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RUSSELL H. CONWELL
AND HIS WORK
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Vanity Fair Studios, Inc.
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RUSSELL H. CONWELL
AND HIS WORK
ONE MAN’S INTERPRETATION OF LIFE
By /
AGNES RUSH ‘BURR
WITH DOCTOR CONWELL’S FAMOUS LECTURE
ACRES OF DIAMONDS
Blustrated
PHILADELPHIA
THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1926, by
THE JOHN C. WINSTON Co.
Copyright, 1917, 1923, by
THe JoHN C. WINSTON Co.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
THE Baprist TEMPLE
PHILADELPHIA, PAe
August 21, 1923.
Gentlemen:
In the preparation of this biography
Miss Burr has had the advantage of intimate
acquaintance with me and my work for many
years. I have given her full access to every
kind of information that I possess, and
have talked with her freely as to the aims
and purposes I had in view. I have repeated
to her conversations which I have had with
representative men whom I have met in my
travels both in this country and in Europe.
The estimate which Miss Burr has placed
upon me and my work is of course entirely
her own. She has written with the eyes and
heart of a friend, and that must color more
or less the account in my favor.
While of course I cannot accept respon=
sibility for the opinions of the author, I
believe that her narrative of the facts of
my life is correct and it goes forth with my
entire approval.
Fraternally yours,
[fecetell Mbortuehl-
To The John C. Winston Company
Philadelphia
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1
FOREWORD
HE biggest problem that confronts a man is
life. It includes all problems. ‘To find a sat-
isfactory solution is every man’s earnest desire
and persistent quest.
How others have solved the problem is often enlight-
ening. Particularly do the records of those whose lives
have been greatly useful to the world have much in
them of help, especially when they began life with none
of the aids considered necessary to achievement, yet
have achieved.
Such is the career of Russel H. Conwell. He started
life as a penniless boy on a rocky New England farm.
He had neither money nor influence to help toward
success. Yet he achieved success in great measure—
a success that ranks higher than the gaining of wealth
or fame, though these have been won—in that its finest
flower is great service to his fellowmen.
The road he hewed for himself may prove both inter-
esting and helpful to trace. This record of it is offered
with the hope that the sign-posts along the way may
be of use to others in faring toward their goal.
This book was revised by the author and approved
by Doctor Conwell a few months before his death. A
new and final chapter tells of his last days on earth
and gathers a few tributes to his memory.
(9)
Ver erly.
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Rep eT oe
CHAPTER *
ib
Il.
III.
IV.
VI.
VIL.
VIIT.
CONTENTS
Tue Story OF THE SWORD.
Doctor Conwell’s Favorite Occupation. He Tells
the Cause of His Unceasing Work...............
THe Man He Grew To BE.
His Life Harvest. His Wide Activities—His
Many Charities—His Aims in Life...............
Doctor CONWELL’S ANCESTRY.
The Conwell Family Tree. Doctor Conwell Tells
Hig Views -om ANCeStry sac. ters ie tes haere ete
Toe CoNnwEeELL Homes WITHOUT AND
WITHIN
Doctor Conwell Describes the Daily Life of His
Boyhood. The Mental and Spiritual Atmosphere
Of the Homes icc. ics Late ae eee eee es se fory a Ss
THe FRIENDS THAT CAME AND WENT.
Doctor Conwell Gives Personal Recollections of
John Brown, Frederick Douglas, William Cullen
Bryant and Other Distinguished People Who
Influenced Him in His Boyhood.................
EARLY YEARS.
Formative Influences of Nature. Traits Developed
by the Hard Work of the Farm. The Literature
of the Home and Its Influence upon His Life....
THE RUNAWAY.
Doctor Conwell Tells of His First Escapade. Run-
ning Away a Second Time and Going to Europe. .
ScHooL Days.
Doctor Conwell Describes His Early School Days.
He Shows How One can Get a Practical and
Useful Education Right at Home................
(11)
PAGE
26
29
32
45
59
67
12
CHAPTER
CONTENTS
IX. Tue Puace or Music in EDUCATION.
cle
XI.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
Doctor Conwell Tells the Value of Music in a
Child’s Education and How He was Able to
Secure It. The Benefit It Became to His Life.
He Makes Some Suggestions for Musical Programs
Scuoot Days AT WILBRAHAM.
Earning the Money to Go. Working His Way
Through. His Studies. Doctor Conwell Describes
His First Public Debate There, Its Ignominious
Failure and‘the Value of Debating Societies. His
Work as a Book Canvasser...........2022ee200-
CoLLEGE Days AT YALE.
His Struggle to Get Through College. The
Humiliation of those Days. A Dip into Atheism
Tur OUTBREAK OF THE WAR.
A Visit to New York. Doctor Conwell Gives His
First Impressions of Henry Ward Beecher and
Lincoln. Speeches for Enlistment...............
GoInc TO WAR.
Enlisting. Raising Troops. His Election as
Captain and Presentation of Sword. Doctor
Conwell’s Letter Home Describing His First
Fingagement.... 2 meme ee ele, online meee en ee
THE SECOND ENLISTMENT.
Captain of Company D. Accompanied by John
Ring. In Charge of Newport Barracks. Attack
of Pickett’s Corps. Defeat of Conwell’s Men.
Death of John Ring. Appointment on General
McPherson’s Staff. Wounded at Kenesaw Moun-
tain. | Conversion an eens. a ee ee
New VENTURES.
Admitted to the Bar. Marriage. Removal West.
Life in Minneapolis. Mrs. Conwell’s Progressive
Editorial as to Woman’s Place and Interests.
Loss of Home and Illness. Immigration Agent
to Germany. Given up to Die in Paris. Health
Restored. Reporter on Boston Traveller. Trip
Around World as Correspondent...........0.0:
PAGE
83
90
101
106
112
125
CONTENTS 13
CHAPTER PAGE
XVI. Busy Days 1n Boston.
Doctor Conwell Tells about Meeting Tennyson,
Gladstone, Garibaldi, Henry Ward Beecher,
Whittier, and Many Other Famous People. His
Work as a Lawyer. Free Legal Advice to the
Poor. The Boston Young Men’s Congress. His
Tremont Temple Sunday-school Class........... 151
XVII. His Entry into THE MINISTRY.
The Death of Mrs. Conwell. Increasing Interest
in Religious Work. Doctor Conwell’s Second
Marriage. The Lexington Church. His Decision
CENCE Be WAITSUL VC te faerie te een eat 166
XVIII. His First Pasrorate.
Doctor Conwell Tells Why He did not Earlier
Enter the Ministry. His Advice upon Choosing a
Life-Work. The Condition of the Church at
Lexington. The First Service. Building a New
Church. His First Church Fair. The Activities
and Growth of the Lexington Church. His Help
in Developing Lexington. His Ordination. The
Cali to Philadelphia}: tanrac setae wate wlersi dave ek ya 170
XIX. THe Earty Days oF THE PHILADELPHIA
PASTORATE.
The Beginning of Grace Baptist Church. A
Letter Describing a Church Service. John Wana-
maker’s Tribute to Doctor Conwell’s ‘‘ Different”’
Methods. The Growth of the Church........... 185
XX. A Cuytup’s LEGAcY.
The Beginning of the Building Fund of The Baptist
1203) 6) [a ae PEN OF roe Vl ho, ROL AGI E anda aang Cot 197
XXI. Burupinc THe TEMPLE.
How a Poor Congregation Built One of the Finest
Church Edifices in the Country. Doctor Conwell’s
Ideas as to What a Church Edifice Should be Like.
His Own Plans for The Temple. His Warnings
Against the Perils of Success..........+.0005 ek OD
14
CHAPTER
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
AN»
ROAV AG
XXVIT.
XXVIII.
CONTENTS
PAGE
How Tur TEMPLE WORKS.
Doctor Conwell Discusses the Church Work and
Tells the Underlying Principles which He Believes
should Govern. The Various Organizations. The
Temple Fairs and their Purpose. Doctor Conwell
Gives His Ideas of a Church Fair. The Various
Entertainments. How they are Planned and
Managed oii... «!s + -led eis ale oho apa et tena lad eae
Tur Business MANAGEMENT.
Doctor Conwell Tells how the Business Affairs of
The Temple are Conducted. The System of
Handling the Church Finances..................
THe Music or THE TEMPLE.
The Chorus of The Temple and Its Organization
and First Leader, Professor David D. Wood.
Professor Wood’s Views on Choir Organization
and Work. ‘The Business Management of The
Temple Chorus. The Special Organ.............
TEMPLE SERVICES.
The Sunday Routine. The Children’s Church.
The Sunday-school and Sunday Prayer-Meetings.
Baptismal Services. The Dedication of Infants.
Special Services. Watch Meeting...............
TEMPLE PRAYER-MEETINGS.
Doctor Conwell Tells the Purpose a Prayer-
Meeting Serves. The Various Prayer-Meetings
of The Temple. The Method of Conducting Them
How TrempitE UNIVERSITY TRANSFORMS
LIFE.
The Reason Instruction at Temple University
Means More than in Many Institutions. Doctor
Conwell Tells How it Came to Be. Rev. Forest
Dager Shows the Need of It
oo 6 Om 66) 0 <@ © *) C18 6 & se eee Be
A UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE.
Obtaining the Charter. Laying the Corner-Stone.
The Ultimate Development that is Hoped will
Come
HOU 8 Oo 610. FT OO C6 es Siete ane Saere 6 Oe ee 86 Le 6, ela ie heehee
227
233
243
255
274
CHAPTER
XXIX.
XXXI.
XXXII.
XXXITI.
XXXIV.
XXXY.
CONTENTS
15
PAGE
A Democratic INSTITUTION.
What the Opportunities it Offers Mean. Its
Adaptable Curriculum. Its Willingness to Meet
Needs. The Various Departments. Many Unique
Special Courses. Its Small Tuition Fees........ 2
HELPING THE Sick Poor.
The Samaritan, Garretson, and Greatheart Hos-
pitals. Doctor Conwell Tells How the Samaritan
Hospital Started. He Gives His Ideas of True
Charity. The Unique Beginning of Garretson
Hospital. The Work it Does at Present..,,.....
SPREADING VISIONS.
How the Lecture ‘‘Acres of Diamonds” has
Brought Fuller Life to Many. How it Helped a
Salesman. How it has Built up Towns. Its
Voice Within Prison Walls. The Message it
hast for? Al, ee Fee en (sre ay Anon Camm an ar ET EPAN
Tue History or ‘‘AcRES oF DIAMONDS.”’
The First Time ‘Acres of Diamonds” was
Delivered. Its Present Great Popularity. What
it has Earned. The Number of Students Helped.
Doctor Conwell Tells How He Came to Give the
Proceeds of the Lecture to Poor Students. Inci-
dents of Becture Trips. ge. semen tae ss acre aretts
Ten MILLION HEARERS.
Unique Lecturing Places. Lecture Topics. Doc-
tor Conwell Discusses Audiences. ‘Tells How to
Keep the Voice in Good Condition. Mentions
the Best Ways to Study for Public Speaking and
Speaks of His Early Efforts. What Others Say
of His Lectures. His Chautauqua Work and
what He Thinks of the Chautauqua Movement.
Firry YEARS ON THE AMERICAN PLATFORM.
Doctor Conwell Discusses Lecturing as a Career
and Gives Reminiscences from His Many Years’
EXPCPIEN CO We. of od ok See ee ee oe canes
Doctor CoNWELL AS A WRITER.
His Biographical Work. Lives of the Presidents.
How He Wrote His Successful Life of Spurgeon.
Books that Have Helped Him. His Favorite
Autnors and Charactersemansas \iieineie retains s8
294
307
318
331
16 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XXXVI. MARGINALIA.
A Favorite Motto. Home Life. Family Bereave-
ment, (Public Honorsi cae tee oes ere 347
XXXVII. Toe Messace or A LIFE.
The Secret of Doctor Conwell’s Success. He
Emphasizes the Power of Right Thinking and
Tells How to Use It Intelligently. The Develop-
ment of Personality—a Process of Education.
Doctor Conwell’s Search for Knowledge and How
He Found It. What True Living Is. In Tune
with the Infinite. Doctor Conwell’s Life—a
Mighty Inspiration to Everybody............... 352
XX XVIII. “Open THE GATES OF THE TEMPLE’’...... 355
APPENDIX
Doctor CoNWELL’s ViEW oF A MENACE TO OUR
DEMOCRACY 20 ee eee ee 363
“THe BATTLEFIELDS OF THE REBELLION’’............ 876
Warrrinr’s Porm, ‘“MEMOREBStAu one ee 388
OUTLINE OF HARLY SERMONS See. ee ee 391
SERVICE USED IN THE DEDICATION OF INFANTS....... 399
ACRES OF DIAMONDS
‘ACRES OF .DIAMONDS”’ je. Sees ee een A405
ILLUSTRATIONS
RUSSULL YI) GONWELLY DAD eee ke, Frontispiece
PAGE
BVA TENE COON WEL Larch cit tr ital eric ithe Au ualen tonsil na 2 19
THE BIRTHPLACE OF RussELL H. CoNWELu.......... 34
BVLEHAIND A) COOM WIRED: «yh tek te Ft Led Rome Ae UME Ge, 51
RussELL H. CONWELL AT THE AGE OF TWELVE...... 66
Tue Oup Door-sTEp, WILBRAHAM ACADEMY......... 99
THE Campus, WILBRAHAM ACADEMY................ 99
RusseLL H. CoNWELL WHEN ELECTED CAPTAIN...... 114
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL CONWELL..........-0-e+000-- 137
NIRS JENNIE, CON WELDS. 0g: eRe alepmenen: fecaiity MN, 140
Tue First “Cuurch Home” or Grace Baptist
GEER E Eh latent oo: 5). 5's Noll aa SCP ae DCS 185
Russevt H. Conwet WHEN He Enterep THe Ministry 188
Ree BA PTISTACERMPLR 0... ea ae Mm eh anne ek Ag
BEORESSORUWAVID 10:)(WOODs. Sau eee rots & sae eee 226
New Buvitpinaes THAT WILL COMPLETE TEMPLE
NRA RETUNY Mees ces oe Sk ae a re eater 275
THE SAMARITAN HOSPITAL......... A OB AA ASS REA ol) eb ue)
WIRES OARAH DM (CONWELL. 22 eee: EES Nee He ea 349
(17)
MARTIN CONWELL
FATHER OF RussELL H. CONWELL
CGrA Pi hiheot
Tue Story oF THE SworpD
Doctor Conwell’s Favorite Occupation. He Tells
the Cause of His Unceasing Work.
USSELL H. CONWELL was once asked, ‘‘ What
R is your favorite occupation?”’
“Tiving,’ was the prompt and hearty re-
joinder.
His career proves his words.
No one could meet him, feel his hearty handclasp,
hear his deep, vibrant voice, or see his cordial smile,
without knowing that he enjoyed living.
No one could come in touch with his work—the big
church, with its membership of more than three thou-
sand; the great university with a roll call since it
started running into the hundred thousands; the hos-
pitals, with their thousands of patients annually; his
lecture trips from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in the
course of which he spoke to hundreds of thousands of
people; his radio lectures in which he spoke to thou-
sands more—without realizing that he gave to this
occupation of living all of his time and energy. He
threw himself wholly into it.
But, though his pleasure in living and working was
keen, he had still another and greater incentive for his
wealth of achievement.
Over Doctor Conwell’s bed, in his Philadelphia home,
hangs a sword. Back of this sword is a story. It is
the tragedy of this story that is the chief cause of the
unceasing activity which filled his days. He was aman
who would undoubtedly have accomplished much with
(19)
20 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
his life. But this disaster made it imperative that he
do so.
He was induced sometimes to tell the story of the
sword. He related it once to a little group of friends
in his home. As they were admiring its beautiful,
gold-chased scabbard, his face saddened. He was
silent for a moment. ‘Then, in the simple, direct and
unaffected way characteristic of him, he told what
this sword meant to his life.
“During the Civil War,’ he said, “when I re-
enlisted at Readville, Massachusetts, a boy came to
me who wanted to go to the war with me. His father
had consented. His mother was dead.
“T said to him, ‘John, you should not go to war.
You will be killed.’ I tried to frighten him, but he
was determined to go. I told him then that he could
not go. But his father insisted, and I finally permitted
him to go with me.
“T went to war from Yale College. I had been
there a little over a year and naturally knew every-
thing that anybody could possibly know. I remem-
ber coming home the previous vacation and while
digging potatoes my devout Methodist father said
to me, ‘My son, I notice that you do not go to church.’
I said, ‘No, father. And I am not going to church any
more. I don’t believe the Bible anyhow.’ ‘My son,’
he continued, ‘are you getting away from your father’s
God; from your mother’s God?’ ‘No, father,’ I
replied, ‘you ought to consider that I have been to
college and know all these things. You have never
been to college and you are not expected to know.
I am an agnostic. I have learned that I don’t know
anything about religion.’
‘““My father was broken-hearted. He said to me,
‘Don’t go to school any more. I would rather you
THE STORY OF THE SWORD 21
would hold on to the love of God than go to school
and learn everything. My son, I would rather see
your body going into the grave than to hear that you
had joined the atheists and infidels.’
“‘T said, ‘I will have to tell you the truth. I have
joined the free-thinkers’ club.’
“My classmates’ autograph books still bear the
record with my name as ‘Atheist.2 I was known as
a disbeliever in the Bible and I used everything I
could find to prove that it was untrue.
“But the first night that John Ring came into my
tent, he took out his Bible and read it by the candle-
light. I said, ‘John, you can’t do that in my tent.
I don’t believe in it and everyone will laugh at me if
I permit you to do that.’ The next night I found him
reading it again and I said to the boy, ‘You can’t read
that Bible in my tent!’ ‘Why,’ he said, ‘what is the
matter, Captain? ‘This is my mother’s Bible and
father told me to read it in memory of mother.’ I
said, ‘You ought to remember your mother, but you
can’t read that book in this tent.’ He answered with
tears, ‘I love you, Captain, but you are a very wicked
man.’ After that night John went into my orderly-
sergeant’s tent to read his Bible.
“One day, when I was called away on duty, there
eame an attack upon our fort in North Carolina, below
Newbern, at the Newport River. Pickett’s celebrated
corps drove our men from the camp. My troops fled
across the river and set the long trestle bridge on fire.
When some had gotten across, John ran up to the
orderly-sergeant there and said, ‘Where is the Cap-
tain’s sword?’ He answered, ‘He has it on. Get
out of the way.’ But John meant this gold-sheathed
sword that was presented to me at Springfield, Massa-
chusetts, when I first went to war. It always hung
22 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
on the center-pole of my tent, and it was John’s especial
delight to polish it and keep it bright. Fearful now
that it had been left behind, he ran back across the
bridge, in among the Confederate soldiers, into my
tent and pulled down this gold-sheathed sword that
I had promised, when it was presented to me, to give
my life to preserve.
“He managed to get about half-way back across the
burning bridge when a Confederate captain saw him
and did one of the noblest deeds of the war. He came
out in full view and swung his white handkerchief.
The fire on both sides ceased and the Confederate cap-
tain shouted, ‘Tell the boy to Jump into the river!
Jump on either side. We will save him!’
‘They shouted, but they could not make him hear.
When he came near our end of the bridge his clothes
were blazing high. He ran through the smoke and
flung himself out on the end of the abutment of the
bridge, and my sword fell from his hands to the bank
of the river. ‘They rolled him into the water and washed
out the fire, but he was insensible.
“They put him on a gun carriage and took him down
to the hospital at Beaufort. There he lay for three
days. With the return of consciousness, one night, he
asked the nurse, ‘Where am I? Where is the Cap-
tain’s sword? Won’t you bring it in, so I can put
my hand on it? Is the Captain coming to see me?’
The nurse told him that I was coming to see him soon.
The next night he awoke and said, ‘ Hasn’t the Captain
come yet? I want to give him the sword myself, for
then he will know how much I love him.’
“‘A little later the surgeon came along and said,
‘That boy isn’t going to live.’ He called the nurse
and asked, ‘Are you a Christian woman?’
§ SEY Bee
THE STORY OF THE SWORD 23
“‘ «Then tell the boy he is going to die, for he won’t
live till morning.’
“The nurse sat down beside him; took his hand and
said, ‘John, you are going to see your mother.’
‘ano Dabs:
“You are going to see your mother,’ she repeated.
“Do you think I am going to die?’ he questioned.
‘““*Yes,’ said the nurse. ‘I will have to tell you
the truth. You will probably not live more than
twenty-four hours. Do you want some one to pray
with you?’
‘“‘He didn’t answer her question but put up his hands
and began to move his lips in prayer. She sent for
the chaplain but did not find him. A short time
afterward John took hold of the sword and whispered,
‘Will you tell the Captain that I saved his sword?’
“She answered, ‘Yes, I will tell him; but I hope
he will be able to get here before you go.’
“He turned his face upward; peace came to his
features and my John went into the Shining. When
they sent me word that he was dead, no man can
describe the horror that came into my soul.
“Six months afterward I was left for dead on the
field of battle at Kenesaw Mountain, in Georgia.
I came to myself in the hospital tent and asked my
nurse if I was living.
‘‘She said, ‘Do you want something to eat?’
““ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I want the chaplain.’
‘She sent for him; he came and sat beside me and
said, ‘What do you wish?’
““‘T want to be forgiven,’ I replied; ‘I want to find
my Lord. I feel that I must. Will you pray for me?’
‘‘He made one of those formal prayers that we hear
sometimes. It didn’t do me any good and I was
angry. I said, ‘I want to be prayed out of my sins
somehow or other.’
294 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
“He got cross and went out, but soon he came back
and said, ‘I am sorry that I was impatient.’
“T told him that I wanted him to read the Bible to
me; that I had disbelieved in it and now I wanted to
believe in it. I told him about John Ring and how he
had once read the fourteenth chapter of John. He
read it, and then the twelfth chapter of Romans, but
I couldn’t see anything then. I felt there was no
help for me in the Bible. I told him so and he said,
‘The only thing for you to do, Colonel, is to go to
God yourself.’
“T said, ‘It looks as though I must. I don’t see
that I am getting any help from you; but come in
again.’
“Sometime during the night I felt a strange sense
of dying—a fading, falling out of life—and I said, ‘I
am going to my God if there is one; to the Saviour
whom I have scoffed at and despised; going to meet’
John and his God.’ An awful sense of sinking came
over me and I called upon the unknown God for for-
giveness, and asked Him to reveal Himself to me if
there was any revelation possible. Pe
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GOING TO WAR 115
“Then he bade the sword to remember all it had
done in shaping the destinies of men and nations; how
it had written on the tablets of history in letters red
and lurid, the drama of the ages. Closing, he called
upon it now in the battles for the Union to strike hard
and strike home for freedom, for justice, in the name
of God and Right; to fail not in the work to which
it was called until every shackle in the land was broken,
every bondman free and every foul stain of dishonor
cleaned from the flag.”
Before leaving for the front Russell’s company went
into camp for about six weeks near Springfield. It
was fall and the weather began to get cold. There
were heavy autumn rains and snow flurries, and the
actualities of war began to come home to the men.
It was Conwell’s first experience of feeling, in a large
sense, responsibility for others. He realized it now
overpoweringly. ‘These men had enlisted to a great
extent through his influence. They had appointed
him as their leader and he felt accountable for them.
Up to the outbreak of the war he had been concerned,
quite naturally, with self; with getting an education
and with what he was going to do with his life. But
these need experiences and responsibilities began to
turn him from looking inward to looking outward.
This larger comprehension of life was not a matter
of mere speculation or sensation. It took a practical
form. Russell Conwell has ever been a practical man.
In his ministry, he has followed up his preaching by
work. And in these early days, as he went among the
men, he responded in practical ways to their needs.
To an ill-clad man shivering with cold, he gave his own
overcoat. To the soldier with no money to buy medi-
cines, he gave his own pay. In hundreds of other
ways Conwell showed that he had been aroused from
his theretofore self-centered life.
8
116 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
Dr. Richard Cabot says in ‘What Men Live By”
that the sense of somebody’s need is the most power-
ful motive in the world. ‘This sense of need and also
of responsibility pressed heavily upon Conwell at this
time and rapidly changed him from a boy to a man.
This was the beginning of that desire to serve others
which has been such a marked characteristic of his
work.
At last the order came to leave for the front. Cap-
tain Conwell’s company was ordered to North Carolina,
and the men sailed from Boston, on the steamers
“Merrimac”’ and ‘‘Mississippi,’? November 5, 1862. ,
eo hl ad ae eee ‘
J in — ee
1s Ware. -
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL CONWELL
SEcOoND ENLISTMENT
NEW VENTURES 137
been among his pupils when he first taught school.
She was a warm friend of his sister Harriet, a frequent
visitor at the Conwell home, and a favorite with the
entire family.
Life’s greatest incentives were now his. Almost
with joy he thought of those hard years at Wilbraham
and Yale. They filled him with confidence for what
now lay before him. ‘They were a promise of what he
might again do. Tor now, as then, he had nothing
with which to start upon the new life but determination.
‘“T had no money,” Doctor Conwell said, in speaking
of this period of his life. ‘‘ Nothing but my education.”
“Don’t you think it is rather hazardous to marry on
such prospects?”’ was asked. ‘‘Wouldn’t it have been
better to wait?”
‘“‘No,”’ was his emphatic reply. ‘‘ Marriage is not a
mechanical business. Married life is the normal life.
The ambition to have a home is the greatest incentive
a man can have. I don’t believe in waiting to be
married. I do not believe in being reckless; but there
is always work a man can do, if he is earnest and willing.
If he can’t find one kind of work he can another.”’
In his wife he found a true helpmate. She had a sweet
and loving disposition that matched and responded to
his own affectionate nature. She was as courageous as
he, and she faced their future as confidently. She was
ambitious, but it was an ambition with high ideals.
She wanted to live to do good; was utterly unselfish,
and recognized her husband’s capabilities and threw
herself wholly into the task of helping him.
“Persistent faithfulness,’’ Doctor Conwell has
described as her chief characteristic. ‘‘She utterly
effaced herself in her desire to help me,” he has said.
And permeating all these qualities was a forcefulness
and self-reliance that swept on with his to dare and do.
One who knew her well, in describing her said:
138 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
‘She was a beautiful woman, with bright, dark eyes,
good color and a fine form. She was very jolly and
full of fun, and could see the funny side of anything.
When others saw the dark side, she would always find
something to make it bright. Russell adored her
and depended on her. He confided in her and talked
things over with her. She believed in him, encouraged
bim and was anxious to see him rise. She never thought
of herself. She saw the potential power in him and
gladly sacrificed herself to help him.” A _ cousin,
writing to Mrs. Conwell from Williams College, under
date of March 4, 1865, has this to say of their marriage:
‘““T was very much gratified to find that the people
among whom I have been visiting entertain so high an
ppinion of your husband, as a young man of firm prin-
ciples, fine talents and great promise. I discovered that
his friends have—and I judge not without reasons that
fully justify them—high hopes of his future career,
while I am very sure that it is my earnest wish that he
may more than realize these expectations. To stand
as well as he seems to in the opinion of others is, to say
the least, a compliment to his intellect. I only hope,
Jennie, that your two lives, joined in the highest, ho-
liest bonds on earth, may ever surpass in success and
happiness your most ardent anticipation for the future.”
Almost immediately after they were married Russell
Conwell decided to go West. He had not outgrown
his childhood’s habit of sending for literature of all
kinds. An advertisement of Minnesota, and of the
bright future of those who grew up with the country,
had attracted his attention. He sent for the printed
matter and after a careful study of it and of such other
data as he could get, the two resolved to make their
home there.
One week after their marriage he started, leaving
NEW VENTURES 139
Mrs. Conwell to follow when he had made a place for
her. He had barely enough funds to pay his carfare.
But the lack of capital has never deterred Russell Con-
well from going ahead with what he thought ought to
bedone. The first two dollars he earned in Minneapolis
were obtained by sawing wood. He did not have then,
nor has he now, any false pride. He planted potatoes
and did whatever he could find to do during those
first few weeks; but he also made friends. A letter
to Mrs. Conwell from one of these new friends—Mrs.
Keith, with whom he boarded—gives a good picture of
his first days in the West.
‘‘Dear Friend,” it began, ‘‘ Your husband has vol-
unteered to hoe potatoes for Mr. Keith this afternoon
if I will do his work, 2. e., to write you. As I have
agreed to do so, I shall keep my word, and your loss
will be our gain. I think, however, he will not refuse
to assist me by sending you at least a note, so that you
will not be so great a sufferer by this agreement.
‘‘But, all joking aside, I have wanted for some time
to assure you of the high appreciation that we cherish
for your warm-hearted, noble, Christian husband, and
to allay your fears that should sickness and suffering
come to him, no one in this far-off country would
minister to him or give him the sympathy and love of
true friendship. Let me assure you, dear friend, that
such fears are groundless. In the little while he has
been among us he has gathered around him many
friends, and if the hour of adversity should come, he
will find them just as true as the old and tried ones.
‘“‘But we find that he does not forget old friends while
enjoying the society of many new ones. We are look-
ing forward with interest to your coming among us to
join your husband, and trust you will decide to come
out this summer. I think, if you wish to employ some
140 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORE
of your leisure, you can have the opportunity to teach;
and as our schools are on the graded system that you
are probably familiar with, you would find it pleasant.
‘‘T think there is no doubt in regard to the success
of your husband here. He has already done more
business than you could reasonably expect a stranger
to procure, and the foundation for a good and perma-
nent business seems firm. In the meanwhile accept
the assurances that, until you do come, he shall be as a
brother to us, and in all ways that we can, we will seek
to advance his interest and highest good.”
Russell Conwell, as the writer of this letter says was
not long in getting a foothold, as he soon became the
Minneapolis correspondent of the St. Paul Press, and
filled a column every day with news of the town. He
began to practice law and also went into the real estate
business. A few months after he had arrived prac-
tically penniless, he was in a position to send for Mrs.
Conwell. Keenness, alertness, and a willingness to do
whatever he could find to do, but not to be content with
so doing, had quickly made him known and given him
a footing in this bustling western town.
Mrs. Conwell arrived in August with her mother and
brother, Joseph Hayden, who went into business with
Conwell, and the prospects of the young couple began
to look bright. As Minneapolis correspondent for the
St. Paul Press, Conwell was not long in discovering
that Minneapolis needed and could support a paper of
its own. With him to see a need was to supply it if
there was nobody else to do it. In company with
Colonel Stevens he started the Minneapolis Daily
Chronicle, which has since become the Minneapolis
Tribune. The weekly edition of this paper was called
Conwell’s Star of the North. In the editorial of the first
issue is given not only the purpose of the paper, but a
MRS. JENNIE CONWELL
First Wire or Dr. ConweLu
NEW VENTURES 141
good index of its editor’s outlook on life. In this
article he says:
“Tt will be appropriate in the first number of the Star
to state fairly what the reasons were for bringing out a
new paper at this time and also to say what position
we intend to take upon the questions of the day. There
has been a lack of such family reading as the intelligence
and enterprise of Minnesota would seem to demand.
The political papers cannot devote much time or space
to matters of mental culture and do their parties justice.
Whenever they do insert anything other than political
news or comment it must necessarily be wholly sub-
ordinate to the main object of their publication, viz., to
advance the interest of their party. Far be it from us
to blame them. If they are party organs, let them
speak the things of their party. It is in the contract.
“But with us these things are different. Claiming
to be the organ of no party, bound by no political ties,
having no political history, and doing whatever we do
entirely within ourselves; taking nothing, asking
nothing of anyone, we propose to speak our own mind
freely upon any topic in which we believe the people
to be interested. No ‘stockholder’ can come in and
upbraid us if we differ from him. No ‘private friends’
can come to ‘set us right’ if perchance we tread upon
their toes. This paper will be the organ of the editor
only, and any injustice or wrong that is brought to his
notice will be as openly and freely condemned if perpe-
trated by one man as by another, and anything com-
mendable will be as quickly perceived in one place as
in any other. It is, however, enough to say(which we
are sorry to state is more than some can say) we are
ourselves.
‘We will try to the best of our ability to carry into
the family with the Star a high standard of morality,
142 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORE
a love for the good, a respect for the noble, and an
increased interest in education, refinement, and every-
thing that elevates and dignifies mankind. We say
we will try to do this; but should we at any time fail,
or come short of our aim, it will be the fault ‘of the
head and not of the heart.’ Westart with the people.
We will march on with them. ‘They know the metal
from the dross, and we will rest our cause with them.”
Mrs. Conwell conducted the ‘‘ Ladies’ Department.”
Her initial editorial is not only a good indication of her
broad outlook on life, but it shows how far in advance
of the times was her thought, and how courageous and
independent she was in voicing it.
‘“‘Upon assuming the care and labor belonging to the
‘Ladies’ Department’ of this paper,’”’ she wrote, ‘‘we
take upon ourselves a great responsibility. We feel
how much happiness, morality and religion depend
upon the reading matter furnished by the family news-
paper. In view of all this we lay down our plan of
operation for the future.
‘“We repudiate the ideas put forth by the Star Com-
pany in their prospectus relating to the ‘ Ladies’ Depart-
ment.’ We will never consent to conduct any part of
the paper which proceeds upon the supposition that
fashions, receipts, cook-books, and nonsense are the
only matters of interest to the female part of the com-
munity. Pshaw! Is Minnesota so far behind the age,
that her people do not know that the ‘reign of mind’ has
commenced on earth? Have they yet to learn that
there are found among our sex the brightest, clearest
literary minds of the day? :
“Will the women of the Northwest be satisfied: to be
represented by a journal which concedes to woman
only just enough thought to appreciate a cook-book?
Answer us, ye men whose homes are cheerful and happy
NEW VENTURES 143
in the presence of a thinking wife or daughter. We
know. full well what your answer will be. It will
be just such a reply as should come from the hearts
and heads of intelligent, honest, generous men. You
would say that this is not the age of brute force. The
stoutest arm, the strongest body, does not necessarily
command the respect and reverence of a people now, as
that ancient day. It is the strongest brain, the deepest
thought that compels the homage of the world.
“Woman has been hampered by custom, spoiled
by too much care, bound by the fascinating cords of
fashion, and has never had the opportunity of proving
whether she be man’s equal or not. Whatever she has
done, in nearly every instance, has been appropriated
and claimed by men. Who supposed, until very
recently, that the mowing machine—the greatest
improvement of the age—a machine that saves our
farmers hundreds and thousands of dollars every year—
was the invention of a woman? How little did she
realize the benefit she was doing mankind when she
left the flower-beds she had been trimming with her
scissors and asked her husband if a machine for mowing
might not be made to work on the same plan!
“But we do not wish to enter into any argument.
We wish simply to call attention to the matter, and to
state that we believe woman is mentally man’s equal;
that she has her sphere of action; that her place 1s not
man’s; that her physical and mental constitution is
different from man’s and calls for different exercises;
that there is enough for both to do in the world, and
neither need be termed ‘inferior.’ We do not adopt
the extreme stand of Anna Dickinson, George Francis
Train and others, nor the other extreme which would
treat woman as an ‘inferior order of animals.’
“But. we hold to the golden mean, claiming that
144 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
literature, art, and science are as appropriate studies
for women as for men; that women are as interested
in all that disciplines the mind as are men; that the
milliner should have no more influence over women
than the tailor over men; that millinery, dressmaking,
tailoring, receipts, cook-books, and fashions are worthy
of attention, but not of the whole attention, of any class
of human beings; that in conducting this department
we shall do as we please, without consulting the men
as to the propriety of our action. We shall select,
write, and insert such articles as we shall think of inter-
est to ‘woman as she should be;’ and when we make
up our minds that nothing else but the items recited
in the Star prospectus are of interest to our lady readers,
we will drop our pen and ‘Hie to worlds unknown.’”’
It is a fine, clear, vigorous statement, and far in
advance of the general thought of her day. It brings
out in a strong light her charmingly forceful personal-
ity. It gives a good picture of what a helpmate she was.
One feels that she would put into everything she did the
same force and the same fine mentality and high purpose
that are here shown.
In addition to these undertakings, any other avenue
for earning a living that opened was utilized by Russell
Conwell. Singing lessons were given in his law office,
and he also gave instruction on the piano. Thus many
a dollar was added to the family income by his knowl-
edge of music. But in this new life with all its new
interests and needs, his time and attention were not
wholly concerned with himself. Ever since his con-
version in the Big Shanty Hospital near Marietta,
Georgia, and his open profession of faith when able to
leave the hospital, he had been active whenever and
wherever possible in the cause of Christ.
Although a stranger in a strange land, Russell Con-
NEW VENTURES 145
well’s activity did not cease upon his arrival in Minne-
apolis. He spoke in the cause of temperance, and he
made addresses at Sunday-schools. On one occasion,
when a funeral service was to be held and the minister
was detained by a storm, Conwell preached the funeral
sermon. ‘‘It was an inspiring sermon, too,” said one
who heard it. He organized a quartet, himself singing
bass, Mrs. Conwell soprano, Mr. Hayden tenor, and a
friend alto; and, with him at the organ, the four gave
their services wherever such help was needed.
But perhaps his most important work in this line was
the establishment of the Y. M. C. A. of Minneapolis,
He had been holding a noon prayer-meeting every day
for a year in his law office. It was similar to the “uiton
Street noon prayer-meeting in New York—one of the
most remarkable prayer-meetings of the country.
So successful was this prayer-meeting in Conwell’s
office that those who came felt they would like to
branch out into some larger work. A committee was
formed consisting of a member of one of the large dry
goods firms of the town, a deacon in the church of which
Conwell was a member, and Conwell, as chairman.
The field was carefully surveyed and, as a result, the
Y. M. C. A. of Minneapolis was started.
Thus several years slipped away and prosperity
seemed assured. Conwell’s business was growing;
his friends were increasing and he was, as well, taking
an active part in the religious life of the community—
a work which, had he been willing to admit it, brought
him more genuine satisfaction than anything else he did.
Already he was beginning to feel an inner pulling
toward the ministry that was given increased strength
by the remembrance of his father’s and mother’s wishes
in the matter. But as yet he had not seen this work
in its true light and he resisted the call.
i"
146 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
Then, suddenly, disaster came. One night in 1868,
when the entire family were away, the house caught
fire. Conwell was attending a G. A. R. meeting about
a mile distant. When word was brought to him, he
ran the entire distance, hoping to arrive in time to save
some of the household goods. It was a bitter night,
with a temperature of thirty-five degrees below zero.
The running, the excitement, and the cold, brought on
a hemorrhage of the lungs. At first, this was thought
but a passing ailment. ~
The family fixed themselves in a few rooms and
cheerily set their faces toward retrieving their lost
fortune; but the hemorrhages continued. Often as
much as a pint of blood was lost at one time; he rapidly
grew weak and thin, and business was impossible.
The doctors hinted at tuberculosis and held out little
hope. Everything had been lost in the fire; funds were
low; no money was coming in; and, with health and
business gone, the future looked black. At last it was
decided to take the little money that was left and
return East. His family and friends, if not Conwell
himself, thought his life was but a matter of weeks.
These were dark days for Russell Conwell and his
wife. Everything he had worked so hard to achieve
was lost, and the money he had saved was gone.. The
position he had labored to make was valueless, and
death might be but a few weeks or months away.
‘‘How did you have the courage even to try to go
on?” was asked him. ‘‘Under such circumstances,
most people would have just given up.”
His mouth settled into grim lines. ‘‘They were
dark days,”’ he said, “but I never acknowledge to
myself that I am defeated. I held on, then. I kept
planning in my mind things to do. Then, too, one is
more disheartened if failure comes through one’s own
NEW VENTURES 147
fault. When it comes—as this did—from nothing for
which I could blame myself, I think one has more heart
to try again.”
Not only did he refuse to give up hope himself, but
his friends stood by him. It was thought that possibly
a trip abroad might benefit him; and the warm and
wide circle of friends he had made in Minneapolis
secured his appointment as Immigration Agent to
Germany for the State of Minnesota.
With this appointment, he and Mrs. Conwell
returned to Massachusetts, and he sailed for Germany
to take up his duties; but his health did not improve.
He finally gave up the commission upon which he had
been sent, as he felt he was not able to do the work
properly. ‘Then he wandered about Europe from one
health resort to another, hoping to find relief. At
last he joined a surveying party and went to the Holy
Land, for the inner voice was calling more insistently
to follow in the footsteps of Christ and preach and teach
and heal the sick. He desired greatly to see the country
where the Saviour had gone up and down doing good.
But the trip was of no benefit physically, and the
hemorrhages became more and more frequent. He
could not keep up with the party and, in 1869, he left
it and went to Paris. Here he was so weak that he
could no longer care for himself and he entered the
Necker Hospital for treatment. After an examination,
he was told he could live but a few days.
But his life was not to flicker out among strangers in
a strange land. He now had faith in a supreme and
loving Being, and he prayed with all his fervor that he
might be permitted to again see his wife, his father and
mother and the woods and streams of his native land.
His prayer was answered in greater measure than he
had dared hope.
10
148 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
His case had aroused much interest among the
physicians of the hospital, because the blood from the
hemorrhage, when analyzed, disclosed traces of brass.
The talk about it spread outside the hospital walls and
finally came to the ears of a famous Berlin doctor
then in Paris. He was a man always on the alert for
anything new and remarkable in his profession. He
came to the hospital and studied the case of the young
American.
‘“Were you ever shot-in the shoulder?” he finally
asked.
Then came back to Conwell the recollection of the
duel with the Confederate around the tree in the
North Carolina woods, and the bullet which had lodged
in his shoulder near his neck and which had never been
removed. He told the physician the incident.
‘There is the trouble,” said the doctor. ‘‘That
bullet had brass in it, and it has worked down into
your lung. Only the most skilful operation can save
you, and there is only one man—so far as I know—
who can do it. He is a surgeon in Bellevue Hospital,
New York. Even then, your chance is slight.
But the physician’s words brought hope—hope of
again seeing his people and home, and perchance of
life itself. It buoyed him to attempt the trip home.
It was a fearful ordeal and required all his determina-
tion and grim tenacity to help him carry it through.
Even when almost unconscious from weakness, he
clung to that one purpose to reach home. Few can
realize the suffering and loneliness of that trip, but
he survived it.
Upon landing in New York, Russell Conwell was
taken to the Bellevue Hospital, the case explained and.
the opinion of the famous physician given. The
surgeon of whom the doctor had spoken made an
NEW VENTURES 149
examination, and the bullet was found near the
third rib. It had worked down from the shoulder
through the tissue of the lung to this position. To
remove the bullet would be an exceedingly delicate
operation, and the chance of recovery was slim; but
without it, death was inevitable.
It was an anxious time for all who loved him; but the
operation was successful. The bullet was removed and,
in a short time, health and strength were back in full
tide. With returning vigor came the old desire to
work. Conwell went to Boston in 1870, and secured
a position on the Boston Traveller at fifteen dollars a
week. He and Mrs. Conwell established themselves in
a few rooms and practically began life anew.
But, though poor, these were happy days. The fear
of ill health had been lifted; congenial work had been
found; and their first child, Nima, was born. The
name given to her is indicative of the originality of
Conwell’s mind. It is a Bohemian word meaning
“none such.”’ Doctor Conwell has a dislike for nick-
names and never wanted his children to have a name
that could be thus misused.
As in Minneapolis, his indefatigable work soon began
to tell, and his circumstances to improve. He opened
a law office and also began to lecture. His work on
the newspaper, too, began to arouse comment. Then
came his first big commission. He was sent by his
paper to write up the battlefields of the rebellion, and
‘““Russell’s Letters from the Battlefields,’ became
famous all over the country. They were quoted and
commented upon widely. Simply as descriptive writ-
ing they were vivid pieces of literature. But the human
interest element was woven in, together with memories
of the battles that had been fought; and not only the
soldiers, but everyone throughout the country read
150 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
them eagerly. (See Appendix, “Russell’s Letters from
the Battlefields.’’)
These letters were followed by a trip around the
world as special correspondent for the Boston Traveller
and the New York Tribune. He was already the New
England correspondent for the T’ribune, so it was an
easy matter to place his articles from abroad with the
big New York paper as well as with the Boston Traveller.
When Conwell returned from this trip, he brought
out his first book, published by Lee and Shepard of
Boston, ‘‘Why and How the Chinese Emigrate and
the Means They Adopt of Getting to America.” The
Chinese question was causing great excitement just
then, and this book was timely and popular.
CHAPTER XVI
Busy Days 1n Boston
Doctor Conwell Tells about Meeting Tennyson,
Gladstone, Garibaldi, Henry Ward Beecher, Whittier,
and Many Other Famous People. His Work
as a Lawyer. Free Legal Advice to the Poor.
The Boston Young Men’s Congress. His Tremont
Temple Sunday-school Class.
Russell Conwell was offered an editorial posi-
tion upon the Boston Traveller. Thishe accepted.
His work now broadened in many ways,
and his days became increasingly active. He wrote
not only for his own paper, but he did special work for
other papers and periodicals throughout the country,
and this necessitated much traveling.
The demand for lectures increased and these took
him to various parts of the country. In addition, he
went abroad many times in the interest of different
newspapers and publications, and interviewed many
distinguished men and women of that period.
He thus obtained a wonderful kaleidoscopic picture
of life. From the West—where his work took him to
the very frontiers of civilization and he mingled with
hardy pioneers and obtained their primitive outlook
upon life—he went to the very heart of the slums of
Boston among the poor and suffering, and from there
he boarded a steamer bound for the old and cultured
civilization of Europe, to view its superfine luxuries
and mingle with some of its best representatives.
(151)
Ue: his return from his trip around the world,
152 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
On one of these foreign trips he saw Bismarck—“ A
ereat, large-hearted German,’ Doctor Conwell describes
him, ‘‘with a laugh that fairly shook the building.
He was a rough, rude soldier with hard features; but
I do not believe,” he observed, thoughtfully, ‘‘that he
would have shot Miss Cavell.”
Doctor Conwell also saw Von Molke, whom he remem-
bers as a dignified soldier and a most polished gentle-
man. His interview with Tennyson remains vividly
in his memory, and is one of the most pleasant that
he recalls.
He went to seen Tennyson in company with Harriet
Beecher Stowe and spent an afternoon with the poet.
It was during this interview that Tennyson told about
the writing of the poem, ‘‘ Break, Break, Break,’ which
is probably known wherever the English language
is spoken.
« This poem was written shortly after the loss of a
loved one. The poet had gone to the seashore, upon
the advice of friends, in the hope that new scenes might
fill his mind with other interests and lessen his grief.
As he walked upon the beach and gazed out over the
waters the view took form in:
“Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O sea.”
Then over him swept the memory of his bereave-
ment. The scene before him vanished. All that he
saw or thought was his loss, and the mental picture
ended in:
“T would that my heart could utter,
The thoughts that arise in me.’
The following day he had the same experience and,
as he gazed out over the sparkling waters, his thought
took shape in:
“The stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill.”
BUSY DAYS IN BOSTON 153
Then again the overwhelming sense of his loneliness
swept over him, and he finished:
“But oh, for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still.”
Conwell stayed a week with Garibaldi and walked
with him around Caprera, the island owned by Gari-
baldi, and where he made his home. ‘“‘It was a great
experience,” Doctor Conwell says in recalling it.
“We would sit up and talk half the night. That week
with him was practically the whole of Italian history.
It made me keenly interested in Italian affairs—an
interest I have never lost. All these interviews, how-
ever, were a great education. They made me want to
read and know more about the prople and countries
I saw.”
“My interview with Dickens, for instance, gave me
a greater desire than I had previously had to read his
books. I saw him a few days before he died, so, of
course, he was scarcely his usual self. He was fussy
and nervous, but wonderful, despite the state of his
health. He kept us much longer than we had expected
to stay.”
Doctor Conwell’s recollection of Gladstone is most
pleasant. ‘‘He was a good, kindly old English gentle-
man and he talked long with me about American affairs.
I was amazed at the scope of his knowledge of them.”’
Just before the outbreak of the Franco-German war,
Conwell attended a banquet in Paris at which the
Emperor and Empress were present. ‘‘HKugenia was
a beautiful woman,” he says, ‘‘and,” he added, “‘she
really was the whole government.”
Victor Hugo impressed him as a stern, reserved
man, who hated Napoleon the Third, and looked
upon his ascension to the throne as a great crime.
154 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
Doctor Conwell saw Emperor Francis Joseph, and
attended a reception to William the Third of Ger-
many at his palace. In fact, there were few people
of note that he did not interview, or events of impor-
tance at which he was not present as a journalist.
Li Hung Chang, the famous Chinese statesman, was
among those interviewed during these years. He
impressed Conwell as a stingy old man—careful not
to spend a cent. An indication of this was his failure
to serve his visitors with tea—the custom in China.
“He had a genial side to his nature, though,” con-
cluded Doctor Conwell, ‘‘and when I called upon him,
he was playing leap-frog with his grandchildren, and
also letting them ride on his back, under the pretense
that he was an elephant.”
However, not all of Doctor Conwell’s interviews
were with distinguished people abroad. He also met
many men of note in America. In this way he came
to know Henry Ward Beecher very well. The man—
whose sermons as a child he had read and whom, as a
young man, upon his first visit to New York, he had
heard Pech that remarkable sermon in which
Beecher auctioned off a slave woman—came to have an
important place and a strong influence in his life.
“My acquaintance with Henry Ward Beecher,”
Doctor Conwell says, ‘‘was the most intimate that I
had with any public man. I was often in New York
for several months at a time doing special work on the
Tribune. At such times, I always reported Beecher’s
sermons. When he had anything special to be written
up, he would send for me. We traveled together a
great deal, and, later, when I myself was lecturing, I
met him often on my lecture trips. ”’
Bayard Taylor was another of Conwell’s intimates
of these days. Taylor was one of the editors of the
BUSY DAYS IN BOSTON 155
New York Tribune and Conwell, through his connection
with the paper, had become acquainted with him.
They had chanced to meet upon one of Conwell’s trips
abroad and had traveled together from London to
Italy. After his death Doctor Conwell wrote a biog-
raphy of him; and when the great memorial service
was arranged for him in Tremont Temple, Boston, the
Young Men’s Congress asked Conwell to call upon
Oliver Wendell Holmes and request him to write a
poem upon Bayard Taylor’s death for the occasion.
‘‘T called upon Mr. Holmes and told him what was
wanted,’’ says Doctor Conwell in recalling the inci-
dent. ‘‘I remember the occasion well. He was sit-
ting in a rocking chair. He rocked back and kicked
up his feet, and ridiculed the idea as absurd.
‘<“T write a poem on Bayard Taylor?’”’ he said. ‘No;
but I tell you, if you will get Mr. Longfellow to write
a poem on Bayard Taylor’s death, I will read it!’ So
I went to Mr. Longfellow and told him what Doctor
Holmes had said, and here is the poem he wrote.””’ And
Doctor Conwell recited:
‘¢ ‘Dead he lay among his books!
The peace of God was in his looks.
As the statues in the gloom
Watch o’er Maximilian’s tomb,
So these volumes from their shelves
Watched him, silent as themselves.
Ah, his hand will never more
Turn their storied pages o’er.
Never more his lips repeat
Songs of theirs, however sweet.
Let the lifeless body rest!
He is gone who was its guest.
Gone as travelers haste to leave
An inn, nor tarry until eve.
Traveler! in what realms afar,
In what planet, in what star,
In what gardens of delight
Rest thy weary feet tonight.
Poet, thou whose latest verse
Was a garland on thy hearse,
156 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
Thou hast sung with organ tone
In Deukalion’s life thine own.
On the ruins of the past,
Blooms the perfect flower, at last.
Friend, but yesterday, the bells
Rang for thee their loud farewells.
And today they toll for thee,
Lying dead beyond the sea.
Lying dead among thy books,
The peace of God in all thy looks.” ”
Whittier was another distinguished American with
whom Conwell spent many hours in the poet’s charm-
ing, old-fashioned home in Amesbury. ‘‘I used to
run out to his home frequently,’ says Doctor Con-
well, ‘‘and in his study, talk over with him matters in
which we were both interested.”
That study is a restful room. Many pleasant hours
the aged poet and the young newspaper man passed
together in it. It looks out upon a peaceful garden.
The walls are covered with photographs, autographed
poems and mementos of many kinds from friends and
admirers all over the world.
The furniture is old-fashioned and the desk upon
which the poet wrote is small and cramped according
to present-day standards; but an atmosphere of peace
and charm pervaded the place that was an inspiration
and strength to the busy young newspaper man who
came here so frequently.
“T once asked Whittier what was his favorite poem,”’
says Doctor Conwell when recalling these days. ‘‘He
replied that he had not thought very much about it,
but said there was one that he especially remembered.
It was this:
“*T know not where His islands lift,
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.’
id also asked him, ‘Mr. Whittier, how could you
write all those war songs which sent us young men to
BUSY DAYS IN BOSTON 157
war, and you a peaceful Quaker? I cannot understand
it!’ He smiled and said that his great-grandfather
had been on a ship that was attacked by pirates; and,
as one of the pirates was climbing up the rope into
their ship, his great-grandfather grasped a knife and
cut the rope, saying ‘If thee wants the rope, thee can
have it.’ He said he had inherited something of the
same spirit.”
Another question which Conwell put to Whittier
was of an extremely personal nature, and shows how
intimate they were. ‘Several of us had been discuss-
ing one day in the newspaper office after our work was
done, why Whittier had never married,”’ said Doctor
Conwell in speaking of this particular interview. ‘I
said I would go and ask him. I went out to his house
and approached the subject from all possible sides,
with what I thought were leading questions; but the
poet did not respond in the way I wished. Finally I
asked him point blank. He smiled but again evaded,
and I returned to my co-workers no more enlightened
on the subject than when I left. The next day, how-
ever, I received a letter from Whittier, which read:
““Tyzar CoLonet:—I thank thee for thy interest in
my humble past and hazy future. It was a blest con-
ference we had on First-day. Come again and let us
walk longer by the river. I enclose the answer I
could not give thee yesterday.
“ “Thy Friend,
“ ¢J. G. WHITTIER.
‘* ‘Amesbury, July 10, 1871.’ ”
Enclosed was the poem entitled ‘‘Memories.”’ (See
Appendix.)
But busy as Conwell was with his newspaper, maga-
zine and book work—for he wrote many books in
158 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
those days—this was but a small part of his activities.
He became more and more widely known as a lecturer
and the calls for him to speak became more and more
frequent. While upon one of his trips abroad, he gave
a series of lectures at Cambridge, England, on Italian
history, that attracted much favorable comment.
They grew out of the interest in the subject which
Garibaldi had aroused in him.
It was also during these busy days in Boston that
Conwell wrote a biography of Daniele Manin, the
great Venetian statesman, for whom Garibaldi had
aroused his admiration. This manuscript was thought
to have been destroyed by a fire at his Boston home;
and it was not until years afterwards that it was found
in a barrel in the barn where, in the confusion, it had
been hastily placed for safe keeping, and then forgotten.
Conwell’s law practice steadily increased. He had
an office in Somerville, practically a suburb of Boston,
where he now lived, and also one in Tremont Temple
in the city proper. In this law practice he took a
step unprecedented in the history of the profession in
Boston. He was ever ready to respond to the needs of
the poor, and in his newspaper work he often saw how
a little legal advice would lift the poor and ignorant
over a rough place in the road. So he inserted in the
Boston paper the following notice:
‘““Any deserving, poor person wishing legal advice
or assistance will be given the same free of charge,
any evening except Sunday, at No. 10 Rialto
Building, Devonshire Street. None of these cases
will be taken into court for pay.”
These cases Conwell prepared as attentively and
took into court with as great a determination to win
as those for which he received large fees. This pro-
BUSY DAYS IN BOSTON 159
ceeding laid him open to much professional criticism.
His action was said to be unprofessional, sensational
and a ‘‘bid for popularity.” But criticism did not
stop him. The wrongs of many an ignorant man,
suffering through the greed of men over him, were
righted. Those who robbed the poor under various
guises were made to feel the hand of the law.
And for none of these cases did Conwell the lawyer
ever take a cent of pay. He kept his law office open
at night for those who could not come during the day,
and gave counsel and legal advice free to the poor.
Often during the evening he had as many as half a
hundred of these clients, too poor to pay for legal
aid, yet sadly needing help to right their wrongs.
Another class of clients who brought Conwell much
work but no profit were the widows and orphans of
soldiers seeking aid to obtain pensions. ‘To such he
never turned a deaf ear, no matter what multitude of
duties pressed. He charged no fee, even when to win
the case he was compelled to go to Washington. Nor
would he give up the case—no matter what work it
entailed—until the final verdict was given. His part-
ners say he never lost a pension case, nor ever made
a cent by one.
Attorney Conwell was considered an expert in con-
tested election cases, and he frequently appeared
before the legislature in behalf of cities and towns on
matters over which it had jurisdiction. One who knew
him personally, speaking of these days says:
‘““Conwell prepared and presented many bills to
Congressional committees at Washington, and appeared
as counsel in several Louisiana and Florida election
cases. His arguments before the Supreme Court of
the United States in several important patent cases
were reported to the country by the Associated Press.
160 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
He had at one time considerable influence with the
President and Senators in political appointments; and
some of the best men still in government office in
this state (Massachusetts) and in other New England
states, say they owe their appointment to his active
friendship in visiting Washington on their behalf.
But it does not appear that, through all these years
of work and political influence, he ever asked for an
appointment for himself.” _
An unwritten law in Conwell’s law office was that
neither he nor his partners should ever accept a case
if their client were in the wrong or guilty. But this very
fact made evil-doers the more anxious to secure him.
They knew it would create the impression at once that
they were innocent.
A story that went the rounds of legal circles in
Boston, and finally was published in the Boston Sunday
Times, shows how he was cleverly fooled by a pick-
pocket. The man charged with the crime came to
Attorney Conwell to get him to take the case. So well
did he play the part of injured innocence that Colonel
Conwell was completely deceived and threw himself
heart and soul into the work of clearing him.
When the case came up for trial, the lawyer and
client sat together in the court-room and Colonel
Conwell made such an earnest and forceful plea in
behalf of the innocent young man, and the harm
already done him by having such a charge laid against
his door, that the district attorney agreed to dismiss
the case at once. So lawyer and client walked out of
the court together, happy and triumphant, to Colonel
Conwell’s office, where the pickpocket paid Attorney
Conwell his fee out of the lawyer’s own pocket-book
which he had deftly abstracted in the court-room.
“What was your most interesting case?’”’ was once
BUSY DAYS IN BOSTON 161
asked Doctor Conwell. He thought a moment and
replied, ‘‘It was amurdercase. I came into it after the
supposed murderer had been sentenced for life. He
pleaded ‘not guilty,’ but made no defense. The ver-
dict went against him, and when I came into the affair
he was serving his life sentence. I was called to settle
the estate of his son and discovered that the son had
in his possession some property of the murdered man.
“Suspicion had never been directed to the son at all;
but when I went to see the man in prison to get him to
sign some papers concerning the son’s estate, I said,
‘You did not kill that man. It was your son that did
it... At my words he broke down. But still he did not
admit it. I was so convinced of his innocence that,
without his permission, I took the matter up and brought
it again through the court, with the result that he was
finally pardoned. He had suffered to shield his son.”’
Into work for temperance Colonel Conwell went
earnestly. He spoke for the cause and also helped
individuals suffering from the habit. Many a drunk-
ard he took to his Somerville home, nursed all night,
and in the morning endeavored to awaken him to adesire
to live a different life. Deserted wives and children
of drunkards came to him for aid, and many of the free
law cases were in behalf of those wronged through
drink.
Friend always of the workingmen, Colonel Conwell
was persistently urged by their party to accept a nom-
ination for Congress; but he as persistently refused.
However, he worked hard in politics for others and man-
aged one campaign, in which General Nathaniel P.
Banks was running on an independent ticket, and
elected him by a large majority.
Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson presented Con-
well’s name for United States Consulship at Naples
o
162 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORE
because his lectures at Cambridge, England, on Italian
history had attracted so much favorable comment on
account of the deep research they showed and keen
appreciation of the Italian character. At one time he
was guardian of more than sixty orphan children and
three of the most destitute of these were left a fortune
of $50,000 through his intercession with a relative.
In addition to his newspaper work, his lecturing and
practice, Colonel Conwell went actively into real estate
operations. In Somerville, a growing suburban sec-
tion, he started the Somerville Journal, a newspaper, and
began various real estate operations that materially
assisted in the growth of the place. ‘Two streets in
Somerville were named after him—one, Conwell Street
and the other, Conwell Avenue. He built a beautiful
home in what is now the Tufts College district. This
is one of the loveliest sections around Boston. The
land is elevated, and beautiful views are obtained of
Boston and the towns along the Mystic River.
Despite these many and far-reaching business
activities, he found time for interests other than his
own. As in Minneapolis, he entered energetically into
all work of the community that made for better-
ment and progress.
One of theinstitutions which Colonel Conwell founded
at this time and which has played an important part in
Boston’s civic life, was Boston’s Young Men’s Congress.
It was organized in 1875 by Conwell after he had dis-
cussed the project with Charles Sumner. So important
a body did it become that it was incorporated in 1885.
It was modeled after the Lower House of Congress of
the National Legislature and was a school of the
actual work of the House of Representatives. The
Manual of the Massachusetts Legislature was used for
its rules. Its sessions opened the first Monday in
BUSY DAYS IN BOSTON 163
October and it met every Monday night during the
winter.
The congress had at one time more than a hundred
members, and it became one of the notable associations
of Boston. Bills were introduced as in the legislature,
and all the important subjects of the day were discussed.
The tariff, suffrage, immigration—whatever was fore-
most in the public mind—was argued pro and con; and
many were the heated debates, and widespread was the
interest in the conclusions reached.
Many of the prominent men of Boston were members
of this congress. Hon. John D. Long, Governor of
Massachusetts in 1880-83 and afterwards Secretary of
the Navy, was one of its members; so also was Elmer
A. Stevens, at one time Treasurer of the State of Massa-
chusetts. Mr. Stevens says that his success as a public
speaker was due to the training he received in the
“Young Men’s Congress.”
Other members included Charles H. Innes, then a
young attorney and later a member of the Massachu-
setts Senate; William T. A. Fitzgerald, a lawyer, who
became a Senator and afterward register of deeds in
Suffolk County—one of the most remunerative posi-
tions in the gift of the people; Judge Barnes of East
Boston court, who was for many years a member and
speaker of the congress; March G. Bennett, a member
of the Massachusetts House of Representatives; Ben-
jamin C. Lane and Malcolm G. Nichols, who became
members of the Boston city council, Judge Riley of the
Malden court and a prominent figure in the Demo-
cratic politics of Massachusetts; John Buckley of
Cambridge, a deputy collector of internal revenue;
and Harry Grigor of the customs service. Later these
two men went prominently into social welfare work.
In speaking of the work of the congress, one of its
il
164 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
members has said, ‘‘The congress was not sectarian.
Many Catholics bore no inconsiderable part in its
success during the many years of its existence. I men-
tion this to show that, while the congress was founded
by Colonel Russell H. Conwell, who was not a Catholic,
it partook of none of the petty religious prejudices of
the day.”
Another member regarded the congress as the high-
est class debating society he had ever attended. It was
widely copied. The Law School of Boston University
and the Young Men’s Christian Association both
organized similar societies. Visitors were admitted to
its sessions and occasionally a Ladies’ Night was held.
Once a year a supper was given which was a most
delightful and interesting function, as it included
among its members and guests notable men, not only
from Boston, but from many parts of the country. The
congress disbanded in 1913-14, but for nearly forty
years it was one of the prominent and influential organi-
zations of Boston.
Another association that was almost equally far-
reaching in its influence was the Tremont Temple
Bible Class organized by Colonel Conwell. When he
returned to Boston to live, he allied himself with Tre-
mont Temple Baptist Church, the church of his boy-
hood friend, Deacon Chipman, who figured in his first
adventure in Boston. Conwell started a Bible class
which grew so rapidly that it soon beame necessary
to secure a hall in which it could meet. Its member-
ship numbered about eight hundred, but between two
and three thousand people often attended its meetings.
The Sunday-school lesson for the day was taken up
by Conwell, who gave a little talk upon it, and questions
and answers and discussions followed. The original-
ity and the vitality of the discussions, and the applica-
BUSY DAYS IN BOSTON 165
tion of the truths taught to the everday problems of
life, made the class meetings unusually helpful and
interesting, and attracted to them thousands of the
business men of Boston.
In addition to the study and discussions of the lessons,
the class did much work in the slum district of the
North End. The poor and sick were visited, and books,
clothing and provisions distributed among them. The
class had an excellent male quartet—wherever Conwell
was there was always good music—and the quartet
helped the work of the class in this section by its
singing.
A second child was born in the Conwell family during
these years—a son, Leon—now editor and publisher of
the Somerville Journal, founded by his father. He
is a prominent and influential resident of Somerville,
has been a member of the Massachusetts State Legis-
lature, and mayor of Somerville.
Thus, writing, lecturing, traveling, practicing law,
dealing in real estate, conducting a newspaper, helping
in the civic and religious life of the community, Colonel
Conwell’s days were filled with incessant activity. He
lived life as zestfully as he had done in boyhood, but to
larger ends. Then the years were giving. Now he was
using what they had given. Even now, as he gave, he
was receiving. His contact with all phases and con-
ditions of life, his keen interest 1n all he saw and heard,
his warm sympathies that carried him right into the
heart of things, enriched and broadened him. These
busy years were prolific of much building other than
houses, legal emoluments and bank accounts.
CHAPTER XVII
His Entry INTO THE MINISTRY
The Death of Mrs. Conwell. Increasing Interest in
Religious Work. Doctor Conwell’s Second Marriage.
The Lexington Church. . His Decision to Enter the
Ministry.
Conwell family in happy and useful activity.
Colonel Conwell himself was becoming widely
known by his writings and lecturing; was build-
ing up a good law practice; was conducting large and
successful real estate operations; and was prominent
in the social, political and religious life of the commu-
nity. Mrs. Conwell was equally popular and busy in
social and religious circles; and was as ably and force-
fully conducting a woman’s department in the Somer-
ville Journal as she had done in the Minneapolis Séar.
The two children—Nima and Leon—were growing into
sturdy youngsters, brightening and making happy
the family circle. A handsome home was nearing com-
pletion for them in one of the most beautiful parts of
Somerville.
Then a tragic blow fell. In 1872, after a few days’
illness which was not thought to be serious, Mrs. Con-
well passed away. With her usual cheery spirit, she
had made light of her sickness. She had refused med-
ical help, insisting that her ailment was trifling. The
last time she went upstairs she laughed and joked, the
family say, as she lifted herself from step to step, the
pain, though she would not admit it, being too severe for
(166)
ie seemed to be flowering out once more for the
HIS ENTRY INTO THE MINISTRY 167
her to walk. She was brave, cheery, and self-effacing
to the end. Her husband left her in the morning,
thinking she was better, to return to find her dead.
The rheumatic trouble from which she was suffering
suddenly went to her heart and before aid could be
secured she had left them.
The months that followed were dark ones for Colonel
Conwell. Ordinary occupations palled. He continued
his editorial work, his law practice and his real estate
operations. He worked even harder, if possible, so
that his thoughts could not stray to his loss." It was
during these years that he learned five languages by
studying on the train to and from his office and his
home.
But zest in his many activities was largely gone.
The lonely man needed something beyond these to
satisfy. As in the Big Shanty Hospital at Marietta
after his injury in the Battle of Kenesaw, the death
angel roused him to look into her world—the world of
the unseen, she again urged him to seek the things of
the spirit. This time the call reached depths unsounded
before and he sought to know eternal life and the gov-
erning power of the universe more earnestly than when
he was converted.
Anything that concerned the Bible and Bible people
attracted Colonel Conwell now. He gathered a valu-
able theological library, sending to Germany for a
number of the books. When he was admitted to
practice in the Supreme Court of the United States, he
delivered an address that same evening in Washington
on ‘“‘The Curriculum of the School of the Prophets in
Ancient Israel.’ From all parts of the Old World he
collected photographs of ancient manuscripts and
sacred places, and kept up a correspondence with many
professors and explorers who were interested in these
168 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
subjects. He lectured in schools and colleges on arche-
ological subjects with illustrations prepared by himself.
He also began lay preaching and spoke to sailors on
the wharves, to idlers in the streets, and at little strag-
gling missions where help was needed.
Gradually, through his speaking and teaching and
studying, the true understanding of what it meant to
be a minister of Christ came to him. The misconcep-
tions and narrow views of his boyhood days regarding
the profession dropped away and the joy of the work,
its great value, and the world’s need of workers in this
field began to dawn upon him.
While engaged in evangelical labors Colonel Con-
well met Miss Sarah Sanborn, of a wealthy and influ-
ential family of Newton Centre. She was an active
worker in mission and church circles; a woman of
culture, refinement, force of character and executive
ability, and widely interested in religious affairs. They
met frequently in religious work. 'Their common inter-
est in such activities drew them together and, in 1874,
they were married.
After his marriage Colonel Conwell removed to
Newton Centre, the seat of the Newton Theological
Seminary. His new home was but a few blocks from
the Seminary buildings. Mrs. Conwell already had
many friends among the professors, and Conwell was at
once thrown intimately into the atmosphere of theo-
logical study and discussion.
This brought to his attention and thought another
side of the ministry. He thus obtained, through the
actual work he was doing in lay preaching and teaching,
and through the theological atmosphere into which he
was now brought—a view of the profession as a whole.
He could see the work from all sides.
As Colonel Conwell meditated upon the need of
HIS ENTRY INTO THE MINISTRY 169
religion in men’s lives and the effects it produced there,
the struggles of a little Baptist church in Lexington
to prolong its existence, suddenly cleared his vision as
to his course. He saw what his true work was and
decided to enter the ministry. He closed his law
office, gave up his real estate business, and offered his
services as preacher to the little church in Lexington.
CHAPTER XVIII
His First PASTORATE
Doctor Conwell Tells Why He did not Earlier Enter
the Ministry. His Advice upon Choosing a Lrfe-
Work. The Condition of the Church at Lexington.
The First Service. Building a New Church. His
First Church Fair. The Activities and Growth of the
Lexington Church. His Help in Developing Lexing-
ton. His Ordination. The Call to Philadelphia.
successful real estate business to take the pastor-
ate of a church that was on the verge of ruin
seemed an act of folly to Colonel Conwell’s
worldy-minded friends. Speaking of Conwell’s decision
and his quick action, Mr. Hayden, his brother-in-law,
said:
‘“My wife and I were in New York at the time on a
brief visit. We returned to Boston by boat and, as I
wished to see Conwell about something, I went immedi-
ately to his law offices in Tremont Temple, only to find
them closed and to learn of the change he had made.
I was dumfounded.”’ That was the way many of his
friends and relatives regarded his action. But he him-
self viewed the change in no such light.
When questioned about the matter in later years,
Doctor Conwell said with a happy smile, ‘‘I knew I had
found my work. I was perfectly satisfied. I have
never had any disposition to change it, to do anything
else. Before that, I was always changing. I was rest-
less. Though I was busy; though I was what the
(170)
[os relinquishment of a good law practice and a
HIS FIRST PASTORATE 171
world would call successful, I wasn’t satisfied. From
the moment I decided on this work, I was contented
and happy. I felt a great satisfaction that cannot be
described in words.
‘Had I known what the ministry meant, I would
undoubtedly have gone into it sooner. I always had
a pulling that way but fought against it, for my idea
of the work was formed from my childhood experiences;
from gloomy, harsh sermons I had heard as a child,
from the torture I suffered in church when I could not
keep awake and I knew I would be whipped if I didn’t.
All these things meant to me the church and church
work, and I could not force myself to inflict anything
of that sort on others. It took me a long time to find
out that one could be independent of such methods.
“‘T remember, as a boy, an old preacher who was
always asking me, ‘How is your soul?’ As I had an
inner conviction that it was not altogether commend-
able in his sight, I was eternally seeing it flying off to
some region of eternal woe—not, I must confess, a
pleasant thought to entertain continually. The uneasi-
ness it gave me, I somehow blamed upon the ministry.
‘“‘T remember another incident of my boyhood that
set me against the ministry. Our minister was given
a donation party, and sixteen dollars was collected and
presented to him. But the expense of feeding the
horses of those who came, and the cost of repairing the
furniture that was broken during the evening’s hilarity,
was greater than this amount. Such things made the
ministry seem foolish and futile and lacking in good
sense. I could not see any connection between it and
purposeful living. Yet I always had the desire—as I
think most men have—to do good; to be of use to
others; and to make my life worth while. Had I
realized that these were the foundation principles of
172 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
the ministry, I would have entered it sooner. But my
early ideas of a minister’s life and work and accomplish-
ment held me in a spell which I could not shake off for
many years.”’ At another time Doctor Conwell said,
in reference to this sudden and decided change in his
life:
‘‘T have been often asked how I came to choose my
life’s work, as though it were a matter of my own selec-
tion, instead of a case of being forced to do that which
I did not like. But the feeling within my soul that I
ought to preach the Gospel was never fully out of my
heart, after the days when my mother insisted that I
should be a preacher and told all the neighbors who
came to our house of her great ambition for me.
‘““That feeling would often rise to a very strong desire,
and I seldom ever listened to a religious address or a
fine sermon without feeling conscience-stricken and
often half inclined to throw away everything and enter
upon the humble service of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But I tried to destroy that feeling, or at least bury it
by taking hold of other things and putting my whole
mind and time into them.
‘“‘T studied law while in the army, and paced the
beach many weeks at Fort Macon, in North Carolina,
memorizing the entire works of Blackstone. I thought
I had at least conquered my previous inclination
toward the ministry, and that I should be contented as
a lawyer. But my practice was much broken at first
by the failure of my health, due to my army wounds,
and I was forcibly thrust into newspaper writing by
the necessity of earning a living and traveling for my
health.
“One of the first law cases which came to me after
the opening of my law office in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
in 1866, compelled me to take possession of a printing
HIS FIRST PASTORATE 173
establishment connected with a weekly newspaper
which had failed. That led to a financial interest in
the Minneapolis Chronicle, which Colonel Stevens per-
suaded me to undertake, and afterward led to the
establishment of Conwell’s Star of the North, a weekly
paper later merged into the present Minneapolis
Tribune. Then, for several years, I traveled around the
world, making a complete circuit of the earth for the
New York Tribune, the Boston Traveller and my own
Minneapolis newspaper.
‘But I always kept up the ambition to return to the
practice of law, which I did when I recovered my health,
opening one office in Somerville, Massachusetts, and
another in Boston. There I practiced law, speculated
in real estate, entered into active politics, and began
the publication of the Somerville Journal. All the time
these various matters were being used by me to keep
out of mind that mysterious call of the spirit to preach
the Gospel.
‘““Unexpected and probably undeserved success came
to my law practice in Boston through accident and the
kindness of friends, so that I seemed to be prospering
beyond my highest hopes, when, among my clients
there came a young widow—Mrs. Barrett of Lexington,
Massachusetts—who consulted me as to what could
be done with the property of an old Baptist church in
Lexington, which had been practically abandoned.
“TY had been continuously lecturing in the lyceums
and speaking on the Sabbath to Sunday-school con-
ventions and anniversaries, so that I was not out of
touch with religious life and work. I had also organized
a large Bible class of nearly eight hundred members in
the Tremont Temple Church in Boston, of which I was
a member. My advice as a lawyer to Mrs. Barrett
was that they should sell the property and turn the
174 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
proceeds over to the State Convention for the general use
of the Baptist denomination. But the first little gather-
ing which I attended in Lexington was such a sad
occasion that we could not get the few old people, who
loved the place so much, to do anything about selling the
property; and Mrs. Barrett suggested that I should go
to Lexington the following Sunday and give an address
to such people as might come to the old building.
‘The address, which I delivered there the next Sun-
day, was attended by very few people and it would not
have been safe for more persons to have stood upon
the dangerous floor. But it was an occasion when all
the old-time desire arose in full power within me, and
my conscience resumed complete control of my actions.
I resolved that night—after hours of struggle with
myself and prayer to my Lord—to at last dedicate
myself to the cause which I should have adopted years
before. i was then thirty-seven years of age and
settled in a profession in a large city, with prospects
of wealth and success, which were very attractive; but
I felt, ‘Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel,’ and I
dared not disobey that divine call.
“My family were greatly surprised, my relatives
were indignant, and even the church members thought
me to be unbalanced in mind to do so wild a thing as to
launch out from my settled and successful life into the
uncertainties of poverty and failure, which seemed all
there was before me in the life of a preacher. But I
surrendered all and kept on amid the scoffs and
reproaches of my best friends. And while I have seen
hours of trial; met sore defeats; been wounded by
jealousies; injured by misunderstandings; yet, as I
look back upon life now, I cannot see that I ever suffered
greater hardships than I had expected.
“Instead of those expected privations, I have been
HIS FIRST PASTORATE 175
especially blessed. The Lord has sent to me successes
beyond my highest expectations, and I have had friends
and comforts which I am sure I could not have deserved.
Not for one moment since I came to a full decision to
follow the Lord in his work have I ever been sorry that
I made the change and, although I have not wealth nor
fame, I can lay down my armor now with a feeling
that I have succeeded more than I had ever hoped or
expected.
‘‘T have seen so many men, who have worked much
harder, made more sacrifices, and had more talent, who
have fallen in the rear and sunk into oblivion, that I
cannot take to myself any pride; nor am I willing to
accept these results as more than accidental. But I would
have my friends—as I would myself—give the glory or
the honor to the Great Power which has designs of His
own and who promotes those whom He will or keeps in
obscurity those who may serve Him best.
‘No one in the service of the Lord can say that he is
in the wrong place—no matter where he may be situ-
ated—if his conscience does not tell him that he him-
self. has entered into conscious sin. Defeats are often
the greatest victories; and the Lord may use most
those who seem to be—from a human point of view—
of the least account. It is absolutely impossible for
any servant of God to tell in this life whether his efforts
are going to be of future avail, or whether his losses may
not after all be of more account in the future Kingdom
than the gains of the great.”
This first service at which Colonel Conwell preached
is often recalled by the members of the Lexington
church. ‘‘When we heard that Colonel Conwell was
coming to preach,” said one of these members, in
describing his work in Lexington “‘we felt that we must
get together an audience for him. We scoured the
176 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
town to induce people to come, and succeeded in secur-
ing eighteen to attend his first service. But after that
first service we did not need to do any missionary work.
People came of their own account. Soon they could
not be accommodated in the church and they stood out-
side on the pavement. Colonel Conwell is not limited
for lung power, though, so they all heard him.”
The church building in which the services were held
was in a dilapidated condition, and the steps leading
up to it were really dangerous. The structure was
heated by a stove ‘“‘which,” one of the members said,
“the janitor always insisted upon shaking down in the
middle of the service.’ A small melodeon was the
musical instrument. For this first service, in addition
to securing a congregation, the interest of some of the
music lovers of Lexington was also enlisted.
‘‘T went to some of my Unitarian friends who sang,”
said one of the workers, ‘‘and asked them if they would
not come and sing for us. They agreed, and so we were
able to have a quartet for that first service.”
One can feel the anxiety of the few devoted members
left, who had the welfare of the church at heart, for
that first service. Could they have glimpsed the
future they would not have been anxious. As has been
said, that first service was electrical. The second Sun-
day saw the place dangerously crowded. The building
was thronged, and people stood upon the sidewalk at
both morning and evening service. Lexington realized
that the church had come to life, and there was some-
thing so vital in this new life that the town was stirred.
But it was not mere curiosity that attracted the people.
It was a recognition of the fact that the Gospel of
Christ was being given to them in a form that practically
and helpfully entered into their lives, and they were
eager for it.
HIS FIRST PASTORATE 177
The crowds and the interest shown pointed out to
Conwell the need of a larger building, but he felt that
it would be useless to say anything upon the subject
to the present members. How could he ask a congre-
gation, whose previous attendance fell at times as low
as five or six, and whose former collections—though
the members gave nobly and self-sacrificingly—were
usually less than a dollar on Sunday, and in whose
treasury at his coming was but a dollar and a half,
to erect a new church building? Indeed, the treasurer
of the church said laughingly, in regard to the dollar
and a half that was on hand: ‘‘We were so thankful
that in his letter saying he would come and preach that
first Sunday, he wrote, ‘I will take no pay,’ for we
needed that dollar and a half to fix the door latch.”’
Surely never was the outlook for building a church
more hopeless. But Colonel Conwell is not a man to
give much time to viewing the obstacles in his path.
It is the need to which he gives the most of his attention
and, if this seems definite enough, he believes the very
fact of the need implies a supply.
As he knew it would be useless to propose to the
church members to build a new church, Colonel Con-
well started the work himself. Bright and early upon
the Monday morning after his second Sunday at Lex-
ington, he appeared with saw and hammer and began
tearing away the steps that had broken down under
the pushing and stamping of the crowd. Vigorously he
went to work. The neighborhood was aroused by
the sounds of blows, the rending of boards and the
falling of timbers. By night the most dilapidated parts
of the old building were gone and only a fraction of the
original porch remained.
But more had been done than the tearing down of @
building. That day’s work had aroused Lexington
178 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
and the whole town was talking about it. For not
only was the old building almost razed, but a large
amount of money had been subscribed toward a new one.
Every one who had stopped and asked what was going
on had been told the church’s need. The first person
had voluntarily given one hundred dollars. Others,
when told of the gift, had added what they could.
And when Colonel Conwell laid down his pick one
evening he had nearly five thousand dollars toward the
new edifice.
“The church members could not object to building
a church when I told them how much money I had
secured toward it,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye,
as he recalled those days. ‘‘The question was settled
without any discussion or doubt.”
If Colonel Conwell’s preaching had been electrical
in its effect upon Lexington, his method of building a
new church was even more so. Equally so were the
other activities that quickly followed. While the
church was being made over, the services were held |
in the Town Hall, in which was also held a fair to raise
money for the building fund. This fair was unlike any-
thing of the kind that had ever been held before in
Lexington.
The whole of the Town Hall was used for it.
Upstairs was a restaurant in which meals were ready
at all hours. On the balcony was an old-fashioned
kitchen in which was served all manner of old-time
dishes—cider-apple sauce, doughnuts, baked beans and
other famous New England delicacies. When the
dinner was prepared a man in the uniform of a Colonial
soldier came out on the balcony, blew a silver trumpet,
announced that dinner was now served, and read the
ménu.
Kiverything imaginable in merchandise was on sale
HIS FIRST PASTORATE. 179
from farming tools to the daintiest of hand embroidery.
Orders were taken for the winter’s supply of vegetables,
or for coal or wood. Anything anybody needed was
furnished if possible. The only exception was dry-
goods by the yard. The fair cleared $1,600.
This event stirred the town and the neighboring
community profoundly. Everyone was talking about
it and the church work it stood for. One of the pleas-
ing incidents was the action taken by the Roman
Catholics of the community. Sometime previously the
Roman Catholic church of the town had given a supper.
The church did not have enough dishes and tried to
borrow supplies from the various Protestant churches
of Lexington, but without success. Finally application
was made to Colonel Conwell for whatever his church
might have. He gladly loaned the dishes at his dis-
posal and, when payment was offered, refused it.
The Catholics were not unappreciative and, when
the fair for Conwell’s church opened, the priest speci-
ally addressed his congregation in regard to it. He
told them how kind the Baptist church had been in
helping them and said to his parishioners, ‘‘I want you
to go to that fair and spend money. Don’t only buy a
ticket to goin. But buy something at the fair.” As
the Roman Catholic church had a membership of about
a thousand, their good-will and help had much to do
with the success of the fair.
A Young People’s Society was formed, a Bible class
for young men organized and many entertainments were
given. Activity was the word and the church was
thoroughly alive. Everyone connected with it was
set to work doing something. Energy seemed to flow
from it in many directions and to reach many circles.
Colonel Conwell’s method of choosing a Sunday-
school superintendent is indicative of the simple and
12
380 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
direct manner in which he worked. His knowledge of
men told him that a certain member of the church
would make a good Sunday-school superintendent, but
he knew that the man if asked would refuse from
timidity and self-distrust, as he had never filled any
public position.
Conwell, however, knew the real capabilities of the
man and that all that was needed was for the man him-
self to discover them. So he arranged a little social
gathering of church members at the man’s house and, at
the psychological moment, introduced him as the new
Sunday-school superintendent. Of course the man
protested; but Colonel Conwell held to his point, agree-
ing that he would himself be on hand, if desired, to
make an address, but that the other could easily attend
to the routine work. At last the man agreed, and ‘‘he
made one of the best Sunday-school superintendents
Lexington ever had,” said one of members who had
been present at the affair, in concluding her recital of
this event. ‘‘Why, we no more thought he would make
a superintendent than a butterfly would. But Mr.
Conwell was right.”
Music was an important part of the church services,
and it was not long before the church was said to have
the best music within ten miles of Boston. In describ-
ing the rdle music played in the church work, a member
said, ‘‘Mr. Conwell would usually arrive a half hour
or so before the service, and, seated at the organ, would
play and sing and conduct a general musical service in
which the assembling congregation joined. It brought
tears to every one’s eyes to hear him sing ‘ Where is my
wandering boy tonight?’”’
The finances of the church improved immediately, as
collections increased from a few dollars to an average of
about eighty dollars a Sunday. Not only did the fairs
HIS FIRST PASTORATE 181
and entertainments bring in considerable money for
the work going forward, but individually the people
of Lexington gave generously. In speaking of the
liberal financial support received, a member of the
church said that a friend had remarked to him, apropos
of the financial record the church was making, “‘If any-
body had asked me two years ago, ‘How much can
these Baptists raise, I would have said six cents. I
would not even have made it six and a quarter.’”’
In the eighteen months Colonel Conwell was there
the church raised $8,000.
He lived at Newton Center—ten miles distant—and
drove to Lexington. On one of these trips he lost his
necktie, and his little daughter Nima who was with
him was quite horrified at the thought of her father
preaching without anecktie. But such trivialities did
not bother him. At another time the horse ran away,
and he was thrown and sprained his ankle; but he
limped into the pulpit on an improvised crutch. In
the winter he often had to shovel his way through
snowdrifts; yet such things did not deter him. Love
for the work so filled him that anything extraneous to it
did not count.
Nor did Colonel Conwell confine himself solely to
routine church services or activities. The spirit of
religion he believed should pervade all of life’s enter-
prises, and so he entered sympathetically and heartily
into all the interests of Lexington. He was as ready
to help any person or any interest of the town as he was
those under his immediate charge. His earnest desire
to be of service to his fellow-men was not bounded by
creed or class. |
In one section of Lexington was a somewhat rough
element. It was Pastor Conwell’s wish to reach these
people. One night in passing through the streets of this
182 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
district, he met a crowd of boisterous young men
singing on the corner. He approached them; said
a few words in praise of their singing, and then
remarked, ‘‘Come up and sing for me at the church.
Your voices are just what I want. Bring your friends
if you want to.”
His invitation was met with scoffing and jeers, but he
persisted, and finally persuaded them to come. They
were at the next service and became regular attendants.
Many of them reformed and became respectable and
useful members of the community.
Colonel Conwell also did much other personal work.
It is told in Lexington how he sat up night after night
with a man well-known and liked, but addicted to
alcoholism, to prevent him from going out and becom-
ing intoxicated. In the business life of Lexington
he became an important factor. He was a keen
business man as well as a preacher and had
been interested—both in Minneapolis and in Boston
—in building up communities. He saw business
possibilities in Lexington which had not been made
the most of, so he undertook to develop the town
commercially.
At Conwell’s invitation the Governor of the State,
Honorable John D. Long, visited the place. Large
business enterprises were started and strongly sup-
ported by the townspeople. From the date of Colonel
Conwell’s installment as pastor, the town took on a
new lease of life. He showed them what could be done
and encouraged them to do it. Strangers were wel-
comed to the town, and its unusual beauty became a
topic of conversation. The railroad managers heard
of its attractiveness and provided better accommoda-
tions for travelers. Conwell himself had sae | and
distributed the following card:
HIS FIRST PASTORATE 183
THE HILLS AND VALLEYS OF LEXINGTON
Are now open for the residence of business men, and
the advantages of the town may be briefly stated as follows:
First, official statistics show it to be one of the healthiest
localities in the State; Second, its lands are nearly three
hundred feet above the sea level; Third, the water is so
pure, that an analysis of some of the springs show but a
trace of difference between them and the celebrated Poland
Springs, said to be so valuable in kidney diseases; Fourth,
the location is away from the piercing east winds, although
only ten miles from Boston; Fifth, there are eleven trains
each way every week-day and more wili soon be put on the
road; Sixth, it is an historic town, known over the whole
civilized world; Seventh, its houses and lands and farms
are valuable and so cheap that every citizen can afford to
have at least a large garden tract; Eighth, the people are
descendants of old New England stock, enterprising, indus-
trious, social, cultured and intelligent; Ninth, its schools
are not excelled by those of any other town in the State;
Tenth, its public library, its gas company, its local stores,
markets, etc., are now fully equal to the demand of the time;
Eleventh, there are four religious denominations having
houses. of worship—Unitarian, Orthodox-Congregational,
Catholic, and Baptist.
The writer of this card has no financial interest whatever
in the sale of any real estate or other property, but will gladly
answer any inquiries about the town or its places of resi-
dence, either personally or by mail.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL,
Room B, Tremont Temple.
March, 1881.
184 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
One of the town officers writing at that time says:
‘Lexington can never forget the benefit Mr. Conwell
conferred during his stay in the community.”
The beginning of all this work Colonel Conwell did
before he was ordained, as he merely had a license to
preach. When he made the definite decision to enter
the ministry, he immediately enrolled at Newton Theo-
logical Seminary and pursued his studies there during
the busy days of preaching and building at Lexington.
Russell Conwell was ordained in the year 1879. The
council of churches called for his ordination met in
Lexington and President Alvah Hovey, of Newton Sem-
inary, presided. Among the members of the council
was his life-long friend, George W. Chipman, of Boston
—the same good deacon who had taken him, a runaway
boy, into the Sunday-school of Tremont Temple. The
only objection to the ordination was made by one of
the pastors present who said, ‘‘Good lawyers are too
scarce to be spoiled by making ministers of them.”
: Fora year and a half he thus labored. A new church
was built. The Baptists of Lexington were working
with an enthusiasm and a consecration they had not
experienced for years. The town itself was stirred to
new life, new activities. Then a call came to larger
work. He resigned the pastorate at Lexington to
come to Philadelphia to enter upon what has proven to
be his great life work—a work which has benefited
thousands upon thousands of the people of this country.
VIHUIGAVIIHG ‘StAGULG ANIAUTY GNV SUuag Lv agLodUyY INA], AH],
HOUNHD LSIldvd ZOVUD AO « ANOH HOUAHO» LSald AHL
CHAPTER XIX
Tue Earty Days oF THE PHILADELPHIA
PASTORATE
The Beginning of Grace Baptist Church. A Letter
Describing a Church Service. John Wanamaker’s
Tribute to Doctor Conwell’s ‘Different’? Methods.
The Growth of the Church.
Conwell came was, in a sense, in almost as sore
straits as the one to which he had gone in
Lexington. It was started in 1870 as a little
mission in a rapidly developing section in the northern
part of the city. A number of young men from the
Tenth Baptist Church, seeing the need for religious
Services in this district, secured a hall at Twelfth
Street and Montgomery Avenue and began holding
meetings.
The work prospered and finally a clergyman was
employed to take full charge. Under his ministry the
mission became still more successful. In 1872, evan-
gelistic services were held which brought a large increase
in the membership. It was then decided to form an
independent church; and Grace Baptist Church was
formally organized, February 12, 1872, with forty-seven
members.
The membership soon outgrew the accommodations
of the hall, and steps were taken to secure larger quar-
ters. A lot was purchased at Berks and Mervine
Streets and a tent, with a seating capacity of five
hundred was erected. This was the first ‘‘church
home” of the members of Grace Baptist Church.
(185)
ie church in Philadelphia to which Russell
186 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
But the little church was growing rapidly in members.
Soon the tent could no longer accommodate those who
wished to attend, and the problem of erecting a church
building confronted the band of workers. ‘This step
was finally decided upon. The tent was moved to a
neighboring lot, where it was used for mission work,
after the church services in it were discontinued. Home-
less wanderers were given food and shelter in it, and
helped to a useful life. From this work grew the
Sunday Breakfast Association of Philadelphia.
The edifice for Grace Baptist Church went rapidly
forward. In 1875, the membership was able to use the
basement of the building. But troubled days came;
bills could not be met; judgments were entered, and
finally the sheriff descended and foreclosed. But, after
much persuasion, the mortgagor was induced to wait
and the little band of workers bent with fresh energy
to the task of raising the money and holding their
church together.
This was the condition Russell Conwell was asked to
meet when the call was made to him—an unfinished
building with a mortgage of $15,000 upon it. But
failure and debt did not daunt him. He had seen how
hard work and determination could overcome both.
The only point to be considered was, ‘‘Did the cause
of Christneed his services heremore than in Lexington?”
This was the only issue with him.
He came to Philadelphia and looked over the field.
He quickly saw that a live church could do much good
in the rapidly developing section in which this church
was situated. And the earnestness of the church
members—their willingness to work and _ sacrifice—
touched him. They were of a spirit kindred to his
own and he decided to accept the call.
To many of those interested in his welfare, Russell
EARLY PHILADELPHIA PASTORATE 187
Conwell’s decision again seemed an act of folly. To
relinquish work that was proving highly successful, and
which was giving him an influential position in the
community, in order to take charge of a church that
was on the verge of failure, appeared to many to show
an utter lack of wisdom. But worldly standards' had
little weight with Doctor Conwell. When he was
once convinced there was a work to be done, he went
ahead and did it.
His congregation in Lexington was loath to give him
up. But when he pointed out the precarious condition
of the Philadelphia church; how the people there were
saying what practically the Lexington congregation
had said, ** Help us to save the church;”’ how the church
at Lexington could go forward of its own impetus, and
that in this new field he could be more useful, they
sorrowfully acquiesced in his decision.
“It was a sad day in Lexington,” said a member of
that church, ‘“‘when he preached his farewell sermon.
But we believed that the church in Philadelphia needed
him more than we did, and that he could do a greater
work there than he could in Lexington. And so we
agreed regretfully to his going.”
Doctor Conwell entered upon his duties on Thanks-
giving Day, 1882. He at once went to work with
characteristic energy—preaching, planning, organizing
and getting the people busy. He followed no traditions
or conventions, unless they could be of use in the work
he was doing. He surveyed the field and studied the
people. Then he began in the most simple, direct and
effective manner to accomplish what needed to be done
with the means at hand.
His sermons were simple, direct, full of homely illus-
trations that stayed in the memory and enabled his
hearers to make the spiritual truths he preached a part
188 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
of their everyday life. (See Appendix for Sermon
Outlines.) A Methodist minister from Albany
who happened to be in Philadelphia in the early
days of Russell Conwell’s pastorate, gave, in a letter
home, a good description of one of Doctor Conwell’s
sermons and of the entire service. He wrote:
‘“‘T arrived at the church a full hour before the eve-
ning service. There was a big crowd at the front door
another at the side entrance. I was determined to get
in, so I waited. I was dreadfully squeezed, but finally
got through the back entrance and stood in the rear of
the pretty church. All the camp chairs were already.
taken; also the extra seats. The church was rather
fancifully frescoed; but it is an architectural gem. It
is half amphitheatrical in design; is longer than wide;
and the choir gallery and organ are over the preacher’s
head. It looks, underneath, like an old-fashioned
sounding board; but it is neat and pretty. The carpet
and cushions are bright red, and the windows are full of
mottoes and designs; but in the evening, under the
brilliant lights, the figures could not be clearly seen.
‘‘'There was an unusual spirit of homeness about the
place, such as I never felt in a church before—I was not
alone in feeling it. The moment I stood in the audience
room, an agreeable sense of rest and pleasure came
over me—and everyone else appeared to feel the same.
There was none of the stiff restraint most churches
have. Everybody moved about and greeted each other
with an ease that was very pleasant, indeed. I saw
some people abusing the liberty of the place by whis-
pering, even during the sermon. They may have been
strangers and evidently belonged to the lower classes.
But it was a curiosity to notice the liberty everyone took
at a pause in the service, and the close attention there
was when the reading or speaking began.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL WHEN HE ENTERED THE MINISTRY
AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-SEVEN
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EARLY PHILADELPHIA PASTORATE 189
‘All the people sang. I think Doctor Conwell has
a strong liking for the old hymns. Of course I noticed
this selection of Wesley’s favorite. A little boy in front of
me stood upon the pew when the congregation rose and
piped out in song with all his power, just like a spring
canary. It was difficult to tell whether the strong
voice of the preacher, or the chorus choir, led most
in the singing. A well-dressed lady near me said,
‘Good evening’ most cheerfully, as a polite usher
showed me into a pew. They say that all the
members do that. It made me feel welcome. She
also gave me a hymn book. I saw others thus kindly
greeted. How it did help me to praise the Lord!
At home with the people of God! That is just how
I felt.
“T was greatly disappointed in the preacher. Agree-
ably so, after all. I expected to see an old man and he
did not appear to be over thirty-five. He was awk-
wardly tall. I had expected some eccentric and
sensational affair. I do not know just what, but I had
been told many strange things. I think now it was
envious misrepresentation. The whole service was as
simple as simple can be—and it was surely as sincere
as simple. The reading of the hymns was so natural
and distinct that they had a new meaning tome. The
prayer was very short, and offered in homely language.
At its close the minister paused a moment for silent
prayer, and every one seemed to hold his breath in the
deepest, real reverence. It was so different from my
expectations.
“Then came the collection. It was not an asking for
money at all. The preacher put his notice of it the
other way about. He said, “The people who wish to
worship God by giving their offering into the trust of
the church could place it in the baskets which would be
190 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
passed to any one who wanted to give.’ The basket
that went down by me to the altar was full of money and
envelopes. Yet no one was asked to give anything.
It was all voluntary, and really an offering to the
Lord. I had never seen such a way of doing things in a
church collection. I do not know if the minister or
church require it so.
‘The church was packed in every corner, and people
stood in the aisles. The pulpit platform was crowded
so that the preacher had nothing more than standing
room. Some people sat on the floor, and a crowd of
interested boys leaned against the pulpit platform.
When the preacher arose to speak, I expected some-
thing strange. It did not seem possible that such a
crowd could gather year after year, to listen to mere
plain preaching; for these are degenerate days. The
minister began so familiarly and easily in introducing
his text that he was half through his discourse before
I began to realize that he was actually in his sermon.
It was the plainest thing possible. I had often heard
of eloquence and poetic imagination; but there was
little of either, if we think of the old ideas. There was
close, continuous attention. He was surely in earnest,
but made no attempt at oratorical display. _ Of course,
there were exciting gestures at times, and lofty periods;
but it was all so natural.
‘At one point the whole audience burst into laughter
at a comic illustration, but the preacher went on
unconscious of it. It detracted nothing from the
solemn theme. It was what the Chautauqua Herald
last year called a ‘Conwellian evening.’ It was unlike
anything I ever saw or heard. Yet it was good to be
there. The sermon was crowded with illustrations and
evidently unstudied. They say that Doctor Conwell
never takes time from his many cares to write a sermon.
EARLY PHILADELPHIA PASTORATE 191
That one was surely spontaneous; but it inspired the
audience to better lives and a higher faith. When he
suddenly stopped and quickly seized a hymn book, the
audience drew a long sigh. At once the people moved
about again and looked at each other and smiled. The
whole congregation were at one with the preacher.
There was a low hum of whispering voices. But all was
attention again when the hymn was read. Then the
glorious song! One of the finest organists in the
country—a blind gentlemen named Wood—was the
power behind the throne. The organ did praise God.
Every one was carried on in a flood of praise. It was
rich.
“The benediction was a continuation of the sermon
and a closing prayer—all in a single sentence. I have
never heard one so unique. It fastened the evening’s
lesson; but was not formal. The benediction was a
blessing, indeed. It broke every rule of church form.
It was a charming close, however. No one but Doctor
Conwell could do it. Probably no one would try.
Instantly at the close of the service, all the people
turned to each other, shook hands, and entered into
familiar conversation. Many spoke to me and advised
me to come again. ‘There was no restraint. All was
homelike and happy. It was blessed to be there.”’
_ Both Russell Conwell and his work were widely dis-
cussed, and often harshly criticised. Many said he
was sensational; but his critics were frequently those
who had never heard him and who drew their conclu-
sions from the reports of others, or from distorted
newspaper accounts. His so-called sensationalism
consisted only in doing things differently from the way
they had been done.
Speaking once of the manner in which people had
misunderstood and criticised him, Doctor Conwell said
192 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
with a grim setting of his jaw: ‘“‘I do not do reckless
things. That would be wrong. But when I think Jam
doing right, I go ahead, and let people say what they
will. I take my stand.”
In speaking of these early days, the Hon. John
Wanamaker, upon the occasion of a celebration in
Philadelphia in honor of Doctor Conwell’s seventieth
birthday, said:
‘Thirty-one years ago a poor Baptist minister, of
whom none of us had then heard, came to Philadelphia
and took. charge of a little, struggling church. Not
that he was a poor minister, or a poor Baptist, but a
man whom the world would call financially poor.
‘““When that same man, then in the early prime of
splendid manhood, first came to this city, it did not
take long for the people to discover that in some way
he was different from the average minister; and there
are those in this world to whose minds to be ‘different’
means to be wrong. His brethern in the ministry of
all denominations looked upon him first indifferently,
then curiously and finally many of them with suspicion.
‘Why should this man take the trouble to do this
and that and the other thing? Why should he work
so much harder than his profession required? By
what magical art did he seem to understand the heart
of the common people? Wise heads were shaking, and
it was said: ‘A new broom sweeps clean—but wait
awhile. It won’t last. He is a sensationalist—a fad-
dist!’ When the Baptist Temple was projected, there
were those who called it ‘Conwell’s Folly,’ and a theater
company joyfully anticipated taking it for their own
purposes when the inevitable failure should come.
“Then we remember, when perhaps ten years had
passed away, hearing the story of a white azalea. We
violate no confidence, for it was publicly told by a
ne
EARLY PHILADELPHIA PASTORATE 193
minister then prominent in the city, who now has gone
to the glory land. He confessed to having harbored a
full share of the suspicion and envy which many others
felt toward this ‘different’ worker, and that he also was
waiting for the failure which nearly all prophesied.
‘‘But one day he was very ill, and a beautiful white
azalea came to his bedside. At first he almost resented
it. Why did that man send him a flower? What
motive was back of it? Did he intend to buy him with
a present? Well, he wasn’t to be bought—that was all!
Nevertheless he would watch him, and watch him he did.
He began to see the motive of a great Christ-like life,
of which that white flower was just one expression,
He found Russell Conwell doing little kindnesses here
and there—to high and low alike. He found a great,
wide, deep interest in humanity for Christ’s sake such
as he had found in no other life, such as he presently
longed for in hisown. And upon the day of that man’s
funeral, Doctor Conwell said, ‘I feel personally bereaved,
for in my Philadelphia ministry he was one of my
earliest, dearest, and most sympathetic friends.’
‘The same distrust to which this brother freely con-
fessed personally, existed in larger circles also—just
because he was ‘different.’ When he read that Jesus
went about, ‘preaching, teaching and healing.’ Doctor
Conwell said,,“That is the model for every organized
Christian institution; preaching is not enough; there
must be added teaching the ignorant and healing the
sick.’ Hence the night school which has grown into the
Temple University, and the Samaritan Hospital—and
later the adoption of the Garretson Hospital.
“When the hospital and university first outgrew the
possibility of his own personal care, Russell Conwell
offered them to his denomination—and even plead
with it to come to his assistance in the responsibility
f ‘ { ‘
194 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
and the harvest. Had his own people recognized him
then, as they do now, these organizations would have
undoubtedly been great Baptist institutions. But
God’s plan was a wider one; it was to place these
institutions among the great Christian factors of
human uplift upon a basis as broad as the love of the
Father Himself; and today they are so recognized.
Considered in the light of that white azalea’s revelation
—a, single act that has been duplicated a million times
in its outshining of an inward Christ-like love for
everyone in need—this celebration takes on even
deeper significance.”
Although criticised and misunderstood, Russell Con-
well went ahead. The church was soon completed and
the financial obligations, as they came due, were easily
met. The church became an influence in the commu-
nity. Not only was the immediate neighborhood
stirred, but people from all parts of the city thronged to
hear him. He soon had Philadelphia as much aroused as
Lexington, when he began tearing down the old church
there. The banging of hammers and ripping of saws
were not any more disturbing to that sleepy, old town
than were Russell Conwell’s forceful sermons and his
efficient, practical ways of going about church work
to Philadelphians.
He was a tireless worker. Day and night he went
about the duties that devolved upon him. He made
himself intimately acquainted with the members of his
church family and entered sympathetically into their
ambitions and interests. Such personal history as they
cared to tell him was not forgotten and he was ever
ready to advise and help. His manner was so simple
and informal that no one felt any hesitation in going
to him for counsel, and the practical suggestions he
gave—-drawn from his own wide experience of men and
EARLY PHILADELPHIA PASTORATE 195
affairs—were right to the point in solving problems and
lifting burdens.
The same spirit permeated the membership. The
church fairly radiated kindliness, cheer and _ help.
Religion was not merely preached as being able to give
satisfaction to life; but the fact was demonstrated.
Such work of pastor and people could not but tell. The
church became more and more crowded. In less than
a year—although the seating capacity was increased to
twelve hundred—people stood throughout the services.
It finally became necessary to admit the members
by tickets at the rear, as it was almost impossible for
them to get through the throngs of strangers at the
front. Upon request, cards of admission were sent
to those who desired them.
This was one of the things for which Russell Con-
well was much criticised. Word went about the city
that admission to ‘‘Conwell’s church’’—as it was at
that time scoffingly called by some—was only by
ticket; and others went so far as to say that one had to
pay for these tickets. This is but one illustration of the
misunderstanding and criticism that first met him, and
of how little foundation there was for it. Anyone
could enter by the front door who wished to become
one of the crowd and wait; but it was impossible for
members to get through this crowd in time to reach
their seats for the beginning of the service. Always
many were turned away. So, for the convenience of
the members and strangers, who perhaps could not
come again if they missed a certain service, tickets
of admission were instituted. But even these, though
they simplified the process of entering the building,
did not provide additional accommodations. In
greater and greater numbers were people turned away.
‘““T am glad,’’ Russell Conwell once remarked to a
13
196 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
friend ‘‘when I get up Sunday morning and can look out
of the window and see it snowing, sleeting and raining,
and hear the wind shriek and howl. ‘There,’ I say,
‘as I preach this morning, I won’t have to look at people
patiently standing through the service, wherever there
is a foot of standing room.’ ”
The membership rose from two hundred to more
than five hundred within two years, and the question
began to shape itself in the minds of the pastor and
people, ‘What shall we do?” As a partial solution,
the proposition was made to divide into three churches;
but each section wanted Doctor Conwell as pastor,
so the idea was abandoned.
Still the membership grew, and the need for larger
quarters faced them and could not be evaded. The house
next door was purchased, which gave increased space
for the work of the Sunday-school and the various
associations. But it was a mere drop in the bucket.
Every room was filled to overflowing with eager workers
before the ink was fairly dry on the deed of transfer.
Then into this busy crowd, wondering what should be
done, came a little child, and with one simple act cleared
the mist from their eyes and pointed the way for them
to go.
CHAPTER XX
A CuHItp’s LEGACY
The Beginning of the Building Fund of the Baptist
Temple.
old, came to the church building at Berks and
Mervine Streets to attend Sunday-school.
But, large as the Sunday-school was, there was
not room for even one more tiny child. Other little girls
had been turned away that day, and still others on
Sundays before. And so she was told there was no
place for her.
It was a bitter disappointment. Hattie did not take
it as other children had done; sobs that came from the
heart shook her as she went home, and tears rolled
down her cheeks as she told her mother that she could
not go to this Sunday-school because there was not
room. She dwelt upon her disappointment all the
afternoon and when bedtime came, and she said her
evening prayer, she included in it a special petition
that a place might be found for her in the Sunday-
school.
But this was not enough. Doubtless she had heard
some word dropped about faith and works, or, perhaps,
her childish mind thought it out for herself. No one
knows what led to the resolve; but she arose in the
morning with the determination to save her pennies
and build a larger Sunday-school.
To older persons it might have seemed a big under-
taking, but to her simple faith, it did not seem impos-
(197)
() Sunday afternoon, Hattie Wiatt, six years
198 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
sible. From her childish treasures she took a little red
pocketbook, and into this she put her pennies. The
temptations that assailed Hattie to spend those pennies,
none but her own heart knew. But she did not waver
in her purpose. Day by day the little hoard increased
and, as she counted it, her eyes grew bright and her
heart light at the thought of the Sunday-school that
was to be.
But there were only a few weeks of her planning,
hoping and saving. The little Temple builder fell ill.
She was sick but a brief time, and then the grim reaper
knocked at the door of the Wiatt home and bore the
unselfish child spirit away. With her dying breath
she told her mother of her treasure—told her it was
for Grace Baptist Church to build.
In the little red pocketbook was just fifty-seven cents.
That was her legacy. With swelling heart, Doctor
Conwell reverently took it and, with misty eyes and
broken voice, he told the congregation of the little
one’s gift.
“When we heard how God had blessed us with so
great an inheritance, there was silenee—the silence of
tears and earnest consecration,’’ said a member in
describing the event. ‘‘We felt that the corner-stone
of the new church was laid.”’
CHAPTER XxXI
BUILDING THE TEMPLE
How a Poor Congregation Built One of the Finest
Church Edifices in the Country. Doctor Conwell’s
Ideas as to What a Church Edifice Should Be Like.
His Own Plans for The Temple. His Warnings
Against the Perils of Success.
as to what the church should do to relieve the
overcrowding. The decision was made at once
to build. But it was no light task that con-
fronted the membership. They were men and women
who toiled for their daily bread, and there was no one
among them to aid by large contributions.
It may be helpful to other struggling churches to
briefly recount how this church raised the money to
build. Since they were a people with no one among
them to give largely, and yet succeeded in building
one of the largest, handsomest and most valuable
church edifices in the country, no other church mem-
bership—no matter how unfavorable may seem the
prospect of success—need hesitate to go forward into
large work if the need is imperative.
It was not a question simply of giving. What was
given had to be saved. Few could give outright and
not feel it. Incomes for the most part just covered
living expenses; and expenses had to be cut down, 1f
incomes were to be stretched to build the church. So
these practical people put their wits to work to save
money. Walking clubs were organized—not for
(199)
[ astox WIATT?’S legacy settled the question
200 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
vigorous cross-country tramps in search of pleasure
and health—but with an earnest determination to save
carfare for the building fund.
Tired men, with muscles aching from a hard day’s
work, and women, weary with a long day behind the
counter or at the typewriter, cheerfully trudged home
and saved the nickels. Men ceased to smoke tobacco;
women economized in dress and vacations in the sum-
mer were dropped. Even the boys and girls saved their
pennies, as little Hattie Wiatt had done—and the
money poured into the treasury in astonishing amounts,
considering how small was each individual gift. All of
these sacrifices helped to endear the place to those who
wove their hopes and prayers about it.
Another effort that brought splendid results was the
giving out of little earthen jugs in the early summer to
be brought to the ‘‘harvest home” in September with
their garnerings. It was a joyous evening when the
jugs were brought in. A supper was held and, while
the church members enjoyed themselves at the tables,
the committee on the platform broke the jugs, counted
the money and announced the amount.
Innumerable entertainments were held at the church
and at the homes of the members. Suppers were given
in Fairmount Park during the summer and every worthy
plan for raising money that clever brains could devise
and willing hands accomplish was used to swell the
building fund.
A fair was held in one of the largest halls of Philadel-
phia in the central part of the city. It was as electrical
in thoroughly awakening Philadelphia to what this live
church in the northern part of the city was doing, as
had been the fair at Lexington. As at Lexington,
almost everything salable was on hand. Meals were
served and orders were taken for supplies that could
BUILDING THE TEMPLE 201
not be handled at the hall. The affair was planned
along business lines; conducted in a practical, sensible
fashion—and it went with a vim. It was visited by
thousands of people and netted nearly nine thousand
dollars toward the building fund.
The underlying principle of this effort in behalf of
the building fund was to meet any need that the dis-
cerning eye of any member could descry, or to devise
a new way to raise money that would appeal by its
novelty. The various methods employed would prob-
ably not serve now; but the principle holds good when-
ever and wherever such work needs to be done.
By all these various channels, funds flowed in, and
in September, 1886, the lot on which The Temple now
stands at Broad and Berks Streets was purchased.
The price was $25,000, but only fifty-seven cents, little
Hattie Wiatt’s legacy, was paid down. The beginning
thus made, the work for the building fund was pushed,
if possible, with even greater vigor. Ground was broken
for The Temple on March 27, 1889. The corner-stone
was laid on July 18, 1890, and on the first of March,
1891, the structure was occupied for worship.
But raising money and erecting a building did not
stop the spiritual work of the church. Rather it
increased it. People heard of the church through the
fairs and various other efforts to raise money, came
to the services—perhaps out of curiosity at first—were
awakened to the needs of the spirit, and joined. Never
did the spiritual light of the church burn more brightly
than in those days of hard work and self-denial. The
membership steadily rose and, when Grace Church
moved into its new temple of worship, more than
twelve hundred members answered the muster roll.
The only large amount received toward the building
fund was a gift of $10,000, on condition that the church
202 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
be not dedicated until it was free of debt. In a legal
sense, calling a building by the name of the congrega-
tion worshiping in it is a dedication, and so the struc-
ture, instead of being named the Grace Baptist Church,
was called the Baptist Temple—a name which will
probably cling to it as long as one stone stands upon
another. ,
The first Sunday in The Temple was a day long
remembered by its members. ‘‘During the opening
exercises, over nine thousand people were present at
each service,’’ said the Philadelphia Press in describ-
ing the event, ‘The throng overflowed into the Lower
Temple and into the old church building. The whole
neighborhood was full of the joyful members of the
Grace Baptist Church, and the very air seemed to
thrill with the spirit of thanksgiving abroad that day.
All that Sabbath—from sunrise until close to midnight—
members thronged the building with prayers of thank-
fulness and praise welling up from glad hearts.”’ Writ-
ing from London several years later, Doctor Conwell
voiced in words what had been in his mind when the
church was planned:
‘‘T heard a sermon which helped me greatly. It was
delivered by an old preacher, and the subject was, ‘This
God is our God.’ He described the attributes of God
in glory, knowledge, wisdom and love, and compared
Him to the gods that the heathens worship. He then
pressed upon us the message that this glorious God is
the Christian’s God, and that with Him we cannot
want. It did me so much good and made me long for
more of God in all my feelings, actions and influence.
The seats were hard; the back of the pew hard and
high; the church dusty and neglected; yet, in spite of
all the discomforts, I was blessed. I was sorry for the
preacher who had to preach amid all those discomforts,
and did not wonder at the thin congregation.
BUILDING THE TEMPLE 203
“Oh! it is all wrong to make it so unnecessarily hard
to listen to the gospel. They ought for Jesus’ sake to
tear out the old benches and put in comfortable chairs.
There was present an air of perfunctoriness and lack of
object, which made the service indefinite and aimless.
This is a common fault. We lack an object and do not
aim at anything special in our services. That, too, is
all wrong. Each hymn, each chapter read, each anthem,
each prayer, and each sermon should have a special
and appropriate purpose. May the Lord help me—
after my return—to profit by this day’s lesson.”
No hard benches and no air of cold dreariness marks
The Temple. The exterior is beautiful and graceful in
design, and the interior both cheery and homelike in
furnishing. Doctor Conwell sketched the plans for
The Temple himself and the building embodies his ideas
of what a church edifice should be. These rough drafts
were given to the architect, who drew them to measure-
ment and put them into practical form for materializa-
tion in stone.
The Baptist Temple is of hewn stone, with a frontage
on Broad Street of one hundred and seven feet, a
depth on Berks Street of one hundred and fifty feet,
and is ninety feet in height. On the front is a beautiful
half-rose window of rich stained glass; and on the
Berks Street side there are a number of smaller
memorial windows, each depicting some beautiful
Biblical scene or thought. Above the rose window on
the front is a small iron balcony upon which the church
orchestra and choir often played sacred melodies
and sang hymns on special occasions, such as Christmas
Eve, New Year’s Eve and Easter, thus filling the hours
with melody and delighting thousands of interested
spectators. Of late years this custom has been replaced
by a large electric cross that can be seen for miles
blazing against the midnight sky.
204 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
The auditorium of The Temple is one of the largest
among Protestant church edifices in the United States.
Its original seating capacity, according to the archi-
tect’s plans, was forty-two hundred opera chairs; but,
to secure greater comfort and safety, only thirty-one
hundred and thirty-five chairs were used.
Under the auditorium and below the level of the
street is the Lower Temple. Here, also, are many
beautiful stained-glass windows. In this part are the
Sunday-school rooms with a seating capacity of two
thousand. One of these rooms also answers for the
dining-room, in which five hundred can be seated; and
folding tables and hundreds of chairs are stowed away
in the nearby store rooms.
Adjoining the dining-room are the rooms of the
various associations of the church; and the kitchen,
carving-room and cloak-room. ‘The rooms of the
various societies are pleasantly furnished and home-
like. In pantries and cupboards is an outfit of china
and table cutlery sufficient for five hundred persons,
and the kitchen is fully equipped with large ranges,
hot-water cylinders, sinks and drainage tanks. The
annex beyond the kitchen contains the boilers and
engines and the electric light plant. All appoint-
ments here are modern.
The steam heating of the building is supplied by
four 100-horse-power boilers. In the engine-room are
two 135-horse-power engines directly connected with
dynamos having a capacity of twenty-five hundred
lights, which are controlled by a switchboard in this
room. The electrician is on duty every day, giving
his entire time to the management of this plant.
The building is also supplied with gas, and behind
the puplit is a small closet containing a friction
wheel, by means of which, should the electric light
BUILDING THE TEMPLE 205
fail for any reason, every gas jet in The Temple can
be lighted from dome to basement. For cleaning the
church there has been installed a vacuum plant which
does the work quickly and thoroughly.
In the rear of the auditorium on the street floor are
the business offices of the church, Doctor Conwell’s
study, and the offices of his secretary, and associate
pastor. The offices are equipped with desks, filing
cabinets, telephones, speaking tubes, and everything
necessary to conduct the business of the church in a
business-like way.
The acoustics of the great auditorium are practi-
cally perfect. There is probably no building on this
continent with an equal capacity which enables the
preacher to speak and the hearers to listen with such
perfect comfort. The weakest voice is carried to the
farthest auditor, and lecturers who have tested the
acoustics of halls in every state in the Union speak
with praise and pleasure of The Temple.
At one time telephonic communication was installed
between the auditorium and the Samaritan Hospital
and private homes. Patients in their beds and people
in their homes could hear the sermon and the music
of the Sunday services. In fact, a sermon was once
taken down in shorthand, in Newark, by this tele-
phone service, which was later discontinued because of
the cost.
A helpful device has been installed for those of the
congregation who do not hear well. In front of the
desk on the pulpit is asmall apparatus—the audiphone—
by which the speaker’s voice is carried to a device in
certain seats. This device is connected with an ear-
piece and thus those who otherwise could not hear are
enabled to enjoy what is said on the platform. These
ear pieces are furnished free in the business office of
206 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
the church upon request, though many who use them
regularly have their own.
Compared with other assembly rooms in this country,
the auditorium of The Temple is a model. It seats
3,185 persons. The Academy of Music, Philadelphia,
seats 2,900; the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, 2,433;
the Academy of Music, New York, 2,488; the Grand
Opera House, Cincinnati, 2,250; and the Music Hall,
Boston, 2,585.
The walls of the first floor of the church are finished
with glazed tiles in a soft pinkish tint, that is restful
to the eye and harmonizes with the furnishings of the
church. In each tile is burnt the name of the giver or
the name of some one the donor may desire to honor.
It was a method of raising money for the church that
not only proved very successful but very pleasing to
the membership. ‘The tiles are substantial and are
substantially set into the walls and will remain while
the building stands.
But greater than the building is the spirit that per-
vades it. The moment one enters the vast auditorium
with its crimson chairs, its cheery carpet, its softly-
tinted walls, one feels at home. Light filters in through
rich windows, in memory of some member gone before,
or of some class or organization. Behind the pulpit
stands the organ, its rich-looking pipes rising almost
to the roof. Everywhere is rich, subdued coloring—
not ostentatious, but cheery and homelike.
Large as is the seating capacity of ‘The Temple, when
it was opened it could not accommodate the crowds
that thronged it. Almost from the first, overflow
meetings were held in the Lower Temple, that none
be turned away from the House of God. From five
hundred to two thousand people crowded these meet-
ings in addition to the large audience in the main
auditorium above.
BUILDING THE TEMPLE 207
The Temple workers had come to busy days and
large opportunities. But they accepted them with a
full sense of their responsibility and prayed that they
might use them worthily. Their leader knew the
perils of success and with wise counsel guided them
against its insidious dangers.
‘‘Ah, that is a dangerous hour in the history of men
and institutions,” Doctor Conwell said, in a sermon
on the ‘Danger of Success,” ‘‘when they become too
popular; when a good cause becomes too much admired
or adored, so that the man, or the institution, or the
building, or the organization, receives an idolatrous
worship from the community. That is always a danger-
ous time, and small men always go down, wrecked by
such dizzy elevation. Whenever a small man is praised
he immediately loses his balance of mind and ascribes
to himself the things which others foolishly express in
flattery. He esteems himself more than he is and,
thinking himself to be something, he is consequently
nothing.
‘““How dangerous is that point when a man, or a
women, or an enterprise has become accepted and
popular! Then, of all times, should a man or the
society be humble. Then, of all times, should they
beware. Then, of all times, the hosts of Satan are
marshaled to overcome by every possible insidious
wile and open warfare. The weakest hour in the his-
tory of the greatest enterprises is apt to be when they
seem to be—and their projectors think they are—
strongest. Take heed lest ye fall in the hour of your
strength. The most powerful mill stream drives the
wheel most vigorously just before the flood sweeps the
mill to wildest destruction.”
“The mission of the church is to save the souls of
men,” he told his congregation. ‘‘That is its true
208 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
mission. It is the only mission of the church. That
should be its only thought. The moment any church
admits a singer that does not sing to save souls; the
moment a church calls a pastor who does not preach
to save souls; the moment a church elects a deacon
who does not work to save souls; the moment a church
gives a supper or an entertainment of any kind not for
the purpose of saving souls, it ceases in so much to
be a church and to fulfil the magnificent mission God
gave it. Every concert, every choir service, every
preaching service, every Lord’s Supper, every agency
that is used in the church must have the great mission
plainly before its eye. We are here to save souls of
dying sinners. We are here for no other purpose.
And the mission of the church being so clear, that is the
only test of a real church.”
GHA PDE Re Xa
How THE TEMPLE Works
Doctor Conwell Discusses the Church Work and Tells
the Underlying Principles which He Believes should
Govern. The Various Organizations. The Temple
Fairs and their Purpose. Doctor Conwell Gives His
Ideas of a Church Fair. The Various Entertatn-
ments. How they are Planned and Managed.
WN looking at this magnificent church building on
| Broad Street and the manifold uplifting activities
it houses; in gazing at the great University adjoin-
ing, where more than a hundred thousand men and
women have broadened and made more useful their
lives, and then glancing backward over the life of Rus-
sell Conwell, it seems as if a miracle had been wrought—
a miracle that had flowered forth in visible form in
these two granite buildings, and in great buildings in
other parts of the city, but more in the invisible and
more potent expression in the forces for good that
flow in a never-ceasing stream from them.
Of the work of the church Doctor Conwell himself
says:
‘Looking back over my life’s work with the Church
of Christ, all seems unreal. I cannot fully fathom the
depths of abiding peace, nor understand the powers,
which have combined to make my life so happy and so
peaceful amid such a harvest. I could not be honest
with myself without stating distinctly that it has been
brought about by persons and powers entirely beyond
myself and my control. Strange things—unaccount-
(209)
210 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
able by any human law or in any known human experi-
ence—have come into the religious work, which make
me a firm believer in the interference of a divine Spirit
who casts down and lifts up at will.
“The hundreds of consecrated martyrs who worked
out of sight; the self-sacrificing givers who labored so
hard to earn the money; the favorable conditions which
surrounded our work; and the fortunate combina-
tions in the beginning made by men and women wholly
consecrated to the cause of Christ, made possible
what no human genius could have accomplished alone.
I—here and now—sincerely reject any tributes of
praise to myself, for I honestly feel that it has been a
fortunate combination of providences which built up
the great church in Philadelphia, and which brought
so many to an open confession of their faith in the Lord.
““T was often a ‘looker-on in Israel,’ when great
events were transpiring and when people turned in
from the streets to seek their Lord. It often appears
very foolish to assume that the Lord of Heaven would
care what became of a little missionary church nor
would give any special attention to the upbuilding of
one organization—or even of one great denomination.
Yet it is probably true that the Lord loves each indi-
vidual and takes as full charge of his private affairs
as if that individual were the only person living on the
earth. It is a comfort to believe in such a doctrine.
‘“‘T have found many people, however, who yet dis-
believe the statement that just seven different people
appeared in our congregation every week during five
full years and stated their desire to find their Lord.
Summer and winter—rain or shine—holidays or work-
days—the same number presented themselves without
any previous attempt to regulate it, to the continued
astonishment of myself and all the people. There are
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262 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORE
attendance. The people who came to Temple Uni-
versity then were, most of them, working men and
women. ‘They were men and women who must earn
their living and who had only their evenings—or a
spare hour or so during the day—to study. They
came to Temple University during those spare hours,
or at night, and pursued any special study or course
of study they wished. ‘They often spent years studying
before they were able to graduate.
This tremendous response to such a means of getting
an education showed how anxious were those deprived
of the usual means of study to improve their condition,
To this University came life—unformed and unedu-
cated—and it was molded into usefulness and beauty.
Lives that might have been dwarfed, cramped and
narrow without the help which the University
gave were broadened out into greater joy and
usefulness. It is this which makes the attendance
record of those early days so remarkable. For almost
every one of the earlier students had a vividly inter-
esting life-story to tell because of Temple University—
a story of the enrichment of life; of the fulfilment or—
to give it the literal meaning—the filling full of life,
because of what was received there.
A young man who longed for an education, but
who had no means of securing one in his native city,
came to Philadelphia when he heard of Temple Uni-
versity with exactly thirty cents in his pocket. Today
he is a judge. Temple University was the bridge from
ignorance and poverty to knowledge and power.
A young girl who had been unable to. go beyond the
lower grades in school because of the need of her earn-
ings in the home, could only secure work that paid
two dollars and fifty cents a week. Some one told
her of Temple University and advised her to study
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY TRANSFORMS LIFE 263
bookkeeping there. In a short time she was earning
ten dollars a week; was continuing her education and
was a transformed person.
A poor, ignorant breaker boy came from the mining
districts, having heard of the Temple University. He
studied at night and worked during the day. He
became one of the official stenographers connected with
the Panama Canal Commission. Without the oppor-
tunity Temple University gave him, he would probably
still be in the mining district, stunted in body and mind.
A young girl, belonging to one of the poorest families
in one of the most sordid quarters of Philadelphia, was
brought under the influence of the Temple University.
She entered its classes; became one of its most enthu-
siastic students, and is now at the head of a training
school for nurses which she established in a foreign
land. Her brother, who was induced by her to become
a student, is one of the prosperous and responsible
business men of a growing town in the South.
One boy studied at night for nineteen long years,
taking a single course ata time, working meanwhile to
earn his living during the day, until at last he satis-
factorily passed for the bar and is now a successful
lawyer. Another student was earning six dollars a
week when he entered. He is now receiving $6,000 a
year in a government position at Washington.
One of the students in the early days at the college
was a poor boy without any education whatever. He
had been compelled to help earn the family living as
soon as he was able, because his father was a drunkard.
For fifteen years he studied, passing from one grade to
another. Finally he had the great joy of being ordained.
Such are the life stories of these students. The
records, were they written, would fill volumes. Thou-
zands upon thousands of lives are transformed in this
264 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
way by the Temple University. All over the world
are men and women who have risen to places of power
and usefulness through the opportunity to get an
education given by the Temple University, and which
is not furnished in the same way by any other
educational institution.
As the years have passed, the enrollment has been
from all classes of people. Those who must earn as
they learn still throng it. But so high do its students
stand when life puts the acid test upon the product of
school days that parents in all walks of life are now
eager to send their young people to Temple University.
‘“Next to our common school system, there is no
institution in this city,’’ says one of the leading Phila-
delphia newspapers ‘“‘so necessary to the welfare of our
people as the Temple University.”
This almost phenomenal work which the Temple
University accomplishes started in a small way and
from “doing the next thing.’ In speaking of its
inception Doctor Conwell says:
“The Temple University is another surprising
development far beyond the plans and intentions of
those of us who had to do with its beginning. The
friends who gathered about me were all inspired with
the desire to do good in the Master’s name and simply
did ‘the next thing,’ and tried to do it well. No one
could have believed when Charles M. Davies, a young
printer, came to me for instruction in Latin and Greek
with a view to his entering the Christian ministry,
that from his application there would have come so
immeasurable a result. None of us could take to
ourselves the credit of having laid out plans which could
have reached such a successful position as the Temple
University holds now as an agency for the good of
mankind.
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY TRANSFORMS LIFE 265
“T had been a poor boy and was obliged to sacrifice
much to secure an education,” said Doctor Conwell.
‘‘T was compelled to rise at four o’clock in the morning
io help the steward of the New Haven Hotel at Yale
College in order to get the ‘come backs’ from the
tables, which supplied myself and my brother with
our board. I had suffered the tortures of a poor
college boy—obliged to wear seedy clothing and with-
out extra money to pay entrance fees into social clubs
or share in the festivities of the ‘Wooden Spoon.’
“When young Davies said he desired so much to
have an education, my sympathies were deeply aroused
and I determined to help him in every possible way,
and told him that he should have three evenings a
week of my time for at least one hour each night.
But when he came for his recitation, he brought with
him six other young men who had the same ambition
and who hoped that I might be able to teach a class
without more expense of time or money than it would
take to teach one scholar.
‘“‘T explained to them what a sacrifice it would be to
them but what the gains would also be, and at the
second meeting of the class I was overwhelmed by the
attendance of forty hopeful and enterprising young
men. There were but a few of them who intended to
enter the ministry, but all desired a wider education,
and many hoped to increase their income as a con-
sequence of practical, intellectual training.
“Then we organized an evening school with volunteer
teachers, and established regular grades of instruction,
and, at the beginning of the second year, had over two
hundred and fifty students. We required thorough
study and insisted upon careful examinations with
regular promotion on merit. We felt sure that careless
instruction in evening classes on the go-as-you-please
266 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
plan of attendance was of more injury then good to
the young people of the city.
‘‘Such teaching assisted them into habits of careless-
ness, neglect and laziness, which destroy the hope of
final success. We, therefore, insisted upon a real
school to be attended by real scholars—where regular
study was required and where the teachers were
inspired by a real desire to be of practical but positive
help. Since then almost 100,000 students have already
been taught in regular courses in the institution, and
now every large nation in the world contributes towards
the list of students who attend.
“The enterprise has had its dark days, when great
sacrifices were necessary for its continuance. It has
had the opposition of some employers who feared that
an education would turn their employees into other
occupations, and it has had the prejudice of the rich
who naturally desire to keep the higher places of earth
for their sons and daughters, and who often stated that
they feared the institution was educating the common
people ‘above their station’ and would lead the poor
people to be ambitious for places which could only be
occupied to advantage by the wealthy.
“While the rich institutions of the land received
millions and millions from the gifts of the wealthy and
seemed to have more money floating into their treasuries
than they were able to administrate, yet the Temple
University, without endowment and without gifts of
the rich, kept steadily rising to favor and to power,
until the natural rise in the value of property given to
it laid the foundation for a permanent institution and
landed it safely beyond the danger cf financial wreck.
“The list of men and women who cheerfully gave
their all to the support of that institution is after all a
long one, and when the eternal roll is opened which
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY TRANSFORMS LIFE 267
contains the names of those who made the largest
sacrifices to establish that beneficial institution in its
present position of influence, there will be found many
names which are not now mentioned—and those of us
who have lived to receive the sweet tributes of praise
and honors are really the least among the builders of
the Temple University. ‘God moves in a mysterious
way his wonders to perform.’ And having the spirit
and disposition to serve God, those men and women
were used beyond their own expectations, and found
themselves unintentionally more important instru-
ments in the hands of the living God than they had
hoped. ‘I feel as one who walks alone, some banquet
hall deserted,’ as I strive to recall that glorious com-
pany of men and women who, in the weeks of holy
labor, laid the foundations for the Temple University.
God bless their memories.”
A short time after Charles M. Davies and his poor
young friends applied for instruction, Dr. Conwell
wrote a member of his family of how the idea
their need had suggested was further shaped by other
influences and gradually took definite form. ‘“‘A
woman, ragged and with an old shawl over her head,
met me in an alley in Philadelphia late one night,”
he said in this letter. “‘She saw the basket on my arm,
and looked in my face wistfully, as a dog looks up
beside the dinner table. She was hungry, and was
coming in empty. I shook my head, and with a
peculiarly sad glance she turned down the dark
passage. I had found several families hungry, and yet
I felt like a hypocrite, standing there with an empty
basket and a woman—perhaps a mother—so pale for
the lack of decent food.
“‘On the corner was a church—stately and archi-
tecturally beautiful by day—but after midnight it
268 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
resembled a glowering ogre, and looked so like Newgate
Prison, in London, that I felt its chilly shadow. Half
a million cost the cemented pile, and under its side
arch lay two newsboys or bootblacks asleep on the step.
‘“‘What is the use? We cannot feed these people.
Give all you have, and an army of the poor will still
have nothing; and those to whom you do give bread
and clothes today will be starving and naked tomorrow.
If you care for the few, the many will curse you for
your partiality. While I stood meditating, the police
patrol drove along the street, and I could see by the
corner street lamp that there were two women, one
little girl, and a drunken old man in the conveyance,
going to jail.
‘At my door I found a man dressed in costly fashion
who had waited for me outside, as he had been told
that I would come soon and the family had retired.
He said his dying father had sent for me. So I left
the basket in the side yard and went with the messenger.
The house was a mansion on Spring Garden Street.
The place was inelegantly overloaded with luxurious
furniture—money wasted by some inartistic purchasers
—and the paintings were rare and rich. The family of
seven or eight gathered by the bedside when I prayed
for the dying old man. They were grief-stricken and
begged me to stay until his soul departed.
“Tt was daylight before I left’ the bedside and, as
the dying still showed that the soul was delaying its
journey, I went into the spacious, handsome library.
Seeing a rare book in costly binding among the volumes
on the lower shelf, I opened the door and took it out.
My hands were black with dust. Then I glanced
along the rows and rows of valuable books and noticed
the dust of months or years. The family were not
students or readers. One son was in the Albany
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY TRANSFORMS LIFE 269
Penitentiary; another was a fugitive in Canada. At
the funeral, afterwards, the wife and daughter from
Newport were present, and their tears made furrows
through the paint upon their faces. Those rich people
were strangely poor, and a book on a side table on the
Abolition of Poverty’ seemed to be in the right place.
“That night was conceived the Temple College idea
which, in a way, had been germinating since Charles
M. Davies and his poor young friends had come to
me. It was no new truth; no original invention, but
merely a simpler combination of old ideas. There
was but one remedy for all of these ills of poor and
rich, and that could only be found in a more useful
education. Poverty seemed to me to be wholly that
of the mind. Want of food, or clothing, or home, or
friends, or morals, or religion, seemed to be the lack of
right instruction and proper discipline. The truly
wise man need not lack the necessities of life; the
wisely-educated man or woman will get out of the
dirty alley and will not get drunk or go to jail. It
seemed to me, then, that the only great charity was in
giving instruction.
“The first class to be considered was the destitute
poor. Not one in a thousand of those living in rags
and on crusts would remain in poverty if he had educa-
tion enough of the right kind to earn a better living by
making himself more useful. He is poor because he
does not know any better. Knowledge is both wealth
and power.
“The next class who stand in need of the assistance
love wishes to give is the great mass of industrious
people of all grades who are earning something—those
who are not cold or hungry, but who should earn more
in order to secure the greater necessities of life that
make for happiness. They could be so much more
270 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
useful if they knew how. ‘To learn how to do more
work in the same time—or how to do much better
work—is the only true road to riches which the owner
can enjoy.
“To help a man to help himself is the wisest effort
of human love. To have wealth, and to have honestly
earned it all by skill or wisdom, is an object of ambition
worthy of the highest and best. Hence, to do the most
good to the great classes—rich or poor—we must labor
industriously. The lover of his kind must furnish
them with the means of gaining knowledge while they
work.
“Then there was a third class of mankind, starving
with their tables breaking with luscious foods; cold
in warehouses of ready-made clothing of the most
costly fabrics; seeing not in the sunlight, and restless
to distraction on beds of eiderdown. ‘They do not
know the use or value of things. They are harassed
with plenty that they cannot appropriate. ‘They are
doubly poor. They need an education. ‘The library is
a care, an expense and a disgrace to the owner who
cannot read.
“To give education to those in possession of prop-
erty which they might use for the help of humanity
and which they might enjoy, is as clear a duty as it
is to help the beggar. And, indeed, indirectly the
education of the unwise wealthy to become useful may
be the most practical way of raising the poor. ‘There
is a need for every dollar of the nation’s property, and
it should be invested by men whose minds and hearts
have been trained to see the human need and to love to
satisfy it.’
Thus was the Temple University conceived and
started. Its growth was phenomenal. From the
request of one, to an attendance of six the first evening;
——— ———
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY TRANSFORMS LIFE 271
of forty the second evening, and two hundred and
fifty regularly enrolled students at the beginning of the
first year, shows how the good news swept the city,
and how the opportunity was eagerly seized by those
longing for just such an opening. The University
was justified from the start.
Rev. Forest Dager—at one time Dean of Temple
College, the forerunner of the University—said in
regard to the people who in later life crave opportunities
for study:
“That the Temple College idea of educating working
men and working women, at an expense just sufficient
to give them an appreciation of the work of the institu-
tion, covers a wide and long-neglected field of educa-
tional effort, is at once apparent to a thoughtful mind.
Remembering that out of a total enrolment in the
schools of our land of all grades, public and private, of
14,512,778 pupils, 9644 per cent are reported as
receiving elementary instruction only; that not more
than thirty-five in 1,000 attend school after they are
fourteen years of age; that twenty-five of these drop
out during the next four years of their life; that less
than ten in 1,000 pass on to enjoy the superior instruc-
tion of a college or some equivalent grade of work, we
begin to see the unlimited field before an institution
like this.
“Thousands upon thousands of those who have left
school quite early in life, either because they did not
appreciate the advantage of a liberal education, or
because the stress of circumstances compelled them to
assist In the maintenance of home, awake a few
years later to the realization that a good education is
more than one-half the struggle for existence and
position. Their time through the day is fully occupied;
their evenings are free. At once they turn to the
272 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
evening college and, grasping the opportunities for
instruction, convert those hours, which to many are
the pathway to vice and ruin, into stepping stones to a
higher and more useful career.
‘“‘An illustration of the wide-reaching influence of
the college work is a significant fact that during one
year there was personally known to the president, no
less than ninety-three persons pursuing their studies
in various universities of our country, who received
their first impulses toward a higher education and a
wider usefulness in Temple College.”
In 1893, in an address on the institutional church,
delivered before the Baptist Ministers’ Conference in
Philadelphia, Doctor Conwell said:
‘‘ At the present time there are in this city hundreds
of thousands, to speak conservatively—I should say
at least 500,000 people—who have not the education
they certainly wish they had obtained before leaving
school. There are at least 100,000 people in this city
willing to sacrifice their evenings and some of their
sleep to get an education, if they can get it without
the humiliation of being put into classes with boys
and girls six years old. They are in every city. There
is a large class of young people who have reached the
age where they find they have made a mistake in not
getting a better education. If they could obtain one
now—in a proper way—they would. Universities
do not furnish such an opportunity and neither does
the public school.
“The churches must institute schools for those
whom the public does not educate, and must educate
them along the lines they cannot reach in the public
schools. Weare not to withdraw our support from, nor
to antagonize, the public schools; as they are the
foundations of liberty in the nation. But the public
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY TRAN SFORMS LIFE 273
schools do not teach many things which young men and
young women need.
‘T believe every church should institute classes for
the education of such people, and I believe the insti-
tutional church will require it. I believe every evening
in the week should be given to some particular kind
of intellectual training along some educational line;
that this training should begin with the more evident
needs of the young people in each congregation, and
then be adjusted, as the matter grows, to the wants
of each.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
A UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE
Obtaining the Charter. Laying the Corner-Stone.
The Ultimate Development that is Hoped Will
Come.
the Temple University was genuine, as was
shown by the students who came in great
throngs from all parts of the city, it was not
an easy matter at first to meet this need. When the
first class was started, Doctor Conwell had only been
in the city two years. The church itself was still
struggling with its own problems of larger accommoda-
tions for the crowds that came.
But Doctor Conwell is never one to be daunted by
seemingly insurmountable obstacles, nor by lack of
money, if he feels that a work should be done. He
believes that a genuine need carries with it potentially
and inherently the power that will supply that need;
and that the human agent is but the channel for the
expression of the supply. This is the rock upon which
he stands—the faith that upholds him in his under-
takings. Thus, side by side with the church work in
those busy days of building the great Temple on
Broad Street, went the evolution and development of
the University that now stands beside it.
The first catalogue of the Temple College was issued
in 1887, and the institution was chartered in 1888,
at which time there were five hundred and ninety
students. The College overflowed the basement of
(274)
A LTHOUGH the need for such an institution as
SuIplIing UoTyeIjsIUIUIpyY MON
DULY oY} st ‘onuaay AJsWOSs] UOJ PUB JooI}G PBL JO JOUIO oY} 4 TTeE [[Temuog
ALISUAAINN AIMANWAL ALATANOO TIM LVHL SONIGTING MAN AHL JO ONIMVAC S.LOGLIHOUY
A UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE 275
the church into two adjoining houses. When The
Temple was completed the College occupied the old
church building at the corner of Berks and Mervine
Streets. When that building was filled to overflow-
ing the College moved into two large houses on Park
Avenue. Still growing, it rented two large halls.
The news that in these halls the Temple College had
enlarged quarters brought such a flood of students that
almost from the start applicants were turned away.
Nothing was to be done but to build. It was a serious
problem. The church itself had just been completed
and a heavy debt of $250,000 hung over it. To add
the cost of a college to this burden required faith of
the highest order and work of the hardest.
‘“‘For seven years I have felt a firm conviction that
the great work—the special duty of our church—is
to establish the College,” said Doctor Conwell, in
speaking of the matter to his congregation. ‘‘We are
now face to face with it. How distinctly we have
been led of God to this point! Never before in the
history of this nation have a people had committed to
them a movement more important for the welfare of
mankind than that which is now committed to your
trust in connection with the permanent establishment
of the Temple College. We step now over the brink.
Our feet are already in the water, and God says, ‘Go
on, it shall be dry-shod for you yet,’ and I say that
the success of this institution means others like it in
every town of 5,000 inhabitants in the United States.
‘One thing we have demonstrated—those who work
for a living have time to study. Some splendid speci-
mens of scholarship have been developed in our work.
And there are others—splendid geniuses—yet undis-
covered; but the Temple College will bring them to
the light, and the world will be richer for them. By
18
276 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
the use of spare hours—hours usually running to
waste—great things can be done. ‘The commendation
of these successful students will do more for the College
than any number of rich friends can do. It will make
friends; it will bring money; it will win honor, and
it will secure success.”
An investment fund was created and once more the
people made their offerings. ‘The same self-sacrificing
spirit was shown that had been so in evidence in the
building of the church. It is doubtful if any educa-
tional institution of the country has been founded on
such genuine self-denial. Children brought dimes and
quarters and half dollars—their first earnings; women
sold their jewelry that they might help the poor into
broader life; and families cheerfully cut down their
marketing that they might give food for the mind to
those in need of it. Few large gifts were received. It
is a university for the people and it has been built by
the people. Perhaps that is the reason that it meets
so fully the needs of the people.
Thus the work progressed. In August, 1893, the
corner-stone of the College building was laid. Taking
up the silver trowel which had been used in laying the
corner-stone of The Temple in 1889, Doctor Conwell
sald:
“Friends, today we do something more than simply
lay the corner-stone of a college building. We do an
act here very simply that shows to the world—and will
go on testifying after we have gone to our long rest—
that the Church of Jesus Christ is not only an institu-
tion of theory but an institution of practice. It will
stand here upon this great broad street and say through
the coming years to all passersby, ‘Christianity means
something for the good of humanity; Christianity
means not only belief in things that are good and pure
A UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE 277
and righteous, but it also means an activity that
shall bless those who need the assistance of others.’
It shall say to the rich man, ‘Give thou of thy surplus
to those who have not.’ It shall say to the poor man,
‘Make thou the most of thy opportunities and thou
shalt be the equal of the rich.’
‘Now, in the name of the people who have given for
this enterprise; in the name of many Christians who
have prayed, and who are now sending up their prayers
to heaven, I lay this corner-stone.”’
The work went on. In May, 1894, a great congrega-
tion thronged The Temple to attend the dedication
services of ‘‘Temple College;’”’ for it was in its new
home—a handsome building presenting, with The
Temple, a beautiful stone front of two hundred feet on the
broad avenue which it faces. Robert E. Pattison,
then Governor of Pennsylvania, presided, saying, in
his introductory remarks, ‘Around this noble city
many institutions have arisen in the cause of education,
but I doubt whether any of them will possess a greater
influence for good than Temple College.”
Bishop Foss, of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
offered prayer. The orator was Hon. Charles Emory
Smith, of Philadelphia, ex-Minister to Russia. James
Johnson, the builder, gave the keys to the architect,
Thomas P. Lonsdale, who delivered them to the
pastor of Grace Baptist Church and president of
Temple College, remarking that, ‘It was well these
keys should be in the hands of those who already held
the keys to the inner temple of knowledge.”
President Conwell, in receiving these keys, said: ‘‘ By
united effort, penny by penny, and dollar by dollar,
every note had been paid, and every financial obliga-
tion promptly met. It is a demonstration of what
people can do when thoroughly in earnest in a great
enterprise.”
278 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
The classes at first were entirely free, but as the
attendance increased, it was found necessary to charge
a nominal fee in order to keep out those who had no
serious desire for study, but came irregularly, ‘“‘just for
the fun of the thing.”’ When it was decided to charge
a small fee for the privilege of attending, the announce-
ment was received with the unanimous approbation of
the students who honestly wished to study and who,
more than any others, were hindered by the aimless
element.
Still the demands upon the College grew and the
trustees saw the need of increasing its facilities. On
December 12, 1907, the charter was amended, changing
the name from Temple College to Temple University.
Additional buildings were secured to increase the
facilities for classes. The Philadelphia Dental College
and the Garretson Hospital were federated with it,
thus opening avenues of study and usefulness in new
fields. Conwell Hall, the first wing of the large and
imposing group of buildings planned for Broad Street
between the original University building and Mont-
gomery Avenue, adds many fine classrooms, a well-
equipped gymnasium, a swimming pool, an up-to-date
cafeteria, as well as administrative offices and other
facilities. Each year sees some increase in Temple
University’s scope or accommodations. It grows as
needs present themselves. Speaking of the future he
hopes for the University, Doctor Conwell, at a recent
celebration of Founder’s Day, said:
“We have been struggling upward toward an ideal
which we haven’t quite reached yet. But, with the
aid of our fellow Philadelphians, we are confident
that this ideal will be placed within our power of real-
ization within the next few months, and possibly
within the next few weeks. Then will come the
A UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE 279
apex—the crowning of our ideas and ideals for Temple
University.
“We founded the institution to supply a human
need. Let me illustrate: Some time ago I happened
to be near a baseball park. Happy thousands inside
were cheering the players. I induced a small boy to
let me have a peep through the knothole which he had
claimed as his own. I saw the crowd, and I saw the
players running around the diamond; but I had never
had time to see the game before and consequently knew
nothing of baseball. Then I recognized my loss. I
bought a book and studied it for about three hours.
I called to my aid a man well versed in the game.
The next time I have an opportunity I shall see a game
of baseball. I have laid hold of a new way of enjoying
this world because I have learned this game.
“That is the great need of humanity today—the
need for the enjoyment of this world in which we live.
But the capacity for enjoyment must be enlarged by
the study of the objects in the world. Instruction
' and inspiration are thus the great need of humanity,
and The Temple idea is the universal education of all
the people after they leave the public schools. It is
our first aim to teach people to be more useful to their
employers and thus be of more help to themselves and
those dependent on them.
“Tt is impossible that this work can be done by the
state. Our city, state and national government
could never maintain an institution so immense in
scope. The cost would be too great and it would be
unjust to tax all the people for the benefit of those
with the ambition to make their own way to the top
of the ladder. And so, in this ideal of ours, the stu-
dent must pay his tuition. Every boy in America
should follow the ancient custom of learning a trade.
280 RUSSELL H. CONWELL AND HIS WORK
And while learning his life-work under practical con-
ditions, he must pay his own way through the uni-
versity. I can think of nothing greater than for a
young man or woman to be able to look the world
squarely in the eye and say, ‘I have gone through
college. I made my own living at the same time.
I have paid my way. I have earned my education
myself.’ Such a course redoubled the value of the
graduate to the world.”
Doctor Conwell then explained that the idea of the
ultimate extension of Temple University would mean
a university in every ward throughout Philadelphia.
In this way, he declared, higher education would not
only be placed within the grasp of every boy or girl
in Philadelphia, but would be brought practically to
the door of every home in the city.
Doctor Conwell is also much interested in the part
time work that is engaging the attention of educators.
And this system of carefully planned and supervised
study and work is being introduced into Temple Uni-
versity methods when it is possible and wise to adopt it.
Thus, it was Doctor Conwell’s ambition that a com-
plete education be right at hand for every boy and
girl, and every man and woman in Philadelphia—an
education to be given in such a way that no matter
what each person’s means, nor how occupied his time,
he can avail himself of this opportunity and become as
well educated as though wealth and leisure were his.
And Doctor Conwell believed that by working and
studying—as so many of the students of Temple
University do—they really get a fuller, richer educa-
tion, and have a better understanding of life, than do
many of those students whose way is paid through
college. But, be this as it may, he desired for the
poor the same opportunity to develop life to its fullest
A UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE 281
extent that wealth is able to bring. He wanted for
every one who comes into this world, the joy, the
breadth and the enrichment of life that a full education
affords. Of this ideal, one of the speakers at the
Founder’s Day celebration said:
“Tonight we honor the realization of a vision of one
man; an idea materialized; an ambition embodied.
Doctor Conwell’s vision was constructive rather than
destructive; beneficial rather than prejudicial to man-
kind; an idea which opened the gates of opportunity for
every deserving man and woman of Philadelphia. The
realization and fruition of this idea is a blessing and a
credit to those who have aided in bringing it to pass,
and a monument to the man who conceived it.
‘‘ After living at least three lives in one, he has now
a still greater idea—the greatest of them all. We can
only paraphrase Lincoln and express the hope that the
people of Philadelphia will here, this night, highly
resolve that the university of the people, by the people,
and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’’
Thus, because one poor boy struggled so bitterly for
an education; because a keen-eyed man saw another’s
needs, reading the signs by the light of his own bitter
experience, a great university for busy men and
women has grown to make possible to them the
education which is bread and meat to their minds.
CHAPTER XXX
A Democratic INSTITUTION
What the Opportunities it Offers Mean. Its
Adaptable Curriculum. Its Willingness to Meet
Needs. The Various Departments. Many Unique
Special Courses. Its Small Turtion Fees.
institution. Through its portals pass young
and old, rich and poor. Children from the
kindergarten walk in and out side by side with
gray-haired men and women; and boys and girls from
wealthy families with young men and women from
shops and factories.
The management endeavors to meet the needs of
these various students. President, dean, clerical force
and teachers bend their energies to supply, in the
simplest and most efficient way, what this great army
of seekers desire.
The classes are most interesting. Nearly all nation-
alities are represented, and almost all occupations. A
visit to the various classrooms during recitation hours
is most enjoyable. Upon one such visit one evening,
a young lad of about sixteen was called upon by the
teacher for a declamation. He was pale, with deep-
sunken eyes, and looked as if he worked at a loom.
He came forward without diffidence and began to
describe a landscape. Under his expressive gestures
and the changing modulations of his voice, the picture
grew before the eyes of his hearers.
He was totally unconscious of himself and his audi-
(282)
? YHE Temple University is truly a democratic
A DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION 283
ence. He lived in the scene he was painting. His
eyes glowed. His voice, like the strings of a harp,
was swept with feeling. Those who heard him felt
that, could he pursue his studies, he would probably
become a public speaker. Were not this opportunity
open to him, he might be compelled to spend his life
at a monotonously clicking loom.
In the same class were girls who looked as if they
worked hard and had not too great a supply of food,
and matrons probably away for a brief while from
housekeeping cares. ‘These few hours of study in the
University classrooms gave refreshing glimpses into a
world outside of the narrow one of work in which they
daily lived.
In another class was a young fellow, distinguished
looking in bearing and features. It was learned that
he was a fireman in a nearby foundry. He had care-
fully planned his hours off duty that he might prepare
for the bar without detriment to health or work. His
future as a lawyer seems assured. Yet without this
opportunity he might be condemned to a grimy foun-
dry; and perhaps sink lower in the scale of living as
the years passed, because of inhibited desires.
In a room were a group of deft craftsmen busily
making baskets and other articles from reed and
various grasses. +
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ACRES OF DIAMONDS
iH hear this story over again. Indeed, this lecture
has become a study in psychology; it often breaks
all rules of oratory, departs from the precepts of
rhetoric, and yet remains the most popular of any
lecture I have delivered in the fifty-seven years of my
public life. I have sometimes studied for a year upon
a lecture and made careful research, and then presented
the lecture just once—never delivered it again. I put
too much work on it. But this had no work on it—
thrown together perfectly at random, spoken offhand
without any special preparation, and it succeeds
when the thing we study, work over, adjust to a plan,
is an entire failure.
The “Acres of Diamonds” which I have mentioned
through so many years are to»‘found in this city,
and you are to find them. Many have found them.
And what man has done, man can do. I could not
find anything better to illustrate my thought than a
story I have told over and over again, and which is
now found in books in nearly every library.
In 1870 we went down the Tigris River. We hired
a guide at Bagdad to show us Persepolis, Nineveh and
Babylon, and the ancient countries of Assyria as far as
the Arabian Gulf. He was well acquainted with the
land, but he was one of those guides who love to enter-
tain their patrons; he was like a barber that tells you
many stories in order to keep your mind off the scratch-
ing and the scraping. He told me so many stories that
(405)
| AM astonished that so many people should care to
406 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
I grew tired of his telling them and I refused to listen
—looked away whenever he commenced; that made
the guide quite angry. JI remember that toward
evening he took his Turkish cap off his head and
swung it around in the air. The gesture I did not
understand and I did not dare look at him for fear I
should become the victim of another story. But,
although I am not a woman, I did look, and the instant
I turned my eyes upon that worthy guide he was off
again. Said he, FT. will tell you a story now which
I reserve for my particular friends!” So then, count-
ing myself a particular friend, I listened, and I have
piways been glad I did.
y “He said there once lived not far from the River
Frus an ancient Persian by the name of Al Hafed.
‘He said that Al Hafed owned a very large farm with
orchards, grain fields and gardens. He was a con-
tented and wealthy man-—contented because he was
wealthy, and wealthy because he was contented.
One day there visited this old farmer one of those
ancient Buddhist priests, and he sat down by Al
Hafed’s fire and told that old farmer how this world
of ours was made. He said that this world was once a
mere bank of fog, which is scientifically true, and he
said that the Almighty thrust his finger into the bank
of fog and then began slowly to move his finger around
and gradually to increase the speed of his finger until
at last he whirled that bank of fog into a solid ball of
fire, and it went rolling through the universe, burning
its way through other cosmic banks of fog, until it
condensed the moisture without, and fell in floods of
rain upon the heated surface and cooled the outward
crust. Then the internal flames burst through the
cooling crust and threw up the mountains and made
the hills and the valley of this wonderful world of ours.
ACRES OF DIAMONDS _ 407
If this internal melted mass burst out and cooled very
quickly it became granite; that which cooled less
quickly became silver; and less quickly, gold; and
after gold diamonds were made. Said the old priest,
‘* A diamond is a congealed drop of sunlight.”
This is a scientific truth also. You all know that a
diamond is pure carbon, actually deposited sunlight—
and he said another thing I would not forget: he
declared that a diamond is the last and highest of
God’s mineral creations, as a woman is the last and
highest of God’s animal creations. I suppose that is
the reason why the two have such a liking for each
other. And the old priest told Al Hafed that if he
had a handful of diamonds he could purchase a whole
county, and with a mine of diamonds he could place
his children upon thrones through the influence of
their great wealth. Al Hafed heard all about diamonds
and how much they were worth, and went to his bed
that night a poor man—not that he had lost anything,
but poor because he was discontented and discontented
because he thought he was poor. He said: ‘‘I want a
mine of diamonds!” So he lay awake all night, and
early in the morning sought out the priest. Now I
know from experience that a priest when awakened
early in the morning is cross. He awoke that priest
out of his dreams and said to him, ‘‘ Will you tell me
where I can find diamonds?” ‘The priest said,
‘‘Diamonds? What do you want with diamonds?”
‘“‘T want to be immensely rich,” said Al Hafed, “‘but I
don’t know where to go.’”’ ‘‘ Well,” said the priest, ‘‘if
you will find a river that runs over white sand between
high mountains, in those sands you will always see
diamonds.” ‘Do you really believe that-there is
such a river?” ‘‘Plenty of them, plenty of them; all
you have to do is just go and find them, then you have
408 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
them.”’ Al Hafed said, “I will go.” So he sold his
farm, collected his money at interest, left his family in
charge of a neighbor, and away he went in search of
diamonds. He began very properly, to my mind, at
the Mountains of the Moon. Afterwards he went
around into Palestine, then wandered on into Europe,
and at last, when his money was all spent, and he was
in rags, wretchedness and poverty, he stood on the
shore of that bay in Barcelona, Spain, when a tidal
wave came rolling in through the Pillars of Hercules
and the poor, afflicted, suffering man could not resist
the awful temptation to cast himself into that incom-
ing tide, and he sank beneath its foaming crest, never
to rise in this life again.
When that old guide had told me that very sad
story, he stopped the camel I was riding and went
back to fix the baggage on one of the other camels,
and I remember thinking to myself, ‘‘Why did he
reserve that for his particular friends?” ‘There seemed
to be no beginning, middle or end—nothing to it.
That was the first story I ever heard told or read in
which the hero was killed in the first chapter. I
had but one chapter of that story and the hero was
dead. When the guide came back and took up the
halter of my camel again, he went right on with the
same story. He said that Al Hafed’s successor led
his camel out into the garden to drink, and as that
camel put its nose down into the clear water of the
garden brook Al Hafed’s successor noticed a curious
flash of light from the sands of the shallow stream,
and reaching in he pulled out a black stone having
an eye of light that reflected all the colors of the rain-
bow, and he took that curious pebble into the house
and left it on the mantel, then went on his way and
forgot all about it. A few days after that, this same
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 409
old priest who told Al Hafed how diamonds were
made, came in to visit his successor, when he saw
that flash of light from the mantel. He rushed up
and said, ‘‘Here is a diamond—here is a diamond!
Has Al Hafed returned?” ‘No, no; Al Hafed has
not returned and that is not a diamond; that is
nothing but a stone; we found it right out here in
our garden.” ‘But I know a diamond when I see
it,’ said he; ‘‘that is a diamond!”
Then together they rushed to the garden and
stirred up the white sands with their fingers and found
others more beautiful, more valuable diamonds than
the first, and thus, said the guide to me, were dis-
covered the diamond mines of Golconda, the most
magnificent diamond mines in all the history of man-
kind, exceeding the Kimberley in its value. The
great Kohinoor diamond in England’s crown jewels
and the largest crown diamond on earth in Russia’s
crown jewels, which I had often hoped she would
have to sell before they had peace with Japan, came
from that mine, and when the old guide had called
my attention to that wonderful discovery he took
his Turkish cap off his head again and swung it around
in the air to call my attention to the moral. Those
Arab guides have a moral to each story, though the
stories are not always moral. He said had Al Hafed
remained at home and dug in his own cellar or in his
own garden, instead of wretchedness, starvation,
poverty and death in a strange land, he would have
had ‘‘acres of diamonds’’—for every acre, yes, every
shovelful of that old farm afterwards revealed the
gems which since have decorated the crowns of
monarchs.} When he had given the moral to his story,
I saw why he had reserved this story for his ‘‘ particular
friends.” I didn’t tell him I could see it; I was not
\ % : Mh /
410 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
going to tell that old Arab that I could see it. For
it was that mean old Arab’s way of going around a
thing, like a lawyer, and saying indirectly what he
did not dare say directly, that there was a certain
young man that day traveling down the Tigris River
that might better be at home in America. I didn’t
tell him I could see it.
I told him his story reminded me of one, and I
told it to him quick. I told him about that man out
in California, who, in 1847, owned a ranch out there.
He read that gold had been discovered in Southern
California, and he sold his ranch to Colonel Sutter
and started off to hunt for gold. Colonel Sutter
put a mill on the little stream in that farm and one
day his little girl brought some wet sand from the
raceway of the mill into the house and placed it
before the fire to dry, and as that sand was falling
through the little girl’s fingers a visitor saw the first
shining scales of real gold that were ever discovered
in California; and the man who wanted the gold
had sold this ranch and gone away, never to return.
I delivered this lecture two years ago in California,
in the city that stands near that farm, and they told
me that the mine is not exhausted yet, and that a
one-third owner of that farm has been getting during
these recent years twenty dollars of gold every fifteen
minutes of his life, sleeping or waking. Why, you
and I would enjoy an income like that!
But the best illustration that I have now of this
thought was found here in Pennsylvania. There
was a man living in Pennsylvania who owned a farm
here and he did what I-should do if I had a farm in
Pennsylvania—he sold it. But before he sold it he
concluded to secure employment collecting coal oil
for his cousin in Canada. They first discovered
ACRES OF DIAMONDS All
coal oil there. So this farmer in Pennsylvania decided
that he would apply for a position with his cousin
in Canada. Now, you see, this farmer was not alto-
gether a foolish man. He did not leave his farm
until he had something else to do. Of all the simpletons
the stars shine on there is none more foolish than a
man who leaves one job before he has obtained another.
And that has especial reference to gentlemen of my
profession, and has no reference to a man seeking a
divorce. So I say this old farmer did not leave one
job until he had obtained another. He wrote to
Canada, but his cousin replied that he could not
engage him because he did not know anything about
the oil business. ‘‘ Well, then,’’ said he, ‘‘I will under-
stand it.’’? So he set himself at the study of the whole
subject. He began at the second day of the creation,
he studied the subject from the primitive vegetation
to the coal oil stage, until he knew all about it. Then
he wrote to his cousin and said, ‘““Now I understand
the oil business.”’ And his cousin replied to him,
‘‘ All right, then, come on.”’ :
That man, by the record of the county, sold his
farm for eight hundred and thirty-three dollars—even
money, ‘‘no cents.’ He had scarcely gone from that
farm before the man who purchased it went out to
arrange for the watering the cattle and he found that
the previous owner had arranged the matter very ©
nicely. There is a stream running down the hillside
there, and the previous owner had gone out and put
a plank across that stream at an angle, extending
across the brook and down. edgewise a few inches
under the surface of the water. The purpose of the
plank across that brook was to throw over to the
other bank a dreadful-looking scum through which
the cattle would not put their noses to drink above
412 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
the plank, although they would drink the water on
one side below it. Thus that man who had gone to
Canada had been himself damming back for twenty-
three years a flow of coal oil which the State Geologist
of Pennsylvania declared officially, as early as 1870,
was then worth to our state a hundred millions of
dollars. The city of Titusville now stands on that
farm and those Pleasantville wells flow on, and that
farmer who had studied all about the formation of
oil since the second day of God’s creation clear down
to the present time, sold that farm for $833, no cents— ~
again I say, ‘‘no sense.”
But I need another illustration, and I found that
in Massachusetts, and I am sorry I did, because
that is my old state. This young man I mention
went out of the state to study—went down to Yale
College and studied mines and mining. ‘They paid
him fifteen dollars a week during his last year for
training students who were behind their classes in
mineralogy, out of hours, of course, while pursuing
his own studies. But when he graduated they raised
his pay from fifteen dollars to forty-five dollars and
offered him a professorship. ‘Then he went straight
home to his mother and said, ‘‘ Mother, I won’t work
for forty-five dollars a week. What is forty-five
dollars a week for a man with a brain like mine!
Mother, let’s go out to California and stake out gold
claims and be immensely rich.” ‘Now,’ said his
mother, ‘‘it is just as well to be happy as it is to be
rich.” |
But as he was the only son he had his way—they
always do; and they sold out in Massachusetts and
went to Wisconsin, where he went into the employ
of the Superior Copper Mining Company, and he
was lost from sight in the employ of that company
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 413
at fifteen dollars a week again. He was also to have
an interest in any mines that he should discover for
that company. But I do not believe that he has
ever discovered a mine—I do not know anything
about it, but I do not believe he has. I know he
had scarcely gone from the old homestead before the
farmer who had bought the homestead went out to
dig potatoes, and as he was bringing them in in a
large basket through the front gateway, the ends of
the stone wall came so near together at the gate
that the basket hugged very tight. So he set the
basket on the ground and pulled, first on one side
and then on the other side. Our farms in Massachusetts
are mostly stone walls, and the farmers have to be
economical with their gateways in order to have
some place to put the stones. That basket hugged
so tight there that as he was hauling it through he
noticed in the upper stone next the gate a block of
native silver, eight inches square; and this professor
of mines and mining and mineralogy, who would
not work for forty-five dollars a week, when he sold
that homestead in Massachusetts, sat right on that
stone to make the bargain. He was brought up there;
he had gone back and forth by that piece of silver,
rubbed it with his sleeve, and it seemed to say, ‘‘Come
now, now, now, here is a hundred thousand dollars.
Why not take me?” But he would not take it. There
was no silver in Newburyport; it was all away off—
well, I don’t know where; he didn’t, but somewhere
else—and he was a professor of mineralogy.
I do not know of anything I would enjoy better
than to take the whole time tonight telling of blunders
like that I have heard professors make. Yet I wish
I knew what that man is doing out there in Wisconsin.
I can imagine him out there, as he sits by his fireside,
414 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
and he is saying to his friends, ‘‘Do you know that
man Conwell that lives in Philadelphia?’ ‘Oh,
yes, I have heard of him.”’ ‘And do you know that
man Jones that lives in that city?” ‘Yes, I have
heard of him.” And then he begins to laugh and
laugh and says to his friends, ‘“They have done the,
same thing I did, precisely.” And that spoils the \
whole joke, because you and I have done it. |
“Ninety out of every hundred people here have
made that mistake this very day. I say you ought
to be rich; you have no right to be poor. ‘To live in
Philadelphia and not be rich is a misfortune, and it is
doubly a misfortune, because you could have been
rich just as well as be poor. Philadelphia furnishes
so many opportunities. You ought to be rich. But
persons with certain religious prejudice will ask,
‘‘How can you spend your time advising the rising
generation to give their time to getting money—
dollars and cents—the commercial spirit?”’
Yet I must say that you ought to spend time getting
rich. You and I know there are some things more
valuable than money; of course, we do. Ah, yes!
By a heart made unspeakably sad by a grave on
which the autumn leaves now fall, I know there are
some things higher and grander and sublimer than
money. Well does the man know, who has suffered,
that there are some things sweeter and holier and
‘more sacred than gold. Nevertheless, the man of
‘common sense also knows that there is not any one
-of those things that is not greatly enhanced by the
use of money. Money is power. Love is the grandest
‘thing on God’s earth, but fortunate the lover who has
‘plenty of money. Money is power; money has
‘powers; and for a man to say, “‘I do not want money,”
-is to say, ‘‘I do not wish to do any good to my fellow-
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 415
men.” It is absurd thus to talk. It is absurd to
disconnect them. ‘This is a wonderfully great life, :
and you ought to spend your time getting money,’
because of the power there is in money. And yet’
this religious prejudice is so great that some people’
think it is a great honor to be one of God’s poor.:
I am looking in the faces of people who think just’
that way. I heard a man once say in a prayer-meeting
that he was thankful that he was one of God’s poor,
and then I silently wondered what his wife would
say to that speech, as she took in washing to support
the man while he sat and smoked on the veranda.
I don’t want to see any more of that kind of God’s
poor. Now, when a man could have been rich just
as well, and he is now weak because he is poor, he
has done some great wrong; he has been untruthful
to himself; he has been unkind to his fellowmen.
We ought to get rich if we can by honorable and°*
Christian methods, and these are the only methods:
that sweep us quickly toward the goal of riches.
I remember, not many years ago a young theo-
logical student who came into my office and said to
me that he thought it was his duty to come in and
“labor with me.” I asked him what had happened,
and he said: ‘‘I feel it is my duty to come in and
speak to you, sir, and say that the Holy Scriptures
declare that money is the root of all evil.’”’ I asked
him where he found that saying, and he said he found
it in the Bible. I asked him whether he had made
a new Bible, and he said, no, he had not gotten a
new Bible, that it was in the old Bible. ‘‘ Well,”
I said, “if it is in my Bible, I never saw it. Will
you please get the text-book and let me see it?”’ He
left the room and soon came stalking in with his
Bible open, with all the bigoted pride of the narrow
416 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
sectarian, who founds his creed on some misinter-
pretation of Scripture, and he puts the Bible down
on the table before me and fairly squealed into my
ear, ‘“‘There it is. You can read it for yourself.”
I said to him, ‘‘ Young man, you will learn, when you
get a little older, that you cannot trust another denomi-
nation to read the Bible for you.” I said, ‘‘Now,
you belong to another denomination. Please read
it to me, and remember that you are taught in a
school where emphasis is exegesis.” So he took the
Bible and read it: ‘‘The love of money is the root
of all evil.” Then he had it right. The Great Book
has come back into the esteem and love of the people,
and into the respect of the greatest minds of earth,
and now you can quote it and rest your life and your
death on it without more fear. So, when he quoted
right from the Scriptures he quoted the truth. ‘The
-love of money is the root of all evil.’”’ Oh, that is it.
-It is the worship of the means instead of the end,
-though you cannot reach the end without the means.
‘When a man makes an idol of the money instead of
-the purposes for which it may be used, when he
‘squeezes the dollar until the eagle squeals, then it
.is made the root of all evil. Think, if you only had
the money, what you could do for your wife, your
child, and for your home and your city. Think
how soon you could endow the Temple College yonder
if you only had the money and the disposition to
give it; and yet, my friend, people say you and I
should not spend the time getting rich. How incon-
-sistent the whole thing is. We ought to be rich,
‘because money has power. I think the best thing
for me to do is to illustrate this, for if I say you ought
-to get rich, I ought, at least, to suggest how it is
done. We get a prejudice against rich men because
ACRES OF DIAMONDS AIT
of the lies that are told about them. The lies that -
are told about Mr. Rockefeller because he has two
hundred million dollars—so many believe them; yet
how false is the representation of that man to the
world. How little we can teil what is true nowadays
when newspapers try to sell their papers entirely on
some sensation! The way they lie about the rich men
is something terrible, and I do not know that there
is anything to illustrate this better than what the
newspapers now say about the city of Philadelphia.
A young man came to me the other day and said,
“Tf Mr. Rockefeller, as you think, is a good man,
why is it that everybody says so much against him?”’
It is because he has gotten ahead of us; that is the
whole of it—just gotten ahead of us. Why is it
Mr. Carnegie is criticised so sharply by an envious
world? Because he has gotten more than we have.
If a man knows more than I know, don’t I incline to
criticise somewhat his learning? Let a man stand
in a pulpit and preach to thousands, and if I have
fifteen people in my church, and they’re all asleep,
don’t I criticise him? We always do that to the
man who gets ahead of us. Why, the man you are
criticising has one hundred millions, and you have
fifty cents, and both of you have just what you are
worth. One of the richest men in this country came
into my home and sat down in my parlor and said:
‘Did you see all those lies about my family in the
paper?” ‘‘Certainly I did; I knew they were lies
when I saw them.” ‘‘Why do they lie about me the
way they do?” ‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘if you will
give me your check for one hundred millions, I will
take all the lies along with it.” ‘Well,’ said he,
“T don’t see any sense in their thus talking about
my family and myself. Conwell, tell me frankly,
\
\
418 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
what do you think the American people think of
me?” ‘‘Well,” said I, ‘‘they think you are the
blackest-hearted villain that ever trod the soil!”
“But what can I do about it?’ There is nothing he
can do about it, and yet he is one of the sweetest
Christian men I ever knew. If you get a hundred
millions you will have the lies; you will be lied about,
and you can judge your SUC GES lt any line by the
lies that are told about you.” I say that you ought
to be rich. But there are ever coming to me young
men who say, ‘“‘I would like to go into business, but
I cannot.” ‘Why not?” ‘Because I have no
capital to begin on.’’ Capital, capital to begin on!
What! young man! _ Living in. Philadelphia and
looking at this wealthy generation, all of whom began
as poor boys, and you want capital to begin on?
-It is fortunate for you that you have no capital. I
-am glad you have no money. I pity a rich man’s
-son. A rich man’s son in these days of ours occupies
.a very difficult position. They are to be pitied.
-A rich man’s son cannot know the very best things
-In human life. He cannot. ‘The statistics of
Massachusetts show us that not one out of seventeen
rich men’s sons ever die rich. They are raised in ©
luxury, they die in poverty. Even if a rich man’s
son retains his father’s money even then he cannot
know the best things of life.
A young man in our college yonder asked me to
‘formulate for him what I thought was the happiest
_hour in a man’s history, and I studied it long and
. came back convinced that the happiest hour that any
-man ever sees in any earthly matter is when a young
‘man takes his bride over the threshold of the door,
-for the first time, of the house he himself has earned
and built, when he turns to his bride and with an
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 419
eloquence greater than any language of mine, he
sayeth to his wife, ‘‘My loved one, I earned this:
home myself; I earned it all. It is all mine, and I:
divide it with thee.” That is the grandest moment:
a human heart may ever see. But a rich man’s son.
cannot know that. He goes into a finer mansion,
it may be, but he is obliged to go through the house
and say, ‘Mother gave me this, mother gave me that,
my mother gave me that, my mother gave me that,”
until his wife wishes Ehe had married his mother.
Oh, I pity a rich man’s son. I do. 4 Until he gets
so far along in his dudeism that he gets-his arms up
like that and can’t get them down. Didn’t you ever
see any of them astray at Atlantic City? I saw one
of these scarecrows once and I never tire thinking
about it. I was at Niagara Falls lecturing, and after
the lecture I went to the hotel, and when I went up
to the desk there stood there a millionaire’s son from
New York. He was an indescribable specimen of
anthropologic potency. He carried a gold-headed
cane under his arm—more in its head than he had
in his. I do not believe I could describe the young
man if I should try. But still I must say that he
wore an eye-glass he could not see through; patent
leather shoes he could not walk in, and pants he
could not sit down in—dressed like a grasshopper!
Well, this human cricket came up to the clerk’s desk
just as I came in. He adjusted his unseeing eye-
glass in this wise and lisped to the clerk, because
it’s ‘‘Hinglish, you know,” to lisp: ‘‘Thir, thir, will
you have the kindness to fuhnish me with thome
papah and thome envelopehs!” The clerk measured
that man quick, and he pulled out a drawer and
took some envelopes and paper and cast them across
the counter and turned away to his books. You
27
420 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
should have seen that specimen of humanity when
the paper and envelopes came across the counter—
he whose wants had always been anticipated by
servants. He adjusted his unseeing eye-glass and
he yelled after that clerk: ‘‘Come back here thir,
come right back here. Now, thir, will you order a
thervant to take that papah and thothe envelopes
and carry them to yondah dethk.’’ Oh, the poor
miserable, contemptible American monkey! He
couldn’t carry paper and envelopes twenty feet.
I suppose he could not get his arms down. ,I have
no pity for such travesties of human nature. ‘If you
have no capital, I am glad of it. You don't need
capital; you need common sense, not copper cents.
A. T. Stewart, the great princely merchant of
New York, the richest man in America in his time,
was a poor boy; he had a dollar and a half and went
into the mercantile business. But he lost eighty-
seven and a half cents of his first dollar and a half
because he bought some needles and thread and
buttons to sell, which people didn’t want.
Are you poor? It is because you are not wanted and
‘are left on your own hands. There was the great
_lesson. Apply it whichever way you will it comes to
-every single person’s life, young or old. He did not
. know what people needed, and consequently bought
something they didn’t want, and had the goods left
on his hands a dead loss. A. T. Stewart learned there
the great lesson of his mercantile life and said, ‘‘I will
never buy anything more until I first learn what the
people want; then I’ll make the purchase.” He went
around to the doors and asked them what they did
want, and when he found out what they wanted, he
invested his sixty-two and a half cents and began to
supply ‘‘a known demand.” I care not what your
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 421
profession or occupation in life may be; I care not
whether you are a lawyer, a doctor, a housekeeper,
teacher or whatever else, the principle is precisely the
same. We must know what the world needs first and -_,/ |
is almost certain. | A. T. Stewart went on until he was’
worth forty millions. ‘‘Well,” you wii! say, ‘‘a man
‘ean do that in New York, but cannot do it here in
Philadelphia.” The statistics very carefully gathered
in New York in 1889\showed one hundred and seven
millionaires in the city worth over ten millions apiece.
It was remarkable and people think they must go
there to get rich. Out of that one hundred and seven
millionaires only seven of them made their money in
New York, and the others moved to New York after
their fortunes were made, and sixty-seven out of the
remaining hundred made their fortunes in towns of
less than six thousand people, and the richest man in
the country at that time lived in a town of thirty-five
hundred inhabitants, and always lived there and
never moved away. It is not so much where you are |
as what you are. But at the same time if the largeness
of the city comes into the problem, then remember it is
the smaller city that furnishes the, great opportunity
to make the millions of money. | The best illustration
that I can give is in reference to John Jacob Astor, who
was a poor boy and who made all the money of the
Astor family. He made more than his successors have
ever earned, and yet he once held a mortgage on a
millinery store in New York, and because the people
could not make enough money to pay the interest and
the rent, he foreclosed the mortgage and took possession
of the store and went into partnership with the man
who had failed. He kept the same stock, did not give
them a dollar of capital, and he left them alone and
then invest ‘anf A to supply that need, and success ‘//
we a
422 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
went out and sat down upon a bench in the park.
Out there on that bench in the park he had the most
important, and, to my mind, the pleasantest part’ of
that partnership business. He was watching the
ladies as they went by; and where is the man that
wouldn’t get rich at that business? But when John
Jacob Astor saw a lady pass, with her shoulders back
and her head up, as if she did not care if the whole
world looked on her, he studied her bonnet; and
before that bonnet was out of sight he knew the shape
of the frame and the color of the trimmings, the curl
of the—something on a bonnet. Sometimes I try to
describe a woman’s bonnet, but it is of little use, for it
would be out of style tomorrow night. So John
Jacob Astor went to the store and said: ‘‘Now, put
in the show window just such a bonnet as I describe
to you because,”’ said he, ‘‘I have just seen a lady who
likes just such a bonnet. Do not make up any more
till I come back.” And he went out again and sat on
that bench in the park, and another lady of a different
form and complexion passed him with a bonnet of
different shape and color, of course. ‘‘ Now,” said he,
‘nut such a bonnet as that in the show window.”
He didn’t fill his show window with hats and bonnets
which drive people away and then sit in the back of
the store and bawl because the people go somewhere
| else to trade. He didn’t put a hat or bonnet in that
_ show window the like of which he had not seen before
_it was made up.
“Tour city especially there are great opportunities
for manufacturing, and the time has come when the
line is drawn very sharply between the stockholders of
the factory and their employés. Now, friends, there
has also come a discouraging gloom upon this country
and the laboring men are beginning to feel that they
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 423
are being held down by a crust over their heads through
which they find it impossible to break, and the aristo-
cratic money-owner himself is so far above that he will
never descend to their assistance. That is the
thought that is in the minds of our people. But,
friends, never in the history of our country was there
an opportunity so great for the poor man to get rich
as there is now and in the city of Philadelphia. The
very fact that they get discouraged is what prevents
them from getting rich. That is all there is to it. The-
road is open, and let us keep it open between the poor .
and the rich. I know that the labor unions have two
great problems to contend with, and there is only one
way to solve them. The labor unions are doing as
much to prevent its solving as are the capitalists today,
and there are positively two sides to it. The labor
union has two difficulties; the first one is that it began
to make a labor scale for all classes on a par, and they
Fi
scale down a man that can earn five dollars a'day to
chs
two and a half a day, in order to level up to him an
imbecile that cannot earn fifty cents a day. That is
one of the most dangerous and discouraging things for
the working man. He cannot get the results of his
work if he do better work or higher work or work
longer; that is a dangerous thing, and in order to get
every laboring man free and every American equal to
every other American, let the laboring man ask what
he is worth and get it—not let any capitalist say to
him: ‘‘ You shall work for me for half of what you are
worth; nor let any labor organization say: ‘‘ You
shall work for the capitalist for half your worth.”
Be a man, be independent, and then shall the laboring
man find the road ever open from poverty to wealth.
The other difficulty that the labor union has to con-
sider, and this problem they have to solve themselves,
ax
ie
}
424 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
is the kind of orators who come and talk to them
about the oppressive rich. I can in my dreams recite
the oration I have heard again and again under such
circumstances. My life has been with the laboring
man. Iam a laboring man myself. I have often, in
their assemblies, heard the speech of the man who has
been invited to address the labor union. The man
gets up before the assembled company of honest
laboring men and he begins by saying: ‘‘Oh, ye honest,
industrious laboring men, who have furnished all the
capital of the world, who have built all the palaces and
constructed all the railroads and covered the ocean
with her steamships. Oh, you laboring men! You
are nothing but slaves; you are ground down in the
dust by the capitalist who is gloating over you as he
enjoys his beautiful estates and as he has his banks
filled with gold, and every dollar he owns is coined out
of the heart’s blood of the honest laboring man.”
Now, that is a lie, and you know it is a lie; and yet
that is the kind of speech that they are all the time
hearing, representing the capitalists as wicked and the
laboring men so enslaved. Why, how wrong it is!
Let the man who loves his flag and believes in
American principles endeavor with all his soul to bring
the capitalist and the laboring man together until
they stand side by side, and arm in arm, and work for
the common good of humanity.
He is an enemy to his country who sets capital
against labor or labor against capital.
Suppose I were to go down through this audience
and ask you to introduce me to the great inventors
who live here in Philadelphia. ‘‘The inventors of
Philadelphia,’ you would say, ‘‘Why we don’t have
any in Philadelphia. It is too slow to invent any-
thing.”’ But you do have just as great inventors, and
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 425
they are here in this audience, as ever invented a
machine. But the probability is that the greatest
inventor to benefit the world with his discovery is
some person, perhaps some lady, who thinks she could
not invent anything. Did you ever study the history
of invention and see how strange it was that the man
who made the greatest discovery did it without any
previous idea that he was an inventor? Who are the
great inventors? They are persons with plain, straight-
forward common sense, who saw a need in the world
and immediately applied themselves to supply that
need. If you want to invent anything, don’t try to
find it in the wheels in your head nor the wheels in
your machine, but first find out what the people need,
and then apply yourself to that need, and this leads
to invention on the part of people you would not
dream of before. The great mventors are simply
great men; the greater the man the more simple the
man; and the more simple a machine, the more
valuable it is. Did you ever know a really great man?
His ways are so simple, so common, so plain, that you
think any one could do what he is doing. So it is with
the great men the world over. If you know a really
great man, a neighbor of yours, you can go right up
_to him and say, “How are you, Jim, good morning,
Sam.” Of course you:can, for they are always so
_-simple.
When I wrote the life of General Garfield, one of his
“neighbors took me to his back door, and shouted, ‘‘ Jim,
Jim, Jim!”’ and very soon “Jim” came to the door
and General Garfield let me in—one of the grandest
men of our century. The great men of the world are
ever so. I was down in Virginia and went up to an
educational institution and was directed to a man who
was setting out a tree. I approached him and said,
426 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
‘“Do you think it would be possible for me to see
General Robert E. Lee, the President of the Univer-
sity?” He said, ‘Sir, I am General Lee.’’ Of course,
when you meet such a man, so noble a man as that,
you will find him a simple, plain man. Greatness is
: ..always just so modest and great inventions are simple.
”""T’asked a class in school once who were the great
inventors, and a little girl popped up and _ said
¢ Columbus, Well, now, she was not so far wrong.
Columbus bought a farm and he carried on that farm
just as I carried on my father’s farm. He took a hoe
and went out and sat down on arock. But Columbus,
as he sat upon that shore and looked out upon the
ocean, noticed that the ships, as they sailed away,
sank deeper into the sea the farther they went. And
since that time =gome other ‘‘Spanish ships” have
sunk into the sea. ) But as Columbus noticed that the
tops of the masts, “Uropped down out of sight, he said:
“That is the way it is with this hoe handle; if you
go around this hoe handle, the farther off you go the
farther down you go. I can sail around to the East
Indies.” How plain it all was. How simple the
mind—majestic like the simplicity of a mountain in
its greatness. Who are the great inventors? They
are ever the simple, plain, everyday people who see
the need and set about to supply it.
I was once lecturing in North Carolina, and the
cashier of the bank sat directly behind a lady who
wore a very large hat. I said to that audience, “‘ Your
wealth is too near to you; you are looking right over
it.”” He whispered to his friend, ‘‘ Well, then, my
wealth is in that hat.” A little later, as he wrote me,
1 said, ‘‘Wherever there is a human need there is a
greater fortune than a mine can furnish.” He caught
my thought, and he drew up his plan for a better hat
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 427
pin than was in the hat before him and the pin is now
being manufactured. He was offered fifty-two thou-
sand dollars for his patent. That man made his
fortune before he got out of that hall. This is the
whole question: Do you see_a need?
I remember well a man up in my native hills, a poor
man, who for twenty years was helped by the town in
his poverty, who owned a wide-spreading maple tree
that covered the poor man’s cottage like a benediction
from on high. J remember that tree, for in the spring
—there were some roguish boys around that neighbor-
hood when I was young—in the spring of the year the
man would put a bucket there and the spouts to catch
the maple sap, and I remember where that bucket
was; and when I was young the boys were, oh, so
mean, that they went to that tree before that man
had gotten out of bed in the morning, and after he
had gone to bed at night, and drank up that sweet sap.
I could swear they did it. He didn’t make a great
deal of maple sugar from that tree. But one day
he made the sugar so white and crystalline that the
visitor did not believe it was maple sugar; thought
maple sugar must be red or black. He said to the
old man: ‘‘Why don’t you make it that way and
sell it for confectionery?” The old man caught his
thought and invented the “‘rock maple crystal,” and
before that patent expired he had ninety thousand
dollars and had built a beautiful palace on the site of
that tree. After forty years owning that tree he
awoke to find it had fortunes of money indeed in it.
And many of us are right by the tree that has a fortune
for us, and we own it, possess it, do what we will
with it, but we do not learn its value because we do
not see the human need, and in these discoveries and
inventions this is one of the most romantic things
of life. |
428 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
I have received letters from all over the country and
_ from England, where I have lectured, saying that
they have discovered this and that, and one man out
in Ohio took me through his great factories last spring,
and said that they cost him $680,000, and, said he,
“T was not worth a cent in the world-when I heard
your lecture ‘Acres of Diamonds;’ but I made up my
mind to stop right here and make my fortune here,
and here it is.’ He showed me through his unmort-
gaged possessions. And this is a continual experience
now as I travel through the country, after these many
years. I mention this incident, not to boast, but to
show you that you can do the same if you will.
Who are the great inventors? I remember a good
illustration in a man who used to live in East Brook-
field, Mass. He was a shoemaker, and he was out of
work and he sat around the house until his wife told
him ‘‘to go out doors.”’ And he did what every hus-
band is compelled by law to do—he obeyed his wife.
And he went out and sat down on an ash barrel in his
back yard. Think of it! Stranded on an ash barrel
and the enemy in possession of the house! As he sat
on that ash barrel, he looked down into that little
brook which ran through that back yard into the
meadows, and he saw a little trout go flashing up the
stream and hiding under the bank. I do not suppose
he thought of Tennyson’s beautiful poem:
“Chatter, chatter, as I flow,
To join the brimming river,
Men may come, and men may go,
But I go on forever.”’
But as this man looked into the brook, he leaped off
that ash barrel and managed to catch the trout with
his fingers, and sent it to Worcester. They wrote
back that they would give him a five dollar bill for
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 429,
another such trout as that, not that it was worth that
much, but he wished to help the poor man. So this
shoemaker and his wife, now perfectly united, that
five dollar bill in prospect, went out to get another
trout. They went up the stream to its source and
down to the brimming river, but not another trout
could they find in the whole stream; and so they came
home disconsolate and went to the minister. The
minister didn’t know how trout grew, but he pointed
the way. Said he, ‘‘Get Seth Green’s book, and that
will give you the information you want.” They did
so, and found all about the culture of trout. They
found that a trout lays thirty-six hundred eggs every
year and every trout gains a quarter of a pound every
year, so that in four years a little trout will furnish
four tons per annum to sell to the market at fifty
cents a pound. When they found that, they said they
didn’t believe any such story as that, but if they
could get five dollars a piece they could make some-
thing. And right in that same back yard with the
coal sifter up stream and window screen down the
stream, they began the culture of trout. They after-
wards moved to the Hudson, and since then he has
become the authority in the United States upon the
raising of fish, and he has been next to the highest on
the United States Fish Commission in Washington.
My lesson is that man’s wealth was out*here in his
back yard for twenty years, but he didn’t see it until
his wife drove him out with a mop stick.
I remember meeting personally a poor carpenter of
Hingham, Massachusetts, who was out of work and in
poverty. His wife also drove him out of doors. He
sat down on the shore and whittled a soaked shingle
into a wooden chain. His children quarreled over it in
the evening, and while he was whittling a second one,
> hia BGe 8
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430 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
a neighbor came along and said, ‘‘Why don’t you
whittle toys if you can carve like that?” He said,
“YT don’t know what to make!” There is the whole
thing. His neighbor said to him: ‘Why don’t you
ask your own children?” Said he, ‘‘What is the use
of doing that? My children are different from other
people’s children.”’ I used to see people like that
when I taught school. The next morning when his
boy came down the stairway, he said, “‘Sam, what
do you want for a toy?’ ‘‘I want a wheel-barrow.”
When his little girl came down, he asked her what she
wanted, and she said. “I want a little doll’s wash-
stand, a little doll’s carriage, a little doll’s umbrella,”
and went on with a whole lot of things that would
have taken his lifetime to supply. He consulted his
own children right there in his own house and began
to whittle out toys to please them. He began with
his jack-knife, and made those unpainted Hingham
toys. He is the richest man in the entire New England
States, if Mr. Lawson is to be trusted in his statement
concerning such things, and yet that man’s fortune
was made by consulting his own children in his own
house. You don’t need to go out of your own house
to find out what to invent or what to make. I always
talk too long on this subject.
I, would like to meet the great men who are here
tonight. The great men! We don’t have any great
‘men im Philadelphia. Great men! You say that
they all come from London, or San Francisco, or Rome,
or Manayunk, or anywhere else but there—anywhere
else but Philadelphia—and yet, in fact, there are just
as great men in Philadelphia as in any city of its size.
There are great men and women in this audience.
Great men, I have said, are very simple men. Just as
many great men here as are to be found anywhere.
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 431
The greatest error in judging great men is that we
think that they always hold an office. The world
knows nothing of its greatest men. Who are the
great men of the world? ‘The young man and young
woman may well ask the question. It is not necessary
that they should hold an office, and yet that is the
popular idea. That is the idea we teach now in our
high schools and common schools, that the great men
of the world are those who hold some high office, and
unless we change that very soon and do away with that
prejudice, we are going to change to an empire. There
is no question about it. We must teach that men are
great only on their intrinsic value, and not on the
position that they may incidentally happen to occupy.
And yet, don’t blame the young men saying that they
are going to be great when they get into some official
position. I ask this audience again who of you are
going to be great? Says a young man: ‘I am going
to be great.” ‘‘When are you going to be great?”
‘‘When I am elected to some political office.”’ Won’t
you learn the lesson, young man; that it is prima facie
evidence of littleness to hold public office under our
form of government? Think of it. This is a govern-
ment of the people, and by the people, and for the
people, and not for the office-holder, and if the people
in this country rule as they always should rule, an
officeholder is only the servant of the people, and the
Bible says that ‘“‘the servant cannot be greater than
his master.”’ The Bible says that “he that is sent
cannot be greater than him who sent him.” In this
country the people are the masters, and the office-
holders can never be greater than the people; they
should be honest servants of the people, but they are
not our greatest men. Young man, remember that
you never heard of a great man holding any political
432 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
office in this country unless he took that office at an
expense to himself. It is a loss to every great man to
take a public office in our country. Bear this in mind,
young man, that you cannot be made great by a
political election. |
Another young man says, ‘‘I am going to be a great
man in Philadelphia some time.’ ‘“‘Is that so? When
are you going to be great?’ ‘‘When there comes
another war! When we get into difficulty with Mexico,
or England, or Russia, or Japan, or with Spain again
over Cuba, or with New Jersey, I will march up to
the cannon’s mouth, and amid the glistening bayonets
I will tear down their flag from its staff, and I will
come home with stars on my shoulders, and hold every
office in the gift of the government, and I will be
great.” ‘“‘No, you won’t! No, you won’t; that is
no evidence of true greatness, young man.” But
don’t blame that young man for thinking that way;
that is the way he is taught in the high school. That
is the way history is taught in college. He is taught
that the men who held the office did all the fighting.
' IT remember we had a Peace Jubilee here in Phila-
delphia soon after the Spanish war. ‘Perhaps some
of these visitors think we should not have had it until
now in Philadelphia, and: as the great procession was
going up Broad street T was told that the tally-ho
coach stopped right in front of my house, and on the
coach was Hobson, and all the people threw up their
hats and swung their handkerchiefs, and shouted
“Hurrah for Hobson!’ I would have yelled too,
because he deserves much more of his country than
he has ever received. But suppose I go into the
high school tomorrow and ask, ‘“‘ Boys, who sunk the
Merrimac?” If they answer me “Hobson,” they
tell me seven-eighths of a lie—seven-eighths of a lie,
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 433
because there were eight men who sunk the Merrimac.
The other seven men, by virtue of their position,
were continually exposed to the Spanish fire, while
Hobson, as an officer, might reasonably be behind the
smoke-stack. Why, my friends, in this intelligent
audience gathered here tonight I do not believe I
could find a single person that can name the other
seven men who were with Hobson. Why do we
teach history in that way? We ought to teach that
however humble the station a man may occupy, if
he does his full duty in his place, he is just as much
entitled to the American people’s honor as is a king
upon a throne.! We do teach it as a mother did her
little boy ii New York when he said, ‘‘Mamma,
what great building is that?’ ‘‘That is General
Grant’s tomb.”’ ‘‘Who was General Grant?” ‘He
was the man who put down the rebellion.” Is that
the way to teach history?
Do you think we would have gained a victory if
it had depended on General Grant alone? Oh, no.
Then why is there a tomb on the Hudson at all?
Why, not simply because General Grant was personally
a great man himself, but that tomb is there because
he was a representative man and represented two
hundred thousand men who went down to death
for their nation and many of them as great as General
Grant. That is why that beautiful tomb stands
on the heights over the Hudson.
‘I remember an incident that will illustrate this,
the only one that I can give tonight. I am ashamed
of it, but I don’t dare leave it out. I close my eyes
now; I look back through the years to 1863; I can
see my native town in the Berkshire Hills, I can see
that cattle-show ground filled with people; I can
see the church there and the town hall crowded, and
434 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
hear bands playing, and see flags flying and handker-
chiefs streaming—well do I recall at this moment
that day. The people had turned out to receive
a company of soldiers, and that company came march-
ing up on the Common. ‘They had served out one
term in the Civil War and had re-enlisted, and they
were being received by their native townsmen. I
was but a boy, but I was captain of that company,
puffed out with pride on that day—why, a cambric
needle would have burst me all to pieces. As J
marched on the Common at the head of my company,
there was not a man more proud than I. We marched
into the town hall and then they seated my soldiers
down in the center of the house and I took my place
down on the front seat, and then the town officers
filed through the great throng of people, who stood
close and packed in that little hall. They came up
on the platform, formed a half circle around it, and
the mayor of the town, the “chairman of the select-
men” in New England, took his seat in the middle
of that half circle. He was an old man, his hair was
gray; he never held an office before in his life. He
thought that an office was all he needed to be a truly
great man, and when he came up he adjusted his
powerful spectacles and glanced calmly around the
audience with amazing dignity. Suddenly his eyes
fell upon me, and then the good old man came right
forward and invited me to come up on the stand
with the town officers. Invited me up on the stand!
No town officer ever took notice of me before I went
to war. Now, I should not say that. One town
officer was there who advised the teacher to ‘‘ whale”
me, but I mean no “‘honorable mention.” So I was
invited up on the stand with the town officers. I
took my seat and let my sword fall on the floor, and
ACRES OF DIAMONDS A35
folded my arms across my breast and waited to be
received. Napoleon the Fifth! Pride goeth before
destruction and a fall. When I had gotten my seat
and all became silent through the hall, the chairman
of the selectmen arose and came forward with great
dignity to the table, and we all supposed he would
introduce the Congregational minister, who was the
only orator in the town, and who would give the
oration to the returning soldiers. But, friends, you ~
should have seen the surprise that ran over that
audience when they discovered that this old farmer
was going to deliver that oration himself. He had
never made a speech in his life before, but he fell
into the same error that others have fallen into, he
seemed to think that the office would make him an
orator. So he had written out a speech and walked
up and down the pasture until he had learned it by
heart and frightened the cattle, and he brought that
manuscript with him, and, taking it from his pocket,
he spread it carefully upon the table. Then he
adjusted his spectacles to be sure that he might see
it, and walked far back on the platform and then
stepped forward like this. He must have studied the
subject much, for he assumed an elocutionary attitude;
he rested heavily upon his left heel, slightly advanced
the right foot, threw back his shoulders, opened the
organs of speech, and advanced his right hand at an
angle of forty-five. As he stood in that elocutionary
attitude this is just the way that speech went, this is
it precisely. Some of my friends have asked me if
I do not exaggerate it, but I could not exaggerate it.
Impossible! This is the way it went; although I
am not here for the story but the lesson that is back
of it:
‘‘Fellow citizens.’”’ As soon as he heard his voice,
28
436 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
his hand began to shake like that, his knees began to
tremble, and then he shook all over. He coughed and
choked and finally came around to look at his manu-
script. Then he began again: ‘Fellow citizens: We
—are—we are—we are—we are— Weare very happy
—we are very happy—we are very happy—to welcome
back to their native town these soldiers who have
fought and bled—and come back again to their native
town. We are especially—we are especially—we are
especially—we are especially pleased to see with us
today this young hero (that meant me)—this young
hero who in imagination (friends, remember, he said
‘imagination,’ for if he had not said that, I would
not be egotistical enough to refer to it)—this young
hero who, in imagination, we have seen leading his
troops—leading—we have seen leading—we have seen
leading his troops on to the deadly breach. We have
seen his shining—his shining—we have seen his shining
—we have seen his shining—his shining sword—
flashing in the sunlight as he shouted to his troops,
‘Come on!’ ”
Oh, dear, dear, dear, dear! How little that good,
old man knew about war. If he had known any-
thing about war, he ought to have known what any
soldier in this audience knows is true, that it is next
to a crime for an officer of infantry ever in time of
danger to go ahead of his men. I, with my shining
sword flashing in the sunlight, shouting to my troops:
‘“Come on.”’ I never did it. Do you suppose I would
go ahead of my men to be shot in the front by the
enemy and in the back by my own men? That is
no place for an officer. The place for the officer is
behind the private soldier in actual fighting. How
often, as a staff officer, I rode down the line when
the rebel cry and yell was coming out of the woods,
ACRES OF DIAMONDS 437
sweeping along over the fields, and shouted, ‘‘Officers
to the rear! Officers to the rear!’ and then every
officer goes behind the line of battle, and the higher
the officer’s rank, the farther behind he goes. Not
because he is any the less brave, but because the
laws of war require that to be done. If the general
came up on the front line and were killed you would
lose your battle anyhow, because he has the plan of
the battle in his brain, and must be kept in compara-
tive safety. I, with my “shining sword flashing in
the sunlight.” Ah! ‘There sat in the hall that day
men who had given that boy their last hardtack, who
had carried him on their backs through deep rivers.
But some were not there; they had gone down to
death for their country. The speaker mentioned
them, but they were but little noticed, and yet they
had gone down to death for their country, gone down
for a cause they believed was right and still believe
was right, though I grant to the other side the same
that I ask for myself. Yet these men who had
actually died for their country were little noticed,
and the hero of the hour was this boy. Why was he
the hero? Simply because that man fell into that
same foolishness. This boy was an officer, and those
were only private soldiers. I learned a lesson that
I will never forget. Greatness consists not in holding :
some office; greatness really consists in doing some:
great deed with little means, in the accomplishment’
of vast purposes from the private ranks of life; that:
is true greatness. He who can give to this people’
better streets, better homes, better schools, better:
churches, more religion, more of happiness, more
of God, he that can be a blessing to the community:
in which he lives tonight will be great anywhere;
but he who cannot be a blessing where he now lives
438 ACRES OF DIAMONDS
will neyer be great anywhere on the face of God’s
/’ “We live in deeds, not years; in feeling, not
in_figh res on a dial; in thoughts, not breaths; we
should count time by heart throbs, in the cause of
right.’”’ Bailey says: ‘‘He most lives who thinks
most.”
If you forget everything I have said to you, do not
forget this, because it contains more in two lines than
all I have said. Bailey says: ‘‘He most lives who
thinks most, who feels the noblest, and who acts
the best.”
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