CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924029461708 7 A^A^ElsDQ a.Ca,BaErii.-L From Photograph taken in J88j- Truman Marcellus Post, d.d. :a iSiogtapl^t PERSONAL AND LITERARY T. A. POST BOSTON AND CHICAGO Conflregational SunSag»Scfj0aI antt Pnilisftiitfl Sotirtg Copyright, i8gr, by Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, My circle of exact knowledge seems shrinking as I descend the vale of years; but I feel more strongly than ever that my Father and God will be with me and bear me up through the mystery of the eternal future. — From letter of Dr. Post to Calvin Hurlburd, December 24, 18'jg, PREFACE. It is believed that the life of Truman Marcellus Post will be of interest, not only to his circle of personal friends, but also to the general public. It had to do with events and crises of immense significance in the early history of the West, and later on with the great civil and military struggle for Missouri. And for such reasons it must possess a deep and growing interest to the student of history. This biography contains also autobiographic sketches and narratives, graphic and picturesque, sometimes intensely tragic, which, aside from any historic merit they may possess, cannot fail to attract and charm the reader. But, in large measure, the life of Dr. Post was withdrawn from the outside world, and was passed in the seclusion of his study, among his books and in labors of the pen.. This part of his life furnishes little, if anything, in the way of incident for the chronicler. Neverthe- less it was in some respects the most significant phase of his history. For nearly fifty years it was very prolific intellectually in sermons and lectures and addresses, and in contributions of various sorts to news- papers and periodicals. These writings were the bloom and the fruit- age of his mental manhood. Not only so, but they were the record of his own inner and subjective life, of its habitudes, its moral and intellectual traits, its achievements in learning, and its battles in the field of opinion. And just here a very grave embarrassment has been encountered in this memoir. The limits of the present volume would make the insertion of all, or indeed of any considerable portion, of the literary works of Dr. Post simply out of the question. Many of them, as indeed some of the best of them, were so compact in thought and so teeming with imagery, that any synopsis doing justice to the author would be difiicult and perhaps impossible. On the other hand, to ignore these literary products or to pass them with a mere statistical mention, would be, as already intimated, to eliminate from the memoir that part of it which was the noblest and most significant. There remained, therefore, no course but the middle one, of selecting from his various works sample or specimen utterances on the different VI PREFACE. subjects treated, and from those selected to cull out and present to the reader some of the leading thoughts and choice passages ; although in so doing it was painfully apparent that the benefit, oftentimes very great, of the context, and the symmetry and power of the article or address as a whole, would be lost to the reader. The task of choosing passages from the published works of Dr. Post for republication in this volume, while seemingly necessary to anything like completeness of the memoir, has therefore been a very delicate and necessarily a very unsatisfactory one. Moreover, these extracts, interspersed through the narrative, as they have been, according to their chronological order, are frequently dis- connected with any chain of events, and on disconnected topics, and are therefore sometimes an interruption rather than an aid to the easy flow of the story. But on the other hand it is believed that all the more readily will the reader be led, at odd intervals and as the mood is on him, to take up the volume and ponder over the " life thoughts " and glowing pictures that are presented in them. A fact to be emphasi2ed in this connection is that the present volume leaves altogether unpublished many of the writings, and a number of the best writings, of Dr. Post. Some of them, such as the lecture upon the Age of Pericles and the lectures upon Ancient Commerce, could not be found. Others, such as several discourses on Congregationalism and on the Pilgrim Forefathers, and the Methods of Historical Study, etc., though equal in merit with addresses quoted from, have been omitted as kindred with them in theme, and to avoid any topical same- ness. And some of the most striking and impressive sermons of Dr. Post, such as " Think on these things" ; "Be sure your sin will find you out," and " The power of an endless life, '\ were never transcribed in full, and are therefore not in a state for publication. It is doubtless also true that in another respect this sketch must prove an unsatisfying one. In the present day, and especially in the midst of a great city where events are following one upon another like ground swells of the ocean, the fame of men, however conspicuous they may be in public affairs, is soon swept away and almost forgotten ; to-day they are here ; to-morrow a memory ; shortly a mere tradition. And particularly is this true of a lifework whose results, as in the present instance, are accomplished so greatly along the line of silent causes and by the power of his own character in its impress upon the hearts and lives of others. Of such a history no record can be saved for the future in any earthly chronicle. There was also something in the wondrous personalty of Dr. Post PREFACE. Vll felt by all who knew him, and making him most beloved by those who knew him best, which the historian must despair of transmitting to the generations following. One may attempt to depict such a character, but in delineating its traits he finds that they fade into cold abstrac- tions, like sunlight into its prismatic rays in a spectrum ; the glow, the charm, the warm and living presence which transfused and kindled and quickened them all is no longer there, and the task seems well-nigh in vain. It may not be out of place to add here that the work of preparing this volume is of a character entirely unwonted to the writer. It has been carried on by him in the midst of other and pressing labors, and he has been under no little embarrassment in attempting to do simple justice to the subject of the memoir, without laying himself open to the criticism of bias by reason of personal relationship, and perhaps, also, to criticism of attempting to deal with themes which might be more appropriately dwelt upon by a stranger. Once more, and finally. The life of Dr. Post, as already said, carried him through stormy public crises. It is well known that in the battles for Congregationalism and the Fedetal Union, in Missouri, he took a conspicuous part. And among the readers of this volume, there will doubtless be many, as there were many among his warm and personal friends, whose sympathies and opinions were widely opposed to the course pursued by him during those controversies. Such read- ers will hardly need the assurance that there is no wish in these pages to stir the embers of party or sectarian feuds. But a memoir ignoring or glossing over such periods, and his own public utterances of the times, would present his life with its most conspicuous events left out or half told. Such a biography of Dr. Post would be not only glar- ingly incomplete, but would omit the very facts which, more than all others, bore witness to his moral manhood. Happily, the issues fought over in those days are no longer living issues, and as they are referred to in these pages it is trusted that the reader will find in the narrative neither root of bitterness nor challenge to controversy, but merely a faithful chronicle of events and a record of that bravery for conviction which all persons, of whatever school in politics or religion, will be glad to honor. But it is high time that the volume should go to press, if it is to be published at all, and it is given to the reader without further explana- tions, or apologies for its shortcomings. T. A. P. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. GENEALOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL. Stephen Post. — Roswell Post. — Martin Post: his marriage with Sarah Hulburd, and birth of his sons Martin, Aurelian, and Truman. — His • career and early death. — The Cornwall homestead and church and graveyard. Pages 1-6. CHAPTER II. EARLY HOME AND LIFE. Marriage of Martin Post's widow with Captain Hand, and offspring of this union. — • Larrabee's Point : its scenery and legends. — Early home and life in Shoreham, and youth in Orwell. Pages 7-15. CHAPTER III. PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS. Preparation for college and matriculation. — Picturesque Middlebury. — Its noted men and college faculty in 1825. — College days and graduation.. Pages 16-30. CHAPTER IV. PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR. A year spent by Mr. Post at Castleton as principal of its Seminary, and tutorship of two years following in Middlebury. — Social life there. — The Henshaw household. — Visits to Norfolk, Conn., and to Homer, N. Y., at the time of his brother Martin's wedding. — Sickness well-nigh fatal in 1831. Pages 31-40. CHAPTER V. ANDOVER. — WASHINGTON. — JACKSONVILLE. Andover Seminary and theology. — Winter of 1832-33 in Washington. — Recollections of Marshall, Story, Wirt, Taney, Clay, and Webster; also, of Governor Duncan, of Jacksonville, 111. —Journey West in spring of X CONTENTS. 1833, through the AUeghanies, down the Ohio, up to St. Louis and thence to Jacksonville. — That village in 1833. — Home of Governor Duncan. — Judge Lockwood and his family. — Stephen A. Douglas. — General Hardin and his wife, afterwards Mrs. Walworth. — Appointment to professorship in Illinois College. Pages 41-54. CHAPTER VI. EARLY DAYS IN JACKSONVILLE. Early days in Jacksonville. — Illinois College in 1833. — "Cholera year." — Northern trip and Indian Treaty in Chicago. — Dangerous illness in Jacksonville and reUgious experiences. Pages 55-62. CHAPTER VII. CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. Organization of the Congregational church at Jacksonville. — Public pro- fession of religion, and how it was brought about. — Letter picturing college life and surroundings. — Address at teachers' convention at Cincinnati. — Death of Aurelian Post. — Blind days and Poetry. Pages 63-72. CHAPTER VIII. MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. Trip to the east in 1835, and marriage. — Wedding journey to Jacksonville. — Winter of 1835-36 at college. — Purchase of the Lockwood place. — Strange night's adventure. — The new home : its inmates and surround- ings. — Newton Bateman. — Augustus Hand. — H. B. McClure and wife come West. — Visit of Madam Henshaw. — Story of a boar hunt. Pages 73-89- CHAPTER IX. THE SLAVE-POWER IN ILLINOIS. Daniel Webster in Jacksonville. — The slave-power in lUinois in 1837. — Fourth of July oration. — Death of Lovejoy and "Address to the people of Alton." Pages 90-106. CHAPTER X. CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. Illness at home. — Visit to Logansport. — Death of Mrs. Sarah Hand. — Trip through Northern Illinois in 1840. More as to th& Jacksonville Congregational church. — The pastorate over it. — Views on systematic CONTENTS. XI theologies, ecclesiastical order, terms of communion, and extempore preaching. — Visit to Middlebury in 1843, and preaching in the old Congregational church. — Ascent of Mount Lincoln, — Death of Gov- ernor Duncan. Pages 107-123. CHAPTER XI. AN ADDRESS AND AN ESSAY. Address in 1844 on "The Heroism of the Democratic Ages," and trip to Lebanon, 111. — Contributions to The Biblical Repository oft "The Immortality of the Soul." Pages 124-136. CHAPTER XII. LETTERS AND INCIDENTS. Misadventures of a trip to Burlington. — -Letters and Mss. in 1846 descriptive of Mackinac Island and strange incidents and serious illness there. — Scarlet fever at home. Pages 137-148. CHAPTER XIII. CALLED TO ST. LOUIS. Call to the Third Presbyterian Church in St. Louis. — Call to Middlebury College. — Pressure from St. Louis, and obstacles in the way of removal thither. — Inducements that favored the call to St. Louis ; its final acceptance. — The last years in Jacksonville. — The ideal home in retrospect. Pages 149-160. CHAPTER XIV. FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. First years in St. Louis. — Lecture on the Pilgrim Fathers. — La Clede Saloon disaster. — Address at dedication of Bellefontaine Cemetery. Pages 161-182. CHAPTER XV. ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS. Address at Middlebury, Vt., on " Genius." — Early friends in St, Louis.— Article on "The Moral Obligations of the Legal Profession." — Literary, reviews. — " The Voices of History." — A '• Farewell to 1850." Pages 183-200. Xll CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVI. STRUGGLE OF CONGKEGATIONALISM. Struggle of Congregationalism, and founding of the First Congregational Church in St. Louis. — Address on " Congregationalism ; and the Expediency of forming a Congregational Church.'' — The St. Louis home. — Incidents in 1852-54. — Sundry addresses in the East. Pages 201-216: CHAPTER XVII. THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION. Mr. Post and the cause of education. — Addresses at Illinois College. — Gasconade disaster. Pages 217-228. CHAPTER XVIII. RETENTION IN ST. LOUIS AND LITERARY LABORS. Call to South Brooklyn. — The new chapel. — Articles on " Immortality." — "The Skeptical Era.'' — Address at Iowa College on "Religion and Education." — Letter to sons at Yale. — Address at Norwich, Conn., and various incidents. Pages 229-240. CHAPTER XIX. CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. Christmas Discourses in 1859 on "The Greatness and Power of Faith as Illustrated by the Pilgrim Fathers," and on "The Vitality of Christianity." Pages 241-259. CHAPTER XX. A LOYAL PULPIT. Dedication of the new church at Tenth and Locust streets. — Its standing and influence. — The civil war. — The loyal pulpit as a factor in molding public opinion in St. Louis in 1860-61. — Public services of Dr. Post in this crisis. — Patriotism of the First Congregational Church. — Camp Jackson. — Sermon of Dr. Post on Fast Day in November, I 861. Pages 260-280. CHAPTER XXI. WAR PAPERS. War papers: "Guerrilla war"; "Price's proclamation"; "What ails us?" — Address on Palingenesy. Pages 281-301. CONTENTS. XUl CHAPTER XXII. MARTYRDOM AND FREEDOM. Assassination of President Lincoln, and services at the First and Second Presbyterian churches in St. Louis. — Sermon at the First Congregational Church, on " The Duty of Intercessory Prayer." ' — Paper in The North American Review, on " Free Missouri." Pages 302-312. CHAPTER XXIII. RESTORED SIGHT. — ARTICLES ON OLD AGE. Blind days again ; and removal of cataract in Boston. — Articles in The Chicago Advance on " Old Age." Pages 313-324. CHAPTER XXIV. A CHURCH COLONY. — NATIONAL POLITICS. Pilgrim Chapel. — Services of recognition. — Sundry publications relating to national politics. Pages 325-339. CHAPTER XXV. HISTORY AS A TEACHER. Address before the State Officers and Legislature at Springfield, 111., on " History as a Teacher of Social and Political Science." Pages 340-355. CHAPTER XXVI. HE PILGRIM FATHERS. .;:"-,:;"_ ,-.;: ::-:. s^oth Anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, ..:__;, :he Situation." Pages 356-370. CHAPTER XXVII. A DARKENED HOME. Sermons on the Church Fathers, and Discourse before the American Board on " The Ministrant Church." — Tripsin 1873 to Colorado and Europe. — Death of Mrs. Post, and letter to Daniel Roberts. — Letter from Ferrisburg two years afterwards. Pages 371-379. CHAPTER XXVIII. EXTRACTS FROM ADDRESSES. Address in Broadway Tabernacle, New York — "Our Country as a Factor XIV CONTENTS. in the Kingdom of Christ." — Monograph on the Second Advent. — "Congregationalism: the Life Story." — Class Semi-Centennial Address in Middlebury, and letters to Calvin Hulburd. — Address in Chicago at the Annual Banquet of the Sons of Vermont. — Sermon in St. Louis before the American Board, on "The Outlook of the Times; the Trend of the World." Pages 380-394. CHAPTER XXIX. RESIGNATION OF PASTORATE. Resignation by Dr. Post of his Pastorate. — Hammond Library bequest to the Chicago Theological Seminary, and response of Dr. Post for the Seminary. — Letters on Various Topics. — Summers at Biddeford Pool and elsewhere. Pages 395-405. CHAPTER XXX. LARGELY RETROSPECTIVE. Semi-Centennial of the Congregational Church at Jacksonville, and Sermon by Dr. Post. — Article in The Andover Review on " Transition Periods in Religious Thought." — Death of Mrs. Clara H. Young, and Letters to Mrs. M. C. Mead and Calvin Hulburd. Pages 406-419. CHAPTER XXXI. UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS. Address at unveiling of the Blair Monument, and at the funeral of Samuel T. Glover. — Articles in The Andover Review on the "Life of William Lloyd Garrison " and on " The Things which Cannot be Shaken." Pages 420-432. CHAPTER XXXII. ILLNESS AND DEATH. Signs of the coming end. — Visit to Des Moines at meeting of the American Board. — Fatal illness and death in December, 1886. Pages 433-437. CHAPTER XXXIII. FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. Pages 438-451. CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER XXXIV. TRIBUTES TO DR. POST. Expression of the Press on the death of Dr. Post, and Tributes from the United States Court and Religious and Educational Societies in St. Louis and elsewhere throughout the country. Pages 452-461. CHAPTER XXXV. DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. Some marked traits in the character of Dr. Post. — His enthusiasm in mental pursuits. — His manifold learning and freedom from pedantry. — His idealism. — His poetic genius. — His favorite authors. — His love of nature. — His "Indian summer" cast of thought. — His sense of the unseen world and of the value of human opportunity. — His mental and moral manhood. — His characteristics as a public speaker. — His pathos. — His purity and freshness of soul. — His rehgious beliefs. — The result of his lifework. — Two pictures. Pages 462-479. APPENDIX. Thesaurus of treasured thoughts and pictures taken here and there from the writings of Dr. Post. Pages 481-500. INDEX Of Names and Subjects. Pages 501-507. ^ ..^^^^.^ From Ambrotvpe Picture taken about the year iS^O. TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. CHAPTER I. GENEALOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL. Stephen Post. — Roswell Post. — Martin Post : his marriage with Sarah Hulburd, and birth of his sons Martin, Aurelian, and Truman. — His career- and early death. — The Cornwall homestead and church and graveyard. IT was hardly more than fifteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims, when Stephen Post came from England, and with a band of his countrymen settled Cambridge, Mass. He subsequently went to Saybrook, Conn., where his lineage took root, and from whence it has sent its offshoots through the country to the seventh and eighth generations. Stephen Post was a friend of Uncas in the Pequot war, he was one of the builders of the old fort at the mouth of the Connecticut, and was in his day a man of considerable distinction. His dust, with that of many of his descendants, mingles with the soil of this region, while a goodly number of his name are among its living inhabitants. In 1753 his grandson, Roswell, moved to Rutland, Vt., where a house still standing is pointed out as the "old Post mansion," and where he died and was buried. Roswell's son and namesake was a soldier in the Revolution, with Eth^n Allen at Ticonderoga and with Stark at Bennington, and probably among the " Con- tinentals" under Washington. He attained some civic distinction, having served three terms in the Vermont legislature. In 1773 he settled in Cornwall, and was one 2 TR VMAN MAR CELL US POS T. of the founders of the Congregational church there, and one of its officers till his death in 1827. Of his marriage with Martha Mead, of Killingworth, Conn., were born a number of children, and among them was Martin Post, father of the subject of this memoir. Of his hfe little remains but tradition — the brief story of one having great promise who died too early. His name is not on the records of the Cornwall Church, but he was said to be a man of earnest religious character, a regu- lar attendant on "public worship," and a daily student of the Bible and of books of high moral order. He studied law with Seth Storrs, Esq., a prominent Middlebury lawyer, and was admitted to the bar early in 1802 ; during the interval till 1804 he seems to have practiced law in Jericho, Vt. ; and while there he married Sarah Hulburd, of Orwell Village, a woman of noble type and devoted piety. Shortly after his marriage he removed to Cornwall and built a small house not far away from his father's home- stead, and there he continued the practice of law until 1808, and is said to have been the only one of his pro- fession who ever attempted to ply his vocation in that harmonious township. From monetary or other consid- erations he did not confine himself to the profession of law, but was clerk of the Vermont House of Represent- atives from 1804 to 1808, and also clerk of the Addison County Court from 1808 to 18 10. With the commence- ment of his work in the latter office he moved from Corn- wall to Middlebury, where he is said to have formed a law partnership with Horatio Seymour. From Mr. Seymour he bought a little parcel of ground in the village, and built a modest cottage, overlooking the pretty wooded valley of Otter Creek. Of this house the eye searches in vain for any trace except a patchwork of old red GENEALOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL. 3 clapboards framed into the ell of a more pretending structure of much later date. Cornwall was the birthplace of his sons, Martin Mer- cillian and Aurelian Hulburd, of whom frequent mention will be made later in these pages. It may be said here, although somewhat in anticipation, that Martin gradu- ated at Middlebury College, valedictorian in the class of 1826, and having passed through a theological course at Andover, came at the age of twenty-five to Logansport, Ind. (at that time an Indian trading post in an almost unbroken wilderness), where he remained till his death, October 11, 1876, and where he organized a church of which he continued pastor for many years and until his growing infirmities compelled him to resign. He was one of the founders of Wabash College and intimately associated with the various seminaries and churches which sprang up in the surrounding region. He was a modest, earnest, scholarly and saintly man, of rare purity of heart and life. Of his five sons, three are still living and engaged in the ministry. Two daughters also sur- vive, both of whom are married, one residing in Logans- port and one in New York. Aurelian graduated at Middlebury in 1832, and com- menced a course of theological studies at Andover, but was compelled to abandon it by failure of health. He then undertook to teach a private school at Medford, Mass., but found himself inadequate to the rigor of a northern climate and went to Mississippi, where he con- tinued his labors until, having been completely broken in health, he came north to die at the house of his brother Martin, in Logansport, in 1834. The subject of this memoir, Truman Marcellus Post, was born at his father's house in Middlebury, June 3, 18 10. The first name was given for an uncle who after- 4 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. wards migrated to Illinois and made for himself a farm home not far from Jacksonville and adjoining the village of Waverly, where he lived — and in the later days received stray visits from his namesake — down to the time of his death in 1847. Martin Post the elder seems to have had a penchant for Roman patronymics, as the name of Marcellus, like that of Aurelian, was borrowed directly from antiquity. In the year 181 1, when in his thirty-third year, Martin Post died at Middlebury. Truman was at that time only eight months old and there was something pathetic in the manner in which in after years his mind went groping through the traditions of his father's life, as if striving to lift the veil that hid it from his eyes. Toward the close of his own life, and by the merest accident, he came across a journal which had been kept by Martin Post in his twenty-first year while engaged in teaching, and, as he spent the night over its record of humble begin- nings and lofty aspirations, it seemed, as he afterward said, "like a revelation from another world." After his death the body of Martin Post was taken back to the scene of his youth and early manhood, and buried almost in sight of' the ancestral home, in the churchyard of Cornwall, beside his mother and close to the spot where his father Roswell was buried fourteen years afterward. A slab, now somewhat dimmed with time and flecked with lichen, bears the date of his birth and death, with these lines, taken perhaps from some old hymn : — Beneath this stone Death's prisoner lies. The stone shall move, the prisoner rise, When Jesus, with almighty word, Calls sleeping saints to meet their Lord. Cornwall was a region greatly beloved and hallowed by GENEALOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL. 5 Dr. Post. The house of his grandfather Roswell was a place of frequent and familiar resort, and indeed was almost a home, for his boyhood. He remembered the grandsire "as a tall, white-haired, venerable man, who seemed, with his stories of the Revolution, to have come from a former age." And there in Cornwall was the "meetinghouse" where his grandfather's family were wont to worship, where his father had worshiped in former years, and where he himself received some of his earliest and strongest religious impressions, and doubtless in large measure that love for the Congrega- tional type which became so manifest in after years. In the walls of that church Congregationalism was handed down as a household faith, and so came to have not merely the power of a conviction, but that of a family tie and a heritage of the blood. But the spot of all others that drew his thoughts and footsteps to Cornwall was the simple graveyard near to the church. The place was one which seemed to have been meant, by nature as well as man's device, for holy uses and meditation. Afar from the stir of life and on the brow of a hill, it looks across the peaceful landscape of farms away to the westward where hazy mountains are watching the scene like a spirit of repose. Here the sun comes earliest in the morning, and here he lingers when all the valley is wrapt in twilight. Down below in the meadow one may see the farmers busy in the August days harvesting the grain, just as their fathers harvested for a hundred years before ; and one thinks how in like manner on this upland the fathers of the hamlet have been har- vested in, generation after generation. In 1885, replying to an invitation to preach the centen- nial discourse commemorative of the Cornwall Church, Dr. Post writes as follows : — 6 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. "The occasion would be to me one of deep and precious interest. My heart has ever been loyal to old Vermont. The graves of my ancestors are in your churchyard, and many memories of my childhood and early youth go back to the old church and call up the living scenery wont to be presented there more than half a hundred years ago — faces and forms loved and revered and voices of music and wisdom which long since have been silent in this world. Many of the pleasant associa- tions of my boyhood wander back amid the kind, pure, cultivated, and pious homes and the beautiful scenery of your town." CHAPTER II. EARLY HOME AND LIFE. Marriage of Martin Post's widow with Captain Hand, and offspring of this union. — Larrabee's Point: its scenery and legends. — Early home and life in Shoreham, and youth in Orwell. IN 1 813 the widow of Martin Post, with her three boys, left Middlebury for the home of her father, Ebenezer Hulburd, on the old road from Orwell to Ben- son; and there, in 18 14, she married a retired shipmaster. Captain Augustus Hand, then living near Larrabee's Point in Shoreham. In this home were born Augustus F.^ and Oliver, and Sarah Jane, Hand (afterwards Mrs. Fuller), of whom more hereafter. There is doubtless a mystery in personal character which is not to be accounted for by any circumstances of time or place ; and it is equally true that the environment of early life, its habitudes and the scenes and moods of nature in which it is cast, are most potent factors in developing and molding the original germ. The scenery of Larrabee's Point is specially noteworthy in this narrative, not merely because of its rare beauty, but because it showed the same face as now to the boy that gazed on it seventy years ago ; and the impressions made on childhood then may be gathered by one who stands there to-day. Two miles or more to the south, on the east side of Lake Champlain, were the low timbered ridge and pro- jecting rocky ledge of Mount Independence. On the 1 Died June 15, i8go. 8 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. west and across the narrow channel of the lake stood the gray gables and dismantled walls of Ticonderoga, and frowning down on the fort was the rugged and pine- clad promontory of Mount Defiance ; while to the north- ward, fronting the lake and guarding the then mysterious wilderness behind, was the lesser range of the Adiron- dacks, with here and there a lordlier summit far off and solitary, looking down over its satellites or through some long mountain canon. The scene was one to fill the eye of the painter and poet and stir the blood of the sons of the Revolution. And, with its passing beauty even to a stranger, how the charm of that picture of lake and hill and forest must have deepened with added time and asso- ciation ! Its mountains would grow more familiar and beloved from year to year from their picturesque and changeless contours, and yet they wooed the eye with perpetual change of light and shadow and varying hues; flushing with dawn and gray with nightfall, always somber with their pines, but with each returning autumn flecked with the scarlet and gold of their deciduous foliage; in the Indian summer melting into purple haze, and glittering at last with the snowy mantle of the keen New England winter. Like the warp and woof in the garment of Faust's Earth Spirit were the colors woven by the hours and the seasons on that landscape at Shore- ham. And it was here in the farm home that faced the lake at Larrabee's Point that ten of the first conscious years of the subject of this narrative were spent. In an address delivered to his classmates at Middlebury fifty years after his graduation, he says : - "Among the many things for which I am grateful to the land of my birth, it wakes my special gratitude that she early taught me the love of nature in her wild moods and places, as well as in her sweet and gentle aspects ; in !,, ( ' ■(■ ■,iii g O W w ffl K K o Ik < PL, , 2 .:ii':ii:llli EARL Y HOME AND LIFE. g the lake, the forest, the storm, and the mountain, as well as the quiet brook and dreamy dell. This love, which has lured me ever, on opportunity, to seek her, away from the city, in her own solitudes, I regard as one of the richest gifts of my early nurture, one of the most precious endowments of education. It has been to me a lifelong ministry, both of pleasure and of health — a physical and spiritual life-fountain. Those grand and awful mountains, they were the joy of my childhood and youth, as they wore the charm of the unsealed and unscalable. They have been the joy of my return from distant climes, as their secret has been penetrated by the feet of the climber. They have been the joy of my dreams on far- off, illimitable plains, where clouds alone could type their grandeur to the fancy. They have breathed on the child of New England their mighty spell, as on their awful top I have slept on their cloud-rests, and felt the heartbeat of the great mother pulsating up all night through the granite." In the boyhood of Truman Post the landscape of Lake Champlain was already historic with the story of Aber- crombie and Ethan Allen, and the fall of Ticonderoga, and the cannon-crowned summits of Independence and Mount Defiance. The taking of the old fort was some- thing more than general history. It was a legend told at the Cornwall fireside and afterward repeated by the grandson to his children, with many an added story of his own childhood ; and thus the scenery of Shoreham, with the younger generation, came to be a sort of family classic, and invested with something of his own wistful and loving memories. At Larrabee's Point, when hardly five years old, he had heard the awful detonations from the black hulks of the ' British men-of-war, trophies of Plattsburg, as they floated along the lake in grim proces- I O TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. sion, terrible even in captivity. Rare sport in swimming was there in Lake Cliamplain ; and over its frozen sur- face for many a long mile the boys sped away with the wind in the winter's moonlight. On the Vermont shore, when coming home with the cows, they could hear the fitful howl of the wolf from across the water, and their pulses would cool at the sound. On this lake a ship's captain fell through the ice, and was saved by Master Truman from drowning; and the rescuer, then hardly ten years old, was taken on board by the captain and made into quite a hero. The Shoreham farmhouse was a plain clapboarded and gabled structure, a story and a half in height, substantial but unpretending, with old-fashioned small window-panes, and fireplaces deep and ample after the fashion of those days. It stood hardly a stone's throw from the water's edge, and, with its row of poplars rising like plumes above the roof, made quite a brave show to passing vessels. The household at Shoreham consisted of Captain Hand and his wife, and the five brothers and their "sister Jane." The manner of life there was very simple and largely out- of-doors. While not at school or engaged in study, the older boys were occupied most of the time in tasks about the farm, and during the seasons of planting and reaping in hard labor with the field hands ; and the spare after- noons and holidays afforded many an opportunity to switch the streams for trout, or explore the woods for nuts or game. And in this rugged out-of-door life, with its labor in the harvest, its buffet with the long winter snow, and its hardy pastimes, may be traced a physical education which put the toughness of the New England pine into the fibre of subsequent manhood. The nervous strength and activity of Truman in his early boyhood are handed down in family chronicles as EARL V HOME AND LIFE. \ I something phenomenal. His brother, Dr. Augustus Hand, writes : " He was fond of all kinds of out-of-door sports. Into them he entered with all the vigor and spirit of his character, which fact made him not only a favorite and leader, but the boast of all the boys in the neighborhood on both sides of the lake." While yet a mere lad he had already gained quite a local fame as champion wrestler in the neighborhood ; and his title to such reputation may be judged from an incident here given as an illustration : — Once while the hired men were washing sheep in East Creek near the Shoreham farmhouse, Truman was sitting on the bank and poring over a book very much after his wont. One of the men, seeing, as he thought, an easy subject in the rosy-faced and curly-headed boy, concluded to run up behind him unawares and tumble him headfore- most into the stream ; but his anticipated victim somehow got wind of the project, and as the farmhand came charg- ing at him under full headway from the rear, Truman leaned forward, and with a sudden and dexterous whirl had the fellow in an instant over his shoulders and down headforemost into the water and there ducked him till he begged for mercy. The achievements deserving mention during the boy- hood at Shoreham were by no means confined to those in the line of physical athletics. His prowess in scholarship was equally precocious and noteworthy. Martin, Aurelian, and Truman, during the very early years, attended a country school held in a little building, the shell of which is still to be seen on the hill half a mile east of Larrabee's Point ; and at that time, as Dr. Hand writes, "he manifested a great fondness for all kinds of reading, and surprised every one by the eager- ness with which he devoured volume after volume of books upon subjects which were supposed far beyond one I 2 TH UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. of his years to understand. Yet he seemed to master everything he read. Whether it was history, poetry, or science, he had the same insatiable greed for them all. Milton's Paradise Lost was among the books of my father's srriall library, and I well remember the neighbor- hood talk about his reading and rereading it and other books which few of the old folks could understand. Nothing seemed ' hard study ' for him. It was relish alone — something like fascination — that led him on in everything he did. It was at the age of nine years that he iirst ' touched figures,' and then this work was incidental. The country schoolhouse was about half a mile from his home and it was the custom of the times for the boys to take turns in starting the schoolhouse fire in the morn- ing. Truman, being a little boy, was considered too young for such a task in the cold mornings of a Ver- mont winter. But one day when it came the turn of his brother Martin, who had some ' chores ' to do before he could go, Truman was commissioned to make the fire at the schoolhouse. Accordingly, hot coals were fixed in the oldtime foot-stove, then in common use, and the boy of nine years, holding the stove by one hand and a hot ' nut-cake ' in the other, started off facing the wintry storm to make the fire. I suppose everything went right, for every morning after that the boy wanted, and was permitted, to make the early fire, his mother always put- ting the hot nut-cake in his hand. No one knew what the object was until near the end of the term, when it was discovered that during these morning hours, without assistance and unknown, he had gone through and thoroughly mastered the arithmetic used in those days. I was too young to know anything of this at that time, but I learned of it afterwards, and I well remember, and it was one of the first things I do remember of school, Z O w w m <; a K < z o o EARL Y HOME AND LIFE. 1 3 that all the big boys and girls, and sometimes the teachers, would go to the Httle boy, my brother Truman, with their hard sums in arithmetic." Any narrative made up by a stranger, and at a time so far removed as the present, must necessarily be meager; but the above sketch may give some outline of the life at Shoreham, and of it little more remains to be said. That chapter in the life of Dr. Post was one to which, in the college days and through after life, on to the very latest, his thoughts turned back with a yearning fondness which seemed to grow stronger with the years and with his removal to other lands. His attachment for the kin- dred in his Shoreham home was characteristically strong and loyal and unchanging. With Aurelian he was spe- cially intimate, and with him he skated and hunted and ranged the woods, and fished through East Creek and Lemon Fair ; and his fondness for Aurelian was intensi- fied in after years by reason of this brother's untimely death. In 1822 Martin went away to college, and the love of Truman for Augustus and Oliver and Jane took a peculiarly thoughtful and careful type, as though in the absence of brother Martin they were committed to his personal keeping. His affection for his mother was that of the tenderest devotion and the sorrow of his early sep- aration from her was one of the deepest griefs, as it was the first great grief, of his life. That event occurred in 1824 during his fifteenth year; and the step was taken by him after a long mental strug- gle and with a bitter heart pang. This event was his departure — never to return as an inmate — from the home at Larrabee's Point. Of the cause which induced him to leave, it is unneces- sary to speak in detail. For the purpose of this narrative it is sufficient to say that Captain Hand had been a sea- 14 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. faring man, the master of a ship's crew, and accustomed always to unquestioning and absolute obedience ; that his temper was imperious and subject to frequent and violent outbreaks, and his disposition and treatment were such as at last to necessitate the departure. And so, with the sad consent of his mother, and after a solemn and mournful farewell, Truman started off with a bundle containing all his worldly effects, and, having walked six miles across the country to the house of his uncle and guardian, Deacon Dorus Bascom, then living near the village of Orwell, he was kindly received by his uncle, although entirely unannounced, and became at once a member of his family. At that time the Bascom household consisted, besides the father and mother, of Semantha (afterward wife of Rev. H. H. Bates, of Glens Falls, N. Y.) and three sons, Oliver, Samuel, and Franklin. Two older daughters, Clarinda (Mrs. Samuel Howard) and Emily (Mrs. Riley Sanford), were already married and away. Of the sons of Deacon Bascom, Oliver subsequently made his home on a farm overlooking a stretch of valley lands and glimpses of Lake Champlain a mile away; and there he lived till his death, a few years since. He was a deacon, as his father had been before him, in the Orwell Church. He was a man of deeply religious character, of simple manners and life, and of most sterling integrity. Franklin Bascom secured a liberal schooling, and has since done most effi- cient work in different places, in the higher branches of education. Samuel Bascom . remained in the old home- stead, a mile to the west of Orwell village, and still carries on the ancestral farm. Oliver was about the age of Truman, and more like a brother than a cousin. Till his departure for Middlebury, Truman remained with his Orwell relatives, and shared with them in their farm- EARL Y HOME AND LIFE. 1 5, work and in their pastimes, and with them he spent most of his spare days during the college vacations. Among^ them he found a welcome in the summer visits of later life, and the old associations were thus kept fresh, and the old memories continued green unto the end. CHAPTER III. PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS. Preparation for college and matriculation. — Picturesque Middlebury. — Its noted men and college faculty in 1825. — College days and graduation. EARLY in 1825 Master Post was in Middlebury, pre- paring for college and studying Latin with Lucius Tilden, then preceptor of the Addison County Gramniar School, directly adjoining Martin Post's home of fifteen years before. Of Mr. Tilden and his teachings Dr. Post writes, a ■ month before his own death : — " He had touched my life long ago, had touched it pleasantly ; had touched it when life was all aglow with the freshness, the mystery, the ideals of morning. He was with me, my teacher, when first were opened to me the portals of Latin speech, with its, to me, new world- aspect and structure of thought, its personnel, passion, and drama of humanity. . . , He was a distinct figure and factor, if not a creator and molder, in quite a living and formative germinal period of my life, and I recollect him then, as in after years, as pleasant, kindly, genial. It seems strange to think of him as belonging to a gone world." Of the matriculation for Middlebury College, and of the first meeting with his classmate Post on that occa- sion, Daniel Roberts, the intimate friend of college days and of after life, makes mention in a memorial address at the commencement anniversary of 1887: — PREPARA TOR Y AND COLLEGE DA YS. 1 7 "The evening of that day we met upon the college green and, in our suddenly formed friendship, felicitated each other upon our happy escape from plucking, our hearts beating high with hope and great expectations. It is very fresh in my memory to-day, though this was nearly sixty-two years ago. How lovely was the night and balmy the air ! and how we walked up and down declaiming such choice specimens of oratory as we knew, and 'spouting' poetry to the moon and the stars : 'Ye stars that are the poetry of heaven,' ' Sun of the sleepless, melancholy star,' 'Now came still evening on,' etc., in all which Post was much readier and more prolific than myself ; and our happy meeting closed with an impromptu wrestling bout, in which, by, the kind aid of Hercules, or by accident, I won of him my first and only victory in any department of deserving endeavor." The class of 1829 was an unusually gifted one. It had eighteen members, among whom were Sheridan Guiteau, afterward a Presbyterian clergyman, and in his later years agent for the American Bible Society in Baltimore ; E. F. Hatfield, also a Presbyterian clergyman, whom Mr. Post met in St. Louis in 1833; Calvin Hulburd, of Brasher Falls, N. y., a first cousin of Mr. Post, afterward a prom- inent member of the Republican party and a member of Congress from that state ; and Daniel Roberts, already mentioned, Idng a leading member of the bar of Burling- ton, Vt. "Painter's Hall," the blue-gray granite build- ing of four stories on the hill to the west of the village, then pretty much out of town, was used as study and sleeping quarters by the undergraduates and tutors. And across the naked campus, below it, and toward the village was a three-story, white clapboarded building, standing on the site of the present public schoolhouse, known as the " Old College," in which were the chapel 1 8 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. and library and recitation rooms. The chapel was plain in its appointments as Puritan simplicity could desire. Its seats were uncushioned and without backs, save a single horizontal slat. On the platform was simply a wooden desk, at which President Bates would conduct morning prayers garnished with, singing, in which the students remember his fine tenor in "Scotland" and other sweet psalmody. The somewhat monkish custom then prevailed of conducting prayers by candlelight; and the fireless chapel on those winter mornings gave to the exercises a savor of penance as well as devotion. On each Sunday the students assembled in the galleries of the Congregational church and heard discourses from Rev. Thomas A. Merrill, the pastor, who had been vale- dictorian at Dartmouth in the same class with Daniel Webster, and was a man of great piety and learning. On Commencement days the whole body of students proceeded solenni more from the college to the church, headed by Dr. Bates in official gown, and by the pro- fessors, all marching to the tap of the drum and to such inspiring strains as "The Hunters' Chorus," in Der Freischiitz, from Kendall's band. The college faculty was thrown into close daily contact with the students, and some of its members left a deep and lasting impress upon the young men. President Bates is said to have been a man of portly and imposing presence, quite an admirable figure, on the platform, a fine speaker, and a delightful singer. His scholarship is attested by the fact that in 1800 he bore off the first honors at Harvard over classmates of the standing, of Judge Shaw. John Hough was professor of Latin and Greek, an excellent linguist, and a man of sharp, and trenchant intellect. And both of these men, not to mention others, were thrown into intimate personal PREPARA TOR Y AND COLLEGE DA YS. 19 relations then and afterward with the subject of this memoir. Middlebury at that time had among its people, outside of the college professors, not a few men of prominent standing in that region and throughout the state ; and their power was felt, not only by the community, but in a large degree by the college itself. Some of them were the warm family and personal friends of Master Post during the college life, and men for whom he cherished grateful recollections in all the years that followed. There was Horatio Seymour — counted by many to have been an abler man than his more famous namesake in New York — who was closely connected in friendship and business relations with Martin Post the elder ; and there was Daniel Chipman, quite noted in his time, and imperishably asso- ciated with the history of Middlebury through the hill which bears his family name ; then there was S. S. Phelps, a famous jurist and United States senator and father of the late Minister to England ; and there were Judge Swift — the friend of Truman as of his father before him — and Hon. William Slade, and Seth Storrs who was one of the earliest and foremost benefactors of the college. Relative to these social influences of his college days is the following from the Semi-Centennial Address of Dr. Post, in 1 879, already referred to : — "The college becomes the capital interest of the vil- lage, its foster child, the" object of local pride, affection, and kindly offices, nucleus and center of many of its enterprises. The consciousness of identity of interest extends itself in kindly feeling toward the students, and results in a reciprocal interest, stimulating, refining, and beneficent to both parties. " Much do we, the old alumni, certainly owe to the people 20 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. of this town, old and young, to those in literary, profes- sionalj and business pursuits as well as to those embel- lishing its general social life. There are names of such, familiar, dear, which crowd upon me now, which I may not stop to recite. Still they seem to live, waiting to greet us on our return, coming a phantom army from under the skies of morning. As in boyhood they wrought us blessings, so do they ever. They touch the life pulse, they quicken the heart throb through all the years." During the freshman year Master Post roomed with his cousin, Calvin Hulburd, in Painter's Hall, and for a time, probably, in the same dormitory with his brother Martin. For a while he lodged near the colleges in a students' boarding house, kept by Mrs. Foote, whose son Solomon (afterwards well known as presiding officer. of the United States Senate) was his roommate; and for a portion of of the college course he boarded with Professor Hough in his home on Waybridge Road. While an undergraduate Master Post was not much given to social visiting. When not in the recitation room or dormitory, he was often out on a solitary walk, or a stroll with some classmate. The love of nature bred on the shore of Lake Champlain seemed to grow with what it fed on, and in the life at Middlebury College it found charm and inspiration at every hand. The grace- ful and rounded slope of Chipman's Hill invited young men and maidens to a tryst at the summit, and one never grew too old to feel his pulse quicken at the sight of its marvelous panorama. To the north, half shut from view and in the haze, was the " Chin " of Mansfield, and not far from it, jutting up among its foot- hills, like a crouching lion among his whelps, was the top- most peak of Camel's Hump. To the east was Dunmore Mountain, long, shaggy, and somber, stretching south Congregational Meeting House Middlebury, Vermont. PREPARA TOR Y AND COLLEGE DA VS. 2 1 from Bristol Gap, and behind it rose the bald crest of Lincoln. On the south was the Rutland chain, and to the southwest was Black Mountain with the lesser hills of Lake George. In the western foreground was Snake Mountain, famous for its prospect, and away against the western sky, sometimes in the frosty air very close at hand, sometimes through the smoky atmosphere looking "far, vague, and dim," were the Adirondacks, skirting the life at Middlebury as that at Shoreham and Orwell, but as yet mysterious and unexplored, and standing across the track of sunset, very much, as one might fancy, like " the undiscovered country " beyond our earthly horizon. Near by and nestling at the base of Chipman was the little village of Middlebury, with its houses half hidden by the foliage, and the solitary clock spire whose bell sent up its vibrations through the drowsy air. The old Congregational church stood there then as now, with its white and graceful front, looking across the green and over the bridge and up the narrow street to the southward ; St. Stephen's, with its gray stone walls and square belfry, was not then built, but in the later college days stood facing it at the lower end of the park. Not to be forgotten' in any description of the village was Otter Creek, with the bridge across it, where the passer — however familiar with the scene — would be drawn as by a fascination to loiter, and watch the waters as they sped along and plunged down among the rocks, and to gaze at the dim rainbow above the waterfall, and listen to its ceaseless roar. In the Semi-Centennial Address of Dr. Post, already spoken of, special emphasis is laid on the attractions of the country about Middlebury in the college days, " chal- lenging the student to gymnastics under the open sky, 22 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. to the resolute and manly climb, and bending his noble strength against the steep, or inviting to a morning ramble amid visions as of the Delectable Mountains, or sending him forth to saunter under more than the glories of the Italian sunsets, or summoning to distant excursions up awful heights that battle with the storm clouds for their homes. All these brace and tone the physical man and put the student on his mettle, while they quicken, ennoble, and refine the spiritual being, flooding it with the ideal and blending the aesthetics and imagery of nature with the structure and furniture of academic lore." A frequent makeshift among students who were com- pelled to earn their way through college was school teach- ing in the neighboring country districts. To favor the student in this undertaking, a seven weeks' vacation was given during the winter. And the fact that Master Post gave two or three months of each year of the college course to this calling, without the ordinary student's respite from work, among strangers, at a pittance of thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen dollars a month, and still maintained himself, finished his full course, and carried off the first prizes in a class of unusual talent, bears testimony, not only to the capacity, but to the self-denial and manly pluck and tireless industry that carried him through. During the first winter vacation he was teaching, as he writes his mother (January 28, 1826), in the north part of Williston, seven miles or thereabouts from Burlington. In the winter of 1826-27 he taught in the township of Shoreham, two miles or so west of the village and two or three miles from the lake. Captain Hand and the family had then removed to Ferrisburgh ; but the thoughts and footsteps of the young student still lingered about the old home. PREPARA TOR Y AND COLLEGE DA VS. 23 December 27, 1826, he writes to his mother: — ..." My schoolhouse is situated near the graveyard in which my infant sister was buried. I frequently go there. I cannot distinguish the grave, but the circumstance that I am near it fills me with musings, which, although melan- choly, I love to indulge. " I can see the graves of many of the relatives that have been buried there whom I have never known. I lean on the tombstone and glance my eye over the places where I sported in my boyhood. Our old farm is plainly distin- guishable from the place. I can see the point of rocks where I fished, and the pastures where I, with Augustus, drove the cows. " Every day brings with it thoughts of home. I feel much anxiety respecting the welfare of my little brothers and Jane, not but that I know that they have parents to care for their well-being, but from the consideration that the whole course of their future life will be influenced, and their characters will be formed, by the principles which they now imbibe and the habits which they now acquire. I am extremely desirous of visiting home, and I think of the children at night upon my bed. But I do not think I shall be able to leave my school, and it is not probable that you will see me before next spring. Grand- father's health, when I left Cornwall, was very poor. I do not think that he will live long." In December, 1827, Mr. Post was at Shoreham, proba- bly engaged with his country school. And a letter to Mr. Roberts, read by the latter during his memorial address, already mentioned, in its poetical coloring and its musing, half-melancholy vein, shows the mental characteristics of that period and unmistakably the same stamp of thought that marked the writer in his later days : — " I am in an extreme quandary with what %o begin my 24 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. letter. If it were destined for thine own private indulgent eye alone, it would not be a matter of so much difficulty. But as undoubtedly after my decease every scrap of my writings will be collected and compiled, and given to the world as the remains of departed genius, it behooves me to avoid writing anything that may cast a shade upon my memory. ... I congratulate you on your bright visions and lofty aspirations. But oh, 't is hard to devote the warm spring of existence to the arduous and probably futile pursuit of this ignis fatuus ; to sacrifice our youth- ful pleasures and young affections to this mighty shadow, fame ; to forever chase a bauble that too often, like the fabled apples of the sea of death, molders to dry ashes in the grasp. Yet who for his life would give over the chase } Hard as the struggle is, is it not still harder to think to lie down in the darksome house, ' by the cold world forgot,' to have our memories forever quenched in the silence of the grave ; a grave unvisited by aught save the cold beams of yon pale moon that streams its fitful light through the lattice.' Man shrinks from such a prospect, and vainly mocks himself with idle hopes and fantasies. . . "Hark! the clock strikes; 'tis the knell of 1827. Another year is numbered with the past eternity. It had its virtues and its vices, its follies and its crimes, its toils and its troubles, its love and its hatred, its joys and its sorrows. Many a languid eye has been kindled into rapture ; many a bright one has been shut for aye. Many hearts have been corrupted, many have been broken, many have forever forgotten to beat. Many have sinned, few are forgiven. Many have died, few are remembered, and fewer still are regretted. Where are all these ? They are to us as things beyond the flood. They have been, and is the world the better for them .' What influence has PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS. 25 the past year had on the destinies of the human race ? What influence on our destinies ? What are we ? Where are we ? reeds driven along the tide of human time, ' Which as it glides with ceaseless flow Retains each grief, retains each crime, Its earlier years are doomed to know.' " How seldom does man start into a consciousness of the eternity of his existence ! How few, while they view the dull pageantry of time, awake from its dreams and see themselves a part of immensity, a part of an endless chain of existence ! How few reflect that, like the clouds and sunbeams which have thrown their shades and glories over the eyes of former ages, but have ' Left in yonder silent sky No vestige where they flew,' so they themselves may soon pass, and all that can be known, all that can be told, of them may be, ' Once there lived a man.'" The life of the schoolmaster in those days was not always a bed of roses. Sometimes in the rough country districts the pupils were too much for the teacher ; and in one instance, possibly at the Williston School, two of them successively had been forced to succumb to open rebellion and resign. Perhaps in view of this fact and of the peculiar adaptation of young Post as an athlete, in addition to his other qualifications, he was selected to fill the vacancy. And, having been apprised of the state of affairs, as related by Dr. Hand, "he procured a number of ' oxgoads,' and on his first entrance into the schoolroom placed them conspicuously before the scholars. But," writes the doctor, " it was not long before the rebellion presented itself in the form of an Amazonian girl who purposely made herself the subject of discipline. 26 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. I forget the entire details, save that the girl and her equally big brother suddenly found themselves piled together upon the floor, and the boy in receipt of all the vengeance which the whips could impart. When the scene closed the two insurgents had escaped through the door and with them the last vestige of the school insub- ordination." In the spring of 1828, after consultation with the presi- dent and officers of the college, he taught in the Addison County Grammar School. And in the winter of 1828-29 he had charge of the country district schoolhouse, which may still be seen on the hilltop, half a mile or so west of the Foote homestead and near the bridge which crosses the "Lemon Fair." In January, 1829, he writes his mother from this place : " Although I am in want of money badly enough, I can hardly help regretting, at times, having engaged myself in a school. I had anticipated much pleasure in vacation and hoped I might have been of service to the children." He is passing his time on thf whole very pleasantly, utilizing most of the hours out of school in study, and "trying to learn to sing." His mind is already turning toward the uncertain future beyond Commencement day. "Where I shall go when I leave college, I know not. It hardly seems possible that college life is so nearly over. It has vanished like a shadow. And so I suppose you will tell me all my days will vanish." Of the college days little more than as above outlined remains to be said. The life was one of intense applica- tion, early in the morning and late in the night, and not merely with the studies of the curriculum, but with gen- eral reading in the best standard literature. His faculty PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS. 27 in mastering the classics and mathematics was not more remarkable than his faculty of rapid reading and his power of absorbing and assimilating what he read. In the address of Mr. Roberts, above referred to, is a character sketch of his classmate, which, even down to the mention of bad penmanship and the orator's disregard for his own text, may be recognized by the friends of modern date : — " From the first to the last of his college life. Post was easily the leader of his class in all studies, and was the valedictorian at our graduation. His superiority was readily acknowledged by all his classmates, and that with- out jealousy or envy, for he bore his honors modestly, without ostentation or seeming consciousness of his superior claims ; and his class was a close-knit brother- hood of bright and generous youth, taking pride in each other. . . . " He found time in college for much reading outside the curriculum. He was attracted by the best in English literature, favoring the romantic and imaginative, espe- cially when it exhibited the art and graces of composition and style. He remembered well and was apt and ready in quotations of the choice and dainty things said or written in English speech. The later style of the preacher and essayist, in its gorgeousness, its Miltonic stateliness, its draping and rich phrasing, was native to him and was plainly marked in his college compositions. I was always his prompter at our college exhibitions, for I was almost the only one who would venture to decipher his then unreadable manuscript, nor could I always follow his tracks, for he was not himself accustomed to follow closely his own manuscript, but in the glow and ardor of the occasion words and phrases, ornamental and cumula- tive, would rush in and make themselves places to the 28 TKVMAN MARCELLUS POST. confusion of his prompter, though often to the improve- ment of the original. " He loved from a boy to visit the old historic scenes where sentiment would be fed by association, as Ticon- deroga, Mount Vernon, etc. My first visit to the ruins of ' Old Ti ' was made under his pilotage late in the winter of 1827-28, crossing Lake Champlain from Larrabee's Point on the ice. He loved nature in all her moods. " His boyhood and youth strikingly indicate the man he was. The Rev. Dr. Post was plainly the boy Truman in his development — a change in degree, but not in essential elements. He was then, as in after life, pure and tender- hearted, sympathetic, averse to strife and wrangling, but steadfast in his moral convictions ; honest and honorable ; a lover of the good, the heroic, the true, and the beautiful ; of a tropical fancy and rich poetic nature, which gushed forth spontaneously in an eloquence as graceful as it was daring in its flight." At last came round the coronal day, the Commencement day of August, 1829. An old file of The Vermont American of August 28, 1829, spreads at full length the order of exercises, as of those before the " Philomathean " and "Beneficent" societies on the day previous. The paper chronicles, before the latter association, " An oration : The Moral Sublime. By T. M. Post ; " also, an award of prizes for declamation to H. B. McClure and R. F. Lawrence of the freshman class. On Wednesday were held the exercises of the gradu- ating class, at which fifteen orations were delivered on various subjects announced in the program. At the end was " An oration : The Claims of the Age on Lit- erary Men, with Valedictory Address. By T. M. Post, of Shoreham." PREPARATORY AND COLLEGE DAYS. 29 The American remarks briefly that "the graduating class did much credit to themselves." Neither of the orations referred to in The American has been found. Mrs. H. B. Smith, then Hannah Bates, daughter of the president, writes of Mr. Post and the valedictory address : " I was present at his graduation (it was a great while ago), but I well remember his youthful, modest appear- ance, and the impression he made, not only on his class, but on the whole audience, when he repeated these lines : — There are tones that will haunt us, though lonely Our path be o'er mountain or sea; There are looks that will pass from us only ' , When memory ceases to be. There are hopes that our burden can lighten Though toilsome and steep be the way, And dreams that like moonlight can brighten With a light that is dearer than day. There are names that are cherished, though nameless For aye on the lip they may be ; There are hearts that though fettered are tameless And thoughts unexpressed but still free.'" The above verses may have been quoted, or, as Mrs. Smith conjectures, may have been original with the speaker. At the class reunion of 1879 the scene of that Com- mencement day came up again through "the haze of half a century's memories": — "To some of us gathered here to-day from distant regions, or far-off years, and probably for the last time, come utterances, to which we cannot shut our ears, from the far-fled, ever-receding, beautiful land of youth ; from the day, then so grand, grandest we had ever seen, or 30 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. perhaps were to see, when, our course finished, our diplomas proudly won, we came forth on the Commence- ment stage with the eyes of youth, beauty, and love — 'the starlight of our boyhood' — shining on us, together with the approving smile of the wise and strong, the revered and the honored, auspicating our dibut before the great world. How brave our representation ! How col- ored with the ideal the world into which we were in thought perhaps bringing the new epoch ! With fare- wells, full of love and hope, and some tears and fond promises of reunions, we parted and went out into the mystery of life. "Forgive us, friends, if we seem somewhat strange among you to-day; if on this anniversary festival we appear almost as with sphinx faces, turned, with sad, steadfast look, to the land of the Nevermore. We see there what your eyes may not see, we hear voices you have never heard. Our diplomas are perhaps half dust, discolored with the fade and mold of time. The hands that gave them are long since dust, the eyes that shone on us so kindly, quenched long ago, the faces that beamed so benignly on us their approving smile, long since were reflected in the jasper sea." CHAPTER IV. PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR. A year spent by Mr. Post at Castleton as principal of its Seminary, and tutorship of two years following in Middlebury. — Social life there. — The Henshaw household. — Visits to Norfolk, Conn., and to Homer,, N. Y., at the time of his brother Martin's wedding. — Sickness well- nigh fatal in 1 831. CASTLETON Seminary, in the picturesque village of that name and not many miles from Middlebury, recently celebrated its hundredth anniversary, and on its walls bore in evergreen characters the names of its former instructors; among them that of "T. M. Post," and,, opposite, the figures "1830." During that year he was principal of the seminary, lodging for the most of the time at the house of Zimri Howe, with whom were also at the same time a number of teachers of an academy for young ladies in Castleton. village, The letters of this period refer to these new-found acquaintances and the pleasure derived from their society : but they likewise show that the mind of the writer is much of the time back at Shoreham and among his kindred ; that he is often thinking of the old farm now tenanted by strangers ; of the family circle now broken, and of its loved members who have gone to other parts. He is thinking and caring about Augustus and Oliver and Jane, much after his former wont, as though still burdened with a special responsibility on their account. The same earnest, anxious forecast into the long future for those whom he loved, which marked his later manhood^ is discernible far back in these years. 32 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. In December, 1829, he is just back from Middlebury with rather homesick remembrances of his Alma Mater. In a letter of this date he writes, to classmate Roberts : " There were but few students at the college. It made me melancholy to traverse the deserted halls, and think that not one of the glorious class of 1829 was there. All were gone, each his own way over the earth. I at- tended church on the Sabbath : could n't help looking in our old seat for the well-known faces of our class- mates, but they were scattered. Barber and myself alone were there to represent them. " College life with all its delightful scenes of fellowship and endearment, our frequent assemblings in that place, particularly the scenes of our last Sabbath there, and the hurry, the excitement, and the ^clat of our Commence- ment, all passed over my mind like a melancholy dream. But I need not detail my musings. You know what your own would have been. But I assure you, among the scenes which fancy conjured up, not the least prominent or the least cherished were those associated with the name of ' Roberts.' Very many and pleasant hours have we passed together, and it is sad to think that they are over. But, Daniel, they shall not be forgot ; shall they .' Even in the wane of age they shall rise before the mind's eye, the greenest spots on memory's waste. Our friendship has never been interrupted from our first inter- view on the college green to the present hour, and I trust it never may be. True, the past in its fresh loveliness comes no more. But shall it not occasionally claim from us the tribute of a regret and a sigh .' " In the early spring following he is at Cornwall, enjoying a short release from the drudgery of school, among the friends in Addison County. In April he is back at Castleton. And in a letter to his PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR. 33 mother he mentions the receipt of one from President Bates, offering him a tutorship in Middlebury College. He writes : " I shall raise this year funds sufficient to carry me through the study of a profession. Moreover it will be pleasant to spend another year at home and espe- cially at Middlebury." In the fall of 1830 he took his first extended trip out into the world, passing through Shoreham and Albany, exploring New York, attending Commencement in New Haven, and visiting Norfolk on his return. In the same year came an urgent appeal from the faculty of Middlebury College, calling him to accept a position as tutor. And in response to this invitation the position in Castleton was resigned and that in Middlebury accepted, and as tutor he remained in Middlebury for the two years next following. Mr. Post, though greatly absorbed in his studies and college duties, had a relish for social life, and on his return to Middlebury was welcomed into a most delightful society. As tutor, he was brought into daily association with President Bates, and the engagement of his brother Aurelian to one of the daughters (who died years after- wards unmarried), and the pleasant circle of sisters in the household, made him a frequent visitor there. The tie which bound him to this family proved to be more than a passing college friendship. In 1833, at Marietta, Ohio, he found Hannah Bates, already spoken of, and then wife of Rev. Henry Smith, President of Lane Seminary; and he was the guest of Dr. Bates in Middlebury years afterwards. Among the Middlebury friends of Mr. Post of that day, and long remembered, were Dr. William Bass and his daughters, whose sweet voices used to be heard in the church choir, and the family of Jonathan Hagar, more 34 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. than one of whom were then quite famous for their beauty and social accomplishments. During the tutorship, Mr. Post taught a large Bible class of young ladies in the Congregational Sabbath- school ; and a very dear friend of subsequent years, then a pupil and inmate of Mrs. Cook's noted boarding school, in a recent letter gives her recollection of the young teacher. " To have a call from ' tutor ' Post, as we called him, or to meet him on a walk, was a pleasant theme for conver- sation for days afterwards. There was a fascination about him which was felt and acknowledged in the highest religious and literary circles, or in any walks, by those who were so happy as to know the magnetic, transforming power of his goodness, his refined nature, his constant aim and effort to make men happier by making them, holier." Among the acquaintances of tutor days was Philip Battell, Esq., the classmate of Martin Post, whose friend- ship ripened with subsequent years. In the fall of 1832 Mr. Post is visiting his home in Norfolk, Conn., and writes : — " I am weatherbound for the present, in this mountain town, by the dismal equinoctial ; and from the bustle and hurry of travel and visiting, my mind takes the chance to steal back to old Vermont a while and to inquire after the welfare of old friends. Not but that I am in a most pleasant haven — for never was found one more delightful, or better adapted to soothe the impatience of the delayed traveler. ... I had most sad, sad to me at least, leave-taking of some of my friends in Middlebury, but left — heart and hand free — and went with my brother Martin to Homer, N. Y., to attend his wedding." A household then well known in Middleb^ry was that of Madam Sarah Henshaw, widow of Daniel Henshaw who had come to that village in 1800 and who died' in PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR. 35 1825. The old family mansion, now burned and razed to the ground, then and for well on to a half century after- wards, stood on the rise of the hill, just back from the street whose bridge crosses Otter Creek, and within the rushing sound of its mill wheel and waterfall. The white frame cottage, with its low eaves and long sweep of pitched roof, and its front porch, peeping through vines and evergreens at the passer-by, was known as the " Hen- shaw homestead." And long after it had passed from its original ownership into the possession of strangers, to the older inhabitants it remained a familiar and picturesque reminder of the former days, and was full of departed footsteps and voices. Madam Henshaw was a lady of rare beauty. Her presence was courtly and dignified, and her character of the noblest stamp of Christian womanhood. She was noted for her kindness and hospitality to the young men of the college, and her house was a favorite place of resort to all of them who had the good fortune to know her. During his senior year Mr. Post had been a frequent and welcome visitor. But at that time and during the year of 1829-31 most of the family of Madam Henshaw were scattered. Sarah (Mrs. Charles Richards) was living in Brooklyn. Julia, the wife of Rev. Jacob J. Robertson, was then with her husband in the mission field in Greece, Catharine, who had married Rev. Alfred Baury, was in Boston. John P. K. Henshaw, for many years rector of St. Peter's Church in Baltimore and subsequently bishop of Rhode Island, was away in his ministerial labors. Charles' Henshaw was no longer at home. Eliza (Mrs. Piatt), and Margaret — afterwards wife of Rev. Chauncey Fitch, and Harriet — subsequently Mrs. H. B. McClure, were still in Middlebury. Frances was for a while at Mrs. Willard's school in Troy, N. Y. ; and most of the 36 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. time from 1829 to 1831 was visiting her sister Emeline (Mrs. Daniel Whitney) in Green Bay, Wis., at that time a remotfe Indian outpost, whose principal society consisted of the garrison of Fort Howard and the friendly savages. During part of the college course Frances had been in Middlebury, but her acquaintance with the young student had been slight, and so remained till near the end of his tutorship. The above names furnish a partial list of those whose lives were thrown into association with that here narrated during the tutor days of 1830-32. Each of these names had its own story — some of them pleasant and romantic memories ; others were closely interwoven, not only with Middlebury life, but indelibly with the long future. The intellectual tone and stimulus of the college and the culture and charms of its society must have made the Middlebury of those days a rare world indeed. And it deserves a far more extended mention than can be given it in these pages. Mr. Post, in subsequent life, if practicable, made an annual visit to his relatives in Vermont, and never did so without pressing into the service some one of his cousins and with them making the social round of his kindred. That this habit was an old one appears from a letter written in the February vacation of 1832, in which he writes from Cornwall that he has been on a "cousining foray through this region." He says : " I have ridden and visited, and visited and ridden ; looked into law a little and into novels more, and, to crown all, have delighted, reformed, and illuminated the people of Orwell and Shoreham by a recitation of old speeches." Among the events of the tutor's life, one calling for special chronicle was a sickness — indeed his first serious illness and one which proved almost fatal- — in the spring of 1831. PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR. 37 He was then rooming, perhaps boarding> at the two- story frame house, just across the street from the Con- gregational church, now occupied by Smith Beckwith, Esq. The house then belonged to Mrs. Rebecca Miller, a widow lady widely known in the community for her benevolence and more especially for her kindness to the college students, one or two of whom were almost always inmates of her household. The disorder here referred to was a violent attack of lung fever; and Mr. Post attributed his life to the un- wearied watching and nursing of Mrs. Miller and that of a niece of her husband, a maiden lady living in the same house. For two or three days he was thought to be dying ; the bells that. tolled off the night hours in the clock spire opposite were stopped from ringing ; and during the crisis of this illness daily bulletins announcing his condition were posted at the door. While he was thus lingering on the coast line of mortality the verses of Shelley, written on the bay of Naples, kept chanting and weaving their spell through his half-conscious and worn-out spirit : — But now despair itself is mild ; Even as the winds and waters are. I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away this life of care, Which I have borne and still must bear, Till Death, like sleep, might steal on me; And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. Before this sickness Mr. Post had planned a trip to th& Mediterranean ; and perhaps dreams of that far-away sea may have been a half-waking vision of the " solemn main" which borders the end of life's journey. 38 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. Of this abandoned voyage and of the " terrible impres- sion " — then fresh upon him — of his sickness, he wrote to Mr. Roberts in a letter dated November 5, 1831 : — " After having written and rewritten upon the subject of going to the Mediteranean for a year or two, and having made arrangements in some measure for that purpose, I am yet here and have the prospect of remaining here for the present ; and what is more, am in good spirits, and what is more still, in comparatively very good health. The streams of life have, I hope, resumed in a measure their wonted course. The dream of death, that terrible dream which pressed for a while like an incubus upon my mem- ory, has receded until I begin to feel again reviving inter- ests and sympathies in the passing pageants of mortality and demean myself with something like assurance of life. But that dream still glooms horribly in the distance, still comes up in shuddering retrospect. I know it must come again ; that the hour of its terrible reality must come — that my reprieve at the longest is short — that what I or you or all have to do must be done quickly. It must be terrible for any one in the flush of youth and health and hope to be cut off from the bright throng of the living, but doubly terrible for one who suffers that hour' to come upon him like a ' thief in the night.' " Would not men be wiser, be better, be happier, had- they courage to look in the face the terrors of that hour, to familiarize themselves with them, and to prepare to meet them not as trembling cowards .■" True, one feels cold about the heart to think that its deep beatings, its hopes and desires shall soon be hushed in ' cold obstruc- tion,' and that all it loves and admires shall be but fester- ing corruption. But is it the part of a brave man to quail from any terror, however grisly, which he cannot shun or avert 1 Is it not folly, yea, worse than folly, to PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR. 39 cling, to the disregard of its immortality, to a world whose glories are a lie, whose promise is a mockery, whose sweets are the aspic, but whose disappointments are the stings of scorpions ? What ' beggarly elements ' these to a glorious hope of a blessed immortality ! Yea, should we not rather than blench from death, exult to die, to live forever, to fling off the cerements of corruption and arise to newness of life, forever exempt from the thraldom of sense, the fever of passion, and the thirst of unslaked desire ? " This sickness seemed almost like Byron's " fatal remem- brance," that threw "its bleak shade alike o'er the joys and the woes " of after life. "From that hour," he says, in the "Life Story" (an address delivered in 1877 before the Congregational State Association of Missouri, and from which frequent extracts will be made in these pages), " the shadowiness of time and the sense of eternity ,were wrought into the soul forever. In those terrible hours, when — Faith and Hope not yet grown to strength and confidence — the awful cur- tain was lifted, and, through days and nights which seemed ages, I looked with the vividness of Dante's vision into the open secret of the hereafter, — a hereafter through which I had not yet learned to walk with the Son of God, — that revelation was to the new life with me like Dante's initia- tion to the walks of Paradise through infernal and pur- gatorial gloom and flame. Then was the shadow of the everlasting cast over the field of the present world, and the heart-beat of time set forever to the pulses of eternity. Of those who stood around me to see me die — most of them long since passed away — not a face now wears the light of the sun. But the revelations of those hours are fresh as yesterday. They are burned into my being forever : part of my ever-present consciousness till that 40 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. hour shall come again and that curtain is lifted never more to fall. I now recognize it as then lifted as a ^necessity in order to break the inordinate power of the present world over my youth." CHAPTER V. ANDOVER. WASHINGTON. JACKSONVILLE. Andover Seminary and theology. — Winter of 1832-33 in Washington. — Recollections of Marshall, Story, Wirt, Taney, Clay, and Webster; also, of Governor Duncan, of Jacksonville, Illinois. — Journey west in spring of 1833, through the AUeghanies down the Ohio, up to St. Louis and thence to Jacksonville. — That village in 1833.— ^ Home of Governor Duncan. — Judge Lockwood and his family. — Stephen A. Douglas. — General Hardin and his wife, afterwards Mrs. Walworth. -^ Appoint- ment to professorship in Illinois College. THE fall of 1832 opens a new epoch in this narrative. Previous to his illness, in 183 1, Mr. Post had been studying law, but this event turned his mind into another channel, and he became deeply occupied with themes of religion. He considered the question of making a public profes- sion and uniting with the church. "But," he says, in the " Life Story " already referred to, " I found myself fenced out of communions, which I thought its genuine repre- sentatives, by creeds, requiring, as conditions of mem- bership, categorical statements of belief on doctrines which seemed to me speculative, and on which I had not positive belief nor grounds for any ; and I felt it became me to be honest, if in any matter in the universe, in that of publicly and formally confessing Christ. Whether right or wrong in the ground I took, my embarrassment in this matter I feel was not without divine permission and intent. It certainly became an important element in my subsequent history, and wrought itself into all its texture, a leading and guiding thread. It was the key to most of my subsequent career. It deflected the course of 42 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. my life and shaped its directions for years ; and existed, I think, as the primal cause of my coming west." In the hope of removing these difficulties, and also, as it would seem, with some idea of studying for the minis- try, he went to Andover in the autumn of 1832 ; and he writes : " I spent some months in that delightful seclusion in the study of sacred literature — months which, brief as they were, and without accomplishing their immediate object, are remembered as among the most pleasant and profitable of life, and those most powerful in influence on future thought and culture." But he found that he could get no relief such as he had sought from his theological perplexities, and so left Andover ; and, " seemingly shut up to the profession of the law," and in order to aid his education in this direc- tion by listening to the arguments in the Supreme Court, as also to hear the debates in Congress among the famous statesmen of that day, he went at the close of 1832 to Washington and there spent the winter. His uncle, Reuben Post, afterward for many ^years pastor of the "Circular" (Congregational) Church of Charleston, S. C, was then living in Washington in charge of a Presbyterian church of that city, and was also chap- lain of the United States Senate. In the absence of their natural guardian he had rendered great kindness to the children of his brother Martin ; kindness not merely in the way of counsel but of material assistance rendered to the two older nephews. And at his home Truman doubtless passed much of his time — if, indeed, he were not an inmate there — while in Washington. During the winter, he says : " I was permitted to behold the close of the old regime of men and ideas of the age following the Revolution, and to be present amid the ANDO VER. — WASHING TON. — J A CKSONVILLE. 43 contests of the elder and younger Titans of political debate, in their struggle over constitutional questions which were to convulse the country through an era of agitation that was to close only with the arbitrament of civil arms. The simple majesty of Marshall was still upon the bench, and beside him the rich legal and classic lore of Story. The eloquence of Wirt, exuberant and prodigal of beauty; the pure diction and lucid logic of Jones, and the cold, impassive legal argument of Taney were still heard at the bar of the Supreme Court ; where also figured the second Adams, the dashing and brilliant Clay, the massive and majestic Webster, and others whose chief field of arms was in the congressional chambers above, where the subtle dialectics of Calhoun, the stal- wart force of Benton, and the eloquence of Rives, Bur- gess, McDuffie, and many others were contesting with them the prizes of oratory and partisan leadership. An- drew Jackson was in the chair of state. The times were critical and lowering with war storm, the issues vast, the passion and strife colossal and profound. It was the battle of giants over the life principles of our govern- ment and civilization. The months at Washington that placed me in immediate view of this spectacle I regard as among the most important and productive of my life. Their imprint, their lessons and prophecy ever remained with me. It has seemed to me I was led to Washington in that crisis of our national history that I might feel the pulse and pressure of the times, as I could not otherwise, and be placed en rapport with its central movement and forces." The stay of Mr. Post in Washington during this winter of 1832-33 possesses interest, aside from the experiences here related, from the fact that through an accidental meeting the question of his future home and career in life was then determined. 44 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. During this winter in Washington he met General (afterwards Governor) Joseph Duncan, of Illinois, at that time a member of Congress, and honored as the youthful hero of Fort Crogan, and was urged by him to come to the " magnificent virgin fields of the west, and especially to that grand and mysterious land of promise, Illinois ; " and it was largely in consequence of this invitation that Mr. Post made his journey west in the following spring. Of this trip the reader is furnished with an account made up somewhat indiscriminately from the " Life Story," already mentioned, and from unpublished mss. endorsed "Reminiscences Autobiographic" — of which latter it should be said here, that they were prepared in compli- ance with often expressed wishes of the writer's children, and simply for their gratification, and without any view of publication. Turning away from Richmond, Va., where inducements had been held out by Senator Rives to enter his law office, Mr. Post traveled by railroad cars drawn by mules to Hagerstown ; and then by stage over the AHeghanies to Wheeling. " When descending the western slope of the mountain," he says in the mss., "I felt as in another world. The old life, the former world, with all its hope and love and ambition and passion, had passed away. I seemed divided from it, as if by a gulf separating time from eternity. " All I had loved, hoped, pursued, and achieved seemed vanishing amid the forever past. The distance was such, and the conditions and exposures of travel were such, that I could expect to return but few times in my life, and then to find that the places which had known me knew me no more. What loves and hopes and faces, noble, sweet, beautiful, and loving were fading away forever ! ANDO VER. — WASHING TON. — J A CKSONVILLE. 45 Never, except in that dread hour which severs time from eternity, can any farewell affect me more." In the " Life Story " he says : " I descended the Ohio by steamboat from Pittsburgh, stopping briefly at Marietta, where were already laid the foundations of its promising college, under the presidency of Dr. Henry Smith, now of Lane Seminary, widely known and honored for erudition and eloquence in the lecture room and in the pulpit. Pausing a few days at Cincinnati, I formed the acquaint- ance of Salmon P. Chase, then a young lawyer, in the beginning of his career, afterwards Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court ; also, that of Dr. Lyman Beecher, whose wise treatment of my religious difficulties was of great service to me afterwards. His daughter (Mrs. Stowe), then in early girlhood, was engaged there with her sister Catherine in an educational enterprise, little dreaming then of Uncle Tom's Cabin and subse- quent literary celebrity. Others of the same family were there also, giving little sign of the eventful histories of the future. . . . " From Cincinnati, taking boat with General Harrison — then in his prime — and his son, with the wild refrain of the colored boatmen ringing along shores frowning with primeval forests or escarped with cliffs pierced with caves still haunted with fresh legends of brigands, I passed, with a week's voyage, down the Ohio and up the Missis- sippi, to my first vision of St. Louis, then a French village of some 6,000 or 7,000 inhabitants, hanging on the edge of a green bluff. It seemed to me the end of the world — the 'jum ping-off place.' I so characterized it in letters written from it on my arrival. Third Street was then a bold push westward. Fourth Street was quite out of town." "Along its course, then a footpath," he writes in the 46 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. Mss., " through the thick grass, I scared up the wild prairie-hen — when indeed they were not too Uttle famil- iar to fly at man's presence — or startled the waterfowl, amid the numerous ponds that occupied what is now the densest part of the city, in the region of Fifth and Sixth Streets. Along this path for about a mile through the green waste I walked to the mound that has given the name of ' Mound City ' to St. Louis. From its top my vision was of a new, virgin, and for the most part wild and solitary world ; no sound of steamer on the waters, save here and there a solitary puff, like the initial pulse of a new world waking to life. The skies were pure, smokeless, to the distant horizon, save where the little village below the river bluffs sent up here and there its curl of blue smoke. Between me and the Pacific lay a dark continent, where, amid the lone and mighty stretches of meadow and forest and mountain, roamed hordes of wandering savages and the wild creatures of nature." In St. Louis he found good people already at work "laying in difficulties the foundations of future insti- tutions. . . . Salmon Giddings had already taught and preached here from 1817, through some half a score of years, and, himself a Congregational minister, out of materials largely Congregational, had, according to the usage and supposed requirements of the times, founded a Presbyterian church. Dr. Potts had been here, but was absent for the time in the enterprise of the Marion College. . . . " Here I found, also, to my great joy, my college class- mate. Rev. Edwin F. Hatfield, years since made the stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, who was then starting what since has become the Second Presbyterian Church of St. Louis ; and here I spent a few days, chiefly among the members of the legal profession, a number of whom — some already emi- ANDOVER.— WASHINGTON. — JACKSONVILLE. 47- nent, and, through several decades following, leaders of the bar in St. Louis and Missouri, such as Bates, Geyer, and Gamble — I have had reason pleasantly to reckon among my lifelong friends." Having come so far, Mr. Post felt that before finally settling in St. Louis he must visit his friend. General Duncan, "and look upon the new empire arising with imperial promise and natural resources in Illinois ; " and so, arranging to return and enter the office of Hamilton Gamble, and leaving his trunk behind, he was carried by his classmate, Hatfield, to St. Charles, at that time nearly a peer of St. Louis ; and spending the night there he set out the next morning for Jacksonville, some hundred miles distant, walking across the tongue of land between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers to the ferry opposite Graf- ton, 111., walking from Grafton to Carrollton, thirty or forty miles further, by a bridle path through the wilds. " Never shall I forget," he says, in the " Life Story," " my first vision and impression of the prairie that morn- ing ; the vast, silent green waste, houseless, manless, the red man gone, the white man not yet entered ; the ocean- like expanse, now a level plain, now rippling into verdant wavelets, now with a vast sea roll of gradual rise and fall, occasionally billowing into bluffs that bordered the rivers and the water courses with long stretches and curvature of forest flecked and embroidered with the redbud and the haw ; the grassy desert, studded here and there with oases of the oak, maple, walnut, and pecan, fringed with the sassafras, the persimmon, and the sumach ; and occa- sional islets of the wild plum, cherry, and apple scattered through the sea of verdure and with their fragrance hitting the sense from afar ; amid which the plumage of the paroquet glistened and the thrush and the mocking bird burst into song — it seemed to me a fairy landscape. - 48 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. I seemed as wandering in a Magian realm, under a mighty Solitude that bent entranced over a vision of new, strange, infinite beauty. The Genius of Morning seemed on all things ; it was the morning of the day, of the land, and of my own life. It was Youth's walk amid the fields of morning. " But the day waxed on, and as I followed the bridle trail or the points of the compass, through grassy and forested wilds and up and down the acclivities and descents of the water courses, the sun grew fierce in his rays, and I grew weary and foot-sore. I remember, as I sat down beside a grassy brook and thrust my bruised and fevered feet into its waters, I suddenly seemed to come to myself ; I started to consciousness of myself and my situation, and seemed to hear a voice. ' What doest thou here .? ' Far away from home and friends and all I had known or loved on earth, in the morning of my youth, I seemed drifting, a lone waif on the great tidal stream of nations, a single lost drop in it, into the vast mysterious West — and then onward — whither .■' But a hand above was beckoning onward. Suddenly, as I sat thus self-musing, two large water snakes came swimming along by me, so carelessly and quietly that it seemed they were yet too unfamiliar with man to recognize him for a foe. I was out in the wilds of nature, almost beyond the shadow of the domin- ion and fear of my race over the animal world. " As the day waned, a thunderstorm sprang out of the torrid sky, and caught me ' far out at sea ' on the treeless waste of prairie. Its coming seemed like the march of God from Mount Paran — so fearful was the roll of his chariot-wheel over that floor of the world, and ' burning coals went forth at his feet.' But it passed, and his glory was on the bow of peace that hung on the retreating cloud ; and as the spring thrilled with fresh and grateful pulse all things, 'the whole earth was full of his praise.' ANDO VER. — WASHING TON. — yA CKSONVILLE. 49 " Refreshed, though drenched and weary, I found shel- ter in a cabin, in which, by fragmentary memorials of previous surroundings of luxury, it appeared that a Broad- way merchant had found in these lone wilds refuge from the wreck of his fortunes on the shores of the distant Atlantic. "Striking the stage road next morning at Carrollton, where a stage passed once a week from St. Louis, I rode to Jacksonville." When Mr. Post first saw that town it was hardly a decade since the axe of Isaac Roe, the first settler, had begun to ring in the woods of Diamond Grove. Of Jacksonville at that time say the mss. : " I found it a huddle of log cabins clustered around a public square, where was a rude courthouse in a rectangle of mud and dirt. The village contained about 3,000 inhabitants crowded into these cabins, where each apartment, often quite narrow, had frequently to suffice for the accom- modation of an entire separate household. This crowded condition of the settlement was due to the fact that it was an extreme outpost towards the wilderness of the northwest ; and many came here with no idea of permanent stay, but as a place for outlook for a future home still further on in the wilds. They were here as in a sort of caravansery for a temporary sojourn. " From the college, then just built, the landscape, which- ever way you looked, was for the most part a green wild, full of unique natural richness and beauty — verdant lawns sloping away to the distant forests or with grassy perspective meeting the sky on the far-off horizon, flecked here and there with oases of flowery shrubs or trees, voiced and hued with birds of strange richness of note or plumage, from the humming bird to the mocking bird. It was a scene of strange enchantment to eyes that had been 50 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. accustomed hitherto to the stern and somber scenery of New England. "A little way from the small cluster of log cabins was a waste and silent world. It seemed like a land strangely divested of its inhabitants and momently expecting their return. . . . " I entered Jacksonville on Saturday. That day was a sort of Roman Nundinal, or general weekly holiday, to the people — a day of general rendezvous at the county seat or around some central place for various miscellaneous public purposes, political, social, commercial ; for trading, horse racing, carousing, gambling, and fighting of all kinds ; and especially for public discussion and election- eering addresses. . . . " On my arrival I soon found my way to the house of General Duncan, about a mile west of town on College Hill. I recollect my kind reception there, my finding General Duncan and his wife outside under the trees in front with a long dining table spread, and a large number of hard-looking rough men and politicians gathered from the district to dine with the general, and seeing his little, delicate wife, recently imported from a refined and luxu- rious home in New York, rising and invoking the divine blessing on the repast ; an act which in such surroundings seemed to me, for its devotion to principle and conscience, to approach the moral heroic. It won my respect and admiration for her as a Christian lady forever afterwards. I recollect my first night at this house, where I occupied a bed in the vestibule of what was little more than a hastily erected shanty, and, by the position of my couch on the floor at the door, prevented all ingress or egress ouring night. I domesticated the next day temporarily with Mr. James G. Edwards (then publisher of a Jack- sonville newspaper), and in the house and with, the family ANDOVER.— WASHINGTON. — JACKSONVILLE. 5 I of Judge Samuel D. Lockwood and his noble, lovely, queenly. Christian wife. The house had been temporarily leased to Mr. Edwards, and Judge Lockwood and his family were boarding with them ; and with the inmates I formed new and delightful acquaintances which were a joy and help to me in my after years, and are among the pleasantest memories of my life. This was my first introduction to that home which afterwards was to be- come my own for fourteen years, the birthplace of all my children save one, and to me one of the sweetest and most sacred spots on earth. " I remember my pleasant introduction to the society of the town and especially the legal fraternity ; the first party I attended directly after my arrival, where I met eight ladies and forty-seven gentlemen, among whom were those destined afterwards to wide public celebrity, social or political, and some whose names have become of national historic interest. One of the guests, a little, dapper young man, brought to me a picture of the Acropolis as something rare amid our surroundings in that far land. The man afterwards known to the country as Stephen Douglas was then engaged in teaching a common school. Another, a rather crude and roughly dressed young Ken- tucky lawyer, was afterwards known as the chivalric General Hardin, who fell in victory on the field of Buena Vista. One of the ladies present was his brilliant young wife, a dashing Kentucky belle, afterwards known to the country as Mrs. Chancellor Walworth, and mother of the beautiful Nellie Hardin — afterwards Mrs. Mansfield Walworth, whose husband and son are the figures in the awful Walworth tragedy of 1873, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. " Jacksonville was then a new world, socially embryonic, genetic, in a period demiurgic, constantly engaged with 5 2 TRUMAN MARCELL US POST. primordial problems which required dealing with and handling, reexamining and testing first principles, philo- sophic and organic, social, political, institutional, educa- tional, and religious. The stimulus imparted to those thus engaged was intense and profound. Most of us, also, were in life's morning, with an indefinite kaleidoscopic future through the vague glittering scenery of a world yet in genesis and magnificent mystery and therefore highly idealized. The excitement and activity of enterprise and speculation were universal ; I felt most intently and deeply the impress of this genetic genius of a new world. It was an educational tonic and impulse worth many years at the university." During the winter at Washington and the tour through St. Louis the career contemplated, if not mapped out, by Mr. Post was, as already indicated in these pages, not that of preaching ; not, save as a temporary resource, that of teaching, but the calling of his father, that of the bar. Richmond had been looked to as a possible field, St. Louis as a probable one. And accordingly we find in the olo- graph of Judge Lockwood, who was at that time one of the judges of the supreme court of Illinois, a certificate dated June, 1833, admitting "Truman M. Post to practice law as an attorney and counselor in all the courts of law and equity in the state of Illinois." To this fact and also to the fact that he was then board- ing with Judge Lockwood, Mr. Post refers in a letter to his mother dated June i, 1833, recounting his trip west and settlement at Jacksonville. The anticipation of a lawyer's career was, however, and by what seemed then the merest chance, never realized. On March 20, 1833, as appears from the college records, "T. M. Post was, after conference with President Edward Beecher and Rev. Theron Baldwin, appointed professor of ANDO VER. — WASHING TON. — JA CKSONVILLE. 5 3 ancient languages in Illinois College." And not far from this time he was made also professor of ancient history, and in both professorships he continued till 1847. As to these appointments, and how they came to be offered and accepted, we quote from the mss. : — " I remember one day soon after my arrival in Jackson- ville a call from Rev. Edward Beech er (to whom my uncle at Washington had, I think, given me letters) and Rev. J. M. Sturtevant, who were teachers in the college just opened, and whose names the west and the whole country have since learned to honor. They inquired if I would for a little while aid them in the classical department in the new college, as they were at that time in need of a teacher, and had learned that I had been engaged in teaching at Middlebury College. The proposition struck me favorably, attractively. My sphere of life was, I felt, yet unfixed ; my determination of thought and action between educational, political, clerical, literary, and legal pursuits was as yet unsettled. 'The world was all before me where to choose,' and so I consented to the proposition made me, as a temporary arrangement, one furnishing meantime a point of lookout and a ' coigne of vantage' for a wider survey and more deliberate selection. "Some two weeks or so afterwards. Rev. Asa Turner, one of the founders and trustees of the college, who had been east in quest of a classical teacher, and in that pursuit had visited Middlebury College, had been advised by President Bates to look me up and confer with me. He had accordingly gone on to Andover, and, not finding me there, but learning that I had gone to Washington and thence had disappeared from the knowledge of my friends somewhere in the south or southwest, had aban- doned the pursuit; and on returning to Jacksonville he found me on the ground. 54 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. " Soon afterwards I was offered the chair of ancient languages in the college, and after some hesitation was induced to accept it with the understanding that it was the established plan of the college to build houses for the professors and pay a salary of ;gi,ooo per annum, though both features of the plan might wait a little for a maturer state of things before they could be fully realized. " The pulse of life beat high at this point of my history. I was all the while in a sort of wonderland in both the inner and outer world. A strange glamour of wondrous glory and beauty seemed to rest upon both. The future of myself, like that of the land around me, was glittering with ideal possibility and promise. Under such augury and ideal my new career opened, and I started on it. . . . " Life has but one such start and such vision, as it has but one youth." CHAPTER VI. EARLY DAYS IN JACKSONVILLE. Early days in Jacksonville. — Illinois College in 1833. — " Cholera year." — Northern trip and Indian Treaty in Chicago. — Dangerous illness in Jacksonville and religious experiences. IN the year 1829, under a philanthropic scheme entered into on behalf of Yale College, a number of her graduates, known afterward as the " Yale Band," came to Jacksonville and incorporated Illinois College ; and when Mr. Post became professor the history of the institution dated back but four years to its academic cradle. In this year, 1833, its faculty were Edward Beecher, Theron Baldwin, Julian M. Sturtevant, Jonathan B. Turner, Truman M. Post, and Nathaniel Coffin. Mr. Beecher was president, Mr. Coffin was treasurer, and the remainder of those named were professors. Dr. Samuel Adams, a graduate of Bowdoin and for many years an intimate and beloved associate of Mr. Post, dated his connection with the college somewhat later. The dormitory, then just completed, and burned twenty years afterwards, — a very plain brick building of four stories, and flanked by wings designed as homes for its officers, — stood on the brow of the hill at the edge of a grove and looked eastward with unobstructed prospect over its own ample grounds and across a stretch of prairie to the little settlement a mile distant. Another brick structure of lesser dimensions, hardly a stone's cast to the west, was the chapel, which still remains very much the same, to outward seeming, as it looked in 56 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. 1833. Here the old bell from its perch on the roof called the students to prayer and recitation, and here, just under the roof and within its dormer windows, was the college library. In the northern wing of the dormitory lived President Beecher with his family, and the southern wing was the home of Professor (afterward President) Sturtevant. The middle building furnished quarters for the students and some of the faculty and tutors, and in the basement was a long room used after ancient custom for college "commons." There Mr. Crocker and his wife provided a table, not only for the students, but for some of the professors and their families. In the southern room of the second story of the college Mr. Post and Professor Turner — the latter then fresh from Yale and from his home in Massachusetts — kept their bachelors' apartment from 1833 to 1835. The students, numbering a hundred or more, were gathered largely from the region around, and, like the country of that day, were a good deal " in the rough," but in many instances developed afterwards into men of prominence and wide influence for good. " The first lad I taught," say the mss., "then sixteen or seventeen years of age, who, with one other student, constituted the first class that graduated, was Richard Yates, afterwards known as the grand war governor of Illinois, a modest, bright, amiable, great-souled youth, with a lofty ideal and ambitious aspirations, which grew afterwards to a noble manhood and large, heroic statesmanship. Others also were there who have since climbed to heights of respon- sibility, power and peril in public service and the history of the country." To this day, among those old enough to remember EARL Y DA YS IN JA CKSONVILLE. 5 7 Jacksonville so far back, the year 1833 has a ghastly- preeminence as "cholera year." " Reports came up from the village to our college commons each morning of new cases and startling deaths. Sometimes whole families, as in the case of Rev. Mr. Ellis, were swept off in twenty-four hours. The distress of the town was extreme. Society was not then knit together by acquaintance and mutual kindness. The people, gathered from all quarters, had not coalescence enough for mutual helpfulness. The wild, vague terror of a disease, regarded as contagious and killing with fear- ful rapidity, kept men aloof from each other. Families were isolated in mutual quarantine, and doors and win- dows were seen by one passing along the streets, thronged with pale and fearful faces, sometimes with the sick, who had no one to minister a cup of cold water. But even there were to be found some benevolent and heroic spirits ready to brave personal danger at the call of humanity and to whom the present distress was occasion and opportunity to assert their nobility of nature. Frightful rumors, mean- time, came in from the lonely cabins in regions round about of desolate suffering and dying, of the dead un- buried, or of little children sometimes left to dig the graves and bury as they could their dead parents. Human society seemed almost disintegrated by mutual fear, and at length the college was broken up for the time and the students dispersed." Among those who devoted themselves to these missions of mercy through the country about Jacksonville were the two young professors. Having become pretty well worn out with Samaritan labors, and by reason of the hegira mentioned having an enforced vacation, they took this occasion for recreation, and on horseback and in company with tutor Erastus Colton made a tour through 58 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. T^orthern Illinois, with Chicago and its convention of Indians as objective points. The journey lay (say the mss.) "for three or four hun- dred miles for the most part through a manless wilder- ness, a vast sweep of grassy plains intersected at intervals by river or water courses lined with belts of forest and interspersed with isolated oases or islands of woodland. It was the year after the Black Hawk war, occasional traces of which we passed in our journey. But with the exception of a lone cabin here and there, nestling in these belts beside the water courses or oases crowning some ^ipland, it was one mighty solitude. " Our route took us first across the Illinois River at Naples, and I shall never forget the beauty and magnifi- cence of the river valley that burst upon our view as we stood upon the heights of the overlooking bluffs. It was one vast swale of meadow, waving with long grasses or carpeted with the gorgeous yellow of the flora of mid- summer or early autumn. " Naples was then chiefly a ferry and a steam mill, whose proprietor, Michael Collins, received us very courteously and hospitably. From Naples we went some fifty or sixty miles across what was called from allotments made to soldiers the ' Military Tract,' and after many wanderings, and after repeatedly losing our way, we at length dis- covered the small beginnings of what is now the beautiful city of Quincy, then consisting of some scattered humble tenements on the banks of the river. Here we found intelligent, estimable, and hospitable Christian people, some of whose names, such as Tilson and Turner, were already known to us, and who became friends much valued and loved in the years after. " From Quincy we rode northeast some fifteen miles or so, to what was then called the Bear Creek settlement, near EARL Y DA YS IN J A CKSONVILLE. 5 9 the present Mendon, and spent a pleasant Sabbath with Deacon Chittenden, an agreeable and intelligent Christian gentleman, who had brought his New England principles and practice with him into the wilds. His name and works abide with many estimable descendants at this time. Thence we rode to Princeton, as early as that period the liome of the Lovejoys, a new settlement near the deflec- tion of the Illinois from its western to its southern course. "From Princeton we went eastward to Ottawa, at that time, as far as I recall, consisting of a single house, a hotel (Walker's) on the south side of the Illinois, nearly opposite the mouth of the Fox. " From thence we proceeded to Chicago, passing one house in 'Holderman's Grove,' and not coming across any other as far as I can recollect, and following the latter part of the way in the trail of the Indians ; sleeping some of the nights under skies lighted by the bivouac fires ; some mornings awaking with puddles of water, formed by thunder showers during the night close by on the ground, thus laying the foundations for the fever that followed in the autumn. "We entered Chicago by the trail of the Indians through the long grass of the prairie, for the most part of the year a marsh, but then dry. " Fort Dearborn had a small garrison, and was the d6p6t of government stores of various kinds for the Indians, of whom some 7,000, embracing extensively the tribes of the northwest, had rendezvoused here for a treaty. The place presented, besides the fort and its garrison, a small number of newly erected houses, principally cabins or shanties hurriedly put together, and wigwams or lodges of the Indians of the different tribes scattered about in the neighborhood. " The germ of the town had already been laid off and 6o TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. platted on the south side of the river, and I felt so assured of its future growth to considerable importance that I purchased a large part of one side of the public square, where now the courthouse stands, for $200, with which sum, indeed, I could have bought 100 acres of land on what is now the central part of the present city of Chi- cago ; but we concluded on deliberation that the land was too marshy to pay taxes, which might be levied on it. " I entered Chicago through a lodge of Indians, and saw more of the Indian life and dress and manners while at Chicago on this visit than ever elsewhere, and more than perhaps I could have seen in the years since, aggre- gated at one spot. Many of the squaws — the wives or daughters of chiefs — were there richly dressed and orna- mented, their persons or garments loaded with brooches of silver; but on going for rations to the fort, the 'big Indian ' was manifested, riding proudly on his pony and followed by his squaw trudging along on foot, loaded with the meats and provisions doled out to them. "At the treaty, which was held on the side of the river, where afterwards the Lake House was built, a struct- ure of rough boards had been hastily erected, resembling such as are seen at circuses. There were present on the part of the Indians about 500 chiefs and braves from the tribes of the northwest, with their varieties of costume and dialect, and on the part of the government the lieu- tenant-governor of the territory of Michigan, his suite, interpreters, etc. The session continued for nearly the entire day, and was to me a most memorable scene, and one never to be repeated, and one of lasting consequence in the history and destinies of the northwest. " I had entered Chicago with what I now know to have been seeds and premonitions of malarial disease con- tracted on the Illinois prairies. The tonic breezes and EARL Y DA YS IN J A CKSONVILLE. 6 1 atmosphere of Lake Michigan alleviated or temporarily suspended these, but on returning with the same sort of exposure to sun and rain and night air, now growing autumnal, and with life entirely irregular in all its appoint- ments, the diseased tendency set in again, and before we reached Jacksonville I became so ill that I was compelled to ride with my horse at the top of his speed across the hot stretches of prairie, and then to throw myself, sick and exhausted, on the ground and await the late arrival of my companions. My sickness was what is now termed typhoid malaria. It was protracted through some six weeks — a low, insidious, obstinate type of fever. It made a pivotal epoch in my life and a lasting impress on its subsequent course. Never shall I forget the first days of it when I lay in a college room during the anniversary of its Commencement, a stranger, young, alone sometimes for hours, with none amid the tumult and excitement to think of me or minister a cup of cold water. Never shall I forget the kindness of Mrs. Edwards, wife of the editor, who came to me, saw my desolate case, and took me, a comparative stranger, to her house and like a sister nursed me for weeks. I think I came near to death, and the sickness, I believe, did much to heighten, intensify, and purify my religious experience. " The nights of ecstasy, the delight in prayer, the abstraction from this world and communion with Christ and the eternal world ; the sweet devotion and consecra- tion to a religious life ; the unworldliness of the mood I was then in, — have been unique in my mental history. I thought I never should descend from it, or be in love with this world again. But I have to record sadly that I did descend from it. I went down from this 'mount of transfiguration ' to the renewed contest with evil spirits. The decline was gradual and insidious, yet never, I think, 62 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. to the level of my old existence. The tone, purpose, and ideal of my life were in a degree permanently altered. I think it was a merciful touch of divine Providence, that, which the soul received as a new inbreath of the Holy Spirit, and for which all praise to the heavenly Father. " I recollect that during one of the nights of my sick- ness there occurred a wonderful meteoric storm which strangely excited my watchers. I remember the exclama- tions on their outlook upon the night, as though the end of the world had come. It was, I think, in October. Th& star shower was one of the most memorable recorded in. meteorological history." CHAPTER VII. CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. Organization of the Congregational church at Jacksonville. — Public pro- fession of religion, and how it was brought about. — Letter picturing college life and surroundings. — Address at teachers' convention at Cincinnati. — Death of Aurelian Post. — Blind days and poetry. ON the fifteenth day of December, 1833, not far from nine months after the arrival of Mr. Post in Jack- sonville, the Congregational church of that place .was organized in the Methodist house of worship, on East Morgan Street. On the roll of its first membership were the names of Timothy Chamberlain, Dr. M. L. Reed, Elihu Walcott, Jeremiah Graves, Edwin Mears, Asa Talcott, Salem Town, " Benjamin Allyn, Jesse B. Clark, and a number of others, with members of their households, in all thirty-two persons, — some of which families, well-known at the: time, have disappeared, and faded from the memory of the community. This church was the first of its order further from New England than Western Reserve, unless we except that in Mendon, and one in Rock Island, which were founded about this period, but which for some time were without any mutual relations, and indeed were scarcely heard of beyond their immediate vicinities. Of the Jacksonville church, then under the pastoral care of Rev. William Carter, Mr. Post became a member on the seventh of June, 1834. On this topic he writes (mss.) : " The currents of my religious life having changed, I agitated anew the question,. 63 64 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. never at rest, of uniting with the church by a public profession of my faith ; but I found the theological diflfi- culties which barred my entrance into an orthodox church in the east, and which had sent me from Andover to Washington, and from Washington to the west, were not removed by my new religious experience. But the wish to overcome them and put them out of the way of my making a public profession of Christianity had grown stronger. They were chiefly speculative and created by creeds requiring the affirmation of beliefs on points whereon I had not formed, and seemed unable to form, — had not the data or the faculty to form, — positive opinions ; and ■they were subjects my opinion in regard to which did not affect my Christian life in the inner or outer world. "At length in conversatipn with the Rev. William Carter, a man of earnest piety and Christian good sense, and who was then urging the duty and fitness of a public confession of Christ, he asked if I could not. answer, to the inquiry as to my assent to the creed in a public pro- fession, that I believed I substantially accepted it. I felt I could surely give that form of assent, as I subsequently did give it, and so made my confession and was admitted to the church in a little chamber in the second story of a printer's office, then used as a place of meeting for a small and feeble band that had united themselves together as a Congregational church. "During these days I became acquainted with the Rev. Gideon Blackburn, and was much moved, and I think in some directions helped, by his sometimes crude but majes- tic pulpit eloquence. I was helped still more by the Chris- tian sweetness and simplicity of Mrs. Judge Lockwood." In June, 1834, Mr. Post had just returned from a trip to Quincy and to Marion College in Missouri, and found him- self well pleased on the whole with his surroundings and CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. 65 manner of life. He evidently had no idea of changing the latter. He writes — (letter to his mother, June 8) : — " I have seen another of my birthdays pass by, and am now twenty-four years old. ... I was appointed, some time last winter or early in the spring, professor of languages in the college, and have accepted. " My situation is pleasant, very pleasant, as much so as I ought to wish. I am associated with some of the best men, intellectually and morally, that I have ever seen, in a spot that in beauty and fertility is the garden of the whole west, and in the midst of a community that will soon be immensel}'^ rich and strong. " The station I am in is one of high and numerous responsibilities, and it requires strong energy and effort and high endowments to meet them as they should be met. I sometimes almost shrink back as I contemplate them. "... The college is situated on a height that over- looks the vast meadow before us, in one point of which you can discover nothing but prairie and sky. Imme- diately back of the college is a grove that forms our playground and walks and retreats in the hot weather. It is a beautiful grove, the richest in fruit and flowers that I have ever seen. . . . " About the college hill are several pleasant dwellings : one belonging to the chief justice of the court (a very pleasant man) and family ; another to a member of Con- gress (who will probably be our next governor). "You must remember that this place is in its very infancy. The college is hardly four years old. But we now have two buildings of brick, one of them larger than New College in Middlebury. "I live in a room by myself, a very pleasant one, from 66 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. which I can look down upon the green prairies and farm- houses and groves for many miles in extent. " I am a bachelor yet and probably shall remain so for the present. I board with the college faculty and their families in the college commons." In the fall of 1834 Mr. Post attended a teachers' con- vention in Cincinnati, returning by way of Logansport. Of this trip and a melancholy incident connected with it, an account is given in the mss. : — " I went from Jacksonville to Cincinnati through a country for the most part a wilderness. My journey was induced by a call of the teachers of the Mississippi Valley to meet there in an educational convention, and also by the hope of meeting my brother Aurelian at Logansport, Ind., in a visit I wished to make him after the session of the convention. I had left him at Andover, but he had been driven from there, by what proved the incipient stages of consumption, to seek restorative in- fluences at the west. He had taught a part of the year in the southern states, and was now on a visit for refuge from sickness and in hope of recovery at my brother Martin's home in Logansport. I had anticipated much pleasure from this visit. I set out with a horse and buggy for the teachers' convention at Cincinnati, having an address prepared on ' The Study of the Greek and Latin Classics as a Part of a Liberal Education ' ; anticipating there to meet Grimk6, of South Carolina, who was known through the country as an able and eloquent antagonist of them. I went by way of Springfield, Paris, Terre Haute, and the National Road, except where its terrible condition compelled me to take byways through the Indiana forests to Indianapolis, and thence by way of Lawrence to Cincinnati. Though a stranger and young, I was somehow — I cannot now recall the circumstances CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. 67 — put forward to deliver my address, my first appearance before any extensive public gathering assembled from a large section of the country. I had every reason to sup- pose my address was very favorably received. It was commented on and criticized quite extensively in public prints, and afterwards published in a volume with other addresses before the convention. After it was delivered, an elderly gentleman, Dr. Daniel Drake, came up from the audience to the pulpit, and grasping my hand very warmly, with high compliments on my address, asked me to his house — an invitation I was obliged to decline on account of news from my brother Aurelian at Logansport which seemed to render it needful that I should hasten there if I wanted to find him alive. At that convention. I remember meeting, besides Dr. Drake above referred to (quite a grand man and widely known). Professor McGuffey, a man also of much ability and extensive repu- tation • (afterwards the author of a series of schoolbooks). Both of these men were subsequently my lifelong friends. I also met, and was most favorably impressed with, Edwin Mansfield, then a young man, well-known afterwards in politics and literature. " I left the evening after my address, hastening on to Logansport by way of Indianapolis, and the Indiana forests and my adventures with the wind and storm and nights amid the wilderness were — or would be now — quite memorable. " I reached Logansport only to find my brother Aurelian had been already a week in his grave. Of my grief and disappointment at not seeing once again the brother and companion of my childhood and youth, I cannot speak. He had talked of another trip to the south, till a day or two before his death. He and his elder brother, compan- ions of my boyhood, all that was mortal of them, now 68 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. sleep side by side on the crown of a high bluff overhang- ing the Wabash — to the resurrection morning. " I found also at Logansport my half brother Augustus (now Dr. A. F. Hand, of Morris, III), who had left his father and home in Ferrisburg, Vt., and had come on through almost incredible hardships, traveling on foot, carrying his trunk on his back or working his way by canoe through the marsh and forest from Lake Erie along the Maumee River and down the Wabash to Logansport. " After a visit of a few days I returned by the way of Lafayette, Danville, and Springfield (a journey then through an almost unbroken wilderness) to Jacksonville, bringing Augustus with me." Of his brother Aurelian and his death Mr. Post wrote some lines of poetry, which were enclosed to his mother in a letter written November, 1834. They were not intended for any other eye and the fact that they were written was unknown to his own family till after his death. On his return to Jacksonville Mr. Post contracted a malady of the eyes, of which he writes (mss.) : " It was to me a fearful, persistent, and for two years a seemingly incurable plague. It blinded me to such an ejctent that I could not read anything or pursue my classic studies, except by the help of other eyes. It shut me up to memorizing and analyzing my previously acquired knowl- edge ; to committing to memory poetry : for example, whole books of Milton and other authors. It was of great use to me in teaching me to interpret, analyze, classify, and develop to their cause, origin, or consequence all acquired knowledge, and to brood facts or principles or scenery to their full significance and contents. In this affliction I began writing poetry, meditating at one time a large work. Those years were among the most profitable of my life." CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. 69 Probably the poetry referred to was an epic, or part of one, in pentameter blank verse, entitled, "The Macro- cosm," begun during the first two years in Jacksonville, and containing not far from twenty-five hundred lines. It was never given to the public and indeed never brought to a close. Why it was unfinished is a matter of conjecture. It was probably crowded out, from year to year, by more pressing demands, and the " convenient season " never came. Work upon it was intermitted and resumed, for a time after Mr. Post's marriage ; and Newton Batemen, then an inmate of the household, remembers hearing him, from an adjoining chamber, in the late hours of the night, as, unable to read or write, he paced the floor and thought aloud and dictated to his wife, whose facile pen was then, as through subsequent years, of invaluable service. The poem, rewritten in parts and half copied, was at last laid away in his secretary and served simply as the reminder of an unrealized dream. Paradise Lost, the first two or three books of which he had known by heart from boyhood in Shoreham, and other parts of which, as appears from the mss. just quoted, were committed to memory in these blind days seems to have shot its color through his imagination when this poem was written. And some such influence may have been felt, unconsciously to the writer, in a less degree, from a favorite poem, Byron's " Dream." As the author never saw fit to give the manuscript to the public, and no correct estimate of the merit' of the poem can be gleaned from disconnected extracts, the two or three fragments here quoted must not be read in the light of criticism, but merely as samples showing the beginnings and possibilities in poetic numbers of a young man of twenty-four, whose mind, though rich and abounding in poetic thoughts of the noblest order, was 70 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. afterward too earnestly engaged in pressing needs of the hour for the stately measures of blank verse. In this poem, seen as in ... "a mirror vast, Deep, pure, and spanless as the azure sky," appears, first of all and, far back of created things, eter- nity, inhabited by The Invisible alone. No star, Nor cloud, nor angel's wing, gleamed through the lone And radiant infinite. Time was unborn. Space was the investiture of God. There was No height, no depth, no past, no future. All Was Deity. He was the Universe. ... Then appears the serene primeval world of angel and seraph, Creation's elder born, the winged sons Of strength and splendor. Hues undying bathed Their glorious plumes ; their vision ne'er grew dim ; Their pinions never drooped. Decay ne'er touched The immortal youth that sat upon their brow Serene and golden wing. Nor grief, nor care. Nor weariness, nor evil thought, did cloud Their beings' sinless flow. 'Neath blander heavens. And more refulgent light, mid sweeter bowers Of bloom, and hills of softer green, and streams Of lovelier azure — scenes more brilliant far Than ancient poesy e'er dreamed or sung Of blest Hesperides in soft repose On the bright bosom of the western wave — Amid such worlds, and skies imparadised. They lived, they loved, they wandered, they adored. In quest of knowledge new, or of new themes For admiration, wonder, and delight. They skirted now around the farthest orb That glittered in the crystal depths, and now Returned, with plume unruffled by fatigue. CHURCH AND COLLEGE IN JACKSONVILLE. 7 1 In choir seraphic, and with lyre inbreathed With music's soul, they formed a starry crown Around the Lord of Light. Thus circled on The golden ages numberless, and swift, On silken pinions borne, the happy years Passed unrecorded by. . . . Then the vision changes and shows the drama of war- ring angels and faUing demons and chaos following. Next appears the birth of creation and of Eden and of the first parents : — As dream of youth, or as that sweeter dream That breaks upon the faded eye of age, When on the dark extreme of mortal years Quick Fancy spreads his iris wings in flight And rainbowing o'er the waste of months and years Wakes childhood from its flowery grave, or Faith, With sun-eyed glance undazzled, wanders far Mid worlds of souls beyond the touch of sin ; And fadeless beauty, visions of the blest Eternity, with angel faces, shine Beyond the stream of death. . . . Then follows a description of the world before the flood, and a picture of the flood, closing the poem as transcribed and revised, — after which the mss. are in the rough original, interlined, uncorrected, and somewhat frag- mentary. The vision changed ; and lo ! before me pass'd In hurrying eddies, wasting earth and sky. One universal storm of flood and fire ; And piled clouds, and drifts of solid gloom, And march of mighty winds, and tempest pomp. And whirlwinds with the hot blue lightnings wreath'd Swept darkly on ; and o'er them all there blaz'd Vengeance, pale angel, and the sword of God. . . . 72 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. . . . The vision changed. The broad, bright sun was flaming up a slcy Of spotless blue, save one far cloud, whereon God's bow did hang. Below spread out a lone Illimitable deep, without or isle Or shore. AH but the winds and waves were dead ; All save one motelike home of life, the ark, That floated moving on, a living thing Reposing on the mighty breast of death. CHAPTER VIII. MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. Trip to the east in 1835, ^^^ marriage. — Wedding journey to Jacksonville. — Winter of 1835-36 at college. — Purchase of the Lockwood place. — Strange night's adventure. — The new home: its inmates and surround- ings. — Newton Bateman. — Augustus Hand. — H. B. McClure and wife come west. — Visit of Madam Henshaw. — Story of a boar hunt. IN the spring of 1835 the trouble with his eyes, which seems to have baffled the skill of the Jacksonville doctors, impelled Mr. Post to seek a remedy elsewhere. He writes in the mss. : " I set out for the east ; visited St. Louis ; called to see Judge Peck, of the United States court, conspicuous in the judicial history of the time, who had become nearly blind from disease of the eyes, and consulted him in regard to the treatment he had adopted and the result. I learned nothing satisfactory. I only wondered he had any eyes left. " I proceeded by boat to Cincinnati and thence to Marietta, where I stopped ; had a brief battle with sick- ness ; visited the traces of an ancient Indian city or camp in the vicinity; met Mr. Edward Beecher and family at Pittsburgh ; parted company with them there on board a canal boat, .and took a stage for Philadelphia over the mountains ; went from Philadelphia to New York, was there taken to the home of Mr. Marcus Wilbur, and for some time was cared for and nursed by his wife, a most lovely Christian lady and- friend, whom I shall ever remem- ber with gratitude and pleasure. "While in New York I was under the treatment of Dr. John Kearney Rogers for several weeks, but received 74 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. little decided advantage, and thought it best to visit Dr. Reynolds, of Boston, whose reputation at the time was highest among American oculists. " I visited Berlin, Conn., and Northampton, Mass. ; made the acquaintance of Dr. Todd, my experience with whom was singular, but which resulted at last in a perma- nent friendship. I visited Amherst College, took tea with Dr. Humphreys and the faculty, proceeded to Boston by way of Worcester, stayed briefly in Boston, having received for treatment of my eyes directions which, with other influences, I think resulted in their cure during the year afterwards. "I then traveled from Boston to Boscawen, where I became acquainted with the family of Mr. Ezekiel Web- ster, and attended the Commencement of Dartmouth College. From that place I journeyed to Ferrisburgh, Vt., and there visited my mother, who treated and nursed my sore eyes for a number of weeks, and thence I con- tinued on to Middlebury." October sth of this year was an eventful day in these annals ; inasmuch as it witnessed the double wedding of Madam Henshaw's two youngest daughters, namely, that of Harriet with Henry B. McClure, and that of Frances with the subject of this memoir. The event was at the time a notable one in Middlebury society, though no one of those who took part in the pageant and scarcely one of those who witnessed it now survive. Mrs. Seymour, — then Miss Hagar, — a schoolmate and companion of Frances Henshaw, still recalls a number of incidents and details which will aid in supplying a picture of the wedding scene. Two couples as handsome she had rarely, if ever, seen in Middlebury. She remembers what a striking contrast in types of loveliness was presented by the sisters — Harriet being a pronounced blonde, while St. Stephen's Church, Middlebury, Vt. MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 75 Frances was a brunette. Nor did Mrs. Seymour forget the fact that both wore white satin gowns and a single white flower. Her statement may now seem strange that the face of Mr. Post at that period had a good deal of color and that his hair was nearly black and curling closely about his head. The little church of St. Stephen, where the ceremony took place and where the Henshaw household had wor- shiped since its erection, seven years before, was crowded with friends from Middlebury and elsewhere, and was decked with flowers and evergreens. The Rev. Mr. Crane, rector of the church, officiated, and Madam Hen- shaw, with her son, the Rev. Mr. — afterwards Bishop — Henshaw, stood at the chancel and received the bridal party. The wedding began in a rain storm which broke into sunshine at the close of the service. In the evening there was a reception at the house of Madam Henshaw. •"A day or two after the wedding" (mss.) " I took my wife and drove in a buggy to Ferrisburgh and made a few days' visit with my mother (the last mortal touch of that sweet noble life). Then we returned to Middlebury, and I remember the farewell to my dear, queenly mother-in-law at the Henshaw home ; then our stage ride through Cas- tleton to Troy and Albany and our sail down the Hudson by steamboat, and a visit in Brooklyn, at the hospitable home of Mrs. Richards, the noble, gifted elder sister of my wife. Her daughter Sarah (afterward Mrs. Kirkwood) and another young lady, who were bridesmaids, had been our companions of travel from Middlebury. " From Brooklyn, after a brief and pleasant visit, we took steamer up the Hudson to Troy, spent a day or so with Madam Willard and her children, then traveled by Erie Canal (at that time equal to a royal progress) to Geneva, N. Y. ; thence by stage to Lewistown, then by 76 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. buggy, myself being driver, up the Niagara River to the falls and to Buffalo ; a memorable and never-to-be-forgotten ride, both because of the scenery and the time in our lives, — the climacteric of youth and marriage, — which we took by ourselves in a road then solitary ; an all-day ride in a bright autumn sunshine, through natural scenery in some regards the most wondrous in the world. And we were alone with nature and with each other, moving on toward the great mystery of life, the mystery of a ritw life in a new world in the mysterious West. " From Buffalo we took steamer for Ashtabula, and from that point crossed by stage witlj slow progress — traveling by day and lying by at night — to Wellsville, on the Ohio, and to Cincinnati; thence, after a brief visit, by steamer down the Ohio, which was a trip so slow that we were on ■ it nearly a week, — a travel intolerably tedious except that we were together, deepening our acquaintance with each other, relating stories of our past lives ; my wife reading to me often, as my eyes were not restored, to strength. Then turning up the Mississippi we reached St. Louis in about a week from Cincinnati. There, as I remember, we made a visit with Mrs. Samuel Perry and also one with Dr. Beaumont's family. After this stay in St. Louis we took stage through mud and dreary weather to Carlinville, — then a most forbidding place, — and thence, again by stage, on to Jacksonville, which, with the rain and mud and dark, dreary days of November, wore its worst aspect." To Mr. Roberts he wrote from Illinois College, Feb- ruary 23, 1836: — " We had a pleasant return journey, though a long one, of five weeks. ... It was not till I got amid the mighty solitudes of our rivers and forests and our magnificent prairies that I could make it seem real that I had been MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. J 'J once more to gaze on the mountains of my childhood and the faces of other years, or realize that all the tides of emotion, intense interests, and changeful incident that had crossed my stream of being and marked it to eternity, were anything more than the rapidly shifting scenes and forms and personnel of a fairy and tragic dream of a night in midsummer. But a loving presence by my side, and tones known 'neath far other skies told me that it 'was not all a dream.' " Mr. and Mrs. Post reached the college November 12, 1835, and there they found among the faculty society President Beecher and his wife and her mother and unmarried sister, and Professor — afterwards President — - Sturtevant and wife and her sister. Miss Fairweather. After boarding a short time in the "commons" the newly-married pair spent the remainder of the winter (1835-36) in the north wing with the family of Mr. Beecher. " My wife " (mss.) " first assisted me in preparing for my recitations by reading to me in English and Latin, and subsequently, having learned the Greek alphabet, in Greek, although she could not translate either. Then she took my malady of the eyes from me, and for months neither of us was able to read. We were shut up and could only talk or listen to the reading of others. Yet the cheerfulness of my dear wife never forsook her. She was ever to me a spirit of sweetness and a spirit of light, and the blind days were neither profitless nor unhappy, but in many ways touched beneficently our lives." "This winter," writes Mrs. Post from St. Louis, in the spring following, "was one of blind happiness." Among the friends made during this period and referred to in the mss. were Dr. John Blatchford and his wife. Dr. Blackburn, already mentioned, Theron Baldwin (who soon 78 TRUMAN M'ARCELLUS POST. afterward, with Captain Godfrey, established Monticello Seminary), and Winthrop Oilman. The year 1836 possesses intense interest for the de- scendants of Mr. Post from the fact that his . home life was begun here ; life in a home of surpassing loveliness, where all but one of his children were born, and where the family life continued uninterrupted through all the days in Jacksonville. The selection by Mr. Post of his homestead came about in this way : — It will be remembered that the program of the college corporation when he became one of its professors was to furnish them with residences. And the project ulti- mately failed, simply for want of means. There may be some connection between such a scheme and a resolution appearing in the college records, adopted March 11, 1836, appointing a committee " to provide temporary accommo- dations for Professors Post and Turner, with power to purchase the houSe now offered for sale by Hon. S. D. Lockwood." The house had been recently built by Judge Lockwood, and about it was a tract -ol seven acres. It was only a quarter of a mile from the chapel, and a sweet, solitary footpath through the intervening belt of woodland led from one to the other. Mr. Post's sojourn had charmed him with the spot, and Judge Lockwood was his personal friend. So he concluded to make the purchase, and, with his young wife, went into possession in the spring of 1836, although the title to the property does not seem to have passed till 1839. In that year the place was bought by him for ;^3,6oo, and two mortgages were given for the purchase money, one for a part of it to Judge Lockwood and another for the remainder to the college. Both of these mortgages were paid off in 1846. The site where this house was built is said to have MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 79 been chosen by Judge Lockwood as the highest point in Morgan County. Certainly it commanded a brave out- look to the north and to the west, while to the south and east it was screened by a venerable grove of forest trees. The hill on which it stood swept gracefully down to the road a few hundred yards in front, and the house, while in view to passers-by, was partially hidden by the foliage of oak and elm trees and by elder and snowball bushes,, and was far away from any dust and noise of the turnpike. The woods between the house and the college, though small in extent, were thickly grown and ancient enough for the dryads ; and their lofty branches still afforded occasional shelter to those denizens of wild nature that linger about the dwelling of the pioneer. The house itself was of brick, painted a " cream color," of two stories in height and with gable ends. It had a central hall and stairway and parlor and sitting-room on the lower floor, and chambers overhead, and to the south was a wooden ell, containing pantry, storeroom, kitchen, and bedroom. Among the delights of the place, and by no means the least of them, it possessed a well of immense depth, with water cold and clear and never failing in the driest days. At the southern end of the grounds was an elm of colossal size whose branches, spreading like a parachute, could be seen for miles away above the sur- rounding timber. The place was a strangely sequestered one. Near neighbors there were none. The visitors were chiefly the robin and the thrush, and the wrens which annually came and built their nests in the closed window blinds ; and no ruder sounds were heard there than the chatter of the jay and the cooing of the stockdove, and now and then the screech of the owl in the dead of the night, and the daily call of the chapel bell or the faint sound from that of the church a mile and a half away. 8o TR OMAN MAR CELL US POS T. July, 1 836, brought the first cradle into this household. In that month was chronicled the arrival of a daughter, the firstborn among six children. And in this connection an incident may be given as illustrating the loneliness of the house in its then surroundings and the dangers to which the inmates were sometimes exposed. In those days, what with the absence of Mr. Post at faculty meetings, and the difficulty in securing servants, and the solitary situation of the place, the evenings were often passed by Mrs. Post without a soul in the house except the little baby. It was on such an evening that an occurrence took place, which is described by Mr. Post as follows : — " The evening was wild, the wind blowing violently, the sky moonless, and the air thick with down-rushing snow. Amounting almost to sleet it pattered against the window, which occasionally shook and rattled as in anger or suffer- ing under the fierce paroxysmal blows of the tempest. My house was about one fourth of a mile distant from the college, separated from it by a bit of thicket and forest through which ran a footpath. On the south no house for miles. On the west an old, sort of tumble-down house, formerly occupied by 'Judge Simms,' but rented for the season to a man named Goram, a violent and bad man, but with a wife who was a pleasant Christian woman, a member of my church. My wife and myself and little Frances in the cradle were alone in the house, when sud- denly there was a hurried knocking on the door and then the presentation at the window of a woman's face pale with terror, head bonnetless, with hair disheveled in wild disorder. I sprang to the door and opened it, and the next instant Mrs. Goram was in the room with the ex- clamation : ' O Mr. Post ! two men are murdering my husband ; they are holding him over the fire and threat- ening to throw him into it and roast him alive.' MARRIA GE AND NE W HOME. 8 1 " I immediately put on my boots, took out my gun, and hastened through the thick darkness and blinding snow down to the highway on the north in order to go to the Gorams', the course across lots, over fences, and through forest, being almost impassable in the darkness. As I reached the road I heard the footsteps of a horse ap- proaching. I called aloud to the rider. He answered to my halloo. I told him there was an alarm of murder in the house near by ; that there were two of the murderers and I was alone. He was a cattle driver, a rough order of men at that day, but he immediately turned his horse and went with me to the scene of the alarm. As we approached the house the noise of violent moving and loud objurgation came on our ears. The lower part of the house was strongly lighted up ; we stood for no knock- ing but immediately burst into the room. There stood three men before a large blazing fire, their backs turned toward us. The room was in great disorder as was the dress of the men, and stains of blood were about on the floor. The aspect of the men themselves, with torn and disorderly garments and faces aflame with passion, was wild and, with the shade and the blazing fire, quite of the Rembrandt order. As we entered they turned, each attempting to vociferate his story, so drowning each other that I could understand nothing. " It afterward appeared that the two men with Mr. Goram were Englishmen, father and son, on their way further west. They had with them a team of four horses and a wagon. Overtaken by the cold weather on their route they had taken board for their horses and them- selves at Goram's for the winter, expecting with the first grass of spring to proceed on their journey. Troubles and jealousies and quarrels about various things had arisen, and that night Goram had drawn a knife and axe against 82 XS UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. them. They had disarmed him, but on a second attempt had become exasperated and torn his hand in taking away his weapons and then held him up before the fire declar- ing they would roast him. At that juncture Mrs. Coram had fled through the storm to my house for help. As I came in and all began to tell their story at once, I checked them and told them I could hear but one at a time. As they paused and one of the Englishmen began to talk, suddenly, quick and lithe as a wildcat. Coram sprang for his rifle, suspended from the low ceiling just above their heads. In a moment one of them would have been dead, but we all sprang at and on him and again disarmed him, I presume with no great care for tenderness in the act. Then the younger Englishman began to tell his story, when suddenly I heard the tramp of a multitude, as though a hundred men were beating the earth with clubs. The next minute my strong, Ajax-like, half-brother Augustus, burst into the room, carrying the door with him as he came, and the room was full of men. They were students of the college that, led by Augustus, had rushed through the dark and storm and mud and splash, and through thicket, brier, and brake to the scene of alarm and to my supposed rescue. " The manner of their coming was this : After I had suddenly left the house for the scene of the reported murder, leaving my wife alone with little Frances in the cradle, it flashed upon her that I had gone, a single man, to a scene of murder by two men in a solitary place who might avenge my interference and complete and cover one crime by perpetration of another. She must run to the college through storm and night and, leaving the baby alone, rally somebody to my assistance. Accord- ingly she started and got through thicket and forest and darkness, I know not how, and, approaching the college. MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 83 discovered a light in the chapel. It was evidently full of people, but she could not hesitate ; she dashed into the room where the students were in general assembly for a public debate. She could not speak, but her pale face and her disordered array spoke for her. Augustus rushed to her in alarm. She could only say, ' Your brother — murder — Judge Simms'.' Nor did he wait to hear more, but, he leading, the students scampered pellmell through the storm and mud, and thicket and forest, and over fences till, reaching the house, they made their appearance as I have described. " After they came in, something of order was estab- lished. The men were called to tell their story, which they did in succession. But I soon saw there was no way of reconcilement or peace or safety if they were left together ; and to save bloodshed and possible homicide, I directed the Englishmen to harness their team and come to my house. I would give shelter to them and their animals. They did so, and I housed and sheltered them for several days. " After my wife had delivered her message on the night of the alarm, exhausted, breathless, and spent, she would have rested but that the vision of the little babe in the house all alone, urged her haste almost as much as the vision of her husband set upon and murdered. It was not a great while before they got through the woods, and found the little child sleeping quietly and sweetly as though there was neither harm nor crime in the world. But it took a long time for my wife's nervous system to recover from the shock." It must not be supposed that life in the new home was passed in the wilderness, or entirely away from society. There was a personal magnetism and sympathy on the part of Mr. Post, and a mental stimulus in his teaching, 84 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. that drew the students, strongly towards him, and a number of them were much about his place, rendering service in different ways, and in turn receiving aid in their studies. Among them were Newton Bateman, mentioned in a pre- vious chapter, afterward state superintendent of public instruction in Illinois, and now president of Knox College at Galesburg in that s,tate, and always the devoted friend of his old professor. Augustus Hand for a time lodged in the college, but early became an inmate of the family, and was of great assistance in various matters, besides adding quite mate- rially to the life of the household by his presence and kindly and eccentric ways. After the double wedding, Mr. McClure and wife had spent some time among the relatives of the former, in Brockport, N. Y., and in August, 1836, Mrs. Post, who is longing to have her sister in Jacksonville, writes a most earnest invitation to them to come west ; " Come," she says, "to our home and our hearts." But no definite tidings could be got till Thanksgiving day, when, just as Mr. and Mrs. Post were sitting down to the table to discuss a dinner of wild turkey, the missing ones drove up in a buggy, wholly unannounced, having come across the country in this mode of conveyance. The McClures stayed with them for some time, after- ward removing to a house of their own half a mile or so nearer town on the southern edge of the "prairie," and within easy walking distance of the home on the hill ; and the intercourse between the sisters and their house- holds remained one of almost daily intimacy through their joint stay in Jacksonville. Shortly after his arrival in that village, Mr. McClure opened a law office and com- menced a practice which, in spite of the fearless stand taken by him for free-soil principles, finally carried him into the front ranks of the Illinois bar. MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 85 There was no little visiting done among the families of the faculty, all of whom were from New England, and congenial by reason of birth and education, and all living on College Hill and readily accessible to each other. And there was, as may be imagined, great rejoicing when Madam Henshaw, drawn by the double attraction, about this time took her journey all the way from Middlebury and made the daughters a long visit. But although there was no dearth of pleasant society at the home and among the families of College Hill, — as indeed also by reason of frequent social interchanges with people of the village, — there still remained about the region traces of primitive wild nature that were not with- out their attractions and excitements. The prairie fowl and hen hawk were to be found through the open country, and the raccoon and hoot owl were not infrequent visitors in the College grove. An adventure related in the mss., and here copied, shows that more formidable game had not yet become obsolete : " It was some time about midsummer of 1837, when, on going into my garden one day, I saw there a strange look- ing animal engaged in eating and destroying the vege- tables. It looked in some respects like a common hog, yet struck me as different from anything I had ever seen. The creature was of a reddish brown, with a shag about the head and neck like a mane, \yith peaked nose, and long, terrible tusks. He was not heavier than large specimens of the common, domestic hog, but longer, lanker; with flesh not adipose, but muscle and brawn, and well and compactly limbed. " He seemed to belong to a race of swine imported into the country, a long time ago lost in the wilds and grwwn savage, called 'prairie sharks,' the dread of swine-raisers and swine-dealers-; which could run with horse or hound ; 86 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. which despised dogs and fences and shotguns ; whose greed nothing could gorge ; whose lankness no feeding could fatten ; scrawny, swift, strong, invulnerable. " The animal saw me as I entered and, as I was between him and the gate; he rushed directly at me. Not in the least stopped or turned aside by the missile with which I struck him full in the face, he swept past me, who nar- rowly avoided his stroke, and loping off through the front Ibt, jumped over a five-rail fence and disappeared in the neighboring wilds. But the creature, having got a taste of farm products, evidently liked them, and would return, though not in the daytime. He would prowl about my premises in the night, solitary and wary in his habits, like a wild beast. I set all sorts of snares, scythes, and bear traps, but he knew how to elude them or break away from them. I fed him arsenic enough to have killed a score of men. Nothing could hurt him, nothing could hold him, nothing could poison him ; and he kept on his nightly prowling and foraging. The college boys came over to my help and kept watch around my premises, but so keen was his smell, or so vigilant and wary his outlook, that he was never seen or heard by them. " So matters went on, much to my discomfiture and disgust, for some time. At length one quiet, moonlight night, past the middle of , it, my wife waked mc. The creature was in the front lot ; she could see him plainly. He was deliberately, as one perfectly master of the situa- tion and with no fear of interruption, breaking down the long corn and, like an oriental sultan, was dining leisurely alone. I immediately dressed and, going out in another direction, stole off noiselessly to the college by a path through the intervening forests. On my way I turned over the stile that led from the path into my premises, as I knew if alarmed he would take that mode of exit ; MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 8/ for though his swineship could on emergency defy and despise fences, he evidently preferred going over the stiles like a gentleman. I hurried over to the college and, going to the students' quarters, I roused up Thomas Laurie, a young, bright, and resolute Scotch boy from the neighbor- hood, since that time for years a missionary in Syria, sub- sequently a pastor in Roxbury, and now with a church in Providence. I also called up Ireland, since then a mis- sionary in Africa, where he now is. They hurried on their clothes and came, Laurie with a shotgun and Ireland with his spear, ready for action. " Returning silently through the grove, I posted them by the fence which divided it from the field in front of my house where the marauder was at work, stationing Laurie in ambush behind the fence at the place of the stile, where I knew the boar would first rush, and Ireland lower down in supporting distance, also in ambush behind the fence. I then took my gun and went into the field making a loud noise, whereupon, as I had expected, the animal, alarmed, rushed to the stile and in a moment I heard the report of Laurie's gun ringing on the night air. The beast had come close to him and he had fired full in his face. Intimidated by the report and the smoke and the shock, the boar had run back and was looking for an escape on the other side of the lot, and beyond my house toward the south and west. I knew he could not well escape in that direction as there was a tall, close board fence which he could neither leap nor climb, and I ran thither with my, gun. " But he had discovered his mistake and, finding no escape in that direction, had turned at bay, and seeing me approach, charged upon me. I heard the grinding of his teeth and saw, under the shadow of the trees in the moonlight, the line of a dark object approaching. I 88 TK UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. waited until I could almost touch him with my gun, and then fired and sprang to one side. It was well- 1 did so, for afterward it became apparent that otherwise he would have struck me with his terrible tusks and strength, and must have killed me or torn me fearfully. As it was the shock and flash and smoke, together with my springing aloof, saved me, and he swept past me not in the least deterred or diverted, leaving the strong wild boar smell on the air, and running toward the stile. Then another ring of Laurie's gun on the night air, and with the same result as at the first. But the animal, unharmed, had now retreated into the concealment of the depth of the tall corn, and refused to come out. " It evidently was dangerous to stir him up, or to go in and drive him out, and none of us liked to enter into the cornfield. But evidently it must be done or the enemy, long hunted and at last brought to bay, would escape us. So addressing myself to the exigencies of the case, I armed myself with gun and axe, and also with weapons still more effective, namely, tin pans and pails which I could beat to the direst tantara-ra-ra, and marched, with all drums beating, down upon the enemy. It evidently was too much for him — this new, strange terror — for directly I heard again the ringing of the gun on the night air, and then the jubilant shout, that set all the echoes of the forest a-going, ' I 've killed him ! I 've killed him ! ' I ran up to Laurie's station, and lo ! there he lay, the monster, — for such he was, — stretched out in death. The discharge at close quarters from behind the fence had thrown the entire consolidated charge through the eye into the brain. Otherwise he was shotproof. We might as well have, fired our shotguns at an iron-plated enemy. The previous charges had left no wound in him ; had not penetrated at all the shield of tough brawn an inch and MARRIAGE AND NEW HOME. 89 a half thick with which nature covered his neck and shoulders. " He was something dreadful to behold. His mass of hard muscle with tendons like those of an ox, his tusks, long and sharp, and his red wild shag of mane, made him a fearful object, and suggested the peril beyond our thought to which we had been exposed in hunting him. Few wild beasts could have been more terrible to en- counter. His appearance justified all that the ancients have told us of the peril and the heroic courage involved in the boar hunt. " Next day there was a gathering of students around the slain. They fastened ropes around him and drew him out into the depth of the forest, where people came from miles around to see. He must have been the last of his race in that region. I never saw his like there or else- where. With the Indians of Illinois and the mound builders, he lives only in tradition and the mists of the well-nigh forgotten past." CHAPTER IX. THE SLAVE-POWER IN ILLINOIS. Daniel Webster in Jacksonville. — The slave-power in Illinois in 1837. — Fourth of July oration. — Death of Lovejoy and " Address to the people of Alton." IT may surprise the general reader that a man then so prominent throughout the country as Daniel Webster should have taken a tour in the year 1837 through the "far west," and especially that he should have made any stay in a village so small as the Jacksonville of that period. But it is a fact that he passed through there during that year, and stayed long enough to make a number of speeches and to listen to others ; also to attend a " barbecue " and one or more receptions given in his honor. An address of welcome was given by President Beecher, and in the estimation of the college students the speech, as a specimen of oratory, far excelled the response thereto of the distinguished guest. It may be worthy of narration simply because Mr. Webster figures in the story, that on one of these speech- making occasions, at which, of course, all Jacksonville and vicinity were present, it was found necessary by the com- mittee in charge, for want of a better rostrum, to mount the illustrious orator upon a chair occupied by Mrs. Post ; but Mr. Webster gallantly refused to ascend until another seat had been procured for its occupant and he had in person escorted her to it. One evening Mr. Webster was entertained at the house of Governor Duncan, who probably had known him in THE SLA VE-PO WER IN ILLINOIS. g I Washington. Among the guests were Judge Lockwood and wife and Mr. and Mrs. Post. In a letter to a member of Governor Duncan's family Mr. Post refers to this evening and his recollection of Webster and a conversation with him on the book of Job. Chronologically in this connection reference should be made to the slavery agitation in Illinois in the " thirties " and the attitude taken by the faculty of Illinois College on that question. In Jacksonville, while there was a considerable admixture of people from New England, a very large and influential part of the population was made up of Kentuckians, having a strong proslavery bias. In that place as elsewhere through all that region there was (mss.) "a collision between two antagonistic civiliza- tions, one born directly or indirectly of slavery and the other of freedom ; between different views of humanity as well as Christianity — views as to the rights and relations of men in states, societies, churches, and in the kingdom of God. . . . The shock had been long deferred. Antag- onistic principles had slept side by side in unconscious or timid procrastination of the inevitable. But that era was passed. Those principles were now in direct encounter in the same field, confronting one another in struggle for the same domain, the possession and organization of the same nascent empire, each conscious of the other as its mortal foe and of this as the fatal hour. Amid this con- flict of Ormuzd and Ahriman I had to do my thinking, talking, writing, and preaching, in all the demands of an initial ministerial and pastoral life. The pressure of these questions was ubiquitous as an atmosphere." The writer recalls the relentless and sleepless inquisi- tion of the slave-power ; its " espionage and censorship 92 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. over speech, press, school, society, and the pulpit ; " how it " hounded, with threat of social ostracism, or mob mur- der, or the mad dog cry of 'abolitionist,' all that dared an utterance of opposition to its despotism," and how "it sent forth our young men to vindicate their chivalry by hunting down on horseback a poor negro woman fleeing from the hounds and the lash through the winter storm and snow, shivering in barns or sleeping under the open heavens in the fearful cold." Illinois College in those days was looked upon by the southern people with suspicion, and by many was regarded as an "engine of abolitionism." And although not on the extrem'e lines, its position as an antislavery institution was pronounced and fearless. On the Fourth of July, 1837, Mr. Post delivered in Jack- sonville an oration which (with one spoken on the same occasion by Rev. Edward Beecher) was, "at the earnest solicitation of the students," furnished for the press ; and which, among various topics appropriate for the occa- sion, dwelt upon the portents of the times. Although proslavery proscription and mob violence had not then reached the culminating point, — the tragic denouement of November following, — that crisis was plainly coming and not far distant, and the air was thick with it. Two or three passages from this oration are inserted here, as its words of counsel and warning have a peculiar significance in the light of events shortly following : — "... I come forward, my fellow citizens, to mingle my hopes and gratulations and sympathies with yours. Born amid a wild and mountain land, where the foot of the invader never penetrated but to bear him to defeat and death, nurtured amid plains where the share of the plow- man ever and anon turned up the rusty memorials and moldering bones of Revolutionary times, though the course < o o K U Q Z o o K O THE SLAVE-POWER IN ILLINOIS. 93 of my life leads me aloof from political controversy, I have learned ever to greet this day with joy and with gratitude. It is a day that calls up hallowed associations and treas- ured hopes ; a day toward which, down the far shades of the future, the eyes of mankind will be turned as to one of the proudest in the record of human action. . . . " It is the birthday of a peculiar people, of a new form of human society, predicated upon the assertion of the mutual equality and equal rights of man. ... A new principle has been thrown into human affairs whose influ- ence is to be limited not to our own empire, however vast, but to reach the millions upon whom our midnight sun is the orb of the morning. . . . "It is possible that great and immutable principles, especially when they require effort or sacrifice, may be held up simply as splendid theory, while in practice they become obsolete, powerless, dead. There is such a thing as living down constitutions and Declarations of Right by practically denying or violating the principles on which they are founded, till at last they are located amid the figures of rhetoric or the speculations of fancy, but have no lodgment in the belief of the intellect or the affections of the heart. When the fundamental principles of any government come to be thus regarded by the people, the original vital spirit of that government is lost, the green- ness of youth, the freshness of the heart is gone ; decay and dissolution are the natural results. " There is a relation subsisting in this country that dia- metrically contradicts the instrument to which we have just been listening, and which declares that all men are not created equal or with certain inalienable rights ; a relation at war with the spirit and the letter of our Con- stitution, neutralizing our example, aye, holding it up to derision and contempt with foreign nations, rendering a 94 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. nullity that enthusiastic assertion of universal equality of right which in 1776 awoke the American heart and roused the nations of the earth as with the sound of a trumpet. It was on this principle that the battle of the Revolution was fought. Slavery in our system is a discordant ele- ment. American slavery and American liberty cannot coexist on the same soil. . . "There is another evil to which I will allude, of recent but of portentous birth : insubordination to law. Liberty has come to signify, in the mouths of some, an utter dis- solution of all restraints of law, and with many, license to transcend the law in extreme cases, that is, as facts show, wherever private passion or popular frenzy rage. It is high time that our darling words 'liberty ' and ' republi- canism ' were understood. It should be graven with a pen of iron on the heart of the whole American people that the supremacy of the law is the living soul of repub- licanism ; that the highest liberty of which man is capable is to be governed and protected by the laws which he himself has made ; that an insurrection against law in a republic is an insurrection of the people against the people ; is suicide that no extreme which would not justify plunging the dagger into their own bosom will justify ; that he who is guilty of it, in whatever form, — mob law, lynch law, club law, or dirk law, — is a traitor to his country and does all that he, a single individual, can do to lay her honor in the dust. . . . No nation has ever been able to endure mob law. None ever can." About this time was published in The Jacksonville Statesman an article signed " Hitherto a Whig," from the pen of Mr. Post, condemning in strong terms the mobbing, at Andersonville, Ind., of an "abolition emis- sary," and an editorial defence of the outrage by the. editor of a Whig paper called The Illinoisian. THE SLA VE-POWER IN ILLINOIS. 95 It is a matter of familiar history that on the night of the seventh of November, 1837, a proslavery mob surrounded the stone warehouse of Godfrey & Oilman in the city of Alton, where, at the time, was stored the press of The Observer, a newspaper edited by Elijah Parish Lovejoy. This press had been received from a steamer on the Mississippi two days before. It will be remembered that twenty or thirty men, including Winthrop S. Gilman, were in the building, armed with muskets and shotguns, and defending the property, and that during the fight; Lovejoy was killed. This was the last scene and final catastrophe in a long and tragic drama enacted in St. Louis, St. Charles, and Alton, in which Lovejoy was the central figure. His death was not the mere "taking off " of a single private citizen. He stood for antislavery public opinion in the west. The continued assaults on his press in those cities, and his fearless pertinacity through all the " hunt of obloquy," made his name familiar everywhere in Illinois and Missouri, and the shot that took his life was felt to be that of an organized political power, and aimed at the life of free speech and free press in the Mississippi Valley. While the Alton tragedy was brewing, the situation of Lovejoy at the time was canvassed by the faculty of Illinois College, and "we resolved" (mss.) "it was expedient that Dr. Edward Beecher should go to Alton in his support and render what aid he could by countenance, address, or counsel." Dr. Beecher accordingly went to Alton, and there took an active and prominent part in the antislavery con- vention of October, 1837, being one of the committee on resolutions. At a mass meeting there, November 2, he offered reso- 96 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. lutions championing free speech and protection against mob violence ; but the resolutions were sent to a commit- tee, and at the next meeting substitute resolutions were adopted, in which it was " deemed a matter indispensable to the peace and harmony of this community that the labors and the influence of the late editor of The Observer be no longer identified with any newspaper establishment of this city." Lovejoy addressed the meeting, announcing his inten- tion to continue his work, and closed a strong and impas- sioned appeal by saying : " If the civil authorities refuse to protect me, I must look to God ; and if I die, I am determined to make my grave in Alton." It was only three days afterward when Lovejoy was killed and his press thrown into the Mississippi. And it was very shortly after his death, while public sentiment was at its white heat, that a communication entitled " An Address to the People of Alton," was published in The New York Emancipator. "I had" (mss.) "to keep the whole matter as secret as the grave from my very associates and companions, as though conscious of some dreadful crime. It was thought my life would be worth nothing if my authorship were known, .in the state of the popular mind at the time, so desperate then was the wrath and terror of the slave- power in its tyranny over the free state of Illinois. My secret, I think, was not even known to The Emancipator, which published the article. It was kept even from Love- joy's family, who inserted the address, without knowing the authorship, in the Life of Lovejoy which they subse- quently published." No adequate idea of this address can be obtained except by reading it as a whole ; but simply to illustrate its power of thought and diction, its marvelous word-painting, and THE SLAVE-POWER IN ILLINOIS. 97 its fiery arraignment of the Alton mob, a few passages are here inserted : — " Years have elapsed since I enjoyed the hospitality of your then infant settlement. Since then I have never ceased to feel a lively interest in your prosperity. Most gratifying have been the reports of your growing wealth and commerce, and especially of your liberality, correct morals, and enlightened public sentiment. Should the domestic institutions of bordering states ever enfeeble in them the spirit of freedom, among you, it was hoped, she would still be fqund vigorous and hardy as your own giant youth. Against the invasion of servile sentiment, here, it was presumed, would be an impregnable barrier — here, the rights of man were to find a sanctuary ; the perse- cuted of any name, or of however delusive a creed, were to obtain constitutional protection. Should the lights of American liberty elsewhere grow dim, amid your wild cliffs her torch was still to burn, as brightly as on Bun- ker's heights or the Plymouth Rock. These anticipa- tions, in sorrow, not in anger I say it, are no more. They have been most cruelly swept away. The associations connected with you, in the public mind, I need not tell you, are sadly,- fearfully changed; the bright colors have faded, and dark and dismal and bloody hues are on them. A tumultuary, lawless fanatic power, overmastering or overawing the civil authority, enslaving public sentiment, paralyzing the public conscience, freezing with fear the sympathies of even the generous, the intelligent and the good, and, with a few noble exceptions, making the mind of your whole city hold its breath, and crouch in silence before it — ferocity victorious over right, brute force over free opinion — a gang of ruffians, claiming to be regulators of speech and the press, usurp- ing the name of the people, and grasping in the same 98 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. polluted clutch the functions of accuser, judge, and exe- cutioner — 'making night hideous' with their loathsome triumph, in the presence of unresisting multitudes de- molishing buildings, firing your city, publicly murdering an American citizen for the crime of exercising rights most sacredly guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States aad the state of Illinois ; and finally, with fiendish malignity and a meanness more than fiend- ish, in violation of their express stipulations, firing upon the unarmed and unresisting; such are the images that now start at the name of ALTON. Are they niere horrid phantoms ? Would to God they were so ! Oh, no f. They have left enduring memorials in broken hearts, bereaved infancy, and untimely graves. They have left a community disgraced, freedom of speech awed into silence,, and the majesty of law trampled under foot. In the dis- honor of the American name, in the wound given to the cause of universal liberty, and the outraged feelings of mankind, they have left abiding monuments. The muse of history turns aside her head and weeps, as she chroni- cles in crimson the record. . . . "Other towns can often look back with pride to their early history, and relumine in the associations of the past the waning love of liberty and truth. Boston has her Faneuil Hall, Charleston her Fort Moultrie; but Alton must wear it upon her escutcheon, in characters as imper- ishable as the rocky bluffs around her, that in her early youth she crouched before not one but a hundred mas- ters ; that, in her, freedom of speech found its first Amer- ican martyr ; that she did all that, in her immaturity and feebleness, she could do to bury freedom of press, and with it the American Constitution, in a bloody grave. The sacrifice of life may have been small ; that of prin- ciple was mighty. The infamy of it not all the tide of THE SLA VE-POWER IN ILLINOIS. 99 coming years, nor the flow of your ever-rolling Mississippi, can wash away. . . . " The outrage perpetrated among you was one of aggra- vated enormity, both as it regards the individual and the principles sacrificed. It was no gambler, no ruffian, no malefactor defying or evading justice, whose blood is upon your hands. It was not a case where an indignant popu- lace, in the impulse of an evil hour, inflicted a vengeance, due to its object, though rendering its avengers more guilty than the victim. It had not even the miserable justification of those instances where, in a zeal for jus- tice, all justice is trampled under foot, and in punishing one crime are committed a thousand. It was a man, in the eye of human law, without reproach; a man of un- doubted piety, and giving evidence of a devotion, sincere, however misguided you may have deemed it, to the great cause of human rights ; a man wrong, if wrong at all, only in his views of a great moral question, and in the fearless expression of those views ; a man who, however imprudent or misjudging you may have thought him, you must at least acknowledge could not be deterred by self- sacrifice, or intimidated by the fury of the multitude, or seduced by popular opinion from supposed duty, but who dared in the assertion of the right even to die, — it is for shedding the blood of such a man that mankind holds you responsible. There were, too, at stake, not individual rights only, but vast principles. Whether our general and state constitutions, with their solemn guaranties, should be of sovereign authority, or a mere splendid delusion and a snare, was in controversy. Moreover he who strikes at freedom of speech is guilty of treason, not only to his country, but to his kind ; he strikes at the great means to the ultimate triumph of truth, and the anticipated improvement of the human race. It is these I OO TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. considerations — that the atrocity committed among you was provoked by no crime ; that you made, as far as you could, a solemn oblation of the principles of universal liberty and of the future hopes of the race upon the same ensanguined altar — which sink your hitherto fair fame far below the infamous murders of Vicksburg and St. Louis. . . . " It is vain to attempt to shift the blame by impugning the motives and previous conduct of the sufferer. To degrade him, were it in your power, would not exalt you ; it would only add to the ' deep damnation of his taking off' the coward malice that seeks shelter behind the carcass of his victim. To term him 'rash,' 'headstrong,' and 'imprudent,' is the strongest sentence of self-condem- nation you can utter. Why was it ' rash ' or ' imprudent ' to exercise the most sacred of American or human rights — freedom of speech — in Alton .' Was it because he ought to have known that there was not law, nor con- science, nor patriotism, nor intelligence, among you to protect him .' And if these elements were not found among you, you, and not he, were responsible for their absence. Nor do the results, melancholy as they are, though they argue your delinquency, necessarily convict him of rashness. There are moral as well as political conflicts, Thermopylses where we must make a stand or perish — where yielding would be treason to our princi- ples, our country, and our race — where it becomes a solemn duty to die ! Perhaps nothing less than the shed- ding of blood could awaken the conscience and salutary fears of this nation, and open its eyes to that dreadful Tarpeian on whose verge it is tottering. . . . " If we feel inclined to regret that a minister of the gospel attempted to defend the rights of the citizen and the laws of his country by force, this act should be viewed THE SLA VE-PO TVER IN fLLINOIS. I O I at least with indulgence by those who are wont to regard with admiration examples in their own Revolutionary his- tory, where the pulpit was exchanged for the battlefield. Never was there a cause more sacred than that in which he fell. . . . " Infatuated men ! how could you see an individual mur- dered for the expression of unpopular sentiments, and not feel that you were hopelessly binding yourselves and your posterity to popular opinions, popular measures, popular prejudices, and popular crimes ; in short, never to act or speak but with the permission of the popu- lace, however degraded or guilt-stained it might be ? Did you suppose that Abolitionism was to be the last object of popular hatred ? How could you see liberty of speech smothered in blood in one instance, and not perceive you were creating a censorship over yourselves more jealous, fanatical, and intolerable than that of the Chinese or Austrian or the Romish despotism — that your own souls, the aspirations of your hopes, your own reason and love of truth must henceforth whisper, wizard-like, from the dust ? How could you fail to perceive that you were called upon to witness the obsequies of your own honor and the consummation of your own shame — to set your seal to the act of your own enslavement and of your deep and enduring disgrace ? How could you in retiring to your homes look your wives and children in the face? Did you not feel that you had betrayed them ? that the same red-handed power that had broken the heart of the wife and made the child fatherless might visit your own hearths with widowhood and orphanage ; or, at least, that they might be secured against such visitation only by your becoming passive and pliant slaves, and that to the most despicable and brutal of masters ? Should the vio- lent and bloody spirit of the times, which you have at I02 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. least tacitly countenanced, permit you to see old age, will this be a tale you will be proud to rehearse to your chil- dren ? When the frenzy and infatuation of the day have had their ensanguined hour, and passion and party are silent in the grave, and impartial history shall take up the transaction, will your descendants, think you, be proud to read your names in connection with the disgraceful story ? . . . " With reference to the actual perpetrators of the out- rage, most of them, we are bound for the honor of the American name to presume, were of that refuse of society which is wont to cluster around a commercial emporium, kenneling unregarded in the grogshop and the gambling hell till some demagogue or agitator calls them forth to impersonate the people, supersede the laws, and take care of the public conscience and public morals. Many of them, in charity to the national character, we may assume are beneath the reach of an enlightened public sentiment, either from an ignorance that can not, or a prejudice that will not, read ; or belong to those des- peradoes in society to whom the whip, the axe, and the halter are the only arguments. Others there probably were of slender intelligence and weak moral purpose, but of inflammable passions, who, under the influence of evil men and mistaken opinion, knew not what they did. Such are indeed objects of pity, and upon evidence of repentance are not to be excluded from forgiveness, con- fidence, and kindness. But such, alas ! were not all. We have reason to believe that amid the immediate instiga- tors or actual perpetrators of the felony were some whose titled names, education enjoyed, profession in life, and pride of standing in society, we should have hoped would have kept them from such self-degradation — that there were those of enlightened conscience and cultivated Intel- THE SLA VE-PO WER IN ILLINOIS. 103 lect, who not only polluted themselves with the foul iniquity, but deliberately seduced others into it. With reference to such, whether with utter recklessness of character appearing openly in the transaction, or skulk- ing in concealment and instigating the wretches they had not courage to lead — it matters not — language is inadequate to the flagitiousness and wickedness of their character. That your malignity was too strong for your regard to the right, or your love of your country, is per- haps no matter of surprise ; but I am surprised that it took no counsel of ultimate consequences. The act you were committing, by the interpretation of all courts and all codes, was murder. Why, in that guilty hour did not your good or your evil angel whisper you that, by the act you were perpetrating, you were putting yourselves and the laws of your country at an eternal issue .■• Yes ; between them and yourselves there is, and ever must be, ■war to the knife, a war of extermination, in which one or the other must perish. Public anarchy and ruin are your only safety. Can you expect, can you be so impious as to hope, to conquer in such a warfare .' But should you prevail, have you yet to learn from the admonitions of history that the instigators and leaders of popular frenzy, however they may triumph for a while, sooner or later feed the Brazen Bull their own hands have reared .' Sooner or later themselves are gorged by the anaconda which they are wont to caress, and whose hissing they pro- nounce excellent music. Did Robespierre and his com- peers dream that they were erecting the guillotine for themselves .' But did he, or Danton, or Marat, sleep in bloodless graves .' . . . " Have you yet to learn that there is an avenging Provi- dence which often forbids that bloody and violent men should make their last bed in peace ! But should you be I04 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. left to the course of nature, are there no furies of the guilty mind which the fugitive from human law can never escape and which often make the guilty envy his victim the repose of the sepulcher ? An American citizen mur- dered, a home desolated, a wife widowed, a child made fatherless — these are recollections which will not fade with the fading excitements of the hour. From these you can never flee ; no bars can protect, no concealments hide you from them. No flight can leave them behind — they are become part of your own souls. " The dreadful truth that you are murderers will follow you through all your future existence. In whatever scenes you may mingle, beneath whatever sky you may repose, the grisly accuser will dog you. Though you essay to drown its voice in the madness of intoxication or in tUe excitements of deeper and still deeper crime, vain will be the attempt. It will await you in the grave. Yea ! in the last great congregation the gory phantom will start forth and arraign you at the bar of Eternal Justice. . . . " And what have you gained by all this dreadful and guilty self-sacrifice .' Whatever may have been the faults of your victim, you have embalmed and canonized them. Whatever may have been the defects of his cause, or of his advocacy of it, you have done much by your mad act to identify that cause with that of. freedom of speech and American liberty, and you have given its advocate rank among the apostles of humanity and martyrs to the rights of man ; among the Vanes and Sidneys of other times you have insured his name a record, while the traducer and the murderer are forgotten in the grave. Instead of checking the cause for which he labored, you have made the sympathies of this whole nation react upon you like an earthquake. You have virtually sur- THE SLA VE-PO WER IN ILLINOIS. 1 05 rendered the field of argument by a resort to force. You have made the object of your hate a talisman and a power worth more to him and his cause than a hundred years of life. You cannot bury his shed blood in the earth. It will have voice. It will plead louder than a thousand presses. From its every drop will spring an army of living antagonists. Did you dream that in this age you could muzzle free discussion } You might as well attempt to muzzle ./Etna. Did you hope to chain liberty of speech } You might as well lay grasp upon Niagara. Did you think to oppose yourselves across the path of the lightning and the whirlwind .' . . . " Citizens of Alton : If, in any respect, I may seem to have put myself in the unamiable and most undesirable attitude of a public accuser, it is that I may stimulate to sober inquiry into the causes of the past outrage and the means of future prevention. This means, melancholy experience demonstrates, is to be found only in the firm, fearless, impartial, and universal maintenance of law. Abolition is not the last of unpopular doctrines, nor do we know who or what may next become obnoxious to popular odium. Nothing less than the stern enforcement of law, irrespective of persons or opinions or circum- stances, will prevent persecution, proscription, and mur- der without end. This enforcement implies infliction of penalties as well as promulgation of commands, and involves in your case a melancholy duty with reference to the past. The laws have been repeatedly, openly, and flagrantly violated among you — a public, premeditated, atrocious murder has been perpetrated. The course you may take with the offenders will settle the question in the eye of mankind, whether you have moral energy and political virtue enough remaining to retrieve your dis- grace and recover your lost position. God forbid that I 306 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. should cherish towards the unhappy wretches implicated any other than feelings of Christian kindness and a desire for their repentance ! God forbid that revenge should claim a bloody oblation for the shade of the murdered Lovejoy ! Vengeance belongs to another hour and a mightier hand. But the spirit of slain Justice does walk your street and clamor for expiation. Until that be given no charm can lay her unquiet shade. She will wander up and down your city. She will whisper you in the dark- ness of the night. Her sorrowing tones will steal upon the solitude of your repose and her gory apparition will affright your slumbers. Ages to come her moan will resound among your cliffs and rise upon the roar of the Mississippi. Unless atonement be made to violated law, order and security can never be restored among you — not, at least, until a generation unstained by this transac- tion has taken your places, and the offenders are beyond the reach of human justice." CHAPTER X. CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. Illness at home. — Visit to Logansport. — Death of Mrs. Sarah Hand. — Trip through Northern Illinois in 1840. — More as to the Jacksonville Congregational' church. — The pastorate over it. — Views on systematic theologies, ecclesiastical order, terms of communion, and extempore preaching. — Visit to Middlebuiy in 1843, and preaching in the old Congregational church. — Ascent of Mount Lincoln. — Death of Governor Duncan. DURING the summer of 1839 there was for the first time illness, and, as appears from the mss., danger- ous illness, in the Jacksonville home. " My dear wife and my eldest boy were both very sick at once under the almost suffocating heats of a terrible summer, seemingly nigh unto death, and I was, with no nurse, no servant, passing from the sick wife upstairs to the sick little boy below, attending to and watching both, and obliged to keep from the mother the knowledge of the sickness of her darling boy, accounting as I could for not bringing him into the room. Yet God gives strength for the days of trouble, so that they are never perhaps quite so dark or desperate as they seem at a distance. Youth, health, and hope are strong to bear as well as to do." In the fall of this year Mr. Post was in Logansport, having driven across the country from Jacksonville. He writes Mrs. Post (October 14) : — " Five years have fled, and I am here again. The rain clouds that heralded and pursued me all the way hither seem at last to have parted company with me and left me with the sunshine. The pure, cloudless morning breathes its spell over water and woodland ; the Wabash and Eel I08 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. rivers sparkle in the distance, and far around glitter the stirless forest crests, through which the quiet light streams into the silent and solitary wilds beneath. 'T is a morn- ing for reflection and imaginative thought; an hour which, with me, no less than twilight, ever belongs to the distant, the absent, the past, the future, and the dead. From the . scene before me my eye seems to gaze upon the distant west, until its intense vision transcends the horizon and descries my sweet wife and sweet babes. Would that I could waft over these vast forests and prairies to you the blessings of serene and heavenward thought, of a pure and happy heart, that these, my dear Frank, might ever be your lot and that of your sweet ones. When I look back upon the events of a few past months and think how nea;rly passed by us the stroke that threatened to sunder the silver cord which bound our earthly beings together ; when I think of the probabilities that then crowded with awful force upon my mind, I feel stunned and dizzy, as with a fearful dream, and can hardly clothe with substan- tial hues what I know was intense and tremendous reality. I hope, my dear wife, that what we have felt and thought during the past summer may never be forgotten by either of us, but may wean us from the dream of this world and quicken us to duty and immortal life. " I have just walked out amid the bright, still morning to where the brother of my childhood and youth sleeps his long last sleep. Again the recollections of five years since came back ; again the Wabash murmured and the forest birds caroled on my ear ; but he still sleeps on : for him no bird of morning sings ; for him yon fresh and glorious sun shines in vain. Nature smiles, but not for him. The woodland is wildly beautiful, but not to his sealed eye. The voice of earthly hope and love shall steal on his silent ear no more. He sleeps from the land of his childhood and the land of his love far away. CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. 109 " But I thought — and it was a blessed thought — that the spirit was not there, that the dust would not sleep there forever; and methought I heard a voice saying, ' Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.' A voice too seemed to come from the dust before me : ' My brother, you still live, while the heart that loved you and the tongue that prayed often for you are moldering in silence here. If you once loved me, if my memory is still dear, improve that life which I can now value and let my early death have this fruit, that it may arouse you to your real life and to new zeal for your God.' " My little nephew, who led me hither, after waiting till his little patience was exhausted, said to me, ' Uncle, are you thinking now .' There is my father's brother, and there ' (pointing to a little grave beside it) ' is my little brother. Will they ever come out again .' ' I took the little boy's hand, and, he prattling and I ' thinking,' we walked from the home of the dead." In January, 1840, Mr. Post learned by letter from his brother Martin at Logansport, of the death of his mother at Ferrisburg, Vt., on December 2d of the previous year. During the following summer, traveling with horse and buggy in company with Dr. Samuel Adams, of Illinois College, he went to Chicago, making a tour on behalf of the college through Lacon, Union Grove, Granville, Peoria and Ottawa. Near the latter place is " Starved Rock," in the Illinois River, somewhat famous in Indian story. Of the chapter of experiences of the travelers at this place Mr. Post writes from Charleston, Kane County, July 30th : — " On our way (to Ottawa) we passed near the Starved Rock, lifting itself in solemn and storied grandeur on the opposite side of the stream, inviting us to visit it in I lO TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. language not to be withstood. A river rolled between us and no ford for our wagon appeared. But the spell of th^ place was too strong on us to be resisted. . . . " At last we reached the rock and stood — where I pre- sume it has seldom been approached before on foot — in. the dark, shaded waters, right beneath its mighty preci- pice. There seemq^ in it something terrific. The genius of the place seemed to frown upon our presumption and beckon us back. There was something so fearfully dark in the waters that reposed beneath its awful shade, that, with the precipice of two hundred feet above and the dark river before, and the profound silence (save the noise of the stream) around me, I involuntarily shrank back and had to reassure myself ; then I plunged in and swam across. and laid my hand where perhaps none have touched since: the Indian yell of war rang around the mighty battlement. There was from this point a thrice repeating echo whose loud reverberations deepened the impression of a living and awful Presence. We ascended the rock, traced the inscriptions of other wayfarers who have chronicled their unknown names on the cedars and the sandstone; took our luncheons on the magnificent and far-seeing table of its summit, talked of our other days, of the sweet ones we had left behind, of our prospects and other topics. It was a solemn and delicious hour. We seemed alone with, memory and hope, with Nature and with God." October 8, 1840, Mr. Post was ordained pastor of the Congregational church of Jacksonville, succeeding Rev. William Carter, before mentioned. Though the pastorate continued till 1 847, Mr. Post was never installed. Soon after the organization of the church, a small white wooden structure had been erected on the east side of the public square. And here he preached during the CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. Ill remainder of the stay in Jacksonville. The church was largely made up of New Englanders, and attended by nearly all of the families of College Hill. For that of an. infant village, the congregation was a rarely intelligent and cultured one. " It numbered " (see discourse of Dr. Post at the semi-centennial anniversary of this church in: 1883) "among its members, earnest, intelligent, true- hearted, devoted, stalwart men, some bringing much of the granite of the Old Rock, some with something of the metal of the Cromwellian Ironsides in their veins, to blend with the charms of gentle, cultivated, brave and saintly woman- hood, in the composition of the infant church." The audience room was small and plain. It boasted no' organ, but its bass viol and 'cello did service as orchestra,, and the choir embraced voices of rare quality and long- remembered in that community. The music was wedded to sweet and noble church lyrics, and formed a delightful feature of the worship. "A more enthusiastic choir," writes Mrs. Wolcott, — then Miss Martha Dwight, — "never sang the praises of God. For we were inspired by the preaching — a new departure from the conven- tional theological style, rich in the result of earnest thought, and abounding in imagery of the most vivid and poetic character." The bell which for many years called the flock together,, and which was afterward removed to the new brick edifice on College Avenue, was bought with the proceeds of a church concert, and sung its nunc dimittis over the down- fall of Richmond, having been broken in the general jubilation of the town which followed that event. How Mr. Post became pastor of the church is related in the Mss. : — "During the years of my professorship, and down to the winter of 1837-38, causes were in progress which were I 1 2 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. t6 make an important change in my life. The college had supposed itself well endowed, or with assurances of such endowment, when I accepted the professorship in it ; but a terrible financial revolution had come on the country. Bankruptcies occurred; everywhere commerce was dead and values had vanished. The endowment of the college was largely swept away. My salary had become so reduced that it was inadequate even to an economical support of my family. My house was unpaid for, and the interest on my debt for it was every day accumulating. The lands in northern Illinois, and lots in Chicago which I had purchased for myself and Oliver Bascom with money borrowed by us in 1835 could not be sold, and the debt with its interest remained unpaid. Everything con- spired to make some change necessary. I must either abandon my position and return to the profession of law, or add to my income where I was. " In one of the anxious days, as I came from my college exercises to my home, I found a committee of a dozen or so of the gentlemen of the Congregational church await- ing me. This committee had called at my house to see if I would not ' take license ' and become their pastor. I had never had any words with any of them or any of the church, previously, on the matter. The call came unso- licited, unthought. I fe.lt constrained to take it under advisement. It seemed like the hand of God, in this as in so many things before, leading me in a way I knew not. I had reason to think, from an experience of myself through many years unto mature manhood, that I had gifts now but partially called forth, which I might and ought more to use for his service ; that my life owed more to Christ than it was sending ; that I was in a situation to combine the new office proposed with that which I was already holding. I have always believed that it was every CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. I 13 way desirable for his own sake, and that of the public, for his increased excellency as a teacher, and for the practical power of his life, that a professor in a college should, in theoretic knowledge, and at least in occasional practice, combine his chair in the university with some other imme- diately practical profession — that he would thus become a larger man, citizen, Christian, and professor. While I was intensely interested in my college work, and espe- cially in the department of history, in which my labor had grown to be a delight and inspiration, the ministry seemed more immediately to deal with the truths of the highest interest in being, bringing the mind more perpetually into the atmosphere of those truths ; and it seemed to be favorable to the formation of the highest, noblest and most spiritual character — to place one more in commun- ion with Christ and his works, and in a pursuit that would grow of more and more commanding interest as life should wax on toward eternity. " Moreover I was conscious that my^ social relations and dispositions were pleasant and kindly, and not such as to disqualify for the pastoral service. I had a strong con- fidence in human brotherhood, something of its feeling. " On the other hand, were there not other paths in life, other callings, which equally adapted themselves to my mental and personal aptitudes, and which, while caring more for financial interest, opened methods of influence and benefaction equally, though differently, essential and vital to social and political well-being and the triumph of the kingdom of God among men .■■ It is possible too I had still some remains of the worldly and political ambi- tion of earlier years — dreams, which, however improbable and removed from my course of feeling and action, it was pleasant to hold as possibilities. Furthermore, my educa- tion, though not aloof from theology, had never been 114 ^^ UMAN MARCELL US POST. Strictly or exclusively theological, but rather literary, clas- sic, legal, historical, scientific. "The situation I felt to be solemnly critical. I was- sorely perplexed. Besides seeking divine guidance, and intense personal questioning, I consulted my associates and friends, and especially my wife. I felt that she had rights in this matter. She had not married me as a minister. She was, at the time of our marriage and from the habit and training of childhood, intensely attracted,, by conviction, taste, custom, and social and family rela- tionship, to another form of church order than that itito which I was to enter. But with that true nobility and self-sacrifice which ever marked her, and with her sincere piety and devotion to Christ rising above ecclesiastical predilections or prejudices, and with the beautiful and loving devotion of a wife to what she thought was the true career of her husband, she gave me but one counsel, and that was to enter the ministry. "After full df liberation I decided that such was my duty. I was now thirty years of age, the age for entering the priesthood according to the Jewish law, the age of our Lord at entering on his public preaching — an age mature for me to go forward if I was ever to do so. The Congre- gational Association of Illinois — and there was but one in the state at that time — was soon to meet at Jackson- ville. I applied to them for their recommendation to preach the gospel in the ministry. I objected to the term 'license.' It savored of hierarchy. I refused to accept a license, from them or any mortal man, to speak in the name of my Saviour, and the Saviour of the world. I wished a recommendation — on examination — to Christian people, to the churches especially, which they represented, as one fitted in their opinion to preach the gospel unto the edification of the brethren and the saving of souls, and CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. 115 worthy of the confidence of the churches and of Christian people. This I asked — nothing more; I would receive nothing more ; they could give nothing more. I repudi- ated the term ' license ' in any form of recommendation they might give, and wished my statement might be spread on the records of the church in order that the sig- nificance of the action I was taking might never be mis- understood or misconstrued. If they felt it not compati- ble with their views or principles to grant my request, I should withdraw my application ; perhaps might construe it, under the circumstances, as a providential indication adverse to my purpose to enter the ministry, but not as making it unlawful for me to speak, should any wish to hear, whatever, whenever, and wherever it might be according to my conscience to speak in the name of Jesus Christ my Lord. " My paper at first seemed to startle the association — seemed likely to prove a firebrand or at least an explosive. Had I been young, immature, a stranger knocking at their doors, they would have incontinently shut them in my face. But I was in mature life — their acquaintance and their peer ; I told them I left the matter with them to decide, but I was only reaffirming to them their owa principles. Finally they appointed to examine their stand- ards a committee, who, when they met after adjournment, reported that it was as I had said. They voted to give the 'recommendation,' and to put it on record. It was subsequently thought best to join the ordination form and service with it, as it was desirable I should immediately enter on the duties of pastor." Of his pastoral relation thus inaugurated, Mr. Post says : " I found it on the whole pleasant and beneficial to both body and mind. The church was plain, but cultivated 1 1 6 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. much beyond the average ; a thinking and earnest people, some among them men of eminent force. They were kind, considerate. The students and, I think, the com- munity generally were my friends. The church pros- pered in the main. But I think that then and always I have wanted in the little managements, the versatility in small expedients and policies, which seem to have — and fitly — much to do with what is so-called success, and is such, as far as numerical increase is concerned. This perhaps has been owing to my having been so immersed in an ideal life, and to my natural contempt for everything that did not seem to me based on substantial merit. " I have always been wanting, too, in facility of expe- dients and in practiced skill in the Sabbath-school work. I think the great drawback has been due to the fact that I lived in my childhood in such a region and such a period in the history of the Church that I received no Sabbath-school training and practice either in childhood at home or subsequently at college. So, though fond of children and in quick sympathy with them, I have never been, as it was very desirable a pastor should be, a practical, skillful, and effective Sabbath-school worker. Perhaps my education and association have been too much, too exclusively in colleges and institutions and circles devoted to the higher culture. But my personal relations to my church were ever those of cordial affec- tion, of free, friendly, companionable, social intercourse." Touching creeds and systematic theologies, Mr. Post writes in this connection : — " I think I did the people good in the way of implant- ing germinal ideas and tendencies and seeds of character, and, I trust, of right thinking in matters theological, though I had never completed a theological course. My mind was diverted and forced by my situation and profess- CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. II7 orship into other channels. My theology when I entered the ministry was still formative ; my master and textbook, the New Testament ; my theological seminary and gymna- sium, chiefly the pulpit and pastorate and the exigencies of preaching and practice. I have had little time for speculative or dogmatic theological metaphysics or litera- ture. From my historic pursuits I have had to study Christianity in the concrete very much more than in the metaphysical or the abstract. These facts in my own life have been, though not without serious drawbacks, still not without serious advantages. My mind has been impris- oned by few early commitments and has borne the stamp of no theological rabbi or school or party. It has been, and is now, free ; and my own early struggles have made me more tolerant of individual thought and of abnormal thinking in others, where I have found evidences of sin- cerity and humility. I have had more sympathy with those that, under the prevalent theodicies of the church, feel the agony of spirits in prison or in bonds. But from these very causes there may have been much that was crude and too great a tendency to the apologetic or theoretic and too much reliance on the mere intellectual element— too much betrayal of the theological genesis and speculation of my own mind in the closet or study, in the productions of the pulpit. But on the whole I think I recognize a divine guidance, having in view my especial phase and condition and the exigencies of my work. I have been all my life a learner and with ever-increasing strength of reliance on the great vital and Christly truths and features of Christianity. There is in my mind an increasing tendency to a sense of the limifations of my certain knowledge, and a toning down of dogmatism or peremptoriness in merely secondary and inferential doctrines — the corollaries or deductions in systematic theologies." Il8 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Among Mr. Post's papers is one written and signed by himself, dated January 15 (and as nearly as can be made out, in 1845), evidently answering some communication. It will be read with interest in this connection : — " My views of ecclesiastical order I believe to agree in all essential points with' those of the Pilgrim Fathers and the early Congregationalists both in this country and England. For an expression of these views I refer to the Congregational Catechism published at New Haven, in 1844. I believe in that treatise are developed the true principles of apostolic and primitive church order; and the practice of the Congregationalists o'f New England, as exhibited in it, I regard as varying from tjiem in no essential feature, though I think some parts of New Eng- land in the practice approach nearer those principles than others. I also refer to Neander's History of the Church during the first three centuries, translated by Rose, pub- lished in Philadelphia in 1843, as embracing in Section 2, pages 102-132, the true principles of ecclesiastical order. In regard to ' Terms of Communion ' (on which the Catechism referred to seems not fully explicit) I believe that Christ invites all true disciples to remember him at his table ; nor do I find any authority for man's limiting that invitation by any other condition than His institution and the very nature and intent of the ordi- nance require, namely, true discipleship." Through the forty years of his pulpit ministrations Mr. Post left no manuscript of sermons in shape for publication. A few in later times were published from shorthand notes. But of the great mass of them scarcely anything renftins but disjecta membra, often mere catch- words or hieroglyphics undecipherable by any one but himself. And it is indeed to be deplored that so much of the eloquence and pathos and wondrous imagery and CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. II9 *'life thoughts" with which his sermons abounded should leave a record only in the fugitive memory of those who heard him. Of extempore preaching and the reasons which led to it, he says (mss.) : "I was, at the time I began regularly to preach, giving five lectures a week on history. I had much study, reading and thinking connected with prep- aration for the lectures. I had a scheme of philosophy and method and program for the study of universal history, which had grown much from my blind days. I had a dream of historic authorship and was stimulated by seeing miscellaneous attendants, of different profes- sions, ages and sexes, gathering from the village at the lecture hour into my lecture room. Frequently I was compelled, by the state of my finances, to be my own hostler and driver and gardener and jobber about the homestead. That compelled considerable out-of-door life and contributed to sustain health under the mental strain and pressure. But I felt I had by my historic lectures all the confinement and close use of the eye and hand that I could bear. I could not add to these by writing sermons. I must use a skeleton and a brief, a sign card to guide in arrangement, to hold to unity of subject and logic, to suggest leading thought or illustration, to keep from drivel or wandering or mere [superficial .'] work — to relieve memory, to remove anxiety, to enable the mind to act freely and with instantaneous spontaneity, and an abandon to theme, thought, emotion, passion of the moment, without fear of being drawn off my course, but without requiring the confinement or mechanical labor of writing or of reading sermons. I had long believed that preaching should if possible be by immediate inter- course, interchange, interflash between speaker and hearer, through eye, posture, feature, gesture. It seemed to me it I 20 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. I could be done in the pulpit as well as at the bar, and should be so done — if it could be well done. It was certainly worth the trial, especially as it was evident to me I should have to preach in this way, if at all, from considerations above-noted relating to health. This has always been my ideal of preaching, viz : direct, speaking address, but with previous labor, study, thought, reading, and writing, in order not to load the memory as for reci- tation but to equip and quicken the mind, to make it ready and facile, to furnish it with the dialect of the theme; to brood the theme into life and passion and power ; to insphere and incorporate it with the speaker ; not only to carve the statue into symmetry and grace, but to make it live, breathe, talk, and love, aglow with idealism, with truth lit up, and electric through the spirit of God touch- ing the human soul. Such had been my ideal, my aspi- ration, if not expectation, my attempt and ambition. . I must, therefore, make my preparation for the pulpit largely under the open sky, in outdoor life and motion, in labor, travel, and the scenery of society and nature; in walking, working, driving, and brooding — through all combined. " I began my preaching with a brief, small as my hand. I presume it was feeble as well as small, for although I was accustomed to free, extemporaneous address and argument, I could not — in the strange circumstances of the new position and function, I dared not — give myself over to a self-oblivion and an utter commitment and abandonment to the theme and the occasion which are essential to power. It had only the merit, in regard to method and form as a sermon, of a beginning, I believe, in the right way ; a way which, I am convinced, is the best, if attainable — if the idiosyncrasies of nature or culture of the preacher are competent to it. I have had many trials, discouragements, conscious failures, in- CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. 121 tense self-disgust and mortification, at times shrinking from the thought of ever entering the pulpit again ; a constant and continual sense of shortcoming, even of coming miserably short of my ideal and of the occasion and theme and their demands. But I have never aban- doned this mode of preaching, and attempted reading, without feeling that I was making in practical effect failures more miserable still, and without being con- strained by my own self-consciousness and the utterance of friends, by the faces of my hearers, the aspect of assemblies, and by the advice of one in whose taste and judgment as in whose sympathy and love I could ever trust, to return to the abandoned, though difficult and laborious, way. . . . "Upon a.11 this preparation for the pulpit there must be light and heat and life from a higher world, from com- munion with the Invisible and being possessed by the constraining love of God and man." In 1843 Mr. Post with Mrs. Post and the three children took the first trip back to Middlebury, and there he preached a number of times in the old Congregational church ; and Mr. Roberts, in his memorial address hereto- fore referred to, says of these sermons and their delivery : " The fashion was new to the drowsy crowd that had so long sat in cushioned ' ease in Zion ' giving at best an enforced attention to the regulated rise and fall or mono- tone of the minister's reading. And a very effective fashion it was if I may judge from the account given me by an enthusiastic freshman in a letter to me, November 7, 1843 • 'Your friend Post,' he writes, 'was here two or three weeks after this term commenced. He has now returned to his station in Illinois. His sermons were some of the finest productions I ever heard. They were admired by every one that listened to them. His ges- 1 22 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. tures and whole manner are coincident with the grandeur of his imagination, which indeed ' bodied forth the forms of things unknown.' I would give more for his powers of mind untutored than for all the acquired powers of a Noah Webster. He had nothing but the heads of his ■discourse before him. Such displays make me sick of delving among Greek roots and Latin exceptions. So much for your old classmate by a green freshman." During this visit, a two days' excursion was made with Governor Slade and Messrs. Ira Stewart and Philip Battell, through Lincoln township and up " Potato Hill " {now known as Mount Lincoln), the trip embracing a long climb, full of adventure, for many hours without ■water, and a night passed on one of the shoulders of the mountain, under the open sky, with no shelter from the keen air but a rocky ledge and blanket and a fire of pine logs. The final ascent was made with the dawn, and was rewarded with a cloudless and magnificent view. Mr. Post writes after his return to Jacksonville (Octo- ber 27, 1843) : " I have had one splendid dream of Lincoln since I returned, and two on my way out here. I regard the impressions and recollections of that expedition as alone worth my visit to New England. I turned and gave the mountain one long, lingering look as I passed in the stage through Whiting, and its solitary top, amid lesser peaks that columned up the eastern sky, wore on its extreme peak a crown of black cloud. I looked, and then it faded from my view, till when .' " January 15, 1844, chronicles the death of Governor Duncan, the first friend of Mr. Post in Jacksonville; the one on whose advice he came to that place. Touching the death of Governor Duncan is the following extract from a letter, dated December 23, 1884, written by Dr. Post and published by Mrs. Julia Duncan Kirby in con- nection with a sketch of her father's life. CALLED TO THE PASTORATE. I 23 " I shall never forget that night nor the figures and the grouping around that bed of death. The night winds were out, and there was a stir in the elements, as seem- ingly in sympathy with the hour when a great and strong soul was departing. The blasts came in gusts, fitfully, now sighing and sobbing, and now with loud and mighty wail sweeping through the forest and shaking the window casements. "It was the last hour. The sword given him by an admiring and grateful country hanging on the wainscot- ing over the bed of death, and all the tokens and hopes of mortal fame, what were they all at that hour to one from the heavens and the earth forever passing away ; one con- sciously in the outdrift of the eternities .' That form of grandest manhood, strongest and noblest of all its physi- cal types that were grouped around him in that chamber and seemingly assuring its possessor of the longest life, was in the wrestle with death, sinking lower and lower into the everlasting silence. "And now the last words have been spoken, the last look given to his loved wife and the sad faces around him ; the communion with time and earth is over, all save one utterance. Just as the pale, silent seal was set, I asked him : ' Governor Duncan, is Christ precious to you at this hour } ' Brokenly, but to our hearing distinctly, came the response, the last words spoken by him till the earth and sea give up their dead : ' Ever precious, ever precious.' And so the soul of our prince and brother passed to his Father and God." CHAPTER XL AN ADDRESS AND AN ESSAY. Address in 1844 on "The Heroism of the Democratic Ages," and trip to Lebanon, III. — Contributions to The Biblical Repository on " The Immortality of the Soul." IN August, 1844, at Lebanon, 111., and before the Alumni Association of McKendree College, Mr. Post delivered an address on "The Heroism of the Demo- cratic Ages." According to his practice in such cases he spoke from loose notes, and afterward, at the request of a committee from the association, wrote them out in full for publication ; and the address was subsequently printed and distributed in pamphlet form. Of his trip, which was a decidedly roundabout one, by way of Naples and St. Louis, and of a visit to the latter place, which may have remotely brought about his call to the St. Louis pulpit, he writes from Lebanon, August 20th : — " I went" to Reuben Knox, where I was domiciled. On Sunday I preached, morning and at night, for the Third Presbyterian Church. Was sent for by Mr. Bullard to aid him at four o'clock, but I had a sick headache ; indeed if I had been at Jacksonville I should not have attempted to preach at all. But I had been advertised in the papers the night before and there seemed a necessity. It hurt my head less, however, to preach than to read the hymns. I got through after a while. Preached from the text, ' What shall it profit a man .' ' etc., to a large house, I hope to their good, for the effort was painful to me. AN ADDRESS AND AN ESSA Y. I 2 5 " I left St. Louis on Monday morning at eight o'clock, passed through lUinoistown, along a road that four weeks since had been submerged in ten or fifteen feet of water. The appearance of the houses, to which some of the occu- pants have returned, and in which many are suffering from sickness and destitution, is sad. Rode to Belleville, through dust of which I never saw the like, and through heat that, combined with dust, almost made us desperate." Following are some of the leading thoughts in the Lebanon address : — " The great social feature of the era on which we are entering is Democracy — universal political equality. . . . " Many have supposed that we are entering upon an era of great nations and little men ; that man socially is to be mighty, but individually mean and mediocre ; that the ages of heroic passion are past, those of equable comfort and tame mediocrity and petty agitation are entering. " I wish, oh this occasion, to raise the question whether or no such speculations are founded in a sound philosophy of human nature and of the progress of society } Must greatness of individual character perish in the consum- mation of the democratic tendency of modern society .' . . . Upon raising the inquiry. What is to be the heroism of the democratic ages .' one obvious answer suggested by the aspect of those ages, and indeed implied in their very definition, is that it is not to be of the order of the past. . . . " While we exult in the cheering sunrise of the coming era, we feel that we stand amid the sober tv/ilight and solemn shadows of one that is just dying. Its order of grandeur and beauty disappears from history ; its mighty and its fair are fast fading in the past to come no more. . . . The broken spear and helm and shield have fallen with family arms on the graves of forgotten heroes. But I 26 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. the broken wall and fallen battlement and defaced armor and mutilated marbles and violated tombs are memorials not only of a buried age but of a buried civilization — of a style of thought and feeling and manners that have perished in giving birth to the present ; and the great- ness that leads on that order of civilization has perished with it. The heroes of elder story and eloquence and song are gone, and the broken sword and lyre molder together on their graves. "The future opens on us with a perspective of humaa society presenting one vast ocean level, which, though ever and anon ridged by tempest or upheaved by earth- quakes, permits nothing permanently to rise above itself. The ' castled lord and cabined slave ' have gone forth from their habitations and have met and blent. The castle is a ruin, the cabin has disappeared. No individual starts into individual or social prominence from an hereditary eminence of influence and power that of itself makes him by birth a bulwark or a scourge of a nation. " Other orders of heroism too, kindred to that of the aristocratic sentiment, though not identified with it, have disappeared. No Achilles or Alexander or Coeur de Lion or Bayard can find place in modern civilization. The heroism of chivalry and physical prowess vanishes before the advancing art and the new instrumentalities of war. And the heroism of war itself, we may hope, is destined, soon to fade away before the progress of civilization and Christianity. The ' noise of battle ' and ' the garments rolled in blood,' with the tourney and knightly mail, will, we trust, soon be numbered amid the characteristics of a past civilization. . . . "The idolatry of naked or wicked intellect, too, is passing away. Mankind are learning that intellect apart from virtue is but a shame to the individual and AN ADDRESS AND AN ESSA Y. 127 a curse to the race — that strength is not greatness, nor splendor divinity. . . . " Thus as we look over society the past forms of indi- vidual greatness are everywhere vanished, the individual disappears — the monarch, the baron, the warrior, the idols of mere eloquence or philosophy or song are gone. The masses enter. The millions alone are great. . . . "Now, as heretofore, the agitation of great principles and vast moral interests produces great men; and my hopes for the future lie in the fact that it seems to me thick with the agitation of the mightiest questions and the conflict of the mightiest principles that can stir the soul of man. . . . " It is obvious that in achieving the destiny appointed to it in heaven society must wage to a successful consum- mation the battles already begun of liberty, truth, and love, and that in the events and interests of these con- flicts the future history of man is bound up ; in these, all the vast, intense, spirit-stirring crises of coming times are to be found. It is my conviction that these conflicts are to make the coming ages the heroic ages of time. . . . " The battles of humanity are to be fought hereafter on a wider field and with mightier forces and under different banners. Not confined to section or school or sect or nation or race or clime, they are to embrace universal man, fused by an intense, rapid, and all-pervading intelli- gence into a single republic of principle and opinion. The theater is to be enlarged, the interests vaster, and the actors themselves, it would seem, would naturally assume a loftier stature and a mightier strength. . . . " Amid the confusion and darkness and alarm of a transition period, like the present, while I see an old world passing away and another being born, though I can- not yet clearly discern the form and structure of that new 128 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. creation, I see a glorious triad of organic forces that are destined to rule the confusion and create the new order. This triad are Liberty, Truth, and Love. They are to lead on the great enterprises of Christian civilization. Their triumph over slavery, falsehood, and selfishness is to make the final and most glorious chapter in the history of time. But this triumph, before it is fully achieved, will require many noble and gifted and beautiful and brave and hallowed spirits to become heroes and martyrs in its behalf. Though already the glorious issue of this conflict is recorded in the book beside the Throne, for ages its cause on earth may lie through darkness and tears ; but the enterprise is in movement. Already is its reveille beating through the world and calling for heroes — heroes of the soul and of God. " I see abroad among the nations that spirit that nerved the arm of the warrior and inspired the lay of the poet and touched the orator's lips with fire in the once ' bright climes of battle and of song,' whose trumpet voice in elder times shook the mountains of Hellas and the JEgedia Isles, And fulmined over Greece, To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne, and made the marbles of the Eternal City tremble in the days when she was eternal — who, in the retrospect of far-gone ages, is seen raising her trophies on Marathon or Salamis, at Thermopylae, bending in tears over the dust of heroes, or leading the triumph up the proud Capitoline. It is the Spirit of Liberty, youthful, vigorous, and enthu- siastic as in her ardent prime ; not as she was worshiped in ancient Greece, or revealed herself in the austere wolf- nursed genius of the Seven Hills, the tutelar goddess of the Few that in her name trampled on millions of slaves AN ADDRESS AND AN ESS A Y. 1 29 and robbed and ravened through the world ; not the bar- baric independence of the Goth, or the partial, haughty, anarchical freedom of feudalism, or the God-defying cannibal liberty of atheism, or the wild fanatic liberty of the destructive, or the ferocious, blind, lawless liberty of the mob, but liberty enlightened, humanized. Chris- tian ; the handmaid of order, the guardian of rights, reverent of law, submissive to God ; not sectional or partial, of a caste or a race, but a child of human nature and the Christian faith, and embracing in her scope all to whom that nature and faith attach. " She has heretofore often been of a dark, malign, haughty, and ferocious aspect, often a mad, eyeless, and cruel force, lifting herself, like a Briaraeus, beneath moun- tain masses of wrong ; and the nations have shuddered at her grim visage and many-handed strength. But Chris- tianity has breathed on her. She has heard the voice of Jesus, and the frenzy has left her eye and brain, and she is putting on an aspect of serene and celestial beauty. . . . " Her battles heretofore have chiefly been with the tyranny of the one, and the despotisms of force, politi- cal or ecclesiastical. She has henceforth to conflict with the tyranny of the millions, and despotism that wields a moral oppression. She has shown herself superior to the sword of power ; she must triumph over the terrors of opinion. She has ceased to crouch before thrones ; she must learn to stand erect in the presence of majorities. The principles of physical and political liberty have, to a great extent, triumphed and taken possession of the theory, if not of the practice, of society. Those of moral and intellectual liberty are yet to be vindicated. But that she will ultimately triumph universally, God has uttered his decree in prophecy and providence. She will not 130 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. have accomplished her mission until she has thoroughly- pervaded and mastered universal humanity. . . . " I see another dominant power at work down the coming ages ; a power of which liberty is but the pioneer and precursor, commissioned to prepare her way and secure her free course, that she may ' run and be glori- fied'; a power that bears on the car of the highest;; whose 'motion as when the lightning flasheth,' and whose, 'voice as when the thunder speaketh,' were symbolized on Eylaeus' banks, in the prophet's vision of the cherubim. That power is Truth. ' Truth, not as, in a golden dream, she descended on the Grecian sage and partially un- veiled her dazzling beauty (whereof he affirms that could, we see her as she is, we should be wonderfully ravished with her loveliness) ; not as she walked Ilissus' banks, or the shades of Tusculum, or informed the eloquence that shook Cecropia or the Forum, or inspired the muse that wandered the Delphic steep or Ionian Isles, or on the. Palatine bowed in the temple of the god of light; but the voice of that divine Word, from the beginning speak- ing but unregarded in the heart of man, — in the world and yet not known of it, — which uttered its solemn revelation to the Chaldaean wanderer and his descend- ants on the plains of Mesopotamia and Syria, under the shadows of the throne of the Pharaohs, in the Arabian Desert, and amid the mountains of Judaea, which spake in the burthen of the prophet and the rapture of the Psalmist and in the earthquake and thunderings of Sinai. But her fullest, mightiest, sweetest eloquence and her vision of divine beauty comes forth from Calvary, the Truth of the Cross, — truth of the justice dazzlingly pure, the love stronger than death, the forgiveness stranger and sweeter than song, of our God ; that ' he can now be just and justify him that believeth in Jesus.' This AN ADDRESS AND AN ESSA Y. 1 3 I is the truth that is to subdue and hallow and charm the world. . . . " Another power I see amid the coming ages, demand- ing and creating heroes — the most glorious, most divine of the triad ; without which the others are objectless, dead, impossible — apart from which Liberty could not subsist, and would be a curse if she could ; aiid Truth could not conquer, and would be valueless if she did — a spirit of transcendent might and beauty descending from the skies and walking among men ; the vitalizing principle of the universe, the life of the human soul, and of the very essence of God. It is Love. . . . "It is that love whose birthplace is in the bosom of God and embraces all God's children — which descended from heaven in the person of his Son, and bore our sor- rows and healed our sickness and visited our loathsome- ness and guilt and ruin, and finally through death wrought our eternal peace ; a love which, while nature was wres- tling with mortal agony mid the scoff and hate and blas- phemy of a world for which it died, while the rocks were rent and the sun was darkened and the graves opened, and God hid his face, and death and hell seemed to have power — from far down the valley of the shadow of death, whither the meek and mighty One was passing, uttered itself in the voice, ' Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.' Here is the greatness of Love — the heroism of a God. " Such, in ages since, has ever been the character of her greatness and the condition of her triumph ; mighty in patience, lofty in meekness, irresistible by gentleness, omnipotent by suffering, glorious in humility, she prevails by yielding, overcomes by forgiving, conquers by dying. ... In the fact that the coming era is to be truly and intensely Christian I read both the assurance and the 132 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. cast of its greatness. Jesus Christ is to be the model of greatness to coming men, the model hero of human his- tory, the realized ideal of the human soul. . . . "Young gentlemen, it has not been my object, in addressing you on this question, to indulge in idle specu- lation or beguile the hour with fanciful conjectures. . . . But I have wished to direct your effort to that greatness which the coming age will demand, will value and reward. The man who, at the present epoch, harnesses himself to such conflicts as engaged the heroism of former times will find he has as much mistaken his age and civilization as if he were to go into the battles of the nineteenth century, lightning and thundering with firearms, with the bow and mace and mail of the thirteenth. The man who does not fasten himself to a Christian order of greatness dooms himself to oblivion or infamy. The era of physi- cal, artificial, ideal heroism is passing away ; that of moral grandeur is hastening on. The glory of the past is often but the 'rusted mail that hangs a hatchment over the champion's dim and moldering tomb,' or, like that dead world seen by Ezekiel, where lay Egypt and Elam and Tyrus and the daughters of the famous nations, with all their multitude around their graves, a land of silence and the shadow of death, where lies the hero on his broken sword and the bard on his silent lyre, and Oratory and Philosophy and Empire, of an elder world, are but dim and silent shadows bending like Niobe over their mighty slain. . . . " May yours be the honor that comes not from the acclaim of the million or the glorification of sect or party or the passing hour, but the approbation of the 'still small voice' of conscience, and the verdict of the dying hour and of the last great tribunal — that honor which, when earthly grandeur shall be but an ill-remem- AN ADDRESS AND AN ESS A Y. 1 33 bered dream, shall have a lyre and crown in the skies, and amid the new heavens shine forever as brightness amid the stars of God." In The Biblical Repository for October, 1844, appears an article on " The Evidence from Nature of the Immor- tality of the Soul," which will be read with interest in connection with essays on the same and kindred topics appearing in The New Englander ten years afterwards, and to which reference is made later on. The argument for immortality is not based, like those of the Pythagorean or Stoic or Peripatetic schools, on physical grounds, such as the indivisibility and immateri- ality of the soul. " The necessary immortality of a created being is an absurdity. God alone hath it and all other beings are "or are not as he wills." The argument is predi- cated upon moral grounds ; on the existence of a rational and benevolent and just Ruler of the universe, who has created and, if he will, can perpetuate the soul. "God has assured to the soul another life ; inasmuch as he has assured it he is reasonable — the perfection of reason. He has declared this to it by giving it a reason — one which irresistibly requires and expects order and congruity in the universe — a correspondency of ends to means — and then demands an adequate end for the human souL . . . He has created here a capacity for endless progress, an intellect susceptible of infinite enlargement ; a moral nature capable of Godlike virtue and glory, of sympathies and emotions that can embrace the unseen and everlast- ing, and, by a discipline of threescore years and ten, he has been educating these faculties to higher excellence and power. By a life of struggle with pain and hardship and grief and temptation he has been schooling the soul to habits of patience and courage and self-mastery and faith, and subduing it to gentleness, meekness, ahd love ; 134 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. and by the expansion and excitation of its faculties, has been waking in it the feeling infinite, that reaches through the dark frontier of the visible after the divine and ever- lasting. Do not all these indicate aptitudes that reach into another world ? or has he through this process plumed and renewed the soul for a higher flight and wider sphere and angelic rapidity of progress, merely that in mid-career, with eye and pinion strained towards immortal destinies, it should drop at once sheer down the steep of everlasting nothing? . . . " The eye implies the light, the fin the water, and the wing the air ; and, taught of God, it inquires. What does the soul of man imply ? Where shall it find its end ? in its own earthly life ? in powers accumulated to be destroyed ? virtues disciplined to annihilation ? capacities for active enjoyment expanded for eternal blasting? an eye created and opened on God's sun to be quenched in eternal darkness? the wing of a seraph, nerved and plumed and taught to scale the celestial height, merely to sink fluttering in vain mid eternal chaos and night? . . . Again the human mind may be assured that God wills the soul's immortality because he is benevolent. . . . " In assuring me that he delights in happiness, he has assured me that it is his will that the mighty capacity for happiness often developed by the human soul just before death, which, by a life of intellectual and moral enlarge- ment, by the disciplining of the passions, and the perfect- ing of the virtues, has attained an angelic vastness, shall not be quenched forever in the grave. Surely a God delighting in happiness would not wantonly annihilate such an infinitude of happiness as was prepared for in the mind of a dying Newton or Paul. . . . " Again the human soul might insist, ' God has prom- ised me immortality by informing me he is just.' He has AN ADDRESS AND AN ESSA Y. 1 35 thus informed me by placing in me a conscience, and the laws of my nature compel me to regard the God and Father of my conscience as just. I am constrained to believe that he regards right and wrong with the same emotions that he has constituted me to feel ; that there is in his mind the same feeling of indignation at wrong and of the fitness of punishment as its natural comple- ment ; and the same painful sentiment of violated moral order till retribution overtakes impenitent guilt, and hap- piness and honor reward suffering virtue. And as he has power to secure this result my moral sense becomes to me his declaration that somewhere and at some time all wrongs shall be righted, all moral acts meet a due reward, and moral order be vindicated. In earnest ex- pectation of this vindication ' the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain until now.' Yet it comes not now or here. But the voice of God within me, assuring me it shall come, points me to another life for its consummation. . . . "In the whole circle of falsehood that the most abject and abhorred superstition ever fabled is there one more hideous or more monstrous than those which the credul- ity of skepticism has here embraced ? Strange that men can so believe, and still stranger that they can glory in so believing ! ' Methinks,' one might remonstrate, ' could I come to such a view of God and the destiny of the human soul, it would impend constantly over me like a horrid dream, too horrid for words — as some dreadful, abhorred, deadly things, such as men speak of, not in places of glad light and life, but whisper with pale lips, in foul, accursed glooms, and amid charnel-houses where forms of corrup- tion and horror gather on the senses and on the soul. I could not haste to proclaim it as some blissful discovery to mankind, and call upon my fellows to come and rejoice 136 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. and be exceeding glad with me when I had found the eter- nal grave. Methinks I could not triumph to think that my soul, with its vast aspirations after the Everlasting and Good and Fair and Great, its memory and affection, its hopes, its reason grasping after imperishable truth, its 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' its faith and love that had gone forth toward an imagined Holy One, and its moral nature capable of wearing immortal glory and beauty, was soon to lie down on the breast of corruption and cease to be ; that heaven, the mourner's dream, the martyr's goal, the pilgrim's home, the life-hope of suffer- ing virtue, had become to me a dull, meaningless word, a beautiful mirage vanished from the illimitable desert of being ; that the loved ones that have faded away from my side, who still rise in the dreams of memory and sleep, are utterly perished ; that the mighty and gifted and holy dead of past time are now nothing. Methinks, if I could come to such a conclusion, it would be in silence and sor- row. I would keep the awful secret in my own breast ; I would not whisper it to my dearest friend ; I would not breathe it in the ear of solitude and darkness. I would take my Bible and sit down for one more beautiful and happy dream, and then in mercy hand it over to mankind, and wait in mute despair till Almighty Accident or Tyranny should lay me in everlasting sleep with the brutes." CHAPTER XII. LETTERS AND INCIDENTS. Misadventures of a trip to Burlington. — Letters and Mss. in 1846 descrip- tive of Mackinac Island and strange incidents and serious illness there. — Scarlet fever at home. THE subjoined account of a trip from Jacksonville to Burlington, Iowa, is without date, but narrates experiences which must have occurred about the time of the Mormon exodus, and it may properly be inserted in this connection. It was written by Mr. Post merely for the entertainment of his children and without any thought of its publication, but it gives a chapter of such strange misadventures that it must prove interesting, especially to those accustomed only to the present con- dition of society and modes of travel in the west : — " I had engaged to be in Burlington on the first day of January, to dedicate the house of worship of the Congregational church there, of which brother Salter was pastor. The twenty-fifth of December was a dis- agreeable day. The weather had suddenly changed from a soft, moist, mild condition to one of severe cold, and the day was rough, raw, and unpleasant ; yet I was compelled to start on that day in order to meet my engagements. "Just as I was seated with a pleasant family group at an inviting Christmas dinner, the stage horn blew, announcing the arrival of the coach at my door, and I must rise, say good-by to the company and dinner, and hustle myself into the stage. The case was imperative. 138 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. The driver in tliose days required the utmost haste, and he was master of the situation. 'Ready of unready, no delay.' This was the first augury auspicating evil for the intended journey. The trip to Quincy was through raw and chilly winds, and over roads which the access of cold had transformed from slush into something like a ledge of rough and broken rocks. It was wearisome, slow, and comfortless. But we reached Quincy at last in some fashion. " Arriving there I was met by some friends who en- gaged me for a lecture in that place on my return from Burlington the week following. " The next day I took passage with the mail-carrier from Quincy to Nauvoo ; on entering which place I encountered a gentleman pretentiously dressed in black broadcloth and making quite a display of watch-fob, who addressed me with a polite bow : ' Stranger, I want to invite you to attend a ball here the next New Year's evening. It is given in celebration of our victory over the Mormons whom we have just expelled and driven over the river,' etc. I thanked him, but told him it would be impossible for me to attend, as I should on that day be in another part of the country. Alas, I little foresaw what would be possible or rather would be inevitable on that day. " Crossing the river to Montrose, I took stage from there by way of Fort Madison to Burlington, which latter place I reached in due time. Receiving a kindly greeting from my dear brother Salter, I enjoyed with his people a pleasant service on the following day (Sunday), but to their solicitations for my longer stay and visit, I was compelled to answer in an absolute negative, as my engagement at Quincy required my immediate return. " The next morning was dark with a tempest of wind LE TTERS AND INCIDENTS. 1 3 9 and rain, but I hurried through my breakfast and waited for the stage. Whether from the violence of the storm or carelessness, it did not call, but had gone and left me. Yet I must go ; my engagements compelled me to do so, if possible. Mr. Grimes, then a young lawyer, afterwards governor and senator, kindly took me in his buggy\ and volunteered to drive me to Fort Madison, or in case he did not overtake the stage, then to Montrose. But soon after starting the wind changed to the west. The rain became snow, and the weather suddenly grew bitterly cold. It grew so cold and tempestuous that we could not proceed beyond Fort Madison. But there fortunately we overtook the stage and I got aboard it. " We reached Montrose towards sunset. A crowd was massed there of all ages and both sexes, in most miser- able plight, from the cold and approaching night, the want of public house, or indeed any comfortable house for shel- ter or food, and especially from the fact that the violence of the wind, which was now blowing from the west almost a hurricane, had stopped the ferriage. The crowd was huddled together, cold, hungry, bedless, well-nigh shelter- less. There, was no further progress and the night was coming on. I inquired if no one had a boat that foot passengers could hire. ' No, stranger ; no one except a man down in the grocery yonder.' I received little encouragement that he could or would attempt to take me across. I found him in a low grocery or drinkery, amid gamblers and topers, himself evidently much intoxi- cated. To my loudest inquiry the answer was, ' No, stranger ; I cannot cross in such a time as this ; certainly . not for you alone.' I told him I could and would find a load for him, and forthwith obtained his half-maudlin con- sent to undertake to carry us over. I hurried back to the crowd and saw a man with two women and a young baby 140 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. that seemed to make the strongest appeal to my sympathy or humanity. I took him quietly aside, and told him that if he and his company would follow me, I could get him across the river. We stole away down to the river and committed ourselves to a small craft, a drunken ferryman, and a river rushing under a fierce wind with ice-floes and white-caps. Before reaching the middle of the river we were nearly capsized by the clumsiness of our oarsman and the violence of the surge and tempest. But the west wind impelled us on and we were approaching the shore when we found ourselves suddenly amid the rapidly float- ing ice ; running into which our boat whirled broadside to the waves, and they came dashing in upon us. I said to my companion, ' Take care of the baby ; I will get the women ashore.' So, plunging into the river, there about waist deep, running with swift tide and floating ice, I took one of the women in my arms and carried her to the shore. The other was heavier, was very heavy, and stag- gering under my burden I thought for a time we were about to have a baptism not in the Joe Smith ritual, but at length landed her. I then went for my trunk and deposited it on the bank. But we had been driven by the gale so far from our course that we were now on a lonely spot a quarter of a mile from any house, and my trunk was heavy and the nigjht was fast coming on ; indeed, had already come. I bethought myself of my companion whom I had aided and who now might aid me. But looking around, I saw him departing, going off into the dark without so much as a 'Thank ye.' There was nothing to do but to shoulder my trunk as I could and trudge on toward the distant light of a house, which, . wearied and well-nigh spent, after a time I found, and then deposited my trunk on the ground and rested. Pres- ently I heard footsteps and bethought myself that relief LETTERS AND INCIDENTS. 14 1 might be at hand. Directly, as a man was passing, in my blandest tones I said to him, 'I have a very heavy load.' He looked up a moment, looked at the trunk, and evi- dently taking in the situation, he said, ' I should think you had, stranger,' and passed on. Not in the most benevo- lent frame of mind, I took up that trunk again and toiled on until I came in front of what I could now see was a public house. A great crowd was before it, and I could see shadows in seesaw and zigzag motion cast upon the strongly lighted window. It flashed on me : ' Sure enough, here I am. This is the Walpurgis night, the anti-Mormon carnival ; and I am in it.' " Struggling along amid the crowd, noisy, blasphemous, and reeking with whiskey and tobacco, I at last reached the vicinity of the bar, where the lordly Boniface was doling out his liquors. I asked him if I could get supper. The response came out in tones so absolute and peremp- tory as forbade all parley or argument, ' No man can have anything to eat in this house till the regular supper at twelve o'clock.' " I saw at once that all appeal was useless. Nothing was to be expected from that quarter. I slunk away rebuked. As I cast about disconsolate, a happy thought struck me. I will find the kitchen and bring my appeal to a woman if I can find one there. Acting on this thought I gradually worked my way to a room in which the landlady was steaming and broiling over a large fire, where she was conducting her culinary processes for the coming supper for the multitude. I gently approached her and caught her attention. I told her I was tired and cold and hungry, and did n't belong to the crowd at all — was drenched in the Mississippi in carrying two of her own sex, who were strangers to me, through the waters to the shore ; I asked her if I could not warm myself a little 142 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. by her fire, and get a cup of coffee and a bite of some- thing to eat without waiting till past midnight. The appeal to her womanly sympathies moved her. She told me to take a position behind the door, and she would give me a cup of coffee and something to eat, and if I would take off my boots she would dry them at the fire for me. I need not say I obeyed and was rewarded, and was thankful there were women in the world. ' " Somewhat warmed and refreshed, and putting on a pair of slippers, I went back into the room of general rendezvous — parlor, I may call it by courtesy. Unfortu- nately my slippers had been wrought by some kind hand in rather fancy colors. As I entered, a fellow ran up to me and, looking down on the embroidery, cried out, 'Those are all-fired things for this business, ain't they, stranger .''... " Walpurgis followed. I cannot describe it. . . . "At length by some means I secured a room and retired, but my room was immediately over the dance and general powwow. During the livelong night, which was for the most part sleepless, I could think of nothing but of the fiddler chased by wolves into a deserted cabin in the forest, and pursued so closely that, leaving the door open, he ran up a ladder to a chamber above, closing the trapdoor behind him, and through a crevice in the floor reached the top of the door below, shut in the pack of wolves, which had entered in hot chase after him, and then fiddled all night while the wolves leaped and howled beneath. " At length morning came, and I descended into the room, which seemed as the wreck of some sleepy hollow filled with the debris of last night's carnival, and with men lying about snoring off their debauch. I inquired of the landlord about the Quincy stage. To my dismay LETTERS AND INCIDENTS. 1 43, I was told it had not come in on account of the weather and the roads. The mail had been brought on horseback. I inquired if I could not get a horse to convey me onward. ' No, stranger,' was the answer ; ' while we were at the ball last night the Mormons stole half our horses, and all that were not stolen have gone in hunt and chase of them.' "But I could not remain there with the condition of things around me, and I must go on to meet my lecture engagement. At length towards noon a wagon loaded with boxes of merchandise came along, on which I con- tracted to have my trunk carried on to Warsaw, some twenty miles distant, and started myself for the same place on foot. The weather had changed, and the snow was melting and the roads fast becoming slush and mud. The walking was slow and toilsome, but in my joy of escaping I hurried on cheerily until I began to find my boots feeling roomy and airy. I looked down, and lo ! the good woman, in her eagerness to dry them, had placed the boots so near the fire that she had burned them, and now they had split open. Here was a case beyond previ- sion or provision. But there was nothing to do but splash and hobble along with them as I could. . . . "At the close of the day I reached Warsaw, most dilapidated and demoralized. "Soon persons came to the hotel and wished me to preach for them in a religious service they were holding that evening. I pointed to my bedraggled and demolished condition, and told them that I was much of the condition of David's messengers, whom he had sent to Hanun and who on their return had to hide themselves for a season. However, my trunk arrived presently, and as I had ever felt it a duty to preach when I was asked and was able, and believed it might be of service to the cause of Christ,. I endeavored to do so on that occasion. 144 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " The next day I hurried on by steamer to Quincy and delivered my lecture ; and in the hospitable home of my pleasant friends, the Denmans, I supposed the troubles of my journey were at an end. They were themselves to drive on the morrow over to Jacksonville. " And we did start on the morrow, but a snowstorm set in, and the thermometer fell to fourteen degrees below zero. We floundered on tnrough the storm and the drifting snow as far as Griggsville ; started on the next morning in the same fearful temperature, but found the Illinois River impassable, frozen so as to stop all ferriage, but not with uniform thickness sufficient to make it practicable for passage over. " Driving up and down the river some six miles in quest of some place for passage, we could find none, and my friends were obliged to retrace their course some forty miles in the terrible cold, leaving me on the banks of the river. There was near by a steamboat which had been surprised by the sudden cold and lay in the middle of the river icebound. I managed to get on board of her and by means of small boats and planks and cutting ice, I succeeded, in connection with others who like myself felt they must get across, in reaching the eastern shore of the Illinois River. There my special difSculties termi- nated, and with them this story ends." In the summer of 1846, Mr. Post, with some friend whose name is not given, is making a tour through Springfield and Lebanon and the adjacent region (perhaps in the interest of the college), and is sojourning for a day or two with Rev. Mr. Eliot, at the village of Washington, a hundred miles away. In a letter to Mrs. Post (August 13), he writes : — "Sad were the thoughts — as at such times they LETTERS AND INCIDENTS. 1 45 always are — when I turned away from my sweet home and its loved inmates; but I committed you unto Him that careth for us, and I feel a delight in thinking you are in His hands. Anxious thoughts will arise at times. I think some of you may be ill, and I not there, and that sorrowing thought may go after the. husband and father. But it is sweet to think our heavenly Father is with you ever and knows all your trials and hears the prayer or sigh of pain that may come from the lips of any of you. . . . " Oh, the months and years ! How they have glided with noiseless silken wings away ! How fast and far they have borne us onward ! Beautiful days ! they have led us far and gently toward the sober eventide, the parting hour, the solemn night ; but, oh, the thought, dear thought, that beyond the line of darkness is a world of light where we and our sweet little ones may walk to- gether in unfading light forever ! Let us labor while the light of this life is around us to secure the certainty of that meeting. . . . " Tell my dear children to remember above all earthly things I wish them to become sincere and earnest lovers and followers of our Lord Jesus Christ." A few days afterwards Mr. Post was in Mackinac Island, from which place he writes (August 19) : — " I have just returned from a walk upon the heights along the fort ; and as I sat and mused with my eye wandering over the beautiful waters, my look and thought went far southward, and my fancies traversed the twilight space and pictured to me my sweet eyrie far, far away with the mother bird and the darling birdlings, and I wished I could be there to kiss my good-night, or that you were here beside me to enjoy and feel what I did." . . . 146 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. The stay of Mr. Post on this island furnishes a chapter of quite remarkable events, which are narrated in the Mss. " Soon after my landing and taking quarters at the hotel in the village, I was summoned to the Mission House with a hasty request that I would call there and see a lady who knew me and wanted to see me, as she was sick and among strangers, a little nurse alone being her companion. On " going there I found it was Miss Joanna Smith, a very pleasing, intelligent, and cultivated young lady, who for a time had been the soprano in my choir in the church in Jacksonville. She had been through Lake Superior with a company ; had been taken, sick on the voyage with a species of typhoid fever, and had been compelled to stop off at Mackinac. William Cullen Bryant and William B. Ogden had stopped and cared for her for a while, but both had been called home by hearing of sickness there, and my friend was now among strangers. Her sickness .seemed nigh unto death and was attende'd by strange hallucinations, some of which were so frightful that the ladies of the hotel whO' took care of her dared hardly remain in the room with her. . . . " One day I had been down bathing with Captain Casey, then in command of the fort, when word came that Miss Smith was near to death and would not live to see the sun, which was then declining, set ; and, omitting our cus- tomary walk, we hastened to the hotel and found her expecting to die and wishing to make her will. As there was no lawyer on the island I had to take the place of one and drew up the will. I spent the afternoon in doing it and getting her signature. Possibly that memorial of that hour may yet be found undestroyed. She did not die. The disease took a favorable turn that night ; but I was chilled, having sat in the open draft of the room LETTERS AND INCIDENTS. 1 4 7 through which the wind was blowing for hours, while I was writing out the instrument. Afterwards I had wan- dered forth on the shore of the lake, with the solemn, sad stars looking down from the deep azure of the heavens and talking to me as seldom in my life. They seemed to be watching and weeping over the untimely death of that young, bright life. I returned to the hotel ; a congestive chill set in ; I fainted away in the parlor and have only a dim recollection of being borne upstairs and having cold water dashed on my head all through the night ; and for some days I was quite prostrated in my bed, unable to move. So I and my friend were sick there together. " But meantime help was coming from another quarter. On the next steamer were Mrs. Charles Williams, of Chicago, aunt of my patient, who, hearing of her niece's case, had come to take care of her. She now had us both on her hands. I knew her slightly but pleasantly. I immediately felt the power of her presence as of a spirit of sweetness and life and peace. Her presence in the sick-room was wonderful. Her touch and tone had a magic, a personal magnetism, such as I have rarely found among men or women. A friendship arose between us that ended only with her life. With her influence and that of the light and air of the place, my natural life force soon reacted, and in a fortnight I was able to travel, and leaving my friends there until Miss Smith had recovered more strength I returned home." In addition to his own sore experiences during the trip Mr. Post on his return home found there, and now for the second time, the shadow of great anxiety and distress. The Mss. continue : " I was met by persons who, with solemn and commiserating faces, informed me that there was ' serious sickness ' at my home. Scarlet fever was 148 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. there in a most malignant form, but it was hoped it would not prove fatal. I found it all the sad faces led me to foreshadow. Three of my children were attacked by the dreaded scourge. The daughter, my eldest, slightly ; the two boys — these were all the boys I had at that time — were terribly stricken, seemingly near to death. My dear noble wife was bearing up bravely, but much worn with watching and working and with great solicitude and pain in her heart. "Days and nights of watching and weariness and anxiety deepening at times to absolute despair followed. I remember one night when, with a young lady friend, I was watching the face of little , our sweet 'Flower Boy,' as we termed him. The shadows of night seemed changed to the shadows of death ; they seemed to be unmistakably stealing over his wan, sunken, painful features. Oh, I felt that all I had in this world, how gladly would I give it for that little life ! and my heart went out to him and his little sick brother with a longing unutterable. . . . But God was kinder than our fears." CHAPTER XIII. CALLED TO ST. LOUIS. Call to the Third Presbyterian Church in St. Louis. — Call to Middlebury College. — Pressure from St. Louis, and obstacles in the way of removal thither. — Inducements that favored the call to St. Louis; its final acceptance. — The last years in Jacksonville. — The ideal home in retrospect. THIS chapter records one of the most important steps, as indeed in some regards the most painful one, in this narrative. It was the removal from Jack- sonville to St. Louis. While the latter city then felt the pulsations of a mighty commercial youth, and offered not only marvelous attractions to worldly talent and ambition, but a wide and rapidly expanding field for ministerial labor, yet the college, the church, and the home at Jacksonville had become objects of attachment so strong that it seemed almost like giving up a part of life itself to leave them. The college, with its chair of history, was specially con- genial; the church was not only that of Mr. Post's first pastorate but the one where he had made his public pro- fession of Christ ; in both were those who had become warm personal friends and from whom parting would be a very sore trial ; and the Jacksonville home was the scene of his early wedded life and the birthplace of all but one of his children. But the change came nevertheless ; and it seems now to have been inevitable. Mr. Post was already known outside of Jacksonville as a writer and public speaker. His Alma Mater had kept watch of him since his graduation, and in 1846 two 1 50 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. urgent appeals had come from President Labaree urging his acceptance of the chair of rhetoric and English literature in Middlebury College. The appeals had been strongly seconded by his old pastor, Rev. Dr. Merrill, and the newly formed ties and obligations at Jacksonville alone prevailed against the call. He had preached in St. Louis and had become known among its clergy, certainly as early as 1844. And his address at Lebanon (and probably other publications) had at- tracted the attention of prominent men in St. Louis. Thus, Samuel Treat, then editor of The St. Louis Re- porter, and afterward of judicial fame, was struck with the style of this oration, which, he said, "reminded " him, " somewhat of Carlyle and somewhat of Charles Lamb, though different from either." He recalls the fact that Mr. Post delivered a series of lectures in the old Odd Fellows' Hall, then on Fourth and Locust streets, on subjects connected with ancient history, that the lectures were largely attended, and at the close of the series an informal meeting was organized from the audience, and a resolution was adopted, voting the thanks of the public to the speaker and appointing a committee to wait upon Mr. Post, and request the publication of the lectures already delivered and also to ask a continuation of the course'through the field of mediaeval history. It seems quite probable that these lectures were delivered prior to the removal to St. Louis and made up a series distinct from those afterward delivered under the auspices of the Mercantile Library Association. Mr. Post had also become known to a number of lead- ing men in the Third Presbyterian Church (a young and vigorous offshoot from the original mother church of the same order), then worshiping in its new edifice on Sixth Street. Moses Forbes, one of the founders of the new CALLED TO ST. LOUIS. 151 organization, had met him at a temperance convention in Illinois and there had formed a permanent friendship. Milton Knox, an influential member of the same cljurch, Tiad been at one time a resident of Jacksonville and a member of its Congregational church ; and very likely through him Mr. Post had, as early as 1844, come to know his uncle, Dr. Reuben Knox, a leading spirit of the Third Church, and a man of high professional stand- ing, very considerable wealth, and a great nobility of character. And so it resulted that, Henry M. Field having resigned his pastorate over the church, a letter was written by Milton Knox, February 2, 1847, conveying a unanimous call from that body asking Mr. Post to become its pastor. In a letter of February 15, urging an acceptance, Mr. Knox says : " You may perhaps be of the number who suppose we are not allowed to speak for ourselves and hardly to think our own thoughts in this slave state and among slaveholders, but you need not fear. Though we have three or four families who own slaves, they are mostly as much antislavery as you or I, and long to ' see the curse removed.' " Moses Forbes writes on the same date : — " The session and trustees, after consulting upon your letter of the 9th, declining the call, feel justified in con- struing it into something on which to hang a hope that if you were fully apprised of all the circumstances you might give a favorable response. They at once resolved to send a delegation to treat with you in person. I can imagine that you deem your connection with the college such that a vacancy there created could not readily be supplied ; that in leaving a free for a slave state you would have to sacrifice much ; that, to relinquish your 152 TR UMAN MARCELL US POS T. connection with the Congregational and enter a Presby- terian church, you would have to yield many preferences nearly akin to principles, and that in your opinions on church government and slavery you would feel trammeled. ... " As to your views on church government, permit me to suggest that in this call on you I have recognized the hand of Providence as pointing to one of the means which he designs to use to soften down sectarian animosi- ties, and lead the disciples of our common Lord to look upon each other as brethren, and to reform such objec- tionable features as may have crept into the governmental policy of his church. "In regard to your views on slavery, I think you are fully understood. , You are looked upon as opposed to the system and as feeling it your duty to preach upon the subject as upon other great moral and political evils and sins, and that for the wealth of the Indies you would not consent to be muzzled. At the same time you are not viewed as being so exclusive as to suppose there are no Christians who own slaves, or so unwise as not to use good judgment and sound discretion as to times and seasons, ways and means of treating the subject and removing the evil." The next day came a letter from Dr. Bullard, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, advising acceptance of the call. The same month a delegation from the Third Church headed by Dr. Knox came to Jacksonville with a personal appeal. On his return to St. Louis Dr. Knox writes him, if he can do no more, to " come down and spend a few weeks." In June, the call meantime not having been acted upon, Reuben Knox, George Matlack, Cornwall Sage, and John S. McCune write, asking his services during the vacation. CALLED TO ST. LOUIS. 1 53 In accordance with this invitation Mr. Post came to St. Louis and was domiciled at the house of Dr. Knox, sup- plying the pulpit of the Third Church during August and September. While in St. Louis, and also on his return to Jackson- ville, the pressure continued through personal solicitation from individuals and church committees and through letters, of which it is unnecessary to speak in detail, to accept the call to the pulpit for a stated time, if not to the pastorate. Mr. Post says, in the " Life Story " : — " I had been repeatedly solicited to come to St. Louis, with the proffer of a salary adequate to my financial relief. But I was attached to the college and was unwilling to live with slavery. At length a special delegate from the Third Presbyterian Church of this city visited me. Dr. Reuben Knox, one of the noblest and loveliest men I have ever known, who now waits the archangel's summons in the Pacific seas, coming some hundred miles by stage to urge the application. To his inquiry, if the difficulty was slavery, I told him it was. I was unwilling to lay my bones in a slave state, or commit my family to its desti- nies. His reply was, ' Come down and help us remove it.' But I could not then see my duty in that direction. " At length, after repeated calls and pleadings, my debts constantly pressing more and more, with no prospect of relief where I was, in reply to a letter urging their case anew, and in terms still more earnest, I replied that I would come for four years, but was unvyrilling to commit myself to a longer withdrawment from the college ; and that I would come only on condition that my letter of acceptance should be publicly read — not before the elders only, but publicly, before the church — and that after hearing my letter the church should re-vote my call. In 1 54 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. that letter I stated that I regarded holding human beings as property as a violation of the first principles of the Christian religion, and, that while I did not require of the church that they should adopt my views in regard to it, or to modes of removal, I thought every Christian should be alive to the inquiry after some mode, and his duty thereunto ; and that I must be guaranteed in my liberty of opinion and speech on this subject, at my own discretion. Otherwise, I did not think God called me to add to the number of the slaves already in Missouri. "To the statement often made that I should change my views, as others before me had done, on this matter of slavery, on coming down here, I replied. They must expect no change in me ; that my convictions and prin- ciples in regard to it belonged to the primal elements of my thinking, and the very essence of my Christian man- hood, and were incorporated with whatever was worth anything about me ; and if I could surrender them I should cease to be worth their calling or procuring. " I also wrote them that I was a Congregationalist from principle, and without disturbing their ecclesiastical rela- tions, should still retain my own. The answer of the church was, that they had done as I required with my letter, and they now wished me more than ever." And so it came to pass, after a long struggle with ques- tions of duty and with his attachment for Jacksonville, that in the fall of 1847 (October 31) Mr. Post resigned his connection with the church, and about the same time also with the college of that place, and, with the God- speed and sorrowful leave-taking of old friends and reso- lutions of the college students, lamenting his departure and looking to the possibility of his return, and, without himself wholly abandoning such a hope and under an engagement limited to four years of service, he came to CALLED TO ST. LOUIS. I 55 St. Louis and the Third Church, leaving the family except one son behind him. This departure virtually ends the life in Jacksonville, and concerning that portion of the memoir little more is to be said. It was largely made up of routine and with- out many special incidents other than those already nar- rated. There were the daily recitations at the chapel and frequent lectures to the students and weekly meetings of the college faculty ; and in the later years there were the two sermons each week and weekly prayer meetings at the church on the square. Added to these labors were the long night hours at home, often extending on toward morning, spent with Latin and Greek and with historical authors, and in preparing for the pulpit and in meeting the frequent and increasing demands from the lecture fields and the press. There were also the social demands of the parish ; and the lack of a hired man required atten- tion in work of various sorts about the home during most of those odd intervals which otherwise might have been given to repose. These years, therefore, had little of recreation except an occasional drive with the pony and rifle in quest of the prairie fowl and hawk, and now and then, by the same mode of conveyance, a trip to Waverly or a fishing excursion to the Sangamon or Illinois River, or some more extended tour made in the interest of the college or to answer an appointment for a public address or religious service. The life was intensely and constantly busy, and over- tasked to such an extent that the health of Mr. Post at one time became seriously threatened and his friends entertained grave fears that it would break down entirely under the strain. A sore affliction to which Mr. Post was subject in Jacksonville — as indeed afterward — was the frequent 156 TR UMAN MA Ji CELL US POST. recurrence of sick headache. This ailment was apt to follow any long-continued mental strain and brought with it hours of great distress, often whole nights passed without sleep, during which the sufferer would sit upright in a chair with head thrown back and tightly bound, and receiving only such relief as could be got from anaesthetics and the mesmerism of gentle fingers and the hairbrush. In the Jacksonville home were born Frances Henshaw, Truman Augustus, Henry McClure, Catharine Harriet, and Clara Harrison — all of the children except Martin Hayward, the youngest, who was a native of St. Louis. And what with the increasing household, and a heavy debt, and meager salary and tardy payments, there was in this life no little of carking care and anxious looking forward to the morrow. "With so much that was pleasant there" (mss.) "and amid scenes so Eden-like in review, all was not rose-like. My paradise was cast in a fallen world. Often painful, anxious sickness, if no personal sorrow, was there, and sore labor and care and pinching economies and want of household help and nursing in times of heat, disease, and debility ; and trouble would come at times from the outside world, and sorrowful partings from friends we should meet no more — even should we return to the longed-for, fondly remembered land of youth." Of the reflex influence upon himself of the life in Jacksonville and its mental stimulus, and of his relations with the college and its officers. Dr. Post speaks in the "Life Story." " Those years were of great value to me. They placed me in a school of new and profound interest, with the most important result to my mental development and future, and a school which residence in society of an established order could never have furnished — the school w o w J > z o m o w X CALLED TO ST. LOUIS. I 57 of being compelled to work at primordial social principles and in the organization of the new order of a new world. Those years seem to me now almost like a strange episode in the scenery and drama of my life — a half dream in morning land yet pregnant with eventualities stretching through all the landscape of years and into eternity. "My associates of the faculty and board of trustees embraced men whom I learned to love and honor more with time, some of whom are still with the loved and revered living — loved and revered for what they have been and have done, as also for what they are and are still doing. Some have passed to the loved and honored of higher worlds, their works still ever following them ; one especially, among the sweetest, noblest and most gifted of men, among the most pleasant and cherished of the friends of my youth, — the turf has scarcely yet grown green over his fresh grave, — Dr. Samuel Adams. My connection with these men was stimulant and grateful. " My stay of fourteen years at Jacksonville brought me in contact in the class and lecture room with minds which have since become ruling ones in secular and religious spheres, in civil, military, and ecclesiastical life, and in the republic of letters in the northwest ; some, whose records in the high places of eloquence and judicature and arms, in evangelic and educational work and in the rule of affairs, have been honored among men." Although not sold till some time later, the house on College Hill passed into possession of other occupants in the year 1849; and while a part of his family were there for a season as boarders, and Mr. Post lodged there once or twice on temporary visits, it was never afterwards his home. Since the place was given up, it has changed owners repeatedly, and has been somewhat altered and added to, but in the main the house and the landmarks 158 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. are not much disturbed. Often, as Jacksonville is revis- ited by the children and grandchildren, they wander through the grounds, which of late years are frequently without occupants, and so the memories and traditions of the place are still kept green. To the older descendants, on these returns the scene of forty years ago, and the forms of those who then were there, come back with the freshness of yesterday. The house, with its yellow walls- framed against the green background of trees, crowning the gentle slope and half hid by the foliage, seems as though touched with the light of morning. The grounds are open, and the place is so . quiet that you are tempted to enter and stroll along the winding track, not much worn, and shaded here and there by oak and elm and " white-armed sycamore," till you are at the front porch with its fragrant sweetbriar and clambering honey- suckle. Standing there you almost expect to see a tall,, familiar form coming with rapid step along the path through the twilight archway of the grove from the reci- tation at the chapel ; or you fancy you hear the sound of; wheels as he drives up the avenue, dusty and belated from a long journey ; and you can imagine you hear the voices of children and see the young mother coming out with, them to "greet the sire's return." The old-fashioned- doorknocker ought to arouse something more than echoes,, and you almost start to find that no voices or faces are there, that the mansion is tenantless, its occupants all gone ; nothing left behind but shadows. Everything around recalls the former scene. To the north now, as then, is the landscape of rolling prairie broken by clumps of timber. Hard by, to the east of the house, are some descendants of the wild rose and holly- hock and tiger lily that used to grow there, and beyond is the " College Grove," or what remains of its primeval CALLED TO ST. LOUIS. I 59 and " tangled wildwood." To the west, along the winding road, exactly as of yore, is the " Mound," with the Rock- well mansion and its bower of trees standing against the sky, across which the sun shot his farewell glance into the western windows. And again in fancy come back the long summer twilights spent by the father and his children under that smokeless sky with its wondrous cloud panorama lit by the sunset. " The years of my family life at Jacksonville," say the Mss., "have always had a special charm in memory from the closeness and familiarity of my life with my children that were then in beautiful, lovely, plastic childhood. In my rambles or hunting and iishing I delighted to associate them with me as companions, seeing, hearing, and enjoy- ing with them all the freshness of life. They grew to my very soul. How dim and distant, yet sweet, those even- ings on the porch and under the snowballs, in the moon- light or the solemn dusk, sitting with them or reclining on the grass under the green oaks and elms and rich maples while I talked with them, turned my historic lectures into children's idyls for them, giving them, as I could, pictures of the tragic beauty from the past story of the world." " Here " (says the "Life Story"), " in my secluded home, nestling amid groves, and from its perch overlooking a most living landscape of long green slopes that stretched far away, studded with grove and fringed with woodland or billowing into mound or bluff, to a horizon blent of forest and sky — here I spent the years ; here, where the birds came early in the spring and stayed late in the autumn, and sang in tempestuous orchestra in the morn- ing, or in the soft, sweet hymn of evening — here was the beginning of my family life. Here I dwelt with one sent from God through beautiful and happy years; and little 1 60 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. sons and daughters came to me and played in the shadows of the lofty elm and oak, or wandered amid the green glades glittering with sunlight and flowers, and other matins and vespers mingled with those of birds. "The seedling maples which I planted one morning have grown to be great trees. Some have died of blight or violence. The guardian elms that I set out as senti- nels of the gateway have kept well their charge, until now they seem old and bending with their full-grown honors and with time, and I feel in their presence that I am old." CHAPTER XIV. FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. First years in St. Louis. — Lecture on the Pilgrim Fathers. — La Clede Saloon disaster. — Address at dedication of Bellefontaine Cemetery. DURING the winter of 1847-48, Mr. Post, with his eldest son, was the guest of Dr. Knox, whose house, with its ample porches and extensive grounds, occupying the entire block between Ninth and Tenth streets and Franklin Avenue and Wash Street, will be remembered by old residents as in those days one of the attractive homes of St. Louis. The Third Church was on Sixth Street, just below Franklin Avenue, conveniently near by, and — strange as it now seems — in a quarter of the city then substantially built up with dwelling houses, and desirable for residence purposes. The edifice was one of the newest and roomi- est and one of the most tasteful houses of worship then in St. Louis ; and its tall spire and Corinthian columns made quite an imposing display along the street. The church organization had been, as already intimated, under the pastoral charge of Rev. Henry M, Field, — a brother of Stephen, David Dudley, and Cyrus, — who afterward became editor of The New York Evangelist. Its membership was not large and its wealth not equal to that of some other churches in the city, but it was never- theless a church of marked influence and one of very great promise. It embraced an unusual proportion of young men of energy and enterprise, in prosperous and growing business pursuits ; and quite a number of the congregation were already prominent, not only in mer- 161 1 62 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. cantile circles but in the ranks of law and medicine. The church was young and in a community growing with the vigor of a mighty youth, its pastor was in the prime of his physical and intellectual manhood, and the people were enthusiastically united upon him. The winter was largely devoted by Mr. Post to the making of acquaintance in his new parish. It was very busy with calls and social gatherings and church enter- tainments. In addition to the pulpit discourses he gave: a series of lectures before the Mercantile Library Associa- tion on historical topics. The lectures were very popular. The hall on Fourth and Locust streets was nightly thronged with an audience embracing many men of mark, in the community, and these addresses were a means of. introducing the speaker most favorably to a wide circle- outside of his own church. Mr. Post was also engaged, during the same winter, in preparing another series of historical lectures, which were delivered in Jacksonville in the summer following. During part of that summer Mrs. Post, with two of the children, was visiting in the east, three of them beings left in the charge of Mrs. McClure. The Jacksonville home had been given over to other tenants, but Mr. Post was there while giving his lectures. In June he writes from that place : — " Here I am, my dearest Frances, in the east chamber,, where we have so often sat side by side in sorrow and in. gladness, where I embraced my firstborn, and where I have watched your pale features as they seemed fading forever from my sight. The windows are before me and the green elms, where your sick, longing look was fixed so sadly and so constantly. A thousand objects speak and a thousand voices from the dim past answer. ... I hear those of children coming into my window, but they~ FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. 1 63 are not the music of our little nestlings. Nature around smiles as sweetly for them and the birds sing as merrily. . . . And I have been thinking how glad and bright and tuneful the earth will move on a thousand years hence, forgetting to mourn us and the loving, beautiful, and good, as it has forgotten all that fed on the gifts of life before us. I feel myself a passing echo, a fading shadow amid a world of such." " Thursday. Again I lay down the lecture sheet and take up that of a letter to my wife. It is now another day ; hot — exceedingly. The days are as ardent as the passions of youth and the nights as soft with moonlit beauty as its dreams. Call to mind one of the loveliest nights of memory, and imagine me in the old room musing and dreaming, with ray eyes wide open — alone." In July Mr. Post is back in St. Louis, and once more engaged in delivering historical lectures. In discussing certain revolutionary movements in Europe as "signs of the times," he has found himself called on to advert to the topic of slavery. And he writes : — " It came naturally in my way, and I felt that if I could not in such cases speak and with plainness on the subject, it were best I should know it soon. ... If I find I can- not use Christian freedom on this subject, I have no wish, to stay here to enslave myself. If I cannot succeed here by a manly course, I do not wish to at all, and shall go from this city quite as cheerfully as I came." In August, 1848, Mr. Post had rented a three-story brick dwelling house on Franklin Avenue near the church, and in a neighborhood, as he wrote Mrs. Post, connected by pavement with the center of the city, and to which the gaslights were soon to be extended. In the fall of 1 64 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. that year, Mrs. Post and the children coming by stage through Brighton and Alton and thence by river, and the household effects being shipped by way of Naples and the Illinois steamer, the whole establishment was trans- ferred to its new quarters, and remained there till the lease and occupation twelve months afterward of a house in " Kerr's Row " on Sixth Street. On the Sabbath before Christmas Mr. Post delivered in the Third Church a discourse commemorative of the Pilgrim Fathers ; and three days afterward he received a note signed by Reuben Knox, Moses Forbes, W. D. Skilman, and Henry D. Bacon, saying, "We listened with pleasure to your eloquent and instructive discourse on the 2/ith instant on the character of the Puritans, their labors and difficulties " ; and at their request the address was published. The discourse traces in elaborate risumi the history of Puritanism and the rise and character of independency and its influence in molding civil and religious liberty. As the topic is kindred with that of a number of addresses from which extracts are hereafter made, we quote merely the following tribute to the Pil- grims, taken from the close of the sermon. "Plymouth Rock shall grow more sacred when the triumphs of a thousand years of art have perished. Yea, theirs is an honor that shall grow greener through eter- nity. If their names should fade from earth, it mattered little to them while living, it matters little to them now, for such names are in the Lamb's Book of Life. It adds to his moral greatness, that it was such a thought, and no dream of earthly fame, that soothed the Pilgrim as he lay. down beyond the Great Waters to die. Glorious ones waited him on the margin of the Dark River. Crowns of life gleamed through the death shade. Flaming cheru- FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. 1 65 bim opened wide the Everlasting Gates, and the smile of the King in his beauty welcomed the Pilgrim home. " The little band that we followed to the shores of th* New World, more than half of them, the first winter, found the end of their mortal pilgrimage. They seemed only to have come to the great wilderness to die. Amid the wilds, beyond the vision of the great world, in their cold, lone cabins, without food or comforts, in almost untended sickness, they died. Under the forest shade they were laid. The mighty oak and the solemn pine united their branches over them, through which the wail of the wintry wind and the wave was their lon-e requiem. Thus they slept on the margin of the mighty wilderness and the mighty waters, and the ages rolled on and seemed to lose their memory from earth. But the ages that rolled on were to bring them up again. The world was to inquire after the Pilgrim ; for he left his monument, though not in bronze or marble. " The American empire is his monument, with its liberty, its greatness,- its power, its happiness, and its destiny. His name written on it must rise with it. It was not his work alone, but he laid the corner stone, and his was the architectural idea. This shaped its propor- tions, and compacted its vast strength, and heaved its mighty dome. " And even were this empire to sink, still the Pilgrim's name would live. Though the result should perish, still were the heroic act and thought immortal, and from the rock where first they trod should gush forth a life stream for the nations. Time may sweep away many things. Institutions, outward forms, political and ecclesiastical structures may pass, but the creative spirit is immortal and will still survive. Coming ages shall pay them the tribute of grateful tears, and pilgrims from many climes 1 66 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. and from the ends of the earth shall come to kindle anew their patriotism and piety at the shades of Vernon and the rock of Plymouth. Time will take from many fames. Others will grow with years ; their true altitude will be taken only from the standpoint of ages. Such is the fame of these men. As the eye of history recedes it will rise higher till it towers like Mount Blanc and projects its solemn and solitary grandeur on the distant sky. "Thus, as years roll on, more prominent and lofty in the temple of the past shall the figure of the Pilgrim be over our history, as he now stands on the living canvas of Weir over the halls of our national congress. There above our arch of civilization and empire he stands and will stand forever with lines of deep suffering and grief on his countenance, but still with a serene repose, a sub- dued passion, an iron resolve and lofty faith and earnest love, the strange, intellectual, devout, sagacious, inflexible, heroic man." In some respects the early days in St. Louis stand in rather dismal contrast with those preceding them. The house on Franklin Avenue was in the midst of noise and confusion, to which its inmates had been strangers; the limestone dust, and mud of the streets were an absolute pest ; and the great fire and cholera will be remembered as the lurid calamities of 1849. After the epidemic had begun to rage, the family of Mr. Post were sent back to Jacksonville and passed the summer at the house of Dr. Adams ; but Mr. Post himself remained in St. Louis and gave his ministrations to the sick and bereaved through the worst days of the pestilence. Among the events of the period, none left on the FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. 167 public mind an impression more vivid or tragic than the disaster which occurred at the La Clede Saloon in 1850. The edifice, with its stuccoed front, occupying the site where now stands the Mercantile Library Building, and its courtyard adorned with statues and fountains, was then a well-known resort of fashion. In the hall above it, on the evening of May ist, the pupils of Mr. Purket's famous school for young ladies, and their teachers and friends, had gathered to celebrate the day with music and reci- tations and charades. What followed was always counted in the family of Mr. Post as one of a number of signal providences. A strange melodrama and transformation scene was that — the stage with its gay paraphernalia, the white throng of girls and their admiring friends, the weaving of the comic plot, the audience on tiptoe for the denouement pressing forward and together toward the center of the room ; then the shudder of the building and the strange rumbling sound, and in a moment more, fast as thought can follow, faster than words can describe, benches, desks and flooring, and scholars and friends shunted down together, crashing and shrieking, into a cloud of mortar dust that seemed to envelop them like " the dunnest smoke of hell." The scene was seared into public memory ; and for months afterward the schoolboy, passing along Fifth Street and peering through the board- ing nailed across doorways and windows, would linger fascinated by the ghastly spectacle of torn and splintered floors tilted on end, and rafters and furniture piled in hope- less tangle ; while high above the hideous and gaping ruin, suspended as in fantastic mockery, swung the remnants of stage decorations and festoons of holly and myrtle. Two lives were lost that night ; many persons were injured; some permanently. And the passing wonder is that the casualties were not greater. 1 68 TRUMAN MARCELL US POST. Mr. Post and wife and three children were there.. The eldest daughter was one of the pupils who were to take part in the entertainment, and one of the many injured. The rest of the family were unhurt. Mrs. Post writes : — " I never could have imagined, without witnessing it, a scene so horrible. The shrieks and screams were inex- pressibly dreadful as they arose from that awful pit through the gloom. The floor on one end and on one side of the room did not give away. There were standing on this part of it, I suppose, seventy-five or one hundred persons, but the great mass had gone down. I knew that F must have fallen, and supposed that the two boys and Truman were also in the dreadful miUe. " I covered my eyes to shut out the horrid scene, expecting every instant that the walls and roof would fall in and crush us in the ruins. But, thank God ! we escaped. Mr. Blatchford, who was with me, told me after a few minutes that we could get out ; and trembling, but speechless with anguish, I passed down into the street and went to the house of a friend, where I remained for three quarters of an hour before I heard whether my husband and children were dead or alive. . . . Truman was standing on a part of the floor which gave way, but he felt it falling and, God-directed, as i believe, he stepped off just in the right direction to escape." A notable event in these annals was the dedication of Bellefontaine Cemetery, which took place in May, 1850. "The day," says The St. LoUis Intelligencer, "was all that nature could have made it, or man desired it, for such an occasion. The sun shone brightly, and the joyous face of a lovely spring day smiled on all the scene. A very large company of citizens were present." Among those who took part in the dedication were FIUST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. 169 John' F. Darby, president of the association, Rev. Dr. Bullard, Rev. E. C. Hutchinson, Rev. William G. Eliot, and Rev. Dr. Jeter. The address of dedication was delivered by Mr. Post. The newspaper above referred to says : " We shall attempt no description of his effort. It was worthy of the man and of the occasion. No happier selection of speaker could have been made. It was one of the most eloquent and beautiful pro- ductions it has ever been our pleasure to hear." The exercises were hardly a stone's throw from the spot selected a month or two later by Mr. Post as his family lot and presented to him by the Cemetery Association "as a slight token of their appreciation of his address." The oration was something far more than a dedication of cemetery soil. More than forty years have passed since the voice of the speaker, with the funeral anthem of the Odd Fellows' band, died away on that then untenanted woodland, and all but one of those whose names are men- tioned as taking part in the dedication services have gone from the stage of the living. The lot given Mr. Post now holds what is mortal of himself and his wife, and one of his. daughters, the wife of one of his sons, and some of the third generation. More than thirty thousand of the population of St. Louis, embracing many of those most honored and beloved in her history, are slumbering in Bellefontaine ; and the address, from its drift of thought and its association with the history of that spot, has to-day the eloquence of a requiem over all the sacred dead who have gathered there, and indeed, in its solemn and majestic close, over the unnumbered train "who shall draw after them " down the remotest future. This oration is among the cherished classics of St. Louis literature; and so it will doubtless remain as long as private or public love and veneration shall guard Belle- 1 "JO TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. fontaine. Its eloquence and pathos will receive a deeper meaning as time passes on and the muster roll is swelling in "that long and silent rendezvous." " We are come hither," said the speaker, " on no ordi- nary errand. No civic festivity or literary reunion, no achievement of commerce or joy of victory, gathers us this day amid these scenes of nature, this green and wooded seclusion. " We are come, 't is true, to found a city — of your own emporium the shadow, the counterpart, the home ; to grow with its growth and become populous with its people — yet a city for no living men, a city of the dead, we found this day. "Not in pride come we. In no vain ambition to wrestle with our mortal state, or rescue these bodies from corrup- tion, or our names from oblivion. Too well, alas ! we know Nor storied urn, nor animated bust, Back to its mansion calls the fleeting breath; Nor Honor's voice provokes the silent dust. Nor flattery soothes the dull cold ear of death. "In no such dream of the children of pride, but as under a common doom, we come on an errand of love and sorrow. We come to consecrate a place to the sad proprieties of grief, the last offices of earthly affection, the holy memories of the dead, and the repose of the grave ; to hallow a sanctuary, for remembrance and love and tears, to thoughts that walk again life's pilgrimage with the departed, or see the faces faded and lost from earth brightening in the smile of God. We come to select the last home for families and friends and forms we love most dearly. Yea, to choose the place of our own final rest, where memory, perchance, may drop over our dust the 'tribute of a tear.' . . . FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. I 7 1 " Apart from all philosophy, we love to linger around the place of our dead, where we looked on the forms we loved for the last time. Thither fondly we oft return, and sorrow soothes itself with its offering of tears over their lone and lowly rest. We love to beautify their last repose, as though the departed spirit were more quickly conscious and cognizant around the spot where the companion of its mortal pilgrimage awaits the resur- rection, as though there it were still sensible to the soothing charm of natural beauty or the gentle offices of memory and love. True, we cannot wake their sleep, they answer us never with voice or sigh ; still we delight to make their rest beautiful — beautiful with all that nature and all that art can give ; we would strew it with flowers, to be tended with gentle fingers and bedewed €ver with fresh tears ; we would that affection and honor should speak of them in commemorative marble, and nature around should wear her benignest and loveliest aspect. "This feeling springs irrepressible in the mourner's heart. At times it seems as though the dead did plead with us not to be all forgot. Their whisper steals on us in the stilly night, and their faces, pale and beautiful, gleam on us in the rising moon — they plead to be left not alone and unvisited of the living in their cold and lowly bed. We hear their voices when spring comes forth, and when the leaves fall, yea, in the glee and glory of life, in the joyous and genial circle it comes — that gentle entreaty, by the love we once bo.re them, that we leave them not all abandoned now — that still, from time to time, in visits, not too oft, nor in gloom to darken life, we pay the tribute of a passing hour, and some mindful tears to those whom living we loved so well, and whose hearts beat for us so fondly till they were forever cold. 172 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. They ask us sometimes to come where they lie alone, and commune again with the farewell word and the fading look of love, and the hope of reunion in realms unvisited of death. " Call it illusion, if you please, this feeling of sympathy with the dead. It is an illusion no philosophy can dispel. It springs directly from our conscious, painful dread of passing forever away from this world of light and life and love, and having our very, thought perishing in bosoms most dear. In spite of philosophy Nature still exclaims : — Ah, who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerfiil day, Nor cast one longing, ling'ring look behind? On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires ; E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries. E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires. " Natural taste and sensibility again plead for the rural cemetery. A seemly and beautiful sepulcher amid the jostle and din and offenses of sight and sound, in the tumult of the city ! It is impossible ! In the city churchyard, on the borders of our crowded and reeking thoroughfares, mid the clang and clamor and dust and tramping of feet and the rattling of wheels, it seems as if the buried could not rest. We can hardly disabuse the mind of the painful illusion that the turmoil of mortal life may still perturb even the sleepers of the grave. The sensibilities of the mourner are shocked by the mingling of vulgar and profane life with the awe and silence of the house of death. Meditation flees such scenes — the sanctity of private grief is outraged. The faces of the departed will not come to greet you', and the sensitive FIUST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. 173 spirit hastes to hide its wound away from the stare and curiosity of the passing crowd. No, not there! but in seclusion, silence, and solitude, grief loves to seek the face of the dead and commune with its memories and hopes ; where the earth, with its stilly life, grows green in its time, and spring comes forth with its flowers beau- tiful and voiceless ; and summer passes into a solemn Sabbath glory ; and pensive autumn throws its seemly shroud of fading loveUness over the dying year ; and the desolate winter keeps religiously, at least the fitting loneliness and stillness of the tomb. " We love to seek converse with sorrow and the dead where the outer world, seems in sympathy with the mourner; where the trees gather in gothic solemnity and cathedral gloom around the grave, and where nature, with the touching similitudes of her own brief bloom, and transient summer beauty, of her swift decay and sure renewal of life, may image the brief flower of our mortal being, its hastening decadence and its immortal hope. . . . " To make the place of the dead beautiful and attract- ive is wise for men. The amenity that lures life often within the shadow of the tomb purifies, ennobles, and hallows it. The tomb, the great refiner and chastener of life, as a beneficent remembrancer and educator — the perpetuator of the discipline of sorrow without its pang — the admonisher of the true and enduring in our being; it is well to give it permanent voice, often to invoke its influence to sober life's passion and hope and to impart true wisdom to its reason and aim. "To localize a grief and give it embodiment and ex- pression in enduring outward forms that shall speak on and speak ever, until time wearies out the very marble, this is to make sorrow a permanent purifier, long after I 74 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. the agony of grief is past, and establish a blessed guard- ian influence in human life. " Sweet and beautiful are the uses of sorrow. It softens the hardness of our nature and quickens bur sympathy with our brother. To lead man to frequent converse with the scenes of grief blesses man and blesses society. " Hast thou had a sorrow .' Erect a monument to it — establish it by some enduring remembrancer and visit oft its sad memorial. For sorrow remembered turns to wisdom. Keep its memory green ; often wander where sight and sound and the spirit and genius of the scene shall call its pale but beautiful face. Call in the aids of taste, and let the charm of natural and artistic beauty lead you often to visit such scenes. For that face shall be to thee the face of a seraph, to win and woo thee to a higher and purer being. In the shadow of the cypress and marble your spirit shall catch lessons that may change weeping memories to immortal hope, and the death shade to heaven's own light, and make the mute, pale sleepers of the grave blessed angels beckoning to their own bright sphere. "We think it wise to make the church and school attractive. Render inviting, then, the spot that teaches a wisdom beyond all the philosophy of the schools, and preaches with an eloquence more solemn than ever rang under vault of minster or cathedral — the grave. Let the young, the ardent, the gay and frivolous, the hot and eager throng of life, often be allured to its audience. For the most part, life rushes eager on in its phantom hunt, unrecking of its true position and destiny. It is well to pause and listen at times to the stern but merciful monitor that warns us that we are shadows in a world of shades. "Place, then, and preserve the city of Death beside FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. 175 that of Life, as its sorrowful but blessed remembrancer. Let Life look oft on the features of its pale brother. Make that face not foul and revolting, but charming with the spell of beauty and of holy repose, that the living may often come to gaze thereon, and may turn away with chastened hopes and passions and quickened sympathies and higher and holier thoughts. . . . "The Present holds its life of the Past, and that through the memory of the dead. These monuments are perpetual proclaimers of their thoughts and institutions. The faces that look down on Faneuil Hall and from the rotunda of our Capitol are watchers over principles that are our national life. The tomb of Vernon is the moral keystone of our arch of union and of empire. History shows the strength of the power of political conservation in reverence for the dead, even in cases of its abuse and perversion. The Chinese, whose worship of the dead has conserved an effete civilization for twenty centuries ; the Hindoo, whose traditions embalmed in time-defying monu- ments from the source of the Ganges to Cape Comorin, have for three thousand years kept watch over a civiliza- tion seemingly as lasting and changeless as the features of the natural world ; ancient Egypt, who embalmed herself for ages in porphyry and granite and marble, making the whole Nile valley one cemetery of mausoleum, of obelisk and pyramid, — illustrate the power of the principle, though in misdirection and excess. Greece understood its power ; and in temple and grove, and forum and cemetery, in forests of statuary and funeral sculpture, she caused her gifted and glorious dead to speak, from generation to gen- eration, to her brilliant but mobile people. What a school was that of the cemetery of the Ceramicus, where Plato and Aristotle taught in sight of the tombs of the great departed ! What memories there aided their instructions. I 76 TRUMAN MARCEILUSPOST. to the youth of Athens, with an eloquence more glowing, subduing and awful than the wisdom of the. Areopagus or the Senate, than the heroic thought and Pythic enthusi- asm of Homer or Pindar, or than the pathos of her tragic Muse, or the fiery logic of her great orator. There, in awful marble, still spoke her great lawgiver ; there stood the hero of Marathon, whose trophies would not suffer Themistocles to sleep ; and there Pericles, the true, the ■ noble, the eloquent, still pleads for the life and glory of the Athens he loved so well. And Rome, did she not cement the tremendous strength of her empire in tears of honor for the dead, even more than in the blood of war .' This sentiment pervaded her entire life. It ran like a religion through all her policy and laws and institutions. From where the Lares stood on the family altar, to where her rural tombs o'erwatched the public ways, and to where her awful heroes looked down from her marble capitol, it greets you as a tutelar genius. So of modern nations — the monuments of the dead keep watch for the living. Does not the life of Britain this hour stand as much in the memories of Westminster, and other high places of her dead, as in her fleets and armies, or in her industrial greatness or parliamentary wisdom ? Nor is the benefi- cent power of this sentiment confined to names eminent and world-famed. From sire to son in the obscurest household, and through all the relations of family and friendship, this contexture of sympathy and authoritative memory extends, binding together the fabric of society. Each hearthside has its memories of virtues, thoughts and affections, unknown to the great world, but to it a vestal fire." . . . Mr. Post's address concludes with the following passage, a part of which is carved in marble over his own place of rest : — FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. I 77 " Nature, historyvhealth, taste — the demands of affec- tion and of cultiv^on — sanction our enterprise. Pre- pare we, then, here a forum of the dead — a church of the past, where memory and honor and love and sorrow may- speak from generation to generation. Along these hills, beneath these whispering shades, adown these silent dales, what voices from -graves unnumbered shall whisper through the coming time, breathing the spirit of the departed over the living, and blending in sad, solemn, but beautiful harmony the past with the future life of society, aye, and time with eternity ! The forum of the dead ! silent and vacant now; but fast the orators of the future hasten hither, and hourly by the hearthside and in the seques- tered vale of life, as well as in the high places of com- merce and politics and philosophy and genius, they are now preparing the magic of their eloquence in the love and honor of human hearts — an eloquence that, from age to age, through these retreats shall pour its hallowing pathos and persuasion on the ear of the future as long as the heart of yonder city beats with life's fever or yonder mighty river sweeps to its ocean home. "The pale orators, the tearful auditory, will soon be here. Along the paths of the future I see them hastening hither — and ourselves amid the silent speakers and the weeping, awestruck listeners. " The time gone — the beautiful masonry — melancholy realm. Here oft shall we come to hear the sweet sadness of its voice ; to sit again in its light shadow and dream over its dreams once more ; to summon up its fading scenery and call back its fugitive phantoms from the realms of perpetual night. Here oft we shall come, where genius and goodness and beauty and affection shall be wedded in death, to relimn in memory the dim- ming image of the beautiful ; to list again the sweet 178 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. music of love and walk again in awful companionship with saint and sage and hero, whose home is now above the stars ; to catch again the magic tones of eloquence now dying on the ear of time ; to see the colors and shapes of art start into life under hands that had forever forgotten their cunning and listen to the lyre that shall be swept by the breezes of this world no more. "Aye, we trust memories as awful and as eloquent as any that consecrate Auburn, Greenwood, or Westminster may here utter themselves in enduring and grateful mar- ble ; that the champions and victims in the battles ofi the coming age, — the battles of truth and liberty and love, — glorious as any that have hallowed the high places of history where they stood and the spot of earth where they repose, shall here speak to coming time, in forms of art and nature ever beautiful and young. " Aye, and here too shall we come to hear again the hearthside voices that moan at times over the spirit from the past, like an .(Eolian harp in the breeze of a summer eve, to converse again with look and lips now sealed in perpetual silence, and eyes that shall open on the world of life no more. "Here the counsels of a revered father, too oft, alas^ and too long, unheeded in life's hot and giddy game, shall speak from the sod that covers his hoary locks ; and to our tearful eye shall come again that sweetest of remembered things, a mother's smile, now sweeter and holier from the consecration of death. The sister that faded in her early flower ; the brother that sank in his generous prom- ise ; the little son or daughter whose face shines like a far-off star in memory ; and the companions of our pil- grimage, the meek, the noble, and loving, the pure and the saintly that have fallen from our bosoms to the tomb ; hither shall we come to commune again with these — to FIRST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. I 79 see their beckoning hands and hear their gentle voices from the other side of the dark river, and look upon the beauty of those who have beheld the face of God. " Make we, then, beautiful here the place of our dead — make it sacred to quiet thought and meditative repose — make it where the sun may shine on it, cheerful, but still and solemn, like the light of another life, where the warble of the bird and the voices of nature may gently wake the morn, or lull the dreamy noontide, or soothe the sober hour of even. Away from the din and turmoil of life and from the clamor and bustle of commerce ; where the changes of the year come each in stillness and gentle- ness ; where the voices of spring come like a Sabbath orchestra, and summer's music is like the matin or vesper hymn of prayer, and nature dies in autumn as man would like to pass, in content maturity and gentle quiet beauty, and winter in seemly repose and solitude waits the new- born and glorious life ; here we feel it is fitting to lay our dead on the bosom of sympathizing nature. Let the violet and harebell kiss the turf above them ; let the rose and ivy embower, and the oak and evergreen wave above their silent rest ; let the zephyrs, freely visiting, sigh through the whispering leaves with the voice of the past ; let the nightwind tlirough the solemn wood wail its requiem for the departed ; let the moonlight stream over them, through the shadowy branches, like the light of other days, and let the stars of even, in tranquil and holy watch, look down upon their graves, like celestial Love watching their resurrection. "Fellow-citizens : It may not be inappropriate to remem- ber here, in this scene and at this hour, that of that voice of the dead which is to go forth of these shades, down coming time, we shall not only be listeners, but utterers, ourselves a part of it. Often may we come hither again. 1 80 77? UMAN MARCELL US POST. slowly and solemnly, and in tears, following those who shall no more behold the sun ; but I see in the future another coming which knows no return ; when other mourners shall pass sadly by, and other eyes shall weep because we go to our long home. Soon the mourner shall follow the mourned, till we, and all hearts that beat for us beneath these heavens, shall at last keep the long and silent rendezvous of the grave. Yea, I see the endless succession of the future hastening on, as the many waters of yonder mighty river, till marble after marble crumbles ; till the seasons weary in their round, and the sun grows weary in the sky, and time itself is sere and deathlike old. I see the world of Life itself passing, and Death's shadow falls over all. But Death himself shall perish in that hour. The great Victor of Death shall summon the pale prisoners of the grave, and they shall come forth ; and then, though voice of earth's memory may have perished for ages, though the rock-hewn monu- ment may have crumbled long cycles ago, still a record, written on no earthly marble, waits us in the great Doom, and our mortal works follow us there. May this spot, as often as we may visit it, remind us of that world, lest while we beautify the face of the grave we leave its bosom dark and chill and desolate ! " Well is it for us to remember that all our care and adornment of the tomb cannot avoid the doom or change the reality of death. Garnish and disguise it as we may, still it is the grave — the dark and narrow house. Our care for the sepulcher is simply reflexive in its benefits — it reacts on the living — it cannot wake again, or comfort in the house of dark- ness, the sleepers of the tomb. To it all the ways of life lead. No cunning of art, no wisdom of philosophy, can shun it. FISST YEARS IN ST. LOUIS. l8l The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave. " We cannot wrestle with death, or wrest from oblivion his prey. Stern, immitigable Death ! Him no tears can soften : no sorcery of art, no charm of beauty can beguile of his rage or cheat of his victim. Alas ! him we cannot soothe or propitiate or disarm. Dark, cruel King ! To him go down the revered and the lovely — the good, the wise, the gifted, the heroic, the beautiful, down to his gloomy realm. There is the awe of age, proud man- hood's strength, sweet childhood, and the glorious bloom of youth. For ages these have been his prey. Unsated, unpropitiated, unbribed, he waits still the loved ones from our arms and bosoms — inexorable Death. And vain is our struggle against his strength, the indomitable, the mighty, strongest of all beneath the Throne of the High- est ; vain against him are the strength of empire or the pride of art — the charm of innocence, or the smile of love, the magic of eloquence or wit or song — the life of the granite or the marble. To dark Oblivion's bourne hasten alike the glory of intellect, the acclaim of fame, the pride of ambition, the pageants of power, and the bannered battalia of war. All-conquering Death ! One, and only one, hath vanquished him — vanquished in his own blood. In that blood alone we also may conquer. He it is that ' liveth, and was dead ; yea, and is alive for evermore, and hath the keys of hell and of death.' Be those tombs with their sculptured instructions memorials to us of this great truth. Let pyramid, column and statue with heavenward hand, and slab with graven cheru- bim, who speak of immortality and point to God — let them be to us ever the index fingers, which time, in the 1 82 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. shadow of vanity, still extends toward the world of ever- lasting light, pointing ever to Him who sitteth above the stars, wearing the vesture dipped in blood, the Conqueror of death, the Achiever of immortality for man." CHAPTER XV. ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS. Address at Middlebury, Vt., on " Genius." — Early friends in St. Louis. — Article on "The Moral Obligations of the Legal Profession." — Literary reviews. — "The Voices of History." — A " Farewell to 1850." IN August, 1850, Mr. Post, at the request of his old society, "The Philomathesean," delivered in Middle- bury an oration (afterward repeated in St. Louis), on the subject of " Genius." The occasion was the annual Commencement and also the Semi-Centennial of Middle- bury College. Says a newspaper : " The alumni, in shape of congress- men, presidents of colleges, doctors of divinity, and other magnates of the land, came mustering in scores from nearly every state in the Union " Of the oration the same paper observes : " Where all the performances were so unusually excellent as here, it seems a delicate matter to particularize. Our unshed ink, however, would cry out against the nonuser if we failed to mention the strikingly original, masterly, and just analysis of genius by Rev. Truman M. Post, of St. Louis. The address was something of a departure from the author's usual topics. Its theme was impersonal and belonged to the realm of " calm speculation," and its treatment, though graphic and aided by characteristic image and illustration, was largely that of a metaphysical analysis. It was "the primary question of that power, minister of success and victory to all, but belonging ex- clusively to none ; in each, collaborator with truth in urging 183 184 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. on the great movement of humanity — the power we term Genius." . . . "The genius so called, be it real or only imaginary, that simply blazes and detonates athwart the vision of our world like a bolt of the skies and often to our view as random and ruinous — its movement, however dazzling or mighty, as barren as the furrow of the lightning in the heavens or of the hurricane on the deep — such genius were a theme certainly little appropriate to a society emi- nently devoted by its very name to self-culture and to emulation rather than worship. Nor is it a theme so attractive to my own mind. I believe that in the economy of our world the useful is the beautiful ; the mightiest the most normal and orderly. The stars that shine fixedly on in their high walks seem to me lovelier far and stronger than constellations shooting madly from their spheres; and the sun-car, moving in regular orbit up the heavens, not only more beneficent, but sublimer and mightier far than when driven by mad Phaeton blazing and blasting through the crackling skies. . . . " The worship of abnormal genius has been most per- nicious ; productive of false ideas and false practice ; of arrogant confidence, indolent pride, or paralyzing de- spair. The more salutary and, as we believe, more truth- . ful view stimulates the energies of an active and emula- tive hope. Such a view will at present engage us. A Demosthenes or a Tully, a Milton or Newton, a Cuvier, a Pitt, a Fox, a Burke, and the like, belonging as we know to the cultivable and imitable type of genius, present an order of intellectual power high enough to satisfy our ambition of analysis or of imitation. . . . " Allowing as we must for diversities and inequalities of original delicacy and force, we must assign as a defini- tion descriptive of the mood and quality, if not the abso- ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS. 1 85 lute essence, of genius, mind intensified or mind energetic- ally, concentratively and sharply attentive. This definition applies to genius in discovering, resolving, combining, vivifying, or uttering truth. For in the rapidity and clearness of its intuitions, the vividness and permanency of its impressions, or its faculty of analysis and order, of combination or utterance, here is the hiding of its power — in its ability promptly to converge the mental rays to a fine and burning focus on each point, in each aspect and relation, in singleness and succession. . . . " The philosophy of this relation of attention to intel- lectual power, and the primal principle from which a logical -analysis of genius must start, are found in the fact that the mind is not properly a creator, but only a seer; that its great function is to behold^ and that in the combinations of wit, or fancy, or taste, or logic, the mind is simply a discerner, not an originator of ideas and relations, and is a creator only in selecting and regarding certain ideas and relations and neglecting others ; that no act of the will can call up the requi- site relation or idea, but they must be waited on and watched for, till the laws of the association shall purvey them. "The mind cannot create an idea more than it can create worlds. God alone does this — God that made the heavens and the earth, the spiritual universe, and the soul of man. . . . "Take, now, genius in one of its happiest moods, — acquisitive, analytic, or creative, — when its reason seems insight, and its insight inspiration, and its combination and architecture rapid, subtle, exact, vast, and gorgeous, like a god's, and its memory, too seems as quick and immortal. And mark, first, its aspect of profound and strong repose. It is the repose of trancelike attention,! 1 86 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. of concentrated, fascinated, resolved gaze upon its theme. The eye of the mind is open wide ; intent, silent, and fixed as a star. It is the telescope directed to the rolling sphere. God is passing in the glory of the material and the spiritual universe before the mind — God dwelling above and behind the unapproachable light, but his train falling down and sweeping the mortal vision — enduring laws of mind his ministers, and shapes intellectual and ideal, a mighty host, his Sabaoth. " The mind is now to unite in its act the seer and the prophet. Its mission for the hour is to see and to tell. But not to see and to tell all, more than the eye sees all the images which light builds on the optic nerve turned toward the outward world. . . . " Processes of selection, analysis, comparison, and com- bination, quick, subtle, and strong as the action of the imponderable agents of nature, — light, heat, and elec- tricity, — are now requisite to meet the exigencies of the moment. Amid that shadowy rush of ideas you need now to grasp some one appropriate to your present pur- pose, and hold it as with a clutch of steel in the focus of the intellectual rays, till it glows, blazes and makes full evolution of itself, and till relation after relation flashes out, and faces of truth and beauty look forth from its shadowiness. . . . " Ideas thus arrested and resolved under the analysis of an intense attention, and made to develop their afi&ni- ties and relations, are now under the same influence recombined and grouped, whether by essential and perma- nent relations, as of cause and effect, and of intrinsic and enduring correspondency, or by the lighter ones of super- ficial or accidental affinities, or mere juxtaposition, or of flitting, unique, or capricious analogies. And thus recom- bined and grouped they are laid by in magazine, as the ADDRESSES A/VD WRITINGS. 1 87 ready furniture of the mind in the future, whether of knowledge or embellishment, illustration or argument, or as the ideal archetypes of art or the organic generaliza- tions of philosophy. They are laid by to come forth, when the hour needs, in groups, chainworks, and masses, the glittering wreath of fancy, the playful summer flash of wit, the hot thick shafts of passion, the linked bolts of logic, or the collected storms, massing all in one, of poetry or oratory. Thus wrought, they are committed over to memory, which, under the same intense, concentrated action of the mind, becomes not so much recollection as an ever quick and living consciousness. Indeed they seem not so much remembered as spontaneously kindling up, when the mind is highly excited, like fireworks attached to the mind, ignited and discharged by its glow ; to which glow the mind is wrought, when a fitting theme is pre- sented, by the same attention that first attached these combustible projectiles to it. " Thus it is attention to the great end, and the specific relation, and the precise point, following it out through division and subdivision, and through all complexities of the webwork of association — it is such an attention that is the genius of analysis and order and generalization, and of the artistic and poetic combination and creation. It is the same faculty or act of the mind which daguerreotypes and stereotypes the fugitive ideas upon the mind with a vividness imperishable as the mind itself. It is this, too, laying them by in store, classified, grouped, and compacted, and when the hour for their use comes throwing an intense irradiation into the rich and ready magazine — it is this that characterizes and well-nigh creates the genius of utterance or eloquence. . . . "This it is that incarnates the abstract and translates vague generalities into sharply defined, statuesque Individ- 1 88 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. ualizations. Dead terms become living, charged, electric. The word war, for instance, which to the superficial view starts only the glittering martial pageant, or the rapture of battle, or the pomp of victory, to the mind turning its converging lens upon it — what a hell yawns in its three letters ! So art, which to the common mind walks a vague and cold abstraction, how to the analytic and meditative thought it trains along a host of the historic and ideal beautiful ! And religion again, to the unheeding ear a sound so dead and often so repulsive, to the intent and familiar reflection, what an eloquence of sweet charities and holy affections, what a scenery of awful love and beauty, what an exceeding and unutterable weight of glory there is in it ! . . . " The faculty of attention has ever been the familiar of the philosopher, the artist, the poet, and the orator. . . . " Poetic genius, though undoubtedly implying peculiar original gifts, presents to us, in its moods of inspiration, mind in steadfast and eclectic attention to- the cesthetic relation of things and the aspects and similitudes of life. Its norm of eclecticism is a feeling of life and beauty, or, I may rather say, of a beautiful life ; for it is attracted to beauty as the garment of soul — as the face of passion and feeling. . . . " What an inner world was that which grew upon the eye, as under the rays of an introspective attention the invisible handwriting and picture came on the tablet of the soul ! There it stood photographed ; culled from all that eye had seen, or ear heard, or heart conceived, or fancy dreamed — grouped and animate by the 'feelings infinite ' of life and beauty — the eclectic, poetic Cosmos — the cssthetic reprint of the universe. There was the vast, varied, passionate, and phantom drama of the present; the splendor of cities, the pomp of thrones, the tramp of ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS. 1 89 armies, the clang of plumed and bristling battle ; kaleido- scope forms of the brave, the strong, and the beautiful; and there in funeral procession followed the solemn past — of the present the gloomy and mournful shadow ; there, too, was imagination's brood — sons of pale Erebus or holy Light, with the Scyllean rage, the enchanted gar- dens, and Syren's Isle. There were the crystal battle- ments and the sapphire blaze of heaven, and there the awful structures of eternal night and the gloomy palace of the king of hell. There wandered the happy amid amaranth and ever-blooming asphodel ; or zephyrs sighed along the stream of oblivion, and funeral trees waved dusky branches amid the pale skies of eternal pain. The white-robed walked along the streets of pearl and the river of life, or the lost shrieked around the City of Dis and the Burning Sea, or the departed stretched their shadowy hands across the Dark River, still longing and loving, toward the children of mortality. There stood they all, waiting the heraldry of their orchestral song — the archetypes of the verse that was to charm all time. " Oratory, again, is a kindred exhibition of attention guided by the peculiar exigencies and elective affinities of the theme, the occasion, and the object. . . . "The power of concentrating the energy of the mind with lightning stroke and starlike steadfastness on the objects of this triple consciousness and on the multiplex and shifting aspects of the triple relation between them, the prerogative of the Genius of Persuasion. It is only when all the elements of the triple relation are vast and noble that the highest order of eloquence is born — the theme great — the auditory great, in power, character, or destiny, and an end moving and mighty. When all these are great, speech is great if uttered by a mind whose attention develops their greatness. Ofttimes the light igO TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. and inattentive glance will fail to detect it even if pres- ent. But in case of such failure in regard to either of these, one element of the highest eloquence is wanting. The mind of the preacher, for instance, must not only sympathize with the vastness of the doctrine he unfolds, and of the end to which he would persuade, hut must see before him, not merely so many weak, ignorant, and sinful men and women, but an assembly of the heirs of eternity — bearing in themselves the destiny of gods for weal or woe, for glory or shame. . . . " At such times appears the full glory of the orator,^ perhaps that of the loftiest attitude among men — almost as of a superior being swaying the will and reason as he lists — instinctively grasping at once a multitude of heart- strings, and sweeping them in symphony with his own passion, and hurling forth over the astounded auditory the bolts, fiery or beautiful, riving and overthrowing all in their path. An embattled storm, a veritable cloud com- peller, he moves along his victorious march. Above and beyond himself — yea, above and beyond man — almost an inspired revelator seems he — yea, almost a very reve- lation, he stands before us in such an hour, an incarnated idea, a living logic, a fire-lipped thought. "Demosthenes is no longer Demosthenes, but Greece herself — trampled, torn, bleeding, yet beautiful — start- ing one glorious moment in her mighty despair, lifting her hand to the blue heavens over her heroic dead, and swearing her great oath. " Cicero is no longer Cicero, but the awful Genius of eternal Rome herself, in death-grapple with assassins. " Paul is no longer Paul, of stammering speech and feeble presence. He has put on 'the Crucified.' He is an impersonation of the everlasting gospel, with logic and love kindled at the unapproachable Glory. ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS. Igl "Ames is no longer the senator — broken and bowed with pale consumption. His port rises to the awful ear- nestness and command of the Genius of Humanity itself, with intellectual buckler beating back from the land the storm of war — and pouring warning and wail upon the ears of the pale senate. His voice is the cry of woe from a thousand log-cabins beyond the mountains — the shriek of a thousand miles of frontier burning with savage war. " Whitefield is no longer Whitefield, but the great doom itself impersonate, summoning a pale and conscience- stricken world to the bar of eternal judgment. . . . " Permit me, young gentlemen, to allude, in conclusion, to another relation of my subject : one most important of all, yea, of infinite solemnity. In the conduct and direc- tion of the attention lie moral destinies for both worlds. We grow like that we look on, be it of heaven or hell. The attention is the direction of the soul — a direction prophetic and determinative of its eternal career — its outreach and movement towards the everlasting. The mind follows its intellectual ray projected upon the universe, be it toward light or gloom. If attention is genius, its direction is destiny. This determines whether genius shall be of glory or of shame, of heaven or hell. This controls our moral sentiments and is the key to our moral character. Directed to a narrow and partial circle of truths, political, philosophical, or reli- gious, it makes the bigot, the fanatic, and the moral or social lunatic ; and will lead man to imagine that the heavens and the earth were of old fashioned according to its formularies. Directed to the mere letter and outworks of Christianity, to mere visible forms of order, creed, or ceremonial, it dooms the mind to imprisonment of its reason and charity within them as a Bastile — degrades and enslaves the soul, and condemns it to grind all its 192 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. days in gloom and shame and fear ; fixed contrariwise on the spirit and life of Christianity, it makes a spiritual freeman, godlike expansiveness of intellect and soul. " Bear it in mind, then, that our themes of steadfast and habitual thought shape and doom the soul. Turning from the good and persistingly gazing on the evil, the mind establishes its gravitations toward the eternal night. The bands of association become chains of darkness bind- ing to the gates of hell. Mighty it still may be, but with the fame of a fallen angel. Oh ! there are minds — a vast and gloomy army of them — starlike in their birth and lit up of God to shine forever beside his throne ; but whose intellectual ray, alas, turned ever toward the outer dark, drew them down forevermore. Comet minds there are which, like those wanderers of immensity, whichever side the orb of light they turn, project their ray ever to the opposite realm of night. Drawn though they may be within the very verge of heaven, still turns their vision ever to the nether glooms ; and hurrying in seeming impatience and pain through their perihelion, they follow their projected visual ray into the dark and infinite void. The face of Evil, gazed on, throws out its baleful assimila- tive influence and its bands of deadly fascination, and draws them within its malignant sphere forever, while of the sons of light a different destiny follows a different mental gaze. They shall be like God, for they shall see him as he is." The early life in St. Louis possesses no little interest from its social environment. Among the many warm friends of that period were some men then and after- wards very famous, such as Edward Bates, Henry S. Geyer, Hamilton R. Gamble, Roswell Field, and Judge Leonard, all of whom were at the front of the St. Louis bar. ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS,. 1 93 The acquaintance with Mr. Bates, dating back to the first days in St. Louis, grew warm and intimate during the political troubles that culminated in the Civil War ; and after Mr. Bates' return from Washington to St. Louis the ties grew stronger than ever. With Mr. Geyer his relations, though not so intimate, 'were those of a cordial friendship, in spite of the fact that Mr. Geyer was of the proslavery, Democratic school, and professed no great fondness for " Yankees " in general. Mr. Field and Judge Leonard were both from Vermont. The former was at Middlebury College at nearly the same period as Mr. Post. And, although his opinions on reli- gious subjects were such that he had little to do with the clergy as a rule, his friendship with Mr. Post terminated only with his death. The personal and family associations of Mr. Post with Frank P. Blair and Samuel T. Glover were very intimate, but of later growth, and are referred to hereafter. Apropos of the St. Louis bar in those days may be mentioned an article appearing in The St. Louis Intelli- gencer over the signature of Civis, and entitled "The Moral Obligations of the Legal Profession." It was pub- lished shortly before the time when the Montesquieus were tried for murder committed at the City Hotel. That tragedy was one of the most startling and appalling in the local annals of crime. Mobs gathered about the jail, and the air was full of threats of Lynch law for days after- wards. At the trial an array most rare indeed of legal talent was marshaled, both for the state and the prisoners, and there lacked nothing in the history of, that homicide to place it among the most famous causes cdibres in the criminal calendar. Hence it will be readily understood that the publication of this article, just as the trial was coming on and while 1 94 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. public sentiment was at white heat, and its masterly dis- cussion of the legitimate province of the bar in defending criminals, its arraignment of the practices too often employed to shield them from justice, and its warnings, against the dangers in store for a community where such practices were successfully resorted to, made a widespread and profound impression in St. Louis. The years 1848, 1849, 1850, and 1851 were very prolific in literary work, outside of the pulpit. And in addition to the public addresses already referred to, among the products of his pen should be -mentioned a large number of contributions by Mr. Post to The St. Louis Intelligencer,, reviewing various new publications on the shelves of Skil- man's bookstore. There were more than a hundred of these notices, some of them — such as those on John Randolph and William Wirt — very elaborate, and all prepared within a few months, and in the midst of pulpit and parish and other multifarious and pressing demands. Together with many other articles written for the press,, often over assumed signatures, these notices were clipped from the newspaper columns by the same careful hand that copied them for the printer, and were pasted away in a scrapbook, with the thought that they might be read and treasured afterward by the children and grandchildren. About the same time with the Skilman bookstore notices, in January, 185 1, Mr. Post lectured before the Mercantile Library Association on " The Voices of His- tory." This lecture was one of a series, delivered before this Association, which included discourses by Father Smarius, of the St. Louis University, and other popular lecturers and representative men. These " Voices," by the stories of parties and sects and empires of former ages, are calling to the worshiper of the present, to the idolizer ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS. 1 95 of country, to those under thrall of sectional or class prejudice, to the idolater of the past, to the reformer, to the religious sectarist, to the political partisan, to the lover of fame ; warning against vainglory, teaching humil- ity and steadfast courage and faith and foretelling the coming of that kingdom — " the stone cut out of the mountain without hand " — which is to fill the earth. The address has an elegiac ending, not unlike that at the dedi- cation of Bellefontaine. Touching "The Voices of History" and the literary notices there was an editorial in The Intelligencer, a part of which is quoted : — " Professor Post is pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church of St. Louis, situated on Sixth Street, above Franklin Avenue. As pastor of that church he is known — known favorably for the possession of those kindly graces of the clerical and Christian life which endear a minister to his flock. Those over whom he is placed love and cherish him as the 'shepherd and bishop of their souls,' abundantly satisfied with his constant and lumi- nous teachings of Christian duty, and justly proud of his moral worth and intellectual strength. " But it is not alone in this quiet and humble sphere that Professor Post has made himself a name and caused his power to be felt. The time has come when more should be known — when the quiet and thoughtful minis- ter of a St. Louis church should be known and acknowl- edged as one of the most industrious students, profound thinkers, and eloquent writers that our country can boast of. "The literary reviews that have appeared from week to week in the columns of The Intelligencer since the date of its establishment have attracted wide attention. Both at home and abroad they have excited a quick 196 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. interest in the minds of scholars, and many compliments have poured in congratulating the paper on the posses- sion of so able a department, and from the literary world of the eastern cities the question has frequently come, • ' Who is the writer of those reviews ? ' " The beautiful address delivered by Professor Post on the dedication of Bellefontaine Cemetery introduced him in a most favorable manner to the public mind in St. Louis. The present production, 'The Voices of History,' renews that introduction, and confirms its distinguished author in the public estimation as one henceforth to be prized as an honor to the city and to the West. " Desiring to do our part in awarding to Professor Post his now merited and inevitable position in the world of letters, at the risk of offending his taste and his judgment, we make public the fact that he is the reviewer whose pen has so greatly enriched our columns. To the grace of his pen and to his brilliant imagination and rich storehouse of scientific, poetic, and historic knowledge we are indebted for all under the head of Literary Reviews that has ren- dered the Intelligencer so interesting and instructive. "We commend 'The Voices of History' to every reader. It is a good type of the author's mind and mode of thought, and a fair specimen of his lofty, grand, and poetic style. . . . , " There is something grandly apocalyptic in the theme and in the discourse, and the mind rests from the rapt study of the moving panorama of the past, and strangely rejoices at having been ' snatched up ' from the narrow fixedness of time and permitted to enjoy a sweep of view around portions of that all-comprehending circle which is eternity." The St. Louis Intelligencer was at this time, and during the years immediately following, an active and enterpris- ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS. 1 97 ing and quite promising newspaper, ably conducted by Mr. A. S. Mitchell, who was a personal friend and warm admirer of Mr. Post. In this connection the fact may be mentioned that the latter not infrequently wrote articles and sometimes editorials for this journal, although the authorship was not given. Here, by way of illustration, is a leader written by him, headed, "A Farewell to 1850," and appearing in the issue of January i, 1851 : — " I love thee, Old Year, for what thou hast taken away. Thou hast covered the faces of the revered and the beau- tiful ; thou hast quenched the eye of genius ; thou hast sealed the lip of eloquence ; thou hast hushed the music of love ; thou hast borne away untold riches of charities and joys, and golden opportunity, and blessed privilege ; thou bearest away with thee forever much of my earthly history. Oh, what a wealth of heart and soul, of thought and hope and affection, thou buriest in thy silent bosom ! " Yea, I love thee for the dark hours thou hast minis- tered ; the agonizing vigil, the nights of pain, and all the stern but truthful monitorship of grief. I thank thee for their faithful whispers. Blessed angels I know they were, though their faces were veiled in gloom, like yon dusky night, through which the clearer shine the heavens. They fade — but ah ! their record, never ! I fear thee. Old Year ! I shrink with awe when I think of the immortal chronicle thou hast writ on leaves above the stars — the Book of God — the Book of Character — the Book of Doom. Ah, me ! what guilty purposes, vain desires, and pleasant sins, what careless shadows and unconscious slurs on souls I love, stand against me there ! Still I thank thee, Old Year, that thou whisperest me with thy parting breath of the great cleansing Life Foun- tain, where all this crimson may become white forever. 1 98 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " I honor thee, too, Old Year. Art thou the first or latest born of thy half cycle, not unchronicled or unsung shalt thou be in the great hereafter. Though thy foot has not been shod with revolution or with war, still we know it has been onward. It has fallen in the silence of the night in the dungeon and the palace of the Oppressor and the Despot like the tread of doom, and on the ear of the dark millions like the trump of Jubilee. It has borne on the march of humanity in the Old World and the New, » and thrown more clearly over the dark waters of time the morning-red of a better era of light and liberty and love. Though storms, not yet laid, have lowered upon our American Empire, and reaction, dastardly or bloody, sits on carnage in Naples and Rome and Vienna and Paris, still we know thou hast labored at the wheel of change by the command of God who sent thee, and hast brought the earth, whether we see or not, toward the Upper Light. Farewell, brave 1850! Fare thee well! not to oblivion, but to history and to fame ! Thou hast left the achievements of art and genius, of eloquence and science and song, and of heroic and martyr virtues in thy track. Still, fare thee well ! Much as I love thee, I would not, were I an Orpheus, call thee back from the world of shadows, or walk thy round with thee again, to unseal anew the closed fount of sorrows, or undo the fin- ished, hallowed suffering,' or again to struggle and again to fall. " Now, Old Year, farewell ! Ha ! who echoed that • Farewell ' ? Was it the night wind sighing along the casement ? Or came it so stilly from the place of graves .' I look forth on the solemn night. Shadows dim flit spec- trally along the wall and street, and seem in fantastic shift, as they mingle with the forms of late and lone wan- derers, to change to shapes of my departed hours. A ADDRESSES AND WRITINGS. 1 99 melancholy funeral procession ! But they are only spec- ters. There is no speech or speculation in them. 'T was not their voice. I look above — there burns Orion in the sky, as he burned over the birth-year of time, and will burn over his last; yea, as he burned over my own far- iled years of dreamlike childhood and glorious youth. But beyond his fires I see them — the shining faces — the loved and faded from the earth. There, there they live and love. They beckon me with their white hands, but no whisper comes, save rifts of angel melodies from that far world. " ' Farewell ! ' The echo comes again. Ah ! I see it now. It was the sigh of the dying year, whose latest shadow now lingers upon yonder sky like a film cloud across the moon. ' Farewell ! ' I hear it whisper, ' I wish thee joy of my newborn brother. May the wings of all his hours be tipped for thee withAgold. Use him well, but trust him not too much. The rosy hues of youth are now upon his eye, and his pencil is dipped in dreams ; but he will not love thee more than I have done, and may not serve thee better. Much he will surely take away of what thou lovest — much of thy swift -winged life — he may bear off all ; at least, his pinions, be they of ebony or gold, shall waft thee nearer life's solemn close and nearer the eternal doom. May they fit thee for it, calm thy pas- sions, temper thy hopes, reform thy evil, and bring thee gentle charity, true wisdom, and heavenly love. In this solemn night and solitude be thy life's fever soothed and the strife of thy life's battle stayed ; and be thy hates, political and personal, if such thou hast, subdued to sym- pathy and pity ; directed, as this hour reminds thee, against the fellows of thy frailty and thy transientness, whose life, like thine, is but as the wind in yonder silent sky, that passeth away and cometh not again. To higher 200 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. passions, holier moods, better and milder thoughts, to more charitable judgments and the behests of duty, piety, and love, be thy soul attuned, as committing thee to the mysterious future, I wish thee a blessed and a beautiful coming year. " ' Farewell ! When suns are quenched and stars are fallen, before the Great White Throne we meet again. I bear thee record there ! ' " CHAPTER XVI. STRUGGLE OF CONGREGATIONALISM. Struggle of Congregationalism, and founding of the First Congregational Church In St. Louis. — Address on "Congregationalism; and the Expediency of forming a Congregational Church." — The St. Louis home. — Incidents in 1852-54. — Sundry addresses In the East. IT may seem strange now, in this year of 1891, when Congregationalism in Missouri is not only an admitted institution but a very prominent and influential factor in the religious and political life of the state, having in its associations over sixty pastors and eighty churches, and a following of six thousand members, and, in numbers and wealth and enterprise, keeping abreast with the most advanced growth of this commonwealth, that in the days of 1850-51 it was looked upon as an intruder and its presence there challenged and almost interdicted.. At that time it will be remembered that St. Louis was without a rival in the Mississippi Valley ; with an im- mense river commerce unhampered by railway competi- tion and forging onward in population and wealth with an increment more rapid than before or since. In trade and travel it was then the key to Missouri. It was the focal point of her enterprise and also of her intelligence ; and immigration and " isms " from all quarters were swarming thither and obtaining a foothold and becoming a part of its complicated nexus of life and growth. There was then a large eastern population in St. Louis, with Congregational antecedents and in other religious connections, but no Congregational church had been started there or had taken root anywhere in Missouri. Such an one is said 202 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. to have been organized in Arcadia in 1840, which had "a name to live " for a brief season, but was an exotic that did not survive its first decade. This is understood to have been the only figment of a Congregational church which, prior to the movement here chronicled, had an existence in the state. At all events it was at St. Louis, in 1851, that Congregationalism, then a stranger and an alien, crossed the Mississippi and planted its standard and fought its first battle, and the battle which fixed its destinies in Missouri from that time forward. That period is of deep interest to Congregationalists, not only by reason of this fact, but also because in that controversy more than in most phases of its history, the first principles of Congregationalism were called in ques- tion and were laid bare and collated and tersely stated and discussed on reason and authority. While in New England it was a primitive growth, always recognized as a part of her history and institutions, in Missouri it was called to a halt and compelled to declare itself and cham- pion its own right to exist ; and its tenets and the logic and historical precedents which supported them were sharply tested in the ordeal. This opposition to Congregationalism may have been partly owing to the fact that the dominant sentiment in St. Louis was southern and proslavery, and that a denom- ination having in it so much of the atmosphere of the New England hills would be out of place, if not in open antagonism, in a slave-holding community ; although it was a fact that other churches — as conspicuously in the case of Unitarianism — obnoxious by reason of the same objection, were founded and flourished in St. Louis with- out opposition. A secret spring of the antagonism from certain sources may be traced to another fact already referred to, namely, that eastern Congregationalists, STRUGGLE OF CQNGREGATIiONALISM. 203 finding no house of worship of their own order in St. Louis, would make, as they had for a long time before made, most excellent timber for churches of a different school, and such churches would therefore suffer from failure of new accretions if indeed not also from withdrawal of memberships. But the special "root of bitterness" was Taecause the First Congregational Church had developed from the chrysalis of a Presbyterian one; and the change was charged to have been the work of a "proselyting propagandist," and due to unfair and underhand methods. Let it be said in this connection that it is not the pur- pose here to write a chapter on Congregational history, •or to resurrect denominational animosities, long since dead and buried. Among the most intimate and enduring church fellowships in the subsequent years were those, on the part of both minister and people, between the First Congregational Church and two of the leading Presbyte- rian churches in St. Louis. The sole object of this chap- ter is to furnish such outline as may be necessary to the understanding of a prominent and significant epoch in the ]ife of Mr. Post ; and the reader will so interpret what is here said. In brief, the facts are that there had been in the Third Church, from its organization, an eastern element, with a natural predilection for Congregationalism, and there had also grown up during the four years of Mr. Post's stay in St. Louis an ardent personal attachment on the part of the church and congregation for himself. His views on church order, and the contingency of his leaving in 185 1, had been understood at the outset, and the strong New England sentiment in the church had combined with a general wish to retain him as a permanent pastor, in bring- ing to a head the project of forming a Congregational church. But it is also a fact not to be forgotten that 204 TR VMAN MAR CELL US POS T. during the movement which had this result Mr. Post sedulously held aloof from any participation in discussions or meetings, and even from personal conversations calcu- lated to affect such movement, and that the only aid received from him was the silent influence on his part inevitably resulting from the attachment of his people and his known denominational preferences. It was not until the decisive step toward the formation of a Congre- gational church had been taken that Mr. Post broke the silence to which, during this exciting crisis, he had restrained himself, and became the champion of Congre- gationalism in St. Louis. At the first inception of this enterprise it embraced within its ranks a majority of the church, while a small minority most strenuously opposed it. It also met with attacks from a portion of the pulpit and religious press in St. Louis and elsewhere. But, in spite of dissension within and assaults from without, it was determined early in the winter of 1851-52, by a vote of sixty-two to twenty-four, to form the new church, the majority offer- ing to buy out the minority at eighty per cent, of the value of their holdings, or to sell their own interest at a less per cent. The former settlement was in fact made. After the decisive vote had been taken, although prior to the organization of the new church, on the formal invi- tation of Hudson E. Bridge, Carlos Greeley, and Judges John M. Krum and Samuel Treat, and a number of other prominent representative men of St. Louis, neither con- nected with the movement nor Congregationalists, Mr. Post gave, at the Third Church, on January 11, 1852, an address, the title of which had been suggested, not hy Mr. Post, but in the invitation, on "Congregationalism; and the Expediency of Forming a Congregational Church in St. Louis." STRUGGLE OF CONGREGATIONALISM. 205 The discourse declares the organic principles of this denomination, namely, the Scriptures as the only authori- tative instrument creative and regulative of church polity, the completeness and independence of the local church and the sovereignty of the brotherhood, and the Bible alone as the book of government, law, judicature, and faith. These principles were defended on reason and Scripture precedent, and on apostolic and primitive usage, and by citations from pulpits outside of the lines of Congrega- tionalism, such as Mosheim, the Magdeburg Centuriators, Father Paul of Venice, and Neander. The lecture traces the power and pregnant influence of this order in Eng- land, through the Revolution of 1640, and afterwards in New England history, and on the institutions of America. And the question is then put : " Do not her character and history and the number of her sons here, and the cause ' of her great Head, require that she should have one church here in the heart of this great American domain, of which she has been so primordial and mighty an architect .' " The discussion of this latter question sheds no little light upon the difficulties that beset the progress of Con- gregationalism in Missouri and upon the grounds and methods of opposition which at the present time one would hardly imagine could ever have been invoked. And the entire lecture, of which the above is a meager and very imperfect synopsis, should be read in connection with this part of the narrative, not merely as an exposi- tion of Congregationalism, but also as a statement of its position in St. Louis in 1851. March 14, 1852, dates the organization of the First Trinitarian Congregational Church of St. Louis, " a name," says Dr. Post, in his historical discourse delivered in 206 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. i860, "assumed in no sectarian challenge or arrogation, but simply as descriptive of its faith, order, and history; in faith, Trinitarian ; in order. Congregational ; in history, the first of such faith and order in the state." On that occasion were present and participating in the exercises Rev. Mr. Mears, of Quincy, and Julian M. Sturtevant, President of Illinois College. The organization of the new church did not by any means put an end to the crusade against it. And, as may be inferred from what has been said, 't-lie_^ontroversy involved something more than the shock of religious opinions ; it engendered a good deal of acrimony and produced a number of attacks through the press, not only upon the infant church, but upon the pastor and upon his personal conduct and motives. Conspicuous among these assaults was one from the editor of an eastern religious journal of high standing, alleging that the Congregational church was the work of a few restless agitators, and that the course pursued by the pastor was that of a propagandist in disguise. The reply of Mr. Post which' appeared in The New York Inde- pendent in May, 1852, was a full and succinct review, over his own signature, of the movement establishing that church, and a defense against the aspersions and-Jalec— charges thrown upon the enterprise and its promoters. The vindication was complete, and with it virtually ended all further agitation touching Congregationalism in Missouri. It having been settled, though no formal installation ever took place, that Mr. Post should become the pastor of the new church, and all thought of returning to Jack- sonville having been abandoned, he began to think of a home in St. Louis ; something more than a tenement at STRUGGLE OF CONGREGATIONALISM. 20/ the mercy of the landlord, sealed up among other build- ings, and half smothered in smoke and macadam dust — a house which the occupant might call his own, with playground and garden, where the pure air and sunshine would visit, and by-and-by pleasant memories might come and build their nests, even though they should not replace the recollections of the Jacksonville "Eden." So in the fall of 1851, at the famous sale of "Stoddard's Addition," Mr. Post made purchase of a small tract of land, then well out in the country and separated from town by a belt of timber ; and on this site, in the follow- ing year, he built a dwelling house, which was occupied in the autumn of 1852. From its roof was a wide and then unbroken prospect away to the southwest, extending,, in clear weather, as far as the bluffs of the Meramec. The house stood on an open moorland, which, with its greensward and numerous ponds, — some of them lakes in size and fed with living springs, — presented a picture like that of a natural park. Mrs. Post gave to the new habitation the name of " ^olian Castle," and in the early days, before houses were built about it, the winds of night were wont to sing their lullabies through its crannies, and many a summer's gale and fierce northwester used to beat upon its unprotected walls. The little plat of ground about it was large enough to create enthusiastic zeal in all sorts of husbandry, and under the supervision of Mrs. Post the terrace next the house was made to bloom with roses, while the yard to the east of it was swarded and planted with orchard trees that soon yielded abundantly most delicious apples and peaches. Very sunny mem- ories cluster about the first years in this new home. There the children grew together, in a circle unbroken by death or separation, unto youth and early manhood, and womanhood. The house was then brimful of social 2o8 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. life; of church entertainments; of visits from new-found friends ; and of . reunions not , a few — for the bonds of kinsmanship were then very many and strong — of rela- tives gathered ir.om the west and from far away in the east. Among the guests, of those days were some men very famous ; notably on one occasion, early in the fifties, Frank P. and Montgomery., Blair, Salmon P. Chase, and Ralph Waldo Emersdh. Gf this old. family mansion, it may not be anticipating too much to say here that it continued to be the residence of Mr. Post till the day of his death and has never gone into th* hands of strangers. The house has been painted and repainted, and is somewhat altered, but not enough to niar its identity. The orchard has ceased to flourish and thei city is, close about the, place in all directions. The ■ homestead building, after its nearly forty years of service, is, like all things earthly, gradually lapsing into a decline, and the memories that have gathered about it in the recent years are of the shadier hue — some of them solemn arid saintly. In the study room of the third story, removed from the noise of the house and the street, was the ' laboratory where Mr. Post wrought out hjs busiest and most earnest lifework. In the western chamber below, Mrs. Post and a beloved daughter passed away ; and in the later years of his life the room opposite was both sleeping apartment and study, where Mr. Post spent much of his time by himself among his books and manuscripts and where he at last answered the call of his Master. Quite a conspicuous and memorable occurrence, owing to the fact that the trip was through regions often of almost virgin wilderness and along shores inhabited by the red man, and also from the goodly company of promi- o X D O to STRUGGLE OF CONGREGATIONALISM. 2O9 nent and representative St. Louisians who made up the party, was the excursion in 1852, up the Mississippi to Fort Snelling and the Falls of St. Anthony, on the steamer Die Vernon, under the charge of John S. McCune, then and since widely known in river annals, and at that time president of the board of trustees of the Congregational church. Among the passengers was Henry S. Geyer, already mentioned, then very famous at the bar and afterwards United States senator. Of this trip an account, from the pen of Mr. Post, character- istically graphic and picturesque, afterward appeared in print. The church during this period showed marked pros- perity in things temporal and spiritual. The spring of 1853 witnessed a special religious awakening. Aside from the assistance of Rev. Edwin Johnson, of Jackson- ville, " the labor of the meetings," writes a correspondent, "as far as regards the ministrations of the Word, for more than a month, almost nightly, devolved on the pastor." On the last day of March, thirty-four were added to the church — thirty on profession. Lyceum lectures were then very much in vogue, and in February, 1854, a series was billed in Alton, where Rev. Dr. Gassaway, of St. George's Church, and Mr. Post were to alternate as speakers. On February 16, the latter was to have lectured there, but for mutual con- venience Dr. Gassaway took his place, and was instantly killed on board the steamer Kate Kearney when her boilers exploded at the St. Louis wharf. During the same month Mr. Post delivered a course of lectures at home before the Young Men's Christian Asso- ciation, which were to have been followed by others from 2 I O TRUMAN MARCELL US POST. Dr. Gassaway. Of this melancholy tragedy Mr. Post said at the beginning of the lecture — and his words take an added significance and solemnity when one thinks of the mysterious crossing of these destinies : — "The speaker I had hoped to announce is not here to-night ; no, nor shall he ever be. He is this night with another assemblage — the vast and voiceless congregation in yonder silent city of the dead, that grows to our own as its shadow. The lips that should have taken up and continued the argument are sealed till the heavens and the earth be no more. . ^ " As I stand here thus, I feel how awful are the words we utter. We utter them in the ear of God, and God alone is our everlasting auditor. I feel how small a matter is human censure or praise, when I reflect that one of those whose according and approving opinion I most valued has, as it were, even while I have been speaking, passed to the circles of eternity. Pulseless and cold forever now the hand that on last Tuesday, within this hall, grasped my own with all a brother's true-hearted sympathy and encouragement. Changed of God and fading to a mem- ory, that face that then beamed on me with the light of an earnest and genial soul. " Such is the hour. A grief and awe are on it ; and I seem as if now stepping aside for the dead to speak. The program projected changes to the funeral order. The course, now ever unfinished, dies away into the ever- lasting silence. The voice whose accents we waited to take it up passes to the awful eloquence of the grave ; yea, rises to the mightier argument of those who dwell not in houses of clay. May that eloquence instruct us in lessons which the utterances of this life could never teach!" STRUGGLE OF CONGREGATIONALISM. 2 1. 1 In 1854 the ordeal through which the First Congrega- tional Church had passed, and the "fierce light" which "beat upon" its history, and its position "solitary and alone," on the frontier line and in the Queen City of the valley, and its championship by the pastor, together with , his general reputation through addresses and contributions to the press, had brought Mr. Post into prominent notice among the Congregationalists in New York and New Eng- land. Accordingly we find this year 1854 quite prolific in invitations to deliver addresses and to respond to calls at various religious and benevolent reunions in the east. Thus, at the annual meeting of the Congregational Union, the distinctive national convention of Congrega- tionalism, held in Brooklyn, N. Y., on May 10, 1854, and on the same occasion with discourses by Dr. Edwards Park, of Andover, and Dr. Leonard Bacon, of New Haven, was one by Mr. Post, prepared in response to an invitation sent to St. Louis, on " The Mission of Congregationalism in the West." The address referred to that " ever-drifting natal Delos of new nations following the sun in his flight," the "social deep momently crystallizing to the marble and granite of new worlds," and calling for " the mightiest powers for social fusion and assimilation and for the creation of Christian civilization " ; and the adaptation of Congrega- tionalism to the new west, its harmony with the demo- cratic spirit of that region, and its natural sympathy with liberty and the bold philosophic methods of the west- ern mind, and the relations of order and liberty in its system, were the prominent themes of the discourse. A similar order was selected by the divine Spirit as an evangelizer, in the primitive ages, and in a melange of nations presenting in greater force the difficulties sup- posed now to exclude Congregationalism from the west. 2 I 2 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. No denominations in the west have prospered more than those with principles and forms of polity correspond- ing in the main with hers. But with Congregationalism, till within a few years, " a sort of compromise seems to have been supposed to forbid the assertion of her distinc- tive individuality beyond certain lines of longitude. She became in consequence a mere local arrangement, a glebe polity, an accident of time and place and of certain phases of civilization, not a matter of essential and enduring principle at all." And this relation of compro- mise "reacted on the churches and theological schools in the land peculiarly her own. It neutralized her denomi- national spirit, took away her self-appreciation, and silenced her pulpit and lecture room on the subject of church polity. . . . And she became first silent, then indifferent, and gradually even ignorant in regard to her own principles. " Is it wonderful that Congregationalism did not thrive vigorously under the auspices of such a polity .' Does it not show great vitality that she lived at all .' " Western churches distinctively Congregational were in consequence of the causes referred to "for the most part isolated and weak, with no press and no organ, girt around and overlaid by vast and powerful systems with well-furnished appliances for self-advocacy and extension. Is it any wonder that they were misunderstood first in the west and then in the east .' " Is it strange that such churches " without kindly counsel or strengthening fellow- ship should have often withered away" .' " Still, with all their trials of position and history, the Congregational churches as a body need shrink from com- parison with no other in the west. They have already wrought there a truly great and noble Christian work. The trial of Congregationalism there, even amid such 3' Tli UG GLE OF CONGRE GA TIONALISM. 2 1 3 discouragements, is a triumphant vindication of her claim as an evangelizing and organizing power. . . . "A church that truly holds up the Pilgrim banner, though it stands alone, shines afar. It stands as a con- stant representative and suggester of vast and potent truths. Could it simply deposit these truths in the germ of nascent communities and then die, it would be a mighty benefactor. It will have infused a leaven des- tined to work in coming times, through all the economy of the social and religious world. Much more will it be a power for good, if, as it may be hoped, as a living light it shall pour its perpetual beams on all the future. . . . " Of you, brethren, who dwell in the old land, the mis- sion of Congregationalism at the west demands that you follow your exiles there with your interest and affec- tions, your letters, your newspapers, your counsels, your prayers, and, as far as practicable and requisite, with material aid to those who are compelled at the same time to build the church, the schoolhouse, and the cabin in the wilderness ; certainly do not withdraw trust and sympathy because iidelity to your principles of church order may have brought on them the strife of tongues. Believe not all rumors. Try them. Respect your principles and those who respect them ; teach them to your children, your churches, your theological seminaries, and send them with your sons to the west. Especially — and this I say in reference to all classes and interests, and not those ecclesiastical only — cease lionizing renegades, political, moral, or ecclesiastical. Cease worshiping mere success, irrespective of the question of its mode of attainment. Let New England have done forever with wandering after all demagogues in church or state that bring back to the old mother as trophies of success what are only wages of shame, the bribes for which they have sold their principles. 214 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " Use well and wisely, brethren, your influence of met- ropolitan position. It is mighty ; we feel your power — the power of your thought, opinion, and affection. Strong still are the ties that bind us to you. Your exiled sons bear ever a 4engthened chain. We wear it by the pictured rocks of Superior, the distant falls of the Missouri, and to the Pacific seas. We feel your heart- beat across a continent. We are of you still. Your land of rock and glen, of gray cliff and crystal lake, your mel- ancholy pines and lofty solitudes, your glorious mountains and free old solemn sea — oh ! they come to us in our dreams ! they come with the faces of memory, living brows on which still beat life's storm, and with the mighty spell of many graves — the graves of honored fathers ; of brothers that have fallen in their strength, and gentle sisters who sleep in silent beauty on the distant hillside, and mothers whose holy love still looks out on us from the green mound in the shadows of the church or in dells over which the awful mountains keep guard like angels of the resurrection. Oh ! from all that magnificent and boundless realm where your wandering brethren and chil- dren seek a home, from the mystic springs of the Missis- sippi and the tropical magnificence of the Southern Gulf to the Dalles of the Oregon and the Alps of gold ; from lone prairie and forest and desert, and the roar of mighty streams, and from chambers in the cities of the plague — thick as beams of the setting sun, the West rays on you her thought, from hearts and homes past number, weav- ing the million-threaded web that binds still our lives together. Through these threads, as strings electric, we are acted on and react. " The east, too, is our classic land. Here are our glo- rious memories of history. Here the shadows of the sainted, gifted, heroic dead still linger and still walk. 5 TR UG GLE OF CONGRE GA TWNALISM. 2 1 5 Here are Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill and the shades of Vernon. The nation's soul comes here on constant pilgrimage. From the solemn and gorgeous savannas that stretch beyond the ' outgoings of evening,' and from the margin of seas that lave spicy Cathay, it ever wanders back to the Waves of the bay where the Mayflower lay, and the ocean that murmurs the requiem of heroes, and purpled of old under the battles of liberty to a richer stain than seas that flame with occidental pearl and gold." At the session of May 11, Mr. Post was elected one of the vice-presidents of the convention, and on the evening of that day there was a symposium of the clergy and delegates at the Mansion House, at which toasts .were responded to by Dr. Lyman Beecher, Professor Park, Dr. Dwight, Dr. Tappan, Mr. Buddington, Henry Ward Beecher, Professor Stowe, and Dr. Bacon. Among other toasts was the following : "The Far West. The furthest outpost of freedom, order, union, and truth on the banks of the Mississippi, linked by golden bands to our metropolitan heart and granite history." In responding to this toast, says a newspaper clipping which is here given, Mr. Post, " was willing to be consid- ered an ' out-Post ' as he stood in St. Louis, and was him- self both pastor and association and general association in his own person. He compared the condition of the Church in the west ten years ago, with its flourishing condition now, and concluded his remarks by some very eloquent allusions to the unity and harmony of the Con- gregational body in America." About the same time was a collation of the Congrega- tional Library Association in Faneuil Hall, at which Mr. Post replied to this toast : " The new settlements of the 2 1 6 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. west. Congregationalism is doing for them in the nine- teenth century what it did for the new settlements in the east in the seventeenth." In responding, he said : — "... We at the west are trying to be true to our motherland — to propagate those principles which have produced such blessed results. Order and liberty are one and, like Milton's angel, 'vital in every part.' Throughout the far west, we are of you. Countless heartstrings con- verge to this spot. The harp of national life is here, and you sweep that harp. We glory in your glory. If the glory of Massachusetts shall ever go down with shame, thousands of hearts at the west will burn with indignation. Sweep that harp not to soft and mercenary tones, but to old Congregational music, to the magnifi- cence of that Psalmist's lyre, of the stormy sea that rolls over the Puritan shores ; and if these principles fail to be sustained in the west, then let the old anthem of Congre- gationalism gather back to the Puritan clime, and to the rock where she sung her birthsong." CHAPTER XVII. THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION. Mr. Post and the cause of education. — Addresses at Illinois College. — Gasconade disaster. NO inconsiderable part of Mr. Post's life was given in one way and another to the cause of education, not merely during the years in Middlebury and Castleton and Jacksonville, but afterwards and in connection with various other institutions. In the spring of 1848 he was chosen one of the trustees of Monticello Seminary, at Godfrey, 111., and in 1849 was elected president of the board, which office he held until his death. During this period of nearly forty years he presided at trustees' meetings and commencement exer- cises, and in visits and counsels and correspondence gave much of his time and thought to the affairs of the institu- tion. He was peculiarly attached to Monticello. He felt the charm of its quiet shades, the cheery young life of its pupils, and the genial and cultured society of its teachers ; and teachers and scholars were alike drawn to him and welcomed his coming. As the years of his con- nection with the seminary multiplied, the name of Dr. Post was not merely identified with its living interests, but became a part of its historical past, and was held in grow- ing veneration as class after class in its long roll of alumnse received their diplomas from his hands. At the annual commencement after his death, tributes from the graduating class and a poem written by one of the teachers were read in honor of his memory ; and now in the stately edifice of stone built on the ashes of that 2 1 8 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. which knew the living face of Dr. Post, the new library room holds his portrait and bears his name. He was long and actively connected with the Chicago Theological Seminary, and was a charter member of its board of directors from the time of its incorpora- tion in 185s till the close of his life. In 1856 he was appointed professor of ecclesiastical history, and for years lectured before the seminary on that subject. At different times a strong pressure was brought to bear upon him to remove to Chicago, and connect himself with the institution as a regular and permanent teacher. But although the field of exalted moral influence and higher learning and literature thus presented, attracted him, and the question of removal was more than once seriously agitated", other considerations prevailed and kept him in St. Louis. Of his connection with the seminary, Pro- fessor Fiske writes : " He gave us without stint his wisdom and care during all the years from 1854 to his decease in 1886. His presence here was a benediction to all, both faculty and students." Aside from his general interest in the institution, he found special attraction and inspiration in the lecture field allotted, and was strongly drawn by his warm personal relations with some of the officers. In the whole circle of friends east and west, none were nearer than E. W. Blatchford, president of the board of trustees, and Colonel Hammond, one of its early directors ; and up to a short time before his death it was his wont to make at least one visit, often a number of visits, each year, to the seminary and to his Chicago " home " on La Salle Avenue. Dr. Post was for years president of the Missouri Blind Asylum, and was at times in the lecture department of Washington University in St. Louis and that of Andover Theological Seminary. THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION. 2I9 In these colleges and seminaries scattered widely through the country and through his long life, from the days of the country district school and the tutorship, students felt the benefit of his learning and profound thought ; and more than that, and that which was considered by himself as the noblest education by the teacher, they felt the personal impress of his mind and character in the daily contact of the class and lecture room. The impress so left by him on different institu- tions which were themselves radiating centers of edu- cation was among the most potent and far-reaching, as it was amon^ the most silent, forces of his life. For his college "boys" in Jacksonville Dr. Post had a personal attachment and interest that followed them through life. Among those .especially loved were the firstfruits of his labors as a teacher far back in the "thirties," and conspicuously Richard Yates, who was one of the first class that graduated. In 1854, May 15, speaking before the Western Collegiate and Theological Education Society, at Tremont Temple, in Boston, Mr. Post recited some of his early experiences in connection with Illinois College. As appears from a newspaper account, he said that " being in Washington lately and looking into that capitol, over which a late act had cast its dark shadow, he was pleased to see there the first one that he taught his Latin lessons ; and he spoke and voted against the Nebraska Bill." " Upon this announcement," says the reporter, "there was a burst of applause, con- trary to the custom of the place, and the first instance of the kind.' The seventh of October, 1854, was a great fete day in Jacksonville. A few months before, the old college dor- mitory had burned down, and on that day its phoenix 220 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. began to arise from the ashes. In a communication published in The Democratic Statesman, a correspondent says : — " Saturday last witnessed the ceremonies connected with the laying of the corner stone of Illinois College. The great event of the occasion was the address of Pro- fessor Post. Many years since, in a far distant state, I listened to him with the interest and admiration of youth. I then thought his sermons and poetry unrivaled ; and when I learned in after years that a college oration, which had attracted more admiration than any other, had been stolen from him verbatim, it renewed my desire to listen again to his ' winged words.' The enthusiasm of youth, alas ! does not return ; but I see enough to justify it and the admiration of those who declare this the finest address to which they have ever listened. A sketch would do no justice to it. . . . In this most happily con- ceived and felicitously wrought picture of the past, he excited to the full the mirthfulness of his audience or their admiration at the change already wrought on their hopes for the future, and their sympathies and tears by the pathos of his allusions to the loved and the lost." In July of the following year, 1855, occurred the twenty-fifth anniversary of Illinois College, and at the supper closing the festivities at the Mansion House, in Jacksonville, in the evening, "Professor Post" answered this toast : — " The first faculty. Some have retired, but their mem- ory and their works abide to bless the institution for which they have toiled and endured." The response was made up largely of word portraits of his old friends, who had been officers and students and early friends of the college. " Of another circle, too," said the speaker, " the sister- THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION. 221 hood clustering around this band of brothers, no unimpor- tant nor ineffective part of the first faculty in days of early trial, my theme reminds me ; some of them far distant now, some gladdening this scene with their pres- ence; others — their mortal forms dear to memory — repose in yonder sleeping place of the dead. Fain would I picture the beautiful intercourse of our domestic circles in those days, — one family almost, in heart, in interest, in joy, and in suffering, — an Arcadian dream, destined to fade away before the advancing stages of more artificial society. As a common gift, a gladness to us all, I well remember the little girl whose blonde tresses and laughing eyes and winsome face and pattering feet seemed like a consecration of our college halls new risen in the wilds. But the face of the little maiden faded like a star into heaven. Nor did she go alone ; other little forms went from our circle after her. And memory oft recalls how with ' sorrowing step and slow ' we followed members of that little band of sisterhood to our sequestered college burying ground on the prairie, and how our tears glittered in the soft, silent, lone light of the setting sun, toward v\^ich our fallen ones went to their rest, far from the homes of childhood. . . . " Amid many things suggested by this hour, my breth- ren of the first faculty will remember, as in that morning time we looked forth, how many lights, meteor or starry, glitt^ed through the 'horizontal misty air' of the dawn. We could then hardly tell fireflies from constellations. But the false, the spurious, the earthly and illusive have long since fallen. The genuine still live. Yea, as the broad vault of the firmament has turned, we know they are of the heavens. They have been lifted by them and shine in them. Such is the institution we commemorate this dajj. A quarter of a century has passed. It has not 222 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. fallen to the earth. It has been lifted with the heavens, rolling toward the noon. Higher and clearer on it shines. May it so shine on forever ! " At the Middlebury College commencement, August, 1855, the Alma Mater conferred on Mr. Post the degree of Doctor Divinitatis, and the familiar title of " Doctor " Post properly originated at this time. Thursday, November i, 1855, — like the days which record the La Clede Saloon catastrophe and the death of Rev. Mr. Gassaway, — marks a mysterious and seemingly providential deliverance from sudden and awful death. About four o'clock in the afternoon of that day, which celebrated the opening of the Pacific Railroad to Jefferson City, seven cars of an excursion train, freighted with a company comprising many of the most widely known and highly esteemed citizens of St. Louis, plunged through the temporary wooden bridge which spanned the Gascon- ade River, down to the ground at the edge of the stream forty feet below. In this disaster not less than forty passengers were killed. Other railroad horrors have f*- nished a larger death roll, but it is doubtful if any list ever embraced a larger number of prominent representa- tive men from various callings in one community. Among the killed were Rev. Dr. Bullard, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church; Rev. Dr. Teasdale; Thomas Q'Sul- livan, chief engineer of the railroad; A. D. Pomeroy; Mann Butler (already referred to) ; Church Blackburn, a conspicuous figure at the St. Louis bar ; and Benjamin B. Dayton, partner of Henry S. Geyer. The experience of Dr. Post in connection with this accident is told in a letter written by Mrs. Post, and one of his own. THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION. 22 Ty " About half-past twelve at night," writes the former, "the doorbell rang, and I opened the window instantly, and heard your father's cheerful voice say, ' Frances ! ' ' Yes,' said I ; and ran downstairs to let him in, but he refused to let me get a light for him, telling me to go back to bed, or I should get cold. " After some time he came up stairs, and as I knew he was expecting to attend a funeral the next morning, I asked no questions, thinking he needed sleep, and if I said nothing he would soon get it. At daylight he said to me : ' My dear wife, it is of the mercy of God that I am now in the land of the living.' He then told me of the terrible disaster and of his wonderful deliverance. Mr. Ross, who was killed, had been sitting by him all the morning, and just before the accident proposed to your father to change seats with him, that he might have a better opportunity to see the scenery. Had your father not moved, he would undoubtedly have been among the dead." The tragedy is 'described by Dr. Post in a communi- cation published in The New York Independent : — " I write under circumstances tending peculiarly to impress me with the feeling that services rendered to im- perishable interests alone can long bestow either pleasure or honor. I seem to myself as writing this on the verge of the dark river where all aims this side of immortality shrivel. The sense of sudden and awful peril presses on me^ — a peril which has in a moment swept acquaintances and friends from my side into eternity. The shadow of the Dark Angel has fallen on me. I have heard the whir of his awful wing and felt his chill breath. With pulse feverous, and person gashed and bruised, and a great sorrow on my heart, I write ; and yet as I look around on the faces of my home, and on this glad light of life, I thank my God, oh, how fervently, that I stiU live ! 224 ^^ VMAN MARCELL US POST. " As you may infer from the above, I was day before yesterday in the frightful catastrophe on the Pacific Rail- road at the Gasconade River. Invitations had been extended to jOur citizens by those of Jefferson City to meet with them on November i and celebrate the open- ing of the Pacific Railway to that place, to which the cars were to run that day for the first time. " Between six and eight hundred persons, comprising to a great extent the /hie of our city, started from this place on the morning appointed, with mutual gratulations on the opening of such an important section of the Pacific Railroad, whose name indicates that, in the idea of its builders, it was to be only the beginning of that mighty transcontinental route which has for years been the dream and aspiration of our city. With words and thoughts more or less grave, but all jubilant, and through a region in sympathy of jubilation, we passed about one hundred miles to the Gasconade River, which this railroad crosses. As we approached the river, I was sitting in the car, the fourth, I think, from the engine ; all around me men most eminent in professional and mercantile life and in the political history of the region, variously engaged in gay or serious converse — trade, stocks, politics, morals, reminis- cences amusing or sad, hopes and schemes for the future, the jest and pleasant laugh, or reflections, grave, philo- sophic or religious, engaging us, as we looked around on each other's faces in an intense consciousness of life and a sense of perfect security, when lo ! in a moment that multitude, in horrid imbroglio, were struggling in the jaws of Death. "As we were thus in the fullness of life and enjoyment borne on, all at once there comes on the ear an awful crash ! Instantly the car pitches forward ! We feel the grasp of the Ruin-Demon tearing it with horrid clangor THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION. 225 downward. One flash of thought. Here it is, the last moment! Eternity! Sweet home, wife, children — fading! The universe gone ! God only left ! If thy will it be, O God, I go ! I go to thee. One such flash of thought like lightning through the mind, and with it a sense of falling and of things tumbling with us and around us and upon us ; and then . the stunning, hideous c-r-a-s-h ! with blows innumerable, all over our persons, as we strike the earth ! and the crash, crash, crash, till seven or eight cars, with their living freight, have taken the dreadful leap over and upon each other, crushing through that mass of ruin and of living flesh. It was all the work of a moment, and yet it seemed as if it would never end. I was so buried up and stunned that the sound came to me less distinctly through the superincumbent mass ; others compared it to successive thunder claps. Oh, the relief when it stopped, and I felt I was yet alive ! for the pressure on me was so great, I felt a little more and I must die, and was mo- mently expecting the plunge of another car upon us. The consciousness of a long time was gathered into that moment. Indeed I can hardly tell how long I lay there crushed in darkness. I felt alone with God ; that he was there and it was well. The prayer of Jonah flashed upon my mind : ' Out of the bosom of hell I cry unto thee, O God ! The depth has closed around me. The grave with its bars is about me forever. Yet I am not cast out of Thy sight. I will look once more to Thy holy temple.' And He did bring my life up again from corruption. Blessed be His Holy Name ! " God's hand warded from us the dreaded stroke. The hideous clangor was over, and it was for a moment still as the grave. I found myself under a mass of I knew not what, crushed, prisoned, helpless, and almost stifled. I heard a voice near me cry out, ' Thank God, we are yet 226 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. alive ! ' but there was no response save groans. Instantly it flashed upon me, We are in the river and I must drown ; and momently I expected to feel the cold death-touch of the waters. But it came not. Then came a moving in the mass above me, mingled with the cries of the muti- lated and the dying. I waited in awful anxiety until, by the lightening of the pressure, I could gradually stir my limbs. With difficulty I extricated my person and rose to- my feet. I had suffered a severe contusion on one limb, which nearly disabled me ; my head was cut and bruised, my forehead gashed and seared with hot iron, — for the stove had fallen against me, — and my face was begrimed with blood and ashes ; but, oh, the glad thought that I was yet alive, and with no dangerous wound ! As I looked around I found the wreck of a car in which I was, nearly empty of men. Behind me lay a man with bloody face, who called out to me by name as to one rising from the dead. Beyond was a poor youth with both legs broken, crying out for God's sake to help him ; and below me, toward the forward end of the car, was one still buried in the ruin and imploring to be extricated. I removed the rubbish as I could, and lifted him up. Beside him was one who had been killed instantly, and was already purple almost to blackness. All others I thought had gone or been removed. I got up to the rear end of the car, which was poised somewhat in the air, and looked forth. Famil- iar voices called to me as one from the grave. With the help of kind friends I descended, and we greeted each other as only those can do who are conscious of a common escape from an awful death. But what a scene there was around us ! It was one frightful to remember. The bridge — a temporary trestlework not designed as a perma- nent structure — over the Gasconade River had broken. The first span of it, fortunately not extending to the THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION. 22/ water's edge, had given way under the pressure of the engine and train. Had it been the next span, that over the water itself, the loss of life must have been fearfully- increased. The engine had reached the first pier, some forty yards or more from the abutment, when it fell with the foremost cars, dragging those in the rear after them, till seven or eight cars had crashed one after another into the chasm between thirty and forty feet deep ; while others farther back had tumbled sidewise down the embankment. " As I looked on the terrible and Titanic ruin, there lay the huge engine on its back, still pouring forth its fierce vapor; engineer and superintendent crushed dead, or screaming in living agonies underneath it. The cars lay ' crisscross,' scattered about, and partly on each other, splintered and crushed, like the forest trees in the path of the tornado. The cries of those prisoned and muti- lated beneath made the scene hideous. Amid the wreck men were running about — some mad with consternation and anxiety, some looking for friends, some aiding the wounded. Some seemed paralyzed and astounded, as if stunned with the greatness and suddenness of the catas- trophe, and others appeared nerved by it to heroism and energy of effort. Fortunately our company was of men, and we were spared the horror of the shrieks of women and children usually accompanying railroad disasters. The wounded for the most part bore their sufferings in silence, or with suppressed groans. Some I found sitting on logs or beside stumps ; some lying on the ground in the storm ; for, to add to the horrors of the hour, a thunderstorm, one of the most violent ever known in this region, broke upon us just as the catastrophe took place. The air had become dark as night ; the wind was roaring what might seem the paean of ruin through the 228 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. desolate hills — the rain falHng in torrents, and the light- nings playing like a park of artillery on the gloomy forest around us, striking the wreck itself, and nearly stunning some that were extricating the wounded and the dead. It seemed as if God were angry with us ; and hearing the awful blasphemies that broke from the lips of some just snatched from the grave's mouth, I could not help shud- dering lest the bolts of offended heaven should at once smite the impious ingrates into eternal silence. With most, however, a better feeling — one of grateful awe — obtained, and a sense of a present God, that, I trust, may long remain. " After a while the relief train came and brought away the wounded, who were more than enough to fill it, leaving most of those unhurt, and especially our military companies, — who rendered very effective serv- ice on the occasion, — to assist in extricating the dead, or perchance those still alive and buried under the wreck. Sadly, and in fear and pain, through the darkness and storm, we returned to our stricken city ; finding it, though at dead of night, tempested with dread and anxiety, and multitudes waiting at the depot, many of them for friends they never more should behold. And with what tears of grateful joy we greeted the loved ones of our homes once again, while our hearts were bleeding for those to whom father and brother should return no more ! " On November 12 Dr. Post preached a discourse com- memorative of Dr. Bullard at the church edifice on Fourteenth Street just completed, but whose pulpit the latter was destined never to occupy. CHAPTER XVIII. RETENTION IN ST. LOUIS AND LITERARY LABORS. Call to South Brooklyn. — The new chapel. — Articles on " Immortality." — " The Skeptical Era." — Address at Iowa College on " Religion and Education." — Letter to sons at Yale. — Address at Norwich, Conn., and various incidents. DECEMBER 2 of this year marks a step forward in the history of the First Congregational Church. On that day it took possession of the new chapel just finished, at the corner of Tenth and Locust streets. For some time the difficulty which for many years afterward proved the bete noire of the church had been manifesting itself. It was the growing disadvantage of location, then on Sixth Street. In 1854 the surround- ings were already very undesirable and daily becoming worse. The members were leaving the neighborhood and their places were not supplied. The evening con- gregations especially were falling away and the church receipts were constantly shrinking. It may have been providential that in this year, 1854, a call came inviting Dr. Post to a Congregational church in South Brooklyn, a young and active parish, worshiping in a costly edifice and in a very attractive part of the city. A home in Brooklyn would be near the sea and very desir- able, particularly at that time, as affording ready access to the best means of education and culture to be found in the country. This call and the prospect of losing their pastor proved an additional stimulus to action in the home church, and the result was the purchase of a lot on Tenth and 230 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Locust streets and building of a new chapel. On this topic we quote here from the Historical Discourse dehv- ered March 4, i860: — " I was advised, by a true friend of myself and our enterprise, of the general discouragement and indiffer- ency, and counseled to listen to invitations calling me to other fields. Anc|, though with much pain at aban- doning an undertaking which had seemed to open so auspiciously and so fittingly to the wants of the place and time, still I was compelled to feel that Providence was closing the door upon me in this city ; that I had done what I could, and it was my duty to submit our well- purposed and prudently considered but baffled attempt to the disposal of Him at whose call, I believed, I had been led to engage in it. Sadly I had determined to withdraw from a city and a cause very dear to me, and for which I had declined attractive calls elsewhere ; and was in corre- spondence in regard to a field in an eastern city to which I had been invited, when — and not without prayer I feel assured — again that Providence, whose Book of Remem- brance had been over us all the while, interposed in his own cause. " God had moved on the minds of the brethren to make one effort more. One day, I well remember, after the bitterness of the struggle of surrender was over with me and my thoughts were directed determinately to other and distant fields, a deputation from the members of the church called on me with the statement that, if I would remain with them, they had determined to build a chapel on Locust Street, between Tenth and Eleventh. This measure I felt might save our church enterprise, and I believe it did save it. I regarded it also as an indication of Providence arresting my personal arrangements in progress." RE TENT JON IN ST. LO UIS. 2 3 I During the fall of this year and on until the spring of 1856, Mr. Post was at work at spare intervals preparing two articles on " The Immortality of the Soul " ; the first of which, "The Argument from Nature," was published in the February number, and the second, " The Argument from Scripture," in the May number, of The New Englander for 1856. The first paper is accompanied by an editorial note stating that it was "prepared by an eminent writer at the request of the conductors of The New Englander, on the proposal of a gentleman in New York, who offered a generous compensation for it and who intends to repub- lish it with a reply to be written in defense of the notion that the wicked will be annihilated." In a letter written March 31, 1856, Mrs. Post writes: " I have been so busy that it is now two weeks since I have been able to write you a line. Day after day, from •early morn till dewy eve,' I have written and written till my eyes are nearly worn out. But congratulate me, my dear son, for the article is now fairly done." The first article, reasoning in the light of nature alone, like that written for The Biblical Repository in 1844, finds no assurance of immortality save as the gift of God, and it does find argument potent and convincing, drawn from the moral attributes of God, for immortality as a boon to the good. But the main question concerns the problem of perpetual continuance of life or blank anni- hilation hereafter to the incorrigibly wicked. And the argument is that there is nothing in the justice or wis- dom or love of God which forbids the hypothesis of their endless existence ; that such theory is in consonance with the natural religion of mankind, and that the question, viewed from the standpoint of nature is certainly an open one. 232 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. In "The Argument from Scripture," the ruling texts are marshaled and compared, and their meaning, with the import and construction of special terms and phrases, such as "life," "eternal life," "perdition," "death" and "destruction," and "everlasting punishment," are ana- lyzed and tested by sacred usage and examination of the original texts ; and the writer maintains that by deliberate, formal declarations, as well as by implication, in numerous passages, the Scriptures teach the immortal existence of the wicked. The picture presented in the article is something more than a perspective "down the awful avenues of endless night and sorrow." It is also that of " a glorious One wrestling for man, not with the king of mortal terrors, but that mighty horror of which he is but the shadow, and quelling him — the Second Death. We see Him unbinding for humanity the chains of darkness, . . . opening the dungeon house for the prisoners of eternal sin and woe and lifting them up to His glorious throne. That throne — the rainbow of peace and love is around it forever." In the same year Charles Scribner, of New York, published a volume from the pen of Dr. Post, entitled "The Skeptical Era in Modern History," a work of nearly three hundred pages, and among all the publications of Dr. Post the only one reaching the dimensions of a volume. This work was an argument to show that the infidelity of the 1 8th century in Europe, particularly in France, Italy and Spain, had its origin in spiritual despotism. In March, 1856, was an old-fashioned surprise party, at which the people of the congregation captured the pas- tor's dining room and left on their departure a profusion of thoughtful gifts in the way of family supplies and dry- RE TENT I ON IN ST. LO UIS. 233 goods, and also more solid tokens in the way of silver- ware and ^63 5 in gold. Mrs. Post, after a graphic account of the occasion, writes : " These kindnesses of our dear friends draw them very near to us. I pray that we may be the means of doing them a great deal of good. I have certainly never heard of a parish so kind and attentive to a minister." In the spring of this year there is "more than ordinary religious interest." " Each Sabbath, as it passes," writes Mr. Post, " is to me a day of intense interest and excite- ment that rolls its surges far into the night. Last night I did not get to sleep till long after midnight." July 20, 1856, Mr. Post delivered, at the commencement anniversary of Iowa College, an oration on the topic of "Religion and Education," which was afterward published, at the request of the trustees, and from which it is said that extracts, committed to memory by the students, were heard on the platform in college declamations. In the course of this address Mr. Post said : — "Related in natural associations as Light and Life, joined in mutual helpfulness as Truth and Love, — twin angels of culture, — they are shown also in history as bound together by a community of destiny. One speedily perishes with the extinction of the other. Both alike are essential ministry to our spiritual vision. If education may be compared to the optic glass through which truth is fuller and farther revealed, religion may be likened to the sun, in whose light the true universe is discerned, and which is, at the same time, the most glorious of all objects disclosed by its beams. " If, in arguing this inter-relation, I may seem to be arguing a truism, be it remembered there is nothing in our world more needs rearguing. Resurrection and 234 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. revitalization are often more needful than new creation in the realm of Truth. ' Who has traduced Hercules ? ' asked an ancient prince, solicited to listen to the eulogy of a bard on the hero of twelve labors. But Hercules is often forgotten, if not traduced. Great truths too often consummate their lives like the silkworm — wrap themselves in their silken robes to torpor and death. Or like the Egyptian demigods, they obtain apotheosis only to be prisoned in the marble of the sarcophagus, or lie smothered under mausoleum and pyramid. " Nothing is more needed in our times than an Old Mortality, that shall enter into the graveyard of conse- crated truths, and cleanse off the dust and mold from the inscriptions of elder piety. . . . " You cannot keep the human mind during the period of youth in a simple, expectant, uncommitted position — a mere empty fane awaiting its Deity. In the progress of culture, its aroused moral instincts and reason will assuredly feel after a God. Nature within and without will speak to it. The tempest, the thunder, the ocean, the mountain, the morn, the noontide, the stormy night, as well as its own consciousness, will, at times, utter to it of the awful proscribed secret. Out of life's trial and vicissitude, its change of light and gloom, of joy, beauty, sorrow, and death-shade, a religion, in some sort, will be likely to look forth on the mind from which we would veil it. Indeed falsehood and superstition- will be sure to speak to the' soul, if -Christian education will not. Belials and Molochs will be sure to seize on the vacant throne of Jehovah. Twilight faiths, phantom-peopled, demon-peopled, will be sure to steal in, The mind will become as the cavern through which is refracted the twilight of early dawn, rousing, not dispersing, all its reptile and venomous tenantry. Waked to dim conscious^ RETENTION IN ST. LOUIS. 235 ness of its nature and prerogatives, it will hiss and bristle with malignant instincts of rights, without consciousness of duties. It is just this dim, twilight Christianity, rous- ing the sense of rights without that of duties, that is now bewildering and maddening the nations. It is this religion of rights alone, and those dimly revealed, that as a lunar faith, with half-disk dimly lit, sheds over Europe its bloody illusions, and makes true liberty impracticable. Such dim, mischievous misbeliefs will be likely to spring from the demanded postponement of religious culture. . . . " As all truth is one, — and in this unity the mightiest and the crowning, unitive element is religion, — an edu- cation ignoring religion must present truth in a measure distorted, fragmentary, imperfect, and torn out of place. Other truths, apart from it, cannot be presented in true relation, proportion and aspect any more than the material universe, should you eliminate from it gravita- tion or light. Literary and scientific truths have a reli- gious reach and connection requisite to their perfect exhibition. "To give a true education, with an entire divorce between science and religion, were as impossible as it were mischievous ! As well teach light with the colors of the spectrum considered in separation and succes- sion." The speaker dwelt upon the special importance of blending religion with popular education in republics, and peculiarly so in the United States at that time, and, among all departments of education, he urged the para- mount importance of such blending of the two in the colleges. " It is not a quarter of a century since I traveled along the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the Fox to then lone Michigan, with the blazed tree, the trails of the 236 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. savage, and the sun and stars or the resin wood and the mosses for a guide over green solitudes, now thronged and resonant with the exode and settlement of nations. Their dim tread was then in the eastern distance ; now, stormlike, it sweeps west to the Pacific seas. Then, amid verdant and flowery immensities, presenting from St. Louis to Chicago a magnificent panorama of prairie, belted with wood-fringed streams, and embossed with groves broidered and perfumed with the haw, the red- bud, the wild apple, and the wild rose, we seemed as if wandering through Paradise after the expulsion. Its profound and boundless silence and solitude awed and oppressed us, insomuch that, as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, we almost felt We were the first That ever burst into that silent sea. "We were then traversing the intermediate space vacant by repulsion between two races — the zone of silence and solitude cast by the shadow of our empire in its westward march. Between us and the Pacific seas were only these awful spaces and the virgin mold for new worlds. Michigan and Arkansas then were territo- ries. Wisconsin still slept along the stream destined to give her a title. Iowa was unnamed. Kansas and Nebraska had not risen to the horizon. No muse of history pointed thither with sad and bloody fingers, or brandished her avenging scourge over wrongs about to be perpetrated there, the foulest, meanest, and most portentous in American story. The Erostratus of that infamy was not yet emergent from the innocent obscurity of the common-school room. California and Oregon were lands of myth and mystery — farther removed from us than Japan now. Opposite here, bordering on an illimit- RE TENTION IN ST. LO UIS. 237 able wilderness, the realm of savagism, solitude, and Lynch law, a military outpost preindicated the site of your beau- tiful city. The war-path of the Indian was along the Fox and the Rock rivers ; the tread of the receding buffalo was still along the Iowa and the mouth of the Platte and the Kansas. The Falls of St. Anthony poured forth their roar in the dim and far northwest, as mysterious as the fountains of the Nile. And far under the northern sky the Superior rolled its wave, lone, lordly, in the scenery of solitude and winter, as from the original creation. " Not one fourth of a century has yet passed, and a Titanic brood of empires has sprung from the wilds, almost as the children of ancient Gaia from the earth. Nations with agriculture, trade, mechanics, railroads and millions of people, are here. States, too, have started from the Pacific, and are striking hands with us across the great American steppe. The great Northern sea reflects in its bosom the village and the church spire; and its pictured rocks and Apostle's Islands are resonant with the steam-whistle and the gay troops of travel. " Looking over the past quarter of a century, I feel that, measured by events, it has traversed the progress of ages ; such has been its march of history and of empire. Moreover this growth is as peculiar in character as in vastness and rapidity ; and that character especially requires the incorporation of religion. Energy, enter- prise, decision, daring, power — the common product of our institutions — are peculiarly borne on upon the for- ward wave of western migration. Vast power is being developed for good or evil. But to be used for goodness, safety, and permanent glory, it needs to be attempered, serened, and guided by Christian faith ; else its strength will be like that of the tempest or the ocean — a terror and a ruin. . . . 238 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " Permit me, in closing, to express my joy to recognize in this institution, to which this anniversary week has passed so auspiciously, what I believe to be a permanent light and life-fountain in the vast social genesis going forward in these lands ; and to congratulate you on the achievement, this day, of the object of many prayers, labors and sacrifices, in the dedication of your new, tasteful and commodious college edifice to the cause of Christian and liberal learning; a fane consecrated to no Tyrian or Hellenic sun-god, such as was wont to attest the march of Grecian and Punic civilization westward, but to Him who is the true Light and the Life eternal, and wearing as its ensign the motto emblazoned over the first collegiate enterprise in America, ' Deo et Ecclesice.' "May the waters of life that have gushed forth here under the renewed smiting of the Pilgrim staff break forth as widely and livingly as from the primal Atlantic Rock, and may they flow on while yonder Mississippi rolls its tide to the ocean ! May memories gathering around these seats of learning, and growing awful and holy with time, conserve and transmit, in marble and on the canvas and the storied page, names as beneficently creative as those which hallow the shades of Harvard or Yale ; and may coming men have like occasion, in the consciousness of blessings received, to catch them up and repeat them to their children. May this educational institution grow from age to age, till it becomes — I was going to say — a pedestal, lifting their forms into Time's gaze ; but I would rather say, — and more in accordance, I know, with their own prayer, — till it becomes a grateful altar, presenting them as the firstfruits of the land to God. As the ladder seen by the sleeping patriarch, may it seem their life's stepping to that higher sphere, where alone the greatness and beneficence of their work here RE TENTION IN ST. LO UIS. 239 begun shall be duly estimated, and where, to their eternal honor, it shall be chronicled in God's Book; while on earth, as it rolls toward its better ages, their memories shall ever grow green and blossom from the dust." In the fall of 1857 the two oldest sons are at Yale College, to be gone for two years — the first long break in the home life. The subjoined letter was written from St. Louis, September 12 : "Although it is Saturday afternoon, and I am very busy in making preparation for the Sabbath, yet, as no one else that I know of is writing you from your home, I have transferred my pen from the sermon to this sheet. " We followed you in thought, during the long, long day of your departure, with many a prayer and many a tear. I saw you, as I looked from my study window, in the summer house and amid the peach trees ; I seemed to hear your voices from each vacant apartment. " And when the evening falls, we miss the music of our dear boys in the magic of twilight and moonlight. The trees murmur to me of you in the stilly night ; and the winds, as they moan along the window casement, sigh to me of other days, of faded visions and memories that change to hopes again only when the mortal shall put on immortality. " I start to feel that your infancy, childhood, and youth in my home have passed like a dream, varied as all life is, painful at times with divers anxieties, yet, as it comes up in retrospect, so sadly sweet ! From the still waters of the fountain of life's river, and the quiet bay kissed of the glowing morn, and out on the stream, the torrent, the rapids, and on, on to the stormy main, I see you embarked to return no more. The hope of permanent reunion must look now to the house of our Father. 240 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " How dear you have been to me, how prized your presence, and what a wealth of sweet affections gathers around your memories in this home, you will never know." As the sons were not to return west, they were joined by the father during the following summer vacation, and, with a nephew of the famous John Brown as guide, the party made a tour of the Adirondacks, climbing Mount Marcy, and camping and tramping through the North Elba and the Indian Pass. The trip was .not the first or the last through this mountain wilderness. Years before, with _the oldest daughter and Orwell kinfolk, he had visited Lake Placid and ascended Whiteface, and afterward more than once there were camping parties and tours through the region of Mud Pond and Clear Lake and Dix Peak, and the upper and lower Ausables. Of the year following, June 5 deserves passing mention here, as it brings this memoir into connection with a memorable tragedy and the death of a greatly esteemed citizen of St. Louis. It was on the night of that day that Dr. Post was summoned to the deathbed of Joseph Charless, after he had been shot down by Thornton. The next month Dr. Post was in Norwich, Conn., at a historical celebration of that place, and delivered an address, devoted mainly to Congregationalism in the west, and the importance and proper methods of its diffusion ; not by a system of crusades and aggression, but by the interpenetration in its own body of a more distinctive self-consciousness, and a better understanding and manly assertion of its own system. CHAPTER XIX. CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. Christmas Discourses in 1859 on "The Greatness and Power of Faith as Illustrated by the Pilgrim Fathers," and on " The Vitality of Christianity." SUNDAY, December 25, 1859, i" the chapel at Tenth and Locust streets, Dr. Post dehvered two occasional discourses, both of which were afterward published by special request, the first commemorating the previous Forefathers' Day, and the second suggested by the day itself (Christmas). The morning sermon was from the following texts : — " By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed ; and he went out, not knowing whither he went." — Hebrews 11:8. "After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram : I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward." — Genesis 15: i. "These all died in faith, not having received the prom- ises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." — Hebrews II : 13, 39.40. The general theme was " The Greatness and Power of Faith in the World's History as Illustrated by the Pilgrim Fathers." . . . "What saw they as they gazed forth on the great, wide sea, that seemed to them as washing the shores of another planet ? Have you ever looked out on the ocean 242 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. rolling on under night ? going ' forth, dread, fathomless, alone,' with its voice dim, drear, vast, and eternal as the breathing of the under world ? What must have been its outlook to our fathers, as before them stretched its illimit- able and stormy waste, with no margin of cities beyond, dashing desolate against the western sky, like the dark flood that divides our world of life from death ? What saw they there beckoning them onward ? Dreams of political philosophy ? visions of these United States of America? or simply God's hand, glimpsing forth in immediate personal duty ? "By faith they became dwellers in the New World. What saw they as they looked on its sad, rock-bound coast and its forests stretching away under the wintry sky in infinite and mysterious gloom ? The architecture of republics ? or a present God, the skirt of whose glory was even over that desolate land and main ? . . . " In faith they 'took the wings of the morning and fled to the uttermost parts of the sea,' knowing that there His hand would still uphold them. In faith they kept their first Sabbath in the New World, in a lonely isle, with garments stiffened with the frozen spray, beneath sleeted pines that harped with the tempest and the wintry ocean ; and so inaugurated they the ordinance of sacred rest for their children to all generations. "By faith they dwelt alone, far off amid the wilds. There the 'dayspring' still 'knowing its place' was the brightness of His coming. It was He that made 'the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice.' 'His paths dropped fatness ' in the wilderness, and ' the utter- most parts of the earth were afraid at His tokens.' There the Pilgrim lived and walked with God, enduring from no dream of earthly fame or power, no vision of states and empires, worshiping no genius of liberty or abstractions CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. 243 of philosophy; but 'as seeing him who is invisible.' As a fallen, wandering soul, conscious of guilt and peril, he sought God as a refuge and a dwelling-place, content, if need be, in finding him, to lose all the world beside. " It was in such direct vision of God — not in com- munings with political philosophies — '■ that gentle and cultivated women bore the lifelong heartache of the exile ; and when they ' could have had opportunity to return,' preferred banishment with God, to the sweetness of their early homes. It was in this vision that the weak grew strong beyond nature, and childhood became wiser than its years, with wisdom looking beyond the tomb. So it was with the Pilgrim through all the trials of his earthly lot ; and so when came the final hour. Dying alone, far away from the great world, looking out on ' the deep no plummet soundeth,' what chart shall guide him over that mysterious main } No mundane constellations light thee now, O Pilgrim ! No earthly sunsets lure thy wandering sail ! No mortal pilot serves thee here \ Time's Speedwells and Mayflowers fail thee. This is no earthly tempest ; this, no Atlantic surge ; before thee the gloom of no mortal shore ; the shades of no mortal wilderness. What, O voyager, shall avail thee now i" Visions of coming earthly time, or of a present God.' of the American republic, or the shining city } "That little child, in that lone cabin, who, wan with the hunger and fever of that first sad winter, — while the strong are bowing themselves under their burden, — is wrestling alone with death, and who through those eyes, lustrous with the strange light of famine, seems gifted beyond nature to look into the spiritual world — what is it that descends as the glory of an angel on that soul in this awful hour .' Is it the muse of history or the Spirit of God .? 244 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " And that fair wife and mother, with fever and con- sumption attending her desolate couch, and the Dark Angel's shadow over her, now that memories of the past and distant are pulling at her heartstrings, memories of the loved and beautiful beyond the great flood, of the soft hands and gentle voices that should have soothed her now, and with these mingling the ineffable longings for the little son and daughter she is leaving alone in the wilderness — what imparts to her in this convulsion of nature an awe and beauty of repose beyond all earthly heroism ? A vision of no ages, however glorious and beautiful, between her and the great white throne, but directly of Him that sitteth thereon. " Such was the greatness and power of faith in the world's history, presented in the case of the Pilgrim fathers ; such the beauty and the mightiness of a life that truly walked with God. It went out in the wilder- ness and seemed lost. It was lost, however, as a star is lost in heaven. Indeed, a life of faith is never lost. Other ages shall gather around the graves of these men ; and the muse of history shall bear their story as a power and a glory down the future. This American Common- wealth shall be their monument. They must live with it; yea, they will live, should it perish. For in building it, they were building another structure, for loftier ends and mightier duration. To the honor of faith, and simple and direct loyalty to duty, this shall be written for remem- brance to the world's end ; yea, for their record in the eternal kingdom of the pious: 'These are the men who vindicated liberty for the nations and for the human soul, while aiming simply to obey the divine word, "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve ; " ' who in loyal endeavor to maintain fealty to God, and to save their own souls, saved the great forces of civilization ; CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. 245 who, aiming to please God, have come into the eulogy of the human race, and, aiming to found a pure church, have founded the mightiest empire beneath the sun ; who accomplished the greatest of historic works while never thinking of history ; who, unconsciously and unam- bitiously following simple duty, found it the key of the most glorious of earth's destinies and fames, and were honored to be, beyond all meh, saviors of the present world, while aiming supremely to save that which is to come. " Some five years since, I visited the landing place of the forefathers and spent a summer's day amid their tombs. On a height overlooking the bay and the sea, and the place of the first rude hamlets where they lived and died, the forefathers sleep, awaiting the resurrection. Their burial place is fittingly rural, simple, humble, almost rude, away from the city's din and the great world's walks. No ambitious or gorgeous monument mars the simplicity of the scene or offends the severe genius of the spot. " Before me the sun was shining brightly on the distant sea and on the islands and the bay, Where the Ma5fflower lay, and the world-famed rock, where democracy, civil and religious, first stepped on the shores of the New World. Hills, sterile and somber, in keeping with the historic spirit of the place, keep ward around it. Nature has left few of her lighter or more graceful touches on the picture. All, even in the summer light, seems grave, solemn, and stern. " Still the ' birds that sang so sweetly ' to the ear of the Pilgrim, ' in the March woods,' are there ; and their music that gushes soothingly from the mossgrown stones and 246 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. from the thorn bush and the flowering shrubs that grow scantily around, comes on the bright still air like a requiem over the dead. And around and beneath were sleeping the dead ; the holy and heroic dead, whose life and death had hallowed that scene to all time. Here was Carver, their first governor, who had sunk in that fatal winter and whom they had with weary hand and heart laid in his lowly rest in the wilderness. There was the tomb of Bradford, who had followed him in ofifice. Yon- der they may have laid — I say, may have, for time's effacing fingers have erased most of the inscriptions — yonder they may have laid that wife who had perished on the sea, but whose body had been borne on her husband's bosom through the foaming surf to the shore. Here, it may be, men gifted and of high culture, who had been carried forth through the winter night and storm from the log hospital to their hidden and hurried graves in the wild, may be mingling their mold with that of the per- ished forest. There, methought, sleeps the maiden whose bloom wasted with consumption from that terrible Decem- ber, but who had found her rude low cabin the home of the loving angels and God's beatific spirit. There child- hood, which seemed strangely gifted to commune with eternal mysteries and with strange serenity to joy in the hour of its departure, waits the call that shall softly break the slumber of the little ones. " Here womanhood, that faded under the low thatch and solemn pines through which the New Jerusalem glimpsed on her dying eye, was sleeping with her baby on her breast. Yonder they may have laid the wise Winslow or saintly Brewster. That may be the brave Standish's last bivouac, and here the fair flower of the wilderness, his sweet Rose, may have hidden the bloom of her mortal beauty in the tomb. CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. 1\1 " These, and more, may be imagined ; imagined, for to the stranger's eye, at least, the graves cannot be identified ; for the sentinel stones have grown weary and worn with their charge, and have forgotten the story which affection fondly wished to perpetuate of a faithful life and trium- phant death. But it matters little that the moldering rock has forgot its record ; for their record is on high kept with God, above the obliteration which shall blot the stars. And it shall be kept on earth. This American empire shall be their memorial — their living witness or their mausoleum ; and a new and happier order of the future inaugurated by them shall conserve their story, incorporate with its immortal youth. " Nor matters it that the cursory visitor or antiquarian curiosity may no longer be able to identify the places of their mortal rest, whether here or amidst yonder hills, under that whispering oak and pine, or along the sound- ing sea, or in yonder dells, where they hid their graves lest the malignant eye of the savage might note the diminishing of their number. It may be better thus. So the whole land shall be their monument, and the more their spirits may walk it unconfined ; while none the less the angel of the resurrection shall guard their mortal type to the transfiguration of the last great morning. "On earth, meanwhile, it matters little that more and more what is individual may pass and what is personal fade into the ' unsubstantial pageant ' of the past. Indi- vidual history grows to general truths ; personality is transfigured to principle and translated, like Astraea, to the stars. "As the stranger looks down on the scene, on the harbor of the anchorage and the shores of the first land- ing, at the touch of the muse of history the bright skies and waters of June change to the sad days of December ; 248 TR UMAN MARCELL US POS T. the gloom and storm of winter are on the desolate and icebound coast ; and from the Mayflower in the dis- tance, the shallop, with its living precious freight, — first- fruit of a new era, — struggles through the chill spray to the shore; but as all this to the stranger is passing before the mind's eye, lo ! the scene is no longer the same ; the personages change ; the Winthrops and Car- vers, the Brewsters and Winslow, are not there. Awful angels of history appear ; principles, the architects of happier ages and cherubim of the car of Providence, seem entering from the baptism of storm and sea and winter into the opening theater of the Occident — the demiurges of a new world. " So, brethren, from the receding history of our fathers, from the fading of life and personality in the retiring picture, step forth, more and more conspicuous and sig- nificant, immortal truths and vast and solemn lessons it were well our troubled times could hear, teaching us that faith in God is the true architect of greatness for men and nations ; for this world as well as for the world to come. This is the star in the east that brings to a Saviour; that amid difficulties and dangers and bewil- derments and storms shines true forever, over the pilgrim- age of individuals and empires. Duty, and duty alone, is great, safe, mighty. Man is strong as he holds God's hand, lofty as he bows before Him, wise as he listens only to His voice ; true liberty is His service ; true order His law ; true life His love. "Our fathers, seeking Him only as their 'exceeding great reward,' found greatness, riches, and empire ; reach- ing after simple, direct, personal duty, they touched the springs of general history for ages. Around God grew life, order, and liberty for the individual, for society and the state. Honoring Him they were honored of Him to CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. 249 plant the seedplot for a continent, and to belt it from sea to sea with institutions and civilizations quickened with their heartbeat. " So it has been, so it must ever be. Following His hand a highway shall be opened for us through no matter what deserts and what deeps. Listening to His voice, and His only, the ages are our own. But disloyal to duty we perish. Enthroning expediency in place of God we shall see life, order, and liberty decay." On the evening of the same day (Christmas, 1859) Dr. Post preached a sermon on "The Vitality of Christianity," from Psalm 72 : 1 5 : " And he shall live ! " " This clause, selected from a triumphant prediction of the Messiah and often read as a mere expletive or orna- mental adjunct, is one of substantive, distinctive, vast sig- nificance. It prefigures the essential vitality, the immortal ' livingness ' of Christianity. . . . "The life of Christianity is the life of its Founder. And in a sense most true and wonderful this clause applies to Jesus Christ as to no other of the sons of men. . . . " In his ethics Christ lives ; but as no other moral teacher. His ethics are recognized by the consciousness of universal humanity as pure reason and perfect equity ; the eternal thought of God incorporate with our moral constitution, and so coessential with our moral being itself. Of self-declarative and sovereign authority, if read on a stray leaf picked up in the street, valid if repealed by all the counter-edicts of all ages and worlds, they must live with the immortality of reason and con- science themselves. "Nor does their authority, like that of other ethical systems, rest upon mere human sanctions ; it is shrined 2 50 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. •within the sanctuary of religious awe ; living with the life and sovereignty of God himself. "Never since he spake on the mountains of Galilee has Christ so lived in his ethical teachings as at this hour. His moral utterances are becoming more and more the law of the world, the recognized fountain of justice and the authoritative standard of right between men and nations. " In the form of public opinion they are becoming representative of the collective reason and conscience of mankind, and as such sit throned and sceptered over armies, diplomacies, protocols, cabinets, and parliaments. Nations may dash against them, but their raging falls as far beneath them as the Atlantic below the sky. " Them even infidels — men or nations denying Jesus Christ the Son of God — still accept. Passion, lust, and pride have gnashed on them through ages, but what one of his precepts have they expunged, dimmed, or abraded .■" As well attempt to tear a star from heaven ! " Contemplate them steadfastly, and they deepen to the infinite like a firmament. But before the gaze of ages they start only higher towards God's throne — not one has fallen. " Still, and more than ever, they hold back the sword of war, the torch of massacre, the scourge of the oppressor. They arrest the despot in the midst of his fortresses and the conqueror at the head of the armies ; they bind up or roll on revolution ; they unfetter the millions, upheave thrones, and arm nations against tyrannies, or they medi- ate between wrathful empires and enforce on them truly 'the truce of God.' " Christ's ethics are served of philosophies ; and yet they live independent of the philosophies that serve them ; and will live if those philosophies should change CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. 25 I or die. The Newtonian theory or the analysis of La- place may perish, but the eternal heavens will still roll on. " Christ lives in the religion he has founded as no other man lives. " In the first place, . . . Christian ethics give vitality to Christian faith by both attracting belief towards Chris- tianity and by vitalizing the societies in which Christian- ity inheres.' . . . " In the second place, Jesus Christ lives perpetually in his religion because that religion, like his ethics, is counterpart to our moral consciousness. As the former corresponds to the commands, so does the latter to the facts, of our moral being. It meets our felt wants — our conscious moral condition and necessity. . . . " Thirdly. Christ hves in his religion because of its wonderful provision for the perpetual new birth of indi- vidual souls, and consequently of nations. "Civilization is thus eternally renovated by revivals, individual or social ; by new impulses or illapses of the original life; by restorations or innovations and reforms. Other nations — pagan or Mohammedan — fall to decay, have no second youth of faith, civilization, or empire. Like the parasital vine, poisoning and smother- ing the oak it clings to, their religion itself sinks with the civilization it destroys. But Christianity starts to new life in ekch newborn soul, and injects that new- ness into social and civil life. Fresh as from the first baptism of Jordan, she steps forth from each new revival glistering with the dew of her youth ; and she lives with the immortality of the civilization she thus perpetually vitalizes. " Again : Jesus Christ lives as does the founder of no other faith, because his alone is the religion of true 252 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. science ; not that it aims to teach science, but that it harmonizes with it as it is progressively discovered, just as its history finds its counterpart in the Egyptian or Assyrian sculptures, as they are gradually disen- tombed. . . . " Like the starry heavens above us, it is true and shall be true forever, though with varying aspect and depth of truth, alike to the savage or civilized ; to the rude peasant or slave, or to Bacon creating new intellectual systems ; to the child that can say ' Our Father,' or to a Newton sounding the astral abysses, or a Milton, passing ' the flaming bounds of space and time.' " False science has been the fatal plague of false reli- gions. Brahmanism must perish before a true astronomy or genuine system of physics. Mohammedanism cannot survive the acceptance of a true political or social philosophy. But the facts and principles of Christianity are like mountain peaks which, in the nocturnal land- scape, seem hills almost touching the eye, but with the morning start up afar off and leagues into heaven ; or like constellations which, through the city vapors, seem part of the street lights, but as you emerge from its smokes spring up to the firmament. They are ever veri- table and real, though they rise to loftier heights as the world's vision clears. " In like manner, Christ shall live in his religion, because that religion, genuinely apprehended, is an emancipator and excitant of mind and thus makes civilizations which embrace it quick and powerful. Other faiths, by false science and intellectual repression, enslave and enfeeble nations. Thus peoples which have em- braced, however imperfectly, the religion of Jesus Christ, in art, culture, opulence, and power are this hour amid the other races as gods. Moreover, among nations nom- CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. 253 inally Christian, those, as a general law, are mightiest with whom Christianity is mightiest ; and she again, though she can live amid diverse organizations of church, state, and society, is yet strongest with the freest and most enlightened. . . . " Again : Jesus lives, and shall live as no other of the sons of men, through his church — an organization whose life principle most solemnly consecrates it amid the social economy to a function of unselfish beneficence and per- petual reform. . . . "Organized on the principle of supreme love to God, and supreme devotion to human salvation — its life individualized and quickened and made powerful by its relations of liberty, equality, and fraternity among its members ; a reciprocity of obligation to God's word and work among men — holding all equally responsible to truth, and to God, with no earthly power above the brotherhood, or mediating between it and God — an organization better fitted to individualize intelligence and activity, and to emancipate, purify and vitalize universal society, cannot be imagined. It seems planted in commonwealths as a fountain of perpetual youth. "Again : Jesus Christ lives as none other in the history of time, through the power of his personal character. The instincts for the moral beautiful must perish in the human soul before it can let that character go forth from its love and honor. Its instincts of truth must be destroyed before it can believe that character false or the religion which enshrines it a fraud. That personage is the Atlas of the system, bearing it up immortally. Rightfully his name is called ' Wonderful,' the separate, the isolated, the unique. There is no fellow to it among the sons of men. Others have been great, but time has drawn them within its shadow. But that character grows ever upon the mind 254 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. of the world with age and culture, towering up ever higher across the valley of ages. " Others fade or tarnish with years. But when shall that character gather dimness or stain } It grows brighter by the attrition of ages and clearer with their progressive illumination. Eighteen hundred years have not attached to it a fleck or shadow. Serene, self-poised, complete. Godlike — what fellow has it in the histor) of men.^ Other fames fade or show hollow and counterfeit with time. But when shall that face be the face of fiction or imposture .' And if not an impostor, then is he the Son of God. . . . "As an object of personal endearment and admiration, Christ lives and shall live as no other of the sons of men. As a personal friend and benefactor, exercising universally and towards each, as if alone, cognizance, care, and affec- tion, — not one overlooked amid millions who love him, — he lives with the life throb of a conscious personal love, through ages and millions. Many love a Washington, Kosciusko, Gustavus, or Howard. But the race of man weeps around the cross this hour. Earth has other high and monumental places, national and ecumenical ; but one Jerusalem. " Nor is it with love for the dead alone they gather there. No mere dead saint or hero is Jesus Christ. The sorrow of death and the joy of life blend together at his tomb. It is 'he that liveth and was dead, and is alive for evermore, and hath the keys of hell and death.' To all the millions of his disciples he is a living presence,, companion, comforter, brother, saviour. " No other being is so profoundly and supremely loved, and by so many millions, and with such consciousness- of living, constant, personal intimacy, as Jesus Christ. While other fames and faiths decay, it is not so with his.. CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. 255 Never was the heartbeat of humanity toward hiro fresher, stronger, more vivid, more conscious, or from more millions, than at this moment. Never were more ready to suffer or die for him. " When Napoleon led his vast army into Russia, and his devoted squadrons, charging into the foaming Nieman and sinking in the deadly torrent, still with swords waving' above their heads, poured out their ' Vive I' Empereur ! ' from lips gurgling with death, Europe heard with admira- tion and terror. But this was in sight and hearing of their chief. " But for Christ nations and races never having seen or heard him are ready to pass through floods and exult amid flames, glorying to be counted worthy to suffer for him. Millions through all the earth recognize him as a present witness, champion, and deliverer. Through life's changes, in dark or light, the bridal festival, or the cham- ber of sickness and the shadow of death, in all homes and all paths, in hut, palace, or prison ; in wilderhess or city, the mountain wild or the stormy sea ; drawing the curtains of evening or lifting the veil of morn ; leaning on human bosoms, quelling human cares and terrors, and wiping human tears, that loved presence walks the whole earth this hour. As the champion of the poor, the vindicator of the rights and duties of universal humanity ; as the great apostle of brotherhood and liberty, the ennobler of labor, the comforter of the wretched, the visitor of the sick and imprisoned, the protector of the outcast and exile, the orphan, the desolate, the enslaved — as all these, Qirist is destined to live in the coming demo- cratic era of history, more and more, as Lover and Lord of the race. " Christ is, again, destined to live as the representative man of the future ; the mightiest of plastic forces, assim- 256 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. ilating the race to itself ; the ' Sun of righteousness,' whose shining is to strike his^image through the great deep of humanity, mirroring itself individually in the million, which are drops in that deep. He is to be the ideal to which the race of man shall shape itself, and to live repro- duced in its coming nations, through the ages as long as the sun. " Again : Jesus Christ shall live through and in the kingdom he has established, recognized of the world in his regal majesty, the central personage and imperial guardian in a new order. In this kingdom the ethics of Christianity are presented as grouped around a living, vitalizing Christ. They are not a mere system of abstract maxims and precepts, but vital, incorporate, impersonate in the Son of God — the robe of his epiphany, worn of him as the sun wears his beams. They are no longer simply a true philosophy or rules of being, to be vindicated at the last judgment ; but the present policy of a most real, though invisible monarchy : a policy worked by an unseen but ever-present sovereign, and whose expanding influence is his triumphal march over the earth. " That kingdom was never so much a living power as this day. Other founders live with the dynasties and constitutions they establish or inaugurate. Thus Solon lived with the Athenian constitutions ; thus Peter the Muscovite, through the czars, and Frederick the Great through all his successors. But with truth, liberty, and love — the great principles of Christ's kingdom — he lives and reigns. Wherever true justice, freedom, purity, and brotherhood live and triumph, there Christ lives and triumphs. Wherever the martyr, confessor, or missionary, wherever the patriot, philanthropist, or hero, utters or enacts his testimony to these principles, there Jesus Christ still lives. Wherever men think, reason, feel, CHRIS TMAS DISCO URSES. 257 labor, and pray for these interests, there Christ still lives. Wherever men forgive their enemies, or return good for ill, ' bless those that curse them, and pray for those that despitefully use them,' there Christ lives. Wherever men engage in disinterested beneficence ; visit the sick or imprisoned ; cherish and comfort the weak and helpless ; enlighten the ignorant ; reclaim the vicious ; or where they free the enslaved ; build hospitals ; endow asylums ; establish schools, — there Christ, though personally unrec- ognized of the actors, still lives. In all battles of Princi- ple ; in all conflicts of truth and reason, and their victories over falsehood and wrong ; in all labors of love, the world over, Christ lives. " In short, in all the infinite outgoings of light ; all the great movements of history towards truth and righteous- ness ; in all the advances of society, in freedom, art, science, and power, Christ — who is converting all these to agencies of his economy — lives and conquers and reigns. " Finally and especially, as we enter into the circle of revealed agencies within the awful forces of the spiritual world, we find the life of Christ among the children of men, guaranteed by that wondrous all-vitalizing power, moving now on the deeps of mind as at first on the ruin- ous abyss — God's Spirit. With that Spirit pledged to breathe that life into human souls, and to quicken them with the thought and love of Christ, till he comes again in the clouds of heaven, we feel the future of Christianity is placed above accident or natural causes and above human caprice or will. He cannot die but with death dominating over life through the universe. " All these forces have guarded the life of Christianity in the past, and brought it safe and triumphant through th6 deadly perils of more than eighteen centuries. Often 258 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. have her enemies thought her to be dead ; but never was she more living than at this moment." Following the above is an eloquent and characteristic picture of the struggle of Christianity in Palestine with. Jew and Roman, pagan and Pharisee, high* priest, Pilate, and Herod, " who conspired to quench it in a bloody grave," and then with " the pride and cunning of heathen, philosophy, oratory, poesy, and art — with the charm of sensuous and intellectual beauty, and all the sorcery of falsehood, thinking to confute and awe and sneer and shame her out of the world" ; then successively with the iron power of imperial Rome, and barbarism and spiritual despotism, and the political and social upheavals and insur- rection of nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,, and with modern infidelity, and transcendental and ration- alistic philosophies, and through all her struggles depicting, the triumphant progress of Christianity to the end.- The entire passage is in the writer's most exalted, vein, and is here omitted simply because of its length and because no mere extracts could do it justice. The address thus closes : — , "Nothing we can discern seems destined to destroy or arrest her. History and philosophy conspire with prophecy in declaring of Jesus Christ, as of none other of the sons of men, ' He shall live' — shall live though cities, nations and civilizations pass away : shall live through ages that may trample over the fallen arches of British or Anglo-American empire ; live, even if so be, when the New Zealander shall stand amid the ruins of London and New York ; live as long as the earth rolls and man dwells upon it. Yea, and instructed by a philos- ophy of history that extends its inductions from time to eternity, and from the life of souls here to their life there, and by prophecy unveiling to us the mystery beyond the CHRISTMAS DISCOURSES. 259 Great White Throne, we know that far past the changes of earth and time, when suns fade and stars fall, and worlds burn, — in the new earth and new heavens, — with the life of humanity bearing the crucified One in its bosom evermore, with the life of the divine Spirit breathing his thought through the universe and through eternity — ' He shall live.' " One glorious thought closes on our vision as we attempt to pursue it into the infinite future, even as the transfigured cloud on the pathway of the setting sun. If Christ shall live, we shall live also. He shall live in us and we in him, forever. He is to man, as here, so ever- more, 'THE LIFE.'" CHAPTER XX. A LOYAL PULPIT. Dedication of the new cMrch at Tenth and Locust streets. — Its standing and influence. — The civil war. — The loyal pulpit as a factor in molding public opinion in St. Louis in 1860-61. — Public services of Dr. Post in this crisis. — Patriotism of the First Congregational Church. — Camp Jackson. — Sermon of Dr. Post on Fast Day in November, 1861. THE year i860 was very memorable in the annals of the First Congregational Church, for reasons which will presently appear. In the spring of that year it erected its principal edifice on Tenth and Locust streets, and this event marks an important epoch in its history. With the removal to the new chapel the church had gained largely in member- ship and attendance, so much so that this building soon proved wholly insufficient for the audiences in the morning service; and in the spring of 1857, in a discourse "by one [Rev. Charles Peabody] whose manly services will be long and gratefully remembered by the people, the appeal was raised, ' Let us arise and build. This place is too strait for us. Our sittings are all rented. We cannot increase for want of room. Our cause cries. Onward ! Providence imposes the necessity. Let us obey.' " ^ Thereupon — and in great measure under the stimulus of this sermon — a subscription was set on foot, and suffi- cient funds to authorize the undertaking having been obtained, the corner stone of the new and main building was laid in March, 1858, and the structure was completed in the following year. ^ Historical Discourse of March, i860, by Dr. Post. s6o A LOYAL PULPIT. 261 On March 4, i860, the church was dedicated. In the morning the dedicatory services, including the historical discourse by the pastor (above referred to), were held ; in the afternoon the first communion was celebrated, and in the evening a discourse was preached by President Sturtevant, of Illinois College, on " The Ministry of the Sanctuary." The church at this time was in a high tide of pros- perity. The house of worship was in a part of the city then most desirable, and its accommodations were ample and attractive. It was built after the Grecian school of architecture, without spire or tower, and before its entrance were massive stone columns. Exclusive of the organ and price of the ground, it had cost over ^53,000. The membership, embracing only two hundred and thirty -five names, was not numerically strong as gauged by some of the leading churches of to-day ; but its power in the community meant far more than its church roll. The congregation identified with it was large and rapidly growing. Its pews were greatly in demand — at the first sale forty of them were sold for an aggregate sum of ;^3 5,000. It stood for Congregationalism, as its sole, and historically as its signal, representative in St. Louis. It was made up largely of men in the prime of life, actively engaged in various business pursuits, in pros- perous circumstances and of growing fortunes ; quite a number of its members were already wealthy and some of them stood very high in the ranks of medicine and law and education. The First Congregational Church was among the strongest in St. Louis, both financially and by reason of its commanding influence. But it was near- ing a crisis which, for a time, threatened to engulf it, and did leave it crippled in mast and sail, though it finally outrode the storm. The year i860 was very memorable 262 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T . in the history of this church because of the part borne by it in the momentous tragedy upon which the country was then entering. The fall of i860, with its great political struggle and the election of President Lincoln, brought about in St. Louis a condition of anxiety and suspense hardly paralleled anywhere in the country. That city, it must be remem- bered, was not, like most others of the land, one which in case of war would send munitions and troops to a distant seat of hostilities ; nor was it a community which, although facing an enemy near at hand, was homogeneous in itself and united in political sentiments. In Missouri, and especially in St. Louis, there was a wretched tangle of irreconcilable theories of government and race preju- dices, which set at variance those of the same neighbor- hoods, and the same coteries and churches — often those of the same households. It is difficult now to realize that there could have been at that time such a state of mutual menace and fear and secret plotting and bitter personal antipathy as then prevailed. The war itself, which in the spring following carried the hot bloods off into the armies and brought martial law into St. Louis, even with its grim realities was a relief from the dreadful uncertainty and distrust and social blood-poisoning that had possession of the people during the fall and winter of i86o-6i. In this year 1891, with the war storm long passed, and the prob- ' lems of that period wrought out to their ultimate results, it is a simple matter to understand the "logic of events." But standing as the citizens of St. Louis stood in 1 860-6 r, what man among them was farsighted enough to pene- trate the veil .■' Above and on every hand was a thick murk, from which all were expecting hour by hour to see the bolts descend, not knowing where they would strike, or what interests, embracing property or personal A LOYAL PULPIT. 263 safety or even life itself, might not be in jeopardy. All was uncertainty, dreadful as it was vague, and yet it seemed palpable enough to any comprehension that the war once here would be not only a civil, but also a social and a fratricidal, war. And it was apparent from a glance at the map that St. Louis would be a prize to be fought for by the north and the south, and likely enough would be swept over by the armies of both, and thus converted into a quarry for mutual plunder and depredation. While "the timid good would stand aloof," or merely cry for "peace on any terms," it took a bold and manly citizen from any calling to come to the front, and, with the air full of threatening and defiant disunion- ism, and with the nightly tramp of " minute men " heard in the armories, to proclaim himself for the government at all hazards and at any cost. It was a time peculiarly to test the manhood and patriotism of a clergyman in such a community ; and more especially a clergyman in the immediate social and church environment of Dr. Post. His circle of acquaintance outside the church was a wide one ; it had been formed before sectional lines were drawn and embraced many whose antecedents were from south of Mason and Dixon's line, who had welcomed him at his first coming to St. Louis. His own congregation was by no means a unit on the great issue then before the public ; on the question of forcible maintenance of the Union it was divided. With a large majority in favor of standing by the government, come what might, it contained an element, not numerically strong but includ- ing wealthy and influential members and prominent church officers and old personal friends of Dr. Post, who were strongly southern in traditions and associations, and strenuously opposed to any measures on the part of the government that savored of coercion, and who were still 264 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. more emphatic in their opposition to any advocacy of such measures from the pulpit. It was insisted by people of this school that the duties of the clergyman pertained solely to spiritual concerns ; that he had no call to meddle with politics ; and that his special and paramount obligations were, not to foment dissensions, but to preserve "peace and good will" among those of the same "household of faith." The south was swiftly massing in open rebellion, and coercion meant war on a tremendous scale, with no end of sacrifice of blood and treasure. Such a war was declared to be abhorrent to humanity, and especially to be depre- cated by preachers of "the gospel of reconciliation." It was notorious that there were many of "the best citi- zens " of St. Louis, who, in mass meetings and conventions, advocated resolutions opposing secession and favoring sub- mission to the laws (and some of them afterwards did yeoman service for the government), but who at that time refused to support the administration in " a war of sub- jugation." Surely, it was argued, the clergy, regardless of political bias, and without in the least impeaching their loyalty to the government, might assume an attitude as moderate as that. At all events, in their capacity as pastors over flocks honestly differing within themselves in political convictions, they certainly might pursue a policy of silence. Such a course in the pulpit, it was contended, was perfectly consistent with a patriotism at the polls and in the avenues of private life. It was urged and was plainly manifest that on the other hand public deliver- ances in favor of the nation and its preservation, when it could only be preserved by the bayonet, meant church dissension and schism, the loss of most valuable members, and the probable estrangement of long-tried and beloved friends. A LOYAL PULPIT. 265 Such were' the arguments — containing a modicum of truth and by many sincerely believed in, and most persua- sive to a man of conservative views and averse to strife — for keeping out of the pulpit any reference to the national issues. But a crisis was upon the people of Missouri. It was her "Valley of Decision" — the turning point in her destiny. The state was a possible key to the situation in a political and strategic point of view, and its fate might carry with it that of the national controversy. The test came home to every citizen and he could not fend it off. There was a trumpet call to every man in every rank and every position in life, and in every political party, to throw what measure of talent and influence he possessed into the trembling scale for the cause .which he honestly thought to be the right. Which cause was wrong and which was right, it is foreign to the purpose of these chronicles to consider. It is certainly true that there were in St. Louis at that day many very prominent and influential citizens and those of unquestioned political honesty and conscientiousness who squarely and boldly opposed the course of the govern- ment. Many considered the war upon the south as a wanton outrage upon state rights without a shadow of justification. Many loyal men counted the enforcement of rightful authority, at the fearful cost which would be entailed, as too dearly obtained, and so were for peaceable separation. There were also many who were educated by subsequent events to the stanchest patriotism who then sincerely "halted between two opinions." But with Dr. Post the case was far different. With his convictions — bred into the bone and sinew of his moral nature, in the days of Lovejoy and before them-^ on slavery, on the supremacy of the federal government, on obedience to constituted authority, there could be in 266 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. that crisis no middle course or divided duty or stinted service. There was, as he believed, hardly anything sacred in the past or hopeful in the future that would survive the downfall of the Union. After that catastrophe there opened to his mind only a long perspective of anarchy and disaster, with an end of the experiment of free government on the earth. And he did not believe that, a clergyman could entertain such convictions in private and with justice to his own manhood fail to avow them in that sphere wherein his power for efficient service was most to be felt, on the platform and in the pulpit. Consequently when the question presented itself, what course to pursue before the public, it was with him simply no question. Prudential considerations, questions of worldly-wise policy, the balancing of chances, were never taken into account. As to fears he had none. His conduct was simply characteristic. He was the declared friend of the national government from the very outset, in the somber autumn of i860 and the winter following ; during the period preceding Camp Jackson, when the arsenal was threatened, and a coup de main was looked for which would turn the city over to the Con- federacy, as well as afterward through the varying fortunes of the war. He advocated the cause of the government by public persuasion and appeal, in the pulpit, in platform addresses and through the daily and periodic press, as well as through the quiet channels of personal influence. He not only pleaded for submission to the federal govern- ment, as a matter of loyal duty, but he insisted upon its maintenance at all hazards — by force if necessary. Such was the position taken by Dr. Post throughout the war. And those who differed from him most widely, while they condemned his cause and opinions, were ready, in common with those of his own political faith. A LOYAL PULPIT. 267 to honor his fearless manhood and to recognize the potency of such services as those rendered by him to the government in St. Louis, during the time of its wealiness and need. Indeed the effect of the course pursued by Dr. Post and a few other prominent clergymen who stood together in the breach at the beginning of the disunion agitation can hardly be overestimated. When the war was actually here the issues were relegated to a great extent from the field of discussion to the wager of battle. But the fall and winter previous to the actual outbreak of hostilities chronicled a shock and struggle of political opinions, more intense than any in the history of Missouri. The war of 1 86 1 was emphatically one of ideas. It grew from a soil of strong primordial beliefs touching the first principles of government. It was the fable realized of dragons' teeth then sown and soon to spring up in serried columns of war. Theories vitally affecting state and nation came forth like Homer's gods and met in battle here in St. Louis during the fall and winter of i860 and 1861. In this conflict of sentiments, especially among Americans, the churches were a mighty, if not indeed a controlling, factor. The thinking classes — those who gave tone to public opinion — were largely to be found in the various city congregations. There they gathered from Sabbath to Sabbath, often when public excitement was at fever heat, and when the all-absorbing' theme of the hour was that of the discourse or woven into it ; and thus by sheer aggre- gation of numbers, the feelings and sentiments of men would become focalized, and under the inspiration of the topic and the speaker would flame out into passion and enthusiasm. The opinions of the clergy, with few exceptions, carried very great weight among their followers, and with many 268 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. were held as almost ex cathedra ; and where the pastor was a person of recognized standing and of strong person- ality and persuasive eloquence, his power in the field of public opinion was mighty indeed. It is doubtful if the pubHc press or the club or the mass meeting did more to fix the wavering, to rally the lukewarm and encourage the timid, and generally to mold and strengthen the public sentiment, than did the pulpits of St. Louis which championed the cause of the country during that fall and winter. The steadfast and uncompromising fealty of Dr. Post to the Union cause was not rendered without a painful sacrifice. It cost him the estrangement, for years, of more than one among his earliest and best friends in St. Louis ; those, in some instances, with whose house- holds his own had been on terms of the closest intimacy and from whom he had received abounding and sub- stantial evidences of kindness during the whole period of his life in St. Louis. Their family ties and ancestry were, as already stated, southern ; their young men were following the fortunes of the "stars and bars," and in spite of strong attachments, as the contest waxed in bitterness, and patriotic appeals from the pulpit contin- ued, and prayers went up from Sabbath to Sabbath for the success of the national arms, the offices held in the Congregational church were one after another resigned by them, and letters were taken to more con- genial fellowships. So to the sorrow shared in common with the public in that dark period was added the shadow thrown across the warm personal friendships of former years. The old relations were not forgotten ; mutual respect and esteem were not lost ; and in subse- quent times, when the passions gendered by the war had subsided, the cordial kindness, if not the intimacies, of A LOYAL PULPIT. 269 early days in St. Louis gradually came back. But these separations were among the sorest trials in the life of Dr. Post ; they were a heavy loss to himself and to the church ; a loss which a more temporizing and worldly-wise policy might have avoided. It must not be inferred from anything here said that the advocacy of the cause of the government by Dr. Post was also a "gospel of hate." Such was far from the fact. He spoke with all the earnestness and intensity of his convictions. But the words were uttered in kindly warning ; they were addressed to the public conscience, — not to sectional or party animosities, — and they were coupled with appeals to the better angels of our nature — to love of country, to reverence for law, to the spirit of fraternity and mutual charity. The church on Tenth and Locust streets, notwith- standing the defections spoken of, was a tower of strength to the Union cause in St. Louis. Its aid to that cause was felt in a thousand ways. The provisional and military authorities in that city knew that a loyal support was at their back in this as in other patriotic churches. Officers and soldiers from different states stationed in St. Louis, though shunned and tabooed by the southern element, found in this church a welcome and a home. Those passing through in thousands on their way to the front heard the prayers and words of hope and courage and rally to duty from its pulpit and carried them on the march and to far-off and lonely camp-fires. Substantial aid was rendered to the Union cause by the Congregational church, directly in contributions of money and food, and indirectly through assistance given in fairs and the work of the Ladies' Loyal League and Union Aid Society ; in both of which Mrs. Post was an officer and 270 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. a most active and devoted member. This church gave a number of its young men to the service ; and the touch of its kindly charities was felt in ministrations to the wounded and fever-smitten soldiers in many a hospital in this city and on the steamers along the southern Mississippi and the Tennessee. To cite, in whole or in part, the sermons and other deliverances by Dr. Post touching on the national issues during the fall of i860 and the four years following, in his own church and in the sister churches, in joint service and on special occasions of fasting and prayer or thanksgiving, would be out of the question. Many of them were unreported. Of the many that were pub- lished or noticed in print, very few are now obtainable. But those sermons and those scenes of excitement and exalted feeling — sometimes of mourning and agony — and the personnel of those that figured in them will always live in public memory. Two or three of these discourses hereafter mentioned must serve to illustrate the attitude of Dr. Post on public affairs during the war and shortly before. Thus, at the Congregational Church, after the national election, and as the state was drifting haplessly toward the breakers of the Twenty-first General Assembly, he delivered, on Thanksgiving Day, a discourse entitled " Our National Union," which, by request of Francis Whittaker, Wyllys King, J. S. McCune, Russell Scarritt and Samuel Plant, was afterwards published in pamphlet form. The sermon is a call for gratitude for a Union, — God-given for so long, — and a warning and prophecy, drawn from the sad story of past ages and the inexorable logic of history, pointing to the fate awaiting dismembered republics. Chronologically in this connection, and by way of epi- A LOYAL PULPIT. 2"] I sode, passing mention should be made of a strange scene witnessed from the top of Dr. Post's mansion, on the tenth of May, 1 86 1. The city was then over the hill and east of Seventeenth Street. The region about was open country ; the houses were few, and on the morning of that day most of the men who lived in them were absent in town. There was scarcely a sign of life then stirring in the neighborhood,, except where, among the tents that flecked the grove south of Olive Street, the, flutter of pennons and the glint of sentinel muskets were to be seen, and now and then drum taps and bugle calls were to be heard — all of which, betokened a body of soldiers quartered there in camp. But three o'clock in the afternoon of that day saw a. very different picture. By that time, though the sky was mild enough for a May picnic, the air about " ^olian Castle " was very far from .^Eolian. From half a dozen avenues of approach, and as if by clockwork, were coming at a quickstep and almost simultaneously and gathering about the cluster of tents, marching columns of dark blue-coated "regulars," and "home guards" with their various uniforms, and artillerymen with caissons and horses and trailing cannon. Close by the house was the regiment of Colonel B. Gratz Brown, which, with its leaguer of bayonets and gleaming field-pieces, had appeared so suddenly that it seemed to have sprung out of the earth. And who will forget the grotesque and motley convoy that came with the advancing columns .? — the mMange of furniture wagons, drays, carts, buggies, everything that had wheels, and men, women, and children, babes in arms — people of all sorts and conditions, white and black,, not less than thirty thousand of them, pouring helter- skelter over the common, like the sea across a sandy flat Z'JI TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. at the flow of tide. And who can forget the crazy noises of that most crazy multitude ? the skirl of Yankee Doodle and the shouts for Dixie, and the nervous pulsations of drums, answering one another in defiance here and there through the field, and finally blending in a Babel chorus till all the air was quivering with the din. From the housetop, in the midst of all the chaos of voices and swaying masses, like checker-work could be distinguished the blue squares of the " regulars," motion- less as a rock in the ocean. Exactly what is the meaning of the squadrons of mili- tary, and this conglomeration of people, and these cheers and confused noises, nobody seems to comprehend, except that Lyon and Blair are understood to be surrounding Frost and his encampment, and that some dreadful tragedy is brewing. The music and the drum roll continue, and the people keep on shouting very much like the mob at Ephesus, hardly knowing what the bedlam is about, when in the midst of it is heard the ominous splutter of firearms, followed by round after round of musketry, silencing all other noises. What can this mean .' Can it be a salute to our national colors .■■ If so, why that ragged fusillade, and why that sharp whisk of minie balls that come flying over and around the homestead, and why the reeling and backward surging of the crowd along the line of soldiery, and the sudden stillness more significant than the wildest clamor .^ The watchers on the roof are not left very long in doubt as to the general result, for the strains of " Hail Columbia" and the columns moving 'to the eastward with the stars and stripes flying and marking their line of march and the tidings that come on the wings of the wind, proclaim the capture of the camp with seven hun- dred of the flower of young St. Louis — officers, men and A LOYAL PULPIT. 273 arms and equipments, all surrendered, and being taken away to the arsenal. The bloody work of the musketry was heard of later. That and the grim procession of prisoners, with the files of home guards before and behind and the ambulances bringing up the rear with the dead and wounded, marching down Olive Street through the howling and cursing rabble, and the night of terror that followed in St. Louis, all are the matters of notorious history ; but Camp Jack- son, as here described, is simply the scene as witnessed from the housetop on that memorable afternoon of May 10, 1861. In November of that year war was a most grisly reality in Missouri. The shock of contending armies had been felt at Wilson's Creek and Belmont and Lexington. The bloody tragedy of Camp Jackson and the shooting frays on Walnut Street and Seventh Street in St. Louis were seared into, the public recollection. Fremont, with his bodyguard had, till shortly before, dispensed martial law from Chouteau Avenue ; the city was cordoned with his earthworks, and Halleck now held sway in his stead. Lyon had fallen and Price was still menacing from the southwest. Worse than all, guer- rilla fighting and vendetta and assassination — warfare in its most lawless and relentless phases, with its concom- itants of pillage and devastation and terrorism — were holding high carnival in many of the interior portions of the state. A picture of the commonwealth in the lurid light of those times, and the attitude of the loyal churches in St. Louis, and the public stand taken and maintained by Dr. Post throughout the war, may be gathered from extracts taken from a sermon delivered by him, November 26, 1 86 1, in response to a proclamation from President 2 74 ^^ UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. Lincoln setting apart that day as one of fasting and prayer for the country. The address was delivered at the First Presbyterian house of worship to the united audiences of that church and the Second Presbyterian and Congregational churches. The occasion was one of many during the war — some- times of thanksgiving, as often perhaps of supplication and sorrow — wherein these three sister churches, drawn together by the bond of a common national cause, united in worship and listened to one of their respective pastors. The address was one of considerable length, and the portions here inserted are from the report taken in shorthand as delivered and published the next day unrevised in the daily press. The discourse was from the texts: — "Make a chain : for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence " (Ezekiel 7 : 23). "The powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13: I)- "Why is it," said the speaker, "that this city now feels a sense of repose under the iron curb of martial law.? Why that feeling of relief in the suspension of our common civil rights and franchises, and in the presence of a power invested with prerogatives arbitrary for a time as those of any despotism in Europe .' It is be- cause, from violence and bloody crimes, — the hideous brood of insurgent and conspiring anarchy, — it seems the only refuge at this time left us. . . . " At last we behold with our own eyes, emerging like the Typhon of fable from the abyss, the horrid form of civil war with all its grisly train, robbery, arson, assas- sination, devastation, massacre ; the rider of the ' pale horse ' and Hell following after him. . . . " With party politics, with measures not immediately A LOYAL PULPIT. 275 and vitally affecting morals and religion, and waging their conflicts under and within the Constitution, it may be wise the pulpit should rarely intermeddle. But when attacks are made directly and avowedly on the existence of the Constitution and government, the case is widely altered. Whichever party triumphs in the former case, its victory is in the name and alleged defence of, not in deadly and professed antagonism to, the life of the country. But when the very being of government is assailed, and, with it, society, and all institutions under it are imperiled, silence anywhere and in any class ceases to be a duty. Between the country and its destroyers, between government and those who seek its life, between law and insurrectionary violence, between order and bloody anarchy, there is in logic and in honor no neutrality for any institution, interest or man, sheltered under our political system. " Especially when the footsteps of the invader are already on our soil and are heard in near approach to this city for the avowed purpose of overthrowing the government whose protection and blessing we have always enjoyed and of coercing and subjugating the state which is our home, which has so solemnly and repeatedly uttered, through its suffrages and representatives in convention, its protest against secession, and when, in enforcement of this treason against both the United States and the state of Missouri, — this violation by secessionists of their own theory of state's rights, — our thoroughfares are infested with arson and assassination, our trains of travel are ambushed and fired into, and our railroad bridges are converted into slaughter pens of unwary and peaceful passengers : . . , when the Indian savage is invited into the bloody carnival of invasion ; when in order to subjugate us our fields are desolated, and families 276 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. guilty only of loyalty are driven forth from their wasted homes, fleeing for life, abused and wounded, into poverty and exile, while our brothers and sons and fathers, in defense of the government and of our homes and per- sons, are standing for us this night on the field of battle, or lie mutilated and groaning in our hospitals, or mol- dering in red heaps amid the wilds, — while such force is used to drag our state protesting and struggling into the abyss of this rebellion, then surely silence is no longer admissible — any more for the pulpit than the press. . . . " The vital question now is not of party men, or names, or politics, or antecedents, or of finance, tariff, slavery or anti-slavery, but simply of government itself. Shall civil order live } . . . "The Titanic insurrection against our national govern- ment and life is much the outgrowth of sentiments and practice, insurgent against lawful authority . . . looking on offenses against civil ordinances and power as offenses not at all against God, but against a mere fiction — an intangible, ideal impersonation called government, which we can make and unmake at our pleasure. . . . "This mode of thinking and feeling derived from an infidel and material philosophy of the last century has pervaded us widely, until we have come to regard civil government as a mere creature which we were bound to reverence as little as a child its puppets, or the African his clay gods, which he installs over himself, but which he may buffet and chastise at his caprice. "Government, regarded simply as a thing of human creation, by agreement, compact, votes, or violence, has simply the authority of its original. There is nothing divine in it. Crime against it is no sin. Treason has nothing immoral. If you have the power to overthrow the government, you have the right. Success purges all A LOYAL PULPIT. 2'J'J the guilt of insurrection. It bleaches treason to purity and heroism. Might defines right : interest duty. Authority, resting upon a mere fiction of consent, and compact purely imaginary, is resented as tyranny. . . , " Government must become to us more than a mere human expedient ; authority something beyond interest ; right no mere synonym for might. Constitutions and institutions, though seemingly born of man, must be seen to be, after all, in a true sense, children of God. Powers that be must be recognized as ordinances of God; like the Temple, though issuing from human hand, directly hallowed by the indwelling God. "De Tocqueville has told us that despotisms may be infidel, but republics must have a God. Government with us must be either despotic or divine. . . . "God's sanction and majesty watch around civil government ; yet not everything that may be so called. Government thus sanctioned has its definition and limi- tation both by nature and Scripture. It is a thing of definite, distinctive type, a majesty of order, right and peace, characterized as ' a terror to evil doers and a praise to them that do well.' It is limited. also by the example of the apostles and by natural reason, as subor- dinate to God's government. It is presupposed by the apostle to be a power for right and order. "But with these definitions and within these limita- tions the Scriptures consecrate civil government; arid it is sacred with God's authority and bears with it the divine majesty as much as though its ordinances were uttered by the earthquake of Sinai or authenticated by the thunders of heaven. . . . " And as the authority of God is in every government true to its idea, so especially is it in the vital principle of that government. If the sovereignty is placed in the 278 TR UMAN. MARCELLUS POST. voice of a constitutional majority uttered in form pre- scribed, then is the voice of such majority armed with the authority of God's sanction. " Vox populi, vox Dei, then becomes a truth, 'and whoso resisteth, resisteth the ordinance of God.' He that strikes at that, as in the case of the present rebellion, strikes at not mere human majorities, but at the majesty and authority of God. If it succeeds, the vital principle of the government is destroyed; the government and civil order die ; anarchy and an organ- ization in which popular liberty can form no feature are all that await us. . . . "Before attcinpting such an awful thing as the over- throw of an existing government, one is bound most solemnly to . inquire, not simply whether there are wrongs in it — as in all things human — but, first, whether they vitiate it so that it is not on the whole a beneficent power ; and, second, whether they cannot be redressed by peaceful : means ; and, third, if not, whether there are not evils as terrible as those endured to be encountered in revolution, and whether the interests to be obtained are as great as those imperiled by change ; and, fourth, whether the government destroyed is likely to be replaced by anything better, or whether the government existing is not so rooted into the life and being of a people that it can not so be torn up without jeopardy to national life itself. If the answer to any of these questions is adverse to the meditated violence, then the divine majesty guards that government as truly as the flaming sword did Eden. "But in applying these principles to our federal gov- ernment, whether we look at it by itself or in comparison with others, in regard to its nature, spirit, form and effect, or the method and material and cost of its origin and elaboration, or we reflect on the piety and wisdorh A LOYAL PULPIT. 279 engaged in its history, and its aim to combine most per- fectly popular liberty with civil order ; of what ages it is the growth ; to what coming millions it is the represent- ative of the future; what a continent it embraces as its theater; what relation it sustains to the hope of popular liberty and to Christian civilization through the world ; whether we look at these or at the peace, liberty and general prosperity that it has sheltered and now shelters ; •or at its provision for all desired change, without jeopard- izing the continued peace and life of the nation, through the free voices of the people of whom it claims obedience and who again control, modify and direct it, not only by suffrage but by the subtle, omnipresent and constant influence of free thought and speech ; when we look at the slight wrongs and evils alleged against it, even by its enemies, and the awful crimes, woes and ruins in that abyss through which revolution must welter before it can stop its bloody wheel ; when we look at the good, the peace, the wealth and prosperity already destroyed, the homes desolate, the fields wasted, the battle carnage, the mutilated forms of the hospital ; and further, at the death agony of a mighty nation before it will submit to its assassins, and then at the grim, iron, merciless despotism lying beyond, but into which reason, patriotism, and even religion must rush to close up such an open hell, — when we look at all these and ask the character of the act that is attempting the overthrow of the government of these United States, we need no refinement of political ethics and dialectics for an answer any more than for a chemical analysis to prove that the sun shines or that the lightning blazes. . . . " Let us plead with God for our country ; for His kingdom in this land ; for institutions belonging to that kingdom and bequeathed to us from heroic and martyr 2 8o TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. ages ; plead in the name of the wondrous kindness, the mighty acts of former years, and the covenants with our Father, that He still may be gracious and forgive, according to the exceeding greatness of His mercies. . Let us plead for the whole land, that He may drive away from all parts of it the blindness and madness and astonishment that now are on millions ; that He may give soberness, reason and conscience, and a love of man and a fear of God to all sections of it ; . . . that, on the basis of Christian truth and righteousness, freedom and fraternity may grow, blend- ing with the Christian church, the Christian state, conse- crated with the recognized indwelling presence of God, and with the awe of divine majesty guarding it around as with flaming sword against all insurgent violence forevermore." CHAPTER XXI. WAR PAPERS. War papers: "Guerrilla war"; "Price's proclamation"; "What ails us?" — Address on Palingenesy. IN addition to the public addresses delivered by Dr. Post during the war time, there were, as already intimated, contributions by him to the press, not a few, most of them over a nom de plume, and not generally credited to his pen. Among these articles were two on the subject of "Guerrilla War in Missouri," contending that such fighting never defended liberty or empire against regularly organized war, and that to a population having fixed habitations and fixed capital — cities, villages, farmhouses, railways, and public and private improve- ments — guerrilla war was manifestly ruin. The position of the writer was illustrated from the Peninsular War in the days of Napoleon, and from the history of brigandage in Italy and the Tyrol. A wretched phase of guerrilla war was the fact that the secession cause for which it was carried on was making its assault on the State of Missouri and against the forms and reality of her popular will. " It is insurrection against a state government solemnly inaugurated by the representatives of the sovereignty of the people, and officered by men long known and the most widely approved and loved of all parties which we have in the state ; men whose assured loyalty to the Union and to the solemn trust with which " they have been invested makes the efforts of the insurgents still more hopeless and the wickedness of their attempt mere gratuitous mis- 282 TRUMAN MARCELLVS POST. chief. This condition — making insurrection a desperate, double treason against both the state and general govern- ment — shuts up its instigators, actors, and abettors to the character of mere brigands and bandits, impotent for war, but adequate only for robbery, arson, and assassina- tion. Before treason will be allowed to succeed in circum- stances like these -J- to wrest Missouri from the United States — the land will become an Ireland of the seven- teenth century or a La Vendue of the last. Those per- sisting in works of treachery and blood that can only irritate and embitter a war whose ultimate result they cannot affect — where will they end their career except in exile or by military execution or on the scaffold .? "The general government, with its vast and populous military states adjacent, cooperating with our loyal popu- lation, has certainly power to vindicate its sovereignty here, and will manifestly do it though its flag wave over vast regions waste as the original wilderness." In the fall of 1861 appeared in one of the St. Louis daily newspapers a communication headed " Price's Proclamation," and published shortly after the date of that remarkable fulmination. About the same time were printed in The Evening News, a well-known . daily of that period, a series of articles on the political situation of Missouri. One of them of considerable length, signed "Verax," was entitled "What Ails Us.?" At the commencement anniversary of Middlebury College, in 1864, Dr. Post delivered an address somewhat kindred in its line of thought to that on "The Vitality of Christianity," entitled " Palingenesy ; or. The National Regeneration." He subsequently received a note signed by W. G. Eliot, George Partridge, Wayman Crow, James Richardson, S. C. Davis, Henry Hitchcock, Carlos S. Greely, James E. Yeatman, F. B. Chamberlain, S. B. IVAff PAPERS. 283 Kellogg, J. P. Collier, and S. Waterhouse — men well known, some of them very prominent, in the community, asking him to repeat the address in St. Louis. "The patriotism, wisdom, and eloquence which you have always exhibited in the discussion of public questions inspires us," said the note, " with the liveliest desire to hear the oration. Believing that an expression of your views upon the restoration and renovation of the Union would be of public service, we cordially invite you to deliver that address at the hall of Washington University. The encouragements to loyalty which are based upon political philosophy, enforced by historic example and pervaded by Christian sentiment, cannot fail to be eminently useful." In compliance with the above request, an address — not the same, for on both occasions it was delivered merely from loose notes, but in substance and drift the same — was given in St. Louis, November 4, 1864. Afterward in a pamphlet, containing the address as delivered in that city and taken down in shorthand, the committee of invitation say by way of preface : " The satisfaction which the rich learning, profound reasoning, and fervid loyalty of the speaker afforded the assembly, expressed itself in a general and urgent demand for the publication of the discourse." The St. Louis Democrat, commenting on the lecture, in a notice which disclaims "any attempt to reproduce, or even to imitate, the wonderful word-painting" of the speaker, says : — ^ " If every man and woman in the country were imbued with the sentiments of that address, our land would soon be blest with millennial prosperity. . . . The solemn eloquence and pathos of the peroration were deeply impressive." 2 84 TR VMAN MARCELL US POST. When this lecture was given, peace had not begun to dawn in the east and those darkest hours that precede the day were upon the land. The country was in the birth throes of its national election, with McClellan as candidate of the Democracy on a platform declaring the war a failure and recommending a treaty with the seceding states. And the Palingenesy, although belong- ing, as the lecturer said, "rather to the philosophical chamber than to political harangue," was evidently suggested by the issues then before the people. " Not only our institutions are assailed," said the speaker, " but the ideas which created them — ideas which, with our fathers, held the place of first truths, and were to them the most practical convictions, and for which they braved the axe and the fagot, imprison- ment and exile and battle, overturned thrones, crossed seas, founded empires, achieved revolutions, organized society and government — these have become terribly shaken by the shock of our present rebellion. Old heroic traditions seem perishing. Old and time-honored maxims seem passing out of the nation's life. The principles, organic and vital, of our social and civil order seem well-nigh death-stricken by various causes, but especially by the subtle poison diffused through the national mind by the institution which has caused this war. . . . " There are many that contend there is no such thing as political regeneration. They point us to Niebuhr's picture of Greece, after the Peloponnesian war, and it is indeed a melancholy picture. Greece was ' living Greece no more ' after that fratricidal strife. The old Hellenism had passed away forever like a beautiful and heroic dream. He describes it as a land already in hopeless' decay. The national and ethnic sentiment had fVAJ! PAPERS. 285 fled. Its early faith, its heroism, its enthusiasm for liberty and country were gone. It was a land without hope, without a futnre. There was for it no renovation. " So of the old Roman world under the later Caesars. I know of no picture of mankind more melancholy — a world in hopeless decrepitude ; old ideas upon which they had built heroic action dead ; and the mind of earlier times gone forever ; heroic passion and virtue forgot ; heroic memories faded into myth ; civilization in dissolution. The human race itself seems old and dying. And there are those who universalize this fact ; and they tell us these aspects of decay of Greek and Roman civilization represent stages inevitable in all national life ; that all nations have their climacteric beyond which they can only descend to the grave. They point to Assyria, China, India, and Egypt as examples. There was no second youth for Persian or Phoenician, the Latin or Hellenic races. Babylon had none ; nor had Athens, or Magna Grecia, or fair Ionia, or Rome, or Jerusalem. Ancient history presents in whole or in part no such rejuvenescence. Nor will they admit in modern history any certain examples. Indeed, there is a school that theorize all history into fate — a mere game of inexorable necessity. They find its program written in physical geography : on land, flood and sky ; the configuration of continents, the courses of rivers, the nature of soils, the belts of latitude. Society, they claim, is the mere creature, the victim, of nature. Nations, societies, civilizations, they assure us, are all mortal. The shadows of death are on their cradles. Life with them, as with the plant or tree, is limited by the ethnic germ. History is a circle ever returning upon itself — a birth, growth, chmacteric, decline and death, in a course as fixed as that of the seasons. And 286 TJi UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. progress, that of which we speak so hopefully, is with them tut an eddy, ever turbidly whirling ; or an endless oscillation between tAvo opposite polarities ; a vibration between reform and counter-reform. " But is this so ? Is history but the endless labor of a Sisyphus ? a web of Penelope, ever woven, but only to be raveled and rewoven ? Is society cased in a mechanism of adamantine fate, where genius and heroism, passion and achievement, and all that we admire as most powerful and free in humanity are only forces to hasten the motion along the grooves of an eternal necessity ? And to die — is it with nations, as with men and animals, only the debt of nature ? " I thank my God I confess to no such gloomy creed. Both my logic and faith revolt from it. History is no eddy, though embracing many such. It is a Mississippi, bearing all eddies, with refluent or affluent whirl, ever to the great ocean. It exhibits in itself, it is true, per- petual oscillatory movement ; but the oscillation is of the pendulum below, that is ever moving the index hand above, on the horologue of the ages, ever nearer to the morning hour. " Its movement, too, presents also periodicity and rotation ; but it is the rotation not of the circle, but of the cycloid ; or the curve described by a point in the periphery of a carriage wheel in onward motion, which point ascending or descending never retrogrades, but ever in each revolution starts in each ascent in advance of its last descent, and falls in each descent in advance of its last ascent. Or perhaps its movements may be better likened to the epicycle in the Ptolemaic system of astronomy — a device by which they attempted to explain the apparent retrograde .motion of the superior planets, representing their orbits as described on a crys- IVAJi PAPERS. 287 talline sphere that ever moved stars, planets, and epicycles together along in its great revolutions. " I believe in no necessary mortality of states or civilizations ; at least, in the present or future. The forces of social progress are immortal, and by properly applying them society may itself become immortal. These forces are eternal ideas — inextinguishable in- stincts of the human soul, blending with, and conse- crated by, the imperishable principles of the Christian faith. The apparent failures and deaths of civilizations in the past are owing to defect, distortion or dispropor- tion, of these forces. Society was imperfect in its vital or constituent elements, and, like all imperfect things, having wrought to the measure of the capacity of these elements, was destined to change or death. Ancient civil- ization lacked the full idea of humanity in it as well as of Christianity. Having wrought to its measure without these elements, the fate of decay was necessarily on it. The periodic or cyclical movement in history proves not the mortality of these vital forces, but rather the reverse ; it proves their perpetuity and omnipotence. For it is the incompleteness, the neglect or the violation of these forces, that has slain states and civilizations entombed in the past. The power of a life principle is demonstrated as much by the death that ensues on its withdrawal or violation as by the life that attends on its presence. This cycloidal and oscillatory movement, amounting to reform or revolution, or to dissolution and new creation, must go on till society attains its full complement of constituent elements and forces ; that is, until the im- perfect has reached the perfect. Indeed the millennium itself seems, in the program of Revelation, to be only the most brilliant and enduring of the cycles of time, but mortal, like its predecessors, and bearing the race 288 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. in its descent to the final revolt and to the foot of the throne of doom. But these rotations or revolutionary movements, I believe, need not strike so low as the death shade, but may simply achieve reform within the circle of life. " Indeed in one aspect the rapidity and power of these vital forces asd of the social life are represented by the rapidity of these rotations. They mark revolutions of the wheel of progress. In the dim and distant past the strokes of that wheel are heard only at vast intervals, like the leap of Hesiod's horses of the gods : which making one bound, awful ages have passed away. So of the ^car of social progress ; the wheel strokes at first fall on the ear solemn and slow over the vast and twilight profound. But, quickening with time, they grow more and more rapid as they approach, till at length they become indistinguishable, and sweep by us with the con- tinuous rush of the steam-car, hurrying stormlike to its goal. " In this respect the rotary movement of modern his- tory finds its analogue in the cyclone, or tornado, which has a double movement ; one rotary on its own axis, the other projected along the great circle of the storm ; the rapidity of the one measuring that of the other. "We are dealing in this question with no problem of speculative philosophy, nor in the spirit of merely curious inquiry, but earnestly and anxiously, as we would feel the pulses of a dying friend. The hour is awful with destiny. A mortal crisis, such as comes only once in ages, is upon our country. Shall it live or die 1 Philosophy, the most profoundly and widely speculative, is here intensely practical. "What remedy, then, may a search guided by such philosophy discover for our national disaster.' What IVAJi PAPERS. 289 revitalization from decay ? What restoration from ruin ? In some diseases the malady itself discloses both the cause and the cure. So it is with societies. Social con- vulsions are a social apocalypse. Revolution is revelation. The upheaval and overturn reveal what smoother and more tranquil times never disclose — elements and forces ever at work in the deeps, but commonly hidden and voiceless. " As the geologist, in his researches into the dynamic laws and structure of the earth's mass, takes a position, not where^ the smooth champaign spreads out in level lawns and rich gardens, smiling with fruit and flowers, but in fields of ruin and the disaster of nature ; where the earthquake has torn open the earth's bosom ; and, gazing down the rent, he may read her interior constitu- tion and forces and may trace the awful subterranean powers which build or destroy her structure, vitalize or waste her surface, which have left their finger prints on the rent marble or the molten granite on the dingy sides of the chasm, or are still stirring the eternal fires below : so we may now take position beside the abyss that has opened in our American society, and trace powers, laws and elements heretofore but dimly disclosed under our smooth and beautiful prosperity. A wrong, hoar and mighty, has heaved under our foundations. The deeps have been torn open and their secrets disclosed. Fright- ful and infernal forms — passions and powers undreamed of by us, the grisly and goblin troop of Death and Hell — are emergent from Erebus ; come back as from ages of fabulous corruption and crimes, to afEright the fair world again. The rent abyss also reveals the enduring demiurgic forces of society : the forces creative, organic, conserva- tive, and destructive. Brahma, Vishnu and the dreaded Siva — all are there, and all are one. These demiurgic 290 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. forces, these world builders and destroyers, are ideas; eternal and profoundest constituents of our humanity. Normally and legitimately at work, like the impalpable forces of nature, they "elaborate order, beauty, and life ;. but, suppressed and disturbed, they breed the tempest and the earthquake. They are the ideas, primordial, organic, and vital to our civilization and institutions; powers invoked by our fathers at the beginning and by them inaugurated over the empire they founded. It is these ideas — resisted, stifled, and imprisoned — which have upheaved this ruin. " And now what shall we do ? Shall we renounce these ideas ? Shall we cast away the vital principles of our civilization, the architeetive genius of our institutions ? Shall we discard our theory of popular liberty as a chimera and a curse .'' Surely not ! Our fathers were no political dreamers or fanatics. The ideas they invoked were eternal truths, essential and immortal instincts of humanity, appointed of God to vitalize and guard social progress ; powers that utter themselves in the spirit- of the age ; that bear on our modern civilization ; powers that are imperial, omnipotent, the Lords of History. They- are stronger than empires, longer lived than the centuries. They shall shape the order of the millennial cycle itself. . . . "This present rebellion is a war of ideas; started because of no actual sufferings, such as niake nations mad, nor because of alleged actual oppression and mate- rial wrongs ; but in the name of resistance- to ideas. Ideas have sprung. up in the form of a million armed men, who go forth to battle for no vulgar and material interests, such as have moved in the common wars of history, but in the name of principles, abstract and universal." WAR PAPERS. 291 Ideas concerned in political order were divided by the lecturer into two classes : first, those of the rights of liberty, or, those rights we are wont to speak of as the rights of man ; second, those pertaining to the rights of authority, command, and rule in God, and those he may depute to rulers, and designated by way of antithesis as divine rights or the rights of God. "The two combined are the factors of all civil liberty, of all free, permanent and beneficent social or political order. They were designed of heaven to organize and rule society in joint regnancy — mutually complementary, and bracing each other to greater strength, like the opposite sides of an arch. As in case of the two forces that keep the earth in its path through the ecliptic, so their coaction is requisite, and in fit proportion and direction to keep society in its sphere and course. As in the solar sys- tem, either of the two forces failing or distorted, the earth would rush into the central flame or the outward abysses of night and frost ; so, either of the social forces failing or distorted, society rushes upon anarchy or despotism." In the Orient, "theocracy has prevailed from the morn- ing of history — an organization in which the rights of God have been usurped by the priest, patriarch, monarch, or caste, and then turned as 'devilish enginery' to crush and smother the rights of man." In the ancient Occident " the state was God, and before its usurpation of the divine prerogative there were no human rights sacred or indefeasible. The rights of man as man were unknown. The boasted liberties of Greece and Rome were only the civil equality of the lordly few among themselves and their equal liberty to dominate the millions below. But in the presence of the state, the mightiest as well as the meanest, eupatrid and patrician, 292 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. a Themistocles and Epaminondas, the Fabii, the Cornellii, the Scipios, and the Bruti, were alike slaves. Indeed the idea of humanity with the individual sanctity and sover- eignty of prerogatives in each human soul seems to have had no place in ancient occidental civilization save in connection with Christianity. And Christianity entered the world not in time to save it but to seed it for a far future. . . . " Christianity lived in the heart of the world as it must ever live with a life immortal. But as a public power it crossed the gulf of ruin chiefly as a superstition and a hierarchy ; and from the barbaric violence, the crimes and wretchedness of the time, the spiritual usurpation grew like an exhalation from hell soil. Over province, diocese, nation and continent, the hierarchical structure rose in many storied gloom, arch on arch and vault over vault, till it culminated in a central dome that loomed through the pale night over the nations like the palace of infernal Dis." . . . But "the eternal ideas of humanity, suppressed, stifled, crushed down in darkness and deeps, manacled, blinded for ages, have at times burst their prison-house ; and, like the children of Old Night, have emerged — a power 'of blind rage — into the superior realms. Like the giants of ancient fable, bound under Erebus, with the closures of the mountains above them, but at last bursting their chains, upheaving the rent earth as they rose, and stand- ing before the sun stalwart, grim, and vast, blinded with the sudden light and with rage ; then rushing with the broken bars of Tartarus and the seized thunders of Jove on Olympus, and driving the superior gods to the outer abysses — so these eternal forces of humanity, long pris- oned under night, often bloodily beaten back in attempted uprisings, have at times upheaved against the pressure of WAS PAPERS. 293 despotisms piled higher than ^tnas upon them, and, overturning thrones and empires and civilizations as they rose, have emerged into the realms of power. " The earth has shuddered at their ruinous wrath and their million-handed strength, and the high ones have fled from their seats in terror. Maddened and blinded by ages of night and wrong, trodden down and crushed in the name of God, finding the heavens apparently banded with their oppressors, the Church conspiring with the State, they have raged alike against the thrones of earth and heaven, brandishing their broken manacles both in the face of God and the king. " So it has often been in modern history. So it was, signally, with France at the close of the last cen- tury. ... So it has been in other European upheavings and revolutions, and so it must ever be as long as a tyrannical Church leagues with a tyrannical State. The emancipation of nations will then become insurrection against God, and civil liberty impossible. For, as De Tocqueville most wisely utters, ' nations to be free must believe.' This is the despair of European politics at this hour; placed between the sad alternatives of devout tyranny on the one hand and impious and infidel liberty on the other ; of freedom without authority or authority without freedom ; of rights without duties, or duties without rights ; superstition consecrating despotism, or skepticism unloosing anarchy! It is Christian in the valley of the shadow of death — on one side the bottom- less, infernal bog, on the other the flames grinning and shrieking with goblins and fiends. "Christianity seems to have been to the European mind, in the mass, an orb of perturbation — not of illumination — swaying it as the moon does the water to a tidal move- ment, as well on the unillumined as the illumined side of 2 94 ^-^ UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. the earth. It has stirred the sense of right in millions which it has but imperfectly illumined. The light of Christianity has touched them as the morning twilight strikes through some noisome cavern, arousing to activity all the creatures of night — bats, serpents, and all foul and venomous things, which more light will disperse. " A stronger illumination is required for European eman- cipation ; an illumination that shall show them that a hierarchy is not Christianity ; and Christ a liberator, not an oppressor of nations. ' More light ! ' is the cry from the million, baffled and groping, amid forms half revealed or phantoms — ' more light ! ' like the despairing prayer of Ajax in the drama: 'Light, light, light, O gods! and in the light even let me die.' " So disastrous has been the antagonism of these two classes of ideas, these two eternal social forces in history. The arch, built up on one side only, has fallen on the millions below. Society, driven from its fitting orbit of law and liberty, has rushed upon the abysses of despotism or anarchy. Civil liberty in perpetuity has seemed impos- sible. " Christianity relieves this despair of history. She is the term of reconcilement between the two. She weds human right to divine. She puts these two forces of the social system in adjustment and harmony. She does this by giving divine origin, authentication, and inauguration to both orders of ideas — those of liberty and those of authority. She derives both from God; baptizes, conse- crates, and crowns both. She does this for human rights, or those of liberty, by express command, by implication, and by institution. . . . " In like manner divine right, or that of authority and government, is vindicated and inaugurated by Christianity, by express precept and implication. She commands, and WAX PAPERS. 295 she enjoins on her ministers to teach, subjection to 'the powers that be; to kings, governors and magistrates, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake.' She vindi- cates the rights of social order and the majesty of the law, recognizing civil government as an ordinance of God. ... " Moreover, not only does Christianity inaugurate and set in harmonious coaction these two orders of ideas, creative and organic, of free society ; it also ministers to the continuance or renewal of social life, by ministering a palingenesy — a new birth — to the ideas themselves. "The genius of liberty has not always been humane, gentle, just ; as regardful of duties as of rights ; as con- siderate of others' claims as ready to assert her own. Arrogant, violent, clannish, selfish, has often been her manifestation in history. Through these vices her polit- ical creations have often perished. But Christianity breathes on her the breath of a new life — that of love and sympathy with universal humanity — and a love and sympathy kindling to the power of a passion, because communing with no abstract philosophy, but with the person of a living Christ. In consequence these ideas "will be themselves mightier, and their work more endur- ing. For liberty that is partial or selfish, and does not assert herself for all men, is illogical and suicidal ; she perishes herself, through the violation done to humanity she does not vindicate. Liberty, to be immortal, must be universal." . . . The classic civilization "had no sympathy with the rights of man as man, and on this rock it suffered ship- wreck. But of our social order among the most hopeful signs is a sympathy extending down more and more to the masses from all departments of our civilization. Our institutions, our political economy, our laws, and our 296 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. literature in all its divisions — philosophy, poetry, history, and romance — as also art, mechanic and fine, are all more and more of and to and for the million. " By this I feel that civilization gives assurance of its perpetuity and its approach to the better era, in that its circle of sympathy is becoming more and more commen- surate with all humanity. " In like manner the sentiment of divine right, or of authority, which has for the most part been too wont to bear itself haughty, insolent, oppressive, and hard of heart, is, by Christianity, imbued with a new life, and made gentle, reverent, conscientious, and of quick and genial sympathy. It cannot but conduce to this result that the mightiest and meanest, the wearer of purple as of rags, governors, lords, emperors, as well as slaves, must each kneel in prayer, morning and evening ; must sue for mercy, living, and in the dying hour, and look for doom in the great judgment, to one who, in this world, was a poor man, a laborer, a carpenter, a Galilsean peasant." . . . As restorative means " ' the hearts of the children must be turned to the fathers.' . . . Our faith in them must be renewed and revived and the national mind must be baptized anew in their principles." And the public mind must be thoroughly and profoundly impressed with the principle that "the voice of constitutional majorities pro- nounced in legal, constitutional forms is, under God, the supreme law . . . and with the conviction that the abso- lute rule of this principle, saving only the divine suprem- acy, is the only shelter for the liberty and prosperity of us all. . . . " We have heretofore thought to incorporate in our social and civil order, with eternal rights, human and divine, a vast wrong most audaciously and flagrantly violative of both. We have thought to do this — to bind W^R PAPERS. 297 up the torch and magazine together — and that with the self-consciousness of the nineteenth century burning and kindling upon it. As well lock up the earthquake or muzzle the volcano. . . . " A government utterly dark and despotic may live for a while frotn evil consistency. So one purely light and free may live immortally with the life of humanity and Christianity. But one attempting to combine liberty and slavery ties up the tempest in its bosom." There has been in our country " no failure of free insti- tutions, but the eternal failure of attempting to combine them with slavery in the same political system." . . . The slave-power "trampled on rights — human and divine — and sent forth her defiant challenge to the genius of American liberty and the moral sentiment of mankind. She disdained to plead at the bar of modern civilization. She thought to turn back the courses of history and to lead captive its ruling ideas. She opened not her prison-doors at the behests of any rights of man or of God. She endured no arbitration of earth or of heaven between her and her victims. 'They are mine,' was her utterance, ' and no power may take them out of my hands. I allow no sanctuary for them. I drag them alike from the temples of justice and the Church of God. I scoff at your cant of philanthropy, your glittering gener- alities of liberty, your vapid platitudes of rights, your fanatical drivel of humanity. My law is might, and the strength of my right arm. I forbid all question of myself. I lock up the lips of the eloquent and the pious. I shut up the school. I muzzle the press. I repel popular enlightenment. I invoke the power of darkness. I lead the forces of freedom and Christianity themselves captive in my train.' " The Highest heard — heard also the wail from the 298 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. deeps, and he who is no respecter of persons pitied the hapless and hopeless millions in the prison-house of ages. He touched and commissioned in their behalf the immor- tal forces of history, the imperishable ideas of humanity, ever living in the heart of the millions. They arose to the rescue and pleaded the cause of the victims. The Dark Power against which they rose in moral warfare^ stung, maddened by the assaults it could not avert or repel, in rage at the impalpable and immortal assailants, struck in blind fury at the Union itself — that Union at once her shield and instrument. . . . "Slavery — the sighs from her vast prison-house of past ages, swollen with the rage and agony of this civil war, following her like a tempest — now stands before us, the confessed enemy of our national life, reaching hands for readmittance across the gulf of public ruin and over the graves of half a generation. Shall we clasp those hands again, reeking with the blood of a million of our country- men .' A mighty army of melancholy, heroic shadows forbids. " Shall we again bind up the torch and the magazine together, and hope to escape explosion .■• We attempt an impossibility. We are in conflict with eternal and resist- less forces. We might sooner wrestle with the stars in their courses. We grapple with Omnipotence. "Let us build anew, and purely, of Truth, Right, and Eternal Ideas. Let us do it for the sake of the human race. Their hope is garnered in our trial. If that fails, if freedom, stricken down with us by our adhesion to slav- ery, perishes on this continent, then the shadow is turned back on the dial plate of time for a gloomy cycle. The hopes of millions in other lands, long looking to us, become for ages a flat despair. "Let us do this for the sake of Peace — beautiful, WAR PAPERS. 299 blessed Peace ! . I long for peace. But I know we cannot have it while incorporating elements immortally repug- nant into our system political and social. We cannot have peace while infolding a crime that draws on us the malediction of mankind and the curse of heaven ; while at war with the imperishable instincts of humanity and the sentiments of religion. With these eternal forces not at rest all peace is a mockery and impossibility. . . . " Let us eliminate from our social and political life the element that drives upon the hopeless conflict. Let us build with the eternal ideas of right as our agents and standard. Let us do this, I repeat, for the sake of peace. We want peace, not so much with rebels, but peace with humanity, with Christianity, with the genius of liberty and law, with the immortal forces of the human soul, with the civilization of Christendom and spirit of the age, and with the government of God. Not in accordance with these, all peace is mockery ; it will be endless agony and fear. In accord with them, we shall have a peace garri- soned by the angels of Christianity and the human soul. The powers of civilization will be appeased ; the long agitation will cease, and the Nemesis of an oppressed race will cease to wander through our empire. Otherwise, peace, spite of negotiations and reconstructions, is hope- less, except over the grave of the nation, or of civilization itself. " Let us do this for the sake of the martyrs of this war. When we think again to wed American liberty to Ameri- can slavery, half a million of forms start from their bloody graves to forbid the bans. ' Give us,' they cry, ' our guerdon, the reward of our toil and pains and blood ; give us a republic, all free, of constitutional liberty, not con- stitutional slavery. For this — ^for this we have given freely youth and hope, sweet home, the gladness of this 300 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. fair world, and the joy to behold the sun, Oh, let it not be in vain ! ' " Refuse to hear that cry and it becomes a mighty despair — wailing, like the night wind from the melan- choly climes of the 'south, the dirge of national honor, liberty, life, and heroic glories, lost evermore. Let us hear their cry and give them their guerdon. On their heroic graves let us build an arch of liberty and Law ; of rights — human and divine — every explosive and alien element removed ; an arch triumphal, under which coming free nations may march on to new achievement and glory. "The martyrs of the Republic rest in stoneless, name- less graves. They sleep lone and afar. No footsteps of love and sorrow may visit their place of rest ; no sister's eye may drop a tear over their repose. In grass-grown tumuli of multitudinous and promiscuous sepulture, or shrouded in autumn leaves in the lone forest dell, in the dank everglade, or the cypress gloom, or where the orange groves sigh over the unreturning brave ; along many a sad stream, rushing purple to the southern gulf or those which roll the forms of heroes to the Atlantic main ; in high mountain solitudes, or in the depths of the ocean, — they sleep until the resurrection morn. " Nature guards the mystery of their repose ; the solemn winds breathe of it to forest and ocean ; the lone stars of night look down upon them, and morn and even drop their dewy tears. But from the knowledge of living men not only their living forms but their graves are hid forever- more. Their being fades into the vast and shadowy past ; their dust blends with the air and earth and flood and mingles with universal nature. Blessed peace shall come again to deck these climes with beauty; but for our martyred heroes it will find no monument, no tomb. WAR PAPERS. 301 " Let US build them more than pyramid or mausoleum or Westminster — a temple of living liberty, overarch- ing a continent, where the spirits of the true, the loved, the gifted, the brave, may come back and walk with the memories of holy and heroic souls of all time and with the genius of American liberty through the ages. So it best fits.. Be this great continental Republic their monu- ment as it is their grave ; their temple, where the battle hymn of heroes and the sweet psalm of the saints shall mingle with the clank of no chain, the sigh of no slave. . " So built, our structure shall stand, guarded for aye, as never was Eden by 'limitary cherub,' by the immortal forces of the human soul and the Christian faith ; yea, o'erwatched perpetually by the Sabaoth of God. So con- stituted and guarded, it shall have no principle of decay. It shall be in accord with eternal powers. It shall stand through earth's better era. With God's favor it shall defy the corrosions of time. Its starry symbol, now torn of the battle-storm, and beset with treason and hate and the powers of darkness, floating aloft far above their impotent rage, shall stream on and on, in the skies of beautiful peace beyond, till the archetypal constellations shall them- selves fall from heaven. And thus our political structure — the house of liberty and law and love — shall abide till its glory of arch and spire and dome shall blend with the amethyst and chrysolite and sapphire of the New Jerusalem ! " CHAPTER XXII. MARTYRDOM AND FREEDOM. Assassination of President Lincoln, and services at the First and Second Presbyterian churches in St. Louis. — Sermon at the First Congregational Church, on " The Duty of Intercessory Prayer." — Paper in The North American, on " Free Missouri." PERHAPS the most memorable among the war scenes in St. Louis, .with which the life of Dr. Post is associated, were those immediately following the assas- sination of President Lincoln. In that city, as in many others, the fifteenth of April, 1865, stands by itself in the calendar. It will be remem- bered that this day had been set apart by the proclamation of Governor Fletcher and by the general consent and cooperation of loyal citizens, as a sort of impromptu Fourth of July over Richmond fallen and a nation re- deemed ; and everything was in readiness for a jubilee of bell-ringing and bonfires and parades which should inaugu- rate a new era of " good will and peace." That morning expectation was on tiptoe for the grand gala day, when Booth's pistol shot, by a species of hideous legerdemain, in a single hour transformed the feeling of the loyal public from joy into horror and smoldering fury that needed but a pretext and a victim to burst forth into riot and bloodshed. " A crime starting out of the dark- ness of past ages suddenly appalled the people with its strange horror, skulking into our nation's capital and striking at the nation's heart." (Address of Dr. Post at subsequent memorial service.) mastyjrdom and freedom. 303 Never to be forgotten was that Saturday morning in the First Presbyterian Church. Union thanksgiving services of the people of that and the Congregational church were to be held there, as often on former oc- casions, and Rev. Henry A. Nelson and Dr. Post had been advertised to address the united congregations, When the hour arrived, the clergymen were on the plat- form. The national bunting, as on previous war reunions, was draped about the pulpit. The crowd was coming in through the body of the church and through the galleries in vast numbers. The orators, the flags, the audience were all there, according to the program as arranged and heralded for days through press and pulpit announcements. But what a startling and awful shadow seemed to have fallen upon the scene ! The national flags, instead of lending their usual bright colors, were ghastly with the signals of death. Through the vast crowd, as it filled the seats and swarmed in the aisles and corridors, instead of the usual hum and flutter of gathering humanity was a hush that was painful. When the organ began to sound, its tones were not a Te Deum but a Miserere. The words of the opening prayer fell on a congregation still as in a fimeral gathering ; but the stillness was not so much that of an audience stricken by sorrow as of one that was stunned and dazed by some great shock. The speakers, who had prepared to touch a keynote of praise and rejoicing, seemed themselves like men overwhelmed by a new and outr^ form of tragedy whose dialect they could not yet master. The first utterances were all the more eloquent because wholly unpremeditated and frequently choked and broken with emotion. But as the theme began to find a voice and the scene at Ford's Theater and the White House came up in the imagination, and burning denunciations were hurled against the assassin of 304 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Abraham Lincoln, and at the "deep damnation of his taking off," the crowd was stirred as the wind stirs the sere forest, and the noise — strange enough in those sur- roundings — of clapping hands and stamping feet that could not be repressed broke out and rolled tumultuously through the congregation. Indelibly impressed on the memory in all its circumstances and incidents, that scene is recalled rather as a nightmare of the past than as an actual chapter in this narrative. An occasion very similiar in character was the memorial service on the following Wednesday, in the Second Presbyterian Church, at which Rev. Samuel J. Nichols and Dr. Post were the principal speakers. From the address of the latter, as it appeared in the morning paper the next day, is the following : — "There has been presented before me while sitting here a far distant scene : the pale form of our beloved President being borne from the mansion of dignity and government and power, where it has been moving and where with heart and brain it has been breasting the storm and tide of this terrible rebellion for more than four years. And I hear the wail going up not only from the broken-hearted wife and little boy and manly son ; but from ocean to ocean, the great American heart — whatever there is that is pure and noble in it — is uttering its sorrow, and a wail comes upon all the winds that sweep the conti- nent, and will come on winds that sweep the climes beyond the seas. " And well may we weep ! . . . The meek, the gentle and just spirit that so long animated that pale form and moved in those mansions has been removed from its contact with power and government in this world forever- more. A glorious, beneficent gift of God has been with- drawn ; and I feel that we may call on the poor and MARTYRDOM AND FREEDOM. 305 distressed and the enslaved and oppressed everywhere to mourn. ' Multiply your mourning, ye daughters of mercy,' for the good and gentle and merciful one has fallen by the stroke of murderous violence. Well may we call upon the millions of this land from their cot- tages and their hovels and homely homes and their exile, to lift the voice of mourning ; for the heart that was true and manly in its beat for them is still forever- more. . . . " Though I cannot contemplate the scene without feeling as though one dear to me by blood and kindred were in the dust by violence, I cannot pity Abraham Lincoln. He is above pity. He is beyond it. " In an hour when he was at the acme and height of human prosperity and human fame, with the influence of the good, the wise and the loyal, all gathering around him, with the love of the beneficent and Christian of every land fixed upon him, before friends were divided on questions that were to be raised — in that very hour, by the sudden stroke of the assassin, he is enrolled among the martyrs to liberty and humanity for all time, and fixed as far above the petty malice that has assailed him as the stars in heaven. . . . "Abraham Lincoln, with all his faults and all his excellencies, has passed to the tribunal not only of human history that shall judge him for all time, but to the tribunal where all our words and the tumult of our grief, and our eulogies, and all our arraignment or accusa- tion can never, never touch him more. Ages shall go on, till this starry emblem like the starry archetype of heaven shall go down in the depths of time ; but in that world where he has gone, as he was good, and true, and faithful to God, as he was an executor of the divine will and obedient to the divine purpose, there he shall dwell with 3o6 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. the good and the wise that have been delivered from this world and from great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." In line with the above addresses is the following extract, taken from a sermon delivered at the First Con- gregational Church, May 7, 1865 ; the theme being "The Duty of Intercessory Prayer": — "One signal instance of the fulfillment of such prayer has been recently exhibited in the public events of our times, the memory of which should not perish. It should become historic. They strikingly exemplify also God's strange, and to us often terrible, modes of fulfillment. A little more than four years ago he for whom the land now is in mourning, on the eve of his departure for Washington and for a future whose troubled and mysterious aspect God only could penetrate, as he stood on the platform of the departing car, uttered to his- friends and neighbors the farewell words : ' Pray for me ! ' And they did pray for him, and millions of others have prayed for him, lovingly and earnestly. " Such was the departure. I was at Springfield last Wednesday and witnessed the return. And in what form strange and terrible to the petitioner, yet most kind and faithful, God often answers prayer .' Vast multitudes were assembled, expectant of the return. But there were no signs of jubilation — no cheers, no shoutings, as of those that wait a victor. They seemed hushed and bowed as by a mighty grief. A vast and silent woe seemed upon the- air, and symbols of mourning were upon public and private dwellings. Our national colors, half raised and draped in sable, drooped as in sorrow ; or moving sadly in the languid air, cast on the thronged streets and walls below weird waving shadows, that seemed as specter banners borne by specter hands of shadowy armies, from MARTYRDOM AND FREEDO^M. 307 far-off battlefields, gathering here to welcome their great chief. "And now on the vast hush breaks the minute gun, detonating into space, like the outburst of some mighty- soul breaking from its mortal closures into the abysses of eternity ; and the sky murmurs with funeral bells, as if the spirits of the air were knelling some parting soul. Anon music, ineffably sad and sweet, comes wailing from multitudes of instruments and choral voices, as if the refrain of a mighty requiem, that, starting from the Atlan- tic's murmur, pouring along rivers and mountains and the shores of inland seas, had at last come freighted with the funeral cry of cities and states, to breathe its dying cadence over a tomb at Springfield waiting to receive the dead. " Presently a cortege appears — not as the cortege of a returning conqueror. The mighty in council and in battle are beside it, but in silence and in tears. No cheers greet it. It comes not in the colors of victory but in the drapery of the tomb. " And now, as the throngs, silent and reverent, press once more to behold the form they loved so well, it is to see that kindly face and noble brow pale marble with the majesty of death. He that departed asking their prayers, and for whom they had most earnestly prayed, now returns marred and slain by the hand of the assassin. And this is the manner of his return — murdered, cof- fined, and his darling little Willie, that went to Washing- ton so glad with sweet life, brought back a withered flower amid other withered flowers around the dead father. " ' And this the answer to prayer ! ' the superficial, worldly, sensuous throng might exclaim. ' This the bless- ing promised to faithful petition ! ' 308 TJiUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " ' Yes, this is a faithful answer ; true with God's truth,' replies not ' faith ' only, but a truer and profounder 'sight.' Yes, this is most truly the return of a victor; of one blessed of God beyond almost all others of the sons of men. His mission has been a success ; his return a triumph hardly equaled in the showings of all history. That cortege, that for seventeen hundred miles has struck the pulses of everf sky beneath which it has passed with a mighty requiem, that has called up cities and nations to wail around it, is surely the cortege of a conqueror receiv- ing such an ovation as the earth never saw before. The millions that waited around his bier — the high and the lowly, the rich and the children of toil and sorrow, the weeping multitudes of a dark and wronged race — all these — young men and maidens, old men and children, gathering with flowers and tears around that bier, repre- sent an ovation of universal humanity, an ovation anticipating the verdict of universal history, attesting a genuine truth and manhood, a heroism of justice and mercy, honesty and magnanimity, proved in an era of trial the most difficult and terrible in history. " Yes, God had blessed him, had gifted him with loyalty to duty, fealty to honor, truth and charity, steadfast against the corruptions of place and power, the flatteries of parasites, and intimidations of foes. Amid the tumults of factions and the rage of war, God had borne him up and kept him pure, merciful, just, hopeful against calumny, ridicule, hate, perplexities, disappointments, despairs. He had endowed him with vision, faith and courage, to discern and grasp and steadfastly hold great and lasting principles, which, rising above the confusion of the times, bore him up also, and rising evermore in history will bear up his name with the highest of all of human- kind amid the objects of a world's love and fame. Tears MARTYRDOM AND FREEDOM. 309 of love and honor and sorrow will flow for him as long as intrepid principle and gentle mercy and a loving humanity shall be honored among the sons of men. " Yea, as I looked on that majestic manhood, lying pale and low, I felt that God had answered prayer — had most truly ' blessed ' him. I was comforted for the fact that those lips were now forever mute, as I remembered that their mortal utterances had ever been true to liberty and humanity, to his country and to God, and now by martyr- dom had been placed amid the hallowed and immortal forces of history. I was consoled that that hand could never again greet my own with its genial, generous pres- sure, in the thought that it had been nerved amid its pulses of life to write the Proclamation of Freedom -to an enslaved race." Among other papers bearing on political war issues, and the last, as it is the most jubilant, of Dr. Post's utterances on war topics which will be referred to, was an article published in the April number of The North American Review for 1865, entitled " Free Missouri," and taking for special text the ordinance of the State Convention, passed January 1 1 of that year, declaring the abolition of slavery in her borders. Although the authorship of this article is not announced with its publication, it is stated in the general index of subjects and authors afterwards published. "It was at that time," writes Thomas C. Fletcher (then governor of Missouri), "the subject of very extensive and favorable comment, especially among old and steadfast Union men." He recalls the fact that the State Board of Immigration had before it the suggestion of Honorable Frederick Muench to translate the article and publish it in pamphlet form for distribution in Germany. This paper gives a graphic picture of physical Missouri, 3 lO TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. its area, its resources in soil and minerals, its rivers and streams, and its local vantage ground among the states ; and it condenses in thirty-three pages of the magazine a large amount of statistics and information. " But," says the writer, " over this land, presenting such a picture of fertility and beauty, and such promise of agricultural and pastoral, manufacturing and commercial prosperity, has brooded one institution that, like a plague, seems to have struck at once a blight on man and nature. That institution was slavery, — the fatal gift extorted for her by friends, falsely so called, in a convulsion that well- nigh shook down the Republic, — wrung from unwilling and remonstrant reasons and consciences by threats of dissolution of the Union, and in the name of a compro- mise since most foully violated. " Her beauty and riches were wedded to the great wrong of the century, and she passed over with all her resources to the enemies of liberty and progress. . . . "Slavery, having become identified with state pride, policy and supposed interest, enlisted her against the cause of civilization and social progress. It poisoned her intellect and passion. It suborned her thought, spirit and speech, to the championship of falsehood and crime. It paralyzed her enterprise ; muzzled or perverted the press. It drove from her the free school and free church, together with free labor and free thought. It stifled invention, despised improvement, dishonored industry and economy, and repelled skilled work. It mastered, as an evil genius, not only politics, but literature, and corrupted the very heart and soul of society." Such had been the power and effect of the slave system in this commonwealth ; but the emancipation ordinance of 1865 was to herald in a new society and political life. "Such a new life already begins to beat through the MART YRD OM AND FREED OM. 3 I I heart of free Missouri — a life which we believe will be- come a power to heal the terrible wounds that have been inflicted on her by her own children in this cruel war, and with which it seemed she might bleed to death. She feels a strange and mighty force at work within her that shall repair her fearful desolations. She feels new life pulsating through all her vast domain. She hears the footsteps of free multitudes coming from near and far, attracted by her peerless natural gifts — multitudes which shall more than restore the ruin. They shall bring to her skill, industries, enterprise, intelligence and a social and physical well-being, unknown before, and which could not dwell in the presence of the slave. Above all, her great wrong purged away, she may now dare look up and see the heavens propitious over her, and through the rifted clouds behold the throne girt with the bow of peace — peace with eternal law, with omnipotent right, with humanity, civilization and the government of God. . . . " With slavery done away, no fears need be entertained that feuds will continue to fester in the body politic. The subserviency of public opinion to it" (slavery) "can only exist because of force, fear, interest, or of a false political and social position. But let all influences per- turbing natural action be removed, let the bribe of interest be withdrawn, let society be restored to its natural status, and there will be a rebound of public opinipn, vehement in proportion to the pressure and violence to which it has been subjected. . . . "To all the natural odiousness of slavery will also have been added the guilt of this most foul rebellion, with all its cruelties and crimes. . . . "The antislavery sentiment will also tend to become more overwhelming and universal henceforth, because of its prestige of victory and power. . . . "Freedom will, meantime, be vindicating itself by its 312 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. fruits, and a new and more intelligent immigration, invited in by the downfall of slavery, will be throwing the con- stantly increasing weight of its numbers and influence into the scale of liberty, socially and politically. . . . " Our reliance for the future must be on religious and intellectual forces, more than on those of arms. The schoolhouse and church will guard the land better than fortresses and garrisons. For the purposes required, all our people must unite — the patriot, the philanthropist, the statesman, and the Christian. We must accept, as men and Christians, the inexorable logic of our own past wrongs, and be ready to meet and mitigate, as far as possible, the consequences they have entailed, and to respond manfully to the demands which self-interest and patriotism, as well as justice and humanity, make upon us in behalf of an oppressed race. . . . "Let the demands of the hour be fitly met, and Missouri enters on a career of unsurpassed prosperity. "Sad is the story of her sale to slavery. All her beauty and strength and riches and magnificent future bound and bartered to that dark power ; its chains put on. her virgin hands and its accursed seal on lip, heart, and brain. Melancholy, monitory, opprobrious, and at last terribly tragic has been the drama of 'Missouri Bound.' Thank God ! it is past — the wretched cycle of her binding. The agony is over ; the chain, rusting with her blood and tears, is broken forever. This day, Missouri — bruised, spoiled, trampled, bleeding, wasted with murder and fire and battle — yet is free ! Her foot on her broken chain, she stands erect before earth and heaven, claiming the sympathy of both, her eye fixed hopefully on a beautiful future that seems as ' descending from God out of heaven ' to restore her land from desolation, and make it the permanent abode of freedom, justice, happiness and peace ! " CHAPTER XXIII. RESTORED SIGHT. ARTICLES ON OLD AGE. Blind days again; and removal of cataract in Boston. — Articles in The Chicago Advance on "Old Age." IN 1865 Dr. Post underwent an operation in Boston for the removal of cataract. This disorder had for years been gradually dimming his eyesight, and total blindness was then setting in. For a long time he had been compelled to use the eyes as well as the pen of his devoted wife. Texts and hymns he would commit to memory, and would recite rather than read from the open page before him. Something of his accustomed walks he .continued to take from day to day, but' gropingly and counting the steps as he went. He literally " walked by faith rather than by sight," and more and more in solitary ways and left to his own thoughts ; on the whole bravely cheerful, yet at times in deep despondency. In July, 1865, he writes from Providence, with a waver- ing and uncertain pen : — "My dear Children, — I have not written a line to any of you since I left St. Louis. You know the reason, but do not know that now I should not attempt to break the seals but that it is inexpressibly painful to me to think I am to write to my children no more. " My thoughts, my love, my prayers, are with you ever, and I love so much to communicate with you directly, it seems to me at times as if I were cut off and isolated from my household and walking alone till the Great Morning breaks. Your utterances of love and affection 314 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. have a deep 'echo in my heart, though you may not hear it.' . . . " I write this not as a letter or as an apology for one, but from the inexpressible desire of my heart to speak to you and utter my ' God bless you.' " On the sixteenth of August the cataract was removed with very successful results by Dr. Williams, at the Boston Hospital. Five days afterward Mrs. Post >yrites : " I am glad to think of you now as being apprised of the success of the trying and delicate operation. Your dear father says : 'Tell them all not to forget God's goodness to us ; but let it lead them henceforth to be his active servants.' . . . We shall now add another to our memorial days, not only the first of May and the first of November, but the six- teenth of August as the crowning mercy." August 26 she writes : " The time seems long. At first I dreaded the nights — they were so dark, and he required more attention than now. But at present I rather welcome the darkness, for the friendly moon lightens our room somewhat, and I can draw aside the dark curtains. . . . " I feel that if his eyesight is restored and you at home all live to welcome us back, we shall have cause to sing thanksgiving all the days of our lives." September 5, the news is still better : " Yesterday the doctor brought with him some cataract glasses and put one before your father's left eye, first parading the wife around in front to be looked at, in spite of my assertions that he had seen enough of me. But the patient said he had not seen my face so clearly for five years. The doctor then opened The Eclectic, and your father read a sentence from it aloud and said that he could see the type RESTORED SIGHT. 3 1 5 distinctly. Afterward the doctor drew aside the window curtain and told him to look at the flowers on the lawn in front. ' Oh, beautiful ! beautiful ! Thank God for light ! ' was his exclamation. . . . " I had a feeling of light-hearted happiness all day yes- terday, such as I cannot describe. I did not shout aloud, but I sang and made melody in my heart to God." Not long after the date of this letter Dr. Post was released from his imprisonment and returned home ; and from that time onward, while the cataract glasses were indispensable, yet with their aid he enjoyed — what was, to one of his constant habit of reading, an unspeakable blessing — a completely restored vision. In the year 1868, although Dr. Post still lacked two years of sixty, his whitening locks and pale face and his spectacles gave the impression of greater age and made him seem quite venerable ; and, to one hearing him in public, this impression was oftentimes aided by his habit of communing with themes of the past and with those which belong to the lore of life's sunset. But notwith- standing these touches of autumn upon his face and these mental habitudes. Dr. Post possessed a youth of the soul which never felt the frosts of time. In this year, 1868 (February 13), an editorial in The Chicago Advance made reference to the "venerable Dr. Post, of St. Louis, who stands erect and vigorous under his burden of sixty summers"; which quotation — while Dr. Post playfully rejected the title of "venerable" — was made the text of a number of characteristic articles. From the first, entitled " Old Age : Senescence not Senility," is the following : — " Senescence is not senility, nor are years old age. There is possible a youth of the soul that defies time. 3 1 6 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. ' While the outward man perishes, the inward ' — the true — man ' may be renewed day by day.' ' The River of the Water of Life ' is the fountain of perpetual youth ; and of that we may drink, even here, and not die. Life may be long and not old : long either through duration or inten- sity. For length of life is not measured merely or mainly by circles of the sun, but more by the intensity or large- ness of our sense of being, or our conscious selfhood. Events and interests which intensify this sense make life long or great, but do not bring of necessity old age of soul with them. Rather this intense, gensg, of existence is a prophylactic against all old age; antisepfic^Ui that spiritual deadness and decay that are its essence. So man may live long and count few summers. He may be aged and not old ; his years many and his soul ever young. "That intense sense of existence which expands moments into months, or curdles years into hours, is quickened in the presence of those vast truths that time reveal^, and which often make life and soul solemn, se^mingJjF^somber, with their awful shadows ; but truths which, though often, like stars, uncovering their faces only in nigEt and gloom, yet legitimately, should make the soul healthier, stronger, and mightier; not deadening but quickening its sympa- thies with whatever there may be of young life or beauty in the earthly and transient ; not divorcing from time, but wedding to eternity; even through earth's ideal touch- ing the immortally real, and feeling through all the pulses of time the heartbeat of the everlasting. "Nor need youth's ideals — forms from that 'heaven' that lies ' about us in our infancy ' — wither away with our years. In souls that are growing old they may change to mockeries or die into the loathsomeness of the corpse; but in those that truly live, touched by divine trust and love, they should grow to a holier and sweeter beauty with RESTORED SIGHT. 3 I 7 years. They will pass by transfiguration and glorification to shapes immortally young beside God's throne ; or what- ever is illusion in them will, as it vanishes, be as cloud forms rolling off the shining mountains." Another paper, headed "Old Age: God's Gift," con- tains the following : — . . . "The law of decay is on the body. There no charm can stay it ; there is no enchantment against it. Mental manifestation, which uses for the time the body as its organ, must be conditioned, to a degree, on the state of its material medium, and becomes limited and enfeebled as it is impaired. But may we not keep the life of the soul fresh, though its utterance is restricted through the mold upon its clay tabernacle.-' It may, we believe, be kept quick, delicate, powerful, young, even though the tongue stammers and the step falters and the blood flows more sluggishly through the veins. " The lessons and losses of our earthly being should be disciplined to a spiritual excellency and power more than compensative. Age, so dreaded as cold, lone, drear, con- gealed, may be like the peaks of some high volcanic mountain projecting themselves out of masses of ever- green only to reflect serener and purer light, and by their own interior ever-glowing fires lifted above cloud and fog into the loftier and grander converse with the upper infinite. So, congealed and lone and drear as age may seem, it may yet be serener, grander, and nearer heaven. It may feel more the airs that come from eter- nity. But these airs are perpetually vitalizing. They come from the fields of immortal youth. Still it is our duty to keep young as long as we can, and as one means of keeping pff mold from the soul, do not allow yourself to be made old before your time. Do not be 'venerable'- 3 I 8 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. ized prematurely into decrepitude and retirement. Con- tend bravely for your manly life and force, as a great gift of God, and do not be revered or venerated out of your consciousness of it. Consent to no burial alive, with whatever funeral pageant or honors. Do not be eulogized or epitaphed into entombment before your time. " Beware of being shelved through overmuch venera- tion, of being be-' fathered ' or be-' reverenced ' into non- action or nonentity. Consent not to be untimely niched, even though they will burn incense to your statue, or will bear it about in state ; nor to be ' suspended ' prematurely in the historic picture gallery, though it be of dead saints and heroes. Accept no early apotheosis, no enshrinement among ' dumb ' idols, worshiped because they are dumb. Be chary of welcoming homage rendered only to departed worth, and that on condition that it return not to trouble the living. . . . "Yet accept age, when it comes, as a good gift of God, the kindliest, most favored issue nature permits to your earthly life, and granted to few, comparatively, among the sons of men. As it comes by heaven's appoint- ment, as a part of life's drama, so you may be sure it comes with peculiar gifts of power, privilege and duty. It is due to its Giver that we study its functions, proprie- ties, and possibilities, and its fitting culture ; consider its position and accept the situation with what it gives and. what it takes away. In order thus to accept it, there is. need we meet it prepared for its necessary or probable concomitants. " Losses in physical vigor and grace, and in power of mental action or utterance, the foreshortening of earthly perspective and hope, a life with diminished and con- stantly diminishing capital, a loss, to some extent, in practical estimate, and demonstrations of such estimate^ RESTORED SIGHT. 319 by the world — which gauges such estimate and demon- stration by the possibilities attaching to one's future, and even pays court to power and hope — these we miist be prepared for, as also for a degree of personal isolation^ from the diminution of the personal magnetism of youth, and the loss of early friends by death, changes, alienation, or the intervention of new persons and interests crowding us asunder with the course of years ; for lives ' tracking their streams ' to the same ' parent lake ' flow on in diver- gent lines, with vaster and vaster stretches of continent intervening, till at last they move on solitary to the solemn and silent main. " Against depressing influences from incidents like these we must arm ourselves as we approach age ; and also for a struggle against a sense — fanciful or true — of neglect, oblivion, or ingratitude on the part of society when we have strength no longer to give to it. These, if they seem to us facts, we are to accept as lessons of man and life, and 'bating not a jot of heart or hope,' or of human kindness, address ourselves vigorously, cheer- fully, and gratefully to our duties still before us. It should be our aim, out of the ruins of the material and earthly, to build the beauty immortal of the spiritual and the heavenly ; from the decay of personal grace and vigor to create the imperishable youth of the soul ; to convert our very losses into power, excellency and beneficence. It will be ours henceforth, in the social economy, to work by suffering more than by doing, by counsel more than by action. Ours will be the part, eminently, of the milder and calmer virtues. Life's stormier era of passion, tumult and strife, subsiding, there should follow on its subsidence one of clearer reason, larger candor, and pro- founder wisdom, as also of kindlier judgments, gentler charities, and serener, Christlike peace. Thus losses 320 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. become gains. Our earthly unclothing shall be ' clothed upon' by 'our house which is from heaven.' The fading of the colors of earth shall make brighter those of the New Jerusalem. The lifting of mundane cloud forms shall reveal the shining country. The desolations of time shall set our faces more heavenward ; our isolation drive us more to the bosom of our eternal Friend ; the detach- ing from earth attaching to the skies ; the decay of the material vesture and the sundering of earthly bonds, being the progressive loosening and pluming of the spirit's pinions for its everlasting flight." In another contribution, under the caption, " Time and Experience : Vitalizers, not Wasters," is a passage written under the fresh memories of his blind days, three years before : — "Soberness the most intense, solemn even to sadness, and the profoundest sense of time and eternity, these are not the constituents of senility — counteractives rather. They may be its very negation. Changes profound, vast, startling, may have power to invigorate, regenerate, reju- venize. They may be of a nature to brace, nerve, refine and exalt, while they quicken, deepen and broaden, our self-consciousness ; prophylactic against torpidity or maun- dering fatuity. Such experience bears us into awful deeps, moors us amid the scenery of mighty and vast truths — the strange and solemn forms of a new earth and heaven ; but the air around is tonic with the power of an endless life, and illumined from the more thinly veiled face of the Eternal Beauty and Eternal Light. Under influences like those the soul grows, not decays. It is more profoundly, intensely vital, all the while. " Experiences of this type must have thronged life to most men, amid the terrible and vast events of the past few years, and seem now to be throwing over our Amer- RESTORED SIGHT. 32 I ican society and character a deeper shadow, but not a death shade. " Amid events tending to results above indicated, and most powerfully to engrave on the soul the imprint of time, and give length as well as shadowiness to the impress of our day of life, is the interjection of a night in the midst of this day; a night of blindness between two periods of vision, in a manner duplicating life by dividing it into two compartments by a partition of dark- ness. To see the written page fade out and then the face of men and then of nature and then the ever-shining heavens grow dim and the constellations ' star by star ex- pire ' ; to walk along the borders of perpetual night and feel no dawn is coming till that of the resurrection morning; to have felt all thisy-and then by heavenly love to be called back again from that 'dark sojourn' and placed once more in the ways of the light, with the solemn joy and awe of a new faculty and a new commission from God — such experience tends to deepen and intensify one's con- sciousness of existence and to make the restored light seem like the resurrection life, young, yet solemn with the shadow of time that has been. The interval that divides the two seasons of light none can describe, not even one who has passed through it. A feeling that attaches to the twilight and moonlight — the dimness of the infinite — is in it ; the sense of waning moons and setting stars and of the majesty of darkness alone in heaven. Then that majesty, as in new genetic fiat, utters again, ' Let there be light,' and creation's morning chimes are heard again in the heavens. All things in the new sunrise are lustrous with the dew of- youth, and the fresh- ness of a new being touches nature and soul. Especially the idea of duration is intensified ; as, in the newly restored light, in the reillumined page of remembered faces is read 32 2 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. the legend of care and wear and toil and tears, written there during our night of nature, together with touches of the hastening transfiguration that have thickened there during the season of darkness. Changes strongly- marked to your suddenly restored faculty to peruse them, breaking on you as in morning vision to one awakening from slumber, deepen your idea of elapsed time. A strange solemnity, like the sober coloring life's sunset gathers to the eye 'that hath kept watch o'er man's mor- tality,' a solemnity as of eld, yet such we may imagine as the ever-young angels feel, attaches to all things. The mind is toned with a sense of profounder significancy in all things. The music of nature comes sweeter and holier, but in a minor key, and as chiming from some far-off sky of our gone being. Spring comes with love- lier, sadder beauty. The face of the night is more weird and spiritual. The morning blazes from a higher orient and the stars shine out of a deeper sky. " So with other vast changes years may bring. Life may become profounder, loftier, intenser, and the soul's pulse beat all the deeper and stronger for them. Time that destroys the material should build the spiritual, and experience, under the rule of a God of light and love, instead of dulling, deadening, should stimulate, renovate,, and vitalize the soul of man." From the last article in the series on "Perpetual Youth" is the following: — "It [old age] is especially the uniter in social life of the seen and temporal with the unseen and eternal. Its standpoint is between the earthly present and the eternal future. It has moved along life's voyage to the zone of calms — those lone and silent depths where the time storm is lulled, the passion and strife of time grows feeble, and the great life-beat of eternity comes in", in RESTORED SIGHT. 323 vast, solemn tidal pulses. Beyond the illusion and fever of earlier years, far out toward the verge of the real and everlasting, it stands as mediating between two worlds — as an electric agency, constituted by God to charge the mundane and shadowy with the power of an endless life. " This office is one which properly revitalizes and reju- venates. The soul that sympathizes with the everlasting never grows old. The touch of eternity is immortal youth. Faith transfigures death. The life of heaven, living in a human soul here, lives for evermore. He that liveth and believeth in the life eternal shall never die. Perpetual youth is of the spirit — spiritual. " To those aspiring after it, it may then be said, its secret is not far to seek. Sympathy is its eternal life- fountain ; sympathy with all that lives, with humanity in all its stages and tenses ; but especially sympathy with the living, and, most of all, with the young world. Love childhood and live with it. Its touch renews. The mys- terious magnetism, drawing age towards it, is an instinc- tive recognition of this law. Bless God for little children ! As angels of renewal and juvenescence they perpetually come into the grand old march of the world. Frequent the circles of the young. Be young with them, but not like them. "Cleave to old friends. Never forsake them. Visit them often. They will keep you en rapport with the days of your youth. Aim, if practicable, to spend age amid old scenes and memories, where the days of strength have treasured a capital against the days of feebleness — the days when we can no longer elicit new claims or attract new friends. But new ones, should heaven send them, welcome as infusers of new life into the stream of age. "Action vitalizes. Work rejuvenates ; it prohibits rust, 324 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. mold, stagnation ; especially that work which puts you in sympathy with all the soul's life, and unites time to the eternal years of heaven — the work of evangelization or of salvation in the name of Him that 'liveth and was dead, and behold, he is alive forevermore.' " Ever learning also keeps us ever young. New truths quicken us with the freshening of a new life. Keep up with the ideas of the age. Live with the life of civiliza- tion. Be hopeful for humanity. Rejoice in progress. Do not expect wisdom will die with you ; nor that truth, reason, or the Divine Spirit, will with you abandon the world. Hold faith in God and man, in truth and virtue. " Above all things, put on charity. Charity is the eternal dew of youth. To love is to live ; to love rightly and truly is to live forever. Love is the River and the Tree of Life, and unites the soul with the Eternal Life, whose name is Love. Keep ever young by the love of the beautiful, the good and true ; and keep that love young by perpetual communion with the Lord of beauty, goodness and truth. " So shall your earthly life be transfigured and trans- lated, that it see not death. All its forces and memories shall become pulses of immortality ; and the all-vitalizing Spirit shall ever breathe on you from the climes eternal. Age shall become as the cape of Beulah, beyond the skies of storm, lying far out toward the shining shore, where the air is always mild and sweet, and the light ever soft and serene, and through the hallowed solitudes from beyond the death shade and the dark river, from the heights of immortality, ever and anon and nearer and nearer come rifts of the Psalm of Life, — hymn of even- ing and of morning — vesper of time and matin of eternity, — the new song of the ever young." CHAPTER XXIV. A CHURCH COLONY. NATIONAL POLITICS. Pilgrim Chapel. — Services of recognition. — Sundry publications relating to national politics. IN the year 1866 the chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, which was the eldest born of the mother church on Tenth Street and has been such a power in the denomination, was completed and dedicated. The new enterprise marked the growth of Congregationalism in St. Louis. It showed also the westward drift of popu- lation in that city and the chronic disadvantage of local surroundings, more than once alluded to in these pages, against which the old church was compelled so long to contend. The movement which resulted in the organ- ization of the Pilgrim Church took away from the First Church a number of very active and much valued mem- bers, who believed that a church of this order was needed in the new and rapidly filling territory in the western suburbs. In the services of recognition which were held in the chapel building, in the rear of the present main edifice of the Pilgrim Church, Dr, Post gave to the young offshoot the " right hand of fellowship." Of this discourse, wrote a newspaper correspondent who gave an account of the affair, " It was one of the noblest speeches I ever heard ; great even for Dr. Post." From the address, which was delivered without notes and published without any attempt at revision, the follow- 325 326 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. ing extract is clipped from a St. Louis newspaper of the next day : — " Dearly beloved, I feel almost as though it were a mockery to stand here and offer you my fellowship — almost as though the parties to a golden wedding were required to get up and make protestation of their affection. " Brethren, we have had fellowship through many a weary year, many of us. We have walked before God through months and years that measure much of human life. As that list was read over, how the names thrilled me, as one and another and another, associated with our story in the past, with life's labors and hopes and joys and struggles, were repeated ! There are those here before me with whom, for many years, we have had fellowship in the bridal and funeral, in the house of God and in the place of prayer, over the solemnities and sor- rows of the tomb; we have had fellowship in trial, in suffering and anxiety and uncertainty ; and there are faces I see around me between whom and myself, through all these years, never has cloud formed ; and to this hour it is a joy to think that not a word or a thought or a breath but what may be remembered with pleasure, and that has savored of kindness and friendship, has marked the history between me and a large number who enter into this organization. That fellowship will go with me to future years, and shall be a comfort as we enter that shadow that to me is near, and to none of you is afar. We have lived together — I speak now to those whos,e memories go with me — we have lived together peculiarly alone here, far away from the sympathy or aid of churches of our own order. We have been given over by God to each other peculiarly. We have trusted each other ; if we had not, our enterprise long since would have crum- A CHURCH COLONY. 327 bled. We have loved and aided each other. In spite of invitations and remonstrances, I have preferred to give the strength of my years in trust to you, committing this life and its interests, my reputation and my hopes, to your care, and our hearts have been open to each other — mine has been to you, and I believe yours to me. I seem to see a new scene. It is but a few days since, seemingly, and yet, since it passed, the child that was in its mother's arms then has borne arms for the country and given his blood for deliverance. " Some fifteen or sixteen years ago, a small company — some of you will remember it with me — stood up side by side in the assertion of the principles which we have had here recited and so ably expounded to us. We stood side by side, and the shadow of a dark power was over us that laid its hand on the moral and spiritual world, upon earth and stream and the soul of man, and pervaded all human society and threw its Upas tendrils around the Church of God ; and that power that mastered the state and society was most malign to our principles ; and the atmos- phere was cold — oh ! how cold, that atmosphere of indif- ference or of ignorance and prejudice surrounding us ! Had you not been true, and had not true men been here, this beginning would have been swept away ; but God gave to you love and truth, and honor and trust, and thereby we lived and lived on. We lived, we grew; at length without the aid of a single dollar from any one out of pur city, with the raising of that sum among our- selves when we were poorer than now, we built a church, and we rejoiced as we entered into that sanctuary. Then came other days and other forms of trial. The surge of rebellion rolled over the land, and that dark power that had so long threatened us and aimed to crush us down, that power was arrayed against the genius of liberty, 328 TRUMAN MARCELLVS POST. against the power of the mighty idea which lies at the foundation of our republic. In those days when it was not simply ostracism, but almost the peril of a man's life to be true, in those days side by side most of this church stood ; in those days we relied upon each other, in trust and confidence; and shall we not now? And then when came the glad era and we rejoiced as the light broke, the storm fled and the bow of the Lord was upon the stars, the voice of Jehovah thundered and the dark fragments of the storm were seen and the glorious morn arose. We rejoiced because the human soul was unbound and society was released, and there was opportunity for free movement, for carrying forward our principles. We re- joiced then together; and now as this era of prosperity brings us to a period when it is expedient for us, for the multiplication of influence, that we go forth from each other, shall this sundering be the sundering of fellowship .'* Nay, nay ; never ! May God give us grace still to hold in view the common great need, and we still shall have fel- lowship. And oh, if the hours come which tempt other- wise, if evil counsel should ever arise and evil thoughts be busy, let us go back to Bellefontaine and look on our common dead. Let us remember a Mack, a Plant, a Whitney, a Chapin, a Forbes, a Knox, voices that should come from out the past, that belong to us both ; voices that invoke us to the glorious fellowship of heaven. Let us work on side by side. The Christian heights are not afar, and if it be the Lord's will that we may not again work together as we have, oh, let us still remember what is the past and what we have been ! and as our eyes have grown dim and weary waiting for faces in that far-off circle of which I have spoken that are not here, let the eye of hope turn to the glorious hereafter in the land of rest, as we are moving to one common end, to a common fellowship, and let us A CHURCH COLONY. 329 maintain constant and perpetual love towards each other. We may not see each other as we have done. The things, the relations of earth are shadows. We have not time here for friendships that shall last in their enjoyment. But, brethren and sisters, we who stand now, in one sense, at the point of parting, there is time enough for us along the river of the stream of life, in the soft airs of paradise, where the victor hangs up his dinted shield, in air forever sweet with the songs of Christ's saints ; there, in our Father's house, we will secure the intimacies and joys .and memories of our life here." After the close of the war, as all know, there followed in the border states a chapter of reaction and reconstruc- tion, full of political excitement and calculated to inspire the friends of the Union cause with very grave misgivings. During this period Dr. Post wrote frequently for the press on topics then agitating the public, such as "The Test Oath," "The Causes and Dangers of the Reactionary Movement," and "The Lessons of the Hour." The following extracts are from an article entitled " The Late Elections " : — ..." The logical consequences of great principles are not often fully comprehended by those who feel the right- fulness of those principles, and who even do battle in their defense. But these consequences are certain to be dragged forward and to be pressed for popular acceptance by the logic of events. Then they must ultimately be accepted or by reaction slay the principles from which they sprang. They will consequently be urged forward, on the part of some who feel most intensely their reason, right and necessity, with all vehemence ; while in turn they will be resisted in the same spirit by others who have not reached the same standpoint of knowledge and conviction, and 330 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Tvho dread them as premature and destructive. So that questions begun on the battlefield, and victorious there, must be argued to their full and ultimate conclusions in the halls of legislation or in the popular canvass. The arbitrament of the sword has fully and definitely to be interpreted and executed by that of ideas and of the ballot. As, for example, the import of the English Revolution of 1688 has been in debate between the Whigs and Tories — parties emerging from that period — to this day ; and by this debate of press, parliament, and electoral canvass the progress of English liberty has been achieved and its civil structure and constitution elaborated. So the various parties that have sprung up in this country since the American Revolution have been to this day discussing the full import of that revolution and the logical and rightful consequences of the principles announced and vindicated in it. In this question of exec- utory measures and legitimate consequences there will often occur the rise of parties with new names, or with change of base and issues, within the circle of the prin- ciples settled previously and perpetually in the great battle of revolution or reform. Hence there will arise revolution within revolution, reform within reform, all nominally sub- servient to the great original and organic principles pre- viously indicated, and constantly, in the resultant of these forces, bearing these principles to full and complete tri- umph and realization. Thus revolution advances on to its full accomplishment ofttimes like a tornado, with a rotation within itself, which, though through part of the circle it seems adverse to the general direction of the storm, and tending to arrest it, yet is perpetually wheeling it on in its great line of movement. Many are unreason- ably alarmed or elated, as the case may be, at those revo- lutions within and not against revolution. They chronicle A CHURCH COLONY. 33 I them as counter-revolutions. The eddy of the rapids is to them the affluence of a Niagara or Mississippi. But it is all within the great current — part of it and borne on with it — a token and method of its force, not a counter- tide. . . . "The French Revolution of 1789, for instance, estab- lished itself for perpetuity in the abrogation of the no- blesse and the new distribution of landed estates through the kingdom. The reaction against it, which produced the empire of the First Napoleon, could not restore the France of Louis XIV ; nor could the revolution, again, that reenthroned the Bourbons, bring back that of Louis XV. Nor was the second Napoleonic empire, rising on the second fall of the old monarchy, a reprint of the first; nor was it at the same standpoint of political order or of ideas. There had been movement never to be retraversed. The new order of things had become the order of life and civilization of France. So the restoration of Charles the Second could not bring again the era of the first Charles, or the Tudors. Nor could the ascendancy of Toryism in England, after the accession of William of Orange, rein- state the regime of the Stuarts. They had been left behind forever by the politics and the civilization of Britain. " But, though revolutions may not be turned back, they may be switched off from the legitimate track, to the ruin or disaster of states. It ever exceedingly imports those implicated in the struggles of reform or revolution to see to it that the forces be not thrown off their proper aim, and swayed to ends which are extreme and ruinous. So those forces which were generators or factors of our recent vast reform (or shall we call it revolution .?) are to guard lest, on the one hand, they be cheated of their true aim and the rightful prize of the victory achieved at such 332 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. terrible cost ; or, on the other, be misdirected and wrought to purposes alien or extreme and pernicious. The move- ment, unless guarded, may be baffled, or may bear to ruin. But the reform or revolution, whichever we may term it, may never be reversed, more than the course of the world. It has already created interests, relations, situations, ideas, that render reversal impossible. It has already wrought itself into the elements of our population, and all the tissues of the body of the state and of society. It has become a part of the life of the commonwealth. Those looking to the restoration of the old status might as well expect the return of feudalism or the age of the Plan- tagenets. They are dupes of a hopeless illusion. Their cynosure is sinking forever behind the waters of the past." From a contribution headed "The Present Political Relaxation — Its Causes," is the following : — ..." Among the causes found in our common human- ity is its liability to weariness of any high or intense mood of the emotions or the will. Reform is always an effort, often a paroxysm. It is a sudden spasm, or a protracted agonism against difficulties and hostilities certain to be encountered from some form of our human selfishness or from the vested right or wrongs which it assails. Re- forms provoke the resentment of the disturbed ideas, order or interest, of society. They require an abnormal putting forth of strength, liable to be followed by exhaus- tion. Indifferency and relaxation are wont to succeed the strain of extraordinary passion and purpose. The same law holds in regard to all great and intense convulsions and struggles of society ; especially such as the strife for national life in the conflict of arms through which we have just passed. The extraordinary excitement and exaltation of the public mind in such crises may for a time lift the masses to a loftiness of heroic doing, daring A CHURCH COLONY. 333 and suffering. But they cannot, certainly with the pres- ent average character of humanity, be permanently held at that height. That condition is abnormal, above their ordinary range of life and passion. There must follow a remission, and society will slide down from this elevation to its ordinary level. " It is a sad truth that men, for the most part, are not heroes or martyrs. From the extraordinary tension requi- site to act the part of such, they must in time relax from sheer exhaustion ; and they will either lapse into languor or indifferentism, or will drift back into the old selfish and sordid current. " Another explanation of this and of similar tendencies to counter-reforms, generally, is found in the fact that principles and issues that at first startle nations as with the blast of a war trumpet lose in time much of their power to wake enthusiasm. With the loss of novelty they become staled, and the same passions no longer resffond to them ; the public mind grows in a measure insensible to them. It is a law of nature. History ex- hibits nothing grander than the national uprising at the call of arms for the country at the beginning of the war. That spectacle could not be repeated. The mind of the nation hardened and grew intenser in its resolve towards the close of the war ; but that magnificent enthusiasm could not be recalled on the same issues. " But in all such cases the intermission of sensibility is temporary. If the original issues were wise and worthy, they will in time return to the domination of the public mind, with a power more strong, profound, intelli- gent, and enduring than before ; and they will pass from a passion or enthusiasm to become the habit and order of national thought and life. The principles in the name of which our recent great battle was fought and won we 334 ^^ UMAN MARCELL US POST. believe are true and eternal and must in time thoroughly dominate the public reason and conscience and establish their rule in permanent institutions." A paper entitled " Tendencies to Reaction " has this passage : — "The great party that has heroically and triumphantly upborne the nation through the awful agonism of our civil war is manifestly in peril. Its life has been a grand one. It has not always been guided by the most profound sagacity. It has not been uniformly wise in policy or brilliant in action. It has not always foreseen events, or comprehended situations, or been conscious of the full import of principles. It has often been borne on by events contrary to its own thought or will. Its wisdom has come often from defeat. Disaster has scourged it to the right. Necessity has wrought it to grandeur of prin- ciple and action. A hand mightier than man's has upheld it against its own weaknesses and follies, and has used its very plasticity of policy and principle to the accom- plishment of its destined end. " Still it has, on the whole, done its work grandly. Its daring, its sacrifice, its resolve, endurance and achieve- ment, will ever rank among the heroic things in the most heroic ages. From out a struggle among the most des- perate and tremendous in human story it has borne itself a victor. History will read its record forever. It may die, but its cause — and this is one of the grandest facts of its achievement — its cause will not die with it, but is allied with essences imperial and imperishable, the im- mortal ideal forces of the world, that will go to the grave with no party. " It is not so much indeed the party that has borne up the cause as the cause that has borne up the party. Nor A CHURCH COLONY. 335 do we believe the victory will be lost if the victor falls. Indeed, history is full of examples of victorious parties not only perishing apart from the causes they have cham- pioned, as the scaffolding falls from the structure when completed, but perishing by the very principles they have vindicated to immortality — like the builders of the pyra- mids, buried around the base of the everduring pile they reared. ... "The masses are wont, to a great extent, to see and feel chiefly in the present and the immediate. In the wound they see the surgeon's knife only ; they forget the cancer. The annoyances, offenses, losses, imposts and distresses, that come of necessity from the resistance of a nation against its own attempted assassination they charge to the resistance, not to the assassins, and they come at length to regard the principles that wrought us- to that resistance with indifference and weariness, if not with disgust and resentment. By God's outstretched arm they have been delivered, have been led triumphant through the sanguinary gulf of revolution, and for the hour have taken up the exult of Miriam. But still they are in the wilderness, sore bested it may be with hunger and weariness, and the land of promise is afar. And now memory pictures to them the fleshpots of their house of bondage. But between them and it the Red Sea rolls. They may not return ; but they cry against their deliv- erer, 'Who is this Moses that has led us forth into the desert to perish ? ' "Great principles cannot triumph in perpetuity by mere shock of arms. They must be wrought into the national soul through suffering. In the very nature of moral victories for a great cause, a people must not only dare, but greatly bear. But a Saviour who brings not peace, but a sword, and saves not even by the sword 336 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. alone, but through the very painfulness of the wounds — in such a Saviour they are offended, and often rush from ' hosannas ' to the clamor of ' Crucify him ! ' "Thus the heroism that has grandly triumphed in the sharp paroxysm of battle often weakly succumbs in the hospital ; and nations in revolution that have borne them- selves grandly through the conflict of force, in suffering the wounds of victory turn with resentment on the cause that has for the time exalted them above themselves. Old selfishness and meannesses return ; old lusts, "with exasperated fierceness ; old habitudes, with stronger des- potisms. Seven devils, worse than the first one that has been for the hour exorcised by a spasm of public virtue, reenter. " Especially will such reactionary tendencies develop themselves under the pressure of a vast public debt, be- queathed by the victorious reform, and necessitating heavy and universal taxation. Such a tax is the fiercest test of public patriotism. It presses on the entire life of a people like a bad atmosphere, producing a universal sense of disorder, uneasiness, discomfort, embarrassment and dis- tress. It is a universal irritant. Everybody feels the plague. Few refer it to the true cause, or bear it as the ransom of national life. Something they feel is wrong ; something annoys and oppresses them. Almost any change is welcomed, as presenting a possibility of relief. Even old enemies are eagerly listened to, coming with such promise. The perjury and treason of the past are forgot ; accusations against the existing administration and the dominant party are welcomed. Discomfort breeds discontent ; discontent grows to disaffection ; and dis- affection is exasperated to counter-revolution. Especially does this take place if the malcontents can point to prof- ligacy, corruption and fraud, in the administration or its A CHURCH COLONY. 337 functionaries, aggravating the public burthen, and the reactionists can triumph in the name Of economic reform, "A tax is the mightiest lever of revolution. The tax- gatherer has wrought to national uprising more potently than the inquisitor or the military or judicial executioner, more than the Alvas, or Jeffreys, or the autos-da-fL Crimes of the sword or brand, or of judicial or ecclesias- tic murder, touch generally the class, or few only. The tax hits, alarms, irritates the people. It was a tax that at last rallied sluggish England to the championship of Hampden, and the Parliament against the Stuarts. It was a tax that drove the Netherlands to insurrection against Philip II, when the stake, the block, conflagration, and massacre seemed unable to rouse them. A tax broke the iron wall of the old Roman Empire. It was taxation that, after ages of pressure, under crimes of tyranny un- speakably loathsome and atrocious, at last recoiled to the overthrow of the Bourbons. The American Revolution rose against a tax. Throughout the history of the past the tax has been the most potent factor of political change, whether of dynasties or administrations. And it is undoubtedly among the profoundest and most uni- versal of reactionary forces now at work through this nation. " A widespread feeling of permanent embarrassment and distress, with a fear of change paralyzing or perplex- ing trade, is likely to breed, with multitudes, not only a feeling of indifferency or resentment towards the cause and principles in vindication of which our debt was in- curred, but also a blind impulse towards political change, in the illusory idea that shifting the party will be the shifting of the burthen. The party in power must guard against this tendency ; must aim at the lightening of the public burthens ; must endeavor to do it for the sake of 338 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. the very cause for which those burthens were assumed. For nothing is more certain than that, without such re- lief, we are on the eve of a disastrous political reaction. Safety of the cause requires that we should promptly reduce taxation to the lowest figure compatible with the maintenance of the public credit." The last extract here quoted is from an article entitled "Brevity of Party Ascendancy in Democracies " : — . . . "Beyond the legitimate scope of its principles, there ever hangs on the skirts of revolution an extreme ' left ' — the Terrorists, the party of ruin. The nation is either dragged by them down the red gulf, or it breaks from them and the revolution at the same time, as from fiends pushing to the abyss. On the other hand, refus- ing to carry out its principles, the party of revolution or reform perishes by a logical inconsequence. It falls on the sword of its own creed. Attempting to stop in its career, it finds it has invoked forces that will impel it onward or explode it to fragments. "Again, the compress of outward danger being re- moved, the tension of battle relaxed, the grasp on the great central principle becomes enfeebled, and side issues break in. Factions of all ideas aim to graft themselves on the great movement, and to dominate it. Failing in this, they fly off in segments ; or, succeeding, they change the original party, till, attenuate, dislimned, deformed — itself no longer the same — it ceases to rally the same elements around it. Its call has lost its potency. It perishes of inanition or fever ; of abandonment or inter- nal oppugnancies. So, from the nature of democracies, party domination in them is brief. " It is better thus. Parties usually live long enough. Their euthanasia follows when their principles have been A CHURCH COLONY. 339 universally accepted and incorporated with the national life. They die into nationality. Their function is ended. Beyond that they survive only in a proper name, a name which is no longer a symbol of peculiar distinctive prin- ciples, but merely the term of comprehension for indi- vidual ambitions, which, under the shadow of a great name, scheme for personal ends, for place and money and power. But parties may perish untimely, leaving their work unfinished, to be committed over to alien or hostile hands, interested to thwart or pervert it. The hour of their power, then, is most precious according to the greatness of their work. Opportunity comes like the sibyl, with its volume of proffered possibilities con- stantly diminishing. Its brevity demands a prompt use, a wise dispatch, with urgency proportioned to the vastness of interests to be served during the term." CHAPTER XXV. HISTORY AS A TEACHER. Address before the State Officers and Legislature at Springfield, III., on " History as a Teacher of Social and Political Science." IN response to an invitation from the governor of Illinois and the state officers and members of the Constitutional Convention then assembled at Springfield, a lecture was delivered there by Dr. Post, February i6, 1870, on "History as a Teacher of Social and Political Science." The topic was one with which Dr. Post was peculiarly at home, and it embodied results derived from his reading and thinking for nearly forty years. By special request, the address was given to the public in pamphlet form, with an introduction from the pen of Dr. Newton Bateman, then superintendent of the Illinois State Board of Education, and already mentioned as a pupil of Dr. Post in the early college days in Jacksonville. In this note Dr. Bateman says : — " It was generally known that Dr. Post had studied the philosophy, methods and uses, of history and historical research ; that he regarded a knowledge of the teachings and warnings of history as eminently useful and neces- sary, especially for American statesmen and scholars ; and that his reputation as a lecturer uppn those and kindred themes was acknowledged and pronounced throughout the west. The occasion of revising and reconstructing the organic law of a great commonwealth seemed especially appropriate for a discourse by such a man upon such a subject. The audience would be largely composed of the distinguished gentlemen who were then HISTORY AS A TEACHER. 34 1 in council, from every part of the state, for the purpose of laying anew the foundations of civil government in Illinois ; and it would be meet, it was thought, that the light and lessons of history should be held up to view of those who were themselves making history. " How grandly and graphically this was done the lec- ture itself will show. For sublimity of conception, range and sweep of survey, dynamic grasp and compression of diverse, elusive and gigantic materials, elements and ideas, for marvelous power of statement, illustration and coloring, and befitting magnificence of diction and splen- dor of rhetoric, this address will captivate every student, not only of history, but of the English language itself. " Did ever chemist manipulate more easily the tiniest objects and substances in his laboratory, extorting their subtlest secrets and making them eloquent of the arcana of God in nature, than this address deals with ages and empires and civilizations, with ethnic and continental and cosmical facts, events, ideas, laws — forcing them all to testify of the presence and regency of God in history ? Where in modern literature is there an ideal portrait so perfect, so grand and luminous, so palpably distinguish- able, and yet so exquisitely veiled from nearer view — so transfigured, exalted and glorified by poetic and spiritual environments, by the golden haze, the translucent mists through which it is revealed, as that here given of him whose dust reposes beneath the shades of Oak Ridge.' And for awful majesty and grandeur, upon what canvas did artist-author ever dash historic colors with a vividness so dramatic and terrible as those which glow and glare and flash from the picture here drawn of the ' crimsoa tempest,' whose sullen echoes have hardly yet died away along our shores ? "But let the lecture be read; it cannot be described." 342 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. This lecture covers certain leading thoughts which are also to be found in the Palingenesy, and, like that paper, was prepared with more immediate reference to certain great social and political problems of the country. Its thoughts were suggested in view of "the genesis and organization of states imperial in extent and in the gran- deur of their future " ; in view of the " problem of univer- sal popular liberty"; in view of "the federation of the states " and " the blending through our vast domain of a metropolitan with a colonial civilization " ; and finally in view of the problem of " the coalescence into one national life of many kindreds, languages and civilizations." The following are extracts from the discourse. ..." Myriads — soon destined to be counted by mil- lions, annually brought to our shores over both oceans — are constantly incorporated with the body of our empire. We are becoming a medley of all customs, manners, dia- lects, religions, civilizations and barbarisms, under the sun. The vast caldron, seething with these ingredients, must soon show some strange form of beauty or terror, something angelic or demoniac, emergent — a cosmopoli- tan civilization beyond all the past, or a power of ruin with no prototype. We surely build a Pandemonium or a New Jerusalem. " For these problems history must be our directory ; for history alone, wrought to a wise philosophy, must instruct us in the science requisite to their solution — namely. Sociology, or the Science of Society ; the science of its nature, laws and tendencies : its moods, impulses, passions ; its dangers, plagues and safeguards ; its pa- thology and therapeutics ; its factors of liberty, order and life, or of dissolution and death ; that which Plato, in his Republic, places as the chief and summary of all sciences. It treats of the millions, their life and action, of institu- HISTORY AS A TEACHER. 343 tions, of great and permanent causes, of eras, nations, civilizations ; in brief, of iiumanity itself. It is the ulti- mate coronal lore of the centuries. "The necessity of it is pressing imperatively on the world ; eminently so, at this present, as the million — the democracy — is clearly seen rising to the sphere of power; a rise, which, regard it as we may, as a hope or a horror, as devilish or divine, is recognized by publicists throughout the world as moving on with the certainty of a decree of God, The. science of this new sovereignty is now, there- fore, to the nations, and especially to our own, the riddle of the sphinx which we are to read or die. Of this science history is teacher, as history is properly the biography of society, of nations, of civilizations, and of political and social systems. This is its import in common parlance used absolutely and without qualification — a paradigm of the fortunes of humanity, of that common- wealth of commonwealths of which different ages, peoples, and sections are but segments, and which we are wont to term ' society.' The drama of humanity with its scenery and personnel, its passion, achievements, failures, suc- cesses — it is the great thesaurus of the materials, instances, and proofs for any science of it. " Apart from history there is no field for induction ; the past is mute; it has wrought through the centuries in vain : and the nations must still wander and stumble on in hopeless, helpless bewilderment and empiricism. This, as we have faith in a divine Reason regent in affairs, we do not, we can not, receive ; not that history properly ever repeats itself, or that the future is destined to be a coun- terpart of the past. The life of society may be circular, but its circle is a spiral. It climbs as it winds. Its move- ment may be rotary, but with the rotation not of the mill but of the chariot wheel. It advances as it revolves. 344 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " But though history does not repeat itself, humanity does, and the great factors of its science — God, man, and nature — are the same ; the same now as in the days of the Caesars and the Pharaohs. The voyage of human- ity may now be with new ships, crews, machinery and motive power, and through new seas ; but the great forces of nature, of eartji, air and flood, the indications of the compass and the barometer and the signs of the heavens are the same : the same tokens of the shoal and breaker, gale or tempest, of nearing the belt of calms or the storm circle, the region of the regular trade winds or the sultry atmosphere of the cyclone or typhoon. With whatever change of position, development, or environment, of cul- ture or faith, the chief elements in the social problem still present adequate analogies for an inductive and practical philosophy. " Taught by recorded experiences we may recognize the approach of critical periods and vital perils, and feel the tempest of revolution and changes in the air, or the coming storm in tidal pulses of the social deeps. . . . "For the materials of a social science, history is a reliable witness. Many are wont to deride it as only the dullest fiction — fiction without its romance. Rightly, often, especially if respect be had to minutiae, details, per- sonalities. But social science is one of averages ; the stabil- ity of its induction and deduction depending on the breadth of its survey. Its lessons are of generalities and aggre- gates, truest of the largest : of millions and ages, of laws embracing long periods and large multitudes, and vast and permanent causes. These may present moral certainties, while doubts wait around individual facts and instances. Nothing may be more uncertain than what certain individ- uals, A, B, or C, may have done or may do ; when, at the same time, nothing may be more assured than what the HISTORY AS A TEACHER. 345 masses or eras to which they belong may have done or will do. Statistics show a wonderful uniformity of action in large averages, and that in things most abnormal and capricious, most bizarre and almost irrational. . . . " Social science inquires especially after the vast, uni- versal, immortal, mental forces that we term technically ideas, denoting certain essential and inextinguishable elements of the human consciousness which cannot perish apart from mind itself ; sentiments that attach to us as men, and belong to the definition of our moral being; such'as those of rights of liberty of person, prop- erty, thought, truth and worship ; elements and creators of civil, intellectual and religious, freedom. These con- stitute the great demiurgic forces of the world — the im- mortal Titans, that no .lEtnas of prescriptive despotism or hoar wrongs can smother, nor all the bayonets beneath the sun can perpetually beat down. " These great, permanent, indestructible and ultimate, irrepressible social factors are recognized as the chief objects of the historic quest and philosophy, and the chief elements of sociology. They are becoming of mightier power and significancy perpetually, as the world is passing more and more from the realms of force into those of general ideas. Thrones and bayonets are not, even at this present, sovereigns in the world. They themselves already recognize an awful sovereignty above them — the one universal public opinion into which these ideas culmi- nate — the supreme Law and Lord of mankind. . . . " But ideas are to be sought through facts. The proper treatment of facts — their verification and interpretation — becomes a capital question in a historical method in quest of social science. . . . We cannot build on myth, poetic fancies, or panegyric embellishments, more than on direct falsification." . . . 346 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. A " record of facts " should be " causative, consecutive and complete." And the student should inquire, " Is it causative ? Does it truly develop cause, effect, antecedent, and consequent ? A fact out of causative relation admits of no philosophy, furnishes no elements of science. An isolated character from the Chinese alphabet, a pebble from the Parthenon, teaches me nothing. " Again, is it consecutive .' presenting things in the order of their happening, the order of organic growth and development, or is it a medley, a congeries, the disjecta membra of history, annals, or chronological tabl'es .'' Moun- tains of rubbish can make no St. Peter's ; a thousand kaleidoscopes, no picture. " Again, is it complete .' Not absolutely indeed. That were impossible. No finite intelligence were adequate to the entire relations of any fact. All facts belong to the infinite, are parts of a boundless web, links in an endless chain. All truths reach through one unity, which God alone can measure. Still, facts have a measurable com- pleteness, a synoptical lifetime. Your history must be more than excerpts, memoirs, memorabilia ; it ought cer- tainly to aim at the completeness requisite to develop the generic and organic idea. . . . " Your facts being assured, the next question of historic method is that of interpretation — how to extract their import. A veritable fact, then, being before you, make it speak ; make it utter all its contents, all its implications. Put it upon the rack ; torture it. Compel it to disclose its cause, consequence, concomitants ; its essence, its idea — whence .' why .' how } whither t Search it as with the analysis of the compound blow-pipe. Hold it steadfast in the focus of the mental ray, till that which was before dark, dumb, dead, lives, glows, kindles, flames, unfolds itself — flashes into interrelation and correlation, and the HISTORY AS A TEACHER. 347 irradiation of its sphere. Then apply to the elements pre- sented by your analysis a rigorous induction of laws, and then, from the results of your induction, construct philo- sophical principles and practical lessons. . . . " A historic method, again, that seeks a social science, requires a wide-seeing and discriminating eclecticism. First, out of the vast expanse of universal history we must select fields most fertile of material for social science — peoples, countries, races, eras, richest in facts, examples, principles, ideas. Some fields are too mythical, others too barren of memorial or example ; some present nations prisoned and smothered by despotisms — vast cycles tell you nothing ; they are dreary, silent, dead. Richest elaborators of social science are the histories that bring the millions much into view, and in their own culminating and climac- teric periods of culture and liberty ; as, for example, that of the classic nations of antiquity, or of those with liberal institutions in the modern world. An hour with Pericles were worth ages with the Pharaohs ; a day in Europe, a ' cycle of Cathay.' "Again, in fields thus selected our method requires subselection of times and topics on the same principle and of compartment within compartment. "Again, to the fields selected there must be applied what is called in art, grouping and relief. To some per- sons history seems one boundless uniform plain — all objects, alike in value. They read with equal emphasis, ' Adam, Seth, Enoch,' of the genealogies, and ' In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth ' ; and intone ' and the snuffers were of pure gold ' with the same solemnity as 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.' "But history is not a dead level, nor are all its objects alike in prominence or relation. It must be treated accord- ingly. Some objects must be set in strong light, others 348 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. in shadow ; some made conspicuous, others obscure ; some placed in front, others in the background ; some strongly individualized, others less so. Here the landscape will rise into mountains, there droop into vales. Some objects must be central and chief, others auxiliary and incidental ; and this not only for artistic effect, but for truth's sake and for knowledge. . . . " Central objects especially prominent and significant in this grouping and relief, and which require especial study, I call historical exponents. They are representative ob- jects, class facts, organic and historic forces. They are as mountain-tops with wide outlook, before, after, and around ; peaks shining over wildernesses ; lighthouses illuminating nightly seas. They are representative of causes or effects, antecedents or consequents, of relation and environment ; are exponential of vast social laws and forces." Among such exponents the lecturer designated physical geography, laws, language, genius, — ethnic or individual, — commerce, finance, institutions and politics, decisive battles, and social and political convulsions. Such convulsions "are usually the pitched battles of ideas, the culmination of movements long in process, the collision of antagonistic organic forces, cataclysms between different orders in political cosmogony. They are pro- found revelations, showing us humanity in its capacity of grandeur or guilt ; earthquake epochs, tearing open abysses beneath the smooth superficies of our civilization, and under the brilliant show disclosing magazines of wrath and the volcanic heart-throb of ages of wrong, hate and woe ; the upheavals of mighty and immortal ideas in dark and lurid deeps, where Phlegethon rolls its fiery waves, and ghastly Cocytus sighs and shrieks ever- more underneath landscapes of smiling prosperities and ' fields of the cloth of gold ' ; and where the millions in HISTORY AS A TEACHER. 349 their Titanic agony are lifting under old worlds and wrestling with night. They are solemn Nemeses often — the fifth act in long dramas of crime where the Eumeni- des of hoary wrongs hound down guilty nations and wreak the catastrophe ; days of wrath, when the Babylons and Tyres, the Romes and Parises and Londons of the world, with their pomp and power and pride and pleas- ure, their shams and shames, 'go down quick into hell.' "They too are demiurgic and inaugurative epochs, where different cycles touch and new orders are born. They are challengers of the deeps. They call up the Titans lying on the nether floods. They bring new ideas, forms and forces, to the regency of affairs. It is well carefully to note them as paradigms of social pathology, as well as epiphanies of divine rule in the affairs of the world. "Of such national agonies, one, the hour admonishes, presses on us for closer inspection — one which history will gaze on forever. The land where we tread still feels the shock and tremor of the earthquake. The earth has yawned beneath our feet, and disclosed the deeps. But too near is that gulf which has opened for narrow scru- tiny, and our eyes too dimmed with tears. We cannot look clearly down it, for that a mighty host of our loved and bravest, our sons, our fathers, our brothers, lie there, forever cut off from the light of the sun. The thunder- cloud, too, yet wanders over it, and the echo of the bolts is still sounding through the deeps. We cannot yet dis- tinctly take the gauge and dimensions of things. But some things are clearly disclosed. The lessons enunci- ated, some of them are patent to all the world. "And first, the sovereign force of moral ideas in his- tory ; it is the explosive upheaval of such ideas against a system of wrongs ponderous with the weight of an empire, 350 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. that has sprung the abyss beneath our wondrous prosper- ity, and caused the cry of our agony and ruin to be heard through the coasts of all the earth. " Moral ideas, by the shallow philosophy of Buckle and his school, divorced from the category of appreciable his- toric forces, are demonstrated to be the mightiest of things beneath God's throne. Right and truth 'are shown to be imperial powers, armed with a divine prerogative and the strength of a decree of God ; wrought in the heart of nations to a living sentiment, they are not to be perma- nently stifled or repressed : sooner will they turn this broad world over. Woe to the people that essays to smother them ! They champion omnipotence. " Again, our great tragedy shows that the great per- sonal forces of history are moral more than intellectual ; that the personal influences most sovereign in it are those of moral quality and character. Persons that are ideal- ized, that is, that are transfigured in the world's thought so that they become representatives of an idea potent in shaping and directing history, are thus transfigured by the opinion of moral goodness attaching to them. "This idealization of persons, of characters, is heaven's means of husbanding the moral excellences of the past, and of enthroning moral grandeur and beauty over his- tory. We have had occasion to see how these idealiza- tions are created, and how God hangs the historic sky with stars to illuminate and guide, ennoble and vitalize the course of humanity. He peoples the historic Pan- theon, not so much with intellect as with souls ; less with geniuses than virtues. It is goodness and truth — con- crete and impersonate, it may be in vulgar human mold, set in homely environment and girt with incongruous inves- lure ; it is the qualities of soul, that have power to trans- figure the gross and earthy embodiment into a power and HISTOR Y AS A TEA CHER. 351 a glory, a light and a life to the nations. Persons change to principles ; the material to the spiritual — to virtues impersonate — to living ideas. The corporeal type fades out ; there is a vanishing of the idiosyncrasy and the per- sonnel, an elimination of the local and temporary, the accidental and incongruous. Everything works to a spir- itual unity — to a single essence — to the pure idea. Such, at last, is its aspect toward the world. So the ideal is born of the real; but of the real sublimated, clarified, etherealized, transfigured, and upborne to the empyrean. Men become the embodiment of an idea, and that idea becomes their apotheosis. Their face becomes the face of a truth. Time bleaches it of stain and defea- ture, of the impure and the alloy. Their defects fall away with the years — and time, which clarifies, uplifts. They are stars shining as they rise, dimly through the earth fogs and smokes, and liable to be mistaken for the city lamps with which they blend, but starting with the earth's roll from the street lights to the zodiac and the zenith. . . . " An awful presence wanders by noon and night around the grave at Oak Ridge. But its representative orb shines over that tomb, higher than the Pleiades — evermore. To that, the muse of history will point down coming time, as asserting for heroic loyalty to God, country and human- ity, walking according to the light God gave, and for a simple, childlike honesty, that carried this loyalty into the most mighty and awful issues of human history, and in its high mission, steadfast to the last, ' in charity to all, in malice to none,' gave up life itself for duty, — I say the muse of history will point to that example, as asserting for such honesty and loyalty of soul an essential and immortal kingliness, that — apart from brilliancy of genius or' culture, despite of imperfection and defeature, per- 352 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. sonal or mental — in despite, if so be, of weakness, or mistake in logic or policy — claims a perpetual scepter and crown in the historic realm. . . . " It may startle us to think of one of late so near and now so far — one long beside us in the common and famil- iar walks of life, of no regal guise, presence or culture, throned so high amid the perpetual kings. But the ideali- zation and translation are in progress, not so much from any qualities of intellect or masterliness of policy or measures, as from the moral majesty of truth, the beauty and grandeur of a soul honest to its very core and to the very death. And by force of these it requires no prophet to assure us, spite of whatever in- congruity or defeature — idiosyncratic or personal — that face and form, transfigured by the idea of the indwelling virtue, will shine forth in the skies of the future more glorious than the Belvederean god of light — shine forth as the face of a truth, a virtue, a divine idea impersonate. "This was foretokened in that funeral heralding that draped belts of latitude and longitude and successive states in mourning over the martyr, yet victor, on his great return. Never had a conqueror in the past such a cortege and following. And when, pale, silent, and marred, that form thus came back from the war, and lay in state in yonder capitol, the transfiguration had already begun. History and death had touched that face to an awe and majesty that seemed no longer of the sons of men. On that brow the assassin's mark was already changing to the aureola, — to the glory, — and from the mute lips the words, ' In charity to all, in malice toward none,' and ' For these I am willing to die ' seemed mingling with the hymn of history down the aisles of all the future. "That face, thus transfigured to that of the Moral HISTORY AS A TEACHER. 353 Sublime, to a virtue already on high, will be seen by the idea of heroic goodness inhering, upborne higher and higher over the future, when the surge of our great tragedy shall have sunk behind the horizon, above its war-scenery, its masses of force, its blazon of mighty names, latest of its historic constellations — rlike Cassio- peia's throne in the circumpolar skies, in the circle of perpetual apparition ; rising and falling, it may be, with the earth's roll, but to set nevermore." Following this passage is commemorative mention as among the personal moral forces in the early history of Illinois of Duncan, Hardin, Baker, Blackburn, Wolcott, Tillson, Lippencott, Douglas, and Godfrey : — ..." Another — from a grave not far from his, a form dabbled in blood — comes from the heights of Alton, known to fame as a proto-martyr in the moral and polit- ical battle of half a century — his blood among the first drops of what a crimson tempest ! Beside him appears that brother that caught the fallen flag from his dying Tiand, — its folds all purple with a brother's blood, — and Ijore it on, his clarion voice summoning the sons of Illinois and those loyal to freedom and country, through the land, on to battles and to victory." The address closes as follows : — "These, and others whose names are part of the land's language, but of whom I may not speak, — for that God still gives them to us, — who have wrought in their day, greatly, wisely, bravely or lovingly, for Illinois, have made its early history already signal and illustrious — often grand. What its future may be, who shall limit, if that future is true to its past .'' "A state which in 1833 I found an infant in swaddling bands, cradled in the green wilderness, and which I have since seen, at the call of its noble governor, — then a 354 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. gifted, great-souled boy in college, — rushing to the rescue of fatherland with an army of 150,000 men, under the gallant leadership of its own sons ; a state which in public schools organized and systemized under the able admin- istration of its wise and large-minded superintendent,, to whom I was then imparting the rudiments of culture under the shadows of the wild woods, whom I loved then as a child, and whom I now love and honor as a man ; a state which now presents, in its public schools, an array vaster in number and in elements of power than that which Napoleon led against Moscow, — a state which exhibits such promise in the morning of youth — what may we not hope from its manhood ? " What that future shall be will be determined mainly by the moral ideas which shall be regent in it ; indeed largely by the moral sentiment of some now before me, to whom, honored with highest position, — judicial, legisla- tive, and administrative, — or sitting in constitutional con- vention, this grand young state now commits itself. For through sentiments of this order, — those of truth, honor and piety, — more than through intellectual brilliancy of forecast, rises the life of states. Great ideas make men and states great. These are ultimately the mightiest and profoundest of historic factors — those which God espe- cially husbands and utilizes through idealization, as benefi- cent powers for the history of man. "A divine reason and economy seem thus to unite all the past to all the future, showing one moral rule through all. Under the one God history becomes one. With God recognized as historic factor all things have a vaster rela- tion and significancy. We come to a new order of his- torical exponents. Exponential values become infinite; exponential forces strike the circle of the everlasting. All the past becomes exponent of all the future. On HISTORY AS A TEACHER. 355 time is everywhere the signature of eternity ; over the inchoate and imperfect, the prophecy of consummation. Lost ages are not lost. None of the wise, the good, the true, have lived in vain. Our baffled and broken works and lives are outreaches toward the perfect and immortal. Time's broken chainwork links at last to God's throne. Its shreds are wrought to a divine warp and woof in the vast loom of Providence. Cycles dark and baffled marshal to the coronal outcome — a veritable kingdom of God on earth. " The mighty grave itself, where the good, the beautiful, the wise, and the brave have age after age gone down into night, becomes as the portal of a setting sun — vistaed with mountains of chrysolite, amethystine cities, the forms of glorious seraphim and angel pennons stream- ing through the sapphire, marshaling to a morn beyond the sunset. So our earthly landscape, not only with the spires of all its temples, but with the shafts of all its tombs, seems thick with index fingers pointing upward to the eternal and the divine — the descending City of Light; the coronal, historic order ; the New Jerusalem." 358 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. Fathers, and by the fact that neither they nor their works need historical introduction or sketching. Their story is before all the world, in pictures and song, and the historic pages, blazoned forevermore. Their principles, too, are still among the mightiest of living things — triumphant with our flag as it floats from ocean to ocean, and quicken- ing through the life of modern civilization. The May- flower has not finished her voyage. She is still sailing. Nor will she fold her sails on mortal shores. That craft that some two hundred and' fifty years since lay in the offing of the new world, history now-Jsees had set her sails for eternity, not like the City of Boston, for the silences of the underworld ; nor like the phantom ship, to reappear in the storm cloud as harbinger of wreck, — but des4^eui,ip illumined seas, and more and more to enter into the ujM- versal voice and vision of human history as it lapses^^^o the kingdom of our Lord. . . . f' / " The occasion is for principles more than men, of, rather, is for principles through men ; and that not in-ttie intc-est of section or party, but for principles universal fas human- ity, catholic as the kingdom of God. Men we idealize, not idolize. The Lord of hosts alone we glorify. The graves of the fathers are in the right direction. But it is ours not to lie down beside them, or to petrify around them, but looking the way they looked, to gather some commun- ion with their spirit and example for a new Pilgrim's Progress. "To this intent we idealize, not idolize, men. The difference is world-wide, a difference in times and in the things themselves. They are separate in times as widely as the eras of achievement and panegyric, or of genius and commentary. There are ages when grand things are done, and when they are eulogized ; when saints are made, and when they are canonized ; when martyrs suffer, and THE PIL GRIM FA THERS. 359 when men hunt their relics ; when prophets prophesy, and when men build their tombs. The passage from the former era to the latter is commonly one of degradation ; it is the transition from the heroic and martyr spirit to the pusillanimous, the selfish and servile ; in a word, from idealization to idolatry. These, though often confounded, are diametrically opposite. The former quickens with spirit, life, principle. In the latter the spirit is smothered ; the life in the form, the principle in the apotheosis. " Idealization is that process in the world's thought whereby men are made representatives of an idea, a prin- ciple, or truth impersonate. This is a requisite process in the divine economy of history. Its great moral forces are personal. A virtue or truth, in order to possess mank^ind, must be presented in the concrete ; acted out in a life, either in its general tone or in some signal instance in it. When God would save the world he did not blazon the skies above it with the ten commandments, but hung over it the face of the beautiful and glorious Christ. " There is but One in whom the perfect ideal and the perfect real are blent. In all others the ideal embraces only part of the character and history. The idealization is wrought by eliminations, vanishings, oblivions, sublima- tions. By leaving out of view for the time some facts or qualities, defects, foibles, or inconsistencies, and by con- centrating the vision on some illustrious instance or characteristic in a given life, the person becomes trans- formed to an impersonation of the virtue or truth signalized in that instance or characteristic, the face of the pure idea. Men become the embodiment of an idea, and that idea becomes their transfiguration. Such ideals become the great moral motors of history, its vitalizers, illumi- nators and cynosures. " The stars seen ' through the horizontal misty air ' 358 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Fathers, and by the fact that neither they nor their works need historical introduction or sketching. Their story is before all the world, in pictures and song, and the historic pages, blazoned forevermore. Their principles, too, are still among the mightiest of living things — triumphant with our flag as it floats from ocean to ocean, and quicken- ing through the life of modern civilization. The May- flower has not finished her voyage. She is still sailing. Nor will she fold her sails on mortal shores. That craft that some two hundred and" fifty years since lay in the ofifing of the new world, history now-'sees had set her sails for eternity, not like the City of Boston, for the silences of the underworld ; nor like the phantom ship, to reappear in the storm cloud as harbinger of wreck, — but destineiivljg illumined seas, and more and more to enter into the uni| versal voice and vision of human history as it lapses on^io the kingdom of our Lord. . . . / " The occasion is for principles more than men, of, ratfier, is for principles through men ; and that not in the intcest of section or party, but for principles universal as human- ity, catholic as the kingdom of God. Men we idealize, not idolize. The Lord of hosts alone we glorify. The graves of the fathers are in the right direction. But it is ours not to lie down beside them, or to petrify around them, but looking the way they looked, to gather some commun- ion with their spirit and example for a new Pilgrim's Progress. "To this intent we idealize, not idolize, men. The difference is world-wide, a difference in times and in the things themselves. They are separate in times as widely as the eras of achievement and panegyric, or of genius and commentary. There are ages when grand things are done, and when they are eulogized ; when saints are made, and when they are canonized ; when martyrs suffer, and THE PIL GRIM FA THERS. 359 when men hunt their relics ; when prophets prophesy, and when men build their tombs. The passage from the former era to the latter is commonly one of degradation ; it is the transition from the heroic and martyr spirit to the pusillanimous, the selfish and servile ; in a word, from idealization to idolatry. These, though often confounded, are diametrically opposite. The former quickens with spirit, life, principle. In the latter the spirit is smothered ; the life in the form, the principle in the apotheosis. " Idealization is that process in the world's thought whereby men are made representatives of an idea, a prin- ciple, or truth impersonate. This is a requisite process in the divine economy of history. Its great moral forces are personal. A virtue or truth, in order to possess mank^ind, must be presented in the concrete ; acted out in a life, either in its general tone or in some signal instance in it. When God would save the world he did not blazon the skies above it with the ten commandments, but hung over it the face of the beautiful and glorious Christ. " There is but One in whom the perfect ideal and the perfect real are blent. In all others the ideal embraces only part of the character and history. The idealization is wrought by eliminations, vanishings, oblivions, sublima- tions. By leaving out of view for the time some facts or qualities, defects, foibles, or inconsistencies, and by con- centrating the vision on some illustrious instance or characteristic in a given life, the person becomes trans- formed to an impersonation of the virtue or truth signalized in that instance or characteristic, the face of the pure idea. Men become the embodiment of an idea, and that idea becomes their transfiguration. Such ideals become the great moral motors of history, its vitalizers, illumi- nators and cynosures. " The stars seen ' through the horizontal misty air ' 360 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. seem part of the street lights. The earth rolls, and — fogs and smoke and earthly light left below — they glitter in the zenith. The Chimborazo that on near view seems mingled amidst an equal .(Etnaean brotherhood, only as you recede starts to its true solitary grandeur in the sky. So moral greatness looms in due proportions only as seen across the interval of centuries. So colossal statuary grows to its true beauty only when lifted on high. " We believe that we see and feel the moral attitude of the Pilgrim Fathers more truly than did the men of their times, and that we legitimately and beneficently contem- plate them in their great action and essential characters, and in the profoundest import of their life, as ideals, impersonations of great truths and principles. "This idealization, again, embraces moral rather than intellectual grandeur. The historic Pantheon is peopled more by great souls than great geniuses. We idealize not so much the creed, but rather the manner in which creeds are confessed. So, while we honor those men for the truths God disclosed to them beyond their age, — disclosed in germ and embryo, the full growth by no means yet fully discerned, — it is in the confession of them eminently that they rise before us in the grandeur and beauty of ideals. For the great principles of order and liberty of which they were confessors in their day, — the lordship of Christ and the brotherhood of man, — and the element- ary and organic truths of civil and religious freedom derived therefrom ; the inviolableness and supremacy under God of the individual conscience, the right of private judgment, the autonomy and sufficiency of the local church, the equality and sovereignty of the brotherhood, and the communion of the saints ; for principles of this class, some of which they held in advance of their century, thrown into the formative and organic elements of a new THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 36 1 world, — for these they deserve the thanks of the race of men, and especially of us their successors. But pre- eminently by the childlike faith exhibited in their confession of them, by their faith in His truth and spirit, as also faith in humanity and liberty — by this they rank with the illus- trious roll of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, and are entitled to the same historic uses. Thus used they become factors of order and life, of liberty and progress, of true conservatism and reform, and minister courage, counsel, guidance, and energy to those who commemorate them. " Such are the uses of idealization. Idolatry, on the other hand, looks at men more than principles ; indeed, merges all principles in itself. It attaches to the attire of man. It is the apotheosis of the person, and all appur- tenant to it becomes divine : all thought, word and act, is perfect, and in those thoughts, words and acts, all truth and excellency are formulated, and in them find their ultimate development and their enduring stereotype. Liberty no longer means liberty, even if still retained in the vocabulary, but permission of conformity ; the doing just what the fathers did, and just as they did it. Free- dom is limited to mere antiquarian research. Truth is no longer an expanding germ ; it is a petrifaction into their mold. Life is smothered in the dogma. Spirituality perishes in literalism. The iconoclast is abused to an idol, the liberator to a despot. The men whom we cele- brate for trampling down all tyrannies, for repudiating all authority, claiming to mediate between the soul and God and his truth — their names are invoked to the repression of free thought and worship. The apostles of progress are made wardens of a prison house — limitary cherubs barring the gates of light. . . . " We fitly commemorate our fathers by repudiating all 362 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. man-worship. We honor by refusing to idolize them : rather by claiming for ourselves to 'prove all things; hold fast that which is good ' ; by essaying to separate principle from form, life from mere dress, essence from mere accident or incident ; and under all and through all to grasp and hold forth the vital, substantive idea. " It behooves us, therefore, on this fifth semi-centennial of their history in the New World, in reviewing the sit- uation, to inquire whether, in our practical workings, our reverence for the acts of our fathers has in any respect obscured their life-principle, and whether our system has in consequence lost in any degree its original flexibility and power ; and that we enter on the great work that now opens to us, in the spirit of life, liberty and faith, with which they wrought in their day. . . . " Our national life and civilization are seriously im- periled by open revolt and attack — a revolt among their descendants against the faith as well as practice of the fathers, against their religious, if not political, principles, in forgetfulness of the fact that these are vitally and indissolubly united — a revolt against the God of our fathers and his ordinances, saying, ' Let us break his bands asunder, and cast away his cords from us,' reck- less that his cords and his bands are those of our national life itself. Men forget that this break in national life, ever perilous for all peoples, is especially so for ours; that a blow at our religion is a stroke at the national heart, a severance of all the grand, heroic, and martyr pulses that beat through our civilization with the life- blood of the past. "A nation that cuts loose from its primitive faith — though rude, simple and imperfect, it may have been — is generally seen in history entering upon an era of decay, of shams, corruptions and crimes. All the grand THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 363 nations and civilizations, in their grand eras, have been believing ones. Eras of skepticism have commonly been mean, shallow, corrupt and cowardly. But if this be so in case of nations cutting loose from dim, confused, distorted, natural theisms, what must be the result with those sever- ing themselves from such a primitive religious faith as ours } On what an opprobrious and disastrous career shall we suriely enter! In blind and fanatic hate, silly derision of defeatures, real or imaginary, of Puritanism, we are in danger of casting away its life-principle — of abandoning, in ignorance or cowardice, the noblest legacy God ever gave to a nation. "With the progress of this revolt civilization must shrivel. Its taint is leprous ; itb triumph, corruption and the charnel-house. For the life of civilization, the life of what is best, noblest, most beautiful in it, yea, for the existence of the nation itself, we must resist this move- ment as we would cordon or drive back the plague. This revolt brings the deadliest peril, as, indeed, it derives its chief origin, from the fact that a medley of all nationali- ties, creeds, manners, civilizations and barbarisms, under the sun is constantly flooding us from both oceans. Wide flung are the gates of the Orient and of the Occident. ■ A multitude, like which the populousNorth Poured never from her frozen loins, to pass Rhene or the Danaw,'" is annually inundating us, and becoming part of the body of our empire. The elements of the whole earth are thrown ^to the caldron. What form shall emerge ? We need the mightiest forces — assimilative and organic — to be immediately applied, or our national life is lost. No such forces for this purpose are disclosed in history, as those in our own life-fountain. 3 64 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. "The problem before us becomes the more perplexed and difficult because upon the social chaos a foreign superstition and spiritual despotism is directing all its enginery. Its direct effort may not so much alarm us. We may believe our political democracy will antagonize and baffle it. We may regard its ordnance, shotted with infallibility, as more dangerous at the breech than the muzzle. Indeed, I have little alarm at the ecclesiastical anachronism termed an Ecumenical Council, that is now plotting and processioning about the Vatican ; or the ghostly council that sits there, with stage thunder and tinsel fulmination, rattling about the bones of buried majesty. Mediaeval Rome is dead as the Coliseum. No councils. Ecumenical or Pandemoniacal, can galvanize it to life again. But out of the decay of its corpse emerge plagues and corruptions whose name is legion. The indirect and reactionary evils of the papal crusade on our country we may well dread ; and chief among them, the spread of rationalism, the deadliest foe to modern faith. Against these we need to invoke and invigorate our original life-forces. "Another danger to our church system which the situation discloses is our want of coalescence and co- efficiency, of a unity of consciousness and action — an autonomy that verges to the extreme of individualism. We are jealous of our liberties. It is well ; we can hardly be too much so. We are wary of concentration, or of large and long delegations of power. This, too, is wise. But unity of spirit, of cooperation and counsel, is no sur- render of freedom — often is its protection and conserva- tion. A communion of the saints — not for legislation or judicature or administration, but for concert, mutual advice and encouragement, awakening a common con- sciousness, and harmonizing and combining action for THE PLL GRIM FA THERS. 365 common ends — this is not usurpation, or hierarchy, or spiritual despotism ; but it is rather a necessity for the maintenance and efficiency of our very liberties. For with our isolation and individualism we stand amid vast and concentrated ecclesiastical systems, armed with the sagacity, vigilance and self-consciousness, and with the perpetuity of succession and policy, of aristocratic or pre- latic rule, gifted with facility of long project and large coercive combinations, and furnished largely with learning, eloquence and piety — amid such systems, possessing, some of them, the prestige of great wealth and hoar anti- quity, magnificent ceremonial, artistic liturgy, and strong with the pride and sympathy of vast numbers, our churches stand, individual and isolated, in simplicity of order and policy, like petty unarmed states amid those with vast standing armies — like the Grecian cities of anti- quity in the presence of the overshadowing monarchy of Macedon. . . . " The situation presents a changed relation of the world to our church system and principles, one auspicious in itself, but liable to produce, and actually producing, a general relaxation of interest in the public mind in regard to the value of religious liberty and the dangers to which it is exposed. It has become in a great measure indiffer- ent to the vast questions that convulsed the age of our fathers, or is extending its guards in wrong directions and becoming hoodwinked to real perils. The cause is this : the special occasion against which the mind of the world was braced has passed away — that which nerved, toned, and exalted to exile and martyrdom. The sword of perse- cution, once brandished over the confessors of religious liberty, has fallen from the hands of spiritual despotism and, to a great extent, the spirit of the confessor and martyr has fallen with it. It has happened to us as has 366 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. often befallen in history. Usually, universal principles are born of special occasions — the vindication of a right, in a certain instance, requiring the assertion of its univer- sality. So men have achieved beyond their thought or hope. But the special instance vindicated, the general principle is suffered to sleep, or at least is not pursued to its consequences. It passes to the tomb of accepted but dead axioms. The zeal aroused for it in the hour of its first conflict passes away, and in the security of triumph it perishes of its very victory. Like the Spartan war- rior, it is brought back upon its shield — a victor, but dead. . . . "We need to indoctrinate our people into the nature and value of spiritual liberty, and the dangers to which it is now exposed, that they may recognize and appreciate the subtler and more deadly attacks to which it is often liable in times of its apparent general triumph, after open violence has been abandoned, and to be admonished that the vocation of the Pilgrim church is not gone when the sword has been wrested from the hand of the persecutor, and the attack, transferred from the surface to the vitals, has passed from the regions of material to moral force ; or is waged, not so much by the powers of superstition and hierarchy as by those of materialistic and rationalistic worldliness. We need to give our children some reason for the ecclesiastical faith that is in them, so that they be no longer the prize and prey of rival and conflicting sects when they leave our own thresholds. We need to indoc- trinate them beyond the idea that Congregationalism is a mere special protest, a temporary expedient, a fragment thrown off in some ecclesiastical explosion, into the truth that it is the primitive, primordial, normal church type; older than Westminster, or Lambeth, or St, Peter's, or the Vatican ; resting on ' the foundation of the apostles THE PIL GRIM FA THERS. 36/ and prophets, Jesus Christ being the chief corner stone ' ;, that it is not a thing of mere conveniences and sections, classes or orders, but of the ' holy catholic church ' ; that it has the right to go everywhere or to exist nowhere ; that it is legitimate for all men or for none. We need to indoctrinate them beyond the idea that indifferentism is liberality or charity ; or that these require, as due to themselves, the surrender of those principles or of that order which are to them their natural expression and embodiment — their vital and effective organ. We need to indoctrinate them beyond a mere denominationalism, or the worship of a proper name — beyond a mere sectari- anism, or devotion to an organized party or a formulated symbol, unto a love of our church for its principles of order, faith and freedom, and for the glory of the Lord. We need to indoctrinate our people with the idea that while liberty is to Congregationalism the breath of life, yet that liberty is not sheer individualism or isolation ; but for its own protection and extension needs the concert and cooperation of the churches blent with their individualism and autonomy ; that system can only compete with systems, and large despotic massing can be met only by the free unions of the free ; and that communion of the saints should be coefificient and co- operative as well as sentimental. "We need indoctrination, beyond idolatry of mere lip-honors of the fathers, into their principles of faith and life, of doing and suffering; and the honoring of their principles, by accepting themselves as brethren, not masters, counseling, not commanding, helps and guides, not despots ; and by receiving the great truths God gave to them to see, not because they believed them, but because they proved them, and God has given to us to see and prove them also ; and, moreover, by applying 368 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. to their modes, forms, platforms and policies, the same private judgment we revere them for applying so fear- lessly to those of their fathers. . . . " We need to indoctrinate our people to the effect that liberty is a means, not an end — a means of truth ; yet that truth itself is not the end, but the end is life ; and espe- cially that in order to quicken and combine our forces of individualism and of order into one living organism, we need more the conscious communion of one life, some- thing transcending community of dogma, ritual or order, but vitalizing, energizing, and utilizing to one end, all these. That life is the life of Christ. The application of Christ himself as a living, present person is our great perpetual need. He must walk amid the golden candle- sticks, or vain is their gold, vain their shining. He must hold the stars in his right hand, or the constellary bands are broken ; ' the sweet influences ' cease to bind the Pleiades. We need to feel him ever as a living, indi- vidual, unitive, ubiquitous presence, enrobing us with himself as with another being ; dwelling in us as a new and higher life, the Supreme Head, the Coronal Mind, the Central Heart. Beyond fathers, confessors, heroes, theologues, champions, or sects. His is the name above every name. . . . " Let our church be living with that life, and it shall be the most beautiful and mighty of earthly things. All individual elements and forces shall be stimulated, har- monized, and knit into one celestial cosmos through this life. Liberty shall be sweetly under law, and law trans- figured to love, through it. Form and dogma shall be all alive and aglow with it. The church will delight to elaborate and appropriate, as fitting the Lord of beauty, all things grand and fair ; for his sake arraying herself in the richest and loveliest dress. This incorporation THE PILGRIM FATHERS. ' 369 of the life of Christ with our order, completes, consum- mates it. With it, it cannot grow old or obsolete or de- cayed. It is immortal. It must live with the life of humanity and Christianity. "To Him, then, look we to-day. 'A cloud of wit- nesses ' seem gathering here, this hour, from Bunker Hill and the Atlantic waves. But look we away beyond them all to ' Him who is the author and finisher of our faith.' "As we take our final outlook of the situation, its ulti- mate indication for the church and the land our fathers planted is that for the sake of liberty, life and order, the Lord God be enthroned anew over it as king, even as of old by our fathers. Let us go forth with the chant of the Second and Seventy-second Psalms. Let a new coro- nation anthem inaugurate a new Pilgrim's Progress, to end after another quarter of a millennium — at what goal, who shall tell .? " As I look out on that future I seem to hear a cry as in the burden of Dumah, ' Watchman, what of the night } What of the night .■" ' And one answers, 'The day cometh, and also the night. If ye will inquire, inquire again here- after.' ' Light and darkness mingle in the conflict. The victory does not yet appear. Inquire hereafter, when the grand outcome, the triumph, of light shall be manifest. But over that gulf, thick with phantoms and with forms of change, I see the brightness of the burning wheels, and I know that He cometh whom we this day inaugurate ; and as the principles of his government are taught in his word, I know that in some form the principles we hold and commemorate this day — liberty, truth, love — shall ultimately triumph. In this assurance, let us, brethren, work and wait and rest in hope. " But as we inquire, with the prophet beside the Euphra- 3 70 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. tes, ' Lord, how long ? ' we are answered, ' Go your way. Many shall be purified and made white, and tried ; but the wicked shall do wickedly, and none of the wicked shall un- derstand. But the wise shall understand.' 'And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever.' 'But go your way till the end be. For ye shall rest and stand in your lot at the end of the days.' " And, brethren, by the changes that have passed since we last met (some of us) in National Council, I know the end to some is not afar. Some five years since we stood together — nearly a thousand of us — on Plymouth Rock, beneath the shadow of Burial Hill. We stood there under the shadow of the great war-cloud. It was rifted. God's bow was on its brow, and the glad sun was once more shining through. But the thunders were still in the heavens, and the roar of the Atlantic was mingled to our ears, not simply with the martyr-anthem from earlier ages, but with the mighty requiem of vast myriads of our sons, brothers, and fathers, embracing among them the best and noblest of the land, who for the life of the principles of the Pilgrim martyrs and confessors had just gone down forever from the light of the sun. To-day, in this Tyre of the new world, at the head of these occidental Medi- terraneans, one third the way to the western Ocean, we stand again in council ; to meet next, hereafter, when or where, who may tell .' But one reunion, brethren, is surely disclosed to hope, in climes whose dialects we have not yet learned, in mansions which we cannot name, for that their names are not borne to mortal ears. But we know it shall not be on Burial Hill, nor in Farwell Hall. For in that land there is no grave, and on its breezes no farewell." CHAPTER XXVII. A DARKENED HOME. Sermons on the Church Fathers, and Discourse before the American Board on "The Ministrant Church." — Trips in 1873 to Colorado and Europe. — Death of Mrs. Post, and letter to Daniel Roberts. — Letter from Ferrisburg two years afterwards. IN 1871 Dr. Post preached a series of discourses — some of them afterward published — on the church fathers, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Constantine, Ambrose, Chry- sostom and Augustine ; and in October of the same year, at Salem, Mass., an occasional sermon before the Ameri- can Board on "The Ministrant Church," from the text, " The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." In this sermon is a very characteristic passage concern- ing the "Mountain of the Lord's House." For many years the Adirondacks had been, as the reader is aware, the familiar resort of Dr. Post. Hardly a guide knew the peaks and lakes of the eastern range better than he. Summer after summer, in company with kindred or old friends, — the burdens of life thrown aside^ — and equipped with a marvelous stock of youthful vigor and enthusiasm, he would " rough it " through the gorges and " fire slash," and along the trout streams, and up the loftier summits. From Dix Peak is a lordly vision of the Champlain valley on the east and the roll of mountains billowing away to the western horizon. The picture here given is seen from that point : — " Recently, as after a toilsome clamber through forest 372 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. glooms and wilds, formless and desolate, and up arduous steeps, I emerged upon one of the loftiest peaks of the Adirondacks, there was suddenly revealed a scene such as our eyes may rarely behold this side of the Golden City, and which seemed to type the Coronal Temple itself. " I seemed standing as in the presence of one of God's great minsters. The ' Gothic Mountains,' fitly so named, rising immediately before me, with awful mural steeps, castellated with cliffy turrets and battlements, and their white escarpments, or sharp-cut salient angles, wrought by the elements into wondrous tracery and mysterious symbol, carved or emblazoned with semblance of cross and sacred emblem, or of column, oriel, pointed arch, or half- swung portal, seemed as the facade of some vast cathedral, surmounted with sweep on sweep of ridge and peak above and beyond, that appeared as frieze and architrave of its mighty entablature ; while farther on, and higher, crowning the stupendous pile, and girt round with lesser heights that stretched as stalagmites, pinnacles, and cupolas to the horizon's utmost verge, up sprang the central dome, the mighty Tahawas itself, and under a sky ' So cloudless, deep and purely beautiful, That God alone was to be seen in heaven.' "As I emerged on this view I saw before me, emblazoned, 'the mountain of the Lord's house estab- lished in the top of the mountains.' Over what an agony and ruin of nature upheaved, in what gloomy and formless deeps founded, was that glorious pile ! From what dismal disorder of marsh and fen and cliff and flood and forest it rose ; from what confusion of nooks and vales hidden in beauty, and crystal cascade and rivulet, and flowers of wondrous sweetness, strangely blent with poisonous growths and wilds deformed, 'Rocks, caves, bogs, dens, and shades of death'! A DARKENED HOME. 373 Yet from all this at last uprose — what a visible hallelujah of the mountains and the sky ! a liturgy statuesque in eternal granite ! " In 1873, and after a flying trip to Colorado and through Denver, Idaho Springs, and Georgetown, and up Gray's Peak, Dr. Post, in company with two sons, visited Europe. This trip, long dreamed of, was at last accomplished through the urgent request — almost entreaty — of Mrs. Post, who, although an invalid, and gradually growing feebler, in this project, as always where the happiness of others was considered, had no thoughts for herself. The journey was undertaken with some misgivings and after a good deal of hesitation. A month spent in London, in its endless maze of historical relics and associations, was fraught with intense and unflagging interest. While there, and after a round of sight-seeing. Dr. Post said, one day, "I have heard and talked and dreamed of London, the mighty city beyond the ocean, hardly expect- ing ever to be walking in its streets ; and lo ! I am here. And so will it be when I come to stand on the shores of another life. I shall think then how 1 have talked and read and dreamed of the New Jerusalem that seemed so dim and far off in my earthly life ; and lo ! I am here." The Scotch and English lake countries, Salisbury and Stonehenge, a fortnight in Paris, and a brief sojourn in Florence, Venice, Rome and Naples, are among the shin- ing features of atrip where almost everything was delight- ful in experience and charming in retrospect. One solid month was passed among the Alps, in ram- bling and loitering, as humor might dictate, with alpen- stock and field-glass, and independent of guide or diligence, mainly among the Napoleon roads ; sometimes up among 374 ^^ UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. the glaciers and snow-peaks. The untiring energy with which Dr. Post, then in his sixty-fourth year, kept the road over hill and vale, often at a sharp gait, for twelve or fourteen hours a day, seemed little short of marvelous in one of his years and sedentary habits. Here is a picture given by him from recollections of Switzerland, in his address at Middlebury at the semi- centennial reunion of his class : — "The temple of humanity rises before me in the land- scape of history, like the tower of the Matterhorn in the Alps, as I saw it on my first approach, its base half descried through eddying mists, while above, the mighty obelisk, hieroglyphed and scarred by awful storms, and piercing with uplift on uplift higher and ever higher into heaven, was draped with wild clouds and tempest, swirling around and enfolding it — save in broken glimpses — from sight, till far in the azure height its top was touched by the reflected glory of the sun which had sunk below the horizon." And here is another picture taken from an address in January, 1881, at the reunion in Chicago of the Sons of Vermont : — "The voice of old Vermont from the far-off years has ever followed me through all my exile, calling, as did the London bells to the departing boy, the future lord mayor, ' Turn again ! turn again ! ' — a voice such as seemed to call to me from the high Alps as I was descending one of them, amid scenery whose wild, strange beauty and awful grandeur would have persuaded me to linger forever. A strain of melody — wild, weird, melancholy, and strangely sweet — came floating through the air, mingling with the bursts of sunlight, the flash of glaciers, the rush of tor- rents, the awe of vast gorge and precipice in deep shadow, and cloud-masses charioted along the peaks by the moun- A DARKENED HOME. 375 tain winds — a strain that with wailing, echoing refrain seemed pleading around my departing footsteps, 'Turn again ! turn again ! ' I looked around, above, beneath, amid the torrent, the glacier, the gorge, and the echoing peak and cloud, to see where and what the voice might be. At first, in vain. Presently I saw across a deep gulf, on the slope of an opposite mountain, an Alpine boy seated on a rock, and from his lone, high perch flood- ing the earth and sky with his Alpine melody." The glories of the Oberland and of Chamounix, and the valley of the Visp and the Corner Grat, were a never- failing theme during the evenings at home in the years that followed. Italy had for him, in addition to its charm of sky and landscape and art, the eloquent story of a past world in which had been his familiar walk through many a year of research, with Mommsen and Niebuhr and Merivale and the Latin authors. The trip was brought to an abrupt and painful close in this "far land " by a telegram from St. Louis announcing the illness of Mrs. Post and calling the travelers home. The news was meager, but sufficient to excite the gravest alarm ; and after traveling night and day by rail, and taking the first steamer from Liverpool, they reached St. Louis about the end of October, in time for a few hours of broken but unspeakably precious converse at the dying bedside. Mrs. Post had, with one of her daughters, passed a few weeks at Middlebury, but, rapidly failing, had journeyed painfully home. The time of the return from Europe was so looked forward to by the sufferer, and the days and hours were counted over with such anxious and eager expectancy, that it seemed as though the meeting itself might cause too great an excitement to be borne. 376 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. At length, on the fourth day of November, the shadow fell, and the first great grief entered the household. The family circle, through nearly forty years unvisited by death, was at last broken. Long known jn a wide sphere of friendship in the church and out of it, actively connected with many schemes of benevolence and patriotism, Mrs. Post was beloved and honored everywhere. In the sacred circle of home life, how much she was loved and mourned can never be told. To Dr. Post the loss was unspeakably great. His coun- selor, to whom plans and problems in life were always submitted without reserve, one whose admirable system and method supplemented his own disorder, whose facile and lucid pen was always in readiness to translate his obscure manuscripts for the press, who was eyes and staff to him in days of blindness, who was sunlight and hope and cheer in despondency, and whose untiring and abso- lute self-devotion had never failed him in trial and sickness — was taken away. No fidelity or loving care of children could so watch over and minister to him. Solitary nights in his chamber, and days that were lonely in his study without' the gentle presence and faithful ministries so wonted there, were thenceforward in store for him. The stroke, heavy as it was, he bore as would be expected of one whose converse was so much in another world. With the labors of the pulpit and parish, and those of educational causes with which he was connected, with denominational interests, with contributions for the press, all in turn pressing and demanding his attention, he continued at work, not faltering in the great purposes of his life. But the world could never be the same. The journey was thenceforward " under altered skies." A DARKENED HOME. 7)77 To his old classmate he writes (December 2, 1873) : — " Dear Daniel, — Friend of my earlier years! How in those years would these days have looked to us, when we are being borne along amid the sad, solemn, tremendous experiences of our mortal life — experiences which then appeared to belong to the dim, distant, hardly real scenery of some other and visionary world, and could never really be ours ! But here I am where deep calleth to deep, and the shadows around me are awful — and the only true light around me is that which gleams from no mortal shores. " I thank you much for your words of true-hearted sym- pathy and of genuine wish to comfort me. They affect me deeply ; they are very grateful to me. You knew my dear wife from the days of her girlhood, and can, better than most others, estimate my terrible loss in my bereave- ment of that sweet, noble, gifted, loving spirit that for most of my manly life — now more than thirty-eight years — has been almost perpetually beside me, the light of my heart and my home, and blent with all life's scenery, and become a part well-nigh of life itself, but has now gone from me, to return nevermore. "Such afflictions as mine commonly bring their own press of strange cares that will not allow grief its wont for self-indulgence or self-utterance. It is probably in mercy thus. For when I begin to think or speak of mine I know not where to stop. I may not attempt to tell you how I miss one presence everywhere ; how the lights seem gone out everywhere in this world, and there is to me the constant, dull, heavy pain of the feeling that some- thing is wanting — something sweet, beautiful, and loving is gone, which I shall not find again — which the all- circling sun shall nevermore behold in all his course. "There is a solemn comfort in the thoughts which you 378 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. suggest, that we are all gathering fast to that shadowy- border, one which our ' late departed saints ' and most of the friends have already passed. May God bring us to it with as rich ripeness of life and soul as I believe was pos- sessed by her whom I mourn ! So I believe we shall descend into the darkness that borders this mortal sphere with the assurance, through Him that has for us overcome death and the grave, of a rising hereafter to a reunion in the land of eternal light. May this be God's gift to us all ! " Two years afterward, September 2, 1875, Dr. Post writes from North Ferrisburg, then the home of his brother Oliver, where his mother had passed her last days and was buried, and where forty years before he had vis- ited on the wedding journey : — " My dear Son, — It seems strange to write ' Septem- ber ' and to feel that autumn is here again leading on to "winter. ' Eheu ! fugaces . . . Labuntur anni.' " What have the years brought, what borne away, and whither do they marshal .' " I am here, where I have been years ago with my mother, with your mother, with faces that are wrinkled and changed under distant suns, or look out on me only from the shores of other worlds. ' Oh ! for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still ! ' "Scenes from life's enacted drama come back, and personages and moods of being forever past come back, and for the moment seem to live, then vanish ; but as they • do, they utter words I could not, if I would, recite in the ears of youth, for youth has no dialect for them. But A DARKENED HOME. 379 with significance pointing to other worlds and vaster deeps and mightier continents of being, these utterances also admonish us of this world which is passing. ' Life let us cherish while yet the taper burns,' so as to make the most and best of it, to effectuate to the utmost its possibilities not only of blessing, but also of being blessed. " As I look back, how many harvests seem as within my reach, but which are now as with the dreams of a faded paradise ! Shall it be so with the future of my life or of yours .■' "These thoughts have stolen upon me as I have sat here in this silent chamber in a silent house, with the warm south winds sighing amid the pines under a haze that rests like a half sleep and half dream over all the land- scape, stretching from the hills above me over the valley and Lake Champlain to the distant and dim Adirondacks." CHAPTER XXVIII. EXTRACTS FROM ADDRESSES. Address in Broadway Tabernacle, New York — " Our Country as of the kingdom of truth, the seeming delay of the coming of the Lord, the long eclipses of the Sun of righteousness. Lo ! I am not slack concerning my promises. Lo ! all the ages are mine ; a thousand years with me are but as yesterday. Long is the lifetime of God. Ever watchful is his husbandry. Nothing truly good or beautiful perishes. There is no baffled, abortive virtue. There is no with- drawing, no forgetting, no wearying, in the work of his kingdom. Lo ! he that bringeth out the host of heaven by numbers, and calleth the stars by name, may forget to summon Arcturus or Orion in their season, or the Pleiades to their places in the sky, sooner than he may forget a LARGEL Y RETROSPECTIVE. 41 I single soul that trusts him, or withdraw from leading on the armies of Light to triumph. . . . " ' Neither fear for the loved and the sainted dead, lest they and their work have been lost, when they disappeared in the shadow of death. Lo ! I am the ever living One, the Victor over death and the grave ; I am the Lord of the world of the departed ; I open and shut its doors at my pleasure. Nothing good and lovely shall ever descend into the "kingdom of perpetual night." He that liveth and believeth on me shall never die. Lo ! I am he that was dead, and am alive for evermore. By dying I con- quered death. I came forth victor from the grave, and none of mine shall be held prisoners in its dark confines. Because I live, they shall live also. I keep the keys of the abyss, and not of the abyss only, but of the shining city, which I open and none shutteth evermore. I guard mine own, and I watch over their slumbers of the tomb. I hold them ever in memory, though the oblivion of uncounted ages and the dust of a thousand generations cover them. Through all the effacements of time or eternity I keep their names engraven on my heart, and I will that they shall be with me where I am. I shall surely bring them forth in the waking of the eternal morning. " ' Fear not, thou penitent and believing one, for thy sin or its power or its curse, for the scourge of conscience or for the terrors of the judgment day. I have died for thee, for thy pardon and redemption from sin and its doom, from its remorse and its fear ; I have risen again for thy renewal and glorification ; and I bind all things to my throne. I compel sorrow and pain and even evil itself to work for the salvation of those I have bought with my blood. To them I stanch all sorrows, I quell all fear, wipe away all tears ; I bolt the abyss, I unbar the gates of Light.' . . . 412 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " Such, according to Christ's annunciation, is his being, nature and power ; and such are his relations to his church. It follows that the church truly and supremely loyal to him is in eternal safeguard ; is victor over death ; leaves not its dead in the grave ; has eternal effectuating of all its true work, and has eternal life. Grounded, for- tressed, garrisoned, in Christ, it shall be conqueror over evil in this world and over the gates of Hades. . . . "The true church is Christocentric. It centralizes and crystallizes Christ's name. In its system all things relate to him. By him they are tested, gauged, ranked, and estimated ; with emphasis on different aspects of the one, manifold Christ, differing with differing stand- points of different ages and countries, it. yet ever con- fesses to him as the one Lord, 'the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.' As the astronomer from different standpoints of science and discovery would ever be look- ing at the same old heavens, though perpetually transfig- ured into infinite diversity of ever new beauty and glory, so the true church, with whatever changes from progress- ive knowledge and culture, ever confesses to one supreme and only Head, with Liberty, Truth and Love, as minis- ters of his light and life, and the organic builders of his kingdom." The sermon went on to show the power of the Trinity of Liberty, Truth and Love, in the history of the church, following somewhat the train of thought pursued in the sermon on " Our Country as a Factor in the Kingdom of Christ." " As I close," said the speaker, "a solemn thought presses which drives me for refuge to the final clause of our text : ' I am the ever Living one ; I was dead, but am alive for- ever more, and have the keys of death and Hades ' ; a clause without which all earthly triumphs were but a LARCEL Y RE TROSPECTIVE. 4 I 3 funeral procession, and the banner blazoned with victory at last only droops its folds over the grave. Across the mystery of our onward march there lies one solemn, cer- tain fact, one vast shadow, which we mortals call death. Fifty years hence, and however bright or grand the march of the years of the twentieth century may be, we shall most of us be lying under that shadow, to mortal vision among the vanished, the passed away. " But is it truly so } our souls inquire. Is this mortal vision all .■• Ends the grandest life-hymn only in a dirge, wailing off into the eternal silence over the loved and the lost that return no more .•' " Who that has fallen suddenly on some old letter, and whose eyes have been running over the lines traced by a hand long since vanished, yet seeming still quick with the thought and passion, the genius and love of the far-gone years pulsating through them, has not been startled to ask himself, Where is now all that wealth of life, being, faculty .'' " What is it now ? What has become of it .? Is it van- ished away forever .' Has it gone down to the grave, to come up no more .' . . . " And here now, brethren, how on us presses that question in such an hour as this, with its memory of half a century full of names of love and honor and its outlook to our own personal future. Oh, the outreach in such an hour, of a human soul, its love, its longing, its hope, into the world of the departed ! On what can it fasten, on what rest, but on One who has the keys of Death and Hades .' How glad at this time the voice of him that sitteth high above all height, at the right hand of God — the voice that was heard of John in Patmos : ' Lo ! I am he that liveth, and was dead, and am alive forever more, and have the keys of death and Hades.' Lo ! here is the declara- 414 ^^ UMAN MARCELL US POST. tion that lifts us forever above the death shade. Our loved and sainted dead are not lost. They wait us beyond the gulf. Neither they nor their works, nor aught true and lovely, shall ever be lost from the universe of life. " Not in gloom, then, nor in fear or sorrow, but sing- ing, we go down into the valley of sunset, into the shadow of death, and lo ! there is no sunset valley, no shadow of death. The cloud and darkness are transfigured into the jasper and chrysolite of the New Jerusalem, the starry propylsea of the City of Light. And the gates shall not be shut at all by day, and there shall be no night evermore. ' O City of our God, so near and yet so far ! Lo ! on the borders of this shadowy land We pilgrims of perpetual sorrow stand. Our hands outreaching to the far-off shore. . . . Very far off its marble cities seem ; Very far off; beyond our sensuous dream ; Its woods unruffled by the wild wind's roar ; Yet doth the ravening surge howl to its very verge. One moment, and we breathe within the evermore. Those we have loved and lost, long, long ago. Dwell in these cities for from mortal woe, Eternal peace have they, God wipes all tears away. They drink the river of Life that flows forevermore. Thither we hasten through these regions dim, But lo ! the white wings of the Seraphim Gleam in the sunset. Lo ! on that happier shore Our lightened souls shall know the life and love of long ago, And shades of sorrow, sin, and death shall flee forevermore.' " In the June number of The Andover Review of 1884 was a contribution on " Transition Periods in Religious Thought." "Such periods, welcome or unwelcome, coveted or LARGEL Y RETROSPECTIVE. 4 1 5 dreaded, are sure to come, coming on the world like a barometric storm, cyclonic at times in both suddenness and force, or like the slow and silent approach of spring, or winter, if you will ; still it is in the ordinance of nature and the order of life that they should come. . . . ' "Change of truth in some regard, as of aspect or relation, form or essence, or of new analyses, syntheses, developments, — novelty, in some form, — seems essential to its sustained life-force. God passes before us ever the same, yet eternally new as the ever-rolling skies. . . . " The life of the world goes on by pulse and paroxysm rather than by continuous uniform stress. The transition period is that of long-hidden and silently working forces, suddenly coming to outburst or outflash, or, to change the figure, of floods, long, and it may be slowly, accumulating, then suddenly breaking their barrier and rushing into rapids. . . . "Transition periods are those of great opportunity as well as of great dangers ; they are pivotal and plastic for the issues of a vast future. They often determine the direction, "quality, and consequence of religious thought for a cycle of centuries. . . . " Ordinarily the transition periods are not difRcult of recognition. Often we are conscious of their approach as of something abnormal and bodeful in the air, as the chill of the iceberg on the sea or the hot pulse of the cyclone on the atmosphere. There is a murmur in the deeps or on the heights as of the coming earthquake or tempest. . . . "The Church cannot well ignore extensive, persistent and pronounced tendencies to transition movements, from whatever causes arising. If morbid, capricious, irrational, they point to diseases it may be vital to recognize and, if practical, to remedy. But not uncommonly they indicate some real, grave cause imbedded in its theology, some 4 1 6 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. incongruity or conflict with the human reason and moral consciousness of the world ; an incongruity and conflict which must be relieved, or it will imperil the faith of man — at first, it may be, of the thinkers, but, subse- quently) of the million. . . . " The danger is, lest on the appearance of the signs of change, in the fi^st alarm the impulse should be toward immediate, arbitrary, stringent repression. No chapters in human history are more opprobrious than those which record such attempts ; none more disastrous and ulti- mately more hopeless. . . . " If the movement lies deep in reason and Christian consciousness, the attempted repression will, at the most, only effect a surface arrest or reflux, as futile ultimately as the storm surge against the profound tides of the ocean. Repression, failing, tends to a stronger and more serious outbreak. The dammed-up river accumulates a mass for a mightier overflow. The peaceful stream breaks into rapids or a devastating inundation. . . . " But while transition is to be regarded as in itself neither hostility nor disaster, yet we are not to forget such is the contexture of our thoughts, wrought through time and custom, that change in any single article in the scheme of old and time-honored beliefs not infrequently imperils a whole system of correlated and associated truths. . . . " There is danger, often, of slaughtering many truths in killing one falsehood ; of uprooting much wheat in extirpating one tare. There is hardly any false belief but becomes in time organically inwrought with many true ones. . . . " It may be asked, ' By what criterion shall we know that transition is true progress .''... You will know it by its trend ; that will be Christward. Its system of LARGEL Y RETROSPECTIVE. 4 1 7 truth and life will be Christocentric. Out on the drifting deeps our anchorage, cynosure, and goal will be the eter- nal Christ ; ' the same yesterday, to-day, and forever ' : for- ever the same, yet ever new, with everlasting unfoldings of nature and relations and new revealings into the infi- nite, ministering in the eternal unveilings of his beauty the endless novelty that attracts and quickens to endless progress." The second day of February, 1885, marks the death, after a brave struggle for years with the progress of disease, but at the last after a brief illness, of Mrs. Clara H. Young, the third daughter of Dr. Post. She was called away from her three little children at a time when her care seemed indispensable, and her loss was felt BOt merely in the home life, but through a wide circle of loving friends and in various literary and chari- table undertakings. Of the place occupied by this dearly-loved one in the household, of her intellectual gifts and bright, brave spirit, of her thousand winning ways and charms of person and character, it would be idle to attempt any extended mention here. They are qualities which will be cherished long and lovingly in memory, but which can find no adequate expression in words. To Mrs. Mead Dr. Post writes : — " She passed in the prime of a rich, beautiful woman- hood, fiiU of the opening fruits and brilliant possibilities of a widely-varied beneficence in which God seemed lead- ing her in many spheres. God had richly endowed, her with potencies by which mind touches mind in the varied circles in which she moved. She was ever sweet, womanly and loving, as she was noble, and her sun went . down as it was climbing toward noon, and we can only 4 1 8 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. say : ' Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight.' " To Calvin Hulburd he writes : — "Your consolations to me in my great sorrow are rational and Christian. Yet He who wept with the mourners at Bethany will pardon our human tears over the loved and loving, the beautiful and gifted dead. "There are things no words can describe beforehand, and which none can utter after their coming. It is not want of trust or submission to the heavenly Father, not from reason or philosophy or the absence of them, but from nature itself, which God has given us — nature stretch- ing out her arms with unutterable fondness and longing down into the grave — down into the 'nevermore,' after the fleeting, vanishing forms of the loved dead. . . . " I cannot tell you what a wealth of love and hope and joy and promise for this world has gone from my life. . . . I cannot make it seem real. It seems surely as some sad dream from which I must soon awake. But morning and evening come and go. The suns have been rising and setting now three weeks to-morrow since she left us, and the darling one that has been for many years wrought into all my life, who has been my housekeeper since her dear mother died, she appears nowhere beneath the sun. " Crowds pass below my window unceasiijgly, but her face is not among them. " I start at a gentle tap at my study door, in the moment's thought to see her sweet, bright smile as of wont. I see indeed some of the stricken household with the shadows of a great heartbreak on the brow, or the wistful faces of the sweet little motherless ones looking- up to me pleading with the unutterable love alud pity which are in my heart. ... I look and I know th©' dream LARGEL Y RETROSPECTIVE. 4 1 9 is not to come to pass ; until the earth and the sea give up their dead she will not return. " So I sit in my silent study, sad but not disconsolate ; not murmuring. I know that God is behind all the cloud, and his name is eternally Love. I thank him for the inex- pressibly precious gift enjoyed so long and the hope that follows it to the blessed heavens, and for the heavens grown more attractive and beautiful, and for the assurance of a reunion beyond the storm and surge of this mortal life on the shores of the land of peace whgre farewells are never heard more." CHAPTER XXXI. UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS. Address at unveiling of the Blair Monument, and at the funeral of Samuel T. Glover. — Articles in The Andover Review on the " Life of William Lloyd Garrison," and on " The Things which Cannot be Shaken." IN 1885 (May 21) an undertaking long in progress was accomplished in the unveiling of the statue of General Frank P. Blair, which, from its site at the entrance of Forest Park, now looks down the broad avenue leading to the city of St. Louis. General Blair was an old personal friend of Dr. Post, and members of 'the family of the former had long been connected with the First Congregational Church. Ten years before the event here spoken of, in the presence of a great concourse of citizens and the veterans of the First Missouri Volunteer Infantry, the funeral services of their old commander had been held at Tenth and Locust streets. The address of Dr. Post then delivered, and which was, says The Republican, " extemporaneous and of rare eloquence," appeared in the local press the day following. Dr. Post, at the request of General Blair's family, was selected by the committee in charge of the ceremonies to deliver the principal oration at the unveiling of the monu- ment, but found himself unequal to the physical exertion of speaking so long in the open air and in the blustering weather which prevailed that afternoon, and the oration which had been prepared by him was not in fact deliv- ered. It was, however, treated as a part of the program UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS. 42 I and published in the pamphlet containing the speeches and describing the ceremonies of the occasion. The address was something more than a mere personal memorial of General Blair. His life had been a most potent factor, in guiding and determining the issues of the slavery conflict in Missouri preceding the war, as well as later on in keeping the state in the Union ; and the oration accordingly traces in outline the progress of the Benton and Blair Freesoil party in Missouri, and the struggle between the nation and the States' Rights party, as well as the coup de main for the military control of St. Louis, and the subsequent career of Blair in the field and in political life. The following is from the opening of the address : — " Woe to the people that will not listen, that shuts its ears, to its heroic or martyr ages. Such a people is in moral decay. The age of glory is surely setting, though it be in an age of gold. " Of heroic memories and examples, it is timely that we begin to gather in the firstlings of the moral harvest of our civil war — the growth from so many graves of our best and bravest. The years for the calmer and clearer reading of that terrible drama are coming on, while the personnel of it, meantime, is fast drifting into the realm of myth and tradition. The glorious fugitive forms require to be fixed before they fly forever. The landscape is with vaster and stronger eminence and outline, but lying in dimmer light : the mountain peak more emergent into the empyrean, but from depths of thickening haze and shadow. " The war storm, with its dark mass and lurid flash, has drifted to the far horizon. It is now about one fifth of a century since the shock and shudder of our civil war. Nearly a generation has gone since the blue and the gray 422 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. have been lying down together at rest, ' sleeping on to the judgment day.' " From the passion of war, of victory or defeat, of the march and the battle, from the rapture and the agony of the strife, how still they sleep ! The grief of the living, over marble mausoleum, or inquiring vainly of moun- tain or wilderness for their dead, has had its course ; fresh tears have ceased to bedew the moss-grown grave, for that the fountain is dried or the mourner has come to lie down with the mourned in the slumbers of the tomb, or sorrow has grown to a love and honor akin to a solemn and mighty gladness over the beauty and glory of heroic deaths. The war storm laid, time has been bringing calmer and kindlier judgments and a larger charity to both victors and vanquished. These may not obliterate principles, yet the charitable and generous judgments of history will remember that the epochs which this monu- ment commemorates were torn with partisan passion and convulsion, which for the time seemed to confound our normal thought and reason, to unsettle the primal princi- ples of our political and social order. But the era of madness being over, war having exscinded the desperate and deadly malady with the surgeny of the sword, again, like the eagle that has ' mewed its mighty youth,' our one united nation is exulting along its sunward way." Of General Blair the following character-picture will be readily recognized by those who know him : — " The old Ironsides of the Revolution seemed drifting pilotless upon the rocks, and picaroons and mutineers were plundering her chests and distributing her cargo. " It was a time when in Missouri a master mind was wanted, that clearly comprehended the tremendous issue and was resolute and fearless to meet it ; that could not be deluded, intimidated, bribed or seduced ; whose sagac- UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS. 423 ity and intrepidity and patriotism commanded widely the confidence of intelligent and loyal men ; one who was vigilant and wary as well as brave, fertile of resource, patient of labor, reticent and ready of counsel, prompt and fearless in action. Such a man was the immediate supreme exigency of the hour. Such a man at such time was worth armies ; and such a man for such a time, to an eminent degree, was Francis P. Blair. Widely and per- sonally known and knowing amid both parties in the state from his previous career, largely conversant with affairs in Washington, and after the inauguration of Lincoln, and especially after the appointment of his brother Montgomery to a place in the cabinet, in the con- fidence of the national government, he was eminently the man for the hour. Emergencies ever found him ready. At the beginning of the war, he, beyond others, under- stood what it meant, its spirit and purpose, its audacity and its ambition ; he gauged its trend, its mass, its exi- gencies ; he clearly read its problem and penetrated it with practical conviction and purpose. Quick to read through tangled complications of political interests and charac- ters, and to forecast the resultant issue, he was seldbm taken by surprise, or suffered ' the native hue of resolu- tion ' to be 'sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought.' Untrammeled by intrigue, superior to fear or favor, while others curiously speculated, he had reached imperative, practical principles and convictions; while they doubted and hesitated, he acted; while they were parleying and debating, with him the thing was done. Unperturbed amidst threats, dangers and disasters, quick of eye and brain and hand, sagacious and wise in tact and in that highest prudence that recognized the fit time of action, he saw when utter daring was the highest discretion and audacity alone was safety. 424 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. The subjoined passage is from the close : — " Should the storm cloud ever again darken our skies — which may heaven forefend — and passion and party frenzy strike at the life of the nation, still may we hope that heroism and patriotism may gather impulse to loftier dar- ing and sacrifice for liberty and fatherland, as the youth of coming times may look on that heroic form and face placed here as type of the heroic days, over the growing magnificence of our beautiful city. So shall the Amer- ican mind be inspired to produce new heroes ever for the new exigencies of the future. And should there ever be required another Curtius to plunge for the life of the land into another Curtian gulf,, or another Horatius Codes to stop with his own person the flight of recreant or panic- stricken citizens ; or even a new Iphigenia to propitiate by her own sweet life the rage of adverse tempest sweep- ing our nation from its course ; or should another Arnold of Winkelried be demanded to gather in his own bosom hostile spears in order to break the phalanx of our coun- try's foes, and open ' a way to liberty,' we trust, with this statue standing forth with the glorious army of martyrs from the past in the light of coming times, the self- devoting ones shall not be wanting in the hour of trial to place themselves between the country and the country's danger, coming from whatever quarter, from without or within, from foreign invasion or internal faction, from plot- ting among the few or demagogism among the many, from fraud or falsehood, from treachery or violence, from the corruption of the one or the million ; and that, through the favor of God, over all the glory of our empire shall be the inspiration and defense of heroic memories ever- more. "And now, in this hope and prayer, amid the sugges- tions of this occasion, and the scenes and events called UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS. 425 up in review, in vision of the awful tragedy, the almost national shipwreck, through which we have passed, look- ing back over the red gulf wandered over by the shadows of the heroic dead, mingling with those of mighty woes and sorrows, — a red gulf where sleep half a million of our best and bravest, for the maintenance of our national life forever cut off from the light of the sun, — I feel still the pulse of mighty rapids along which our country is being borne, with sounds in our ears, whether of the nearer cataract, or of an ocean stream bearing on to the great sea. I feel awed as in the presence of the solemn mystery of a future of vast hope and vast fear. As we stand here to-day, not alone, but girt round with a glorious cloud of witnesses, the wise and good, the gifted, the beautiful, the brave and the saintly, that have wrought and suffered for the life of the land in other days, but now are fast drifting into the eternal past, I am borne under the shadow of that throne in whose timeless date stars and galaxies rise and set, and earthly systems and empires come and go like ephemerides in the setting sun. In that presence, I pass from an atmosphere of uncharitable senti- ment and severe condemnatory judgment toward those from whom I may have differed in my mortal years, to feelings of pity and sympathy towards those implicated with me in the weakness and frailty of this life, as I think how soon we shall lie down together ifi the dust : and I look for that which in this scheme of change binds eter- nity to time, and earthly empire to the eternal throne." In the year previous to the unveiling of the Blair monument, January, 1884, occurred the death of Samuel T. Glover, himself as conspicuous in the history of this state for his unflinching patriotism in her sore time of need, as for his standing at the bar. He was the personal 426 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. friend of General Blair and co-worker atid adviser with him through all the momentous struggle for Missouri in 1861. The relations of Mr. Glover with Dr. Post through all their acquaintance were kind and affectionate as those of a brother. At his home Dr. Post was a frequent visitor, whose coming was welcomed by all the household. The funeral of Mr. Glover was attended by members of the Supreme Court, who came from Jefferson City for that purpose, by the bench and bar of St. Louis,' who were present in a body, and by many leading men of the city from different walks of life. The services were conducted by Dr. Post, and short addresses were made by him and by Rev. Dr. Leighton, an old friend of Mr. Glover's family. Dr. Post shared in the universal regret at the loss to the community of a man of the kingly endowments and public spirit and sterling worth of Mr. Glover; but he also felt most deeply the personal loss to himself in the private walks of life of a most valued friend. "I feel little fitted," he said, "to be the organ of a public utterance to-day, or to be the voice of the public love and honor and sorrow for him whose lifeless form we bear at this time to the mansions of rest The stroke comes too near me personally. It strikes a friend of many years; if not lifelong, one of more than the life- time of a generation, and one loved by me beyond the ordinary measure of friendship." The address referred to the legal talents of Mr. Glover and his standing at the bar and to his eminent services to the country; and it bore witness to the noble and gen- erous qualities which made him so beloved in the relations of home life and in his circle of friends. After touching upon the shining qualities and career of his dead friend. Dr. Post said : — UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS. 427 " We Stand here wailing as over a lost life. But is that life-force perished ? Is its imprint on the page of time erased forever ? That loved material type, goes it down to the grave to come up no more ? That brain, with its chambers of wondrous imagery, its godlike faculty of reason, its ' thoughts that wander through eternity,' is it forever sealed ? That heart, with its throb of generous and heroic impulse, is it forever hushed ? Those lips, shall they open with the charm of persuasion, the flash of logic, or the music of truth and love, no more ? Is all the opulence of such a life perished ? No ! there is that in its impress on the world that shall never pass away. Man's words and deeds and spirit live after him. That life will pulse on in the veins of his children and his children's children, a power for good through coming years ; and when human memories perish, and the foot- steps of human love and honor and sorrow shall cease to visit his tomb, when the mourners and the mourned of to-day shall lie down together in the chambers of silence, still in the great electric conduction of thought and senti- ment from mind to mind and age to age, it shall live on incorporate, if unrecognized, with the action and feeling of the world in the currents of the future, till time itself shall lapse. Nor then, nor ever, shall it die. In the eter- nal memory of God, in eternal consequence, and in the eternal judgment, our mortal lives shall live on immortal. " This immortality of action and destiny invests every human life with a solemn significance. This thought pressing on its close makes life's finished record awful — a record forever. Writ in joy or sorrow, in honor or shame, in virtue or sin alike, what is writ is writ, unto eternal registry and eternal adjudication when the books shall be opened to be closed no more. "Before that throne of judgment, in the light of the 42 8 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. all-pure One, we know no son of Adam may stand, how- ever loved or honored, in the strength of his own purity. One alone is disclosed to mortal man almighty to save in that awful arbitrament. . . . " Never shall I forget the lesson imparted to me when, in the days of my youth, sitting alone on a grassy mound in the then quiet seclusion of the shades of Mount Ver- non, I looked for the first time on the tomb of Washington, and read on it no sculptured trophy or triumphal legend of that great life, but simply the text, ' I am the Resur- rection and the Life : he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and he that liveth, and believeth in me shall never die.' Here, dear friends, at this hour, is all our comfort, all our hope. Earth fades away ; earthly fames drift off into the everlasting silences : in Him alone the buried majesty and power and genius of the Westminsters of the world at last can rest ; in Him alone." The Andover Review of May, 1886, contained a review from the pen of Dr. Post pf the Life of William Lloyd Garrison, and in the December number of that periodical appeared his last contribution to the press. This was an article entitled " The Things which Cannot be Shaken." It was the last, as it was among the most significant, of his publications. ..." The life of the world must go on with endless agitation and change in the phenomenal, together with a perpetual outreach to grasp what is substantively change- less and eternal." Difficulties in unessentials presented by the " higher criticism " may be flanked by Christianity and its march not thereby retarded. To such criticisms " it is legitimate to show, by way of answer, that, however curious, im- UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS. 429 portant or interesting, they may be, they do not touch the life of our Christian faith, and have no claim to arrest Christian evangelism or belief." . . . The proper quest of mankind " is not simply after truths that are imperishable ; but . . . after those which are potent to grasp and hold human belief. . . . Our inquiry is for a form of Christian truth and evidence com- petent not for angels and coming ages, but for men and those of our own time," and for " a method of Christian proof which is accessible, apprehensible, and practicable for ordinary men ; within the compass of their time, opportunity, and capacity of investigating and judging." And the truth not to be shaken is that which "carries with it the life question of Christianity. . . . Throwing down the gage of mortal combat on mistaken or immaterial or inadequate issues suggested by such criticism is likely to prove disastrous in various ways. Victory on such issue does not establish the truth of Christianity, while a defeat is regarded as a defeat and overthrow of Christianity itself, and that which may be at the utmost only a capture of a redoubt will be looked at as the fall of the citadel ; or the retreat from the skirmish line found indefens- ible, will be chronicled as an abandonment of the campaign. . . . " There are two modes of Christian proof : one leads through a vast circuit of literature, Biblical, historical, philological and philosophical ; is mainly apologetic, defen- sive, or negative ; widely complicated and concatenated, accessible and traversable only to the few ; for the most part cold, distant. The other is positive, immediate, direct, open to the million; aggressive, imperative, per- sonal, full of living force, outflashing and glowing as the sun. One begins with a book and a system to evolve and prove a person ; the other with a person who proves him- 430 TR VMAN MARCELL US POST. self, then tries, tests, proves books and systems, and arms what he validates with divine sanction and the authority of the guiding and illuminating Spirit of Truth. One begins with a letter : the other with a life ; one with a chainwork of long-drawn inductions and interdependent propositions : the other with direct moral intuitions or inductions so immediate, necessary and flashlike, that they have the force of intuitions." As to the former method of proof, " when we look at the vastness of the field and the circuit of investigation required for the integrity of this argument, where often the strength of the whole chain amounts only to that of the feeblest link, we cannot forbear pausing and inquiring whether the way of faith unto salvation necessarily lies through this extended curriculum of erudition, and the settlement of questions so far beyond the time, opportu- nity, and competency of the vast millions to whom the gospel of salvation came ; whether Christ, who calls upon all men to come unto himself and be saved, and especially proclaims, as marking his mission from God, his gospel to the poor, can only be approached like the mystic image in some Egyptian temple, through a long avenue of sphinxes, each propounding their enigmas, which we must read or die. . . . "It is under the uplifted, personal Christ that the. salvation of men and the new birth of the world is to go onward. So it was in the first ages of Christianity. It was under this vision and argument, not through erudi- tion, philosophy, or bibliological or historic lore, that the arts and arms and empire of paganism went down. So it has been in the ages since, and so it will be in those to come ; above all storms of change, God shining in the face of Jesus Christ, the ever-unsetting sun. . . . "TheTcingdom of Christ must stand or fall with its Founder. . . . UNDYING MEN AND UNDYING TRUTHS. 43 1 " The ' higher criticism ' may allege what difficulties you please in the Old Testament Scripture, but discuss and decide on them as it will, there still confronts it the question ever demanding logical answer, 'Jesus of Naza- reth — who, and whence, and what was he ? ' . . . " The New Testament record . . . has so carried with it the general trust of men in it as an honest and substan- tially veritable history that its portraiture of its central personage may be regarded as accepted in its main linea- ments as real and true by the general consensus of man- kind, and that the Christ-idea diffused by it through the ages may be regarded as a true historic face looking down like the sun in heaven on the world's mind, swaying its tides and mirroring itself in its deeps. . . . "The deepest, strongest, most instantaneous and uni- versal of all forms of knowledge and belief is the intui- tional. ... To deny or decry our intuitions is to deny or decry all reasonings and all science, as all must begin or proceed with postulating their truthfulness. They may be at times abused, may be deceived, may sometimes play us false, may require to be educated. So may the eye ; still I must see with it, or not at all ; it may require the achromatic lens as well as optic power, yet I have to rely on it in order to correct its own mistakes. So to reject or discredit intuitions, because of possibility of abuse or mistake, is to make all mental structure impossible, and to renounce faculties and methods through which errors or abuses may be detected or remedied. "These intuitions are the first elements and factors in all science, intellectual or moral ; and our moral intui- tions are as valid and as imperative, in their sphere, on belief and action, as those of the pure intellect ; and they relate to things as real and abiding. ..." Each science is to be built up on its own dis- 432 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. tinctive principia : and in that of religion, the principia are our moral sentiments or intuitions directed to moral objects or interests, and in Christianity especially and primarily to the person of Christ. . . . " Christ is self-proved to us, not only by his congruity with our moral tastes and judgments, but also with our perpetual moral wants. So long as we are conscious of sin and sorrow and death, and a need and longing, for for- giveness, purity and moral restoration, with the gift of immortality and eternal life, so long will man's outreach- ing sense of eternal want lead him, disappointed and despairing from all other outlook, to turn to Christ with the outcry of Peter, ' Whither else shall we go .^ Thou only hast the words of eternal life.' " Christ will ever stand as " the perfect Ideal, ever shap- ing souls to a nobler, loftier, diviner manhood, and wear- ing all the attributes predicated of himself as the Christ, the Son of the living God, interpreted to their full scrip- tural import ; an Atlantsean figure bearing up the entire system of Christianity and glorious with consummate revelation of God." CHAPTER XXXII. ILLNESS AND DEATH. Signs of the coming end. — Visit to Des Moines at meeting of the American Board. — Fatal Illness and Death in December, 1886. AT the period to which this narrative has now been brought, signs of the coming end began to thicken. The letters written during these later years seem to have, even beyond their former wont, a prevision of the eternal world. Thus, in 1884, recalling the early days in Andover, he writes to Mrs, Mead : — "Very far off these beautiful times and scenes seem now, and ever more and more receding, as we are borne hurrying like the clouds onward. But in grateful and sweet memory they go with me and ever will go as I move toward the valley of the sunset, more and more solitary of the friends of earlier years, as my steps verge on the twilight where the earthly path seems to fade and the stars are stealing out one by one as outsentinels of the City of Light." "The mighty problems that lie at the heart of our being and environ it," he writes the same friend in 1885, "press more and more upon me as the shores of the eternal land loom up more and more grand and awful across the narrowing gulf of time." At this period Dr. Post was fully conscious of a physi- cal disorder in the nature of heart trouble, which might hasten the end. He writes in 1884: "That great and long-faithful organ seems sometimes aweary and laboring with a mufHed drumbeat." He had experienced within a few years recurrences — 434 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. not at very frequent intervals, but such as to cause the gravest alarm — of fainting fits, lapses of consciousness, sometimes lasting for almost an hour, and from which it was difficult to arouse him ; and they were warnings not merely of failing strength but of the danger of suddea death at almost any time, and caused much anxiety and. dread on the part of his family. In the fall of 1886 the American Board, of which he had for many years been a prominent member, held its annual meeting at Des Moines, Iowa. The session then held was to him, as to all Congregational clergymen, one of surpassing interest, involving as it did a discussion of the requirements placed on candidates for the missionary field, touching their belief in the destiny of souls in the. heathen world to whom the gospel had not been pro- claimed. So anxious was Dr. Post about this issue and. its wise settlement, that, although in a low state of health, he went through the fatigues of a very rough, trip, in order to be, if possible, of some service in the deliberations of the Board. On his arrival he found himself too feeble even to attend its sessions, though sent for with the urgent request that he should at least take a seat on the platform, if he were unable to do more. After passing two sleep- less nights at the hotel in Des Moines he came home utterly worn out in body and spirit. One grave trouble which had been growing on him for a number of years now became rapidly worse. He sel- dom got any sleep after one o'clock at night, and to aggra- vate this, a new disorder, known to the medical fraternity as Cheyne-Stokes respiration, began to manifest itself. His breathing would fluctuate and at periodic intervals almost cease. While he longed for sleep, he dreaded its. approach, lest it should prove the harbinger of death. ILLNESS AND DEATB. 435 On Saturday, December, 25, he was attacked with paroxysms of great distress, to relieve which resort was had to hypodermic injections of morphine. Under the influence of this drug his mind became clouded and got to wandering. He was not expected to live through the following night, but the next day he rallied surprisingly, and his faculties resumed much of their norma] clearness. He was manifestly a good deal improved, and his phy- sicians, Drs. Johnson and Baumgarten, seemed to regard the change as decidedly hopeful ; but early the next week the distressful paroxysms and Cheyne-Stokes respiration returned, with no relief but the use of morphine, followed as before by darkened consciousness. There were, how- ever, lucid intervals, unspeakably precious, during which the spirit, which seemingly had taken its last look upon mor- tal things, was back again in the bedchamber and holding- converse with its loved ones. Monday, December 27, the baby grandson, Martin Hayward Post, was brought in by his father and mother, and placed at the bedside, and in the presence of the gath- ered kindred, and in a profound stillness only broken by sobs, the covenant of baptism was administered. ' Early in the week his brother Dr. Hand and his niece Mrs. Stryker arrived in response to summons by telegraph. On seeing him Dr. Hand was greatly moved and fell on his knees at the bedside. " Brother Truman," he said, "whatever of good there has been in the life of the poor wandering boy that found your home in Jacksonville has been owing to you. As I grow older, I am getting more and more to believe in the gospel of Christ as you have taught it." To which Dr. Post answered tenderly and solemnly : " That is my faith. It is the faith which has come down to me through the ages." When himself Dr. Post was fully conscious that the end 436 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. was at hand and faced it with that deep and unruffled calm which was in keeping with his character. During one of Dr. Johnson's visits he said, "Doctor, do you think I shall ever get up again ? " When told that in all probability he would not, he said, " I have thought so. I have supposed for a good while that I had a dis- order which sooner or later would take me off. You know I have no fear of death. But I feel a sense of awe to think that only a thin veil divides me from the eternal world, and that in so short a time my soul will stand in the presence of my Maker. But you know that my Saviour will be there to lean upon." At another tihie, as Dr. Johnson entered the room, he said pleasantly, "Well, doctor, you see I am jogging around the corner." Once he seemed to be thinking of the life in Jackson- ville, and asked to hear a song which used to be sung there by the children in old days, to Mrs. Hemans' verses, beginning " Come to the sunset tree " — a song telling of twilight repose and tranquil musings on the " world beyond the grave." Campbell's poem, "The Last Man," with its prophecy of immortality, was also in his thoughts, and he repeated most of the lines aloud, recalling them at intervals. On Tuesday he became delirious and fancied himself away from home, and about to take the train, and in fear of being left behind ; insisting on having his baggage put in order and everything got ready at once for the trip. That evening, while in one of these hallucinations, he had himself dressed, and walked across the hall into the room occupied by the children of his deceased daughter, Mrs. Young. Once there, he imagined himself at the home of his sister Jane, at Charlotte, on Lake Champlain, with the expanse of water and mountains just before him. ILLNESS AND DMA TH. 43 7 He Stood at the window for some time and tried to dis- cover the lake and the hill country -beyond, but at length gave up the attempt, saying it was too dark to see the peaks on the other shore. He passed an hour or more in the room with the grandchildren, peaceful and con- tented, never doubting the fact that somehow he was back again among his old kindred in Vermont. In an interval of consciousness, and one believed at the time to be his last, all of the younger generation were called together and one after another brought into the room, each in turn receiving from him a smile and caress and some word of parting affection and admonition. Toward the end, and while in complete possession of his faculties and fully aware that death was close at hand, he said to those about him, after a long pause, and in solemn and measured tones, as if intending that his words should have the weight of a last testimony : " I die in hope of salvation through Jesus Christ." Wednesday and Thursday the paroxysms became more frequent, and under the morphine applied to ease them, as also by reason of the progress of disease, his mind was shadowed and wandering most of the time. Once or twice in his delirium he prayed as he prayed in the pulpit, with a full, strong intonation, coherently and fervently and for minutes together. • Among the last words remeinbered, he said in h^-lf consciousness, " As I stand in the presence of the mystery that is" — and then his faculties failed and the sentence was never finished. Thursday night it was plain that the end was close at hand. Shortly after midnight, the unmistakable signs caused the watchers to summon the household to the bed- side, and near five o'clock in the morning of the last day of 1886, as the gray dawn was breaking, his.spirit passed away. CHAPTER XXXIII. FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. JANUARY 3, 1887, was the time appointed for the funeral observances. The day was bitterly cold and was made doubly trying by the wind which was blowing violently. In consequence of Dr. Post's long pastorate over its people, the Congregational Church on Delmar Avenue was fitly selected as the place for the services. Loving hands had draped its walls in black and had strewn its pulpit platform with flowers and branches of palm. Despite the increment weather, the audience room was thronged. Among those who gathered there, besides members of the church and congregation, were many from other Congregational churches in St. Louis and from the church at Webster Groves, not a few of whom had known Dr. Post as a pastor in former times and through 'trying and stormy days in the life of the mother church. In the assembly were old faces — not many of them — which belonged to the early period in St. Louis — faces of those who had been the friends of Dr. Post in his younger manhood. And men well known in the community, representative citizens in different callings, to some of whom Dr. Post, although not personally known, had stood for much that was good and noble in the his- tory of St. Loiiis, were there to do honor to his memory. And there were those from without the state ; teachers and officers of institutions with which Dr. Post was at 438 FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. 439 his death connected, who had come from Chicago and Monticello to be present at the funeral. Dr. Post had, within a few years before, and up to the time of his death, been a member of the Chi Alpha Society; a club composed of clergymen from different denominations, who were wont to meet informally from time to time at the houses of the various members. He was actively connected also with the Evangelical Alliance, a large organization of ministers, representing most of the Protestant churches in St. Louis. Members of both organizations assembled at the house and went thence in a body with the funeral procession to the church. Those who acted as pallbearers were L. L. Walbridge, George Denison, Moses S. Forbes, Thomas Howard, George S. Edgell, Denham Arnold, Dr. Charles E. Briggs, and Robert P. Studley. Additional and honorary pall- bearers, all of them intimate friends of former years, were Judges Samuel Treat and Thomas J. C. Fagg ; James E. Yeatman, Charles Belcher, Melvin L. Gray, Charles Holmes, Dr. John B. Johnson, and William D. Griswold. Following them were the kindred of the second and third generation and a train of mourning household friends. As the procession entered the building, the congrega- tion rose, and the words of the Ninetieth Psalm, so often spoken by the old pastor and so familiarly associated with his voice, and presence in former scenes of mourning, were chanted by the choir to the muffled refrain of the organ. The reading of other and appropriate passages from Scripture by Rev. Dr. Brank, pastor of the Central Pres- byterian Church, followed. Prayer was then offered by Rev. E. B. Burrows, of the 440 TRUMAN MARCELL US POST. Congregational Church of Webster Groves, and the hymn beginning " Forever with the Lord ! " was sung, as it had been sung thirteen years before at the funeral services after the death of Mrs. Post. Rev. J. G. Merrill, Dr. Post's successor in the pastorate, and a most considerate and loving friend, delivered the principal discourse, a large part of which was historical and touching upon events and incidents narrated in these pages, and solely for that reason not here inserted. His address closed with a character sketch, of which the fol- lowing were leading thoughts : ' — " The flight of his imagination was, on great occasions, the wonder and admiration of those who heard him. . . . History was his favorite pursuit. The men of the past lived in his thinking, and the deeds of bygone ages were as vivid as present transactions. The rare faculty of a correct perspective was his, the ability to group events also. The 'trend' of affairs, as he often expressed it, was the constant object of his search. . . . " And he was a philosopher. The deep things of God, the farthest reaches of the human mind, engaged his thought. He was of the Lord's chosen ones bidden by the Master to launch out into the deep. In his later years the richness of his conversation upon vast themes was only surpassed by its breadth and vigor. Others might be content with the beauty of the ocean of truth ; he sounded its deeps to discover the hidden treasure. Systems he did not formulate, doctrines he cared little to develop, but the thoughts that underlie systems, the truths that stand behind doctrines, were his delight. For he was a seer. The logical processes that other minds must employ he overleaped. The trodden paths that others had walked in he had left behind. The mountain FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. 44 1 top, whence could be seen at a glance the greatest truths, was the outlook he had gained. Of him it could be said : ' Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God.' . . . "Few men of his day have had his intimate, direct, loving acquaintance with truth. It is not surprising that such a mind welcomed with eagerness any new manifesta- tion of truth, abhorred all restraints on those who were searching for the verities, and demanded for himself and for others liberty. . . . " Dr. Post was supremely honest of soul. Where other men could lightly give assent to a creed, and thus join a church and enter the ministry, he stood back appalled. The vast truths of the confession and the catechism must be his before he could declare them true. I shall never forget his comment as he recalled an attempt to commit a mass meeting of one of our large societies against a dogma at the time regarded as unorthodox. 'Who of those who voted for or against the motion,' said he, ' knew the teachings of the Scriptures upon the question ; what if those who were voting against heresy, as they thought, were voting against the Bible .'"'... " The church which he founded has a creed, the work of the hand of its founder, twenty-five years in advance of the creeds of its day ; but no man, woman, or child found this creed or any creed standing across the portal of his church. It distressed him to learn that a npw convert, who had had no instruction or little thought upon the truths that it contained, desired to stand up before God and man and declare his belief in its different articles. It was all that he dared ask of any that they should be received after his saying to the congregation, 'These persons, on previous personal examination, have exhibited satisfactory conformity with the following statement of 442 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. the great truths of Christianity, exhibited in the Confes- sion of Faith of this Church.' "The only vows asked were those of consecration and service. In more than one direction looked this pregnant passage from the dedication sermon which Dr. Post preached at the opening of his church in 1852 : ' Here we inaugurate a gospel free in vindicating the eternal rights of the human soul to God's truth and its private judgment thereon. May the gospel here never be bound! Chain up, if you will, the senate chamber, the courthouse, the forum, but may the gospel never come forth in this place wearing manacles. Wretched the preacher, wretched the people, that will suffer chains on it ! Eternal chains await them both.' " His was a Christ-loving soul. He loved with all the intensity of his being the Christ. His soul was knit with the soul of our Lord. To Him he referred all question- ings and doubts. It mattered little what theories were held upon this or that fact of God's Word or govern- ment. Jesus was to him 'the way, the truth, the life.' Acquainted with all the planets and knowing their motions, he learned them all by the study of the central sun. In the last-published utterances of Dr. Post I find these words : ' The present need of the Christian world is a new resurrection of our Lord from the dead, another mighty angel to roll away the stone from the sepulcher. We need a new walk with the risen Christ to Emmaus, and to feel our hearts burn within us as he opens to us the Scriptures. We need another Pentecostal effusion of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church, with the conscious- ness of him as a living, personal presence. There needs a new enthronement and coronation of him ; another apocalypse and unveiling of him as King of kings and Lord of lords.' . . . FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. 443 " Commanding as was his intellect, lofty as was his soul, to those who knew him best, Dr. Post owed to a loving heart the secret of his power. He had friends everywhere and of all classes and conditions, of those who loved him, not merely because he was great and good, but because he loved them. Strong men, tender women, and little children, bewailed their loss when it was said that he was dead. ' St. Louis had three saints — now there are but two,' said a prominent banker on the day of his funeral. ' Was not that the apostle John .' ' said a little girl, who, after hearing of the Revelator and his last words, ' Little children, love one another,' felt for the first time the hand of the aged pastor emeritus on her head. " Three generations mourned a dear friend : the few equal in age to himself, who with him had passed through the valley of the shadow of a great national conflict ; the many into whose life had been wrought the instructions which he had given them in their youth ; the boys and girls, who, when the twentieth century shall have dawned, will recall the face they were taught to revere and learned to love. . . . "Judged by the only just standard of judgment, that of his generation. Dr. Post had few peers. What he ought to have done as the organizer of educational institu- tions or the founder of churches can never be answered until it has been learned how large a part of the work that he did accomplish would have been left undone, had he given his time and attention to labors belonging either to minds of a different mold or times of a different date. But what this man did he never would boast of, nor suffer those who loved him to bruit abroad. His only glory was in the Lord, whom he adored and loved. He has written in his own matchless way the relation which he held to 444 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Jesus ; and with his eloquent tribute of love to the Ador- able One, this brief sketch of his life shall close. " He died as he had lived. None but Christ ; all with Christ. "As he himself, in his magnificent discourse upon the Incarnate One, has said, ' I find myself under a system which, of itself, unless supplemented by some further revelation, leaves me with no moral deliverance. My moral nature is cold and dead. God is glorious and the universe is beautiful. But I am helpless, hopeless, lost. I sink beneath the glory and the beauty, as the desperate swimmer sinks beneath the splendors of the nightly skies in the depths of ocean. " ' But now, as I look around in the very crisis of my despair, lo! the heavens are open. A wondrous Person descends from the bosom of the Father, revealing the beauty of his unspeakable love in a human form, that means for me mortality, and suffers and dies for me. " ' As I behold, a new spiritual power enfolds me. I find myself in a new universe. New life beats through ray whole being. Divine love stooping to my nature, and proving itself through suffering, is mightier than my guilt, my fear, my despair. It subdues me to repentance, to faith, to hope, to love. It invigorates me, it transforms me. Cloud and darkness pass from before the throne. The emerald bow of peace engirds it. The intolerable brightness is shaded into the sweetness of human sym- pathy. Wide flung are the gates of the city of God. Hands that were pierced for me hold open its portals. One that has redeemed me, and washed me from my sins in his own blood, that cried on the cross, ' Father, for- give,' bids me come up thither — a saved soul.' " The sermon of Dr. Merrill was followed by a brief per- sonal tribute from Rev. Dr. S. J. Niccolls, pastor of the FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. 445 Second Presbyterian Church, whose friendship had been peculiarly warm and intirnate from the days of the war, and whose church through that dark and trying period had been by reason of its sympathy and associations especially knit to his own. Dr. Niccolls said : — " Beloved friends : We have come to-day, to the house of God, with our hearts saddened by a great bereavement. I am at a loss with what words to express the common grief which we feel. First of all, the sentiments of per- sonal friendship rise up and struggle for expression. Twenty years of professional and intimate intercourse, with its varied experiences of joy and sorrow and trial, through strange and stormy periods of the past, excite emotions which cannot be dnven away from my mind, so as to leave me free to say that which I would otherwise say, with reference to the noble and saintly life which has just been closed. " Yet while I sorrow as a friend, I am only one of many mourning friends that sorrow sincerely. While one fam- ily grieves, — the family in which he was revered and loved so tenderly, — hundreds and thousands of families throughout this land, to whom he brought hope and com- fort, also grieve. Not one church, — the church to which he was bound by the strongest and tenderest of ties, — but many churches mourn to-day for the departure from earth of a man who was filled with the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and who exercised the ministry of Jesus Christ with power. " The presence of this large and tearful assembly, repre- senting what is best in a great city, attests how power fully the influence of this man's life has touched the whole community in which we live. "We do well to come to-day, to give honor to his 446 TR UMAN MARCELL US POST. memory. Grief is a tribute which we owe to departed greatness ; but I would not seek by any word of mine to aggravate your sorrow. Tears are easily shed in this world. Better than tears is a cheerful and patient sub- mission to the will of God. Besides, sorrow for the dead is wholesome only when it leads us to revere their virtues, imitate their attainments, and, above all, to exercise grati- tude to God for the blessings he has bestowed upon us through their labors. And surely, as we remember what has been wrought by him whose death now so sorely afflicts us, we can find much to excite gratitude and thankful- ness. There are those here that can recall, as they look back over past years, the time when our brother began his ministry for Christ in this city. He was then in the morning of a vigorous manh\>od, and his glowing words attested how deeply he had experienced and how firmly he believed that gospel which he preached. From then until now, through forty eventful years, he never faltered in his testimony, but the rather gave it with increasing power. The memory of those years, quickened by the tender influences of this hour, brings to you many a mes- sage from his lips which filled your fainting souls with new hope or confirmed your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. To some, perchance, come again the sweet invi- tations of divine love, spoken as only this poet-preacher could utter them ; to others, solemn warnings of the judg- ment of the transgressor, depicted with such vividness and robed in such splendor of diction that they flamed before the trembling soul like the fiery sword of an avenging angel. His was the human voice that awoke you from the fatal sleep of sin an3 called you to eternal glory. Under God, you owe to him more than to any other man — more than the gift of highest station or largest wealth could confer on you, for through his min- FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. 447 istry came to you the hope of eternal life. There are others to whom he has been a counselor, a comforter, a guide. When you were overwhelmed with sorrow, when your dead lay cold and silent before you, and your heart was torn with great anguish, he it was who came and with tearful sympathy, like that of his divine Master, mingled his tears with yours. With a strong uplifting faith, he helped you through the trial and led you to believe in that divine love which you could not see. Some of you can remember your times of joy, when he came to share your gladness and invoke heaven's choicest blessings upon your prosperity. In your hours of perplexity you sought him for counsel, and as with a vision of a seer he pointed you to the pathway in which you might safely go. There are others here, upon whose heads, long ago, he placed the seal of the unbroken and everlasting covenant in holy baptism. In your childhood, led to the sanctuary by parental hands, you listened to his words from the sacred desk as to those of a teacher sent from God. They were the first that profoundly awakened your conscience and made you alive to the power of an endless life. Under the spell of his words the heavens seemed opened before you and the invisible world became a grand reality. His hand touched chords within your bosom that will vibrate as long as life shall last. His teachings have gone into your soul life ; they are incorporated in your character there to remain forever. There are others also among you, little children, who in the years to come, will remember the aged and saintly man to whom they looked up with reverence, and yet who was so childlike that they had no fear in his presence ; who laid his hands upon their heads with a touch soft and gentle, and yet with a power so great that it seemed in the joy that fol- lowed as though virtue had gone out from him unto them. 448 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. With such memories awakening within our bosoms, and with such influences pressing upon us, well may we thank God for his gift in the ministry of Dr. Post ! " We speak of the honor which is due to benefactors, and we rightly revere their memories. What, then, shall we say of him who has been a faithful minister of the gospel in this community for forty years 1 He was not rich. He built no hospitals or schools or stately asylums out of his abundance. He devised no schemes of com- mercial policy or material development by which the community was enriched through trade or commerce. But if he is worthy of the name of ' benefactor ' who has enriched his fellows with the choicest and greatest truths ; who has comforted the sorrowing and lifted up the weak ; who has been feet to the lame and eyes to the blind to lead them in their pathway ; who has by his life confirmed others in their holiest faith, and who has left the rich legacy of a blameless and holy character, — then to Dr. Truman Post belongs the name of 'benefactor,' and you owe to him a grateful and loving remembrance. Build him a monument of marble and enduring bronze ; it will not endure so long or speak so grandly for him as that which he has already built for himself in the lives and in the hearts of those to whom he has ministered in Christ's name. " Such a ministry as his cannot be told in its minutest details on an occasion like this. A part of that ministry belongs to the history and to the progress of the denomi- nation of which he was the first and foremost representa- tive in this city. Others must speak of it ; and yet Dr. Post did not belong to a particular denomination. He believed sincerely, I might almost say intensely, in the polity of the Congregational Church ; but he was held by no sectarian bounds. While he was denominational, he was more catholic than denominational. Over and above FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. 449 his special belief in the polity of a particular denomina- tion, was his larger and grander faith in those great truths which belong to us all as Christians. This larger faith made him exceedingly tolerant — tolerant almost to an extreme — ■ of the peculiar views of others. He did not glory in denominational differences, but the rather in the common possessions of the Christian Church, in those eter- nal truths which he was accustomed to speak of as the ' things which cannot be shaken.' He had no patience with controversies over doctrines which he deemed to be nonessential. Unwilling to define either for himself or for others the circumference of all revealed truth, he ever pointed with delight to its great center, which, as he saw it, was none other than the God-man, Jesus Christ. " On his deathbed he said to a friend who was speak- ing to him concerning his faith : ' I believe in the faith that has come down through the ages.' The faith . "through which Abraham saw Christ's day and rejoiced ; that filled the heart of David as he sung of the blessed- ness of those who trust in God, and that flamed in the rapturous songs of Isaiah ; the faith that the apostles proclaimed and that was sealed by the blood of martyrs ; the faith that the golden-tongued Chrysostom preached and that Augustine defended; the faith of Luther, of Calvin, of Knox, and of Wesley ; the faith of Bellamy, of Baxter, and of Howe ; the faith that the Puritans carried as their most sacred treasure across the sea to Plymouth Rock; the faith of Brewster, of Robinson, of Mather, of Edwards, and of D wight, — was his faith. He lived in it, he died in it, and he has entered heaven through it. No wonder that, upheld and comforted by it, the last utterance that came from his lips as they were closing in the long silence of death was 'Blessed be God ! ' His was indeed a faith that could triumph over death. 450 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " But it is not simply as the poet-preacher of our city that he endeared himself to us all and that he has minis- tered so largely to our welfare. The power of Chris- tian character is not limited or held by any religious denomination. It is like the fragrance from a garden of roses, which cannot be confined by the garden walls. The free winds of heaven carry it abroad and the passer- by is quickened and regaled by it. So it is with the Christian character of our brother. Thousands in our city who did not attend his ministry have recognized in him a man 'full of faith and of the Holy Ghost.' He was a living epistle of Christ, ' known and read of all men/ He walked in meekness, in gentleness, and in sincerity. In the twenty years of familiar intercourse which I had with him I have never heard him speak a harsh or bitter word of any one. He knew the imperfections of men, but he dealt with them in the spirit of forbearance and gentleness inspired by Jesus Christ. Tried by many sorrows and disappointments, he never lost his cheerful- ness of disposition. He was no pessimist, weeping over the present and despairing of the future. With a hope born of faith in the promises of God, he walked with radiant and uplifted countenance, rejoicing that he could , still work for Christ and in due time be with him in glory. " Brother ministers ! how much is there in this life, whose earthly career is now closed, for our encourage- ment ! It bids us live for Christ, preach Christ, and teach Christ by our example. It assures us that our labor is not in vain in the Lord, and that all earthly honor is poor in comparison with the rewards of the gospel ministry. "Sitting here to-day, and looking upon this great assem- bly burdened with its grief, it seemed to me that the FUNERAL SERVICES AND ADDRESSES. 45 I scene changed. Instead of this part of the church, bring- ing their tribute of respect and sorrow, with their eyes overflowing with tears and their hearts torn with grief through parting with their beloved pastor, I saw another part of the church. It was composed of those who through past years have gone ' over the flood ' and entered into their eternal rest. No tears were in their eyes, no lamentations on their lips. They were welcom- ing the pastor through whom they had been brought to know Christ, and who, during their earthly pilgrimage, had so faithfully ministered to them. They came with songs and rejoicing, band after band gathering around him, to accompany him to the presence-chamber of the King. And he who lies here silent, unmoved by our grief, was there saying in glad surprise, ' My brethren, dearly beloved and longed for, my joy and my crown.' " Happy and rich in blessing was the ministry of our brother on earth. Its memory will long linger among us like sweet fragrance. But happier and more abundant in blessing is his lot now that he has entered ' into the joy of his Lord.' He has left us the poorer by going away and full of sorrow because we shall see his face no more. But in a ' little while ' we shall see him ! Until then, faithful fellow-laborer, dear companion, brother tenderly loved, farewell." The address of Dr. Niccolls was followed by a prayer from Rev. Dr. Stimson, pastor of the Pilgrim Congrega- tional Church, and a hymn, with the benediction, closed the services. The funeral train, with the bearers and kindred and a few of the more intimate friends, conveyed the body to Bellefontaine and laid it close beside those of his wife and child and near the spot where thirty-seven years before his own voice had consecrated that place of the dead. CHAPTER XXXIV. TRIBUTES TO DR. POST. Expression of the Press on the Death of Dr. Post, and Tributes from the United States Court and Religious and Educational Societies in St. Louis and elsewhere throughout the Country. OF the utterances of the public press and communica- tions and memorials following upon the death of Dr. Post published throughout the country it would be impossible to speak in detail, much less to insert extended extracts. In the St. Louis daily newspapers were biographical sketches and notices, immediately after the decease. Said an editorial of The Globe-Democrat, on the following day : — " The death of Rev. Dr. Truman Post is a melancholy event with which to close the history of the old year in St. Louis. Although age and infirmity had been pressing upon the distinguished divine for some time, it seemed hard to realize that he was about to pass from a com- munity in which he was so dearly beloved and of which he had been for forty years a conspicuous member. His death is for himself a long journey ended and a heavy burden of care and toil laid down ; but for the people of St. Louis it is a familiar figure to all and a dear friend to thousands gone forever." The following is from The Republican of the same date : — "In the death of Dr. Truman M. Post, not alone the faith in which his long and earnest life was passed, but the whole city of St. Louis has sustained a loss. In a TRIBUTES TO DR. POST. 453 ripe old age, full of years and honors, Dr. Post has ended his labors and gone to his reward. Few men have deserved better. His simple faith, his kindly humanity, his loyalty to conviction, his manly courage combined to make him, not alone a remarkable man, but a man who was loved and honored and believed in by all who came within the circle of his influences. For many years he has been a factor of no uncertain importance in the best life in St. Louis. Rich and poor, gentle and simple, have been the better for it that he has lived among us. Age hardly impaired the vigor of his intellect or the effective- ness of his labor. Around his coffin will gather more than one generation of St. Louisans, anxious to testify their respect and his worthiness. Not alone Congrega- tionalism, but Christianity gained from what he did, and loses because he will do no more." On the day of the funeral the United States Circuit Court stood adjourned. And this order of Judge Treat was spread on its records : — " Inasmuch as the Judge is desirous, by his personal presence, to pay an appropriate tribute of respect to the memory of one of his earliest and best friends, the Rev. Truman M. Post, whom not this community alone, but all who value genius and exalted worth do and ought to honor ; and inasmuch as the last sad rites, which at the end of his long, learned and saintly career, commenced in legal and culminating in clerical pursuits, are to-day to be duly observed, it is ordered that, as an expression of respect to the memory of one so worthy of all honor from every learned profession and from the entire public, this Court will now stand adjourned until to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock ; so that the Judge and all others asso- ciated with the administration of justice may testify by their personal presence to their just appreciation of the 454 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. worth of the deceased, and to the loss which all suffer in the close of his saintly life." The following memorial was adopted by the Congrega- tional ministers' meeting in St. Louis : — "At a ripe old age the founder of our order in our city and state has heard our Father's summons, and gone to his eternal home. " With mental force undimmed and spiritual vigor un- abated, after more than twoscore years of service he has entered upon his reward. " We call to mind his strong, benignant countenance ; his sparkling, instructive conversation ; his poetic, pro- found preaching ; his wise, tender counsels ; the legacy of a saint grandly endowed, widely cultivated, and enriched by the spirit of all grace. " We sympathize with the family that has been deprived of its revered head. We share the grief of a church which has lost a beloved father and a loving friend. We glory in the place he filled among the heralds of salvation. " We rejoice in the memory of his intense passion for liberty, his unbounded loyalty to truth, and his unflinch- ing adherence to the right. " With the prayer to God that his mantle may fall upon us who are left to finish the work that he began, we go forward rejoicing in the inspiration of his peerless life." From resolutions adopted by the Board of Trustees of the Missouri Blind Asylum is the following : — " The biography of the late Rev. Dr. Post would be an epitome of many of the institutions of charity and of learning not only of this city but of other cities in this and other states. He gave the initiative to, and was an assiduous laborer in, all such works. His whole very active life was that of goodness, of saintliness and purity ; a beacon to his contemporaries and an example to those who will follow him. TRIBUTES TO DR. POST. 455 " His connection with this school, both as a trustee and for many years as president, was very felicitous and bene- ficial. His frequent visits to the school and personal asso- ciation with the pupils were happy events never to be forgotten by them. He spoke to them with a loving, sympathizing heart. He was a light to their darkened eyes and a comfort to their saddened hearts. The afflic- tion of blindness was in a measure relieved by the spiritual consolation he gave to their souls. He left with them the assurance of a brighter light in the life to come." The following is taken from an editorial in The Chicago Advance : — " By his character and eloquence he early attained com- manding distinction at the east as well as at the west. On many and various public occasions in the east, at col- lege commencements and the anniversaries of our great societies, he rendered ipost important services as one of the most representative men of the west. His connection with the Chicago Theological Seminary dates from its origin to the time of his death. He was one of its earli- est instructors and always one of its directors. He was nearly as well known among the churches in Chicago as at St. Louis. His coming to any pulpit here to preach was an advent filled with eager interest. His last sermon preached in the New England Church, only a few months since, was one of extraordinary beauty and grandeur of thought and spiritual impressiveness. "The gospel and kingdom of our Lord here and now were to him vivid, glorious realities, and under their inspi- ration his character took on a simplicity and a nobility, a gentleness and power, a tenderness and dignity, a sweet- ness and solidity, a balanced conservatism and radicalism, penetrated alike with caution and high cheer, which all 456 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. together imparted to his personality and influence, both here and at the east, a value which none who knew him can recall without emotions of deep love and admiration for the man and of devout thanksgiving to God for the gift to our generation of such men as he." From the memorial prepared by Professor G. N. Boardman and adopted by the Chicago Theological Semi- nary is this extract : — " His acute thought and rare power of expression enabled him to waken interest in topics that seemed trite and to adorn whatever he touched. His powerful but ever-controlled imagination often bodied forth the future with amazing vividness before his spellbound hearers and depicted the events of history as if they were occurrences of to-day. His love of nature — of the mountains, forests and streams, of the home of his childhood ; his delight in reproducing in thought and word the experiences of the early settlers along the mountain slopes of Vermont ; his impassioned appeals to young men about to leave their native state, to cherish the memories of the early days, the days of trial and conflict, to remember and reverence the battlefields of three wars in the Champlain Valley, — these marked him as at once a poet and a patriot. " There were rare combinations in Dr. Post's character. He was by nature conservative ; he reveled in books, in the recorded thoughts of great authors, in libraries, in transmitted culture ; yet he was a man of his day, his thoughts and utterances related to present time and present need. His public addresses had, besides their marvelous eloquence, a remarkable fitness to the occasions which called them forth. He held firmly to the faith of the fathers, yet he never fully accepted any man's state- ment of Christian doctrine. He was impatient of wild or fanciful speculations, but most kindly tolerant of those TRIBUTES TO DR. POST. 457 who were inquirers rather than dogmatists concerning the truths of revelation." From the pen of Rev. George C. Adams, in The Chicago Advance, is the following : — " He seemed to be led all his life in a way that he knew not. He chose the law as his profession and was admitted to the bar, but God had made him a teacher, and he taught in the college until he was led to the higher office of teaching from the pulpit. He was led here to plant and sustain a church from which should spring many. He laid the foundation on which others were to build. All through those weary years, when it was a grand triumph to merely stay here and be a Congregationalist and an Abolitionist, he was living a life whose influence should last long after his work was done. Character counts for something in this life. For many years, when Congrega- tionalism was mentioned in this region, about all that people knew of it was Dr. Post. Thousands who do not grasp the meaning of forms and creeds judge a sect by its men, and surely no denomination ever had a truer, nobler object lesson in its behalf than was given in this blameless life." This is from an editorial notice in The Independent of January 6, 1887: — " The telegraph announces the death last week of the Rev. Dr. Truman M. Post, of St. Louis. To that city he was called in 1847, when Puritanism in all its forms was very unpopular in the state of Missouri. He lived to see Congregationalism a strong body, not only in St. Louis, but far west of him, a result which he did very much to produce. Our personal acquaintance with him dates from 1 86 1. We shall never forget the cordial welcome he gave to the young minister entering on his first parish in the state of Indiana under special difficulties and with a 458 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. threatened division in the church, which happily was averted. His counsel and his support at that time were those of an affectionate father and these words are written by one of the many to whom he endeared himself by like acts of a loving sympathy. He had then already begun to suffer from weakened eyesight, and had abandoned the use of notes in the pulpit — a weakness that became his strength, for it made him one of the most eloquent of pulpit and platform orators. " Dr. Post was sometimes called the father of Congre- gationalism in Missouri, as the first church of that denom- ination in that state was that over which he became pastor in 1847." A very elaborate and beautiful life sketch, read by his old-time and loved friend, E. W. Blatchford, before the Chicago Congregational Club, closes with the following, of which the first paragraph as well as other passages referred to are from the subject of the memorial: — " ' As we read of Moses, at the command of God, going up Mount Nebo to die, our thought follows him through the hours in his arduous climb up the lone peak, till he stands there with the evening shadows beginning to stretch around, already betokening the awful mystery of that shadow into which he was to pass, with God alone, forever from mortal sight.' " For some years we have recognized those ' evening shadows ' gently gathering, though his commanding frame was still erect and his mental action vigorous and incisive. The frequent monitions of danger he well apprehended. That heart, whose faithful beatings had measured more than the ordinary period of life, gave its quiet warning that in an unexpected moment might ' the silver cord be loosed.' The soul, 'the body's guest,' as the hour of part- ing drew near, more and more asserted her divine birth- TRIBUTES TO DR. POST. 459 right, till in his presence one felt more conscious of the spiritual presence than of the material. During a visit in the autumn, in our country home, a visit of profound enjoyment of nature and social life and reminiscence, he spoke often and cheerfully of the change that might be near; yet with all his old-time power, on that beautiful Sabbath, did he preach in our homelike chapel, amid the falling leaves of the forest, typical of the nature so soon to enter into rest. His text was : ' Finally, brethren, whatso- ever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, what- soever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, what- soever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things ' ; and in his own matchless grasp of thought and imagery did he show how the lines of char- acter are graven by 'thinking on these things.' Once thereafter was it permitted me to see him this side of the eternal gateway, and plainly did the failing strength indi- cate a near departure. Yet again and again did he rally, and words of life and power and suggestion were heard from his lips. The closing struggle was not long pro- tracted. In moments of wanderings he thought himself in the beautiful valley of his birth, with the bright waters of Champlain and the ranges of the Adirondacks, his loved summer resort, in view ; but in his deeper conscious- ness there was ever the clear sight of that ' hill of God ' which he was soon to ' ascend.' ' The shadows are about me,' he said to a friend. ' They are beckoning me from the other shore,' he said as he kissed his daughter good-night. To an intimate associate of many years and eminent physician, three days before he left us, he said : 'You see the end is near; it is a mist — a thin veil — that separates from the other life ; it is easily drawn aside, and the entrance within is a very simple act, but it is a momen- tous act — a momentous act — passing from the finite into 460 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POST. the infinite. This I cannot comprehend — have never comprehended, but I have ever trusted in a living Christ, and am now wilUng to place my hand in his and confide myself to his guidance.' "As he said of another:- 'This, friends, was the last testimony of our beloved brother till the heavens and earth be no more. Ages shall not add thereto, nor can they subtract from it.' " At a meeting of the Congregational Club at Kansas City, February 14, 1887, the following resolutions, offered by Judge Stephen P. Twiss, were adopted : — " Resolved, That we have received, with feelings of pro- found sorrow, intelligence of the death of Rev. Truman M. Post, D.D. " That we mourn his death as an incalculable and irrepar- able loss to the church of Christ, and especially to that branch of it of which we are humble members ; in which for many years as an advance guard amid great trials and difficulties, but always with an unfaltering integrity and a rich and consecrated scholarship, he successfully main- tained the Christian standard of justice to, and the equal rights of, all men. ' "That his daily walk, his long ministry and untiring service for the Master, manifested in a high degree, a modest and unassuming manhood, happily combined with Christian courage and valor, blended with charity and con- secration, supported by an abiding faith in God, should incite us to greater sacrifices and more devoted lives." The memorial occasion at Middlebury College, and the address by Daniel Roberts, have already been referred to in these pages. The above are only a few out of the published utter- ances, from newspapers, from churches, from various societies, religious and educational, and in personal com- munications which appeared in St. Louis and throughout TRIBUTES TO DR. POST. 46 1 the country, omitted here simply for want of space, all of which bore the same testimony of grief and love and veneration. We close the quotations with the following, from a poem by Mary Alden, one of the teachers in Monticello Seminary, and a dear friend of Dr. Post, which was read at the commencement exercises of this institution in 1887 : — Dolorosa 1 stands bereaved with her sorrow for a crown ! But as serried Hebrew armies piling surges could not drown, So, nor tears, nor lamentations can our consolations crowd. That the cameo face we cherished seems to-day archangel browed ; That the speech of our arch-poet likewise of the " golden mouth," Vibrant as a quivering harpstring swept by zephyrs of the south, In the passage of that spirit to diviner atmosphere. Is translated to a diction that the seraphs lean to hear ; That his thought with glowing figures arabesqued in patterns quaint. Like the canvas of old masters who so reverently did paint. Has been lifted from such levels to a higher plane than ours. In the temples which our dreaming coronets with phantom towers. For the death we dread so strangely and which each must meet alone. He called transit into summer from the steppes of frigid zone ; In the thick of that great darkness do transfigured forms appear? Does the vale of velvet shadows skirt the foothills of Mount Clear? Monticello's Prince of Israel doth but tread the path before ; He shall christen her fair daughters — must we write it ? — nevermore ! But some loves refuse to perish, though they pass beyond our sight ; Dead? Ah, no! Sancta Majestas, our new Laureate of the Light ! Dolorosa ! Speciosa ! weeping may endure a night ; Joy is charioteer of morning riding up the sapphire height ; Praise we wear as christening raiment, nor will be in sables clad ; Though our loss doth make us sorry, yet his gain doth make us glad. Thus, our name illuminated as the missals were of old. By the monks who dipped hair-pencils in their inks of burnished gold. Claim we for a choice possession as such sacred memories are, Since there gleamed in Orient azure the white light of Bethlehem's Star! ' The class motto of that year. CHAPTER XXXV. DR. post's marked TRAITS. Some marked traits in the character of Dr. Post. — His enthusiasm in mentat pursuits. — His manifold learning and freedom from pedantry. — His ideal- ism. — His poetic genius. — His favorite authors. — His love of nature. — His " Indian Summer " cast of thought. — His sense of the unseen world and of the value of human opportunity. — His mental and moral manhood. — His characteristics as a public speaker. — His pathos. — His purity and freshness of soul. — His religious beliefs. — The result of his life work. — Two pictures. AS it was the privilege of the writer to enjoy for many years the most intimate relations with the subject of this memoir, it may not be out of place to supplement the narrative with some personal impressions of the traits which peculiarly marked Dr. Post among the men of his generation. One characteristic to be noted at the outset, as it furnished perhaps the mainspring to his intellectual achievements, was what may be described as enthusi- asm in mental pursuits. Facility in the acquisition of knowledge he had in a rare degree, but this quality was something more. It made learning not only easy, but gave to it a positive relish and enjoyment. He found an inspiration in his studies. New fields of knowledge were explored, as a boy unravels the mysteries of lakes and streams in a forest. " Hills of difficulty " were his "Delectable Mountains." His ardor and enthusiasm in mental acquisition con- tinued fresh and unabated, even in those days when most men grow brain-wearied and feel that there is "nothing 462 DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 463 new under the sun." To the end of life he kept abreast with the latest literature of the magazines ; he found interest in each new discovery that widened the circuit of knowledge, and " as a stranger gave it welcome." In reading, his habit was to choose some subject spe- cially congenial to his mood, and for the time to give himself wholly to it. He read very much by topics, and on kindred topics ; and, in his library, light from the best authors was turned upon the special theme till it was made to glow and burn. Peculiarly in early and middle life his faculty for men- tal work was something marvelous. During these periods he read and wrote far into the night. In later times he retired earlier, but resumed his book and pen in the first gray of the morning, and often by gaslight. Dr. Post was a most affectionate man, and cheered by social converse ; yet among his most intimate associates the greater part of his time and thought was withdrawn and absorbed in his mental pursuits; even in his own household he lived in a world very much by himself. In this connection it is noteworthy that although for many years a teacher he was as far as possible from pedantry or dogmatism. All his life a learner he had no ambition to parade his accomplishments in erudition ; and his manifold information, as occasion drew it out, often surprised even those who knew him best. He sought to impart principles more than rules. He pursued the study of tongues chiefly as a means of mental discipline and as furnishing the key to ethnic literature. History he valued mainly as a foundation for knowledge of that great science which he described as " sociology." In a large sense of the word Dr. Post was, in his habit and method of thinking, an idealist. 464 TR UMAN MAR CELL US POS T. His researches in history made him conversant with almost every clime and age. China and India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, of the ancient world, and Europe of the modern ages, unfolded their panorama to his mental vision. Before his glowing fancy commerce and art of the past displayed anew their treasures and revolution repeated its tragedy. Hero and sage and bard, no longer mortal, were builders of dynasties and institutions and molders of literature, through the centuries. Events were no cold, dead facts, but living and universal signs and exponents — touch-stones in the science of human progress. His lectures, abounding in wealth of philosophy, were also picture galleries. That Dr. Post was a man of poetic genius, as shown in occasional flights, was a fact widely known as his public reputation. But only those with him in daily life could know how' thoroughly the spirit of poetry permeaJted his whole nature. It was about him like an atmosphere; it gave. a coloring to his everyday thoughts and a dialect to his familiar speech ; it was a part of his mental constitution. His correspondence, even his household letters, were full of it. His conversation in the family gatherings at home was replete with pictur- esque legend and reminiscence. His love of poetry was fed on the best of ancient and modern classics — the Latin poets, Greek tragedy, the poetry of the Bible, and that of the best standard English. The choice passages of English poetry never dropped from his memory. Paradise Lost had shot its colors through his mind in boyhood ; and the first three cantos he knew by heart. Byron he read in early manhood. Childe Harold was at his tongue's end, and The Dream, and The Giaour, and Manfred, and The Siege of DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 465 Corinth abounded in passages which he often quoted. Gray's Progress of Poetry, and the Elegy, and Macbeth were among his special fancies. In the younger days he loved the picturesque and martial verse, the " thoughts that breathe and words that burn." And his love for such poetry never ceased ; but in the "years which bring the philosophic mind" his thoughts seemed to turn to the Ode on Immortality, and Yarrow Revisited, and to the Lines on the Wye. Without technical education in music he was soothed and charmed and set adrift in revery by simple and plain- tive strains, such as the songs of Moore and Burns, and hymns set to old tunes. The stately march of heroic verse was well fitted to his voice, and its measured cadences are associated with many a noble passage from poetry of this character. The traits of Dr. Post were a sisterhood. He was an idealist and a poet ; he was also an intense lover of all that was grand and beautiful in nature. Many of her aspects he loved not only because they were grand and beautiful, but because they pictured the scenery of child- hood and recalled its hallowed memories. Nature was his "nursing mother." Her spirit brooded over him in the boyhood at Shoreham, and year by year, through his subsequent life he received fresh tonic and inspiration from her life fountain. More than anywhere else he found food for the imagination and rest for the spirit and a sanctuary for communion with God, away from the haunts of men in the deep solitudes of nature. During the days in Jacksonville, when the region about was a fresh wilderness, there was a novel charm and fascination for him in its primeval woods and lonely stretches of virgin prairie. While in St. Louis, often- 466 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. times wearied of its dusty walks and Babel voices, he sought such solace as might be obtained for himself and his boys in short excursions out of town ; now and then on a holiday with fish rod and line along the banks of the Mississippi and the Meramec. A feeling which with him had preeminently the power of a passion — one that grew to be like the fondness for a human friend — was his love for the mountains of the old Vermont home. In later years, when most of his early friends were gone, those mountains still kept their tryst, cloudy and phantom-like as when they peopled the daydreams of youth, but unchanged, even in their shad- ows — not an outline shifted, not a hue added or taken away. Some of them, no longer far-off mysteries of the horizon, had learned to welcome the tired traveler with their separate stories of tramp and camp fire and cloud walks and skyey visions. Those now living who were companions of Dr. Post in the excursions, which on these visits to Vermont were always sure to be planned by some of the kindred, through the regions of Mansfield and Camel's Hump or of Lake George and the Adirondacks, will remember the enthu- siasm, like that of a boy on his vacation, and the nerv- ; ous vigor of step — amazing to the younger generation — with which the gray-haired clergyman wrestled through the forest tangle and made his way to the topmost summits. To him there was memory of childhood and a challenge to manhood and a reservoir of perennial spring in those mountain scenes ; and it was simply a touch of nature when in the delirium of his last sickness he saw through the chamber window the hills of Charlotte. Dr. Post was certainly not, in the common acceptation DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 467 of the word, a melancholy man — not of a morbid or de- sponding nature. But his mind was often in a mood akin to melancholy and frequently found in genius, par- ticularly in that of a poetic order — as said in his cen- tennial address at Middlebury, in " a sort of Michaelmas atmosphere, a soft, dim, Indian-summer air, the euthanasia of the year. A tender, dreamy mezzotint envelops it, half sadness, half repose, half sweetness and half pain." His horizon was far off. It was natural to him, and a trait which showed itself even in early life, to turn his thoughts tenderly and lovingly to scenes and incidents and faces of the gone years, and his personality itself, to those who knew him well, seemed touched with the pathos of a world that had passed away. He was often drawn into communion with "the world beyond," and that world threw back its solemn light upon his thoughts. The lines of Wordsworth which he was wont to quote described something of his own mental habitudes: — The clouds that gather round the setting sun, Do take a sober coloring from the eye, That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality. Shortly before the last illness of his daughter, Mrs. Young, one Sabbath afternoon her children had been learning the hymn commencing Softly now the light of day Fades upon my sight away. And not long after her death, at the close of the day, when the sun had set and the twilight was gathering. Dr. Post lifted the curtain of a window in the St. Louis home, and drawing to his side one of the family who had aided in teaching the hymn, stood for some time gazing silently at the red and fading sky. Then, evi- dently thinking of the incident above mentioned and of 468 TR UMAN MAS CELL US POST. the mother of the little ones, he said in a tender cadence peculiar to himself : — " Soon for me the light of day. Shall forever pass away." There was with him a consciousness, that clung to human life like a shadow, of the returnlessness of time. "Once only a child, never a child again. Once only manhood with its responsibilities and power and reason. Use them well. It never comes again. And once only old age with its powers and privileges : for age has its own peculiar march. Once only we pass through this period. We cannot go back and do the work over again. We cannot correct the missteps. He that goes down to the last long sleep, over him may roll the destinies of ages and empires ; but no tramp of armed men or pageant of peace, nor the tumult of commerce, nor the mighty din of life, shall awake the sleeper till the heavens be no more." In his reminiscences he spoke of himself apparently with a dash of regret as " a dreamer more than an ob- server." And in a certain sense such was the fact. In the events of the day — thos'e which passed with the day, leaving no mark behind — he had little interest. He was very absent-minded ^ forgetful of names — not infre- quently of appointments ; lacking, often much to his annoyance, in systematic arrangements. He had little aptitude for planning and organizing church work, or for any of the schemes and methods so often resorted to for drawing audiences and swelling church memberships. What he accomplished as a clergyman was due almost entirely to the inherent power of his preaching and the power of his character, and was accomplished almost as much for the denomination at large as for his own special church. DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 469. He was certainly a dreamer, in this sense that he was much of the time in communion with a world which to the greater part of mankind is a world of dreams. Indeed he seemed, and especially in the later years, less a dreamer than a seer. He saw life in a dis- solving view in which the present and visible world melted away, and the unseen world — the true world of character and destiny — came into sight. Life in his consciousness was intensely real ; but it meant something far different from its conception by the masses of men. It was of immeasurable solemnity and moment, as a key to the hereafter. It was of unspeakable value, because so brief and unreturning. It has been said that Dr. Post was not a desponding man. He was far otherwise. Those very qualities which in most persons would take the zest out of life and para- lyze its energies had with him an opposite effect. No man was more earnest than he in making it tell on long results, in redeeming the time, in building character. His words often had the strains of a funeral march ; but they also sounded a trumpet call to duty, and fealty to high privi- lege, "while it is called 'to-day.'" How eloquent was the power, the mighty and transforming "power, of an endless life," so often preached by him, as witnessed by his own personal history ! Those of the present generation who knew Dr. Post in his declining years saw in him still a vigor of step and activity of brain which were belied by his pale face and white locks. Some of them had heard the legends of his youthful prowess. His fearless and uncompromising atti- tude in public affairs was a matter of general history. But only those who knew him long and thoroughly would comprehend in its full force and all its bearings the mental and moral manhood of Dr. Post. 470 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Often in matters of opinion persons who mean to be honest and upright are overawed by strong and aggres- sive minds or bow to ancient maxims or precedents. But Dr. Post in his beliefs was emphatically a freeman. He believed in the lordship of reason and recognized no commanding authority in prelates or councils or sanctified names. He believed not only in the right of private judgment, but in the duty of asserting that right as occasion demanded. Many men who will obey the mandates of conscience when plainly declared will suffer unsettled issues to slumber on in its high court, where the question is of doubtful solution and self-interest may be at stake ; or in such cases they will permit the judgment itself to be led astray or darkened by specious sophistries. But rare indeed is the stamp of moral manhood which marked the character of Dr. Post : — a manhood to grapple with ques- tions involving individual duty as they arise along the path of life, with the one dominant purpose of knowing the truth and the right and of shaping life accordingly, regardless of personal consequences. He had no fondness for polemics and no patience with casuistries. He seemed to reach the solution of questions without the labored processes of logic and almost by insight. Few men had his faculty of intellectual and moral discernment. His opinions were rarely on the extreme lines, but he believed in them through and through, and when occasion arose he advocated them without fear. He was constitu- tionally averse to strife, but when a cause in which he believed was at stake he was never a silent or lukewarm friend. He had a thorough contempt for shams and a strong repulsion from disingenuous men. While he readily gave DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 47 1 his trust, when once betrayed it was rarely ever restored. Nothing awakened his resentment niore than injustice in any form ; and when his indignation was thoroughly stirred, rough and hard men would quail before it. When one contemplates a nature so endowed, so clear in its mental and moral perceptions, and so resolute in its stand for principle and so potent in persuasion and con- viction, and then thinks of it as tempered and hardened by long years of unswerving rectitude, he may form some conception of the force of character and of its power among men that marked the later manhood of Dr. Post. Few men in St. Louis have figured more on the stage of public life — in the pulpit and the lecture room, in conventions, on occasions of mourning and rejoicing, at social and literary and political gatherings — than Dr. Post. The peculiar characteristics of his sermons and addresses are therefore well known and need little more than a passing reference. His preaching has been characterized as Miltonic in its type. While it ranged over a vast variety of subjects, and could not be accurately described as confined to any special class of topics, it is true that very largely its themes were those of the eternal world ; and the imagery of such discourses had a vastness and dimness of out- line and masses of light and darkness which belong to scenery of the infinite and which mark the poetry of Milton. Who will forget also in his sermons a solemn mysti- cism of figure and symbol ! — imagery of seraphim and cherubim and archangel, and the "Great White Throne " — kindred in type with that of the vision on Patmos. Dr. Post was often spoken of as a " poet preacher " ; 472 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. and in a much wider sense than as above indicated, that is, far more widely than in the vast and solemn sublime, the description was applicable. The wealth of his fancy- seemed inexhaustible ; it gathered its pictures everywhere, from earth, sea and sky, and from classic art and story. But his sermons were never " prose poetry " in the sense that beauty of metaphor and word-painting were their distinguishing excellence — the uppermost thought — flowers which with the hearer bloomed in a mere garden of sentiment, taking no permanent root in his character. With Dr. Post the sermon was always an argument. Some vital truth, some earnest principle was woven into it ,like a theme in a symphony. Metaphor and illus- tration were always subsidiary — caryatides that both adorned and lifted up the dominant thought of the discourse. The argument lost none of its force because the syllo- gism was not laid bare. Oftentimes the figure was itself premises and conclusion and example, cast into one mold and with gathered intensity and power. In his sermons, as in his other literary productions. Dr. Post had the power of taking an abstract truth and so setting it in beauty of concrete image and metaphor that it would not be a mere intellectual thesis, but would charm and thrill the hearer, and live and glow and burn in his memory afterward. An extract from the " Palingenesy," already quoted in these pages, touching on a reconstruction of the states which reinstates slavery, is selected by Rev. Joseph Haven, the writer of an article in The Bibliotheca Sacra (vol. xxiv, pp. lOS, io6) " On the Province of the Imagination in Sacred Oratory," as a masterpiece of English, showing how " an illustration or an apt and striking metaphor that shall embody and project an abstract truth or general DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 473 principle into concrete reality is often the most effective form of argument." A few passages culled from the writings of Dr. Post, and placed together in a thesaurus at the end of this volume, will illustrate, to some extent, how striking and marvelous were bis powers in the direction above indicated. Dr. Post's delivery did not bear the stamp of the schools. It had very little of the long and sweeping gesture of the elocutionist. His hands and arms were seldom still, and their restless motions might provoke the criticisms of a drill master. He spoke without manuscript or notes, other than slips of paper which he called "sign cards"; and he never memorized his addresses either in whole or in part. Those published in the pamphlets were usually revised from shorthand ; and those which appeared in the daily newspapers were given to the reader verbatim. It followed that, in his addresses as they were delivered, there was not always the careful attention to literary finish that is found in the written essay. But in spite of these facts — perhaps to some extent by reason of them. Dr. Post had a strong hold — at times a marvelous hold — upon his audience. While the sentences of his extemporized discourses sometimes lacked the elaborate smoothness of the writ- ten or memorized address, on the other hand he was thoroughly master of his theme and of its dialect, and phrases singularly apt and images rare and noble came to his tongue as it seemed with the fresh inspiration of the moment. His addresses were in the last degree removed from exhibitions of rhetoric or declamation which are intended to call forth praise of the speaker. His very peculiarities 474 TRUMAN MAKCELLVS POST. served to emphasize the fact that he was completely for- getful of self and lost in his theme. There was a natural- ness, a simplicity, an unconsciousness of his surroundings, an earnestness and a directness in the presentation of truth in the addresses of Dr. Post that tended to make the audience, like himself, oblivious to everjrthing but the topic itself. The master power of Dr. Post's eloquence lay in its minor strains. Speakers are not often found who will stir the audience to a high pitch of enthusiasm or passion ; but still more rare is the power that, like the rod on Horeb, can touch the deep and buried springs of the heart and cause strong and hard men to shed tears. Such power there was pre- eminently in the eloquence of Dr. Post ; and its sources are not far to seek. His endowments of the imagination, his affluence of diction, his faculty of "moral scene-painting," doubtless had marvelous power in chaining the attention and charm- ing the fancy of the audience ; and, in these qualities, he excelled especially in the il penseroso vein. Mrs. Post used to say that he " looked on the ' dark side ' " ; and reference has already been had to a tendency of his mind, half akin to melancholy. The mood and dialect of the elegy were familiar to him, and his thoughts were pecul- iarly attuned to themes of solemnity and sorrow. But the eloquence of Dr. Post lay in his own person- ality perhaps fully as much as in what he said. His pale and thoughtful face, his look of open, manly sincerity and kindly sympathy, would win a stranger before he had uttered a word. And when he spoke, especially on graver themes, there was something in the tones of his voice — not by any means the stereotyped accent often fallen into DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 475 by clergymen, but an impressive tone pitched in the lower key and modulated with a tender and pathetic cadence, almost impossible to describe and always associated in memory with himself — which was sure to find a deep responsive chord in the breast of the hearer. No one who ever listened to Dr. Post on occasions of sorrow and mourning would fail to realize another more subtle and potent influence, which bound the audience to the speaker like an electric chain : and that was the magnetism of his personal sympathy ; the sure conscious- ness of those who heard him that his words were the direct outflow of a great and loving heart which felt the sorrows and carried the burdens of others as it did his own. During the later years, to those in thousands who knew his history, was there not also in his own person- ality that which the Greek philosopher pronounced the sine qua non of true eloquence } — the eloquence of his own character witnessing to so many years of stainless honor and steadfast integrity, and pure and Christly living ? A shining trait of Dr. Post was the purity of his nature. The quality was not the negative one, found in thousands who have kept "unspotted from the world." His purity was no passive virtue ; his thoughts dwelt in a high and noble atmosphere and his converse was tonic as the air of a mountain crag. There was a species of alchemy in the touch of his friendship that brought out the gold in men. He dis- cerned and drew forth what was good in them, and they grew better by his association. To the last he preserved a youth of the soul. His sympathies and attachments went out to the young. He had 1 o low and pessimistic views of human nature. 476 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. He held fast to his belief in exalted manhood and womanhood. He had kept faith with his own early ideas, and they did not wither with youth. Even the romantic sentiments, which most men survive and afterward look back upon as youthful folly, continued green in his old age. With all his manifold learning and research in theology, the religious beliefs of Dr. Post were in keeping with his character — simple, manly, earnest. He held to the great columnar truths of the gospel. The central object of his system was the " uplifted Christ drawing all men unto him," the living and personal Saviour touching and quickening the heart of the world. His faith grew simpler and stronger with time. We quote again from a letter written near the close of his life and given on the title page of this memoir : " My circle of exact knowledge seems shrinking as I descend the vale of years. But I feel more strongly than ever that my Father and God will be with me and bear me up through the mystery of the eternal future." The above are some of the characteristics, as they dwell prominently in memory, and portrayed as nearly as possi- ble from the life, of a grandly ideal man. It is not intended here to dwell on the public career of Dr. Post. His championship of Congregationalism in its first struggle in Missouri ; the character and standing of his published works; his connection with various insti- tutions of learning; his advocacy of the cause of freedom and national union, — are all topics which have been gone over in these pages, and indeed they are matters of general history. DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 477 And it is needless to enlarge upon his exalted life, his stainless integrity, his broad humanity — qualities which made him universally honored and beloved. They are known by heart in the community where he had his walk for nearly forty years, as they are a part of his name and fame everywhere. Other themes there are which will dwell longest and deepest in memory — his life in the circle of home, his tender and thoughtful and great-hearted love and care, which through all the years "knew neither variableness nor shadow of turning," the fidelity of his teaching and example, the warm light of his presence, and the loving and hallowed thoughts which gather about his memory — which never can be told, and belong to a world now sacred. Widespread and lasting • as are the manifest achieve- ments of his life, of him it is preeminently true that its mightiest power and influence are beyond any human record or estimate. No one understood more thoroughly than he the vanity of earthly fame. And in a nobler field than that of any human ambition is the true harvest of his labors. Their longest and grandest results are to be traced to the personal power of his life, in its silent touches upon thousands of hearts and lives, for time and eternity ; strengthening the faith and lifting the aspira- tions of men, and through the appulse of his own char- acter on those of his day and generation, sending out waves of influence beyond any mortal calculation, even to the remotest future. How fitting here are the words already quoted and uttered by himself over the coffin of a loved friend and great and good man ! " Is all the opulence of such a life perished .' No ! 478 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. there is that in its impress on the world that shall never pass away. Man's words and deeds and spirit live after him. That life will pulse on in the veins of his children and his children's children, a power for good through coming years ; and when human memories perish, and the footsteps of human love and honor and sorrow shall cease to visit his tomb, when the mourners and the mourned of to-day shall lie down together in the chambers of silence, still in the great electric conduction of thought and senti- ment from mind to mind and age to age it shall live on incorporate, if unrecognized, with the action and feeling of the world in the currents of the future, till time itself shall lapse. Nor then, nor ever, shall it die. In the eternal memory of God, in eternal consequence and eternal judgment, our mortal lives shall live on immortal." We cannot think of Dr. Post as dead. His saintly life, always having in it so much of the other world, in death had an easy transition. He had his citizenship in that world, and while here, and more and more in the later years, his thoughts and character seemed to belong to eter- nity rather than to time. He is living where old age and growing infirmities " can never touch him further," as we cannot but believe in reunion with the loved of other years and still in his great heart of love compassing those whom he has left behind. This sketch is prefaced with two pictures ; and as we close it two faces present themselves through the past, _one in the far background and one close at hand. They are very different and yet one ; and each is eloquent with its own story of the same life. In the law office of Henry B. McClure in Jackonville, in 1845 or thereabouts, hung a copy of a portrait — now well known — of Ruf us Choate, which was at that period DR. POST'S MARKED TRAITS. 479 not infrequently mistaken for that of "Professor Post." And there was in the horizontal lines of the forehead, slightly arching with the brows and underneath masses of dark hair, and in the deeply musing and shadowed cast of face, a resemblance, very likely a strong one, between the portrait and Professor Post of College Hill. Forty years later, the face, in its deep lines grown yet deeper and with the marks of added time upon it, yet seems to have grown younger. On the street coming towards the gate of his home in St. Louis is a tall form in black, slightly stooping, and with steps somewhat slower than formerly. He has a cane in hand and wears glasses, and his hair is turned to silver. The face is written over with the story of lifelong integrity and manly honesty and noble thinking. It is one which draws a child, and from which anything low or mean in human nature would shrink away. As it looks up and kindles with recognition, it is kindly and full of blessing. It is the same face which has looked so lovingly through all the past. But somehow it seems to have grown saintly as if touched by a light from that world which is drawing near. THESAURUS OF SOME TREASURED THOUGHTS AND PICTURES TAKEN HERE AND THERE FROM THE WRITINGS OF DR. POST. " Under the stimulus of gold and glory she [Athens] blooms forth the ultimate flower of ancient civilization, a creation unique amidst those of ancient commerce, gymnast and victor of the seas, mistress of a thousand states and a thousand isles, purple and golden with the trophies of battle and traffic, wearing the diadem of Hellenic chief- taincy. She rises on the eye of history, if not robed in the gorgeous magnificence of Tyre, a combination never witnessed before, of beauty with strength, of exquisite taste with heroic vigor, and of Oriental riches and voluptuousness with Occidental daring and enterprise ; wear- ing the hue of every genius, and changeful and glittering as her skies and her waves. Such another spectacle the world has never seen ; a picture of vast commercial opulence wedded to a civilization so refined, so energetic, so imperial. In the picture gallery of history she stands alone both in finish and in grouping, like the artistic miracles of Prax- iteles and Apelles, blending, in personality all unique, her muse's dream of Pythian power and beauty with her tutelar genius of patient industry, invention, art, and political wisdom that stood embodied in the marble of her Parthenon. She shines across the ages like her own Acropolis gleaming over the Saronic: gold, empire, liberty, genius, constellate above her : and the trophies of commerce and battle, with those of art, eloquence, philosophy and song, hang together on the glittering columns of her Propylsa. " Perhaps no picture in the past would more attract and interest us, could we recall it, than a glimpse of her seaport — the Piraeus — in the time of Pericles, 470-430 B.C., a gay, animated, picturesque miniature of the world of that age ; the emporium of the productions, industry and art, of many climes. History exhibits few spectacles more brilliant or magnificent than that presented by it when amid music and festive and sacrificial pomp and applause ' outvoicing the deep-mouthed sea ' 481 482 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. the Athenian youth embarked — a brilliant, garlanded victim-pageant — in an expedition against lordly Syracuse, the Dorian centre of Greek power in the west. The graphic pen of the most tragic of historians has made the scene vivid as it is memorable in the perspective of the Past. Athens pours forth her multitudes that day — her wisdom and beauty and valor and genius — to auspicate the embarkation. The old grow confident, and enthusiasm thrills the veins of youth, as they look on the gorgeous and mighty armament. The galleys with their models of grace and strength, decked and furnished with the sagacity and bravery of art, their images of gods and heroes, and their linen sails, snow-white, gleaming double in the Ionian sun and wave, their count- less streamers flaunting with every hue in the upper and nether azure, they seem another Athena of purple and scarlet and marble and gold, a dream of the sky and the sea, floating between either, starting to life under the charm of music. The public prayers cried by the herald and its solemn repeat running along the ships, echoing from the waves like responses of the gods of the sea to libations that from cups of silver and gold fell like a purple rain on its bosom, the stormy paean of the military, the wild refrain of the oarsmen, mingling with martial or voluptuous strains of the Dorian or the Phrygian moods, ' Hymning of highest Jove, The queen of intellect and the queen of love, The lord of light or god of the rosy wine,' — these, with the shouts of the sea to the shore and the shore to the sea, all reverberate from wave and cliff and Pyraean walls till they answer back from the glittering Acropolis, where Athenas in armor, on her glorious Virgin-house catches the Eleleu t and brandishes her spear towards the sea. The air quivers like the harp strings of the Sun-God who never has looked down on a more magnificent spectacle. " The deep below pulsates under the mighty joy. It is the queen of Grecian culture, in her gold of commerce and war, going forth as in a revel of her Bacchus on the Saronic. In the eye of history that revel changes to the funeral pageant ; that tempest of exultant sound to a wail over the young, the gifted and the brave, that shall return no more. That proud expedition is to find its grave, and with it, that of the commercial supremacy of Athens, in the depths of Sicilian seas. Sea- born she is, and her doom is of the sea ; the sea her field of empire, and of victory and her grave.'' — From fragmentary unpublished MS. of Lecture on Ancient Commerced ^ Found after the previous portion of the Memoir had heen given to the printer. THESAURUS. 483 " In the past she [Commerce] is exhibited almost as a creative power. At her touch the desert sands rise into architectural marbles ; the for- ested wild and splintered cliff group themselves into forms of art and beauty, and the solitude wakes to the din of mechanism and the tramp of nations. The drear rock, under her spell, grows resplendent with opulence ; the dismal marsh shoots into mast and column and spire ; the desolate places are hung with purple and scarlet, the woven picture and the tissued gold. The mountains stoop for her, and the valleys rise ; realms are conquered from the sea, and the dividing ocean becomes the highway of civilization. She more than discovers Californias : she creates them; yea more, she creates that of which all the gold that glitters on the surface or that hides in the depths of the earth is but a poor representative — free, sagacious, powerful men. Builder and civilizer of cities and empires, mother of laws, quickener of art, elabo- rator and diffuser of ideas, humanizer, liberator, conciliator, pacificator of nations — such are some of her prerogatives in history." — Idem. " The origin of commerce is found in the geologic and climatic constitution of our globe and in the relation of mutual wants and capacities of supply which this constitution establishes between differ- ent regions of the earth. It is an ordinance of human interdependence and brotherhood bound up with the structure of the earth we inhabit and written by its Architect on the face of the earth and on its sky." " Instead of the East Indiaman with its huge bulwarks and bristling cannon, and with its thousands of sailors and soldiers, passing like a floating island or a winged city over the vast waste of ocean, and coast- ing southward well-nigh to the Antarctic circle to reach the clime of spices, we must picture to ourselves the bronzed, sinewy, turbaned Arab, or the shag-clad Massagetse, and the parti-colored, gayly caparisoned caravan, with clouds of camels/ and of cavalry, moving like drifting oases amid the solemn and illimitable Sahara ; in the midst of which, on some island of green sprang up a Tadmor, or in some rocky fastness a Petra, or on the rich alluvium of some river margin glittered a Damascus or Alexandria, a Samarcand or a Babylon." — Idem. "Her vast and gloomy, gorgeous and bloody superstition presses down the millions, like her own mighty, mysterious, awful Himalaya with heights glittering in frozen, lifeless splendors, where the moon- beams and sunbeams paint dazzlingly beautiful or terrible phantasma- goria on the icy face of eternal death, while the dark, ponderous mass below lies in deep shade and cavernous, sunless glooms." — From unpublished Lecture on India. 484 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " Like the broken marbles of Greece, it [the Sanskrit] speaks of a past which has left in its successors no peer. It lies, like the bow of Ulysses which living hand cannot bend, or the harp of Apollo rifted from the skies which mortal cunning cannot tune or wake to melody." — Idem. " The vast Persian military empire rises and falls ; the star of Greece culminates in the ascendant and sinks into a night. of ages ; the pen- nant of Carthage floats over the western seas and sinks in the waves ; the meteor of Macedonian empire streams up the skies of the Orient and goes out atnid the gardens of Semiramis ; the dynasties of the Seleucidae and Ptolemies run their course of opulent and powerful centuries and pass away; the Roman Empire throws its dome over the ancient world for ages, till even its mighty manhood grows old and falls under the hand of Time ; still China has been simply and movelessly conservative — moving only on the dead swell of the past. "So in modern history; its vast events and periods of change, revolution and agony, have passed, while she has seemed petrified and changeless like the face on an Egyptian obelisk amid the shifting scenery of time. The old world falls and long drear ages of wild bar- barism roll over the west. The Saracen empire starts from the Arabian deserts and storms over southern Asia and northern Africa, and has its brilliant noon of centuries ; and it passes. The mighty empire of Charlemagne lifts itself out of the chaos of the Middle Ages and rears its bulwarks against the inundation of nations, and falls to pieces ; still China remains and the index-hand on the clock of time seems not to have moved a minute. "The tempest of Western nations beats for centuries in the crusades on western Asia, and is laid. The Papacy starts from the grave of the secular world-empire of Rome — a mighty and fearful shadow she rises over a barbaric world ; she has her baleful and lurid centuries in the midnight of modern history and declines toward the west ; still China stands in the waste of ages pointing to the far past. " Nations are organized in the west and a political system of European states arises and sinks in ruins and is reconstructed; the new world comes into history, and empires and civilizations are developed in the bosom of the Atlantic sea. The Reformation convulses and shakes the world ; the long paroxysms of modern history subside ; the English Rev- olution startles the west with its clangor of the fall of hierarchy and throne ; and it passes. Finance and commerce throw their chainwork of silk and gold — but chainwork still — around modern civilization. THESAURUS. • 485 Ages of Titanic heaven-assailing philosopliy run tiieir impious and ruin- ous courses. The delirium tremens of the French Revolution shakes the occidental world and her orb of empire streams baleful in the north and sets amid the Boreal lights of the Polar night. And, still, China slumbers on far beyond the reach of this din ; like the inmate of an enchanted chamber in a paiace where the sleeper sleeps on amid orgies of wild wassail and rapine and festivity and slaughter, or like a face on an Egyptian sarcophagus looking out with the same dull, changeless, lifeless aspect while the storms of empires and ages sweep across the sky." — From unpublished Lecture on China. In a MS. lecture on Ancient Egypt, the writer gives a picture of her ruined cities and " their huge prostrate columns of porphyry that seem like the fallen pillars of an elder sky ; their stupendous gateways that seem as portals of elder gods ; their gigantic forests of syenite col- onnades or mystic sphinxes or towering cabalistic obelisks emerging from the desert sands ; their sunken labyrinths that imitated and emu- lated the mazes of the Zodiac ; and the solemn cities of the dead, that, with their vast, cavernous recesses and mummy millions and stiff but strongly marked and pictured sculpture, exhibit a mimic mockery or a sorrowing, longing memory of the world of life — or perhaps rather a semblance of that underworld where the shadowy nations enacted in silent and phantom show the passion and achievement of remembered mortality." ' ' A vast gulf arises before me. thick with many phantoms. Powers of light and gloom are struggling there, the powers of anarchy and ruin, and a paralytic conservatism with impotent curb maddening the fiery courser of progress till the sun-car leaves its fixed, high, beneficent orbit of movement, and burns, blazes and wastes, through the heavens. I see them too, grim prisoners of infernal night ; fearful Briarean forms such as ancient fable called from the realms of nether gloom into the light of pale, affrighted Olympus. These are revolutions. But I see even these soothed, serened, humanized. Christianized, under the bland influence of a holier and more living faith. " I see the mighty forces of Liberty and Truth and Love emerging. I see awful destinies in conflict for humanity. They hide their faces in cloud. But I fear not, for I see among them a Mighty One crowned long ages ago as King of coming ages and his face is such as the king of Babylon saw in the midst of the furnace — like unto the Son of 486 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. God." — From unpublished Lecture on Philosophy of the Progress of Society. " The advance of society is like that of the heavens in the Ptolemaic system of astronomy — the great starry sphere moving steadfastly on, though orbs within it meantime exhibited all the while many a pertur- bation, many a mazy and retrograde movement in their epicyclical wheel." — Idem. "Other towns can often look back with pride to their early history, and relumine in the associations of the past the waning love of liberty and truth. Boston has her Faneuil Hall, Charleston her Fort Moultrie ; but Alton must wear it upon her escutcheon, in characters as imperish- able as the rocky bluffs around her, that in her early youth she crouched before not one but a hundred masters ; that, in her, freedom of speech found its first American martyr ; that she did all that in her immaturity and feebleness she could do, to bury freedom of press, and with it the American Constitution, in a bloody grave." — From Address to the People of Alton. " He who strikes at freedom of speech is guilty of treason, not only to his country, but to his kind." — Idem. " You made, as far as you could, a solemn oblation of the principles of universal liberty and of the future hopes of the race upon the same ensanguined altar." — Idem. "You have made the object of your hate a talisman and a power worth more to hira and his cause than a hundred years of life. You cannot bury his shed blood in the earth. It will have voice. It will plead louder than a thousand presses. From its every drop will spring an army of living antagonists. Did you dream that in this age you could muzzle free discussion? You might as well attempt to muzzle ^tna. Did you hope to chain liberty of speech ? You might as well lay grasp on Niagara." — Idem. " Forgive us, friends, if we seem somewhat strange to you to-day ; if on this anniversary festival we appear almost as with sphinx faces, turned with sad, steadfast look to the land of the Nevermore." — From Class Semi-Centennial Address at Middlebury College. "In those terrible hours, when — Faith and Hope not yet grown to strength and confidence — the awful curtain was lifted, and through THESAURUS. 487 days and nights which seemed ages I looked with the vividness of Dante's vision into the open secret of the hereafter — a hereafter through which I had not yet learned to walk with the Son of God — that revelation was to the new life with ine like Dante's initiation to the walks of Paradise through infernal and purgatorial gloom and flame. Then was the shadow of the everlasting cast over the field of the present world, and the heart-beat of time set forever to the pulses of eternity." — From Congregationalism : A Life Story. " As the day waned a thunderstorm sprang out of the torrid sky and caught me ' far out at sea ' on the treeless waste of prairie. Its coming seemed like the march of God from Mount Paran — so fearful was the roll of his chariot wheels over that floor of the world, and ' burning coals went forth at his feet.' But it passed, and his glory was on the bow of peace that hung on the retreating cloud ; aAd as the spring thrilled all things with fresh and grateful pulse ' the whole earth was full of his praise.' " — Idem. "The Wabash murmured and the forest birds caroled on my ear; but he still sleeps on : for him no bird of morning sings ; for him yon fresh and glorious sun shines in vain. Nature smiles, but not for him. The woodland is wildly beautiful, but not to his sealed eye. The voice of earthly hope and love shall steal on his silent ear no more. He sleeps from the land of his childhood and the land of his love far away.'' — From letter written after death of Aurelian Post. "Methinks I could not triumph to think that my soul, with its vast aspirations after the Everlasting and Good and Fair and Great, its memory and affection, its hopes, its reason grasping after imperishable truth, its ' thoughts that wander through eternity,' its faith and love that had gone forth toward an imagined Holy One, and its moral nature capable of wearing immortal glory and beauty, was soon to lie down on the breast of corruption and cease to be ; that heaven, the mourner's dream, the martyr's goal, the pilgrim's home, the life-hope of suifering virtue, had become to me a dull, meaningless word, a beautiful mirage vanished from the illimitable desert of being." — From article on Immortality of the Soul, published in The Bibliotheca Sacra in 1844. " I have been thinking how glad and bright and tuneful the earth will move on a thousand years hence, forgetting to mourn us and the 488 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. loving, beautiful, and good, as it has forgotten all that fed, on the gifts of life before us. And I feel myself a passing echo, a fading shadow amid a world of such." — From letter written in Jacksonville in 1848. " The days are as ardent as the passions of youth and the nights as soft with moonlit beauty as its dreams." — Idem. " We love to seek converse with sorrow and the dead, where the outer world seems in sympathy with the mourner ; where the trees gather in gothic solemnity and cathedral gloom around the grave, and where nature, with the touching similitudes of her own brief bloom and transient summer beauty, of her swift decay and sure renewal of life, may image the brief flower of our mortal being, its hastening deca- dence and its immortal hope." — From Address at Opening of Belle- fontaine Cemetery. " It is well to pause and listen at times to the stern but merciful monitor that warns us that we are but shadows in a world of shades." — Idem. " Here we feel it is fitting to lay our dead on the bosom of sympa- thizing nature. Let the violet and harebell kiss the turf above them ; let the rose and ivy embower, and the oak and evergreen wave above their silent rest; let the zephyrs, freely visiting, sigh through the whis- pering leaves with the voice of the past ; let the night wind through the solemn woods wail its requiem for the departed ; let the moonlight stream over them, through the shadowy branches, like the light of other days, and let the stars of even, in tranquil and holy watch, look down upon their graves, like celestial Love watching their resurrec- tion." — Idem. " Let pyramid, column and statue with heavenward hand, and slab with graven cherubim, who speak of immortality and point to God — let them be to us ever the index fingers, which time, in the shadow of vanity, still extends toward the world of everlasting light, pointing ever to Him who sitteth above the stars, wearing the vesture dipped in blood, the Conqueror of death, the Achiever of immortality for man." — Idem. " There wandered the happy amid amaranth and ever-blooming asphodel ; or zephyrs sighed along the stream of oblivion, and funeral THESAURUS. 489 trees waved dusky branches amid the pale skies of eternal pain. The white-robed walked along the streets of pearl and the river of life, or the lost shrieked around the City of Dis and the Burning Sea, or the departed stretched their shadowy hands across the Dark River, still longing and loving, toward the children of mortality." — From Address on Genius. " Comet minds there are, which like those wanderers of immensity whichever side the orb of light they turn, project their ray ever to the opposite realm of night. Drawn though they may be within the very verge of heaven, still turns their vision ever to the nether glooms ; and hurrying in seeming impatience and pain through their perihelion, they follow their projected visual rays into the dark and infinite void." — Idem. " I look above — there burns Orion in the sky, as he burned over the birth-year of time, and will burn over his last ; yea, as he burned over my own far-fled years of dreamlike childhood and glorious youth. But beyond his fires I see them — the shining faces — the loved and faded from the earth. There, there, they live and love. They beckon me with their white hands, but no whisper comes, save rifts of angel melodies from that far world." — From A Farewell to 1850. " It was the sigh of the dying year, whose latest shadow now lingers upon yonder sky like a film cloud across the moon. ' Farewell,' I hear it whisper, ' I wish thee joy of my newborn brother. May the wings of all his hours be tipped for thee with gold. Use him well, but trust him not too much. The rosy hues of youth are now upon his eye, and his pencil is dipped in dreams ; but he will not love thee more than I have done, and may not serve thee better. Much he will surely take away of what thou Idvest — much of thy swift-winged life — he may bear off all ; at least, his pinions, be they of ebony or gold, shall waft thee nearer life's solemn close and nearer the eternal doom. May they fit thee for it, calm thy passions, temper thy hopes, reform thy evil, and bring thee gentle charity, true wisdom and heavenly love. In this solemn night and solitude be thy life's fever soothed and the strife of thy life's battle stayed ; and be thy hates, political and personal, if such thou hast, subdued to sympathy and pity ; directed, as this hour reminds thee, against the fellows of thy frailty and thy transientness, whose life, like thine, is but as the wind in yonder silent sky, that passeth away and Cometh not again." — Idem. 490 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. • " What are we, and all this proud, worshiped, Godlike Present with all its passion and beauty and intellect and achievement, but the foam-crest of a surge on time's solemn sea, upheaved a moment in the light, then rolling on in lone and infinite darkness ? " — From The Voices of History. "The mission of reform is not simply to destroy. Destruction is but vulgar work ; but to create approaches the divine. If you can only tear down existing order and leave society in chaos, your highest glory is that of an architect of ruin. As order, in an imperfect but progres- sive world, lives only by reform, so without order, reform itself perishes.'' — Idem. "Amid martyrs' tombs and quenched brands and inquisitorial cells and wars flaming with many a red cross ; amid the wordy thunders of belligerent schools, and Babels of discordant tongues now silent as that of Shinar ; o'er many a dusty symbol, and tomes of statutes grim and bloody; cathedral and chapel smoldering on the ground, miter and tiara trailed in the dust, and white surplice changed to the crimson streamer of carnage — I see the Muse of Ecclesiastical History, standing amid the prostrate forms of peace and sweet charity and Heavenly Truth, a Cassandra, alas ! doomed for ages to prophesy in vain." — Idem. " Learn that Charity is not indifferentism, nor gentleness cowardice, nor temperance lukewarmness, nor faith bigotry. Nor, again, is diver- sity schism, or variety discord, or difference hate, or a school necessarily a faction, any more than dumbness is concord, despotism order, or death peace." — Idem. " Have you ever stood in the darkness and solitude of a winter's night beside the Niagara River where it lashes itself into foam prepara- tory to the fearful leap of the cataract? Beneath and around all is confusion and turmoil and earth-shaking uproar — an agony, a ruin, a madness, of the elements. Your eyes are dizzy with the whirl of the mad waters. . . . " In such a moment have you looked up to the ever-tranquil sky, and beheld the stars of night shining in serene and holy beauty forever there, looking down in seraph meekness upon the eternal uproar and strife and torture of nature beneath.' If you have, you have seen imaged Eternal Love overwatching human passion, agony, and strife, as THESAURUS. 49 1 they for a moment convulse the tide of mortal time, and leap the dark cataract." — Idem. . . . " If we come down to times bordering on our own, where our memories and affections attach to the actors, and they seem as yet within the circle of living sympathies-, the lessons, more moving, are not less instructive. The Muse of History seems to bear us to the moonlit picture gallery of some once familiar but now ruined mansion, where all along the wainscot the buried locks seem waving from the canvas, and the faces of the good, the pious, the brave, the gifted and the lovely, seem by the broken moonbeam to look on us like life ; living command seems still to repose on brows which long since wore the mightier awe of death ; lips long since sealed seem ready to open again with the shaft of wit, or charm of persuasion, or the beautiful music of love ; forms long ago wedded to corruption seem lit up again with the glow of mortal loveliness, and countenances seem kindling anew with earthly devotion, that long since amid the blessed ranks have reflected the brightness of God. "For a moment the illusion lasts, then vanishes and leaves us alone with empty images. The night winds sigh along the desolate cham- bers like the voice of the Past. The uncertain moonbeams stream along the silent corridors like the light of other days ; and the eyes on all sides around gleam on us with the ghastly vacancy of the grave. We feel that the dead are there, and through the dim light we seem to see their shadowy hands beckoning us to join their vast and silent throng." — Idem." ..." The eighteenth century may be fitly defined as a period of Religious Eclipse in modern civilization. . . . An eclipse, not a sun- set — for the orb of Christian light and life was still climbing the skies. The world passes into profound shade — but though dark and chUl, it was not the shadow of night. It was an eclipse in which the satellite lunar orb — the reflector of the great central light — came between the earth and the light. The Church intervened between God and the world, between humanity and Jesus Christ." — From The Skeptical Era in Modern History. ..." The era of skepticism opens with the moral constitution of the world relaxed, and its life-pulse beating heavy and feeble. Its tone is low; the vital principle faint. It is a time for disease to set in. The guardian forces of the social system are asleep. Its energies of 492 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. resistance are paralyzed, and the elements of corruption are at work ; a dissolution is begun. We feel, as we enter the period in question, that we approach some melancholy catastrophe of human society ; one of those sad, chill, feeble, foul epochs which mark the decay and death of nations and civilizations. Its type of life and passion is worn out, and itself in collapse. Chivalry, honor, heroism and faith lie dying ; the mean and crawling vices — the worms of dissolution begin to appear. The world seems old and wan. The air grows chill, the gloom thickens. We feel we are entering the penumbra of the eclipse, and the occultation of the orb of light and warmth is at hand. Thus the skeptical cycle impresses us as it enters. But there are also in its aspect portents of change. Society is torpid, spent, faint. But we may prophesy for it there is fever lurking in that ague stage, and mad- ness and delirium are couched in that atony. It is a world where all things seem portentous. We snufF the plague in that stagnant air. We feel death in its chill and gloom. We feel the shadow of the destroying angel in the sky. We momently wait his epiphany. That sky, we feel, is to kindle to another hue. Blood red it rises before us, and beneath it twenty millions of victims. We hear the edict, ' These millions for the guillotine ; these for sword ; for famine, and pestilence and the rage of the elements these ; and these for madness and terror and sorrow and shame.' There is a tumult of nations raging against God. The abyss yawns under European civilization, and Hell from beneath is stirred to meet the mighty, the gifted, the brave, the beauti- ful, the noble at their coming." — Idem. . . . "Not now for God or glory or beauty, but for gain were all things. For this men plotted and fought and chaffered ; for this they made treaties, alliances, peace and war; for this they legislated, planted colonies, established manufactures, tariffs, trade-laws, colonial and commercial systems, coerced agriculture, instituted banks, inflated and exploded financial bubbles. For this they explored new seas and savage continents ; they ravaged ancient realms ; plundered barbaric monarchies ; they dismembered kingdoms ; they blotted old nation- alities from the map of Europe; they prostrated the public law and political system of Europe in the dust. . . . Faith, honor, heroism, patriotism, justice, chastity, piety — all had their prices. Power, empire, beauty, fame, grace, the favor of man, amd even of God were exposed for sale. Courts, monarchs, hierarchs, pontiffs, the church, and even heaven itself, in priestly finance, were venal." — Idem. THESAURUS. 493 " The history of Christianity in the past is of a life. It shall be so in the future — a life climbing ever mightier and loftier, in a more inspiring atmosphere, and clearer light, and larger vision. It is not to die : not till the throb for immortality has ceased in the human breast, or an answer, surer and more hopeful than that of the risen Christ, shall come to the ages applying the ear to the abyss of the grave ; not till that risen Christ has ceased to be the uplift of the world, His Gos- pel to be the power of God unto Salvation, and the vision of the beauty and glory of Christ has sunk from the gaze of the worJd into the deeps of the eternal past, and the New Jerusalem, with its faces of the loved and beautiful and blessed, has been resigned by man to ever- lasting oblivion ; not till then shall the stone rolled by the angels from the door of the sepulcher be rolled back again, and the history of the Church of Christ become epitaph — the memory of a dream the sweet- est, most beneficent, most beautiful, most blessed, that ever descended on human vision, but drifting itself to the same grave to which it marshaled the deluded race of man. Till then history, standing by the open tomb of ' Him that liveth and was dead, and is alive for ever- more,' shall utter with the beloved disciple, ' This is the true God and eternal life.'" — Frotn " Charge'''' given to Hugh McDonald Scott at his inauguration as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the Chicago Theological Seminary. "As I looked on that majestic manhood lying pale and low, I felt that God had answered prayer — had most truly 'blessed' him. I was comforted for the fact that those lips were now forever mute, as I remembered that their mortal utterances had ever been true to liberty and humanity, to his country and to God, and now by martyrdom had been placed amid the hallowed and immortal forces of history. I was consoled that that hand could never again greet my own with its genial, generous pressure, in the thought that it had been nerved amid its pulses of life to write the Proclamation of Freedom to an enslaved race." From Sermon after the Death of President Lincoln, on Inter- cessory Prayer. "Usually, universal principles are born of special occasions — the vindication of a right, in a certain instance requiring the assertion of its universality. So men have achieved beyond their thought or hope. But the special instance vindicated, the general principle is suffered to sleep, or at least is not pursued to its consequences. It passes to the tomb of accepted but dead axioms. The zeal aroused for it in the 494 ' TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. hour of its first conflict passes away, and in the security of triumph it perishes of its very victory. Like the Spartan warrior, it is brought back upon its shield — a victor, but dead." — From Address delivered in 1870, on The Occasion and the Situation. " That face [the face of Lincoln] thus transfigured to that of the Moral Sublime, to a virtue already on high, will be seen, by the idea of heroic goodness inhering, upborne higher and higher over the future, when the surge of our great tragedy shall have sunk behind the horizon, above its war scenery, its masses of force, its blazon of mighty- names, latest of its heroic constellations — like Cassiopeia's throne ia the circumpolar skies, in the circle of perpetual apparition ; rising and falling, it may be, with the earth's roll, but to set nevermore." — From Address on History as a Teacher of Social and Political Science. " God's golden purpose strikes through all the past, its lines of light shooting through all the maze and kindling into a divine scheme. The labors of our fathers and of our own shadowy lives are economized and eternized in a plan of God. In vision beyond Columbus' dream, beyond even the Pilgrims' prayer, I seem to see arising in this new world a power rainistrant in chief among the nations, to the universal royalty of Christ ; and I seem to hear sounding along its march down its vast future, the exultation of the Hebrew seer over God's people of old : ' There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.'" — From- Sermon on Our Country as a Factor in the Kingdom of Christ. " A force is herewith imparted to, and inwrought with, eternal souls, and can never die — not in this world, not in the world to come. It strikes through the ages in Time's diorama and through cycles when time shall be but a remembered dream. It works on here beyond the date of our earthly being, and will continue to do so through ages when, we have passed away. The hand that this day bestows this gift shall stj'etch forth across the graves of centuries, to touch with new life-pulse the youth that here seeks the sources of larger and deeper truth, as it shall hand down to him in alcoves here to arrive, the volume rich with the lore of the gone ages." — From response on behalf of Chicago Theological Seminary on receipt of Hammond Library Bequest. " Whichever way I take my outlook I see over the shifting scenery of earth and time, over the change of human philosophies, theologies and. THESAURUS. 495 institutions — standing ever one living Presence, swaying all yet iloof from all, like a celestial orb ever over the tides of ocean, though darkened with clouds and vexed with tempest — the Christ of God, Lord of the ascendant in all the future. Ages pass, monuments crum- ble, the memory of man grows faint with years ; history, with its great evidential facts, is receding further and further into the dim deeps of the past. But over all, above the Church and the world, one wondrous face comes out brighter and brighter as we move onward. That face is the face of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. . . . "More and more grows the feeling that Christ is Christianity — its foundation, its substance, its columnar proof, its self-evidencing" warrant — the sun that illumines, coordinates and sways all — the inspiration of its spirit, passion and purpose — the impersonation of its. reason, pathos and persuasion. As the Scriptures term Him, He is the Life — the life of His people and the life of His religion — its perpetual vitalizer. It ever lives in the reflection of that face, rather as the reflection of that face. So living it cannot die. That face of divine sweetness, love and beauty — ' the brightness of the Father's glory and express image of His person ' — once risen on the mind of the world can never set, it is forever above and beyond all storm or eclipse. It can never perish from the memory, nay, from the vision of men. It will be the eternal answer to all the sophisms of unbelief, the living confutation of infidelity, and the queller of doubts and fears and all the powers of darkness ; shining on above all disaster and change of men and nations, over the Universal Church in all its life, over all its walks in time and through the shadow that fringes eternity. He shall endure as long as the sun, and shall be, like the sun, his own argument, through all races and all the ages." — From Sermon on " Christian Union,^^ delivered in the First Congregational Church in St. Louis. ..." Instead of the solid and regular advances of an argument where elimination, conviction, pathos, and purpose proceed in health- ful order and to practical result, he [the preacher of a certain class referred to] treats the public with a display of flashy and fitful pyro- technics that glitter without guidance and startle without striking, and thinks to storm the strongholds of lust and falsehood with an artillery of rockets." — From an article ^ on "Relation of the Pulpit to the Press," published in The St. Louis Christian News of March, 1878. ..." You are all the while printing yourselves on minds in an imprint that shall outlast material monuments, and endure whea 496 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. earthly libraries shall feed the final conflagration. Yea, an imprint on one soul unto life in Christ, shall last when God's chirograph in the starry heavens shall fade, and shall be read to your joy and honor 'when the books are opened.'" — Idem. . . . "Oh! the glory, the beauty, the sweetness of faith that can rest upon God's own bosom, and feel that He loves, that He forgives ; that casts away those cold clamps which we term science and philos- ophy, and reasons from its sole imperishable instinct and accepts God's own declarations. Mysteries may encompass us, but let us have faith. It is our privilege to pray, and, as he has taught us, to call him ' Father.' All ranks of holy beings pray, from the seraph before the burning throne, to the little child that lisps ' Our Father.' The great Redeemer of man prayed on the mountain, prayed in the Garden, prayed on the cross, and in the hour of ascension His last view over this world was with His hands outspread in prayer for blessing." — From Sermon on Prayer and Philosophy. " History places in her Valhalla no monoliths, lives entire and all of a piece, nor those completely and minutely depictured, but lives glimpsed at their loftiest, noblest, and best. This she must do in dealing with imperfect men, or she can have no Hall of Heroes. . . . To the heroic she will condone much. Over much she will drop the mantle of oblivion. On what is brightest and best she will fix her longest look; and as the sapphire and chrysolite of the loftiest mountain-peaks kindling in the sunset are seen latest by the receding voyager over the ocean waves, while the unsightliness and disorder of their bases sink in shadow or fall below the horizon, so the heroic life ■will be looked at longest and latest when it climbs highest into heaven." — From article in The Andover Review on The Life of William Lloyd Garrison. '■ Age, so dreaded as cold, lone, drear, congealed, may be the peaks of some high volcanic mountain projecting thfemselves out of masses of evergreen only to reflect serener and purer light, and by their own interior ever-glowing fires lifted above cloud and fog into the loftier and grander converse with the upper infinite. So, congealed and lone and ■drear as age may seem, it may yet be serener, grander, and nearer heaven. It may feel more the airs that come from eternity. But these airs are perpetually vitalizing. They come from the fields of immortal youth." — From, article published in The Chicago Advance, entitled ^' Old Age: God's Gift:' THESAURUS. 4gy " The interval that divides the two seasons of light hone can describe, not even one who has passed through it. A feeling that attaches to the twilight and moonlight — the dimness of the infinite-^ is in it; the sense of waning moons and setting stars and of the majesty of dark- ness alone in heaven. Then that majesty, as in new genetic fiat, utters again, ' Let there be light,' and creation's morning chimes are heard again in the heavens. All things in the new sunrise are lustrous with the dew of youth, and the freshness of a new being touches nature and soul. — From an article in the same paper, headed " Time and Experience Vitalizers, Hot Wasters?'' "It [old age] has moved along life's voyage to the zone of calms — those lone and silent depths where the time-storm is lulled, the pas- sion and strife of time grows feeble; and the great life-beat of eternity comes in, in vast, solemn, tidal pulses. Beyond the illusion and fever of earlier years, far out towards the verge of the real and everlasting, it stands as mediating between two worlds — as an electric agency, constituted by God to charge the mundane and shadowy with the power of an endless life." — From contribution to The Advance, on ''Perpetual Youth:' " Above all things, put on Charity. Charity is the eternal dew of youth. To love is to live ; to love rightly and truly is to live forever." — Idem. "Age shall become as the cape of Beulah, beyond the skies of storm, lying far out towards the shining shore, where the air is always mild and sweet, and the light ever soft and serene, and through the hallowed solitudes from beyond the death shade and the dark river, from the heights of immortality, ever and anon and nearer and nearer come rifts of the Psalm of Life — hymn of even- ing and morning — vesper of time and matin of eternity — the new song of the ever young." — Idem. . . . " History is no eddy, though embracing many such. It is a Mississippi, bearing all eddies, with refluent or affluent whirl, ever to the great ocean. It exhibits in itself, it is true, perpetual oscillatory movement ; but the oscillation is of the pendulum below, that is mov- ing the index hand above, on the horologue of the ages, ever nearer to themorning hour." — From Lecture on Palingenesy. 498 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. " Social convulsions are a social apocalypse. Revolution is revela- tion. The upheaval and overturn reveal what smoother and more tran- quil times never disclose — elements and forces ever at work in the deeps, but commonly hidden and voiceless. As the geologist, in his re- searches into the dynamic laws and structure of the earth's mass, takes a position, not where the smooth champaign spreads out in level lawns and rich gardens, smiling with fruit and flowers, but in fields of ruin and the disaster of nature : where the earthquake has torn open the earth's bosom, and, gazing down the rent, he may read her interior constitution and forces and may trace the awful subterranean powers which build or destroy her structure, vitalize or waste her surface, which have left their finger prints on the rent marble or the molten granite on the dingy sides of the chasm, or are still stirring the eternal fires below ; so we may now take position beside the abyss that has opened in our American society and trace powers, laws and elements, heretofore but dimly disclosed under our smooth and beautiful pros- perity." — Idem. In the same lecture, referring to the fallen soldiers of the Union, Dr. Post said : — ..." Nature guards the mystery of their repose ; the solemn winds breathe of it to forest and ocean ; the lone stars of night look down upon them, and morn and even drop their dewy tears. But from the knowledge of living men not only their living forms but their graves are hid forevermore. Their being fades into the vast and shadowy past ; their dust blends with the air and earth and flood and mingles with universal nature. Blessed peace shall come again to deck these climes with beauty ; but for our martyred heroes it will find no monu- ment, no tomb." In his lecture on "The Greatness and Power of Faith, as illus- trated by the Pilgrim Fathers," he said of the dying pilgrim at Ply- mouth : — " Alone, far away from the great world, looking out on ' the deep no plummet soundeth,' what chart shall guide him over that mysterious main? No mundane constellations light thee now, O pilgrim! No earthly sunsets lure thy wandering sail ! No mortal pilot serves thee here ! Time's Speedwells and Mayflowers fail thee. This is no earthly tempest ; this, no Atlantic surge." " Here womanhood, that faded under the low thatch and solemn THESAURUS. 499 pines through which the New Jerusalem glimpsed on her dying eye, was sleeping with her baby on her breast. Yonder they may have laid the wise Winslow or saintly Brewster. That may be the brave Stand- ish's last bivouac, and here the fair flower of the wilderness, his sweet Rose, may have hidden the bloom of her mortal beauty in the tomb." — Idem. " Individual history grows to general truths ; personality is trans- figured to principle and translated, like Astrasa, to the stars." — Idem. " Duty, and duty alone, is great, safe, mighty. Man is strong as he holds God's hand, lofty as he bows before him, wise as he listens only to his voice; true liberty is his service; true order his law; true life his love.'' — Idem. ' ' A mightier hand than Alexander's was drawing him through the curtain of time." — From passage of a sermon in which Dr. Post was depicting the last hours of Alexander the Great. " There rises before me another scene. The watchers are about the bedside. They are speaking in bated whispers or moving about with stealthy and muffled footfall. To one life the last hour is at hand — its moments almost numbered. The world, home, sweet friends and kindred, are disappearing ; Time itself is fading. There is now ' no more device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom,' nor power to touch the springs of human action ; the good that might have been done must remain undone forever ; the word of comfort and hope and warning, that might have been spoken, must henceforth remain unspoken for- evermore. " Draw near the bedside, friend, and tell me whose pale form is that which lies before thee. What face is that upon which Death is already beginning to set his changeless seal? Nay, mortal, start not back! That face is thyself." — Recalled memoriter from a sermon of Dr. Post. ..." I feel still the pulse of mighty rapids along which our country is being borne, with sounds in our ears, whether of the nearer cataract or of an ocean stream bearing on to the great sea. I feel awed as in the presence of the solemn mystery of a future of vast hope and vast fear. As we stand here to-day, not alone, but girt round with a glori- ous cloud of witnesses, the wise and good, the gifted, the beautiful, 500 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. the brave and the saintly, that have wrought and suffered for the life of the land in other days, but now are fast drifting into the eternal past^ I am borne under the shadow of that throne in whose timeless date stars and galaxies rise and set, and earthly systems and empires come and go like ephemerides in the setting sun. In that presence I pass from an atmosphere of uncharitable sentiment and severe condemna- tory judgment toward those from whom I may have differed in my mortal years to feelings of pity and sympathy toward those implicated with me in the weakness and frailty of this life, as I think how soon we shall lie down together in the dust; and I look for that which in this scheme of change binds eternity to time, and earthly empire to the eternal throne." — Front Address at the Unveiling of the Blair Monument. INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS. Adams, John Quincy, 43. Adams, Dr. Samuel, 55, 109, 157, i65. Adirondacks, 21, 240, 371-3, 405. Alton, 95-96. Andover Theological Seminary, 42, 218, 403. Arnold, Denham, 439. Autobiographic Mss., 44, 53-4, 56, 57, 62, 63-4, 66-68, 73, 75, 76, 77, 82- 83, 85, 89, 91-92, 96, 107, III, 119- 121. Bacon, Henry D., 164. Bacon, Rev. Leonard, 211, 215, 356. Baker, General, 353. Baldwin, Rev. TheWjn, 52, 55, 77. Barber, , 3a. Bascom, Dorus, 14^ Bascom, Franklin, 14. Bascom, Oliver, 14. Bascom, Samuel, 14. Bass, Dr. Wm., 33. Bateman, Hon. Newton, 69, 84, 340. Bates, Hon. Edward, 47, 192-3. Bates, Rev. H. H., 14. Bates, Pres. Joshua, 18, 33, 53. Bates, Mrs. Semantha, 14. Baltell, PhiUp, 34, 122, 405. Baumgarten, Dr. G. A., 435. Baury, Mrs. Catharine, 35. Beaumont, Dr. Wm., 76. Beecher, Catharine, 45. Beecher, Dr. Edward, 52, 53. S5, 56, 73. 90. 92. 9S- Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, 215. Beecher, Dr. Lyman, 45, 215. Belcher, Charles, 439. Benton, Thomas H., 43. Biddeford Pool, 404. Blackburn, Church, 222. Blackburn, Rev. Gideon, 64, 77, 353. Blair, Gen. F. P., 193, 208, 420-5. Blair, Hon. Montgomery, 208. Blatchford, Rev. John, 77. Blatchford, E. W., 218. Brank, Rev. R. G., 439. Bridge, Hudson E., 204. Briggs, Dr. Chas. E., 439. Brown, Col. B. Gratz, 271. Bryant, Wm. Cullen, 146. Buddington, Rev. , 215. ' Bullard, Rev. Artemas, 124, 169, 222, 228. Burrows, Rev. E. B., 439. Butler, Mann, 222. Camp Jackson, 270-3. Carter, Rev. Wm., 63-4, no. Casey, Captain, 146. Castleton, 31, 32. Calhoun, John C, 43. Chamberlain, F»^B., 282. Charless, Joseph, 240. Chase, Hon. Salmon P., 45, 208. Chicago, 59-60. Chicago Theological Seminary, 218, 455- Chipman, Daniel, 19. Chittenden, Deacon , 59. Cholera year in Jacksonville, 56-57, Cholera in St. Louis, 166. Clay, Henry, 43. Civil War, 262-9, 273~4i ^84. Coffin, Nathaniel, 55. 501 502 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Collier, J. P., 283. Colton, Erastus, 57. Congregational Church in Jackson- ville, 63-4, iio-ii, 114-16. Congregational Church, " First " in St. Louis, 203-6, 209, 229-30' 260-2, 268, 270, 39S, 399. 438. Congregational Church, " Pilgrim," 325-7- Congregationalism, Struggle of, in Missouri, 201-4, 205, 206. Cornwall, 3, 4-6, 32. Crane, Rev. , 75. Crow, Wayman, 282. Darby, John F., 169. Davfs, S. C, 282. Dayton, Benjamin B., 222. Denison, George, 439. Denman, Matthias, 144. Douglas, Stephen A., 51, 353. Drake, Dr. Daniel, 67. Duncan, Gov. Joseph, 44, 50, 90-j, 122-3, 353- Dwight, Rev. Timothy, 213. Edgell, George S., 489. Edwards, James G., 50-1. Edwards, Mrs. James G., 61. Eliot, Rev. Wm. G., 169, 282. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 208. Fagg, Hon. T. J. C, 439. Field, Rev. Henry M., 151, 161. Field, R. M., 192. Fisk, Prof. Franklin, 218. Fitch, Mrs. Margaret Henshaw, 35. Fletcher, Gov. Thomas C, 302, 309. Foote, Hon. Solomon, 20. Forbes, Moses, 150-2, 164, Forbes, Moses S., 439. Fuller, Mis. Jane, 7, 13, 31, 436. Gamble, Hon. Hamilton R., 47, 19? Garrison, William Lloyd, 428. Gasconade Disaster, 222-28. Gassaway, Rev. Dr., 209-10. Geyer, Hon. H. S., 192-3, 209. Giddings, Rev. S^mon, 46. Gilman, Winthrop, 78, 95. Glover, Hon. S. T., 193, 425-428. Godfrey, Captain, 78, 95, 353. Gray, M. L., 439. Greeley, Carlos, 204, 83. Grimke, , 66. Griswold, Wm. D., 439. Guiteau, Sheridan, 17. Hagar, Jonathan, 33. Hand, Capt. Augustu^, 7, 13, i^. Hand, Dr. A. F., 7, fI-13, 25-6, 31, 68, 82, 84, 435. Hand, Oliver, 7, 31. Hand, Madame Sarah, 13, 14, 109. Hammond, Col. C. G., 218, 400. Hardin, Gen. John, 51, 353. Harrison, General, 45. Hatfield, Rev. E. F., 17, 46, 47. Henshaw, Charles, 35. Henshaw, Daniel, 34-5. Henshaw, J. P. K. (Bishop) , 35. Henshaw, Madame Sarah, 34, 35, 7S. 85. Henshaw home in Middlebury, 34-5. Hitchcock, Henry, 282. Home in Jacksonville, 78-80, 84, 85, 89. ISS. 156, 157-160, 162, 163. Home in St. Louis, 207-8. Hough, Prof. John, 18, 20. Holmes, Charles, 439. Howard, Thomas, 439. Howe, Zimrl, 31. Hulburd, Calvin, 17, 20, 385, 387-88, 418-419. Humphreys, Dr., 74. Hutchinson, Rev. E. C, 169. Illinois College, 49, 52-3, 55-6, 65-6, 77, 92, 149, 219, 220-222. Intelligencer, The St. Louis, 194, 195- 197. Jackson, Andrew, 43. Jacksonville, 49-52, 53, 90, 155-7. 403' INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS. 503 Jeter, Rev. Dr., 169. Johnson, Rev. Edwin, 209. Johnson, Dr. J. B., 43s. 436, 439- Kellogg, S. B., 282-3. King, Wyllys, 270. Kirby, Mrs. Julia Duncan, 122. Kirkwood, Mrs. Sarah, 73. Knox, Dr. Reuben, 124, iji, 152, 153, 161, 164. Knox, Milton, 151. Krum, Hon. John M., 204. La Clede Saloon disaster, 166-168, 222. Larrabee's Point, 7-8, ^13. Laurie, Rev. Thomas, 87-8. Lawrence, Hon. R. F., 28. Leonard, 192, 193. " Life Story," 39-40, 41-2, 42-3, 44, 45-46, 46-47, 47-49, IS3-IS4. IS6- 157. 159-160. 385- Lincoln, Abraham, Assassination of, 301-304, 304-306, 306-309. Lippincott, , 353. Lockwood, Hon. Samuel D., 51-2, 78, 91- Lockwood, Mrs. Samuel D., 64, 91, Logansport, 3, 67-8, 107-9, 40i- Lovejoy, Rev. E. P., 59, 95, 96, 353. Lovejoy, Owen, 333. Merrill, Rev. Thomas A., 18, 150. Middlebury, 2, 3, 4, 8, 16, 19, 20, 21, 33-4. 74-5. 405- Middlebury College, 3, 16-20, 26-30, 32. 33. 53. 150. 385-6. Miller, Mrs. Rebecca, 37. Mitchell, A. S., 197. Missouri Blind Asylum, 218. Montesquieus, Trial of, -193-4. Monticello Seminary, 217. Muench, Hon. Frederick, 309. Macrocosm, The, 69-72. McDuffie, , 43. McCune, John S., 152, 209, 270. McClure, H. B., 28, 74, 84. McClure, Mrs. Harriet Henshaw, 35, 74-75. 84, 162. McGuffey, Professor, 67, Mansfield, Edwin, 67. Marshall, Chief Justice, 43. Mead, Mrs. C. M., 402, 417, 433, Mead, Martha, u. Mears, Rev. Mr., 206. Merrill, Rev. J. G., 440. Nelson, Rev. H. A., 303. NiccoUs, Rev. S. J., 304, 444-451.. O'Sullivan, Thomas, 222. Ogden, W. B., 146. Orwell, 2, 14, 21, 36. Park, Rev. Edwards, 211, 215, Partridge, George, 282. Peabody, Rev. Charles, 260. Peck, Judge, 73. Perry, Mrs. Samuel, 76. Phelps, Hon. S. S., 19. Plant, Samuel, 270. Piatt, Mrs. Eliza Henshaw, 35. Pomeroy, A. D., 222. Post, Aurelian H., 3, 11, 42, 66, 67-8, 108-9. Post, Catharine H., 156. Post, Mrs. Frances Henshaw. In Mrs. Willard's school and at Green Bay, 35-6; Marriage of, 74-5; Wedding journey, 75-7; First winter in Jacksonville, 77 ; Strange adventure, 80, 82-3; Welcome visitors in the new home, 84; Daniel Webster's courtesy, 90; Trip east in 1843, 121; Scarlet fever in Jacksonville, 148 ; Letter describing La Clede Saloon dis- aster, 168 ; The St. Louis home, 207-8; The Gasconade disaster, letter relating to, 223; Articles on Immortality, 231 ; Surprise party, 232 ; Ladies' Loyal League and Union Aid Society, 269-70; Operation for cataract upon eyes 504 TRUMAN MARCELLUS POST. Post, Mrs. Frances Henshaw — concl'd. of Dr. Post, letters from Boston hospital concerning, 314-15 ; Death in 1873, 375-6; Letters of Dr. Post to Daniel Roberts, 377-9- Post, Henry McClure, 156. Post, Martin, 2-4, 16, 19. Post, Martin Hayward, 156, 435. Post, Martin Mercillian, 3, io, 11, 12, 13. 20, 34. 42, 66- Post, Rev. Reuben, 42. Post, Roswell, 1, 4, 5. Post, Mrs. Sarah H., z. Post, Stephen, i, 2. Post, Truman Augustus, 156. Post, Truman, 3-4. Post, Truman Marcellus. ' His birth, 3-4 ; Early home life, 7-13 ; Youth in Orwell, 14-15 ; Preparation for College, 16 ; Matriculation, 16-17 ; College days, 17-20; School teaching, 22 ; Letter to his mother, 23; Letter to Daniel Roberts, 23-25 ; School teaching under difficulties, 25-6: College days, cont'd, 26-27; Character sketch, by Roberts, 27-8 ; Graduation, 28-30; At Castleton, 31-32; Let- ter to Roberts, 32 ; At Castleton, cont'd, 32-33 ; Trip to New York, 33; Tutorship in Middlebury, 33-34; Bible class, 34; Visit to Norfolk, Conn., and Homer, N. Y., 34; Visit to Orwell, 36; Ill- ness in 1831, 37-40 ; Letter to Roberts, 38-9; Studies at An- dover, 41-2; Winter' of 1832-3 in Washington, 42-4; Journey west in spring of 1833 through St. Louis to Jacksonville, 111., 44-9 ; Arrival at Jacksonville, 49 ; Night at house of Governor Dun- can, 50 ; Sojourn with family of Judge Lockwood, 50-1 ; Meeting with Stephen A. Douglas and General and Mrs. Hardin, 51; Post, Truman Marcellus — cont'd. License to practice law, 52 ; Ap- pointment as Professor of Illinois College, 52-4; Bachelor's quar- ters in College, 56; Experiences in "cholera year," 56-7; Trip to Chicago in 1833, 57-60 ; Danger- ous illness and religious experi- ences in Jacksonville in the same year, 61-2; Public profession of religion and how it came about, 64; Letter to his mother, 65-6; Address at Teachers' Convention in Cincinnati, 66-7; Visit to Logansport, 67-8; Blind days and poetry, 68-72; Trip east in 1835, and marriage, 73-5 ; Wed- ding Journey to Jacksonville. — ■ Letter to Roberts, 75-7; Winter of 1835-6 in Illinois College, 77; . " Lockwood Place,"78-9 ; Strange night's adventure,8o-3 ; Boar hunt, 85-9 ; Evening with Daniel Web- ster, 90-1 ; Fourth of July ora- tion in 1837, 92-4; Address to people of Alton, 96-106 ; Visit to Logansport ; letter to Mrs. Post, 107-9; Trip through Northern Illinois in 1840. — " Starved Rock," 109-10 ; Pastorate over Congre- gational Church in Jacksonville, how it came about, 110-116; Views on systematic theologies, ecclesiastical order, terms of church communion, and extem- pore preaching, 116-121 ; Visit to Middlebury in 1843, and preach- ing in the Congregational Church, 121-122 ; Ascent of Mount Lin- coln, 122; Account of death of Governor Duncan, 123 ; Trip to St. Louis and Lebanon, 111., in 1844, 124-5 ! Address on Heroism of the Democratic Ages, 125- 133 ; Article in Biblical Repository on Immortality of the Soul, 133- 6 ; Account of trip to Burlington, INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS. 505 Post, Truman yi.a!cc€&a.s^ cont'd. Iowa, 137-144; Letter to Mrs. Post, in 1846, 144-5; Account from MSS. of strange incidents and serious sickness in Mackinac Island, 143-47 ; ■ Illness at home, 147-8; Call to Middlebury, 149- 50; Call to Third Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, 150-54; Jacksonville life in retrospect, 155-160; First years in St. Louis, 163-4 ; Letters from Jack- sonville and St. Louis, 162-3; Discourse on the Pilgrim Fathers, 164-6; Summer of 1849 in St. Louis, 166 ; La Clede Saloon dis- aster, 166-8 ; Address at Dedica- tion of Bellefontaine Cemetery, 168-182 ; Address on Genius, 183- 192; Early friends in St. Louis, 192-193; Article on Moral Ob- ligations of the Legal Profession, 192-94; Literary notices, 194, 195, 196 ; Voices of History, 194- S, 196; Farewell to 1850, 197- 200; Address on Congregation- alism, 204^5; Organization of First Congregational Church, 205-6; Home in St. Louis, 207- 208; Trip to Fort Snelling, 209; Church Revival, 209; Remarks on death of Dr. Gassaway, 210 ; Address on Mission of Congrega- tionalism in the West, 211-16; Response to toasts in Brooklyn and Boston, 215-16; Connection with Educational Institutions, Monticello, Chicago Theological Seminary, Missouri Blind Asy- lum, Washington University, An- dover, 217-219; Addresses at Illinois College, 219-222; Title of D.D., 222; Letter describing Gasconade disaster, 223-228 ; Discourse commemorative of Dr. BuUard, 228 ; Call to South Brooklyn, 229-230; Articles on Post, Truman MaroeJlBS-i^ <;«»/'' Truman Marcellus Post.D.D.. a bog ,. 3 1924 029 461 708 olin