ADDRESSES 
 
 OF 
 MELANCTHON WOOLSEY STRYKER 
 
Hamilton 
 Lincoln & 
 other addresses 
 
 BY 
 
 MELANCTHON WOOLSEY STRYKER 
 
 President of Hamilton College 
 
 Tfltica, m. I?. 
 
 TOltlllam U. Smitb & Company 
 1806 
 
Copyright, 1896, by 
 M. Woolsey Stryker. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
S63 
 
 , 
 
 HAirJ 
 
 PUBLISHER S NOTE 
 
 THIS volume gathers the chief Orations and Addresses, to 
 gether with three Baccalaureate Sermons, given by President 
 Stryker during three and a half years, beginning with 1893. 
 A few of them are reprinted from public reports, and are given 
 with the bracketed comments of their auditors, in the belief 
 that this reflects in a not unacceptable way the color of their 
 several occasions. 
 
 292835 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FAOB 
 
 I. ALEXANDER HAMILTON: An address before the Hamilton 
 
 Club of Brooklyn, N. Y., January ii, 1895 9 
 
 II. ABRAHAM LINCOLN: An address before the Union League Club 
 
 of Brooklyn, N. Y., February 12, 1895 2 5 
 
 III. OUR PURITAN FORBEARS: An address before the New Eng 
 
 land Society of New York City, December 22, 1893 .... 36 
 
 IV. THE DUTY OF ENTHUSIASM: An address at the Woodstock, 
 
 Conn., celebration, July 4, 1894 48 
 
 V. THE FUTURE OF THE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE: A paper read 
 at the Convention of Colleges and Schools, at the Johns 
 Hopkins University, at Baltimore, Md., December I, 1894 . 5Q 
 
 VI. EMMA WILLARD: An address at the presentation of the 
 
 RUSSELL SAGE Hall, at Troy, N. Y., May 16, 1895 .... 67 
 
 VII. IDEALS: An address before the graduates of the BARTHOLO 
 MEW School, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 30, 1895 74 
 
 VIII. THE STEWARDSHIP OF KNOWLEDGE: An address at the 
 
 opening of the Brooklyn Institute, September 30, 1895 ... 92 
 
 IX. ETHICS IN POLITICS: A speech at the I2yth Banquet of the 
 
 Chamber of Commerce, New York City, November 19, 1895 102 
 
 X. SEEING THE UNSEEN: The baccalaureate sermon to the gradu 
 ating class of 93, at Hamilton College, Sunday, June 18, 1893 ^2 
 
 XI. THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE: The baccalaureate sermon to the 
 
 class of 94, Hamilton College, June 24, 1894 126 
 
8 CONTENTS 
 
 XII. RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE: The baccalaureate sermon to 
 
 the class of 95, Hamilton College, June 23, 1895 138 
 
 XIII. CREEDS: The annual sermon before the Alumni of Auburn 
 
 Theological Seminary, May 9, 1895 152 
 
 XIV. PARTISANSHIP AND PATRIOTISM: A speech at the Hardware 
 
 Dinner, New York City, February 20, 1896 168 
 
 XV. THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE: Remarks be 
 fore the University Club of Buffalo, N. Y., March 3, 1896 . .180 
 
aieyanber ftmmflton 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE 
 THE HAMILTON CLUB OF BROOKLYN 
 JANUARY n, 1895 
 
 Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Hamilton Club Let me be 
 gin with grateful acknowledgment, both of the honor which 
 you have conferred in asking me to speak to you on this anni 
 versary and of your hearty and encouraging greeting. Let me 
 also moderate all expectation by telling you that I am not the 
 adept this occasion merits, but the merest novice at this festal 
 art and withal let me confide, (tho my present presumption 
 seems to contradict me), a modest one. Modest one must be 
 facing such a theme and company a company to which the 
 details and suggestions of the theme are so familiar and which 
 contains so many speakers of renowned power. You have 
 heard of the good woman who prayed that her minister might 
 be "anointed with the ile of Patmos ! " [Laughter.] For 
 many reasons too humorous to mention, I must bespeak, and, 
 too, in your own behalf, your present entreaties forme. I am, 
 alas, like the man who said he could " risk anything except 
 temptation," and I freely confess that my good resolutions to 
 talk less and think more, to have more bung and less spigot, 
 were quite vanquished by the tempting opportunity to stand here 
 as the representative, however poorly, of an interest which 
 holds in reverence that name which is its title, as it is also the 
 title of this group. In a recent most courteous note relating 
 to this evening, your president graciously assured me that you 
 " recognize very distinctively the patronymic relationship of 
 the club and the college." It is indeed a broad common ground 
 
iIpS*": *.^ : ;\ ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 and well may we each attempt untiringly to maintain the spirit 
 of Alexander Hamilon and to recognize our debt to his super 
 lative services. But this duty is not elective and singular, it 
 goes with our birthright as loyal Americans. If to that duty 
 we are, e nomine, peculiarly and publicly pledged, it is also one 
 shared joyfully by all citizens of this land who are intelligent 
 in its constitutional history. [Applause.] For his great name 
 is not one merely to grace a holiday, but it is woven into the 
 very texture of our chief events. All that is subsequent to him 
 is like a palimpsest above his original script. His initials are 
 the watermark under every page. If any meager recitation 
 of mine shall be effective to stimulate your mental energy 
 if I can but start your thinking by a kind of flying switch I 
 shall be satisfied; for a train of treasure is far more than the 
 wheezy engine that moves it. Should I seem parsimonious of 
 ideas, remember that I have now given you the oars and that 
 I only agree to do the steering while you row. 
 
 It was ninety years ago that the heavy-booming guns at the 
 Battery were answered by the French and English warships 
 then in the harbor yonder, and that to their miserere the 
 three nations to which he was related joining in that last salute 
 the heart of the people of his fond adoption quivered in re 
 sponsive pain. So, in Trinity Churchyard, close by the middle 
 of its south wall, where today a quaint and time-worn con 
 struction of stone with its obscuring inscription but poorly 
 marks his sepulture, they laid all of him that could die, to 
 
 " Let the sound of those he wrought for, 
 And the feet of those he fought for, 
 Echo round his bones forever more." 
 
 There was no Tennyson to celebrate in majestic ode "an 
 empire s lamentations," and sooth it was but a little empire 
 then and this great city but a trivial village: but time and " the 
 strength of a diffusive thought " have wrought the poem, and 
 his mausoleum is a mighty dome upheld by well-nigh fifty 
 pillars. That little provincial New York is now, as a centre of 
 
HIS PRECOCITY 
 
 metropolitan population, the second on Earth. He sleeps well, 
 
 " While the stars burn, the moons increase, 
 And the great ages onward roll." 
 
 To him and to ourselves and to those who shall follow we 
 owe it more strenuously to consider our immortal debt to one 
 who so heroically endured " as seeing the invisible." The out 
 line that dates furnish, however familiar to you, it will be well 
 rapidly to trace. Hamilton was born on this day, 1757, in the 
 small island of Nevis, his father and his name utterly Scotch 
 and his mother of Huguenot lineage. So in his veins blended 
 the stuff of the race of Knox and of the race of Coligny and 
 Beza. At 12 a counting-house of Santa Cruz had in him a 
 clerk of exceptional facility and of premature commercial tact. 
 Already he was of manly force and trustiness. At 15 here 
 not long to be a stranger and busy with books at Elizabeth, 
 N. J. At 16 an eager student advancing rapidly in King s 
 College, whose title by his good help was soon and thereafter 
 to be Columbia. What a star is that which stands by his name 
 upon the roll of that venerable school to which your own club 
 has given its present great president! At 17 he began 
 and with no prentice hand threw himself upon the issue 
 as a speaker and a pamphleteer. At 19 captain of artillery, 
 maneuvering his stubborn guns with skill at Harlem and White- 
 Plains. At 20 upon the staff of the commander-in-chief with 
 rank of lieutenant-colonel. At 23 he weds Eliza, daughter of 
 General Schuyler. As lieutenant-colonel of infantry he led 
 one of the last charges upon Cornwallis works at Yorktown. 
 He sits in Congress 1782-83 and again 1787-88, in which last 
 period he becomes the controlling spirit of the Constitutional 
 Convention. Two-thirds of the substance of that sagacious 
 exposition which we call "The Federalist" was Hamilton s 
 critical contribution toward the ratification of the Convention s 
 work. Well has it been called the " Bible of Republicanism." 
 In 1780, at the age of 32, as Washington s " principal and most 
 trusted friend," he became the first Secretary of the Treasury. 
 
12 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 In 1708 he was made Inspector-General of the army, and in 
 1799 Commander-in-Chief. In 1800 he was president-general 
 of the Society of the Cincinnati. In 1804, Burr, largely thro 
 the influence of Hamilton (who read him well and distrusted 
 his sinister ambition), being defeated in his effort to become 
 Governor of New York, sought a quarrel with him. Hamilton ac 
 cepted the cartel and fell murdered. It was July II, and on 
 the next day at the age of 47 he died. So ended his crowded 
 career of nearly thirty years of public service. "That is not a 
 common chance that takes away a noble mind," and the per 
 sonal traits of such a phenomenal man claim the most care 
 ful pondering. 
 
 Those traits were rare, one by one, and in their combination 
 they were marvelous. Much, of course, he owed to natal gifts, 
 much to the variety of his early training, much to the emer 
 gencies that influenced his most flexible years, much to his 
 prompt consorting with the ablest men : but heredity, impulse, 
 circumstance, occasion and environment illustrate they do 
 not explain. He was what he was. All else defines, this 
 isolates. From the first Hamilton was avid of large things, 
 and, hating abstractions, he sought broad ideas in order to 
 their concrete and constructive uses. His faith in primary 
 principles was tirelessly industrious to search out and establish 
 these : but his prescience was never ministrant to that vanity 
 which often pretends to evince originality as if independent of 
 dire mental toil. He forewent no labor of self-equipment, but, 
 mixing all he did with brains, and with no occult reserve of 
 method, he steered for conviction and hesitated neither for 
 odium nor for applause. It was this rectilinear purpose, this 
 undeviating candor, that both made him to be immensely loved, 
 and, by indirect, subtle and plausible minds, as intensely hated. 
 In either sense his way was straightway. If he lacked, it was 
 in conciliation and patience. Precocity is not of itself a virtue ; 
 it may even be a defect ; it is always a peril. It was in spite 
 of his youth, and not because of it, that he was so early heeded 
 and followed, for with all his energy of enthusiasm he seemed 
 
THE MAKING OF THE MAN 13 
 
 endowed at the beginning with the fertile resource and bal 
 anced judgment of middle life. That gallant, expressive face 
 not only glowed with heat, but also beamed with light. That 
 lithe, supple and animated form spoke of command as well as 
 of impulse. Well for us that in him the range of hope had 
 not time to be cramped by that incertitude which so often 
 poses as discretion. [Applause.] Well for us that he so 
 trusted himself to truth, and that his early disciplines had made 
 him both so rapid and so exact. It was thus he seized hours 
 at which looser-girded wills faltered or shrank. His prompt 
 ness rivalled occasion, and serried obstinacy yielded to his 
 intrepid assaults. [Applause.] It was not his own success 
 he sought, but the triumph of a mighty cause. Had he pre 
 ferred power, which is transient, to influence, which endures ; 
 had he been a partisan rather than a patriot, a self-seeker 
 rather than the trustee of a future beyond even his hope or 
 ken ; had he been duplex, where he was open, lucid and sin 
 cere; then he had not impressed his individuality upon a 
 whole America as the truest translator of her predestinate 
 nationality. When the surrender was making at Yorktown it 
 is said that some of the American troops began to cheer. 
 41 Silence," ordered Washington, "let posterity cheer for us." 
 They are not always happiest, but they are always blessedest 
 who prefer faith to popularity, and who appeal from the plau 
 dits of an hour to the solemn vindications of history. There 
 this great jurist rested his great case. He was neither sophist 
 nor paralogist. He dwelt above manipulation, and compro 
 mise, and expedient, and formula, and all mere passport. He 
 sought the underlying principles and the ultimate reality. 
 His soul went into his plea. With warmth and grace, but 
 with a peculiar logical simplicity a clearness that became 
 clarity and with the unshaken courage of one compelled by 
 conviction, he summoned his facts and marshalled his reasons. 
 His was the strategy of unambushed truth and the elastic 
 energy of a direct will. [Cheers.] The power of the will in 
 oratory is elemental. An orator is a leader a captain and 
 
M ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 captor of men his captaincy is captivation; for hearts are 
 made that way. But the genius for this control is none other 
 than undisguised and uncalculating devotion to a cause. The 
 words of such an one are spermatic. To him the souls of men 
 respond as tinder kisses flame. It was said that in the conven 
 tion of 88 Hamilton "converted his opponents on his feet," 
 and later still his irnpressiveness had no dubious tribute when 
 Congress refused to hear him as Secretary of the Treasury, 
 lest it should be too much convinced. But he was no theatri 
 cal rhapsodist. His rhetoric served, not mastered, his syllo 
 gism. With pen, as with voice, he was a chief of assemblies. 
 He was a sharp sword and two-edged. He was the exponent 
 and champion of frank and fearless argument. Malignity 
 might vituperate, but he did not pause. Malice might misrep 
 resent him, but he never sulked. Cunning was not in him, nor 
 little envy, nor treachery. He met each new issue as it arose, 
 and, his enemies themselves being judges, he was never put to 
 the worse in free and open encounter. Nor were his strokes 
 sporadic or inconsecutive. He stayed well. At Philadelphia 
 he thralled his auditors thro a speech of six hours, and at 
 each point of controversy thro all those momentous ses 
 sions he was armed and alert. Never did he for one repulse 
 forego his purpose. Continuity was his secret. He sought to 
 show the symmetry of that which he beheld and was glad that 
 "from Discussion s lips" it should be 
 
 " Set in all lights by many minds 
 To bind the interest of all." [Applause.] 
 
 "The noble and magnificent perspective of a great federal 
 republic" filled his eyes, and he, too, was not disobedient unto 
 the heavenly vision. Life, fortune, honor were to that sacredly 
 rendered, ungrudgingly, unweariedly, unregrettingly, and, 
 thank God, with absolute success. He had no secrets from his 
 country! [Cries of " Bravo! "] To the versatility, the acumen, 
 the deep symmetrical strength of this rare being all witnesses 
 agree. Morris, Kent, Story, Marshall (by both direct tribute 
 and judicial decisions), Von Hoist, and a hundred more exalt 
 
HIS RELATIVE RANK IS 
 
 his work. Bryce says: "He stands in the front rank of a 
 generation never surpassed in history." For remember the 
 eighteenth cycle, if you would be just to it, not by its mori 
 bund first seventy years, but by the tragic awakenings of its 
 last quarter. Guizot said: "He powerfully contributed to 
 secure to the constitution its every element of order, force and 
 duration." Talleyrand said that he "never knew his equal." 
 " He has divined Europe." And what schoolboy does not 
 know Webster s sonorous acclaim? "He smote the rock of 
 national resources and the waters gushed forth. He touched 
 the corpse of national credit and it sprang to its feet." For 
 my part, I venture especially to affirm Hamilton s rare magna 
 nimity. In a day of reckless political envy he, with Washing 
 ton, shines exceptional. Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, 
 make this excellence of his vivid by contrast. When I medi 
 tate the deep damnation of his taking-off, it is piteous to recall 
 that but a little earlier he had upon entreaty made a private 
 loan to the dastard who slew him. Of all those federalists 
 who 
 
 " Wrought in a sad sincerity, 
 And builded better than they knew," 
 
 Hamilton is in the van. 
 
 It was he who had made Webster s best possible, and his 
 worst impossible. It was Hamilton s spirit that replied to 
 Hayne. It was Hamilton s spirit that spoke thro Jack 
 son s lips to the nullifiers, and, alas, the lack of it that suc 
 cumbed to the devious and disastrous compromise that fol 
 lowed. It was Hamilton s soul that made way for Lincoln 
 and for liberty. We dwell, gentlemen, under the roof he fast 
 ened, and which of us will not, with his heart in his throat, 
 remember the legacy of that leader of leaders, and say with 
 a gratitude that is also a vow, "I, too, am a Federalist." 
 [Applause.] Let me turn you rapidly toward some of the 
 memorials of his commanding fame, whose spirit reigns here 
 tonight, and so approach the swift review of that greatest 
 result which is his pre-eminence and crown. And let me 
 
16 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 diverge somewhat from the historical order to seek the poeti 
 cal. At the base of all the public miseries succeeding the 
 peace of 83 lay poverty poverty and with it apathy. Pro 
 ductive industry frightened and unprotected, credit prostrate, 
 the army muttering, intense localism breeding the maggots of 
 secession, quivering and perilous unrest, universal faction, 
 Congress discordant and impotent. It was a needful disci 
 pline. It prepared the way for that recognition of unity of 
 interest which alone could supersede the baleful and porten 
 tous distress. While Europe sneered at us, and the stoutest 
 hearts shrank before calamities that threatened cataclysm, 
 Hamilton, as the first secretary of the treasureless treasury, 
 addressed to the situation his whole intellect. Much was 
 chaotic and all was new. Against these somber skies this 
 mentor of the first administration towered alone. Upon his 
 commanding wisdom was laid the whole and fundamental 
 problem of finance. The ship of state, such as it was, no lofty 
 frigate then, but a water-logged schooner rather, plunged and 
 rolled amid cross currents and upon a lee shore. The crew 
 was spent and all but mutinous. "Sauve qui peut," was a 
 gaining cry. It was this indomitable pilot who brought the 
 craft thro the perils of great waters and safe to port. For 
 eign censors stood amazed as Hamilton set fast our public 
 credit upon the eternal rock of honesty. Woe betide the hand 
 that would unwrite his work, and that would, printing a coun 
 terfeit presentment of Liberty upon fifty-one cents worth of 
 silver, invite credulity "to trust in God" for the other forty- 
 nine! [Loud cheers.] No; true faith in God involves good 
 faith toward men. The philosophy of fiat currency be it of 
 paper or of pewter leads to a maudlin ethics, and horrors 
 untold lie that way. The eighth commandment is not to be 
 repealed, even for silly Americans. Nothing comes so dear at 
 last as cheap money, and they who urge it would worst rob 
 the least able; for the fewer dollars a man has the more need 
 that they be of the very best in all the markets of the world. 
 We do not yet want to be an argentine republic. Nor can 
 
THE COLLEGE NAMED FOR HIM *7 
 
 sectionalism in finance live long, putting, as it does, a penalty 
 upon that capital which is the surest friend of the craftsman. 
 [Applause.] The hand of Hamilton traced the outline and 
 wrought out the whole detail of a system whose soundness 
 was proven in its success and stability. Revenue, currency, a 
 funded debt, the mint, the bank, were creations of a skill that 
 fathomed both needs arid resources. West Point was Hamil 
 ton s idea. His forecast planned for and frustrated the immi 
 nent war with France. The so-called Monroe doctrine was 
 but a plagiarism of Hamilton s proclamation of neutrality. 
 The exalted patriotism and still pertinent admonitions of 
 Washington s farewell address were submitted to and touched 
 by the pen that he so long had trusted without disappointment. 
 
 And now, with apology, I advert to that college sitting at 
 the very core of this imperial State and binding about her 
 brow, as a chaplet, that name which tonight you delight to 
 honor. Kirkland, the great Indian lover, was patriot, too, and 
 army chaplain at Fort Stanwix. Hamilton knew him well and 
 advised with and assisted the missionary s hope to plant, under 
 "the smiles of the God of wisdom," a true school upon the 
 far frontiers. As an active member of that Board of Regents 
 whose comprehensive idea so well fitted his synthetic temper 
 (that Board whose present chancellor is one of our college s 
 most honored sons, and one of whose most distinguished 
 members, my friend, Dr. McKelway, will address you tonight) 
 Hamilton was chosen as chief sponsor and became the first 
 charter applicant and trustee of the academy which rapidly 
 grew into the college. Steuben laid the corner stone in 1794. 
 Have we not good right with such associations proudly to 
 wear as our distinctive colors the Continental blue and buff ? 
 We cherish that history and would honor it. For more than 
 thirty years our commencements have heard a competitive 
 prize oration upon some feature of the work of New York s 
 foremost son. With this goes also a parallel oration "The 
 Duties of Educated Young Men to the State." Is it any won- 
 
1.8 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 der that from that high hilltop 183 men with General Hawley 
 among them went down to the great war to maintain the 
 doctrines of the Federalist? That was one for every six of 
 the sons then born to us. [Applause.] Is it any wonder that 
 Dr. Elihu Root sat in a group of nine who love that old cam 
 pus, at the very centre of the tasks of the New York Constitu 
 tional Convention of last summer, and who well paid the inter 
 est (if any was in arrears) upon that old charter of 1793? 
 [Cheers.] Some things go by avoirdupois, but Alexander 
 Hamilton is to be taken by Troy weight. When I reckon 
 patriotism, eloquence, effectiveness, I am well content to be 
 an alumnus of a little college of large men. And, by the way, 
 when some day Brooklyn is making her last will and testa 
 ment and all your treasures are bequeathing, remember that 
 I now put in a plea for that noble statue which guards and 
 glorifies your doors. What a figure of speech it is, and with 
 what difficnlty I have carried past it that most brittle tenth 
 commandment ! I fear if it were more portable, that nothing 
 short of force would replevin it from beneath those swinging 
 elms where it ought to stand. [Applause.] That ardent atti 
 tude recalls the scenes at Poughkeepsie. With all his soul he 
 pleaded and by a majority so small that one shivers to recall 
 the parliamentary chances, he won, and was the father of the 
 Constitution. It was no still-birth, but alive. What a voice it 
 had, and what a child it is, to be sure, this year of grace 
 1895 its benignant and penetrating eyes still bright with 
 youth and liberty. But it was born, as every man-child is 
 born, in anguish. 
 
 " For all the past of time reveals 
 
 A bridal dawn of thunder peals, 
 When truth hath wedded fact." [Applause.] 
 
 Thirteen distinct and various sovereignties, wrangling, greedy, 
 stubborn, could not long cohere under an arrangement which 
 was at best of provisional utility, and which Washington de 
 scribed as "a shadow without a substance." " If the federal 
 government should lose its authority civil war would certainly 
 
THE DAWN OF NATIONAL UNITY I<? 
 
 follow," was Hamilton s prediction. But that authority would 
 be lost unless vitally strengthened. He saw the menace and 
 reading the analogy of dead republics prepared with astute 
 decision to parry it. Rivalry meant ruin, sympathy meant 
 strength. The coalition of fragments must be changed into 
 11 a solid coercive union." No mere treaty alliance would do. 
 That was, as Madison said, " imbecile, discordant, precarious." 
 The idea of confederacy had shown itself incapable to realize 
 that community of life that latent, but crescent, sense of 
 nationality which was the inward voice of America s providen 
 tial calling. Germany and Italy, thro their long and pain 
 ful gestations, afford us similar instances of the inadequacy of 
 the confederation theory to affirm the mission of a homogen 
 eous people. That theory is over-centrifugal. Our revolution, 
 whose success is one of the marvels, almost miracles, of his 
 tory, had wakened an instinct, but the years of process were 
 still necessary to show out the disintegrating elements of a 
 selfish, vacillating and irascible colonialism. Like the twins 
 in the womb of Rebekah the old divisive spirit struggled with 
 the new cohesive spirit. Esau came first, but the nobler off 
 spring was the later and it was revealed " the elder shall serve 
 the younger." The national idea was growing. The very 
 word " continental " was significant. " We, the people " ran 
 the declaration. [Applause.] The constitution was an in 
 terpretation of a life anterior to itself. The instrument was 
 the demonstration of prior fact. Geography and history blend 
 ed to affirm this destiny of wedlock. Many stars, one constel 
 lation "an indestructible union of indestructible states" 
 toward that we tended and to that we came. Well writes Mul- 
 ford, in that great treatise of his on the Nation "There has 
 been in the history of no people the witness to a higher unity." 
 But eyes were dull then. The body was suffering with its 
 schismatical parts. In the spirit of sectionalism which is es 
 sential disunion, province was saying to province "I have 
 no need of thee." Perverse local interests were ready to write 
 severalty where God had written commonalty. The wonder 
 
2O ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 is that any hand could stroke those angry seas into rhythm. 
 [Cheers.] When we recall the reluctance, not only of the Car- 
 olinas, but of selfish Massachusetts, cranky Rhode Island and 
 greedy New York, and recall the slender margin by which all 
 this insularity was overcome, we may well tremble and praise. 
 Hamilton never bated a jot of his purpose. By every tireless 
 resource he explained, advocated, appealed. The sequel vin 
 dicates him. The present Empire State is the reply to the 
 dismal forebodings of those then in it who assailed his work. 
 In the light of events he stands forth as the one great prophet 
 amid a throng of doleful prognosticators. That mighty sum 
 in complex fractions was done Hamilton had brought them to 
 a common denominator. First came dear little Delaware, the 
 "blue hen" with her chickens, and may she never be degraded 
 by electing corrupt men to her places of honor! [Applause.] 
 Last came Rhode Island all in, and the ark floated. The 
 constitution was a happy mean between confederacy on the 
 one hand and imperialism on the other. The structure of the 
 Senate, which only rash impatience undervalues, illustrates the 
 counterpoise of the system. That a framework of government, 
 so flexible yet so firm, and with so much that was experimental, 
 could be made de novo, is the wonder of political philosophy. 
 Hamilton was accused of monarchial tendencies because he dis 
 trusted the tyranny of an unmixed democracy. But he only 
 appealed to the restraints of that second sense which ought to 
 triumph over extempore impulse. If you will pardon the 
 anachronism, I will say that it was air-break offsetting steam- 
 chest popular power working in both and in balance safety 
 complementing speed. The Senate, with its check upon the 
 haste of untried majorities, says Think twice. [Loud ap 
 plause.] They tell us that Hamilton was aristocratical. In 
 the good and accurate sense he was that, but not in the sense 
 of promoting oligarchy. He longed to have a government by 
 the best. Who does not ? [Cheers.] If we have made of his 
 electoral college an elaborate cui bono, that may show him to 
 have been too sanguine of his political heirs, it does not prove 
 
MAN AGAINST PREROGATIVE 31 
 
 his theory to have been wrong. Fending alike the dangers 
 from the imperium and the vulgus, from scented pride and 
 unsoaped envy, he steered by the middle channel. Our trou 
 bles have not been from the chart, but from the crew ! The 
 white of an egg and the venom of a rattlesnake are both albu 
 men. The difference between food and poison is a matter of 
 slight chemical proportion. The revolution was a mighty evo 
 lution. It was at last perceived to have been a struggle for 
 English liberties, too ; that Burke and Chatham were right, and 
 the fatuous Lord North and the fat-witted George III. were 
 wrong. We had fought the good fight of a man against pre 
 rogative, as we fought again for labor as against caste. That 
 was true, even if Mr. Gladstone, the great tide-waiter of the 
 nineteenth century [applause and laughter], could not see it; 
 even if that licensed and fascinating scold Carlyle did interpret 
 the roar and smoke of our civil war as "the burning out of an 
 old chimney," and seemed not to care if the house went with 
 it. John Bull whistled, but found his whistle a costly toy. So 
 little do men perceive of where the point lies whose heads are 
 thick with the wit of Punch. [Laughter and applause.] But 
 the beginning was not the end, nor is the end yet, tho "now 
 is our salvation nearer than when we first believed." The old fac 
 tional elements gathered in partisan antagonism. It may be 
 gravely doubted whether if that tortuous and temporizing reac 
 tionary, Thomas Jefferson, had not fortunately been absent in 
 France his jealous weight would not have sufficed to "turn the 
 poised and trembling scale" away from nationality. We moved 
 in and began to live under the "new roof." Thenceon our 
 history becomes an effort to realize both the Constitution and 
 ourselves. Hamilton thought the Union "might endure thirty 
 years" how nearly did he divine the reach of the Virginia 
 resolutions and the date of nullification ! but even he did not 
 see that the instrument was an effect rather than a cause, that 
 while it registered so much it subtended far more ! It was a 
 law; but the nation was a life. Great as were the specific 
 bequests the residuum was^ far greater. The testators did not 
 
22 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 measure their legacy. They did not then know that they were 
 bequeathing an estate, which some perfervid orator described 
 as "bounded on the north by the aurora, on the east by the 
 sunrise, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, and 
 on the west by the day of judgment !" [Cheers.] 
 
 For three-score years and ten, two principles, the centripetal 
 and the centrifugal, were in collision, and making ready to 
 grapple. Then, after that appointed labor and sorrow, the 
 enduring knowledge that our orbit is an ellipse, with its two 
 foci, both determinate and mutual. It was the school of pain: 
 but it was God s ! It was sharp surgery: but with a blessed end. 
 The very being of this Union went into the crucible, and melted 
 in the furnace of Antietam, and Shiloh, and Chickamauga, and 
 the Wilderness. We, too, as all-American, will cherish the 
 memory of the devoted, if mistaken, bravery of Albert Sidney 
 Johnson and of Stonewall Jackson, and of his sword who was 
 turned back from Round Top, while we repudiate the oligarchic 
 fallacies of Toombs and Stephens. Where these failed let no 
 feebler hands attempt. The cause of separation is a lost cause ! 
 The great replevin has been served ! I am a Federalist ! It is 
 no vague theory. It affirms the solidarity, the common destiny, 
 of a people. I am with Washington as against Jefferson, for 
 John Jay as against George Clinton, for Webster as against 
 Calhoun, for Lincoln as against Davis, for those two South 
 erners, Farragut and Thomas, against Lee ; for Alexander 
 Hamilton, as against that other, whose treacherous nature 
 Hamilton so clearly discovered, and who with treason and 
 murder upon his soul, went out from the vice-presidency as 
 Aaron of old from the presence of the Lord a leper. [Great 
 applause.] The whole is both the sum of all its parts, and is 
 itself greater than that sum. True patriotism is synthetic. I 
 love best my duty to the whole. Those dreadful swaths of the 
 dead were not reaped for nought ! While the uncounted brave 
 sleep on, and the constellations march west until the reveille of 
 the archangel, let the survivors and heirs of that bitter time 
 lock hands, and standing with blending cheers and tears above 
 
A UNION INDISSEVERABLE AND PURE 23 
 
 the buried armies, register an implacable oath that no bastard 
 doctrine of unfraternity shall ever again assail our common 
 hearthstone ! And let history go for this at least, that the Con 
 stitution down to its latest amendment shall be best interpreted 
 by its friends. [Applause.] We are called to meet the trials 
 of a new age. Our expanding nation requires that, as by a 
 pantagraph, old fundamental principles be extended to en 
 larged problems. This Union that we love is imperial in 
 opportunity, therefore in duty. Ability is responsibility. By 
 the grace of God responsibility is ability. What we ought, we 
 can ! Let us swear it what we can, we will. 
 
 So once as old Leonidas 
 
 Held his, will we our bivouac, 
 With daybreak crowd the narrow pass, 
 
 And cram the droves of devils back. 
 So, thundering down the thorofare, 
 
 Against the odds and chaos rout, 
 With lightning in his streaming hair, 
 
 Blazed Sheridan ! and " Right about," 
 With will that made the rebel writhe, 
 
 The army s dulled edged whetting keen, 
 Swung left, swung right, the loyal scythe, 
 
 And mowed the Shenandoah clean ! 
 Spite of torpedoes in the bay, 
 
 So Farragut, with steady keel, 
 Up to close gunshot split the way, 
 
 And set the stars above Mobile ! 
 And so, to bless the coming years, 
 
 And in the faith of heaven born, 
 We ll hail the call for volunteers; 
 
 For righteous hope was ne er forlorn ! 
 Ah ! tis time we were beginning 
 
 To build our platforms to the rock; 
 Smooth planks and rotten underpinning 
 
 Can never bide the future s shock. 
 So hew them rough, but hew them strong 
 
 Stout creeds mean burly deeds again 
 Trample the tom-tom and the gong, 
 
 Cease worshipping the weather vane. 
 Let low commercial special pleas, 
 
*4 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 With smiting knees, spell out their doom ! 
 Ungag the great moralities, 
 
 Give clean men clean sweep with clean broom. 
 So shall a people s candidate 
 
 Again in spotless toga wait. 
 Out on the shuffled lying tissues ! 
 
 What patriots mean, let parties say, 
 Confront the living, bleeding issues, 
 
 And do the deeds that dare today. [Loud applause.] 
 
 No State bears the name of Hamilton, as none is yet named 
 for Lincoln: but this Union of States, one endowment, one land, 
 one history, one task, one flag, one God, is the deathless memo 
 rial of them both. I join their names and their service. Let 
 it grow from more to more, as the ample fulfillment of them 
 both a realm of magnificent, because equal, laws, adminis 
 tered by fearless, because incorruptible, men. Until out of the 
 calm eternities shall break the days of the Son of Man, let it 
 be our unanimous prayer and our unshaken pledge, "Each of 
 us for every other, and God for us all!" [Loud and long- 
 continued applause.] 
 
Hbrabam Uincolru 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE 
 
 THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF BROOKLYN, 
 
 FEBRUARY 12, i8g$. 
 
 Mr. President and Gentlemen It is time for an American 
 Book of Days. The land we love is old enough and rich 
 enough in men and achievements to have a rubricated record 
 all its own. 
 
 The dates which punctuate its great events, its births and 
 burials, its successive and interwoven crises of national evolu 
 tion, its high tides and low, its " storms and tempests greater 
 than almanacs can report," its feasts and fasts, its anguish and 
 its anthems these dates make a calendar with all its weeks 
 illuminated and emphatic. More than we often pause to 
 remember are we rich in history, not of a continental, but of a 
 world-wide significance. Our life is of inter-centurial and 
 planetary import. Each month is a volume, with its peculiar, 
 illustrious and garlanded events. Wonder at all that our 
 Aprils have witnessed, recall the annals of our great Julys, and 
 then, you who love your country and treasure in your hearts 
 her excellences of character and action her sins, her repent 
 ances, her renewed probations turn your thoughts to Febru 
 ary, least in length of the twelve, but with two natal days, star- 
 set and resplendent, and own the month that has such a 22d 
 and such a I2th, the chief and brightest in all the round of the 
 zodiac ! 
 
 We are met, under the compulsions of a common reverence, 
 to keep high festival, upon one of Columbia s cradle-nights, 
 nay, to recall the gift, thro us, of one of the royal heirs of 
 a world s admiration and affection. Ours indeed he is: but 
 
26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 not ours only. The pantheon of Time claims him as one of 
 Humanity s types and leaders. The " razure of oblivion " shall 
 never touch his story, nor devotion to its high import become 
 obsolete. 
 
 Amid the awed and woful group that watched that wild 
 April night sink to the ashen dawn, Stanton was one, and 
 when all was ended, it was his voice that spake out in solemn 
 and befitting prophecy, " Now he belongs to the ages." The 
 ages claim him. Thenceforward no one city, commonwealth 
 or clime could appropriate him. History admits no transient 
 and local monopoly to intrude between her and her elect dead. 
 They are her own. She is their Rizpah and their Rachel. 
 
 "Never before that startled morning" (wrote Lowell, at 
 the conclusion of that essay whose strong and chiseled para 
 graphs go with the masculine emotion of his commemoration 
 ode to make up his complete and unsurpassed tribute) 
 " Never before that startled morning did such multitudes of 
 men shed tears for one they had never seen. Never was 
 funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent look of sympathy 
 which strangers exchanged when they met on that day. Their 
 common manhood had lost a kinsman." 
 
 That day is one of the strange indelible memories of my 
 boyhood. How long and how little seems this interval of 
 thirty years ! But as each year has gone, with what certainty 
 of just conviction, it has added one more tier to the masonry 
 whereon is founded that ascendant and invulnerable fame. 
 How such a story effaces the poor pride of language ! How 
 unequal are iridescent word-bubbles to catch and carry the trem 
 ulous half-lights and the true splendors of that luminiferous 
 character ! How must the soul stammer and sob that yields 
 to the whole appeal of a spirit so great, so genuine, so gentle. 
 Little indeed will the world heed, nor long remember, what 
 any lips can now say of him, enough that it will never forget 
 what he did for us and for all men. 
 
 Who, then, shall presume to think that he has well summar 
 ized or at all completely analyzed the contents of such a life ? 
 
AN IMMORTAL MEMORY *7 
 
 I lay my withering blossoms with those of his innumerable 
 lovers, knowing that were their stems of gold and their petals 
 of ruby, these would rust and dim long before the tooth of 
 time had touched his immortal renown. I deprecate your 
 heed to me, even while I entreat it. Think round, past, over, 
 beyond, my frail and slender utterances. Let your reasoned 
 gratitude and heartfelt admiration weave their own tributes in 
 words that no man can utter. Let the "mystic chords" that 
 he knew so well to touch into music, sound their master s re 
 quiem. Sursum Corda ! He was God s gracious gift to a tor 
 mented and distracted time. He took who gave. He who 
 gave and took, guards the inaccessible honor of a supreme and 
 solitary soul, who, "having served his generation by the will 
 of God, fell on sleep." 
 
 Bare-browed and wet-eyed, we stand in this our day under a fir 
 mament whose four-and-forty stars, unnamed and indistinguish 
 able by any claim of severalty, make one unrivalled and un 
 quenchable constellation, and highly resolve that Abraham 
 Lincoln shall not have lived in vain nor vainly died ! 
 
 And we declare our faith that the theme of that lost leader s 
 greatness will still be new, curious, alluring, inspiring, until 
 America shall have failed of her memory, until patriotism is 
 senile, until self-sacrifice is no longer cogent, until popular 
 government is moribund and democracy is numbered with the 
 lost arts. 
 
 In the city of Chicago, at the entrance of the beautiful park 
 that bears his name, there is placed commandingly, a statue of 
 our greatest President. 
 
 Doubtless nearly all of you are familiar with its noble and 
 unassuming pose. But what has always most impressed my 
 imagination is that which stands just behind the exalted 
 figure of the man the empty chair ! Never was vacant throne 
 so suggestive and so full. Well might those words have been 
 sculptured there which Lincoln uttered so early as 1858 
 "Tho I now sink out of view, I believe I have made some 
 marks which will tell for the cause of liberty long after I am 
 
28 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 gone." All of the memorials of such a nature and the remin 
 iscences of such a life are significant and inestimably precious. 
 We are to be glad that the narrative by his partner, Herndon, 
 both establishes so much intimate fact and dispels so much 
 possible myth. It was an unusual witticism of Longfellow s 
 that auto-biography is what biography ought to be ! This 
 close friend more than any other, or than all others, sets forth 
 the real personality without gloss or apology. We want the 
 negative to be untouched in a single line, that we may get the 
 truest impression of one who sat, quite behind what any strange 
 or casual eye could see, within a most sensitive reticence. 
 Frank as Lincoln was, inaustere, accessible there was an in 
 wardness and reserve behind whose further curtains few pen 
 etrated, and they but seldom. It is in his public words that 
 we receive the deepest revelations of that strong and longing 
 soul, so tender and so taciturn. His phenomenal gift of narrative 
 was the alleviation not the assertion of his inmost self. Talk 
 was his refuge from a proud and stately sorrow, a most pathetic 
 and melancholy reverie. He was born under the sign of 
 Aquarius. His life was clouded and rainy. Some of the 
 sweetest sources of happiness were frozen to him. His yearn 
 ing spirit turned upon itself and for the most part sealed its 
 records. Upon that Cromwellian face (for tho it was more 
 than Cromwell s, it was Cromwellian, wart and all) there were 
 the seams of early responsibility and long restraint, and in all 
 the humor of his smile there lurked the twitch of pain. 
 
 We all know the story of his early days Kentucky, Indiana, 
 Illinois the bare poverty, the indomitable struggle to learn, 
 the country law office with its rough clinic of human beings 
 its pathology of affairs, his small book lore and yet his keen 
 literary susceptibility, that apparent listlessness in which he 
 thought, and thought, and grew. All around, as we see it, what 
 a wretched school, and yet what a schooling God gave him 
 there! Soft raiment never sat well upon that home-spun king. 
 Here, providentially, and out of the unlikeliest origins, was six 
 feet and four inches of man. Little thripenny minds once 
 
HIS INDIVIDUALITY 29 
 
 sneered at his suburbanity and thought him outlandish, but 
 splitting fencing or riving sophistry, steering a flatboat or a 
 government, at the cabin hearth or at the capital of the Repub 
 lic, in county law or commander of armies and fleets that 
 man, uncouth of limb and courtly of heart, is always and only 
 Abraham Lincoln ! There was but one, there will be no other, 
 the mould is broken. " The case of that huge spirit is now 
 cold." 
 
 Where did he get that aquiline wit, that shrewd and sensitive 
 judgment, that pronged logic, that felicity of instance, that sure 
 touch of nature, that vital and saline style ? For t he was 
 cunning in the niceties of language and coined wisdom into 
 colloquial aphorism. What tough sense, what absence of va 
 poring, what conclusive directness, what sagacious transpa 
 rency. "Honest Old Abe" what a thirty-third degree of 
 popular confidence was that! Which of us does not remember 
 his wish that other generals "would get some whisky of the 
 same kind" his ballot- winning remark about "swapping 
 horses while crossing a stream" his appealling fun over 
 "Uncle Sam s web feet." Thackeray, once for all, defined a 
 snob as "one who admires mean things meanly." A great 
 man is one who seeks great things in a great way. So was 
 Lincoln great. He "never sold the truth to serve the hour." 
 
 With marvelous development he rose to each new demand 
 and met it adequately, and there was never a day when he was 
 not more of a man than the day before. Vast tact and abso 
 lute rectitude together. He was a student of occasion, but 
 never in the shifty and selfish sense an opportunist. He dis 
 cerned concrete issues and was no doctrinaire. He cared for 
 results and was no respecter of persons. He used what he 
 could get, and so got what he could use, knowing how to pur 
 sue that high expediency whose duty it is both to forego and 
 to transcend mere legalitys. Astute in deliberation and biding 
 his time, he never surrendered to others one ounce of his own 
 responsibility, and proved his wisdom in taking "all the advice 
 he could get and using what he thought best. 
 
3 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 "Gentle, plain, just and resolute," he surprised those who 
 had thought to control him by his revelations of aptitude and 
 of decision. Lowell wrote: "While dealing with unheard-of 
 complications at home, he must soothe a hostile neutrality 
 abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war." What tasks 
 were these and with what untried tools ! His temper equaled 
 the emergency. He wielded war measures without flinching, 
 yet always as an elect citizen, and so loved both the Union and 
 the Constitution, that in their preservation he saved the one 
 from those who would have destroyed it, and the other from 
 those who would have defended it to death by quibbles. He 
 saw that the Union was the very life of the Constitution that 
 academic distinctions-are trivial in a struggle for existence 
 he could not consent to the cult of a disembodied spirit, nor 
 protect the constitution of a corpse ! His elastic tact was also 
 stubborn. He refused to embroil us with angry England in 
 the Trent affair, yet made the bully halt when thro the lips 
 of Minister Adams he said: "It is unnecessary for me to 
 remind your lordship that this means war!" Even to John 
 Bull what "Hosea Bigelow" called "the fencin stuff," seemed 
 likely to come a little too high ! 
 
 Lincoln s self-restraint was not that of "a being without 
 parts and passions," but of one controlling his forces for use. 
 Of slavery he said in 55: "I bite my lips and keep quie:t" 
 but, a while later, stirred to the depths by the seizure of a free 
 black boy at New Orleans, he said and I take his indignation 
 not as an oath but as a vow "By God, gentlemen, I ll make 
 the ground of this country too hot for the feet of slaves !" It 
 was in that resolve that he entered upon the great debate in 
 Illinois. He loved peace: but as a "just and lasting peace." "I 
 hope it will come soon, and come to stay, and so come as to be 
 worth the keeping for all future time." But his integrity never 
 blenched. In the teeth of the counsels of timid friends he 
 crystalized the truth in 1858. "This Union cannot endure, half 
 slave and half free. A house divided against itself cannot 
 stand." Withal, his rugged patience was as cautious, strategic, 
 
HIS AUGUST PATIENCE 3* 
 
 diplomatic, as it was persistent and courageous. Patience in 
 him became a genius, a purpose that censors could neither 
 hurry nor hinder. 
 
 " He knew to bide his time; 
 
 And can his fame abide 
 Still patient, in his simple faith sublime, 
 
 Till the wise years decide. 
 Great captains with their guns and drums, 
 
 Disturb our judgments for the hour: 
 But at last silence comes. 
 
 These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, 
 Our children shall behold his fame; 
 
 The kindly, earnest, brave, far-seeing man, 
 Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame. 
 
 New birth of our new soil, the first American !" 
 
 This many-sided, yet directly simple President, this greatest 
 Democrat of history, ennoblecl the people by trusting them 
 and trusting himself to them, as they ennobled themselves by 
 responding to that trust. "When he speaks," (wrote Lowell 
 in 1864, in that monumental essay which I have before quoted) 
 " it seems as if the people were listening to their own thinking 
 aloud." His alert ear heard always that little click which pre 
 cedes the striking of the clock. " It is most proper (he said 
 at Buffalo) that I should wait and see the developments and 
 get all the light possible, so that when I do speak authorita 
 tively I may be as near right as possible." " Why should there 
 not be (so went his first inaugural) a patient confidence in the 
 ultimate justice of the people ? " At " this great tribunal " he 
 pleaded. "This is essentially a peoples contest," ran his first 
 message. 
 
 He knew how to interpret public opinion, and it answered 
 him with a mighty and unbetrayed confidence. He both 
 roused it to self-recognition and registered its vast resolve. 
 The, to me, most moving lyric of those days utters that 
 response of the nation, as the deed vindicated the song: 
 
 " Six hundred thousand loyal men 
 And true have gone before, 
 
 And we re coming, Father Abraham, 
 Three hundred thousand more ! " 
 
3 2 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 Verily he had prophesied well, in his good-by to the citizens 
 of Indianapolis, "Of the people when they rise in mass in 
 behalf of the union and liberties of their country, truly it may 
 be said, The gates of hell shall not prevail against them. " 
 
 This soul to whose noble abstraction and dedicated purpose 
 the small gossip of the world was naught, drank deep the cup 
 of vicarious pain. He paid daily the penalty of heroic love. 
 In his sympathy he became a sacrifice. He "bore his cross" 
 for the soldiers in the field and the mothers in their homes. 
 And all the while he was "sustained and cheered by an unfal 
 tering trust," a " faith that right makes might," " that in some 
 way men can not see all will be well in the end." He deserves 
 a place with "the elders who obtained a good report thro faith," 
 and yet who only foresaw Canaan and the Christ to be. He 
 came, like Moses, no further than Pisgah. But he believed. 
 He believed in himself, in Arnerica, in man, in God, and in 
 that faith he climbed the steps of the altar. 
 
 He was at once a poet and a prophet; he had that intuition 
 which is the common differential of both that insight which 
 is foresight. For hear him, when leaving Springfield for "a 
 duty greater than has devolved upon any man since Washing 
 ton" "unless the great God who assisted him shall be with 
 me and aid me, I must fail: but if the same omniscient and 
 almighty arm that directed and protected him shall guide and 
 support me, I shall not fail I shall succeed." By that token 
 so was it unto him. I read and reread that pathetic invoca 
 tion, I trace his growing trust in supreme mercy, I witness him 
 "lead the whole nation thro paths of repentance and submis 
 sion to the Divine will," I hear him urge "humble penitence 
 for national perverseness and disobedience," and as our repre 
 sentative and spokesman say, "If every drop of blood drawn 
 by the lash thro years of unrequited toil shall be repaid by 
 one drawn by the bullet, still must we say our God is right 
 eous." I see him not shrinking nor counting the chances of 
 his own life. And blessing God for such a heart-born testi 
 mony as that one more, -"Die when I may, I want it said of 
 
HIS SUPREME FAITH 33 
 
 me by those who knew me best that I always plucked a thistle 
 and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow," 
 I challenge those who question his intrinsic truth toward the 
 Highest. 
 
 Whatever were his speculative doubts, born of wholly inade 
 quate religious teaching and hetchelled by experiences that 
 embitter many justice, mercy, humility, reverence, love, stead 
 fast submission to God s will and way, these are the elements 
 of the piety that Heaven accepts. He learned to pray and 
 to intercede, and thro a temperate life he pitied the widow 
 and the fatherless and kept himself unspotted from the world. 
 "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is 
 J:his." Who loves what Christ loves, loves Christ. This high 
 faith availed him in all affairs. He was no vagarist. Yet see 
 ing and seizing the possible, he strove toward the stars. He 
 was the most practical of idealists, believing that what should 
 be can be, and that what should be and can be, shall be ! 
 
 Per aspera ad astra thro stripes to stars, for that stands 
 our dear flag. It is the seal of the national wedlock, between 
 each state and the Union, and that which God hath joined to 
 gether no man shall put asunder! 
 
 "Hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath," says 
 Herndon, were Lincoln s words as in 56 he joined the party 
 pledged to resist the extension of slavery. 
 
 Lincoln felt the unconscious destiny of America and helped, 
 in the forefront, to abate the taunt of the world that our eagle 
 was but a vulture. In that stumbling and disastrous night his 
 soul was one that believed in the morning. Only a base and 
 bastard mind can forget that he was part of the great price 
 wherewith we obtained this freedon. The lost cause of caste 
 was a triumphant failure. It freed the white man most. 
 
 " We ignorant of ourselves, 
 
 Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers 
 Deny us for our good. So find we profit 
 By losing of our prayers." 
 
 "The struggle of today (said Lincoln s message of Decem- 
 
34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 her, 1861) is for a vast future also." Thankfully I quote from 
 a true poet: 
 
 " I love the South. I fought for her 
 
 From Lookout Mountain to the sea, 
 But from my lips thanksgivings broke, 
 
 When that black idol, breeding drouth 
 And dearth of human sympathy 
 
 Thro all our sweet and sensuous South, 
 Was, with its chains and human yoke, 
 
 Blown hell-ward from the cannon s mouth, 
 While Freedom cheered behind the smoke." 
 
 Gentlemen, recall, you who can, that Good Friday all those 
 April days of 1865, when God "shewed us hard things and 
 made us to drink of the wine of astonishment," when all our 
 victory was turned into mourning ! 
 
 First, horror, then incredulity, then anguish one wild, con 
 vulsed sob, "It can not, must not, shall not, be!" And then 
 the reeling certainty that it was, and an orphaned nation calling, 
 " My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen 
 thereof ! " All the lowly of the Earth mourned, and in that 
 mourning took hope for the universal cause of the people, and 
 so the great conclave of universal hearts canonized him by 
 acclaim. Party passions withered in that august homage. 
 Factious critics and envious detractors stood abashed or re 
 pentant. In the knowledge of what it had lost the land first 
 realized what it had had. So that catafalque moved thro its 
 slow procession of twelve hundred miles. Dirges, minute guns, 
 flambeaus, choirs, bells, and everywhere black misery and pite 
 ous tears at last, Springfield. The faithful tomb unveiled its 
 bosom to take to its trust this new treasure, and the troubled 
 soul was at peace. But already that soul had begun to keep 
 its endless Easter. The hand that penned the proclamation 
 has touched the hand of that lost child whom the father s 
 heart had never ceased to mourn. Those steps have come out 
 of tribulation and found that One who "saved others and him 
 self could not save." An offering? Yes his own tired and 
 thankful soul ! A gift ? Yes not a scepter, but a pen; not a 
 
SAFE WITH THE GREAT 35 
 
 crown, but a broken manacle. "Well done, good and" the 
 gates are closed ! 
 
 Once more I cite Abraham Lincoln: "We cannot escape 
 history. The fiery trial thro which we pass will light us 
 down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation " to honor, 
 noble one ! Contrasted with the achievements of mere con 
 querors, how poor is all their prowess and ambition. Where is 
 Bonaparte by the side of that tall spirit. Lincoln has one soli 
 tary peer in history William of Orange, like himself, a martyr 
 to his patriotism. The first administration of Washington gives 
 parallel in the state of the army, the treasury and public opin 
 ion: but these were not war. The sorrow for Hamilton is an 
 analogue. I think of these three as the three greatest Ameri 
 cans. 
 
 If Lincoln had not the charm of Hamilton and the urbane 
 dignity of Washington, he had a sagacity rivaling the 
 one, a patience rivaling the other, and a tenacity that sur 
 passed them both. But I would not compare them; I would 
 blend them all. They have passed under Time s impartial and 
 dispassionate recognition. The place of Lincoln is secure in 
 the judgment of mankind. Words can add nothing now to that 
 monolithic fame. Death hath no more dominion over him. 
 He was the pre-eminent man of the century that is hurrying 
 to its end. Let the ascription of the French people, so signifi 
 cant in its allusion to the lower empire, stand as our last trib 
 ute "He saved the Republic without veiling the statue of 
 Liberty." 
 
ur puritan jforbeara 
 
 ADDRESS BEFORE THE NEW ENGLAND 
 
 SOCIETY A T ITS EIGHTY-EIGHTH ANNIVERSAR Y 
 
 DECEMBER 22, 1893 
 
 Mr. President, and Fellow-men ^-The honors of this opportun 
 ity, as I well know, are not my own, but belong to my college 
 mother. That college, to which you owe your new President, 
 tonight to be inducted ; to whom Hartford owes those two 
 great citizens, Senator Hawley and that delightful speaker 
 whom presently we are to hear, and whose "journeys in the 
 world " have never weaned him from his Alma Mater. [Ap 
 plause.] 
 
 We bear the name and studiously expound the fame of that 
 Scottish Huguenot than whom this imperial State never claimed 
 a nobler or more potent son. Patriot, jurist, financier, orator, 
 statesman, father of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton 
 [strong applause], clarum et venerabile nomen who of this 
 company, in the city where his dust waits the last reveille, 
 will not gladly acknowledge the legacy of that great Federalist, 
 who said : " If they break this Union they will break my heart ! " 
 To us he is dear as the counsellor of our beginnings our gen 
 erous first almoner, our earliest trustee. [Applause.] 
 
 I come from a village named for that Scotch-Irishman who 
 so long governed this Commonwealth, George Clinton, and 
 from the glint of the stream which a little to the north wit 
 nessed that bloody afternoon of the Oriskany fight, where with 
 shattered knee Herkimer sat smoking his pipe and issuing or 
 ders, while the German colonists of the valley blocked St. 
 Leger and saved Stanwix and the Mohawk and the Hudson and 
 New England and the cause. [Prolonged applause.] We who 
 
A GREAT ANCESTRY 37 
 
 were born in her lap will not let you forget your debt to the 
 pioneers of Oneida County. 
 
 Right on the earliest slope of our college hill a stone be- 
 carved with totems notes the secant of the " line of property " 
 which by Johnson s treaty of 1768 set a "thus far only" to the 
 East and bounded the perpetual West. 
 
 In the earlier days their loving missionary, and thereby strong 
 with the Oneidas in those good diplomacies which in their 
 critical value made Washington and Hamilton and Steuben his 
 friends Samuel Kirkland, son of Connecticut, came thither 
 again in 1793 to be the founder whom we venerate, and the 
 spirit of whose prayer to " the God of Wisdom " we would ever 
 maintain. There he wrought and there he sleeps. 
 
 Where gentlemen, can we turn and not find common ances 
 tors who were strong, true and prophetic? The best of our 
 heritage is our lineage. Only supine ignorance and recreant 
 neglect can alienate it. No anodyne, but a tonic the story 
 of those s turdy, believing, irreparable men should tutor our 
 courage while it shames our vanity. [Applause.] 
 
 One has shrewdly said: "When a man s talk is mainly of 
 his ancestors, you may know that the best of the family is 
 underground." [Laughter.] That is keen, but it is not true 
 when retrospect teaches humility and stirs emulation. To 
 come here to "garnish the sepulchres of our prophets" may 
 be a sorry self-accusation, or it may be a regenerate pledge to 
 those immortal and ever ennobling issues which their fidelities 
 defined. [Applause.] Let that be true of us each which our 
 Yankee Montaigne said of Landor: "He has examined before 
 he has expatiated." If all the tale has long since been copy 
 righted, we may at least make repetition original by the accent 
 of a new purpose, by an emphasis that life, fortune, honor 
 shall add to our forbears ourselves. No torso of rhetoric 
 shall be such a tribute as the whole resemblance of a manhood 
 that utters an intelligent noblesse oblige. 
 
 He was a sapient fellow who thought it "so fortunate that 
 all the great cities had great rivers to run by them:" but when 
 
3o OUR PURITAN FORBEARS 
 
 we merely flatter our Fathers for having ourselves as children 
 we make the same ludicrous inversion of cause and effect. 
 [Laughter and applause.] They are no discovery or inven 
 tion of ours. They are the rivers, and well may we build by them. 
 
 Not about any slender and scantling facts has your society 
 gathered all these years, and these facts are accessible and 
 heroic. Levity ill becomes their gravity. I for one would as 
 soon attempt a parody of the Dies Irae as to make mirth of 
 that manly price which obtained the freedom into which we 
 were born. 
 
 A certain sea captain wrote in his log: "The first mate drunk 
 all day." "But," protested that officer, "it was but once for a 
 year, and your record implies that I am a common sot." "Is it 
 true?" asked the captain. "Then let it stand." The mate s turn 
 came to write the log and he set down: "The captain has 
 been sober all day." "What do you mean, sir?" roared the 
 irate shipmaster. " Is it not true !" was the reply. [Laughter.] 
 
 We can distort facts by isolating them. We may caricature 
 the Puritan by diverting to the wart of his foibles that heed 
 which we owe to his full-length virtues. It promotes fun and 
 also falsehood. The way in which some cross-eyed critics of 
 these men, who so largely wore their ears snipped, "damn the 
 sins they have no mind to," the sins of austere conviction and 
 of obstinate righteousness, reminds me, in a way, of an authen 
 tic story of Pius IX. // Papa was a wit and a smoker. One 
 day in his private apartments, offering cigars to a group of 
 ecclesiastics, one declined with, " No, Your Holiness, I have 
 not that vice." While the rest looked aghast, the Pope with 
 twinkling speed replied, "Ah, my good Bishop, if it were a 
 vice you would have it." [Laughter.] 
 
 There is a temper toward our progenitors which, affecting 
 self-complacency, comes close to the perilous edge of hypoc 
 risy, for cant may also wear silk and dine sumptuously. Of 
 the Puritan life, conquering and to conquer, that may be said 
 which, of the same cause, Beza affirmed to the Queen of 
 Navarre: " May it please Your Majesty to remember, the 
 
THE HONOR OF REPROACH 39 
 
 Church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers." 
 Our forefathers ! Where shall we begin and where end ? 
 Seven generations back, and they become sixty-four fathers, 
 (you can do it upon your fingers.) A little further back, and 
 there is no end of them. Please God, there shall be no end. 
 They are "after the order of Melchisedec." But who shall be 
 your Atlas to stand up under this great epic ? 
 
 Alas ! I fear to be as that Methodist minister who ended his 
 sermon: "Brethren, I have had a great subject, but it has 
 caved in on me." [Laughter.] 
 
 First, in London, and about 1564, the "Puritans" received 
 the nickname that was to become a talisman. But that for 
 which the name stood, of pureness of public law, of religious 
 ceremonial, of private life, was wider than any Tudor domain. 
 It was international. In the name of the rights of God and of 
 the rights of man, it clamored with divers tongues, and in 
 many lands. 
 
 Our forefathers ! They were Huguenot, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, 
 and withal they had the sinews of the men of Haarlem and 
 Leyden, of that people who, in both the data and the details of 
 human liberty, were, in 1600, a century in the van; that people 
 who educated for the British throne the logical and moral heir 
 of Cromwell, William III., so far as the miscellaneous line of 
 English royalty goes, a man with few predecessors and no 
 heirs. 
 
 But if our fathers polyglot becoming Pentecost were all 
 these, they were more they were themselves. They had de 
 scent and precedent; they had also originality. Some things 
 they imported, some things were home-made here. But fully 
 and thankfully owning the composite metal which God has 
 brought out of the crucible, let us take that type of the Puritan 
 which we know best. 
 
 Those English apostles of all liberty did not go out from the 
 Church as by fiat established. They were thrust out. And yet, 
 deprived, defamed, proscribed, they were the stanchest uphold 
 ers of the Crown. It took them sixty bitter years to learn how 
 
40 OUR PURITAN FORBEARS 
 
 brittle is a royal oath and to put no confidence in princes. 
 What that selfish Queen would have made them they could not 
 endure, but with their counsel and their courage they were the 
 surest buttresses of her menaced throne. John Stubbs, printer, 
 was one of them. He had written against the calculating flir 
 tation with that saintly demon, Philip III., and for his offensive 
 plainness was condemned to lose his hand. He wrote a plea as 
 chivalrous as any that Sidney could have penned, that sentence 
 might be revoked: but Elizabeth Tudor never knew pity, and 
 he suffered. Leaping up from that mutilation, John Stubbs 
 waved above his head the stump, spouting blood, and cried, 
 "God Save the Queen! God save the "and so fainted. That 
 was Puritanism then. 
 
 Time wrought. From brave Peter Wentworth in the Com 
 mons, in 1572, down thro Eliot and Hampden and Pym, the 
 voice sounded out and on for higher law than prerogative, ever 
 deeper, fuller, more resolute. These men knew bonds and mu 
 tilations and the loss of all things. They crowded Bridewell, 
 Newgate and the Fleet. They languished unjudged. They 
 dwelt upon intimate terms with death. They were harried by 
 sceptre and crosier. Bancroft and Whitgift lorded it over 
 God s heritage, but their victims were constant. That bad tri 
 umvirate, Finch, Strafford and Laud, tormented them, but the 
 cause grew and multiplied. 
 
 Came James I., of odious meanness, of adroit duplicity, of 
 unspeakable profligacy. Came Charles I., that master of inde 
 cision model of stubborn irresolution that James Buchanan 
 of the seventeenth century. [Laughter and applause.] Charles, 
 called the martyr, supple in equivocation, a liar by wholesale 
 and retail, with a royal disregard of oaths, and a regal inca 
 pacity for apprehending that the world was moving. Perfidy, 
 sycophancy, usurpation went on; Star Chamber and Court of 
 High Commission, differing in name only from Inquisition, 
 were blind to the writing on the walls. . And Cromwell came, 
 the soul and fist of political puritanism, of whom Taine says: 
 " He was a man struck by the idea of duty." A man after the 
 
OLIVER THE GREAT 4I 
 
 thing itself, real, curt, masterful, direct. With wide, deep 
 eyes, he saw those ideals for which England was yet unripe. 
 He could not give England what she could not receive. He 
 passed. They spiked his terrible head at Tyburn Bar. The 
 cause of the people had no other human Protector. It seemed 
 lost. But it was not lost; for the permanent results of the Com 
 monwealth, which Guizot sums up in these words " The down 
 fall of absolute monarchy, the assured preponderance of the 
 Commons, and the permanence of religious freedom" these 
 lasted as the tripod of English liberties. Under the compost 
 heap of the Restoration lay the sure seed. It was Cromwell 
 who, under God, was to find his true successors in Cobden, 
 Bright and Gladstone. [Applause.] Shame to any English 
 man who renounces the name of that great emancipator- 
 Oliver, the first and the last. 
 
 But John the Baptist was gone, and the Herods were back. 
 The populace reverted to "the leeks, the garlics and the 
 cucumbers," and Whitehall again reeked with gay orgies. All 
 things seemed to relapse. Stratagem, corruption and pusillani 
 mous subservience to France rose to a flood that not even the 
 genius of Clarendon could stem. The bishops, as the crea 
 tures of royalty, and sometimes the appointees of courtesans, 
 turned on their stomachs as on a pivot. Adulation revamped 
 its blasphemies. Then Charles II. went to rot with his mem 
 ory, and the Duke of York reigned in his stead. But at length 
 England, by very nausea, had learned the impossibility of the 
 Stuarts, and would have no more of the varlet race. At last 
 the Petition of Rights had come before that court "where sits 
 a Judge no king can corrupt." Puritanism had wrought well. 
 There had been excesses, vagaries, absurdities, partly post 
 hoc, and partly propter hoc ; but I, for one, appeal from the 
 pen of Samuel Butler to the pen of John Milton, from the 
 "Book of Sports" to the Word of God, and recall the testi 
 mony of Hume, himself a Tory, V It is to the Puritan alone 
 that England owes the whole freedom of her Constitution." 
 
42 OUR PURITAN FORBEARS 
 
 The cause of equal rights, the doctrine of "liberty and zeal," 
 found its avatar in the Ironsides. Up from Lincoln and Nor 
 folk and Essex and Kent swarmed the men whose sires 
 Wyckliffe had emancipated, and who had stood to their pikes in 
 the Low Country against the myrmidons of Alva. They were 
 not humorists; life had been to them too stern and strenuous: 
 but they had been schooled in the terse directness of the 
 English Bible, and uplifted by its motive, its appeal, its bound 
 less scope. They did not lack imagination nor hope. Easily 
 they adopted the figures and terms of that "people s book." 
 They, too, were fronting Philistia and Babylon. They made 
 their own the war-words of Joshua and Jehoshaphat, and the 
 exultant paeans of Miriam and Deborah. They gripped their 
 stout tools at Naseby and at Preston with the challenges, 
 "Quit you, like men," "Bind their kings with chains, and their 
 nobles with fetters of iron," and between the hills and the sea 
 they set their high psalm, "Arise, O God, and let thine 
 enemies be scattered," and wrenched the victory at Dunbar. 
 [Applause.] 
 
 Well did Curtis, whose silver bugle is now, alas ! silenced, 
 say of them: "If they snuffled in prayer, they smote in the 
 fight; if they sang thro their noses, the hymn they chanted 
 was Liberty." 
 
 May 29, 1660, the Parliament army was drawn up on Black- 
 heath to receive Charles II., and then disbanded. They would 
 march no more! No more? Nay evermore! That spirit 
 could not be mustered out. They rally again. It is to stand 
 fire on Lexington Green; to "fire for God s sake" at Concord; 
 shirt-sleeved and bare-headed to man the stone walls of the 
 Boston Road; snatching their flint-locks by the barrel, to win 
 that victory in defeat at Charlestown ! "I cannot understand," 
 said an Englishman, "why you make such a fuss over that 
 monument. Who won that fight?" "Who kept the hill?" 
 answered the American. It was the blood of Marston Moor 
 that sent the husband of Mollie Stark from Londonderry to 
 
THE IRONSIDES STILL MARCH 43 
 
 Bennington, and that, by the command of that Connecticut 
 Vermonter, bade Ticonderoga surrender "in the name of Jeho 
 vah and the Continental Congress." It was that spirit which 
 yet makes all Connecticut men the children of Israel Putnam. 
 It was Cromwellian determination that breathed again in Sam 
 Adams, and Cromwellian valor, smiting home at Trenton and 
 Monmouth, and enduring at Valley Forge, that at last took the 
 sword of my Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. 
 
 Disbanded ? Nay ! " Fall in ! fall in, Ironsides ! " thundered 
 the guns of Robert Anderson, and down thro Baltimore trooped 
 the men of Lynn and Marblehead. The theories of Round 
 head and Cavalier grappled once again to make the ground of 
 Virginia classic forever, and holy as the stairs of an altar. 
 We can all of us, at this remove from that second and sterner 
 clench, speak reverently of the nobility of Robert Lee and 
 Stonewall* Jackson, and blend their names with our dearest 
 heroes. What their personal nobility failed to do, surely no 
 weaker arm can dare attempt. Their swords, too, are 
 American. 
 
 Wherever the New England spirit had gone, thence her 
 children s sons went down to the clench of Gettysburg and 
 Chickamauga, to Hampton Roads and Mobile, until century 
 replied to century, and Worcester s fight was sequelled at 
 Appomattox. [Prolonged applause.] 
 
 If the day demands, the State of Nathan Hale [applause] 
 can furnish other Ossawatomie Browns [thunders of applause] 
 to lead the forlorn hope of those whose cries have come into 
 the ears of the God of Sabaoth, and other Whittiers can set to 
 their lips the terrible trumps of judgment. 
 
 Never until duty, "stern daughter of the voice of God," 
 shall cease to speak, can the work of the Ironsides be ended. 
 
 We know the story of Scrooby and Amsterdam and Leyden 
 and Delft Haven, of Brewster and Carver and Standish and 
 Bradford, of dear Pastor Robinson, who testified of the break 
 ing light, and said: "It is not with us as with men whom small 
 things can discourage." [Applause.] 
 
44 OUR PURITAN FORBEARS 
 
 We know that boat (no bigger) of one-hundred-and-eighty 
 tons, of the one-himdred-and-one souls who shipped in her, 
 the torment of the seas, the bleak December, the new Ararat 
 within the curved arm with which Massachusetts shakes her 
 fist at all the world, the struggle to exist, the Colony five times 
 decimated, the tedious and bare years. Yes, and we know 
 renegade Peters and his fabrications. Knowing all about the 
 Quakers and Roger Williams and Ann Hutchinson, we now 
 claim them, too, as ours and Time s. 
 
 We recall the horrible delusion that found its twenty hap 
 less victims, and see how those fathers fell below their ideals, 
 as what greatness does not ? But we recall also that Matthew 
 Hale burned witches in England, and we do not forget the bit 
 ter persecutions of Presbyterians in Virginia and on this island 
 down to 1775. 
 
 Withal, we see the marvelous power of true Puritanism to 
 learn to confess its sins, to amend itself, to outgrow errors, its 
 hospitality to new light, its genius for self-rectification. This 
 great impulse has done what it was led hither that it might 
 do it has outgrown mediaeval England. [Applause.] Its 
 infallibilities are not of the past, but of things hoped for. 
 
 They were men of like passions with ourselves. We do not 
 worship them; but we revere them. We do not organize a 
 cultus; we accept an inspiration. They loved their land and 
 their language. The white hills of Devon were in their hearts, 
 as they named their Plymouth after the last they saw of Old 
 England; but they "desired a better country." And so, hold 
 ing the fireside sacred, and calling their babes after the heroes 
 of the Old Testament and the virtues of the New, they wedded 
 and wept and warred and worshipped, and ever they wrought, 
 " by the armor of righteousness, by evil report and good report, 
 as chastened and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; 
 as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet 
 possessing all things." They "feared not the wrath of kings," 
 for the shout of that other King was among them; and so of 
 
OUR INEVITABLE DEBT 45 
 
 them also it was true, "a nation and a company of nations 
 shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins." With 
 sublime unconsciousness, they were shaping institutions of 
 which they never dreamed, but always tenaciously affirming 
 the ideals which are the base of these institutions, and with 
 out which we can neither understand nor maintain them. 
 [Applause.] 
 
 The best of them were what the best of you would then 
 have been, and the best of you are what the best of them 
 would now be. 
 
 They magnified those influences without which great things 
 could no more be fulfilled than Dakota could ripen her wheat 
 by moonlight. They trusted the chemistry of noonday truth. 
 They revered and they practised that law which alone, of all 
 the codes of time, ordains for labor fifty-two holidays in every 
 year, and they proved that God will bless the land where every 
 week is bounded on the west by rest and prayer. These heirs 
 of Latimer, Knox, Coligny, Prince Maurice knew why they 
 had moved so far. They had a religion that bore transplanting. 
 They nursed those "household virtues whereon rests the 
 unconquerable state," and sung the cradle songs that are the 
 true foundation of anthems. We cannot take out of our bone 
 and fibre the stuff our forefathers have put there. If it is so 
 much more comfortable to be a Buddhist in Boston than in 
 Bombay, it is Puritanism that has made it so: but we cannot 
 long renounce the high obligation and retain the wide benefit; 
 for that which made this a land worth coming to will alone 
 keep it a land worth staying in ! [Applause.] 
 
 The prevailing forces of this, our country, have been Saxon 
 and Norse and Teutonic, not Latin. 
 
 We are not French, La gloire is not American glory, and 
 V amour is not American love. We are not Spanish. We will 
 not be Italian. I love the Italy of Dante, of Bruno and 
 Savonarola, of Galileo and Garibaldi; but not the Italy of 
 those who stifled or rejected these. [Applause.] 
 
46 OUR PURITAN FORBEARS 
 
 Let our Washington still be heard: "Resist with care the 
 spirit of innovation, however specious the pretexts. . . . 
 Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you 
 to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people 
 ought to be constantly awake." [Tremendous cheering.] 
 
 Yes, great leader, we do believe; we will remember; God 
 helping us, we will not become the acolytes of a system our 
 fathers suffered so to renounce. The Potomac shall not 
 become an affluent of the Tiber. We need no larger infusion 
 of priestcraft into politics. Let all super-serviceable Satollis, 
 and satellites whatsoever, learn that the American eagle is not 
 that kind of a bird ! We stand by the old watchwords a free 
 State, free churches, a free press and free schools. [Pro 
 longed applause.] One hundred years our ancestors wore the 
 nickname, but the thing they achieved shall, God grant, be the 
 empire of a thousand years. 
 
 When was there ever a fitter time than now to bring into 
 affairs the stern conscience of the Fathers ? Where a more 
 suitable place for it than Manhattan Island ? Think how you 
 will need it when you are no longer compelled to swim your 
 Hellespont to fondle New Jersey ! And think, too, in behalf 
 of New Jersey ! You may build your Washington arches and 
 your Grant tombs, you may fill your parks with eloquent 
 bronze; but what a loftier tribute would it be to these mem 
 ories to the memory of such as Hamilton and Jay to make 
 the municipal rule of New York City respectable ! What men 
 are more divinely called than those I speak to, to forswear the 
 dastardliness of indifferentism, to see that of all "dangerous 
 classes" the sybarites and shirks are the worst, to remember 
 that tacet soon becomes licet, that to permit rascals is to pro 
 mote them and be their quiet accomplices ? 
 
 Straining hopes look to us. The peoples of Europe "not 
 thrones and crowns, but men," whose leaders, staggering to 
 the brink of bankruptcy, yet stare with fierce, unforgiving 
 eyes over ever-widening lines of scientific iron piteously 
 appeal to us to be true to our trust ! 
 
A MIGHTY MOTHERHOOD 47 
 
 Talismanic land ! As America goes, so goes the world; but 
 as the cities go, so goes America ! Let us not flinch from our 
 tasks if we would be enrolled with our fathers. 
 
 Emerson said of Boston: "Her annals are inextricably 
 national." It is true of all that region of " man-bearing granite." 
 
 New England, mother of constitutions, of States, of Sena 
 tors, of churches, of missions, of colleges, of armies, of inven 
 tions, of ideas, of men ! And I will drink the pledge in that 
 element which was to our fathers at once a bridge and a bas 
 tionin water, as clear as the bright dews of baptism, as pure 
 as that which gurgled down the sands at Plymouth. [Pro 
 longed and repeated applause.] 
 
Duty of JEntbusfasm 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE 
 CELEBRATION OF INDEPENDENCE DAY 
 WOODSTOCK, CONN., JULY 4, 1894 
 
 Mr. President, Sisters and Brothers One may well pray to be 
 delivered both from his traducers and his introducers ! Hav 
 ing already suffered many things of many presidents, I am 
 once more the victim of circumstances. Presently you each 
 shall be ! I have been delighted, as you have been, to hear 
 the honorable member from the Worcester District sauce Mas 
 sachusetts. [Laughter.] No one outside the bounds of Massa 
 chusetts dare speak his mind so freely about Harvard Col 
 lege. Perhaps I should begin the words I have to say with 
 apology for ever having graduated from a college ! And 
 should make further apology for having anything to do with 
 a college faculty. But I do not impugn the logic of my friend ; 
 for I remember that there are colleges and colleges, that, as 
 " they didn t know everything down in Judee," so they do not 
 know everything even in the great colleges of New England, 
 tho they know a little of everything. There are colleges and 
 colleges, there are Congressmen and Congressmen. Our friend 
 does not want free sugar in his, but some Congressmen do. I 
 desire, this morning, to put myself outside the range of his 
 syllogisms, and to say that however humble may be my rela 
 tion to college work I will not stand in the shoes of any cold 
 blooded expounder of what has been so well called the dismal 
 science, because, first it leaves out God, and second, it leaves 
 out man. [Applause.] 
 
 " That s it," Mr. Walker? Thank you. 
 
 I say Amen to some things, not to everything that you have 
 
NEW ENGLAND PLATOS 49 
 
 stated. I am sound on this question. There has been some 
 little discussion because the college with which I am connect 
 ed, in Central New York, has lately declined the formal lead 
 ing strings of the Presbyterian Synod of New York, and I told 
 some friends who were questioning our ecclesiastical polity, if 
 no more, that we were sufficiently sound on that matter, 
 and to prove it to them I quoted a prayer that my little boy, 
 eight years of age, made at his mother s knee, in which he 
 said : " O Lord, help me not to branch off into any other re 
 ligion. Help me always to be a good Presbyterian, and not a 
 Mormon, or anything like that !" [Laughter.] 
 
 This is not my first and I hope it will not be my last chance 
 to detain the ears of New Englanders. It is hard to hold on and 
 dangerous to let go ! There is a certain independence in speak 
 ing to those who are like the farmer to whom Whitter loaned 
 his copy of Plato, and who came back saying: " I like that 
 fellow ; he has some of my idees." [Laughter.] The New 
 Englander takes his ideas always mixed with brains. The 
 multitude of those who are gathered here today are not to be 
 measured by arithmetic, but by ethics, rather. New England 
 ers are not to be counted, but are to be weighed. They come not 
 by the dozen, but by the pound. Before this representative aud 
 ience I feel as if I were speaking into a telephone that had univer 
 sal connections. I hope that I shall be heard at the other end 
 of the line with that emphasis which was illustrated at one of 
 the earliest telephones, when a farmer went into the office 
 and, having had the thing explained to him, was asked to put 
 his ear to it. He called up his wife. Just then there came a 
 clap of thunder. He exclaimed: "That s Maria!" He 
 recognized the voice. [Laughter.] One of our speakers said 
 something about the boycotts that were such a trouble, or 
 blessing not unmixed, and a friend of mine, who always sits 
 very near to me, suggested that the girl-cotts had something 
 to do with it, too. [Laughter.] I am thankful for both the 
 boycotts and the girl-cotts of that sort. I think the women, 
 
50 THE DUTY OF ENTHUSIASM 
 
 who make the majority of this and perhaps every other crowd 
 in New England and out of it, too where brains are at all 
 in demand, may well take comfort to themselves from a senti 
 ment which was given at a New England dinner in New York, 
 where one, proposing an impromptu toast to the Pilgrim 
 Mothers, said, They endured all that the Pilgrim Fathers en 
 dured, and they endured the Pilgrim Fathers besides ! [Laugh- 
 ter.] 
 
 I am glad we started off today with " Yankee Doodle." It 
 is great, classic with something better than classicism. Every 
 New Englander ought to know that story of how the 
 first regiment went down from these hills that so ballast the 
 memories of an honorable race. They were gathered into the 
 Astor House in New York, the first New England regiment to 
 go to the front. Broadway from curb to curb was thronged, 
 and as the first glitter and flash of the front file issued from the 
 doorway of that historic inn, about ten o clock in the morning, 
 the band struck up "Yankee Doodle," of all tunes in the 
 world. The people set up such a mighty roar and tempest of 
 sympathy and determination as seemed to rock the very gran 
 ite walls. There was no uncertainty after New England had 
 set that tune of how the city of New York would go ! [Ap 
 plause.] 
 
 We stand within the bounds of no mean commonwealth, 
 rather of one whose historic honor is so bright that when one 
 reads her annals it is to wonder what is left to record for the 
 fame of the other stars of our constellation. It is a record 
 legible and luminous all the way from Buckingham to Morris. 
 Under what better motto could we gather than Connecticut s 
 " Qui transtulit sustinet" ! But today, men and women of a 
 score of States, perhaps of every State, where that dear ban 
 ner answers the heavens with its stellar and auroral beauty 
 today we are each and all Americans! [Applause.] Thanks 
 to the host who calls us here ! Joy to the hearts that answer 
 him ! Peace, plenty, above all piety, unsullied, unbounded, un- 
 
THE UNAPPORTIONED STARS 51 
 
 faltering, to the land we love and call our own ! But we are 
 all here not only to remember ; we are also here to resolve, 
 highly, humbly, fervently and with unanimous consecration. 
 No one can attempt to voice your wills today with a deeper 
 sense of inadequacy than mine is as I think how many notable 
 and noble souls have brought their best to this illustrious ren 
 dezvous. How poor shall be the largest that the best can 
 bring to this great love-feast of our loyalty ! 
 
 Dear America ! " Beautiful my country ! " " Nation and 
 company of nations ! " I hail my privilege to lay my offering 
 among the laurels of this day of days. Massachusetts, the 
 mother of Adams ; New York, proud foster mother of Alex 
 ander Hamilton ; Illinois, dear to us forever for those two 
 sons of Anak who smote home for the cause of mankind s 
 emancipation and enfranchisement I have loved all these 
 with a filial love : but were any or all of them to lift recreant 
 and insane hands against the District of Columbia, I am for 
 my whole country ! Thank God, undistinguishable, indissev- 
 erable, all those stars blend in one ever-crescent light. How 
 shall Texas say " This is mine," or Ohio say " This is mine ?" 
 All are ours, and we are for them all ! [Applause.] 
 
 But we are here for a mission. That were but tawdry decla 
 mation that should deal in glittering vagueness. A duty sum 
 mons us a divine, a holy trust is in our hands, at such an 
 hour, in such a land, where still portent and promise so strange 
 ly blend. It is ours in the name of the fathers, to recognize 
 the demands upon our total powers, and to pledge ourselves 
 that the hastening future of our fatherland shall be epical and 
 not tragic. 
 
 I am to speak to you of THE DUTY OF ENTHUSIASM. I wanted 
 a big text, and there it is. Enthusiasm is a great word. A 
 true master, who gave language new force by his idiomatic use 
 of it Isaac Taylor once wrote a book upon the "Natural 
 History of Enthusiasm." But his whole treatment of that 
 theme dealt with the lower and oblique associations of the 
 
52 THE DUTY OF ENTHUSIASM 
 
 word, and warned against perverse, unreasoned and mistaken 
 zeal. He noted the quixotic and fanatical elements of the 
 mere rhapsodist the dogmatism and violence of the self- 
 opinionate the passion that lacks wisdom, and the ecstacy that 
 is sanguine without sense. It is of the better and truer signi 
 ficance of Enthusiasm that I would speak. The word means 
 full of the god. It shall stand with us for inspiration, for con 
 secration, for that joyful and dauntless purpose which never 
 rests in the superficiality of averages and which hastens the 
 kingdom of that truth which it is persuaded of and hails from 
 afar. True enthusiasm means daring and uncompromising 
 devotion. It is not a sentiment and an intoxicant, but an ar 
 dent and quenchless hope that what should be shall be ! This 
 is dedication the sublime surrender of the whole being to 
 the guidance of the ever-on-going God. And this is duty. Be 
 cause it is a duty it is a possibility. It is our privilege and our 
 right. I summon your souls to see that nothing less than such 
 a surrender to our Maker can answer the voices of the times and 
 fulfill the obligations of high manhood and womanhood. [Ap 
 plause.] 
 
 It is the conquest of the soul by great and profound ideas 
 that makes great. This is the stuff whereof pioneers and 
 prophets are made. Said Swedenborg: " Such as the love is, 
 such is the wisdom." Men see with their hearts, and the heart 
 that counts no sacrifice costly if ultimate truth may reign, is 
 the heart that is full of the god . The three great elements of 
 power are these judgment, imagination, hope. He who 
 has these is complete and furnished to every good work. One 
 may have either without the others then he is gibbous in 
 stead of spherical. The true leader and the true follower 
 each is one who will take great risks for great reasons. 
 
 " He either fears his fate too much, 
 
 Or his deserts are small, 
 Who will not put it to the touch, 
 And win or lose it all." 
 
IMPLACABLE MANHOOD 53 
 
 But this non-prudential eagerness does hot forget the crit 
 ical, it rather consummates its conclusions in executive de 
 cisions. There is today a cant of moderation. It is one of 
 the affectations of conventional propriety to suppress impulse 
 and to cry down intensity of conviction. This blase theory 
 of behavior, this ennui of life, avoids elemental seriousness. It 
 never breathes deep enough to breathe hard. It skims the 
 mere rim of reality. It dwells in petty fads, and gushes over 
 them with abundant adjectives. It is superlative because it is 
 not positive, and takes the whole English language in vain to 
 ornament a whim. It lives in the subjunctive instead of the 
 indicative mood. It wishes, but it never wills. The simula 
 tion of enthusiasm is its death. Shallow intent destroys the 
 very capacity of high thoughts and deep life. Dawdling sel 
 fishness is the damnation of dudes and impotents. 
 
 " For life is not as idle ore, 
 
 But iron dug from central gloom, 
 And heated hot with burning fears, 
 And dipped in baths of hissing tears, 
 
 And battered with the stroke of doom, 
 To shape and use." 
 
 We need to get by heart Paul s characterization of Epaphro- 
 ditus, who "for the work of God was nigh unto death, staking 
 his life." 
 
 A wise Frenchman wrote a book under the proposition that 
 "Eloquence is a Virtue." It is a faithful saying. When the 
 real man arrives he speaks with tones that smite his time of 
 stupidity as the thunders break the oppression of the heavy 
 summer day. John the Baptist, Martin Luther, Cromwell, 
 Mirabeau, Sam. Adams, O Connell, John Bright, Garrison, 
 Phillips, Lincoln these are the men whose enthusiasm inter 
 rupts and crushes the stolidity of custom and the irresolution 
 of policy. The great orator is the implacable man. With 
 molten speech, with the naked power of a conviction that 
 scorns half-truths, a terror to the bad and to the timid, im 
 peaching that absolute infidelity to the hour and to the oppor- 
 
54 THE DUTY OF ENTHUSIASM 
 
 tunity which often intrenches itself in the most consummate 
 orthodoxy in thesi not sinister and never merely dextrous, 
 but two-handed and whole-hearted the Voice leaps alive into 
 the midst of a stagnant and querulous time, challenging its 
 practical atheisms with all the sublimity and mastery of the 
 truth itself. Such men God sends as the couriers of repent 
 ance, and they are the herald-angels of the Evangel. They 
 disdain the paltry evasions and subterfuges of expediency, and 
 trembling themselves in the reality of that kindling ideal 
 which both consumes and compels them taking fire like 
 meteors by the rapidity and friction of their passage they are 
 the avatars of the message they announce ! [Applause.] 
 
 But to us all God is ever saying : "Whom shall we send, and 
 who will go for us?" A deep voice sounding out the lonely 
 truth is like a midnight bell; it rings into innumerable ears, 
 which wake and listen and thank God for another day. God 
 guide and guard that prophet who, in the face of vast reproach, 
 is rousing the hypnotized conscience of Manhattan Island. 
 [Applause.] The Tammany Goliath may vaunt, and the Re 
 publican Eliab may sneer, but this last David, not in the Saul s 
 armor of the place-holder and pelf-distributor, but with the 
 smooth stone slung true shall slay his tens of thousands. The 
 one great mission of the Hebrew Prophets was to preach 
 righteousness to their times they were in politics for all they 
 were worth ! It is an antedeluvian heresy that denies the 
 right or neglects the duty of such an enthusiasm as knows how 
 to perceive the power of contemporary iniquity and to arraign 
 it with the voice of a Micaiah or a Joel. [Applause.] 
 
 Enthusiasm is the characteristic alike of the scientist, the 
 historian, the poet, the true statesman, the apostle, the saint. 
 Inspiration is the note and accent of every life that touches its 
 age with the dateless law of duty. They who "prefer bondage 
 with ease to strenuous liberty" are those who have said of the 
 idols of material success "these be thy gods." Shall it be 
 Aaron, with the cultus of the calf the worship of the visible 
 
PATRIOTISM MORE THAN NATIONAL VANITY 55 
 
 or Moses, with "Thou shalt have no other God before me! H 
 There is no slavery so blind as the prostitution of enthusiasm" 
 at the altars of Mammon where today "the great man bow- 
 eth down, and the mean man humbleth himself." The last 
 question is, "Who shall reign?" The sovereignty of God is 
 the final truth. Deep and ominous if we heed it not, the long 
 roll is already beating, and from gate to gate the whisper will 
 swell to a voice like the storm, "Who is on the Lord s side?" 
 
 Americans are, of all people on earth, most avid of congrat 
 ulation and averse from censure. But a merely provincial pa 
 triotism that worships either knowledge, or skill, or strength, 
 or plenty, will no more preserve our semi-Christian civilization 
 from becoming godless than these saved Babylon! Americans 
 do not love their Jeremiahs: but they well may heed them. 
 We are not in such danger today from foreigners as we are 
 from ourselves. I for one, because I am a patriot, will remem 
 ber that the best part of the word "fatherland" is the first 
 part; and, repudiating that toast of Stephen Decatur s, "Our 
 Country, Right or Wrong," I will pray, " Our Father which art in 
 Heaven," and, "Our Country Right, and Never Otherwise." Vox 
 Dei, vox populi" must be the new patriotism. [Applause.] It is 
 only the discipline of obedience to the high God that can ap 
 ply the power of enthusiasm to public life. Eagerness of con 
 science must be trained, by common consent, to effective pro 
 grams. We need today a new oath of allegiance to that God 
 whom on our coinage we say we trust. We need to publish a 
 new Declaration of Dependence. Public opinion is not infal 
 lible. Majorities are not final. Righteous minorities are the 
 real rulers not screaming themselves hoarse with that terres 
 trial apotheosis of man in the "Aux armes les braves" of the 
 Marseillaise, but chorusing the deeper purpose and the sub- 
 limer enthusiasm of "Einfeste Burg ist unser Gott! " [Applause.] 
 
 Liberty s statue yonder in New York Harbor is but a hollow 
 idol unless it upholds the lamp which God alone can kindle 
 and keep ! Providential America, daughter of privilege and 
 
56 THE DUTY OF ENTHUSIASM 
 
 opportunity, understand thyself by that philosophy of history 
 which thine open Bible gives thee, by that enthusiasm, that 
 fullness of God, whose prayers become prophecies ! 
 
 " For here is truest taught and easiest learnt 
 What makes a nation happy and keeps it so, 
 What ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat." 
 
 Upon the Saxon race lies the triune mission of Greek, Ro 
 man and Hebrew. It stands triply for culture, for law, for 
 reverence. Not alone in these tongues, but in our own dear 
 English let it be written in the tongue of Wyckliffe and Mil 
 ton, and Tennyson, and Whittier, and Lanier, "Tnis is THE 
 KING"! 
 
 The Saxon never wore the yoke easily nor long. With the 
 power of conscience and the enthusiasm of truth, he has con 
 quered his conquerors. He may perish, but he can only per 
 ish by his own moral suicide. The Saxon is invited to the 
 headship of the nations. Fie rules as Caesar never dreamed of 
 ruling. He holds the commanding influence in four continents, 
 and is sole master of the fifth. He girdles the round Earth, 
 with nations. His righteous will may be law for the planet. 
 He must not swerve from God. Christ has raised up this solid 
 front of a hundred million men. What pencil dipped in the 
 dawn can write its possible glories, or dipped in the smoke of 
 Hell can limn its obloquy ! The switch points are set close 
 for either line. 
 
 "Today we fashion destiny, the web of fate we spin, 
 Today for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin ; 
 E en now from starry Gerizim or Ebal s cloudy crown 
 We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down." 
 
 There is an optimism which boasts in its own strength, and 
 there is a pessimism which cravenly invites the woes it dreads. 
 There is a tertium quid, the cross of Christ; above us Heaven, 
 beneath us the pit, about us God ! Not optimism, not pessim 
 ism, but enthusiasm. There are dangers dire and dark, dema 
 gogs and monopolists, poltroons and panderers, with sophisms 
 
HOPE IS CREATIVE 57 
 
 that slander manhood and doubts that slander God : but by 
 the arm of God we can beat them down ! 
 
 Back in 1871, when men in Chicago were hanging themselves 
 to lamp-posts and drowning themselves in the lake, a man put 
 an advertisement in one of the papers, reading: "Men of 
 Chicago, take hope. Our fathers raised her from the bog, 
 and we can raise her from the ashes ! " It is that spirit that 
 raised that Phenix City by the shore of Lake Michigan. It is in 
 that Chicago spirit, translated and transfigured by the Gospel 
 of Christ, that we need today, every one of us, to put whole 
 souls into all affairs. [Applause.] God will give us light if we 
 ask Him for it. Hope is creative, doubt is abortive. Let us 
 hope, then act. The men who are willing to deny themselves 
 any possible gain, who forget that a vote is a vow, who forget 
 that a candidate is a man clad-in-white, who forget the patriot 
 ism of paying taxes, who forget that law is like a bicycle and 
 that the way to keep it standing is to keep it going, whose 
 very bones are flabby with civil neglect, whose minds are 
 mere kennels for vagrant theories, and who recant the old- 
 fashioned law of duty and "the faith that comes by self-con 
 trol," (and by self-sacrifice, too,) these moral spendthrifts and 
 soul paupers, these are the incubi of the times ! Such a man is 
 not a man, but a manikin. [Applause.] But upon the souls 
 who are full of the enthusiasm of duty rests the unconquerable 
 State. To these "the Christ that is to be" flings wide His 
 effectual doors. Ruled by such a ken life can never seem 
 shabby nor hope irrational. To him who truly lives and does, 
 the veil of the visible becomes more and more diaphanous. 
 There are such men. We do not always listen to hear the deep 
 breathing ef the people ready to respond to the prophet of 
 conscience. We bite into one blasted ear, and forget the green 
 sabers of the corn that array a thousand prairies. We find one 
 brackish pool, and forget the trickling of a myriad translucent 
 springs. We see one whirling, copper cloud, and doubt the 
 Sun. But God reigns ! God reigns ! 
 
58 THE DUTY OF ENTHUSIASM 
 
 On some level shores the tides rise, invisibly percolating all 
 the sands. One instant it is shore, and the next up comes the 
 ocean and it is sea. The ebb is no more, the flood tide is on. 
 Such is the spontaneity and instantaneousness of many a great 
 and invisibly gradual movement under the Sovereign Spirit. 
 
 Thou who didst steer the little "Mayflower" to her desired 
 haven, bring America to port ! Grant that upon this gathering 
 of the people our dear flag may shine with the light of an 
 Evangel, pure as the sweet influences of the Pleiades and firm 
 as the bands of Orion. Thou who dost guide Arcturus, grant 
 that those stars may glow in the coronet of Christ. In the 
 enthusiasm of loyalty to God, and serried against the evils and 
 forebodings of the time, we will march in the footsteps of a 
 believing ancestry. Let every flagstaff and belfry, every 
 throbbing dome and thundering cannon, every eloquent orator 
 and voice of multitudes, every prayer of gratitude and every 
 sob of joy, carry the name that is above every name, and swear 
 it with a mighty oath: "This God is our God, as He was our 
 father s God, and He shall be ours forever and forever." So 
 can we say, with all high confidence, after the great laureate 
 
 now asleep: 
 
 " Are there thunders moaning in the distance? 
 Are there specters moving in the darkness? 
 Trust the hand of light will guide His people 
 Till the thunders pass, the specters vanish, 
 Aud the light is victor, and the darkness 
 Dawns into the jubilee of the ages." 
 
 GOD SAVE AMERICA ! 
 
future of tbe ffnbepenfcent College 
 
 AN ADDRESS GIVEN AT THE CONVENTION OF THE 
 ASSOCIATION OF THE COLLEGES AND PREPARA 
 TORY SCHOOLS IN THE MIDDLE STATES AND 
 MARYLAND AT THE JOHNS HOPKINS 
 UNIVERSITY AT BALTIMORE 
 DECEMBER /, 1894 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen The invitation given me to speak 
 here was cheerfully accepted because of the introduction it 
 assured to those from whom I am glad to learn. HAMILTON takes 
 its place this year as a permanent unit in this Association. I 
 find myself the fortunate successor to the good-will last year 
 accorded to Professor Brandt, of our Faculty, who at that 
 time represented us by a careful and critical paper. You may 
 hereafter reckon upon us to take all proper share in the stim 
 ulating discussions which mark your annual sessions. 
 
 The question now before us has already been amply and 
 adequately introduced, and with all deference to the gentle 
 men who have so surrounded the theme, I submit my remarks, 
 quite aware that you will "piece out my imperfections with 
 your thoughts." 
 
 The subject, as furnished me, was "The Independent Col 
 lege as Distinguished from the University." Not as a doubter 
 but as a believer, not as an outsider but as a loyal son of such 
 a college, I venture to offer these paragraphs to your larger 
 and elder experience. Endeavoring to deal with whatever is 
 futuritive so as to find its relations to present fact and obvious 
 tendency, I would avoid the role of either Balaam or Cassan 
 dra, and seek, tho least, a place among the canonical, if minor, 
 prophets. 
 
60 THE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE 
 
 Until a recent period (epoch some of you might call it) the 
 story of higher education in America has been the story of 
 the Independent College/ By Independent, I shall mean 
 that which is not in absolute dependence upon a particular 
 State or Church, which is self-governed and which is main 
 tained by its own corporate enterprise. 
 
 The relation which any college sustains to the Christian 
 church should be vital rather than formal, one of reciprocity 
 but not of merged identity. Its status and responsibility 
 should be moral rather than ecclesiastical, and in absolute 
 freedom from the contingencies of denominational weather. 
 
 Prelatical or quasi-prelatical control is non-representative, 
 and sacrifices philosophical breadth and progress to a special 
 regime of polity. 
 
 Affinity and affiliation are far stronger and far freer and less 
 inconstant than sectarian responsibility. They appeal to a 
 larger constituency, in a nobler way, and with ampler assur 
 ances of both movement and stability. Moral relation is more 
 than legal. It is not contradictory, it is other and fuller, and 
 it escapes both the caprice of casual majorities and the shadow 
 of mortmain. 
 
 The denominational plea is too exclusive and too procrus- 
 tean, and in so far as it is efficient it is narrowing. But the 
 non-sectarian is not therefore the secular. Secularism is one 
 of the most cramped of sects and its shibboleths are as 
 arbitrary as any that can be imposed. Unhesitatingly I claim 
 that substantive Christianity is both scientific and crescent. 
 Only a polyglot and Babeled theory forgets the spatial horizon 
 of that kingdom whose King of Truth offers the ultimate con 
 structive standards of mental and moral life. These two are 
 at last but one, and to magnify the mastery of second causes 
 to the forgetting of origins and ends, is to rob thought of its 
 profoundest realm, and to substitute a frustrum for the zenith. 
 
 The non-religious or contra-religious alleged learning, 
 whose hopes are all horizontal and temporal, is neither beauti- 
 
THE STERILITY OF NESCIENCE 6l 
 
 ful nor rational. It deals with surds. What is genial (as Cole 
 ridge said of Shakesperean criticism) must be reverential. 
 The world needs spherical not bulbous men. Its spiritual 
 Philistinism can only be mastered by unshorn Samsons. 
 Ethics of convention, of terrestrial expediencies, reveal their 
 bastardy in their barrenness. The crossing of intellectual 
 avidity with an undevout nescience is both hybrid and sterile, 
 and against it the array of schools that have been maintained 
 and blessed in the faith and fear of God must teach that a true 
 biology leads on toward Him in whom all that lives has its 
 being, that astronomy is the royal herald of the Light of the 
 World ILxT^o ran/ <WTOH/ , that faith is the eye of scholar 
 ship, and that practical and expert manhood consists in bring 
 ing the loftiest motives to the lowliest tasks. 
 
 The latest word of science (writes Henry Drummond) is 
 that "All nature is on the side of him who tries to rise." To 
 that rising time sets no limits. 
 
 That College has an assured future which renounces all 
 inferior dependence that it may be loyal to the Christian decla 
 ration of the rights and rule of the Highest. That College 
 has an assured future which in history distinguishes between 
 the dead who live and the living who are dead, and shows 
 those whose gristle is soon to become bone, how modern mer 
 cantilism taints the moral sense, and how the idolatry of merely 
 optical knowledge becomes sciolism. 
 
 Real education draws out the deepest faculties and bends 
 them to their utmost functions. 
 
 "We live (says Principal Fairbairn) in the generation that 
 has witnessed the transit of power, and this means that for the 
 battle to maintain our place and fulfill our function in the his 
 tory of humanity we have called out our last reserves ! The 
 earliest moments in the use of power must always be the most 
 critical, for they are the formative moments. It is the people 
 who now rule, and unless God live in and rule thro the people, 
 the end of .all our struggles, the goal of all our boasted 
 
62 THE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE 
 
 progress will be chaos." The true school must scholar its 
 product to serve the people the peoples. The school, be its 
 product more or less for quantity, must qualify that product 
 to advantage mankind in the undermost necessities. Thus 
 only can the school be saved from soulless dilletanteism and 
 and minister to the profound and restless exigencies of the age. 
 
 1 i ) What I have so far said opens my first contention, namely, 
 that manhood is the thing to be sought, evoked and equipped 
 under the obligations of a celestial allegiance. I do not speak 
 by way of disparagement; but affirming thus the standards of 
 one "small College" whereof I know, I venture to assert that 
 the three hundred smaller colleges of America are doing a 
 work in instilling reverent and comprehensive motives which 
 nothing else in America, on the whole, is like, and that neither 
 the present nor the future can spare these labors nor their 
 vast results. Their part is indeed coordinate with that of all 
 special schools ; but it is also peculiar, integral and indispensable. 
 
 (2) An important and peculiar mission of the College, as 
 such, is its exponency and guardianship of all-around disci 
 pline, as discriminated from that special or technical training 
 which the University, as such, must make its specific area and 
 prime end. This matures and enlarges men for that. 
 
 The impulse of the representative College magnifies those 
 ideals and enforces that patient drill which are the best of all 
 preparation for thoroness in particular pursuits, be they scien 
 tific, literary, or professional. These widen the personal orbit, 
 and confer both balance and momentum. 
 
 The significant and enduring literature of New England has 
 thus far come from those who were lessoned and roused under 
 the disciplines of a training strictly collegiate. It remains to 
 be seen whether their successors shall on the whole excel 
 them. The appliances and associations, the apparatus and the 
 teachers who are using the old disciplinary methods, are now 
 as in the past bent toward making pliant minds aware of their 
 whole and best selves, and of their dutiful part toward what 
 
A LIBERAL EDUCATION STILL WORTH WHILE 63 
 
 the ancients called "the wheel of life." I presume, however 
 signal the pedagogic station of those who have uttered it, to 
 controvert the proposition that " it is no longer worth while 
 to uphold the idea of a liberal education." 
 
 The liberal arts that is, in the old sense, those suitable for 
 a freeman still subtend the truest training of the man not 
 servile. They temper and anneal. However useful or benign 
 the after art, or exact the later science, either fares better with 
 him who has been developed roundly by intelligent interest in 
 many things. We cannot dispense with great investigators ; 
 but we must have a multitude of resolute and clear-visioned 
 citizens to encourage and to appreciate these, and so to ap 
 propriate and extend their results. Physician or attorney, 
 preacher or pedagog, jurist or juryman, the least near-sighted 
 man will go the furthest. Early discipline is the best pre 
 ventive of after pedantry. True education is a geometry of 
 three dimensions. Narrow depth will be found as partial as 
 shallow breadth. I plead for neither and against both. We 
 want cubic men. 
 
 The discipline of a thoro-going undergraduate course pre 
 pares for the wisest and heartiest selection of the lifetime s 
 work. Moreover it often does this by revealing aptitudes and 
 rousing ambitions that else would have slept unguessed. It 
 suggests and solicits choice. This discovery and motive ser 
 vice is acting upon latent talent thro all our land and finding 
 what, acting alone, the University proper would never find. 
 
 I do not lack manifold assurances from experts in techni 
 cal and professional schools that the soundest and best-grained 
 material they get comes from the ranks of those who have not 
 shunned the routines of a stiff general course in arts. I am 
 so far constrained to think that the men who specialize least 
 in College are the men who specialize best afterward. Could 
 the Universities do their present work and forego the supply 
 of this Bessemered man-material ? 
 
 Rivalry and mutual disparagement can never well beseem 
 
64 THE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE 
 
 these complementary forces. The future can spare neither. 
 They give the two foci of the education which is to be. 
 
 (3) And, yet again, quite apart from the vertical influences 
 of the college training, I insist upon the lateral influences of 
 college association. It consorts men. It is democratic. Its 
 aristocracy is of the right sort. It reduces the tendency to 
 ward snobbery, even of the intellectual kind. Its romance is 
 of essential value, fully realized, alas ! by most of us, only 
 when it is irreparably past, but containing a vital poetry we 
 can never forget. 
 
 Those days of ideality and dreams ! How the shreds of 
 long-silenced songs sound on in the corridors of our hearts ! 
 That microcosmos with zests, emulations, politics, achieve 
 ments, all its own, swathed by an atmospheric force that rivals 
 the curriculum as wings rival wheels ! It is an intense epitome 
 of the strenuous life to which it is the door. He who forgoes 
 the eager, fervent, imaginative spirit of such a community of 
 zeal and effort, misses what he may learn to regret but can 
 never recover. That glamouring light shines only once. 
 
 The ruthless haste into affairs or professions which skips the 
 ardors and aspirations of the " collegisse juvat " is self-robbery. 
 I dare implead those who ignore this period of exceptional 
 ideality, of generous sentiment, of manly, even if sometimes 
 hasty, impulses, of hope, high and hot, of developing will that 
 shall use after skill, of lifelong and unrivalled friendships. 
 
 Our college students with all their impetuous faults live a far 
 deeper life than ever goes to print. This dormitory life with its 
 keen criticism of common interests, its swift puncture of sham, 
 its absolute appreciation of all that is fair, gallant and strong, 
 makes many men better and makes few worse. American life, 
 could ill spare the boisterous energies, the thrilling enthusiasms, 
 the rousement and unsophisticated purpose of her college 
 boys. For this, too, the College has a future. It cannot be 
 come an anachronism. 
 
 (4) Last I insist upon that direct relation with its personal 
 
A CLOSER-WOVEN WEB 65 
 
 knowledge and friendly interest, which the College favors and 
 stimulates, and I cite the words of President Porter, words 
 whose pertinency the recent interval of years has not dimin 
 ished, and which are at once an eulogium and a confession. 
 "A small college, (he wrote) well manned and thoroly 
 administered, has many advantages over one that is larger in 
 respect of the intimacy of acquaintance and intercourse be 
 tween the officers and pupils, and also in respect of the vigor 
 with which a few studies wisely selected can be thoroly en 
 forced. The larger colleges have much to fear from the bulk 
 and weight of the mass of material thrown upon their care, 
 and from the growing tendency to exalt the professorial to 
 the disadvantage of the tutorial function." 
 
 Truly; for beyond all instruction glows the sphere of inspir 
 ation. Information is much: but formation is more. The con 
 tagion of thoughtful and truth-devoted lives is subtile and 
 swift. Our colleges, with keen regard to this result, must in 
 sist upon manning their every department with those who im 
 personate fineness and force and the "faith that comes by 
 self-control." 
 
 Such they do seek and largely find; men who, because they 
 themselves have enthusiasm, can both rouse and guide it, 
 whose first specialty, with whatever else, is influencing young 
 me?i. Sincere intercourse with high-minded and wide-minded 
 teachers is the chief means to the best educational ends. 
 Other things being even nearly equal the College where this is 
 most realized is at the fore. This belongs characteristically to 
 the College domain as it does not to the University, just as it 
 is the captains rather than the colonels who know the rank 
 and file of the regiments. The future cannot spare this con 
 stant element of leverage, and more and more, by every con 
 sideration, will the Colleges appreciate and use it. 
 
 And so, to approach the end, I submit that the term "small 
 college" frequently puts a coarse arithmetical appraisal in 
 place of one that is dynamic and therein more just. In the com- 
 
66 THE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE 
 
 parison of ratios between their respective groups of effective 
 and influential graduates, it is not always the little College 
 that suffers. Colleges vary as the square of the ideals which 
 they impart and vivify. Those are large that issue the largest 
 pro rata of large men, and those are small whose man-product 
 is relatively lesser in mental and executive efficiency. Those 
 who are so ready to make a patronizing complaint that the 
 College unduly attempts the functions of the University in 
 advanced specialization should logically be as careful to see 
 that the University should not usurp or minify the indispens 
 able functions of the College. 
 
 Neither legitimately includes the other. The University has 
 no more call to dictate the College course than the College 
 has call to dictate the University course. The two are of right 
 as distinct as they should be complemental. 
 
 The edges where they divide may and probably must slightly 
 overlap, but this is no reason for friction, either by an airy 
 and opulent condescension, or by a covetous and impatient 
 ambition. There should be a self-respecting individuality in 
 each task, and in the assertion and fulfilment of that individ 
 uality the utmost mutual regard and cooperation. Graduate or 
 under-graduate course, let each affirm, honor and magnify its 
 own peculiar and distinct occasion and sphere, ever more per 
 sistently, symmetrically, convincingly, and let neither envy 
 and neither vaunt. 
 
lEmma MUlart> 
 
 AN ADDRESS AT THE PRESENTATION 
 
 OF THE RUSSELL SAGE HALL IN TROY, N. Y. 
 
 MAY 16, 1895 
 
 IT is one of the high privileges of a college president to be 
 put into relation with many noble enterprises and occasions 
 that lie somewhat outside of his own strict sphere. It is also 
 one of the penalties of such an office that its incumbent is 
 often summoned to minister in matters that quite transcend 
 his own special fitness. 
 
 But willingly I have met the cordial request of these twain 
 whose united hearts and hands are responsible for this occa 
 sion, and most cheerfully I become the spokesman of an appre 
 ciation and gratitude which all now here share, and would, 
 each, I am sure, desire to express and to augment. Most cor 
 dially I bring to this assembly, and, first of all, to these gen 
 erous benefactors, the greetings of an institution that has a 
 fraternal interest and zeal for whatever shall advance the cause 
 of true and general education within the bounds of a state 
 whose primacy in learning, in law, in civil and domestic char 
 acter, in commercial enterprise and influence, in noble popular 
 ideals and in all that promotes their realization, in reverent 
 and religious purpose, whose primacy in these things that 
 make a commonwealth truly great, all the states of this 
 august "family of nations" may well honor without envy and 
 emulate without rivalling. The motto of this imperial New 
 York of ours, with its ardent six millions and its noble 
 schools, colleges, churches and homes, its varied centres of 
 manufacture and trade, its splendid thorofares of traffic and 
 travel, its strong and earnest homogenity, is a motto of per- 
 
68 EMMA WILLARD 
 
 petual ambition and betterment. EXCELSIOR is a device that 
 was both a purpose and a prophecy. Vital labor is always the 
 impulse and expression of hope. Manly hope, which must be 
 hope for all that uplifts and unites man, can never tire nor 
 pause in its outreach and upgoing. The New York of this 
 generation is but an enlarging link between the New York 
 that was and the New York that in God s providence is to be. 
 To Him, under the word Excelsior, we are pledged, in the com 
 parative degree, pledged always to transcend present attain 
 ment in committing ourselves to more, larger, better things. 
 We accept this onward step as a token of progress in this 
 community and as a type of the duty to which all our Empire 
 State is elected and divinely urged. 
 
 Zeal for the simultaneous deepening and widening of educa 
 tion is the recognition of God s august plan for a nation, and, 
 thro a nation, for all nations. The mind that is at all taught 
 by Christ knows that the genius of His plans of universal 
 sovereignly holds education to be not the luxury of the few, 
 but the right and calling of the many. The spirit of that 
 thought for humanity which Christianity, when faithful to its 
 trust, is ever more strenuously expounding, is the spirit of 
 both intensification and of diffusion. The extension of knowl 
 edge is a Christian instinct. The open Bible is both itself a 
 mighty school and is the inspiration of all schools. It at once 
 demands and incites general advance. All gifts toward exten 
 sion of true thought are tributary toward the sweetening and 
 ennobling of human life. That wisdom and goodness which 
 meet in God are His intention for men whom He trains to 
 know and serve Him. 
 
 Generosity is the counterproof of genuine grace. But gen 
 erosity has wishes that are not bounded by the artificial 
 demarcations of a semi-civilized and half-christianized exclu- 
 siveness. Help toward one group only rises to its true stature 
 when it is offered as a step toward the help of all who need 
 help to the very least and neediest. Uncommon schools are 
 
SOWER OF PRECIOUS SEED 69 
 
 intended at last to leaven and lift common schools, else they 
 lapse into a selfish pedantry which is its own defeat. 
 
 "That white soul of my race (nobly said George William 
 Curtis) naturally loves the man, of whatever race or color, 
 who bravely fights and gloriously dies for equal rights, and 
 instinctively loathes every man, who, saved by the blood of 
 such heroes, deems himself made of choicer clay." [1:173] 
 We hail this recognition of the impulse of our beloved state to 
 diffuse the blessings of which knowledge is the almoner and 
 guardian. 
 
 And, met as we now are, we also read reverently another 
 paragraph in God s evident method of process. We all hope 
 that this fine and well-adapted building will be a means to 
 noble uses and ends, and that the institution it so advantages 
 will grow from more to more : but we are to remember that 
 we are celebrating results, a past as well as a future sum 
 mons our attention. Here is fruitage as well as blossoming 
 and promise. All survival is proof of fitness. All evolution 
 is essentially ethical in its demonstration that God counts no 
 process too complex, no graduation too slow, no cost too 
 great, no sacrifice too painful, that makes toward betterment. 
 God s way leading up to man, and God s leading of man of 
 which history is the record, is supremely expressive of his 
 will to secure the eventual best. Evolution is charged with 
 ideality. 
 
 Therefore, we trace steps, and hope is educated into unfal 
 tering trust that He who sees the end selects the means. 
 
 Therefore, we turn properly and heartily to consider her 
 name and prescient fidelity to whose original labors this build 
 ing is at once a tribute and a testimony. You will I am sure 
 gladly go with me in tracing the personality and services of 
 EMMA HART WILLARD. 
 
 She was born in Worthington parish, Connecticut, upon 
 February the 23rd, 1787, and she died in this city of Troy, 
 April 1 5th, 1870. Her life thus compassed the long period of 
 
70 EMMA WILLARD 
 
 four-score years and three. It is suggestive of much to say 
 that she was two years old at the date of Washington s first 
 inauguration, and that by five years she survived the death of 
 Lincoln. What events, changes, discoveries, achievements, for 
 America and mankind, crowd the record of those abundant 
 years! Of good stock that virile stuff that has made the 
 influence of her little state so wide and so enduring, she was 
 the sixteenth of an old-fashioned family of seventeen children. 
 Beginning upon seventy-five cents a week, she was a teacher at 
 the age of sixteen. Rapidly advancing she became an academy 
 preceptress in Berlin, Conn., in Westfield, Mass., and, in 1807, 
 in Middlebury, Vt. Hers was thus a New England training, 
 well absorbed by a New England character of energy and 
 ideality. 
 
 The little town of Middlebury was well-famed for its in 
 telligent society. Of the college there, Dr. Henry Davis was 
 president. Men of Hamilton College who know the story of 
 their Alma Mater recall with pride that having in his hands in 
 1817 two calls, one to Hamilton and one to Yale, he deliberately 
 preferred the former, and in 1818 as the second president of 
 Hamilton succeeded the lamented and beloved Azel Backus, 
 entering upon a career of fifteen years of arduous and noble 
 service service whose results are still indelible. 
 
 Emma Hart was married to Dr. John Willard, of Middle- 
 bury, in 1809. The robbery and the failure of the local bank 
 with which he was connected, led her to open a school for 
 young women in 1814. Avid of books and eager for all men 
 tal acquisition and skill, she was also full of ideas that for that 
 time were far advanced. The contrast of the education then 
 afforded to girls with that administered in the College at her 
 doors led her to introduce many new studies and methods. 
 
 Great changes have taken place since that early day in the 
 curriculum furnished to both young men and maidens; but 
 preeminently it was Emma Willard who asserted and demon 
 strated the capacity of young women for higher studies. 
 
A PIONEER IN METHODS 71 
 
 Wellesley and Wells and Vassar and Smith and Bryn Mawr 
 are today working upon lines that this pioneer teacher project 
 ed and established. Mary Lyon followed this audacious and 
 triumphant lead. It all seems right and natural now: but 
 then it was held as chimerical. Now it keeps a young man 
 well-tasked to prove that he is not the mental inferior of his 
 sister. Then his vanity went all but unchallenged. 
 
 Dr. Willard was one husband who took a woman of rare in 
 tuition and force at her true value and was his wife s ardent 
 coadjutor. 
 
 Mrs. Willard, in 1819, set forth her "Plan for Improving 
 Female Education." To some it seemed revolutionary: but it 
 obtained the warm approval and practical support of Governor 
 DeWitt Clinton, and under his urging she came to Waterford, 
 N. Y. Thenceon she belonged to our own state. By special 
 act, state funds were granted in furtherance of her scheme. 
 
 Under the proffer of a more suitable building, she removed 
 to this city of Troy, in 1821, and, adapting the word, estab 
 lished in that year seventy-four long years ago the Troy 
 Female Seminary. 
 
 Her husband who had so trusted and seconded her sound and 
 generous vigor, died in 1825. Her work went on until 1838, 
 when she gave it over to her son and his wife. Thirteen thous 
 and girls, of whom more than five hundred became teachers, 
 received and again diffused the influence of Emma Willard s 
 benign labors. Mrs. Nettie Fowler McCormick, whose wise 
 generosity has written itself upon a great Theological school 
 in Chicago, graduated here in 1854, and she was one of many. 
 The true woman whose name we honor today rises up at this fit 
 time, and by her husband s loyal help, this building prolongs 
 what long ago was so bravely done. 
 
 Emma Willard journeyed, wrote and wrought to the last. 
 " Rocked in the cradle of the deep " was her fine lyric. So, 
 and still in this city, she fell asleep, a well-won rest, in 1870. 
 
 Only the Omniscient can measure the fruit and the ever-in 
 creasing harvest of so true a woman s work. 
 
1*. 
 
 EMMA WILLARD 
 
 Wisely has it been placed upon the pedestal of the statue, 
 today unveiled, 
 
 "HER MOST ENDURING MONUMENT 
 THE GRATITUDE OF EDUCATED WOMAN." 
 
 Our country, to use her words of 1861, "a continent in ex 
 tent, an island in security," may well recur to tasks and 
 triumphs such as hers. Not all pyramids are labelled, but 
 here is one that is. 
 
 I do not detain your gentle patience with any apostrophe to 
 womanhood. Yonder noble bronze speaks to whomsoever hath 
 ears to hear. 
 
 I need not plead for that mutual trust and high cooperation 
 which that noble pair so well illustrated. I only say, would 
 that more men appreciated those instincts of high service which 
 are maternal beyond the bounds of the household, and whose 
 ample love embraces the needs of all who suffer and aspire. 
 Such wedlock is ideal, and, so, real, "like perfect music unto 
 perfect words." Well might an old Massachusetts epitaph be 
 borrowed for Emma Willard. 
 
 "A SARAH TO HER HUSBAND, 
 A EUNICE TO HER CHILDREN, 
 A LOIS TO HER GRANDCHILDREN, 
 A LYDIA TO GOD S MINISTERS, 
 A MARTHA TO HER GUESTS, 
 A DORCAS TO THE POOR, AND 
 AN ANNA TO HER GOD." 
 
 That one does his work well is proved in that its perpetuity 
 and power can be transferred to his successors. The proof of 
 active life is its fecundity and transmissiveness. No one has 
 wrought fully whose plans perish with his departure. 
 
 Loudly does this time of ours, at once appalling and sub 
 lime, summon all duty-loving souls to the strenuous and sub 
 lime exactions of stewardship. 
 
 We are too sordid of love, we do not enough give to the 
 hearts of men, near and far. " Mammon, the least-erected 
 
ONLY THE GENEROUS ARE GREAT 73 
 
 spirit that fell from Heaven " usurps the rights of the heart. 
 
 We are too selfish with our ideas. Living is sharing. With 
 holding is losing. Truth is a trust and true men its trustees. 
 Our knowledges are not ours to secrete and to hoard, but only 
 ours to impart. And our substance is lent for use s sake. Men 
 of great means are only mean men, unless they are also men 
 of great ends. Acquisition if it becomes a lust dries up the soul 
 and violates the first commandment with that covetousness 
 which is idolatry. EMMA WILLARD gave. She gave her heart, her 
 hand, her brain, her gatherings, herself. She joined her name 
 with the generous, who alone and therein are the great. Abil 
 ity in any measure is responsibility. She did what she could. 
 Oh, that today we all might be nourished and ennobled by 
 entering more fully into her unresting and unwasting spirit ! 
 
 This is the fulfilment and the only fulfilment of the "law of 
 Christ," who "came not to be ministered unto, but to minister," 
 and to give life as the ransom of many. 
 
 I turn, with hearty thanks to God, who has put it 
 into his heart, to acknowledge the exemplary service by which 
 this noble structure is now dedicated to woman and to truth. 
 May God lengthen his days to prosper many with this and like 
 bestowals. May he receive into his own soul the gratitude of 
 those he helps. May he be thrice rewarded in the blessings 
 that add no sorrow. 
 
 This RUSSELL SAGE HALL will stand to shelter a noble 
 preparation for high and helpful womanhood, long after 
 we all are gone. It will be more and more beloved, as the 
 years glide on, and rich associations gather about it. But we 
 are sure that no hearts will ever find a purer happiness within 
 its walls than today is theirs who with such affectionate plan 
 ning have wrought this completion, and who now with over 
 flowing pleasure witness the crowning of the work. 
 
 In your names, one and all, dear friends assembled, I con 
 gratulate these donors upon the finished and beautiful result 
 of love and generosity. 
 
flbeate 
 
 AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE GRADUATES OF 
 THE BARTHOLOMEW SCHOOL OF CINCINNATI, OHIO 
 
 MAY 30, 1895 
 
 THE genial urgency of the invitation under which I find my 
 self in this present critical situation, was wholly inverse to the 
 value of any service that utterance of mine is adequate to ren 
 der. In this estimate I am only too sure presently to win your 
 substantial agreement ! 
 
 Not having eluded the request of the honored head of this 
 school, my little wisdom and less wit is placed at your mercy. 
 It is so easy to give one s note, and alas, often so difficult to 
 meet its promise with full payment! To one who takes such 
 chances there is always a temporary relief in that sagacious 
 truism of Aristotle s, "Count it among the probabilities that 
 many improbable things will happen," and for me there was 
 left the possibility that a providential cyclone, or flood, or 
 some other personal or public disaster, might intervene. But, 
 alas ! Congress has adjourned, and no other general calamity 
 has befallen. 
 
 Once again, having " treated my resolution," I have tasted 
 the guile of a honeyed invitation, and I am reminded of that 
 response to a toast to Eve s daughters, in which a rapturous 
 devotee so confused his Scott and Pope 
 
 "O Woman, in our hours of ease, 
 Uncertain, coy, and hard to please: 
 But seen too oft, familiar with her face, 
 We first endure, then pity, then " 
 
 Let me warn all maidens here not to listen to addresses 
 which they intend to reject, and au contra, never to say No ! 
 
SERMONIZING INCORRIGIBLE 75 
 
 with such ambiguous back-glancing that a later Yes ! seems 
 possible. For, out of sheer desperation, ere now, many a man 
 has been " married to get rid of him." It is entirely true that 
 "any man may marry any woman that he pleases provided 
 he can find any woman that he does please !" It is handy to 
 be well supplied with a previous engagement. As many a cashier, 
 so valuing his services as to anticipate his employers, by rais 
 ing his own salary, has, to his pain, found that reckoning 
 comes with sure and wool-shod feet, so now my temerity and 
 insolvency are confronted by the relentless and accusing hour. 
 In my plight, I throw myself upon your clemency. Like many 
 another remorseful, if not penitent, convict, I would win the 
 good will of my gaolers, and, by decorum, shorten my time ! 
 Being sentenced, let me, at least, be sententious. 
 
 A shrewd applicant for a vacant Texas pulpit, when ques 
 tioned as to the usual length of his sermons replied, " Thirty 
 minutes, with a leaning toward mercy." If not quite so tele- 
 grammatic, I shall, at least, attempt no more than the relative 
 liberty of "night rates." I speak of sermons, and I must frankly 
 own that since my nature is well " subdued to what it works 
 in " I find my azure always shading toward the pulpit 
 ultramarine. My garb of cogitation has long ago been cut 
 with what an honored teacher of mine used to call the "homi- 
 letic bias." "And that they knew full well (or should have 
 known), who gave me public leave to speak to you." Cole 
 ridge once said to Lamb, "Did you ever hear me preach?" 
 and Lamb replied, " I never heard you do anything else." 
 
 For theme, I had granted the "world all before me where 
 to chose," and, choosing, I have not thought to compete with 
 those faithful instructors who have put into the hands of the 
 young women to whom this occasion chiefly belongs so many 
 well-spun clues instructions which have set the sturdy warp 
 upon which each one now moving to her own life-loom must 
 henceforth pack home the woof. It will be the fault of the 
 scholars, not of their tutors, if the after-work ravels or is at all 
 
76 IDEALS 
 
 woven in with shoddy yarn. These skilled hands have attired 
 your minds in serviceable suits of sober fact. Your conscious 
 ness of obligation to their labors of love will deepen as you 
 advance into the years where you will find that it is not the 
 gaudiest wardrobe that wears best. 
 
 I would that I might utter some not all-futile and ephemeral 
 word for this group of earnest debutantes^ and for those who 
 love them well and wish them God-speed. To be at all 
 urgent and cogent, to have help or heartening in it, I know 
 that, even tho it may stammer, what I try to say must, at least, 
 be serious. 
 
 Youth may bubble with fun: but just under the ebullition, 
 however merry, there lies, in every soul of noble capacity, the 
 range of intuitive seriousness and sham-hatred. 
 
 Genuine energy is too self-respecting for trifling. Whole 
 some ardor is friendly with kind mirth: but behind all sane 
 humor resolution sits. 
 
 Strength smiles, where weakness grins, simpers, or giggles, 
 and the palpitating and earnest purpose that alike resents 
 platitude or sophistication hates nobly that laughter which is 
 but the "crackling of thorns." 
 
 The true mind, untainted by commercial or social fictions, 
 ungangrened by mere professionalism, loves truth and 
 soberness, and demands real maxims and lofty aims. 
 
 Our strenuous time as commanding and as epical as any 
 that ever was a time whose crucial analysis and sharp inter 
 rogations prepare the way of God for a clearer and sublimer 
 synthesis, for a braver affirmation of truth and duty, than ever 
 yet dawned upon the tribes of men the great TO-DAY, and 
 the to-morrow that hastens, these summon and enjoin all man 
 hood and all womanhood to meet the lifting horizons with 
 reverent brows and purged eyes. 
 
 Solemn issues beckon and claim sincere souls, and such I 
 ask to go with me now, as in the time alloted I speak of IDEALS. 
 
 " All things (says an old Hebrew book) are double, one over 
 
THE INMOST IS FIRST 77 
 
 against another." Our world is full of an august and coherent 
 symbolism. It is "a copy and shadow of the heavenly," "like 
 in pattern to the true." It teems with prophecy and revela 
 tion. The "seen and temporal" is big with premonition of 
 the "unseen and eternal." Every true mental as every true 
 spiritual tabernacle is "according to the pattern in the mount." 
 
 Men vary, according to their interest in ideas, and according 
 to the ideas in which they are interested. 
 
 An idea is a thing seen, a mental image, an inward vision. It 
 is the thought which all appearance quickens. It measures 
 phenomena and thus surpasses them. Action and effect arouse 
 the idea; but it is explained only by itself. Plato, and, with 
 Plato, all who hold that mind is original and creative revealed 
 in organization and force, but not secreted by these under 
 stand that in the world of being the innermost is foremost. 
 Force and form but translate and incarnate mind. The idea is 
 the core. Purpose precedes energy and begets it. Things 
 are the manifestations of thoughts. 
 
 Consciousness is aware directly, immediately and finally, of 
 its infinite urilikeness to matter. Each of us, in himself, sees 
 how motion proceeds forth and comes from mind, and, thus 
 aware of what no sophisms long can tangle, we turn toward 
 "the Father of our spirits," "in whom we live, move and are," 
 assured that 
 
 " Tho He is so bright and we are so dim ; 
 We are made in His image to witness Him." 
 
 All religion (whether the word religio, is from religare to 
 bind; or from religere, to ponder) is the instinct of the rela 
 tionship between our invisible souls and the invisible God. 
 "God is spirit," and we are. Soul comes from soul and harks 
 back to its original. Howsoever clouded or defective, all 
 religions unite in affirming religion, whose ground and root is 
 in man s intuition of soul and his irrepressible instinct to find 
 its rest. Religion s purest Interpreter one and only among 
 a thousand bade the wearied world learn, in Him, and of 
 Him, what that rest is. 
 
78 IDEALS 
 
 Religion, then, is the grand tribute, world over and time thro, 
 to spirit, and declares that sense is but its servitor. All poetry, 
 which is the language at once of intuition and of aspiration, 
 says with that Greek whom Paul quoted, "we are His offspring." 
 Faith (whose inimitable definition as "the proving of things 
 not seen," begins the eleventh chapter of "Hebrews,") is the 
 "witness bearer" of the supremacy in this universe of the idea. 
 Faith is second-sight. It sees the invisible. " By faith we 
 know the world to have been framed by the word of God, so 
 that what is seen did not come from phenomena," that is, 
 the visible order did not originate from the various appearances 
 which it presents. The word preceded the ivorld. " Because 
 of Thy will they were." 
 
 So, at the outset, we observe how deep the philosophy of 
 idealism lodges in religion. Revelation matches mankind s 
 thirst for "the first and the last of the Living One." That all 
 men "feel after God" is the deepest proof that "He is not far 
 from every one of us." Life contradicts those denials which 
 use the very functions of mind to reduce mind to a "strong 
 delusion !" 
 
 The idea is the very substans the underfoundation of our 
 natures. Every act of self-expression is the embodiment of a 
 "thought and intent of the heart." Deed is idea translated, 
 and life is the constant process of turning one s self inside out! 
 Both for quality and for quantity, "as a man thinketh so is he." 
 Any other theory of what man is makes him an automaton or 
 a puppet, in either case only a mechanical contrivance. But 
 conscience, in blaming or in commending, affirms that man is 
 responsible, and, if responsible, free. Our thoughts, "accusing 
 or excusing one another," affirm that we are moral and not 
 mechanical. They move in the realm of a finite but real option. 
 Each of us knows that ! Self-understanding faces itself as a 
 spirit. Deep within these bodies sits that mysterious self, per 
 ceiving, wishing, deciding, and capable instantly to be aware 
 of itself as a thinker and not a thing, Ideas are the food and 
 
MEN REVEALED IN THEIR AFFINITIES 7g 
 
 raiment of souls. Idealism is the soul s proper and distinctive 
 life. So we were made. We are true or false, just as we 
 prefer, and incarnate true or false ideas. Life is an inevitable 
 and persistent distinction of motives from among the various 
 ideas that throng our souls. The heart is a "chamber of im 
 agery," where we renounce this and accept that. Be the idea 
 great and generous, just and commanding, the man is these. 
 If the idea is low, confused, gross, the man is. One s ideal is 
 the thought which he adopts, crowns, and obeys. One s actual 
 inmost ^preference and purpose becomes himself. Our ideals 
 are those ideas which, by surrender and loyalty, we wed and 
 cherish. Our deeds are the offspring and counterparts of this 
 inner wedlock. We take raw stuff of impression and weave it 
 into the fabric of personality. High ideals are thus the product 
 of high thoughts plus high purposes. So large-mindedness is 
 necessary to large intention. Greatness of soul is given to a 
 mental hospitality at once eager and modest. It sits alert and 
 gracious with open doors and wide windows. The spirit that 
 would search the stars must live in an observatory. To have 
 the best we must both compare and distinguish, admitting all 
 comers and selecting the superior "being at peace with many, 
 but having one counsellor of a thousand." The sons of Jesse 
 must all file before Samuel, that he may deliberately single out 
 David. The genius for a great ideal must be comprehensive 
 to collect, and exclusive in selecting. 
 
 Shakespeare is the first dramatist, because he is so inclusive. 
 He drives an omnibus, and all sorts and conditions of men get 
 in. From the base and the brave we may select our affinities. 
 The mirror reveals a thousand minds, all the way from lago to 
 Cordelia. Each of us chooses and approves according to his 
 own liking. The capacity to discern ideals in instances is the 
 test of mental power; the preference of the genuine best is the 
 final proof of spiritual excellence The wise soul seeks goodly 
 pearls, knows the priceless one when it is seen, and sells all 
 else to have that. 
 
8o IDEALS 
 
 Candidly, then, let us recognize that knowledge is shown in 
 ideas, and character in ideals. One is taste, the other is truth. 
 This is the difference between encyclopedia and Bible, between 
 the science of seeing and the art of being. There are brains 
 that are but curiosity-shops, stuffed with inconsequent and 
 second-hand odds and ends the pawn-place of gems and 
 pewter, tools and toys, laces and jute, bric-a-brac and trash. 
 To be more than pawn-brokers we must order and organize 
 knowledge, and consent to do business in a particular line. It 
 is of no profit to gather if one does not classify, to observe if 
 one does not reflect. A constructive character must passion 
 ately and absorbingly invoke the moral intent of things. It 
 must not only see how the concert of facts implies plan, it 
 must also discover the summum bonum which that plan intro 
 duces and fulfils. Geometry is ethical. The ultimatum is 
 Tightness Tightness whose correlative is duty. This is "the 
 end of being and ideal grace." Sure that this radical, inevita 
 ble ego is more than the material things amid which it dwells 
 and upon which it works, we are also sure that motives and 
 ends are the summary and goal of its reality. The word ought 
 warrants and inspires the word ca?i. Function expresses rela 
 tion and, at last, the cap-sheaf of synthesis is God. We are His. 
 He is ours. Love is the last word and has no synonym. It is 
 the harvest-home of philosophy and the desired haven of the 
 soul. 
 
 The mind s eye has thus pierced distances no four-foot re 
 flector can fathom. He whom we seek is not at the other end 
 of the telescope, but at this end. God is not the distant object 
 He is the light by which we search and find, and the mind s 
 eye is His witness. The soul is in His image, and His image 
 is in it. 
 
 We, whose pain and glory it is never to rest until we have 
 an idea deep and wide enough "for all the argosies of object 
 and event," have at last struck the true trail "the trailing 
 cloud of glory." The intuition of the creature is the subjective 
 
THE LYRICAL INSTINCT PROPHETIC 8l 
 
 recognition of the Creator. It is not proof, it is the open vision. 
 THIS is IDEALISM. 
 
 This is the insight that interprets and transcends eyesight, 
 the illumination of the inward eye that makes one a seer. It 
 has been well said that there are three orders of sight, "that 
 which sees things, that which sees into things, that which sees 
 thro things." Observation, understanding, appreciation. What 
 eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath entered into the 
 deductions of reason, God reveals by his spirit. "The spirit of 
 man is the candle of the Lord." Its light is His. At this open 
 organ the wondrous Player sits. It is built to utter His music. 
 It is this divine-human, human-divine, symphony that peals 
 and trembles in the Hebrew Psalms. God s hand swept the 
 harp of the heart, and therefore religion will never outgrow 
 those chords. Prose is finite. Realism, with its hard postu 
 lates, not only has no ear for music, but it must logically deny 
 both the right and reason of song. The lyrical instinct contra 
 dicts it. Both the misereres and the anthems of the heart 
 affirm the intuitions whose hopes even the protests of sorrow 
 recognize. Music is a sublime and irrefutable prophecy. That 
 culminating I50th Psalm, which summons to praise "every 
 thing that hath breath," is the warrant of a perpetual and aug 
 menting hymnody. Poetry, which is the twin of song, is the 
 irrepressible vehicle of the inmost life. Idealism either com 
 pels worship, or its denial renounces it. Both are the evidence 
 of the unseen and eternal. Only in immortal souls are such 
 harmonies. 
 
 In the clash and clangor of definitions, where either rash or 
 timid rationalists vie in vain endeavors to transfix with this 
 logical pin, or that, the elusive wings of inspiration, we must 
 not for an instant forget that the devout heart always knows 
 more than it can utter, and that no one expression can satisfy 
 or exhaust it. It must "say of itself" and not "what some 
 other told" it. 
 
 So I plead for Ideality for that uncommon sense which 
 
82 IDEALS 
 
 seizes the symbolism of the material and sensuous for that 
 *V#tfg*-i nation, which, breathing life into the nostrils of dust, 
 manifests its birthright in God. The commanding reality of 
 the idea sets forth the only plane of spiritual loyalty. 
 
 To those alone, who are " not disobedient to the heavenly 
 vision," creation gleams with correspondence and compensa 
 tion. To such the world is plastic and mobile under the con 
 stant energy of God the Holy Ghost. Everywhere the shekinah ! 
 
 The idealist is no idler. That idealism is not vague revery 
 or sentimental rhapsody, you are now helping to prove by 
 your firm attention to these efforts toward a high and abstract 
 thought. The meta-physical is the soul s privilege and crown. 
 
 But consider and know the tree of a sincere idealism by its 
 fruits. Royal imagination has never been atheistic, and under 
 the fullest breath of revelation it has spread its broadest 
 wings. ^Eschylus and Dante, Milton and Tennyson, Longfel 
 low and Lowell are devout. No literature has been so free 
 and so great as English literature, and none is so saturated 
 with that idealism whose other name is Christianity. Man s 
 loftiest powers have been instructed in affirmation and aspir 
 ation. Poetic (that is, creative) activity can not breathe the 
 carbonic acid gas of denial. Faith flies where doubt creeps. 
 All noble theory is ethical. But ethics resents the duress of 
 custom and circumstance, displays the extra-physical environ 
 ment of moral law, responds to the fiery forbiddings of an un- 
 repealed Sinai, and to the yet more inquisitive search of the 
 beatitudes, and in the immediate center of human nature erects 
 a tribunal which predicts an ultimate, tho as yet postponed, 
 poetic justice. The ancient reasoning of Plutarch, "concern 
 ing such as the gods are slow to punish," still is valid. 
 
 The terrors of the law are interior realities, and their up- 
 shutting to sheer mercy reveals the world of spiritual judg 
 ment in which we already dwell. If we will not heed the sad 
 ness of Solomon, we may listen to the melancholy of Wilhelm 
 Meister. If Judas can not teach us, nor Pilate, we can heed 
 
ANALOGY UNIVERSAL 83 
 
 Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr. If Jezebel shall not warn, 
 Lady Macbeth shall. Remorse, too, is ideality. 
 
 Idolatry is baneful because it parodies the ideal. The es 
 sence of the "second commandment" lies in the danger that 
 "graven images " would displace the mental image of God, and 
 transfer to a dead device that emphasis which was meant to 
 rest upon communion with the Holy- and Living-One. That 
 not even the incarnation of Christ should deny this perman 
 ent need, He said, " It is expedient for you that I go away. 
 
 Idealism, unconscious or confessed, is at the base of all 
 power. By it (as Stopford Brooke says, in his recent fine 
 treatise upon the secret of Tennyson, page 152), we are to be 
 "saved from the impertinent despotism which claims that the 
 reasoning intellect is higher than the imagination, and the 
 work of Science more important to man than the work of Art." 
 To feel the profound teaching that underlies simple things is 
 the proof of spiritual stature. It is the badge of noble 
 minds, that, where many see but trifles, or see naught, they get 
 the schooling of analogies. That was high praise which Charles 
 Sumner gave Lincoln, when he said that, " To him, illustration 
 is equally important with the argument ; his ideas, like the 
 animals into the ark, go in pairs." All true greatness, adds to 
 judgment, imagination and hope. It thus interprets the ac 
 cident by the essence, and so is persuaded of the possible, an 
 nounces it, embraces it, while it is yet afar off. This patient 
 prescience, this devotion to a truth and anticipation of its tri 
 umph, even while as yet it is ignored or denied what is this 
 but the faith whose instances make the paragraphs of the 
 eleventh of Hebrews so resonant and so dramatic ? What were 
 Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Job, Isaiah, John the Baptist, and 
 and that greater Plato, John, the evangelist and seer, if not 
 sublime idealists, alive to the absolute, and treading the upper 
 levels, under the light to come? 
 
 " Far into distant worlds they pried, 
 And brought eternal glories near." 
 
84 IDEALS 
 
 True ideality is not imitative, but creative. Here runs the 
 line of division between rhymer and poet Pope, of Twicken 
 ham, dwelling in preposterous Arcadias, full of pat conceits 
 and adroit fancies, enamored of unscrupulous antitheses be 
 tween such an one and a serene Wordsworth, an epoch-voicing 
 Tennyson, or an epoch-urging Whittier. Mere fancy is but a 
 kind of intellectual photography. It fixes the instance but it 
 misses suggestion. Creative genius works out of the particu 
 lar to the general, and its portraitures are illustrious with " a 
 light that never was on sea or land." Contrary to the frequent 
 and dull notion that imagination is impractical, we may aver 
 that its anticipations of things "not seen as yet," are superla 
 tively practical. Ideals the stimulations of ultimate truths 
 stand behind all high performance. Progress is led by those 
 who see visions and dream dreams. The most practical men 
 are they who, earlier than their fellows, perceive what can be 
 and ought to be, and who bend brain and hand to get it done. 
 They are stout to shape ideas into acts. They become the 
 heralds of the future, and across the impassable they throw 
 themselves as a living bridge. Men, " to whom the common 
 place is forever unintelligible," resent their message and call 
 them visionaries and iconoclasts. Dastards and reactionaries 
 hate those to whom life means the pursuit of high objects : 
 but these, blowing away the malarial fogs of tradition, inertia, 
 and the lassez faire of the moribund, lift the horizon of the 
 world. They are av ant couriers of Providence. They punctu 
 ate history. It is under the contagion of such lives lives 
 that no coffin can hold that Froude writes (Studies 1:35): 
 " The drama of history is imperishable, and the lessons of it 
 will be lessons for which we have no words. The address of 
 history is less to the understanding than to the higher emotions. 
 We learn in it to sympathize with what is great and good ; we 
 learn to hate what is base. In the companionship of the illus 
 trious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we 
 escape from the littlenesses which cling to the round of com- 
 
THE SEERS ARE THE DOERS 85 
 
 mon life, and our minds are tuned to a higher and nobler key." 
 What is this but to say that motive is more than muscle, and 
 and that he who is mastered by the highest motive is he who 
 most stirs the pulses and guides the on-marching of man ? 
 The personality of such efficient souls is not translatable 
 its idiom is its own. They do not define their ideals, they live 
 them. 
 
 "Consider," as Froude says again, "what the Odyssey would 
 be reduced to an analysis." It is to be felt, not formulated. 
 Tennyson felt the breezes that fanned the Mediterranean of 
 Homer when he wrote 
 
 " My purpose holds 
 
 To sail beyond the sunset and the haths 
 Of all the Western stars. It may be that the gulfs 
 Shall wash us down ; it may be we shall touch 
 The happy isles." 
 
 Yes ! Consider how deeply the power of the unseen wrought 
 in Columbus before he placed upon the map the continent 
 that was in his heart ! Think what part an irrepressible in 
 stinct played, when the daring voyagers of Elizabeth s reign 
 "wooed all the oceans with their sturdy keels." Angelo con 
 ceived " the Pantheon hung in mid-air," and then lifted the 
 dome of St. Peter s. Leverrier thought out Neptune, then 
 predicted, then saw it. Roget de Lisle was the Marseillaise 
 hymn, and then sung it, hoarse with the shouts of nations, 
 thunder-rhythmed with tread of a million feet trampling the 
 gilded woodwork of rotten thrones. " Ein feste Burg" was 
 the echo of Luther s confidence in Him who fills all the moun 
 tains with His chariots. Cromwell s spirit had already fought 
 thro the battle when his Ironsides "rode down among the blue 
 bonnets at Dunbar," and amid the fogs of the border pitched 
 that 68th Psalm in an immortal key " Arise, O God, and let 
 Thine enemies be scattered." The men and women of the May 
 flower brought New England with them in their shallop. Sam 
 Adams loved liberty, wedded her, and so inspired the struggle 
 
86 IDEALS 
 
 of the men who " fired for God s sake " at Concord, and at last 
 received the sword of my lord Cornwallis, at Yorktown. Ham 
 ilton saw "the noble perspective of a great federal republic," 
 and being dead yet speaketh. Abraham " believed God," and 
 became the patriarch of three religions. Wycliffe dreamed of 
 an open Bible, and made it true. "The Pilgrim s Progress" 
 was Bunyan s autobiography. Lincoln travailed in pain with 
 his decree of emancipation, and then it was born. Bismarck 
 and Cavour listened to the inner voice, and Germany and 
 Italy sprang to their feet, each a united people. John Brown 
 struck his blow in the dark, and all the morning stars of Liberty 
 answered him ! 
 
 The calculus, the steam engine, type, the telephone all dis 
 covery, is out of the idea. Invention is first a mental combin 
 ation the thought moulding the thing. It is not better tools, 
 but deeper wits, that explains an Edison. What is inspiration 
 but the idea of God imparted to upward-open minds. When, 
 at Pentecost, the power of Christ dawned upon those plain 
 disciples, they went forth to "shake all the mighty world." 
 The sublime interpretations of the Gospel are the supreme 
 demonstration of the soul-sight whereof we speak. Under this 
 august sky man best knows the mysterious inwardness of be 
 ing. 
 
 It was when Saul of Tarsus saw what a lifetime of obedience 
 might be, that all his old conceptions shrank to nothingness. 
 All else was loss submitting to the splendors of Christ, he 
 became the conqueror of three civilizations. Momentous 
 resolution ! Idealism conditions apostleship. For an ideal, 
 to be truly our own, must own us. It conquers us into its 
 grandeurs only upon terms of unconditional surrender. High 
 thoughts can not long live in low men. To say, after Ovid, "meliora 
 proboque, deteriora sequor, " is at once an elegy and a judicial 
 sentence. 
 
 Oh, might some poor word of mine touch to the quick the 
 womanhood of you who now are advancing toward the larger 
 
THE SHAME OF MEDIOCRITY 87 
 
 probations of maturity ! You will differ, my sisters, in the 
 efficacy of your lives, by just so much as you differ in fidelity 
 to spirit, as superior to sight and sense. It is motive that dif 
 ferentiates the doer from the drone, the sybarite from the 
 saint. You stand here now as if with "sealed proposals." Are 
 they noble ? are they sordid ? Time must tell. Adopt an 
 ambition high enough for eternal character and under it, 
 add yourselves to that phalanx of the eager souled, who, with 
 a thousand varities of task, have realized their ideals under 
 that high pledge "ONE THING i DO." 
 
 Not by exuberant declamation shall you win to the " prize 
 of the high calling," not by theatrical sentimentalities: but 
 by thoughts knit to performance, by the energy which makes 
 its own right of way, by the definitive renunciation of that list 
 less, purposeless existence, which is "as idle as a painted ship 
 upon a painted ocean," by making duty the star of all your 
 steering, by absolute allegiance to the " Father of lights." 
 
 Life lies there. Will intends work. He who would warm 
 and brighten the world must consume himself. Cheap souls 
 delude themselves with fine talk, but a genuine ideal is expen 
 sive. It hates mediocrity. That is a keen German apothegm, 
 "the good is enemy to the best;" for the merely "passable," 
 the " pretty good," the half-baked, " seconds," putty and rub 
 ble, demoralize, yes, any one of these debauches him who offers 
 it, and justice wreaks the vengeance of a bar-sinister upon him 
 who shirks sacrifice. 
 
 Phariseeism and Sadduceeism, in art and labor, as in religion, 
 alike centering upon self only, forfeit and frustrate that Love, 
 whose immortal definition is that it " seeketh not its own." 
 The centripetal motive destines itself to perpetual shrinkage, 
 to futility, to an eternal anti-climax ! 
 
 I delay you with no picture of the un-ideal life. Place, 
 pleasure, pelf, power, what are these as e?idsf and what are all 
 objects that end in these, but the soul s prostitution ! 
 
 It was a remark, that seems finer still because Philip Sidney 
 
88 IDEALS 
 
 uttered it, that "eagles fly alone." Rarity of altitude the 
 bird s-eye view means separateness. The penalty of spiritual 
 rank is apt to be a measure of isolation. But the society of 
 absorbingly high ideals can never be solitude. There was one 
 who, in a loneliness of misrepresentation that no experiences 
 of ours can ever make intelligible, declared, " Yet I am not alone." 
 
 Antagonisms there must be, and they are neither to be 
 evaded nor feared. It is the divine testimony, not the garn 
 ished sepulcher that makes the prophet great. "They may 
 kill me if they can catch me," said Socrates. But is Socrates 
 dead ? Are any dead of the "choir invisible" the omnipo 
 tent minority who have set the share of truth in the fallow 
 generations and plowed their several furrows to the wall ! 
 
 The very elements fight for the free spirit that does not (in 
 the words of Ruskin), "lower the level of its aim to enjoy the 
 complacency of success." Wider than the waters could carry 
 the ashes of John Wycliffe, strewn by impotent malice, they 
 have carried that open book which tyrants hate ! They might 
 impale at Tyburn bar that head, terrible to all Stuarts and 
 their ilk, but the fingers of the Protector work yet in the 
 commonwealth of the world. 
 
 Thoughts are bessemered into principles only in the cruci 
 ble, and shaped to use under the steam-hammer. "Talent 
 (wrote Goethe) is developed in solitude; character in the 
 stream of life." Constancy comes at last to its coronation. 
 
 When Henry Smart, one of the sincerest of modern English 
 church composers, lay a-dying, he thought he saw the master 
 of his life-work, and half rising, with gleaming face, he cried, 
 "Hi ! John Sebastian Bach !" But to each of us who wills, it 
 may be given at last to recognize Him "whose name is above 
 every name" whom Stephen saw and fell asleep. 
 
 To pull the world up the steep grade of Time we must send 
 more steam to the cylinder than to the whistle. Vital enthu 
 siasms make all terrestrial rewards shabby they turn fins 
 into feet and arms into wings. In the entertaining miscellany 
 
AN AGE OF EPICAL DEMAND 89 
 
 of the older D Israeli, upon the "Literary Character" (2:20), 
 it is written of the mineralogist Werner: " His unwritten lec 
 ture was a reverie, till, kindling in his progress, blending 
 science and imagination in the grandeur of his conceptions, at 
 times, as if he had gathered about him the very elements of 
 nature, his spirit seemed to be hovering over the waters and the 
 strata Such an interpreter holds the master-key to all locks. 
 
 "The lesson of life," says Emerson, (Rep. Men., pp. 182, 
 183), "is, practically, to generalize to believe what the years 
 and the centuries say against the hours to resist the usurpa 
 tion of particulars, and to penetrate to their catholic sense." 
 "This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. 
 The world is saturated with Deity and with law. A man of 
 thought must feel that thought is the parent of the Universe." 
 
 This topmost plane of philosophical idealism is, however, 
 but the lowest stair of that spiritual confidence whose courage 
 it is that "All things work together for good to them that 
 love God." 
 
 If, now, at last, some of you are thinking that this paper has 
 been too much a homily, and too little a literary excursion, let 
 me ask you, What is literature? What but the record of ideas 
 and of man s life therein ? What does college or school stand 
 for, if not for the society of ideals and the discipline of their 
 inculcation. What is education but the eduction of the inner 
 nature ? What are facts worth without this factoring ? Your 
 library is the memorial of personalities striving to interpret 
 life, and thro its materials to discover its meaning. A library 
 is an arsenal for those who fight under the colors that never 
 shall be struck. The vitalest books are those in which blazing 
 and unconsumable souls allure us to try the way they trod. 
 The books we heed are the books that bleed. The sufferers 
 are the sages. Their works do follow them. They are of no 
 date, and carry the imprimatur of God. A library is no mauso 
 leum, but the populous abode of the mighty who cannot die. 
 
 And so, to strike the cadence of this monody, let Deborah s 
 
go IDEALS 
 
 challenge ring yet, "Up ! for this is the day ! Is not the Lord 
 gone out before you ?" Heed Lowell s praise of Chaucer, that 
 "he was the first poet who wrote as if today were as good as 
 yesterday." The evangel is not exhausted. Time advertises 
 for those whose far-sight refuses to believe that the world is 
 used up. There are to be new Iliads. 
 
 The age needs sane and serious souls men who are not 
 tailors models, nnd women who are not dolls. It calls from 
 the lyric to the epic. It bids the brave to resent the incoherent 
 ethics of that so-called realism which flaunts its hour, to refuse 
 the whining and suicidal postulates that self and sense are final, 
 and to proclaim that materialism in morals is the degradation 
 of conscience from a queen to a scullion, and that in affairs 
 Hedonism is cousin to anarchy ! 
 
 The divine appeal is to us all, to own the trusteeship of 
 truth, as well as of possessions, and that with a severe noblesse 
 oblige all better having imposes a larger debt of sharing. 
 
 The hours which run, summon, with a bugle s call, men, and 
 maidens to match them, who shall put aside the paltry for the 
 pure. Patriotism and faith alike lie here. Here are the 
 domestic virtues, "whereon rests the unconquerable state." 
 Here waits the chivalry of Christ. These are the "daughters 
 that prophesy." This is the womanhood that wears the 
 imperial crown. 
 
 " Then reign the world s great bridals, calm and chaste, 
 Thence springs the crowning race of human kind." 
 
 Ye "blessed damozels," such, and such only can command 
 the century which must be either epical or tragic. God grant 
 you, therefore, to be idealists and more than you ask or 
 think to have your dreams come true. For the humble bravery, 
 which trusts the powers of an endless life, which surmounts 
 itself in the love that " beareth all things, hopeth all things, 
 endureth all things, believeth all things," is at one with 
 "That God, which ever lives and loves. 
 One God, one law, one element, 
 And one far-off, divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
ON THE THRESHOLD gi 
 
 He shall bruise Satan under our feet, and by and by we shall 
 be ready to say with brave Walter Scott (great for his genius, 
 but greater yet for his indomitable honor), that which he so 
 simply penned as his mortal chapter drew to its ending, "I 
 think that next week I shall be in the secret." 
 
Stewarfcsbtp of Iknowlebge 
 
 AN ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF 
 
 THE BROOKLYN INSTITUTE 
 
 SEPTEMBER 30, 1895 
 
 Mr. President, Members of the Brooklyn Institute, and all Good 
 Friends The invitation under which I am to speak to you, 
 while it confers a great honor, also imposes a severe respon 
 sibility. The best reasoned conclusions, the most compelling 
 sympathy, could not be too much for this earnest assembly 
 and alert hour. I cannot hope to disguise the limitations, 
 which, as I begin, are so uncomfortably real to me. I can only 
 ask of your associated censorship, Portia s quality of mercy. 
 
 Only in wakening your self-realization, and in touching, 
 however poorly, your enthusiasms for what this Institute is 
 and purposes, shall I at all avoid the penalty of that temerity 
 of mine which is just now our common misfortune. 
 
 So far, then, my unfeigned condolence: but for all else my 
 admiring congratulations, tempered only by that note of sor 
 row which you all must sound as you miss the hoped-for 
 presence of one whom you have so long loved and trusted as a 
 leader in the best life of this community. This city is at once 
 the richer and the poorer because the Rev. Dr. Charles H. 
 Hall is tonight the guest of God ! 
 
 It is a privilege to which I am deeply sensitive that I have 
 been introduced to you by one whose station as the Nestor of 
 all learned and Christian utterance in this good town, there 
 are none to dispute and myriads to recognize. Long may Dr. 
 Storrs, as your most representative citizen, receive your ready 
 acclaim. 
 
AN AUTONOMOUS CITY 93 
 
 I spoke of self-realization. By that I mean the realization of 
 what this Institute is and is able to become. 
 
 An unconscious sagacity ruled the efforts of Augustus 
 Graham in 1823 and thenceon. He builded (as do all true 
 architects) better than he knew. Your augmenting constit 
 uency, now four-thousand, with its still wider influence and 
 stimulation, is the present fruitage of what he planted in hope. 
 The capitoline edifice that is to adorn your park will be his 
 outward monument : but even its amplitude will be but promise 
 and symbol of what none of you can now measure. 
 
 Halls, libraries, conservatories, galleries, platforms, chairs, 
 apparatus what breadth and uplift does your program be 
 speak ! Your scope is naught less than to articulate the whole 
 mental aesthetic, ethical life of this fourth city of the nation.. 
 
 If you build as high as you are planning wide, and if this 
 community shall at all realize and avail itself of the opportunity 
 which it is your ambition to make ever more ample and more 
 inviting, then this work will have recognition as the most com 
 manding feature of your civic life, arid those (if there are any) 
 who have questioned your peerage will praise your supremacy. 
 
 I for one wonder that any are to be found in such a popula 
 tion, and a population of such a quality, to hold lightly or wil- 
 ingly to forego the autonomy of a corporation of such high 
 omens, or to wish to merge its individuality of ideas into the 
 mere bulk of commercial unity with a neighbor which, how 
 ever great, need not desire to swallow you whole and alive ! 
 
 Were I a citizen here, far rather would I plead for another 
 star in the flag, for the erection of Long Island into an inde 
 pendent state with Brooklyn as its capital ! Between Tioga 
 County and Manhattan Island Albany would still be busy ! 
 
 But, letting all that pass, I turn toward the things more im 
 mediately belonging to my present permission, and crave your 
 sympathetic hearing. 
 
 This Brooklyn is not only a "city of churches," but also a 
 city of high-minded men and women, of strong domesticity, of 
 
94 THE STEWARDSHIP OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 fearless and cogent journalism, of noble schools a city of 
 thoughtful and representative American life. 
 
 You have no need of imported teaching or exhortation. 
 Your Newcastle needs neither to bring in coals nor fire ! 
 
 The best that one can offer to this municipal intelligence 
 and zeal, can only reflect, not enlarge, your own considerate 
 determinations. 
 
 I should be embarassed and restrained in this presence of so 
 many whose peer I cannot hope and will not pretend to be, 
 did I not know that the most competent are always the most 
 gentle. 
 
 I have no discoveries, no panaceas, no surprises to propound: 
 but can only seek to be the echo of your own good sense, the 
 voice of sober conclusions that must accord with your own 
 desires for the reasoned good and true gain of this great city, 
 and of all our cities and our land in this decade that runs so 
 fast and in that century whose imminent issues shall be so 
 terrific or so august. 
 
 For thoughtful souls must feel that "God s balances by 
 angels watched" were never hung across the skies to measure 
 more potent results than now are to be weighed. The acceler 
 ating pace of the world commands our awe. The r step of 
 Providence rocks the round Earth. 
 
 Esau and Jacob struggle again in the womb of time. Em 
 pires verge to the day of Armageddon ! ",,,% ... 
 
 Transient adjustments, and compromises of expediency, must 
 give way to the authority of the Son of Man, and to the arbi 
 tration of the peace of God. 
 
 I do not deplore, I welcome, an age that puts all questions 
 to the proof, and exacts righteous relations to the two funda 
 mental propositions of God s sovereignty and man s unity. 
 
 There are no surds, or shall be none, in the demonstration 
 of His wisdom, who ordained this planet to be a very Bethle 
 hem among the stars ! 
 
 The whining cowardice of pessimism, and the coarse and 
 
THE CITY THE FULCRUM 95 
 
 brutal optimism of self-idolatry, with its two insanities of cov- 
 etousness and carnal pleasure, are alike repugnant to those 
 who both hear the murmur of man s great unrest and listen to 
 the bird song of God s dawn ! 
 The only Healer comes ! 
 
 " The healing of His seamless dress 
 
 Is by our beds of pain, 
 We touch Him in life s throng and press 
 And we are whole again." 
 
 The crisis of this fevered world is momentous, but under 
 Him "to whom all power is given" it shall not be a collapse 
 but a convalescence ! 
 
 The song of time is not a lullaby nor a ballad, but it is not a 
 dirge. It shall be an anthem, even the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, 
 et in terra pax / 
 
 A child on Mt. Washington watched with his father a glorious 
 sunset as it shot the clouds with unspeakable splendors, and 
 exclaimed "Oh papa, I see the Doxology." Let us seek 
 the heights where solar power interprets the horizons ! Let 
 today s Sun go down tomorrow s shall rise ! 
 
 With that acumen which was an inspired instinct the Apostle 
 Paul struck for the cities. The city is the fulcrum of oppor 
 tunity. Taught truly its cities shall tutor the land. Their sal 
 vation shall make all good dominant. 
 
 And so in this instant which we call now which is always 
 the accepted time, and in this vocal city I try to affirm a 
 truth which has in it the potency and promise of every form 
 of life this "THE STEWARDSHIP OF KNOWLEDGE." 
 
 I am sure that all your hearts are keyed to that theme, and 
 I am thankful to speak to those who already believe. 
 
 I stand here as an inadaquate but loyal representative of 
 one of what Holmes once playfully characterized as the fresh 
 water colleges. 
 
 For some purposes, friends, salt water is not the best. Truly 
 it is an element in which the heirs of the Mayflower and the 
 Guerriere have proved staunch and sturdy down to the other 
 
g6 THE STEWARDSHIP OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 day when the dun raven skulked (or sulked) away from prov 
 ing the eagle wings of the Defender: but it is among the hills 
 the fountains run wherefrom we drink. On the high crests 
 of Oneida County stands Hamilton College, little in some 
 ways, but to her sons large and lovely. 
 
 In the name of such a college, placed amid scenes worthy 
 of increased renown, bound up with patriotic names, proud of 
 her colors and her story, I speak tonight of those guarantees of 
 liberty of which men educated in obligation are under God the 
 sole guarantors. 
 
 For, College or School, University or Institute, the benefic- 
 iarys of every endowed seat of learning or of art are by their 
 very relation constituted the heirs and the almoners of a great 
 fiduciary trust. 
 
 Ability is answerability everywhere and all ways. Private 
 possession, all possession is a public trust ! Accountability 
 cannot be escaped. 
 
 There are two sorts of souls. Those who seek for themselves 
 the advantages of things as they are, and those who seek to 
 give themselves to the advantage of things as they ought to 
 be, and therefore may be made to be; those who accept ad 
 vancement, and those who confer it, those who would exploit 
 the world and those who would save it benefactors and mal 
 efactors Christ and the thieves ! 
 
 A man is " worth " what he gives, not what he gets. One 
 has what he bestows, all else has him! A man of great means, 
 (whether of lucre or of learning) is bound to be a man of great 
 ends. The royal souls are the generous. Genius is but another 
 name for generosity. 
 
 " Thyself and thy belongings 
 Are not thine own so proper, as to waste 
 Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee. 
 Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
 Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues 
 Do not go forth of us, t were all alike 
 As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched, 
 But to fine issues." 
 
THE VIGIL OF CONSCIENCE 97 
 
 Possession, of every sort, is opportunity: but without dis 
 tribution possession is infamy. 
 
 He is the true millioniare who rejoices to have a million heirs ! 
 
 Each of us, to the extent of that endowment which God 
 gives him, is a legatee that he may be a steward. It is the 
 common law af all trusts that they can not be delegated. 
 They must be executed or defaulted ! In the court of the 
 Supreme Surrogate, many a will constitutes an indictment. 
 
 And what is true in the stewardship of crass material wealth 
 is also true in the stewardship of mental and administrative 
 ability. Who can, must. 
 
 The sybarite who uses an elegant and fastidious leisure in 
 purveying to mere literary taste, who is dainty in mere editions, 
 a glutton in books, and who in the seclusion of a library ignores 
 or disdains the woe of the world, makes of his knowledge a 
 toy and not a tool. He too is but a miser. 
 
 This strenuous age, wherein still the people are destroyed 
 for lack of knowledge demands of us our all and our best. 
 
 If shadows are to fall from the truth, and falsehood die, the 
 times challenge and demand souls who shall be filled with the 
 instinct of help and wear on helmet and brow Ich Dien, souls 
 ablaze with that love which ever "seeketh not her own," and 
 who, trained for resolute, aggressive, and undaunted leader 
 ship, are exemplars in interpreting every least task by the 
 largest ideals. 
 
 Municipal politics, with their constant conflict between the 
 sensual and sordid and the honest and humane, furnish a test 
 between soldiership and shirking. The reeking vats of city 
 government demand persistently antiseptic men. These, or 
 the doom of putrid blood ! It is by an indomitable resistance 
 of those who would suffer our civil rulers to be a praise to evil 
 doers and a terror to them that do well, that the wicked are 
 not to walk on every side while the vilest men are exalted. 
 Sleepy citizens can not resist the sleepless devil. True liberty 
 does not come cheap. Vigilance is none too high a price to 
 
$8 THE STEWARDSHIP OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 pay for it. But it is because those who know are too listless 
 in the doing, because of the gigantic sum in default from those 
 who could and will not, that for our epileptic spasms of public 
 virtue we condone our perennial neglects. "The fault is not 
 with our stars but with ourselves, that we are underlings." 
 
 The Son of Man came to break down all middle walls of 
 partition. He shall yet have His triumphant way on Earth ! 
 
 The Church He established not the nominalists who merely 
 say Lord, Lord : but those who seek what he sought for men, 
 as men, that true church against which neither the treachery 
 of false friends nor the hate of open adversaries, nor the gates 
 of Hell, shall prevail that is the "pattern in the mount" 
 of what society, in all its international common life, is intended 
 to be, and of what under His augmenting control it shall become ! 
 
 The instant abolition of differences is impossible it must 
 come by the slow spirals of process: but the abolition of indif 
 ference is both possible and imperative. This, or the deluge. 
 
 The true Sociology (and that alone is the true patriotism, 
 all else being insular and parochial) the true Sociology is 
 an utterly applied Christianity. All unapplied or partially 
 applied theory is but parody, or even blasphemy ! 
 
 All that is not human is inhuman. All classes are danger 
 ous classes. 
 
 If this be preaching the very stones cry it out ! 
 
 Our time then is none for gentlemanly young women and 
 lady-like young men. Of such there is already an elegant 
 sufficiency the supply has long exceeded any rational 
 demand. 
 
 A dude (like the glazed paper upon pasteboard boxes) is a 
 low grade man with a high grade finish ! He reminds one of 
 the remark that the Almighty must have a sense of humor, or 
 He would not have made monkeys ! These silken loiterers 
 with falsetto lisp and drawl and hand-shake like a penguin, are 
 a satire and a shame. Sincerity repudiates them as super 
 cargoes and incubi. 
 
POWER A MEANS TOWARD INFLUENCE gg 
 
 Plato defined Man as "a two-legged animal without feathers:" 
 but Diogenes picked a chicken and said, "there is Plato s man." 
 These dawdlers amid the hunger and sorrow of the world are 
 impotents and imbeciles, whom a true sense of the stewardship 
 of all life will shudder off. 
 
 Nor are sardonic and pessimistic souls wanted in this God s 
 world. A pessimist is a man who hopes for the worst ! " Every 
 thing as aint lone and lorn goes contrary" with him. He is of 
 the Gummidge family. He has stood so long that he is 
 soured ! No ! The leaders are always believers. Doubt is 
 palsied. Its cry is the cry of the barren womb ! Doubt is 
 often the pique and mortification which attends the disap 
 pointment of an attempted omniscence. Those who best help 
 their generation are such as are resolute to find not the mere 
 facts of this terrestrial environment: but to use these con 
 structively toward the betterment of that relation to God the 
 Father and to Man the Brother, whose last and unsynonymed 
 word is love. 
 
 "The increase and diffusion of knowledge," to use your 
 quotation of Washington, must come at last to this. "He that 
 loveth not knoweth not." "Tho I have all knowledge and 
 have not love I am nothing." 
 
 He who came "that men might have life, and have it more 
 abundantly" was the supreme Teacher because He was the 
 supreme Lover of souls. To evoke and enlarge the best sen 
 timents of men, to quicken their joy by fitting them to bestow 
 as well as to receive, this is basilar in any true philosophy of 
 education. 
 
 The increase of power is, at last, in order to the increase of 
 influence. Men are to be lifted, broadened, deepened, that 
 they may not only rise to these larger measures, but most of 
 all realize and prove that they have so risen by imparting their 
 new dimensions to their kind. The kingdom of Heaven is the 
 leaven of this philanthropy ! Acquisitiveness of ideas is only 
 a mean hoarding unless these are transmuted into character 
 
100 THE STEWARDSHIP OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 character, which as a signet proves its intaglio upon all it 
 touches. All learning, little or large, is a dangerous thing if 
 it is idolized as an end and not consecrated as a means. It is 
 a dissonant jargon of shibboleths, "a clanging cymbal" if 
 its stewardship is refused. 
 
 Here lies the paramount nobility of the real teacher s office 
 and calling, and that vocation touches its topmost dignity in 
 realizing that influence always transcends instruction and that 
 interpretation by sympathy a seminal and genial purpose 
 is the ideal of the master s art. 
 
 The true pedagog is saved from the besetting danger of 
 pedantry by heeding that he is a leader of youth. Life alone 
 kindles life. Boy or man, whoever turns a plastic side to 
 another, bestows an opportunity that would thrill an angel. 
 
 Those men and women, young men and maidens, who accept 
 the advantages of your rare offers of illumination and inspira 
 tion are rich indeed, but happy beyond all these are those 
 whom you commission with the privilege of this great giving. 
 
 It will be such an interpretation as I now urge that shall 
 save your Institute from the curse and paralysis of institu- 
 tionalism ! 
 
 No sordid and cloistral spirit can feed the mind-hunger, 
 and deeper soul-hunger, of our time. The mind itself will 
 reject that which does not use the heart to reach the heart. 
 
 But to discover to another his latent capacities of reflection, 
 of feeling, of aspiration, of purpose, is to turn a task into a 
 pean of joy. Here is wisdom. 
 
 The goal of life is an all-around manhood to the glory of 
 God. The danger of us all is a narrow specialism, a protuberant 
 and lop-sided particularity, a danger which nothing can so 
 well forfend as an early zeal for our neighbor s good, a pur 
 pose to escape from egotistic abstraction by finding the les 
 sons afforded in the proximate man. Subjective aspiration 
 needs translating into objective helpfulness. Declaimed gen 
 eralizations about humanity and the age and education are 
 
TRUE FREEDOM IS TO SHARE IOI 
 
 excellent to run wind-mills: but zeal for everybody is not 
 nearly as important as fidelity to some one. For a world is a 
 sum of individuals. 
 
 All of us are debtors both to the wise and to the foolish to 
 transmit with increment the benefits of that vast intellectual 
 and spiritual endowment of which, by no supreme merits of 
 our own, but by the providence of God, we are the beneficiaries 
 in an unreckonable sum. 
 
 Hail then to every plan and every task that affirms and main 
 tains the altitude and outlook of such a stewardship of truth. 
 
 All good and growth to the endeavors of this people s uni 
 versity whose new year of enlarged service is tonight begun; 
 
 for, 
 
 " Is true freedom but to break 
 Fetters for own dear sake, 
 And with leaden hearts forget 
 That we owe mankind a debt ? 
 No ! true freedom is to share 
 All the chains our brothers bear, 
 And with heart and hand to be 
 Earnest to make others free." 
 
 Pale and poor are all these words of mine: but great and 
 lustrous is the text. Gladly I would disappear behind a theme 
 so large and so alluring. Truth held as a sacred trust this is 
 the life and light of men. This is the calling and election of 
 scholarship of whatever degree. This is the liberal education 
 offered us by the Giver of all good. Under this banner may 
 you wage and win your new battle of Long Island ! 
 
lEtbics in politics 
 
 SPEECH AT THE CXXVII BANQUET 
 OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE 
 
 STATE OF NEW YORK 
 NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER ig, 1895 
 
 Mr. President, Gentlemen, of the Chamber of Commerce, and all 
 good Friends It is with an unfeigned diffidence, not to say 
 anxiety, that I find myself confronted by this company and 
 occasion. This house of representatives stands for so much, 
 and its attention demands so much, that any such post-prandial 
 tyro as myself must sympathize with the agued BELSHAZZAR, 
 as he attempts to meet its critical exactions. And yet I am 
 as sure of your generous forbearance, as I am grateful for 
 your confiding hospitality. 
 
 A witty parson, whom I knew, once said to a company of 
 theologs "Young men, you will have observed that all the 
 great preachers have great congregations the way then to be 
 a great preacher is to have a great congregation !" I would, 
 for your sakes,that the humorous sophism were true. [ Laughter. ] 
 I heard of a man who rose to speak in the chapel of Auburn 
 prison. There were about 1,700 auditors, in compact rows, all 
 modestly and appropriately attired, and in his embarrassment, 
 the minister began "Ahem, I m glad to see so many of you 
 here today !" In like confusion, I can only say, " Me too." 
 [Laughter.] For you are so well wonted to competent and 
 cogent speech, that it is a pity to make this time an exception 
 to the adage that "to him that hath shall be given," or as it 
 was condensed by a shrewd feminine and rural tongue, "Them 
 that has, gits." [Laughter.] 
 
 The president of almost anything, is a man expected to keep 
 
A DEMAND FOR AGILITY 103 
 
 ideas on tap, with a spigot for every call. A college president, 
 even if a small president of a large college, is supposed to have 
 an artesian supply of talk. A barrel of addresses and a barrel 
 of sermons, and always ready to fire with both barrels. I con 
 fide to you that I have but a small keg and without compart 
 ments. It goes on a swivel, like a churn, and is labeled " Ser 
 mon " on one end and " Talk " on the other. An address is 
 but a sermon upside down, and a sermon is an address other 
 end up. It does require a certain briskness, like that of the 
 deacon, who, when asked to " lead" replied, " I was goin to 
 make some remarks, but I suppose I can put them in the form 
 of a prayer," or, like that of the Yankee, who, taking a boat 
 load of shoe pegs to New Orleans, and finding the market 
 " long," invented a machine, sharpened the other ends, and 
 sold them for oats. A sermon differs from an address, as a 
 pie differs from a tart, merely in the form of the crust. [Laugh- 
 ter.] 
 
 Of a sermon or of a speech often the best is the text. Gen 
 eral PORTER, who is the other man to blame for my being here, 
 evidently had in mind his fable of the New-Englanders who 
 "crossed their bees with lightning bugs, so they could work 
 o nights," when he gave me twenty minutes and all the diction 
 ary. His liberality of permitted topic reminded me of an old 
 BARNUM poster, which ran, "This is the most gigantic, out 
 landish and unreasonable performance in the world ! " "Any 
 thing I d like." It suggests that small girl, who, when her 
 fond father took her to see the new cradleful of twins, medi 
 tated a moment and then queried, " Did any of em get away ? " 
 [Laughter.] 
 
 What not to say has been my quandary. A man was run 
 over by a heavy wagon, and stepping from the crowd a young 
 mistress of simple surgery, sure of her attainments, whipped 
 out splints and rolled linen, and deftly proceeded to bandage 
 the broken leg of the sufferer. As soon as possible he was 
 taken to a surgeon. "Who, (said the expert,) applied this 
 
104 ETHICS IN POLITICS 
 
 bandage ? " The maiden modestly confessed her handiwork. 
 "It is well done, (said the surgeon,) but it is on the wrong 
 leg !" [Laughter.] 
 
 Gentlemen, please remember, that it is dangerous to sleep 
 when the gas is turned on unlighted. I m much afraid that 
 you will say as did the farmer s wife upon viewing the hippo 
 potamus, " My, ain t he plain! " or be ready to write with the 
 stone-cutter down in Maine, who, having to chisel, for a 
 lamented and scrawny wife, "Lord, she was thine," found no 
 room for the final letter of the last word. 
 
 ETHICS have place in politics, because they have place in 
 everything. All human questions are at last ethical. Politics 
 is not the art of office-getting, but is concerned with every 
 policy and program, every interest and exigency, that affects 
 the people. The insisting that this or that tremendous issue 
 must be "taken out of politics " would be amusing, were it not 
 so fatuous. Men sometimes rise to urge that a given matter 
 must be eliminated from "sentiment" and from theories of 
 right and wrong, that it may be considered " practically." 
 Impotence! Sentiment moral sentiment, is the one thing 
 with which all politics must at last reckon. Duty and feeling 
 are omnipresent, and will be found omni-prevalent, because, 
 under God, they are omnipotent. That alone is " practical" 
 which is ethical. All government is ethical, being either good 
 government or misgovernment. 
 
 Men tried once to take slavery out of politics, as now they 
 attempt to transfer to some other realm, some no-man s-land, 
 the question of that power which fills with its vomit our cities 
 and our capitols. This land, believe it, cannot endure, half- 
 sober and half-drunken. Whatever debauches labor and 
 wrongs it of the 52 days of rest, ordained in that code whose 
 mercy is written in the very nerves of mankind, is a question 
 that may be avoided and postponed, but must at last be met, 
 
LOCOMOTOR ATAXIA 105 
 
 and weighted by all arrears of delay. It is cowardly to shuffle it. 
 No. Politics is not a game, it is a task. It rests in those 
 principles, without which parties suppurate. Great LINCOLN, 
 with his sane and seer-like sense of the ultimate might of 
 morals, laid his eye, as if to the sights of a long rifle, and said, 
 "Nothing is ever settled until it is settled right." [Applause.] 
 
 Last year, so shows your record, you were as happy here as 
 a group of boys with a new-milch cocoanut. This year you 
 are wiping your lips on the husks. All of our hats (for I, too, 
 live in the Empire State) were suddenly too small for us! 
 Now, there is on this Island a demand for Pond s extract, 
 which not even Mr. ROOSEVELT can supply. 
 
 You were, then, as pleased as a woman who once told me of 
 a local revival of an earlier writer, saying: " We had a great 
 mess o converts !" You thought the manna might keep over. 
 It soured. You did not remember to reckon that with the venal 
 and lupine power which you opposed, one summer only makes 
 a swallow. 
 
 Suddenly the new moral vigor of this great City was seized 
 with loco motor ataxia, which your lexicon defines for you as "a 
 disease of the spinal chord, characterized by peculiar disturb 
 ances of gait and difficulty of coordinating voluntary move 
 ments." It is to be hoped that it may not become "progressive." 
 
 Let my poor voice be the phonograph to recall a period 
 from a letter, which, a year ago, you heard with vigorous 
 applause: "Any tricky manipulator or political expert, of 
 whatever complexion, who undertakes, at this date, to train 
 victory upon political lines, to limit it by political ambitions, 
 and to prostitute it to political ends, is an execrable traitor to 
 our municipal interests, and ought to receive from us all, 
 regardless of distinctions of faith or party, that contempt 
 always due to an attempt to emasculate great opportunities by 
 fingering them meanly and pettifoggingly." 
 
 There spoke your SAVONAROLA ! I find that MICAIAH and 
 MALACHI, and JOHN BAPTIST and PETER and KNOX, and LATI- 
 
106 ETHICS IN POLITICS 
 
 MER, and all that indomitable line, have not been truant from 
 their own times, but have always arraigned the living iniquity 
 and defended the beleaguered truth. It is one of the emolu 
 ments of a real prophet to be misunderstood and misrepre 
 sented, and to find foes in his own household. It is also his 
 sure mark that not for this does he hesitate or recant. The 
 preachers of genuine righteousness speak in the second person 
 and in the present tense. 
 
 But you applauded then. Will you take it back ? You can 
 not take it back. Surely 1894 was not an inspiration that 
 showed itself only in the gift of tongues and that denied their 
 interpretation ! 
 
 This great municipality is in the condition of that patient, 
 whom, having examined him, his physician overwhelmed with 
 effusive congratulations, explaining, " My dear sir, my dear 
 sir, you have a disease that was supposed to be extinct." 
 [Laughter.] 
 
 What are you going to do about it ? Relapse into civic 
 pessimism and pussilanimity ? "Lackey the varying tide," or 
 rather, say, " Once done can be done again. Done well can be 
 done better." After Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and by and 
 by Appomatox. [Applause.] 
 
 You know the legend of the Scandinavian demigod, who, 
 thinking to twist out a huge root, found he had grappled the 
 head of the great serpent coiled about the Earth. Those are 
 really beneficent humiliations which acquaint us with the size 
 of our tasks. 
 
 A man might as well attempt to stay hunger with popped- 
 corn as to cram the stomach of his sense with the notion that 
 sporadic protestations of virtue can terrify perennial rascality. 
 Intermittent reform is just enough to advertise the business it 
 opposes. Remember Christ s parable of the tenantless house, 
 the restless devil walking thro dry places, and the latter state 
 of the man who forgot that it is not enough to expel the bad, 
 but that it is necessary to dispossess it by installing the good. 
 
A BALLOT NOT AN OPINION BUT A PLEDGE 107 
 
 A trouble with many reforms, personal as well as public, is 
 that they are critical rather than constructive. They dig the 
 cellar, but they do not build the house. They lack architect 
 ure. They imagine that a ballot has value per se, whereas it is 
 good only as it is a note of hand, a promise to do. If it does 
 not stand for a will, a will that will find ways or make them, 
 then it is only a waste shred of wood pulp ! 
 
 No; eye to eye, foot to foot, must our cities be retaken, as 
 once they crowded back the Commune in Paris. For this war 
 of thethreshholdno "ninety days men" will answer. [Applause.] 
 
 I asked a friend of mine what not to speak of here. I appre 
 ciate his shrewd reply: "No Rum, Romanism and Rebellion, 
 no politics, nor much religion." The only rebels hereabouts 
 I know of today are in the Sandwich Islands and in Cuba. I 
 believe they will at last win all of their two cases. I hope so. 
 
 As to the Roman church, I thank God for its abundant good 
 fruits among us, for its increase of grace, and for its present 
 testimony for law and liberty, and against treason and vice. I 
 do not wish to see it, any more than I wish to see the Presby 
 terian church allied to the State as such. Neither could ever 
 be. Because I am an American and a Prostestant, I protest 
 against both the arguments and methods of the A. P. A. God 
 bless all who name Christ in sincerity, say I, and give them 
 light and mutual love. 
 
 As to Rum, it speaks for itself. The saloon is non-bi-anti 
 or multi-partisan, just as suits its purpose. It is for itself. It 
 is the great public courtesan, and seduces legislators with 
 absolute impartiality. In responsibility for its waste, dis- 
 1 honors are easy. " Making nice of no vile hold," it sets the 
 blistering iron of its approbation and ownership upon dema 
 gogues and panderers of all given names. I am proud that 
 the metropolis of my native State has at last a mastiff whose 
 bite is even better than his bark. [Applause.] 
 
 Well, " No politics and not much religion." Let me then 
 "preach against the Mormons, for they have no friends in the 
 
108 ETHICS IN POLITICS 
 
 congregation," or let me rouse you to recognize the unspeak- 
 ableness of the Turk ! 
 
 Never did religion, not the snarl of ecclesiastics, but the 
 religion that is pure and undefiled, more need to come close 
 to affairs. Never did affairs more need to be interpreted by 
 the everlasting yea and nay of Almighty God. 
 
 Politics covers the whole mechanism of life; religion con 
 tains its whole motive. Forego these two and you are in 
 vacua. I know that I am not to handle the shibboleths of sect 
 or party; but surely I may and I do appeal to both the rever 
 ence and the patriotism of this Chamber. And so I name the 
 exacting and determinate fact that the battle ground where 
 our institutions are to fight for very life is the municipality. 
 EMERSON said, "Cities illustrate the land." A century ago 
 our cities contained one-thirtieth of our population. Now 
 they contain one-third. Our corporate life is for the most 
 part either urban or just suburban. Whatever, then, blesses 
 or curses the City, perjures or ennobles it, animalizes or spir 
 itualizes it, debases or exalts the Nation. And in view of 
 what is so undeniable, I make this my main contention, and it is 
 an ethical contention, that national and municipal politics of 
 right ought to be absolutely distinct. A City is a great busi 
 ness, National watchwords bring only mischief into its man 
 agement. Partisanship should have no more to do with the 
 Police, the Health department, the Fire force, with street- 
 cleansing, than with the Army. This is truism; but how far 
 are our chief cities from seeing it. [Applause.] A vicious 
 theory must be exterminated before the Common Councils of 
 our land shall cease to be the opportunity of scoundrels. Men 
 are not always to be plundered, ring-ridden, boss-driven, 
 crank-confused, unless by consent. This City has reached 
 the age of consent ! Has it not also reached the age of resis 
 tance? Mere pleasuring, the dry-rot of avarice, the timidity 
 of investment, the dawdler who cares more for the points of a 
 horse than he does for the suffering of men, the Anglomaniac, 
 
THE CRIME OF APATHY 
 
 I0 9 
 
 the dude, (fake and fad in one,) all this and these must be 
 renounced for the sake of a clean City, administered by clean 
 men. Apathy is a crime. The non-voter ranks with the pur 
 chased voter, his price being selfish ease. His nonchalance is 
 civic treason. Whether such a clean City can be had is the 
 crucial test of the Republic. The bi-partisanship of setting a 
 thief to catch a thief won t do. Deals, shifts, evasions, must 
 be forsworn. The ranks of plain men must be convinced, and 
 by whatever missionary work is needed, that health, safety, 
 economy, manhood, all rest in honest government. Stern, 
 resonant and incorrigible the cry must go up from this rock- 
 ribbed island, " Nothing for tribute, everything for defence." 
 [Applause.] 
 
 Is the situation today in any of our chief cities without 
 shame? You recall DE QUINCY S consideration of "Murder as 
 a fine art." He says, " My face is set against it in toto. For if 
 once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to 
 think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to 
 drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to incivility and 
 procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you 
 never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated 
 his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought 
 little of at the time." Delicious. With a similar absurdity of 
 anti-climax we may say of our American civic conditions that 
 they are both abominable and disagreeable ! 
 
 Just now there is a strife of cities, as there was once a strife 
 among the twelve disciples, "which should be the greatest." 
 But bigness is not greatness. Bulk is not honor. You talk of 
 a greater New York. But this City is far more in need of 
 quality than of quantity. So is Brooklyn. Lumping the 
 moral assets of these two towns will not increase them. Mix 
 ture is not multiplication. Redistribution is not regeneration. 
 There will be a truly greater New York when there is a tre 
 mendous increase of greater New Yorkers. The extinguished 
 foreigner, who, for obvious reasons, chose to remove the con- 
 
HO ETHICS IN POLITICS 
 
 test of this autumn from the good salt water which once 
 floated " Le Bon Homme Richard" and the Kearsarge," has 
 recently attempted to launch the issue in dish-water. Avoid 
 his way. [Laughter.] As true Defenders of the land meet 
 the race. Metropolitan honor is the goal. Take the whole 
 contention out of the dish-water of partisan recrimination, and 
 launch it in the blue open of patriotism. 
 
 " It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down, 
 It may be we shall touch the happy isles." 
 
 If we would be no longer underlings to the dynasty of a 
 theory that finds no place in politics for ethics, we must real 
 ize that lust of power is as fatal and as corrupt as lust of gain, 
 and that a deal in which offices are the price is as 
 oblique as a deal in which the price is money. Our hope 
 lies in the clear recognition of our dangers, in a deep sense of 
 the wholeness of the interests involved, in city, common 
 wealth and country. Realizing the formidableness of the 
 equation to be solved, roused, resolute, angry, it is within your 
 power, gentlemen, to move and guide forces, that at least in 
 these two counties, shall make the antiquated serfdom to par 
 tisan competition for spoils, whether of place or pelf, obsolete. 
 The men of this Chamber are able to exert influences that 
 would give this City a new Evacuation-day, and to set art 
 example that would run like the light. The State of sturdy 
 JOHN Dix, and of " Christian jurists, starry-pure like JAY," nay 
 our whole land, would have a new birth of freedom. It would 
 not be an episode: it would be an epic. Bear with me gentle 
 men, if I say that the hour has come to put all your ethics into 
 all your politics, and to thrust aside the whole rancid philoso 
 phy of the wire-puller and the spoilsman. 
 
 Love "love which seeketh not its own" love to the stout 
 history and providential calling of this splendid City, love to 
 this noble State, love to our whole America, love to Man, and 
 love to the God of righteousness, 
 
 "LOVE SHALL FIND OUT THE WAY." 
 
THE DAY IS AT HAND III 
 
 And so you shall 
 
 " See Truth s white banner floating on before, 
 And the good cause, in spite of venal friends 
 And base expedients, move to noble ends." 
 
 [Applause.] 
 
 With gratitude to the Spartan band who have sat out this 
 full evening, I make an end. It is tomorrow, and my up-hill 
 task of the twelfth hour is done. May the moral fast of New 
 York City come to its feast at last, and with acclaim, that 
 none can measure now, the midnight pass over into the 
 morning ! 
 
"Seeing tbe Tflnseen" 
 
 THE BACCALAUREATE SERMON 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS OF 1893 
 
 HAMILTON COLLEGE, SUNDAY JUNE 18, 1893 
 
 "He endured as seeing Him who is invisible." 
 
 Hebrews, 11:27. 
 
 THE Letter to the Hebrews was both an argument and an 
 appeal. With its array of fact and its august consolations, 
 there was blended an unfaltering and personal trust in God. 
 That confidence in and commitment to Him is of the very es 
 sence of true religion. Religion is either the fulfilment of a 
 real relationship, or it is a fond dream. The spirit of con 
 stancy is so sustained and illuminative thro this whole writing 
 as to make it, concerning faith, the classical source both of 
 definition and instance. 
 
 Not in any special phase or exercise, but absolute and gen 
 eric, faith is affirmed as the basis of life and the warrant of 
 all rational hope. The book deals with the apparent vicissi 
 tudes of an ever-moving process, and at the same time with 
 the consistency and constancy of Him whoguidesit, mutability 
 and the immutable God. By broad retrospect it would prepare 
 souls to recognize and meet ungrievingly the disciplines of 
 change. At the eleventh chapter the argument proper culmin 
 ates with the resonant citation of preeminent believers, women 
 and men. Certain of the venerable roll are named, souls of 
 altitude that greeted the Sun from afar, and then, time failing, 
 groups and classes are summoned, of those, who, having won 
 their rest, make up the celestial part of that holy alliance and 
 
PHENOMENA SECONDARY 113 
 
 comradeship in which all souls are one who love and seek 
 the will of God. 
 
 " Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses " 
 (/xaprvp5 doubly, in that they were once the spectacle who now 
 are the spectators) we are to have the tremendous appeal in 
 creased. The clenching thought is that these veterans are to 
 have their work perfected in those better things provided for 
 later days and riper faith. 
 
 Fascinating and rewarding as the whole analysis and the 
 various aspect of this great epistle must be found, we are 
 bound now to press in toward that core-idea which rules it all. 
 
 What was that " wherein the elders had witness borne to 
 them? " What is the theorem upon which this chapter moves ? 
 Why, at the outset, it is given, a definition which inspires our 
 whole instinct of flight, and lifts our eyes past the hills, past 
 the path of the eagles, up the ways of the angels ! " Now 
 faith (and right there the writer leaves the ground and takes 
 the wings of the morning) "faith is the proving of things not 
 see?i" the " assurance of things hoped for Faith is itself a proof , 
 a conviction. This eleventh chapter is that proposition ampli 
 fied by instance. It begins at the beginning (as Genesis and 
 John begin) with " the word of God." We know "that what 
 is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear," 
 that is, (as the Greek noun " ^cuvo/u van/ " suggests), "that -which 
 we look upon did not come from phenomena" Spirit and life are 
 behind phenomena. First-cause precedes second causes. 
 Word is back of world. The seen is the result of the unseen. 
 The Creation is a creation, and over and thro it the Creator 
 lives and moves, and the creature who knows this and so lives 
 joins the triumphs of such as are here enrolled. 
 
 It is upon the thought that our text condenses, that 
 this roster of great and effectual men proceeds. At 
 the point where we station our present study Moses is the 
 immediate instance. Our text analyzes his life and sums it. 
 Unmatched and solitary that life stands above all the lives of 
 
114 SEEING THE UNSEEN 
 
 the old Testament : forty years in Egypt, forty years in Midian, 
 forty years in the Wilderness, "endurance" all the way from 
 Nile side to Pisgah top ! 
 
 Such enduring, under such burdens, borne by such a man, 
 must be accounted for ! It must have " assurance " and " proof" 
 under it. And thus the writer to the Hebrews (and so to all 
 souls perplexed by ages of transition and mental disturbance) 
 states this epitome of all that Moses was and did strikes the 
 chord in which all his life was set " He endured as seeing 
 Him who is invisible." From first to last his life was one of 
 displacements it was also one of submissions because of 
 convictions. He accepted the loneliness of leadership. He 
 became therein a type, at once of the sorrow and the grandeur 
 of a prophetic soul. He did not fear Egypt s king ; for face 
 to face he knew the Blessed and Only Potentate. The " King 
 eternal immortal, invisible," made poor both the riches and 
 the wrath of Pharoah. 
 
 This contrast is contained in our text, but the very Greek 
 states even more broadly the secret of faith it is generic not 
 personal " TOV yap doparov ok 6pwv " " as seeing the unseen" 
 God, and all else secured in God, the ruler, and the whole 
 realm beyond present vision. We keep both the euphony and 
 the paradox of the holy page when we say that/^z/A is the sight 
 of the unseen. That then shall be our present theme. Tran 
 scendental as the statement is, it announces the real wisdom 
 and the real life of the soul. All uplifted and uplifting souls 
 have endured as seeing the unseen. Oh, that this penetrative 
 beam of truth might scatter the vagueness with which we think 
 of Faith! It is the vision of the invisible the "heavenly 
 vision." This " conviction of things not seen" (v. i.) is a test 
 and organon. What the eye is to sense, /^/confidence in God is 
 to the soul ! Sense is not the last of us, we are hyper-physical 
 we were made to touch the impalpable, to hear the inaudible, 
 to see the unseen. 
 
 It is this idea of the soul s true function and self-prophecy 
 
FAITH IS IN A PERSON 115 
 
 that speaks in many another New Testament expression. The 
 very word aopara marks that great statement in the first chapter 
 of Romans, " the unseen things of Him are seen by the things 
 made." Nature is a telescope ! 
 
 Paul speaks of Christ as "The image of the unseen God." 
 The things seen are for a while and the things unseen are 
 forever." 
 
 If we " have the eyes of our hearts enlightened" we shall 
 look for the reality that underlies the the apparent, and find 
 
 that 
 
 " Earth s crammed with Heaven." 
 
 Faith is a " spirit of seeing," spiritual " second sight." Faith 
 is logical. It reasons from the consistency of God. The child 
 clutches his father s hand in the night, knows him, trusts him 
 to guide and so walks homeward thro the dark, and " we go by 
 faith, not what we see." It is faith to go out " not knowing 
 whither," because we know with whom. 
 
 Faith is always this confidence in and commitment to a per 
 son. Faith is not guessing, it is not arguing, it is not taking 
 chances, it is trusting someone who is trustworthy. Trust 
 is more than a persuasion from visible evidence, it is self-prov 
 ing. It is not merely one emotion or attitude out of many, it 
 is a distinct and vital connection with what lies beyond the 
 boundary of the five senses. It is " the masterlight of all our 
 seeing ;" for it is the response of our life to His life who gave 
 us ours and who made the outer light the universal parable 
 of the inner. Soul at last can be satisfied only with soul. We 
 " thirst for the living God ", and surrendering to the compul 
 sions of an irresistable hope we find suddenly that faith is the 
 guide of reason. Without faith reason is not a safe guide. 
 Certainty is more than sight, it is insight. All progress, all 
 skill, comes by trusting ourselves to that next step which is 
 ever just beyond present knowledge. It is not as a mere opti- 
 graph of Heaven that these scriptures are holy ; but because 
 they prompt that trust in a trustworthy God, which is life 
 
Il6 SEEING THE UNSEEN 
 
 eternal and already begun. Nor is it only in man s relation 
 to God, but also in his relation to every other person 
 with whom he has to do, that "faith" is indispensable. In 
 other matters also, ocular evidence is neither all nor chief. 
 "Without faith it is impossible to please" anyone! The soul 
 itself, and the souls impartiality, count in all convictions. 
 Everywhere we have to reckon with what lies below the hori 
 zon. In all things good faith is more than compulsion. There 
 is no sphere of thought or action in which it is rational to 
 " dwell only in things seen" (Col. 2:18) to inspect only "the 
 things before the face" (2 Cor. 107). The apostle Peter uses 
 the very word "myopy" when he speaks (2: 1519) of those 
 who are spiritually " near-sighted." 
 
 Everywhere the unseen presses for recognition. Whether 
 in the laboratory, or the garden, on the judge s bench, or upon 
 one s knees reverence and expectancy toward the "things not 
 seen as yet" are indispensable to great result. 
 
 To go on from observation to classification, from conse 
 quences to cause, from instance to rule, all assortment and 
 all synthesis, means faith. 
 
 The quest alike of the eager mind and of the longing heart 
 is for the ultimate Unity in whom power and pity meet. We 
 are not afraid of too much learning but of too little \ The legal 
 cannot be too exact ; and that it may be exact it must be loyal. 
 We are carefully to look down that at last we may fervently 
 look up ! Love is the way of light. 
 
 We are now already in what we call " the other world ;" for 
 all God s realms are one. Only now we are withheld from 
 the upper light. We are shut within the shell of sense, and, 
 with sense, can see only its smooth and hard limitations : but 
 we have equipments for which those walls are too narrow and 
 tho now in embryo we reckon that wings mean something, and 
 with an act which stakes itself upon the conviction of accessi 
 ble tho as yet unperceived realities we us^ Qur beak upon the 
 fragile and temporary wall ! 
 
NOT AN EXCEPTIONAL FUNCTION II7 
 
 We are sure that the vast is not a void, that derivative life 
 answers Creative life, that longing is the clue whereby to track 
 love to its source, that, conscience is a right line be 
 tween man and his Maker, that "the spirit of man 
 is the candle of the Lord," that these things of sight 
 are "a copy and shadow of the heavenly things," and 
 so, the deep within us calling to and answering the deep above 
 us, we make God s statutes our songs, pitch our pilgrim tents 
 toward the apocalypse, and rejoice in Him, " whom not having 
 seen we love." 
 
 But let us come close to the fact that the perception of that 
 which is out of sight is not an exceptional but a normal func 
 tion. In every growing and advancing life men " hope for 
 that which they see not." All lofty imagination is of a kind with 
 faith. Duty uses the same faculties and the same methods 
 that we use in all affairs, only the purpose is lifted toward 
 God and the scale prolonged into eternity. 
 
 The life of the spirit simply applies to the Being above 
 that which every day relations apply to the beings about us. 
 Civilization rests upon faith. Society is Mosaic (a Mosaic if 
 you please!) with that which does, dares, and endures, "as 
 seeing the unseen." Faith, as religious, is not different in 
 essence, but in direction. Men who renounce the service of 
 the unseen God, serve their unseen fellows with this very faculty. 
 Architecture works with the same problems whether one builds 
 a church spire or a grain elevator, and certainty as to the ex 
 ternal and as to the eternal world is in either case a reasoning 
 from the seen to the unseen. There is no working theory, in 
 physics or psychics, that is not an illustration of Faith. As 
 surance of the undiscovered all induction all foresight, 
 walks Moses way. Tell me, what other brilliant generalization 
 from particulars ever shot such light on man s mental or moral 
 path as the thought of the trustworthiness, the FIDELITY OF THE 
 CREATOR that the Universe is rational and not capricious ? 
 
 We eat, sleep, trade, by faith. You wrap money or love in a 
 
Il8 SEEING THE UNSEEN 
 
 letter, scratch a few marks on it, attach a stamp, put it into the 
 mail box at the nearest corner, and wait, with a thousand 
 "maybes" menacing-, for your answer from Iceland or Cal 
 cutta; all because you believe in the integrity and efficiency of 
 the post service. And is it credulity to believe Him "whose 
 eyes out run the morning and who maketh spirits His messen 
 gers ? " You cable a friend across the sea and get his reply 
 by a strand 3000 miles long, and yet you will cavil at His word 
 " running very swiftly " who said, " Before they call I will answer 
 and while they are yet speaking I will hear !" 
 
 Albany, and "51," the fastest and promptest train in the 
 world is 12 minutes late by the board. Men walk watch in 
 hand, for they are assured of the Empire State Express. 
 Ten minutes, eleven, and over the Hudson a film of smoke 
 wavers up, while, as we watch, far this side, the train curves 
 into sight and swings out over the bridge. All is haste. 
 Clang go the testing hammers along the wheels. Clank, clank, 
 answer the journal boxes. Couplers and air-tubes snap to their 
 places, and we are behind " 893." Tom Dermody, white-haired 
 but keen of eye, is in the saddle there, eight feet over the ties. 
 He has given the cups their fill of velvet oil; and alert and 
 ready the creature waits with strange deep-drawn sighs, the 
 touch of the hand that will hold it to its work. " Board! 1 
 and at the word the throttle feels the touch, the mass of 
 mechanism answers the mind that commands it and we are off. 
 Six feet six, twenty feet at every turn, the huge drivers respond 
 to the steam. Up the steep grades, the wheels biting the 
 sanded track, swift and more swiftly past avenue and factory, 
 and the pusher is outsped. Away now into the west. Along 
 the glistening lines of Bessemer, down hill we go 56, 55, 54 
 seconds to the mile. Five times each second does that piston 
 make and recover its 24-inch stroke a hundred tons of steel, 
 with a heart of flame, hurling itself toward sunset ! The sandy 
 plains swing backward, the Mohawk unwinds its silvery rib- 
 
THE EMPIRE STATE EXPRESS 
 
 IIQ 
 
 bon, the hills stand aside, and by orchard and quarry, thro 
 town and valley, in, out, swinging, sliding, leaping it is ever 
 on, on! What a race! Curving as the river curves, the train 
 seems to cling convulsively to the rails over which it rushes. 
 Can that slender flange hold this awful centrifugal force ? 
 How possible seems one mad plunge, with not a soul left this 
 side of eternity to tell what it was like ! And, now we think 
 of it, is the engineer competent, cool, sober ? Has he good 
 eyes ? Are all the switches true ? The semaphores twitch to 
 the horizontal: but that is for those who follow us. How is it 
 ahead ! No pause. Our steed drinks upon the gallop. Rock 
 ing with the storm of motion, Tom Dermody peers into the 
 distance and draws the bar a little wider. On, on ! Here 
 trailed the Iroquois. Here Herkimer struggled toward Fort 
 Stanwix. Here went Kirkland thro the wilderness and the 
 winter. Could they rise up to look, what would they conceive 
 this thing to be, this blazing, screaming terror this tornado 
 of iron? Behold adjustment, contrivance, fuel, fire, force; 
 nay more, it is an epitome of this strenuous and Earth-subdu 
 ing age, it is the transit of the Saxon! Now Deerfield hills 
 throw back the long shriek, sharper than any savage cry of 
 their wild days, and the complaining wheels smother their 
 riot pace under the touch of the same power that compelled 
 them to it. Slower, tho rebelling, slower, and then still. 
 "Utica !" 95 miles in 90 minutes ! On time ! 
 
 And you submit yourself to that pace and peril, with its 
 multiplied chances of stupid switchmen, flaws in spike or axle, 
 imperfect inspection, a thousand risks to the mile, and you 
 trust your life and other lives more precious to you, because you 
 have confidence in the management of the New York Central. 
 You will, I say, trust yourself to all this mechanism which 
 you do not understand, and to the management with which 
 you are unacquainted, and yet insist that only seeing is 
 believing ! 
 
liO SEEING THE UNSEEN 
 
 What credulous incredulity is that which refuses to the 
 Creator s control of His own world that which it bestows upon 
 the officials of a railway ! 
 
 But turn to the market. What is credit, national or inter 
 national, but trust, trust in that "which no man hath seen or 
 can see" ? 
 
 Certifications, vouchers, endorsements, bonds, are these 
 sight ? What is security but personality? What were our 
 banks, our whole system of exchange, the United States Treas 
 ury itself, without confidence in common conscience? 
 
 I say Faith is the world s clearing house. Financial infidelity 
 breeds palsy. What is Panic but doubt scaring itself into worse 
 doubt? When but a percentage of unbelief diffuses thro the 
 world of trade, haggard calamity peers in at a thousand doors. 
 What if all faith were destroyed ! ,That were such a catastro 
 phe as if the world were suddenly arrested in its turning and 
 all things upon it flung into bottomless chaos. 
 
 When relief comes after a stringent or a barren market it is 
 not because there is more money, but because there is less 
 commercial agnosticism ! 
 
 And here also remember that business credit is what it is by 
 a diffused Christianity. The banks of the world are not in 
 pagan lands. By the river of faith all things flourish. 
 
 No more than I would starve while having a certified cheque 
 upon the Chemical Bank, no more will I fail to use what I have 
 every reason to think bears the very endorsement of God. 
 
 It is by faith, social, domestic, financial, scholarly, scientific, 
 as well as religious, that we live. Faithlessness is barbarism. 
 If it is barbarism it is also treason. Surely; for how can one 
 be a patriot and at the same time a cynic? 
 
 This sixth sense is good sense and no other. Indigent indeed 
 is he who has it not. As the vestal of God, nature lights our 
 way. It is not by observing the lantern, but the way it lightens, 
 that we get us home. He who cares only for objects, and not 
 for the subject of them all, consents to a mere optical illusion. 
 
ALL MEN BELIEVE I2 i 
 
 But I would speak of the Endurance which the sight of the 
 unseen teaches and inspires. It is this sight that measures 
 power for daring and for waiting The size of your faith is the 
 size of your manhood. The believers are the doers. 
 
 Faith is no idler s possession. It is a high exercise of 
 power. It bids keenly for action. It is a noble energy ot the 
 whole nature. It propels and compels. It is leadership. It 
 is brave. 
 
 That Roman was a stalwart believer in his city who bought 
 up the land on which the Carthaginian army was camped ! 
 
 "There is no unbelief; 
 Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod, 
 And waits to see it push away the clod, 
 
 He trusts in God. 
 
 Whoever says when clouds are in the sky, 
 Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by/ 
 Trusts the Most High. 
 
 Whoever lieth on his couch to sleep, 
 Content to lock his sense in slumber deep, 
 Knows God will keep. 
 
 Whoever says Tomorrow, The unknown, 
 The future, trusts that Power alone 
 He dares disown. 
 
 The heart that looks on when the eyelids close, 
 And dares to live when life has only woes, 
 God s comfort knows. 
 
 There is no unbelief; 
 
 And day by day, and night, unconsciously, 
 The heart lives by that faith the lips deny; 
 
 God knoweth why." 
 
 It was the sight of the unseen that sent Columbus over sea, 
 that kept Washington in heart as he manoeuvered his footsore 
 regiments across the Jerseys, and there was never a discover, a 
 commander, a liberator, an inventor, an author, who was not 
 strong in faith, if strong at all. It is this presentative faculty 
 
122 SEEING THE UNSEEN 
 
 that has led to all the realized marvels of science. The hero 
 ism alike of the inventor and the martyr is faith teaching 
 endurance. 
 
 Leverrier predicted and located Neptune, with its orbit of 
 165 years, because he believed in gravitation. And faith is no 
 more audacious, is just as exact, as scientific, when it trusts His 
 consistent goodness whom all events obey as firmly as the 
 battalions of the stars march west. 
 
 Science is Faith plus Investigation. 
 
 Religion is Faith plus Service. The sciences of sense or of 
 the soul are both compelled to use the same implement. It 
 has well been said that " The believer in the unseen atom should 
 be the last to ridicule belief in the unseen God." The unseen 
 is at once the problem and the power of all search. 
 
 You are more than any or all of your senses. It is soul, not 
 sense, that quivers and exults, moans and rejoices. Your senses 
 are but postmen handing you what they do not read, electric 
 transmitters, if you please, but only mechanical. Back of these 
 personal being sits, listening as blind Milton listened while his 
 daughters pronounced to him the Greek they did not com 
 prehend. Look ! Yonder is Beethoven, old and stone deaf. 
 He weaves passion, pain and peace into strange immortal har 
 monies. He forges music into light. He is rapt as a Sibyl: 
 but the voice of the oracle is all within. He can not hear his 
 own harpsichord ! His soul plays on, and on, shreds of the 
 symphonies of Heaven, and he endures as hearing the unheard. 
 
 These are the souls that open their windows to the day. 
 They are horizoned by beckoning hands. Strength to bear, to 
 meet and to master the emergencies of life, can only come 
 from the guidance of God. And this can only come by that 
 choice of God which makes Him the first in our hearts. De 
 cision wonderfully clears the mind. God reveals himself to 
 those who surrender to His guardianship. We will but shift 
 our doubts from one hand to the other so long as we forget 
 that in everything commitment seals conviction. Self-will shuts 
 
REVELATION COMES BY COMMITMENT 123 
 
 the door from self-knowledge. Sensualism staggers into the 
 arms of scoffing. Mighty faith comes only to mighty devotion. 
 None can teach you his faith, nor give it. You must buy for 
 yourselves and pay God s price. The deepest is incommun 
 icable. 
 
 " How can he give his neighbor the real ground, 
 His own conviction ?" 
 
 It is as one who being but a bystander perceives only the 
 absurdity of a telephone dialog, because his ear does not catch 
 the responding voice. 
 
 When Titus took Jerusalem and penetrated to the Holy of 
 Holies he saw nothing. The Shekinah was not for him. We 
 see what we have the soul to see no more. We abide in the 
 truth in so far as there is truth in us. But belief and life are 
 something more than showing that faith toward God has 
 rational analogies. The certainty that vanquishes objection is 
 not argument but commitment. The blessing of Him that 
 dwelt in the burning bush awaits all who will turn aside to see. 
 Self-giving is the price of all high companionships. Hastening 
 into the sweet fulfillments or the terrible surprises of the 
 unseen, (one, or the other, they shall be to us each) we may well 
 quit all else for that which alone has " the power of the world 
 to come." 
 
 That sense of the security of righteousness, of the stability 
 of God, can only come by a surrender absolute to the Father 
 of our Spirits. That life of Moses was stupendous with strug 
 gle, danger, dissappointment: but it was crowned with a tes 
 timony which was also autobiography. "The Eternal God is 
 thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms." The 
 shell will be shattered at last ! 
 
 Wings ! wings ! 
 
 To touch the hem of the veil that swings, 
 As moved by the breath of God, between 
 The world of sense and the world unseen; 
 To swoon where the mystic folds divide, 
 And wake, a child, on the other side; 
 
124 SEEING THE UNSEEN 
 
 To wake and wonder if it be so, 
 And weep for joy at the loss of wo; 
 To know the seeker is lost and found; 
 To find Love s being but not his bound; 
 Oh for the living that dying brings ! 
 Wings! wings! 
 
 Gentlemen of the Class 0/1893: 
 
 You will not ask me to forget that you are the first to whom 
 it is my privilege to say these syllables of parting. I remember 
 it, and shall always remember it. 
 
 I have longed to say or to suggest a quickening, and inspir 
 ing word to you, a word that should help you under God 
 toward mastery, first of yourselves and second of your circum 
 stances. The Spirit of your Heavenly Father, the Presence of 
 Him who loved you and gave Himself for you, must broaden 
 and deepen my incompetent speech. 
 
 And yet it is my last occasion with you all. Other feet shall 
 tread the ways of our dear hilltop, others shall answer the 
 chapel call: but, all together, I can never pray with you again, 
 nor talk with you over the open Bible. And for some of us 
 this is the last. Bear then with one more loving and fervent 
 exhortation. In the name of our good College, and by the 
 memory of those who with prayer and toil dedicated its unseen 
 future to the God of wisdom; in the name of those graduate 
 ranks of staunch and reverent men that now are to receive 
 you ; in the name of those who have taught you here with gen 
 uine solicitude for your noblest culture, "seeking not yours 
 but you," than whom you may find more plausible friends, but 
 none sincerer; nay, by your own responsibility to your Saviour 
 and your Judge; I charge you, be men of second sight ! 
 While the visionaries who fix their affections on this unsubstan 
 tial pageant of the senses chide you with absent-mindedness, 
 look you, with the vision of the seer, on into the world of 
 ultimate realities. Put the facts of the soul before the fancies 
 of the senses. 
 
THE ULTIMATE VISION 12$ 
 
 Educate your spirits vision by using it. Leave both the 
 upstarts who make little of life s most serious and unsilencable 
 questions, and the dastards who avoid them. Let God print 
 upon the inner wall of your very eyelids these words "AS 
 SEEING THE UNSEEN," and when sense is not enough, when you 
 curtain your eyes for that swift prayer for light which each of 
 you must sometime pray, when all is dark but duty, then re 
 member the Kingdom of the invisible 
 
 " nor bate a jot 
 
 Of heart or hope: but still bear up, and steer 
 Right onward." 
 
 You have mistakes, and you have also bright successes 
 behind you: but neither way are they final. You may offset 
 the mistakes. You must surpass the successes. To answer 
 the time that with a bugle call challenges constancy of soul 
 and the heroisms of a spiritual philosophy, you must hold fast 
 Him who today is so near to you. May the light of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God shine in your hearts in the face 
 of Jesus Christ ! He is your soul s Lord, your Master, your 
 Captain, your Example, your Redeemer. Oh, seize His loving 
 hand ! He will stand by you in the furnace of temptation, in 
 the prison of afflictions, in the solitude of responsibility. You 
 shall come, more and more intimately, to know Him, and more 
 and more deeply as the rough years move shall you feel that 
 His tender promise is for you, " Yet a little while and ye shall 
 seeMe." 
 
fln&issotuble Xife 
 
 THE BACCALAUREATE SERMON 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS OF 1894 
 HAMILTON COLLEGE, SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 
 
 " Not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power 
 of an endless life HEBREWS 7:16. 
 
 IT is necessary to see what these words mean in this connec 
 tion, and from that force to proceed toward the great idea 
 which they open, and which the local application illustrates. 
 
 The expression stands in a paragraph whose purpose it is to 
 show the supreme priesthood of Jesus Christ, that He is beyond 
 and above the Levitical succession, that He is after the order 
 of that great king-priest to whom even Abraham gave tithes, 
 accepting his blessing as of a better than himself; that Christ s 
 priesthood, single, complete, unchangable is the fulfillment 
 and ideal, which no high-priest of Israel had ever attained 
 offering one final sacrifice, without infirmity and perfected for- 
 evermore. 
 
 And this paragraph (and chapter), which, however far away 
 it may seem to us, came close to the daily thinking of the 
 Hebrews who first read it, is part of a minute and patient, and 
 at last triumphant and rapturous, argument, to show the devout 
 Jews, who in those apostolic days had accepted Jesus as the 
 true Messiah, that all that they had loved and lived in of rubric 
 and rite was not now despised but transcended; that they 
 were not to be troubled because the venerable things of their 
 past were changed; for they were fulfilled not destroyed. 
 
 In Christ, all which they had held so intimate as the vessel 
 and vehicle of a precious covenant and a common worship, 
 was not only made good, but made better. 
 
LAW WORKS IN WHILE LIFE WORKS OUT 127 
 
 The whole letter to these believing Israelites is based upon 
 the comparison of the old and the new. Contrasts, general 
 and special, are its whole structure. It is ruled by antithesis 
 and argues a fortiori. 
 
 This our text is an expression eminently characteristic of 
 the argument into which it enters. Christ s place and office is 
 not carnal, transient, legal: but mighty, quickening, enduring. 
 
 Put compactly, here is a summary and a confronting the 
 Old against the New. Law on the one side, life on the other. 
 The life does not deny the law, it surpasses it, taking a higher 
 outlook and a wider outreach. Law works inward from with 
 out. Life works outward from within. It is rim versus centre, 
 exterior restraint versus interior constraint. 
 
 The word endless in the text, is much more exactly ren 
 dered, as in the margin, by the word indissoluble a life then 
 essentially and uninterruptedly one in all its parts. 
 
 The old dispensation which led up to the fulness and the 
 fulfillment in Christ is set forth as rudimentary and prelimin 
 ary. It is pedagogical. It is mechanical not dynamic; and 
 so, a moment later, our writer says "for there is a disannulling 
 of a foregoing commandment because of its weakness and un 
 profitableness (for the law made nothing perfect), and a bring 
 ing in thereupon of a better hope, thro which we draw nigh 
 unto God." 
 
 The thought I urge is that this contrast between the tem 
 porary scope of that special commandment and the boundless 
 scope of that Supreme Life, bases upon and illustrates a gen 
 eral truth of high importance. The contrast is representative 
 of the permanent conditions that divide punctiliousness from 
 power, the narrowness of legality from the abundance of life. 
 
 In all the things which we are saying the chief point is this 
 that there is all the difference between the artificiality of com 
 mandment and the spontaneity of life that there is between 
 Aaron and Christ. 
 
 The law of all commandment is the law of criticism and re- 
 
128 THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE 
 
 pression, the power of all life is the law of appreciation and 
 expansion. 
 
 The destructive opposes the constructive because it is per 
 se inhibitive and cannot be creative. All precepts are good only 
 as they lead to principles. The literal rule is only a means to 
 the ends of the right living. 
 
 Law measures imperfection life alone can repair and re 
 place. Law may introduce but it can never complete. 
 
 The Bible is not only a history but it also gives a philosophy 
 of history and it shows the degrees by which carnal rule is led 
 on to spiritual power. The whole climate of Hebrews is 
 changed from that of Leviticus. This was God s way always 
 is His way. While at first life, so far as it can be, is stated in 
 the terms of law, at last law is to be transfigured in the terms 
 of life. 
 
 Painters and sculptors know rules and work with them: but 
 what knowledge of their rules alone could make a Rubens or 
 Thorwaldsen ! The Idylls of the King are grammar plus Ten 
 nyson. A Lamia is prosody plus Keats ! The Gettysburg speech 
 was history plus Lincoln ! 
 
 By law we learn to avoid death, but it is by the contact of 
 the inspiration of a superior life that we learn to live. 
 
 And these two dispensations of law and of life furnish us 
 with two realms, an upper and a lower, in one of which we 
 must all dwell. The upper includes the lower life is not 
 extra legal, but super legal. He who denies or despises law has 
 not learned it, and must, if he would ever go up, go down 
 again to the first principles and rudiments of the teaching of 
 Christ: but law cannot say the last word. For instance, mar 
 riage is a contract. That is a sorry marriage which forgets its 
 contract, that is also a sorry marriage which is only a con 
 tract. Carnal commandment must be underneath, but it must 
 be underneath, the "power of an indissoluble life." 
 
 We may choose, and we must, whether we will live positively 
 or negatively. I mean whether we shall be actively or passively 
 
HOW TWO EQUALS TEN I2g 
 
 good. Whether we shall have that timid and hand-to-mouth be 
 havior which is concerned mainly not to make mistakes, or that 
 vital eagerness which is more concerned to avoid making 
 nothing ! A man may be negatively good, in the sense that he 
 does no mischief. Such an one idolizes caution until it becomes 
 impotence. His keeping of law is as if one for fear of going 
 wrong were to lash himself to the sign-post at a four-corners, or 
 as if a soldier were to save his powder for fear his gun might 
 burst, or as if a sick man to assure himself against an error by 
 the pharmacist, were to swallow the prescription. 
 
 Keeping law means more than eluding penalty he is still 
 coarse and carnal who does not perceive that sin and the con 
 sent thereto is the thing law indicates, that seeing it in its 
 naked abominableness, the soul may cry out for His help who 
 has the power of the indissoluble life in whom " the law of 
 the spirit of life makes free from the law of sin and death." 
 
 The differentiation of Negative from Positive goodness may 
 be seen in noting the altitude of the Siniatic Law in contrast 
 with the Teaching on the Mount desert Arabia and fertile 
 Galilee. Here we get right at the idea. The two ways of the 
 one God : but one introductory, the other complete. We may 
 not refuse Him either way, and we must be sure that the primer 
 of particular command is mastered it cannot be skipped. 
 Neither is it the end. It is much to avoid concrete evil, and 
 so the ten words go on " Thou shalt not" it is goodness by 
 by exclusion it is safe: but when Christ comes to translate 
 precept into spirit, he gives goodness by inclusion, and that is 
 strong. He " Blesses" the humble, suffering, restrained, eager 
 for right, merciful, pure, pacific, in other words He chooses 
 and extols the life that begins within. Again in summing the 
 law of Moses into two commandments, He made active love to 
 God and Man the whole result. Christ states goodness ; but 
 in a new way. He shows how ten " thou-shalt-nots " equal 
 two "thou-shalts." Positive goodness is less verbal and 
 more direct. Life advances by exchanging negatives for affirm- 
 
130 THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE 
 
 atives. By mastering rules we grow into relations we walk in 
 the go-cart that we may walk without it. When the mechani 
 cal has become the natural when effort has become spontan 
 eity, when the crudeness of intention has become the second- 
 nature of intuition, when one has learned to absorb the princi- 
 that is the kernel of the rule then the elocutionist has become 
 the orator the disciple the apostle. One noble conformance 
 is worth eight or ten avoidances. Too much searchingof scrip 
 ture is a search for vetos, too much pruning and too little 
 mulching. Doubtless too much of the education of children 
 says, " don t " " don t" instead of " do" do." The primary 
 lesson, so long as it is needed (but no longer) must be to turn 
 from error ; but to proceed in right is the path of life. Pre 
 occupation is a strong protection. A higher interest can sup 
 plant a lower. When a child can be made to laugh it is already 
 stopped from crying. The way for a man to stop being stingy 
 is by beginning to be generous. Presently Scrooge is no longer 
 himself! It was because his goodness had been so far only 
 negative keeping the " shalt-nots" that the young man, 
 whom Christ invited into the positive and eternal life, went 
 away sorrowful ! Meaning not to do harm is much less than 
 determining to do good. The two commandments go deeper 
 than the ten and so at first seem harder to keep: but when 
 drudgery has been overruled by vitality they prove easier 
 there is all the difference that lies between a balloon and a 
 bird inflation and wings. 
 
 We never do anything right well until we do it unconsciously. 
 To be too much aware of self is to be awkward, or a least arti 
 ficial. The senses are to be "exercised by use" until they 
 cease to do ill by learning to do well. One must think of the 
 target not of the arrow, of the bird not of the gun, of the 
 listener and not the song, of the soul and not of the sermon. 
 Medative goodness is prim and timid it is too self-concerned 
 to dare aggression. It guards its rear instead of advancing its 
 front it adopts the tactics of McClellan rather than of Sheri- 
 
PATHOLOGICAL PIETY 13! 
 
 dan ! And still the philosophy of making the provisional 
 seem to be the permanent treats symptoms instead of dealing 
 positively and radically with causes. Tonic is better than lan 
 cet. Build up the system and the disturber quits. Get health 
 in and sickness goes out. Health does not recollect that it 
 has a body. It is when life looses its hold and power that the 
 patient has to fall back upon carnal commandment. A great 
 deal of our religious living is "at a dying rate," or at least 
 " feeble and sickly," because it forgets that the way to fight 
 asphyxia is not by vacuum but by quantities of fresh air. 
 There is a style of piety that is mainly pathological, speak 
 ing with the accent of invalidism it measures mournful doses and 
 adjusts hot-water bags. The power of the Living-One still 
 summons chronic debility and selfish neurasthenia out of it 
 self as of old "Arise, take up thy bed, and walk"\ 
 
 It is the expulsive and propulsive dynamic of what is posi 
 tive that " gives power to the feeble and to them that have no 
 might increases strength." The locomotive gets up steam by 
 going, the more speed the more draft. To warm a room 
 one must close the window: but he must also light the fire 
 to raise the temperature the stove is far more important than 
 the thermometer. To get the darkness out of the room one 
 does not use a broom but a lamp. Enter truth, exeunt lies. 
 Enter liberty, exit bondage. Power is in the ratio of displace 
 ment. " Fire makes room for itself," say the Japanese. While 
 dupes consent, tyrants rule them, not longer. The Czar will 
 take a walk to Siberia just so soon as freedom shatters rotten 
 beaurocracy. There will be a different Russia when there are 
 different Russians. 
 
 America will have better cities just so soon as it has better 
 citizens. There will be a morally "greater New York" when 
 there are greater New Yorkers no earlier. Bad men can 
 be kept out only by putting good men in. That spasmodic 
 reform which stops half-way is illustrated in Christ s parable 
 of the untenanted house it was cleansed: but it was suffered 
 to stand empty and so became again the kennel of demons. 
 
132 THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE 
 
 Not doing is un-doing. It is content with negations of 
 wrong, in place of zeal for the affirmations of good, that makes 
 so big and so fatal the bulk of sins of omission. " Ye did it 
 not" may be the irrevocable sentence ! He who is either so 
 irresolute or so proud as never to risk a mistake will never do 
 anything. The talent wrapped in a napkin and hid in a hole, 
 hurt no one: but it helped no one. No servant will enter into 
 the joy of the Lord by proving that he "never did much ill." 
 
 The really upright life must be downright, willing to 
 blunders to stumble forward to fall up. Real virtue is 
 active true goodness is overt. It does and moves. It is 
 measured by its momentum. A good citizen is not merely one 
 who keeps out of the criminal court. It is of course some 
 thing not to go to state s prison: but that cannot be the sum 
 of patriotism. I certainly hope that none of you will ever be 
 hung ! but I really hope more for you than that ! A Christ 
 ian is other than merely one who does not flagrantly violate 
 the moral law. All the sanctions of respectability, adinfinitum 
 or ad nauseam, cannot make a great life a life of perpetuity. . 
 Abstinences from evil are worth while, so far: but it is not 
 the ill we let go but the good we hold fast that sizes us. 
 
 The whole Jewish system established at once the value and 
 the weakness of commandment. It was indispensable as an 
 introduction, altogether deficient as a conclusion. It was the 
 preceptor of adolescence a "tutor until the time appointed." 
 The grandeur of Judaism was its original advance into precept; 
 its decadence and stultification was in its refusal to see how 
 law was intended to lead on to and into life. Judaism came to 
 worship carnal rule and so at last rejected the vital and per 
 petual newness of its great Consummator. It learned the letter 
 of exclusive goodness and refused the Spirit of inclusive good 
 ness. It put the trellis for the vine. Thus it elevated the 
 scribe above the prophet and dwindled to a retrospect. The 
 Jews of our Saviour s time had become high-protectionists in 
 jre.ligion, and by their very privileges denied their stewardship, 
 
A LOW-TIDE PROGRESS 133 
 
 ignoring or hating all non-Jews. The Son of Man announcing 
 the ripeness of a changed order breaking down the parti 
 tions of severalty declaring that the special could only be 
 fulfilled in the universal arraying the positive against the neg 
 ative life endured the inevitable contradiction of parchment 
 and phylactery and signed the charter and covenant of eman 
 cipation with the sign of the cross ! The monastic spirit re 
 peated the mistake of moribund Judaism and in turn its carnal 
 and perfunctory system went down before the power of whole- 
 ness-of-life. For it is the way of life to transcend circumstance 
 not by caution, but by character not merely to quote a maxim 
 and do a task, but to inspire an ideal and incarnate its joy. 
 This is the freedom of the soul which perceives the spiritual 
 goal of instances and rubric, and (never disdaining their con 
 crete value) holds them always as non-finalities. So does the 
 flood-tide first follow, then fill, an d then with its broad sway 
 cover the little indentations of its estuaries. Then the boats 
 go wide and free that at low-ebb must strictly heed the channel. 
 
 Ramadan, or Lent, or Sunday, think how these are kept 
 merely by abstention, instead of by a typical and sacramental 
 substitution of works of love and mercy. If the Lord s day 
 were once used by the alleged followers of Christ in His way 
 in helping the hungry and heartening the distressed, even if 
 sleek congregations upon cushioned seats sang fewer lyrics in 
 good-natured praise of the cross, had less entertainment in the 
 way of sacred rhetoric with all the week for anti-climax 
 that were to keep the day holy. Long ago Isaiah described 
 the fast God has chosen (58:5.) 
 
 The way we keep the 4th Commandment is a specimen of 
 our conception of the others not doing, this and that. It 
 irritates our self-complacency to be told that clean linen and 
 general inertia are only negative virtues and that " it is lawful 
 [the fulness of the law] to do good on the Sabbath." Most of us 
 us are semi-Jewish yet in our Christianity ! It is vain for us to 
 hope to understand Christ, until we too " go about doing good." 
 
134 THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE 
 
 He is the pattern of a strong affirmative, constructive life. The 
 old priesthood offered something else: but He offered Him 
 self. That offering of self is our only availing answer to His 
 call who said that the way to find life is to lose it. He does 
 not now preach economy: but great investment ! It is the 
 engineer s business to burn coal, not to save it ! 
 
 This whole and indissoluble Book is a book of positive and 
 so of profound theories of life. It offers to supplant the vague 
 ness and barrenness of mere negations by invincible realities. 
 It gives us law as a base of operations. It teaches us to answer 
 the literature of doubt and denial by the power of Christ. We 
 are to put off the old man by putting on the new, to cease to do 
 evil by learning to do well. Might of spirit does not come by 
 carnal measurements. Doubt dies by deed. It is answered by 
 fidelities, not disputations. It is not what we controvert but 
 what we demonstrate that tells. No party and no person is 
 long tolerated whose only outfit is a grievance. " Non credo" 
 makes few converts. Trust alone can vanquish distrust and 
 "overcome evil with good." The nature and distinction of all 
 conquering greatness is in its displacement of shabby apolo- 
 gizings by daring aggressions. It is in this direction that 
 Phillips Brooks so wisely noted "how many more resolutions 
 to do right are kept than resolutions not to do wrong." Better 
 be strenuous for one truth than strenuous against ten lies ! In 
 chess or in war defensive tactics are to postpone defeat, offen 
 sive tactics to win the game. 
 
 When in Rio harbor our Admiral manned the guns of the 
 Detroit and said / will act he defended American non-com 
 batants and British too. It was life, and all Saxons said Amen! 
 Do your duty and let risks take care of themselves. To live is 
 much more than merely not to die! 
 
 " HERE LIES ONE WHO NEVER DID MUCH HARM." 
 
 Who wants that for his epitaph? But if mortuary marble 
 were less diplomatic how often this negative legend would 
 summarize a nominal life ! Webster on his last couch said " I 
 
STORMING OF FORT INFERNAL 135 
 
 still live." Someone attempted to repeat that, and got so near 
 as to make it, " I airit dead yet." There is a difference, and it 
 illustrates our present contention. 
 
 Abandon is the dynamic before which prudentialities shrivel. 
 Personal will alone can rouse will: for, "every seed after its own 
 kind." 
 
 At the siege of Port Hudson, in May 63, when the invest 
 ment had been made complete and the lines were almost with 
 in talking distance, the rebels had at one point erected a pow 
 erful redoubt, crowned with rifled cannon and crowded with 
 sharpshooters. The Federal soldiers dubbed the point Fort 
 Infernal. It silenced the works in its immediate front and 
 made the trenches deadly. Its vomit of iron seemed as if set 
 with a hair-trigger. On the evening of July 6th General Banks 
 sent for the officers commanding the opposed Union front. He 
 sharply criticised the apparent inaction of the assailants, and 
 to the reply of Col. Berrier that half his guns were dismounted 
 and the redoubt impregnable, the General gave orders that at 
 nine the next morning, at whatever cost of life, the battery 
 should be stormed. " It shall be done " replied the Colonel, 
 and, his bronzed cheek burning under the implied rebuke, he 
 saluted and turned away to consult with his subordinate 
 officers. With one voice they pronounced the attack hopeless 
 and declared that the men would not obey a command that 
 meant the annihilation of their columns. Sternly the Colonel 
 answered them all "Gentlemen, the attack will be made if I 
 make it alone ! " 
 
 At half-past eight, of the /th of July, the troops, mustered 
 close in the trenches, stood gloomy and unresponsive to the 
 words of their commander as with a few words to each com 
 pany he inspected the line. Watch in hand, he waited the 
 moment, and as the finger marked nine, with sword in hand he 
 leaped to the parapet. " Forward! " A tremor fluttered down 
 the front: but they remained irresolute and there their Col 
 onel, the lead hornets swarming about him. " FORWARD ! 
 
136 THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE 
 
 CHARGE ! " Heads went down dark shame flushed the faces, 
 yet still they stayed. " Cover your carcasses, cowards 7 will 
 storm the battery ! " About face and alone ! Twelve steps, 
 and over the breastworks went color-sergeant Whittaker, and 
 there were two ! A sword and a flag and the cannon goug 
 ing the earth about them to left, to right the sleet of death 
 pitiless ! Madmen, shoulder to shoulder ! The fire slackened, 
 heads peered over parapet and bastion gazing at the two. 
 Then the significance of it dawned on the beholders, and alike 
 from Unionists and Rebels there went up a wild Saxon cheer. 
 It was life ! Out of the trenches and over the earthworks 
 came the regiment wild with the passion to do tho doing 
 were dying. On and over and in! Steel to steel soul to 
 soul they would have stormed Hell ! 
 
 No one remembered how, but it was done, and as the grimy 
 remnant gathered about the shredded flag struck into the par 
 apet, they heard the faint voice of their wounded Colonel 
 " Well, boys, you came, after all ! " 
 
 Fort Infernal had fallen and with it Port Hudson. 
 
 Men of the Class of 94: 
 
 You stand here today with sealed orders as to where you are 
 to live and labor: but the whereby and whereunto, this text, if 
 you will take it to heart, makes an open secret. "Kara Swa/uv 
 a)?js cucaTaAvrov" Power, Life, Indivisibility what words are 
 these to heed as you go. Carrying love in your hearts for the 
 dear Mother who has done more for you than you now can 
 guess, may you vindicate and honor her by your positive deeds. 
 Acta non verba! In the ever-growing library of memory cher 
 ish these four volumes, today so near the last paragraph, and 
 of which the whole sum is this "Quit you like men, be strong 
 in the Lord and in the power of of His might." "If your vir 
 tues do not go forth of you, twere all alike as if you had them 
 not." Submit your souls to the influences of Christ; for that 
 will evoke your latent capabilities as the miracle of irrigation 
 makes the western desert lands into gardens. 
 
SINGLEMINDEDNESS 137 
 
 Fidelity to your inmost natures will add your lives to that 
 phalanx of light which is turning the battle to the gates. 
 
 The i6-year-old boy who against a field of 400 expert men 
 won recently a great bicycle race, said what is worth remem 
 bering. He was eagerly questioned in regard to the way he 
 managed to do it. "I took the best gait that I thought I could 
 maintain for the twenty miles, and kept it up, just the same 
 from start to finish. I did not look at any one, but just kept 
 my eyes on the ground ahead of my wheel, and kept up my 
 gait." There were famous "sprinters" competing with him, 
 but he did not "sprint." The others were watching others to 
 see what they were doing, but he watched nobody but himself. 
 
 That is the moral route by which souls arrive at the goal ! 
 
 God free you from sordid seductions, from base appetite, 
 from the paltry ambitions of the many, and number you all 
 with the glorious few who refuse the sham goodness of con 
 ventionality for the tasks and the triumphs of the more excel 
 lent way. 
 
 God fulfil for you every desire of goodness and every work 
 of faith with power. 
 
 May your souls realize themselves in service 
 " Like perfect music unto perfect words " 
 and so may you attain the crown of life ! Amen. 
 
IRa&tcal anb Conservative 
 
 THE BACCALAUREATE SERMON 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS OF 
 HAMILTON COLLEGE, SUNDAY JUNE 23, 1895 
 
 " Every scribe who hath been -made a disciple unto the kingdom 
 of heaven, is like unto a man that is a householder, which bringeth 
 forth out of his treasure things new and old." Matthew 13:52. 
 
 RIGHT upon the utterance of several most suggestive para 
 bles, Christ turned to his disciples, asking them " Have ye 
 understood ? " And at once, to that important question, he 
 added the words of our text, illustrating how much he meant 
 by really understanding. Therein He described the width and 
 abundance of His own instructions, and so He shows what, in 
 his relative degree, every teacher must be. 
 
 He would make all disciples to learn to be such teachers, 
 bringing them, by expectant and eager attention to the sweep 
 and search of His word and work, into the open secret of His 
 method and His purpose. He teaches, as He also rules, by the 
 way both of continuity and of increase. To Him and in Him, 
 time and its tenses are not fragmentary; but truth is a unit, 
 both constant and augmenting. 
 
 All that this keeper of His house brings forth, (or, rather, 
 throws forth) swiftly, determinedly out of his abundant 
 thesaurus, or treasury, is precious. There is no rubbish there 
 no moth-fret nor rust. Thence we are to accept and adopt 
 " things new and old." What we are now to affirm and urge is 
 the oldness and the newness of the teachings of Christ. He 
 certainly made good this declaration in both argument and 
 accent. 
 
VARIETY IN UNITY ! 3g 
 
 The words of this Instructor of Time were as emphatic and 
 sedate as Mt. Horeb, and yet as fresh as the balsamed winds 
 that blew out of Gilead to ruffle the mirror of the Galilee. His 
 utterances were as old as the light, and yet as new as the 
 morning. 
 
 So it came that they who had found the soul and substance 
 of elder revelation, welcomed gladly His authentic message, 
 and that unsophisticated every-day men trusted Him as an 
 authoritative interpreter of those primary problems which lie 
 near to plain hearts. So also those who could only value 
 quotation marks, who had no insight of that which lay back of 
 ceremonial and rubric, who idolized idioms and had lost the 
 idea, failed to comprehend this Scribe of the Spirit and the 
 divine truth-kingdom He announced, and had Him killed. 
 
 Whoever, then, (and now it is the same) held to Christ 
 Himself, and pressed past the objections of unfaith and semi- 
 faith, found Him deeper than the oldest words of men, brighter 
 than the newest. 
 
 The whole story of that Wisdom Incarnate establishes our 
 text, as the chord in which His testimony was set. 
 
 And I go on to say that our Lord s illumination of " things 
 new and old " was not an exception, but rather a specimen of 
 all the normal and constant self-manifestation of God. 
 
 The material of truth is changeless, its form is never twice 
 alike. Christ here asserts its variety in unity. One treasury, 
 many things. Let us open wide our minds to the lesson. This 
 heavenly and kingly Scribe is wiser than our half-sight, and 
 quietly rebukes that attitude of mind which looks only in one 
 direction, whether that be backward or forward. For he who 
 but considers the east, equally with him who but considers the 
 west, ignores the half of a complete day. 
 
 Christ summons us to live under a whole sky. In Him and 
 in His words, and in those (and their words) who best know 
 and most resemble Him, the past and the present are held not 
 in opposition but in sympathy. 
 
140 RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE 
 
 The partial way is the easier and the feebler. The sturdier 
 and more genial way loves to discover the combination, the 
 union, the vital identity of what has been done with what is 
 doing now. For, just as every June is both a result and a 
 cause, the child of an elder and the mother of a junior sum 
 mer, so, in all the spirit s life, the past and the present are felt 
 to be blended in Him who has "neither beginning of days nor 
 end of years." 
 
 Man, in his obstinate fallibility, easily lapses into one or the 
 other of two equally incomplete frames of mind living, on 
 the one hand, only in what is old, and, on the other hand, only 
 in what is new. 
 
 Each mistake is a mistake not only of onesidedness but of 
 outsidedness the mistake of identifying the eternal substance 
 with its transient appearance, of prefering accident above 
 essence, fashion above fact. 
 
 These opposite moods are of course largely temperamental: 
 but it is the business of a rational soul to overcome predisposi 
 tion and bias, and to get rid of its stiffneckedness by realizing 
 that man s head is not set on a pedestal but on a pivot ! 
 
 Some minds are eager for any change, and some are always 
 angry at any. The one is born senile, and the other dies 
 puerile. 
 
 Each of these classes has its own dislike, whether muttered 
 or mumb, to the under-thought, the wide comprehension of 
 our text. One secretly wishes that Christ had spoken only 
 "things old," and the other would have, even from Him, only 
 "things new." One frustrates truth of its eternal summits of 
 oxygen and outlook, the other would ignore its permanent 
 foundations and base. But every mountain that has heights 
 has also depths. Altitude measures both ways. 
 
 The man who loves the old only as old, and the man who 
 seeks the new only as new each thinks with but one brain- 
 lobe. He whose discipline is unto the wide kingdom of 
 Heaven loves what is true loves it whether it seems old or 
 new loves it because it is always both old and new. 
 
ONE TIME TO BE TESTED BY ALL TIMES 141 
 
 There are two words (much misapplied as I hope to show) 
 which in current and somewhat careless fashion are made the 
 class-titles of these alternative habits of mind, the words 
 Radical and Conservative. Nothing can be more deplorable 
 than to fall entirely under either category, whichsoever it be; 
 for either, by itself, is segmental. 
 
 Conservative means preservative. Under this title range all 
 those who dread and repel change, who are angered by the un 
 expected and tormented by agitation. The conservative hoards 
 decisions and loves only what is gradual and guaranteed. Cus 
 tom and continuity are his comfort and he is apt to look with 
 a stony face upon the unconventional. An ounce of caution is 
 worth to him a ton of daring. Sudden and precipitous men 
 who would crowd all tenses into the present, who delight in 
 speed and scorn the steam-guage and the escape-valve, who 
 (as Lowell said) "must see the world saved before night," are 
 his abhorrence, and they in turn renounce him as impossible, 
 coagulated, obsolescent! 
 
 But whether the Conservative is a dullard and dotard, or a 
 seer and safeguard, rests upon his particular scope and motive. 
 For to test one time by all times, to resist swiftness in the in 
 terest of strength, to weigh secure axioms against rash impor 
 tunities this is wisdom, and he who has it saves the future, 
 postponing the unripe today that he may secure the bountiful 
 tomorrow. The true Conservative declines both green apples 
 and rotten. The false Conservative, if he marches at all, 
 marches backward. He is crabbed and hard-shelled. He is 
 an antiquary and mediaevalist. He adores inertia and is an in 
 corrigible temporizer. "His strength is to sit still." His forte 
 is negation. He worships in a pantheon of mummies. To him 
 the present is but a pile of exhausted slag, and history is not a 
 nursery but a graveyard. He likes his manna pickled. Ex 
 perience is sacred to him as a means wherewith to rebuke 
 hope. He can only accept the prophecies that were long ago 
 fulfilled and the miracles that are memories. The best days 
 are past. He only believes memoriter, 
 
142 RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE 
 
 The Radical is the man who would go to the root. The tops 
 of things do not satisfy him. His watchword is " Thoro" He 
 is assertive, aggressive, intense, sweeping. He nails a besom 
 at his mast-head. He does not add precedents, and he for 
 swears formulas. He prefers any innovation rather than to 
 endure mortmain. Yeast is his element. He rides bare-backed 
 revolution. He wields the iconoclast s hammer, and loves axe 
 and plow and the rubbish-searching flame. 
 
 Routine men, who like yellow parchment and pale rubrica- 
 tions and chancery-tape and all that is canonical, resent the 
 radical as an intruder, an impracticable, and a fanatic. 
 
 But whether the Radical is a sheer destroyer or a sublime 
 reformer depends upon whether he too is farsighted or near 
 sighted, upon whether mere destruction or reconstruction is 
 his ultimate and goal. There is a crude and cruel temper 
 whose whole passion it is, not to extend boundaries but to 
 trample them, whose essence is lawless and anarchic. Upon 
 whatever plane of theory or affairs, he who thinks hard with 
 out thinking far, or moves fast but not firmly, is a danger and 
 may become a disaster. 
 
 No classification of men is ever absolutely accurate. No 
 man falls exactly within a single catagory. But the instance 
 of the partisan who disdains experience, who renounces the 
 sequence of causes, whose prospect scorns retrospect, who 
 mistakes a fancy for a revelation, who thinks his dividend can 
 decree its own divisor, who falls with hysterical rapture upon 
 the neck of "each new-hatched, unfledged comrade," he will 
 occur under a hundred names. He has his use as a scourge 
 and a warning the false Radical, who does not go to the root. 
 
 Of the radicalism of wild excess, clashing with the conserv 
 atism of stupid lethargy, the France of just a century ago was 
 a sufficient instance, the collision of two collossal madnesses ! 
 
 This then remains; that either type of opinion and method, 
 prevailing in isolation, emphasizes one, and but one, of the 
 two necessary and complementary phases of a full human ac- 
 
THE SCARCE AMBIDEXTROUS MAN 143 
 
 tivity. Man is to look both fore and aft. The best guns are 
 turreted and command both bow and stern. One can wisely 
 neglect neither the synthesis that groups time into a unity 
 "broadening down from precedent to precedent," nor the anal 
 ysis which subjects all phrases, customs, statutes, constitutions, 
 to reinvestigation. 
 
 The wild Radical puts out his torch at midnight, the blind 
 Conservative shakes his torch in the face of the noon; but he 
 who has disclaimed infallibility goes, at whatever hour, by the 
 best light that hour offers. There they sit, in senates, or on 
 thrones, robed in the livery of officialism, or brain-bound with 
 hoops of gem-set gold, waiting, or muttering "nothing can be 
 done," the "everlasting No," the non possumus of imbecility. 
 History puts them into its museums of fossils. George III 
 may stand for a specimen, or you may take the impotent in 
 decision of James Buchanan. And there too they rush frantic, 
 screaming that everything must be done at once ! Your 
 Wilkes s, Dantons, Garrisons. 
 
 But now and then an epoch advances which combines both 
 moods. It becomes crystalline and effective. The scarce and 
 ambidextrous man stands up to say, "Something can be done 
 now, if not everything, and what can be done, shall be." With 
 this man comes an era. In him "the old order changeth," as 
 the dried leaves fall before the outpushing buds, while their 
 tree lives and expands. Seeing both possible benefits and pos 
 sible harms, reckoning with both the obstacles and the helps, 
 enduring or daring, but never shirking, this man waits with a 
 patience that is not delay, and works with a sureness that is 
 not haste. The really large one lays the axe to the root that 
 he may conserve the truths blighted under the rank shadow of 
 a lie, and he also holds back impetuosity, "lest with the tares 
 it pull up the wheat also." 
 
 In writing upon the Long Parliament, (1:98), Macaulay has 
 a terse and balanced paragraph upon this matter, and he con 
 cludes "In the sentiments of both classes there is something 
 
144 RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE 
 
 to approve. But of both the best specimens will be found not 
 far from the common frontier." 
 
 Truly it is not in the frigid zone nor the torrid, but in the 
 temperate that the greatest events issue and endure. But, that 
 being said, it is not for dawdlers and sybarites to estimate the 
 stern resolve of an Elijah fronting Jezebel, of Elizabeth s son 
 denouncing Herodias, of Savonarola, and Beza, and Knox, and 
 Samuel Adams, and Phillips, and Sumner. Time-servers can 
 not realize the indelible influences of the commonwealth of 
 Cromwell, nor can tuft-hunters perceive that he was England s 
 truest king. When such deputy-sheriffs of Almighty God utter 
 their summons let men listen. "So shall He startle many 
 nations." " Kings shall shut their mouths at Him." These 
 radicals are conservative too, tho in a way no small calipers 
 can measure. But in a range far above these stand the calm, 
 comprehensive souls, who know how to work while waiting 
 and wait while working, and their appealing eyes, look past 
 the hour and the event, for the verdict of God. Plato and 
 Tacitus and the nameless writer of the book of Job stand there. 
 There are Angelo and Kepler. There, silent, tender, time- 
 abiding, upon a pedestal cut from the core of things, which no 
 man manufactured and no man can mar, Lincoln stands. 
 
 The spherical man is he who beyond the symbol seeks the 
 essence, who will have that, cost how it may, and will at any 
 cost keep it. 
 
 Supreme herein is He upon whose lips absolute righteous 
 ness and everlasting peace kissed each other, and to Him, 
 whether we would dare or endure, pity or denounce, cut down 
 or build up, to Him we turn for the complete example of 
 the symmetrical life the life in which all the traits of nobility 
 are coordinate and entire, in which wisdom is not cold nor 
 zeal roiled. And he who would follow Him, must be a mani 
 fold man, Conservative and Radical in one. 
 
 Under the domain and dominion of Christ, the old and the 
 new, instead of warring, wed. Judgment replaces and enthu 
 siasm restores. 
 
THE DUAL STRENGTH OF CHRIST 
 
 145 
 
 The two terms we are discussing are not absolute, but relative. 
 That is but a so-called conservatism, not really such, which 
 mistakes routine associations for the truth itself and identifies 
 the treasure with the earthen vessel, which prefers an empty 
 ark to a living Messiah. 
 
 The true conserver is a Radical, in desiring to keep the real 
 thing. The perennial second commandment is dearer to him 
 than any transient device. Form is to him a utility and life 
 alone is holy. He would preserve what is older than all form 
 in any form that will hold it and would rather have a quart of 
 truth in a square cup than a pint of truth in a round one. 
 Christ was such. His balance was far superhuman. He whip 
 ped the traffickers from the temple, yet predicted that temples 
 overthrow. He rebuked petrified tradition, yet declared, "I 
 came not to to destroy but to fulfil." To the Pharisees He 
 seemed a rash leveller, to the Herodians a futile moralist. 
 His very disciples often wanted to hasten or to restrain Him: 
 but He would neither hurry nor delay. 
 
 He came to set men at variance, to kindle a fire/ to send 
 a sword, to say "every plant that My Father hath not planted 
 shall be rooted up," "he that is not for us is against us": but, 
 and also, He considered the bruised reed-pen, and the smould 
 ering flax-wick, the little ones, the lost sheep, and turning 
 pride upside down, He put in the beatitudes a premium upon 
 what the world despises, and He said " he that is not against 
 us is on our part." Evolution and revolution wrought together. 
 Positive yet patient, daring yet cautious, never hedging and 
 never hasting, He was outwardly all that men did not expect 
 and would not comprehend, and inwardly all that they needed. 
 He never snarled and he never sneered. He never mitigated 
 His meaning nor receded from his program. 
 
 He affirmed principles and left them to work out their appli 
 cations. He was too slow for some and too swift for others 
 bi-partisanship scouted him. He was so supreme that no one 
 measured Him. President Hyde well says, "the average good 
 
146 RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE 
 
 man is equally at war with the bad man who is below him and 
 the progressively good man who is above him. The reformer 
 and the criminal are about eqnally obnoxious to the man of 
 average goodness and intelligence. The prophets and the be 
 trayers are equally odious and promiscuously stoned. The 
 Saviour is crucified between two thieves." 
 
 Still the church is but semi-christian in its emancipation 
 from what is seen and temporary. It still but begins to know 
 its mission as Christ s ideal of society. We fail to see that the 
 husk is precious only for the kernel s sake, and that when the 
 wheat is gone what is left is straw and chaff. The old is good 
 while it covers and contains the new, after that it is a dry pod. 
 
 John the Baptist was one mighty radical who illustrated the 
 law that they who wield sharp tools must feel them: but that 
 axe of his laid to the upas-tree of hollow words was the recon 
 structive agent the time was most in need of, and his lonely 
 voice was the herald of Israel s King. 
 
 Every great preserver is called a defoimer till he is gone. 
 Men are prone to garnish the sepulchers of their prophets 
 with epitaphs: but the prophets with epithets. The many feel 
 more secure when those who compel them to think are under 
 a good-sized slab ! 
 
 It remains for us, if we would neither tear nor raffle this 
 seamless text, to hold to the fluidity of God s purpose and 
 providence, and to see the sacredness of all its conduits 
 whether present or past. They are neither identical nor inde 
 pendent. Truth is perennial, and we hold what we have of it 
 both as the heirs of our parents and as the trustees of our 
 children. 
 
 That age is most important which does the most to empha 
 size what is of permanent importance. The wise man per 
 ceives both what is permanent and what is progressive, neither 
 unduly preponderating. The new and the old do not impeach 
 one another. Origins, means, and ends all are coordinate. 
 Revelation is a process by which what is vital and seminal 
 
NEW SKIES FOR NEW DAYS 147 
 
 constantly adapts and enlarges its new expressions. Finality 
 is death, and prejudice the rigor mortis. 
 
 Providence unfolds the book. It is not a kaleidoscope for 
 a toy, but a telescope for a tool, and it looks deeper than any 
 of us is aware. 
 
 Christ planted a thousand seeds that now are forests. Under 
 that Argus-eyed, Atlas-shouldered, Briareus-handed leader 
 both the intensive and the extensive life find scope. Under 
 that calm and conquering dominion we are not to be terrified 
 at ideas that surpass and supersede our inherited schemes. 
 One could not, for instance, crowd our modern (and still ten 
 tative) conception of missionary duty into the ideals of the 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 Slavery, feudalism, the serfdom of one sex, have felt the 
 touch of Christ s sceptre, and the cowardice of wealth, as the 
 envy of want all usages without reason, are yet to own His 
 ever germinal Kingdom. 
 
 We are to imitate faith (fidelity), not fashions. As our for 
 bears did, so must we, tell what we learn of God in our own 
 words ! We must mint our own coin-current. We are not in 
 vited to repeat the wile of the Gibeonites (Joshua gth) and 
 provide ourselves with what is dry and mouldy ! Miracles are 
 not repeated, greater ones are wrought. He who accustoms 
 himself to God s Spirit finds the old renewed in larger wonders. 
 God s latency is all in all. He does not exhaust. Life is in 
 cessant innovation. It is only when one stops going that his 
 horizon and perspectives no longer change. " Tempora non 
 animnm" "They change their skies but not their souls who 
 traverse the ocean." New seas are sailed under new stars. 
 It is not the familiar scene but the intimate companion that 
 makes life s journey serene. If you are scholars of the great 
 Teacher, He will give you both review lessons and advance, 
 and, outgrowing your garments, you will find that your appre 
 hension of today will not fit you tomorrow, certainly not the 
 day after tomorrow. " Remember Lot s wife ! " 
 
148 RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE 
 
 We are put by our God into a day that forces us upon Him. 
 Much does our Lord s word apply to our very time. It is a 
 strong detergent to "every disciple unto the kingdom of 
 Heaven." 
 
 The giant is out of the bottle ! The era of analysis is not 
 accidental, it is providential. Man needed it. The church 
 needed it. God awakens us from "opiate of usage." It is a 
 revival. The ages in which the status is unchanged are wintry 
 ages. In scholarship, legislation, society, religion, the motion 
 less times are the moribund. Life must either be moribund or 
 more abundant ! 
 
 A time like our own is deplored by those who dread any 
 change and adored by those who love all change: but, if sane, 
 we will neither neglect nor abuse its disciplines. We may 
 neither surrender to every challenge, nor reject every claim. 
 Truth is not shaken by either assault or doubt. We can do 
 nothing against it. Magna et prevelabit spite of harsh at 
 tack or feeble defense. 
 
 Just as to a man walking too fast upon a city s crowded side 
 walk, every other man is too slow, and to a man walking too 
 slowly every other man is too fast, so the pace of the world is 
 a limitation which we can somewhat affect, but to which, to 
 affect it, we must somewhat conform. We are to advance, if 
 effectively, neither too slowly nor too fast. We are to have to 
 utter new things and old, old things and new. The web if un 
 folded will show that every true age has pressed home new 
 woof upon the old warp. We cannot do more than to utter 
 our own convictions, and we may not dare do less, both 
 aggressive and circumspect, neither timid nor tumid. 
 
 The processes of readjustment compel the processes of 
 restatement, and both these processes come often with clamor 
 and always with pain: but only those wring their hands whose 
 assurances are outside of God. There are half-men, who only 
 see one way, and there are ages dominated by such men that 
 are only half- ages; but the whole man, and so the whole age, 
 
OUR SOULS UNDER MARCHING ORDERS 149 
 
 looks both ways, and sailing by the North star, or by the 
 Southern Cross, is piloted by Him who sees all and will show 
 all. Holding to Him the genuine soul can never shiver nor 
 shrink. 
 
 What we all need is less anxiety over precedent and more 
 confidence in God. In the trust that history is prophecy 
 that God is here that He still steers the world, the deep 
 seers of our century have spoken. "In Memoriam " voices 
 this. Whittier is the bard of "that great law, which makes 
 the past time serve today." 
 
 " Whate r of good the old time had 
 
 Is living still. * * * 
 God works in all things. All obey 
 His first propulsions from the night. 
 Ho, wake and watch ! The world is grey 
 
 With morning light." 
 
 Wordsworth and Robert Browning are such poet-seers. 
 
 No, "this is not our rest" for body or mind. We are in 
 transitu. Our souls are under marching orders, and lodge 
 only in tents. 
 
 What this word of Christ should fix in us is that truth is 
 eternally young. Revelation, nature, man, providence, yield 
 perpetual increase. The encyclopedia of knowledge must be 
 supplemented with annual volumes. 
 
 Pondering the inexhaustibleness of the treasures of God hid 
 in Christ, richer, deeper, wider, with every practical test of 
 them, a truly reverent philosophy of this world, as His, must 
 take on continually grander proportions, and must speak with 
 ever mightier convictions and ever better arguments. 
 
 No true science remains stationary. Geology, chemistry, 
 astronomy, biology, even history, what changes of method 
 and result have these undergone in three generations ! But 
 the objects have not changed, nor have the necessary mathe 
 matics of thought changed. 
 
 World and event prove Him the Interpreter of time and 
 
150 RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE 
 
 eternity. The more He does, the more He both displays and 
 confirms. His words are not Dead Seas: but wells of living 
 waters. The " Heir of all things," His latest words are His 
 largest. Who shall debar His illimitable and crescent sway! 
 Upon Him all converges, and from Him all radiates. The old 
 and the new blend in Him. 
 
 May every one of us be a true disciple to that kingdom 
 where the old story bursts into the new song! 
 
 Men of the Class of 95: 
 
 This commencement is an ending: but far more is it a be 
 ginning. Poetic fitness, as well as convenience, long ago 
 transferred it from the autumn of the college year to the sum 
 mer. Your real curriculum is not behind you, but before. 
 
 You are now to translate and parse that " Sunt quos curri 
 cula pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat" The Olympic 
 dust is yonder. The college has been but your introduction 
 to the " collegisse" You are whirling up to the line, and are 
 all but ready for the word. Let me add my voice to the send 
 ing cheer. 
 
 When you come panting and straining to the finish "the 
 goal nicely-avoided by the glowing wheels, and the noble 
 palm" the voices that shout "Well done!" will not sound 
 here! In that eternal commencement, having " finished your 
 course with joy," may it be true of you each and all, in a far 
 deeper sense than bilthe Horace ever considered " evekit 
 ad Deos\" Bethink yourselves that you are charioteers "a 
 Bcarpov to the universe and to angels." I am sure that you 
 would admonish the new-fledged Sophomores here who are 
 kindly translating my little Latin to the maidens beside them 
 ( " junctacque Nymphis gratia dece?ites") to bestir them 
 selves even already for that third summer hence when they too 
 shall gather taut the reins for their life race. 
 
 Goodbys are always trite: but not the less are they solemn. 
 Already, to two of your company to Frank Burrowes, who 
 
THE LATEST LIVING GRADUATE OF 95 151 
 
 died in September, 93, and to John Myers, jr., who died in 
 July, 94, you have given the irrevocable farewell. Forty-six 
 men began the work of your class four years ago, twenty-nine 
 men complete the roll now. Never, after this week, will so 
 many of you gather under one roof ! In groups you will 
 return to the dear hillside of your common love: but little by 
 little your ranks will gather closer, until, perhaps in 1955, you 
 will hold your last class meeting of one ! He will come, the 
 relic of you all. He will ride up the hill he can then no longer 
 climb. He will, with some young guide, not to be born for 
 thirty years yet, observe the stately new buildings, and people 
 the old with you and your comrades of the moss-grown I9th 
 century. Perhaps he will say a kindly word at the mound 
 where one shall be resting who for three years (under what 
 ever college vicissitudes) was a good friend of 95. He will 
 look out upon the lovely slopes, and beyond the curving hills 
 
 the boys will gather in their caps and gowns, and cheer, 
 Boom Rah ! Boom Rah ! Who is he ? 
 
 Vive La ! Vive La ! XCV ! 
 
 and then he will go down into the valley! 
 
 But in between this day and that work lies your real 
 standing is to be registered. It is a good time to live ! Live 
 well ! Live boldly ! We shall watch you from this signal sta 
 tion. You will be welcomed back, with your honors new and 
 old. The white spire and its far-flashing point will guide you 
 home again. The bell will greet you. The old well will bub 
 ble for you. You will send on your boys for the nineteen- 
 twenties. All good to you in the strenuous years upon which 
 you enter. Be Christ s men ! Accept every one of you His 
 name, His present guerdon of self-sacrifice, and graduate 
 having at last "having obtained the good degree," and all of 
 you with high honor! 
 
 And this be our goodby. 
 
Cree&fi 
 
 THE ANNUAL SERMON BEFORE THE 
 
 ALUMNI OF AUBURN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 MAY 9 , 1895 
 
 " For we know in part" I Corinthians 13:9. 
 
 NEITHER agnosticism nor omniscience ! We at once know 
 and do not know; we know something, not everything. Ac 
 cording to our knowledge we are to "prophecy," or proclaim. 
 Our present degree is at once a mighty incentive to speech, 
 and a limitation to make reason modest. We are not to be 
 irresolute, and neither are we to assume to be infallible. En 
 ergy is our duty, but finality belongs to God. 
 
 The Apostle Peter left this catholic admonition: "Grow in 
 grace and in knowledge." These growths, if they are genuine, 
 are coincident. Growth is the proof of life. But growth means 
 outgrowth not by loss but by gain, by comprehension. The 
 measure of every spiritual soul must be followed by the plus 
 sign. While the present is stated, it is already past. The 
 links of life are an endless and increasing series. "Tomorrow 
 shall (under God) be as today and more abundantly;" the 
 latest the largest; the best wine last. God s "increasing pur 
 pose" leads the ductile mind into ever more stately man 
 sions. " For we know in part." And to know that we know 
 in part is the condition of knowing more. It puts us safe from 
 both immobility and confusion. 
 
 With the hope that you will open your hearts to this quick 
 ening thought, I ask you to reckon with its bearings upon the 
 unclosed question of Creeds. 
 
 Fellow Alumni of Auburn, we are children of a school whose 
 genius is that of both conservatism and freedom. This place 
 
STOLIDITY IS HERESY 
 
 153 
 
 is not noted either for toadstools or for trilobites. We stand 
 solidly for truth and for valid tests of it and for all of both 
 truth and test that we can get. You will hear me patiently 
 and candidly, as I submit my thesis to your sober and devout 
 consideration. 
 
 I, for my part, am sure that one who would appreciate "the 
 law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ " as a law of progress in 
 both appreciation and affirmation, must renounce that mental 
 inertia and laziness whose indulgence dishonors " the abund 
 ance of revelations." Lazy thought is always sleazy thought. 
 
 Every man must earn his theological assets, and in his own 
 idiom declare his own conviction. Faith and the hope it 
 nourishes are what none can lend and none borrow. Love s in 
 tuitions come at love s price. " Sayest thou this of thyself, or 
 did some others tell it thee of me? " " It is the heart," said 
 Henry B. Smith, " that makes the theologian," and the heart is 
 never satisfied with " the things that are behind." And so it 
 yearns toward the unretracted pledge of our Lord: "Ye shall 
 see greater things than these." Expectancy is cardinal. To 
 regard the tuition of the Eternal Spirit as a closed canon de 
 nies the immanence of Christ and regards revelation as a 
 mathematical crystal, rather than as a palpitating heart. 
 
 To " know as we ought to know," is to watch the bearings 
 of the figures upon that growing web, upon whose unbroken 
 warp manifold wisdom smites home the woof of the present. 
 These nineteen centuries are not fringe; they are part of the 
 pattern. Providence is the interpreter. Deeper and deeper 
 strike the roots, as the boughs spread wider and wider. The 
 perpetual Leader " takes the things of Christ " and shows their 
 unremitting increase. Far from being orthodox, it is not even 
 devout not to expect new demonstrations of Christ in the ap 
 plication of His exhaustless precepts to new problems. So far 
 we have seen " but a part of his ways, and many such things 
 are with Him." Discipleship can never be stationary. Living 
 waters run. Revelation is not a pond but a stream. 
 
154 CREEDS 
 
 No one transcript says the last word concerning the dis 
 closures of God. Eternity will be forever new with discov 
 eries. Not only are we now, but we will always be under the 
 dawn. Time and Earth speed to their afternoon; but knowl 
 edge is a morning whose sun shall rise while God lives. The 
 desiring heart bounds with joy to know that holy and ardent 
 curiosity shall never weary or want, and that love shall never 
 climb its last summit nor utter its last surprised rapture of 
 adoration. 
 
 These holy books are not only supremely important history, 
 they are also specimens of God s method of His continuity of 
 increase. 
 
 Everything that is here was first written upon human souls. 
 The book is the corollary of that. The inspiration preceded 
 the record. The parchments were memoranda of God s per 
 sonal imprimatur upon persons spirit answering to spirit, 
 the deep within calling to the deep above. 
 
 Progress of teaching is displayed from the earliest leaf of 
 scripture to the latest, and the history of doctrine in the church 
 is full of new and newer apprehension of this living oracle. 
 That the book is God s book is shown in that we never learn 
 the last of it. And that the real church is God s church is 
 shown in that it is a school whence no true pupil ever grad 
 uates. The songs of degrees will have no end. 
 
 Theology is man s philosophy about God. It takes this book 
 of the ages and rearranges its materials into other octavos. It 
 fuses these ores and coins them under its own date. It is an 
 excellent, indeed an indispensable process and result; but not 
 being infallible, it cannot be final. Each new volume grows 
 out of, and is, more or less consciously, educed by the special 
 exigencies and needs of that time that writes it. 
 
 Each age is a crucible, and while the mold is provisional 
 and transitional, the material is the main thing. The book is 
 needed, is written, is read and goes to its quiet shelf. It does 
 its work for its own period and whatever is essential has its 
 
BETTER HEED, BETTER CREED 155 
 
 vital result in the souls of men, there and nowhere else to live. 
 Every statement of truth is good, when it makes the way for 
 one that is better. 
 
 I am well aware of its perverse use by some, but neverthe 
 less, I am willing to say with emphasis those lines of England s 
 greatest laureate: 
 
 " Our little systems have their day, 
 
 They have their day and cease to be, 
 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 
 And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 
 
 At once with the systematization of our present, and there 
 fore partial, knowledge, we have introduced a new arrange 
 ment. The scientific method has displaced the natural and 
 vital. The sphere has become a cube. It is the problem of 
 squaring the circle. Each new pen adds new figures to the 
 statement. They may and should increase the approximation; 
 but the fraction, however far extended from the decimal point, 
 can never be completed. The scientific method is of indisput 
 able value, but only when its limitations are recognized, when 
 the evidential never usurps the intuitional. It is corroborative, 
 but it is indirect. Fallible hands always wield fallible instru 
 ments. Theology is, I gladly consent, " the queen of sciences," 
 but knowledge is the king. He who really knows a thing, 
 knows more than he can scientifically demonstrate. 
 
 The inherent danger of systematic theology is rationalism. 
 I do not say the vice, I say the danger. The danger only 
 becomes a vice when we deny or forget it. Rationalism is the 
 vanity of human logic, declaring itself independent and all- 
 sufficing. Orthodox speculation may be, and so far as its 
 manner goes, often is just as rationalistic as heretical spec 
 ulation. 
 
 Our tools are not exact enough so to square the ends of our 
 propositions that we can pile them indefinitely. Just because 
 of our confidence in Biblical premises, we must take as tenta 
 tive, the conclusions that mix them with our minor premises. 
 
I6 CREEDS 
 
 Deduction is insecure after it builds past two or three stories. 
 I prefer to dwell on the ground floor; upon "the things that 
 cannot be shaken." The sorites is man-made. To say more 
 than God is as great heresy as to say less. 
 
 The Bible contains doctrine, but it is not a system of doctrine. 
 If it is a system, then any other system is impertinent. I 
 believe the Bible warrants systems of doctrine; but that the 
 quarry is God s and their architecture ours. 
 
 Two buildings may honestly try to build in all their mater 
 ials: but one will be Roman, and another Greek, and others 
 still, Gothic, or modern English. Each may be a mental shelter, 
 none exhausts possibility of combination. A map of the 
 White Mountains from Mt. Washington will be one map, from 
 Mt. Jefferson another. Each will be true if it includes all 
 it can see. The Bible is not a map, it is a mountain range. 
 The maps help to describe the hills; but the hills are the end, 
 and the maps, means. The vital ways of revelation are not 
 mechanical, nor yet metaphysical. The apostles taught and 
 wrote most naturally, not in the way of legal treatise or con 
 tract. They were direct rather than diplomatic, narrative 
 rather than discursive. Their ardor was not on the defensive, 
 and their very unguardedness was convincing. Their accuracy 
 surpassed all verbalism, and their harmony was concord rather 
 than unison. They are not collusive, but complemental. And 
 so they are to be taken breadthwise and lifewise. To seize 
 " the analogy of the faith;" both as to method and as to mat 
 ter, we must take it as they gave it, straining nothing to fit into 
 a "scheme," and contented with Paul to "know in part." 
 This and this only, is to magnify God s word above man s. 
 " Many other things did Jesus which are not written in this 
 book," and I suppose we all adoringly avow that He is still 
 doing. Good faith denies that there is such a thing as profane 
 history; all history is sacred save to profane men. 
 
 Biblical Theology, in distinction from Systematic Theology, 
 keeps close to the sources. The Bible is the referee; back and 
 
EXPECTANCY IS EVANGELICAL 157 
 
 ever back " to the law and the testimony." All books are good 
 that bend to this " Divine Library," as Jerome called it. The 
 technical method of definition is, in terms, finite. It shuts out, 
 as well as shuts in. A fence has necessary uses; sometimes 
 even a barbed-wire fence. It restrains beasts and makes a 
 good roost for birds. For men it should have plenty of gates 
 in it, swinging easily both ways, seeing that in the matter of 
 truth God alone has eminent domain. "Easement" is public 
 right. 
 
 Reverence for God s demonstrations, which are truly biolog 
 ical rather than morphological, which in all fulness took the 
 nature of man as their elect vehicle, this reverence, refusing 
 to be wise above what He says and does, accepts the human 
 paraphrase as partial and evanescent. The seal of our Presby 
 terian part of God s church is an open Bible. Let it be opened 
 wider, and let our spirits open toward it, always remembering 
 that, in the Westminster words, " The purest churches under 
 heaven are subject to both mixture and error." We must not 
 dare to assume to know what God has wifhheld. Logic is 
 pallid beside the changing emphasis of life. Scholarship is 
 only genuine when it keeps itself synonymous with disciple- 
 ship. Statement advances under the tuition of God and de 
 mands restatement. 
 
 " The fathers had not all of Thee; 
 
 New births are in thy grace; 
 All open to our souls shall be 
 Thy Spirit s hiding place." 
 
 "Take heed lest there shall be any one that maketh spoil of 
 you thro his philosophy and vain deceit, after the rudiments 
 of the world, and not after Christ." 
 
 So said the apostle, (Col. 2:8), who boldly wrote, "We know 
 in part," imperfectly. 
 
 No chemical formula can state what a child is to his mother. 
 As soon as we redistribute truth, we have missed an inherent 
 somewhat, that eludes analysis. We must not identify manni- 
 
158 CREEDS 
 
 kin with man. The vital secret evades the clinic. The law of 
 life refuses an equation. 
 
 Analysis is like turning a stocking inside out to mend it; 
 synthesis is like turning it back to wear it. But it is not quite 
 the same. When we divide and recombine, the result carries 
 the marks of the process; a certain original naturalness neces 
 sarily has escaped. One can never unpack and perfectly re 
 pack an egg. He can perhaps restore the matter but not the 
 arrangement. It can be eaten but it will not hatch. Bees do 
 not hover over artificial flowers. Partially, (of course!) all this 
 can suggest that while wisdom furnished the outfit of a prepo 
 sitional theology, that wisdom was revealed in a more excel 
 lent way. The permission to philosophize is also the inculca 
 tion of humility. In the word, as in the world, suggestion is 
 shoreless; truth is fluid, not frozen molten, not molded. 
 Here is a man, not anatomy; here are wells, not cisterns; tides, 
 not ripples; a sky full fathomlessly full of stars, not a 
 stellar map, which is a tabled surface without depths and back 
 grounds. 
 
 Botany has its merits, but its herbarium is not a garden. 
 We want it, but we want more the perfume of revelation, 
 rooted and growing. Our laboratories can never supersede 
 the chemistry of May. Creation is a poem, translatable (partly) 
 into prose, but appealing to feeling as prose cannot. God is a 
 poet and man is His epic. Euclid and Aristotle furnish one 
 much, but John Zebedee, and Paul, offer more. 
 
 Even heroic bronze and marble borrow from the beholder. 
 Their metonomy is only vindicated in his memory. Any 
 theodicy that is not punctuated with interrogation marks re 
 quires that the proof-reader shall insert exclamations. 
 
 Our catenas may include more or less of the priceless attar, 
 but they are all brittle vessels and some to honor and some to 
 dishonor. No single period has exhausted God or man. 
 There are always surds. Whatever is alive is mobile. Any 
 theory that announces its completeness digs its own grave. 
 
BETTER TELESCOPE, MORE STARS 159 
 
 Identity, with its personal relations, continues, but our 
 bodies die daily. The man never outgrows his father, while 
 he puts away many childish things clothes and their fashions, 
 notions and their phrases, and so at last he attains true child- 
 likeness and " flnds the blessedness of being little." And the 
 ology, unless it has exchanged plasticity for ossification, 
 retires from its volumes this and that conjectural and tenuous 
 paragraph and rewrites its translation with pain and purging. 
 To say "there can be nothing new in theology," is either to 
 dismiss its assistance, or to make of it a graven image and 
 imitate the stagnant decrees of the Council of Trent. It is to 
 say, "I have found out the Almighty to perfection," and is as 
 impious as it would be to say "there can be nothing new in 
 astronomy ! " Each better telescope has that boast in derision. 
 No, the glory of this cathedral is that it is unfinished. The 
 soundest theology knows that it is the quotient, or rather the 
 multiple of truth and experience. The obiter dicta of men too 
 often deny the authenticity of inspiration and lead toward 
 Deism. When we go with the Living God, we change our 
 maps. It is true of Him, but never of us "there is no paral 
 lax, nor eclipse." 
 
 By no post-mortem, of the third century or of the sixteenth, 
 are we to find what man is to believe concerning God, or what 
 duties God requires of man; but by heeding the ever-consist 
 ent and ever-persistent Spirit of Christ. Faith cannot be 
 copied or copyrighted. As we come out of the damp and in 
 door air of man-made explanations, our lungs and eyes both 
 do better. Having sat at the feet of Gamaliel, we fall on our 
 faces before the noon-transcendent Christ and re-learn. 
 
 It is just so far as opinion corrects itself by His word, as 
 "the only infallible rule," that it has any claim to speak or be 
 heard. The " unadultered milk," is " the simplicity that is in 
 Christ." We should be grateful to all serious and modest 
 souls who have handled the problems of divinity, and we must 
 " imitate their faith," by handling these for ourselves. Their 
 
160 CREEDS 
 
 warrant is ours, too. They acknowledged no mortmain and 
 we cannot. No syllabus is an ultimatum; it is rather like the 
 catalog of a living library, accurate to date. It may be a good 
 index, but never can exhaust all the cross-references. 
 
 That catholic man and tireless student, Henry B. Smith, 
 said well: "He who asserts that there is no truth in past sys 
 tems and thinks to make one wholly original, and he who as 
 serts that the whole of truth, in its most perfect form, is given 
 us in the formulas of the past, and only there, each of them is 
 equally distant from the just equilibrium. * * The whole 
 history of theology gives but the attempt to reproduce the 
 contents of scripture in the forms needed by the different 
 times in which the different systems were made." 
 
 Those weighty syllables contain what I mean, that the church 
 militant is a church marching, that as the sun rises the shad 
 ows shift and shorten, that all ongoing swings the horizon. 
 No two battles are the same, even if issued upon the same 
 field. Certain defences are abandoned when the enemy 
 attacks flank or rear. Silenced batteries and spiked guns are 
 worth no further powder. Change of strategy is not surren 
 der. They used to complain of Bonaparte that he violated 
 the accustomed evolutions of battle. It was that supreme 
 genius in tactics who said " the army that stays in its entrench 
 ments beaten." Surely one is not disloyal to the constitution 
 of these United States, because heartily approving its amend 
 ments. Our bright flag is not the same that waved first on 
 land at Fort Stanwix, then at Trenton, upon Lake Erie and 
 over Fort Sumter: but we love it because it expresses growth 
 in its revision. We keep the stripes and make room for all 
 the stars that come. Franklin and Adams, Hamilton and 
 Madison and Marshall were sturdy patriots: but they were 
 not the last of the line. 
 
 Well then, at last I approach my" main contention and I 
 would express my conviction of the proper distinction be 
 tween theology and creed. It is one of uses. A creed should 
 
FOR SIMPLICITY AND DIRECTNESS I$I 
 
 express attitude as well as opinion, and it must be portable. 
 Creeds are guidons and banners. They are symbols and 
 standards. They should be emblems not encyclopedias 
 titles rather than indexes. The best are those that are the 
 most vivid and pity, writ in large letters and short words. A 
 good creed affirms facts not inferences. The Te Deum which 
 I would call the best confession of faith since that of the Apos 
 tle Thomas, is not abstract nor is it panoramic. Moreover it 
 is lyrical. The best creed will be adoring rather than explan 
 atory. It will be positive and personal and will prompt, and 
 perhaps supply, anthems. Ascription is a higher and more 
 influential tribute than subscription. Creeds are the landmarks 
 of great campaigns. They have always punctuated the pro 
 gress of the church. The elaborate amplifications of Augsburg, 
 Dort, and the rest showed the competency of the reformation 
 to antagonize its terrible foes. I admire the massive masonry 
 and revere it services; these are bastions; but while I am im 
 pressed, I am not attracted. " I cannot go with these for I 
 have not proved them." 
 
 The regulative principle of these great symbols, is the non- 
 finality of all human statements. In their bold affirmative- 
 ness and determined revision they emphasize a progress to 
 which they could and would set no period. 
 
 That venerable chapter will not be erased. It is exemplary. 
 What they saw they said. 
 
 Holmes says "Science is the art of packing knowledge." 
 The folios and quartos should be kept accessible: but they do 
 not forbid the handier duodecimo. There can be little doubt 
 that the New England primer has done more educating than 
 Turretin. There is nothing holy about a polysyllable. I plead 
 for shorter statements not shallower, for clearness not weak 
 ness, for a closer front, for increased distinctness. The church 
 is the servant and trustee of a definite gospel. She knows 
 whom she has believed, and is bound both to confess Christ 
 before men, and evermore to ask "what think ye of HIM?" 
 
162 CREEDS 
 
 Christianity is a life based upon commitment to Christ as the 
 Saviour from sin. This is the calyx and cover. Let us stand 
 at this centre and so have word, work, and worship all concen 
 tric and all Christian, not incidentally but elementally. Prov 
 idence is the radius swung about that point! Assuredly that 
 will be most Patro-centric which is most Christo-centric. To 
 the credulity of infidelity, to the dogmatic agnosticism which 
 denies the knowledge of God, to the bigotry of indiffer 
 ence, and to the sharp-set creed of creedlessness, we are con 
 fidently and constantly to affirm the love of God in Christ as 
 the law of life. 
 
 That " liberalism " which would resolve the church into a 
 debating society and change the thesis of the cross into hy 
 pothesis chooses to renounce the sweep and summons of the 
 Christian facts. 
 
 That is slovenly thinking that wants to read time by a "lib 
 eral" chronometer, weigh duty in a "liberal" scales, and steer 
 by a "liberal" compass. We do not want less fibre, but more. 
 We would not abandon our positions, but defend them with 
 modern ordnance. We would have statements that in all their 
 length and breadth can stand not only the dialectical test, but 
 what is far more searching, the homiletical test. 
 
 There is a cheap and glib assault upon the Westminster con 
 fession by those who have not read it, and to whom serious 
 and careful thought is so irksome, that they would not appre 
 ciate it if they had. Here is a declaration and testimony whose 
 influence witnesses the learning and wisdom of its sponsors. 
 It was the precipitate of a great age. It has vigor and sap. 
 It is vertebrated and erect. It was written between prayers. 
 It gave a sheet-anchor to England and Scotland, too, when 
 church and state were all adrift. It has stood so long and 
 served so well because it was so good and such an advance 
 upon its predecessors. It has been so conservative because it 
 was so positive. It is strong because it denies so much error, 
 and explains so much truth. 
 
FLYING ARTILLERY NEEDED 163 
 
 I would neither undervalue nor overvalue it. "We know in 
 part." It cannot be that the last statement under that mo 
 mentous verb credo (in which man should be at once at his 
 loftiest and his lowliest) was written in 1649 I can assent 
 bona fide and con amore to that instrument as containing a 
 system of doctrine warranted by the Scripture. I cannot say 
 that it is the system Scripture teaches; for Scripture does not 
 teach by system nor can I say that it is the only system Scrip 
 ture warrants; for that would be to denounce the point of view 
 of other Christian brethren who by their fruits may be known 
 to be as near to God as we are, and yet who have built their 
 philosophical house another way. I like it far better than any 
 other system man has so far made; but it is a little long for a 
 creed. Systems will do as garrison flags 36 feet long; creeds 
 are better at the regimental measure of 6 feet and 6 inches. 
 
 I would therefore see a new statement to avoid both the 
 deficiencies and the redundancies of this. My feeling is that 
 many of its inferences are extra-Biblical and some infra-Biblical. 
 It does not do equal justice to the different summits in God s 
 range of attributes. But I do not desire to criticise this house 
 that has sheltered so many of my ancestors. I do not want to 
 see it tinkered, mangled, desecrated, changed from its identity 
 into some dichromatic eccentricity which would have the faults 
 of two periods with the strength of neither. 
 
 I make no apology for referring to the attempt and failure 
 of four years ago. That movement toward a so-called revision 
 failed for many reasons and with few to mourn, When the 
 committee said to the presbyteries, "how will this do?" the 
 more part replied, "it will not do." 
 
 There were some who wanted nothing changed and who 
 were satisfied that the Confession was good for 250 years 
 longer. 
 
 There were some who wanted numerous verbal changes and 
 some paragraphs modified, but who liked the philosophical 
 method and held to its permanent adequacy. 
 
164 CREEDS 
 
 And there were some who thought that all revision would 
 be either too much or too little; who thought a brief, ardent 
 and profoundly evangelical statement could well be made now 
 for actual uses in our churches, not one in twenty of whose 
 members know practically anything of the Westminster con 
 fession. A true creed should be popular rather than official. 
 It should be both handy and hearty. 
 
 Of those who then urged the need of such a creed I am 
 thankful to say I was one, and I have ventured to broach this 
 subject now, because I firmly believe the recent postpone 
 ments have but increased the demand and the duty. 
 
 It should be written in full recognitiou of the value of past 
 creeds and of their necessary temporariness. It should not 
 attempt to sketch the whole coast line of present Christian 
 knowledge; bui should present all the great lighthouse head 
 lands. It should be warm, thankful, and martial, a "confession 
 of hope " too, one that could be joyfully used and clearly 
 understood in Christian worship, and that would furnish an 
 entirely adequate test of official loyalty to the everlasting gos 
 pel and the ever-crescent kingdom of God s dear Son. The 
 seventeenth century wrote its noble chapter and said what it 
 honestly believed. It was definitive then. For its time it was 
 generous and conciliatory. Why should not we do as much 
 for our day? Why should we imitate Pharoah s command to 
 the midwives and if the cry is that of a man-child, kill it ? 
 Even Canute set down his own foot as a mark for the sea. 
 True reverence is not afraid and does not face two ways. It 
 thanks God for the wonderfully augmented apparatus and for 
 the intense, sanctified study of two centuries. Only bourbon- 
 ism in religion thinks that God s clocks were all stopped at the 
 time of the Long Parliament. Even Rome has new popes. De 
 claring them infallible, she has not yet decreed them non-mor 
 tal ! The pillar of flame is still vanguard and rereward of the 
 church, and only anchylosis stiffening of the joints refuses 
 to march. 
 
AN AGE UNABLE TO WRITE ITS CREED, UNFIT TO SAY ONE 165 
 
 That stormy Westminster assembly did its noble best, and 
 the liberty of the gospel "strenous liberty," permits and in 
 vites us to a blessing we greatly need, that of actually telling 
 what we actually hold, and flinging a flag to all the winds of 
 heaven, without ambiguity and without anachronism. I say with 
 Baxter, "Do not make more necessary articles than God hath 
 done. Let no man s writings or the judgment of any party be 
 made that test." I refer to the wise words of Calvin (in the 
 fourth book of his Institutes) concerning church councils. 
 "When the voice of God (one has well said) ceases to speak, 
 silence becomes the only orthodoxy. "Credo" is to be said in 
 the present tense, not the imperfect, nor the future-perfect ; 
 in the indicative mood, not in the subjunctive or imperative ! 
 I do not plead for the apocopation of statement ; but on the 
 contrary for one so clear that it shall tempt no one toward 
 demoralizing sophistication and sublimation. I believe there 
 never was an age better fitted to write its creed. But fit or not, 
 and under the scornful challenges to our sincerity, it is pusil 
 lanimous not to be willing to try. A period that is unwilling 
 to write its real creed is unworthy to say any ! Brief, but not 
 bare; ample, but not prolix; neither indefinite nor drastic; not 
 pointing like a rusted vane to the windward of yesterday; 
 playing neither at Procrustes nor at Tantatus; neither with 
 drawing the offense of the cross, nor offering fully to solve all 
 its universal meanings such a creed the world would wel 
 come and respect. It could mightily bless the Presbyterian 
 Church to write its manifesto of what it was prepared to live 
 for and die for ! We must not expect more of a creed than it 
 can do. It cannot excuse us from hard thinking, nor from 
 hard work in carrying it out to the proof of life. I hail the 
 movement to state the actual present faith of the church as the 
 sign that the Omnipresent and Supreme Spirit is leading to 
 ward other Pentecosts. Mental growing pains are the proof of 
 His contact. The Rock will stand. It is not in jeopardy. 
 Neither violent foes nor timid friends can shake it. God will 
 
166 CREEDS 
 
 teach us His own accent if we will ask His approval only and 
 utter all that He gives. This alert, sensitive, confused, and 
 yet earnest and plastic age so greatly needs the true meaning 
 of the genuine Church of Christ, that I long to see all ecclesi 
 astical impedimenta sent to the rear. 
 
 The plain issue is so mortal and so painful that we can well 
 afford to let the ecclesiast and the logician pass by so that 
 the humane Son of God can lift and bear and heal. A shorter 
 statement and a longer arm say I, for one. 
 
 Now, "He standeth behind our wall. He looketh in at the 
 windows. He showeth Himself thro the lattice." 
 
 Yet a little while and "we shall know, even as also we have 
 been known," Him "in whom are hid all the treasures both of 
 the wisdom and knowledge of God," who said "I am come 
 that ye might have life and more abundantly; " Him, "of the 
 increase of whose government there shall be no end." 
 
 Thou Holy, Omnipresent One, 
 
 Of God s whole Church the only Guide! 
 Thy gifts, at Pentecost begun, 
 
 Thro every age are multiplied. 
 
 Above the heads of fervent men 
 
 Still burns the unconsuming flame, 
 And Thou dost utterance give again 
 
 To speak with tongues in Jesus name. 
 
 In every land and language, Thou 
 
 One mighty work dost still increase, 
 Perplexing earthly wisdom now, 
 
 For Babel discords giving peace. 
 
 Man s spirit is Thy lamp, O Light ! 
 
 Wherewith to search the inmost part. 
 Obedience shall not walk in night, 
 
 Nor guiding fail the craving heart. 
 
 Thy Scripture speaketh not in vain 
 
 Of all the yearning love Thou hast 
 That man should in Thy life attain 
 
 That sky no doubt can overcast ! 
 
EXPECTANT ATTENTION 167 
 
 We trust Thee, God, forever near ! 
 
 Not timid lest Thou be withdrawn ; 
 Each century makes Thy word more clear, 
 
 And shall, till day eternal dawn. 
 
 We dare not heed another hand, 
 
 Nor hark to any lesser voice, 
 Give Thou Thy truth to understand, 
 
 And make that truth our only choice ! 
 
partisanship anfc patriotism 
 
 A RESPONSE AT THE "HARDWARE DINNER" 
 
 HOTEL SAVOY, NEW YORK CITY 
 
 FEBRUARY 20, 1896 
 
 Mr. President and Fellow-citizens : 
 
 It was a remark which I have seen attributed to Sydney 
 Smith, upon his leave-taking with a departing missionary, 
 "Sir, I hope you will agree with the man that eats you" ! It 
 always struck me that the indigestibility of Jonah must have 
 been instructive to that fish whose hospitality was so unsuc 
 cessful and so brief. Both the monster and the medicine must 
 have had wiser notions as to quick sails and small prophets. 
 
 A little while ago I talked behind a table in this city and 
 did not finish until the next day ! The presiding officer in 
 timated that I was the last man who should speak that night, 
 and he was right. I began by congratulating those who had 
 already left and then asked leave to print. I would say to my 
 fellow morsels who are appetizingly displayed at this counter, 
 that I know what it is to hold my thumbs and wonder if there 
 is to be any time left. I am credibly informed that the Hol 
 land Society is responsible for first running a dinner with a 
 windmill. The fluidity of the Dutch Republic may have much 
 to do with the fluency of which we are now in the habit at sev 
 eral dollars a plate. Men used to take naps as an aid to diges 
 tion, now they hear speeches. Let us make the most of it 
 while it lasts. The next thing will be something else. The 
 peerless lay-preacher who in his less occupied moments pre 
 sides over the only four track road in America is one of the 
 chief sponsors for this decade of ventriloquism. All of us can 
 admire where none can emulate his scintillating facility. Not 
 
COMMUNITY OF LIFE 169 
 
 pretending to offer you anything so stimulating in its efferves 
 cence, I would try to persuade you that Apollinaris is as good 
 and even better if you only think so! I am a preacher and a 
 college professor. There are some who are ready to assume 
 that preaching and teaching make a man an impracticable, a 
 spinner of theories without real relation to average and actual 
 affairs. If there are those here who think that preaching is, in 
 Mr. Huxley s polite phrase, " lunar politics," and that a col 
 lege is a school of cranks, I will not challenge them nor argue 
 the point. I am a man. I am an American. I am a citizen. 
 I trust that I am a Christian. These grounds are solid lever 
 age for my present purpose. From them I speak. And from 
 these I say that he is no true minister who is not evermore 
 busy to show how all desirable good rests in the recognition of 
 ultimate principles, and who is not urgent to compel all mat 
 ters of custom and practice to testify before the grand jury of 
 conscience. And I say again that any College abuses its op 
 portunity if it does not seek to inspire its every student with 
 ideals which are most practical when they are most generous, 
 and to base him broad and strong with the conviction that 
 his better training is a holy trust for larger manhood and for 
 the most resolute, intelligent and robust citizenship. It is the 
 human duty of us all, whatever our antecedents, our attain 
 ment, or our occupations, to help make this a larger and pleas- 
 anter world for every man that is in it. We can only do this 
 as our love steadily becomes more dominant, and as we more 
 and more widen our comprehension of that high relationship 
 in which all men are kin. Not the word "My," but "Our," 
 begins the Lord s Prayer. The man who prays: 
 
 " Lord, bless me and my wife, 
 My son John and his wife, 
 Us four and no more, Amen," 
 
 that man does not pray at all, and, preaching tho it may be, I 
 say that a man who does not pray does not live! In this state 
 which holds the ashes of John Brown, in this city, which keeps 
 the dust of Alexander Hamilton and of Ulysses Grant, you are 
 
170 PARTISANSHIP AND PATRIOTISM 
 
 assembled in the name of a common business interest. This 
 dining emphasizes a commonalty, a community, a cooperative- 
 ness of purpose. It is what men have in common, not what 
 they have in severalty, that fulfils their life. That which unites 
 men is normal, that which sunders them is abnormal. It is 
 not because we are states, but because we are United States, 
 that we are a nation. But real union can not be an external 
 device, it must be an inward truth. 
 
 In my eagerness to affirm a great principle, as wide as all 
 life, and comprehensive of all human relation, I am aware of a 
 peril of becoming too abstract. An aged woman in Alabama 
 was with her husband, taking her first ride on the cars. Her 
 wonder and anxiety increased with the speed, until at the 
 top of her astonishment and fear, the train struck a long 
 and high trestle. With a scream the woman bounded to her 
 feet, clutching the seat-back before her. To her trembling 
 obliviousness of all else it seemed that the cars had leaped into 
 space. But in a brief moment the train was on terra firma 
 once more, and with a happy shout heard thro all the car, she 
 cried: "Thank Heaven, she s lit again!" Gentlemen, if for a 
 little here and there, I seem to you to be in the air, I assure all 
 who have tickets for this trip that I shall try not to leave the 
 rails! 
 
 What is partisanship? It is identification with a part. A 
 party is a section bipartisanship is bisection. To see no 
 more than a part is to ignore the whole. A part is a part only. 
 The sum of parts is the true goal. A part divorced from its 
 fellow parts is a part no longer. Your arm wrenched from its 
 body is not your arm! Parts and parties are means, partner 
 ship is the end. The word idiot is from a Greek adjective 
 meaning selfish. It is an introspection which becomes mental 
 blindness. Individuality, by exageration, becomes insanity. 
 The vice of selfishness is in its isolation from a common life. 
 Its secession is centrifugal the atom resenting the universal 
 law of unity. In the heart it is hate, in the life it is war, in es 
 sence it is hell. The bane of partisanship in whatever realm 
 
PARTISAN BIGOTRY 
 
 171 
 
 and to whatever scale is in its arbitrary exclusion of relation. 
 Give and take, mutuality, reciprocity, is the law of a bal 
 anced life. A year ago Senator John Sherman rose in his 
 place to insist that "measures for the relief of the treasury 
 should be viewed from a higher standpoint than partisanship," 
 and he said: " If I were to think of party or party advantage 
 in proposing legislation to protect the government credit, I 
 would be guilty of violating my oath of office." Yes and 
 Amen. But if that be true, where does it not reach? Well 
 may we, in such days as these, pray in the words of the Psalm, 
 that God would "teach our senators wisdom " of that sort! In 
 Congress or out of it, he is false to his country who is a partisan 
 first and a patriot afterward. Each of us is guilty of a treason 
 able narrowness who prefers tactics to truth. It is ungenerous 
 and degrading to refuse to recognize the excellences and per 
 sistently to impugn the good faith of those who differ from us 
 in their philosophy. The bonds of civil life and of national 
 loyalty are strained and broken when we vituperate our mag 
 istrates merely because they did not happen to have the pref 
 erence of our particular votes. Whoever the President of my 
 country is, he is the President of my country ! Two things de 
 bauch our politics one is money, the other acrimony. We are 
 all of us too much Tillmanized. The man who thinks to exalt 
 himself merely by depreciating others and who glories in his 
 hostilities rather than his friendships, but exhibits his own semi- 
 civilized estate. 
 
 So long and so far as we consent to send mere party merce 
 naries and not statesmen, to make our laws, so long and so far 
 will bitterness and sectional advantage override considerations 
 of that weal which ought always to precede the prestige of a 
 faction. We are all to much the constituents of a false theory, 
 and we pay the penalties. A little tyrant, three years old, was 
 kicking and screaming at his nurse. It was on the cars, and 
 the passengers all longed to spank the small autocrat. He 
 wanted a wasp that crept on the window sill. He tried to take 
 it. The nurse caught his hand and said coaxingly: "Harry 
 
172 PARTISANSHIP AND PATRIOTISM 
 
 mustn t touch. Bug bite Harry." Harry screamed savagely 
 and began to kick and pound the nurse. The dozing mother, 
 without opening her eyes or lifting her head, said sharply: 
 "Why do you tease that child so, Mary ? Let him have what 
 he wants at once." "But ma am, it s a " "Let him have it, 
 I say." Thus encouraged Harry clutched at the wasp and 
 caught it. The scream that followed brought tears of joy to 
 the passengers eyes. The mother roused again. "Mary," she 
 cried, "let him have it." Mary turned in her seat and said, 
 confusedly: "He s got it, ma am." 
 
 " When we in our viciousness grow hard, 
 The wise gods seal our eyes. * * * 
 In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us 
 Adore our errors; laugh at us, while we strut 
 To our confusion." 
 
 The braggart spirit anywhere is absurd. Some little school 
 girls (it is chronicled of Chicago) were discussing their clothes. 
 "I ve a lovely new dress," said one, "and I m going to wear it 
 to church next Sunday." "Pooh !" said another, "I ve a new 
 hat, and I m going to wear it every day." "Well," said a 
 third, "I ve got heart disease, anyway !" The two were mute 
 with envy. She was a Populist! Must minorities always be 
 truculent and majorities always be insolent? Yes, while party 
 is put above principle: No, when that infamy ends. Unless 
 one is willing to be a mere political fashionist whose german- 
 silver principles, like those of Bunyan s By-Ends, are at once 
 harmless and profitable, he may not prefer clique to charac 
 ter, and a mean success to an honorable defeat. He must not 
 confuse pro party and pro patria, nor bow and cross himself at 
 the beck of a civil ultra-montanism that would mother devotion 
 by ignorance; but must protest, tho he be but one contra mun- 
 dum, and vote as it were a sacrament. Better vote in the air 
 than vote in the mud! When the air is full it will snow vic 
 tory. To heed that brazen and bitter cry: "Party, right or 
 wrong," disgraces the soul and sears the vision. Nothing is 
 more immoral, more ruinous of personal honor, than to sue- 
 
POLITICAL FARO-DEALERS 173 
 
 cumb to that social coercion of the straight ticket, which has 
 lost most of its terrors for men whose spines are not bits of 
 wet string mere boneless marrow, but which has so long os 
 tracized independence, and in the name of Csesar usurped the 
 things of God. Softening of the back may be as fatal as soft 
 ening of the brain. I am thankful to live in a commonwealth 
 whose vote party bell-wethers so often fail to predict by a 
 hundred thousand majority. Electoral unindependence is 
 political serfdom. The discriminating voter is evidently in the 
 right way because he so bothers and exasperates bad men. 
 
 "When none will sweat but for promotion;" when dema 
 gogs "make nice of no vile hold to stay them up;" when 
 legislators are often so notorious that self-respect must pray 
 "unto their assembly mine honor be not thou united;" when 
 "the most upright is as a thorn hedge" (combing wool from 
 every passing sheep) taking toll both ways; when the indirect 
 but debauching bribe of patronage would make office but a 
 carcass for the swiftest vulture; when Truth is about to be re- 
 crucified between bipartisans, no decent man can wash his 
 hands with Pilate and say "I am innocent, see ye to it! " 
 
 Of course statesmen, like Demetrius, the silversmith, seeing 
 the craft by which they have their wealth in danger to be set 
 at naught, will raise the specious cry " Great is Diana" always, 
 "of the Ephesians." 
 
 Of course honest citizenship will be resisted, claw and tooth, 
 by those "whose mouths (as Lowell said) are filled with the 
 national pudding, or watering in expectation thereof." All the 
 more must it withstand and smite that lust of spoils which 
 would wreck the stateliest cause to make flotsam and jetsam 
 of every public trust from president to poundmaster. The 
 belly of the great machine "teems with armed men!" Left 
 alone within the walls, they will after dark do all their fell 
 intent. In our own Troy, that revolver at the polls, finding its 
 victim, was a danger signal that only deaf souls can forget. 
 Party, at any price, is that which prostitutes republican in 
 stitutions, and with the malaria of its ill breath poisons us all. 
 
174 PARTISANSHIP AND PATRIOTISM 
 
 It exhales pestilence and breeds corruption. 
 
 Must it ever be the task of Sisyphus to rescue the primary 
 from that exploitation by hucksters which makes the individ 
 ual citizen but a blank proxy? Shall platforms always be 
 mere verbal expedients gull-baits, declarations of proposals 
 that are not purposes, of crafty phrases without intent, and 
 whose quotation after the polls close is considered to be a 
 roaring farce? Are we always to be fed on platitudes? Is the 
 originating force of those costly campaigns, which ought 
 always to advance the lines of loyal purpose, to lodge in 
 the councils of honest and earnest citizens fairly and freely 
 assembled, or in the back office of self appointed and power- 
 stealing autocrats who with ambi-sinister facility slit the throats 
 of cities, impose tribute upon firms and corporations, or amuse 
 goggle-eyed credulity while twitching the wires that work re 
 spectable and unsuspecting men as marionettes? 
 
 Is the selection of candidates to be relegated to the stage 
 management of these Punch-and-Judy showmen? 
 
 When the primary and the caucus and the convention are 
 cajoled, intimidated, packed, perverted, they cease to become 
 representative, and only rivet the shackles upon those who in 
 their surrender to an insolent arrogation of proprietorship re 
 duce themselves to servility and moral impotence. It is an 
 impudence that makes the average voter a puppet. Dr. Jekyll 
 becomes Mr. Hyde. The voice is Trilby s, but the song is 
 Svengali s ! The auction of the voter is completed in " the 
 sale of law." Moral inertia, lotus-eating indifference, crass 
 selfishness, a materialistic and mercantile theory of life; 
 these things "tend downwards, justify despondency, promote 
 rogues, defeat the lust," and will, just so long as voters consent 
 to be shovelled, or to be done up in express packages to be 
 delivered C. O. D., at owner s risk ! Poor Sinbad ! Whoever 
 those possible nominees of 1896 may be whom these steerers 
 and confidence men least want, them the respectable part of 
 this company most is for ! 
 
 How the municipality problem lours with portent, in all its 
 
ULTRAMONTANE FINANCE 175 
 
 subordinate details of drunkenness, lechery, bribery, simony 
 and sleek coupon-cutting apathy. Kill me that last and I will 
 render you the heads of all the rest ! 
 
 When shall we adequately resist the intolerant imposture 
 and intolerable duress of underlings and send truly represent 
 ative men to the councils of the nation? Think of a state that 
 owned a George William Curtis, that contains a St. Clair 
 McKelway and an Elihu Root, persistently preferring some of 
 the second-rate partisans who have strutted into the United 
 States Senate ! I would that I could make these words strike 
 and detonate like percussion shells ! We need unconditional 
 men, indomitable souls, who shall, to all that would wheedle 
 or coerce them, utter a rigid No! Patriotism first, Party 
 afterward. We are grateful for the noble few who are such as 
 ennoble their constituents in refusing the pettings of ring 
 leaders and the trammels of mediocrity, and in living toward 
 their parties that fine sentiment which the cavalier of Lovelace 
 utters to his Lucasta, 
 
 " I could not love thee, dear, so much 
 Loved I not honor more." 
 
 Never did a time more need noble leadership. Must we 
 always flout our living prophets, and ever be lamenting a dead 
 Lincoln ? Must the witchcraft of foul selfishness always 
 stupefy and strangle us with its incantations? Worthy thought 
 will be incarnate in worthy men when we summon such. As 
 yet we do not seek them. We consent to partisan dishonor. 
 " Democracy can be justified only in so far as it furnishes the 
 most effective method of securing wise and just rulers: but in 
 a democracy this end can only be attained in so far as every 
 citizen fulfils his civic obligations." All peoples have as good 
 a government and as good governors as they demand, no 
 better. All improvement begins in new convictions. The 
 best things are offered only to the best men. Our theory con 
 fronts us with our condition. At present sectionalism and 
 class legislation hold us up at every turn, and localism laughs 
 at the general good. We think that law can repeal arithme- 
 
176 PARTISANSHIP AND PATRIOTISM 
 
 tic. A great mob of inflationists clamors for more money. By 
 an artifice it would set a fictitious value upon silver and ask the 
 world to believe that 50 cents is 100. At that rate all the sil 
 ver of the Earth would come in here "by telegram at our ex 
 pense." Why not declare that a bushel of wheat is a dollar, 
 that a barrel of oil is two dollars, build elevators and tanks, 
 take the whole product, and offer warehouse certificates for 
 these stores as money at this fanciful rate? Money has either 
 an intrinsic value or an extrinsic. These are not to be con 
 fused. If the present light-weight dollar, with its counterfeit 
 of Liberty and its hypocritical profession of faith (for a false 
 balance is an abomination, and sanctimony is poor currency) 
 if such a dollar, of which the Treasury has 300,000,000 that no 
 one wants at the price asked, if such a dollar s value is ex 
 trinsic, 16 to I is too much, by 16; if intrinsic it is too little 
 by 13. If we as sellers at that rate, would try to foist an 
 anachronism upon the world, it won t buy: if we are buyers at 
 that rate it will joyfully accommodate us with its last ounce. 
 
 Remember, Gentlemen, that those who are so eager to 
 double the coinage value of silver over the actual bullion 
 value, are those who have silver to sell ! In comparison with 
 those who listen to the invitations of these silver sirens, Alad 
 din s wife was astute ! Why not coin copper free at sixteen 
 to one, and so boom an American product? Such a chimera 
 would indeed make us all money-maniacs and America a ver 
 itable asylum of all nations ! It would be no less "woolly" to 
 assert that eighteen inches is a yard. England would gladly 
 sell to us at such a rate, she would not buy. The whole thing 
 illustrates the great truth that every man has his price who 
 is for sale? I do not object to a metal I object to a ratio 
 that is a lie. "Sixteen to one," is obsolete. To have two val 
 ues for a dollar is a fatuity over which I feel like the preacher 
 who, standing in the pulpit of a son who had gone daft over 
 ecclesiastical millinery, took for his text "Lord, have mercy 
 upon my son, for he is a lunatic ! " Inflation is balloonacy. 
 A nation which in two supreme crises so grandly determined 
 
NOT TWO STANDARDS OF RIGHT 177 
 
 to be free, shall never blandly consent to be dishonest ; which 
 in such a seven-heated furnace learned the sixth command 
 ment and the seventh, shall not repudiate the fourth at the 
 bidding of rum, nor the eighth at the bidding of silver mines. 
 At last the tenth shall round into the first, and "Thou shalt not 
 covet" shall touch "Thou shalt have no other God." Happy 
 is the people that is in such a case ! How far class envy can 
 go is shown in the artificial provisions of that preposterous 
 inter-state commerce act which at present is prostrating the 
 greatest industry of the land, flinging scores of roads into the 
 hands of receivers and robbing the incomes of numberless 
 employes, and of widows and orphans whose savings it slaugh 
 ters. Its provisions are mainly based upon an envious partic 
 ularism which is both sumptuary and socialistic. 
 
 But I forget that I am only a country parson, and I preach 
 too long. You noticed yesterday that the Cave of the Winds 
 had gone dry ! I will speak of Patriotism. Pater means father, 
 the Patria is the fatherland. Patriotism is brotherhood, and it 
 has no limits. As a family that seeks only its own advantage 
 is a curse to its community, so too, a nation that seeks only its 
 own good is a curse to the world, and ultimately to itself. 
 Shall there ever be a truly Christian nation ? Does liberty 
 only mean " our liberty ?" If the ethics of the gospel are not 
 fit to be national, they are not fit to be personal. But how 
 many nations have learned the ten commandments, let alone 
 the beatitudes ? Patriotism is but a geographical partisanship 
 if its ultimate notions are unfraternal to mankind. Too many 
 in their handling of that word illustrate what the recent Cen 
 tury has described as " the effect of a large idea upon a small 
 mind." "Make me pure (prayed a little girl) make me as 
 pure as baking powder !" We have lately been discussing the 
 merits of Royal baking powder and Cleveland s. But the 
 question of which of these contains the least alum and the 
 most force is not so important as that we should seek to have 
 all the world join us at the knees of God in that petition: 
 " Give us this day our daily bread ! " Partisanship is sectional, 
 
178 PARTISANSHIP AND PATRIOTISM 
 
 patriotism is national; nay, it is international. Whatever may 
 be my secondary and subordinate relations, primarily I am a 
 1 man. Anything less than loyalty to the whole cause of man 
 kind is secession from God. 
 
 " The peoples, Lord, the peoples, 
 Not thrones and crowns, but men." 
 
 " Have we not all one father ? " As patriotism is above 
 party, so is humanity above diplomacy. " Let not thy country 
 (said fine old Sir Thomas Browne) let not the law of thy 
 country be the non-ultra of thine honesty." What are the 
 questions of Venezuela and the Suez canal, what is even the 
 harsh question of Cuba, by the side of the world disgrace over 
 Armenia ! 
 
 Thank God the American protest has been made. Shame 
 to England that her tumescent Lord Salisbury passes by on 
 the other side. Shame to all alleged Christian nations that 
 there is not a new crusade to abolish that hideous and pirati 
 cal power whose cimetar is the corrollary of its Koran. Oh, 
 for another Cromwell, Peter the Hermit, Charles Martel, to 
 smite utterly this cruel absolutism. Oh, for another Coeur de 
 Lion. What is an empty sepulchre whence the Lord of life is 
 risen to the perishing myriads for whom he came ! God of 
 armies, bare Thy holy arm against that livid, curdled and pu- 
 trescent misgovernment that sets its crescent above the city of 
 Constantine, and seduces nations to forget that watchword of 
 the cross, In Hoc signo vinces ! How can any sneer at the 
 brave words from Washington that invite a new holy alliance 
 against that malign despotism. There might be a thanksgiv 
 ing dinner of the world if Russia and England would cease 
 their flatulent haggling over the wishbone ! Would that the 
 bleeding Eastern questions were delivered not only out of 
 the hand of the uncircumcised Philistine, but also out of the 
 paw of the Lion and of the Bear ! 
 
 I for one am grateful for that pertinent apothegm of the 
 Brooklyn Eagle it was indeed eagle-eyed "What is funda- 
 
THE IGNOBILITY OF SELFISHNESS I 7 g 
 
 mentally right is also profoundly wise ! " Oh, the cowardice 
 of the ledger and the bank book "letting I dare not, wait 
 upon, I would !" It refills a religious cult, emptied of Christ 
 ianity, with that old exclusive provincialism which slew Christ, 
 and makes his house of prayer for all nations into a stock 
 exchange ! 
 
 Gentlemen, America is providential. She is adapted to be 
 an almoner and an arbiter of nations. Let us interpret destiny 
 by duty, honor by service, opportunity by responsibility, and so 
 
 "Set up a mark of everlasting light 
 Above the howling senses ebb and flow," 
 
 that we shall enter into the task and so alone into the triumph 
 of the Son of Man ! For vox recti populi, vox Dei ! 
 
 Let us lift the non-partisan, the truly patriotic standard both 
 of national righteousness and of a world-wide sympathy, of the 
 true partnership of man under the one paternity of God. Let 
 Rome stand for force and statute, Greece for culture, Germany 
 for learning, France for art, England for diplomacy and 
 aggrandizement, all these for war; and we, in God s name, for 
 character, for inter-national and super-political justice, for 
 real freedom, and for the ever-nearer dominion of the Prince 
 of Peace. 
 
 Domain, ancestry, heritage, however much we are not 
 merely to follow, but to fulfill our fathers, " God having pro 
 vided some better thing for us, that they without us should 
 not be made perfect." 
 
 Here lies the nobility of both men and of nations. Here is 
 truth that has no barrier of river or mountain, no bound of sea 
 or shore. All of us for America and for all America, and 
 America for all mankind ! 
 
Gbe distinctive function of tbe College 
 
 REMARKS BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY CLUB 
 OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK 
 MARCH 3, 1 
 
 Gentlemen of the University Club: You are not associated 
 under this title by caprice or mere casual impulse. You began 
 and you continue this fellowship for the sufficient reason that 
 you have certain important common interests which by organ 
 ization you desire to proclaim and to promote. 
 
 You affirm, as do similar bodies in now so many of our 
 major cities, the accordant aims and the substantial good will 
 of all men liberally educated. You also affirm your joint re 
 lation to the public good. 
 
 Your two hundred and fifty members, in representation of 
 fifty colleges, is no meagre showing, and it is a high credit, as 
 it ought also to become a broad benefit, to the city which is 
 the third in our preeminent state, and in the nation the eleventh. 
 
 Each of us here loves well his own academic cradle, and is a 
 perpetual debtor to the hand that rocked it. Each of us cher 
 ishes the songs of his own college fireside. But we are all of 
 kin and bear a family likeness. The several Alma Matres to 
 whom we owe our baccalaureate birthrights are one large and 
 loving sisterhood and we are warm first cousins. We are the 
 alumni (or nurslings) of one grandmother, and her name is 
 2o<ta. While the timbers stand that uphold the great an 
 cestral and homestead roof of American education, may Wis 
 dom be justified of her children ! The tie which is expressed 
 by such a sodality or guild as this, both confesses and 
 strengthens a partnership of competency, of aspiration, and of 
 purpose. 
 
A SHARED OBLIGATION l8l 
 
 The relatively large ratio of influence so far exerted in our 
 land by its College men is a commanding fact, too often neg 
 lected. To us it should be full not of vapid self-praise but of 
 ardent stimulations. It is a commission, and it lays upon every 
 true-souled College man a thrilling noblesse oblige. It is a 
 badge that is morally a pledge, a pledge that we alone can 
 vindicate and that we alone can smirch and degrade. This 
 throng is a part of that providential endowment of skilled and 
 equipped manhood which should and shall have great share in 
 meeting the inevitable and impending battles of the age, and, 
 in Truth s name, in turning them into victories beyond prece 
 dent or imagination. The beneficiaries of singular privilege, we 
 are bound to be the exponents of singular power. The benefit 
 we partake is ours not to hoard or squander but to transmit. 
 We are bound not only to resent but to refute the little sneers 
 that impugn scholarship as tending toward either the impract 
 ical or the unsympathetic. Our banners many but our flag 
 one, without selfishness or schism let all our varied colors blend 
 in one prismatic white. Echoing the spirit of that gallant 
 greeting of England s poet, 
 
 " Come to us, love us, and make us your own, 
 For Saxon or Dane or Norman we, 
 Teuton or Celt, or whatever we be, 
 We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee, 
 
 Alexandra ! 
 
 so be our loyal acclaim to the princess Duty. 
 
 I said, Noblesse oblige. That may be the mere boast of titular 
 precedence, of hereditary assumption. But where the nobility 
 is essential, moral, genuine, not the freak and accident of 
 birth; where it stands for character not class, it is not a duress 
 but a consecration. The real " war-lord " never poses nor 
 struts. He is a captain because not bellicose, and imperial 
 because not imperious chief because the servant of all. 
 With no European, but with a royally American accent, in the 
 aristocracy of democracy, true nobility affirms itself not in a 
 
182 THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 clannish condescension but in a humane and therefore manly 
 social creed. So meant, it binds all better ability to quit a 
 cloistered intellectual luxury, and to give itself to better the 
 world. So meant, its claim is verified in the generosity of un 
 stinted helps. For just as agriculture is not for the field s 
 sake, but for the harvest s, so mental culture is for human use 
 and social result. More strength, more strain. More mind, 
 more man. 
 
 It is by recognizing such ends, and by combining toward 
 them the abilities and impulses otherwise scattered, and so 
 less efficient, that clubs like this are to warrant their name and 
 propriety. Your social pleasure, if it is to be worthy, must 
 move toward the moral alliance and augment of personal con 
 victions concerning the questions of this decade of the passing 
 century, with its huge pride and need, its dangers and its sus 
 ceptibilities. Organization, as an end, is mere addition as a 
 means toward ends that lie beyond individual strengths, it is 
 multiplication. Surely there are problems enough, civic and 
 national, moral and mental, to make royal demands upon all 
 taught and trained citizens, and to constrain such to draw to 
 gether and to stand together. A really educated manliness is 
 sacred to service and sworn to the general good, and the 
 ethical compulsions of such an election and calling are as 
 beautiful to willing souls as they are austere toward the re 
 luctant and the recluse. The high summons that implies high 
 tasks carries in its left hand to those who reject such a sum 
 mons the stern penalty of missing these tasks. 
 
 You, gentlemen, are distinctively and representatively Col 
 lege men. "University" is to be sure more comprehensive: 
 but in this connection it is metonomy. Not as Masters of Arts, 
 or of Science, not as Doctors of Philosophy, Divinity, Lit 
 erature, or Laws: but as Batchelors are you here bound and 
 blended. The A. B. degree is your common ground. Those 
 distinguish, this unites. Whatever else you have, you are here 
 because you have this. Its relation to the rest is basilar. It 
 
THE DISTINCTION OF THE A. B. DEGREE 183 
 
 still carries with it the most of prima facie proof. Less than 
 any other title has it been tarnished and deteriorated and 
 cheapened by brevet use. The chevron often certifies more 
 than does the epaulet. Let the A. B. be reserved from mis 
 cellaneous bestowal. To use a little Latin, let us say the nunc 
 pro tune should be a quid pro quo, and should be given only for 
 the stiff four years which it crowns, or for their most genuine 
 equivalent. 
 
 To a company, then, of those who primarily are Batchelors 
 of Arts, and whose coordination founds upon that fact, I make 
 the theme of these remarks (which are stipulated to be but 
 conversational) The distinctive function of the College, as such. 
 I shall not be misunderstood to seek an adroit obtruding of 
 my own environment, nor to be doing any indirect advertising, 
 when I speak from the view point which that environment has 
 furnished me. If at some tangents I shall challenge some of 
 the views here held, you must permit me to be frank rather 
 than diplomatic. These opinions are not polemical, nor are 
 they deprecatory. You will I am sure allow me an area of 
 the freest speech. 
 
 The College is a distinct and indigenous thing in American 
 education, with firm and clear limitations. It has history 
 deep roots, wide branches, fair and abundant fruitage. It 
 stands between Academy and University and is neither. It 
 advances the one and furnishes the other. Handling much 
 material that will never attain the University, it should have, 
 and, in its first class types it has, a certain completeness of its 
 own. During the present experimental stage of our Univers 
 ities, with so much that is inchoate and heterogenous, the 
 College may well assert its own time-honored status, and re 
 fuse either to be diverted or misvalued. Our American fond 
 ness for novelty and bigness, for two-story fronts on one-story 
 buildings, needs curbing rather than coddling, and the sincere 
 and dutiful College should not be dazed or dazzled by the 
 glamour of a polysyllable. 
 
184 THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 I do not speak of the lust for this top-title which has deluded 
 some inferior schools, (not all of them in the West), schools 
 whose actual product is sometimes not above that of a med 
 ium grade high-school, and whose intellectual frame is largely 
 "front door and back yard." 
 
 A University, truly such, is a school where the science of 
 subjects (and by implication many subjects) is explored to 
 the utmost. In general the aim of the University is the sub 
 jects taught and the man as related to these: the aim of the 
 College is the man taught and the subjects as related to him. 
 President Seth Low puts it clearly in saying "A College is 
 conceived of as a place of liberal culture, a University as a 
 place for specialization based upon liberal culture." The two 
 functions should not be confused, nor either disparaged. They 
 are in different tiers and to compound them is an awkward 
 compromise. A given corporation may change from one to 
 the other, but not by a mere change of title, only by an inward 
 change of scope and emphasis and method. 
 
 Our American Universities are now, most of them, in transi 
 tion. Their evolution is adolescent and incomplete. Harvard 
 is feeling her way along a process of elimination. Her dis 
 cussion of the reduction of her A. B. courses is one step in her 
 palingenesis. She may take the full step now or later. She 
 will take it. Taking it she must logically and naturally go 
 further. In purposing to be a University pure and simple she 
 decomplicates herself from the College idea. Granting, as an 
 outsider must, the definiteness of her aim, that it is rational 
 and not capricious, it must be understood as a direct move 
 toward final and complete Universityhood. But even were 
 that not yet the avowed or the intended end of her diminution 
 of A. B. work, it is the proper and inevitable end. 
 
 This must decrease that that may increase. The shrinkage 
 must match the growth. Harvard began by translating her 
 sub-University work in the terms of specialistic study. She is 
 now proceeding toward what she therein elected. 
 
 She will be a great advanced school " Fair Harvard", still : 
 
THE NARROWNESS OF UNCULTIVATED SPECIALISM 185 
 
 but she will cease to be Harvard College. Such a displace 
 ment of the College purpose and function by the University 
 purpose and function establishes nothing save its own fact. It 
 proves preference, not superiority. We trust that Harvard will, 
 when entirely and completely a University, continue that re 
 nown which she attained and in which she throve when entire 
 ly a College. This is her q. e. d. 
 
 There must be Universities and there must be Colleges. Let 
 each school make its own election, consistently and com 
 pletely, and do its chosen work. Let neither face two ways. 
 
 I claim the liberty to speak for one College a College that 
 believes in its own function as one to be magnified and main 
 tained appreciating and testifying the separateness of discip 
 linary instruction from that which is technical and professional. 
 This is a work to be done, and the Colleges are to do it, with 
 out pretension or apology. 
 
 Their contribution is of a kind that is indispensable not only 
 toward a generous broadening and basing of manhood, but 
 also indispensable to give to those particular schools assem 
 bled in the Universities such material as they themselves can 
 not best prepare either in quality or in abundance. I say 
 quality, advisedly and boldly, assured that the College course 
 is best interpreted and illustrated in the College that stands 
 independently, unnarrowed by the influence which, when it ad 
 joins an elaborate University scheme works down to pervert 
 even the course in Arts from its broad function into a mere 
 specialization. The functions of the disciplines presupposed 
 in the A. B. degree, and of the investigations leading to higher 
 degrees are decidedly unlike. The processes have different 
 conclusions. One should make iron into steel, the other make 
 steel into tools. 
 
 Specialization not "based upon liberal culture" attempts to 
 put a fine edge on pot-iron. The man who is but a specialist 
 and has no general aptitude is absurdly narrow and is less 
 capable even in his own sphere. No Cyclops is lovely. Poly- 
 
186 THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 phemus may crush Acis, but he never can win Galatea. The 
 winning man must be a wide man. High wall exacts broad 
 sub-structure, or it will topple. The world s available men 
 must be trained to be alert, supple, adaptive to have an in 
 telligent appreciation of various realms, to be well-begun in 
 many things, that so they may each both select his own life- 
 specialty and understand its important bearings. Synthetic 
 men, who have minds and hearts for the ensemble of life are 
 quite as needful to the world s weal as are expert partialists. 
 Per centum of the population more of them are necessary. 
 Success then to the course that aims to make its student great 
 in one thing: but success also to the course that makes him 
 good in many. 
 
 Specialism is so important that it needs to be defended from 
 its own dangers. A minister who is only a theologian, a doc 
 tor who knows medicine and no more, a lawyer whose whole 
 library wears sheepskin, a teacher who is only a pedant (not 
 truly a pedagog, because he prefers books to boys), a speaker 
 who is only a declaimer, a high magistrate who is only a poli 
 tician, all these are narrow and narrowing. They have edge 
 without back-blade, and they are "by their means defeated of 
 their ends." They are too hollow ground. On the contrary, 
 one who, with only a general training, attempts a specialist s 
 tasks will prove an empiric, and not an expert. 
 
 The world wants men who have both temper and point. 
 Both. Neither by itself. You do not make a lancet out of a 
 brad, nor shave with a barrel hoop. Technical study if it is 
 not balanced by wide interest tends toward a petulant and 
 paltry conceit. 
 
 A large introduction to philosophy, history, literature, law; 
 a speaking acquaintance with many sciences, physical and 
 political; a good grounding in logic and ethics such dis 
 cipline both in its matter and its method opens wide the mind 
 toward the large world of things and thoughts. 
 
 To know anything at all well one must know it as related 
 
MATURITY A FACTOR OF POWER 187 
 
 and horizoned. Elisha Gray the inventor of the tel-autograph 
 told me of an interview with a recent product of a course in 
 that present fad of tyros, electrical engineering. " I suppose 
 you know all about electricity," said Dr. Gray. " I ought to 
 (was the reply of the youth of twenty-one) I ve studied nothing 
 else for three years." "Ah, (said the inventor) I ve studied 
 electricity forty years, and I feel that I know nothing about it!" 
 
 Specialism is to be forefended from pedantry by that earlier 
 patient exercise and enlargement of many faculties which 
 promotes both competency and modesty. At a period 
 like ours a period that calls for the ripest and readiest 
 power, there is small occasion to undervalue and skip that 
 which widens and matures the whole man. So the College, in 
 situ, may well demur to have its demonstrated value assailed 
 or patronized by the University in transitu. And yet the Col 
 lege has had, and has, its due time begrudged and its true 
 calling deprecated by many coteries of supercilious technicists. 
 But what sound regard, I ask, toward advanced courses and 
 their high exactions is that which is willing to take half-pud 
 dled material, and thro a foreshortened disciplinary prepara 
 tion to rush men into the laboratory and the seminar? 
 
 Poor pulp, poor paper no matter how fancifully water 
 marked, highly-calendered, and daintily-packed. A youth of 
 eighteen may be wet with a College coursjs in two years: but 
 he cannot be saturated in less than four. We know of men 
 dropping out of College and dropping into special courses: 
 but let us be reminded that nothing ever drops up! 
 
 The best is none too good for the imperious exactions of a 
 time that sifts and selects its instruments with impartial sever 
 ity and that sends to the auction-room all seconds. 
 
 Over-haste must spill itself halfway, and arrive empty. 
 Men who graduate Sophomores are apt to remain such. One 
 there was who, tho the world was dying for Him, waited, until 
 He was thirty, to begin to save it, growing into that wisdom 
 and stature which were His equipment for complete ministry 
 
188 THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 and without which He would not begin. First Nazareth, then 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 However I may traverse the opinions of those who are so 
 graciously following me, I must be permitted to say resolutely 
 that I believe it to be a demonstrable error to attempt to com 
 bine College and University into one school. 
 
 As an Academy should not try to be a College, so a College 
 should not try to be a University. 
 
 As a College is handicapped by trying to include an Academy, 
 so a University is handicapped by trying to include a College. 
 
 The sphere, the atmosphere, the whole esprit, of each is, and 
 should be, individual and distinct. 
 
 Undergraduate work takes a different material, or takes its 
 material at an entirely different stage. Those surroundings 
 are not the best which are half one thing and half another. 
 Each demands a peculiar adaptation in the qualities of in 
 structors and in their standards and methods. Confusion of 
 these trammels and frustrates. The accent should not be a 
 compromise. A University course ought to be absolutely elec 
 tive, of course by groups. Electives should be the incidents 
 of the course in arts. Neither the mental nor the moral dis 
 ciplines of the two coincide. The College student is and 
 should be half-boy, the candidates for A. M., or Ph. D., should 
 be all man. Not two cases or three, to be sure, but the aver 
 ages, give the demarcation. 
 
 So I say firmly that in my opinion (be it worth never so 
 little) the College that is contained in a University is not the 
 best kind of a College, and that the University which attempts 
 to include undergraduate work is not the best kind of a Uni 
 versity. It is a College that does not rightly honor its own 
 specialty of discipline, or it is a University that has not yet 
 gotten its growth. In either case something is forfeited, either 
 in prematurity or immaturity. 
 
 Let none take umbrage at this, for I seek the relative and 
 peculiar honor of each set of functions. They are coordinate 
 
THE TWO TITLES NOT CONVERTIBLE 189 
 
 parts of one full system, they are not parts of each other. 
 Germany separates from her gymnasia her special schools of 
 science and philosophy, and it is retrogressive and abnormal 
 to combine them here. 
 
 The College knows what it is doing and needs to do. Its 
 task is still imperative. Its distinctiveness is its distinction. 
 The firm, honest, high-class College of today gives a product 
 all its own, and which it need not be ashamed to compare with 
 any of like degree. Criticism is its atmosphere, as investiga 
 tion is the atmosphere of the advanced post-graduate realm. 
 The University course is to be guaged by its permissions: but 
 the College course by its exactions; not by what a few may 
 get out of it, but by what the more part must get who conquer 
 its schedule and attain its imprimatur. 
 
 As subsequent to College life, University work has its unim 
 peachable importance; as a substitute for that life it is a fail 
 ure. That such substitution is a failure may be argued by com 
 paring the ratio in efficient success, between those who take 
 special degrees after a true College experience and those who 
 take these without such experience. To say nothing of the 
 moral callowness of boys plunged into the (for them) too 
 absolute irresponsibility of University surroundings strictly 
 such, there is not onfy the chance but the likelihood that they 
 will develop spindling and thin. It is bad husbandry to let an 
 orchard run to apples until it has for some years developed 
 sturdy wood. Precocious fruit robs fibre and sacrifices the per 
 ennial for the transient. The ultimate should be more than 
 the proximate, the enduring held higher than the extempore, 
 and the long run preferred to the short dash. 
 
 It is by an instinct that is an argument that the typical Col 
 lege is relatively rural. The University is naturally urban and 
 even metropolitan. The country is not its normal place, and, 
 on the other hand, a city is no place for a College. 
 
 Numbers and the eclat of boisterous crowds are no adequate 
 test of what is best and most effluent in either case. Certainly 
 
igo THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 the College should be compact and wieldy in order most 
 surely to emphasize each particular man. Some of you will 
 join me good-naturedly to remind any who need reminding 
 that the quality of a home is not always to be estimated by 
 the size and costliness of the house, and that some of the best 
 products of the world are still hand-made. 
 
 It is high time to make more distinct and positive the claim 
 of the College proper to a place and power not to be super 
 seded. It is high time to resent and to resist the assumptions 
 of educators in specialistic realms who so readily volunteer 
 an advice which they are not most competent to give, and a 
 dictation of theories which are vitiated or at least devitalized 
 by failure to consider the strict College area and requirement. 
 University ideals and tasks are after their own kind and give 
 no warrant of special competency in the philosophy of College 
 ideals and tasks. Ne sutor ultra crepidam. 
 
 When President Woolsey could write: " Had I my life to 
 live over again, I would throw in my lot with one of the 
 smaller Colleges, where I could have more influence in train 
 ing mind and shaping character," there is surely something to 
 exalt in that differentiation which makes of each student an 
 individual problem, yes, and demonstration. The prime duty 
 of a College professor is the study of students. 
 
 The thoro College course keens the mind while it binds the 
 hearts of those who share its romance and comradeship. In 
 rubbing men well together it reduces snobbery while it edu 
 cates mutual respect for whatever is sterling and brave. And 
 here I say that attending recitations in College subjects and at 
 College age, is not necessarily "going to College." For a 
 class-room at the end of a trolley or a cable is not College ! 
 Campus and dormitory and table and prize contest and ath 
 letic-field and chapel, the collectivity of these is an elemental 
 part of real College days. These adjuncts to the curriculum 
 make up that whole influence and momentum which nothing 
 else is like. I appeal to your memories, who have heard me 
 
HUMANISTIC TRAINING Igl 
 
 so kindly. That enduring spell "of woven paces and of wav 
 ing hands" which we can neither forget nor renew, that mys 
 tical sentiment of youth changing to manhood, that tearful 
 charm a "gleam of irrecoverable gold," you whose hearts 
 all this once subdued, can you analyze or appraise it ? Would 
 you exchange it for aught else ? 
 
 As A. B. graduates, let us then urge the values of those dis 
 ciplines which cultivate all powers so that they may be 
 applied to any subject, which compact men for either the 
 demands of ripened investigations, or for the shock and pres 
 sure of affairs, putting first the broad and sound, and putting 
 afterward the exceptional. 
 
 We are to honor the breasts that nursed us by being thoro 
 and all-around men toward every present demand in church 
 and school and government and enterprise. We owe it to our 
 selves to be true men of letters, interested in the whole record, 
 lengthwise and widthwise, of human feeling and action, remem 
 bering so that all real literature is a transcript of life, having 
 concrete ends for the soul and forever. As humanists, to 
 whom nothing that is is alien, we are bound in duty to think 
 into our rational and voluntary lives the problems and the 
 proofs the motives and the ideals that make life most worthy 
 when most exacting. Festina lente wise paradox to con and 
 keep ! Haste without hurry, grow then go, that is the true 
 College idea. The man is primary, speed is secondary. 
 
 This is the true order in life, therefore in education. 
 
CORRECTIONS 
 
 Page 21, line 11; omit "a" before " man." 
 
 Page 34, line 22; read conclave of human hearts. 
 
 Page 36, title lines; read New England Society of New York City, 
 
 Page 57, line 13; read men who are unwilling. 
 
 Page 123, put verses beginning at foot of page in quotation marks. 
 
 Page 130, line 33; meditative, was misspelled. 
 
 Page 151, last line but two; omit the first "having/ 1 
 
 Page 164, line 5; "know" should be read, knows. 
 
 line 12; inverted n in recognition. 
 
 line 15; read t for "i" in but. 
 Page 170, last line but four; exaggeration, was misspelled. 
 
 This limited edition, of one thousand copies, of 
 HAMILTON, LINCOLN, AND OTHER ADDRESSES, was 
 printed, from type, at the Courier Press, Clin 
 ton, N. Y M March, 1896. 
 
292835 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAIvIFORNIA LIBRARY