)MWWI)l1IIWIWrtim il l li riflll l lf»iHWHXWWM! CWWHBBMi € 9SZY JUDSON & ASSOCIATES Q JAMES *L" BILL r~ GIFT OF ■*;*i THE IMMORTAL SEVEN THE IMMORTAL SEVEN £/?. ^^VZ) M/?5. ADONIRAM JUDSON SAMUEL NEWELL, HARRIET NEWELL GORDON HALL, SAMUEL NOTT LUTHER RICE By JAMES L. HILL, D. D. Boys in the Late War," " Woman " The Scholar's Larger Life," etc. Author of " Boys in the Late War," " Woman and Satan ' Published in Connection with the Centennial of the AMERICAN BAPTIST FOREIGN MISSION SOCIETY by the AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY PHILADELPHIA BOSTON CHICAGO ST. LOUIS Copyright 1913 by A. J. ROWLAND, Secretary Published December, 1913 CJa JONATHAN ACKERMAN COLES, M. D., LL. D. AND ALL KINDRED SPIRITS WHO CAN SAY "it's THE CAUSE, the cause!" 436200 " Let me review the scene And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been. " Stranger than fiction. PREFACE In these days when the business instinct is uppermost, it sobers one to find that the epochs which are distinct and resplendent — the creative, the redeeming, and the expanding — overshadow all others in influence and im- portance. The formative period with which we are here concerned is transcendent because of a matchless group of extraordinary persons, and it conditions the epochs that follow. The first missionaries from this country " to the heathen in Asia" were remarkable characters. They were raised up by Providence for a definite and im- portant purpose. As Bezaleel and Aholiab were dis- tinctly inspired to " devise cunning works," and as upon Edison and Bell were laid nature's hands of wondrous anointing to invent instruments and to solve mysteries in the material world, so these chosen people were ordained to enter a door of amazing opportunity. The Immortal Seven did not have to be found. They were at hand, equipped, ready for the tide. And they had no superiors. It is touching, almost unaccountable to see how solitary these devoted spirits were at certain points, as at the head of the unorganized host they bore the Ark of the Covenant until it had rest in the zayats of darkest India, completing thus a sacred chapter in the world's history. Not less significant is the fact that the nineteenth century, during which the progress of the world in mate- rial prosperity and in the advancement of the race in all that affects human happiness is unparalleled, becomes supremely great on account of its discoveries, among the vii V1U PREFACE most important of which was woman, who in previous centuries scarcely had an existence in the sense in which she is now recognized in the church. Anticipating even Mary Lyon and Jennie Lind, and strangely beginning almost evenly with a century, in the morning watch of a better age there appear before the eyes of the aston- ished church the binary stars from Bradford. New England at the time was the most virtuous coun- try in the world. The population was largely rural and singularly free from vice, and was being mysteriously prepared to disclose human nature on its noblest side. The Immortal Seven exhibit both the quality and the flavor of the New England church and the times at their best. Having youthful ardor together with spiritual ambitions and incentives, they were the flower of the young men and women of that day. The book is designed for those who love biography and missions, for young men and women, for those who must make quick preparation for a missionary meeting, for those interested in Salem as the place of so many beginnings, and for a use to which some of these pages have already been turned, in meetings where one reads aloud, while others sew, making articles for our workers in the field. The Judson Centenary swept up into unexpected prom- inence the most famous ordination in Christian history. As nothing is so dull as an anniversary with nothing to celebrate, at a meeting convened in anticipation of the signal event, the writer was delegated to give to the press the statement of our occasion of public rejoicing; and so he sat, for many weeks together, at the center of an enlarged whispering gallery, while persons who had priceless letters, treasured pictures, bits of history, or items of suggestion, reported them to him until, in the language of Elihu, the son of Barachel the Buzite, " I PREFACE IX said, I also will show mine opinion, for I am full of matter." As the situation developed, an unexpected impression was gained touching the immortality of good- ness and usefulness. How few the memorials of the savage ! But such is the vitality of goodness that, " doom it to silence, and the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer." The determining influence looking toward this publication came from repeated requests for items that had been given to the press that they might be preserved in scrap- books, and from the fact that such paragraphs as were printed fruited in gifts, as will be seen. If anything has been done to humanize a missionary who had become chiefly a steel engraving, if the note of reality is sug- gested, if something of true life inheres in these pages, so that they will carry forward in any degree not mis- sions only, but the spirit of missions, the work will fulfil the largest wish of one who has engaged in this study from the love of it, whose whole hope is that the book, coming from the heart, may reach other hearts. CONTENTS Chapter Page I. One of the Sacred Spots of Earth i II. What Manner of Manhood ! 21 III. Diversities of Gifts 43 IV. Through Death to Life of Power 61 V. A Prophet Mighty in Word and Deed 81 VI. From the Centennial Pisgah 101 VII. Salem, Center of Pilgrimage 129 ILLUSTRATIONS Page Ordination of Judson and his associates. Frontispiece Old Tabernacle Church, Salem 4 Harriet Newell 8 Sailing of the " Caravan " 12 Samuel Worcester 16 Samuel Newell 16 Lucius Bolles 16 Judson with last leaf of Burman Bible 24 A village in Burma 26 Adoniram Judson 50 Ann Hasseltine Judson 50 Washermen of Upper Burma 34 An elephant at work $6 A village in Burma 40 A schoolhouse in Burma 40 A typical old chapel in Burma 46 Where Gordon Hall died 52 Shan carts at Maymyo 66 xi Xll ILLUSTRATIONS Pagb /. Ackerman Coles, M. D., LL. D 74 Immanuel Baptist Church, Rangoon 76 Campanile at Rangoon 78 A typical village in India 92 Present Tabernacle Church, Salem 108 Ordination of 1912 in Tabernacle Church, Salem.. 112 An idol in the mud 118 A Burman buffalo 122 A village school in India 126 Roger Williams House in Salem 134 Tablet on Tabernacle Church, Salem 148 ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH WHAT is it in tis that inclines us to visit Mount Ver- non? What is that principle in our nature that induces us to go to Gettysburg, Waterloo, Plymouth, and Bethlehem? It is one of the fine, curious characteristics of human nature that the affections of strong men in remote parts of the earth turn tenderly to the places where they were born. Who can visit his mother's grave entirely without emotion? We do not originate this feeling. It seems to be native in us all. And there are shrines of the soul like the Scala Sancta, Bethel, Jacob's Well, the Mount of Olives, and the way to Damascus. With much evident emotion, in a supreme shining moment, Dr. Adoniram JudsOn went into the Tabernacle Church in Salem, Massachusetts, and bowed his head upon the spot where he had been consecrated to the mis- sionary service. It was to him one of these Palestines and Meccas of the mind which are held in imperishable remembrance and each one of them "hath a tongue." It is a memorial place in his heart history. In visiting it he lived his life over. Judson had been out of the country for a generation. It was his only return to his native land. No other mis- sionary who survived had passed through such incredible toil, suffering, hardship, and privation. He had been in prison for a year and seven months, nine months in three pairs of fetters, two months in five, six months in one pair, and two months a prisoner at large. Coming up out of the deep waters of bitterness, impelled by a 3 4 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN V- *,.;-*« * <••, strange force within him, he made a spiritual pilgrimage to that sanctuary where he had solemnly knelt at the threshold of his career. While from his father there was bequeathed to him a certain Roman loftiness of character, from his gentle mother he inherited a pecu- liar warmth of temperament and an exquisite tenderness of heart; and as the memories of the past sprang now vividly before his mind, his tears gushed forth as freely as a child's, and the record is left us that he wept aloud. His thoughts were those of the German soldier, who with two of his companions crossed the German Rhine to fight the battles of the Fatherland; later, scarred and worn, retracing his way homeward, on reaching the river he remembered the unreturning forms of those who had earlier crossed this stream with him and, swept with emotion, said to the ferryman: Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee, Take, I give it willingly, For invisible to thee, Spirits twain have crossed with me. At the ordination Judson had said of his associates who were to go with him to India : " We are seven, like the five loaves and two fishes blessed by our Lord where- with to feed the multitude." Now recalling the past tenderly, with the forms of all his companions about him, as he follows their fortunes, the affecting thought surges through his mind that, except himself and one who remained but three years upon the field, they have all left the earth, and their lives in every case ended in tragedy. The Law of Association On Thursday, the sixth of February, 1812, occurred the unique solemnities, without precedent in all religious annals, when Adoniram Judson, Gordon Hall, Samuel OLD TABERNACLE CHURCH, SALEM ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH 5 Newell, Samuel Nott, and Luther Rice were ordained the first missionaries from America " to the heathen in Asia." It has now become the most famous ordina- tion in this country or in any land. Ministers and people flocked to the scene from all the surrounding towns. The mother took her babe, that she her- self might be present and the child be enabled later to tell a family tradition to the generations following, which in this locality has been very faithfully done, as we shall see. It will be noticed where the en- graver comes to our help that the mother, infant in arms, is pictured not only as present, but well to the front, the facts of the case requiring the artist thus to feature the unexampled occasion. The Tabernacle was packed like rows of new pins in a paper. Throngs were peering down from the gallery. The aisles could be traced only by the ridges or seams made by the people standing. Within the walls were not less than fifteen hundred persons. " Some would say there were at least two thousand," who filled the church and hung on every word. " In that great assembly there was a stillness like the stillness of God when he ariseth to bless the world." The entire rapt convocation seemed moved as the trees of the wood are moved by a mighty wind. Pent-up emo- tion could no longer be restrained. Eyes overflowed with Christian sympathy at the affecting scene. An irrepres- sible sighing and weeping, which broke at times the silence of the house, attested how deeply the heart of the vast congregation was touched. There are times when men are so associated together that they reflect their thoughts and feelings upon each other. All the persons present seemed to lose, at least to merge, their individual self-consciousness in the prevailing spirit of the assem- blage. A sweet contagion prevails, cumulative in its effect, multiplied and intensified by the number who are O THE IMMORTAL SEVEN present, when each member of an audience feels that he is surrounded by other people who are experiencing the same emotions as his own. When men are thus moved by the same beneficent impulse, we can plainly see the imperishable essence of religion that makes it, in Vinet's words, the eternal youth of the human race. A feeling of religious obligation, hitherto confined to a few choice spirits, has now spread beyond them and amounts to a passion. There is something hallowed about the romance, the ardor, and the all-overness of a first love. When the sacred flame reveals itself in a Robert Emmet, a Hugh Miller, or a John Newton, the world turns aside to see this great sight, why the bush burns with fire and is not consumed. It is said that the great characters of history commonly act their part under a perceptible sense or presentiment of their mission. There is every kind of evidence that this was true on this occasion. The time to favor Zion, the set time, had come. A suffusion of solemn and grateful joy gave such force to Christian feeling that it was felt among the churches throughout the land. It was the prevailing idea that it was no ordinary event, but had relations to a great future and to all peoples and tribes and tongues. All were amazed, and glorified God, saying, " We never saw it on this fashion." " No enter- prise comparable to this had been undertaken by the American church," said Doctor Spring. " All others retire before it like stars before the rising sun." " It was a sound in the tops of the mulberry trees, and some of us held our breath." At the moment when the five candidates kneel and five conspicuous ministers Of New England — admirably represented by real likenesses in the picture, from left to right, Morse, father of the brilliant inventor of the telegraph, Griffin, Spring, Wood, Worcester— place ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH J their consecrating hands upon the bowed heads of the five young men, the first to be sent from this coun- try abroad, the solemn grandeur of the day rises to a climax; a scene is presented which is of its kind the most interesting since the Saviour ascended, and more melting than any other company of missionaries had passed through; and those present who afterward came to witness other farewells of missionaries contrasted them as incomparably less moving and overpowering than this. It was a millennial moment. It suggests Antioch and the mysterious voice which said : " Separate me Bar- nabas and Saul to the work whereunto I have called them." The son of Doctor Worcester states that only under pressure would his father put forth his full strength. It is interesting to note that at this ordination his father put forth his strength. There is more real energy and fervor and heart noticeable in his work than in that of any Others. The books say that he came home to his audience. His glowing imagination lights up the banks of the Indus, the Ganges, and the Sal win. In great elevation of feeling he swings out : " By the solemnities of this day, you, Messrs. Judson, Nott, Newell, Hall, and Rice, are publicly set apart for the service of God in the gospel of his Son among the heathen. You are the precursors of many that shall follow you." The First Bride of a Foreign Missionary It is at the height of the solemn rites which awaken in us the emotion of sublimity, and during the ordaining prayer that Ann Hasseltine Judson, the bride of a day, is pictured kneeling in the aisle near her gifted husband, who is to be styled the Apostle to the Burmese. Harriet Newell, the star-eyed beauty, sometimes called the Belle of Bradford, is also present, and is three days later to be married, at eighteen, to Samuel Newell, making up the 8 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN number familiarly called the Sacred Seven. Both young women in beautiful portrayal look down from the walls of Bradford Academy upon every visitor. Little was it thought by those who so admired those fine Bradford Academy young women that they both would so soon be embalmed in the memory of the church, become a dis- tinguished and imperishable part of its records, and add a touch of tenderness to all missionary annals by their youthful consecration, their faith, and purpose unfalter- ing in death. Aye, call it holy ground, The place where first they trod. Up to this day Burma had been little more than a geographical expression. But even the small boys who were present were so greatly impressed that later, holding their little prayer-meetings on the rye scaffolds over the floors in their fathers' barns, they named themselves Burma, Bombay, and Ceylon. Doctor Woods, one of those by whom the cradle of the infancy of missions was rocked and who does not figure in New England history as an enthusiast, states that " intense excitement spread rapidly through New England and all the States and extended to other lands." Students from Phillips Academy and the Theological Seminary in Andover had walked to Salem, sixteen miles. The services began at eleven, and continued until three. In those days time was taken to do the thing to be done. The students, " with- out refreshment," attempted to return on foot to Andover. One of them, Ephraim H. Newton, in a letter written two days later (sent to the author by his grandson), states not only that he is still very badly way-worn, but also that the audience was very large and as solemn as the house of death. William Goodell, the future notable missionary, the hero of " Forty Years in the Turkish HARRIET NEWELL • • * c i e » r ■ < a ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH 9 Empire," tells us that the day was the coldest of the winter. After the sun had gone down he became ex- hausted, and would have perished had not some theo- logical students, overtaking him, placed him between two of them, and they, bearing his whole weight, by taking turns, succeeded in carrying him along till the suburbs of Andover were reached, when a bed was spread for him upon the floor before the fire. He was filled for life with the missionary spirit, " being so thoroughly inocu- lated with it that a reinoculation was never necessary." First Lessons in Missions On the day of the ordination the American Board, which assumed the responsibility of sending the men abroad, had $500 in the treasury, and only $1,200 in sight. But the atmosphere had become so electric, so intense was the public feeling, so marked was the promise of the five young missionaries, who obviously possessed talents and attainments of the highest order, and such was the appre- ciation people had of their spirit, heroisms, and sacrifices, that money flowed spontaneously toward them. Gifts for them were laid on the communion table, and the table be- came an altar of offerings, so that before they sailed the American Board had received $6,000, and the missionaries were given the money for their outfit, which was to be the same as a year's salary, and besides had received their full stipend in advance for a year and a quarter. They were showered with kindnesses and gifts and diver- sified tokens of personal regard, lavished in part by some who doubted the wisdom of the venture and trembled for the issue, believing it rash, hazardous, and premature. At the Emersons' in Beverly, where the Judsons were enter- tained, the door was opened by an unknown hand and a purse of fifty dollars in coin was thrown in, with the label, " For Mr. Judson's private use." Mrs. Norris had earlier 10 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN given two hundred dollars for his outfit. The mission- aries were so loaded with kindnesses that Harriet Newell wrote to her mother : " We have every accommodation for the voyage. Friends in Salem are very kind. I have received many valuable presents ; " and Mrs. Judson wrote from India, " No missionaries were ever blessed with greater favors." By the war of 1812 certain ports of the country were shut up by a long-continued embargo; New York, for example, had been in a bottle tightly corked. But sud- denly and unexpectedly by special permission of the government, two vessels, the brig " Caravan," from Salem, and the good ship " Harmony," from Philadelphia, were about to sail for Calcutta, and they would take the young missionaries to the heathen in Asia. Strict orders were given that they should speak no vessel by the way, nor reply to any overture. The ordination was hastened by the desire of the owners and captains to avail them- selves of the long-sought privilege and get out to sea. The " Caravan " left the wharf on February thirteenth, and moved out into Salem Harbor and cast anchor, await- ing the first fair wind. It was an inclement winter day, not unlike that wherein the " Mayflower " discharged her precious freight on the ice-bound Old Colony coast. The vessels had this point of resemblance too, that their passengers, while appreciated by a few, were not recog- nized in their full power by the eyes of the world. Both were destined, as the embodiments of great moral prin- ciples, to unfold vital changes in nations and empires and to become distinguished factors in the world's history. The Call of the Deep On Monday, February seventeenth, there was a violent snowstorm. But on Tuesday the eighteenth, though it was bleak and cold, Captain Heard of the " Caravan " ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH II became very desirous of sailing immediately after dinner, and soon everything was stirring. Mr. I. W. Putnam, then a law student in Judge Putnam's office, later a dis- tinguished minister at Middleboro, where the " Putnam meeting-house " is still a venerated feature in a familiar landscape, procured a sleigh at a stable, went to Mr. Isaac Newell's and carried Samuel Newell and the lovely Harriet to the wharf ; and Mr. S. B. Ingersoll, afterward minister at Shrewesbury, took Mrs. Judson from the house of Eliphalet Kimball out to the end of Crowinshield's wharf. Judson himself preferred to walk, for he had a great aversion to farewell scenes; when he left his father's house in Plymouth, and when with his wife he left her home in Bradford, it was in each case before the family had risen, indicating his desire that there should be no ado in his adieu. When they met on the wharf, it was a confused time. Everything was being hurried on board. But though Captain Heard had been so resolute and sudden in his determination to sail on that tide, he had to give it up, as the wind died away, and he himself did not go aboard the vessel finally until the next morn- ing. Many friends lingered about the harbor until the night drove them home. Mr. Putnam, whom Harriet Newell in her diary calls Mr. P., and Mr. Ingersoll, who is styled in the memorial Capt. I., acted in a sort of representative way for the Salem people in doing the courtesies and, keeping up the spirit of the young mis- sionaries, remained aboard the " Caravan " all night. The evening was spent, as Harriet Newell tells us, " in singing, and I never engaged in this delightful part of worship with greater pleasure.'' The next morning, Feb- ruary nineteenth, soon after sunrise, it was raw and cold, but, the wind being west, Captain Heard saw his chance to clear the coast, and so put to sea, carrying Mr. Putnam and Captain Ingersoll out with him for six 12 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN or eight miles, when they returned in the pilot-boat. There were three other sailing vessels that cleared from Salem the same day. An excellent picture exists of the missionaries waving their farewells and of the gathered friends expressing their godspeed. Multum in Parvo The " Caravan " was but ninety feet long, twenty-six feet broad, and measured two hundred and sixty-seven tons. She was built by Enos Briggs in 1802 at his ship- yard, a little west of the present " Union " bridge. She seems insignificant compared with the sea-monsters now being built. But the " Caravan '■ carried a grander destiny and a surer freight than Caesar and his fortune, and her cabin became a consecrated and memorable place, and may be called the nursery of the American Baptist mis- sionary enterprise. Not only the Burmans, but the in- habitants of Bombay and Ceylon must always revert to the " Caravan " as the " Mayflower " of their history. The sturdy little craft was seventeen weeks on her pas- sage. She consumed a year and one month on her trip, and when she returned in March, 18 13, she paid $26,975 duties at the Salem Custom House, a very good contribution to Uncle Sam's treasury by the famous little vessel, whose name had been made immortal by those who took the outward voyage in her. The Doctor Shreve House, 29 Chestnut Street, in Salem, stands to this day the monument of her substantial earnings for her owner, Mr. Pickering Dodge. Time for Further Missionary Education Immediately after the ordination on February sixth, Gordon Hall, Luther Rice, and Samuel Nott hastily de- parted for Philadelphia, where they remained until Feb- ruary eighteenth, attending public meetings and inciting iW^t-N* ffr ■■t. 1 mm Tj* ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH 1 3 the beginnings of missionary feeling among the Presby- terians in their various churches. " The attention paid to the missionaries by the Philadelphians and the deep interest they appeared to take in their success excite emotion which language cannot well express/' Gifts and tokens and articles of equipment were bestowed upon them with a prodigal hand. Some of the young men had taken medical lectures, where now for nearly a fortnight the young heroes of the cross found themselves for a very fact in a city of brotherly love. On the eighteenth, the very day that their associates went aboard the " Cara- van " to spend the night in Salem harbor, they left Phila- delphia in a packet and dropped down to Newcastle. On Monday the twenty-fourth they left the Capes of the Delaware in the " Harmony," and reached India on August eighth. It was the sympathetic interest of the captain and his willingness to provide their passage, the first that had been found, that precipitated the ordina- tion and departure of all of them from this country in midwinter. The Policy of Faith All the missionaries that had ever been sent from this country were now afloat upon the high sea. When the century was near its dawn, like Joan of Arc they heard the future calling them, " Up, out, and away." With the courage of Saint Paul when he crossed over into Macedonia, they with sublime heroism were crossing over into a neglected country, wild and boundless, bearing precious seed, not knowing the things that should befall them there. First and foremost in the order of merit as well as of time, they expatriated themselves for Christ's sake and the gospel's. They were to hunt up the sheep of the wilderness, and feel their way along an untrodden path. They were taking the Sabbath with them 14 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN across the sea. All hail to the advent of the missionary spirit! A new scene is opening. It is the heroic period of a missionary age. The story of missions can never be told, and no list of heroes can ever be completed, without them. They have put forth an influence that now encircles the earth like a zone of light. The Anglo-Saxon race is henceforth to be God's chosen people. All the world shall be full of his glory : " I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth." Participating in the same solemn ceremonial, they all bowed together here at the same sacred shrine, and have at length gone to bow together before One clothed in a vesture dipped in blood, whose name is called the Word of God. Enlistment of Three Denominations It will be noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Judson, Mr. and Mrs. Newell, sailed from New England, the heart of Congregationalism ; that Hall, Nott, and Rice sailed in the " Harmony " from Philadelphia, the heart of Presby- terianism, thus turning two great denominations toward Salem, the cradle-place of foreign missions in this coun- try. But a greater denomination has even a larger interest in the event, for by their Bible studies aboard ship, one man in each vessel — Judson in the brig " Cara- van " and Rice in the ship "Harmony" — the separate- ness of the men in study is a feature of it — began the investigations which resulted in their becoming Bap- tists; and, singularly enough, a letter written to this country in appeal for sympathy and support from the new household of faith, as a distressed spirit turns instinct- ively to a strong man, was addressed to Dr. Lucius Bolles, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Salem; thus a wonder-working Providence caused a third denomination — each of the three with almost exactly equal reasons — to trace the beginning of its work for the heathen here to ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH 1 5 this Bethlehem of Missions. Thus did the new volume of missionary interest divide into three currents, and thereby it watered a wider range of the moral wilderness. All flowed from the same source, and took the same general direction. Love for the Bible, in the Missionary Enterprise To the Salem Bible Translation and Foreign Missionary Society belongs the distinction of being the first Baptist organization in America for promoting foreign missions. Bible lovers, it will be seen, were earliest active in mis- sionary operations. To give the Bible to the heathen was the leading object in their existence. After our regular missionary organizations were established there were still many who preferred to adhere to societies that existed chiefly to promote Bible translation. When the American Board applied to the Legislature of Massachusetts for an act of incorporation, resistance was made on the ground that " It was designed as a means for exporting religion, whereas there was none too much at home." It was re- plied that " religion is a commodity, of which the more we export, the more we have." It was moved to add the fol- lowing section : " That one- fourth of the annual income of said Board of Commissioners shall be exclusively devoted to defray the expense of translating the Holy Scriptures into foreign languages, and of printing and circulating the same." Thus those opposed to missionaries had nothing but praise for the deathless Book. The feeling that the unevangelized should have Bibles is not now appre- ciated in estimating the cause of the rise of the Home Missionary idea in our own country. Some of the finest States in the Middle West were in the Louisiana purchase, a Latin Province, where under Spanish and French rules Protestant churches and worship had been forbidden, and the Bible subordinated or excluded. Under Governor 1 6 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Claiborne a Bible could not be found with which to admin- ister the oath of office in that " God- forgetting, God-pro- voking portion of our country." The earliest mission- aries were Bible-bearers, the sacred page was speaking paper. Doctor Bolles became the first paid secretary of the Baptist General Convention, and from Salem was en- kindled that holy flame now recognized everywhere in the intense missionary feeling of the second largest denomination of Protestant America, which has more con- verts than any other on the foreign field to-day. The Baptist missionary magazine, " Missions," which in its present form has a host of readers, takes the ground that " no one's missionary education can be complete who has not paid a visit to historic Salem with its sacred mission- ary shrine." Once Salem had a larger shipping than New York. It would have been high praise for New York at one time to be told that her foreign shipping would ever become equal to Salem's. But this magazine goes on to affirm that the " world may forget that Salem once stood first among American cities in regard to com- mercial activity, but it should never forget that it also stood first in projecting missions. Her ships of trade sailed every sea, but none carried such precious freight as the ' Caravan/ " Christian Sagacity The genius of that constructive period, when no pagan nation had heard the name of Christ from American lips, was Dr. Samuel Worcester, a rare man of sterling worth, a natural leader and teacher of men, who could no longer smother the holy fire that was burning in his own large heart. Foremost in everything, he had first suggested the organization of the American Board and then its name, raised its first money, became its first secretary, and he > • 1 »< SAMUEL WORCESTER SAMUEL NEWELL ,, ^C~,SiSr-_ ^J^JZ1:Z^ ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH 17 figures in all the initial campaign with the character of a Washington. The elegant Macaulay observes that, as the sun illuminates the tops of the hills while it is still below the horizon, so truth is discovered by the highest minds before it becomes manifest to the multitude. This remark applies with peculiar fitness to Doctor Worcester. His prescience gave him something of the same advantage over minds that the telescope gives the eye of the astronomer over other eyes. The morning star which had appeared indicated to him the near approach of the rising sun. The few rays which then gilded the distant summits were to him pledges of the day. He read aright the signs of the time. What men call foresight is insight. When the fig tree's branch has become tender and is put- ting forth leaves, we know that summer is near. The man who, like Worcester, with anointed sight sees the trend of events and discerns forces put in motion by an unseen hand, and who gauges correctly the rising tide of public feeling, has a finer wisdom than the bird-in-the-hand man who has an eye for the tangible, but not for the potential, and sees only a barrier in what is half-developed and so to him premature. Where seed is small, there may be too a prepared soil. Falling at another time or place, the spark that has fired a train or blown up a fortress, would have simply expired. It was Worcester's con- ceded prominence in this transcendent enterprise that made it natural, even inevitable, that the ordination should be in Salem. When it became plain that his labors in missionary matters in addition to his pastoral work had broken his health, he stated that he did not want to recall anything that he had done for missions, saying in substance that, seeing what influences had gone out from Salem, he was willing to pay the price. Furthermore, it was a bequest of $30,000 — the most generous gift at that time ever made to such an enterprise in any country B l8 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN and unequaled by any other gift to the Board for half a century — from Mrs. Norris, who lived on the present site of the Merchants National Bank, on Essex Street, in a house which is now moved directly back, and stands dismantled at Number 10 Barton Square — that caused the American Board to be incorporated to receive and admin- ister the money; that, more than anything else, deter- mined the Board to undertake an independent enterprise; and that caused Doctor Worcester to take the ground that " the dwelling of good Mr. Norris, in Essex Street, Salem, must have a chronological place in the missionary register, before the Meadow and the northwest lower room of the East College, at Williamstown." Where Streams of Influence Meet To the parlor of that house on a winter night, in 1806, came Doctor Spring, of Newburyport, with a plan for founding a theological school. The evening was spent in explaining the plan to Mr. Norris and his wife, but they separated for the night without any promise of help on the part of Mr. Norris. He was in doubt, he said, from the fact that his great object was the foreign missionary enterprise. This was about three years and a half before any measures were taken for the formation of the American Board. The next morning, however, Mr. Norris said to Doctor Spring: "My wife tells me that this plan for a theological school and the missionary enterprise is the same thing. We must raise up the ministers if we would have the men to go as missionaries.' , With this idea of the matter, he promised to give ten thousand dollars to what is now Andover Seminary, and, going to the bank, he drew out the whole amount in silver, which he carried to his chamber and dedicated with prayer to the cause he had so much at heart. He explained the offering of the amount in silver by saying, ONE OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF EARTH IO, " That he never heard that paper money was given to build the temple." There is no half -providence. God's providences always match. The same Salem fortune that was to cause the incorporation of the American Board and to become its substantial corner-stone, was thus used in preparing the very men who were to go forth under its auspices when it in turn should be established. " It'll be a sorry time for us," said a recent visitor, " when we forget Salem and the * Caravan ' and the Norris House and the Tabernacle. I realized this as I walked almost with bared head the streets of the city where one hundred years ago the earliest missionaries rang out from the belfry of the ages the signal for a crusade, and a new birthhour of history struck." Even when the world is evangelized, millions in Asia must always turn to this missionary Mecca as people in England go and stand before St. Martin's Church in Canterbury, with which are associated Augustine and the first missionaries to England — once heathen ground, her people distinctly classed as pagans and sold as such in the markets of Rome. II WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD! II WHAf MANNER OF MANHOOD ! IF ever a missionary has been practically canonized, it is Judson. His name shines in the firmament of mis- sions as a star of the first magnitude. His sayings and maxims have been reverently treasured up and em- balmed like Joseph's bones. He seems to have possessed an unusual share of the heroic character. When the Almighty has a great work to be done, he appears always to select a man that is " game." In accounting for the apostle to Burma, whose praise is in all our churches, it is suggestive to notice that he had a slogan. He knew exactly what he wanted. There is power in a banner with a device. The other great religious movements in history have each had a watchword. It concentrates. Adoniram Judson set out distinctly as his life-work to raise the standard of the Cross in a citadel of oriental heathenism, to execute a translation of the Scripture into a language in which it had never before been known, and to collect a church of one hundred members among the heathen. His heart was in it. He put his strength to it. Does any one ask what Christian enterprise was on foot a hundred years ago? Let him look at this pro- gram. Judson is a workman, but he has no tools. He has a message, but no medium. He is tongue-tied. Tyndale, and Wyclif, and Luther translated the sacred oracles into their mother tongues, but Judson, like Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, had to acquire the dialect and idioms of a barbarous people, and to learn customs that were rooted in a past to which at first he had no key. 23 24 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Saint Jerome, who owes his eminence chiefly to his trans- lation of the Scriptures, was believed by the early church to have been raised up through a special Providence for this purpose, and to have been particularly assisted from above. Each translation of the inspired volume has a history, a spiritual romance, of its own. What heart is unmoved when Judson, whose sincerity at every point no being ever doubted, on the last day of January in the year 1834, kneels with rapturous joy and with stream- ing eyes holds up toward heaven the last leaf of his translation of the Burman Bible, thanking Goodness and Grace that his life has been lengthened out to see this day? It is a notable event in the history of missions. His high ideal was reached. It suggests, only it is more touching, the garden at Lausanne where Gibbon experi- enced the tender emotions he so affectingly confesses, when, between eleven and twelve at night, he wrote the last line of the last page of his great history and, laying down his pen, walked out to recover himself in the temperate air; and Noah Webster when he, having arrived at the last word of his dictionary, was seized with a tremor that made it difficult to proceed. The Oracles of the True God The recording angel could at length seal up the record of a new translation of the sacred writings into an uncouth language, in which it is now widely diffused and cheaply obtained. Doctor Judson's version, which com- petent judges consider one of the best renderings ever made into an Eastern language, still holds its place with little change as the standard Bible of Burma. It is pondered by the sable Burman in his hut, and worn by the fingers of tens of thousands of children in their native Sunday-schools. Its well-thumbed pages, stained by the tears of the afflicted, retain all their original power, JUDSON WITH LAST LEAF OF BURMAN BIBLE WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 25 and speak to the heart of a generation born long after our missionary hero accomplished his course. Its strength is unwasted as if God had brought it down through the years in his hand. It is distinguished among translations by its elegance, and the missionaries point out its frequent felicities. We have" looked upon the earliest copies as the ancients did upon Aaron's rod, by which such marvels were wrought. The story of the preservation of the translation of the New Testament possesses some of the elements of a wonder. It was taken to Ava in manu- script. When Mr. Judson was thrown into prison, it was secretly sewed up by his wife, who was driven away by the jailers from the prison door, and she gave the bundle which she made the form of a cushion, too hard and unsightly to tempt the cupidity even of his keepers, and it was used by him as a pillow. At the close of seven months, he and his fellow sufferers were rudely thrust into the inner prison, and the old pillow fell to the share of one of the keepers. Finding it too hard for his use, he threw it back, and it came once more into its owner's hands. When Judson was marched from one prison to another over the blood-tracked way, it was lost. Stripped of the mat which was tied about it, the roll of hard cotton containing the paper was again flung back into prison. Here it was found by a disciple, Moung Ing, who took it home as a memorial of his teacher, without suspecting its priceless contents. Several months after- ward, the manuscript, which now makes a part of the Burmese Bible, was found still uninjured. Cotton Mather says that John Eliot wrote out the whole translation of the Indian Bible with one pen, which, it need not be said, became a priceless relic. In the same class is the table, preserved in the room of the Bible Society in New York, on which Judson wrote his translation. If Cambridge, Massachusetts, is forever cele- 26 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN brated as the place where Eliot's Indian Bible was printed, so Moulmein acquired imperishable distinction as the loca- tion of the printing-presses that gave this translation to a pagan people at a time when, as Judson said, every stroke of the press shot a ray of light through a kingdom of darkness. He had the honor to see reality surpass his dream, and lived to witness the issue of more than five million pages from the mission presses in a single year. What forty-seven translators did on our common King James Version, working under the auspices of a king, with every facility supplied, Judson performed unaided. His hope was that the idols of Burma should fall before it as Dagon fell before the ark of God. He must get the names of the animals mentioned in the Bible right, and the flowers and plants, and this only suggests the dif- ficulty of expressing the accountability of man and the character of God and the thought of eternity, where speech was without words to communicate the ideas. For among the natives, who were incredibly immoral, distinctions which we take for granted did not exist. They are totally unable to see that a lie is an evil. Despite all difficulties, his translation is singularly free from obscurity, and stands an established monument to his genius and patience and persistence ; and when the conse- quent harvest began to ripen, he took great care to bind up his sheaves and gather them into his barn. We bless the God of grace, Who hath his word revealed To this bewildered race, So long in darkness held. A Genius for Generalship The epic muse has found her choicest themes in the struggles of the good and brave who have pursued some noble aim against adverse fortune. Judson, whose type WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 2J of mind men have usually honored with the name of genius, beginning his work among the benighted idolaters of the East exactly where the Apostles left it, only with the difficulties of the- situation very much increased, for the first six years appeared to have gone upon a forlorn hope; the gloom was relieved by scarcely a gleam of success. To reward a decade of inordinate toil, persecu- tion, and imprisonment, he had but one small church of eighteen. It fell to him to drive the entering-wedge into the very toughest gnarl of paganism. The haughty Burman, with a heart of marble, was inclined, like the ancient Greek, to cast contempt upon the Cross. From the first, the harvest has been the fruit of excessive toil. So thoroughly has the selfish principle of their religion molded the popular life that no expression equivalent to " I thank you " is found in the Burmese language. The Karens, however, without a priesthood, without forms of worship, tractable,, kind, and trustful, like the Bereans, received the word with all readiness of mind, and the work from the start was blessed with astonish- ing fruitage. One-third of the Karen people are now Christians. More than five hundred congregations are practically self-supporting. They tithe the produce of their land for the support of their pastors. Ceasing to be a child race and becoming a mother race, they send mis- sionaries to Siam to expand a work whose foundations were laid by the first Mrs. Judson. The work among the Karens, of whom twenty thousand became Christians in twenty-five years, is exactly analogous to that of Titus Coan in the Sandwich Islands, where before the mission- aries landed a professed idolater had dealt the death-blow to idolatry, and where for the first time in history a nation had flung away a false faith without a new one to replace it, and was without a religion — where five thousand converts were received into church relations in 28 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN one year, seventeen hundred in one day, flying as a cloud and as the doves to their windows, and where Titus Coan baptized eleven thousand, nine hundred and sixty persons. During five years seven thousand, five hundred and fifty-seven persons were received into the church at Hilo, three- fourths of the whole adult population of the parish. There were at Judson's death seven thousand Burmese and Karen Christians; and the American Baptist Mis- sionary Union that sustained him, reckoning from the birthhour of our foreign missions, and so including even the fruitless, formative years, has organized a church on the mission-fields for every three weeks, and bap- tized a convert for every three hours day and night. Judson had put his program through. " The only time I felt that I wanted to be orthodox for an hour," said the last speaker at a Unitarian Convention, " was the hour in which I noted the great missionary triumphs of ortho- doxy." The land in which Judson founo^ a dungeon, with its unnameable horrors, and in which the Baptists have had their greatest success, has now become itself an evangelistic power, giving in one year $31,616.14, rank- ing thus third in the list of donors to the American Baptist Union, only Massachusetts and New York having precedence. Romance is entirely outdone in its highest effort by that theater for men and angels, which filled heaven and earth with praise, when in a period of twelve years a church of eight grew to be a church of twelve thousand, when two thousand, two hundred and twenty- two persons were baptized in one day, and in two days following the number was made up to thirty-six hundred, and before the end of the year to ten thousand, becoming thus the largest single church in the world, doing a work that surpasses in magnitude any other ever known in Christian history. The Telugu mission, rooted in Jud- WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 20, son's work, experienced the greatest local revival since our Lord's ascension, when ten thousand converts were made in one year. One in a hundred of the inhabitants of India is now a believer in Christ. Christians have grown in ten years by nearly a million. Consistency and Cumulative Power The progression is not arithmetical, but geometrical; not along the slow lines of addition, but by the rapid process of multiplication. In Bombay, where two of the favored band of brethren, Hall and Nott, whom God has most abundantly honored, made the beginning, seventy different languages may be heard in the streets and markets. During fifty years in India alone, more than six hundred saintly men and women have fallen asleep and found a missionary's grave. Who can tell how many souls have by reason of them been added to the church of the redeemed in heaven? India is now a starry firmament sparkling with missionary stations. There are now eighty-four foreign missionary organizations at work in that country, and the gospel runneth very swiftly. If you say that Judson has not done all this, you must admit that with a fine sagacity and devotion he led the way. He opened the door, and others have passed through. Gladstone says that the first fifty years of the century, which would cover the formative period of Jud- son's work exactly, marked more progress than the pre- vious five thousand. What a bundle of history such a life binds up, and what a power he is shown to have been! A Heroic Plan The success of Judson and his associates, their con- tributions to our religious history, and their claim upon the remembrance of mankind, spring from one line of deliberate action more than from any other cause or 30 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN condition whatsoever. Their imperishable fame, their in- fluence and power come from that with which they iden- tified themselves. What would Paul be without his identification with the Christian gospel? What would Columbus be without his relations to a new continent? What is Lincoln except for identification with the eman- cipation and a reunited nation? What would Wendell Phillips, or William Lloyd Garrison, or Elizabeth Fry, or Howard be except for what they identified themselves with? The Sacred Seven espoused missions, and gave themselves to the alliance absolutely, with all abandon. They glorified the cause, and it in turn was the making of them. They firmly established the work, and it became their pedestal, and upon it they stand conspicuous, as long as ships shall sail the sea. Judson inherited some money, but turned it over undiminished to the mission board. He escaped the greed of wealth and the mania for owning things. When times were hard he asked to have his stipend reduced. While with many the business instinct is uppermost, he merged himself in the cause. He made religion the great concern of his life. He came to be known as the Jesus-man. He declined the title of Doctor of Divinity, although it always adhered to him, preferring that of missionary. By this designation he always alludes to himself. His home was " the mission." While he was without a single convert, a little inattention to his per- sonal appearance would appear excusable; but no, any opinion formed of him was an estimate of a missionary. His early habits of study were kept up with unabated diligence. He magnified his office. It is suggestive that the chief message left him by his dying wife was that it should not be said of him, as Mr. Carey said of his son, Felix, that he had " driveled into an ambassador," mean- ing to say that he was once a great person as a missionary, but he had accepted a comparatively insignificant office. WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 3 1 The Highest and the Most Human Too He was always, though perhaps needlessly, on his guard against secularizing the mission. In the ablest, finest appreciation of him probably ever given, the glow- ing orator appears to tremble at the apparition of the ruin and loss that would have been sustained if a man of such decided ability, indomitable resolution, so full of soul and sensibility, had gone off on a tangent at any point. His name is not alone. He was a center of a family group to which no parallel can be found in ancient or in modern history. Ann, Sarah, and Emily shared in his labors, rose to his height, and deserve to shine beside him. A reversal, or any change whatever in the order, would have made the whole result impossible. No one of the three could possibly have taken the place or have done the work of either of the others. He is inexpressibly indebted to each of them. To the first he owed his life when the foundations of his monumental work were hardly laid. Another surpassed him in a fine discrimina- tion of words, sympathized with him in his great work of translation, helped him turn his problematical beginnings into phenomenal growth, and called him " a complete assemblage of all that a woman could wish to love and honor." The other had more than talent, even genius. She had a fine appreciation of him, ranking him as a " lion " and a " wonder." With grace, elegance, exquisite raciness, and unapproachable nicety of language, she gives us an estimate of him, a vivid word-picture of the closing scene, and a clear reflection of his habits, spirit, and style of oratory, which illumine the brightest pages of any biography of him, and cause him to be better known than any of his fellow laborers, though some of them had talents of the first order as we shall see, and were trusted, revered, and beloved. 32 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN The wife of his youth was called, " The woman of the century." She was ever his good genius. No other wife in missionary service ever witnessed and passed through such scenes of suffering or made such efforts, crowned at last with success, to effect freedom. She was once a prisoner alone in her own home, guarded by ten ruffianly men. She showed consummate tact and in- ventiveness, unflinching courage, and heroic resolution in caring for her husband, in finding the means to visit him and prepare food for him, and in her efforts for his liberation from prison that would never have occurred to a man. She seemed wholly unaware that she was play- ing the heroine. When her heart is involved, a woman has by native endowment an ingenuity which men do not possess. Affection gives her second sight. " Mother- wit " indicates the same thing, as it implies that her love of her dependent young gives discernment and wisdom in action. The Flower of New England Womanhood This queenly soul exhibits a character, which in some of its elements is not equaled in female biography. His- tory has not recorded, poetry itself has seldom portrayed, such capacity for exertion and endurance, and such fer- tility of resources for the accomplishment of a purpose. With a life in the balance, her instincts were amazing and infallible. Let us be thankful that to her was given the joy of carrying to her husband the tidings of his liberty on the approach of the English army. She was beautiful, very fond of society, and famed for her extreme gaiety, vivacity, and sprightliness in conver- sation, and for her social sparkle. The acknowledged ornament of every circle in which she moved, a martyr to her sufferings and superhuman efforts to save her husband from the executioner, surrounded only by the WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 33 dark-browed, dark-minded children of the sun — her hus- band having been for some time absent on a journey — alone in her mortal illness, in her early deajth and lamented burial, she was the first of all the six hundred missionaries that are now sleeping in soil of India to go down to her windowless home. There is a story of a German merchant, so wealthy that he paved his court- yard with silver dollars ; but here is the pathway of a life paved with good deeds, leading up to that city whose streets are " pure gold, like unto clear glass." Doctor Wayland said, " I do not remember ever to have met a more remarkable woman." " She appears on the page of missionary history as an illuminated initial letter." Married at twenty-three, to her belongs the praise of being the first woman from this country who made up her mind, for Christ's sake, to exchange her friends and her country for the unmingled abominations of the heathen. With no example to guide and allure her, in a preeminent demonstration of missionary feel- ing, she rose superior to the prevailing spirit of the time, and, like a star in the moral firmament, sheds a distinct radiance on the path of all succeeding generations of mis- sionaries. " Nor do I yet know that I shall have a single lady companion, but God is my witness that I have not dared to decline the offer that has been made me." With noble energy and intrepidity, unsurpassed in all missionary annals, the renowned heroine of Ava marked out a path- way for herself absolutely untrodden, shedding upon it imperishable luster, and introduced to the world a marked feature in the new Acts of the Apostles, which is the Apostolate of Woman. The cost of self -exile to a woman, what it means to her to be like a person buried alive among them who are afar off, in an outlandish country, where darkness covers the land and gross darkness the people, may be inferred c 34 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN from the flat refusal of Carey's wife to go with him to India so that he and his oldest son, Felix, embarked on the " Oxford " without her. His letters to her and to his father revealed the tenderness of his love for her and the severity of the struggle between duty and affection. During the ship's enforced delay, Carey's wife recon- sidered her refusal and consented to go with him on con- dition that her sister should accompany her. This does not sound much like Mrs. Judson. Luther Rice finished his career of great usefulness and devotion unmarried. He was not without " the object of his affections, and there was a strong attachment, mutually indulged." He hoped she (Miss Eaton) might be willing to accompany him on the mission, but a distinct negative was given to the question, thus releasing him from all engagements with her, provided he should determine to go. "After many painful thoughts " he forsook all and, relinquish- ing an attachment of long and intimate standing, made the voyage to India. Such a consistency was stamped upon Ann Judson's life that we cannot point to an act in her career with the wish that it had been otherwise. Leaving her country and her father's house with a heroism and fidelity unparalleled in the annals of missions, she maintained through years of monotonous, disheartening toil, her position as Doctor Judson's only companion as he opened his work in the Burman Empire. William Carey recorded his impression that the Judsons looked too delicate for missionary work, and yet Judson toiled among these earthliest and grossest types of humanity for thirty-seven years. Seeing the missionaries had such wives, we marvel less at the solidity of their work. Mrs. Judson was quicker than her husband in learning to speak Burmese with fluency, though it is an extremely difficult language, and the dif- ficulties were then increased by the non-existence of any WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 35 such thing as dictionary or grammar. Her catechism was for many long years taught to every child in the Burman mission schools. The first Christian book ever printed in Siamese, a catechism, the first step ever taken toward the evangelization of that oriental Eden, was prepared by her. It remained for a generation almost the only contribution to the enlightenment of a nation of dark, debased idolaters, contentedly dwelling in the deep night- shade of heathenism. She wreathed with unfading laurels woman's missionary work, so honorable to her sex and her country. It attracts an increasing company, now enrolling one-third of the entire force in the foreign field, and must now go on adding circles, widening until they shall teach no more, saying, " Know the Lord." She was the first returned woman missionary that ever visited this country. Her little missionary tour in the East and South, pitifully restricted by broken health, developed nothing to detract from her illustrious precedence. Rain as Well as Sun Rangoon in her day was a mere collection of wooden shacks and pagodas. Judson's first convert, Moung Nau, became an invaluable assistant at the zayat. This was a bamboo shed, with thatched roof, which Judson caused to be erected under the shadow of one of the great pagodas, which had been newly gilded, and was con- sidered the most sacred in the whole country, as it con- tained six or eight of the hairs of Gautama; there he could meet daily, like Saint Paul, with all those who came unto him. Leaves twenty inches long and a foot in breadth, from the teak tree, the most valuable of all known timbers, which was once the chief export of both Rangoon and Moulmein, were used by the natives for plates, for wrapping up parcels, and for thatching such a hut. One day the viceroy of Rangoon, seated on a 36 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN huge elephant and attended by a numerous retinue, passed this provisional chapel. He said nothing, but eyed very narrowly the missionary and the little band of natives with whom he was conversing. Soon were heard the first mutterings of the coming storm, and the hopeful beginnings began to be darkened by gloomy fore- bodings. As hostility showed itself, the Judsons asso- ciated it with the appearance of the elephant at this shelter by the roadside. The number and immense size of the elephants, Mrs. Judson says, surpassed anything she had ever seen or imagined. The white elephant appeared caparisoned with silk and velvet and blazing with jewels. The ordinary Asiatic elephant, the largest and heaviest of terrestrial animals, whose strength is almost unlimited, under the dull heat of the tropical sun is the main worker in the teak forests of Burma. He drags the felled trees to the river. At the mills he does the packing and stacking. An elephant will grip the plank firmly, get it to balance, then with remarkable dexterity and astonishing power raise the great timber horizontally and push it into posi- tion. The beasts file along in undisturbed succession, and do an indispensable work with a minimum of direction. The First Grave in American Foreign Missions To Harriet Newell, who went out on the " Caravan " with the Judsons, belongs the never- failing distinction of laying her life first on the altar of sacrifice in the cause of foreign missions. She was no weakling, but with courage showed that she had fine traits of action and aggressiveness. She was extremely winning, idolized by all who knew her, and made friends everywhere to an un- exampled degree. Mothers named their daughters after her. Do you know that elusive quality which makes a person popular? It is centered, of course, in personality; I c UC« t. « WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 37 it produces affection; it insures confidence; it stands for a form of ability. It is what we call charm in a young lady. Harriet Newell had it to a superlative degree. It is the heart that governs the world ; it is the feelings that perform the real miracles of history. The masses of men are influenced by what appeals to their sympathies. Duty, no less than affection, bade her go forward. Noth- ing attracts like a struggle. This is seen in athletics. The drama too makes a quick recognition of this fact of human life. No struggle, no drama, is the unbroken law. The contest is usually with others, but in poor Harriet's case it was in her own soul, between her natural love of life on the one hand, and her heart and conscience and sense of duty on the other. The story of her life takes hold of the public mind for exactly the same reason that Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" does. It has in it many, and indeed most, of the same elements. Possessing immortal pathos, it reaches down into the vitals with a deathlike grip. You cannot escape it. There are all of the lights and shadows of a great drama. Brutality and love, greed that ordered her out of India, the devotion of woman, self-sacrifice, generosity, the power of the world to come, life and death — the whole range of the human passions is represented in the book. You see life in many phases, and it is all consistent. Each one acts his part. All the things happen naturally and in such quick succession that there is no waiting. The moving force of love, the most common- place of all the emotions, a vein that dramatists always work to its limit, implied by the presence of the beau- tiful young women from Bradford, unquestionably added to the power of the ordination to capture and enchain the audience. A lady, herself a consecrated missionary, claims that even the nicety, shown in the portrait at Bradford and in the frontispiece to her memoirs, in the 38 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN arrangement of Mrs. Newell's hair and the obvious pains- taking with a curl on either side of her handsome fore- head, contribute touch and power, for while no one doubts her piety, this shows her still a woman. To be " like as we are," and then to be consecrated, somehow appeals to hearts that are first of all human. A Princess in Missions She writes to her mother after her marriage that she is perfectly content, and that she wants her mother to remember this whether she lives or dies. Her mother had consented to her going, at eighteen, for the reason that the girl felt it to be her duty to go. She made it a matter of conscience, and the mother, notwithstand- ing her love for her daughter, did not feel at liberty to put herself between her child and the sense of duty. The mother has never had her day in court. Her side of the case has not been heard. She made a sacri- fice at the parting with her daughter almost equally with the young woman herself. The mother and daughter went through the heart-struggle together, each suffering as much as the other, and each the more on account of the other's suffering. The mother would have died at the last if she could have saved young Harriet. Nearer the Sunset In a letter which at this distance has lost none of its pathos, for it is charged with the undying fervor of a heartfelt sorrow, the husband writes to her mother that Harriet, a victim to the incidental hardships of the voy- age, becoming the first American martyr for foreign missions, had died at the Isle of France, often called by its old Dutch name, Mauritius. After they had been driven out from India, upon the great wide sea this island rose to their view, like that hillock in a wider WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 39 waste of waters where the wandering dove of Noah rested the sole of her foot and plucked the leaf of olive. It was a part of the cant of the day to sneer at sacrifice, but here it was unparalleled, and it came in a form that silenced all cavil and pleaded her cause more eloquently than any language. The Good Night When this proto-martyr found at nineteen that for her the end had come, the sentence from her dying lips that thrilled through the land was that, although she was prevented from building the temple, like David she had it in her heart to do it. It was an arrow that reached many in this country and could not be dislodged; one woman after another felt within herself, " I cannot say that, no thought or plan for the temple has been in my heart." Many a missionary is yet to be made by the moving recital; it still pleads with irresistible eloquence the momentous interests for which she left her country and her father's house. She had qualities and an excel- lence above the reach of mere human nature. In her memoirs, almost entirely written by herself, amounting to a girl's autobiography, she was drawing from her own life, coloring from her own heart. They reveal her life at sea; her peculiar affection for her widowed mother in Haverhill ; her glee at the first sight of India and of the natives, of the pilot in his calico trousers and white cotton short gown, who came on board the " Cara- van," to take the vessel into port ; her bright expectations — she was in the very prime and bloom of her youth; her disappointment, her sufferings, her death. Memory Comforting Sorrow Doctor Woods, of Andover, obtained the letters written by her and published them, with some extracts from 40 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN her diary and other sources, and it became in those days, though not a large volume, the greatest dynamic in early missions. It is another case of the broken alabaster box, for the story of her life became a potent influence in the modern missionary era. It had the widest circulation, single colporters disposing of more than a thousand volumes. If religion appears lovely when seen in its principles, how much more so when seen in the conduct of talented, devoted, excellent men and women. In no way is a person so likely to be truly known as in his familiar letters; for these often express the nature and spirit much more effectually than the best biog- raphy. Harriet Newell and all the Judsons were medal- ists in letter-writing. The friendly craft was in their day much more in vogue than at present. They were not writing for the public eye, and a person who is not prepared to unlock his heart can never write a great letter. Without the letters we should not know the real Judson, and Harriet Newell would be swept from the firmament, which would be like the loss of a star. Dr. William Goodell says that he was profoundly stirred by her life. He saw her here at Salem and, remembering her, says, " I could not restrain my tears while look- ing on her likeness." Her memoirs dropped into a woman's hands in Smyrna, in central New York, where was neither church, minister, nor Sabbath-school, and where had never been a revival of religion, but the sacred fire kindled in this woman's heart spread through her home and the town and the region, and two new churches came out of it, and some new religious voices that were presently " heard round the world." In any personal library, note the scantiness of biog- raphies of women up to the Judsons and Harriet Newell. The shelves are loaded with Napoleon, Johnson, White- field, Edwards, Washington, and Franklin, who in his A VILLAGE IN BURMA A SCHOOLHOUSE IN BURMA WHAT MANNER OF MANHOOD 41 writings always appears so much pleased with himself, but up to the year whose centenary we are now cele- brating how few, comparatively, are the biographies of women. These first missionaries not only opened a new sphere of activity and usefulness and distinction, but revealed a work that is appropriate exclusively for women. They can best enter into sympathetic relations with those in lowest degradation. With the advent of the Judsons and Newells the old monkish idea of religious methods was gone. One branch of the Christian church teaches the celibacy of the clergy for the reason, as is stated in their literature, that a mission requires it. Not with such conditions as existed in India; not where there is social female inferiority; not where evils exist that must be slain ingloriously like Abimelech and Pyrrhus by the hands of women. The very decided advance of mis- sionary enterprise which is to be attributed to the newer activity of woman is an enlargement of the beginnings which were witnessed in the sailing of the " Caravan." Ill DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS > Ill DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS The Orator of the Group ..«,,., ». . . . , IT was the design of the missionary board to send out but four men. To attempt to do more, in the opinion of Doctor Spring, would stagger the churches and make the project seem rash and impracticable. When Luther Rice asked to be added to the list, he was accepted only .e leven days before the ordination on condition that, on account of the scant provision of money at the time, he would occasion no additional expense, but would provide for his own outfit and raise the money for his passage. With this hard condition he cheerfully complied, and immediately set out on horseback, and traveled day and night in the depth of winter to assemble the wherewithal. It was owing entirely to an intenseness of feeling which could neither be restrained by himself nor resisted by the Prudential Committee, that he was enabled to force his way through the almost insuperable difficulties of the case so as to go to India at that time. " I had to provide by begging the funds for my outfit, passage, etc., and all^ this -in the space of nine days, for two of the eleven ^ passed before I learned that the day for ordination had\ been fixed upon. Three more were consumed in agonizing and successful, successful only because agonizing, efforts with the Prudential Committee, leaving only six days to provide the necessary funds. By the signal aid of Provi- dence, this was effected." He refers to the ordination at Salem as most solemn and interesting, although he was worn down with fatigue and agitation of mind. 45 46 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN " Perhaps no American has done more for the great mis- sionary enterprise. It is thought the first American Foreign Mission, on which he went to India, associated with Judson and others," affirms the inscription on his marble tombstone, " originated with him." When opposi- tion began to rear its brazen front and the missionaries were forced to retire from India to the Isle of France, as Rice found himself one-third of the way to the United States, and as he and Judson had become Baptists and no support was either organized or in sight, it was judged best by them that Rice should return to this country to rally the forces in this denomination. He was received with great affection. Above the ordinary height, robust, perfectly erect, of commanding presence, making a fine appearance in the pulpit, and having also the gift and temperament of a public speaker with talents of the very first order, sprightliness, pathos, and a vigorous, natural eloquence, always exceedingly felicitous and impressive, sometimes overpowering, he was Often called the orator, and as his pulpit efforts were highly attractive, he was ranked as one of the most interesting and effective speak- ers in the land. Eloquence to the Purpose As the churches were quietly slumbering over the Saviour's last command, he was kept " flying through " every part of the country like an angel with a message of life and light. The use of wit is said to have been the only defect in his character. He was led to its use at times by the natural vivacity of his nature, but the general feeling of the day was against its exercise, and he strove to keep it in check, although he still delighted to look at the bright side of things. He had excellent taste in music, had taught its art, possessed a sociable disposition, and was a fine conversationalist. On one of his journeys DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS 47 in the interests of the foreign mission he visited Lynn and found three or four Baptist families. They had no public meetings, and he inquired if it was not their duty to establish weekly or semi-monthly lectures by Baptist ministers, offering, if they would open their doors for this purpose, to engage the clergy of Boston and other places to supply them. Such lectures were regularly maintained for two years, part of the time once a week, and this beginning grew, through his initiative, into a large and prosperous church which has now ex- panded into several thrifty and beneficent Christian com- munities. But his greatest work was in unifying the scattered Baptist churches, and in developing an entirely new denominational consciousness. " No Baptist," his epitaph states, " has done more for the cause Of educa- tion. He founded the Columbian College in the District of Columbia." To this inscription could be added, " The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up." When students for the ministry besieged him for admission to the Columbian College and for support, he had no heart to deny them, and so undertook obligations, wholly benevolent, that were beyond his power to bear, with the result of irreparable injury to himself and to the college, which, as his epitaph recites, " failed to fulfil the high purpose of the founder." On a salary of four hundred dollars a year he gave everything to the college, in- cluding an inheritance. In the year 1826, without a penny in the world, supported by his friends, clad ofttimes in tattered garments, to a stranger he would appear to resemble more a poor beggar than a great and good man. He was one of those who wrought righteousness, clothed in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, of whom the world was not worthy. We cannot easily express the importance of his labor in its twofold relations, to the work abroad and to the churches at home. 48 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Sacred to Memory I have admired that man extravagantly. I have prom- ised myself a visit to his lonely grave. It is in a spot seldom trodden by the foot of man. The little Baptist church which once stood near it has been destroyed by fire and will probably never be rebuilt. When the hand of time has marred the extended epitaph, inscribed on marble, his name will still be found, written imperish- ably in our missionary Valhalla among those of men who have shut the doors to selfish enjoyment, wealth, and ease, who have shaped the beginnings of missions and planted the small seeds of great future success. Sig- nificant as was his share in an age movement of noblest consequence to men, his death came on a stage set with humbleness and obscurity, lighted only by the glow of his heart's thoughtful generosity. While on a journey to the South, he was arrested by illness at Edgefield in South Carolina. Unaware of the dangerous nature of his malady, without a home, without a place to lay his head, with no tear of kindred affection at his death-bed, with nothing else for him to do but quietly to die, Luther Rice, organizer of missions and founder of a university, calmly directed that his horse and sulky and his light personal baggage, his only earthly effects, be sent to the college. Aye, take them to the college, let them be My dying testament. I shall be dead To-night. During his mortal illness his mind seemed to revert to the early missionary society, composed of students of whom he was one, and in hours of great bodily weakness he entered upon a detailed account of it with all that clear- ness and energy for which his mind was distinguished. As the mighty intellect of Napoleon returns in his dying DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS 49 delirium to France, Josephine, and the head of the army, as Agassi z, who grew great in the use of the English speech, returns to die in French, his mother's tongue, as Alexander Adam, master of a high school, imagines himself plying again his vocation, and exclaims, " It grows dark; boys, you may go"; so in his delirium, Rice, re- turning to the associations and soul-stirring events of his early missionary career, is represented as thus breaking the mournful silence : Hark! did you speak of India? Or was I dreaming of it? Yet methought, I heard the voice of Newell — was it thine, My Judson? Thou panoplied of God! These river damps have loaded me with chills. So I but illy hear thee ! Bring ye news ? Have dying pagans turned to Christ to-day? Oh, I have walked a weary round ! and yet It was not wearying — for I had rod And staff in all the promises — But Judson, see! Thy wife is falling there, she falls! what she, The good — the brave — the fair! Ah ! no ! it was a dream ! Methought I was in India— but see ye, friends Are all beside me! Ah, Boardman! is it thou that speaks? Yonder, within the jungle where he toiled, They dug his grave. I catch a glimpse of those I see beyond! Come nearer. I have much to say — and I Am passing like the shadow on the face Of time. But, ere I mount, grant me this one request; Take all, and give the college. Let the wealth, Which some might bring to gild my coffin with, Be consecrated where was my poor life. Nothing for me— but everything for God. 50 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN And let me die, as I have lived, all armed For battle, on the tented field. Heard ye my request? Aye, take them to the college! Let me die With their departed spirits hovering Around me, and their benisons shall drop Like dew upon my soul! Hall the Beloved Among the Sacred Seven Gordon Hall appears to have been the beloved disciple. He seemed to fill the eye of his teachers and friends. " He was ordained and stamped a missionary by the sovereign hand of God," said Samuel J. Mills. Williams College promptly appointed him tutor, and Woodbury, Connecticut, issued a flattering call to him to settle as pastor. " Then the heart of the mis- sionary came out." " No, others will be left whose health or preengagement requires them to stay at home, but I can sleep on the ground, can endure hunger and hard- ship. God calls me to the heathen." Such was his heroism that, if the missionary society should fail him, he would work his passage and throw himself on the natives for support. Our literature will be searched in vain for a more creditable and energetic piece of composi- tion, written chiefly by him, than is discovered in the protest with which the missionaries faced the governor when they were ordered to leave India. It is instinct with mental energy and moral force. Nothing brings a man with a conscience to a full halt so surely as for a determined religious soul to take his stand against egregious wrong with the witness which each person has in himself. Wickedness is weak when directly confronted with a pungent protest. On reaching the second and third sections in this grave, nearly inspired deprecation, the solemn " God Forbid " rises into the realm of the morally sublime and is perfectly overwhelming in effectiveness. DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS 51 Your excellency knows perfectly well, that whenever human commands run counter to the divine commands, they cease to become obligatory. By all the dread of being found on the catalogue of those who persecute the church of God and resist the salvation of men, we entreat your excellency not to oppose the prayers and efforts of the church, by sending back those whom the church has sent forth in the name of the Lord to preach his gospel among the heathen. But should your excel- lency finally disregard the considerations we have presented, should we be compelled to leave this land, we can only say, Adieu, till we meet you, face to face, at God's tribunal. We are bound to think well of a missionary that could encounter wickedness in high places with a mastery like that. Yet it is with the divine reality of religion embodied in young men of that caliber, clothed with a power not of this world, that we are here and all along concerned. In his address in the Mahratta language he rose to heights of eloquence, and was celebrated among the Brahmins for consummate ability in discussion. When worn with fatigue on a missionary tour, no other place being available, Gordon Hall put up at a heathen temple for the night. He spread his mat in the veranda and lay down, but, finding himself cold, removed to a warmer place; this, however, he found occupied by two sick men, one of whom soon died. About four o'clock in the morning he called up the lads who were with him, and was making preparation for proceeding on his jour- ney, when he was suddenly seized with the cholera. The spasms were so immediate and violent, that he fell help- less to the ground. His best and most effective remedies he had exhausted in ministering characteristically to others. Being laid upon his mat, he attempted to take the small quantity of medicine which remained in his pos- session, but it was immediately rejected. He then told his attendants that he should not recover. Calmly he gave directions concerning the disposition of his watch 52 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN and clothing and of his body. Death overtook him, as it came to Goujon, the sculptor, who with chisel in hand had his eye fixed on a half-carved statue. With much difficulty the lads who accompanied Mr. Hall procured a grave for him in a Mohammedan cemetery and, having shrouded him in his blanket, they laid him, uncoffined, in his humble bed and ".left him alone in his glory." His heroic death adds immensely to the moral treasure of the world, and deserves to be recorded in the annals of mankind with the death of Wolfe upon the Heights of Abraham, of the elder Pitt in the Parliament house, and of the younger Adams in the Capitol at Washington, as it has in it all the elements of moral sublimity. He was well-born, well-connected, well-educated, early well-placed in a fine New England environment. Gifted, spirited, a complete gentleman of perfect poise, a moral pioneer, having a devoted zeal worthy of apostolic days, qualified by his bold traits of character to lead in a daring enter- prise — after an illness of barely eight hours his body takes possession of a promised land — Whence his uncoffined clay- Shall break again, most wondrous thought, Before the judgment day, And stand with glory wrapt around in a land redeemed, the heathen temple where he died being replaced, and the heathen Hindu Pantheon over- thrown. The Teacher dies; he came to plant, Deep in a heathen soil, The germ of everlasting life; He faints amid the toil. Strange olive brows with tears were wet. As a lone grave was made, And there, 'mid Asia's arid sand, Salvation's herald laid. J * 3 ~> 3 DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS 53 But bright that shroudless clay shall burst From its uncoffin'd bed, When the Archangel's awful trump Convokes the righteous dead. The Prophecy of a' Great Renown With the honors of valedictorian in September, 1808, Gordon Hall had graduated from Williams College, located in " The Piedmont of America/' so called because, walled around by hills, in striking scenery it approaches Italian beauty. Western Massachusetts supplies a strong argument for the effects of environment when it produces such characters as Jonathan Edwards, Mark Hopkins, Mary Lyon, John Todd, Bryant, the Humphreys, D wight L. Moody, and becomes the home of the youthful " re- formers before the reformation." At Williams College Hall became a bosom companion of Samuel J. Mills, James Richards, and other kindred spirits, and the as- similative power of an ardent piety is witnessed in the fact, stated by Byram Green, that it was from the im- pressions made by the study of geography in their sopho- more year in college that the missionary enterprise was projected. Dr. Jedediah Morse, who was one of those portrayed by the artist in the act of officiating in the lay- ing on of hands when Hall and his associates were ordained, was the father of American geography as gen- erally used in the United States and in foreign countries. His works were republished abroad and translated into French and German. It was not until four years after the ordination that grammar and geography were required to be taught in the English schools of Salem, and globes were not intro- duced for eight years. Before that time young people had to wait for possible years at college to receive train- ing that would now be given them in high school, yes, 54 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN even in the lower grammar grades. So Hall and his companions met geography in Williams. The primitive edition of Morse's work in two large octavo volumes, pub- lished in 1 79 1, was read in those days by eager minds through and through. The maps were printed in different colors. By this pictorial vividness the portions of the globe visualized respectively the regions that were savage, barbarous, half -civilized, civilized, and enlightened. Re- vivals were abroad. The sight of Hall and Mills and Richards had been illumined. In the simplest primary study their eyes were opened to the fact that immense populations dwelling in countries shaded on the map were like the man of Macedonia reaching out their hands to them. A Token from the Skies One Saturday afternoon, in August, 1806, it was deter- mined that a meeting should be held in a maple grove between the college buildings and the Hoosac River. On account of the weather, which was hot and menaced rain, the men from the East College and some others were detained, so that but five college boys were present, only one of whom ever reached the foreign field for permanent work. The meeting which we are now ap- proaching was not, as is sometimes supposed, without antecedents, having separate origination, and so detached and causative, but was in a series which were being held twice a week by the young men, in summer, out-of-doors. The groves were " God's first temples." A dark cloud that had been rising from the west soon burst upon them, and they hurried for shelter under the overhanging sides of a haystack in the clearing, called " Sloane's Meadow." While the lightning was cleaving the heavens with rivers of fire, the service was continued in this extemporized cave behind the sloping sides of the haystack. The rapid DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS 55 prayer of Mills that God would strike down any arm that opposed the heralds of the Cross, was accompanied by the artillery of the skies. The bright rainbow that spanned the heavens as they went forth from the hal- lowed place was a propitious token. The sacred spof was long unidentified, but Hon. By ram Green, who was present at the meeting, indicated the site, forty-eight years later, and setting up the stake with his own hand, marked the spot, which is held in reverence, like the place of retirement for prayer of Washington at Valley Forge, of Damaris and her sis- ters at Lystra, and of the Divine Man of Galilee at Gennesaret. That the memory of the place might be imperishable there came first the gift of a dollar, a gold one, to buy a cedar stake at least, then through the generosity of Harvey Rice, a classmate of President Hopkins, the far-famed monument of marble, crowned by a globe three feet in diameter, which, with the con- tinents traced in map lines on its surface, typifies the expression in the last command, " all the world." Here is a striking twofold coincidence. The missionary enter- prise in William Carey's mind first took definite shape from reading Cook's Voyages Round the World. As he taught his geography class at school from a globe of leather of his own construction, it flashed painfully upon him how small a portion possessed any knowledge of a Saviour. Contemplating the globe, he arrived at the con- clusion that the gospel must be sent to the heathen. His idea grew into a passion with him, and he could scarcely talk or preach, and he could never pray, without reverting to the subject. God in History "On Thursday morning, June 28, 1810, there might have been seen some six or eight young men walking into 56 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN the village of Bradford from the Seminary on Andover Hill. Four of them were introduced to a grave and reverend body of fathers in the ministry, who as the General Association of Massachusetts had commenced a session there the day previous for the transaction of busi- ness, no part of which contemplated such a presentation " as was made to them. Some world events were just ahead, and it will be seen that they turned on the per- sonal impression made by these young men. Their appearance "before the Association produced an inde- scribable sensation. While they were making their state- ment and answering questions, the tears were flowing fast down the cheeks of the listeners. Gray hairs were all weeping." The young men declare that they are impressed with the duty of personally attempting a mis- sion to the heathen wherever God in his Providence should open the way, and feeling their youth and in- experience, they look up to their fathers and respectfully solicit their advice, direction, and prayers. Thus it will be seen that the fire broke out unexpectedly, and it is obvious how the material had been brought together. The minds of the young men had been acting on each other, and like influences and like circumstances pre- pared them for a combination which made a starting- point for early progress. " The young men take their leave and return to Andover, ten miles on foot as they came." On testimony of Mr. Nott, they walked along, " anxious and solemn in their aspect and spirit, wholly uncertain and perfectly unable to conjecture what action with regard to the memorial and themselves the Asso- ciation would feel authorized to take." On the follow- ing day, June twenty-ninth, it was voted : " That there be instituted by the General Association of Massachusetts, The American Board of Foreign Missions, for the pur- pose of devising ways and means and adopting and prose- DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS 57 cuting measures for promoting the spread of the gospel in heathen lands." Later three of the young men were ordained at Salem, and were forwarded to their long- coveted field of labor. They are now a name and a praise in all the earth. Their record is on high. They hold their preeminence 4ike fixed stars in the firmament, though sometimes outshone by planets less remote in time or place. To the memorial were attached the names of Judson, Mills, Nott, and Newell. At first it had also the names of Rice and James Richards, but these were stricken off at the suggestion of Doctor Spring, lest the Association be made apprehensive by the formidableness of sustain- ing such a number in the foreign field. " The resolve to send four missionaries abroad was regarded by many as a doubtful movement, and Doctor D wight, of Yale College, thought it unwise." Only one member of the Prudential Committee was " decidedly in the affirmative." The prominence of Mills is proved by the fact that his name, though he belonged to a later class than Hall at college, and Judson, Newell, and Nott, at Andover, and so would not naturally be on the memorial, is conspicuous and obviously made so for the reason that it carried both in- fluence and power. Mills was ordained in the same county, and by sub- stantially the same ministers, as Judson, and the place was the Old South Church in Newburyport. Then for the first time in New England, and probably in the coun- try, the Lord's Supper was celebrated by nearly seven hun- dred communicants from various and distant churches, meeting together. The tything men, whose duty was to maintain order and propriety in the house of God, oc- cupied rear seats, and carried their official rods, still in evidence, which were used to strike the rebellious youth with awe. On April fifteenth, 1861, the duty of maintain- 58 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN ing order and propriety in the house of God was relegated from the tything men to the sexton, and he was instructed to be in attendance during public worship and " to attend all public meetings " for this purpose. Special seats are still shown, that were reserved for Negroes, who were the slaves owned by the rich old sea-captains. A sea- captain is said to have occupied the end of every pew down the broad aisle. The sanctuary was at that time warmed in winter only by foot-stoves. A great sensa- tion was produced later by the introduction of stoves at an expense of one hundred dollars ; the sexton had the habit during service of walking a third of the way up the broad aisle, puffing his breath into the air, to ascertain if the heat was sufficient, and usually he was able to detect his own frosty breath. The candidates for church-member- ship were required to give an account of their religious experience in writing. In the crypt the bones of White- field are exposed to view. The whispering gallery in the church is so perfect that when everything else is still, you can hear a watch tick a hundred and fifty feet away. Successors, Not Rivals We have followed the movement of the guiding pillar from Williamstown through Andover and Bradford to Salem to show distinctly the place of transfer of leadership in the divine enterprise from Samuel J. Mills to Adoniram Judson. It is much easier to take the lead than to keep it. It will be noted that of all the six men immortalized by their relations to this initial memorial, Mills is the only one who does not go to India. Mills' specialty was initiative. He had vision. He saw intuitively the thing to be done, and then undertook patiently to assemble the forces that would accomplish it. He was retained at home to beckon to the partners of those fishers of men to come and help them. It was strictly typical of DIVERSITIES OF GIFTS 59 him to ascertain that not a Bible could be found for sale or to be given away in New Orleans, and hence to suggest the establishment of a National Bible Society, which was accordingly instituted the next year, and has since printed seventy-five million copies of the Holy Scriptures; including those portions which many desire to have bound separately, it now publishes two million copies with each revolving year. He was magnetic, tact- ful, adroit in keeping the forces together, having less impetuosity than Judson, but it is also true of him that after bringing about an organization of " the brethren," he filled a sheet of foolscap with attempts at a consti- tution, but finally left that part to another ; while on the other handjudson's memorial to the Association is a gem, for he was a master of terse, singularly lucid statement. At the meeting in Professor Stuart's study in Andover, Tuesday, June 26, 18 10, when the memorial was advised in anticipation of the presentation of their case at Brad- ford, it was inevitable that Judson should be designated as the one to write it. Judson now is always at the head. He possessed certain qualities which fitted him to act in an important, critical juncture. As he had unquestion- ably endowments of the highest order, a genius for gen- eralship, and was not without self-reliance and a certain love of precedence, you will now never find him in a second place. Heroic men must have campaigns of some kind until we come to the divine harmony of the millennium ; so Judson threw into this one all the energy of his impassioned character. As one star differeth from another star in glory, it is extremely suggestive to notice that, whenever American missionaries are listed, his lus- trous name leads all the rest. With such an ardent mind, of such mighty energies, to labor as Doctor Thomas did in Bengal for seventeen years before baptizing his first convert, and to preach eloquently as Robert Hall did at 60 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Bristol for seventeen years without the addition of a single convert to his church, would have laid Judson in a grave before his time. He arrived in Rangoon in July, 1813, and baptized his first Burman convert, June 27, 1 819. There were three distinct missions established by the Sacred Seven — Bombay, Burma, and Ceylon. If the mission at Bombay has been less successful in the number of conversions from the heathen than some which have followed, it should never be forgotten that the experiments and labors and lessons of that mission contributed to the success of the others and to the devel- opment of the religious spirit at home by which their work was begun and sustained. IV THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER IV THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER The Time is Short THE average life of a missionary in the East was only about five years. " The scythe of death is sweeping all around us." Of twenty missionaries who entered upon their work at Bombay before 1830, five died and seven had returned to America. By 1832 thirty children had been born to the missionaries, nineteen of whom had died. In the first twenty years of the history of this mission the number of missionaries who had died was greater than that of converts who had been baptized from heathendom. Samuel Newell did not know that he was attacked by cholera until the day before his death. He died May 31, 1821, lamented by the Christian world. He and Hall, the only two who lived and died in the service of the American Board that sent them out, were both thus suddenly summoned, victims of the same disease. An Elegy that Led to a Missionary Career When for reasons of health, Mrs. Judson was return- ing to this country in 1823, it was inevitable that she should visit the Nazareth of missions. A meeting was arranged in her honor. A young lady of twenty, Sarah Hall, one of the youngest members of the First Baptist Church in Salem, who at the age of thirteen had writ- ten a poem upon the death of little Roger Williams, son of Mr. and Mrs. Judson, now being much impressed by the death of Colman, an associate in the mission field with the Judsons, wrote a beautiful elegy. As a pretty 63 64 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN feature of the meeting the Salem girl was put forward, despite her low pleadings, to read the elegy which had been given a wide publicity by the admiring public press. She finished and, without lifting her head to perceive that the dark eyes of Mrs. Judson were filled with tears, stole away to hide her blushes in a retired corner. Had it been possible to turn a few leaves in the book of human destiny, what interest would have been attracted to this exceptional meeting between Mrs. Judson and the timid, talented, poetic Salem girl who was to be her successor in the home of Judson; and the poem was central to this further romance. It came under the eye of a slight, manly student of Water ville College on the Kennebec, George Dana Boardman. It led to an acquaintance with the author and to their marriage. He came to Salem to labor during a vacation of nine weeks for the Clarkson Society, which had been formed by some benevolent ladies for the benefit of the colored population in this city. Slavery continued in Salem until after the Revolu- tion, when there were here about one hundred slaves. After Mr. Boardman's day Mrs. Lawrence, who was herself colored, long instructed the colored school, and had at least forty scholars. The school was on Mill Street, on city land opening on the gravel-pit. It was not until more than thirty years after the ordination that the colored population became dissatisfied with their sepa- rate school as being too distinctive in point of complexion. After the " Mayflower " landed the pilgrims at Plymouth, she engaged in the slave-trade, and the place where she berthed is pointed out here as is the memorial at Plymouth, for she landed many more individuals here than she ever did on Plymouth Rock. The Clarkson Society was named for the man who created a powerful excitement in England by causing to be made an engraving of the interior of a slave-ship, with its low spaces between THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER 65 decks, its cell gratings and barricades for the confinement of the blacks. Through Salem's Doorways Standing in her place in the vestry of the First Baptist Church, faced out' toward Asia, our Sarah uttered as her final sentiment before passing over the threshold, " If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence." The slender figure of Mr. Boardman, his transparent complexion, the blue veins on his temples, formed a sad tablet on which any one could read that what he did in India he must do quickly. His short life, which carries us back to the heroic age of the church, was not lived in vain, for by great good fortune his brief work fell in part among the Karens who, in the most exact sense, were heathen, if by heathen are meant people of the heath, bushwhackers, unorganized, untrained, but with immense immediate possibilities for better things. They were walk- ing through dry places, seeking rest and finding none. The house seemed in a peculiar sense empty, swept, and garnished, with no prior occupant fighting to keep pos- session. The worst and the best of life in India are both religious. In contrast with the Karens were the Burmese, who, like the Mohammedans, were already filled full with a stubborn false religion, and amid their countless pagodas were given up to hardness of heart. Their religion was almost worse than none. But with the Karens, trustful, affectionate, childlike, it was, " Come in, thou blessed of the Lord, wherefore standest thou without?" The inscription on Boardman's monument was written by his son, distinguished and titled throughout a long brilliant pastorate in Philadelphia, and it shows the quality of the early missionary and his Salem bride, for a son must be well-born and inherit abilities of the first order to rise to such eloquence and vigor and nicety of 66 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN expression. Here is a model in English rhetoric. Among the inscriptions currently known, not a dozen in our language will equal it, and none will surpass it. On one side of the monument is written : Sacred to the Memory of GEORGE DANA BOAKDMAN American Missionary to Burma Born, Feb. 8, 1801 Died, Feb II, 1831 His epitaph is written in the adjoining forests On the other side of the monument is found this in- scription : Ask in the Christian villages of yonder moun- tains — Who taught you to abandon the worship of demons? Who raised you from vice to morality? Who brought you your Bibles, your Sabbaths, and your words of prayer? Let the reply be his eulogy. A Woman's Way Mrs. Boardman captivated the Karens, and was almost idolized by them. On her missionary tours among the jungles she was accompanied by her " beloved " Karens as a body-guard. On one of these expeditions after she became a widow, surrounded by her dusky attendants, she met in a rain-storm a Christian English officer who was hunting in India, and he, from her uncommonly fair countenance and charming ways, " almost mistook her for an angel visitant from a better sphere." The unexpected meeting formed the basis of a lasting friendship between them. There are many testimonials to her personal loveliness and grace of manner. Her English friends in India styled her " the most finished and faultless specimen of an American woman that they had ever known." " I •' < H< ( THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER 67 exceedingly regret that there is no portrait of the second Mrs. Judson," said Doctor Judson, to whom she was mar- ried, April 10, 1834. " Her soft blue eyes, her lovely face, and elegant form have never been delineated on canvas." The Karens kissed her shadow as she passed. They would sometimes put their tawny tapering fingers upon her neatly formed slippers, so unlike their own clumsy sandals. Such was her modest, unconscious grace that her letters contain almost no allusions to herself. There is something exceedingly touching in the affec- tionate simplicity of her request, sent home to Salem: " You must let the children and my sweet sister make each a mark upon a paper that I may have some token from their little hands." She shows that it is possible to get religion into the public schools if it be embodied in a person of high quality. She was always allowed to teach as her own conscience dictated. It is an honor to Salem, that an appropriation was obtained from the government in India " for schools to be conducted on the model of her schools at Tavoy." Her education took place in the atmosphere of schools, but only in small part by the use of their facilities. Her translation of Bun- yan's " Pilgrim's Progress " into Burmese is a classic. Her hymns, about twenty in number, were the best in the early Chapel Hymn Book which she edited. As, in company with her husband, she was returning to Salem with health impaired, when Edward, her dis- tinguished son who has erected the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, was but eight months old, on reaching the Isle of France, where Harriet Newell had died and was buried, she had so much improved, that it was decided that Doctor Judson should return to the place where he had unfurled his standard upon the enemy's ground. What beauty can exceed the exquisite- ness of this precious little gem of song written by her at 68 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN the impending separation, when the deeps of her heart were broken up? We part on this green islet, love — Thou for the Eastern main, I for the setting sun, love — Oh, when to meet again! The music of thy daughter's voice Thou'lt miss for many a year, And the merry shout of thine elder boys Thou'lt list in vain to hear. My tears fall fast for thee, love — How can I say farewell? But go! thy God be with thee, love, Thy heart's deep grief to quell. Yet my spirit clings to thine, love, Thy soul remains with me; And oft we'll hold communion sweet, O'er the dark and distant sea. Then gird thine armor on, love, Nor faint thou by the way, Till Boodh shall fall and Burma's sons Shall own Messiah's sway! But after their arrival at the island she faded per- ceptibly, and was once more borne back to the ship, and her husband, under these alarming conditions, revised his plan, and together they took their departure " for the setting sun." On their route is another islet, a towering, forbidding, and awesome " rock of the sea," lifted right up two thousand feet by volcanic action, which has gained a great hold on the imagination, whether we fancy it as the home for fourteen years of a solitary man, who by excessive fear and then by excessive joy became dis- tracted, or as the aerial habitation of the " Man of Destiny," that pest of civil society, after his irretrievable THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER 69 ruin had been accomplished, when he, as pictured, stands on the rocky, beetling cliffs and ruminates the livelong day on the awful occurrences of his unexampled career. The rocky prison where he fretted away the later years of his tempestuous life, and the early tomb of this fallen conqueror of nations, the hero of the sword, callous to everything except his own interests, will always attract the gaze of men. Being right on the route to India, St. Helena was once a sort of half-way house, and greatly flourished as a port of call. But the opening of the Suez Canal, offering a short cut to the East Indies, deprived the people of their chief means of support, and since the British Government several years ago withdrew its mili- tary station, the islanders have had a desperate struggle for existence, and Sir Alfred Moseley, the wealthy Eng- lish philanthropist, has proposed to bring three thousand of the poverty-stricken residents to California. A Shade Among the Shadows Unpromising to those who design it for a residence, but a welcome sight to a sea-worn mariner, St. Helena stood before the ship, " Sophia Walker/' and before Cap- tain Codman (a name honored in New England), who was anxious for his passenger in her threatening illness. Mrs. Judson had given twenty-one of her forty-two years to Christian service in a heathen land. On shipboard three days after reaching the desired haven, the dread of burial at sea done away, she breathed her last. The colors of the ship were hoisted at half-mast, and imme- diately the other vessels in port hung out the same signal. The American consul, at his own expense, procured suits of appropriate mourning apparel for Mr. Judson and his three children. Boats were connected in such a way as to form a funeral procession, three going ahead to tow that which carried the sacred dust of the gifted yO THE IMMORTAL SEVEN woman, and in this form they advanced with a slow, heavy beat of their oars. Another small boat followed, in which Mr. Judson with three of his children, the other three having been left in India, and the captain of the ship were seated as chief mourners. On the arrival of the melancholy train, the procession on land, all shops being closed and business suspended, was followed by a concourse numbering about one hundred of the inhab- itants of the island. Mrs. Judson was buried the same day she died ; the same evening the ship, carrying Doctor Judson, went to sea, and the next morning the rock of the ocean, keeping its precious treasure, was out of sight. Fiction never described a scene more soul-stirring or better adapted to enlist the deepest sympathies of our nature. Mrs. Judson rose from death like a star of eve- ning for Christian and heathen mothers long to gaze at. A beautiful, affluent banyan tree spreads over the grave in almost the exact way in which the willow that was uprooted by tempests in the hour the great chieftain expired upon the same island, used to extend its branches over the place where he most loved to sit. We can almost see the measured rise and fall of oars in Mrs. Sigourney's poem : Mournfully, tenderly, Bear onward your load, The oars keeping time O'er the billowy road, While boat after boat Gliding slowly the while, Approach the rude shores Of the ocean-beat isle. But where is that chieftain, The dread of the free, Who laid down his scepter To slumber with thee? THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER ?I The gray islet answer'd, "No peace could he find, So his ashes rode forth On the wave and the wind: "Aw^ay, thou blood-shedder ! Earth-troubler, away! Hide not 'neath my cliffs On the terrible day, "But rest, sainted sister! And hallow my dust, Till the last trump shall waken The souls of the just." To me the most interesting historical object in all Europe is a simple shaft of granite which rises from the roadside near the town of Wilna, on the western boundary of Russia. It bears two inscriptions in the Russian lan- guage. On that side of the shaft which faces the west are these words: Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way in 1812 with 410,000 men. On the other side, facing east : Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way in 1812 with 9,000 men. He fought, and half the world was his, He died without a rood his own; And borrowed of his enemies Six foot of ground to lie upon. From the early grave of one of those superior beings that stride, like Titans, across the earth and leave foot- prints never to be effaced — the first place of burial of that emperor who caused more deaths and suffering than any other mortal, execrated by Byron and Wordsworth, who yet compare his fall to that of an archangel — visitors J2, THE IMMORTAL SEVEN go to the grave of a gentlewoman, benevolent, eminent, undefeated, whose only ambition was to serve and save. Napoleon was imprisoned here for the five and a half years just preceding his death, at a cost to the British Crown of more than one million dollars per annum. When dead, it did not occur, as it seems, to any kingdom under the sun that it would be a privilege to inscribe something upon his tomb, although his remains lay upon the island for nearly twenty years. Mrs. L. H. Sigour- ney, in fine poetic fervor, indulges the pleasant conceit of a challenge to the nations of the earth to step forward and give an inscription : But there was silence. Not a sceptred hand Received the challenge. And lone St. Helena, heart-sick and gray 'Neath rude Atlantic's scourging, bade the moon, With silent finger, point the traveler's gaze To an unhonored tomb. Some tourists had made the following record, upon which her lines were suggested : " The moon of St. Helena shone out, and there we saw the face of Napo- leon's sepulcher, characterless, uninscribed." Blow softly, gales ! for he no more, St. Helen, rests in thee; He whose dominion shook the earth And stopped but with the sea. He made a ruin where he stalked, And all his trodden path Is darkened by the thunder-cloud Of agony and wrath. She shed a light around her way, And with the steps of prayer Raised up a ladder to the skies Which brought down angels there. THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER 73 The New Testament has little to say about interments. It is filled with lessons of life, but an exception is made in the matter of the two graves in the early church. The contrast is so marked as to deserve attention. We are first led for our instruction to the sad grave of those " who sold a possession and kept back a part of the price," and then to that of " Stephen, a man full of faith," which is not a grave at all, being so full of peace and promise. So at St. Helena, we see, on the one hand, tranquillity, repose of spirit, and the divine bestowal of those gracious aids known as dying grace, and, on the other, the disquiet, after life's fitful fever, of that wild night when wilder yet was the- storm that raged around the soldier's pillow — and two graves only geographically near together, as if by design, that the two extremes by comparison and contrast might emphasize to the most ordinary mind their distance apart. Mournfully, tenderly, Bear onward the dead, Where the warrior has lain Let the Christian be laid: No place more befitting, O rock of the sea! Never such treasure Was hidden in thee. Mournfully, tenderly, Solemn, and slow, Tears are bedewing The paths as ye go. Kindred and strangers Are mourners to-day; Gently — so gently, Oh, bear her away! So have ye buried her, Up! and depart. To life and to duty With undismayed heart; 74 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Fear not, for the love Of the stranger will keep The casket that lies In the rock of the deep. Mrs. Judson's home church stands in the shire-town of a county that has more people in it than the entire State of Vermont and four times as much wealth. This First Baptist Church in Salem is admirably located on grounds that join the three court-houses of Essex County. In architectural correctness and beauty, one of them, " being chiefly Grecian, may be ranked with the best edifices in our country. It would have been a worthy specimen of taste even in the age and city of Pericles. ,, Here on the grounds of this church Dr. J. Ackerman Coles, of New York, has erected a flagstaff which towers like a son of Anak. It has the appearance of having been produced by nature to show mankind what height a tree can attain in favorable soil and in a congenial climate with no enemy to lay his axe at its root. It is a stem from Oregon, such as is to be erected with pride at the Panama exhibition. In front of the church is Federal Street, after which was named by the author, General Oliver, the famous tune " Federal Street/' which has been sung not only in every city in the land, but when- ever any little home missionary church on the vast prairies beyond the great rivers of the West rings its Sabbath morning bells, " Federal Street " is used in raising the song of praise to the Triune God. From this staff broke out into the air our national banner, twelve feet by twenty feet nine inches, with the full forty-eight stars. When Commodore Perry entered the harbor of Yeddo in Japan he placed the American flag upon the capstan of the ship, gathered his sailors about him, and sang the Old Hundredth Psalm. We ought to prize every incident and association that bind our nation and J. ACKERMAN COLES, M. D v LL. D. THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER 75 our nation's banner to the sanctities of our holy religion. " Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." Scan the words. Observe the religious note. Does this "Battle Hymn of the Republic" savor of patriotism or religion, or of them jointly? In line of review, when passing before the President of the United States, or the chief executive of the common- wealth, the flag is received with a greater honor and distinc- tion than is accorded to any human being on the face of the earth. With uncovered heads it is received, because it stands for the majesty of law and for the will of the peo- ple. Those who have seen the colors presented to a regi- ment will remember that, as a distinction of honor, with martial music the flag is escorted to the parade-grounds between two platoons of soldiers. In front of the line, it is received at " present arms " by the entire regiment, the highest honor that can be given in military expression. It is the glorious ensign which has gone before us like Bethlehem's star before the shepherds. It is a standard not found on exhibition in any war-museum of the Old World as a trophy captured in battle. It is not the red flag of anarchy, nor the black flag that fights to death and gives no quarter; least of all do we show a white flag with its loss of spirit, absence of principle, peace at any terms, surrender. It is the most graceful, beautiful banner in all the world. It represents the greatest sacri- fices, the most striking providences ever exhibited in any country. Carried in 1777 by Washington's army, it shook out its matchless beauty to the breeze when he repulsed Cornwallis on the banks of the Assumpsic. It witnessed Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga. It is " Old Glory," being first so named by a man from Salem, Capt. William Driver, and, meeting with popular favor, the name has followed the flag into every port of the civilized world. " Show the flag " was Dewey's admonition to Capt. j6 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN C. L. Hopper. " Thou hast given a banner to them that fear Thee that it may be displayed because of the truth." Up with our banner bright, Sprinkled with starry light, Spread its fair emblem from mountain and shore. " In the name of our God we have set up our banner." On a level with the eyes of people the flagpole bears this inscription: Presented to the First Baptist Church By J. Ackerman Coles, M. D., LL. D. 1913 To mark Centennial Of the Organization In this church of the first Foreign Missionary Society Among Baptists of America First Paid Secretary Being Pastor Lucius Bolles, D. D. To Whom Adoniram Judson, On becoming a Baptist, wrote, "Under these circumstances I look to you." And in memory of Sarah Hall A talented, beautiful member of this church, who became Mrs. Judson The Golden Gate Reviewing the field from a Pisgah height, we find that the pioneer work is now accomplished among the awa- kened nations. Foundations are laid. It was Doctor Jud- son's earliest wish that he might raise the standard of the cross in some chief city of oriental heathenism, and he sought to establish himself at Rangoon — a " city wholly given to idolatry." Three years after his arrival there he IM MANUEL BAPTIST CHURCH, RANGOON THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER JJ speaks of it as a " most wretched place." But it is called " The Golden Gate," and so it has proved to be for all Burma. The Immanuel Baptist Church, sufficiently large and attractive to be an ornament in any city, is now a strong Christian organization. The Rangoon Mission numbers to-day about one hundred and sixty churches, eleven thousand members, with over six hundred acces- sions last year. By reason of that which Judson kindled by a dim taper, ready to be extinguished by a breath, the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. In commemoration of an event which proved so propitious for Burma, taking for a model the beautiful colonial cupola of the old Tabernacle Church, through which in the initial days passed and repassed the eager feet which were to be bound for the sake of the Lord Jesus, Dr. J. Ackerman Coles in a moment of happy inspiration has undertaken to erect at Rangoon, the capital of Burma, which is the largest of the British Provinces in India, four times greater than all New Eng- land, " The Tower of Salem." The Tozver of Peace Its form is an elaborate campanile, and in it will be placed Westminster chimes, which may be heard under favorable conditions at a very great distance. The peal in the Metropolitan Tower, New York, has frequently been heard by voyagers at sea beyond Sandy Hook, and yet so soft are the tones that they are listened to with pleasure by visitors to the observatory gallery, one story below their location. The arrangement of the notes was first introduced over a century ago in St. Mary's, Cam- bridge, England, from an air which is said to have been composed by Handel. It was copied later for the Houses of Parliament, Westminster. Four notes are struck at the first quarter, eight at the second, twelve at the third, 78 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN and sixteen at the hour, fol- lowed by the full hour stroke on the largest bell, which weighs a thousand pounds. The iron staircase, the clock with its four dials, everything which goes into the cam- panile, except the brick of which the walls are built, will be assembled in this country and transported. The changes of the century are incidentally exhibited by the fact that the generous donor can discuss, select, arrange, and order everything into place by the use of his office telephone. We may judge a man by what he loves and honors and lavishes his money to embel- lish. Giving hath a divinity all its own. "The Lord"— and the same may be said of each of us — " loveth a cheer- ful giver." 1 Their Race is Run The last name to be starred in the sun-bright list is mwjKBover.Arebtteet; 1 My Dear Doctor Hill: I have read your interesting article, entitled " The Immortal Seven." The frontispiece of the old Tabernacle Church of Salem suggests a facsimile reproduction of the belfry and tower of the old Tabernacle Church through which Judson and his four companions passed, to and from their ordination, February 6, 1812. If such a memorial should prove to be acceptable to the building committee at Boston, I would gladly bear the expense of the undertaking. I am, yours truly, J. Acker- man Coles. THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE OF POWER 79 Samuel Nott, a graduate of Union College, nephew of its famous president, Eliphalet Nott, from whom thirty- five hundred graduates received their diplomas. Samuel Nott returned home from India in 1815 by reason of physical infirmity, but lived about as many years after the ordination at Salem as five of the others, Mr. and Mrs. Newell, the first Mrs. Judson, Gordon Hall, and Luther Rice, together. He illustrates the principle, that it is essential to longevity to learn by losing one's health how to keep it. Under such conditions, having once lost his health, Professor Park lived to be ninety, and Doc- tor Storrs, of Braintree, to be eighty. There was some hesitation about settling Doctor Prince, pastor in Salem of the First Church, on account of the delicate health which would probably shorten his life, but he survived to bury every parishioner present at his ordination. A glass dish will last as long as an iron one if you take care of it. Mary, always the most delicate member of the Hasseltine family, out of which Mrs. Judson came, outlived all the household. All about us are persons who have often met Nott and talked with him. He lived until the year of the opening of the Suez Canal, and died at the age of eighty-one during Grant's administration as President of the United States. A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED V A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED HOW near we are to the first foreign missionaries! At festivals in the Tabernacle Church Miss Susan S. Driver sometimes sits in the same relative position that her mother occupied at the famous ordination. Dr. Edward Judson, a son of Adoniram, is to-day the pastor of the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in New York. On April 20, 1913, he baptized his older brother, Henry, who was ten years old when their father died. Adoniram B. Judson, M. D., a third son of the missionary, is a distinguished surgeon in New York, who, with characteristic benevolent spirit, has made a specialty of the treatment of crippled children, and has developed real genius in the use of mechanical appliances for that purpose. The Boston Public Library contains twenty-two publications from his pen. In buying coal, many of us in Salem have dealt with a man with whom we have sat in church for years, who remembered Judson perfectly, and he has given us some of our most vivid impressions of him. A gen- tleman writes that he heard this pioneer missionary preach in Plymouth, and that Judson's sister showed him, at the Judson mansion, the first copy of the Bible printed in Burmese, which he had sent her from Asia. This gen- tleman was a lad of thirteen in Plymouth when the father of Judson died. Another, a minister, is proud to state that he was born in the year in which the famous ordination took place. When spending vacations in Plym- outh, the author of this book has noted the presence of 83 84 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Judson's sister, who outlived her brother, has met two residents of the place who had talked with a man who knew one of the " Mayflower " Pilgrims. How near we are to the original exhibitions of moral grandeur when the initial enthusiasts kindled in New England their strange fire! Judson himself was spared for many years to keep fresh in all minds the age of sacrifice, devotion, and the simple beginnings of history of foreign missions. His life was a bond between a dream and its embodiment, between a prayer and its answer. Marvelous man, this ! People did not wait until his death to anoint him with appreciation. They felt the unspoken claim of his worth, as their attention was drawn to behold him, glowing with apostolic ardor, standing alone in Burma, absolutely de- tached on missionary ground from all those associated with him in the beginnings of his work. He was a great personality; there is a beauty of loftiness in him that no pencil can draw. He is on a level always with the greatest. Nobody ever doubted his ability. In all Chris- tendom his name has become one of the best known. Never since the days of the apostles had the world wit- nessed a brighter example of unwavering faith and steadfast consecration to truth and duty. Once embarked on his pioneer undertakings he never flinched. No man has laid on God's altar a more complete sacrifice. He was a kind of first-fruits of the American churches. A Missionary Levee Like General Grant, the valiant soldier of the Cross, the death-defying hero, scarred and battered by his many battles with Apollyon in carrying the very Gibraltar of paganism, made his triumphal return to his native coun- try. The news of his arrival in Boston, October 15, 1845, spread through the city and produced everywhere a stir A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED 85 of emotion. There was the keenest desire to see the storied hero of faith. The formidableness of the dif- ficulties, the portentousness of the discouragements en- countered and overcome, centered all eyes upon him and opened wide to h"im the doors of all hearts, and he was received almost with acclamation. It was a great, unex- ampled demonstration of popular feeling too strong to be repressed. A whole generation had grown up familiar with the story of his labors and sufferings, not one of whom had seen his face. He was not known by personal appearance even to the members of the board that sup- ported him. They viewed him as men may have looked upon Daniel after he had emerged unharmed from the den of lions. Some who talked with him told him that while he was wearing his fetters and facing his appointed executioner, prayer was being made without ceasing of the church unto God for him. His movements were chronicled in all the papers and the account of his triumphal return was spread on electric wings to the re- motest parts of the land. Spontaneous tributes of hom- age, love, and veneration awaited him in every city and village that he visited. He thus secured what he did not directly strive to gain. The largest edifice would be filled to overflowing. Not a seat in any pew, not a place in all the aisles, not the farthest corner above or below would remain unoccupied. When he was introduced there was a thrill of joy, and by reason of obvious sym- pathy and reverence on the part of the hearers they were hushed into the most deathlike stillness, that not a syllable should be lost to any ear. On the Friday eve- ning after landing he was presented to an immense audience, gathered only by verbal notice to avoid a crush, in the Bowdoin Square Church in Boston, where Doctor Sharp interpreted the deep interest and appre- ciation of the assembled throngs. 86 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Unexpectedly a most vibrantly responsive chord was touched, which electrified the tense crowd. While Doc- tor Hague was speaking, a stranger was urging his way up the aisle from the most distant part of the house, and ascended the pulpit and was warmly embraced by Doctor Judson with manifest affection and grateful joy. It was a dramatic moment. Two early associates, all that were now left of the Sacred Seven, who a few months before had never expected to meet on earth, were af- forded the unutterable pleasure of taking each other's hand in the presence of that cloud of witnesses. It was as if the first interviews of heaven had been anticipated. The scene that follows is beyond description, as tears dimmed the eyes of many who beheld the moving sight. Who could this man be? It was Rev. Samuel Nott, the other survivor of the illustrious band sent out into a land of experiment when no pagan nation abroad had ever heard of a Redeemer from American lips. Thirty-three years between this meeting and the last! And what years! What experiences, what recollections! They have changed, and the whole world has changed with them. The Sacred Chamber When Judson left his father's house in Plymouth for his last journey to Burma, his sister, Abigail, had the front door of the house boarded up, saying that no one was to enter by that portal until her brother's return. His sister also closed the room in which he slept, and never allowed it to be opened or cared for. It was to remain untouched, for him to find it as he left it, but the sight of it never blessed his eyes. She was a beautiful old lady, unmarried, with gray hair worn in curls, and these would wave about her face as she said, with tears in her eyes : " My brother and I had a good deal to A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED 87 contend with, but the Lord prospered us and took care of us. And my brother! my brother! Think what he became ! " She drew attention to the unmeasured differ- ence in the outcome of her brother's life and her own. His name was a praise in all the churches, and his won- derful exploits were heralded to the ends of the earth, while she, his sister, a keeper at home, caretaker of her father and mother, a favorite of her renowned brother, and we may presume his peer, unappropriated, unap- plauded, approaching the end of her solitary career, has only .the celebrity which membership in the honored family gave her. A man in Plymouth, becoming unduly bold and not having the fear of Judson's sister before his eyes, unseen by her opened the door of the so-called " Sacred Cham- ber." Darkness was there, and everything was decay- ing and turning to dust. It was a symbol of the fact that the old is passing away. The outward man perisheth. This lesson is borne in upon the student of ancient things. Barring exceptions, notable for that reason, about once in a hundred years the earth is swept with a clean besom. How difficult it is for us to orient ourselves, and become surrounded with the faces and forms and atmos- phere and equipment of former days ! The art preserva- tive was not so freely used then as now, which increases our difficulties. A Clergyman of the Old School We have, however, the account-book, which cost " a shilling and eight pence," of the elder Judson, the mis- sionary's father, which gives, among other items : Expense of my two sons' education, gifts, etc., Adoniram, $950; Elnathan, $1,000. In the account above I did not charge Adoniram for a horse which I gave him, which horse he sold for $50, which added makes $1,000. These two sums are taken 88 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN from accounts of bills, moneys paid, and given to my two sons for their education and other expense; besides their board at home and clothing. As Nabey (Abigail B.), my daughter, has not been at much expense abroad for her education and has lived at home to assist and economize in the family, I now give her $800 in State bank for her own use and improvement. And she has $200 in said bank with her mother's, which makes $1,000. For the future, while she is at home I will give her board and half a dollar per week. Jan. 1, 1814. Steering by the Divine Compass The older son who sold his horse, according to the Plymouth record, married a young school-teacher and sailed for heathen lands where their first son was named Roger Williams; and this is another line of connection between the Judsons and Salem, for Roger Williams and Adoniram Judson both went out from Salem to do their great work. They both represent ideas struggling for mastery. They both identify their fortune with the success of a principle. Impelled to go forth as its heralds, they are both willing to conquer as its champions or die as its martyrs. The path of duty is as plain to them as a call from heaven. It is as clear as a voice from the skies. No angel's message, no vision of the night, no new revelation, was required. They were treading in the footsteps of inspired apostles and were walking in the light that beamed from the oracles of God. Roger Williams, the bold and steady declaimer against the union of the sword and the surplice, stood for the doctrine that every man may be supposed to have a conscience of his own, and that his right to religious liberty is an essential part of Christianity. Tracing this idea to its source as we trace the mighty Hudson to a spring in the Adirondacks, we come to the house still stand- ing in Salem, built before 1635, in which Roger Williams lived. It was once supposed that we had still standing A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED 89 the very church in which he preached. Providence is the second largest city in New England; in tracing our idea we go right back over the entire history of that city and show the dwelling from which Roger Williams, " Teacher " in out first church, made his way to freedom with no guide save a pocket compass, which his descend- ants still exhibit, and with no reliance but the friendly disposition of the Indians. The need of the church, then as now, was for leaders. Not having occupied a subordinate position in college, having an intense love of superiority, even when it had to be honestly earned, having talents of the highest order, a kind of ardor in the blood, a certain dash and brilliancy, by the elastic force of his mind Judson becomes a master spirit and his lustrous name is forever written first in the peerage book of American missions. As the elder Judson went to Yale, he would have liked to send his sons there, but for economy's sake, it is supposed, as the distance on horseback was much less to Providence, he sent them to Brown instead of New Haven ; the necessity of economy is shown in the same account-book, where the first year he is paid $6 per Sabbath for 34 Sabbaths, $204 ; nor was he helped much by wedding fees: "Feb. 20, 1804, $1.50 marriage money." Adoniram graduated at Brown, as Gordon Hall did at Williams, as valedictorian, and, having the highest honors in his class, was offered a tutorship at Brown as Hall was at Williams. On horseback, two days before his marriage, five days before the ordination, young Judson left his father's house in Plymouth, being accompanied as far as Boston by his brother, Elnathan, to whom he was much attached. The Father of the Man That leading paramount influence, that missionary in- stinct for which he was distinguished, asserting itself 90 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN on the way as they were passing some trees by the road- side, he prevailed on his younger brother to dismount and kneel while he prayed for his conversion, which prayer it gave him great pleasure to come to know was graciously answered. Judson was born in a house that many of us have often visited on Main Street in Maiden, opposite the historic Bell Rock, where in Maiden's early history the church bell was suspended from poles that were crossed like heavy shears. Bell Rock is now a distinct part of Maiden, like Castle Hill in Salem, or Wyoma or Glenmere in Lynn. Judson knew Salem well, as seven years of his boyhood were spent in Wenham near-by, where his father was pastor. A Corner in India Michelangelo, in a well-known picture, makes one of his figures stand on a stone in order to give him greater prominence. The biographical method, so widely used in study, has a similar practical effect. In each missionary period, some heaven-sent leader, like Francis of Assisi, or John Eliot, or David Livingstone, occupies the fore- ground, and we look at the situation in terms of him. We have had our Lincoln revival, and Napoleon revival, and Grant revival, and George Washington revival, when the notable facts of their whole respective epochs, all of which they saw and much of which they were, were given attractive restatement. We see Judson rejoicing over his little flock. What is true of him is typical of the other missionaries. Judson remained seated while preaching and knelt for prayer. This is the custom of a teacher in the East. " And seeing the multitude," the Great Teacher, " went up into a mountain and when he had sat down " — his posture became a sign of the begin- ning of formal address. Though, as we shall see, Jud- son's public work was characterized by real oratory, we A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED 91 ought not to think of him as "occupying a pulpit." There is in his chapel no such feature. At the head of the aisle is a platform, eight or ten inches high. Upon it is an armchair beside a plain table. Like the Sermon on the Mount, whfch can be read in fifteen minutes and contains sixty distinct pictorial images, an average of four to a minute, Judson's sermons abound in word- pictures, which take the taste of the Eastern mind. When he preached " every hearer sat motionless, every eye was fixed immovably upon the preacher, and every counte- nance seemed to change with every varied expression of sentiment; now beaming forth joy as though some joyous news from the other world had just reached them, which before had never gladdened their hearts ; now de- picting a feeling of anxiety, as though their immortal all, or that of their friends, was at stake; and next, show- ing a deep solemnity, as though standing before their final Judge/' " Though I did not know," said a visitor, Mr. Vinton, " the meaning of a single sentence he uttered, still my attention was never more closely riveted on any sermon I ever heard. It was impossible to escape the conviction that his whole soul was in his work." God Has His Dwelling with Men If the joy of utterance is exceeded, it is when a Christian worker hears that one of his converts has won a convert. He begins, as Napoleon said, to see himself in history. When all the converts in heathendom taken to- gether were a little flock, when Moung Ing, the first Burman evangelist, after a tour of seven months takes an evening to tell of his adventures, Judson cannot con- ceal his gratification. It is the same in kind with our Saviour's joy as the disciples make a report after their trial mission. So the church at Antioch listened to Paul and Barnabas when they rehearsed all that God had done 92 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN with them. In 1828, Judson, after laboring many years with but little success, hears of the Karens far in the interior. He finds Ko Tha Byu, a slave fifty years of age, who as a youth had been dull, vicious, and brutal, and as a man had murdered thirty men with his own hand. Judson paid his ransom and took him to his own home. This blasphemer was soon sitting clothed and in his right mind, his darkened understanding lightened by the story of the Cross. He was baptized, and going immediately to his own nation to preach, found a people ready for the Lord. For twelve years he made itinerating tours, of from one week to six months, among the six hundred thousand Karens. An aggressive type of the spiritual life being used, the fires on missionary altars burned brightly, and whole villages were converted, and soon there were tens of thousands of native Christians besides those added to the church of the redeemed in heaven. Judson 's Missionary Theory With Judson evangelism was not displaced by educa- tion. Indications abound that he was raised up by Provi- dence, not merely to stand first in order of time and in preeminence of ability, but to set the step, to give the keynote, and to project in about the right proportions the missionary idea. Subordinating other matters, Doc- tor Wayland makes of his memoir of Doctor Judson a distinctively missionary classic; the thing worth while, the real lessons of the life, the main contribution to the world by the illustrious subject of his sketch, is the theory and practice of operating a mission. There are two theories of missions, just as there are two methods of foreign travel. A large company of con- genial tourists may journey together abroad and furnish company for each other and have their exchange of A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED 93 ideas among themselves, or a man may go unattended into the byways of other countries and meet the people directly at every turn and learn much about them, and they on their part may acquire something of his spirit. Judson stood for more of directness in everything. He was exactly fitted for his field. The first ten years in any new mission are of inestimable importance in deter- mining the methods and the future of the work. As his supporters knew a time when there was a missionary, but no missionary society and no missionary policy, the conditions made his life luminous with lessons, not only touching his errand of love to grim Burma, but also pertaining to the manner of doing the Master's busi- ness anywhere. He believed in the rapid multiplication of centers of influence as opposed to centralization in a few large missionary stations. From the first he developed in the natives the capacity of self-government, and discerned every sign of progress with no less pleasure than the mother notices her child as it attempts to stand or walk, and ventures on little inde- pendent journeys of a yard or two without her guiding and supporting hand. With what joy he must have sat in the house of God, surrounded by Christian natives ! As soon as three or four disciples could be collected at one point, every question pertaining to accessions was brought before them, and the decision was according to the judg- ment of the body. With the fondness and pride of a parent's heart, he mentions the fact that a little church of five or six members would sometimes reject a candidate with whom he was himself very well satisfied. He would by tact try to bring the case before the church a second time, but never overruled their action. The pagans came at length to understand that a prophet was among them. In the world's great conquests, vision and power have met the possibilities of each new era. It was so with Shake- 94 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN speare in letters, Michelangelo in art, and Napoleon in artillery and in the quick massing of men at the strategic point. Judson was believed to possess these gifts of vision and power as, in missions, no one before him had disclosed them, and there are many indications that this is a deserved tribute. The forces that were working unseen beneath the surface in his day found expression through him, and this lifted him into prominence and made his influence permanent. He was conscious of a message to be delivered as well as of a command to be obeyed. All of his faculties seemed to say, " Yes " to his occupation. He was a born missionary. No other voca- tion could have called out all his talents. Both grace and apostleship are illustrated in his life. On his own thirty-ninth birthday, Byron wrote: My days are in the yellow leaf, The fruits and flowers of love are gone, The worm, the canker, and the grief, Are mine alone. On his death-bed Judson said : " No man ever left the world with more inviting prospects, with brighter hopes, or warmer feelings.'' The world to-day pays homage to his character and achievements in somewhat the same way that his antagonist in a debate at Rangoon did to his abilities, when, on taking his departure, he prostrated himself, showing thus a deference that a Bur- man never publicly exhibits except to an acknowledged superior. His Name is Deathless Like Samuel J. Mills, whom he succeeded in leader- ship, he died at sea separate from his family. The dinner-table was at the time spread in the smaller cabin of the ship, and the officers did not know what was pass- A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED 95 ing in the larger cabin till summoned to the table, when they gathered about the door of the main cabin and watched the closing scenes with solemn reverence. Jud- son had said in Burman to Panapah, a native servant who was with him, " It is done, I am going." When the peaceful end came, the ship's officers stole softly from the door, and the neglected meal was left on the table un- tasted. A strong plank coffin was soon constructed, several buckets of sand were poured into it to make it sink, and at eight o'clock in the evening the crew as- sembled, the larboard port was opened, and in perfect silence, broken only by the voice of the captain in giving commands, all that was mortal of the veteran warrior and counselor was committed to a vast wandering grave. In latitude 13 degrees north, longitude 93 degrees east, nine days after his embarkation and scarcely three days out of sight of the mountains of Burma, they lowered him into his unquiet sepulcher without a prayer. It was thought that it would be an unmeaning observance in those surroundings. As if in anticipation of this par- ticular burial the psalmist gives to the sea a language of protest against such a funeral for a man of such renown. " The floods lifted up their voice." They pro- tested, they uttered their plaint, but they will tell the story of what was committed to them as they visit every coast inhabited by any branch of the whole family of man. He died within two weeks of bidding his wife adieu, yet she, left in harrowing uncertainty, did not know of his death for four months, and then the news came to her indirectly. Her life from its beginning to its close was a continuous sacrifice on the altar of affection. This was made ungrudgingly, uncomplainingly, almost uncon- sciously. She was a child of genius. Her writings as Fanny Forrester took the taste of the public, and gave 96 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN her an uncommon degree of popular favor, yet with her name on everybody's lips she speaks of feeling u so alone." None yearned more intensely for affection, none repaid it with a more enthusiastic devotion, and when her affection bade her go forward, she never looked back. It seems that Judson had spoken of burial at sea, and always as though the sense of freedom, expansion, was far pleasanter than the confined narrow grave to which he had consigned so many that he loved, and added that while his burial-place was a matter of no real importance, yet it was not in human nature to be without choice. It had pleased God to enable him to bear so many testi- monies for him during his life that none were required of him as he died. The Silent House Everything in his study was just where he left it. All around were proof-sheets, old manuscript volumes, his books, and papers. Everything gave indication of a workman called away from his unfinished task. The labor undertaken had been too vast to be finished in a lifetime. Mr. Stevens begins both the dictionary and the grammar at the point of their incompleteness. Mrs. Judson points out to him that the last word that Doctor Judson defined was and the corresponding initial vowel was >. Judson had made but one request, that there might be made some distinct mark both in the dictionary and in the grammar where his work ended and the next man's labor began; and what a mark was that ! We look upon it with awe. At work, death inter- rupted him, and his hand rested. It suggests Schlegel, lecturing at Dresden, commencing the sentence, " But the consummate and perfect knowledge " at this point his mortal illness arrested his pen. It is like the martyr A PROPHET MIGHTY IN WORD AND DEED 9? who, being called by the executioner, left a sentence unfinished. We think of Whitefield, broken with excess- ive labors, who said, " I shall be better and preach again in a day or two," but died. The poet, long the pride of Germany, was interrupted by death, and his unfinished manuscript was placed upon the coffin as it was carried to the grave. Raphael died of his labor on "The Trans- figuration," and the immortal work was borne in pomp at his funeral. The Marks of the Lord Jesus Judson's death was more generally and deeply mourned than that of any other individual of his generation en- gaged in Christian work. " Had the whole missionary work," said Theodore Parker, " resulted in nothing more than the building up of such a character, it would be worth all it has cost." Certain apt utterances make Judson known to those who have never read his life. Like General Grant too, he could take a thought of gold and stamp it into coin so that it would pass current among men. A golden opinion is not sufficient. It is the stamp that carries it. His reply to the venerable James Loring in Boston will live forever. It must have met itself often going many times both ways around the world. It was one of those inspirations which by a single electric flash illumine the whole realm of thought. " Do you think the prospect bright for the speedy conversion of the heathen ? " " As bright," was his prompt reply, " as the promises of God." When conversions seemed to lag and obstacles were encountered and a suggestion of fail- ure was indulged, " Tell them to wait a few years and they will hear from us again." No one can contemplate the missionary hero without concluding that the muster- roll of saints and worthies was not completed with the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. He bore in his body the 98 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN scars of the Lord Jesus. When his limbs were composed in death, his spirit having been convoyed by angels, there were still upon them the plain marks worn by his fetters, which had changed his gait, so that he had a high-stepping form of walking which came from his habit of picking up his feet when loaded with fourteen pounds of irons. We think reverently of the tied hands of Jesus, and turn to see Judson with his bound feet. Richard H. Dana used to say that every man ought at least once in his life to look death in the face. In a dungeon which was distinctively a death-prison, bound with chains, at night being " strung" — his chains threaded on a pole for additional security to limit his movements — Judson was again and again brought directly face to face with his executioner, and being led away to be put to death, was saved by an angel, as we have seen. Great Leaders in a Great Crisis He was made a missionary, he tells us by reading Claudius Buchanan's thrilling " Star in the East," and we can say of him that he followed the star. The cele- bration of their centennial by the Baptists in 1913 shows that Judson had the force in his own person to produce a reversal of the antecedents of history. An American Baptist Mission, as we have seen, was organized by him in India before there was one organized in this country. Carey was ready to go down into the pit if others would hold the rope; but Judson, without any one pledged to hold the rope, feeling his way along where everything had to be created from the ground up, originated the entire Baptist missionary history, starting it beyond the seas whence it was taken up in this country. It is im- possible to tell what would have been the effect upon American churches if the first missionaries had been either defeated or disheartened. They were schooled for A PROPHET MIGHTY IN;;WORt) ;ANE>; I)E£d 90 their work in trying times and by extraordinary experi- ences. We feel that Washington was ordained for a special mission, that Lincoln was mysteriously prepared to meet an exigency in our national life and in the history of a race. Luther was called to precipitate the Reforma- tion; Calvin, to formulate the seething thought of the religious world; Wesley to create a passion for souls; Whitefield, Finney, and Moody to give tongues of fire to the doctrines of grace. If we wish to be informed with regard to the history of a missionary movement or of a people, we find ourselves studying the lives and character of the leaders. A review of the world's annals shows that no race ever reconditioned itself, or became great without lead- ers, from the times of Abraham and Joseph to that of Moses. Very much of human history turns upon the question who and what were those who led the way. It was something in them or in their message which awakened in the natives of India a desire to enter the gate at the head of the way. So the first missionaries, the Immortal Seven sent from Salem to Asia, occupy a unique place in our annals. Their names are for- ever secure in our Hall of Fame. They were remark- able pioneers. Their lives were well timed. From these beginnings has come the miracle of the century. The time, manner, and event had all been Ordered before- hand. The Cathedral Tower clock of destiny struck at a certain hour, and the immortals led off sharply with qualifications not exceeded since apostolic times. Blessed are the men who find their place and fill it. They that turn many to righteousness shall shine as the brightness of the firmament and as the stars forever and ever. Honor to Salem that anointed them in her house of prayer! All honor to the blessed, fragrant memory of the Immortal Seven, whose names are in the Book of lOf) ' \-\\ T^E IMMORTAL SEVEN Life. Hail to the heralds of the Cross, who, to preach the gospel in the regions beyond, entered a benighted, neglected country, and in the name of our God set up our banner! Hail to the missionary organizations occa- sioned by themselves, which came to their entire unflinch- ing support, and without whose undergirding, their in- fluence, that now encircles the earth like a zone of heavenly light, could not have been shed abroad ! Blessed pioneers! Without precedent, without any known lines of procedure, with full play for originality and formulative genius, a key to the secret of stamping upon idolaters a true religious impress has been found and exhibited for the admiration of the world. A glorious band, the chosen few On whom the Spirit came; Seven valiant saints, their hope they knew, And mocked the cross and flame. They climbed the dizzy steep to heaven, Through peril, toil, and pain ; O God ! to us may grace be given To follow in their train ! VI FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH VI FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH THE year 1812, lifted into such prominence by the inauguration of our world-famous work in a far country full of the habitations of cruelty, is now styled Annus Mirabilis. By reason of their issue some dates tower like mountains above the dreary annals that fall between. In our Christian history this is the range of highest peaks : A. D. 1, 33, 1492, 1620, 1776, 1812, 1863 ; the last date precipitated an unexampled work at home, the next earlier one brings distinctly before us those whose record as our advance guard will be read to the joy of the angels in the last day. Benjamin Franklin ex- pressed the wish that he might return to earth after one hundred years. If that were granted to Judson and his early associates, what a transformation would greet their astonished sight ! Taking our stand on this " hundred- storied height," with a century of missions and progress in our field of vision we may see that, politically speaking, 18 1 2 was a doleful year the world around. Commerce had been hunted and driven from the seas, and the plow was forsaken for the sword. The appeal was to the bullet and not the ballot. Bayonet and saber and spur were the fashion everywhere. Outside of tiny Denmark peace had not a square mile of space that she could call her own. Our shipping, and we had ships in those days, was in the cross-fire between the British and the French. As England's best generals and troops were busily set- ting back-fires against Napoleon on the Spanish peninsula, our own country, without the sinews of war, inaugurated 103 104 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN with the mother country its leaderless, inglorious cam- paign, whose crowning absurdity was the treaty of peace, which did not even mention the issues on which hostilities were begun, whatever they were. Stephen Girard, David Parish, and John Jacob Astor saved the country by com- ing forward in a sacrificial spirit and taking the six-per- cent bonds at eighty-eight dollars on the hundred and one and one-half per cent commission. On the day after the ordination one hundred years ago Charles Dickens was born, with his peculiar sympathy for the sufferings and sorrows of childhood, his vehement hatred of in- justice and oppression, and his unapproached ability to exhibit to the scorn of men hideous scenes of vice and misery. From our mount of vision we look upon the scene in China and find that in the year 1812 that empire pro- mulgated an edict against Christianity; but to-day from this Pisgah of observation, looking out on continent and on island, we find one hundred and one separate societies engaged in taking Christianity to the heathen. Rev. J. Murray Mitchell, LL. D., has told how he once ascended to a high summit in India in search of the source of the Godavari River; how at last a spot was reached where so few were the drops that trickled from the rocks that they could for some seconds be held in the hollow of his hand ; and at that point one could in a few moments scoop out a new channel and turn the whole stream in a new direction. From such an insignificant rill springs one of India's noblest rivers. The little stream he saw, flowing down the slope and gradually broadening, then run- ning eastward toward the Bay of Bengal, growing wider and deeper, gathering volume and momentum, until it became the secret of fertility to thousands of acres other- wise dry and desert. " The waters that ran in dry places like a river " are foreign missions. In tracing the benefi- FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH 105 cent stream to its head, as we track the King of Rivers to Lake Itasca, we come in this country to Salem. The Voices of History It was a law of ancient Israel that every fiftieth year should be kept as a jubilee. At the end of one hundred years, the Tabernacle Church found herself at one of the great mile-stones of the ages. Dr. Samuel M. Worcester, a former pastor, believed and said, that the Tabernacle considered simply as a church and not as a poets' corner, nor as a burial-place of kings, but as a church considered on church lines, is the most famous church in the world. If the Tabernacle in London is entitled to be called " The Cradle of the London Missionary Society/' the Taber- nacle in Salem is the cradle of the great American Evan- gel to "them that are afar off." With an audience intensely affected at the ordination of early missionaries, this sanctuary of holy convocation has presented re- peatedly a thrilling scene. At Salem, writes Doctor Goodell, of Constantinople, the great translator, there were eleven of us together, ordained and expectant mis- sionaries, a number equal to that of the apostles as they returned to Jerusalem from Olivet. Here on this spot the clarion voice of Whitefield had electrified a vast con- course of people. By the charm of every kind of sacred association the past is recalled into the midst of the busy present. We look with deep interest on a place so often signalized by the memorable events of our holy religion. We must actually revisit the scene we commemorate to appreciate how sharp a turn was here given to history. The churches of this country were planted by men who had fled as exiles from European oppression and their minds were engrossed in seeking security and freedom for themselves. America at the first had been itself a field of missionary effort to the Christians of Europe. 106 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN The churches in England had been accustomed to pray in their songs : Dark America convert, And every heathen land. A' society had existed in England, and collections were taken in aid of the missions of Eliot and his associates among the aboriginal Americans. The same story is told by the State Seal of Massachusetts, which bears the figure of an Indian and a star. The star on which the Indian gazes is the star of Bethlehem. The first settlers of New England were the first Englishmen who devised and executed a mission to the heathen. The inspiring idea of Columbus was derived from the prophecies, and a part of his intention was of a missionary character. His patroness, Isabella, made the conversion of the heathen an object " paramount to all the rest." At Salem occurred the " 'Bout face ! " of our religious history. Here was witnessed an entire change of front. Up to this time the religious wave of effort and benevolence had flowed from the east westward, but for the first time in all our Chris- tian annals it was here met by the refluent wave. What rapture would have come to the participants in the initial ordination, if they could have foreseen the results that have come and that are yet to develop from their act of sublime Christian devotion, reaching to all nations! In some measure Doctor Judson must have realized the his- toric relation of this place to all foreign missionary effort; hence when, on his only visit to this country, he came into the Tabernacle Church one Sunday during the session of the Sabbath-school, and would not rest until he came and seated himself upon the historic settee which has now been styled by Mr. Byington a throne. This settee Doctor Judson recognized and identified as the one on which he was seated at the ordination service. Still preserved and widely photographed, it was originally \ FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH IO7 called the Deacons' Seat, and used to be placed in front of the pews, before the pulpit, facing the congregation. After the old Tabernacle was taken down, it was used as a seat on the lawn, till Mr. Richard C. Manning secured it, dressed it, and gave it to the church. Mr. Manning said that he remembered well how Judson looked on the occasion of this visit. There was something very im- pressive about his personality, and he had about him a certain mode or atmosphere of chivalric enthusiasm which everybody seems to have remarked. The Divine Ferment The beloved and almost idolized younger Worcester, in speaking of Judson, who had a singularly gifted sus- ceptible nature, says that in a * conversation there " on the identical spot where he was ordained, he " appeared to have a vivid recollection of the thrilling events of February, 1812," and to think very tenderly of this holy place, toward which hundreds of religious people now turn their pilgrim feet. If after an exact century any assemblage of believers ever had an occasion to lift up a song of gladness, approbation, triumph, and hope, it was this sympathetic, large, prosperous, strong, united church on February 6, 1912. Invitations were sent to all the corporate members of the American Board, all its officers and those of the Woman's Board, many distin- guished officials in other organizations, all of our mis- sionaries on furlough in this country, and to all the churches in our conference, thirty-two in number, all except three being represented, most of them by both pastor and delegate — making a striking contrast with the simple number of three churches sitting in the original council — Rev. George A. Hall, grandson of Gordon Hall, who was ordained in the early solemnity, and Doctor Vivian, professor of mathematics in Wellesley College, 108 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN great-granddaughter of Samuel Nott, and her mother were here. The engraver's art comes to our aid in an address to the eye. Through the research, skill, and generosity of our esteemed citizen, Mr. John Robinson, we behold the form of the " Caravan," whose cabin stands related to the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society very much as the cabin of the " Mayflower " does to the social compact. The old bass viol, wondrously preserved, used one hundred years ago when Judson and his asso- ciates were ordained, was brought forward, having been repaired and strung, that, with its pathetic, affecting tones, and with its feeble voice, such as would be expected in an instrument that has come down to us from the days when James Madison was the fourth President of the United States, it might address the ear. This instrument was played in the choir at Essex for forty years. Dr. David Choate, now senior deacon in the Tabernacle Church, when a boy in Essex played it there, from 1844 to 1848. Dr. David D. Mussey practised medicine in Essex, became a member of the choir, and played the bass viol which he had brought with him to that town. In the village church one Fourth of July he delivered the oration. 'As there was at that time no other player on the instrument, he left his seat on the pulpit platform and descended to the floor to play the bass viol when music was wanted. On leaving Essex in 1809 to prac- tise his profession in Salem, he gave the bass viol to the Choates with whom he had boarded. Soon after his arrival in Salem he joined the Tabernacle Church. Ac- cording to the parish records, a short time before the ordination of the missionaries Doctor Mussey was chosen by vote to see what could be done to improve the church music. He sent to Essex and borrowed the bass viol of the Choates to be used, as the records attest, on " the important occasion." PRESENT TABERNACLE CHURCH, SALEM FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH IO9 Mrs. Sarah Caldwell, who came from Marblehead and joined the Tabernacle Church when she was eighteen, under Doctor Worcester's pungent ministry became in- terested in foreign missions, and her husband made for her a suggestive, tKough silent, almsgatherer. The elder Worcester circulated a paper among the ladies of Salem, and between two and three hundred dollars was raised. Andover Seminary despatched its students throughout New England to serve as financial agents, and in this veritable crusade, and in the stir and ferment of enthu- siasm, this mite-box and the Salem Cent Society, which was very active during the year 1811, were employed as instrumentalities for equipping the missionaries. The Solemnity that Commemorates Back of the pulpit the entire wall was hidden from sight by a huge American flag. Along the balconies were displayed flags of Mexico, Austria, Turkey, Ceylon, Bul- garia, Spain, Portugal, China, Japan, and the chief fields of the operations of the American Board. It was in-, teresting to see the swarms of people distribute them- selves according to their predilections into two different groups. It is said that on the outward voyage of arctic expeditions the crew will assort itself, some looking abaft on receding scenes full of suggestion, memory, and in- terest; others are inclined to look forward only, to con- jecture the future and to tell over to each other their hopes. Exactly so at the jubilee held to signalize the feelings in all hearts because the Lord here had visited his people and the place of his feet is glorious. Some people would bunch themselves about the famous settee, and about the portraitures of Harriet Newell and Mrs. Judson, and about the solid mahogany table, which bears a gold plate stating that sitting around it, the first five commissioners of the American Board appointed at Brad- 110 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN ford, when Judson and his associates had presented their memorial, held their first meeting in the parlor of Rev. Noah Porter at Farmington, Connecticut. These objects performed well the office which is so effectively rendered by the curiosities carefully preserved in the cathedrals and at the shrines of the Old World. Who'll press for gold yon crowded street A hundred years to come? Who'll tread this church with willing feet A hundred years to come? Pale, trembling age and fiery youth, And childhood, with its brow of truth, The rich and poor, on land and sea — Where will the mighty millions be A hundred years to come? We all within our graves shall sleep A hundred years to come; No living soul for us shall weep A hundred years to come. But other men our land will till, And others then our streets shall fill, And other singers, gay and bright, Shall rouse the drowsy hours of night A hundred years to come. Others with more of the Athenian spirit, either to tell or to hear some new thing, were distinctively to-morrow people, evidently believing in the good time coming, that the millennium is ahead and that " the glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former." They rose and faced the sun and, without attempting to reconstruct history or to have their spiritual imagination suffused with the glory of the past and with what it all meant, they centered their interest in the five promising, attractive, tall young men, tall in the best sense of that term — a credit to the churches that sent them forth — who presented themselves at this council to be set apart for special FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH III service in a solemn ceremony that marked the centennial of the early ordination to the hour. It was like life from the dead. The Vitality of Missions If anything helps to stimulate interest in these gallant recruits, whose lives are all before them and who are to encroach farther and farther upon the spiritual dominions of the prince of darkness, it is a view of the panorama of missions from the hundred-storied height whereon we stand. We are not to think that the men who shaped the beginnings and planted the small seed made the his- tory, marvelous as is the vitality of a seed. It is the history that has made the men. It kindles the flame of missionary zeal, excites hope and expectation, and starts almost a feeling of awe, as one looks upon the vast pos- sibilities in consecrated young men. Ezekiel came to those who had sung the Lord's song in a strange land, and " sat where they sat." He had perfect sympathy. He looked at things from the same point of view. In the spirit exactly of Judson, Hall, Newell, Nott, Rice, in the later council, on the same settee, 1 sat Samuel R. Harlow, a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, who, it is said, decided to become a missionary when but eleven years of age, and was now here with his bride, assigned to the West Turkey Mission; James K. Lyman, of the Oberlin Theological Seminary, assigned to Central Tur- key; Charles H. Maas, who is to go to the Marshall Islands; Jerome C. Holmes, of Hartford Theological Seminary, designated to Japan; and William R. Leete, of 1 This settee bears two silver plates which give it first place among objects of missionary interest. , " Upon this seat Rev. Messrs. Newell, Judson, Nott, Hall, and Rice sat in the Tabernacle Church, Salem, February 6, 1812, when ordained to the work of the gospel ministry as missionaries to the heathen in Asia." "Upon this settee, Messrs. Leete, Harlow, Lyman, Holmes, and Maas sat in the Tabernacle Church, Salera, February 6, 1912, when ordained as mis- sionaries of the A. B. C. F. M. to China, Turkey, Japan, and Marshall Islands." 112 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Union Theological Seminary, who enters evangelistic work at Smyrna. As Impressive as It Is Uncommon As was the case one hundred years ago, so on Feb- ruary 6, 1912, the solemnity and pathos centered in the laying on of hands. The prayer by Pres. Albert P. Fitch made one think of the petition of Solomon at the dedication. Couched in noble phrase, with the last touch of exquisiteness, beautiful in the supreme degree, it had the elements of moral sublimity. Each of the officiating clergy placed his hand of consecration upon the head of one of the young missionaries, the two fathers in par- ticular dedicating their own sons. One of them in entire apparent unconsciousness, instead of resting his hand in the passive professional way, with a father's overflowing heart, as if instinctively, took both hands and in a touch- ing way gently stroked his son's head in love and com- mendation. At this moving sight, some of the ladies present, as Virgil would express it, were " wet as to their shining eyes with tears." At this, the culminating point of the whole scene, the photographer comes to our aid with his art, and enables us to recognize the young men from left to right as they kneel in the affecting solem- nities: Maas, Lyman, Holmes, Leete, and Harlow. The clergymen who place their hands upon the heads of the young missionaries in the sacred rite, standing from left to right, are Doctors Boynton, Clark, President Fitch; standing in the center, voicing their petition, Rev. Messrs. Leete and Harlow. Behind them are Doctor Barton, the statesman of the American Board, and Doctor Capen, its president, who later brought its greetings, standing near as if in support and sympathy. The successor of Henry Ward Beecher, Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, of Brooklyn, said that he would have FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH II3 walked to Salem to share in the service. The occasion was just suited to his spirit and type of mind and heart. He exhibited the inherent power and tendency of Chris- tianity to become universal. It is not suited to dominate at all if it is not fit to prevail in every land. Rev. Raymond Calkins, D. D., showed that missionary work answers the reproach which has been lately uttered, touching the inability of the church to produce a hero. It is the glory of a great idea that it cannot remain the ornament of one individual. Successes abroad say to the church at home, " Physician, heal thyself." Each speaker seemed to strike the popular chord and to gain a response from the vibrant auditory. His honor, Mayor Rufus D. Adams, a member of the Tabernacle Church, a teacher of boys in her Sunday-school, welcomed the council to the city, thus immuning local Christians from the sneer of the Pharisees, " Have any of the rulers believed on him ? " Tarrying in the heart like a beautiful stanza in a poem, or a noble strain of music, is " The Missionary's Call," which was rendered by Rev. Messrs. Eddy, Bell, Person, and Smith. The hymn was written by Nathan Brown, D. D., a missionary of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, pioneer in work in Assam, and later a missionary in Japan. The tune was composed by a relative in one of the families in which Judson was entertained while waiting for the brig " Caravan " to sail. It has always been associated with the romance of the first foreign missionaries. It has affected directly the hearts of heroes in our home field. It was once sung by the choir of Dr. Zechariah Eddy, a master of assem- blies, an expert in sacred song, who later was the pastor of a great church in Detroit. It was at the evening's service. His heart was melted. Next morning he wrote to Doctor Badger, the Home Missionary Secretary, pla- cing himself at his disposal. That autumn he was found H 114 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN conducting revival services in a bowling-alley at New Diggings, one of the roughest mining-camps of the time in the West. The words are exquisite. The music is stately, elevating, and touched with homage. My soul is not at rest. There comes a strange And secret whisper to my spirit, like A dream of night, that tells me I am on Enchanted ground. Why live I here? The vows of God are on me. A little booklet has recently been found in Andover, one of the very first imprints of that town, writes Rev. C. C. Carpenter, published in 1810, containing letters about the early English missions in India. In it is the hymn, " Farewell to the Missionaries," beginning, " Sov- ereign of Worlds, display thy power." The three closing stanzas form our familiar hymn, reading then as follows : Yes — Christian heroes !— go — proclaim Salvation through Immanuel's name; To India's clime the tidings bear, And plant the Rose of Sharon there. It is very significant, that this missionary hymn, printed on Andover Hill in the very year of the organization of the American Board, and doubtless often sung there by those first missionary students, and perhaps at their ordination in 1812, should have been used at the Taber- nacle just a hundred years afterward at the consecration of their successors. In 181 2 India was the one great, almost the only, field of missionary messengers; it was to " India's clime " they were to bear the tidings. They were unquestionably regarded as " Christian heroes." 2 2 " Sovereign of Worlds " can be found, page 722, in the well-remem- bered — and a long memory is not required — " Watts' and Select Hymns," once in almost universal use, the work of Dr. Samuel Worcester, enlarged by his son, Dr. Samuel M. Worcester, both in succession pastors of the Tabernacle Church. At the margin of the page are set certain vowels to indicate the quantity of voice to be used in singing and the rapidity of the movement. The letter a means very slow, the letter u when in italics means very loud. FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH II5 The festival in Salem " was to many present even more impressive," says " The Congregationalism" " than the hay- stack centenary in 1907 and the series of anniversaries held in Boston in 19 10." It was " the real centennial of foreign missions in America. It was the most impressive church council which has been held for many years. In Feb- ruary, 1812, the really decisive measure was taken by the ordination and embarkation of the first missionaries. That was the launching of the modern missionary movement in America." " The congregation at the evening session was no larger than in the afternoon," says " The Mis- sionary Herald," " simply because no more could get in. Galleries as well as floor were crowded. About the doors there was always a company standing," and many people said that it came home to the feelings more than any cere- monial they ever attended. " The Boston Globe " stated that there were 3,600 persons in the audiences of the day. After the second collation of the day in the vestry of the church, Rev. H. Grant Person, of the Eliot Church in Newton, in voicing a vote of thanks, said that the ob- servances of the day appealed to people more than those of two years ago in Boston and Andover and Bradford. The thing celebrated was so romantic, so pathetic, so wide- reaching, so fruitful, so human and touching, that it seemed to go to the heart irresistibly. And we had too, our Ann Hasseltine, the fresh-faced bride, nee Stafford, married to Mr. Harlow on the Thursday before the cen- tenary, who was surrounded all day by a group of ad- mirers on account of her personal attractiveness and by reason of the analogous historical position which she occupied. She was early sought as a guest. A City Noted for Hospitality The families that entertained the celebrated mission- aries, especially the young ladies who went to Asia a Il6 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN hundred years ago, would be glad to have tablets placed on their homes, stating that they opened their doors to them, " for thereby some have entertained angels un- awares." The grace of hospitality that so beautifully illumines the earlier event was also a spontaneous and striking feature of our later festival. Members of other households of faith than our own expressed their willing- ness to stand at their doors with an extended right hand of welcome to any guest who should be assigned, and many more homes were opened than could be used. They had often heard delightful memories recalled in homes, which, through keeping a prophet's chamber, had some such experience as Obed-edom and his family had in sheltering the ark of Israel. An editor said, " It seemed like a family gathering." Above the eloquence, surpass- ing the music, was the spirit of friendliness and comrade- ship, which pervaded the great day of the feast. The welcome was obvious. It did not need to be explained. The people felt it, understood it, and knew that they were wanted, and that they added something to the eclat and joyousness by their presence as it increased the size and volume of the jubilee. The papers said that, " The morn- ing service closed with felicitation on every side." In rising to a great occasion that elicited everybody's good wishes, the church used forces she hardly knew she had, and was thus a surprise to herself. Her activities, her vitality, her effectiveness of organization, her numbers, her energies, her full self, were employed with pleasure. Her courts overflowed, and it was affecting to see the church, which is about the pleasantest in the world to attend, respond to the salutations, the joy, and the hearti- ness that marked this unusual public demonstration. In the life of a child the anniversary is a marked event, but when races and a millennium are contemplated the century becomes the unit. FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH II7 Our fathers' God ! from out whose hand The centuries fall like grains of sand, We meet to-day, united, free, And loyal to our land and thee, To thank thee for the era done, And trust thee for the opening one. Oh, make thou us, through centuries long In peace secure, in justice strong; Around our gift of freedom draw The safeguards of thy righteous law ; And cast in some diviner mold, Let the new cycle shame the old ! It has become a canon in the church, when you meet a man who has held strongly a conspicuous pulpit for ten years, to take off your hat to him; but in this church is an honored pastor, Dr. DeWitt S. Clark, who has already enjoyed the implicit confidence of his church for the same length of time that Judson was out of the country on his formative mission; and where has there been a more harmonious congregation? The pastor and people were adapted to work together. He was the shepherd and the flock heard his voice. Fortunate church, fortunate man ! He has given to the office the prominence which the New Testament accords to it. Happy in finding wisdom with length of days in her right hand, he is distinguished by the roll of his friendships, by the unequaled number, probably, of his brethren, who consult with him on personal and professional concerns. Daguerreotype of the Past There are no contrasts like those of Christianity, whether we look at events, or at ideals and ambitions. The extremes of a century furnish view-points for an estimate of progress. One hundred years ago the fires of the suttee were publicly blazing, even in the presidency towns of Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, and all over India. Il8 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Upon these fires the screaming and struggling widow, in many cases herself a mere child, was bound and burned to ashes with the dead body of her husband. One hun- dred years ago infants were publicly thrown into the Ganges as sacrifices to the goddess of the river. Lepers were burned alive. Devotees publicly starved to death, and swinging festivals attracted thousands to see the poor writhing wretches, with iron hooks thrust through the muscles of their backs, swing in mid-air in honor of their gods. The early ordination had a critic who claimed it was a fanatical, ill-advised use of good money and con- tinued, " it will make no difference a hundred years hence " ; but since that event the Bible, reckoning Judson's trans- lation, has been put into two hundred and fifty languages, five times as many as in all the centuries since the days of Peter, James, and John, and more copies were sent info circulation in a single year than existed in the whole world together when the " Caravan " and " Harmony " sailed for Calcutta. The grain of mustard-seed has become a great tree. The world can never get over facts. Christianity never stood so erect and formidable before the waiting nations as now. The cruelties and obscenities of the Juggernaut have been displaced by the faith of the once despised Galilean, even as the shadows flee away before the rising of the sun. Stranger than Fiction By the very antithesis of history, we find that Judson, when sick in India, was forced to occupy the empty cage of a lion which had just died, but we look again and find that the King of Burma, at his own expense, built a Christian church, a parsonage, and a schoolhouse near the very spot where the lion's cage had stood, and the king's sons were pupils in the school, taught by the Chris- tian missionaries. Had Mrs. Judson been told the pres- &w BHBHPW^'flSHH AN IDOL IN THE MUD FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH 119 ent story of woman's work for woman, she would have said : " If the Lord should make windows in heaven, might such a thing be." If from the standpoint of the original ordination, we review the success of the Amer- ican Board, we find it reports that at the end of the year 181 1 it has received $79.95, while at the centennial it was found that the American Board received in the last year, $1,029,772. In 1812, all of the young men were from Andover Seminary. No Divinity College like it then existed in this or in any land. At the earliest opening of her doors, Judson, Newell, and Nott were among the first applicants for admission to that sacred school of the knowledge of God and graduated in her first class. All of the min- isters participating in the first council were in some official way connected with that school of the prophets, dis- tinguished now by having educated two hundred and forty-eight men for the foreign field, whose aggregate service is five thousand years, and the end is not yet. At the later ordination Andover had no candidate. Turning back the wheels of time, we find that there was in 18 12 no such thing as a religious newspaper in existence, if we set aside the possible claim of the " Herald of Gospel Liberty," begun in Portsmouth and removed to Dayton, Ohio, and except a sort of serial, not a newspaper published for the specific purpose of giving revival intelligence. The earliest ordination of missionaries, shown to have been an epoch-making event, was reported in the local paper in ten lines, and in the same issue the " Salem Gazette " printed an article by President Smith, of Princeton University, in disparage- ment of missions, uttering a note of discord which was echoed for many 3^ears, whereas with the varied accounts of the ordination of the five men at the centenary a person could paper a good-sized room. 120 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN The Royal Roster The impression left by clergymen upon their families is lasting. Judson was the son of a minister, and himself left a son who is a distinguished minister. If talents exist in a clergyman's son, his relations are such that they are sure to be observed and to win admiration. As the world grows familiar with Judson's formative work, the more impatience is felt that no missionary figures among those elevated to prominent niches in the semi-circular Colonnade connecting the Hall of Philosophy and the Hall of Languages on the Hudson facing the Palisades, where one hundred and fifty illustrious names approved by one hundred judges are being inscribed. Only thirty names were approved by the judges out of two hundred submitted, and Judson received more than thirty votes. We have no Westminster, nor have we, even in the Statuary Hall in the Capitol, any choice collection of the nation's most famous dead, by reason of the restric- tion that limits to a representation of two a State that already figures so largely in the Honor Roll in the Colon- nade at the University of New York. But reverence ennobles the mind. The past refines. When all is money, let us have some mind, and memory, and association. The missionaries have done more than their part to exalt char- acter, stir chivalry and heroism, and by a reflex influence intensify religion in the home churches. A Verification Proposed We propose a test for measuring what contribution these choice and master spirits of the age have made to the present holdings of Christianity. Archimedes was so pleased with his discovery of a method of ascertain- ing the bulk and weight of an object that in the streets FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH 121 he exclaimed, " Eureka ! " His plan seems to have been to judge of a thing by the void it made when withdrawn. Apply, then, his method, and indicate in thought the high- water mark of Christianity, and then eliminate all that these earliest missionaries supplied, and the subsidence will tell the story. There would be a noticeable lower- ing of the water-mark the moment you extract their initiative, their organization, their work, and their early development of the spirit of benevolence. These mis- sionaries, not being supported by individual churches, occasioned the first American religious get-together cam- paign. Without any long preparation for it, the churches took a practical home course in the art of making com- mon cause. It seems that a man determined to have a hive of bees, and began to catch them one by one in the clover-fields as he came upon them. He brought them home individually, but was surprised to find that, though he had individuals, he had not what is known as a swarm of bees. They had no relationship. There was no bond of sympathy. There was no unity. Nothing was done. A swarm of bees must be an entity. They must have a queen and be a colony, be united in an idea, and have a head. The earliest missionaries were led to cement a union in counsel and effort which developed an entirely new esprit de corps. Women with few independent resources set up their " cent " societies, and when at the meeting the money was assembled and consecrated and apportioned, the little assembly had sometimes almost the spirit and solemnity of a sacrament. We measure these heroic souls in another negative way. Run over the history of the church and recall instances when she did not know the day of her visitation, and allowed great opportunities to slip from her grasp unused. And then turn to this crisis as it opened and beckoned and was promptly recognized and honored by these devoted young 122 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN people, who counted not their lives dear unto them that they might testify the gospel of the grace of God. It demonstrated to the church practically as if by a clinic that the force which the church possesses is amply suf- ficient for the great ends of her existence and extension. The Bridge-builders In the panorama of the past so vividly presented by Judson and his associates we see with new clearness the meaning of the old word Pontifex, " bridge-builder/' exalting it into its Old place of honor, and giving Pontifex Maximus, " the greatest, the best bridge-builder," a better meaning than it ever had before. How to build a bridge from our religious strongholds to the far-off, almost mythical confines of heathenism, for the passage of im- mense benefits, was their problem. They were contriving means of access to heathen people, sitting in unbroken darkness, bestial, cruel, shameless. See the express loads of Bibles that have gone over this " bridge " that con- nects them with us and us with them, and the immense freight of printing-presses and school furniture. Behold what troops of missionaries have followed since the remoteness was bridged between our goodly heritage and the habitations of cruelty. Using a bridge, people are not careful to inquire who projected it. The initial agency in founding a college like Harvard or Yale becomes soon a reminiscence. An idea or a gift bestowed upon a de- nomination is a boon to the world. All that is good in it is diffusive. " Take the lamp of life, ask counsel if you need it, but find your own way in the darkness, and we will send you oil." Seeing the Burning Bush and Hearing the Voice The missionary quickening was at the first, as it chiefly continues to be, distinctively a young people's movement. •> ■> > -> * FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH 123 We have seen young men at the haystack, young men before the fathers at Bradford, and young people in the " Caravan " and " Harmony." The association of older ministers did not originate the project and then look around for young men to carry out their idea, but the conception sprang up in young minds and was com- municated by them. The Student Volunteer Movement, the Missionary Education Movement, and Training Con- ferences illustrate the indebtedness of the world to the initiative of the young, and suggest the usual source of leadership. The Iowa Band, the Illinois Band, the Dakota Band, the Montana Band, all had their genesis in the minds of young men, associated together at one time and place for study. It was the only way they could be brought into circumstances favorable to personal ac- quaintance and to sympathetic associated action. It is the new blood, the new force, the modern method, the grace of spontaneity, the original note that seem to-day heaven-sent with a message and a mission. When this suggestive, creative, inspirational factor is lacking for a time we resort to shifts in administration, to more machinery without increase of boilers, to overworking our politics and turning to the government for what is purely causal, which simple government is powerless to provide, seeing that law is only, as Emerson shows, a mere memorandum. If the men of 1812 had been obliged to study the- ology, as the custom had been up to their time, with various pastors, scattered about the country, the action of mind on mind and heart on heart, the contact, the fellowship, the mutual stimulus, the flow of sympathy, the strength received and imparted, would have been im- possible. The idea, the heroic resolve, came not from the teachers, but from each other. In the main pur- pose of their lives, with minds quickened by study, they 124 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN educated one another. Andover assembled them and they went to school to each other. This association not only touched the springs of action in them, but it unified them and made their combined power effective when they came to appeal to the Asso- ciation and to the churches. From the start they never sought, severally, to serve God alone. The missionary knows nothing of a solitary religion. He must find com- panions or make them. Friendship is not only a great aid to business, but it makes just so many more oppor- tunities for spiritual activity and usefulness. The mis- sionary in learning a new language finds himself con- fronted earliest with the verb " to love." It is the normal type of the first conjugation. He finds too, that Chris- tianity does not seem to thrive, it hardly exists, least of all does it develop its genuine, full powers apart from an ecclesiastical organization. He discovers that man, left to his unaided reason, needs an influence from without to bring him to a full knowledge of God as a Holy Being and a Saviour. These young men ordained in Salem not only fanned the missionary flame until it burst forth into a steady and vigorous blaze, shedding a brilliant light upon the benighted myriads east of the Indus, but reflexively, they started fires burning in every Christian church at home. They formulated practically the principle, which is a fact, that if one person is called to be a missionary, other persons are by that same identical call summoned to support him. And it has been found, from the first, that this incidental call touches the noblest element in men and women. For a program they announced that a bold and aggressive policy is de- manded of the conductors of missionary efforts, and that no other course will either arouse or keep alive the benevolent spirit of the churches. They revealed the fact that arduous achievements, such as the transformation of FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH 1 25 fourteen hundred millions of human beings that inhabit the earth, demand a powerful motive. Touching the Nerve of Missions In effecting great things on difficult ground, ordinary agencies, though excellent, are not sufficient. The sum of a lot of inferior motives is not, in actual practice, the equivalent of a great motive. The missionaries have kept the religious idea in the ascendant, whereas the undevout man, in an age that is prosperous and ambitious for material wealth, simply reverses the plain, practical pungent, quotable epigram of Carey so as to magnify the human equation, " Attempt great things for God ; expect great things from God." That is not the re- ligious order, nor was it William Carey's. Men for a fact do not attempt great things, unless first they have vision, faith, and incentive to put them in motion. The succession as given by Carey is the only practical, effect- ive, fruitful one, " Expect great things from God ; attempt great things for God." That is the established spiritual order. The more immediate preparation for the Hay- stack Meeting came through a strong, religious awakening in Litchfield County, Connecticut, from which Mills and some other students associated with him came to Will- iams College. From the commencement in 1798 to Feb- ruary, 1800, there was but one professing Christian in that institution. In the transformation that came, " the brethren " who soon reappear at Andover, living in the midst of these mighty works, did not fail to make the ways of the spirit a deep and special study. Mills and Nettleton were born the same day, became Chris- tians the same year, were extremely sympathetic. Nettle- ton, like Mills, intended to become a foreign missionary, but had first to pay off the debts incurred by his educa- tion, and became at once so useful as an evangelist in the 126 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN churches that it was shown him that his duty was here. When he entered Yale College, he was the only pro- fessor of religion in his class. When the times of re- freshing came he gave his attention to the work of the spirit. Blow upon my Garden that the Spices thereof may Floiv Out Out of these revivals came the missionary uprising. In dealing with the outward, writers have attributed too little to that which produces the phenomena, the invisible sources of power. Missionary fervor has always followed, says W. J. Dawson, " in the wake of revivals." In asso- ciation with these men, having such antecedents, both Judson and Newell had their first experience of grace, showing the revival spirit that then pervaded that original seat of sacred learning which itself had its roots in a revival. In such a season the soul seems to rouse itself from the lethargy of sense to a living perception of the Unseen, Spiritual, and Eternal, when great truths long disregarded start into living reality, and when eternity in its eminence absorbs all the interests of time. The first of the young men, the pillar of the mission, having found the lamp that lighted his way to the cross, held as his beau ideal among men Dr. Edward Dorr Griffin, a con- spicuous revival preacher who wanted Judson to become his associate and successor, in " the biggest church in Boston," as Judson himself says. Miss Mary Hasseltine, sister of Mrs. Judson, describes Judson's " eloquence and oratory " as " a transcript of Doctor Griffin's," and Jud- son received an impulse from Doctor Griffin's preaching and genius and type Of piety which had a salutary effect on him all his living days. When the earliest missionaries in that constructive period entered the dark places of the earth where Satan's FROM THE CENTENNIAL PISGAH 1 27 seat is, the formidableness of the difficulties, the por- tentousness of the discouragements, the inadequateness of material means, threw them upon their own and their only resource, a single-minded, fervent consciousness of the reality, effectiveness, and sufficiency of the powers of the world to come. They were limited in the range of subjects that they could present, they were confined by the necessity of the case to certain elementary essentials. The energies of a few heavenly truths when set out with freshness and power by educated, attractive, consecrated men forcibly open a way to the human heart, and hearers become new creatures with a new spirit, a new experi- ence, a new testimony, and a new song. Till David touched his sacred lyre, In silence lay the unbreathing wire; But when he swept its chords along, Even angels stooped to hear the song. So sleeps the soul till thou, O Lord! Shall deign to touch its lifeless chord — Till waked by thee, its breath shall rise, In music worthy of the skies. VII SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE VII SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE WHEN admirers of the Immortal Seven turn their pilgrim feet to Salem the effect of the visit is heightened by finding so many other devotees here, thirty thousand in a year, upon an analogous errand. To those who come from the West, Salem seems redolent of the past. Many people go to Europe to find this flavor. Those having a shorter holiday come here. Curiosity gives to the mind a peculiar interest in origins. The first of its kind has a fame in that fact, particularly if the series is well known or long or bril- liant or useful. Adam is indebted for his great distinc- tion to the unadorned fact of having been first. The family's attention is given to a child's first step and to his first word. It was recently said of an aged citizen at his burial that he was the first man in his county to enlist. Such a man stands for more than a single recruit, and this truth is recognized in every movement that implies concerted action. Happy is the man who is permitted to set the example and start the movement! In setting out the true scale of sovereign honors, which has five grades, Lord Bacon gives first place to those who are historic founders. In Salem occurred not only the ordination of the first minister in America; it was here that the first church formed in the Western world was organized. Remember- ing that the ballot is the gist of democracy, at this ordina- tion, which " was the imposition of hands on Mr. Higgin- son," we have the first use of the ballot in the Western 131 132 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN world. Aided by Hawthorne's power of bringing the past into the present, we can now see Pastor Higginson as he " wet his palm and laid it on the brow of the first twin- born child." Such a proportion of the national revenue is now turned into pensions, twenty-five million dollars by a single recent act, we are interested to find the first pensioner in Salem. In 1817 President Monroe saw here an aged, decrepit, Revolutionary soldier, dependent on the town, and, on returning to Washington, laid the matter before Congress, with a result which has since brought comfort and happiness to heroic, sacrificial souls who have jeoparded their lives in the high places of the field. Salem, the Home of History The invention which has transformed the busy street into a white way may be traced to No. 11 Pearl Street in Salem, where the first electric light was shown by Prof. Moses G. Farmer in 1859. When the telephone had been perfected in a cellar at 292 Essex Street, and the patent had been granted — No. 174,465, " the most valuable single patent ever issued in any country " — the first telephone message ever transmitted in a practical test was sent on the night of February 12, 1877, by the present President of the Merchants Bank. Joseph Dixon, the first manufacturer of lead pencils, -started his business in Salem; John Rogers, who gave to sculpture a certain popular turn, made his initial experiments with clay in this town. Mr. Derby and others of Salem were the first to display our ensign at Calcutta, where the Im- mortal Seven first landed in India ; in the Isle of France, where Harriet Newell died; at Bombay, where Hall and Nott labored ; in Siam, where the beginning of missionary enterprise was undertaken by Mrs. Judson; at Zanzibar; in China; in the Sandwich Islands; and at other places SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE 1 33 beyond the vast illimitable ocean, whose breadth was grotesquely exaggerated in all the charts of that early day. According to the records of consulates in Africa, the last shipments of slaves were at the time of Salem's supremacy on the sea in vessels hailing from this port. The first armed resistance to British authority was at the North Bridge in Salem, the " odious " troops being sent here for the same purpose that later took them to Lexington and Concord. Colonel Leslie was afterward court-martialed for his relation to this fiasco, showing how the British interpreted the outcome of the day. The place is hallowed not only by the fact that the first foreign missionaries were sent from it, but also for the reason that the first home missionary was from Salem. If one have the historic imagination, the voice from the past, vibrant with the life that called so much into being, sounds in his soul as he lingers about the residence of this first home missionary, for the building, erected in 1634, the oldest in Salem, like the venerable bakery which the tooth of time has still spared, was contem- porary with John Bunyan. India and the Indians When engaged in setting out the beginnings of foreign missionary operations, certain minds are sure to recur to the question, why, instead of going to the other side of the globe to convert the heathen there, did not the American churches and the missionaries concern them- selves with Christianizing the heathen at our own doors, for the red men of this country were unevangelized ? We are thus summoned to indicate the fact that the church has never been oblivious of her duty to the bronzed stoics of the woods'; that Dr. Samuel Worcester, the prime mover in the ordination of the first foreign missionaries at Salem, whose house in this city on Lynde 134 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Street is visited by pilgrims to this missionary shrine as the place where so many of Judson's conferences were held, himself died at Brainerd, a missionary station among the Indians on the banks of the Chickamauga, seven miles from the brow of Lookout Mountain, where was fought behind a thick curtain that mysterious, de- cisive battle above the clouds. A neighboring height still bears the name of Missionary Ridge, up whose broken and crumbling side eighteen thousand men advanced and did what no commander had the hardihood to order, and what all strategists dismissed from their thoughts, because it was deemed impossible. Having made the latter part of his journey, the greater portion of three hundred miles, through uninhabited wilds, when at last, as he was borne by two brethren from his carriage to the Indian Mission, it was said to him, " You have almost got through the wilderness" — " This may be true in more respects than one," he significantly replied; and so the event proved, for his new associates and the Indian converts laid him to rest as his spirit had taken its flight to heaven. From the earliest settlement of New England, no less a character than Roger Williams, who lived before and yet for his time, became the pioneer in a work of home evangelization. More light has broken forth from his melancholy looking abode here, than from scores of cathedrals and sanctuaries. It is affecting to think that he placed a mortgage upon this somber, primitive house, and his friends, the Indians, received the money, he saving barely the amount needed to remove his family from this place to the shores of the Narragansett. " In Salem every person loved Mr. Williams," says Doctor Bentley. " My soul's desire,"* says Williams, " was to do good to the natives' souls." " He understood the In- dians better than any man of his age." He was the SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE 1 35 pioneer in the actual work of all home evangelization. A company of intelligent gentlemen have agreed that Jonathan Edwards lived the most successful life in this country, achieving „ an exemplary spiritual experience, rendering the greatest service to his generation, pro- ducing when at the height of his unequaled power the foremost product of the American mind. He was at this time a missionary to the Indians, who, as the monument at Stockbridge recites, " were the friends of our fathers." So Williams, the tutelary genius of the aborigines, was a great man in an age of great men. He was born when Shakespeare, by the voice of the whole civilized world, was placing his name first in all literature and receiving honor but little this side of idolatry. On his visits to England, Roger Williams, in the society of scholars and statesmen, was denoted by his friendships. He became the advocate of the new idea that his soul was his own, that governments are concerned with civil things only, and not with faith nor worship nor conscience, that religion can speak to the hearts of men with a voice of power which owes no part of its emphasis to human laws. Impelled to go forth, banished, or, in the euphemism of Winthrop, " enlarged," he became the John the Baptist of this heaven-born conception, and the aborigines, those ravens of the wilderness, fed him. A Kingdom of Darkness Referring to his initial work for the homeland, Roger Williams states that " God was pleased to give me a pain- ful, patient spirit to lodge with the aboriginal inhabitants of our land in their filthy, smoky holes and to gain their tongue." Many times he states that he "preached to great numbers to their great delight and great convic- tion." He writes to Governor Winthrop a report of I36 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN " many a poor Indian's son inquiring after God." It was not until thirteen years after this, October 28, 1646, that John Eliot, known as the apostle of the Indians, began his work of preaching to them, and so we go on to class among the " firsts " Roger Williams' famous " Key to the Indian Language." He made the earliest systematic attempt to translate this unwritten language into a civilized tongue. This preceded Eliot's work on the same subject and his translation of the Bible into the Indian language by twenty years. Williams was an associate of Cromwell, a personal friend of Hampden, Sydney, and Vane, and a companion of the author of " Paradise Lost." Ezekiel Hollimon, a layman, an early resident of Salem who became a preacher, baptized Will- iams, and then Williams baptized " Hollimon and some ten more," whom he organized into a church, which sup- plies the singular fact that men going from Salem occa- sioned, not only the first American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, but they also instituted the first home missionary work, and the first Baptist community, and organized the first Baptist church in America, which was the second church of that persuasion in the British Empire. So indomitable was the patriotism of Roger Williams that he was, at seventy-seven, a captain of militia. At Providence, where he last built his house, there they made his grave. The vitality of his spirit appears everywhere in the prevailing principle of re- ligious tolerance in which he was the pioneer. The abso- lute vitality of nature further appears. In death as in life the house of houses which we call his body, as if touched by his own tender, undying purpose, seemed determined to live for others by his rule of each for all. After one hundred and seventy-seven years it was found that the tree which had grown at the foot of his grave, rising like the young Phoenix out of the ashes of the SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE I37 past, had sent a root and shaped it like a human form just where he had lain. Even in death he was helping some- thing else to live. Self-sacrifice is, in effect, the law of nature, as it is the law of grace: Enough to know that, through the winter's frost, And summer's heat, no seed of truth is lost, And every duty pays at last its cost. The Varied Interest The home of Williams, when pastor of the First Church in Salem, was occupied later by Judge Corwin and be- came for convenience to him the place of the examina- tion of a number of persons charged with practising " certain detestable arts called witchcraft and sorcery ," Abroad in Salem at the time was a community fever, an evil epidemic, a hysteria, a frenzy, a fanaticism, an execrable sort of hypnotism which opened the door to horrors that our history blushes to record. With super- stition running rampant, a belief in the power to work evil by a sympathetic bond, or by the collusion of spirits, or by legerdemain, or by palmistry, seems to have been almost universal. More than thirty thousand persons were executed in England for witchcraft, in which John Wesley believed, and our own Governor Endicott, and Winthrop, and Brads treet, and Blackstone, and Mat- thew Hale, and Bacon. For a fact the Salem Puritans were less guilty than their European contemporaries. If one man, Rev. Samuel Parris of Salem Village, had possessed a sense of humor, the calamity would have been averted. If entertainment or amusement had been provided for the girls that first learned to practise the black arts, our shame would have been counteracted. Visitors to Salem assume that the peculiarity was in the witches, whereas the exalted character of the persons accused — especially of Mrs. Hale, wife of the pastor of I38 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN the First Church in Beverly, and of Martha Corey, who concluded her life with an eminent prayer on the ladder, and of Mary Estey, called " The Self-forgetful " because, while in prison, in a petition to Governor Phips she asked not for her own life, but that other innocent blood might not be shed — brought about a general jail-delivery which had all too long been delayed. The derangement came from testimony and from the current belief that two or three witnesses would establish a fact, whereas we now know it to be true that some persons are not temperamentally qualified to give testimony. Thus no one could be safe before this awful inquisition, at which no counsel was allowed the witches. But men should be judged accord- ing to the light of the age in which they lived; and at that time they had not learned that men may be sincere in their practice of a godless godliness and still be wrong. The presence here of the witch-pins with which the accused were said to have afflicted their subjects, and of the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop, in which the sheriff states that he had hung Bridget Bishop until she was dead and buried in the ground, and of Gallows Hill, where nineteen witches were executed by a young man named Corwin only twenty-six years old, eight of the victims in one September afternoon, has given to Salem a holiday relation to the whole country, and not to America alone. It is a bewitching experience late at night to climb the lonesome elevation of Gallows Hill, and feel that on this neglected spot the innocent, after a semblance of trial, were put to death, as at the place called Calvary. The illusion is the more striking for the reason that two leaning telephone poles long stood here, having but a single cross-bar bearing wires, and at night the wires became invisible so that the two crosses marked that bald eminence which must now stand as a frowning memorial forever on Salem's sunset side. Samuel Sewall, SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE 1 39 heir to thirty thousand pounds in sixpences, who as a judge concurred in the sentence of the witches, but after- ward by his own motion made confession of his error on a day of public fast at the Old South Church in Boston, of which he was one of the brightest ornaments, exhibits the reversals of time. Thus too, Dr. George B. Cheever, a pastor in Salem, wrote the tract, " Deacon Giles' Distillery, ,, and was tried and imprisoned for it, but lived to receive from a son of the actual Deacon Giles a letter in which he referred to that tract as the means of his conversion. Racy of the Soil Salem is greatly distinguished by the noble children she has borne: Bowditch, Prescott, Story, Joseph H. Choate, and the inimitable Hawthorne, the greatest genius Amer- ica has produced, whose works, with some of Long- fellow's poetry and certain sentiments of Webster and Lincoln, constitute the most durable product of the American mind. Hawthorne, like Edwards and Frank- lin and Hamilton, had an original intellect. He was " the brightest jewel in Salem's crown." He is the repre- sentative of the essential spirit and conscience of New England. His characters are typical. John Bunyan is not more at home in the world of the interior life. With- out theological intent, such an original painter of real life is he, that his vivid conception of the spiritual world, and so his theology, as set out in his masterpieces, " The Scarlet Letter," and particularly " The Marble Faun," suggest the touch of the sacramental coal and make the truth seem like a fire shut up in his heart. His theology is old-fashioned and to-day in disuse, but not otherwise can genius keep literature true to the facts of life. Be- cause of his writings Salem has come to be called by our visiting teachers and ministers, The Home of the I40 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN Conscience. In the famous suicide-is-confession case conscience was let loose upon certain degenerates who, being leaders in an infidel club, did not know they had any. An End of Stolid, Stoical Indifference In this case nine weeks had elapsed without educing much real evidence, and Richard Crowninshield, a des- perate, hardened, remorseless murderer maintained, even in prison, a cheerful and confident demeanor and slept so well that he did not hear the throwing of bolts and opening of doors. Said the jailer calmly, " Did you hear that noise last night?" "No! I slept well. What noise?" "Why, Frank Knapp was brought in." The strong, guilty man put his hand to the wall to steady himself. Unable to conceal his emotion, he fell senseless to the bed. Conscience, remorse, and despair did their work, and with the light of a strange morning after a night of horror came the confession — he was self -mur- dered. And Joseph Knapp, the instigator of the crime, had in his hands the actual letter which brought the whole conspiracy to light, and could have destroyed it, but con- sciousness of guilt so confounded his faculties that he stupidly handed it back to his father. If Joseph Knapp had not later withdrawn his testimony, made on the third day of his imprisonment, neither he nor his brother Frank could have been convicted, and so must have escaped their doom of being hung in the yard just north of the Salem Jail in the presence of four thousand people. By the law of that time, which this trial had the effect to change in large measure for the whole country, an accessory could not be tried until the principal had been convicted, and the accessory must have been present actually or constructively as an aider or abetter ready to render assistance if necessary. Frank Knapp was proved to have been in Brown Street back of the Captain White SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE I41 mansion, but not until after the murder had been com- mitted by Crowninshield, who had purposely told him to go home and to go to bed, which he did, and only came out later, secretly-, to learn if the deed was accomplished ; on the conviction of Frank Knapp, Joseph was afterward tried as an accessory, and his execution closed the so-called Tragedy of the Conscience. Webster adopted an aggres- sive program and won. His opponents, without putting Joseph Knapp forward, kept only on the defensive and proved anew that the army that stays in its intrench- ments will sooner or later be beaten. Under terrible conditions Webster expressed a willingness to aid the jury in finding the guilty party, and so, instead of figuring in the case as a prosecuting attorney, he was practically, in power and sympathy, a thirteenth juryman within the panel. Webster, having been brought into the case by Stephen White, was accompanied on visits to Salem by his son Fletcher, the gallant colonel of the Civil War. This had the effect to unite the Webster family and Salem by the marriage of Fletcher Webster to the daugh- ter of Stephen White, who lived in the Lord mansion on Washington Square. Sightseers Linger and Leave Reluctantly When Dean Stanley was asked one day whether he could fix the most memorable hour of his life, whether of all he had heard and seen throughout the world (for he had been a great traveler) he could name an occasion when historical associations had been most vivid, his reply was surprisingly ready. Without hesitation, he named Salem in Massachusetts as the place, and a gather- ing of the descendants of the founders of the republic of the United States as the occasion on which his enjoy- ment had been fullest. " For," said he, " we read of Charlemagne and others with no perfect sense of reality ; 142 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN but at Salem, there they sat, the undoubted descendants, wearing the very names of the founders of a greater state." " I could not help thinking when reviewing Athens," said President Eliot, of Harvard, at the Fiftieth Anniversary of the founding of the Essex Institute, " that if you take one building out of Athens there is nothing in Athens to compare in point of interest with Salem, Massa- chusetts." He did not qualify or explain his statement. He may have had in mind the removal of the Elgin Marbles to the British Museum, which makes it possible to study Athens better in London than in Athens, in the same way that a person sees many things from Pompeii better in Naples than in the buried city itself. It is remarkable that Salem's two highest grounds of distinction, one relating to the world's religious welfare, the other touching the national weal, should both be asso- ciated with the year 1812. The ordination of the first American foreign missionaries will attract, as suggested by the Columbian Exposition and by the celebration at Jamestown, a more significant recognition as the years show its increasing fruitage and as the initial event is estimated in terms of what it conditioned, and not alone in terms of what it was. A City of Peace As the world now knows, the war of 1812 came to a termination very favorable to the United States, because the inroads on English commerce were such as to create among English merchants a sentiment so hostile to the war that its prosecution was impracticable. This his- torical fact was set out with great clearness by Senator Hoar, and demonstrated by Captain Mahan. Yankee privateers had penetrated into the Mediterranean, and threatened the destruction of British commerce even in those waters. No other city did so much, and none had SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE 143 it in hev power to do so much to bring those unhappy hostilities to a full period, as Salem. In a struggle with a powerful maritime nation, New York, Boston, Balti- more, and Norfolk were occupied at the time of the Revolution by the enemy and nearly ruined, so the main reliance of the country was on the shipping of Salem and its vicinity. During the contest there were sent out from this port a hundred and fifty-eight vessels which captured four hundred and forty-five prizes. The amount of money thus distributed in Salem, when considered in connection with the fact that a dollar went so much farther in those days, accounts for Salem's reputation from the first of having been so rich and complacent. The ship " America," built in 1804, brought in prizes to the value of over a million dollars. The " Essex," launched in September, 1799, the fastest among the ships, captured property to the amount of over two million dollars. On an investment of fifty thousand dollars the ship " Friendship " cleared two hundred thousand dollars. Captain Samuel Page, of Salem, had ten children, and named a ship for every one of them. Captain Peabody named a ship for every member of his family, and for his third son, the ship " George," an Argonaut of trade, was named, which was built for a privateer. She made half a million dollars for her owner, Mr. Peabody, and paid in the Salem Custom House in duties on imports $651,744. On her first voyage hardly any man on board of her was twenty-one years of age. Mrs. Judson speaks of the captain of the " Caravan " as " a young gentle- man of an amiable disposition and of pleasing manner." She makes much of the fact that he and the other officers attended the services during the long voyage. She pic- tures them as having fine breeding, observing the ameni- ties of life, and yet holding their high and responsible positions. 144 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN The point Mrs. Judson made touching the youthfulness of the captain and officers and seamen is borne out by the facts as found in all the ships from Salem of those days. The seamen were not only of native stock, but of the best blood of New England, distinctly well-born. They were largely the sons of the original settlers, and in- herited the spirit of daring, the purpose, and the resolve which had possession of a new country and had laid the foundations of great material prosperity and the advancement of our civilization. They challenge our admiration in that all hands, including captains and of- ficers, were often as young as the boys of the present time who are scarcely out of their school days. Neither Capt. Nathaniel Silsbee, nor his first mate Charles Derby, nor his second mate Richard J. Cleveland, was twenty years old, and yet these brave boys carried ship and cargo safely to their destination with imperfect mathematical instruments, and with no charts but of their own making, and returned with a cargo which realized four or five times all of the original capital. Such young men were with West in his daring exploit when in the darkness of the night he cut his prize out of a British harbor under the guns of the enemy. The armed ships of Salem inter- cepted the supply-vessels sent from England and Nova Scotia to the troops in Boston and New York. They cruised in the Bay of Biscay and in the English and Irish Channels, thus raising the rate on British ships to twenty- three per cent, and compelling England to employ most of her navy in convoying merchantmen. The crews on ships leaving Salem were incredibly large, as sometimes, from the beginning of the voyage, they would need to place prize-masters and prize-crews on captured vessels to send them to port, this to be repeated a dozen times. As the first prize in the series would sometimes sell for $100,000, each man had enormous reward. SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE I45 The Old Town by the Sea The sun did not shine on a more prosperous town. Salem Harbor was a forest of masts, and had the most extensive commerce of any American port. She always had her own characteristic note, and unquestionably this is the reason the place has so many namesakes. There are thirty of them in the United States. The Colonial mansions have a peculiar impressiveness of beauty and dignity. The sumptuous homes were fenced or hedged always. The grounds were private. Provincetown and Plymouth have been duly honored with monuments to the Pilgrims, and Cape Ann with a monument to the Puritans, for at Fort Stage Park in Gloucester a boulder is marked by a tablet. Salem stood next in order for the historic distinction, and Dr. J. Ackerman Coles has set up a mile-stone in honor of the immortal names that were not born to die. To the great chorus of admiration which has been rising for a hundred years, we add our voices as fresh commemorative honors are brought to this Antioch, Avhere American disciples were first called missionaries, with the hope that this spot pressed by their Pilgrim feet may be forever hallowed ground, consecrated as it has been by the prayers and baptized by the tears of devoted men. The Century's Capstone 1 We almost protest a place with sacred associations to mankind that is unmarked by monument or tablet. Think x To James L. Hill, D. D. Dear Doctor Hill: Your very interesting article, " A Missionary Shrine," in " Missions " for April, is responsible for my inquiring if the old Tabernacle Church, in Salem, Massachusetts, has a bell in its tower. If it has not, it will afford me much pleasure to have cast a bronze Meneely bell for same, as a memorial of the " Historic Place where Adoniram Judson and his four companions were ordained as mis- sionaries to foreign lands." The names of the five would be cast on the bronze bell. I, of course, would bear all expenses connected with the delivery and hanging of said bell. With friendly regards, I am, yours very sincerely, J. Ackerman Coles. My Dear Doctor Hill: You are a most excellent pleader. You have won your case. I and my architect will go at once to work and prepare a I46 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN of Jamestown, or Bunker Hill, or Gettysburg, or the spot in Cambridge where Washington took command of the American Army without a remembrancer of any kind. An obelisk seems to say, " Here." Then memory and inquiry and history perform their office. It is a grave misfortune where monuments, as in the quaint old Bohe- mian capital, Prague, glorify the wrong side. Some statues there are in praise of men who crushed down Italy's attempt toward constitutional freedom or who died as martyrs to superstition and false principles. Since monuments are in the highest degree educative, they should stand at the crossroads of the history of liberty, discovery, religious progress, and truth. Such embodiments are most effective, if erected solely as monuments, commemorating some honored event or cherished principle. How can a man stand where John Eliot preached, or by his grave, without feeling that places have a moral interest, and by the principle of sacred association bring to us moments of exalted feel- ing? Who can stand on the site of Fort Washington and, looking across the Hudson to the heights of Fort Lee, remember Washington's tears as he wept, " with the tenderness of a child," when he saw many of his men, overpowered by numbers, cut down and bayoneted by the Hessians — who can think of the long, weary, disas- trous retreat and the sad, dreary march to Valley Forge, uncheered by any recent triumph, in hunger and cold, in exhaustion from long keeping the field — who can in imagination trace the footsteps marked by blood in the snow, and yet experience no new and permanent appre- ciation of the price of our liberties? On the site of the haystack at Williamstown, " for once in the history of centennial tablet, as you write, " Memorializing in bronze the names of the missionaries who laid the beginnings of foreign missionary work in three denominations." I will send the design and wording, before cast- ing, to you for approval and acceptance. Yours sincerely, J. Ackerman Coles. SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE 1 47 the world, a prayer-meeting has been commemorated by a monument." For once, probably for the first time, the lay ing-on-of -hands is immortalized by a munificent artistic memorial. Unveiling the Tablet When God gave audience to Jacob, when angels came down from heaven to commune with him, the man set up a memorial to distinguish the place. At a fresh mani- festation of the power of God in the history of the early church some token was reared. The feeling of pious hearts inclines them to make some outward expression of their inward warmth and gratitude. There is divine sanction for recognizing events which change the face of things, not only with our lips, but with some generous landmark which shall make them live in the minds of men. It accords with both the spirit and the command of Scripture to erect a pillar that visible suggestion may be given of a providential occurrence or of a great initial experience. There is in every true and deep life that which presents to the mind a religion of places. The let- tered bronze was unveiled and dedicated to the memory of heroic characters and to the perpetuation of their vitality and influence in the lives and hearts of men. " Their bodies are buried in peace, but their names live evermore/' Though dead, they yet speak, and will con- tinue to speak until the last hour of recorded time. Brutus felt the spirit of Caesar in his tent at Philippi, and exclaimed : " O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet ! Thy spirit walks abroad ! " So wherever the gospel is preached, these first missionaries, not having done all that was latent in them to do, shall live on. Their works do follow them, enriching both earth and heaven. Hymns and music had been provided by Miss Emilie S. Coles, sister of the donor, the words being written by their I48 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN father. Thus the tablet was brought forth with shoutings crying, " Grace, Grace to it." Persons on the street riding by can read the inscription. Capitals are used only for the soldiers of the Cross and for the Saviour. It is bordered, as will be seen, by beauty. It assists the imagination. It appeals to the heart. It gives power to make the past vivid and brings some valorous souls back through one hundred years. It serves to kindle and perpetuate the missionary spirit. It occasions a review of history and starts a campaign of concrete religious education. What Names are These ? These are the first Americans that ever traversed the sea to carry abroad the gospel of great David's Greater Son. Here, shining apart, a pole-star — others forever can only approach it — is the name of the man from the Western world who gained among the pagans in Asia the first fruit of the Cross, the first Christian trophy. He was the first man from these two continents to come with rejoicing, bringing a sheaf with him. Such honor belongs to Samuel Newell. Here is the name of the knight that fought the dragon. When rulers set them- selves, and took counsel together against the Lord, our champion of the aggressive system adventured to beard these evil forces in their high places. Our thought is sometimes drawn to the loneliness of Christ. A corollary of this is the loneliness of his messengers. Turn the eyes upon the loneliness of Gordon Hall, as he waves the gospel flag and attempts to keep his foothold in India. It is the truth and not the number that in the end pre- vails. He embodied the spirit of the missionary age. Let no man, while admiring his associates, begrudge him his coronet. God having enriched him with fine gifts and rare qualities, like dying Jacob he was enabled to f- y pwwWWW WWWluJMW-.., JH'iiuwu i n i MU),! ji i. i ..ni i ..ii iii ,.u i DM Him nuwwunumm >i.. i . i .uuum . . .n i i i i.u ii u i i. am u .'•V ... TABLET ON TABERNACLE CHURCH, SALEM SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE 1 49 testify the grace of God and to communicate religious assurance to those who were with him when he gave up his spirit. Like Christiana in the " Pilgrim's Prog- ress " he witnessed a good confession before those who followed him to the river's side. I bless Thee, for the quiet rest thy servant taketh now, I bless thee, for his blessedness and for his crowned brow, For every weary step he trod in faithful following thee, And for the good fight foughten well, and closed right valiantly. The catalogue of the world's great men is spoken of as short. Here is one whose name is written indelibly on the brief list. He lighted a candle that shall never be put out. Time was when Adoniram Judson stood the only ordained missionary in the Burman Empire. He made the first Burman converts and gathered the first Burman congregation of Christians. He was called to " fill up that which is behind in the afflictions of Christ." When the Saviour, walking to Emmaus, fell in with two disciples," they persuaded him to abide with them. He had passed through such suffering that his face was not recognized by them, but he was made known to them in the breaking of bread. When he reached out his hands to break the bread they saw the prints of the nails. In like manner at a table the scene was brought to mind by others — he himself always omitted such matters from his discourse — when Judson was so roughly seized by " Spotted Face " at Ava and so bound with cords that they cut his flesh and left scars. The conversation took such a turn that at length, drawing back the cuffs of his coat, he said, " There they are." These names suggest not men merely, but a move- ment. It is the era of modern missions, and surpasses in interest and importance any such aggressive undertaking since the age of the apostles. The nineteenth century 150 THE IMMORTAL SEVEN began with just one convert from heathenism. This single convert was baptized three days before the century opened, and these men were then in training, and in about a dozen years started to proclaim to pagans the glad tidings first heralded by angels above Judea's plains. He who holds the stars in his right hand and knows what is best for his church, by a chain of providences saw fit to withdraw two of these men from their sphere of use- fulness in India to give energy and coherence to the work at home and to extend it greatly. Samuel Nott, whom Judson styles, " my earliest missionary associate," was an active, solitary, speaking representative of this missionary band for nineteen full years after all his associates at the ordination in Salem were wearing their crowns. Luther Rice, by developing the domestic side of the work, by organizing unity, and by enlisting the forces of a great communion that had never made an adequate expression worthy of its strength and resources, probably did as much as all the rest together to establish the home base without which there can be no permanent foreign mis- sionary work. These intrepid spirits kindled a fire of devotion to missions in our churches never, we believe, to be quenched. They come off well in a test which has been proposed as a measure of greatness, that prime workers should initiate their successors, advance them into the full recognition of others, and transfer to them power, and let them unfold all their talents. Having smoothed many difficulties, alive still in the heroism and sacrifices of those who have followed them, our mis- sionary pioneers are at work to-day potentially in very many of the churches of Christendom. We shall fit- tingly think of these chivalrous messengers as young. Their labors closed at their climax. Others grow old, but these exemplars are endowed with immortal youth. At the century's close we have come to wipe away the SALEM, CENTER OF PILGRIMAGE 151 dust from the earlier picture of them, to retouch it and re frame it, and hold it up to men that they should admire it. There is a beautiful fancy of pagan mythology, which contends that soldiers who have been distinguished in battle are allowed to meet in the happy fields of Elysium and talk over the events of the contest in which they engaged. Hark! Hark! my soul, angelic songs are swelling O'er earth's green fields and ocean's wave-beat shore. Let us believe with Socrates that the heroes and sages and martyrs of the past are not indifferent, in the present, to the sacred objects for which they gave up their lives. The stray Indians who once roamed over these acres had an odd superstition that, on penalty of never prospering more, it was necessary for them never to pass the grave of certain famous persons without laying and leaving some token of regard thereupon. Let us not be less reverent than they. The Sacred Seven who gave their lives first for Amer- ican liberty on the green at Lexington, had nothing to rest on but their faith and their hope. They became the in- spiration and the spur of patriotism in this land forever. The Immortal Seven who unfurled abroad the banner of the Cross, have now the distinction of showing to all who come after them how excellent and how elevated humanity can become. RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT TO— #► 202 Main Library LOAN PERIOD 1 ~ HOME USE 2 ; 3 4 5 ( b ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 1 -month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405 6-month loans may be recharged by bringing books to Circulation Desk Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due date DUE AS STAMPED BELOW ii li \ * iow .A JUL 16 W* Odt(o FHSi ttL OCT 4 '89 FORM NO. DD6, 60m ; UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 12/80 BERKELEY, CA 94720