arV 16902 rHE KING'S CUP-BEARER IN MEMORIAM EWD WXHevyVtt Cornell University Library arV16902 The king's cjip-bearer; olin,anx 3 1924 031 450 657 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031450657 THE KING'S CUP-BEARER THE KING'S CUP-BEARER a sermon in memory of the Rev. E. Winchester Donald D.D. preached in trinity church on the sunday next before advent NOVEMBER 20, 1904 BY THE REV. WILLIAM REED HUNTINGTON D.D. RECTOR OF GRACE CHURCH NEW YORK PRINTED FOR TRINITY CHURCH IN THE CITY OF BOSTON MDCCCCV D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston E. W. D. THE KING'S CUP-BEARER I was the king's cup-bearer. Nehemiah i : i i . THE man who said this of himself had been, at an earlier stage of his life, in the service of the king of Per- sia. I justify my taking his words as a text for this morning's discourse by re- minding you of what another King, one Jesus, said of this same fun6lion of cup- bearing: " Whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, be- cause ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward." The sign of the cup may be traced through both Testaments, and carries many significations. There is the cup of sorrow, with its plenteousness of tears ; there is the cup of doom, freighted with death ; and then again there is the cup of thanksgiving, the cup which brims with eucharist and overflows with joy ; tears lose their saltness at its approach, CO THE king's cup-bearer and poison its skill to harm. This last is preeminently the King's cup; to be the bearer of it is a most honourable office ; reverently to present it to the King is a lofty a6l of homage ; acceptably to min- ister it to the King's guests is a blessed employ. Dr. Donald your late re6lor, Win- chester Donald your friend and my friend, was thus privileged. He was King's cup-bearer. It is in that charac- ter that I shall try to pi6lure him ; for service rendered under that head that I shall chiefly praise him. It is a great thing to be a preacher of righteousness. He was that. It is an even greater thing to be a son of consolation. He was that also. How often men mistake their own powers and misinterpret their own gifts ! Had you asked your late minister to define himself, he most likely would have said, " I am a swordsman. I fight CO THE king's cup-bearer the King's battles," But no,his supreme gift was not militancy, — however it may have seemed to some, as well as to himself, — his supreme gift was notmili- tancy, it was sympathy ; he gave drink to the thirsty ; he satisfied the longing soul ; his true emblem was not the clay- more, as he fancied, it was the chalice. But let us busy ourselves with here- dity for a few moments, for that battle- word which I just now used carries us back to Scotland, the home of all the Donalds that ever were, and it would be vain to attempt an estimate either of the man or of the minister without hav- ing first taken a straight look at Donald the Scot. To a great, yes, to a most cred- itable extent, your re6lor had himself made himself what he was ; but none the less the blood that had run in the veins of his forbears, from generation to gen- eration, had helped to make him. THE KING S CUP-BEARER The quality most central to Scottish chara6ler is intensity. The people of that stock know how to love, and they know how to hate, — for hatred, the ob- verse of love, is sometimes a virtue: — "Ye that love the Lord, see that ye hate the thing which is evil . " Th e Scotch can be good haters as well as ardent lovers. "Perfervid" was the epithet a controversial divine of the Seventeenth Century fastened upon the race, and it has stuck. When they care for anything or any person, they care a very great deal, — " Praefervidum ingenium Scoto- rum." Akin to this attra6live trait, though in partial contrast with it as well, is what they call in Scotland dourness. The word is a hard one to define, but it car- ries with it a distin6l suggestion of seve- rity dashed with melancholy. The dour man is ever observant of the rugged THE KING S CUP-BEARER side of human life. He notes that all the sounds of inanimate Nature, the voices of the woods and of the streams, are in the minor key . The tragedy of the world afflidls him, and he is willing that oth- ers should call him austere rather than stand in his own eyes an optimist on false pretences. This is a dour world, he says, and I will be dour to match it. That was a shrewd critic of national char- adler who divided the Scotch into two families, "the children of nature under Robert Burns, and the children of grace under John Knox ; " but who shall count the number of the souls whom their very dourness drove into these opposite companionships, some that they might find an antidote for their melancholy in sensuous delights, and other some that they might find warrant for it in the eternal decrees of a predestinating God. It is written of Jesus, at the grave of THE king's cup-bearer Lazarus, not only that he wept, but that he "groaned in the spirit." Tears are often a coveted relief; groans tell of a deep-down sorrowfulness that finds no outlet. Jesus groaned in the spirit be- cause there was present to his conscious- ness at that moment, not the solitary case of Lazarus only, but the sombre pi<5lure of a whole world travailing to- gether in pain. Doubtless his outward features betrayed the inward grief. In all likelihood the charge they brought against him, "He hath a devil, and is mad," was prompted by a look in his face like that which frightened Dante's Florentines. They would not tolerate the melancholy mood. It put their sur- face light-heartedness to rebuke; it spoiled their feast. They desiderated a cheery Christ. Still another Scottish trait is keenness of discernment in the region of things THE KING S CUP-BEARER immaterial and unseen. This shows it- self in various ways. The Scotch, for in- stance, have always taken kindly to the more abstraft, as contrasted with the more concrete, among the sciences, — natural-born metaphysicians almost to aman.They are, moreover, both divines and diviners, divines in virtue of their fondness for theological problems and their skill in wrestling with them ; divin- ers in that their folk-lore deals so large- ly with the marvels of second sight. Spiritually minded they are, if religious ; philosophically minded, whether reli- gious or not; and mystically minded, even to the verge of superstition, when- ever the deep race-instin6l wakes in them. I find in Winchester Donald a blend of all three of these chara6leristics. He was intense in his affe6lions; he was dour in his temperament; he was born THE king's cup-bearer of the Spirit. Faithful in love ; deeply se- rious in purpose ; ever intimate with the invisible ; he showed the best of Scot- land in his handsome face. By the acci- dent of birth, Donald was a New Eng- lander, and to the day of his death a loyal one ; but by all that differences one sort of countryman from another sort of countryman, he must be rated a North Briton, kinsman to the Na piers and Buchanans, the Douglases and Alex- anders, the Scotts and Campbells and Carlyles, — men whose genius has com- pelled a land of which the emblem is a thistle to blossom as the English rose. Elijah Winchester Donald ( and I have sometimes been sorry that he sup- pressed the former of his two baptismal names, there was so much of the Elijah in him ) was born at Andover, in that year of revolutions, eighteen hundred and forty-eight. The atmosphere of the THE KING S CUP-BEARER historic little town was vibrant, at that time, with the breath of scholarship, if also made strident now and then by the rougher winds of controversy. The son of a manufa6lurer, he was helped to offset these influences by a wholesome conta6l with the world of practical af- fairs. It is impossible to overestimate the influence which the surroundings of childhood exert upon the child through the sympathies and the imagination. I was m y self brought up in a " mill to wn ," and I would not for the world see blotted the pi6lures which water-wheels and power-looms, canals and sluice-ways, great bales of cotton and great bales of wool, printed in vivid colors on my me- mory. It is good for the idealism which is in a child to feel the counter-check of reality, to be forced, at times, out of the world of dreams into the world of things. The young Donald felt both influences, C9j THE king's cup-bearer that which streamed from the semi- nary and reached him filtered through the ministrations of the meeting-house ; and also that which issued, strong and healthy, from the mill. He grew up the sturdier man for having known both conta<5ls. In 1869 Donald was graduated from Amherst College,of which seat of learn- ing he afterwards became a trustee. In later life he was proud, and not without reason, of the fa6l that he was the first Episcopal clergyman to receive from Amherst the honorary degree of Doc- tor of Divinity. Forthe College, he ever cherished a warm afFedlion, and by its officers and graduates was loved and deeply trusted in return. He began his post-graduate life un- committed to any particular calling or profession, a teacher for a time, and also, for a little while, a dabbler in journalism . [10 J THE KING S CUP-BEARER All of these experiences helped to make him ready for the real work of his life, which began when, after due prepara- tion at the Divinity School of our own Church in Philadelphia and the Union Theological Seminary of New York , he was made deacon in 1874. Curate for a year to the Rev. Dr. John Cotton Smith, Re6tor of the Church of the Ascension in New York, — a divine well remembered by the older genera- tion of Trinity Church worshippers, — he presently became himself a re6lor, having been called to the charge of the parish of The Intercession, Washington Heights. Here he tarried for seven busy years, learning more of joy than he had known before, and more of sorrow. At the expiration of this preparatory min- istry, he was recalled to the Church of the Ascension, Dr. Cotton Smith, his old chief, having died. At the Ascension, THE king's cup-bearer Donald remained ten years, fulfilling a ministry memorable in more ways than one. During those ten years I was his near neighbour, and since it was impos- sible to be his near neighbour without becoming acquainted with his sterling worth, a friendship sprang up between us to the known strength of which I am indebted for the high honour of having been appointed his eulogist. I had known him before our coming into neighbour- hood, but had not known him well. How vividly I remember the very first time I set eyes on him. It was at a meet- ing of a little group of clergymen inter- ested in the upbuilding of the Church Congress. They were most of them elderly men, and he a youth "ruddy and of a fair countenance." Something was said to which he could not assent, when suddenly there came into his eyes a look like that which flashes from THE king's cup-bearer under the brow of Dore's neophyte in the pi6iure of the monks in choir. He struck his stick against the floor and spoke his mind. Who is this young man, I asked, who ventures thus frankly to dissent from the majority, and they his elders } It was not long before I came to know who and of what make he was. One of the most interesting features of Dr. Donald's New York ministry was what we may call its outreaching charadler. He succeeded in establishing close relations with people of a class which the average minister seldom so much as touches. This was the more re- markable because the Ascension was not at that time what it has since be- come, a church with free and open sit- tings. What his methods may have been I do not know ; but this I do know, that somehow there was gathered, round about the compa6l body of his parish- [13 J THE KING S CUP-BEARER ioners proper, a wide fringe of detached or semi-detached adherents, who loved him dearly and would have followed him any whither. He was a sort of Apo- stle to the Latin Quarter. Young men of business, strangers in the great city, struggling artists, budding journalists, — I venture to say that the young redlor of the Ascension had more of these, and of the like of these, under his wing than any other pastor, certainly any other pastor of our communion , in New York . It was not so much his oratory, his eloquence, that attrafted them, though that was a powerful magnet: it was his virility, his downright sincerity, his in- sight into their needs. Here is a man, they said, who will tell us what he really thinks about these questions that are vexing our souls, one who can un- derstand us, who will not be hard upon our infirmities, or chastise with scor- 04] THE KING S CUP-BEARER pions our shortcomings. And so it was that the young reftor came to have an exceedingly good report of them that were without. Bohemia heard him gladly. Let it not be supposed for a moment that this popularity with the people whom most ministers of reli- gion fail to reach was won by any low- ering of standards. Far from it. His preaching and his teaching were ethi- cal, unmistakably ethical, to the core. His counsels were ever the counsels of perfe6lion. But to help men ethically, we must know men personally ; if we would mend them, we must meet them. This is what he sought to do, and did. He " found " men, in the sense in which Jesus found Andrew and Philip and Nathaniel. Listen to two witnesses whose agreement is the more remark- able because neither one of them knew that the other was to be put upon the [15] THE KING S CUP-BEARER Stand. This is what a former assistant ' writes, — and remember that a re6lor is not always a hero to his curates : — " He had a genius for getting en rapport with the unsettled and the discouraged, and for steadying dizzy eyes. This power of his used to impress me greatly when I was with him at the Ascension. My door looked down a long hall, and peo- ple going to his office had to pass it to get to him. Again and again would I see some one come along the hall, a very pidlure of gloom, go in for an in- terview with him, and in half an hour reappear, the shadows all gone, and hope and a new will put in their place." And this is what another, now a uni- versity professor of philosophy j"" has to say: "His very great love for young men, his sympathetic appreciation of ' "The Reverend Milo H. Gates. ^Professor IVoodbridge, Columbia University. THE KING S CUP-BEARER their difficulties, untouched by any taint of sentimentality, and his untiring and unselfish devotion to their interests, when once they had gained his confi- dence, always impressed me, linked as this was with a winning severity such as I have known in no other person. . . . He seemed to give himself not only spiritually, but also physically to those whom he comforted. It often seemed to me that he actually changed places with them. I have seen stricken people leave him not only comforted, but with a certain bodily elation, and have found him prostrated in his study." This testimony of two men is true, and very wonderful testimony it is. The cure of souls does not often take so much out of a man as it exa6led of this keenly sensitive, though seemingly de- fiant, nature. He did not, like the false prophets of old , " wear a rough garm ent THE KING S CUP-BEARER to deceive," though he did sometimes wear a rough garment that deceived. Of Dr. Donald's ministry in Boston, why should I, who knew it only by re- port, seek to inform you who for more than ten years were in daily conta6l with it, who personally observed its methods and personally felt its power.? The mo- tive which prompted him to accept the invitation to become your leader was a chivalrous one, if ever motive merited that adjedlive. "Some one," he said to himself, " must leap into the gulf; if the lot falls on me, why not 1?" In the spirit of willing sacrifice he came; in the spirit of willing sacrifice he toiled ; in the spirit of willing sacrifice he died. How many there were who ap- preciated it all, the great throng which gathered under this roof at his burial gave proof. Death brings its own Epi- phany. He stood revealed. [18] THE KING S CUP-BEARER It was in the early morning of Trans- figuration Day that Donald took his leave of earth, a fair and happy day to die ; nor can we for a moment doubt that, in the language of the prayer proper to that feast, he, "being delivered from the disquietude of this world," was and is " permitted to behold the King in his beauty." You remember how Donald loved beauty. I should like to say a few words be- fore leaving the pulpit as to your late re6lor's religious opinions and eccle- siastical affiliations. No estimate of the man would be complete that left these particulars untouched. Dr. Donald's point of view both with respe6l to the- ology and" churchmanship," so-called, was a somewhat unusual one. He held con virions that are not often found liv- ing amicably together in one and the same mind. His attitude towards Chris- [19:] THE king's cup-bearer tianity in the large may best be under- stood through a study of his Lowell Lec- tures on The Expansion of Religion, published in 1896. His main contention in these discourses would seem to be that the more the power of the Church, as a visible and distin6l organization, equipped and officered,appears to wane, the more have we reason to comfort our- selves with the refle6tion that the type of chara6ler which the Church was de- signed to create is being generally ap- proved and accepted. As in the old Ara- bian tale, the casket is broken, but out of it has emerged a cloud-giant whose figure towers to heaven. This view, pessimistic as respe6ls the Church, but optimistic as respefts that for which the Church stands in the re- gion of conscience and condu6t, is fa- miliar enough ; but what is less familiar is the concrete instance of a man's hold- C20] THE king's cup-bearer ing, along with so unecclesiastical a phi- losophy of religion, a deep devotion to the sacramental side of Christianity . The Holy Communion was to your late rec- tor's heart singularly attra6live. He cherished the idea of it, he loved the ri- tual of it. At the centre of all his devo- tional life, there stood an altar. Both at theChurchof the Ascension and here in Trinity Church, he laboured to enhance the dignity and the beauty of that por- tion of God's house which is especially associated with the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ. This cannot have been because of his holding the notions of sacerdotal authority common- ly associated with the Anglo-Catholic movement of the last half-century, for, as a matterof fa61:,hedid not hold them. His sympathies went out to the Cam- bridge rather than to the Oxford School. He symbolized with the Thirl walls, the THE KING S CUP-BEARER Lightfoots and the Westcotts, not with the PuseySjtheKebles and theLiddons. How then are we to account for his sa- cramental leaning, apparently so much out of harmony with all the rest of his convi6lions and preferences? Simply in this way, I incline to think : in the midst of shaken walls and crumbling columns, "a dust of systems and of creeds," the eye of his soul discerned the majestic figure of the Son of Man, the uncon- querable Christ. Whatever else fails me, so his meditations ran. He at least will not. To Him I have pledged loyalty. To Him I have given allegiance. He is my Sovereign. Sacramentally, there- fore, seek I to realize what spiritually I am ; with joy to my King's banqueting- house I go; his banner over me is love, and his cup-bearer I will be. It was not that he had it at heart to see one special form of eucharistic doftrine prevail over C 22 ^ THE KING S CUP-BEARER another. Though full of zeal, he was no zealot. What drove him to the altar- steps and kept him there, was simply a strong desire to meet his Lord. Just one year ago to-day, counting by Sundays, on the morning, that is to say, of the third Sunday in November, 1903, your alms were asked, as in a few moments they will again be asked, in aid of the Episcopal City Mission. Donald was here — for the last time he was here ; he spoke — for the last time he spoke. He pleaded tenderly for Christ's poor and sick and lost. Suffer him, dear friends, through my lips, after all these months of pain and silence, once more to plead. It is the ancient plea, the old, old plea," lam hungered, givememeat. I am thirsty, give me drink." No, after all it is not I ; it is not Donald ; it is the Christ. Hear ye Him.