17031903 WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY WESLEY BICENTENNIAL COLLEGE Row 1703-1903 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY MIDDLETOWN, CONN. 1904 Copyright, 1904, by WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY. DEVINNE PRESS Cable of Content^ PAGE INTRODUCTION: PRELIMINARY 3 PROGRAMME OF COMMENCEMENT WEEK . . . . . 5 THE CELEBRATION 7 Sunday Morning, June 28. BACCALAUREATE SERMON: PRESIDENT BRADFORD PAUL RAYMOND . . . . 7, 23 Sunday Afternoon. ADDRESSES : PRESIDENT HENRY ANSON BUTTZ 8, 43 REVEREND WILLIAM FRASER MCDOWELL .... 8, 44 Sunday Evening. ADDRESSES : BISHOP CYRUS DAVID Foss 8, 63 REVEREND GEORGE JACKSON 9, 65 Monday Afternoon, June 29. HENRY CRUISE MURPHY INGRAHAM 10, 85 CHARLES SCOTT, JR. 10, 90 LIST OF CONTENTS OF THE CORNER-STONE OF THE JOHN BELL SCOTT MEMORIAL 90 Monday Evening. ADDRESSES : REVEREND WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY ... 10, 95 PROFESSOR CALEB THOMAS WINCHESTER . . . . 10, 97 POEM: RICHARD WATSON GILDER 10, 124 2012355 vi CONTENTS Tuesday Afternoon, June 30. COMMENCEMENT LUNCHEON 11, 131 ADDRESSES : STEPHEN HENRY OLIN .... 131, 139, 142, 146, 151 JUDGE GEORGE GREENWOOD REYNOLDS .... 134 REVEREND JAMES MONROE BUCKLEY .... 139 WILLIAM DAY LEONARD 142 BISHOP EUGENE RUSSELL HENDRIX 146 PRESIDENT CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT .... 151 Tuesday Evening. ADDRESS : PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON 12, 157 COMMENCEMENT 13, 171 ADDRESSES: BISHOP CHAUNCEY BUNCE BREWSTER . . . -14, 173 BISHOP EDWARD GAYER ANDREWS 14, 180 PRESIDENT WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER . . . -14, 188 APPENDIX : COMMITTEES 197 FORMS OF INVITATION, CIRCULARS, ANNOUNCEMENTS . 199 LIST OF VISITORS: REPRESENTATIVES OF OTHER INSTITUTIONS . . 211 OTHER SPECIALLY INVITED GUESTS .... 214 ALUMNI 217 TRUSTEES AND FACULTY OF WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY: BOARD OF TRUSTEES 227 FACULTY 232 DEGREES CONFERRED 14, 237 VIEWS OF WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY: COLLEGE BOW ......... Frontispiece Facing page WILLBUB FISK HALL 9 JOHN BELL SCOTT MEMORIAL 9 CAMPUS, MEMORIAL CHAPEL, LIBRARY, SOUTH COLLEGE . 12 FAYERWEATHER GYMNASIUM 137 JUDD HALL 137 NORTH COLLEGE 149 PORTRAITS OF JOHN WESLEY: AFTER PAINTING BY WILLIAMS 112 AFTER PAINTING BY ROMNEY 160 PORTRAITS OF SPEAKERS: BRADFORD PAUL RAYMOND . 23 WILLIAM FRASER MCDOWELL 44 GEORGE JACKSON 65 CALEB THOMAS WINCHESTER 97 RICHARD WATSON GILDER 124 WOODROW WILSON 157 CHAUNCEY BUNCE BREWSTER 173 EDWARD GAYER ANDREWS 180 WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER -188 INTRODUCTION rpHE first definite action looking to a celebration, at Wesleyan J- University, 1 of the Bicentennial Anniversary of the Birth of John Wesley was taken by a committee which was appointed at the annual meeting of the Alumni of Wesleyan University, held June 25, 1901. This committee, known as the Wesleyan Alumni Endowment Fund Committee, and composed of David G-. Downey, William V. Kelley, F. Mason North, Frank D. Beattys, and George W. Davison, was appointed to secure from the Alumni an increase of the funds of the University. At a meeting of the committee, held November 1, 1901, all the above-named members were present, and, by invitation, Professor E. B. Rosa of the University. At this meeting the suggestion of a Wesley Bicentennial Celebration was presented and discussed, and resolutions were adopted favoring such a celebration by Wesleyan University in 1903, and asking the Trustees of the University to approve such celebration and to appoint from their number a committee who should form part of a joint committee of Trustees, Faculty, and Alumni, to whom should be entrusted the responsibility of carrying out plans for the proposed celebration. The proposal of the Alumni Endowment Fund Committee having been approved by President Bradford P. Raymond of the University and Hon. George G. Reynolds, President of the Board of Trustees, the Ac_ademic Council of the University voted, on November 19, 1901, expressing themselves in favor of the pro- posed celebration and offering to appoint a committee to cooperate with that already appointed by the Alumni and with a committee of the Trustees, if they should see fit to adopt the plan proposed, and should appoint a committee to carry it out. Finally, at a meeting of the Board of Trustees of Wesleyan University, held November 25, 1901, at 150 Fifth Avenue, New York, President Raymond presented recommendations favoring a Bicentennial Celebration of the Birth of John Wesley by 1 Probably the first suggestion of the pro- communication of Kev. Arthur Copeland, priety of holding, at Wesleyan University, of Syracuse, N. Y., in the " Christian Ad- a Bicentennial Celebration of the Birth vocate " of June 6, 1901. of John Wesley was that contained in a 3 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL Wesleyan University, and it was voted to adopt the recommenda- tions and to appoint a committee to act with the committee already appointed by the Alumni, and with that to be appointed by the Academic Council; the joint committee thus constituted being authorized to make and carry out all necessary plans for the proposed celebration, subject to the approval of the General Executive Committee. The joint committee, as finally appointed, consisted of the following persons : G. G. REYNOLDS, B. P. RAYMOND, H. C. M. INGRAHAM, W. E. SESSIONS, J. H. COLEMAN, W. N. RICE, W. O. ATWATER, C. T. WINCHESTER, M. B. CRAWFORD, H. W. CONN, D. G. DOWNEY, W. V. KELLEY, F. M. NORTH, F. D. BEATTYS, G. W. DAVISON, for the Trustees. for the Academic Council. for the Alumni. The programme of the celebration, as ultimately adopted, is contained in the Programme of Commencement Week, given below. Invitations were sent to a large number of institutions, requesting them to send representatives, and likewise to many individuals prominent as educators, clergymen, or statesmen, as well as to the alumni of Wesleyan and others specially related to the University. The forms of invitations so used, with the lists of guests of the University present in Middletown during the cele- bration, will be found in the Appendix. WESLEYAN UNIVEBSITY programme of Commencement Jteeefe, 1903, * THURSDAY, JUNE 25. 8:00 P. M. Prize Declamations. FRIDAY, JUNE 26. 4:00 P. M. Championship Baseball Game: Williams vs. Wes- leyan. 8:00 P. M. Rich Prize Contest. SATURDAY, JUNE 27. 2:30 P. M. Championship Baseball Game : Williams vs. Wes- ley an. 5:00 P. M. Preliminary Meeting of Phi Beta Kappa. 8:00 P. M. Glee Club Concert. SUNDAY, JUNE 28. 10:30 A. M. Baccalaureate Sermon, by President Bradford Paul Raymond, D.D., LL.D. 3:00 P. M. Address, " The Significance of Wesley and the Methodist Movement," by William Fraser Mc- Dowell, Ph.D., S.T.D., Corresponding Secretary of the Board of Education of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Henry Anson Buttz, D.D., President of Drew Theological Seminary, presided. 7:30 P. M. Address, " The Old Methodism and the New," by George Jackson, B.A., Superintendent of the Wesleyan Mission in Edinburgh. Cyrus David Foss, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, presided. MONDAY, JUNE 29. 9:00 A. M. Annual Meeting of Phi Beta Kappa. 11:00 A. M. Announcement of award of prizes and preliminary honors. 1* 6 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL 2:00 P. M. Class Day. 4:00 P. M. Laying of the corner-stone of the John Bell Scott Memorial. 4:30 P. M. Baseball Game : 'Varsity vs. Alumni. 7.30 P. M. Meeting of the Board of Trustees. 8:00 P.M. Address, "John Wesley, the Man," by Professor Caleb Thomas Winchester, L.H.D. Poem, "John Wesley," by Richard Watson Gilder, L.H.D., LL.D., Editor of "The Century Magazine." William Valentine Kelley, D.D., L.H.D., Editor of " The Methodist Review," presided. 10:00 P. M. Campus Rally. TUESDAY, JUNE 30. 9:30 A. M. Business Meeting of the Alumni Association, fol- lowed by reunions of all classes. 2:00 P. M. Luncheon for Alumni and Guests of the Uni- versity. Toast-master, Stephen Henry Olin, LL.D. 4:30 P. M. Receptions by the College Fraternities. 8:00 P. M. Address, " John Wesley's Place in History," by Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., Presi- dent of Princeton University. His Excellency Abiram Chamberlain, Governor of Connecticut, presided. WEDNESDAY, JULY 1. 10:30 A. M. Commencement. Addresses by Chauncey Bunce Brewster, D.D., Bishop of the Diocese of Con- necticut, Protestant Episcopal Church ; Edward Gayer Andrews, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church; and William Jewett Tucker, D.D., LL.D., President of Dart- mouth College. 8:00 P. M. President's Reception. WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY Celebration It was evident from the number of replies to the invitations issued that the exercises of the week would be very largely attended ; and the resources of the Committee on Entertainment would have been severely taxed had not the citizens of Middle- town so generously opened their houses to the Alumni and guests of the University. By the afternoon of Saturday, June 27th, many visitors were already in the city, and the annual Glee Club concert that evening was attended by an audience that filled the spacious Middlesex Opera House. The exercises more immediately connected with the Wesley Bicentennial began on Sunday morning with the Baccalaureate sermon by President Raymond. All the exercises of Sunday were held in the Methodist Church. At 10:30 A. M. the Trustees, Faculty, representatives of other colleges, and other specially invited guests entered the church in procession ; the Faculty and other college representatives in academic costume. The platform was occupied by the Faculty of the University, the speakers of the day, and a few other prominent guests. Music was furnished throughout the day by the Wesleyan Glee Club, the organist in the morning and afternoon being Mr. W. B. Davis, organist of Holy Trinity Church, Middletown, in the evening Professor Karl P. Harrington of the University of Maine. The opening hymn, number 136 of the Methodist Hymnal, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, was sung by the choir and congregation, after which prayer was offered by the Rev. John W. Lindsay, D.D., of the class of '40. West's anthem, "The Lord is exalted," was then sung by the Glee Club, and after the reading of the Scriptures a second hymn, number 608, Faber's Faith of our fathers, living still, was sung by the congregation. This hymn has been so frequently used in the College chapel and on public anniversary occasions that it has come to be considered at Wesleyan as almost a special University hymn. The Baccalaureate sermon followed. This sermon, with all the addresses of the week, is printed at length in 8 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL the second section of this volume. The closing hymn was num- ber 528 God of all power and truth and grace, and the benediction was pronounced by Bishop Foss. In the introductory services of the afternoon two of John "Wes- ley's hymns were sung, numbers 127 and 474; the first, Thine, Lord, is wisdom, Thine alone, being one of his translations from Ernest Lange, and the other, O God, what offering shall I give, from Joachim Lange; and both brilliant examples of Wesley's skill and spirit as a translator. The Scriptures were read and the prayer was offered by Professor Ammi B. Hyde, '46, of the Uni- versity of Denver. The presiding officer of the afternoon, Presi- dent Buttz of Drew Theological Seminary, with a few remarks upon the significance and appropriateness of this celebration of the birth of Wesley, introduced the principal speaker of the afternoon, the Rev. William F. McDowell. Dr. McDowell spoke at length upon " John Wesley, as Saint, Prophet, and Evange- list." At the close of his address choir and congregation sang the hymn of Bishop Coxe, O where are kings and empires now ? Despite the heat of the day, and the number and length of the preceding services, the church was again crowded in the evening. The presiding officer of the evening was Bishop Cyrus D. Foss, for five years, 1875 to 1880, president of the University, who is always welcomed in Middletown with love and honor. The hymns sung were all three characteristic hymns of John Wesley, number 139, Father of all, whose powerful voice, perhaps his noblest original hymn ; number 496, O Thou to whose all searching sight, one of his own favorite translations from Tersteegen j and num- ber 814, Saviour of men, thy searching eye, a translation from Winkler that well expresses Wesley's heroic faith under trial and persecution. The Glee Club sang the anthem God, that madest earth and heaven, WILLBUR FISK HALL JOHN BELL SCOTT MEMORIAL WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 9 set to an old Welsh melody. The Rev. George Jackson of Edin- burgh, the speaker of the evening, is one of the most able and scholarly young preachers of the English Wesleyan body; his address on " Differences between Methodism in Great Britain at the Close of the Eighteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Century " was listened to with close attention, and is a contribu- tion of much value to the history of religious thought and life in England. On Monday forenoon of Commencement week, at eleven o'clock, is always held the last morning College chapel service of the year, followed by the public award of prizes, and a brief address upon the year's work and history, this year given by the President. This address was made especially memorable by the tribute of President Raymond to the senior member of the Faculty, Pro- fessor John M. Van Vleck, who was appointed Adjunct Pro- fessor of Mathematics in Wesleyan University just fifty years ago. The respect and love in which Professor Van Vleck is held by the hosts of his old pupils, and, indeed, by all who have ever known him, was attested by the fact that at mention of his long and honorable service the audience that crowded the chapel to the doors spontaneously rose to their feet and broke into long- continued applause. The Commencement season this year was rendered especially interesting to all alumni, not only by the Wesley Bicentennial, but by the erection of two new College buildings costing about $100,000 each, larger and more imposing than any built by the College for the last thirty years. One of these buildings is situ- ated on the corner of College and High streets. It is of the Portland brownstone, like all the older College buildings, is three stories in height above a high basement story, and is a dignified and imposing academic building. It is intended for the use of the departments of literature, philosophy, history, and eco- nomics; and it will bear the honored name of the first president of the University, Willbur Fisk. This building was nearly ready for the roof at Commencement time. The other new building, the John Bell Scott Memorial, a phy- sical laboratory, is the gift of Charles Scott and Charles Scott, Jr., of Philadelphia, the former for many years a Trustee of the College, the latter a member of the Class of '86. It commemo- rates John Bell Scott, '81, who died of disease contracted while serving as chaplain of the U. S. Cruiser Si. Paul during the recent war with Spain. The building stands on Cross Street, nearly op- 10 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL posite Judd Hall. The basement is of granite, the upper stories of Harvard brick and Indiana limestone. In architectural ap- pearance and in interior equipment it is thought it will be one of the most satisfactory buildings of its class in the country. Work on this building had been well begun, and it was planned to lay the corner-stone at four o'clock on Monday afternoon, immedi- ately after the close of the Class Day exercises. The afternoon, however, was showery, and the Class Day songs and speeches, and the exercises which were to attend the laying of the corner-stone, all had to be given in the College chapel instead of in the open air. The programme of exercises for the laying of the corner-stone was carried out, save that the stone itself was not actually laid until the next day. President Raymond presided ; prayer was offered by Bishop Foss ; an address was given by Henry C. M. In graham, '64 ; and the audience joined in singing the hymn number 866 The Lord our God alone is strong, a hymn originally written by Professor Winchester for the dedi- cation of Judd Hall in 1871. The next day, Tuesday, at noon, the stone was actually laid, with appropriate remarks by Mr. Charles Scott, Jr., and prayer by Bishop Andrews. The exercises of the Wesley Commemoration were continued on Monday evening. The evening was very rainy, but the Methodist Church was crowded with an audience that not only filled every seat, but occupied every inch of standing-room. The presiding officer was the Rev. William V. Kelley, D.D., editor of " The Metho- dist Review," who introduced the speakers with some grace- ful words of appreciation and compliment. Professor Winches- ter spoke for an hour upon the "Personal Characteristics of John Wesley as a Man," and Richard Watson Gilder, editor of " The Century," read a poem upon Wesley. This poem, the voluntary contribution of Mr. Gilder to the Wesley Commemo- rajion, was one of the most noteworthy features of the week ; of sustained energy and beauty throughout, it was especially mov- ing in the passage referring to his own father, once a student in Wesleyan, and it closed with a noble appeal for a revival of the spirit of Wesley in family, state, and church. The illumination of the College buildings and the "campus rally," which were to have followed the exercises in the church, were postponed, on ac- count of the severe storm, until the following evening. Tuesday morning dawned clear, and the weather throughout that and the following day was all that could be desired bright WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 11 and sunny, but not unpleasantly warm. Tuesday was Alumni Day. It is certain that a larger number of Alumni were present than on any previous occasion in the history of the College. Nearly five hundred registered in the library, and there were doubtless many who neglected to do so. The many friends of the Alumni, with the specially invited guests of the University, swelled the whole number of visitors in the city by Tuesday noon to consid- erably more than one thousand. The campus was covered throughout the morning by groups of Alumni renewing the memo- ries of college days, and many classes held reunions at noon ; but the whole body of Alumni, with the guests of the University, were brought together at the luncheon in the afternoon. This was held in the College gymnasium, which had been tastefully deco- rated for the occasion with flags and bunting in the College col- ors of cardinal and black. Tables were set both in the basement and upon the main floor. The caterer was T. D. Cook, of Boston, and covers were laid for eight hundred. Music was furnished by Beeman and Hatch's Orchestra of Hartford. After the luncheon had been served the members of the more recent classes, who had been seated in the basement room, came upstairs and took seats reserved for them in the gallery, thus bringing the whole com- pany together before the speaking began. The toast-master of the occasion was Stephen Henry Olin, '66, of New York City, and the list of toasts and speakers was as follows : THE TRUSTEES of WESLEYAN, Hon.GreorgeG.Reynolds,LL.D.'41 THE RELIGIOUS PRESS AND ) HIGHER EDUCATION, } Rev ' James M ' BucMev ' DJX ) Rev. Bishop Eugene R. Hendrix, THE CATHOLICITY OF CULTURE, > ^^ LLD '67 THE ALUMNI OP WESLEYAN, William D. Leonard, '78 THE SISTERHOOD OF AMERI- > _ CAN COLLEGES, } President Charles W. Eliot, LL.D. THE INFLUENCE OF JOHN WES- ^ LEY'S WORK IN BRINGING Uon. Carroll D. Wright ABOUT THE INDUSTRIAL REV- I OLUTION, The Hon. Carroll D. Wright was detained by illness and unable to be present; the addresses of all the other speakers will be found in their place in the later pages of this volume. 12 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL On the evening of Tuesday a very large audience gathered, this time in the North Congregational Church, kindly tendered for the occasion by the officers of that society, to listen to the ad- dress of President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton University. The presiding officer of the evening was His Excellency Abiram Chamberlain, Governor of Connecticut, and about him on the platform were seated Governor Bates of Massachusetts, Hon. Martin A. Knapp, '68, of the Interstate Commerce Commission, Hon. Leslie M. Shaw, Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, President Buckham of the University of Vermont, Presi- dent Tucker of Dartmouth College, President Reinsen of Johns Hopkins University, President Eliot of Harvard University, Bishop E. E. Hendrix, '67, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and other gentlemen prominent in school or church or state. President Wilson, who for two years occupied the chair of history in Wesleyan, has a host of friends among the Alumni of the College and the citizens of Middletown ; and the interest which his admirable address on "John Wesley's Place in His- tory" commanded was heightened, in many of his hearers, by their warm personal regard for the speaker. At the conclusion of President Wilson's address, the audience, with a throng of others, passed up the hill to see the illumination of the College buildings and grounds. For an hour the whole campus shone like fairyland. Every window, almost every pane, in old North and South College, was lighted, and the other build- ings were hardly less brilliant. A thousand Japanese lanterns swayed festooned from tree to tree, all over the campus, in front of the president's house, and in the grounds of Webb Hall ; a rope of light climbed clear to the peak of the chapel, while in front of the chapel and over the entrance blazed the electric device 1703 1831 -y^ 1903 Here the crowd gathered, and for a half -hour made the air ring with the songs, old and new, sentimental or nonsensical, but all loyal, in which are enshrined the memories of college days. Then the undergraduates, with the younger alumni, formed in line for a " walk-around," passing from the chapel through the old North If > hd WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 13 College, around behind the whole College row and back to the starting-point in front of the chapel, where an immense ring was formed, more songs were sung, and as the company broke up the "Wesleyan cheer was given seven times over. The programme of the week culminated fitly in the exercises of Wednesday, Commencement Day. These exercises were held, not as in previous years in the Methodist Church, but in the Middle- sex Opera House. The speeches by members of the graduating class in competition for the Rich Prize, which are usually given on Commencement Day, were this year omitted or, rather, they had been delivered on Friday evening of the previous week to make room for three more addresses in harmony with the theme of the week. At 9:30 in the morning, in accordance with the notice of the marshal, the Trustees, Faculty, representatives of other colleges, and other invited guests assembled in the College library ; the Alumni in the lower chapel ; and the graduating class in South College. At a little past ten the procession, numbering about six hundred, headed by Hatch's Band of Hartford, moved from the College campus down College Street to the Middlesex in the following order : GRADUATING CLASS. ALUMNI. INVITED GUESTS, NOT REPRESENTING OTHER UNIVERSITIES, COLLEGES, OR PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS. REPRESENTATIVES OF OTHER UNIVERSITIES, COLLEGES, AND PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS. FACULTY OF WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, PRESENT AND FORMER MEMBERS. TRUSTEES OF WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY. SPEAKERS OF THE DAY. GUESTS SPECIALLY DESIGNATED. His EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR OF CONNECTICUT. PRESIDENT OF WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY. At the Opera House the Alumnae and the women of the graduat- ing class, who were in waiting there, joined the procession and entered with it. Upon the spacious stage, which accommodated about three hundred, were seated the President of the University, the speakers of the day, specially invited guests, the Trustees and Faculty of the University, with representatives of other institu- tions, and in the rear seats the alumni of the earlier classes. The 14 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL rest of the procession occupied the entire floor of the house. The boxes and most of the balcony were reserved for the families and friends of the Faculty, of the Alumni, and of invited guests. On this occasion, as at the Baccalaureate sermon on Sunday, academic costume was worn by the Faculty and the representatives of other colleges. Music was furnished by the Beeman and Hatch Or- chestra of Hartford. The opening prayer was offered by the Eev. James W. Bashford, D.D., President of Ohio Wesleyan Univer- sity. Then followed the three addresses of the morning: the first by Bishop Brewster, representing the parent English Church, of which John Wesley lived and died a member; the second by Bishop Andrews, representing the Methodist Episcopal Church, which was of John Wesley's planting; and the third by Presi- dent Tucker, representing that higher education in which Wesley was so genuinely interested. It is noteworthy that these three speakers, though following a long series of addresses throughout the preceding days, on the same general theme, repeated nothing that had been already said, but gave each, from his own point of view, a fresh and original contribution to the volume of discus- sion called out by the Wesley Commemoration. After these addresses the Bachelor's and Master's degrees in course were conferred after the usual formula, and President Raymond then proceeded to confer the honorary degrees of Doc- tor of Divinity and Doctor of Laws. The candidates for these degrees were introduced to the President individually, those for the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Professor A. C. Armstrong, those for the degree of Doctor of Laws by Professor C. T. Win- chester ; and on investing them with the appropriate insignia of the degree, the President addressed each as follows: WILLIAM EDWARDS HUNTTNGTON. Because of your apprecia- tion of the living questions in theology, which we debated in our theological school-days, and because of that fine sensitiveness of spirit which has made you interested in all that is human, and because of the success that has crowned your work as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts of Boston University, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Divinity. HENRY ANSON BUTTZ. In recognition of your contributions to theological scholarship as teacher of New Testament Greek, and of your services to the Church as President of Drew Theo- logical Seminary, which has grown into fame during your ad- ministration, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Divinity. WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 15 JOHN BINNEY. In recognition of your work as a teacher of Hebrew and Old Testament Literature, and also of that which you represent as Dean of Berkeley Divinity School, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Divinity. FRANK KNIGHT SANDERS. Because of your devotion to the study of Biblical literature, and of the enthusiasm with which you have cultivated the study of the English Bible among students, and in recognition of your position as Professor of Biblical His- tory and Archaeology and Dean of the Divinity School of Yale University, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Divinity. WILLIAM FRASER MCDOWELL. Because of your honorable work as Chancellor of Denver University, and because of the ability with which you have administered the office to which the Church has called you, and because of your advocacy of the cause of Christian learning throughout the Church, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Divinity. EUGENE RUSSELL HENDRIX. Because of the catholicity of your spirit, a catholicity which springs from the instruction of the intellect, the culture of the heart, and the discipline of the will, and because of your advocacy of every good cause in the office of Bishop, to which your Church has called you, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Divinity. CHAUNCEY BUNCE BREWSTER. Because of the insight and ability with which you have treated some of the great themes of theology in your book entitled " Aspects of Revelation," as well as because of the fine qualities which have made you a worthy successor of the man whom we need not name in this presence, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Divinity. HENRY CRUISE MURPHY INGRAHAM. Because of the reputa- tion which you enjoy in your profession for sound learning in the principles of the law, for well balanced judgment in the interpreta- tion of the same, and also because of the high qualities which have marked your practice of the law, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. DAVID ALLISON. Your name has been conspicuous among the educators of Canada for many years. In recognition of the dis- tinction which you have won both in your Church and in the work of education to which the government has called you, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. 16 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL JAMES WHITFORD BASHFORD. Because of your interest in the philosophy of the state, an interest dating as far back as your theological school-days, and because of the lofty ideals of which you have been the powerful advocate in the State of Ohio during the past decade, and because of your success as President of Ohio Wesleyan University, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER. You have shown to the world your insight into the forces that make and unmake men, in your book " The Making and Unmaking of the Preacher." In recog- nition of your work as a scholar and also of your work as an ad- ministrator of the great college which is famous for the men it has made, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. HENRY VAN DYKE. You have passed on in these recent years from the pulpit to the professor's chair, but you have continued to teach the same old verities that men were wont to hear from the pulpit of the old Brick Church in the years 1883-1900. " The Reality of Religion" and "The Toiling of Felix" are refreshing draughts from the same fountain, though they come from quite different periods of your life. Because of your fine sensitiveness to whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are just, what- soever things are of good report, and your genial advocacy of these noble ideals, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. WILLIAM HENRY BREWER. The age in which you have wrought as a teacher of youth has witnessed a development of science that one can hardly expect to see paralleled in the next generation. Because of your contribution to this advancement as a teacher of Geology, as Professor of Chemistry, and since 1864 as Professor of Agriculture in Sheffield Scientific School, as well as because of the nobility of your character, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. RICHARD WATSON GILDER. Because of your earlier work as managing editor of " Scribner's Monthly," and later, as editor-in- chief of " The Century," and because you have found time for the sanctum of the street, and have given service for the betterment of the neglected classes, as well as because of the songs which you have sung with " celestial passion," I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 17 JOHN LEWIS BATES. Because of the fidelity, sagacity, tact, and ability which have brought to you the highest honors in the gift of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, and because of the courage and consistency with which you have administered this great office in the interest of the people and not in the interest of any class, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. LESLIE MORTIEB SHAW. The people of the great State of Iowa have twice honored you with an election to the governorship of that State and your Church has four times elected you as a rep- resentative to her highest councils. The government, with well- justified confidence in your theoretical and practical knowledge of finance, has put into your hands the key to her vaults. It is in recognition of the distinction with which you have met these responsibilities that I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. ABIBAM CHAMBERLAIN. The people of the State of Connecticut have honored you with the highest honors that they can bestow. With these honors has gone commensurate responsibility. In recognition of the fidelity, the promptness in emergencies, and the ability with which you have discharged the duties of your office, I admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws. At the close of this ceremony the audience rose and were dis- missed with the benediction by Bishop Hendrix. On Wednesday evening President Raymond and Mrs. Raymond tendered a reception to all Alumni and guests of the University with their friends ; and with this very pleasant social event the festivities of the week came to a close. It was the universal verdict that the number of distinguished guests that were present, the enthusiasm and loyalty of the visit- ing Alumni, the dignity and propriety of all formal exercises, and the variety, interest, and quality of the large number of special addresses, made this Commencement the most memorable in the history of Wesleyan University. ADDRESSES SUNDAY MORNING, JUNE 28 BRADFORD PAUL RAYMOND BACCALAUREATE SEEMON PRESIDENT BRADFORD PAUL RAYMOND * '"25uttt>ljenit pteaseti >o& .... to rttoeat bitf &on in me, .... imtmbiatrip 3! conftmo not tuitti ffe.sfo anli frfooo, . ... but ( ttjcnt into Arabia anb returncb again unto antaeti#. GAL. i, 15-17. ONE of the first things that attracts ray attention in this con- text is the independent authority which Paul claims for his apostolate. We do not know how much he knew of the facts of the Lord's life as they are revealed in the synoptic gospels. We know that he stood almost within pistol shot of the actors in the great drama, and that what he knew made him a violent perse- cutor. Only four years after the crucifixion we find him a sym- pathetic observer, an active participant with the ecclesiastical gang that followed Stephen to his death. He consented to the death of the men and women who were witnesses for the Lord Jesus, and in his wrathful consent there was much of the Red Indian. The events, however, which were genetically connected with this revelation of which he speaks, constitute for him an inde- pendent claim. He says: " I certify you brethren that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man, for I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. . . . Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me." When Agrippa challenges him to speak for himself, he gives an account of his life as a Pharisee, and of his zeal as a persecutor. He says: "And many of the saints did I shut up in prison . . . and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them . . . and I punished them oft in every synagogue ... I perse- cuted them even unto strange cities." And he adds: "At midday, O king" and here we come upon the dynamic facts which are always alive in Paul's blood and always eloquent upon his lips 23 24 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL " at midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven . . . I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, . . . and I said, Who art thou, Lord?" The fact that stands out in the foreground here is a fact that has a voice, and speaks Hebrew, a fact that is transmuted then and there into a revelation of the Son of God. No one who has fol- lowed Paul as he masses the witnesses in the XVth chapter of first Corinthians, where he says that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve, then of five hundred brethren at once, then of James, then of all the apostles, "and last of all he was seen of me" needs to hesitate as to the dominant note in the revelation of which Paul speaks in this chapter. Of the immediate significance of the revelation to Paul one may be quite certain. He immediately took the oath of allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ. He cried out: "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" Perhaps I may illuminate my text and make the movement of my thought more intelligible by a parable. During the eighteenth century of our history there was a man sent from God whose name was Benjamin Franklin. He was a philosopher, an author, a statesman, and a scientist. He is prob- ably remembered by the most of us by his experiment -with the kite. Electrical phenomena had been observed for ages and by multitudes. But the genesis of a revelation is conditioned upon the warmth given the dead facts by a brooding mind. The dead facts known to every observer were warmed to life in Franklin's mind and became a revelation. Other minds brooded the Faradays, the Brewsters, and the Edisons and the reve- lation grew, and like all revelations began to make a place for itself in the world. This spirit was seen to be swift, expert, deft, and withal eager for service. It is light and heat and power or anything else you like. It turns the old horse out to pasture and runs the car. It wheels the old stage-coach under the shed at the country tavern and leaves it to rot, while the barefoot farmer's boy plays mimic stage-driver on the box. It is a business mes- senger between our cities, and a diplomat between the continents. The Franklins continue to brood and the revelation from the clouds to spread and to make a place for itself in the world, and as the imagination kindles, we become aware that although we have only tapped the frayed edges of the cloud, we have learned of exhaustless resources of power in hiding and waiting for service. WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 25 All this my friends, is a parable. It is a parable of the method of revelation. All the world, indeed, is a parable. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like leaven, is like a grain of mustard seed. Were he here this morning he might say the kingdom of heaven is like electricity. There are three points of contact between this parable and the text. The first is the dead facts and the genesis of the revelation ; the second is the theoretical adjustment of the revelation ; and the third the revelation, making a place for itself in the affairs of men. In the light of this suggestion let us hear the text again. Paul says : " When it pleased God . . . to reveal His Son in me, . . . immediately I conferred not with flesh and Hood, . . . but I went into Arabia, and returned to Damascus." But if we are to follow the method of the parable we need to remember that no external fact conceived in its external isolation constitutes a revelation. It may be the raw material out of which a revelation is to be made. But the genesis of the revelation itself is an inner matter. This experience must have thrown the facts of the whole Messianic history as Saul had known those facts into utter chaos, a chaos from which they could be saved only by bringing them into rational relations to the new revelation. That adjustment and reorganization could not be done in a day. But of the im- mediate result we may be quite certain. In that impassioned ciy, " Lord, what wilt thou have me to do 1 " we have the red blood of all the great creeds, we have a risen Christ, a present Saviour, and the Messiah enthroned. In that utterance Paul puts the scepter of David into the bleeding hand and a regal crown upon the bleeding brow. In this dramatic confession lie concealed the principles which are yet to organize anew the whole Messianic history. And just here I find the "far-flung battle line " of Paul's whole militant career. But this process of adjustment Paul has yet to make, and it is for this I am quite sure he went into Arabia. We know nothing of his life there, but we know that he carried with him into Arabia a new sense of values, and that he brought back to Damascus a new perspective of history. There is no doubt about this question of values. He deals with it in this epistle. He writes to these Galatians: "And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." The object of redemption from the law was this : " that upon the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus ; 26 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith." Here is a new standard of values. He who carries this song in the heart has a test for every kind of coin that is current in the world's market. As during that period of retirement, he repeated to himself the great revelation, and, as he sang the new song, morning, noon, and night, I think he must have felt that the roll of Isaiah's prophecy, stirred by a kindred strain, trembled with sympathetic response. And did he unroll it and read : "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? ... I am full of the burnt offerings of rams. . . . Bring no more vain oblations. . . . When ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers I will not hear : your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean. . . . Cease to do evil : learn to do well." Yes, he braced his spirit as he carried the new standard back into the prophetic rolls, with the comforting thought that Isaiah was with him. It furnished him a principle for the criticism of life. And does he not shout for joy as he turns to Amos and hears his tremulous challenge : " Come to Bethel, and transgress ; to Gilgal, and multiply trans- gression; and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes every three days ; and offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened, and proclaim freewill offerings and pub- lish them ; for this liketh you, O ye children of Israel, saith the Lord." He is pale to the lips as he reads: I have given you cleanness of teeth, and want of bread, and scant harvests, and repeated drouth. Woe unto you. ! For you hate judgment, you trample upon the poor, you afflict the just, you take bribes. But "seek ye me and ye shall live, saith the Lord." Religion is a social force, which displays itself in bringing men out of the relations that are, into those that ought to be. He senses the meaning of the suffering servant of Jehovah, where God's own chosen one is put under the law of the universe, the law of sacrifice, to bleed and die that man might live. He finds that his standard works and the oracles of his fathers are astir with a strange, new life. And now how about tithes and offerings ? They are good if they minister to the spirit. But with this thought their tyranny is broken. " Neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncir- cumcision, but a new creature." Even the law has a subordinate purpose. It plays the part of a pedagogue. The spiritual dis- cernment implicit in this new revelation frees him from the ex- pectation of an external and scenic coming of the kingdom. He WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 27 knows that although Jerusalem were built in all her ancient splendor, though her conquering armies were marching victori- ous to the four quarters of the Roman empire, though cringing captives were crowding to Mount Zion, and the hills of Judea were covered with camels in multitudes, with dromedaries from Midian and Ephah, there would be in all this no evidence of the coming of the kingdom. Christ reigns only where "love and joy and peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness and faith " reign. Guided by the new standard of values, and backed by his readjustment of the old Messianic history, Paul addresses himself to the task of making a place for the new revelation in the thought and conduct of his time. I think that this experience of the apostle rings the most char- acteristic note of Methodism. What is the meaning of that ex- perience which came to Wesley on the 24th of May, 1738, and which he described in language now become classic among us? " I felt my heart strangely warmed, I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation ; and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sin, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." Sometimes a bit of historical setting may vivify our realization of a great truth. A few years ago in a book store in Leipzig I came upon a history of the Moravians. In that history I found the correspondence that passed between Peter Boehler and Count Zinzendorf . That correspondence deals explicitly with the Wesleys and with their religious experience. On the 2d of March, 1738, Boehler writes as follows: " On the 28th of February, I travelled with John and Charles Wesley from Oxford to London. The elder, John, is a benevolent man ; he perceives that he does not yet right- ly know the Saviour and says so. ... His brother with whom you often spoke while in London, is very much disturbed in mind, but does not understand how he shall begin to learn to know the Saviour. Our art of learning to believe in the Saviour is indeed too easy for the Englishman. He is unable to reconcile himself to it. If it were only a little more clever he would the sooner find his way into it." Boehler watched with Charles Wesley when he was sick ; he walked with John while they conversed about his spiritual condition. During one of these walks John said : " Often I am entirely certain and often very fearful. I can say nothing more than this : if that is true that stands in the Bible, then I am saved." He writes on the 4th of May as follows : " I heard John Wesley preach. I could then understand everything. It was not as I 28 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL wished." Boehler gives an account of a meeting in which several of the Moravians related their experience. He says: "John Wesley and the others with him were astonished at these testi- monies. I asked Wesley what he thought of them ? He replied : ' Four examples do not make out the case.' I replied, saying I would bring him eight others here in London. After a little he rose and said : 'We will sing the hymn : Here lay I my sins before thee down.' During the singing he frequently wiped the tears from his eyes, and immediately took me into his room and said he was convinced of what I had said concerning faith." These letters show the intimacy that existed between the Mora- vians and the Wesleys and show also how God made them instru- mental in leading the Wesleys to the simplicity of the faith and into the way of life. Just here do we find the most distinctive characteristic of the Wesleyan movement. Wesleyanism is a life, but that is not all ; it is a life of faith, but that is yet incomplete ; its genesis is dependent upon the creative energy of the Holy Spirit, who works wherever faith works, but this is not yet adequate. Let us underscore that bit of history given us in Boehler's letters : " He [ Wesley] often said I am entirely certain, but often very fear- ful. I can say no more than this. If that is true that stands in the Bible, then I am saved." But that is not the simple way of the Moravians. That is to put the faith of the millions to utter con- fusion. Is each one to work out the truth or the falsity of the Bible in order to find the certitude of faith ? Is each to prove or disprove miracles, or the Divinity of Christ, or the resurrection of Jesus, or has the life of faith a self -verifying power? Does the song, My God is reconciled, His pardoning voice I hear, carry intellectual implications which no logical processes have yet verified ! Here, as I see it, we come upon the profound deeps of the Wesleyan movement j deeps of which John Wesley him- self was not fully aware; intellectual implications which we have not yet consistently and exhaustively worked out. Wesley makes much of the believer's assurance. But no more, I think, than does Paul, only with Paul it is always a kind of sacred lyric. It breaks out in the stately flow of his argument like a spring from hidden streams. You feel it in his practical exhortations WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 29 and in his apology for his apostolate. In the deep diapason of his cosmic philosophy you may hear this recurrent note of assur- ance, clear, sweet, and strong, like the voice of an angel singing : " And because ye are sons, G-od sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." It is worthy of note that genuine religious emotion runs spontaneously into song. On the farther shore of the Red Sea, Moses and the children of Israel sang: "I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed glori- ously ; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and song and he is become my salvation." And Charles Wesley was raised up to write the lyrics of the new religious life. The millions of Christians that have lived since his time have been made his debtors. He sang for them and has enabled them to sing for themselves ; for it is often the case that fitting utterance helps faith to birth. There is a sound philosophy in the use of our hymns. Let the hunted soul sing with the Psalmist : " The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." It has been the refuge of more beleaguered spirits than all the philosophies. Teach the enquiring soul to sing: My God is reconciled, His pardoning voice I hear, and he will learn to listen and to hear. We must never surrender the truth that our faith is a faith that can be sung, and, indeed, must be sung. But did the Wesleys make a place for this new revelation of the Son of God in their country and age ? You may go to Green for an account of the religious condition of the time. Quoting Montesquieu, he writes, "Every one laughs if one talks of reli- gion." He continues to comment on the times as follows : " Of the prominent statesmen of the time, the greater part were unbelievers in Christianity and distinguished for the grossness aud immoral- ity of their lives. Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. . . . Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were sneered out of fashion. ... At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive. . . . The rural peasantry, who were fast being reduced to pauperism . . . were left without moral or religious training of any sort. . . . Within the towns things were worse. There was no effective police ; and in great outbreaks the mob of London and Birmingham burned houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and pillaged at their will." 30 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL It was a capital crime to cut down a cherry tree. Twenty young thieves of a morning were strung up at Newgate. " In the streets of London gin-shops invited every passer-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for two-pence." This account of England when Wesley appeared reminds me of St. Paul's account of Rome as given in the first chapter of Romans ; of Gibbon's account of Rome, when the rotten moral foundations were giving way ; of the days that could produce and enthrone a Nero ; it reminds one of the days of the Reformation, when the priest laughed in the face of his fellow priest as he met him at the altar ; when Christianity was a pretence and the celibate priest was a celibate debauchee ; when the man behind the desk was disgracefully ignorant and the multitude besotted and brutal to the last degree. No doubt the Thirty Years' War, with its wide desolation, lies under the cover of this darkness. It was due to the Puritans and John Wesley that England did not repeat the experience of France. Green says : " England remained at heart religious." " Religion carried to the heart of the poor a fresh spirit of moral zeal, while it purified our litera- ture and our manners. A new philanthropy reformed our pris- ons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education." Then Green goes on to characterize the men who played the chief parts in this movement. They were Whitefield, the eloquent preacher; Charles Wesley, the sweet singer; and John Wesley, the great ecclesiastical statesman. They made a place for the new revelation by putting it into systematic giving in the weekly class, into schools, into reforms, and into philanthropies. Hear Green again: " But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. ... In the nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm . . . whose power was seen in the disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the Restoration. But the noblest result of the religious revival was the steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation of the profligate and the poor. It was not till the Wesleyan movement had done its work that the great philanthropic movement began. . . . The passionate impulse of human sympathy with the wronged and afflicted raised hospitals, endowed charities, built churches, sent missionaries to the heathen, supported Burke in his plea for WESLEYAN UNIVEESITY 31 the Hindoo, and Clarkson and Wilberf orce in their crusade against the iniquity of the slave trade. . . . The sympathy which all were feeling for the sufferings of mankind, he [John Howard] felt for the sufferings of the worst and most helpless of men. With won- derful ardor and perseverance he devoted himself to the cause of the debtor, the felon, and the murderer." For the theoretical adjustment of this revelation we must go to the writings of Richard Watson, Adam Clarke, and John Fletcher. And for the place which Wesley made for this new song we may go to the History of England. One might say, travel any of the great highways of England during the last half of the eighteenth century and miss John Wesley if you can ; or, during the nine- teenth century, and you cannot fail to feel his presence. He is still in the saddle, a herald of the same old message. This age greatly needs to be made sensitive to Paul's standard of value. All revelations have a hard time of it, and the bearers of them a bitter experience. And this because they set a standard of life beyond their time, and because it is the business of the bearer of them to get them into life. A disembodied revelation is a spectral thing. You would not care to meet one at night. And this revelation which deals for the most part with life as it is is in ugly contrast with life as it ought to be; this revelation makes religion an individual experience, and then always a social force, and it is quite likely to encounter like hardness of heart and like opposition. The revelation is in our time. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that everybody agrees that Jesus Christ, both in his teach- ing and his life, is a revelation of an ideal order. It is a great gain as I see it, to get that acknowledgment, even though it be theoretical, to get that vision packed away below the threshold of consciousness, so that when the impulse for action emerges, it shall meet the challenge: "Is this according to the standard of Christ ?" But more than this: this revelation is to-day a haunt- ing presence in all the upper ranges of life. It is in municipal reform, in industrial discontent, in national and international politics. It is a quickening spirit whose subtle influence is felt, wherever the greed of gold is seen yielding to regard for man. And that is great gain. Regard for man is both the cause and effect of the Lutheran Reformation. It was regard for man that beheaded Charles I. and established the English Constitution. A great principle in a savage age works in a savage way. Samuel was not over nice in the method of his warfare against Agag and 32 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL for Jehovah. It was for the rights of man that we fought for in- dependence, for the right to be a nation, and again in '61-'65 for the right to continue to be a nation. A quickening spirit has gone forth into the world from the revelation of the Son of God, whose imperious presence demands opportunity for the last man of the age. The stress of that demand is nowhere more evident than in the United States. It was John Quincy Adams who said that " the highest glory of the American Revolution was this : it connected in an indissoluble bond the principles of civil govern- ment with the principles of Christianity." Perhaps the stress of the demand for regard for man is due to this "indissoluble bond." This field is too tempting. The revelation is evident in our age as an ideal order, and as a stress upon all men and in all our institutions ; for "there is just as much of Christ in the age as there is of the spirit of Christ." Moreover, there is a spiritual energy in that ideal which under- girds our whole life, an energy that is ever carrying spiritual impulse and spiritual elevation into the deeps of man's moral nature. It is not known by a physical stress; it is not an arc light, not an audible voice, but a spiritual impulse that breaks in the consciousness of man, in "love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." Hear Paul's philosophy of this order and this energy: "For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, ... all things were created by him ... by him all things consist." He is their final cause. "Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, . . . that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ," that he might be "head over all to the church." In the eighth of Romans Paul conceives of the whole universe as taken into this movement: the world goes groaning on and up, to his time; the spirit breathes the unutter- able longings of the creature; all things are dominated by a central purpose, and that a purpose to work together for the good of them that love God. Paul assumes, and Wesley testifies to, a miniature duplicate of this kingdom in the soul of man ; to the Day Star already risen ; to a rift of sunshine that explains the meaning of that day and state that has no need of the sun or moon. Conscience with its imperious "you ought" carries us to the border land of that great day, and may not the spirit of the living God carry us into it? But our age shies at this teaching of the revelation. And why, WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 33 may I ask? Is it because of the dominance of a false view of life? Has that false view obscured some things that are very real? Why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the spiritually dead and quicken them to a new life! Many an age has been impoverished by the dominance of some false theory. The Almighty had to destroy Jerusalem in order to free the Israelitish mind from its vitiating dominance. It came to this pass: either the kingdom of God must be set up there, or not set up at all. There was no revelation from the Almighty that could get itself expressed except as it was mediated by that view. Now when that view obtains in any city where you hold real estate, you had better put it up for sale. That perverted no- tion still holds in some quarters. Luther's age was wasted by the false dominance of ecclesiastical authority. Ecclesiasticism has its value, but when a German emperor has to make his way in penitent garb over the Alps, and stand three days bare-footed outside the castle of Canossa to get an audience with Pope Gregory, there is something wrong in the emphasis of things. The vitiating influence of that ecclesiastical dogma made its way into every detail of life, from the life of the crowned emperor to that of the street mendicant. When you make the tithing of mint of transcendent import, you can't make the faith that binds to God and works by love much more important. You have ex- hausted your adjectives and you are obliged to teach, whatever you may say, that faith is about an equally important matter. I do not wonder that the great German chancellor, in his quarrel with the church of Rome, on the educational question, was led to say: "We are not going to Canossa." The false dominance of the trivial may waste the blood of an age like a fever. Paul saw that, and his new standard saved him from it, as is apparent in his letters to Timothy. He writes: " Refuse profane and old wives' fables." . . . "Shun profane and vain babblings. . . . But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes." In contrast to the trivial he exalts the great verities. "Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life ... I give thee charge in the sight of God, . . . that thou keep this commandment without spot, unrebuke- able, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ: which in his times he shall show, who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords : who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto." Is there a perverted view of things in our time, a view that 3 34 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL makes against the ideal and the unseen, and so against this revelation of the Son of God to our time? The most noteworthy achievements of our time have been in the field of science. Marvels are so common that I know of none that is startling enough to lead one to cross the street. But can one realize what it means to stand at a telephone, and, speaking in an ordinary tone of voice, make himself distinctly heard a thousand miles away? Do we know that we live in the day of wireless teleg- raphy? That two instruments can be set up five hundred miles apart, and, like two tuning forks, the second one will take up the vibrations set in motion by the first, and turn them into hieroglyphics which the instructed man can read? Says Pro- fessor John A. Fleming, of London: "When it is realized that these visible dots and dashes are the result of a train of inter- mingled electric waves rushing with the speed of light across an intervening space of thirty miles, caught on one and the same aerial wire, and disentangled and sorted out automatically by the two machines into intelligible messages in different languages English and French the wonder of it all cannot but strike the mind." When I follow the lead of the scientist up along these same waves to the limit of my power of hearing, and know that they reach on and up toward the music of the morning stars, I feel as though we might begin to listen for the heart-beat of the Al- mighty, and when I am told that the spectrum extends far and beyond the colors we see, that if our sense of sight were more keen, the invisible would be made visible in every direction, I begin to feel as though I might meet the Lord walking among the trees of the garden. When I consider that along any of the lines of scientific investigation one is led on into the great mys- tery for mystery enwraps us on every side I feel that science ought to be the handmaid of religion. But I find in some quar- ters the presence of a spirit that makes against the ideal and the spiritual, and therefore against the conditions under which the Son of God is to be revealed in our time. The mastery which science has given us over the resources of nature has contributed to an inordinate greed of gain. It has imperiled the gospel order, that is, the divine order. It puts gain against man. Man can never be made a means to an end. He is an end in and of him- self. It has fostered an exaggerated estimate of mere matter of fact. You cannot put a chapter of names in the Book of Chroni- cles along with the twenty-third Psalm, even though they may WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 35 give you matters of fact. Is there not a call for a standard of value here? It has resulted in an exaggerated view of the scien- tific method. As an instrument of knowledge that method has its place, but it cannot exhaust all that is to be known. The modern version of the old poem hits it off pretty well. It runs now: Twinkle, twinkle, little star, I do not wonder what you are ; What you are I know quite well, And your component parts can tell. What a fine caricature Browning has of that vanity in his old dog Tray. Tray had plunged into the water to rescue a beggar child, and then plunged in again to rescue the doll of the child, and Browning sings: And so amid the laughter gay, Trotted my hero off old Tray, Till somebody prerogatived With reason reasoned : Why he dived, His brain would show us I should say. John, go and catch or if needs be, Purchase that animal for me ! By vivisection, at expense Of half an hour and eighteen pence, How brain secretes dog's soul, we 11 see. There is an exaggerated confidence in classification, tabulation, and the contents of a pigeon hole. Every step in the way of classification is a step away from reality. The truth I am after is this: Neither science nor the scientific method opens or can open all the approaches to reality. Wordsworth felt the truth of some things that do not submit themselves to the scientific method. "He has perceived how nature not merely works delight in the blood, but flashes illumi- nation on the soul." For I have learned To look on Nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, 36 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows, and the woods, And mountains ; and of all that we behold From this green earth ; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half create And what perceive ; well pleased to recognize In Nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. Does not Wordsworth's vision count ? Browning makes tremulous the deeps of every soul when he teaches : All I could never be, All men ignored in me, That I was worth to God. Has Tennyson's message no meaning when he writes : If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, I heard a voice, " Believe no more," A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And, like a man in wrath, the heart Stood up and answered, "I have felt." This is on Paul's line. You need not surrender your hope. You may trust the universe. A recent writer 1 has put it forcibly when he says : The spirit of the age is saying to its children : Have faith. Make your- self at home. This is your own house. The laws were made for you, gravi- tation and the chemical affinities, not you for them. No one can put you out of the house. Stand up ; the ceiling is high. ... If you should act with simplicity and boldness, do you think that you would have to stand alone and take the consequences ? Have you no idea that God would back you up ? We have to adjust this revelation to an entirely new group of questions. What is the relation of this revelation to nature and the stubborn mechanism by which nature is ruled ? Has any one traced the process all the way through from molecule to man ? Are there no breaks in the continuity ? Are we yet at home with the doctrine of evolution ? Paul found a standard of value for tithes and offerings, sacrifice and ritual. Has his experience any i Charles Ferguson, " The Religion of Democracy," p. 7. WESLEYAN UNIVEESITY 37 bearing upon the record of revelation as that record has come to us, and upon the urgent Biblical problems of our day? The debate, with reference to nature and man, has gone on throughout the ages, for the most part under the dominance of the law of causality. It will never be closed along that line. We cannot get through from nature to man on any line of causality. Science informs us that when we see the colors of the rainbow it is because ethereal wavelets come beating upon the delicate retina of the eye, at the rate of millions per second. "The color red is produced by 474 trillions vibrations per second, while vio- let is nearly an octave higher, 699 trillions." But ride never so swiftly, horsed on the wings of light, when these lazy steeds cease to be vibrations and become sensation, you have leaped a chasm that was not bridged. That is true of every sensation and true of the returning movement of thought and volition. But nature with her vast mechanism grows luminous in the light of the doc- trine of values. From the growing wheat field to the shining stars, every bit of nature stands up to witness to the unity and service which no theory can exhaust, no poet can describe. And as to evolution, we have to ask, does this philosophy minister to the uses of the spirit? A plastic world, a world yet in the making, a cosmos of powers in motion and going somewhere under the dominance of a righteous will, would seem to be as serviceable to the life of the spirit as a universe struck into complete form by a creative fiat and then struck out by an omnipotent arm. And then as to the Book of Revelation we may say, that when the work of criticism is complete, there will be many gradations of value, but the pro- jected historical perspective will show that the sceptre is in the bleeding hand and the crown upon a wounded brow. We have no occasion to fear the theoretical adjustment that is going on in our time, because every accredited result is a testimony to the reality of an underlying structural moral order, and when that order is reached, you are already on the line of the great prophets toward the Christ. This is a revelation which is yet to be made, to our age. The Christian employer must abide by its spirit, and find ways to make it work. That is not an easy task. There are difficulties which no theorist can appreciate. I do not assume that the Lord Jesus Christ undertook an easy task when he undertook the sal- vation of this old world. But he gave himself to it with a splen- dor of self-abnegation that draws the whole world toward him. I know of no more difficult task in the evolution of the kingdom 3* 38 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL of God on the earth than that of lifting this industrial age to the level of the new revelation. And it is just as difficult a task for the employer as for the employee. Do not both put money first and manhood second I That gradation of values will have to be changed. That gradation does not conform to the revelation of the Son of G-od in man. That gradation is not in harmony with the structural order of the universe. Man is first and all else is instrumental. Ceremony and sacrifice, circumcision and the law were all made instrumental by St. Paul, that the new man might be made final. Wesley valued the lay preacher, the class organi- zation, out-of-door preaching, the work of women, the organiza- tion of Sunday-schools, and all other agencies as means to an end. The end of the gospel is sonship. Manhood can never be made a means to an end. The industrial unrest of our time makes con- spicuous the need of the new standard. Neither does the new standard need the justification of a working theory. It is creative and recreative in its own right and will make and unmake work- ing theories to fit the actual situation. Only let it have its way. Enthrone him whose bleeding hand sways the sceptre of right- eousness. That will cure the greed of money. For it is always true that five millions has an insatiable hunger to become ten. That will kill the beast in the labor unions, and give right of way to the reason and the moral purpose that are latent and potent in those unions. My friends, it is a long road. Of that you may be very sure. Beware of the man who thinks the goal can be reached one week from to-day. But the task is upon us, the way of advance has been blazed. Confident as I am that Jesus Christ's programme stands for the ideal order underlying the ages, just as confident I am that it works as a social force in the institutions of our time, while the age goes groaning on toward the day of the manifestation of the sons of God. If the Son of God be revealed in us and in our time, we shall continue to work at the readjustment which that revelation always demands, and we shall find in it the only evangel that can cure the soul, or right the wrongs of this or any other time. ADDRESS TO THE CLASS MY young friends and fellow- workers in the world's work : I bring you again to-day the old, old story. There is nothing new under the sun. The order underlying the world is as old as WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 39 the world itself. The constitutive structure of the soul is as old as the soul. Society follows those fundamental laws that were ordained for Adam. And yet the old order is capable of and de- mands ever new applications. As you go out to play your part in the re-creation of the age, in the making of the new civilization, you may well remember that nothing can take the place of the old verities and the old virtues. The essential religious verities have never changed. They are determined by the nature of man and the nature of God. While they remain unchanged, the es- sential truths will remain unchanged. Jesus Christ has expressed them in their ideal form. Neither can there be any substitute for the old-fashioned virtues. "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, what- soever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." Deeper than thought is right feeling. Sympathy with your fellow-men Jias its genesis here. If you are touched by their woes and stirred by wrongs done to them, you can help them. If you are not, you will count for little in the re-creative process that is going on in the world. I wish, therefore, to commend to you once more that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, which carries implicit in it right thought about God, and right feeling toward man, and which fosters the cultiva- tion of the spirit of the good Samaritan in the service of your fellow-men SUNDAY AFTERNOON INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT HENRY ANSON BUTTZ WE are met to-day, under the auspices of the earliest estab- lished university of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to do honor to the memory of the man, who, under God, was the founder of the people called Methodists. Two hundred years have passed since John Wesley was born, but he lives on in the marvellous influence of his life and achievements. It is eminently fitting that an event which calls to mind a life largely moulded in a uni- versity should be celebrated by another university. Wesleyan University, in the fulness of its vigor and success at the opening of the twentieth century greets Oxford at the opening of the eighteenth century, in recognition of her illustrious son. Wes- leyan and Oxford, in the name of John Wesley join hands to-day across the chasm of two centuries. Certainly the celebration, at this time and place, is an eminently proper one, and may fittingly be designated as a great celebration. It is great in the subject it commemorates. John Wesley, by the consent of Protestant Christendom is in the foremost rank among the great men of any age. He lives in history by the side of Chrysostom and Augustine, Luther and Calvin, Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, and the reformers of the world. Viewed in any aspect, his services to mankind have won world- wide recognition. It is a celebration great in its constituents. Wesleyan Univer- sity in itself is a constituency in this celebration well worthy of the occasion. The first of our universities bearing the name of Wesley, she is the mother of a multitude of other institutions bearing a similar name. Her representatives are found doing loyal service in every clime and in every position in the pulpit, in the press, in the professor's chair, in the headship of societies and institutions, in literature, in science, and in art. Everywhere her influence has permeated ; and wherever her children are found to-day they join hearts and hands in spirit and interest in cele- brating the Bicentennial of John Wesley. 43 44 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL It is a fitting celebration, also, in those who have been called to represent it. She has summoned, not only those in the church which Wesley founded, but representatives of other branches of the Christian family, who willingly pay their tribute to our illus- trious founder. Thus this occasion rises above a mere Methodist celebration, and assumes the broad position of Christian. The hon- ored names of those who have come to address us afford a worthy setting for this historic event. The connection of a great university with what was originally purely a religious movement is apparent. True religion has ever been associated with high scholarship. The happy combination of deep piety and sound learning in the Founder of Methodism is the inheritance of John Wesley's descendants, and is happily illustrated on this occasion. The speaker, at this time, is the honored Secretary of the Board of Education of the church which John Wesley founded in this country, and combines, in his relation to our whole educational work and in his personal position as a scholar and theologian, the qualities which fit him so eminently to speak on the topic which has been assigned to him for this hour. I have now the honor to present the Rev. William Fraser McDowell, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Sacred Theology, Corresponding Secretary of the Board of Education of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who will address us on "The Significance of Wesley and the Methodist Movement." ADDRESS BY THE KEVEREND WILLIAM FRASER MCDOWELL * J>i0rafkantt of UDegiep anfc tf>e T?MERSON does not include John Wesley in his list of "Repre- J-J sentative Men." Carlyle does not worship him in the vol- ume on "Heroes." Nevertheless, many excellent people in both England and America now " seek to resuscitate an ancient hero- ism " by the study of his life, the analysis of his character, the WILLIAM FRASER MCDOWELL WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 45 portrayal of his achievements, and the interpretation of his significance. We take our anniversaries rather gaily, as a rule, but I think we are disposed to take this one with commendable seriousness. We seek to interpret the man and the movement as we would interpret any noble history, life or literature, in order that life itself may be increased in nobility thereby. We do not forget that They who on glorious ancestry enlarge, Produce their debt instead of their discharge. It is a solemn thing to be a Methodist in this year of our Lord. The significance of the man is not quite the same as the signifi- cance of the movement. Historic Methodism on both sides of the sea is like historic Christianity, the resultant of many forces. Every such movement adds to and takes from its founder's contri- bution. Except in the case of Christianity, the movement is usually better and worse than the primitive thing. It is easy and common to read into the Christianity of Christ its later accretions, and to attribute to Him what we think vital and precious. We are prone to identify our Methodism with Mr. Wesley's. Every wildest vagary either in doctrine or form seeks to approve itself by assuming to be the only pure and primitive thing. The Christianity most marked by unreason and excess most loudly claims to be the Christianity of Christ. Every reform assumes to be a return, and every departure a restoration. The most wild- eyed and unhistoric manifestations in our Methodist history have most zealously used the name of our founder. One is almost warranted in suspecting any brand either of Methodism or Chris- tianity making special pretension to represent exclusively the mind either of Wesley or of Christ. All of which makes it neces- sary to understand the man and the movement. He is not a pillar of stone to which a church is to be tied while it marks time; but a pillar of fire and of cloud to guide a church forever on the march. Zion has only occasional use for an anchor. We look backward to-day that we may go forward to-morrow. Methodism has had its largest, I will not say its best develop- ment, on this side of the Atlantic. The political and religious children of those two villages, Scrooby and Epworth, in adjoining shires, are far more numerous in the new world than in the old. It is fair to test the tree both by the quality and the amount of its fruit. The Puritan descendants of Elder William Brewster 46 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL and the Methodist descendants of John Wesley must bear this double test. I think they can. It is worth something to the world that the Puritan spirit is both good and widespread, and that the Methodist spirit is both wholesome and abundant. I cannot help being glad that we are as big as we are, and thankful that with all our faults we are as good as we are. The value of love depends both upon its size and its kind. In that very fruitful little book, " What Shall We Think of Christianity ? " the author says that Jesus left three things : " A people, a teaching, and a power." So he did, but he left chiefly a Person. The people gathered about him, the teaching centred in him, the power came from him. The understanding of Chris- tianity begins with an understanding of Jesus Christ. The understanding of the Reformation begins with an understanding of the Reformers; of the Republic, with a knowledge of the Fathers ; and of Methodism, with an understanding of the man born two hundred years ago in that English rectory. It is easy to misunderstand him. One could make a very humorous sketch of John Wesley, or exhibit his weaknesses and foibles in such fashion as to make a fine foil for his virtues. It is not necessary. They said that Mr. Lincoln had big hands, made jokes, did not know how to bow, and that his clothes did not fit him, and all that was true ; but, measured by his char- acter and his achievements, he was one of the tallest white angels seen in civil life in a thousand years. It is said of Mr. Wesley that he was credulous, superstitious, and inconsistent; that his science, his medicine, and his politics all went often astray; and many a merry jibe is made against his matrimonial bungling. It is all true; but measured by his character, his purposes, his activities and his achievements, I believe he was the most apostolic man seen on our planet since St. Paul. I may be permitted to speak of him especially for the student life of the Church and thus interpret his significance for that life to which he is peculiarly related, under the three vast terms, saint, prophet, and evangelist. 1. lohn eskg the Saint. Macaulay said Wesley had a genius for government, which was true. Matthew Arnold said he had a genius for godliness, which is doubtful. It is our easy fashion to credit certain men with extraordinary capacity for saintliness, enlarging the allow- WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 47 ance to nature, reducing the demand upon grace. But if we analyze Mr. Wesley's saintliness, we shall find present every ele- ment to be found in the life of every other religious man. He was good ground, but that he became a saint was not due to his natural goodness or virtue, but to the work of God in him. This is our joy, that he was no angel, but a true man. This is our shame, that with like nature and the same Spirit the saint is now so rare, though perhaps not so rare as he seems. For the true saint is a living man on the highways, not a dead one in the grave nor an angel on the heights. Whatever Mr. Wesley seemed, he was a saint in the midst of his contempo- raries. Right interesting is the history of it, and very instructive. Thomas a Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and William Law early came into his life. Under their influence he made high and suggestive resolutions. It thrills the heart of a young collegian or recent graduate to see this son of Christ Church solemnly writing these words: "I saw that simplicity of intention and purity of affec- tion, one design in all we speak and do, and one desire ruling all our tempers, are indeed the wings of the soul without which she cannot ascend to God. I sought after this from that hour." And again: "In reading several parts of the 'Holy Living and Dying 7 I was exceedingly affected. I resolved to dedicate all my life to God all my thoughts and words and actions being thoroughly conscious that there was no medium, but that every part of my life, not some only, must either be a sacrifice to God or myself that is in effect the Devil." The way be- fore him is a long and weary way yet ; it is a far cry from this affecting moment of this young man's consecration to that jubi- lant hour thirteen years later when a man of thirty-five felt his "heart strangely warmed" within him. More than sixty years stretch out before that youth turning his back upon himself, but an unbroken line runs straight through his ever enlarging life. In youth he chose God and rejected self, and God gave him rich reward. It is to such that God so gives himself in life that in death they can cry out, "The best of all is, God is with us." His heart was set upon God, and, in consequence, God was set within his heart. Trained in a mechanical philosophy and surrounded by a hard theology, he leaped the bounds of both. It was the fashion of his times, and at first it was his fashion, to measure life by logic or in terms of weights and measures ; but John Wesley, the teacher of logic, put life into logic, exalted life 48 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL above logic and threw syllogism to the winds while he went out like Bunyan's man, crying "Life, life, life!" He lived in the face of the most logical system of theology ever wrought out, but rose mightily over it and victoriously rode it down, being filled with an experience of the direct life of God in his soul and a belief in that direct life for all souls. He found the wine- skins of religion beautifully arranged in perfect order, and men so taken up with the wine-skins that they had lost the taste of the wine. But this Oxford scholar one night, May 24th, 1738, got a taste of the new wine of religious life. He liked it. He became as a giant refreshed. Life looked better than form. He left us no worn-out wine-skins, but from his day we have known where to find the true wine of the Kingdom. The age was mechanical and indifferent. It is not necessary to characterize it again. The two most familiar texts were : "Let your moderation be known unto all men," and "Be not righteous overmuch." The age was taking many of its greatest questions in a shallow and half-hearted spirit. Hume and Sam Johnson in England, and Voltaire in France were apostles and expressions of the age. Carlyle called Hume and Johnson " the half men of their time." Wesley created an atmosphere in which the age had to take its questions seriously. Leslie Stephen says that " Warburton trimmed Hume's jacket for not believing in the miracles, and belabored Wesley for believing that they were not extinct. He denounced Wesley for his folly and impiety in believing that God might do in the eighteenth century what He had done in the first. And Wesley succeeded where Warburton failed just because his God whether a true God or not was at least a living God, whereas Warburton's had sunk into a mere heap of verbal formularies." In this barren age suddenly a new voice was heard because a new experience had come. A saint got loose in England. He did not hie to a cave to become a hermit, nor to a cell to become a monk so as to nurture his sainthood. In Lincoln College cloven tongues like as of fire were seen upon scholars. In Aldersgate Street there was the sound of a rushing mighty wind. The super- natural got on foot ; it descended to the upper room and from the upper room it walked abroad into prisons, lanes and mines. Once more young men at the opening of their careers said rever- ently : tl The Spirit of the Lord is upon me! " Many a wrinkle Mr. Wesley shook out of his views in sixty years ; many an inch he grew ; many an opinion he left far behind. WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 49 Under the influence of the new life he threw off the philosophical method and spirit of his time with its mechanisms, its measuring rods and its almanacs. Trees bloomed and bore fruit in season, out of season. All seasons and all soils became theirs. If Metho- dism had not struck the note of the witness of the Spirit, "the un- changing and un wasting miracle reaching from Pentecost to the backwoods"; if it had not proclaimed the fact of the living God and the glorious gospel of a perfect Saviour with a full and uni- versal salvation ; if it had not declared sainthood for every man through Jesus Christ it would never have conquered a human soul. It will not conquer another soul except where it strikes these notes again and again. This was the issue once, it is the issue still. I have referred more than once to Mr. Wesley's mighty utter- ance, " The Character of a Methodist." No more significant, no more autobiographical utterance was ever made by him. In call- ing Mr. Wesley a saint, I have had this document in mind. It seems to describe him. It is a noble plea for freedom and toler- ance because only in this atmosphere is sainthood possible. Mr. Wesley was such a tolerant man because he was such a large man. But this noble document is one of the wisest and strongest ever penned in our history. It is a plea for liberty, but it is far more. It is a magnificent statement of the rights of thought, but it is vastly more. It is the charter of our best intellectual free- dom, but it is much more. Its great notes strike again those im- mortal tones which ring in the words of Jesus and Saint John and Saint Paul. It is not an academic treatise on religious lib- erty, but an apostolic call for freedom, Christlikeness and social service. It is not the calm utterance of one calmly announcing the conceded truth of theory. It is the burning utterance of one who has breathed the upper air in Christ's presence, who seeks to incarnate Christ's spirit and to make Christ's truth of immediate account. There is in this rare document such reliance upon G-od, such communion with him, such joy in the Holy Ghost, and such an atmosphere of prayer, purity and obedience ; there are such love and strength and thanksgiving, such holy conformity to fundamental Christianity, to the mind and method of Jesus ; such high union with all who love our Lord in sincerity and truth, such comfort of love and fellowship of the Spirit; there are at last such Biblical conceptions of the Christian's privilege, life and duty, such devotion to the will of God in personal and social redemption, such visions of righteousness, joy and peace, 4 50 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL such confidence in one God and Father of all, as makes this docu- ment an immortal and imperial document upon which the people called Methodists could joyfully unite while they go forward, not in strife, but in unity for the conquest of the world for Christ. Liberty of opinion, but not liberty to destroy the root of Chris- tianity; liberty in which to live, but not license in which to ruin; liberty that one may develop the Christlike character and render the Christlike service this is what Mr. Wesley claimed for himself and secured for us. Without freedom we cannot be saints. The end of freedom is the saintly life and the saintly service. Free- dom, tolerance, largeness, Christlikeness in life and devotion these are the marks our Saint John bore. It was not monastic nor ascetic, but living and vital in itself and toward others. Dean Stanley said: "I asked an old man who showed the cemetery at City Road Chapel, 'By whom was this cemetery con- secrated?' And he answered: 'It was consecrated by the bones of that holy man, that holy servant of God, John Wesley.'" But he has done far more and better than that. It is the province of a saint not chiefly to consecrate the yards where dead men are buried, but the towns and cities where living men live. This man who dwelt in God, and in whom God dwelt, this man whom I have called a saint this day, has made the streets of a thousand cities and towns safer for tempted men and women, and for little children. His sainthood has sanctified death, but it has chiefly sanctified life. He might have been a Hellenist, creating for us a new Renaissance, but in a country full of old and stately cathe- drals, crowned with venerable and noble universities, he did be- come a living temple of the Holy Ghost. He went up the rugged steeps while his countrymen stayed below, and he saw again God face to face. When he came down he knew not that the skin of his own face shone. But under him religion ceased to be a thing of indifference and became an intense passion; it ceased to be a merely personal matter and became an intense social force. He restored pure and saving belief in Christ. He made it a great emotion and a vital force in the life of the world. A youth of twenty-two wearing an Oxford gown, bending low over his desk, solemnly and irrevocably dedicates himself to the perfect service of Almighty God, as Charles Kingsley at Cambridge did long afterward. A man of thirty-five, a scholar and teacher, listens in lowly chapel to the words of the great Protestant Re- former on the words of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and feels his heart strangely warmed; then for more than half a century this WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 51 scholar, become a saint, exemplifies and declares God's grace in the most apostolic career ever seen in England. A white-haired man nearly ninety years of age is surrounded by friends and helpers, to whom he whispers and shouts: "The best of all is, God is with us." It makes the heart beat fast just to say these words. May the ever-living Spirit of the ever-living God fall upon us in youth, in manhood and in age, making us saints in ourselves, saints among men, and saints toward God forever. 2. lohtt esUg as a He is dead, and the use of this word will not spoil or kill him. It has seemed rather a dangerous thing to call living men prophets in modern times. The term has turned the heads of many. "We have not many larger words to apply to men, nor many which we do apply more loosely. Nevertheless, this suits my purpose in the attempt to discover and interpret Wesley and his movement to our own age. This being a prophet is partly a thing of knowledge and partly a thing of temper. The prophet brings not necessarily a new message, only necessarily a true and living one; not necessarily an accurate prediction of the future, but necessarily a true knowledge of the present. People perish not because they have lost the vision of the future, but because they have lost the vision of God and reality. The prophet must meet his own age with an accurate knowledge and a prophetic temper. He must interpret it to itself and interpret God to it. He must rescue it from unreality and fill it with the real. He must make God real and living to a time that has forgotten him. It is only to such true and timely men as Isaiah that God gives any visions of the future. Mr. Wesley had the prophetic knowledge and the pro- phetic temper. In a brief introduction to the " Character of a Methodist" these words occur : A truly prophetic utterance contains a living message for its own times and for all times ; it possesses both timeliness and permanence. These two qualities belong to all great literature, whether in the Bible or out of it. Re- ligious classics like "The Pilgrim's Progress" have these characteristics. Such an utterance, this paper, written at a critical time by the human founder of Methodism, will be seen to be. To the men and women of the eighteenth century it came as from a true prophet of the Most High. To the men and women of the twentieth century it will sound as " one clear call "summoning 52 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL "the people called Methodists" to a larger life of freedom, wisdom, and power, spirituality, devotion, and service. It is an inspiration, a .rebuke and a comfort. It is so sane, so Biblical, so Christlike ; it is in such touch with the times and with the eternities; it has such ''length and breadth and height " that upon it we can all unite as we gratefully pass out of one century and joyfully enter another in faith and love for holy living and holy service to God and mankind. Timeliness and permanence, a man of the age and a man of the ages, there are other terms necessary but surely these are correct. Mr. Wesley was a man of his own age and not another. It is our easy and careless fashion to say that men of note are a hundred years ahead of their times. But such men are as use- less to their times as though they were a hundred years behind. The prophets were first of all prophets to their own contempora- ries. The more useful they were to their own times, the less they would bear transplanting to another time. We speak not wisely, however poetically, in saying: Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. There is a fulness of times into which men come. The eighteenth century was such a time for John Wesley. I think he would not fit so well in ours. Soberly, with chastened resignation, but not mournfully, I observed with you a dozen years ago the hundredth anniversary of his death. He has become a man of all times partly because he was such a man to his own. How well he understood it, and how true he was to it ! His science was the science of a progressive man of his day. His notions of government were the notions of his day with a note of sincerity, righteousness and progress added. He knew his England in its weakness and wickedness ; he knew it in its strength and goodness. He had visions and was no vision- ary; he dreamed dreams and was no dreamer. Like the old prophets, the most useful men in Israel, " he walked in the high- way of history and the main traveled road of common life." Like them, " the common life was to him the main staple of all life. Their race was run in the dust and the heat of the com- mon day." Like them he brought high things down to men and set the highest truth about God and man on foot among the men he knew. His knowledge of his times alone would not have made him a prophet, but without it he would not have been one. How sane he was ! He never forced providence nor took the government of the world into his hands. His credulity is WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 53 charming, his naiveU refreshing, but his sterling sense is as brac- ing as a mountain breeze. It has been pointed out that he did not originate the Holy Club ; his brother Charles did that. He did not inaugurate prison visitation ; he followed Morgan in that. He did not discover the doctrine of assurance ; he learned that from Spangenberg. He did not begin lay preaching; Thomas Maxfield taught him that. He learned field preaching from Whitefield, and got his ideas of band meetings from the Mora- vians. He did not originate the Arminian theology. But this true prophet, with an eye to what was timely, met these simple ideas and agencies on the highway and made them vital, organic, current, and useful. He knew his England. He had felt the touch of mysticism and of asceticism, but no more practical man walked or rode between his island's green hedgerows for a hun- dred years than this man. He had strength because of his like- ness as well as his unlikeness to his times. He was a man of all ages. Joseph Parker called Jesus " the contemporary of all ages." It is given to other men to be charac- teristic, it is given only to Him to be universal. But your true prophet is more than a man of his own times. England was full of such, and the eighteenth century was desolate enough. Mr. Wesley did not see the end from the beginning, but he laid hold of those truths for man and society which are eternal. England suddenly awoke to hear what she needed to hear, and hear then, but the message was timely because it was eternal. It contained no echoes from an older world nor the unknown accents of a world not yet come. Your prophet is no echo. Your prophet is no sibyl. These are the very tones of Isaiah and Micah, Jeremiah and John Baptist, Jesus and St. Paul. In these tones timeless men speak to their times and to all times. Hearing them, men understand that a thousand years are as one day. Hearing them, to-day is suddenly flooded with might from yesterday and with radiance from to-morrow. Hearing such men, colliers and pris- oners become citizens of a kingdom without beginning or end. Hearing these tones, the high and the low cry out with Browning: What's time ? Leave now for dogs and apes, Man has forever. Hearing them, common men gird themselves as with the power of an endless life, and understand how " the feeling of immortality depends not upon an argument for it concluded, but upon a sense of it begotten." These prophets, men of their age, men of the 4* 54 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL ages, bring not simply a new voice crying in the wilderness, they bring a new humanity clothed with salvation and light to people the streets. For these men of the age and of the ages are men of the Spirit with the power to make things real. Not everything of Mr. Wesley's will stand being lifted into a gospel. He did not think it would. It would be easy and hard to classify him as a conservative or as a radical. I think he was neither and both, and better than either. He made an atmosphere in which conservative and radical could live together the life of the Spirit. Startling sentences can be gathered from his writings. It would not be easy to find in his writings a philosophy of history or criticism or a science of social redemption, but it would be hard not to find in this prophetic man's life and work an atmos- phere in which every missionary in the slums and every devout scholar in the college may dwell. This is what comes of his living the life of the Spirit. He was more than a student of his times, more than a student of history, more than a pious recluse, as the true prophet is always more than these. It is said of John Wycliffe that in translating the English Bible "he lifted the roofs of the lowly English cottages and made them take in heights beyond the stars." This prophet of ours did that again. Remember that for more than fifty years England heard a living voice and saw a living, passionate presence. He spoke to uncounted thousands. They saw the flash of his eye and heard his tones and words. They saw a living definition of prophet and apostle, while this man burned himself out pleading for a holy manhood and a righteous nation. And the living voice and presence did what no printed page could have done. The preacher still has a place which cannot be taken by the editor or the pamphleteer. His world was like ours. Men were interested in religion as a topic; he made it live. Men patronized Christianity as a cult and a doctrine; he proclaimed it as an evangel. Nobody was saying anything great, or had anything very great to say, when upon the fat hearts and dull ears of England he spoke like a Hebrew prophet or a Christian apostle, come to life. The churches were all odious with formularies and smooth words, when suddenly this prophet so set religious reality loose in England, on foot and on horseback, that it has girdled the world. A material age got for fifty years a vision of what the super- natural could do with a consecrated scholar. Unspoiled by self- consciousness, unhindered by selfishness or laziness, this prophet brought religion off the shelves, out of the cloisters and out of WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 55 the skies, and set the common men walking in the ways of the Great Companion. A saint by God's grace, he became the prophet of personal and social sainthood to mankind. 3. lohn Ukskn as an (Duangclist. It is a noble word much abused. Still, let us use it, trying to recover its apostolic sense. A saint, a prophet, an evangelist: these three great terms can be applied to only a few men in human history. Sainthood, leadership, gospel all these marks are in the Methodist movement. They include its rhapsody, its experience, its teaching, its people, its machinery, and its power. One cannot help comparing him with Saint Paul. One born in the Jewish Church, loved it; the other born in the English Church, loved it. To one came a blinding light and a divine voice; to the other that strange warming of the heart. Each thought tenderly of and would have saved the church in which he was born. One was driven to the Gentiles; the other founded the Methodists. Neither saw the end from the beginning, or chose it. Each was driven to it by divine compulsion. The new wine required new wine-skins for Saint Paul as for Wesley. Each hesitated and tried to shift the weight of logic without denying the truth. Each was a chosen and willing vessel at last for larger things than he dreamed. It is God's way with men whom he chooses. Neither figures large in his own thought of the future. Each becomes larger with every passing year. Each was a true evangelist in his spirit. " If kings were philosophers or if philosophers were kings, we should have an ideal state," says Plato. If scholars were evange- lists or if evangelists were scholars, we should have a more nearly ideal church. These terms have been regarded as mutually ex- clusive, to the great loss of the Kingdom. But here was a scholar with the missionary temper ; a philosopher who became a philan- thropist, a man of thought who became a man of action, a man of devotion who became a man of deeds. The competent became the zealot, the master of high thought the lord of high deeds. His breadth was also deep, and passionate with ethical and prac- tical earnestness. Adjectives are not needed. They would be an impertinence here as in Saint Paul's autobiography. One day Wesley wrote : " Leisure and I have taken leave of each other." Then Sam Johnson said : " Wesley's conversation is good, but he 56 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL is never at leisure. He is always obliged to go at a certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have his talk out, as I do." But Johnson was a half man and did not understand, any more than Pilate understood the moral earnestness of Jesus. " Wesley knew the dark places of England. They were on his mind and conscience. He could not sit, even in high talk with Johnson, while men and women must be saved." He was said to be deficient in speculative insight, but not in the power to stir the stagnating currents of human life. It has remained to us to be more philosophical and less moving. The cure is not less philosophy but more motion. Life lacks projective force. He never caught up with his own plans nor overtook his own horizon nor lost the motive or projective force out of his life. At twenty-two life looked large, at eighty-eight it looked majestic. For the boy Jesus, the interview with the doctors in the temple must have been thrilling; but for Jesus, ascending the low hill with the cross must have been far more thrilling. The rapture of the recruit is great, the rapture of the veteran intense. Where got Mr. Wesley this abiding and expanding motive power which enabled him to see that ever larger things were coming to pass ? I answer : " God's greatness flowed round his incompleteness." It surrounded him as an atmosphere; it bore him up as the ocean sustains the ship or the solid earth an army ; it filled him with perpetual and unwasting vitality. He waited on the Lord and for him the ancient promise was both literally and abundantly fulfilled. Mr. Wesley's evangelism was direct and immediate. It puts to shame much of that in vogue this day. He tackled the hard jobs. He faced mobs so often that he finally adopted a principle for their control. He saw the spiritual deadness and the theo- logical unsoundness about him. He saw a godless population. He might have gathered some nice people about him and told them to be nicer; he might have told them how to get others wicked men, jailbirds and some harlots converted. He might have made the Holy Club like some modern meetings for the promotion of spirituality. God be thanked, he did nothing of the kind. He did not try to promote revival indirectly and spiritu- ality directly. He tried to bring bad men and the good God together in such way as to make bad men good. He grappled directly with the worst cases. None were too desperate. Never had a man a clearer view of the facts about man; never any man WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 57 a clearer view of the goodness and sufficiency of Christ and his work. He hated both heresies, " that which as liberalism denied the deity of Christ's person, and that which as hard orthodoxy asserted the deity of his person and denied the deity of his work and achievement." It was a thrilling moment, for his men and for us, when he asked his Conference that searching question : " Do we not lean too much to Calvinism 1 " This celebration ought to bring us face to face with our his- toric position and recover for us our priceless heritage. Men's need challenged him. Christ's power made him imperial. In the strength of Christ he grappled directly with wicked men in a wicked society, and lo, there arose such a tide of spiritual power as flooded a world, sweeping a doctrinal lie, a mechanical phi- losophy, and an indifferent spirit off the earth. We shall not see anything finer than this saint, prophet, evangelist, wrestling at close range with publicans, sinners, thieves, murderers, all the long day, until the night ; and all the long night, until the morn- ing flung shining bars of golden light against prison windows, while men went free. Out of this same stock came Arthur Wellesley, who conquered Napoleon at Waterloo. Step by step two men walked through the century together; Voltaire the French skeptic, John Wesley the English believer. One a critic, the other a constructor; one wearing a perpetual sneer, the other making everlasting affirmation. "Under one, Deism became Atheism ; under the other, it went to death in the vision of Christ. The watchword of the one was honor; the watchword of the other was holiness. Voltaire said : ' We have never pretended to enlighten shoemakers and servants.' John Wesley in Christ's name made kings of miners and cobblers and plowboys." In the year 1778, in a most theatric fashion, crowned with laurel and praise, Voltaire died. That very year John Wesley opened City Road Chapel. This evangelist never tried to establish a philosophical or speculative basis of union. He was always after a working basis. " I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that we be in no wise divided among ourselves. Is thy heart right, as my heart is right with thine ? Do you love what I love and desire what I desire ? I ask no farther question. If it be, give me thy hand. Let us do something. For opinions, or terms, let us not destroy the work of God. Dost thou love and serve God? It is enough. I give thee the right hand of fellowship." These, it seems to me, are the meanings of Mr. Wesley and 58 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL his movement. I repeat the three kingly words : Saint, prophet, evangelist, and reverently declare that the man who worthily bore them has created for us a home of devotion, of freedom, of progress, of activity, of holiness and of service in which it is well to dwell. I cannot forget in this closing moment that one August day in 1856 those gathered in this Wesleyan town, as you are to-day, heard these words: "I would gladly speak to you of the charms of pure scholarship; of the dignity and worth of the scholar; of the abstract relation of the scholar to the state. The sweet air we breathe and the repose of midsummer invite a calm ethical or intellectual discourse. But would you have counted him a friend of Greece, who quietly discussed the abstract nature of patriotism, on that Greek summer day through whose hopeless and immortal hours Leonidas and his three hundred stood at Thermopylae for liberty? And to-day, as the scholar meditates that deed, the air that steals in at his window darkens his study and suffocates him as he reads. Drifting across a continent, and blighting the har- vests that gild it with plenty from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, a black cloud obscures the page that records an old crime, and compels him to know that freedom always has its Thermopylae and that his Thermopylas is called Kansas." "Brothers! the call has come to us," he concluded: "I bring it to you in these calm retreats. I summon you to the great fight of Freedom. Here are our Marathon and Lexington. Here are our heroic fields. The hearts of good men beat with us. The fight is fierce; the issue is with God, but God is good." 1 There in England were the conditions under which educated men easily justify themselves for leaving the Church and for- saking Christianity. The Church was spiritually dead, morally depraved and theologically bad. They could have cursed it and left it. Or they could, as many have done, have rejected the Christ because some follower had gone wrong. It is the peril of educated men. But it is the proud privilege of such men to see in the ruin the rich materials for a new creation. It is theirs, above all, to see the form of one like unto the Son of Man, and to feel the thrill of the omnipotence of God in a perfectly obedient life. To those Oxford scholars the moral condition of England made conquering appeal. They were young, they were trained, they were ambitious. They were England's best. And England met i George William Curtis. WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 59 them in that Holy Club and summoned them to be not her critics but her saviours. Like true men they answered. Some one asked where Italy was six centuries ago, and the reply was: "Under the hood of Dante." Better England was once under the cap of Wesley. The world's need is ever looking under the cap of the Christian scholar. This quiet day, when we have been looking at this ancient heroism, God has been flinging into the face and heart of graduate and undergraduate our unfinished tasks, the saloon, the city, the South, the Republic, and the mis- sion fields of the earth. The Oxford gown was once the royal robe of a new Christian knighthood. Sin fled in its presence. The collieries, the jails, and the highways were made glad by the sight of these Oxford men. So may it be again. God of our Fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle line, Lord God of hosts, be with us yet! SUNDAY EVENING OPENING ADDRESS BY BISHOP CYEUS DAVID Foss THIS is a unique and profoundly interesting occasion. We meet to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of one of the most notable men commemorated in the history of the world a man sure to be admired and revered by multiplying millions of Christians in all lands and to be remembered as long as Paul and Luther are remembered because he took up and carried forward their work as no other man has ever done. This unprecedented commemoration continues through four successive days of the Commencement Exercises of the oldest of the more than two hundred universities, colleges, and seminaries under the auspices of the largest branch of Protestantism in this country. The movement set on foot by John Wesley was entitled by its chief historian, Abel Stevens, "The Religious Movement of the Eighteenth Century called Methodism." No doubt that desig- nation impressed many readers as a piece of arrant boasting, but thoughtful students of history have since come to think it an under-statement, and to declare Methodism the most influential evangelical movement of all the centuries, in respect both to the thought forces which it set in motion and to the number of its adherents. The Methodist family is the most numerous body of Protestant Christians on earth, and Dean Stanley declared that "Methodism changed the religious thinking of the Protestant English-speaking world." Of the immense social influence of the Wesleyan revival one of the best secular papers of this country recently gave, in its leading editorial, the following striking characterization : Wesley's work in England is not to be described merely as a tremendously religious one in point of fact, it attained the proportions of a social revolu- tion. England of the early eighteenth century was a land benighted and be- sotted beyond easy realization to-day ; John Wesley and his band of traveling preachers were like visitors from another world, and as everywhere they 63 64 WESLEY BICENTENNIAL spoke to hungry souls from the coal pits and the paganized fields, England awoke to another existence. It is an assertion acquiesced in by thoughtful students of history that, but for John Wesley, England's awakening would have been in such a revolution as drenched France in its own best blood. As to the man who projected into the world such an amazing force I present some terse non-Methodistic testimony. Lord Ma- caulay said Wesley's " genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu." The recent brilliant English essayist, Augustine Birrell, declares Wesley's life " the most amazing record of human exertion ever penned or endured," and adds, " no man lived nearer the centre than John Wesley; not Clive, nor Pitt, nor Mansfield, nor Johnson. You cannot cut him out of our national life. No single figure influenced so many minds, no single voice touched so many hearts, no other man did such a life's work for England." One word from this side of the ocean. A Boston Congrega- tional pastor, Dr. S. E. Herrick, thus writes : " He is, I think, the finest illustration of consecrated, unselfish, whole-hearted devotion for fifty years of this old world's dark history that the Church of Christ has ever offered to the vision of men." Vast, however, as was the effect of Wesley's work on the moral and national life of England, his chief influence on the world was distinctly religious. It is a very striking fact that when God gets ready to give some great and important truth new and larger currency in the world, he is quite accustomed to accomplish this end by hiding that truth in the capacious soul of some divinely endowed and chosen man, and setting it on fire there by the Holy Spirit. Some truths clearly stated on the pages of the Bible have got very little hold upon the thought and heart of the world, until they have had this special Divine treatment. We have long believed, and of late the Christian world has come to believe, that God raised up John Wesley for such a special purpose, and that the truth which he wished through him to make more effective was the great and vital truth of personal religious experience wit- nessed to the individual by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. For fifteen years, from the age of twenty to thirty-five, Wesley was as strenuous a servant of God as ever afterwards. Then he became consciously a son of God, and was able, with the holy egotism of Paul, to say " My Gospel," and to believe that " Christ loved me and gave himself for me." That day Methodism was GEORGE JACKSON WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 65 born. It was Wesley's chief function to translate the Gospel into the vernacular of each individual sinner, and to put it into the present tense, first person, and singular number. Such is the peerless man and such the mightily influential move- ment we are met to commemorate. We are highly favored at this hour in that we are to be in- spired by an appreciation of some of the chief aspects of the Wesleyan movement by a genuine son of Wesley representing the Mother Church beyond the sea; a brother greatly beloved throughout the British Isles, whose notably successful labors have been devoted chiefly to city evangelization in Edinburgh. He doubtless recalls Mr. Wesley's frank confession about Scot- land, given in his "Journal" : " I know not why any should com- plain of the shyness of Scots toward strangers. All I spoke with were as free and open with me as the people of Bristol ; nor did any person move any dispute. ... I preached on ' Seek ye the Lord.' ... I used great plainness of speech; and they all re- ceived it in love ; so that the prejudice which the devil had been several years planting was torn up by the roots in one hour." We have no such prejudice, my dear brother; but hail with gladness all genuine Britons, especially British Christians, pre- eminently British Methodists. Welcome, thrice welcome, worthy son of the fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, who founded Meth- odism, to this American Wesleyan Oxford. I have peculiar pleasure in presenting to this audience the Reverend George Jackson, A.B., who will address you on " The Old Methodism and the New." ADDRESS BY THE REVEREND GEORGE JACKSON * (je