might have been as effectually attained in another and less cruel way. Again, in ages when men, as in England, won glory and honor and immortality in struggles for Magna Charta, their deeds and their conceptions seem so noble and so splendid because they stand out upon so dark a background of popular ignorance and servitude. But to-day our best men use their best powers for other ends, because these ends, though they may seem, superficially, so often merely commercial and sordid, are, after all, the ends of our advauc- 200 Nobility in Business ing civilization, and with it an advancing Christ. " Every valley shall be exalted, and every moun- tain . . . shall be made low : . . . the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain," cries John the Baptist in the wilderness ; " and all flesh shall see the salvation of God!" Who has not thought of these words as he has seen in om* Wes- tern wildernesses the mighty conquests of our modern engineering? The Romans built their roads for their armies ; but after the armies came the apostles bringing to heathendom the heavenly learning of the cross. And so it has been in the history of our modern enterprise, and of the genius that has inspired and promoted it. A great engineer conceives a great achievement, but it is only a great financier who makes it possible. And it is this gift, that penetrating forecast which makes man, at his highest estate, what Shakspere calls him, " a being of large discourse, looking before and after," which ranks, as I maintain, and not unworthily, beside the noblest achievements of soldier, or statesman, or scholar. One lifts his eye from the narrow range of his domestic environment, and casts it over that vast area which makes our American continent, and whose has been the transforma- tion ? The courage of the pioneer, the heroism of the emigrant, the daring of the explorer? Yes; but behind all these, the calm and far-seeing mind holding in its grasp the resources of two hemi- spheres, who can see what currents may be turned into these newly opened channels, and how a 20 1 Nobility in Business statesmanlike energy can widen and deepen them for the largest good. Some one has said that we have no more states- men because they have all become bankers and raihoad presidents. May it not be because it is bankers and raikoad presidents which our present emergency demands, even more than it demands legislation. There are some of us who think that if we could have a little less of that, we should be all the better for it ; and if to others it seems com- mon and vulgar for a man to be concerned with currency and transportation, rather than with ideas and the forces which engender them, it may be well to remember that among these forces that which puts men in circulation, by challenging en- terprise and promoting travel and traffic, is no less necessary than ideas themselves — nay, that there can be no ideas as quickening and elevating forces without that which rewards labor and feeds hun- ger, whether of the mind or the body, and pays en- terprise, and builds roads and factories and ships and cities — which is money. I beUeve that Mr. Drexel discerned this very clearly. I believe that he came very early to see a long way beyond his particular calling or busi- ness, into that larger realm of commerce and j&nance by which the whole round world is bound together. I believe that he early came to recog- nize that wealth was one of the great forces — not the greatest force nor the only one, but still a great force which had in itself, indeed, no moral or intellectual quality any more than steam or elec- 202 Nobility in Bminess tricity, on the one hand, or language and culture, on the other, have a moral or intellectual quality, but a force which, hke either of these or any other great force, might be accumulated or stored, and used for great ends and in a gi-eat way. I believe that Mr. Drexel early began to outgi'ow the nar- rower limitations of that business in which I first knew him, and to recognize the larger opportuni- ties and the wider relations of his calling as a banker, and when he did, to use them with a pre- eminent wisdom and in a great way. I believe that in so doing he was a most potential factor in the development of our American resources and opportunities, and I venture to think that in doing this he was doing a work as essentially great in its proportions and influence as if he had overrun western Africa with a conquering army, or negoti- ated a treaty with Spain and secured to us the possession of one of the West India Islands. But Mr. Drexel's was no less a character of distinct and unusual eminence morally. I shall never forget the significant emphasis with which my dear friend, your fellow-citizen (in appointing whom as ambassador to Italy the President of the United States, I venture to think, has honored himself scarcely less than he has honored his min- ister) — I shall never forget, I say, the significant emphasis with which, when we dedicated this noble building, Mr. MacVeagh exclaimed (I do not profess to give his exact words), referring to Mr. Drexel's princely gifts, first of the building and then of the endowment : " And not the least de- 203 NoUlity in Business lightful feature of this munificent benefaction is that it is all clean moneys What a large and seri- ous significance lay behind that homely and col- loquial phrase ! Wrote the friend who knew him best : By no act of his life did he take advantage of the misfortunes, difficulties, or embarrassments of any man or men, or corporations even, which are said to have no souls, to enhance his own fortune. He did not drive sharp bargains ; he did not profit by the hard necessities of others ; he did not exact from those in his employ ex- cessive tasks and give them inadequate pay. He was a lenient, patient, hberal creditor, a generous employer, considerate of, and sympathetic with, every one who worked for him. I do not think there could well be higher praise than that, and I have yet to hear it challenged. But consider for a moment how much that is which it means. We talk of the white heat of those fiery furnaces that tried the souls of martyrs and heroes of the elder time. Ah ! they are wait- ing for many a man, as he goes down-town to his business, almost every day of his life. The rest of us who live outside of them can never know how fierce are the competitions, how tre- mendous the strain, how all but irresistible the temptation to seize, as all in an instant, it may be, there flashes upon us some unfair advan- tage which another's action or want of action in some unguarded moment has betrayed to us. We can never quite know the subtle and benumbing 204 Nobility in Business power of that atmosphere of craft and artifice, of dubious methods and more than doubtful maxims, in which many men are called to work who live in the world of business. We can never quite under- stand how, unconsciously, one's own standards of integrity may be debilitated and deteriorated by the example of those whom his fellows applaud, whom the law protects, and whom the community, it may be, delights to honor. To hold one's self erect when all these influences conspire to make a man stoop to actions which are mean or equivocal — to keep one's scrupulous integrity unstained or untarnished — this is a task so great that only they who can measure it by experience can justly honor it. But this was the integrity of Anthony Drexel, this was the moral history of his financial career. But not the whole of it. Great as he was in this, if he had been noble only in this way, it would have been, after all, but a negative nobility. There have been other men of whom all this could be said, and, thank Grod, not a few of them. But it is a painful characteristic, too often, of a scrupu- lous business integrity, that it stops just at this point. It can be just, but it cannot be magnani- mous. It can be scrupulous, but it cannot be generous. It can pay its own debts, and " exact no more than that which is appointed," but it can- not discern that in the realm of morals that alone is true nobility of character and conduct which goes beyond the bald and dry equities, and reaches out and up into the realm of a large magnanimity. 205 Nobility in Business It is this in Mr. Drexel's history which gives to his business career its finest quahty of moral noble- ness. Says the friend from whom I have akeady quoted : Men of thought and conscience, at the beginning of theu' career, commonly adopt a inile by which theh steps are directed. Anthony J. Drexel adopted one, and until death removed him from the busy, helpful path that he had trod so long in the world of business, it was his sole guiding principle in the important and multitudinous affairs with which he had to do. That rule was : " Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." The transactions of his banks, especially during the more re- cent years of their activity, were largely with govern- ments — national, State, municipal; with great corpora- tions, raih'oads, banks, and other financial institutions, as weU as with fii*ms and indi\dduals that came to rely upon Mr. Drexel as a man of unusual sagacity and unques- tionable and unquestioned honor. If the records of this house were made pubhc, it would be perceived how often it had been the prop of public and private credit, the sus- tainer of institutions, corjsorations, firms, and persons, to whom it gave assistance when their ruin had been other- wise ine\dtable. That is what I mean by moral nobleness in busi- ness — a kind of financial statesmanship touched with the finest sensibility, and lifted to the most exalted conception of great responsibilities and opportunities. There is no test of character at once so searching and so final as the possession, in whatever kind, of great power. There are many men who have stood all ordinary temp- 206 Nobility in Business tations, but have succumbed at last to that. " Cast thyself down ! " cries the tempter to some one lifted to lofty and dizzy eminence; and too often the poor brain, drunk with its large conceit, stoops to the ignoble deed just because it can. But here was a man who, holding a great power, wielded it for the greatest good ; who held up the weak, who sustained the public credit, who be- friended tottering fortunes and enterprises, who put hfe beneath the very ribs of death and set the corpse upon its feet again — and all this in a fash- ion of such modest and unobtrusive naturalness, if I may say so, that we who saw him or knew of his doing these things never saw how gi-eat they were until he himself was taken away from us and we beheld them in their true light. And thus it was that Mr. Drexel became, in this community not only, but in two hemispheres, a strong and beneficent moral force. Every honest enterprise was stronger because it knew it could count upon his sympathy. Every equivocal and dubious enterprise, every shrewd and unscrupu- lous man, was weaker because of the necessity of reckoning with his unbending honesty and his uncompromising equity. Knaves dreaded his searching eye, and knavish undertakings were the weaker because he lived to detect and designate them. This was his moral power, and men felt it everywhere with unceasing force all the way to the end. But greater than intellectual or even moral no- bleness is that thing which we call f amiharly gi^eat- 207 Nobility in Business heartedness, even as an apostle has declared that "charity" or love is the greatest. In one aspect of it, indeed, this quality may be said to be only moral greatness in action; but in another and truer aspect it might more truly be described as a high moral purpose inspired and so transformed by a gracious affection. And of this Mr. Drexel's life was a singularly re- splendent illustration. There came to him, as life went on, a great widening of vision; and there came along with this what too often does not ac- company it, a steady enlargement of the scope and character of his sympathies and his beneficence. Let me explain what I mean by this somewhat vague language, and indulge me for a moment in the personal reminiscence which it involves. When I first knew Mr. Drexel I was myself a lad in a counting-room in this city, whose duty, among other things, it was to take to the office of a broker in Third street the uncurrent money re- ceived by the house whose clerk I was. Though the house of Drexel & Sons, as I think it was then styled, was already known as an enterprising and successful firm, I do not beUeve that at that time or any other those who composed it would have claimed that it then stood for any large influence or commanding leadership in the world of finance. All that came later, and with a steady and cumu- lative growth, and it came because of the growth of that controlling mind whose loss we are here to-day to mourn, and whose gifts we are assembled to honor. There are two types of intellect in busi- 208 Nobility in Business ness, as in letters, or art, or anywhere else. The one is that which early breaks upon us with high promise, but which never fulfils that promise. We say of some man at twenty-five or thirty, " He will make his mark — he has a great f utui-e before him." " Grive him ten or fifteen years, and he will be found among the leaders of his daj^" But he never is. His fii*st promise is, substantially, his final achievement. His youthful excellence is the high " C " in the tonic scale of performance beyond which he never climbs. At thirty-five or forty we begin to doubt about him. At fifty we accept him as an excellent specimen of respectable mediocrity, and dismiss him from the realm of our greater expectations. But there are other men who begin, it may be, with far less promise, but who, when the time comes, fit theu' achievements to an opportunity as a builder lifts the steel frame of some mighty structure, when the foundations are ready, story by story, to the lofty and dominant peak and pin- nacle of the whole. We had said of our friend: " He is a good fellow, a clever man of business, a capable lawyer or merchant," but one day he steps a little apart and above the great majority. The task, the crisis, the burden comes, and, somehow, the brain seems to gi'eaten and the shoulders to broaden, till at last we see in this modest and un- pretentious neighbor a man of large capabilities, of dominant force, " of light and leading." Yes, best of all, of light and leading in brightest ministries and noblest service. For this, as I have striven to 1* 209 Nobility in Business indicate, was the crowning glory of Mr. Drexel's career. There have been men of his class and call- ing who rose from modest beginnings to be finan- cial potencies of foremost magnitude. But they never became anything more. Having taught the world how to make money, they never taught other men how to use it. Having illustrated the highest order of ability in organization and ac- cumulation, they have been able to give to the world only the feeblest and, too often, the most unworthy illustration of the much higher art of its beneficent distribution. And here it is that Mr. Drexel's career affords, as I venture to think, so fine and high an illustra- tion of what I have called a truly great benefi- cence. From the beginning to the end of his career he was indeed a man who adorned his life, as have some others of his associates who are with us to-day, with an unceasing stream of private and personal munificence which made it true of him, as of them, that " when the ear heard him it blessed him, and when the eye saw him it gave witness to him." Of all the men whom you to whom I speak have known, I venture to say that no one was more free from the poor infirmity that exercises its charity for advertising purposes. No one but God and they whom he helped and suc- cored will ever know how wide and constant, how discriminating and sympathetic, was the reach of his secret benefactions. But amid all these, and, better still, amid all the pressure of the vast inter- ests with which in so many ways he was charged, 210 Nobility in Business he had time and thought, and steadfast and un- dannted purpose, for the great and monumental work within whose porches we are now assembled. How cai'efully and intelligently it was conceived, how steadily but deliberately it was matured, how thoroughly and comprehensively it was organized, you, his fellow-citizens, well know. He honored me — doubtless he distinguished many others with the same mark of confidence — by asking more than once for the help of such counsel as I could give him. He brooded over this large plan, he considered each separate class of those whose higher education he had in mind, and strove to understand both them and their best wants. He selected his fellow-counselors with equal pru- dence and wisdom, and when all this preliminary work was done, with singular wisdom he placed at the head of it one whose presence shall not re- strain me from reminding you of the rare and keen delight with which in this place, not a great while ago, we listened to his inaugural address as the president of this Institute, and whose eminent and varied ability in its administration has already abundantly demonstrated the characteristic dis- cernment of him who, most of all, chose him. And thus it was that our friend, by that final munificence of his munificent life, gave to his fel- low-citizens and his fellow-men everywhere the final and most characteristic disclosure of the gi-eatness of a princely heart. I may not venture here to follow him into the privacy of his personal friendships, nor into the 211 Nobility in Business innermost sanctity of his domestic life. Others who had a better right to speak of these have done so with a delicacy and tenderness which have touched us all. But I may speak of what all men who knew Mr. Drexel knew and delighted in — his especial and most engaging charm of pres- ence and bearing, the perfect flower of a refine- ment and modesty so sensitive, and a courtesy so invariable, that neither the one nor the other could ever be found wanting. The picture of his personal friendships, and of one, preeminently, with another public-spirited fellow-citizen whom we all love and honor — could there have been anything more charming and engaging than this ? Ah! how could we help loving him — nay, how steadfastly we love him still ! And so I am here this afternoon to lay this wreath, not so much of lam'el as of violets, upon his new-made grave. Do I hear some one say that the act is not unfitting, but that he who has been charged with it is none the less an intruder f Do I hear some one say, " This was our friend and helper and son, a native of our city — 'no mean city,' as he himself justly and proudly ac- counted it — all his life long"? Do I hear some other say, "There was no need to import into this occasion a strange voice and presence to speak the eulogy that belonged to the hour, when we have teachers and orators of om' own at once more gifted and more esteemed"? Believe me, there is no one among you all who can feel all this more keenly than I do. But when you claim 212 Nobility in Business for our dead friend that he was youi's alone, then, verily, I must take issue with you. We have all our municipal, or we have our national, rivaMes and jealousies. Boston girds at New York. New York indulges in its well-worn jests at the ex- pense of Philadelphia; and Chicago, in her ves- ture of new and resplendent triumph, cherishes a fine and somewhat contemptuous condescension for all of us. But when Chicago, confronted by a colossal enterprise, challenged by tremendous diffi- culties, staggered by overwhelming and utterly un- expected perplexities, rises steadily and unfalter- ingly to her gi^eat task, and accomplishes it at last with matchless and superb success, then no petty rivalries can withhold us, nor any alien in- terests restrain us, from lifting our proud and grateful shout of praise and honor to her, our sis- ter, who has done so well and nobly. And so here, and to-day. Our brother whom we are here to recall did not belong alone to you! Great as Philadelphia is, — and if I forget the city of my boyhood and my youth, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth ! — he was too great for that. Such a man as he is the property of his fellow-countrymen, and that not alone because his business interests were almost as much identified with us of New York as with you of Pennsylvania — not alone because it was our happy privilege to enjoy his friendship and some measure of his confidence and regard as well as you — not alone because he was associated with men, and with one especially who has done 1** 213 Nobility in Business for the city in which I live very much what Mr. Drexel has done for yours: but because, most of all, he was the fine fruitage of our best American manhood, and of the ideas which made the founders of this nation great ; because of this it is that we are here to thank Grod that he lived, and to bless the goodness of Him whose reverent and faithful disciple he was through a long and consis- tent career, that he conceived, that he planned, that he wrought, that he gave — best of all, that in his modest and beautiful manhood he was. These are times of tremendous financial shrink- age, we are told. But whatever else has shrunk, the stately and noble proportions of this Institute have not shrunken a hair! It is an impressive and significant illustration as to a good place for a sound and enduring investment, and most of all is it an illustration no less significant and im- pressive of the name and the fame of him whom to-day we recall. That, whatever else maybe for- gotten here, will, I venture to predict, survive and endure. The young feet that turn hither to push wider open the gates of helpful knowledge will linger, as they pass through yonder haU, to look upon the portrait of the man who put all this munificence of many-sided culture within their reach; and as they catch the firm, serene, and benignant expression that shines forth from it, will bless God with us, and with all men every- where who knew him, that Anthony Drexel lived — nay, that, though he rests from his labors, he still lives, even as " his works do foUow him." 214 THE MINISTRY OF MUSIC ADDRESS At the Dedication of the Carnegie Music Hall May 5, 1891. THE MINISTRY OF MUSIC THIS is a feast of dedication, and as, on the field of historic Grettysburg, Lincoln, with matchless eloquence declared. In a large sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot con- secrate, we cannot hallow this ground ; the brave men who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here ; but it can never forget what they did here ' — so here, and to-night, and all through the long vista of tuneful days and nights which open from this hour, wiU it be theirs who are to make it vocal with song and resonant with melody and harmony, to dedicate and rededicate this noble building to those noble uses to which this evening it is set apart. But though in any technical sense such an occa- sion as this demands no set oration, it has been judged that it would not be quite complete with- 1 President Lincoln's Gettysbiirg oration. 217 The Ministry of Miisic out, at least, some words of greeting and congrat- ulation. And, as I fondly believe, I have been chosen to speak them because I happen to repre- sent that largest class among us most largely rep- resented within these walls. There is the scien- tific musician, he of the thorough knowledge of aU the various mysteries of musical construction, and of the intricacies of harmony and thorough- bass ; he who knows the history, the resources, and the relations of every musical instrument, and all the manifold possibilities of that incomparable musical instrument, the human voice; he who is steeped in all the musical lore of the past, and abreast of all the musical possibilities of the pres- ent. We look at such an one with awe, and Hsten to him with reverence ; and such an one listens to us, as I can testify from painful personal experi- ence, with a kind of gracious condescension in which pity for our audacity, and tenderness for our ignorance are mixed in about equal parts. But how far apart is such an one from those others still groping among the elements of the great science of music ; still wedded, as a pungent critic has pointedly put it, to the " poor worship of the commonplace " ; still crying like spoiled and wayward children for a tune, and impatient, like the " gods " in some theater gallery, of any strains to which they cannot keep time with their heels ! These are at the other extreme; but between them there is a great multitude, of which you and I are, I was tempted to say, — or, at any rate, of which I am, — representative. To these there are 218 The Ministry of Music mysteries in Wagner and Brahms, and the rest of their greater kind, which are still unattainable. They listen, sometimes with a respectful patience, and oftener, it may be, with an unconfessed per- plexity. But once and again and again there come even to such the hints of greater things to which even they too may attain. Once and again, leav- ing the shallow shores of melody, they find them- selves borne along upon the ever-greatening tides of mighty harmonies. Once and again they catch some fleeting glimpse of deeper meanings which yet they cannot quite discern ; and these are they who, this evening, hail this hour with heartiest and most gi-ateful acclaim. For here they see the opening of a gi'eat people's great School of Music, in which the present shall not quite lose touch with the past, and in which every soul made sen- sible to God's high ministry of sound and song shall climb up, though it may sometimes be with halting and uncertain step, to its highest and holiest meanings. In such a progress we have come to a memora- ble and inspiring moment. In the history of what I may call the evolution of institutions, their life may be roughly divided into two parts. First, there is the era of gestation, of struggle, of incipi- ency. Some one is quickened by an idea ; the idea ripens into a desire ; the desire seeks for its appro- priate expression ; that expression demands coop- erative forces ; those forces, drawn together by a common purpose, arrange and rearrange and dis- arrange themselves. There is progi*ess and appar- 219 The Ministry of Mmic ent failure ; there is renewed endeavor, and some- thing at least of success ; there are periods of long silence and waiting, and, as some disheartened ones may think, of hopeless discouragement and col- lapse ; and so, step by step, slowly and tediously as it seems to many, — for all gi*eat things grow slow- ly, — the enterprise, the idea, the institution, passes out of its first era of struggle and experiment, on and up to its second and final era of triumph and success. And so it has been here. It is fifty years ago, almost to a day, since the first endeavor of which this is the fine and consummate flower took on shape in the city of New York. Fifty years ago was founded here the first society for the per- formance of symphonic concerts, known as the Philharmonic Society. These few moments will not permit to me a review of its honorable and courageous history, nor that of the little band of resolute and far-seeing men who composed it. When I came to New York, more than twenty years ago, Mr. Carl Bergmann was, unless I am mistaken, conducting its concerts; and I remember with what delight I then turned to them. My home had previously been in Boston, where already we had om' great Music-Hail, and where its Satur- day-afternoon concerts were at once an education and a delight. The influence of New England, felt in so many ways in this community almost from its Dutch beginning, was then already perceptible in the matter of a higher taste in music; for it must never be forgotten, in justice to those magi, 220 The Ministry of Music those wise men of our own East, that in this, as in a great many other good and noble things, Boston had gone a long way before us. But the history of the Philharmonic Society was in many respects discouraging. The new era in modern music had not quite dawned. The new day of wide-spread musical enthusiasm was still a long way off. Classical music had to obtrude itself with con- siderable and cautious reserve, and the dominion of " Yankee Doodle " in the concert-room was still a very vibrant and penetrating reality. It is the more honorable, therefore, to those earlier pioneers in the work which is crowned this evening with this splendid success, that they would not be dis- com'aged. They were few in numbers, they were often and widely misunderstood, but still they per- severed, and in time they planted a seed which has since then blossomed in many and various forms. Among them was the Oratorio Society, founded some eighteen years ago by that rare man and accomplished and enthusiastic musician. Dr. Leo- pold Damrosch. Before that day there had been more than one choral society called into being, only to live a struggling and fitful existence, and then expire. There was high purpose, there was willing cooperation, there was cheerful expendi- ture. But the occasion demanded a man^ and it got him in Dr. Damrosch. He had not, perhaps, every gift and quality that make a great leader and conductor, but he had the most important of them. He knew how to awaken enthusiasm, he knew how to muster and mass his forces, and he was 221 The Ministry of Miisic a thorough master of his art. Best of all, he had that fine and self-forgetting enthusiasm which is indispensable to any large and commanding influ- ence. He believed profoundly in his art, he de- spised charlatanry and pretension, he reverently owned the high and sacred ministry of music, and he gave himself utterly to its promotion. There is an element, to me at any rate, of profound pathos in this occasion, when I think how he would have rejoiced in it, and how within these walls his rare gifts would have found their fitting and inspiring opportunity. May this hall not be long without his bust, to recall to our grateful recollection the reverent student, the loving master, and the ardent and untiring leader ! It was Dr. Damrosch's energy and magnetic per- suasiveness that, five years later, also called into being the Symphony Society. Its experience was not whoUy unlike that of its predecessors, and its honorable story has been one of difficulty and struggle. Along with it, as before it and after it, have arisen other musical societies, aU of them witnesses to a high purpose and ever-growing as- pirations of which I may not tarry to teU the tale. They have known many vicissitudes, and the great musical festivals in which they have from time to time culminated have been followed more than once by periods of reaction and depression. Indeed it could not well have been otherwise. Those festivals, under whatever leadership, whether that of Dr. Damrosch or our own match- less Thomas, — ours, alas! no more; but one day, 222 The Ministry of Mmc I trust, to return to the city of his earlier triumphs and his long and brilliant career, — those festivals had demonstrated, if they demonstrated nothing else, the imperious necessity for such a home for music as we are dedicating to-night. It has been a depressing experience to listen to some great and elevating composition in an atmosphere where the clown was capering last night and might be capering to-morrow. It was not an inspiring spec- tacle to trace the outlines of the prize-ring encir- cling the conductor's throne, and it needed a quahty not ordinarily given to accomplished mu- sicians to dispute the possession of their temple with the gentleman who swallowed three dinner- knives and the lady who jumped, even though it was to the accompaniment of a brass band, through six balloons ! Let us be thankful that to-night that melan- choly era is ended. The hour had come, and it only wanted a man. And then there came the man! We are not accustomed to associate with Scotland the highest conceptions of music ; and if you are ever a guest in a Scottish castle, I can de- sire no better thing for you than that you should survive the welcome of the bagpipes ! But a Scotchman transplanted to America and regen- erated by our freer and more melodious airs — a Scotchman imbued with the spirit of " Triumph- ant Democracy" — what may we not do with him, and what may he not do for us ? You remember the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's Cathedral, " Si monumentum 223 The Ministry of Music requiris, circumspiceP Mr. Carnegie has reared so many buildings, for so many uses, in so many lands, that it would not be easy perhaps for others to say to which one of them that legend be- longs. But we who are here to-night are in no doubt at all. No finer illustration could be found, I think, of the beneficent and enlarging influence of those free institutions to which he has paid so glowing a tribute, than the erection of this build- ing, almost wholly, — and not altogether wholly simply and only in order that he might bind to- gether others with himself in a common endea- vour for its future, — by a private citizen for the greatest good of the gi-eatest number of his fellow- men. In other countries, and under other govern- ments such things are largely done by subsidies, and through the intervention of the State. It is a happy omen for New York that a single individ- ual can do so princely a thing in so modest a way ; and I am sure that you wiU unite with me in those grateful and unstinted congratulations which we all desire to offer him. Happy the man who can use his wealth to widen human happiness, and happiest he who elects to do so in a beneficence at once so felicitous and so far-reaching ! For we may not forget that having lived through the period of gestation, of discipline, of struggle, and of endeavor to which I have alluded, we have now come to the era of achievement. Those who have reared this noble hall would be the first to agree with me that, after all, a music-hall is not music, and that structui^e, fabric, conveniences, 224 The Ministry of Music however ample and various, — and those that sa- lute us here this evening are probably equally- incomparable and unique, — all these, nevertheless, are not ministry and service. My friend and his associates who have reared this building have not reared it as an end. At best it is but a means to an end ; and what that end is to be, it remains for the future to determine. And that brings me to the one thought with which this evening I would conclude. The mis- sion of music to our age and our community — what is it? Plainly the answer which such an one as I may give to such a question must be only that of a layman. But, as I have already inti- mated, it is for that larger constituency which cannot be classed among scientific musicians that I am here to speak. And in their behalf I claim that music has a threefold function. It is, first of all, a recreation. By this I do not mean merely for the performer, though I gladly recognize its mission to multitudes of performers all the world over. You remember Balzac's story of the man who had his mother's soul imprisoned in his violin. It is not, however, one's mother's soul, but one's own, that finds expression in the in- strument one handles ; and in this aspect of music there is doubtless a realm of consolation which is simply inexhaustible. But I am speaking now of the ofi&ce of music to its hearers ; and that, I maintain, is, first of all, recreation. In speaking of music as a therapeutic, Haweis has imagined some tired and overtaxed man or woman lying 15 225 The Ministry of MiLsic fagged and exhausted upon a sofa, and saying: " Do not play that Tannhauser overture just now ; it wears me out — I cannot bear it"; or, "Yes, sing that ' Du bist die Ruh',' and after that I must have Mendelssohn's nocturne out of the ' Midsum- mer Night's Dream'"; and then — and then, what must come next must be left to the tact and quick sympathy of the musician. Surely we have here one of the first, even if you choose to call it one of the lowest, ministries of music. The gift of hearing is one which, like every other gift, carries its own penalties with it. Do I need to tell any one to whom I speak this evening what one of the foremost of those penal- ties is in a great city like ours? The demon of noise, brutal, cruel, piercing noise; the noises of the day, dinning, deafening, maddening almost, — yes, and of the night as well: how the brain aches and quivers often with the torment of them ! Now, have you ever thought that the dissonance of these noises, their harsh and contentious con- fusion, thek sharp and greatening accumulations, the bewildering and tormenting discord of them, were large elements of their torture I And so we hail, whether conscious or not why it is so, those organized sounds which make up what we call mel- ody and harmony. It is the sweet and regulated exchange of order for chaos that first delights us, and, with many persons it is this alone, I imagine, that from the beginning to the end delights us. The simple melody at once soothes and heals the ear, the irritated nerves respond to the kindly and 226 The Ministry of Music easy rhythm, and the whole nature yields in grate- ful refreshment to a skill that is at once whole- some and pure. You may call this a very primitive and a very inferior service for music to render ; but I hope it will never be forgotten within these walls. In that volume of the most marvelous poetry which the hand of man has ever penned — need I say that I mean the Psalms of David? — there occurs a verse in which the writer is depicting a festal pro- cession, and in which he says : The singers go before, the minstrels follow after : in the midst are the damsels playing with the timbrels ; and I have often thought that the words were no unfit image of that gracious and kindly office of music to bind together, so far as may be, the least and the most cultivated hearer, and along with higher and more ambitious aims to marry a low- lier, but no less helpful art. We hear much in these days of the " music of the future," and they who are its apostles may safely be trusted to sound its praises. But will they indulge me in expressing the hope that, whatever the music of the future may be, it will not quite part company with the music of the past ? A wise reformer, a true prophet, leader, seer, is he who, seeing those greater possibilities, in his art or his vocation, which are before him, does not run so fast to meet them that he leaves behind and out of sight those whom he would fain bring into his promised land. The play-impulse in human nature, the 227 Tbe Ministry of Music "eternal childhood in the man" — or woman — which craves sometimes expression and relief even in our latest years — those, verily, we may not leave out of account in recognizing the recreative minis- try of music. And then most surely its ministry as an emo- tional and intellectual discipline. The Greeks were right — wonderful people that they were — in putting music and gymnastics, in their scheme of education, close together. No keener pleasure can come to the mind through the senses, I fancy, than that which comes from following a composer's thought in and out through all the intricacies of his masses and variations of sound. To see the theme betray itself and then retire, — to catch a gleam, so to speak, of a vanishing figure as it melts out of sight, — to detect the return and the retreat, the gathering force, the marshaled movement, and then, at last, after long waiting, the tidal rush and sweep and climax of the whole, the emotions and the senses, all in one, which it needs no artist to discern nor scholar to enjoy ! And that brings me to the last and highest office which this building, ringing and resonant with sweet sounds, is henceforth to fulfil — long may it endure to fulfil it! Outside the realm of sight and sound and sense, there is another realm skirting it so close, and yet in busy, sordid moments seeming removed how far ! We may be tempted to call it the realm of the imagination, but indeed it is in- finitely more than that. It is the realm in which the actual vanishes to give way to the possible. 228 The Ministry of Music It is the realm in which great deeds that seem in our more hopeless hours so unattainable take on another hue. It is the realm of aspiration, of faith, of hope. Out of ignoble thoughts and inter- ests there is a stairway up along which, like Luther along the Scala Santa at Rome, the soul climbs to a great and heroic purpose. And that is the stair- way on whose lowest rungs many tired feet will, I verily believe, come here to stand. As in many an ancient minster and many a lowly sanctuary, music, finding its highest office in the service of religion, has lifted the soul toward God, so here will come those who, on the strains of Handel and Haydn and Beethoven, and their great compeers and greater successors, will be borne as "on mighty pens" aloft to commune with unseen worlds and to find mightiest majesty of harmony and ever greatening waves of song, the vestibule to realms of vision and of peace ineffable. The hour passes, but the act remains; and so this fair and finished temple will endure to wel- come weary hearts aching to be ennobled and up- lifted. Here they will come — I love to think of it — out of narrower scenes into this august am- plitude, and sit and dream and aspire. For music has a language of its own — it is expression to that in the human soul which supremely craves expression, and which in mere words alone can never find it. It may indeed be made the servant of things mean and low, but it was meant su- premely for the highest. May it serve none other than those noblest, highest uses here ! May this 15* 220 The Ministry of Music be, and may it be more and more, the home of loftiest themes, which here find loftiest expres- sion and so may men be trained within these walls to highest thoughts and noblest longings, and so to worthiest service for their fellow-men ! And now my task is done. But one word more remains, and I am glad and thankful to pronounce it. Men and women of New York, we bring this finished work to you. Generously cherish, con- serve, and use it for its highest ends ! 230 THE GOSPEL FOR WEALTH Published m the North American Review, May, 1891 THE GOSPEL FOR WEALTH THE interesting papers by Mr. Andrew Carne- gie, bearing a title slightly different from that at the head of this communication, have, not un- worthily, awakened a wide and keen interest. It is a hopeful sign when one who himself bears the repute of being a very rich man can approach a subject confessedly of so much importance, not alone with such cordial interest, but with such en- tire candor; and when, best of all, he can take such high ground, and define his own position in such unmistakable terms. For it is a discouraging feature of the pres- ent situation that, apparently, it so little inter- ests those who are supremely concerned with it. There are a great many of us who are not posses- sors of great wealth, nor ever likely to be, who are entirely ready to tell those who are how perilous a possession it is, and precisely what they should do with it. Indeed, the satirist might find tempting food for his humor if he could read the corre- spondence of rich men, and know what increasing 233 The Gospel for iVealth streams of counsel and admonition, as well as of solicitation, flow in upon them. Under such cir- cumstances it is not surprising that irritation is followed by impatience, and impatience by re- sentment, and that, in turn, too often by stony in- difference. Indeed, it is greatly to the honor of many people of great wealth that they do not be- come so indurated to the cries of criticism and of mendicancy as to dismiss the whole question of the stewardship of wealth as one impossible of solution. Unfortunately, too many of them do; and the fact to which I have just adverted is a most impressive, and in some aspects of it pathetic, evidence of that fact. The paper which I am dis- cussing is, so far as my own observation goes, ab- solutely unique. At this moment I cannot recall, in our generation, any other instance of one pos- sessed of exceptional wealth who has undertaken to discuss, publicly and at any length, the ques- tion of its disposition. And yet it would seem as if there were no other question which ought more profoundly to interest the rich. Great wealth is a great power. Leaving out of sight, for the time being, its possible effects upon its possessor, it is still, with reference to other people, a very danger- ous power. Such proverbs as " Every man has his price " may be largely false — thank God they are! But they could not exist, and find such wide acceptance, if they had not in them some element of truth. And when once that is admit- ted, it follows plainly that he who possesses, in 234 The Gospel for Wealth some huge degree, the power of corrupting his fellow-men controls an extremely dangerous force. This is true, moreover, whether we regard every man as a purchasable creature, or whether we merely regard society as corruptible as a whole. For it does not need that men and women should be bought for some evil purpose by money in or- der to be corrupted by it. A much more subtle and more general form of corruption is that which reaches down from the vices and extravagances of the rich to those who are below them in the scale of wealth. " Did you ever notice," said some one, " the faces of domestic servants in great houses — how sodden and sensual, how furtive and disingenuous, how vicious and unwholesome, they often become. What makes it so?" And the questioner answered his own inquiry by saying that " when one served, all the while, people who were steeped in luxury, ' busy in idleness,' as an old English dramatist wi'ote, and careless and prodigal in every selfish expenditure, it was im- possible but that he should catch the disease him- self!" But the disease spreads wider than the kitchen and the servants' hall. Does anybody who lives in a great city go about at all in public places and public conveyances without noting the enormous increase in costliness of personal ornamentation which obtains among all classes? When the late Mr. Tweed was in the zenith of his power as " Boss " of New York, he was standing one day in the Mayor's office, talking with the person who 235 The Gospel for Wealth then (as since then too often !) had been elected as the occupant of that office to do the work of a " ring," when a large diamond stud dropped upon the floor and rolled to the feet of a gentleman from whom I heard the incident. He picked it up — it was a diamond as big, nearly, as a good-sized strawberry — and offered it to the Mayor. Said " his Honor," " It is not mine." " Nor mine," said one after another of the circle, as it was passed around. " Stop a moment," said the " Boss," fumbling with his clothes. " Ah, yes ; I believe it is one of my suspender buttons." But if bosses must have diamonds to do the rougher work of personal investiture, their henchmen must have something quite as fine for other and more con- spicuous service. And as one sees women and men whose circumstances in life, honorably inter- preted, can, it would seem, by no possibility ex- plain the costly raiment and costlier jewelry with which they are bedizened, the mind is inevitably started upon a train of speculation which must needs have its issue in most dreary and tragic ap- prehensions. What is the saddest of them if it is not this — that somewhere there is somebody with the command, practically, of illimitable money, who may not at all use it actively to corrupt an- other, but the contagion of whose extravagance fires that baleful light of envy in another's eye which will not be quenched until it has, at what- ever cost, touched the same extreme limit of tawdry and vulgar display f Now, I do not see how anybody who has great 2}6 Tbe Gospel for Wealth wealth, and whose habit is one of large and loose expenditure, can dismiss that aspect of this sub- ject without profound mental concern. It is a most painful consideration, or ought to be to any right-minded persons, that their heedless and selfish use of money is corrupting the very air which is breathed by their fellows; and the ami- able sophistry that luxury and extravagance put money in circulation, and so promote a benefi- cent expenditure, becomes, in the face of our mod- ern civilization, with its complex and tremendous social problems, simply a monstrous impertinence. Let me forestall any gratuitous sneer by the disci- ples of the "Manchester doctrine" of social sci- ence, by saying that I have not the smallest intention of advocating any system of promiscu- ous doles, or free soup-houses, or " General" Booth's " harbors," or any other future contribution to the greater degradation of the poor. But it ought not to be necessary to tell any rich man who honestly desires to be told, how he can wisely employ money to promote art, to beautify men's homes, and naturally, and, if he chooses, preeminently, his own, and so do that which will make men's lives brighter and the guests under his roof or at his table more happy, without spending money in ways that are wanton in the prodigality of their profuseness, and only wasteful in the essentially cheap and perishable character of their results. I went the other day to the house of a gentle- man in a great city (alas ! he is not an American, — nor an Englishman, let me add, — would that it 237 The Gospel for Wealth were much the way of either !), where the guests were bidden to celebrate the opening of a beautiful and stately mansion. There was the most perfect administration of domestic service, there was an hour of the most exquisite music (to which, un- happily, most of the guests were apparently reluc- tant to listen), and then there was a cup of tea, and the simple, refined, and thoroughly refreshing occasion was at an end. It is difficult to see why such an entertainment may not be regarded, in a profuse and over-stimulated age, as a wholesome and charming object-lesson. Music, painting, sculpture, the multiplication of means for placing the advantages of artistic culture and recreation within the reach of those whose lives are bare and hard — surely these are avenues for the employ- ment of wealth that stain no innocent soul, and leave no heartbreak behind them ! And that brings me to the one word which I want to contribute to this discussion, already in danger of being unduly prolonged. I have entitled what is here said, " The Gospel for Wealth," as distinguished from "The Gospel of Wealth." The latter is concerned with wealth as a means of contributing to the happiness of those in whose behalf it is expended. But I have in mind what wealth may become to those who worthily employ it. The gospel — the God's spell — for the wealthy: Can wealth be made efficient for the greater happiness of those who expend it ; and if so, how? There are plenty of people who are entirely clear as to how that question can be 238 The Gospel for Wealth answered ; but it would hardly seem that very rich people have made the discovery. Froissart, in his " Chronicles," writes of those " who take their plea- sui'e sadly, after the manner of the English " ; and when one goes into Central Park and looks at the people who, like Miss Bella Wilfer in "Our Mutual Friend," have learned how to "loll in their car- riages," it must be owned that they who "take their pleasure sadly " still survive in large numbers among ourselves. It is not alone that so many very rich people seem careworn, and often anx- ious and abstracted. It is impossible that any one should have great and grave responsibilities without in some way showing their scars; and mediocrity, whether in gifts or in possessions, may well console itself in the consciousness that if it is without either of these, it is, in the same measure at any rate, without great anxieties. But what I have in mind is that loss of enthusiasms, that con- traction of the horizon of interests, that induration of the faculties that are touched by nature, by humanity, by nobleness of achievement, which, I think it must be owned, is a very frequent, if not a very common, characteristic of the possessors of great wealth. I may not turn aside to explain such a fact, though I am persuaded that it is not difficult of explanation ; but it will not be denied that if it be true, it points to a loss out of life of that which is of priceless value. To keep the heart young; to have the powers that rouse us to keen interest, and sustain us in kindly and helpful service, vig- 239 The Gospel for Wealth orous and alert ; to have the world and our fellow- men so rich in points of enkindling contact that, whatever may befall our capacities of achieve- ment, our sympathies never grow old or cold — surely this is to have snatched from the hand of fate the secret of happiness, the glory of being ! And this is possible to rich people as to poor people, on precisely the same terms. One's own life must somehow reach over into, and be quali- fied by, the struggles and interests of other lives. In the case of the poor this is made inevitable by the hard conditions of their poverty. As in an open boat, with half-rations, all must learn self-restraint for the good of all, since individual selfishness means death to most, so it is in the sorrows, hardships, and struggles that come to the men and women who live on a day's wage. And so it comes to pass, no less, that these supremely venerate, because they better understand, all hero- ism, and kindle quickest at a brave and kindly deed. When, the other day, that brilliant soldier and kindly and knightly gentleman who was well described as " our best-beloved citizen," was borne to his rest, it was in the streets and avenues where the tenement-houses abound that the tributes of love and reverence for his memory were most con- spicuous, even as in Fifth Avenue they were least so. And the contrast was itself a parable wherein it needed no seer to discern how those whose hard- ships were bravely and patiently borne instinc- tively honored one whose splendid service was dimmed, from end to end, by no mean thought of 240 The Gospel for Wealth self, and whose love and concern for his gallant "boys" was ever more eager and alert than any care for himself. But it is the tendency of a well-clad, well-fed, comfortable, and sheltered life to make such care and concern for others more and more impossible, save as it resolutely seeks opportunities for its exercise. Unfortunately, at this point, a conspic- uous tendency of our modern philanthropy inter- feres in a most discouraging way. That tendency, whether in the case of long-existing evils or of exceptional emergencies, is to deal with the prob- lems which confront it vicariously. The first thought in the face of any gi-eat evil, injustice, or suffering would seem to be that it must be referred to a committee. The history of social reforms in our day is apt to be summed up in the story of a public meeting, with eloquent speeches, and the appointment of committees, and the rais- ing of funds. Undoubtedly all these may have a useful place in any great and humane undertak- ing. But it is interesting to note that, in the his- tory of the greatest reforms, and of benevolent movements that have illustrated what may be called considerable " staying " power, their begin- nings have been of quite a different kind. Some single mind has been stirred by an emergency, and without waiting for others has set about doing what it could itself. Some one man or woman, kindled into a flame of indignation by some im- perious necessity, has hastened, without tarry- ing for company, to meet it ; and, doing so, has. 16 241 The Gospel for Wealth of tener than otherwise, shown how it may be met ; and that example, proving, as example always is, contagious, has repeated itself in ever-widening circles. More than a quarter of a century ago an English gentleman of fortune, culture, and honorable lin- eage, profoundly moved by the condition of the most neglected classes in London, determined, at any rate, to try to understand them better ; and, that he might do so, went quietly and lived among them. It seemed a foolish and hopeless waste of fine powers and generous sjnnpathies upon a hopeless and impossible task. But to-day Oxford House and Toynbee Hall, and the People's Palace, and less-known centers of " sweetness and light " all over East and South London, show, with in- spiring significance, that Edward Dennison did not give himself to England's poor unwisely or in vain. Steadily has the spell of that solitary noble- ness reached on, and reached out, until we are see- ing it reproduced among ourselves, and that by men and women alike, in ways which, when one is tempted to despair of his kind, are at once a revelation and a rebuke. In a recent discussion as to the methods of the Salvation Army, and " General " Booth's scheme for the abolition, in England, of poverty, an indi- vidual testimony was called out as to the com- parative value, in individual cases, of what may be called the individual method in reaching and succoring those who are generally considered as representing the most hopeless element in our 242 The Gospel for Wealth vast problem of poverty and vice, which has in it a truth of profoundest import. Says the writer: Years ago I began to seek for a way to reach these lowest people. I went to " organized charities," public, private, rehgious, and secular, in the leading cities of America and Germany. I questioned individual workers of every and no religious creed, and in every case asked, and was allowed to see, the actual working of the meth- ods employed. The result both startled and depressed me. The reformation of a nature arrived at maturity in ways of vice seemed something scarcely ever achieved. The matron of one of the best-known reformatory institu- tions in America told me that, in all the years she had held her office, slie had not Jcnotvn a single case of reform. A cul- tivated and earnest woman, whose whole hfe is devoted to charitable work in connection with one of the largest churches in one of our first cities, told me she was afraid their poor converts came chiefly for the "loaves and fishes." Another woman, of equal intelligence and expe- rience in the same work, said the same thing. An open- handed philanthropist, a man of high standing and marked ability among able men, said that now, toward the end of a long life, he could think of but one person in whom there had been reform in cotiducf, and that one man had really reformed himself ! After much testimony of this nature, I began to won- der whether the people I wanted to help could not tell me more about themselves than any one else could know. I made up my mind that the next degraded-looking woman I met begging I would speak to as I should like any one who loved me to speak to me. I went into a part of the city where such women are met. Almost im- mediately I came on one exchanging hideous repartees with a set of rough men. She turned to me and asked 243 The Gospel for Wealth me to ^ve her ten cents. As she looked up at me, her face for a second struck me dumb ; it was more repul- sive than any brute's. To see a woman look like that al- most broke my heart. I could scarcely speak ; but with an effort I said simply, '' Come with me," and she came. I questioned her. I told her I could not bear to have a woman like that, and if she would trust me with the real truth of her life, I knew we could make her life worth living, which it certainly was not now. To this she assented vsdth answering directness. She told me she was " all bad " ; had been sent to prison again and again ; loved drink, and when drunk " would do anything " ; was about forty years old now, and, when out of prison, had been in most of the reformatory institutions in the city. Nothing had ever done her any good ; she did not think she was " that kind." I had better let her go. By this time we were before the door of a religious institution to which I had made up my mind to bring her ; but, as I turned to speak to her, her face overcame me again, and, to my own consternation, I burst into tears, and wept over her convulsively. She wavered for a second, and then, with a cry of " Oh, dear, my dear, don't cry like that, donH, don't ! I will try, indeed I will ! " she grasped my hand, and suddenly burst into a storm of tears her- self. We astonished the dignified matron of the house which we entered, who told me, before the ivretched woman, that she knew her to be a hopeless case, and nothing but prison bars would restrain her. I told her that I did not believe Christ would say so, and I took my poor sister to another institution. They refused her, on the same ground as the first. We went to another, with the same result. The woman was Irish, unedu- cated, and, by courtesy, a Roman Catholic. But the Cath- olic Reformatory Institution, too, said that a prison was the only place for her. 244 Tbe Gospel for Wealth By this time slie and I had walked far on a cold win- ter day, and were very cold and tired. I was boarding, and had no home of my own to which I could take her. I told her so, but also said that I could not give her up, and if she would come with me to my boarding-house for rest and luncheon I would try to think of what could be done afterward. She came, to the horror of my emi- nently respectable Christian landlady, and after an hour we set out again, but with no better result. My heart grew sick and hot within me ; and at last the poor re- jected creature rushed off from the last place where they refused to have her, calling out : " You see, it 's no tise, nottse!" But I called after her, "Yes, it is; remember my street and number ! " I supposed I had lost her, in spite of myself. The weeks went by, and I saw nothing of her, and I did not know where to look for her. At last, three months afterward, she appeared at my board- ing-house, asked to see me, but, by the orders of the Christian landlady, was refused admittance. She then asked the servant, who happened to be the same one who had admitted her on the first occasion, to tell me that from the day she left me she had not touched a drop of liquor, and had been what I wanted her to be. The servant added : " And the truth it was, too ; for she looked so different and so decent I scarcely knew her." Now, here was a case where not one penny had been expended; indeed, the woman was told with simple frankness that I believed the worst thing I could do would be to give her money ; but, on the other hand, I neither howled, nor grinned, nor used her language. I spoke, straight from my inmost soul, the deepest, the sweetest truth I knew, and " deep answered unto deep." In the presence of such need I learned the clearest lesson of my life, '' For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that ye should love one another." 245 The Gospel for Wealth Sucli a testimony is certainly not to be dises- teemed, and its suggestive value cannot easily be overestimated. And for my purpose now it is preeminently of value as indicating, not alone the power of individual effort and sympathy, but the rewards of it. To know that one has been privi- leged to be the means, if not of entirely reclaim- ing, at least of reawakening some lost life to cour- age and self-control and hope and faith in Grod and in its fellows — this certainly is to win the deepest joy and the highest happiness of which a human heart is capable. And to this happiness, in the case of those who possess wealth and leisure, there open many ave- nues. Not alone in the case of the most alienated and least cared for, but in its ministry to youth, to inexperience, to the tempted and wronged, there are opportunities for the personal activities of in- dividual gifts and acquirements, the improvement of which in the case of any one of generous and noble instincts — and what man or woman is wholly without these % — will be sure to issue in ever-increasing delight. A few years ago a cit- izen of New York, alone and unaided, set out to found a trade-school for American boys and young men. He encountered ignorant prejudice, he awakened hostile criticism, he provoked organ- ized opposition ; but he persevered, and to-day the result of his large expenditure of time and money and sympathy has issued in a foundation which gathers within its walls hundreds of youths from all parts of the United States, which has dignified 246 The Gospel for Wealth and ennobled every handicraft which it aims to teach, which has vindicated the right of every young man to the best training in skilled labor, and which, perhaps best of all, has illustrated the power of a single fraternal and unselfish purpose, modestly but resolutely pursued, to achieve the highest results, and in doing so to illustrate the sure rewards that await a noble and unwearied endeavor. The opportunities for such endeavor are, I re- peat, almost innumerable. When Mayor of New York, the Hon. Abram S. Hewitt was led to inves- tigate the operations of the local police courts. That in these and on the bench there are honest and well-meaning men, I do not at all doubt. But that the interests of justice are best served by a system in which the fate of almost every pris- oner is practically determined by the testimony of the policeman who is complainant and the judge whose knowledge of law and whose instinct of equity may easily be equally imperfect, is, to state the case with the utmost reserve, extremely im- probable. That, as a matter of fact, such an ad- ministration of the forms of law issues frequently in the gravest injustice, to those, especially, who are most obscure, who have no "pull" with the court, who can invoke no neighboring rum-seller, or other local politician, to whisper an aside into the ear of the sitting magistrate — this is a cer- tainty which it requires considerable boldness to challenge. What an opportunity here for the personal in- 247 Tbe Gospel for Wealth tervention of those whose means and position make them strong enough to insist that it shall be listened to ! What a fine school for a young student or unemployed practitioner of the law! What an inviting field for any one, man or woman, who can plead another's cause or help to right another's wrongs ! The Church Club in the diocese of New York contemplates the organiza- tion of a lawyers' guild for this and kindred pur- poses. It would afford a rare field in which learning and wealth might study and strive to- gether. For this I beheve to be the true gospel for wealth, in whatever that wealth may consist. The world waits for new illustrations of that divinest beneficence which the great apostle commemo- rates when, out of a full heart, broken and con- quered by a resistless spell, he writes, " the Son of Grod who loved me, and gave himself for me ! " This is the one secret of healing the world's sor- rows and redeeming the world's lost ones; and, because it is, theirs will forever be the sweetest and most lasting satisfactions who, being rich in whatever men count wealth, themselves adminis- ter their wealth, so giving themselves for all the sad and sorrowful brotherhood of man ! 248 THE CHRISTIAN AND THE STATE ADDRESS Delivered before the New York State Association of Young Men's Christian Associations, at Newburg, N. Y., February, 1896 THE CHRISTIAN AND THE STATE I AM here under the great disadvantage of not having heard what has already been said in this house this evening. If I recollect aright the order of exercises for this evening, it provides for a consideration of the past, present, and future of the work of the Young Men's Christian Associa- tion in the State of New York. You know, then, how large a relation that work sustains to the his- tory of the State which, not alone because of its territorial proportions, its wealth, its intellectual leadership, but because it has been conspicuous in every good word and work in connection with in- terests such as those for which the Young Men's Christian Association stands, is rightly entitled to the name of the Empire State. But when I have said that, you and I are here to remember that when we speak of the State, we are speaking of something which is much larger, even, than the great State whose sons we are, and in whose boundaries we are gathered to-night. That for which the word stands, in the lowest analysis of 251 The Christian and the State it, is that organized form of life which forever dif- ferentiates what we know as barbarism from what we know by a gracious and happy experience as civilization. In other words, the State is a general term, and I am here to-night not to speak of the Christian in the State of New York alone, but anywhere. We should be sorely tried if, when we got over into the bounds of Pennsylvania, we found that the family relations — that things, in other words, which distinguish righteous conduct from un- righteous conduct — had quite a different meaning in different geographical circumferences. And so I say, in the last analysis, that when one speaks of the Christian and the State, one means by the State, I suppose, that condition of organized life which differentiates the circumstances under which you and I are living to-day from those of some savage tribe. What is the condition of the savage tribe ? It is the condition, undoubtedly, of government or law, so far as government or law can be said to exist, purely upon a basis of physi- cal force. The earliest organization of tribal or savage life into anything that can be called a so- cial order can undoubtedly be traced to the situa- tion in which one man found himself stronger than the neighbors by whom he was suiTounded. He could compel obedience both to his will and to his whim. He could organize his little society, first of all, on the basis of force ; and undoubtedly out of such a condition of things there came to be what we call at the present time " mihtarism." 2^2 The Christian and the State You pass along in the evolution of society, and out of the military state we ascend to that more definite form of organized life which may be de- scribed as a regal community. Out of a military rule there emerges the law of hereditary descent. The son becomes the successor in power, and he in turn perpetuates a dynasty, a sovereignty, and there comes what we know as the monarchical system of government. We pass on from step to step in the progi'ess of races and men, and we come down through the abuses of the divine right of kings, until we reach the period which marks the beginning of our own national history, and recognize the development of the republican prin- ciple. Now, what is the republican principle, or the democratic principle! The democratic prin- ciple is the principle that the people are the rulers; that the source of power is that which comes up from the people, and not down from the ruler. That is the basis of the form of govern- ment under which you and I are living to-night. Every official here in the United States, whether he is an alderman, or a constable, or a President, is finally your servant and mine. It is a very good thing for them to remember. They are not fond of remembering it, particularly the policemen in New York, for there they think they own us. But the truth for the people to hold on to is the principle — my brothers, never forget it — of their own sovereignty. Lincoln stated it in a way which Garfield proved : " Our government is a govern- ment of the people — that is to say, the people are 253 The Christian and the State the government; by the people — that is to say, the people are the source of authority; for the people — that is to say, the final aim of govern- ment is the well-being of the people." That, again, is a truth which it is extremely difficult for the people who administer government, even un- der a republic, to realize. If you could turn an X-ray upon the inner consciousness of a ward politician, and see what he thinks — not what he says — when he is making a bid for votes, you would find that the statement which his candor would permit him to make is that it is nonsense : the government exists for his benefit and his friends' benefit. Men and brethren, it is a concep- tion which threatens the destruction of the whole national structure. We must come back again, and again, and again to the fact that organized society in the form of civil government, what you and I understand in one word by the State, exists finally, not for the benefit of anybody who admin- isters the government, who is a paid servant of the government, whether he sits at the apex of the structure, in the chair of the President of the United States, or in the chair of any local justice of the peace, or police, or tax-collector; but in order that he may serve his fellow-men in the re- lation of service to the State, and of those who create a place, and provide the salary, and pay the wages, for which he is to work for the State. A very valuable book to which I should like to call the attention of my young brothers to whom I speak to-night, called " The Modern State, in Re- 254 The Christian and the State lation to Society and the Individual," ^ touches this whole question with singular acuteness, directness, and force. The author says, in other words, that a very popular conception of government is that the exercise of authority is based upon some arbitrary principle which defies law itself ; and he points out that the teaching of Benton and others along that line has this essential defect, that it fails to recognize that there can be no law unless underlying law, deep down below it, there is that thing which we call the moral consciousness of men. Go back to the homes in which you were born ; where, in the face of some early transgression of an order of the family your mother halted your young, wayward steps with the words : " My boy, you must not do that ; it is wrong." You did not need to have explained to you what she meant by wi'ong. The moment consciousness dominates in you and in me, there comes that thing, that which is born in the mind of every child that ever drew the breath of life, because that is meant by the image of Grod in man, the consciousness of distinc- tion between righteousness and imrighteousness. Now, of course, you may obscure that ; you may cloud it by superstition ; you may debauch it by a corrupt life; but over and over again it asserts itself. One day, on his way home long after mid- night, a young undergraduate in a great university of ours met an old college professor, who halted him as he was reeling from the brothel in which iBy Paul Leroy Beaulieu: London, Swan, Sonnenschein & Co. The Christian and the State he had been spending half the night, staggering back again to his room in the college, and said: "My son, where are you going?" The youth an- swered, " Where am I going ? I don't know where I am going." "You don't know where you are going ? " said the old professor. " Can it be pos- sible that you are eighteen years of age, and don't know the meaning of the life you have been lead- ing to-night ? Stop, my son ; think and remember.^ Years afterward that boy, grown to manhood, said : " It was the pivotal point of my life. ' Think and remember.' Yes through clouded brain, stu- pe j&ed by drink, there came back the image of my mother's face ; of my father's prayers ; of the clear, plain, faithful teaching of the past ; that had plead with me as a boy. I did know. All the while there was something in the heart that told me how evil was the life I was li\dng." Now, then, ladies and gentlemen, whether you will or no, that consciousness underlies that organ- ized life which we call to-day the State. It is the basis of our civil government. If it were not the basis of our civil government, we might, instead of being the great, powerful people that we are, as we believe, with a still greater future before us, add ten times the wealth, the achievements, the accumulations of learning, power of multitudes of people, and yet be foreordained to final ruin and failure. Just as inevitably as, under God, the sun will rise to-morrow morning, the sole foundation of the permanence of a State is in the moral con- sciousness, the quickening sense of righteousness, 2^6 The Cbrisfian and the State which abides in the heart of its people. What, then, my brothers, is your relation and mine as Christian citizens to the State? I congratulate you, Mr. President, on the singular wisdom of the choice which has been made of the title under which I am privileged to speak to you. It is not " Christianity and the State," observe ; it is " The Christian and the State." It would have been a much more delicate and difficult problem for me if I had been caUed to discuss " Christianity and the State " ; for I should then have had to distinguish between Christianity on the one hand, as an organized life, and the State on the other, as an organized life. I should have to remind you of that most painful picture of Christian history when, in the decadence of the Roman power, there arose an ecclesiastical power which thrust itself into the government, and in the name of Grod undertook to usurp the functions of the State. There is an eternal distinction between the two, laid down by the words of Christ himself, which we can never afford to forget. When one came to him with the tribute-money, you re- member, and asked whether or no men should pay tribute to Caesar, he forever differentiated re- ligion and the State by saying: "Render . . . unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto Grod the things that are God's." But you are not to confuse the two. No other lesson is more impressive to those of us who imagine that the kingdom of the future is to exist in the exaltation of some ecclesiastical system which 17 2S7 The Chmtian and the State shall usurp the functions of civic government. No picture is more impressive, when one goes, in contrast to such dreams, to the pages of the New Testament, than to find how absolutely silent, from first to last, was the divinest voice that ever spoke to man in regard to what they call civil revo- lutions. Christ came into the world when the Roman Empire was rotten to the core. He spoke to men who were living under a king who was infamous for his vices, scandalous for his admin- istration of justice, and yet the apostle Paul re- affirmed the power of the magistrate. " Honor all men; fear God; honor the king." "What king? Nero, the most infamous of his kind?" "Yes, Nero; in so far as he incarnates authority, — as he is the magistrate, — you are to honor him." No; we are forever to distinguish between the individual relation which the individual Christian sustains to the State, and that absolute disconnec- tion between the Church and the State which is the great and glorious destiny, my brothers, of the land in which you and I live. Let us hold fast to it. Let us take care how we watch, from what- ever direction, the fii'st sign that threatens its supremacy. The relation which you and I must bear to the State, as containing that ideal of righteousness of which I spoke a moment ago, must needs be, first, and last, and all the time, a purely individual relation. If to-morrow, here in Newburg, in Buffalo, in Syi'acuse, in Albany, there should be organized a Young Men's Christian As- sociation ticket on either side of the two great 258 The Christian and the State political houses, I, for one, should regard it as an unmixed evil. Ours is a great deal higher office. Whether we belong to one party or the other, — and just so long as human nature is as it is, men will have not only a natural, but I believe a healthy relation to partizanship, — it will be your office and mine to remember what? That we are Republicans? — yes, if we are. Democrats? — yes, if we are. But more, if we are either Republi- cans or Democrats, when it comes to an issue in which the foundations of morals are threatened, that we are the servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, then, what has that to do with the safety of the State? Fu*st of all, this: That to any man who seeks an office, or holds it, or contributes in any way to place any man into it, we put the ques- tion not merely whether or no he is loyal to the party whose colors he bears, but whether in the discharge of the duty to which that party may choose him, he proposes to put party, or gain, or advantage over and above his duty to the God whose child he is, and to the Master whose con- secrated name he bears. There is a very popular conception that some- how a man's obligation of honor is to his party, even as against his Master, Christ. I remember once hearing Colonel Higginson, of Harvard Uni- versity, narrate the experience of an unsuccess- ful campaign which he made a few years ago, in Boston, for Congress. There are some men in this church who will admit, I presume, that they are old enough to remember the Civil War. They 259 The Christian and the State recollect, I am sure, the story of Robert Shaw's Black Regiment, down in the swamps of Charles- ton; and they may remember, too, the splendid service which my friend Higginson rendered in a very disastrous campaign, in which Shaw himself lost his life, and a great many white and black men who served with him. When Colonel Hig- ginson was running for Congress in Boston, on the morning of the election a friend of his met a col- ored man who had served under Higginson in that immortal campaign. "Ah," he said, "Tom, are you on your way to the polls?" "I am, sah." " Well, of course you are going to vote for Colo- nel Higginson ! " " No, sah." " What ! did n't you serve under him?" "Yes." "Did n't he give your race the first opportunity it had in the his- tory of the United States to achieve a military record?" "Yes, sah." "Don't you recollect the splendid courage which he illustrated on the field of battle, and the unwearied tenderness with which he watched over you?" "Yes, sah." "Do you mean, Tom, to say you are not going to vote for Colonel Higginson?" "No, sah." "Well, I am amazed ! I should think, Tom, that every senti- ment of honor would compel you to vote for a man concerning whom you must always carry in your heart a sense of your profound obligations as a representative of your race." " Well, sah," said Tom, not in the smallest degree abashed, " I don't agree with you, sah. It seems to me that every sentiment of honah constrains me to vote for the gentleman what gave me five dollahs this morning." 260 The Christian and the State What a revelation of the spirit of much of mod- ern politics. Over against it, there is something very inspiring in the power of a single courageous, outspoken voice to make itself felt, and to be a cen- ter of unselfish service. If all the Young Men's Christian Associations in this State should set out from this time forth, without the smallest diminu- tion of partizan ardor, to represent loyalty to prin- ciple, invincible hostility to corruption, in whatever form, I believe it would be the beginning of a move- ment which would lift the Empire State, whose sons we are, into a lofty supremacy of power and exem- plary leadership such as history in modern times has not known. And I want, therefore, before I take my seat, to ask that the men who represent the administration of these institutions throughout this great State will strive for just two practical ends. What is the educating work in your Association doing in the matter of citizenship? Do you re- member that instinctive and most noble cry with which, when the apostle is challenged by the Ro- man captain as to his citizenship, he tells how he himself is a Roman citizen ? And when the cap- tain answers, "But I obtained this freedom with a great price," how the apostle said — we can ima- gine how he lifted his frail figure to its full height — " But I was free-born." Ah ! my brothers, that is a distinction which you and I bear in the great State of which we are citizens. How shall we emancipate men from the bondage of ignorance of party aims ? First of all, I venture to submit, "* 261 The Christian and the State by a work which shall be distinctly and intelli- gently educative. No Young Men's Christian Association ought to be allowed to exist in the State of New York which does not have, every winter, a course of lectures on the science and principles of popular government; something which shall take up the beginnings and origins of government ; what those things are which have destroyed the greatest States ; what that precious jewel is which every State must conserve at the peril of its life. First of all, the educative work. And then that other work which should always go along with the educative work — what I may call the inspirational work. I don't know whether it has occurred to you, gentlemen, but it strikes me as a most felicitous fact that you are gathered here to-night in this great church and this great throng, as it were, between two great days — the days, I think, that commemorate the two most thrilling, and imperial figures in our American his- tory. The other day you kept the birthday of Lincoln. Day after to-morrow you will keep the birthday of Washington. There could not possibly be two more opposite and dissimilar types; the one was, in the merely conventional sense of the term, a gentleman. If you ever go to England, go to Yorkshire, and get a sense of what an old and honest family Washington came from; one with all the advantages of high station, culture and fine breeding, refinement and gracious surroundings; unspoiled — and, brothers, never forget it — as gra- cious as the humblest amongst us all. Will any 262 The Christian and the State of us ever forget how, one day, walking in the streets of Philadelphia with a friend, and meeting a negro who bore upon his shoulder a huge and heavy burden, Washington stepped off the pave- ment into the then muddy and unpaved street until the negro had gone by? "What did you do that for?" said the friend. "Why did you allow that darky to crowd you off the pavement ? " " Crowd me off the pavement f " said Washington ; "what am I and what is he? Look at his bent shoulders. Look at the perspiration streaming from his brow. Think of the hard lines of that man's life. Ah, my friend, respect the hurdenedJ^ A great lesson, my brothers. Whether with wealth, or whatever makes a privileged class, re- spect the burdened. And then, that other; that singular, and, as I think, in many ways incomparable character, of whom, whenever anybody tells something more about his young life, you get a sense of how fine and high, amid all its poverty and hardship, it was; how truly knightly and how truly noble that other — our own Lincoln ! What was it that made these two men great; one with inheritances to make greatness of an ex- ternal kind ; the other with only the simple rug- gedness of a great character? What but this? That each one of them held himself, first of all, as a ser- vant of the Power above him, and sitting in the high chair of state, sat there remembering always first that he was the servant of the people, and that because he was the servant of God. 263 THE HIGHER USES OF AN EXPOSITION Published in "The Forum," October, 1892 THE HIGHER USES OF AN EXPOSITION THE action of Congress in closing the Colum- bian Exposition on Sunday probably expressed the sentiment of the majority of those whom Con- gress represents. People who live in cities, and especially those who live in cities of which the population is largely or considerably foreign, are disposed to believe that of late years a decided change of sentiment has taken place as to the mode of the observance of Sunday, and in favor of the relaxation of those legal restrictions by means of which it is supposed to be protected. In cities this is undoubtedly true. Two causes have co- operated, whether in New York, Boston, Chicago, or in other communities of which these are more or less typical, to bring about such a change. One of these has been the large immigration of those from other lands to whom the American idea of Sunday is at once unintelligible and dis- tasteful. The other cause has been the usage and example of people, claiming social precedence, who, 267 The Higher Uses of an Exposition whether from personal preference or the influence of foreign customs, have chosen to disregard the traditions in which they were nurtured. But these, after all, are not nearly so represen- tative of the American sentiment concerning Sun- day as is commonly supposed. There are, indeed, parts of the country where, as in New Orleans, Sunday usages have always been more nearly European than American ; and there are probably no large towns where the stricter laws of earlier days could be reenacted, or, if unrepealed, could be enforced. There has been, in fact, no more sig- nificant illustration of the impotence of legislation, apart from the sustaining power of public senti- ment, than in this connection. But the cities are not the country, nor may we generalize hastily from the former to the latter. Not a great while ago a convention of thirty thou- sand delegates of the Society of Christian Endeavor assembled in New York, which in regard to the closing of the Exposition on Sunday expressed it- self with most emphatic unanimity. The conven- tion was a very impressive and a very suggestive assemblage. Anybody who had been bold enough to disparage its character or undervalue its sig- nificance would have simply made himself ridicu- lous. The press, that eager echo of the sentiment of the moment, treated it — and this was true even of the most disreputable newspapers — with scru- pulous respect. And the reason was plain enough. Not alone the convention, but the constituency which it represented, was too large and too poten- 268 The Higher Uses of an Exposition tial to be derided or disesteemed. For better or worse, it was distinctly representative of a wide- spread American enthusiasm ; and this, indeed, to any one who stopped long enough to consider its meaning, was the essence of it. It was enthusiasm in the interest of what may be called the working sentiment of Christianity, and it was American enthusiasm. As one met the deputies, or read their addresses, or noted the drift of their confer- ences, it was refreshingly evident that they were the product of a spirit indigenous to the soil, without foreign alloy, unshackled by any subcon- sciousness of foreign allegiance, profoundly per- suaded of the competency of Americans to do their own thinking and give their own mot d'ordre. And as such it was undoubtedly, in one sense, the best expression of many of the deepest convic- tions of some fifty millions of people. Does it follow, then, that most of these fifty millions of people adhere to that which may be said to be our inherited national idea about Sun- day f I do not see how this can be denied ; cer- tainly the action of Congress can hardly be construed in any other way. No one seriously believes that the votes in the Senate and House of Representatives represented, as has been ami- ably insinuated, the " pull " of the Chicago liquor- dealers, eager to close the Exposition on Sunday, that they might crowd their bar-rooms and beer- saloons with the people turned away from it. But nobody, I imagine, will care, on the other hand, to maintain that the vote in Congress represented the 269 The Higher Uses of an Exposition personal conviction or the individual practice of all those who cast it. It was eminently a case where the representative function of a legislator came into play; and it is easy, without any small- est disrespect to senators or representatives, to conceive that any one of them might argue : " To me the Sunday question is as yet indifferent or obscure. In either case, I am not personally pre- pared to take decided ground with reference to it. But with my constituents it is a matter of pro- found conviction ; and I am bound to respect their convictions, and to be influenced by them, unless I have different convictions of my own which are equally profound." It seems very probable that the congressional vote thus pretty accurately rep- resented this popular conviction, reckoned in the large. But the question still remains: Is that senti- ment sound and wise, and are the results of its latest expression likely to conserve the institu- tion which it professes so sacredly to cherish ? It would seem to be an opportune moment, especially in the light of the recent action at Washington, to consider such a question. In doing so, however, it must first be remem- bered that this institution of Sunday, as we have it in America, consists of two things — the institu- tion itself, and its modern accretions. By these last I mean all that Sunday has taken on of more precise and more austere restriction in connection with the Puritan movement, whether in England or in America. I am not here concerned with the 270 The Higher Uses of an Exposition provocation for those restrictions which the Puri- tans and their successors have from time to time found in that tendency to degrade and secular- ize the day, whether in England or elsewhere, of which Christendom has seen not a little. That there was such provocation no one who deals fairly with the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can deny; and it is impossible not to admh'e the heroic zeal of those who, to rescue from profane and unworthy uses a day consecrated to the commemoration of the supreme fact of the Christian faith, bound upon themselves a yoke in the matter of its observance which was neither light nor easy. But the fact still remains that their warrant for what they did, whether we look for it in the pages of the New Testament, or in the traditions of Catholic Christendom, was neither substantial nor sufficient. Of course, as we know, they went for that warrant to that older institu- tion of the Sabbath which the First Day of the week, with its larger freedom, was early ordained to supersede. How large that freedom was, the language of that greatest of the apostles to the Gentiles, who wrote to Colossae, " Let no man . . . judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sahhath days,^^^ sufficiently indicates. There can be little doubt that while the Christian First Day, or Sunday, took over from the Sabbath its venerable conception of a rest-day, with its scarcely less venerable tradi- tions of religious worship, it dismissed on the one 1 Epistle to the Colossians, ii. 16. 271 The Higher Uses of an Exposition hand that earlier strictness that would not on the Sabbath day pull an ox or an ass from the pit into which it had fallen/ nor pluck an ear of corn^ even to satisfy the most urgent demands of hun- ger ; while, on the other, it imported into the day an element of gladness and festivity which made the Sunday of primitive Christianity in many re- spects not unlike our own Christmas or Thanks- giving Day. What we who are native to America are most of all familiar with — its asceticism of do- mestic usage, its absolute prohibition not merely of amusement, but of recreation (the two are very different things), on Sunday, its dreary denial even of innocent occupations, its stern rebuke of the gaiety and mirthfulness of children, its hard con- striction of the domestic affections and of neigh- borly courtesies — by none of these characteristics were the Sundays of the first Christian centuries distinguished. A true picture of them may by anticipation be found in the pages of the New Testament itself, where Christ is found on one Sabbath day healing a paralytic, much to the dis- gust of a ruler of the synagogue, who roundly de- nounces him; or on another dining with a Phari- see, and making this kindly intercourse the means of the loftiest teaching, thus expressively pro- claiming that humaner law which was to govern men henceforth in their observance of all holy days, whether Sabbaths or Sundays. It is difficult to see, looking at that law quite apart from the Being who promulgated it, how 1 Gospel of St. Luke, xiv. 5. 2 Ibid., vi. 1. 272 The Higher Uses of an Exposition it could be improved. In many ways and in strangely different garbs have different commu- nions or societies striven to reintroduce, as the highest type of religion and the finest flower of character, a rule of prohibitive asceticism which Christ, in his own person, once and forever dis- missed. Now by seclusion, now by abstinence, and now again by vows of celibacy, of silence, of poverty, or of self-annihilation, have men sought to produce those choicer frtdts of conduct which have never ripened save as men have faced life and conquered it — have " used the world as not abusing it." And so it will be whether the ques- tion concern the observance of a day, the mastery of the appetites, or the enfranchisement of the will. In one word, we shall get a good Sunday in America when men learn to recognize its meaning and its uses — not when we have closed aU the doors which, if open, might help to teach them that lesson. It would seem as if the door of a library were one of those doors; the door of a well-arranged and well-equipped museum another; the door of a really worthy picture-gallery still another. And for what do these exist? Is it not for their en- lightening, refining, and instructive influence ? In all these temples one may read history. And the story of the world and of the races that have lived in it is part of the nobler and worthier education of man. It is a part of that education which is closely allied to the highest education of all, which is his spiritual education. For in one aspect of it 18 ^ 273 The Higher Uses of an Exposition one cannot look at the humblest piece of human handiwork without seeing in it how patience and the painstaking study of methods and materials have married themselves in some contrivance in which the happy issue of the perfected whole is nevertheless not so interesting as the courage and ingenuity — the hard fight with manifold obstacles — that produced it. And these qualities, though they are not the finest in human nature, are among them. Courage and patience and the steadfast purpose that will not be beaten ; indus- try, the studious questioning of the forces of na- ture, or the clever harnessing of them to the harder tasks of life — all these are qualities that need, un- doubtedly, still other and nobler qualities to in- spire and direct them. But an intelligent knowledge of himself and his environment is a primal need of man, and surely it can be no incongruous thing to teach men to think, to observe, to compare — in one word, in any inferior realm of knowledge to know; even though they will still need supremely to be taught to know in the highest realm of all. And this would seem to indicate that, consis- tently with the scrupulous observance of Sunday as a day of rest, a great assemblage of the achieve- ments of human art and industry might wisely be made a silent school-room of the progress of hu- man civilization. Let the Columbian Exposition proclaim by the hush of all its varied traffic and machinery — no wheel turning, no engine moving, no booth or counter open to buyer or seller, no sign or sound of business through all its long ave- 274 The Higher Uses of an Exposition nues/ and better still, by its doors closed till the morning hours of every Sunday are ended — that the American people believe in a day of rest. But if there be those who would later seek its precincts to look, it may be, more closely at the handiwork of man, to study the progi*ess of the race in the story of its artistic and industrial and mechanical achievements, and to recognize thus, it may easily be, in the study of such achievements, with Job, that " there is a spirit in man, and that the inspira- tion of the Almighty giveth him understanding" — that certainly can be no unworthy use of some hours of our America's rest-day. And all this without reference to that alterna- tive which, nevertheless, one cannot quite leave out of sight. There has been a very persistent effort to ridicule the idea that saloon-keepers and their like, and worse, in Chicago, would be friendly to the closing of the Exposition on Sunday, since it would force the crowds of idle strangers into their doors, either front or rear. But such ridi- cule is very ill-timed in view of facts that are abundantly well known as to the use that people shut out from the Exposition made of their Sun- day afternoons in Philadelphia. It may indeed be urged by those who are contending for the closing of the Exposition throughout Sunday that they are not responsible for what people do with them- selves so long as they keep them out of the Ex- position. But it would seem as if it might with 1 This, if I am correctly informed, was the rule with the British and American exhibits in the case of the Paris Exposition. 27s The Higher Uses of an Exposition some pertinency be retorted that if they are sim- ply devoting themselves to a work of exclusion, it would be better worth while to shut up some other doors before they troubled themselves to close those of the Exposition. For, after all, as this position of the all-day-Sun- day closers implies, it is not a question of doing the best possible thing, but of doing the best prac- ticable thing. And as to what that is there would seem to be very little doubt. The argument is constantly used, and it is one by which I must own that I have myself been greatly influenced in considering the question of particular relaxations of a stricter Sunday usage in a great city — "If you begin to make concessions, you never can tell where you will stop." But there would seem to be two answers to such a proposition as that. The first obviously is, " Are the concessions demanded intrinsically reasonable and a just reaction from previous over-strictness?" We may well remem- ber that if to-day there is in certain quarters among Americans too much disregard of Sunday, it is in part at least because once upon the shoul- ders of those from whom these very Americans are descended there was bound a burden which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear; and that the lawlessness of to-day is the logical consequence of the intolerable and unwarranted restraints of other days. A venerable ecclesiastic was once inveighing with much eloquence against what he considered undue relaxations in certain directions, and concluded by saying: "Brethren, 276 The Higher Uses of an Exposition there are some people who are constantly going about unscrewing things. They never can rest without loosening something here, and letting go something there, and easing up something or other wherever they get a chance. Brethren, be afraid of such people ! They are of all others the most dangerous!" Said a clever and experienced me- chanical engineer who listened to the philippic and who knew a little Latin ; " Dear old bishop ! What a pity he did not remember the motto, Ne sutor ultra crepidam! More mischief is done by screwing things up too tight, sometimes, than was ever done by easing a bearing." And he was wiser than he knew. And still further and preeminently it should be considered that what may be called the Christian theory of life as enunciated by Christ himself de- mands, most of all, as between things tolerable, permissible, and prohibited, what I may call the habit of discrimination. It does not follow, there- fore, that where one makes a righteous concession he never can tell where he will stop. To know where to stop is, in one sense, of the very essence of his Christian liberty and responsibility. "I speak as unto wise men," says the apostle, ^^ judge 2/e." A man need not wear a Quaker coat in order to observe a decent simplicity in the matter of dress. A man need not take a monastic vow of celibacy or poverty in order to live a pure and un- selfish life. He is to deal with the question of his duty to money, to society, to friendship, in accor- dance with the dictates of an enlightened judgment 18* 277 The Higher Uses of an Exposition and conscience. And so he must do with, the Sun- day question. He has not suddenly become a god- less and profane person because he differs with other equally honest and conscientious people about Sunday, or because he holds that there are in- herited views as to the observance of that day which cannot by any process of ingenuity be read into the pages of the New Testament, nor into any canon by which Christendom is bound either in its interpretation of that book or of the Lord's Day. Those inherited views, however dear to some of us, have just so much weight as can be gained for them from the study of the history of the origin and institution of the Christian Sunday, and no more. And if such a study makes plain to us the value of a day of rest, of worship, and no less of a cheerful and manly exercise of our Christian lib- erty in things indifferent in the observance of such a day, we may wisely consider whether a Sunday wisely guarded for such uses is not the best Sun- day alike for Exposition times and for all times. 278 A HUNDRED AMERICAN YEARS ADDRESS Delivered at the Service Commemorative of the One-Hundredth Anniversary of the Consecration of the First Bishops FOR America, by Bishops of the Church of Eng- land, IN the Chapel of Lambeth Palace, London, February 4, 1887 A HUNDRED AMERICAN YEARS WE are here to-day to commemorate the one- hundredth anniversary of the gift of the episcopate by the Church of England to the United States of America. My countrymen who have come here this morning, and you who are his spiritual children, would have been glad if the words to be said in connection with this occasion could have been spoken by him who is the head of the Anglican communion, and to whom church- men in both hemispheres are wont to look with equal loyalty and veneration. Since this, how- ever, may not be, let me lighten the strain upon your patience by saying that it shall be as brief as I can make it. It belongs to me, first of all, to acknowledge, as I do with sincere gratitude, the courtesy of his Grrace the Archbishop in arranging for this com- memorative service at a cost of personal sacrifice and inconvenience how great one can at least partly know who has been pressed upon by simi- lar, though far lighter burdens. The children 281 A Hundred American Years gi'ow to man's estate, and pass out from under the father's roof, but only to turn back again to the parental knee, too often bringing with them their own little interests and memories, as though these were of substantial weight and consequence. Happy would be the world if all fathers thus in- truded upon were as patient as he to whom some of us first came, now nearly ten years ago, or as his successor, who to-day sits in the throne of Canterbmy, and who by his invariable courtesy and kindness to his large family beyond the sea has already made his name a perfume in many an American home ! It may be urged, however, that such kindness does not excuse a fussy and exacting obtrusive- ness, but ought the rather to hinder and discour- age it; and one can imagine the mild surprise with which kinsmen who count their ecclesiastical history by nearly a score of centuries, look on at a new people who make so much of the comple- tion of their first hundred years. The wonder is not unnatural, certainly, in this presence, nor in this ancient city. When one stands in the nobly restored choir of St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield, and is reminded that its beginnings go back to the eleventh century, or is told of those Greek coins dug up from among its foundations, and then of the tradition of the visit of those Byzan- tine princes from whom it has been suggested that its unique and strongly marked Oriental fea- tures of architecture may have been derived, he is not surprised that a church or a nation only a hun- 282 A Hundred American Years dred years old seems to many too new to have a history, or, if it has one, to have one that is worth remembering. But we who are the children of the Church of England may at least plead that for us these hun- dred years stand for a new creation. At the close of our revolutionary war the church in America was not merely enfeebled, it was almost extinct. In a hostile atmosphere, of divided counsels, its ministers largely withdrawn from it to the mother- country, there seemed nothing for it but to die. That it did not die, that it lived and throve and grew, and that it has made a place in the respect and affections of multitudes who are not of its fold, is not less true than that if any one a hundred years ago had so predicted of it, he would have been generally laughed to scorn. And that its growth has been so rapid, and its history so peace- ful, has been largely due, under God, to one of the two men who a hundred years ago were consecrated at yonder altar. On the 20th of November, 1786, there landed in Falmouth two clergymen of the Church of Eng- land, both natives of her American colonies, who had sailed from New York eighteen days before. One of these was Dr. William White, rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, and bishop-elect of Pennsylvania. Dr. White had been educated for the ministry in England, and ordained to the di- aconate and priesthood respectively, some seven- teen years earlier, by the Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Yonge, and the Bishop of London, Dr. Terrick. 283 A Hundred American Years The other clergyman was Dr. Samuel Provoost, rector of Trinity Church, New York, and bishop- elect of the diocese of New York. He was a na- tive of New York, having been born there in the year 1742, and educated in England at St. Peter's College, Cambridge. Having been ordained dea- con in 1766 by Dr. Terrick, Bishop of London, and priest in the same year, at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, by Dr. Edmund Keene, Bishop of Ches- ter, he returned to America, and was elected its bishop by the convention of the diocese of New York in 1786. Dr. Provoost during the revo- lutionary war was a conspicuous patriot, or a conspicuous rebel, according as judged from the American or the English point of view, and during the struggle of the colonists had mainly lived in retirement from ministerial duty. He was a man of varied learning, and prompt and decided in action. The urgent importance of the consecration of these two presbyters was by this time abundantly evident to the authorities of the Church of Eng- land. Indeed, the question of an episcopate for America had engaged their attention at different times for the greater part of a century, and it con- tributes still more to endear to American church- men many eminent names in the Anglican episco- pate, that they are so conspicuously associated with labors and gifts to this end. As early as 1638 plans had been matured for sending a Bishop to the "American plantations," which, however, were frustrated by the outbreak of the troubles in 284 A Hundred American Years Scotland. In 1673 the Eev. Dr. Alexander Murray- was nominated for that purpose by Lord Chan- cellor Clarendon and approved by King Charles II.; but again the plan was defeated by circum- stances beyond control. Yet again, in 1713, Queen Anne responded favorably to the request of that venerable society to which the American Church owes, and gratefully owns, so large a debt for the appointment of bishops for the colonies, and the society actually purchased a residence for a bishop at Burlington, in New Jersey; but the death of the good Queen put an end to the whole matter. Later still. Dr. Gibson, Bishop of London, Arch- bishops Seeker and Tillotson, Bishops Louth, But- ler, Benson, Sherlock, and Terrick, all of them at various times, and some of them by personal munificence, testified to their sense of the great need to be supplied. The rebellion of the colonies put a stop to these efforts, and when the war had ended the relations of the American people to the Church of England were wholly altered. Many of the loyal clergy returned to their mother-country; and, on the other hand, those who remained behind found themselves in an atmosphere bitterly antagonistic. In the popular mind the church was associated with a yoke that had been broken, and with traditions which to republican tastes were most offensive. The proposal to introduce bishops into America was confused, whether purposely or no I will not undertake to say, with a design to erect among an independent people a foreign hierarchy. 28s A Hundred American Years The same spirit which, in the breasts of English- men long before, and on English soil, resented an alien ecclesiastical domination, found a new if mis- taken expression among their children; and the Puritan dread of prelatical invasion took on forms of protest as violent, sometimes, as they were gro- tesque. This had, indeed, been the case with the Puritans of New England and elsewhere before the separation ; and that event, instead of allaying such a spirit, in many instances intensified it. Again, there were those who believed that the issue of the struggle in America was not yet finally settled. They believed that the colonies might yet be won, or coerced, to return to their alle- giance, and they pointed out the embarrassments which would inevitably arise out of the creation by the Church of England of an independent episcopate in America. Finally, there was the still graver problem of the due guardianship of the faith. When the revolutionary war had ended, the churchmen of America, with the exception of some of those in New England, set about the formation of an independent organization. In this, so far as its independence of civil control and its admission of the laity to a share in its leg- islative counsels were concerned, they departed widely from the traditions of the Church of Eng- land. But they did more. They were not wholly superior to the spirit of the age, and that tended toward relaxation, nay, laxity, in matters of the faith. And so the revision of the Prayer-book, which was early undertaken in the American 286 A Hundred American Years Church, proceeded so far, at one time, as to threaten the excision not only of certain of the Articles, but also of the Athanasian and Nicene creeds, and even of an article in the Apostles' Creed. At this point, that gentle but firm refusal to proceed in the matter of the gift of the episco- pate which marked the action of the Archbishop of Canterbury and his associates upon the bench of Bishops was of inestimable value. The issue of their action is well known. The church in America yielded, after a brief hesitation; and though the bishops did not secure quite all that they desired, Anglican Christendom may well re- joice that they were unwilling to be contented with less. Looking back upon their action to-day, it deserves to be said — and though I could wish that it might have been said by a voice which would have carried far gi-eater weight than mine, I am thankful for the privilege of saying it in this place — that what they did, and the deliberation with which they did it, alike attest the wisdom and the generosity of ecclesiastical rulers who combined statesmanlike prudence with unflinch- ing loyalty to the faith. Their hesitancy, it is true, turned the footsteps of the ardent Seabury to the Scottish Church ; and in 1784, three years earlier than the event which we commemorate to- day, he had been consecrated by bishops of that church in an upper room in Aberdeen. But the delay of the Church of England in following that precedent gave time for action in America, which, while securing a great gift for its people, guarded 287 A Hundred American Years its exercise from the gravest abuses. It was a fit- ting question for English prelates to ask, and it was no less fitting to insist upon its explicit an- swer — "Not merely what Church, so far as its nominal designation is concerned, do you design to perpetuate in America, but in submission to what Catholic symbols of the faith is it to be founded and maintained?" Never was there a land in which clearness and definiteness on this point were more urgently demanded. Grod be praised for the paternal decision and patience that secured them ! A few more words will complete the story of this day. On landing in England, Drs. White and Provoost waited upon the American minister, the Honorable John Adams, and were by him pre- sented to the Primate. Their consecration was appointed for the 4th of February; and on that day, their testimonials having been submitted and approved, they were consecrated in this chapel by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. John Moore; the Archbishop of York, Dr. William Markham, acting as presenter, and the Bishops of Bath and Wells and Peterborough, Drs. Moss and Hinch- cliffe, uniting in the imposition of hands. The chronicler of the time rather pathetically records that ''there was a very small congregation present, composed mainly of the Archbishop's household," and adds that the "newly consecrated Bishops dined at the conclusion of the ser\dce with the Ai'chbishop, and left the next day for their distant homes." 288 A Hundred American Years It may be well to add here, as completing the historical sequence in the matter of the American episcopate, that on the 19th of September, 1790, Dr. James Madison was consecrated in this chapel Bishop of Virginia, and that in 1792 Bishop Pro- voost, as consecrator, united with himself Bishops White of Pennsylvania, and Seabmy of Connec- ticut, in consecrating Dr. Thomas John Claggett as the first Bishop of Maryland. Thus and thenceforward the English and Scotch lines of succession in America were united. It is a grate- ful recollection to one, at least, of those who have come here from beyond the sea to take part in this service, that the scene of this consecration was the city of New York, and that through it were united, not merely the thitherto disassociated and somewhat antagonistic American episcopates, but through them the " somewhat divergent lines of Bancroft and Tillotson." ^ It was a discouraging prospect which awaited the newly consecrated bishops on their return. In the convention that elected White there had sat less than a score of clergymen, and lay repre- sentatives from still fewer parishes. The conven- tion of the diocese of New York, which chose Provoost for its bishop, included five clergymen and the representatives of seven parishes. In all the thirteen American colonies there were onlj'- about 200 clergymen, and but few more congrega- tions. To-day, the original diocese of Pennsyl- vania has grown into three dioceses, with five 1 Dr. W. J. Sealrary's " Memorial Discourse," 1885. 19 289 A Hundred American Years bishops, 400 clergy, 300 parishes, 50,000 persons who regularly commune at its altars, and with voluntary offerings for the past year of a million and a half of dollars, or £300,000. The diocese of New York has become five dioceses, with 800 clergy, 700 congregations, over 100,000 communi- cants, and with voluntary offerings during the past year of nearly $5,000,000 or £1,000,000 sterling. During the same period of time the American daughter, including all the dioceses, has multiplied her three bishops until they are seventy, her 200 clergy until they have become 4000, her parishes until they have become 3000, her flocks until they include a cure of some two millions of souls, and her gifts until they amounted for the past year to $10,000,000. She has seven colleges and ten theo- logical seminaries in various parts of the country, and church schools for both sexes, both parochial and diocesan, in large numbers and in almost every diocese. In the single diocese of New York she has four sisterhoods, four hospitals, and churches and chapels ministering in six different languages, and to as many different nationalities. A single parish in New York expends £100,000. upon what is distinctly mission work, and in a single chapel has some 2000 children under in- struction. The church sustains fifteen mission- ary bishops in as many jurisdictions at home and abroad, and is to-day represented by bishops and missionaries in Africa, China, Japan, and Haiti. Her spirit was never more united or aggi-essive, and the outlook for her future, even in the judg- 290 A Hundred American Years ment of impartial observers not of her commu- nion, never so full of promise. Is it strange that she should wish, then, to come back to this sacred and venerable shrine in which, by the consecrations that we commemorate, the completion of her organic life was effected ? Here she drew her first breath as a daughter of the Anglican communion. From that communion she has derived her English Bible, her Book of Com- mon Prayer, and her most sacred traditions. In the language of the preface to her own Prayer- book she declares : " This Church is far from in- tending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or wor- ship"; and in the same preface she records her indebtedness, under God, for her first foundation, and for a long continuance of nursing care and protection, to her whom John Winthrop, governor of colonial Massachusetts, was wont to call " our dear mother, the Church of England." And it was in this spirit that that great prelate William White, first presiding bishop of the American Church in the Anglican succession, planned and wrought. I would that his venerated successor, my father and brother, the Right Rev. Dr. Stevens, Bishop of Pennsylvania, were here to tell you, as I may not hope to do, of the influence of that rare man who, a hundred years ago to-day, knelt be- fore this altar. In the early history of the church in America there is another name associated later in time vdth the diocese of New York — I mean that of 291 A Hundred American Years John Henry Hobart — which no annalist of Ameri- can church history can afford to underestimate. But great as Hobart was, and powerfully as he stamped his impress upon the diocese of New York, and through it upon the whole church in the United States, I may not forget to render that tribute to William White which my brother of Pennsylvania, had the infirm condition of his health not prevented his presence here to-day, would have most surely paid to the saint and sage who was his first predecessor. His hand it was which determined most largely the lines on which the ship of the church should be builded and launched; and, departures though some of them were from your own national traditions, I may, perhaps, venture in this presence to say that time and experience have abundantly vindicated them. Your daughter Churches in more than one of your mightiest Colonies have turned, from time to time, to their Sister in my native land for exam- ples of synodical and missionary organization, and have not been unwilling to adopt our methods in these particulars, and to express their appreciation of them. That feature especially of our organiza- tion which at the first view excited most appre- hension in Anglican minds — I mean the admis- sion of the laity to our synodical bodies — has, it would seem, come to wear, to many of the best minds in the Church of England, a very different aspect. Surely, if the experience of a hundred years counts for anything, it may well be so. And if it be so, that may be sung of England and 292 A Hundred American Years of "WTiite which Wordsworth sang of White and the Western World : To thee, O saintly White, Patriarch of a wide-spreading family, Remotest lands and unborn times shall turn. Whether they would restore or build : to thee As one who rightly taught how zeal should bui'n, As one who drew from out faith's hoHest urn The purest stream of sacred energy,^ And therefore, as the children come to-day to kneel at their mother's knee, they thank her first for that godly and far-seeing man whom she gave back to them as their first primate. But most of all they thank her for those spiritual gifts and graces with which she endowed those to whom she handed on and down the succession of the Angli- can episcopate. Wayward children though many of her sons and daughters may a hundred years ago have seemed, they revered her then, and their children revere her still. Never were her influ- ence and her example more potent in America than now. Never was the memory of her saints and martjTS and doctors more reverently cher- ished than at this houi*. And so across the sea to-day those children send the greeting of their homage and their love. Surely, as they do so, they too may be permitted to remind themselves that this Jubilee year of yours is this morning doubly theirs, that half their first century has been covered by the reign of a single sovereign, who, whether as wife, mother, or 1 Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," part iii, sonnet 15. 19* 293 A Hundred American Years ruler, has endeared herself to the people of two hemispheres, and who in each of these relations has preeminently illustrated those distinctive traits of fidelity to duty, of reverence for the right, and of exhaustless sympathy with misfortune and sor- row, which have been among the chiefest graces of the Church of England. For that church their supplications will ever ascend; and as some of them come back to this historic spot to keep this their first Centennial birthday, this is the prayer they breathe : Honored Mother, hitherto you have been preeminent in Christendom for a Scriptural faith, for sound learn- ing, and for pure manners. Already you have borne witness in many lands to the Catholic doctrine in all its primitive simplicity and power by fives of unselfish and heroic devotion. May it be so more and more in all the centuries to come. And when another hundred years are gone, and children's children gather here, may you still be found in all the plenitude of yet-advancing tri- umphs, rich in the gifts and treasures of your Heavenly Lord and Head, with no stinted hand dispensing them, in ever- widening circles of beneficence, to all mankind. 294 THE LIFE-GIVING WORD A SERMON Memorial of the Right Rev. Phillips Brooks, D. D., Boston, Mass., May, 1893 THE LIFE-GIVING WORD It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing : the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. St. John vi. 63. THE discourse from which I take these words finds both its occasion and its key in the miracle which preceded it. In a day when some people are fond of saying that the most powerful motives that attract people to the religion of Christ are what Bishop Butler called " secondary motives," it is interesting to note that, of some at any rate, this has been true from the beginning. Christ takes the five loaves and two fishes, blesses them, divides them, and distributes them ; and lo ! the hunger of a mighty throng is satisfied. His boundless compassion finds no limit to its expres- sion, and the twelve baskets full of fragments tell of resources which no emergency could exhaust. There must, indeed, have been some in that vast concourse who understood what the wonder meant. There must have been some aching hearts, as well as hungry mouths, that pierced through the shell of the sign to the innermost meaning of that for which it stood. But there were others, it would seem, who did not. There 297 The Life-Giving Word were others to whom, then as now, another's afflu- ence of gifts was only one more reason for de- mands, and they the lowest, that could know no limit. These people were there, over against Jesus then, as there are people now who stand over against any gifted nature just to reveal how sensuous are their hungers and how much they must have to satisfy them. And so it is that Jesus follows the miracle with the sermon. It is, in one aspect of it, a counterpart of all his preaching. A large proportion of those to whom he spoke could see in his mighty works only their coarser side, and be moved by his miracle of enlargement only to ask that it might be wrought again and again to satisfy a bodily hunger. And so he sets to work to lift it all — the miracle, the bread with which he wi'ought it, the hunger which it satisfied — up into that higher realm where, bathed in the light of heaven, it shone a revelation of the aim of God to meet and feed the hungers of the soul. This is the thought that echoes and reechoes, like some great refrain, from first to last through all that he says : " Labor not for the meat that perisheth, but for that which endureth unto ever- lasting life."^ "My Father giveth you the true bread from heaven." ^ And then, as if he would bring out into clearer relief the great thought that he is seeking to communicate : " I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth in me shall never thirst." ^ " The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I 1 St. John vi. 27. 2 St. John vi. 32. 3 St. John vi. 35. 298 The Life-Giving Word will give for the life of the world." ^ " Verily, ver- ily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. . . . For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." 2 One can readily enough understand the enor- mous shock of language such as this to a sensu- ous and sense-loving people. To say, indeed, that it had no meaning to them would be as wide of the mark as to say that it had no other meaning than that which they put upon it. But it is, plainly, to show that other, inner meaning, which from the beginning to the end of the discoui'se they seem so incapable of dis- cerning, that the whole discussion gathers itself up and opens itself out in the words with which I began: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." How the thunders of old disputes, like the rum- bling of heavy artillery through distant and long- deserted valleys, come with these words, echoing down to us from all the past ! It is a reflection of equal solemnity and sadness that no ordinarily well-instructed Christian disciple can hear the sixth chapter of St. John's gospel read as one of the church's lessons without having called up be- fore his mind's eye one of the bitterest and most vehement controversies, which, for a thousand 1 St. John vi. 51. 2 St. John vi. 53-56. 299 The Life-Giving Word years, has rent the Church of God. On the one side stand the mystics, and on the other the liter- alists ; and behind them both is that divinely in- stituted Sacrament which, as in turn the one or the other has contended, is here, or is not here, referred to. Happy are we if we have come to learn that here, as so often in the realm of theo- logical controversy, both are right and both are wrong. For on the one hand, it is impossible to deal candidly with these words of Christ's and not dis- cern that they are words of general rather than of specific import; that they were spoken to state a truth rather than to foreshadow a rite. On the other hand, it is no less impossible to read them and not perceive that there is in them a distinct, if not specific, foreshadowing of that holy ordi- nance which we know as the Eucharistic Feast. It is indeed incredible that " just a year before the Eucharist was instituted, the Founder of this, the most distinctive element of Christian worship, had no thought of it in His mind. Surely, for long be- forehand that institution was in His thoughts; and if so, the coincidences are too exact to be for- tuitous."^ This is the other aspect of the dis- course. But as the great Bishop Durham has said, " The discourse cannot refer primarily to the Holy Communion, nor again can it be simply pro- phetic of that Sacrament. The teaching has a full and consistent meaning, in connection with the actual circumstances, and it treats essentially of iPlummer, "St. John's Gospel," p. 146. 300 The Life-Giving Word spiritual realities with which no external act, as such, can be [co] -extensive." ^ Calm words and wise, which touch unerringly the core and substance of the whole matter, and bring us face to face with that larger truth which most of all concerns us who are here to-day. For, first of all, it belongs to you and me to remember why we are here, and in what supreme relation. This is a council of the church; and whatever conception some of us may have of that word in other and wider aspects of its meaning, there can be no question of its meaning here. The church, with us, and for the present occasion, at any rate, is this church whose sons we are, whose orders we bear, in whose Convention we sit, whose bishop we mourn, and whose bishop you are soon to elect. In other words, that is an organized, visible, tangible, audible body, situate here in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which now at any rate I am talking, and with which you are to be concerned. It is an institution having an earthly as well as a heavenly pedigree and history, and having earthly as well as heavenly means to employ and tasks to perform. There can be, there ought to be, no indefiniteness, no uncertainty about this. Whatever of such indefiniteness there may have been in the life and work of the church in other days, we have all, or almost all, of us come to the conclusion that the time for it is ended now. If the church is to do her work in the world, she must have an organized life, and a iWestcott, "Speaker's Commentary", ii, p. 113. 301 The Life-Giving Word duly commissioned ministry, and duly adminis- tered sacraments, and a vast variety of means and agencies, instruments and mechanisms, with which to accomplish that work. And when we come to Convention we must talk about these things, and add up long rows of figures, and take account of the lists of priests and deacons, and the rest, and make mention of vestries, and guilds, and parish houses, and sisterhoods, and all the various arms and tools with which the church is fighting the battle of the Lord. Yes, we must; and he who despises these things, or the least of them, is just as foolish and unrea- sonable as he who despises his eye or his hand, when either are set over against that motive-power of eye or hand which we call an idea. One often hears, when ecclesiastical bodies such as this have adjourned, a wail of dissatisfaction that so much time and thought should have been expended in things that were, after all, only matters of secon- dary importance; and the fine scorn for such things which is at such times expressed is often itself as excessive and as disproportionate to greater and graver things as that of which it speaks. But, having said this, is it not my plain duty to tell you, brethren of the diocese of Massachusetts, that he who stops over-long in the mere mecha- nism of religion is verily missing that for which religion stands ? Here indeed, it must be owned, is, if not our greatest danger, one of the greatest. All life is full of that strange want of intellectual and moral perspective which fails to see how sec- 302 The Life-Giving Word ondary, after all, are means to ends ; and how he only has truly apprehended the office of religion who has learned, when undertaking in any wise to present it or represent it, to hold fast to that which is the one central thought and fact of all : " It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth no- thing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." And this brings me — in how real and vivid a way I am sure you must feel as keenly as I — face to face with him of whom I am set to speak to-day. In one aspect of it, my task — from which at the first view any one might well shrink — is made com- paratively easy by words which have been spoken already. Never before in the history, not only of our own communion, but of any or all com- munions, has the departure of a religious teacher been more widely noted and deplored than in the case of him of whom this commonwealth and this diocese have been bereaved. Never before, surely, in the case of any man whom we can re- call, has the sense of loss and bereavement been more distinctly a personal one, extending to mul- titudes in two hemispheres who did not know him, who had never seen or heard him, and yet to whom he had revealed himself in very real and helpful ways. It has followed inevitably from this that that strong tide of profound feeling has found expression in many and most unusual forms, and it will be among the most interesting tasks of the future biographer of the late Bishop of Massachusetts to take note of these various 303 The Ufe-Giving Word memorials, and to trace in them the secret of his ■unique power and influence. But just because they have, so many of them, in such remarkable variety, and from sources so di- verse, been written or spoken, and no less because a memoir of Phillips Brooks is already undertaken by hands preeminently designated for that pur- pose, I may wisely here confine myself to another and very different task. I shall not attempt, there- fore, even the merest outline of a biographical re- view. I shall not undertake to analyze, nor, save incidentally, even to refer to, the influences and inheritances that wrought in the mind and upon the life of your late friend and teacher. I shall still less attempt to discover the open secret of his rare and unique charm and attractiveness as a man ; and I shall least of all endeavor to forecast the place which history will give to him among the leaders and builders of our age. Brief as was his ministry in his higher office, and to our view all too soon ended, I shall be content to speak of him as a bishop, of his divine right, as I pro- foundly believe, to a place in the episcopate, and of the preeminent value of his distinctive and in- comparable witness to the highest aim and pur- pose of that office. And first of all let me say a word in regard to the way in which he came to it. When chosen to the episcopate of this diocese, your late bishop had already at least once, as we all know, declined that office. It was well known to those who knew him best that, as he had viewed it for a large part 304 The Life-Giving Word of his ministry, it was a work with which he had no especial sympathy either as to its tasks or, as he had understood them, its opportunities. But the time undoubtedly came when, as to this, he modified his earlier opinions; and the time came too, as I am most glad to think, when he was led to feel that if he were called to such an office he might find in it an opportunity for widening his own sympathies, and for estimating more justly those with whom previously he had believed him- self to have little in common. It was the inevita- ble condition of his strong and deep convictions that he should not always or easily understand or make due allowance for men of different opinions. It was — God and you will bear me witness that this is true! — one of the noblest characteristics of his fifteen months' episcopate that, as a bishop, men's rightful liberty of opinion found in him not only a large and generous tolerance, but a most beautiful and gracious acceptance. He seized, instantly and easily, that which wiU be forever the highest conception of the episcopate in its relations whether to the clergy or the laity — its paternal and fraternal character; and his "sweet reasonableness," both as a father and as a brother, shone through all that he was and did. For one, I greatly love to remember this — that when the time came that he himself, with the simple natu- ralness whidi marked all that he did, was brought to reconsider his earlier attitude toward the epis- copal office, and to express with characteristic can- dor his readiness to take up its work if he should 20 305 The Life-Giving IVord be chosen to it, he turned to his new and to him most strange task with a supreme desire to do it in a loving and whole-hearted way, and to make it helpful to every man, woman, and child with whom he came in contact. What could have been more like him than that in that last address which he delivered to the chou'-boys at Newton, he should have said to them: "When you meet me, let me know that you know me " ? Another might easily have been misunderstood in asking those whom he might by chance encounter to salute him ; but he knew, and the boys knew, what he had in mind — how he and they were all striving to serve one Master, and how each — he most surely as much as they — was to gain strength and cheer from mutual recognition in the spirit of a common brotherhood. And thus it was always; and this it was that allied itself so naturally to that which was his never-ceasing endeavor — to lift all men every- where to that which was with him the highest conception of his office, whether as a preacher or as a bishop — the conception of God as a Father, and of the brotherhood of all men as mutually related in him. In an address which he delivered to the students of Johns Hopkins University during the last Gen- eral Convention in Baltimore, he spoke substan- tially these words : In trying to win a man to a better life, show him not the evil, bat the nobleness of his nature. Lead him to 306 The Ufe-Giviiig Word enthusiastic contemplations of humanity in its perfec- tion ; and when he asks, Why, if this is so, do not I have this life? — then project on the background of his enthu- siasm his own life ; say to him, " Because you are a liar, because you blind your soul with licentiousness, shame is born, but not a shame of despair. It is soon changed to joy. Christianity becomes an opportunity, a high privilege, the means of attaining to the most exalted ideal — and the only means." Herein must lie all real power; herein laj^ Christ's power, that He appreciated the beauty and richness of humanity, that it is very near the Infinite, very near to God. These two facts — we are the children of God, and God is our Father — make us look very differently at ourselves, very differently at our neighbors, very differently at God. We should be sur- prised not at our good deeds, but at our bad ones. We should expect good as more likely to occur than evil ; we should believe that our best moments are our truest. I was once talking with an acquaintance about whose religious position I knew nothing, and he expressed a very hopeful opinion in regard to a matter about which I was myself very doubtful. "Why," I said to him, "you are an optimist." " Of course I am an optimist," he replied, "because I am a Christian." I felt that as a reproof. The Christian must be an optimist. I set these words over against those of his Master with which I began, and the two in es- sence are one : " The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are lifeP There is a life nobler and diviner than any that we have dreamed of. To the poorest and meanest of us, as to the best and most richly dowered, it is alike open. To turn toward it, to long for it, to reach up after 307 The Life-Giving Word it, to believe in its ever-recurring nearness, and to glorify God in attaining to it, this is the calling of a human soul ! Now then, what, I ask you, is all the rest of re- ligion worth in comparison with this ? Not what is it worth in itself, but what is its place relatively to this? This, I maintain, is the supreme question for the episcopate, as it ought to be the supreme question with the ministry of any and every or- der. And therefore it is, I affirm, that in bringing into the episcopate with such unique vividness and power this conception of his office, your bishop rendered to his order, and to the church of God everywhere, a service so transcendent. A most gifted and sympathetic observer of our departed brother's character and influence has said of him, contrasting him with the power of institutions: "His life will always suggest the importance of the influence of the individual man as compared with institutional Christianity." In one sense un- doubtedly this is true; but I should prefer to say that his life-work will always show the large and helpful influence of a great soul upon insti- tutional Christianity. It is a superficial and un- philosophical temperament that disparages in- stitutions ; for institutions are only another name for that organized force and life by which God rules the world. But it is undoubtedly and pro- foundly true that you no sooner have an institu- tion, whether in society, in politics, or in religion, than you are threatened with the danger that the institution may first exaggerate itself, and then 908 The Life-Giving Word harden and stiffen into a machine; and that in the realm of religion, preeminently, those whose office it should be to quicken and infuse it with new life, should themselves come at last to " wor- ship the net and the drag." And just here you find in the history of religion, in aU ages, the place of the prophet and the seer. He is to pierce through the fabric of the visible structm*e to that soul of things for which it stands. When in Isaiah the Holy Ghost commands the prophet, " Lift up thy voice with strength ; lift it up, be not afraid : say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God ! " ^ it is not alone, you see, his voice that he is to lift up. No, no ! It is the vision of the Unseen and Divine. "Say unto the cities of Judah, Behold YOUR God ! " Over and over again that voice breaks in upon the slumbrous torpor of Israel, and smites the dead souls of priests and people alike. Now it is a Balaam, now it is an Elijah, a David, an Isaiah, a John the Baptist, a Paul the apostle, a Peter the hermit, a Savonarola, a Huss, a White- field, a Wesley, a Frederick Maurice, a Frederick Robertson, a John Keble (with his clear spiritual insight, and his fine spiritual sensibility), a Phillips Brooks. Do not mistake me. I do not say that there were not many others. But these names are typical, and that for which they stand cannot easily be mistaken. I affirm without qualification that, in that gift of vision and of exaltation for which they stand, they stand for the highest and the hest — that one thing for which the chm*ch of 20* 1 Isaiah xl. 19. 309 The Life-Giving Word God most of all stands, and of which, so long as it is the church militant, it will most of all stand in need: to know that the end of all its mechanisms and ministries is to impart life, and that nothing which obscures or loses sight of the eternal source of life can regenerate or quicken; to teach men to cry out with St. Augustine, Fecisti nos ad Te, Domine^ et inquietum est cor nostrum donee requiescat in Te:^ "Thou hast made us for Thyself, Lord, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in Thee"; this, however any one may be tempted to fence and juggle with the fact, is the truth on which all the rest depends. Unfortunately, it is a truth which there is much in the tasks and engagements of the episcopate to obscure. A bishop is preeminently, at any rate in the popular conception of him, an administrator; and howsoever wide of the mark this popular con- ception may be from the essential idea of the office, it must be owned that there is much in a bishop's work in our day to limit his activities, and there- fore his influence, within such a sphere. To recog- nize his prophetic office as giving expression to that mission of the Holy Ghost of which he is pre- eminently the representative, to illustrate it upon a wider instead of a narrower field, to recognize and seize the greater opportunities for its exercise, to be indeed "a leader and commander" to the people, not by means of the petty mechanisms of officialism, but by the strong, strenuous, and un- wearied proclamation of the truth, — under all iSt. Augustine, "Confessions," i, 1. 310 The Ufe-Giving Word conditions to make the occasion somehow a step- ping-stone to that mount of vision from which men may see Grod and righteousness, and become sensible of the nearness of both to themselves, — this, I think you will agree with me, is no un- worthy use of the loftiest calling and gifts. And such a use was his. A bishop-elect, walk- ing with him one day in the country, was speaking, with not unnatural shrinking and hesitancy, of the new work toward which he was soon to turn his face, and said among other things: " I have a great dread, in the episcopate, of perfunctoriness. In the administration, especially, of Confirmation, it seems almost impossible, in connection with its constant repetition, to avoid it." He was silent a moment, and then said : " I do not think that it need be so. The office, indeed, is the same. But every class is different ; and then — think what it is to them ! It seems to me that that thought can never cease to move one." What a clear insight the answer gave to his own ministry ! One turns back to his first sermon, that evening when, with his fellow-student in Virginia, he walked across the fields to the log-cabin where, not yet in holy orders, he preached it, and where, afterward, he ministered with such swiftly increasing power to a handful of negro servants. " It was an utter fail- ure," he said afterward. Yes, perhaps; but all through the failure he struggled to give expression to that of which his soul was full; and I do not doubt that, even then, they who heard him some- how understood him. 311 The Life-Giving Word We pass from those first words to the last — those of which I spoke a moment ago — the ad- dress to the choir-boys at Newton. Was there ever such an address to choir-boys before? He knew Httle or nothing about the science of music, and with characteristic candor he at once said so. But he passed quickly from the music to those incom- parable words of which the music was the mere vehicle and vesture. He bade the lads to whom he spoke think of those who, long ago and all the ages down, had sung that matchless Psalter, of the boys and men of other times, and what it had meant to them. And then, as he looked into their fresh young faces, and saw the long vista of life stretching out before them, he bade them think of that larger and fuller meaning which was to come into those Psalms of David when he — was there some prophetic sense of how soon with him the end would be? — when he and such as he had passed away — what new doors were to open, what deeper meanings were to be discerned, what nobler opportunities were to dawn, as the years hastened swiftly on toward their august and glorious con- summation ! How it all lifts us up as we read it, and how like it was to that " one sermon " which he forever preached ! And, in saying so, I do not forget what that was which some men said was missing in it. His, they tell us who hold some dry and formahzed state- ment of the truth so close to the eye that it ob- scures all larger vision of it — his, they tell us, was an " invertebrate theology." Of what he was and 312 The Life-Giving Word spoke, such a criticism is as if one said of the wind, that divinely appointed symbol of the Holy Grhost, " It has no spine or ribs." A spine and ribs are very necessary things; but we bury them as so much chalk and lime when once the breath has gone out of them! In the beginning we read: "And the Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."^ And all along since then there have been mes- sengers of God into whom the same divine breath has been, as it were without measui'e, breathed, and who have been the quickeners and inspirers of their fellows. Nothing less than this can explain that wholly exceptional and yet consistent influ- ence which he whom we mourn gave forth. It was not confined or limited by merely personal or physical conditions, but breathed with equal and quickening power through all that he taught and wrote. There were multitudes who never saw or heard him, but by whom nevertheless he was as intimately known and understood as if he had been their daily companion. Never was there an instance which more truly fulfilled the saying, " The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." They reached down to the inmost need of empty and aching hearts and an- swered it. They spoke to that in the most sin- stained and wayward soul which is, after all, the image of the invisible God — spoke to it, touched it, constrained it, " Wliat has this fine-bred Bos- ton scholar," plain men asked, when we bade him 1 Genesis ii. 7. The Life-Giving Word come to us and preach in our Trinity — " what has such an one to say to the business men of Wall street!" But when he came, straightway every man found out that he had indeed something to say to him — a word of power, a word of hope, a word of enduring joy and strength ! A kindred thinker of large vision and rare in- sight, New England-born and nurtured like him- self,^ speaking of him not long after his death, said: There are three forms pertaining to the Christian truths : They are true as facts, they are true as doctrines intellectually apprehended, they are true as spiritual experiences to be realized. Bishop Brooks struck di- rectly for the last. In the spirit he found the truth; and only as he could get it into a spiritual form did he con- ceive it to have power. It was because he assumed the facts as true in the main, refusing to insist on petty accuracy, and passed by doctrinal forms concerning which there might be great divergence of opinion, and can-ied his thought on into the world of spirit, that he won so great a hearing and such conviction of behef . For it is the spirit that gives common standing-ground ; it says substantially the same thing in aU men. Speak as a spirit to the spiritual na- ture of men, and they will respond, because in the spirit they draw near to their common Source, and to the world to which all belong. It was because he dealt with this common factor of the human and the Divine nature that he was so positive and practical. In the Spirit, it is all yea and amen ; there is no negative; in the New Jerusalem there is no night. 1 Rev. Theodore T. Hunger, D. D. The Life-Giving Word We can describe this feature of his ministry by words from one of his own sermons : '' It has always been through men of belief, not unbelief, that power from God has poured into man. It is not the discriminating critic, but he whose beating, throbbing life offers itself a channel for the Divine force — he is the man through whom the world grows rich, and whom it remembers with perpetual thanksgiving." And shall not you who are here to-day thank God that such a man was, though for so brief a space, your bishop? Some there were, you re- member, who thought that those greater spiritual gifts of his would unfit him for the business of practical affairs. "A bishop's daily round," they said, "his endless correspondence, his hurried jour- neyings, his weight of anxious cares, the misad- ventures of other men, ever returning to plague him — how can he bring himself to stoop and deal with these?" But as in so much else that was transcendent in him, how little, here too, his critics understood him ! No more pathetic proof of this has come to light than in that testimony of one among you who, as his private secretary, stood in closest and most intimate relations to him. What a story that is which he has given to us of a great soul, faithful always in the greatest! Yes, but no less faithful in the least. There seems a strange, almost grotesque impossibility in the thought that such an one should ever have come to be regarded as "a stickler for the Canons."^ But we look a i"A Sketch," etc., by the Rev. W. H. Brooks, D. D., p. 4. The Life-Giving Word little deeper than the surface, and all that is incon- gi'uous straightway disappears. His was the realm of a Divine Order ; his was the office of his Lord's servant. God had called him. He had put him where he was. He had set his church to be his witness in the world, and in it all his children, the greatest with the least, to walk in ways of reverent appointment. Those ways might irk and cramp him sometimes. They did: he might speak of them with sharp impatience and seeming disesteem sometimes. He did that too, now and then ; for he was human like the rest of us ! But mark you this, my brothers, — for, in an age which, under one iSgment or another, whether of more ancient or more modern license, is an age of much self-will, we shall do well to remember it, — his was a life of orderly and consistent obedience to rule. He kept to the chm'ch's plain and stately ways — kept to them, and prized them too ! But all the while he held his soul wide open to the vision of his Lord ! Up out of a routine that seemed to others that did not know or could not understand him, and who vouchsafed to him much condescending compassion for a bondage which he never felt, and of which in vain they strove to per- suade him to complain — up out of the narrower round in which so faithfully he walked, from time to time he climbed, and came back bathed in a heavenly light, with lips aglow with heavenly fire. The Spirit had spoken to him, and so he spoke to us. "The flesh profiteth nothing: it is the spirit 316 The Life-Giving Word that quickeneth. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." And so we thank Grod, my brothers, not alone for his message, but that it was given to him to speak it as a bishop in the church of God. We thank God that in a generation that so greatly needs to cry, as our Te Deum teaches us, " Govern us and lift us up ! " he was given to the church not alone to rule, but to uplift. What bishop is there who may not wisely seek to be like him by draw- ing forever on those fires of the Holy Ghost that set his lips aflame ? Nay, what soul among us all is there that may not wisely seek to ascend into that upper realm in which he walked, and by whose mighty airs his soul was filled ? Unto the almighty and ever-living God we yield most high praise and hearty thanks for the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all his saints who have been the chosen vessels of his gi-ace and the lights of the world in their several generations ; but here and to-day, especially for his servant, Phillips Brooks, sometime of this commonwealth and this diocese, true prophet, true priest, true bishop, to the glory of God the Father ! 317 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE AMERICAN CATHEDRAL Published in "The Forum," May, 1892 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE AMERICAN CATHEDRAL THE American traveler visits cathedrals in the Old "World with frequent enthusiasm and often with sincere and profound veneration. Indeed, it is probable that the larger proportion of people who make such pilgi'images, whether in England or on the Continent, is made up of Americans. But the gi'eat majority of these find in cathedrals as their chief charm a pictm^esque antiquity ; and of Americans who have never seen a cathedral a still larger majority regard them as venerable but useless anachronisms. They do not expect to see them reproduced in their own land, and they still less desire it. They remember them as associated, in the history of the past, in more than one in- stance with grave abuses, and they think of them as costly and unfruitful nests for pompous and in- dolent ecclesiastics. Among modern novelists, Mr. Anthony Trollope has found in the cathedral and its staff a fine opportunity for amiable satire ; and the misuse or perversion of a great institution has 21 321 The Significance of the American Cathedral thus come to be widely accepted as identical with the thing itseK. And so, when some one, touched by the spell of some stately and splendid minster, asks in a moment of enkindled feeling, "Why cannot one whose lot is cast in the western hemisphere have the cathedral!" one answer, and that often the first that one hears, is that " cathedrals belong to the past." The religion, we are told, of the times that built cathedrals was a religion of much igno- rance, of almost boundless superstition, of large leisure, and usually of a very elementary stage of civilized society. There was little teaching, be- cause the great mass of the people was too igno- rant to receive it. There was a very childish faith on the one hand, and there was enormous assump- tion of authority on the other. So incapable was the ordinary man or woman of being impressed otherwise than pictorially, that in ages when learn- ing was the possession of the few, when printing had not been discovered, when books were the privilege of the rich, religion inevitably took on a dramatic or spectacular form, to which the vast- ness, the mystery, and the stateliness of the cathe- dral especially lent itself. " But this," as was said not long ago in a public meeting by an eloquent ecclesiastic, "is an age not of cathedrals, but of hospitals," The appropriate symbolism of religion is something — a building, a society, a cult — that stands for succor and ministry to the homelier wants of man. The age, we are told, wants work, not worship ; lint and bandages, not paternosters ; }22 The Significance of the American Cathedral men and women trained in "first aid to the in- jured," not sm'pliced choirs, and vested priests, and pealing organs, and "long-drawn aisles" and "storied windows richly dight." And it does. Not that this age is peculiar in that, nor so very emi- nent, perhaps, in the possession of such things as it imagines itself to be. Doubtless the mecha- nisms of human ministry and succor are better to-day than they were one hundred or five hun- dred years ago. Doubtless a modern hospital is a better-equipped agency for taking care of the body than an ancient hospice. But it is well to remember that every agency — I use the words advisedly, and am quite ready to be challenged for their accuracy — every agency that modern Christianity employs in doing the work of its Divine Author in the world existed in substance, if not in identical form, a thousand years ago ; and that the men who employed those agencies came out of cathedrals, or buildings which were as much like cathedi-als — abbeys, churches, and monastic chapels — as the people of those times could make them. It is true that the old agencies became corrupt, and that the men who used them perverted them to unworthy uses. But that argument is of precisely the same force against Christianity itself as it is against the insti- tutions which were the fruit of it. And while we are bound to recognize that fact, we are bound also to ask the further question: In all the noblest work for humanity that men did for their fellow- men, in ages that we are wont, sometimes with a 3^3 The Significance of the A^nerican Cathedral very imperfect knowledge of them, to call " dark ages," what was the mainspring of their minis- tries ? About that there can be no smallest ques- tion. It was not the " enthusiasm of humanity," it was not any doctrine of altruism, it was the touch of that spell of love which they had learned, how- ever obscurely, from the cross of Christ. In other words, when we come to look back on the ages that built the first hospitals and founded the first brotherhoods and first housed the orphans, we see that all this manifold service for humanity was done by men who had learned the secret of worli because first they had known that mightiest in- spiration that comes from worship. One would not speak ungratefully or ungi-aciously of those forms of religious activity which distinguish his own generation. It may well be thankfully owned that our time has seen a vast advance upon that conception of religion which was largely the con- ception of our forefathers — a conception that con- founded discipleship with ecstasy, that mistook passive receptivity for devotion, that construed piety to be a kind of spiritual gluttony. I do not wonder at the revolt which has dismissed such a conception of Christian discipleship from multi- tudes of lives. But we may well take care lest in recoihng from one extravagance we may swing over into another. Am I exaggerating what I may call the public or social manifestation of religion, its organized ex- pression, as it widely prevails among us, when I say that the church, in the popular conception, 324 The Significance of ibe American Cathedral consists mainly of a huge auditorium with a plat- form and a more or less dramatic performer, and a congregational parlor, and a parish kitchen ? I recognize cordially the earnest pui-pose to get hold of people out of which much of this has come. But it is well to recognize something else, and that is, that religion has never survived anj^where with- out the due recognition and consei^vation of the instinct of worship. That lies at the basis of it, always and eveiywhere. First, there must be something that moves us to that upward-reaching thought out of which come penitence, and prayer, and faith — and all the rest. But a diet-kitchen will not do that, nor anything that appeals only to the utilitarian side of life. I appeal to any candid experience whether there is not, on the other hand, something else that does. I ask those who remem- ber Rouen, or Durham, or Salisbury whether, when first they entered some such noble sanctuary, there was not that in its proportions, its arrangements, its whole atmosphere, which made it, in a sense that it had never been before, their impulse to kneel ? We may protest that this is mere religious estheticism, and in one sense it is; but until we have divorced the soul and the body, the eye and the mind, the imagination and the senses, we can- not leave it out of account. We Americans are said to be the most irreverent people in the world, and of the substantial truth of that accusation there cannot be the smallest doubt. But did it ever occur to us to ask how it has come about? It is time to stop talking about the influence of 325 The Significance of the American Cathedral Puritan traditions to descendants who are so re- mote from those traditions as to be unable to distinguish between the austerity that hated cere- monialism and the debonair indifferentism that dismisses the simplest elements of religious de- corum. We have little reverence, because we have but a poor environment in which to learn it. The vast majority of church buildings in America are utterly unsuggestive of the idea of worship. There is nothing in them to hush speech, to uncover the head, to bend the knee. And as a matter of fact, they do nothing of the sort. They are expedients devised for a certain use, and that use is one which, under any honest construction of it, in- volves an utterly fragmentary conception of the Christian rehgion. And what, meantime, have we been seeing all over the land? We have been seeing a develop- ment of domestic, civic, and commercial architec- ture of the most costly and gi-andiose kind. I have been told that the costliest building in Amer- ica is that which houses a life-insurance company. Is this a fine satu*e on that decay of faith that has dismissed out of the horizon all other and more irretrievable risks of destruction? Surely, about one thing there can be no doubt, and that is that the noblest ideas should have the noblest expres- sion. But what are the noblest ideas if they are not those which ally man to a nobler and diviner future! It is in vain that a clever skepticism — comic and, forsooth, textually critical in the latest and noisiest exhibition of it among us — it is in ^26 The Significance of the American Cathedral vain that such a skepticism dispenses with God, and tells us that it has looked into the bottom of the analytical chemist's crucible and found no soul. Out from the despair of the present the heart travels as by a mathematical law along the ascend- ing arc of faith until it reaches the vision of the kingdom that is to be. And the witness of that kingdom — its visible expression in stone and color, in form and dimensions, in position and dignity — is tlfiat not of the smallest possible consequence, while you are taking infinite pains with your child's bedroom that it shall have its face to the sun, or your stables that they shall be well drained? There is something, when we stop to think of it, in the relative cost and thought that men spend on the places in which they sleep, and eat, and lounge, and trade — on a club, a hotel, a theater, a bank — on the one hand, and on a house for the worship of the Arbiter of one's eternal des- tiny on the other, which must strike an angel, if he is capable of such an emotion, with a sense of pa- thetic humor. And we are, many of us, so entirely clear about it. "Yes," we say in effect, "let us have churches which are cheap expedients, and that in the poverty of their every attribute express the poverty of our conceptions of reverence, of majesty, of worship. But let us build om* own palaces as if indeed we ourselves were kings." I submit that in such a situation the cathedral, in- stead of being an anachronism, is a long-neglected witness which we may sorely need. The greatest ages of the world, the greatest nations of the world, 327 The Significance of the American Cathedral have not been those that built only for their own comfort or amusement ; and it is simply inevitable that a great idea meanly housed, meanly expressed in these forms in which we express reverence for our heroes and love for our dead, and loyalty to our country — in which, in one word, we express toward our best and greatest among om* fellow- men, or toward human institutions, veneration and affection and patriotism — it is inevitable, I say, that a gi'eat idea thus meanly treated will come to be meanly esteemed. We are fond of speaking, on the one hand, of what is archaic and superannu- ated, and of our cis- Atlantic wants and conditions as being, on the other hand, somehow absolutely unique and exceptional. But they are not. Amer- ica wants, I suppose, honesty and integrity and faith quite as much, and indeed rather more, than she wants electric railways and a protective tariff. And if so, she wants the visible institutions which at once testify to and bear witness for these things, and that in their most majestic and convincing pro- portions. It would be an interesting question, if a foreigner were asked where in America he had seen any visible structure which impressively witnessed to religion, and which compared worthily with the enormous buildings reared for other purposes, or with similar structm-es in other lands — it would be interesting, I repeat, if somewhat humiliating, to hear what he would say. For, in fact, there are not five church edifices in the United States which, for dignity, monumental grandeur, nobility of con- ception or proportion, are worthy of being men- 328 The Significance of the American Cathedral tioned. And it would seem to be worth while to consider whether, the country having spent the first hundred years of its existence in making itself extremely rich and extremely comfortable, it might not be well to set about building at least one noble stracture which did not weave, or print, or mold, or feed, or lodge, save as it wove the garment of an immortal hope, and fed, and formed, and housed those creatures of a yet loftier destiny who are immortal. In one word, it can hardly be urged that a cathedral is out of date until it is admitted that it is out of date to believe in God and to wor- ship him. But again, it is urged by a very different class of objectors that while there may be force in what has been thus far urged, a cathedral is a thing not to be desu'ed, because as an institution it fosters the spirit of ecclesiasticism, promotes the growth of priestly assumptions, and builds up within the communion that accepts it an official oligarchy, narrow in its vision, arrogant in its pretensions, and reactionary in its influence. There is much in histoiy that confirms such an impression, and it will be well frankly to recognize it. But we have no sooner discerned such a fact than we may, if we choose, discern the reason for it. The cathedral has been, in many ages and lands throughout Christendom, in this particular like religious or- ders. It has been made up of men of one caste or class. The administration of its affairs, both tem- poral and spiritual, has been largely vested in the hands of this one class. Abuses of power, pen'^er- 329 The Significance of the American Cathedral sions of function, misappropriation of property, in- dolence, nepotism, and unwarrantable usurpations have all been possible, if not inevitable, because a single caste or class has exercised its powers and discharged its trusts unchecked by criticism or revision other than that of its own order. Now, it does not greatly matter what the order may happen to be, ecclesiastical, civic, or military: such a condition of things carries in its train the same inevitable dangers. The remedy is obvious, and in modern ecclesiastical corporations it has been, on the whole, wisely applied. It is the introduc- tion of the lay element into the administration of ecclesiastical affairs. That in the recoil from the abuses of priest-ridden communities or institutions the movement in that direction may have been excessive is not improbable ; but on the whole, at any rate in that communion of which the writer is a member, the abuses in connection, for example, with a cathedral which are the product of undue authority and excessive isolation on the part of the clergy are no longer possible. In one way or another (it is not possible within these limits to in- dicate in detail how this is variously provided for in various dioceses), no American cathedral can ever be wholly independent of any other than merely clerical control and restraint. Meantime, to those who are wont to think of the cathedral as fruitful only of ecclesiastical exclu- siveness or of pampered indolence, it is well to re- member that, of the names that come first to one's lips in rehearsing the history of modern theological 330 The Significance of the American Cathedral literature, — e. ^., in the Church of England, — those of Alford and Milman, of Trench and Wordsworth, of Stanley and Liddon, and Westcott, and Payne- Smith, and Burgon, and Wace, and Row, are only a few of many to whom scholars everywhere have been indebted, and all of these have been deans or canons or prebendaries in English cathedrals. "When we think of a cathedral, we are apt to think merely of a huge building; but in fact the building is simply the home of an organized society, and the organized society exists to give the most adequate expression to religious worship and the most eflS.- cient presentation of religious truth. And so, out of the necessary provision not for one man of one gift, but for a gi'oup of men of various gifts, there comes a fellowship of community which may in- deed, like any other earthly community, be per- verted from its original design to unworthy ends, but which holds, nevertheless, in that original de- sign one of the noblest possible conceptions of the effective use of the best gifts for the greatest good of the greatest number. So far as the ministry can consent at all to be called a profession, the ap- pointments to cathedral dignities, deaneries, can- onries, and the rest may be regarded as the prizes of the profession. And, on the whole, it cannot be denied that, in our time at any rate, they are, as a rule, wisely and worthily bestowed. This, however, is of far less consequence than the further fact that such bestowal has undoubtedly resulted in giving, to men of exceptional gifts, opportunities which otherwise they could never have commanded for 331 The Significance of the American Cathedral employing these gifts and enlarging the horizon of the best scholarship, and in the loftiest realm of learning, which is surely that of theology. In om- country, for a considerable part of its earlier history, this result has been reached to some extent in connection with our colleges and universities. But whatever may have been the services which these have rendered to the cause of sound learning, it will not be denied that their dominant enthusiasms are to-day directed toward a learning which is purely secular. Less and less are American colleges, especially those of com- manding influence, the homes of rehgious teach- ing or theological inquiry; and though there are other centers for these things, none of them can ever have the unique advantages of that calm re- treat which is to be found in a cathedral close. Worship, meditation, and the large liberty from pedagogic duties which there obtain would seem to be the ideal conditions for the achievements of a Christian scholar. But even if this is admitted, there are those who will still dismiss the cathedral with the one sweeping and final condemnation that it is "un- American." I have never been quite able to make out why this is said, unless it be that cathedrals are not indigenous to America, or else because deans and canons are sometimes appointed by the Queen. On any other ground there could not well be a more curiously inaccurate statement. Dismissing any attempt at subtle definition, I suppose that the synonym for "un-American" would be "un- 332 The Significance of the American Cathedral democratic," or " aristocratic," or " exclusive." But the cathedral in America, at any rate in any case in which its worship is not in an alien tongue and under foreign authority, is of all other places the one in which the principles of democracy invaria- bly obtain. The history of religious worship and of religious buildings in America is, in this aspect of it, as exceptional as it is inconsistent. I pre- sume it would be safe to say that there is no other land in Christendom where so many places of re- Ugious worship bear witness to the inflexible su- premacy of the spirit of caste. For what is the spirit of caste if it be not the spirit which in these conditions and relationships, seeming to exclude distinctions implying superiority or inferiority of persons, insists upon affirming them! And is there any other institution which, in the face of the plain teachings of the religion of Jesus Christ, as where in the Epistle of St. James it is said : " My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons. For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in \ile raiment ; and ye have re- spect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him. Sit thou here in a good place ; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: Are ye not then partial in your- selves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?" (i. e., discriminate from unworthy motives) — is there, I ask, any other institution which, in the face of the plain teaching of its Founder, departs 333 The Significance of the American Cathedral so radically and habitually from that teaching as thus given as does the modern pewed church? Mr. Webster once said that it was an evidence of the divine origin of Christianity that it had so long survived its being preached in tub pulpits. It will be a stronger evidence of it if in America it sur- vives the enormous incongruity of the pew system. But in St. Paul's in London or in St. Peter's in Eome, to-day, sanctuaries each of grandest propor- tions and of most magnificent worship, you may see what never since their doors were opened has by any chance been seen in any one of the sanc- tuaries that line our chief thoroughfares in the great cities of America — and that is, a steady stream not alone of the poor, but of the poorest, ragged, barefooted, travel-stained, working-women and peasants, with babies in their arms, to whom those Christian temples are not theu's, or yours, or mine, but God's, and therefore as free to them as Grod's air and God's sunshine. And now it may well be asked, if we are going to teach the great lesson of Christian brotherhood, of the absolute equality of aU men before their Father who is in heaven, how more expressively can we teach and affirm it than by rearing a sanc- tuary in which nowhere nor under any conditions shall there be any reserved rights, any locked pews, any hired sittings, any proscription on the one hand or any favoritism on the other % And if any one inquires whether this is anything else than an idle dream, let him go and see the congrega- tions of thousands — six or seven thousand some- .334 The Significance of the American Cathedral times — of working-men gathered under the dome of St. Paul's, and privileged to share in what is to- day undoubtedly the noblest and most impressive service in Christendom. The hesi is there, and is for him who will come and take it. It is in this conception that the true idea of a cathedral culminates. It is vast, it is rich, it is stately and majestic in proportion and in appoint- ments. It is for the honor of God, and not for the glory of man — and it is free to all alike. If this is un-American, then they who founded the Republic were un-American also. In one word, the past of Christendom has given to the future of America a great and noble instrument. Let not ours be the doubtful wisdom of those who are afraid to use it ! 335 HENRY K r.iTY UC SOUTHERN RERIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY II [I III III li I ll ill III! II I II llj ill AA 000 993 261 7