Was .-■■■■■■'■ '■>. :■■■■■ \ ■■- ■■ r .■■-.■ ... FROM THE LIBRARY OF REV. LOUIS FITZGERALD BENSON, D. D. BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO THE LIBRARY OF PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY ;^> £7/ i,*** si:ori;L OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library http://archive.org/details/sequelourlibOOalle SEOU E ro Our Liberal Movement' JOSEPH III.NkN ALLEN LATE LECTURER ON \ in HARVARJ ll V BOSTON ROBE RTS BROTH E RS 1897 Copyright, 1897, By Joseph Henry Allen. John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. CONTENTS. I. 'I'm: Old School and its Worm II. German [rtluenci I II. Fob i i Vi kRfl Later . . I V. I'm DERK QeNRI 1 1 i i-,i V. >< -Ml \< 'I EfOEH Ml M' 'KM.- James Freeman Clarke William Greeoieaf Eliot Thomas Starr King . John Weiss .... I lerick Set* mai Thomaa Hill . William Francis All.-n . Samuel Longfellow . Edmund Burke Willson < )cta\ in- Brooks Frothingban David Atkins Wasson . 1 11 :<7 llM) Hi:; 108 li:. 120 132 lm IP. 162 SEQUEL TO OUB LIBERAL MOVEMENT." THE OLD >■ HOOL AND its WORK. 1 OtiTE 3 i William Henry Furness, then in his ninety-fourth year, — the widest known, the inn-: ted, and the best beloved name among as, - was appointed th r of this sion. It was an act of confiding trust in his per- petua] youth; for of him that may more literally than of any othei whom we have known, which Elomei m his tongue Rowed bj ch more Bweet than 1. I already two generations of mortal men v. while be Btood as a prince among the third." And, when some of us beard him at the conference in Washington, four months Utter, we Listened to a voice as resonant and firm, it' not quite bo mellow, as when h< i spoke to ns in his earlier prime. li i- i will easily understand, with much diffidence and reluctantly that I have consented to occupy the hour which that voice should have filled; 1 An address before the Alumni <>f the Harvard Divinity S June 23, i - 1 1 Z THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. and I did not promise to undertake the task until it proved impossible to be undertaken by some one at once more nearly contemporary with Dr. Furness and more closely associated with his earlier life- work. Besides, it was thought fitting that this should be an occasion not only or chiefly of personal commemoration, but for brinoirm into a single view the work of an entire period, which the passing away of that one life seems suddenly to have thrown back in the perspective, and to have made a scene in history by itself. Two circumstances, which I will not dwell on, set this view of our topic in special relief to-day, — the recent passing away of so many of the " Old Guard " among our ministers, making a death-list in the last eighteen months of ten, whose average age was con- siderably over eighty, and the average length of their ordained service nearly sixty years ; 1 and, sec- ond, the completion of seventy years since the build- ing and consecration of this Divinity Hall in which we are now met. And I may add that the reason of my speaking is that what I shall offer is in the way of personal testimony rather than an historical sur- vey simply or a general essay, since every name I shall have to recall in these memories is that of one toward whom I have stood in some direct personal 1 Their names in the order of seniority are : Thomas T. Stone (1801-95); W. H. Furness (1802-96); J. H. Morison (1808-96); H. A. Miles (1809-95) ; G. W. Briggs (1810-95) ; F. W. Holland (1811-95) ; E. B. Willson (1820-95) ; J. F. Moors (1821-95) ; 0. B. Frothingham (1822-95); Augustus Woodbury (1825-95). Dr. Stone had been associated with our body since 1846. The others were all members of the Harvard Divinity School. ANDREWS NOR! relation 01 n ratitude, affection, kindred, or mutual help. The history of this School properly begins with the time when a regular post-graduate course of the- was established here under the presidency of hi-. Kirk land. The class of 1811, I believe, was the first to which t hi- was open. But the Divin- School apart from the College was not formally lized till 1819, with the appointment of An- drews Norton P 1 Literature. [I will be proper, therefore, to begin our Burvey by considering briefly what that first appointment sig- nified in the teachings and character of the SchooL The date here given >• member, just twenty years before Pi N - ton led the way in vehement prol I rinst the newer Liberalism her- alded in Emerson's Divinity 9 >ol address, which he denounced as "the latest form of infidelity." Here it is difficult for us of a youuger generation to do justice to his position, or perhaps even to understand it. It is one of the tragedies of the in- tellect ual life when a Bine >re and able lead opinion finds his maturest work already outgrown before it has reached its final shape by the advance neral thought, and outlive Mr. Morton did for fifteen years, his own cordial sympathy with that advance. Till he gave up his professorship in his was unquestionably the dominating mind in this school, which was largely guided by his in- fluence till the new ti may have been from disl natural tem- per iment, <>r relu quiet and still air of delightful studies" in which his l"t was at any rate, a mark of his sensitive independence, perhaps of a certain proud humility, that he always refused the academic title which is conventionally held proper for a theological pro- : : he was never M 1 factor " or " Reverend," to end of his days. Tip — ' titles he held the due only of ordained workers in the ministry. A keen critic he always v« have heard, of the pulpit exercises of other men, younger men, his pupils . and if they were sometimes more daunted than helped, as I fear they were, by the severe standard he judged them by, no doubt they would feel the value of it afterward. I' n - a man of his own training, we must remember, George Ripley, who stood «'ut against him boldest and longest on n question touching the foundations of religious belief ; and, whatever else his .-indents learned or failed to 6 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. learn, I am sure he taught them respect for perfect integrity and honest candor of the spoken word. The next influence comparable with Professor Nor- ton's in amount and depth for its effect on the life nurtured here was, I suppose, that of Henry Ware, Junior, a man of radically different mental temper, but absolutely harmonious in conviction and aim. More than any other, I should say, he was during his twelve years' service the pastor and apostle in his calling, — in a very special sense, what Matthew Arnold so finely says of Emerson, " the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." He was put and sustained in the place of service for which he was felt to be singularly fit, by the special con- tributions of friends who created that place ex- pressly for him. He was a modest but excellent scholar, a man of very precious and tender pastoral experience, of poetic gift, also, who would (his brother said of him) have desired more than any- thing the vocation of a poet, shy of native tempera- ment, and often slow of utterance, yet capable of fervent, ready, direct, and incisive speech, of sym- pathies warm, wide, quick, generous, and helpful, and, as much as any man we have ever had among us, having what we may call the very genius of piety, — a choice gift which he shared with a few such men as Channing, Furness, Gannett, Dr. Hos- mer, and Ephraim Peabody. It is impossible not to associate with his influence one very noble phase of the life that has gone forth from this School : I mean a certain devoted and heroic consecration to a ministry of holiness, which I might illustrate by HENRY WABB, JUNIOR. maiiv examples, but will here mention only tw.>. — our own "Apostle Eliot" <»f St Louis, and that beloved and valiant u saint of all the humanities/' Samuel Joseph May, — men alike in their clear insight and great moral courage, though e\ wide apart in the lim trvioe they were sever- ally true to. This quality in ting we ciate as distinctly with the nam.' of W connect i< - order of intellects e with those oi Norton, Palfrey, and Noyes. I wish there were time i" speak fitly of them all. But here I must deal with currents of influence, not with names of men; and there will be Borne dow present who, with a certain filial gratitude, will alv. ociate the particular influence I Bpeak of with him who died of tener than any other 1 can remember by an epithet unusual among us, and very precise in its application, as " the sainted W His name reminds us, again, that tins has never, as its proper title, been called a school of Theology, but a school of 1 >i\ urn v. It may be well, just here, \ a word of what this designation seems to imply. I will do it by dwelling a moment on an aspect of this School, or of tin* Life sheltered ami trained in it, which we sec perhaps most distinctly when we Look hack t<> those years among the "thirties," or a little earlier, ami recall the men whose life-work was inspired ami Bhaped here then, wlm make our best illustration of the characteristic thing here done. Representative names are those of Ephraim ami Andrew Peabody, I Ripley, Samuel Atkins Eliot, Jam 1: iniiii Clarke, Wil- 8 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. liam Henry Charming, Henry Whitney Bellows, and Theodore Parker. I choose these from a long list, not merely for their eminence, but for the variety of gifts they showed. Certainly it would not he easy to devise any one type or descriptive name that would fairly include them all. But they seem to me to illustrate very well a feature in this School, which may possibly distinguish it favorably among some other schools more famous and more richly endowed. The complaint always made of it in its earlier years, was its poverty of endowment. Two men, it was said by way of reproach, were made to do the work of five or six : the first thing wanted, we were incessantly told, was a wealthier endow- ment. But to such complaint I should always reply that we must not " think that the gift of God can be purchased with money." The essentials of the higher education are a consecrated will, intel- lectual opportunity, a wide, buoyant, and elastic atmosphere of thought, sufficient guidance — but not too much — in the wide wilderness of learning, and, above all, great mental leisure and freedom, with great joy and wealth of spiritual companionship. And it may be fairly questioned whether all these may not be had at their best in the inverse ratio of that elaborated equipment which is often more a burden than a help to the nobler intellectual life. Even if we suppose poverty in such things to have its difficulties, yet it is through difficulties, not fa- cilities, that men win the temper fittest for their work in life. But I am not speaking here of difficulties, — here, •L <»f DIVINITY. where university life Lb overburdened with I of opportunity. I -peak only of the two essential things, — large freedom oi leisure of companionship, — these, with the motive and the guidance that are just enough for the best as that freedom and that Leisure. 1 1 to me that we Buffered any serious Loss in that "ur teachers were only two, when those two were Senry and Dr. Noyes. I am not Bpeaking here of tli • theological department in a university, — which (no doubt) a wide variet ecial Learning, — but of a Divinity School such as this was where the first 1 d is personal influence and inspiration, restrained but not dominated by critical erudition. And I am not saying that this is a better thing than the other, but only that it was a good thing in its way to have, while we were waiting for the other. Nay, for the time we have in view it may even be contended that it than the other would have been if we could have had the other thru. The Liberal movement, which in a way it has the business of this School to guide and help, is a movement even Less of thought than it is of Life, a movement even Less of theology than of pra conduct. And at that time its aim and method precise than now. The questions that coming up had more to do with the vague idealism which we term u Transcendental " than they had with the very precise and tangible scientific problems of the present day. Nobody knew, for one thing, or could possibly BUSpect, how far the advance 10 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. of criticism would affect our interpretation of the Bible, or how far the advance of natural science would invade and alter our very conception of human duty and destiny. At such a time, with an astounding amount of shallow and restless radicalism, with appalling questions of society and politics loom- ing, too, in the horizon, it was of far more account to the student that his mental atmosphere should be elastic and wide than that his mental training should be carried on within rijnd lines. At such a time there is an inconvenience in being committed to too sharply defined opinions. Opinion, to be worth anything, must be long held in solution in a medium (so far as may be) transparent and colorless, and must crystallize very slowly about some nucleus of positive conviction, which is the gift not of logic, but of life. No opinion that was ever held, I should think, was more sincerely held, more wholesome, more manly, conducive whether to a purer piety or a more devoted humanity than the form of super- naturalism in which Norton and Ware and their whole generation were trained ; yet in the next gen- eration it was destined to be completely outgrown, while they, as honest men as ever lived, could never learn or endure to see it so. That was in one way a great pity, causing as it did painful misunderstand- ings and great loss of moral force. But it w^ould have been a far greater pity if, in the temper of that day, there had been here an equipment of learning that should compact that half-way view into a full- grown system and an intellectual creed. From that worse evil, it may be, the very poverty ITS METHODS OF STUDY. 11 of this School protected as. At least, there was no* a corps of teachers aumerous enough, or well enough armed with modern applii Learning, to tie us down by exactions of routine-work to the n an elaborated method in theology, which we should see now to be painfully inadequate. I think that, on the whole, a healthier growth has come of it than if there had been. I do not easily associate such wealth, vigor, variety, and independence in tl ligious lifi ■ til in the names I little while ago, — take only whal is signified to as in the last i wo, Bellow - and P i • i . names that belong to the period next before my own, — with thr Btricter training appropriate to a purely scientific theology that is up to the present standard i would mean a longer time of pupilage than is for the ; Mian, — at any rate, longer than would bave been possible to us then. I give my testimony for what it is worth; but I know that, for one, the best piece of work I did while here was entirely outside all school courses, actual or conceiv- able: it was an attempt to master the principles of the modern scientific method, with such guidance as could be had then, in the st-vm thick volumes of Whewell and John Smart Mill, aided by some light in pure mathematics from my near friend of those Thomas Hill, and brightened by a good deal of talk with President Walker, who was so generous of his shrewd, wise, kindly, and helpful companion- ship to us younger men. This may serve as, if not a brilliant yet a useful example of what I Buppose was very common, — the accidental and incidental 12 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. benefit that befell from the less formal methods of a Divinity School in that earlier day. I will now attempt to recall one or two aspects of the field where our life-work lay, for which we had been preparing under such influences as I have described. The date I have here in mind is 1840, which marks the end of the period spoken of hith- erto and the beginning of that in which I became a sharer in its tasks. Our life-work was to be found in that part of the Lord's vineyard for which we were in training, to dress it and to keep it, every man according to his several ability. The soil of that vineyard was just then remarka- bly fertile in " isms," which grew in it like weeds. These I would define as so many off-hand creeds, of one article apiece, which the believer in it ac- cepted with a certain romantic faith, and spent his life in thrusting upon the consciences of his fellow-men. All these more or less abortive creeds had, I think, an aim more mundane than the curi- ous other-worldliness which has come into being since the famous " Chardon Street Conference," where they swarmed preparatory to taking flight, — where I witnessed a great twinkling and sputter- ing of new lights, some of them set rather awk- wardly in their candlesticks, and not nearly so neatly trimmed as hotly burning. This took place, we must remember, while Brook Farm was an enterprise just set on foot, and five years before the first advent of modern spiritism. Some of those embryo schemes were of a certain vague but high idealism, and were the precursors of the FORMS OF RADICALM 13 ] sophy and Christian S a day. S met the social problems of the time in a j i in I heroic temper, testified in brave cam- paigns of conscience, Buch as Christian socialism, the temp rm, and (most chivalro all) the " old-school n antislavery crusada Some not much more than the whim . — the no-Sabbath, no-property, n eminent, no-resistance leaguers. But, io they were u sports," or ofl growth of modern liberalism, suddenly become com f, and without the experience of that twofold discipline which 1 jrnly held them in during the half-century which has the disciplim b, painfully learned thi the struggle that cam- in our Civil W • with thai rather chaotic chapter which describes our political performance Bince; the discipline of science, — for the time I - twenty years before D rwin had brought home to the common mind tl of evolution in natural things, or Spencer had expounded th< I law which has greatly chastened and chilled the i lutionary temper bo vagraut and rampant then. Aml.it must be remembered, all these esca] of moral knight-errantry took a shape io this com- munity, with its Puritan antecedent . sternly practical, and even, in a intensely religious. Each, in its fashion, If about taking the kingdom of heaven by violence; each, no doubt sinccrdv, deemed itself the one indis- pensable gateway to the New Jerusalem, the earthly 14 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. paradise. It may be easily seen, then, what a warp must have been given to the minds in train- ing for their life-work here. Those minds had chosen their vocation because it represented to them the ideal side of life. They were for that very reason susceptible to this chaotic clamor of many tongues, and fascinated by some one or another phase of that ethical ideal, which glances in facets as multitudinous as a cut and polished gem. How would the sober tradition of their re- ligious culture be invaded, how would the grave lessons of their theological or philosophic training be beguiled, by these so many voices from the world about, when not one of those voices, as their own Scripture itself assured them, was without its proper signification ? Who knew whether it might not be the one voice to show you or me the particular path it was ordained for us to follow, forsaking every other ? In looking through the catalogue of these years, we see how large a proportion of those educated here have, found their real vocation in some other thing than what they seemed to have chosen. Life is so different from our theories and plans of life ! The liberal ministry, as we have sought it or ac- cepted it, has been often said to be like certain localities, which are good to grow up in, but par- ticularly good to emigrate away from. This may be a drawback in a profession, or in the education that prepares one for a profession ; but it need not be a disaster or a reproach. It is a special glory of the life educated here that it has turned so easily JOHH GORHAM PALFREY. 15 to so large a variety of outside work. Among its ministers of the Word there have been a fair pro- portion better known to the public as teachers, historians, artists, or p public charities, literary editors and \' several Oriental dialects, and was a pioneer in our first attempts at a scientific criticism of the Old Testament Asa mem- ber of Congress, later on, he 1 popularity to honest independence, becoming one of the original founders of the 1; Soil party. As postm of Boston, he was a reformer of official methods, and set an example, which some would deem fantastic, of scrupulous integrity in his accounts. Always a laborious -indent, the well-known cl 16 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. historian of New England, and able among the ablest editors of the " North American Keview," he was, as a gentleman, cultivated and courteous, with abounding vivacity and wit. As a man of con- science, he set the high example of liberating nine- teen slaves whom he had selected as his share in a family inheritance, and generously aiding them afterwards, as if dependent members of his own household. Such was the versatile and brilliant intellectual life he brought to this high service. By so much was the theologian ennobled in the man ! I have spoken of Dr. Palfrey as a pioneer among us in the scientific criticism of the Old Testament. This is better seen in his attempt, published in 1840, at a constructive theory of the book of Genesis, — which he regarded as a compilation from earlier sources by the hand of Moses, ■ — than in his defence of the Mosaic authority of the Pen- tateuch throughout, which is quite on the lines of the conventional apologists. These lines were broken into, four years later, with a much bolder hand, by Mr. Norton in his " Note on the Old Testament," which is as radical in tone as anything we have had since, but for its very characteristic reserve touching Moses and Elijah. Dr. Noyes's argument on Messianic prophecy, in the " Christian Examiner" of 1834, — which brought out the famous hint of prosecution under the old Massachu- setts law of blasphemy, — we may take to have been (however heretical it looked) a piece of legiti- mate textual criticism ; and it is not, perhaps, to be counted as a conscious departure from the tradi- THE LATEB CRITICISM. 17 tional point of view. 1 1 e to this School by his intellectual candor, honesty, and courage, in guiding it through a "1 of transition, by which he earned a debt bitude from his immediate students Bucb quite due to any other, belong consider- ably later than thai I have here in view. how how completely the later method of thinking that pre mong US, both literary and i in the last half-century has almost wholly blotted out the older view, was an outgrowth of the training of this School, Dr. Furn< ader and sympa- thetic treatment of the gospel story, which ingenu- ously attempts bo identify natural and supernatural, while keeping close to the letter of the claims to follow out Legitimately th had learned under Norton's teaching, since what ii holds to have been natural in Jesus would be supernatural in anybody And it was only one easy step in advance when Theodore Parker, with temper and motive widely different from theirs, threw wide open to public gaze the of the course that has been followed since. Bmer- Bon's address in this very chapel in 1838, -the controversy between Norton and Ripley thai lowed the next year, — the group of later eloquent expounders, including John Weiss, Samuel John- son, Octavius Frothingham, Samuel Longfellow, and William Potter, not to Bpeak of work done by their associates still living, — are bo many dates that connect every phase of the advancing liberalism in 18 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. theology with names, influences, and traditions belonging to this School. Not one of them be- trays a motive merely academic, speculative, criti- cal, or scientific. Every one made a step forward into a new and wider intellectual life. No mat- ter how frank the negation, it always sought, not a narrower or feebler, but a larger and a robuster faith. In this sketch I have had in view a definite period in the history of this School, — a period which ended fifty-six years ago, and had most to do with shaping out that life whose general fea- tures we have been trying to retrace. For this reason I have said nothing as yet, and can say but a few words now in closing, of two men to whom I am personally indebted very much, whose best work in life was too closely related with our present topic to be quite left out in our survey, — Convers Francis and Frederic Henry Hedge. Professor Francis was somewhat on in years, not far from fifty, at his coming here ; and it may be that his most fruitful work in life, his most kind- ling influence, and the singular esteem yielded him by the men of his own time, belong rather to the date of his more than twenty years' ministry in Watertown than to the somewhat hampered and (I fear) disappointed toils of his later service. His earlier manhood fell in with the sudden widening of the intellectual field by what was, to all intents and purposes, the discovery of a new literature, a new philosophy, a new way of thinking among us. I do not dare to say whether the enthusiasm that CONVEBS KHAN 19 d this fresh discovery did or did Dot qualities of < terman l< German thought For I half a eration, while the many Looked on ignorantl; jealously askance, th< i :<> whom s almost as if there were no - and no other thought worth their study. In the of this select circle, the mind of I > r. Fi I with eager enjoyment ami quenchless thirst the i thus thrown open, though it might be in their mosl arid form. For it mind more sympathetic than critical, widely and •_ ously eclectic, almost too impartial in its likes, and apparently having no dial A Theodore Parker, hi ful your ad, said to 1 "did not gravitate to the r thoughts or the greater minds." Such width of mental sym] lacks some Btringent mental tonii I I less • ive faculty, his m superfluil mere possession, which dulled the dent thinking, and, like a lens inconveniently near, blurred the Bharp outline of the object yon were trying to define. Bat to one Becking mat. -rial for unbiassed judgment nothing could be finer than that quiet impartiality, that untiring kindliness and patience, that lavish generosity in patting at your service, in any Bhape you would, the stores he had so diligently gathered. N I am Bure, d the interest of true learning here with more scrupulous devotion; ami the placid widening-out of the circle of our knowledge under his kindly influence was of more value, in that day of i 20 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK. anticipation and hastily formed conclusion, than some of us were quite willing to understand. Dr. Hedge's large and richly stored intelligence had had the advantage of a far more thorough early discipline than most of us have received, or than could have been given in this country at the time he needed it most. In his school-days Ger- man became to him a second mother tongue. Thus not only did he benefit from the tonic method of the German "gymnasium," but he was guarded from the illusion which many suffered under, of taking all to be sublime, august, and true that came to them in the long and many syllables of that magic tongue, — since he knew, among other things, Ger- man school-boy slang. The great boon he gained from that source was, however, qualified in him by two specially English gifts — a certain wealth of poetic imagination, with a feeling of the rhythmic melody of language that might easily have made one of less critical or reflective temper eminent as orator or poet ; and a deep ground of ethical con- viction, which wholly dominated his speculative faculty, and made him restive under the restraint of any merely intellectual creed. More than any other of like philosophic turn whom I have ever known, philosophy was to him a department of literature, not a system of regulated opinion. More than with any other of so wide literary accomplish- ment, the chief interest with him lay in the ranges of higher contemplation. The more he studied the results of speculative science, the less he was satis- fied with any claim it put forth to solve that most FREDERIC H. HEDGE. 21 tantalizing of problems, how to give a tme intel- lectual theory of the universe. It is likely that this seDse of inadequacy troubled at intervals his philosophic conscience; for i. quite let that problem go, or fully accepted the positivist d (which he inclined to) that in the nature of things it is unsolvable. Bi was that which many of the best mind ind, — re- ligious discipline and religious meditation. The visible work he did was by no means a full measure of his ability ; yel he wa I the most | taking as well as conscientious of workers, one of the widest in intellectual range, and a dil I er to the end of his day II most ch teristic treatise, "Reason in Religion," wi associated with his earlier labors here; and it re- mains among the most highly valued of the agencies that have enriched the thinking faculty in a gen- eration later than his own. I have thus outlined, bo : my allotted hour permits, tin* work of tin- old School a- we have known it, illustrated by the names and incidents most familiar in its history. Bow that work has been developed ami carried on in the half-century Bince the period chiefly had in view, and how in influence has gone forth upon the mind and life of cur community, is a topic requiring a treat- ment and a different hand. I trust that what has now been said may serve, in some Blight measure, as an introduction to Buch a theme. II. GEEMAN INFLUENCE. 1 IN order to bring the vast topic of German The- ology in any intelligible way within my limits, I must confine myself to the very narrowest inter- pretation of the words in which my subject is an- nounced. And these must be understood to mean, not how Unitarianism is to be found in German theology, for it is not there at all — at least in name. The German theologians, for reasons which I need nob explain, are generally bound by Lutheran or other State traditions and conditions ; and while it may often be said of the best of them that their way of thinking is quite in harmony with ours, their form of doctrine is wholly different. 1 shall not, therefore, trouble myself or you about that, but take what is the only serviceable rendering of the words of my title, namely : How, when, and where has the course of Unitarianism in America been affected by contact with German theology since the beginning of that movement of thought among us which we term Transcendental ? This brings me, again, to a very precise date, which I must take for my starting-point. That date I shall take, for reasons of convenience, at just 1 An address delivered in Charming Hall, in November, 1888. EMERSON'S ADD! fifty years And, as there is a persona] equa- tion in all these things which more or Less warps our judgment of them, perhaps you will pardon me the impropriety of a word to explain what those ; i convenient I is at that time a student in college, among circumstances thai me to take an eager Interest in the discussions then going on, and to look forward with timid hope to til.- part I might possibly be afterwards called to take in them. I was in the dear and serious h hold of my mother's brother Henry Wan-, Junior, who affectionately < acouraged Buch early hopes in his kindly bul taciturn way. I I tied with a vague but exhilarating delight to Mr. Emerson's J Jiviiut v School Ad h \ en i hat Bumm which had, as you know, shocked Borne, while it had charmed others, as the fii word of other gospel, which yet was not another." So thai I was already prepared, when a year liter the battle of the books began, to follow its changing fortunes with a degr f personal feeling as to the issues involved which has not been in the least diminished to this day. [n Bhort, to Bpeak with still gr precision, the exact crisis that broughl to the front the bearing of German tl logy upon American opinion was I lie publication, in 1839, of Pro Andrews Norton's Divinity School \ ion "The Latest Form of Infidelity." Bere, perhaps, 1 ought to add a further word of explanation. First, as t i myself, — for by nurture and habit T clung strongly to the more ative side in the debate that followed. I have always 24 GEEMAN INFLUENCE. considered that Professor Norton had the better of his opponents in scholarship and logic ; till the age of twenty-five I intended or expected that my place would be on that side ; and if I have altered from this position since, it has been not so much due (as I think) to the course of that discussion as to a passage of argument with that rude logician, Orestes A. Brownson, during the crisis of the notable change by which he became a Catholic. Next, as to others ; for the real point at issue in that debate has been often misunderstood, as if it had been the question of admitting the supernatural or miraculous in Christianity. On the contrary, in one of his letters addressed to Professor Norton, Mr. George Eipley says : " For my own part, I cannot avoid the con- clusion that the miracles related in the Gospels were actually wrought by Jesus : " and in a pamph- let of the same date, understood to have been writ- ten by Theodore Parker, he says, " I believe that Jesus, like other religious teachers, wrought mira- cles." And as neither of these men has been ac- cused of Jesuistry or moral cowardice, it appears that the question at issue was not as to their opinions, which at that time were in the main con- ventional and customary, but as to a new and un- familiar order of thought, which was seen to be powerfully affecting the principles and foundations of men's religious belief. What this new order of thought was, and what has been its effect among us during this past half-century, it will be my duty to make as clear as I can within the limits allowed me. GERMAN THEOLOGY. _ • That Influence, whatever it was, we ascribe in a vague and general way to German theol dally from the time of Schleiermacher. But mail theology of that period — that is, of the last ninety yeai 9 ■ is (as 1 said a \ I and un- manageable topic; and I must therefore narrow my Geld still further, by pointing out t t de- partments into which it may be roughly divided. First is that which especially dates from Schleier- macher himself, though it also has to do with those famous philosophical schools which appear to have had absolute control in the higher thought oi many down to about forty years ago, — chiefly, the school of Hegel. It was these that intellectual impul - ■. and that appeared to open up an entirely new interpretation of religious thought and the religious Life; and hence created that fresh enthusiasm among some of our younger men half a century or more ago, which we call Transcendental- ism, and Prof< i Norton called " the latest form of [nfidelity." This (as I just said did not so much affect men's particular opinions as their whole way of Looking at the subject of Religion. We may call it, if you please, the German Speculate Theol rod, and producing its effect more gradually, is a movement which Btarted still farther hack, largely from the impulse given by the German poet and critic, Leasing. I may describe it in a genera] way by saying that its effect has been to take the Bible out of that sanctuary where it was regarded as a holy thing by itself, never to be judged, but only to be explained and then accepted reveringly by the 26 GERMAN INFLUENCE. human mind ; to take it, I say, from that sanctuary, to class it among our other literary treasures, and to interpret it just as we do other books of history, of legend or tradition, of moral exhortation, or of re- ligious poetry. I say nothing for or against this result, which I suppose that we are all at this day fully agreed to accept. I only say that to bring it about took something like a century of controversy, often very angry and bitter ; and that during this time there was evolved a mass of erudition, argu- ment, exposition, speculation, literally unspeakable in its dimensions, which makes the field of German Critical Tlieology. And it is the diligent cultiva- tion of this field among our own best scholars — including Professor Noyes, Dr. Hedge, Theodore Parker, and James Freeman Clarke, against the strong protest of the elder school represented by Professor Norton — that has brought about the most marked changes in the body of opinion known as American Unitarianism. Third, we must reckon a field with which I have nothing whatever to do here, although in some ways it is perhaps the most important of all. For Ger- man theology, in its large sense, has been one of the greatest and most remarkable educating influences of the last half-century to a very large class of minds. Every topic suggested in both the lines of discussion I have described has been taken up, and with infinite painstaking, erudition, and patience followed out to the last slender filament of inference or investigation on which it was possible to string an opinion or a guess. It would be mere pedantry IHLEIERMAGHEB. to cite the Dames of the innumerable labor • thai wide fi M ; ' and any attempt to explore it would only lead us away from the Btrict and narrow line we have to follow. That portion <»f the field we may call the German Theolog ition. With it, as I have said, I have for the pn nothing to do. I must now go back, and explain the prominence which has been given in my topic to the name of Schleiermacher. Frederick Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in 1 768, and died in 1 ^ 1. at tip- j -six. lie was a in. iii of tin- very finest religious genius, a preacher "i extraordinary fervor and wealth of thought, "i" a moral nature singularly clinging, sym- pathetic, and emotional, a scholar of vast erudition even for a ( rerman, a student i and ind gable industry, and a teacher, or intimate advis* personal weight and influence almost unparalleled. Professor Philip Schaff calls him, without qualifica- tion, " the greatest divine of the nineteenth century." To understand the ground of his unexampled and unique influence upon the religious thought of his day, we should take into account that very early in life he saw (dearly these two things: first, that the doctrinal system built up during the Reformation had completely gone I and existed only as a lifeless and sterile form — at least in Germany and among the educated classes, where his work was, as ee in the life of Lessing — and must | 1 Tholnck and Neander are perhaps those which will be most widely and gratefully recognized. 28 GERMAN INFLUENCE. unless a new soul could be breathed into it ; and, second, that the idea, the method, the discipline, embodied in the Christian Church and known to the Christian conscience, must form the type, the model, the condition, under which such new religious life could be had, — and this, if it must be, independent of all doctrinal forms whatever. To show the inten- sity of his conviction on this point, I copy here his own words : " Eeligion was the mother's bosom, in whose sacred warmth and darkness my young life was nourished and prepared for the world which lay before me all unknown ; and she still remained with me, ivhen God and immortality vanished before my doubting eyes." This, I say, is his characteristic testimony to the reality of the religious life, wholly independent of all doctrinal forms whatever. And we must take it as our starting-point, in estimating both the peculiar nature of his influence upon the mind of his time, and the peculiar dread of that influence which we find amongst those who, like Professor Norton, honestly held that very clearly defined opinions were essential to any hold at all upon the Christian faith. To such minds that lan- guage sounded merely vague, delusive, and sophistical. The date of the first strong impression made by Schleiermacher upon the mind of his time was the year 1799, when he published a series of eloquent pamphlet " Discourses " on Eeligion, addressed to " the cultivated among its despisers." As to this date we have to bear in mind that it was just at the coming in of the tide of reaction that followed the BLEIEBMACHBE 20 extravagant anti-religioua fury of the French I Lution, and Bel so strongly towards conservatism in politics and religion : bo that he was doing in Ger- many a Like task to that attempted just then by Chateaubriand in France. But we must look back of that date, to see how this religious reaction took just the shape it did in his mind The father of Bchleiermacher ws rioned Calvinistic her, chaplain to a regiment ; and, for conven- ience in Borne of his wanderings, he put the I school among the " A£ora\ ian Brel hren. made the most pious of religious communities. In spiritual descenl their tradition came down from Bohemian exiles, who carried into their retreat the same religious ardor that had flamed with such obstinate fury in the ETussite war-; but in them, or in their followers, it was tempered to some- what austere, and most oobly self-sacrificing piety. It was the placid faith of a company of Moravian missionaries in a Btorm at sea that had touched John Wesley more profoundly than ever before with the reality and power of a religious life. And this obscure community was " tin* mother's bosom, warm and dark," which nourished the germs <»t" that young lip- given to its charge. The later experience of university life, and the deliberate study of the Deistical writer- (then mak- ing a good deal of uoise), \\ Inch he undertook against his father's earnest protest, did net. as we have extinguish the d< e that religion in bishopric, like Rev. ( Jharles \ . Brooke (before tin ion of these have done the same; Matthew Arnold, openly a member of the Church of England, saya without rebuke that "miracles do oof happen." The way for thi markable change of opinion among men in general has do doubt been opened by scientific habit thinking; but, as a change in religious opinion, the way for it had to be prepared by philosophy. Schleiermacher, as usual, speaks both ways: " In- sulate any natural fact," he says, "and it becomes a miracle; repeat any miracle, and it becomes a natural fact" Ami. for a time, the religious scruple is pacified by such a compromise. Clear and honest thinking, however, demands something more than this tampering with words. It demands, first, a fixed habit <•!' mind in harmony with thf best opinion or knowledge <>t' the day: this we call a philosophical method in our thought; 34 • GERMAN INFLUENCE. and, second, a careful study, with the best helps of modern learning, of the documents and evidences of our faith : this we call a scientific criticism in our theology. I have just spoken of the great change that has come to pass in the opinions of the think- ing world, in the common understanding of the Bible history. I have now a few words to say of the way in which this change has been helped amongst ourselves by the study of German critical theology. To go into the subject properly, I ought to show how there have grown up in Germany, more or less directly as the fruit of different philosophical schools, a great variety of interpretations, or ways of interpreting the Bible records, most of them more or less rationalistic ; and how these may be divided into three main groups : the non-miraculous, pure and simple, represented by the name of Paulus ; the mythical or poetic, represented by Strauss ; and the historical or scientific, of which the best ex- ponent is the school of Baur. Now the story of these groups is extremely interesting and instruc- tive, but I have not time to give it here ; 1 and, besides, my subject seems to make it more proper for me to illustrate it by examples taken among our own students and theologians, instead of those that come to us across the water in a foreign tongue. Strictly speaking, there has been no scholarly investigation of this field amongst ourselves. The best that any of our students have done has been 1 It is given in " Christian History in its Three Great Periods," vol. iii. pp. 227-238. KARLIEB tNDICATIOl to study according to their ability, and appropriate as far ai they thought good, the learning which has 1 n poured forth in unstinted measure from the German press. German has for this half-century the favorite, I may Bay the indispensable, language in which to follow up any of these lines of investigation. And, whether <»ur own writers have borrowed their opinions out and out, or whether they have thought them out for them- Belvea under the atmospheric pressure of that world of learning and speculation, the result is one: the general, even the popular, way of looking at the subject, with <>r without knowing it, has taken it - tone from I rermany. The earliest signs of this influence among as were in essay on "The Messianic Prophecies," by Mr. rwards I i l; \ critical "Lectures on the < >l«l Testament," by Prc- c Palfrey, published in 184 \ be on the ( Md Testament," by P N irton, in 184 \. These, however, though expressing the extreme of radical opinion in their day, were addressed only to scholars, and hardly reached the general mind ; then, too, they did not directly touch the ( Thrist ian records, and so excited little or no particular alarm. The first book I remember, Bhowing (dear trace 1 1 srman influence upon critical opinion, — less by its argu- ment than by the fact of its publication, — v. tale called u Theodore, or the Skeptic's Conversion," translated by James Freeman Clarke from the learned and famous theologian De Wette. Theodore is an ingenuous young theologian, beginning to be 36 GERMAN INFLUENCE. troubled with doubts of the supernatural, — a sort of Eobert Elsmere of that period, whose spiritual struggles are mild, indeed, compared with those of a later day, and who easily finds comfort in such pious compromises as those we have seen in Schleiermacher. There could not have been a gentler or kindlier introduction among us of the line of thought which controversy was to make so familiar afterwards. De Wette was one of the earliest, one of the most devout and pure-minded, as well as most copious and learned, of the new school of commentators; and his writings, though long left behind by the rushing current of specu- lative exegesis, did perhaps more than any others to instruct the students of that generation. It is natural to speak next of the work of Theodore Parker, whose chief task of erudition was to translate and expound, from his immense range of reading, De Wette's commentary on the Old Testament. He had already, in his South Boston sermon on " The Transient and Permanent in Christianity " (1841), cast these topics of learned discussion into the waters of popular controversy ; and his name, more than any other, came to be the watchword of the change of opinion that was slowly coming to pass upon the popular mind : a change which was strikingly shown three years ago this month, when the American Unitarian Association published a large volume of Theodore Parker's writings, including that very discourse, under the editorship of James Freeman Clarke. Two other Unitarian scholars, especially revered W. H. FUBNESa — K. II. and beloved among as, have Bhown in different and more obscurely something of the German influence in their commentaries upon I J)r. William Henry Furness and Mr. Edmund Hamilton Sears. ad his I which is the completest and tement oi Dr, Furni ith extn tnde and respect his obligation to his instructor Profi rton ; but its chai iw — thai the miracles, taken in their most literal * natural I Buch a sou] as Ji • n<»t only w k to the I opinion, but no one can read the rationalistic commentary of Paulus, without Boeing how the two differ in their method only by a hairVbreadth, and how (consciously or not) the one has caught the manner and spirit of the other whom apparently he means to contradict They have the f-fact w ay of taking the detail of narrative and of gii in,u r it a "natural" explanation, each in his own fashion. Allow for the thick, clumsy, dingy, ill-printed German volumes, and Bet beside them the fair, clean, trim, compact pages of the American prei compare the scholastic method of the German erudite, who chiefly rejoices and expands in the dry light of criticism, with the religious beauty and tenderness that mark the later exposition, — and you have in the one, in many a familiar pas only a transfigured Likeness of the other. Mr. Sears's "Heart of Christ,*' 1 should Bay on the ether hand, with perhaps a little less confidence in the great sweetness and spiritual beauty of its 38 GERMAN INFLUENCE. exposition, the tone of Olshausen, that most devout and mystical of learned commentators, whose ortho- doxy of belief seems purely a phase of his senti- mental piety, and whose spirit is wonderfully winning as you begin to read him, whether or not you are long content with his intellectual view. Mr. Sears's refined and beautiful intelligence was the gracious channel through which that vein of influence flowed in, to the delight and comfort of many a kindred mind. I do not know of any theologian among us who has accepted seriously Strauss's mythical theory of interpreting the gospel narrative. It was taken up by Theodore Parker, while it was yet new, in the " Christian Examiner," in an admirable exposition and confutation; and I do not remember any dis- cussion of it as a living issue among us since. In brief, it would make the supernatural parts of the Gospels a sort of allegory, or philosophical poem, founded on ideas current in Jewish tradition, and embodying in symbols certain facts and phases of the higher life of man. Especially such transcen- dental facts of the Gospel narrative as the Incar- nation, the Temptation, the Transfiguration, the Kesurrection and Ascension, are expounded frankly as " myths," — that is, philosophical ideas, or facts of the religious life, put in the form of narrative of real events, which are regarded as purely symbolic or allegorical. It is understood to be the product of what is called the school of Hegel " of the Left " in philosophy ; and, if one wishes to see how that general line of symbolic interpretation is carried D. I . STRAUSS. — I'. a BAITS. oat through the field of fu«-t and dogma, he might be advised, instead of studying the words of Strauss himself (which are foreign in tone, and more or less repellent to ue . to find it in the writings of D Eedge and Everett before specially the form* Of far greater importance at this day than the schools of criticism yet spoken of is whal is known as the "Tubingen School," established and still largely controlled by the massive Learning and masterly mind of Ferdinand Christian Baur, I have myself several times given public exposition of the method of this school and the results it seems to I'-ml to, and Bhall say nothing of it now, except that it has been most fully, most intelli- gently, and l"'-i Bet forth before our public by that graceful scholar, that widely read theologian, that accomplished man of Letters, Octavius Bi Froth- ingham, a man who inherits the elegant and fastidious refinement of our elder New England scholarship, and has added to it an intellectual breadth, a mural courage, and a mental vigor which put him conspicuously in the front rank younger school of theologians. 1 I have now, as time allowed me, passed in review the influences, both religious and dogmatic or intel- lectual, which have come upon American Unitarian- ism during the last fifty years, while 1 have been 1 When these - ipoken, Mr. Frothingham washy my side; and the response they culled forth must have convinced him, gratefully, how Little the noble independence "f hu career had estranged him from the affection and honor of his earlier associates. 40 GERMAN INFLUENCE. a close and interested spectator in the field. There is one other thing which seems to me necessary, in order to make this survey complete. I have said already what were the dismay and repugnance with which that influence was first seen to be coming on. To quote from Professor Norton's address on " The Latest Form of Infidelity " : " In Germany the theology of which I speak has allied itself with atheism, with pantheism, and with other irreligious speculations, that have appeared in those meta- physical systems from which the God of Christianity is excluded." Some of you may no doubt remember when the very name German was a sort of reproach, and any suspicion of that line of speculation was a stigma from which it was not easy for the young theologian to get absolved. Yet you have also lived to see one who as a young theologian most eagerly and with warmest sympathy followed that line of speculation, come nearer perhaps than any other man of education among us to the common thought and heart ; for, when I recall those early influences, I seem to find the popular embodiment of them all in James Freeman Clarke. Again, it seems to me clear that the life of re- ligious thought which has come down to us survives not in spite of, but in virtue of, those influences I have attempted to describe. I do not mean that the opinions of the present day are in better har- mony with the true religious life than those which prevailed fifty years ago. I do not think they are. At any rate, it is not for us to disparage that body of opinion which stayed the religious life of Chan- THE OPEN CHANNEL. 41 oing, Tuckerman, and Henry Ware. What I do mean is, that to have Bhut down the [gainst an intellectual ti ad strong as was then setting in, would have been to turn what till then had been an open channel into a little land- 1 creek, and to shut ua out effectually from the large intellectual currents of our age. The alternative in that ould ha to strand in dry-rot, or to effect a breach by violence into the wider waters. There were those then who willing to do either : Norton the one thing, Parker the other thing. But all of us, I think, an- now I that th«- in ia that taken by the younger scholars of that day. - Furness, Hedge, and Clarke being conspicuous in the group, — who set themselves t" deepen the channel and keep it open, and won for us who follow them the free navigation of the And tin- service of theirs turned, a- you will have seen, upon the same point which Schleier- macher made the pivot of his first appeal t<> the' German people : I mean his ion that the religious life — with all there ia in it of beauty and imfort, aspiration th, and hope — is its own evidence and its own exceeding great reward ; and, while it is not without intellectual foundation of its own, is yet independent of all form, of specu- lative opinion. It was (humanly speaking) of in- finite importance for ua at that time that this conviction should he well established Doubtless it baa had the ill effect of making some men loose, reckless perhaps, about holding firmly any clear 42 GERMAN INFLUENCE. conviction at all about an} T thing. But it has had the good effect, with very many more in whom opinion was wavering, to hold them still within the blessed circle of Christian fellowship, till character should be ripened, principle braced, and the mental tone invigorated. Thus it has quickened and refreshed the springs of spiritual life in the veins of our religious organization itself. Besides, as we must remember, the opinions then most dreaded — opinions touching the supernatural and miraculous in the ministry of Jesus — were not opinions invented by theologians, however radical. On the contrary, the most radical of theologians used every art of forced interpretation, of evasion, and of intellectual compromise, to escape the pressure of those opinions. If the old doctrinal view of the incarnation, the atonement, the resur- rection, and the miraculous works of Jesus has in any mind been weakened, dissolved, or washed away, it has been not by the theology which first exhausted every shift to save it, but by the science which in a pitiless flood beat and encroached upon it, in spite of those poor makeshifts. Within these fifty years many of us have had thrust upon us, again and again, first-hand testimony from be- lievers of facts as distinctly miraculous as anything in the New Testament, — facts which one or two hundred years ago would just as distinctly have received that interpretation ; yet we know perfectly well that such testimony, however vouched, would not stand an hour in any civilized court of justice, and so we quietly lay it by, whatever be our private THE BELIEF IN* MIRACL1 4. - '. opinion of its validity. It is just bo with treatment of the miracles of the New Testament Thousands amon< Ave them with the Bame faith, comfort, and reverence as of old But not one of us thinks of defining the line of Christian fellowship by the acceptance of them ; not one of us would stake a single point of his own religious faith upon them; ae of as appeals to them as argument for the spiritual truth, but at most as what that " truth as it l- in Jesus " may help us to a< cept This change in the general intelligence has come about, reluctantly and with infinite protest, during the entire scientific revolution of the last two centu- Ii has not been franklj accepted, among those calling themselves Christians, till comparatively late in the fifty years' period we have been Looking back upon. But it had to reach not our scientific opin- ions merely, but our religious opinions. If the religious life survives among us in Bpite of it, this result is due, in no small part, to the influence upon our elder Unitarianism of German theology from the time of Schleiermacher. III. EOKTY YEAES LATER IN the course which comes to an end to-night, 1 you have been studying one of those large movements of the human mind, whose advance is measured not by years, but by centuries. The line of thought you have followed reaches back some- thing more than five hundred years. Certainly, it is a new heaven and a new earth that have come into view, since the slow and painful dissolution began, of that great structure which we call the Catholic civilization of the Middle Age, — a new heaven, revealed in the system of Copernicus, or through the telescope of Galileo; a new earth, whose law of development, long foreshadowed, comes to be more clearly seen, by Darwin's and Spencer's help, in these last thirty years. And this change in the world's outward aspect is but a type of the more radical revolution in men's religious thought, — a revolution far costlier in conflict, tears, and blood. Its march is not a holi- day journey, but a campaign. Its victories are won by hard and painful strokes. The campaign is not always bloodless. It has not only its solitary vic- 1 An Address delivered before the Brooklvn Association for Moral and Spiritual Education, May 30, 1886, TIIK MARCH OP THOUGHT. 45 tims, like Giordano Bruno, burnt alive in I -thinking ; but its martyr hosl the Huguenots and the English Puritans, who died in the hope of founding a free religious common- wealth. And, ii" doubt, the way will even yet be rough and painful, t<» us or to our children, I the present movement will h. fruit in a fully rered harmony between men's knowledge and their faith, h is well to think of our Bubject thus rting, in and more I ami to feel that we ouj aot, let us hope, quite unworthily) in the which it indicates of our common humanity. That march of thought you have Bought t«> inter- - it has borne upon those tw.> chief interests of men their morals and their religion. A march — in this present view of it — (»f five centuri in out ol bscurity, and has been followed with Blow and hard-won - in thes ■ latter days into a clearer field, we have a better understanding of what it is, and whither it is tending. [I this later phase of it, for about a century hack, that we in particular, the name "liberal movement;' 1 and you have asked me to attempt sunn- n of the point it has come to, and the I presents to-day. 1 am glad, and a littl ■ proud, to have this task .'■d me But, as I come to take it up, I find If in a mood which I should like to explain in advani a For, I must bo plain and easy a busin ss - 1 might have hoped. 46 FORTY YEARS LATER. The earlier phases of this movement, indeed, it is comparatively easy to interpret, as they settle into shape and take their place in history. We are well away from the passion and turmoil that beset them once. We think of them now as steps in an evo- lution determined in advance by the very nature of human thought and life. We feel nothing of the dread and horror the Eeformers felt at the mighty genius of papal Eome, that had created and for a thousand years controlled the Catholic Empire of the West. We calmly balance the right and wrong of the conflict waged against it by the valiant, heroic, austere, and domineering creed which gives a lurid glory to the name of Calvin. We look back, it may be, with easy indifference to the sectarian controversies of sixty years ago, in which the dear- est interests of mankind seemed then to be at stake. We embark, with an easy confidence, on that widen- ing and gracious stream, which bears in its bosom the literature, the science, and the philosophic thought of our nineteenth century ; and these, by their blending with our religious thought, make the very definition of what we know as Liberalism. So far, our view is quite clear and undisturbed. But when we come square up to the hour in which we live and speak, and try to interpret that, we feel a sudden arrest. The abrupt challenge of that ques- tion — What is, after all, the aspect and the promise of this very moment of time ? — must give us pause. The scientific phase we talk of, indeed, quite con- fidently ; but of the social phase, which envelops and controls the scientific, who knows what symp- TWKKTY-FIYE AND BUTT-PTV 47 toms may open on as unawares, this very coming month ? One may be pardoned at twenty-five for feeling very sure of the way be La going, and very sure that the great world is going tl ■■ way too. Look- log as he does with one eye — the eye of ho] through a narrow tube, his vision is more keen than wide. Well for bim that it Lb so! I do not know how he should ever have i I he future, which makes the field where In* must walk and work, if he had t'» Bee in advance all thai he will look back on with tli'- eye of experience before his work is done. Well for him that that future shows to liim in ill'- color of his own hope I Bis aim in life (we will suppose) is idea] and intellectual, not mercenary and base. In thai temper, he easily finds things aa he wants to find them. Faith fur- nishes forth tin' substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. Tim-, " Y«>ur young men Bhall see visions; n and tin-, aa Lord Bacon tells as, is lit'''- contrast against that dim, remote, uncertain glance upon the future, hinted in the phrase that follows: "Your old men shall dream dreams," -knowing, alas! that they are dreams, whose real being i- of the past But the pardon found so easily at twenty-five will not he given him if fort} years Liter he has only the same Banguine confidence, if he still finds the situation as clear ami easy t«> be interpreted as he thought it then. life has brought him in sharp collision with facta and forces, whose existence he had hardly begun to suspect. The "stream of 48 FORTY YEARS LATER. tendency," whose course he thought so smooth and certain, turns out to be a turbulent flood, whose twisting eddies perplex his bearings as he tosses and spins upon its surface. Those forty years will have brought to the front many a revolution of opinion, many a political upheaval, the eclipse of many a shining reputation, many a social change wrought through blind passion, and involving unforeseen events. They will, further, have brought such advance and widening-out of general knowledge as to make the visible sphere he moves in quite another, a wider, a more bewildering thing. His thought moves painfully and slow amid the new surroundings. He envies and admires, it may be, the alacrity with which younger minds find free play in a scene that to him grows dim and unfa- miliar. He begins to feel that a younger hand must take and carry forward that torch of truth on which his grasp is slackening. He is less hardy and single-minded in his view, not because he has less faith, but because he knows more things. He sees more widely than he did, and so sees not so far or sharply in one direction as he thought he did. And his opinion is likely to be the calm assent that this is so upon the whole, rather than the ardent assertion that this is surely so, and cannot he otherwise. Now I stand, in comparison with some of you, at the end of that term of forty years ; and I stancl in something of that attitude of disadvantage. And, to simplify the task you have given me, I must begin by narrowing down my view : not try TO LIMIT THK FIELD. 49 to -pan the wide horizon, but to look understand- inelv at one or two things that lit- very ne the present aspect of the liberal movement i by right to Include a Leal that I canni much as touch upon. Hardly a hinl mple, of those most interesting and kindred phae it among the leaders of liberal thought in England; still less ' he later as] siicriii.iti'.ii, or the instructive criticism tb from the universities of II illand, or tl precious, and heroic Btrri I the- ology that appear here and there — in France tally, but also in Italy and even Spain — in the field bo long given o\ er to tween the spiritual despotism of R >me and blank materialistic unbelief flaming out now and then in hol revolutionary hate. All these would be needed, to lill out an adequate picture of our time, taken from the point of view you b me. Bui 1 am afraid thai a ski • and ambitious would be Ineffective and thin. It is an ungrateful task to summarize ■ volume in the limits of a half-hour's essay. And because haw applied to me, who have Bpent th< years, and more, in living contact with certain d phases of the liberal movement, and i a far-away study of it as a whole, I -hall deal only that pan of the wide field in which I have been an interested eyewil i I in a small a worker. It is only with that small segment of our Bubject that I propose to deal; only there, if anywhere, my word can be of any use. 50 FORTY YEARS LATER. Taking this point of view, then, I shall briefly trace some lines of comparison between the present and earlier stages of the liberal movement in these three respects, — its temper, its thought, and its aim ; and with this I shall mingle as I may some consideration of those practical aspects of it most plainly bearing upon the future. I. And first, as I look back upon that lapse of time, I do not seem to find liberalism so light of heart as forty years ago. Nay, I easily fancy that then the world itself was younger, and the spirit of the time was younger, as well as we who were living our youth then. Grave events, cruel disappointments, some of the darkest tragedies of history, have stamped their mark upon this period of time. How easily and how eagerly the human heart looks for the present coming of an age of gold ! How heavy and quick the shadow falls upon that fair vision ! Some of you may recall the glow of hope that greeted the revolutions of 1848, that year of wonders, whose promise of liberty and peace was followed so soon by such thunderstorms and shocks of war. That type shows us in the world of politics what we so often find in the world of morals and thought. It seems impossible that with anybody the view of things should be so roseate and cheerful now as it was with almost everybody then. Our time, in com- parison with that, looks anxious, critical, and full of doubt. It is a long way from the serene gospel according to Emerson, in which all the higher faiths are taken for granted, to the labored theistic 3 OPTIMIS 51 arguments which are the last product of the cord School. It is a long way from the easy op- timism that explored with bo confident touch our chief social horrors, drunkenn ■•. and crime, to that sterner mood in which we live, tem- pered by the fire and blood of civil war, or taught by the Blow revolution in - ad the s that has been proceeding It is a long from that fair Arcadia of Brook Farm, with its harmless socialistic theories and rather futile idealizing of daily toil, to the obst labor-battles of this last month, and the red-handed, death-dealing anarchism of Chicago. The first aspect, then, in which the libera] move- ment presents to my mind at this time, is the contrast that it shows to the ad optimistic idealism of forty 3 Looked oally, the change is a little saddening. Bui if we look to the temper of mind that meets it, we find that i healthy and a promising change. The manly and brave temper is tli.it which chooses to l""k in the face and see the worst of them, rather than brood upon them in the illusive glow of Utopian dreams. Anything like advance to b bet- ter knowledge of the situation is had by dealing first-hand with the facta of human nature, includ- ing its malign and dangerous • 11 as its radiant possibilities. That. 1 think, is more the temper of liberalism in our day than it was forty vears ago. Those darker facts of men's life, those evil pas E tin 1 mind, are what religion- ists of earlier time hated and fought against as 52 FORTY YEARS LATER. enemies of God, desiring to see their face openly. And in this regard, we have better understanding than earlier liberals had of the heroic side of that elder faith. For, in its first form, religious liberalism is simply a movement away from the creeds and institutions of the past, with the heavy bondage they laid upon the human spirit, toward the breadth, the freedom, the wealth of the world's larger life. The fresh consciousness of this is a keen sense of emancipa- tion, it is the joy of a new-found liberty. Deliver- ance from the ancient terror, — terror before the inexorable Judge whom theologians have depicted ; terror of devils that assailed the soul in all un- guarded hours ; terror of the eternal hell, whose fiery torment has so been held out before the naked conscience ; terror at the thought of blasphemy in casting off beliefs that have grown to be flat unrea- son, while the mind yet shrinks from looking its honest thought in the face, — deliverance from that manifold " terror of the Lord " is enough, at first, to fill the soul with a great joy. It seems, for the time, as if it were alone ample to supply the fulness of the religious life. Only leave that vague dark dread behind, and the whole soul is flooded with kindly light. That is the first flush of feeling in the new eman- cipation ; and that was, very largely, the spirit of the younger liberalism with which we compare our own. It was as if we had abolished those dark facts of life, of which the old dogma was but the symbol ; as if there were no longer any such thing THE CHANGS FOB <■ 53 epravity in human nature, when we had denied the d uption ; re no divine wrath that blazed against wrongdoing, when once we had got over our dread of a future hell A radiant humanity found nothing anywhere but good Misery and pain, it thought, nishe I at a word out of the conditions of men's Uvea Ah: but it forgot that chaos horror of men's passions which have furnished the beginning the imagery, the apprehension, and the foretaste i aal d n. We have learned, too, thai religioi : in the soul, is its own joy and exceeding great reward Bere, too, we have understanding ancient creed With all its narrowness and error, we still see that while it was honestly and bravely held, it brought t<> it- adhe- rents :m heroic temper t-> fight stoutly .1- the Lord's champions in the battle against wrong. It brought, of heart and a peace which ] . understanding, from tin- men that it v. religion, — that it meant the surrender of the soul to that which was worshipped as highest, holiest, best That heroism remained, that joy and peace remained, of the faith that had hern as the soul of gOOdne88 in an evil understand its loss; for the old foes have been about US with new fac B. And, in tl. years since the early flush of our newly emancipated liberalism, there i> n<>t. bo much t<» boast of our own 3 in dealing with those "Id foes ;i- to 54 FORTY YEARS LATER. give us any very complacent sense of the superiority of our ways over the former ways. And so the pres- ent temper of liberalism is soberer, more modest of itself, less apt and confident in its claim, less proud of its achievement ; and it is well for us that it is so. II. The second aspect of the liberal movement now, in comparison with forty years ago, is that it seeks a scientific rather than a sentimental, mystic, or idealistic expression of itself. Any movement of religious thought implies these two things. It aims, first, to state with authority what is the deepest ground of trust and the most imperative law of conduct: that is the sphere of personal religion, dealing with the individual heart and conscience. It aims, secondly, to train and stimulate the intelli- gence, by setting forth, both to the mind and im- agination, the largest and most general view we are able to get of the universe and of human life in its broadest relations : that is the sphere of religion intellectually, dealing with the speculative under- standing. Now, regarding the former, I do not see that religion as a spiritual force in men's lives has changed in the least from what it was when the Vedic Hymns or the Hebrew Psalms or the trage- dies of JEschylus were composed. Life brings men face to face, now as then, with the same great won- der and glory of the heavens, with the same stormy passions or gentler affections of the heart, with the same bitter experiences of pain and grief and guilt, with the same dark problem and mystery of the human lot, As to either of these, I do not see that our attitude, morally regarded, has changed at all KM since the jorded thought. The only solution to the enigma of life, as it touches us ; inally, La that which consists in the reconcilia- tion of heart and to the conditions of each marts particular lot in life. The key of this reconciliation is found, now in the words " obedience and trust and help." Thes have to do with life itself, not with our thoughts about their meaning i- to the 1. inder- standing; the method they indicate i> tip- method nut of soience, but of faith. By that method, and by that alone, able t" Bolve the problem <. Now, it i- just within these fortj that science has made its most brilliant effort, and -•■••ins t<> have all hut fulfilled it- promise, to do that thing. Consider, for a moment, the change that has come about in our mental habit Fort ago the most advanced religious thinking was purely of tin- type known as transcendental; that is, it was speculation upon data and postulates furnished by tip- religious sentiment The three great words which more than any other marked the advent and set the key of that phase "f the liberal movement were spoken in Emerson's "Nature" in 1836, his appeal to the ''American Scholar" in 1837, and his Divinity School Address in 1838. The last two of I 1 as they were Bpoken; and — though 56 FOETY YEAES LATEE. dimly and confusedly, out of my deep ignorance — I felt with a sense I can yet recall the breath and pulse of the new era then opening upon us. And I do not yet see that that fresh inspiration has lost its charm or its power or its use. But, as soon as we think of what now appeals to our chief intellectual interest, we find ourselves in another atmosphere, — chill, gray, and bracing, when we compare it with that warmth and glow. We have lost the secret of that willing and radiant faith. We yield belief only where fact has had the verifica- tion of scientific tests ; we feel assured only where experience has bodied forth the meaning of the word. Thus the great and certain verities of the religious life, as they were then thought of, — God, Freedom, and Immortality, — we submit to tests which no one demanded then, and bestow upon them interpretations which no one would have admitted then. Theories of the universe, which formerly were purely speculative or religious, — the origin of the visible heavens, the development of life upon our planet, the law of the Providence that rules in human history ; theories of life, dealing with the laws of health, the laws of character, the laws of sanity, the laws of population, wealth and pov- erty, the laws of crime, — are constructed on scien- tific data and dealt with by scientific methods. For providential rule, we have the law of evolution ; for the " sacred history " of our younger days, we have the study of " comparative religions," which becomes as mere a branch of human science as that of com- parative philology; and so with all the rest. SCIENTIFIC Tin:: This, I Bay, La the change which has bout within the recollectioD of Bome of us, marking strongly one present a liberal movement On thf whole, it is better to welcome this phac our religious thought, and make the best of it, than to criticise or vituperate it as Carlyle and Ruskin done so hitterly. 1 Bui we may say of it that it attempts too much. Take the two phrases most commonly in use to express the conscious attitude of men's thought toward the highest of intellectual problems, — "a Scientific Theism "and "the Edea of God," — and I think we may both of them that, bo far as it is a religious theism we mean, and not merely a cosmic speculation, il premises, it underlies our | i *, and makes a supplement t<» our deductions: like Newton's " s. holium " at the end of his I w bich nivr^ mi eloquent Btatemenl of bis own belief, but ertainly not proved by his differential calculus. So tlw form of theistic argument most familiar t»» us at this day may be regarded as the cropping out conviction implanted by a devout Christian train- ing rather than a logical deduction from the prem- bhat have been assumed. And the result, upon the whole, we may find t" he this: that religion, with its implicit faiths, abides as a primary element 1 Thus from Mr. Kit-Liu : "I know <>f nothing that hat taught the youth of our ti <'xc.pt that their fathers ami their mothers winkles ; that tin- world began in accident and will end in darkness ; that honor is a folly, ambition a virtue, charity a rice, poverty a crime, an. I rascality the means of all weal the sum of all wisdom. Both Mr. Carlyle and I knew perfectly well all along what would he the outcome of that education." 58 FORTY YEAES LATER. in human nature ; that it must be accepted, where it is accepted at all, on its own merits, and not on those of any logic ; that natural science must waive the attempt to solve that problem of the universe which has proved beyond the grasp of speculative philosophy. Thus we learn that the true province of Keligion must be experience and duty of the life that now is, not vain strivings to fathom the Eternal and Unknown ; and the true province of Science will be to explain not the ultimate ground of things, or the primary motive of right and duty, but the real conditions under which men's work on earth may be more effectually done. III. And so we come to a third aspect of the liberal movement, more characteristic and more full of powerful appeal to our hope and fear than either of the others. I mean, that the questions it raises are not those of theory, but of life, — questions of ethics and questions of social order. There is a singular consent, all along the line, in turning away from interests merely speculative, and facing the problems of human life. Not merely that societies for " ethical culture " take the place of societies pro- fessedly religious ; not merely that greater attention is given, in pulpits and religious journals, to the social questions of the day ; but that, with multi- tudes, their real religion, the only religion they pre- tend to know, is that which deals with secular concerns and is inspired with secular passion. A man's religion is that which makes to him the ideal thing in life ; that which he believes in so heartily that he holds any other gain, or life itself, cheap in 3TION8 Of LI IF. NOT THEORY. comparison with it. Tims, that which maki nihilist or an anarchist ready to Buffer and d his horrible creed is the same religious frenzy that inspires a cannibal war-dance, and that made the priests of Baal howl aloud and gash themselves with knives. The fervent passion of a " Nationalist," whose true religion is [reland, is toe Bame thing with t li<' Messianic p s, which salted into a symbol, and made the central fact of religious history. I s ci ed of Calvin, for which men freely fought and bled three hundred 3 >, has faded to a mere chimera; it is no longer a genuine religion — that is. a flaming and dominant passion of the human heart — with anybody in our day. What has come to take its place is not the serene platitudes of a speculative theology ; not the "cosmic theism "or the M scientific theism" which builds itself up, as an intellectual deduction, upon the foundations of modern knowl- edge. It is rather the keen interest, the patient service, th 1 Bacrifii f personal indulgence, the spirit kindling to moral enthusiasm and a passion of self-devotion, that drafts and enlists men champions in the battle for right, for truth, for human welfare. Just in proportion as the fin old controversy fade, as the mind falls back, baffled and weary, from its search after the infinite and unknowable, just in that proportion the faith and zeal, of which the human heart has shown capable, come to be devoted to that attainable ideal which in pious phrase we call the Kingdom of ( • I npon earth. 60 ' FORTY YEARS LATER. At least, that great hope which lays hold upon the future, even (we may say) the possibility of any religion at all for mankind in the coming time, seems to depend on the vital reality of that phase in our movement which is ethical and social. It has nothing to do with denial of or indifference toward those sublimer conceptions, — a Living God as the soul of things, and Immortal Life as the inspiration of men's hope : on the contrary, the more vividly these are conceived, the deeper and surer the motive of that service of humanity. But " pure religion and undefilecl," as James says, consists in that very service, not in any dreams or speculations or opin- ions of men. And, of that liberal movement we are studying, the most hopeful aspect is that it has en- tered upon that phase. It were a waste of time to cite here the innumer- able illustrations that appear in every channel where there is the least activity of religious thought. But our business is with that which is properly included in " the liberal movement." Wherever, indeed, those human feelings and motives have colored the exposition of religion, there we find a liberalism of heart wider than any creed and embracing many. But it has often happened that religious thinkers, professedly liberal, have been the pioneers and the shapers-out of work taken up then and pushed by other hands. Such work may be semi-secular, like education and prison-reform, which got their first great impulse so ; or it may be purely humanitary and moral. I have just received from that veteran leader in religious liberalism, Francis William New- RELIGION OV HUMANITY. I 1 man, now just closing his eighty-first year, — a man whose singular intellectual candor an tivity of thought go along with an equal fen spirit touching all human needs, — a pamphlet in which he Bets forth, with more than youthful ardor uviction, the five "new crusades" of oui [Is of model ty, — slavery, now happily extinct ; drunken] tute right and fostered by executive favor; the shelter of vice under lawa especially offensive insulting to women ; that Bpecia] horror of capitals assailed by the Whit i I. gue; and tnormous guilt of w i : , court of appeal for nations, [nail these — and much in the peril that comes with tin- new conditio modern industry, the distress and alarm of the great labor-battle, the " red terror" irchy, the chronic task of disinfecting our party politics we Bee the need both of tl •. calm guidance <»f the scientific spirit, and of a deep religious devotion of the hearl to human welfare. These things, and Buch as these, are in out day 1 tasks of " the Religion of Humanity." It is in keeping with the spirit of our liberal move- ment from the beginning, that practical and not theoretical in! should be its main concern ; that it should more and mure become an ethical and social, not a speculative movement ; thai its learning shall not degenerate to pedantry, f the Revolution, whose patriot neighbors made life a burden to him in consequence. To the eldest of his sis boys there fell, as by birthright, the privilege of going t i while a b1 ardy youn , Levi, brain and hand, was apprenticed to a master mason ; but at the age of t wenty, or thereabout, laying down brick and trowel, resolutely won hia way to the only higher education then known, and became a professor of logic and metaphysics in Barvard Col- and the father of our eminent theologian and teacher, the subject of this sketch. The son kept in bis mind a pretty image of hia maternal grand- mother, daughter of President Holyoke i I II irvard, whom tradition pictured as a bright young girl, standing on an insulated stool and holding an elec- tric chain, while Bhe offered her Laughing lip in challenge to whatever daring youth should advance to touch. Experimental Bcience was young and gay in those good days! A great-uncle on the same side was Edward Augustus Bolyoke, a physician of Salem, who died in 1829 at something over ilu- ace 64 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. of one hundred, — a man of methodical ways, ad- dicted to scientific observation, and of a repute in his profession which, I suppose, gave to his young relative, who knew him, the feeling, which he never quite outgrew, that in choosing another path he had forsaken his own true vocation. Of such parentage and antecedents Frederic Henry Hedge was born, on the 12th of December, 1805, two years younger than Emerson, three years younger than Eurness, his two nearest life-long friends. Of his school days little can be known, since his schol- arly calling was declared so early that, as he has told me, he never had a purer delight in letters than in committing to memory, at seven, the Eclogues of Virgil in the original, and at ten he knew by heart long passages of Homer in Greek. This means that he could have had no companions in study, and no class rivalry to cramp or cheer. But a young man of uncommon genius and scholarship, George Ban- croft, then in college, became an inmate of the father's family, and tutor to the boy ; and it shows in the father a singular confidence in both, that, when the boy was thirteen and the tutor a graduate of eighteen, they were sent together across the ocean to become, the one a student of philosophy, and the other a pupil in a classical school, in Ger- many, where, absolutely among strangers, he passed the next four years. I once persuaded him, when he had pleased himself for some weeks in recalling incidents of this period, to put them in the form of an autobiographical sketch. It was in the interval just before his grievous malady of the spring of AT SCHOOL IN GERMANY. ] 7; and it was in a respite of that lingi torment that he gave me the few pages th I low — the only consecutive memorials that lm has left behind, of a career in which there was bo much of interest to tell : — At the age of thirteen, bavin- first been duly in- stitute. 1 in the mysterii i rman language at a private pension, I was pul I ium in north Germany, situated in a romantic valley among the southward-si retching Bpurs of the rlarz, perm by a small stream fordable in summer, I to a roaring torrenl by the melting inter, and washing the base of the II , a mountain a what less than a thousand feet m In : The school buildings, a con ogles with other structures, including a church, had been a monastery: the boys' i- tretching two or three corridors, wei formerly occupied by the monks, [uare, with little bedi They had stone Qoors and were heated by to every tWO rOOm8, the mouth open:: the corridor and closed by a lock of which the factor kept, the key. Underneath the portion of the building inhabited by the officers and scholars was the crypt, lined with perpendicular tombefc faced with an effigy in relief of the sainted brother who slumbered beneath. Through this crypt the truant boy, admitted 1 ■;. , ed as janitor, had to paS8, with such COU] he might, when after dark the upper doors were closed. The School church was also the church of the Flecken, the small town that leaned to the cloister, though 5 66 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. governed by a magistrate of its own. The students with the teachers occupied the transept, the towns- people the nave. My coming was awaited with much curiosity by the youths who were to be my fellow-students. They expected to see a copper-colored savage : they were met by a boy as white as the whitest of their own race, with no more of the savage than belongs to the boy in every clime. And yet these fellows were acquainted with the history of this country, and could have passed a better examination concerning it than the average of American boys in those days. They knew that the people of the United States were English, not Indians. But such is the difference between book- knowledge and ideas practically appropriated and assimilated by the mind, and such was the glamour attending the word " America ; " in the early years of this century, the geographical confusion of ideas respecting this somewhat extended continent is in- credible. When about to leave Germany on my homeward journey, I was requested by a learned professor to make inquiry concerning his wife's brother who had emigrated to America: when last heard from, he was in Surinam. My schoolmates gathered around the little stranger. They made much of me. The hazing usually prac- tised on new-comers was forborne, instead of which, with true German Wissbegier, they assailed me with questions about tropical plants and tropical animals, as if all America lay in the torrid zone. The staff of instructors consisted of the director, the rector, the conrector, three collaborators, and a French teacher of his own language, who resided in THK SCHOOL DISCIPLINE. the /' ' . The I Erector Brobm s\ iglish with ease, and was more inclined to grant my requests if] ; him in that I The official ii >n pupils and I outside of the lecture-room I communion, was conducted in Latin. For example, if a Btudent wished to be I from attendance on th< 3 of the day, be aegrotiri ailed it; that is, he pleaded illness, — it might be real or it might Lammed, -and on that ground wrote a letter addressed to all the teach circulated among them by our \ , on this ■ Yiri honoratissimi ! It milii aegrotanti (or <>l» capil purgandi CSUSa) bodic a lectioiiilui.s votris ;ibe>se li.-.-at r«»^o |H«to.juc. rub at. ]*>ut this privilege bad its pri I must not leave tfa do dinner but a plal ip and a piece of dry bread, [fhe really ill, what needed he more '.' it he shammed, let him I consequences, which t"<>r a healthy boy with good appetite and love of museul.r might be supposed to oounterbalan< of idleni In like manner, sen- punishment adj : bya teacher was given in Latin. Of punishment there three grades, — Ccurem, loss of dinner, Kl Letention within doors, an ration. Accordingly, the sentence would read : Schulz or Kurz ob negligeutiam^ or ob contumaciam^ or, if the Latin for any particular offence did not come readily to mind, <>b causas sibi cognitas, hodie />r/io <• or per triduurn nr eoenobio >s<>it, i ■ n>nn 68 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. subeat. The career, or prison, was a room in the attic in which the student was locked up for one or two days, with tasks sufficient to occupy the solitary hours and prevent the morbid action of the mind. The discipline, if superficially strict, was not searching and not quickening. Our rooms were visited several times each day, always twice in the evening, — once at nine, when the teacher whose turn it was came to our desks to see what we were doing, and again at eleven to see that we were in bed. On Sundays we were marshalled into church ; but, once there, devout attention to the service, if expected, was certainly not enforced. A teacher in the op- posite side of the transept was supposed to be watching us ; but the inspection did not prevent our conversing freely or amusing ourselves with a novel, except in winter, when the bitter cold kept us in a state of torpor amounting almost to suspended ani- mation. Such cold within doors I had never before experienced, and have never experienced since. The gymnasium supplied us with two meals daily, one at noon and one at six p. m. We sat at long tables, each table presided over by one of the teachers. We were well served, and had no reason to complain of our fare, although complaints were not wanting. At the upper table one of the Primaner read aloud ac- cording to monastic tradition. But the books selected for that use were not works of monkish or any other theology: they were not chosen with a view to edifi- cation, but for entertainment solely, mostly works of fiction. Our breakfasts we had to provide for ourselves out of our weekly pocket-money. Each student furnished himself with an apparatus for cooking with charcoal, SCHOOL DELIGH and with Buch table furniture as he could afford. cooking was a pleasant occupation; but the washing of the rously discharged. Only when a cup became - crusted at found necessary to cleanse Li I Borne of the boys became adepts Id brewing chocolate, and invited othi I their proficiency in that useful art \ I colate • was a anient, to which of ;i Sunday afternoon the knowing would ask their friends. Ii' the discipline was in some i variously relieved. Sometimes we were taken on a walk to the nean ibout five uw. play or an elephant One of our t aula fancy for pyrotechnics, and gave as an occasional en- tertainment in that kind. 1 dents were allowed to gii I, to which ladies within a circuit of ten miles were invited! but none of tin- other Bex, the youths themselves officiatii partners. The dancing lasted all night, relieve intervals by drinking of bishop 1 said other refection, which caused a good deal of aegrotiren on the follow- ing day. [ndeed, if I remember rightly, the coeding the hall u d a holiday. A marked peculiarity of this gymnasium wai organization of the students . inde- pendent of the teachers, and suppoet I unknown to them. Boys who had reached the age ni sixl and who had spent a year and a half at the school, constituted a senate called the ■• Y exercised an absolute and ondispul ■ over tho 1 A weak concoction of spiritaooa liquors. 70 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. younger portion. There was a written code of laws, to which each new-comer was required to sign his allegiance. He then received his cloister name, con- ferred by the veterans, — a sobriquet suggested by some personal peculiarity, to which he must respond when called by a senior, though not allowed in return to address a senior of a year's standing by the cloister name which that senior bore among his peers. The code contained provisions for the protection of the weak against the oppression of his stronger mates. If a boy was bullied by another for whom he was physically no match, he had only to say to his perse- cutor, Ich chasse Sie, " I bid you leave me," and the intercourse between the two was stopped at once. For if, after that magic formula had been pronounced, the bully should continue his persecution, an appeal to the veterans would subject him to a sound thrashing. The non-intercourse between the two was usually of short duration, but could only be terminated by an offer of reconciliation by the chasse?*, who would say to the chassed, Soil es ivieder gut sein ? " Shall we be friends again ? " If a student had been guilty of meanness, such, for example, as cheating at play or informing against a fellow-student, the veterans in council decreed that he be sent to Coventry, or, as the phrase now is, "boycotted/' for a definite term. Who- ever should speak to him during that period would be visited with the same penalty. Boys under the age of twelve in Germany address each other with the second person singular, du; but the gymnasium brings a transition to adult speech. The gymnasiast is addressed and addresses his mates with the customary third person plural, Sie ; but if two of these youngsters are smitten with a mutual liking, SCHOOL tNSTRUCTION. 71 tlioy agree to use the more familiar second j singular: Sollen wir uns du n I • that such treaties of amity were m formed when wine was circulating. But they sur- vived the festive hour. A an evidence of the democratic spirit which pre- vails in academic life, I may mention that, though many of the boys in this Bchool w< of noble- men, and some of them of the highesl rank, no dis- crimination was made by pupil <>r teacher in fav< these high-born youths. [f the discipline, as I have said, was nol qui neither was the instruction fructifying. For oung, it partook too much of the univi method of teaching by lecturt . T< i little pn tion was required of the pupiL Many of these, it is true, took ootes of the lectures with all the assiduity so caustically recommended by Mephisl when he personates l i I in the play; but they wen examined on their notes, and the question of promo- tion to a higher class or detention in a lower was determined by no very rigorou • 11', I seem on looking hack to have mad.- hut little pr< while there, except in writing Latin, ti. that was rigorously enforced. Alter nearly two pent in this school, I was transferred to Sohulpfoite. And what a change! Bchulpforte was then, as it is still, a Prussian ii tion, and manifested in its discipline, its vitality, its thoroughness, the care of the best government of modern time. It wa^> a pel of that government, and was often visited by the minister of instruction in person. It lies on the Saale, about thirty miles from Leipsic and sixteen from Weimar. It constitutes a 72 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. community by itself, independent of any municipal control. The main building, or collection of attached buildings , including a church, like the other school had once been a monastery. Other detached edifices, among them the house of Amtmann, or purveyor, had sprung up around the central mass. An extensive playground, with bowling-alleys and gymnastic ap- paratus, formed part of the establishment. The whole was enclosed with a wall of a mile or more in circumference. This wall no one of the alumni proper was without special permission allowed to pass. The term alumni proper requires explanation. For Prussian citizens, Schulpforte was a free school. A limited number of Prussian youth were educated at the cost of the government. These were the alumni proper. They had no single rooms, but, when not in the class-rooms, were distributed through several spacious apartments, presided over by a senior who superintended their studies and gave them special in- struction in addition to their class-work. At night they were lodged in large dormitories. But, in addition to the Prussian alumni, the school was open to boys from other States, either German or foreigners, who were called Kostganger (boarders). They were domesticated with the professors, and had rooms of their own or shared by a single chum, and paid for board and tuition. I had the good fortune to be boarded by Dr. Koberstein, who has written the most complete history of German literature. My chum was young Baron von Muuchhausen, nephew of the veritable but unveracious story-teller of that name. The staff of instructors consisted of a rector, a con- BCHULPFOBTE. r, five professors, and four adjuncti, or tut a considerably Larger number of teachers than Harvard could boast in in; To added the pastor, the physician, the Kapellmeister, or director of mu8ic, a drawing-master, a dancing-m and in sammei a swimmipg-master. The course of study, though moi pur- sued, was much tie- same as In 'other gymnasia; but special attention was given to Greek composition ami to Latin ■-• rses. \ an illustration of the former, I may mention thai Pfortm r ti G Iphigenie into I >f which translation a copy was nted i" the poet by a commit I upon him. The making of Latin lire- ments of the semi-annual examination. The m poetica was dictated in portions adjusted to the rank of each class. A Primaner had, I think, a hundred hexameters to exhibit. The one who accomplished this Pensum first Bignalized his triumph by ringing the great hell. This was done twice while I was there by Wilhelm Etanke, brother of the historian, who was also a graduate of Schulpforte, Saving gone SO tar. the tired hand Stopped, ami refused t<> take up the task again : once more it was holden "by a sort of tat-. II commissioned me to do what I would with it. and even dictated a few sentences as a sort ofsequeL Tim substance of them was that at Schulpforte his mind opened to a knowl- edge of what is meant by a life of thought and letters; and, above all, that " here I came to know Goethe." But an anecdote or two may Berve to piece out the too fragmentary sketch. Tim- it is 74 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. odd in this day to hear of his long walk in the country with his tutor, who would keep up his pupil's spirits by a glass of undiluted gin ; and the tales are wonderful of the aptness of the more advanced students in their exercises of Latin verse ; and he showed me once, in the " album " of those days (a portfolio of very modest engravings), the autograph of his school-friend and chum, Carl von Munchhausen, nephew and heir of that veracious traveller, the far-celebrated baron. Munchhausen was the better mathematician, and Hedge the better linguist, so that they were often helpful to each other in their school tasks ; and it happened once that when the former was to be "confirmed" by the Lutheran rite, and was much put to it how to w T ord his indispensable confession in Latin, the draft was truthfully and skilfully composed for him by his friend. Truly, one might say, a school-boy has not lived in vain, to whose lot it has fallen to write " the confessions of Baron Munchhausen " ! A more serious event in this friendship befell, when the two agreed together to swim a somewhat powerful river. The Saxon boy was the sturdier, and came safely across, when turning he saw his companion the American gasping helpless in the stream, and just about to drown : he succeeded in dragging him out, quite unconscious ; and, ignorant what to do, stretched him on the warm sand, where that and the sun's rays presently brought him back to life. Ee turning to America at the end of 1822, he was first beguiled into a tedious boat-passage down the Elbe ; then long kept in port by the sickness of the AT IIAKV Alii) COLLI ii of the ] r little ship ; then, when the tain had died in Hamburg, to put t with an incompetent mate for command a Ion" and terrible winter voyage t<» New Xork. II.. nut c.»!, ■ an»l remembered most distinctly the mine when they were becalmed in the Gulf Stream and reduced t<> a pint a day, and his effort t<> wash in water baled from the sea, which me and horrible t" be touched, - this, with tin- overland journey borne, when he had to trudge age-coach through the blocking snow- drifts of Worcester County. Little hints like these help till out the picture "t" tin- cheery, sturdy, valiant Lad of seventeen, fighting his way through Buch cold welcome t<> the home where his academic honors were to ht' W "]|. The date of his graduation ;it Harvard College, in ilass of Charles Francis Adams and Horatio Greenough, in 1825, very nearly touches the high- • mark <»t" that wave of intellectual enthu which for tii- 'Tati<»n ulenl iti<*d the college with the beet life of New England more closely than, probably, it has ever been befoi since. The rise of that wave was first made plainly visible in the installation "t* President Kirkland in 1810; its flow included the colli 1 it. Frothingham, Walker, Bancroft, and Em- erson; it^ shining crest was when, in 1 124, Ed- ward Everett, in his Phi Bets Kappa oration, paid eloquent homage t-» Lafayette a- the L r nr-t of tin 4 nation and a hero of two world-, — a moment which 76 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. is still looked back to, by living witnesses, as the most splendid in that period of their young pride and hope. It will be noticed that the character of this mental epoch was almost purely literary, rhetor- ical, or philosophic : of those just named, President Walker was the only one who gave his mind seri- ously to study the scientific method in its effect on the intellectual life ; and he was by profession a theologian and moralist, not himself a man of scien- tific method as a thinker. All the best intellectual work of the period was shaped and toned by the exigencies of popular speech, rather than the severer logic of the Schools. Even grave chapters of his- tory, theology, or metaphysics, in such hands, be- came a series of eloquent addresses rather than steps in a methodical essay. Even the severely disciplined mind of such a scholar as Dr. Hedge was at its best in the four or five noble orations which mark the culminating moments of his career; and his first public appearance in the field was as the poet of his class on Commencement Day. After passing through the regular course of the- ological study, he was settled as minister of West Cambridge (now Arlington) in 1829. Here, in his six years' ministry, he developed by resolute disci- pline the mental habit that remained with him through life. A sturdy build, and a fibre tenacious rather than supple, marked the character of both mind and body. Alert and no way sluggish (that vice of scholars), he was a vigorous pedestrian till near the end of his days, and the strains of endur- ance he underwent in his various travelling experi- His LITBRABY HABIT. ,7 U a man of letters in these days. But the daily 1; that <■{' a laborious student, — which means that he w pable oi the physi in o! an amount <»f confine- ment t<> books which few meu are equal to. Ami it iii''. hi- l'M», in his case : v unusual strain of laborious and painstaking literary composition. Tip- amount of mechanical labor in preparhi the" pulpit wa ter then than now; and, while exceptionally faithful in this task-work, he ■ always Blowly ami with effort Quite in with the Bwifi and brilliant movement of hi- emi- contemporary and friend, Dr. Hartineau, who made himself master of shorthand, that his pen might keep pace with the electric rapidity of his thought, every sentence, every Line, was traced with deliberation, — nay, revised and interlined with scrupulous care. There was none of the labor-saving that comes with the modern way of dictating t<> an amanuensis or type-writer, none "f the slovenly pen- manship which is said sometimes t<> !"■ tic cruel tation of men of letters. In the hundi pages of his manuscript that I have read, formal familiai- epistle, I do not remember ever hesitating at a Bingle illegible word "i- [y written let- ter: th.' pages of tic autobiographic fragment just given arc as scrupulously penned as a school composition; no trembling <>!' the hand, even, is discernible, though written far past eighty, in the lassitude ami drea I of threatening infirmity. This firmness "t' fibre, this resolute temper, i- strongly characteristic l>"th of the scholar and tin- man. 78 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. As a set-off to this laborious habit of mind, lie had the rare gift — which we have never known in equal degree except in the case of Edward Everett — of mastering with verbal accuracy, by a single read- ing, the form and phrase of a lung elaborate dis- course. The advantage this gave him on the public platform, on formal occasions, has been often felt ; and all the more, because (as we may recall of the eulogy on Bellows and Emerson 2 ) it was attended with so easy a mastery of matter as well as form that his mind played freely, in variation of the theme, as the point, the phrase, or the illustration might suggest itself at the moment, I have never understood why he did not avail himself of this remarkable power in the ordinary exercises of the pulpit : possibly it involved a grasp and a strain that he did not care to put forth too often. But among the very last of his public utterances there were two occasions — in Providence and in Phila- delphia — when, distrusting his eyesight for the evening service, after speaking in the usual way in the morning, he secured by that forthputting of memory the freedom of speech he craved. These habits of thought and speech, along with the gathering of great treasures of book-lore, we may suppose to have been the attainment of those six years of his first pastoral charge. At the age of thirty, with powers ripened to self-reliance, and with rare wealth of intellectual resource, he became min- ister of the Independent Congregational Church in 1 These are given, with the author's revision, as an Appendix to " Our Liberal Movement." BAHOOR. — visits TO KUBOPE. B >r, Maine, then a p] mote and hard to .' but lull of the. intelligence, the enterprise, in a brilliant future, which we be n more accustomed since to with rowth of om W stern The fifteen spent here not on! I t<» develop big po* a more vigorous independence <>f thought and will than they might, possibly, have grown to in an older community, hut were tin' ]"-ii<».l when the position he has bo long held before the public was firmly taken ami broadly recognL Lmongwarm friends and ' rnera in the circle of his local ministry there was an ease and joy in t : ion of his own ripening thought ; while the special contribution he could bring, from the intimate home knowledge he had "t' < ' Tiium, made his moat char and valuable gift to the larger movement of thought that illuminated those days. The first of three later visits t'> Europe for the pu I study and travel, and of by far the deepest influence in Bhaping his riper thought, was in the year 1847. Spending the ensuing winter m Rome, he not only became an appreciative Btudent "t" Italian art, thus enriching his culture by a vein which iik »f his. wIi.mh I knew afterwards, wai ealmed f<>r a week off the headland <>f Penol i the return from Boston ; ami tlm overland journey in winter had its full share ««f arctic hardships ami perils : he has told me <>f toiling through half the night to help right th< - ten when apt keep it from being blockaded in the mow-drifts. 80 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. 'ate protest of Pope Pius IX. against the demands of the revolutionists : Non xoglio, non debbo, non posso ! — words which he was fond of quoting as he had heard them from those sonorous lips. The delight of that one deep draught of the intellectual life of Italy, and then of moving with the ease of native speech in the scholarly circles of revisited Germany, made one of the treasures of a memory ever fresh, during the years that followed. With his rare intellectual gifts and great wealth of literary culture, there was no one farther than he from the dilettante spirit which cherishes literature or art for its own sake, apart from its higher uses. It was his fixed habit of mind to regard those things not merely as good and beautiful in themselves, but as instruments of service. It was highly character- istic of this temper of mind that he disdained the clamor, and wholly dissented from the argument, that demanded international copyright on the ground of property-right, holding in scorn whatever seemed to turn into a trade the high vocation of authorship. The temper was that of the teacher, the preacher, the interpreter of thought or beauty to the higher life of men. This vocation was very early rec- ognized in him, and it was rewarded in his long career with every honor which service like his can win. Yet, in the simplicity of his judgment of him- self, he always doubted whether he ought not to have followed his first inclination to a physician's life ; and always regretted that he was born too early (as he thought) to be baptized into the newer life of Science, instead of that almost purely literary MENTAL TEMPEB AND BESOUJ 81 and philosophic training, in which moat person the, noblest field for tl While he was born to the birthrig full enjoyment of companionship in the most brilliant intelli ra of New England, he brought t<> ii a gift of bia own, which no other man either r could, — the gift (as we might almost term it j of two mother-tongues, English and German being about equally familiar to him from his Bchool-day& h was not alone the Literary kno 1 1 srman, in which many Bcholara may have rivalled him; but he Learned the tongue as a boy amongst boys, when the greal i German Literature was -till Bhining in it- mellow afternoon, while t loethe, w -till the object of that revering homage which is never, perhaps, bo Loyally felt as by young disciples to a li\im_ r M ter; bo that not only he was quick in Later years I I any dis- paragement of that hero of his boyish imagination, but in him and in other masters could trace the touches of home-feeling, and even here and there the reminiscei] jhool-boy slang, in the d that makes up the marvellous com] I the Goethean verse and pr< Thia ■ of German thought rather than its form and under- standing merely, he had brought home with him just at a time when it not only quickened and enlarged his own university studies, but could be turned to later BCCOUnt, to make flexible and rich the Bomewhat provincial dialect of and scholarship thru prevailing in New England. This, rather than any formal teaching of philosophy, — 6 82 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. which he disbelieved in and kept aloof from, — made his characteristic service to our so-called " Transcendental " movement. Perhaps the greatest social as well as intellectual delight he ever enjoyed was in the companionship of that golden age (as we are tempted to call it now) when the glory and the dew of youth still lay upon many fields of thought which we have since had to survey with measuring-rods and to take account of in critical judgment and comparison. And those companionships were perhaps always the closest and most familiar to his thought. None others have ever quite taken the place to him of the names of Emerson, Furness, and Margaret Fuller. It may he that some, even among his own students, have since those days found or imagined him difficult of ap- proach and slow of sympathy ; and he might find it hard to pardon an affront once given to his good taste, his self-respect, or his jealous regard for a friend. So that it has been often a surprise to find how generous, considerate, tender, even humble- minded this strong man could be when the magic circle was once passed, or when his thought came up for judgment and comparison in debate as be- tween equals. The writer of these lines has been personally indebted to that generous consideration in many ways that do not concern the public, and has come to know instances of his bounty in giving, and thoughtful loving-kindness, which for mere justice' sake, and in memory of a friend, and for the better understanding of those who did not see that side, justify this brief mention here. THE GIFT 01 MEMORY. It may 1"' mentioned here thai the Bingular vigor and tenacity of memory, before spoken of, embraced first and naturally those masses of liter- bask-work which made hi icuons public performance; but took in with equal ease long from classic writers, — particularly from the poets, both German and English, who made his favorite companions, — and served a ln-lp in the omposition as well For ex- ample, the lines entitled " The [d< first published I the longest and most striking of bis ] ms and among I be regarded as the besl , were ested to liis thought while watcliing the stars daring a Bleep- aight in the Bangor mail-coach, and were wholly elaborated in memory, to be written down on his arrival at home * >* 1 1 « • i - of hi were composed in a similar way. Whatever was metri- cal in form, he -aid, was taken easily into his mem- ory and Btayed thei ►. For < :■ ferring quite incidentally to the early promise and the early loss of Edward Emerson, the most brilliantly gifted of the three brothers, he quoted at once for illi tion the pathetic Btanzas in which thi I enius farewell to his native land from the ship that bore him out of Boston Harbor upon the voyage from which he never returned. NTor were these as one might expect, only the familiar handling of long-kept hoards; for once, when I epok those verses of Matthew Arnold ("Obermann once more") which tell bo powerfully the tragedy and pathos of that desolation of Bpirit in ancient Borne 84 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. which bowed her proud head to the yoke of Orien- tal faith, he began, in that deep and mellow tone of recitation which his friends will recall so well, and without hesitation repeated perhaps a dozen of those wonderful stanzas, which (I think) he had read only once, but which had so struck and clung upon his memory. One other quality in him appears to have been ripened in these days : it belongs, in part, to that which President "Walker had in mind when he spoke to me of him once as " the only man we have who is master of the grand style. 1 ' This phrase might possibly mean only what is ornate and orotund in rhetorical composition ; but in this case it meant something more. I was first dis- tinctly conscious of it in a passage of the " Christian Examiner," about 1851, speaking of the effect upon the imagination of an experience at sea ; and I have since thought that in this one deep resonant chord there was a tone not reached by any other living master of English prose : we might compare it to the music of a bell, which is no one single note, like that of a bugle, but is made up of the harmonies, peal within peal, which respond to the intricate curves, of varying diameter, that make the shape and vibrate to the cadence of the bell. A few passages in his writings — in no writer are there more than a very few — will justify this comparison. The mind of Dr. Hedge was in like manner sensi- tive to what we may call the resonances with which the soul or the imagination responds to the utter- His [NTELLECTUAL HABIT. ance of a thought, — it may be in a image, or it may be in a philosophic truth. He would c be content with the absti m of a thing, the one hard formal statement. T<> his mind it must Bpeak in the Language of literature rather than science. And this had a mop reaching effect upon the Bubstance and i I tin- thought itself than illicit at first be Bupj Thus, f<>r example, he -■ braordinarily well read in the literature of philosophy, — which we may, indeed, qualify by Baying that it was mainly tin- literature anterior to the last thirty or But he v. remely distrustful of tin* dogmatism of formal metaphysics. II-' steadily and with increasing emphasis dis] matizing of Hegel and his discipli -. He - con- stantly and with increasing •• his preference to Schelling, whom arded as having the profounder in- a theorist. What we might -till less have pectedj while his knowledge of greatly his inferior b and wealth of the knowledge to he had from 1 as there Is no one of us but musl 9 himself to he — will take such indications as the above t<> show not the extent or accuracy or value of that knowledge in him, but only the particular lin< which it lav. We take the impression of a I luminous, and richly stored intelligence; we stand towards it in the attitude of learners; and we are aware of the powerful influence thai com.-- I from that mental touch. When, further, we look- to see the form of the channel through which it 88 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. comes, we are at once struck by noticing how much is instruction and discipline, how little is mere didactics : to use the familiar distinction, how little in comparison is the " literature of knowledge," how much the " literature of power." Now power tells best in a series of waves, or blows, — not like the tug of a chain, which is no stronger than its weak- est link. Tt will be found that the delivery of Dr. Hedge's argument — take, for example, his best- known work, "Beason in Eeligion" — was in a series of discourses, each rounded and complete in itself, which developed a single order of thought with culminating effect, but with little of logical coherence. There was a felicity of phrase, but ab- solute injustice of thought, in the criticism which once spoke of these discourses as a garland of plucked flowers tied together with a string, not a living plant that yields them by vital force : the live thought connecting them runs underground, like the root of " Solomon's seal," sending up its shoots independent of one another, and is invisible to those who do not look below the surface. But, it may be contended, the argument is all the more readily grasped, and so all the more effective, be- cause delivered in this form. And the book just named has doubtless had far more influence in our own later thinking than any other of its time and class. Quite in keeping with the mould in which he thus cast his argument, Dr. Hedge felt a certain impatience and disdain of that intellectual method which affects logical completeness, and tries to for- HIS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD. mulate al] modes of being in a cob From his own mind ms distinctly to have excluded anything that could be called a theory of the univei . H nded ou the one hand by the argument for Final Causes, which he thought to have been effectually discredited in Kant's " Critique," and by modern I I Evolu- tion, which seemed to him a ba itism, and which he never attempted really to understand Probably that conception of the an >uld have d him best which took into account only the order of [deas exhibited in it ; and it' he had mulated it at all, it would have been in a m< less qualified Berkleyanism. What was m>t in the Divine order of [deas touched neither his philoso- phy Dor his religion. It* he tended more and more, in later life, to a way of thinking thi d to regard the Eternal God i ( I material things, and set up an illogical Dualism our traditional Theism, it was, I think, more from a moral than from an intellectual moti would not make the Holy < me responsible for the woe wickedness w< he would at 1 sanctuary of worship for the soul, undisturbed by the jarring and painful argument that ever Be< ks and ever fails to reconcile the Ea< ts of daily life with the conception the mind loves to frame of a purely benevolent Creator. And it may be held, further, that his mental tem- perament — poetic, sensitive, and sympathetic rather than severely logical — made it all the harder to accept the optimism which consoles the av 90 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. religious mind. He. would admire without heartily accepting the clear and brilliant argumentation of that masterpiece of forensic divinity, Martineau's "Study of Eeligion;" and, while he was morally repelled, he was intellectually fascinated — more, perhaps, than he would readily admit to himself — by Schopenhauer's interpretation of the more som- bre facts of life. At any rate, he kept his religion and his cosmology quite apart, excepting so far as he might indulge in speculation or poetic meditation upon the latter. In the constant mood of his in- ward life he was a reverent, submissive, and humble worshipper of the Living God ; while he refused to lift with daring hand the veil that hides the mys- tery of the Eternal, and repudiated the pious logic by which many have thought to bolster up their faith. Just what effect this habit of thought had on his doctrinal belief, it would be hard and not quite safe to say. In his own expression of it he was true to the Emersonian maxim, to see and say the one thing, honestly and plainly, as it reveals itself to the mind in its best moods, and let the matter of logical consistency shift for itself. Eeverent and submissive in his own acceptance of the discipline of life, and asserting with whatever fulness of mean- ing it could bear to him the sublime and comforting faith of the soul's eternal life, he yet has given public expression 1 to an exposition of that faith 1 See "Atheism in Philosophy," p. 388, and the essay on "Per- sonality" in the volume entitled "Luther and Other Essays," pp. 288-288. HIS BKLIGI0U8 FAITH. 91 which seems to deny outright the survival of man's nal consciousness beyond the present sphere. Thai this was no mere phase <»f philosoph lation he Bhowed, further, by his repeated assertion that memory and consciousm "functioi the brain,* 1 which cannot be conceived to Burvive its dissolution ; nay, by the • found in insist- ing upon this view at a time Buffering and depression, when "to drag the lengthening chain of memory " into perpetual duration seemed to him ill- most dreadful of anticipations, and absolute repose was the only boon he craved. To which it is only to I"- added that the Eternal Life itself, with whatever it may imply for the Berenity and support ot' the individual bouI, was to him the most vivid tnd that, religiously as well as men- tally, he walked always in those "ways of the Spirit " which it was ever the burden weighing upon his thought to interpret fitly to other men. A friend who was privileged to be much in communication with him in his 1. follows : — u In tlif early months of this year [1887] he was for many weeks afflicted with a most depressing tons) complaint, as to which I have often thought since that its torment exceeded many times over that of martyrdom by slow tire, as in th< indeed, the memory of it is. I think, to be traced in the tone of Borne of his writings since, for example in the article on -Nature, a Problem/ in the • I nita- rian Review' of March, l svs . During this time of Buffering his frequent and almost passionately 92 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. pressed wish was only for absolute forgetfulness and rest. It happened once that, when I had not seen him for two or three weeks, he sent for me to his bedside, and spoke to me nearly in these words : ' I wished to see you at this time. When I recover from this sick- ness, if I do recover, you will see another man, and you will not know your friend. I shall have lost my memory ; I shall be afflicted with a troublesome aphasia ; and I shall not be able to say what I wish to say now,' — going on, with strong assurance of affection and of gratitude for the service he conceived me to have rendered, to give the few instructions which I was to observe. I assured him (as I very sincerely could) that I thought his fear quite ground- less : I had watched carefully, and had observed that (allowing for the languor due to his malady) his thought was always precise and clear, and the right word was always chosen. I left him, I think, partly reassured ; and indeed, as soon as the crisis was past, he not only rallied surprisingly fast, but his conversa- tion was never more fluent and clear, or his memory of the past held in easier grasp, than in the months that followed." This testimony, it is true, needs to be qualified by adding that something — not much — of the difficulty he dreaded did in fact occur. It was most marked by the inability of sustained literary effort ; the old habit and desire remained, but after a few paragraphs or pages the pen absolutely re- fused its task, — " by a sort of fate," as he expressed it. Thus the publication of Emerson's memoir was the occasion of a long series of delightful remi- niscences ; but to the hope that these might be HIS LAST VK 03 wrought into Buch a picture and judgment of his life-long friend as other friends would Love to b^p, he could only reply by pleading the utter im] bility of the task. And while his talk (which we would test sometimes in that rcr through the wide fields of history, I ture, and philosophy that had been familiar to him, there would come the check — oftener as time went on — of being unable to recall the came of the person or the p] I pie, Leibnitz, and Newton — Paris, Genoa, the Riviera — occur among the names that had to be Bupplied to Ml the blank. Bui he held with a jealous • to what re- mained of his wonderful verbal memory, and among the last efforts by which he Btrove to keep his grasp of conscious intelligence was the Bilenl repe- tition to himself of i some Length, from German \ ts, which had been among the cherished treasures of his great intellectual wealth. A mind so individual, and so far apart from the conventional beliefs of Christendom, was slow in finding wide popular recognition, and Long failed of its proper weight among those "t" its generation. That his power was felt in his circle of immediate influence was a thing of course: hi- word was always "weighty and powerful/ 1 — the more, be- cause much of what he said, and often tin' b what he said, had to d<> imt with matt pecu- lation, hut with every-day ethics, the personal ex- perience of religion, and the - I oui public Life. But it was when he was already more 94 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. than fifty, and his name came up in connection with a certain academic appointment he was understood to desire, that Dr. Putnam (then in authority in the university) spoke to me of the contrast there was between the honor in which Dr. Hedge was held among those of his own profession and the ignorance of him in the general public. This lack of general appreciation afterwards changed very fast to vague respect and then to better knowledge ; and for full thirty years he has been everywhere fully recognized as without a peer in the com- munion to which he loyally belonged from first to last, certainly without a superior among the intel- lectual leaders of our country. This change in his attitude towards the large world of those more remotely interested in philoso- phy and letters had to do, it is likely, with his removal from Bangor to Providence, in 1850 ; and again with his removal from Providence to Brook- line, in 1857. Here he was in what he probably felt to be his proper place, as one of the immediate Boston circle ; and, besides, it was now that, by persuasion of his near connection, Eev. Thomas B. Fox, he took editorial charge, for a few years, of the " Christian Examiner," and so opened new chan- nels of communication with that wider world. At this date, too, he accepted the charge of the depart- ment of Ecclesiastical History in the Harvard Di- vinity School, which he held for twenty-one years, receiving meanwhile, in 1872, the appointment of Professor of German Literature in the University, which he held till 1881. His WRITINGS AND ENTLUINl B. The last fori of his life were thus spent in full view and in close relations with that I intellectual public bo which he alia strong i ion. I' Iso the period of hi activity and influence as a writer. The volumes already cited -"Reason in Religion" :. ■ w ' ■ j I the Spirit" (1877), M Atheism in Philosophy " I ad " Luther" I 1 with "The Primeval World of II Dradition" (1869), and a thin volume of translations and n;il poems —have been the way marks of this later career. They are the proper Bubjecl of literary crit- icism, which I do not propose to combine with this persona] memorial; and his place in the future development of our religious thought will turn upon the judgment that shall be formed upon them. To me it simply happens that for just one third of b century I was thrown into o< aal relations with the man, sometimes as helper and sometimes as successor in his work, — sometimes, too, in a close and confidential way, — and this seems to lay upon nit' the charge not of critic, but of interpreter in part : to help, if I maw by such knowledf him as 1 have been able to gain through personal communication, in the right understanding of the lesson which he has left to the world. The L< truly interpreted, is that which we find in the char- acter, the spiritual endowment, and the mental habit of the man. How these had their roots in the antecedents and their growth in the earlier his career, it has been my attempt to Bhow. Ami with this key it is my hope that the work of his 96 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. pen and hand — which with every gifted and original mind is a sort of hieroglyph, needing that clew to its proper reading — may be the better understood. I am sure that the man himself will receive his full meed of loving honor. V. SOME 5TOUNGEE MEMORIES. BEFORE closing this record, which is bo Largely made up of persona] recollections and im- ims fitting to include in it the Dames of .t few whose history belongs to a later day, most of whom were my own contemporaries and com- panions. In the tender words of Benry Vaughan, "they are all gone into the world of Light/' and remain our examples of the " holy hope and high humility," which belong to the ideal of Life we cherished together. What 1 would recall of them is not anything that would make the faintest out- line of a biography or him of criticism, hut only some touch or memory, not elsewb which iii justice to them I would not willingly let (lie. First, however, two or three mimes occur, mark- ing the transition from the time I have been chiefly dealing with to that which i> properly of my own generation. The impression one gets from the com- panionship, in later life, of those old enough to have been once Looked up to as his teachers ami guides is the one I wish here very briefly to recall. This impression some of us have had in the memory of a well-marked group of men, examples of a sp< 7 98 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. form of idealism more familiar once than now, who made, as it were, a " bridge of light " that brought over the finest faith of an older generation into the new intellectual conditions by which we found our- selves surrounded ; whose generous interpretation of that faith saved many a mind from the sterile doubt which a period of rationalizing criticism might else have carried with it. It was something, in that day, to be a herald and interpreter of the new light that (to the deep mis- giving of some of our best teachers) was breaking over upon us out of Germany, — to be a loving expositor of Schleiermacher and Goethe, and at the same time to keep all the pure single-heartedness of " the faith which was once delivered to the saints," through such apostles as Freeman and Channing. This service James Freeman Clarke, more perhaps than any single man, has done for us ; but in doing it he was one of a goodly company. It seems as if no one who had not felt in its prime the glow of that quickening movement of the Spirit could quite know how much that group of men have been to those who came a little after them. It happened that I was in California when the death of William Henry Channing had just left Dr. Clarke the sole survivor of that group ; and I was moved to express to him by letter my sense of this peculiar debt. His reply was as follows : — " I received your very kind letter, and it gave me very great pleasure. Your description of the interest in the group of which Theodore Parker, William Henry Channing, James H. Perkins. George Ripley, JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. and others were members, and with winch J also had : being associated, was peculiarly pleas- ing and touched me nearly, il trange are the influences which act on us I There was our poor little 'Western Messenger, 5 which found you out in North- borough, and found our dear brother Conant in Chicago, and in which we put the best life we had- How well James II. Perkins wrote! When if printed in Louisville, I had to be publish' contributor, proof-reader, and boy to park up the copies and carry them to the post-office. Bui I joyed n. A:;d you read *Th lore* too, and went to Anion- Ball] I have scarcely ever heard of any one's reading 'Theodore,' but, if you liked it, perhaps others also liked it. Every man who writ. or preaches a Bermon casts his bread on the w happy if he finds it, again after many days. [1 very kind of you to write to me as yon have done, and your kindly appreciation of some of my efforts warms my heart. We do not care as we grow old, but we always are made happy by sympathy. • ( lommon m light is 1<>\ e, And its familiar voice vreariea do! While of Dr. Clarke's many and cho - the greatest was charity, — which we may here interpret as that tine and rare quality which drew men to him in confiding sympathy, — he could be valiant for the right with a courage as invincible and obstinate as any champion of the Bword. I rememl strange scene in Faneuil Hall in 1847, when, with- out hesitation as without effect, he pressed his word of "sweet reasonableness" upon a Btormy 100 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. crowd, — when the hall fairly glistened with the shining caps of a valiant crew mustered in for the war with Mexico. One can point to at least three distinct issues in these later years of political note, in which that serene conviction of duty, backed by no little hardihood of temper, left a definite mark upon the event, the chief of them being his defence of independent politics in the convention at Worces- ter. But in general he has left the impression of one averse to contention and the strife of tongues. No one that we can anywhere recall has led the intellectual life in an atmosphere quite so radiant with the gladness and affection of a great host of friends ; no apostle of the Word, whom we can readily name, has sent forth that word so penetrat- ing and so broadly into the hearts of those waiting to be delivered from bondage to error and fear, who received it in the spirit of glad confidence which was so eminently the spirit of his gospel. It is now a great while ago — in fact, some years more than sixty — that I remember hearing read, in my father's vestry, a little tract which may be called the first sounding of the key-note of Unitarian missions in the West. It was in the form of a letter written from Ephraim Peabody (then in Cincinnati) to George Putnam. I believe it was the same tract which keenly interested William G. Eliot, then completing his course in the Cambridge Divinity School. As I heard the account from his mother (who was, long after, a member of my congregation in Washington), he resolved at once, WILLIAM GREKNLEA? F.I.: 101 witli the tenacity of purpose en i ! him, that the West should be his field; and it wi a call from without, or an invitation in any - hut a stu.ly of the map of the United States, that first made him, in that early day ol tedious and difficult travel, fix <>n a pi i remote and un- promising 3t L ii and disappointed at this resolve, for he ■ bo them ; and they had fond hop b B settlement, which would have kept him nearer, and given what » brilliant opportunity. Finding him inflexible, his father at I id to him : "Go where you think it is right I will find you in clothes, and where you go, no doubl will have food and lodging; and God be with you, my son." At the beginning he found an audience of thirty, — at best, perhaps twice as many. At tin* end of >ix months he had b n «»f nine, but, of these, seven were resolved t<> stand by him; and by the end of the year they wen- in- d to two hundred The result makes perhaps the most eventful chapter in our denominational history. When once, during the war. a broth niinc, visiting St. Louis on busi I S aitary Commission, said to a friend, " I suppose that Dr. Eliot has done as much as any man to e wouri to the Union and make it a free State," tin- reply was instant and prompt : "As much as any man1 Dr. Eliot has done ten times more for that than any other ten men put together I " There was a time — in 1847, I think — when it was proposed and voted to invite Dr. Eliot to Berve 102 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. as Secretary of the American Unitarian Association. Antislavery feeling at this time ran high ; the action of religious bodies was jealously watched, and the Association was at once sharply attacked for putting its confidence in a man supposed to have some complicity with slavery, — nay, charged with being himself a slaveholder. The true story shows how cruel and unjust such charges sometimes were. For it appears, from the account his mother gave to me, that a certain gentleman, to whom he was under obligation for much kindness, had lived for a time in his family, bringing a servant-woman, — a slave, — to whom the family became much attached. Afterwards it happened that the gentle- man failed in business ; and, under the cruel law of slavery, the woman was liable to be seized for his debt, and sold to the Southern market. Full of distress, she appealed to Mr. Eliot, who paid out of his own means the price of her ransom, never took a title-deed or was her legal owner, — unless it might be technically, till her free papers could be made out, — and simply accepted her verbal assur- ance that her wages would go towards the payment of the sum advanced. Only a small part of this was ever in fact repaid ; for when, some time after, Mr. Eliot took a journey to Europe, he cancelled the debt, giving her a small house and a cow, and she lived thenceforth in comfort and independence. Such is the true story of his " slaveholding." And who is there that can possibly make a younger generation understand what the name of THOMAS BTASB KINi 103 Thomas Starr King means to those who knew and loved him '. A noble memorial statue in S Francisco; the well-known Btory I Scotl who Baid he had heard that California \'. to the Union by "a young man of the name of King;* 1 two small volumes, without the lu those read them by, — these are all, or Dearly all, th.it the general public can ever know "t him. Yet to us his presence and hi- Loss Beem bo near! Many are the recollections cherished of thai young lit'.', which ought to 1. inting than was given by his friend Mr. Whipple i in! roducl ion t<> tin- volume of his D : the let ters, in ]' trl icular, of which none t here, would • Lh ing pi< ture of that bright and versatile intelligence than any more formal composition. But who i> there to pri sui'li memorials from fading into the dimn< istered tradition i In his brief publi and in the charm of friendly intercom all transparent and i daylight to wh would come and hear, as it' there were no shadow behind that beaming and winning personality: the Luminous eye, the noble quality of v< irtain sag t gayety of temper, quick wit and humor, an intelligence to which the term "lucid" as well as wide, swift, and vigorous belonged more absolutely than to any other I have ever known, drew men to him as to a friend whom not only they would in- evitably love, hut might easily read through and through. But a c >rrespondence with him early in the fifties contained one letter (lent, alas, and 104 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. lost) which threw a deeper light on his earlier life than anything that yet survives. And there were hints and confessions from his lips in conver- sation, — not, surely, of anything that stained the crystal purity of his life, but which showed a vein that appealed to one's sympathy in quite another way than the public could ever know. In particu- lar, he lamented a certain " coldness " of temper- ament which no one could ever suspect under the charm of that genial companionship. Dr. Hale has told of his distrust of his own ability to speak out, spontaneously, such words as flow from heart to heart. I happened myself to know (being just then his guest) that what seemed, on a public occa- sion, to be an easy flow of unpremeditated wit was anxiously studied and put together in the spare minutes of a very busy week. The natural gener- osity of his temper towards certain matters of public right was cramped by a fastidious critical sense that shut off his sympathy with some popular moral movements of his day, and made the ruder methods of many "reformers" strongly repugnant to him ; and the full wealth and strength of his nature, we may well believe, would never have shown itself, but for the magnificent opportunity of those last four years, — when the cause was that of national unity as well as personal liberty ; when for once he threw himself upon the tide of a noble passion without any misgiving or with- holding. I copy here from a letter of this later period, written in San Francisco in February, 1862: — THOMAS STARB KING. 105 W I am tolerably well, and intolerably at work, much in ii year as during th< . and am speaking as much as n. voice will permit. Ajnong my r nine were • 11 that I am rej ire oot utterly barbarous here, chapters of [a recent book] Btirred me bo much that I wrote a Lecture on ' 9 nd its I ." which I mmed houses in our church and two or tin- where. I am I \ year or i from the dear East and precioui . Then Europe, — perhaps shall have earned the rig it. . . . \\ [Port Royal, etc.], I arranged a dtatdon Ln church, last Sunday, in which the music w sudi a jam ! But I fear the dipl a beat, but the f \ ■ that God has a purpose of winding hit anaconda around the South, which won't be prevailed on to And again, from a letter written to Dr. M little more than gil WI >re the writ I (Jan. \-2, 1864) : — "San Francisco is t: do her duty again on the Sanitary subscription. We Bhall • year, and I am now arranging circulars and plans ■are $100,000 from the interior of ' Perhaps I shall have to take the Btump ire it. l>ut my church duties are now very heavy, and my I Bhould like to give the ihurch, with its grand coi >n and ample treasury, into the keeping of B new voice and spirit. 106 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. I have no carnal pride in it whatever, but a sincere longing to go into quiet and seclusion. The moment the war is over, I shall run like a mole for a burrow — perhaps Burroughs Place again." From a letter of earlier date (1851), I copy this illustration of the conservative temper of those days : — " Perhaps you have seen in the papers that I de- livered a Fourth of July address before [a certain New England town]. I have heard of ' Hunkers ' and ' Union men,' but never saw the genuine article till I made acquaintance with the leading citizens of . They were determined, they told me, to have no one as an orator at all tinctured with Free-soilism ; and after trying in vain to get either Choate, Cashing, Frank Pierce, or B. F. Hallet, telegraphed to me, relying on the newspaper reports of the Artillery sermon that I was ' national ' and true blue. I was in what Charles Francis Adams calls 'the tight pinch,' but succeeded in satisfying all but two or three of them in the address, and those took excep- tion to some remarks which implied that the institu- tions of the South were not so consistent with the American idea as those of the North. I was de- fended by others of the committee on the ground that my language ivas misunderstood and that I could not have meant so ! " He said once, pleasantly, that in the new Cali- fornian creed " we are no second-adventists ; we believe in no ' thousand years,' but in thousands a year." But no one, surely, was more generous of his own means, or more faithful in urging the re- sponsibility of those who had greater. I insert THOMAS BTARB KING. 107 by request of a friend, a characteristic bit of b pract ical '1 of bis od u The Christian Dollar": — •• \\ is the duty of every man, with any means, to proportion in his Burplu penses; to have a conscientious order with regard to hich his Buperfluous dollars i Over against every promin for ;i per- Bonal Luxury, I rd book i some entry in favor of the cause i I - and Buffering humanity; for every guinea that goes into ;i theatre, a museum, an athenaeum, or the treasury of ;i rausio ball, there ought to be some twin-guinea pledged i ith, or flying on Borne errand of mercy in a city bo crowded with mi this. Then we have a right to our amusements and our grateful pleasures. Otherwise we have no right t<> them, but are liable every moment to impeachment in the court of right and charity for our treachery to heaven and our rao Sonic years ago I had a conversation with our oil friend, air. Oliver Steele, of Buffalo, who told ■ me facts that Beem to me very interesting about Starr King's parentage, — he having been a member of his father's congregation when preaching as a Universalist minister in Connecticut Mr King, the father, was born in New Fork City, and it was through his mother that the son inherited the -Main of Irish blood which I had been told of in accounting for his remarkable vivacity of mind and wit : the father, 1 have heard, was even a more brilliant talker and story-teller than the son. He 108 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. had been educated as a mechanic, — I forget in what trade, — and had gained a certain fame among his fellows as a ready and eloquent speaker in their trade meetings. It was customary for the New York trades, in turn, to elect an orator — generally a lawyer, preacher, or politician of local fame — to give an annual address before their united societies ; and when the turn of his own came, proud of their fellow-craftsman, they broke the precedent by ap- pointing him speaker of the year. His address made such an impression that he was soon per- suaded to lay down the tools of his craft and take the post of preacher, which he filled with eminent success in New York, Portsmouth, and Charles- town, till his death about the age of forty. Starr King had said more than once that he never ex- pected to outlive his father's age : the horizon, up to seventy or eighty, looked very far and dim to him. In fact, he died early in his fortieth year. John Weiss, too, was a man whom one should have known in person to know at all as he was, — his gayety and invincible wit, and the singular dash of humor with a pathetic something that was partly ill-health and partly a certain reckless disregard of self, along with his busy, immense, yet largely fruitless industry (for masses of fact laboriously gathered in his commonplace-book seemed never to find a use), and the eccentricity of style and temper that handicapped his real genius. All these are matters of keen personal impression, and need to be dealt with — as they have been — by one (0. B. JOHM m 109 Frothingham] with whom they made part of a near and affectionate memory of the man. He was three me in collegi II - father, I have understood, waa a barber in the town of W a ( German by blood and I • i Jew, — to which last ' have sometimes ascribed the Bingular fervor of his religious genius. The : I ever saw of him was in the c ird, where he had a sort of ovation from his classmates on his return from a few months' rustication, and h like a child among them I dy's buj who knew his quninf Levity and drollery, he joined our class in the Divinity School, spending the coarse in Germany. Meeting him from time to time in the " ETook-and-Ladder," and having wards some Bpecial links of communicatiou with him while he waa in New Bedford, I have felt per- sonally nearer to him than any degree of mental sympathy I could claim might seem to warrant. Having at one time something to do with the " Christian Examiner/ 1 I I ing from him one ot two papers which I greatly valued But he was alwa; citric, kicking out of the i, and enveloping his brilliant parts more and more in a thicket of Bparkling rhetoric ; hampered by ill health and persona] anxieties; but having, with a certain carelessness of appreciation and su< a winning sweetness and humility at bottom, that made everybody fond of him. I tri <1 on< him to w.»rk out a Bketch of Jesus " the Galilean," such as he had given the hint of in conversation, and might have developed with great vigor if he 110 SOME YOUNGER MEMOEIES. had chosen ; but he appears never to have put his hand to it. He said, with much emphasis, that the popular theory of Jesus, his mildness and serenity and so on, was thoroughly mistaken : he was a man, on the other hand, of deep and powerful nature, capable of strong passion and high political enthu- siasm ; his most characteristic sayings were not the Beatitudes and moral precepts, but rather his hot denunciation of Scribes and Pharisees. But of this, and of many another judgment daringly unconven- tional, his full word was never spoken. The mind of one so spontaneous and versatile is best read in his unstudied correspondence ; and I will fill out the hints already given, by transcribing at some length from letters which revive, by some characteristic touches, the interests and discussions of those days : — New Bedford, January 29, 1849. All thoughts of correspondence were interrupted by a fire, of which perhaps you have heard ; and now I am plunged in the lassitude consequent upon the material and mental dilapidations of the past three weeks, including the rehabilitation of another dwelling. But, upon opening my ill-used secretary again, I find your epistle, which was good enough to have deserved an earlier answer. So, in spite of a sort of general apathy, which has seized me in consequence of late excitements, I '11 acknowledge said letter at the least. Were you ever burnt out (I doubt not the Spirit has flamed over your prairie, and that you have been tried " as by fire," but) burnt out physically, and left with two or three hundred wrecks of books, to JOHN W 111 Say notliing of a genera] redaction of your valuables ? It is astonishing how much c bed in a kindly way in twenty minutes. 1". tgular rebellion in 1834, conducted with dam \ final . was not mi Idenly decant the contents of three or four neighboring is in your rooms, and the fire eing the dirty work. The warm-hearted fellow would have made clean work. Such, then, is our latest noticeable circumstance; and I can fairly set down a Qfl tiOD as having been exp< riena I. Note, too, thai I the chil- dren of light was wise enough to have Ids library insured, also furniture and wearing apparel. Who shall say, after lli.it policy, that I am of the impracti- Cablea '.' Bu1 you would like to know what on ; and I. smbarrac little to communicate. The gold f< in this city, and it is supposed that from four to five hundred stalwart men will emigrate. They all belong to the h.tter •mmunir -. . mechanics and clerks. I Uj>«ui the whale- fishery is at present had. v a tit out here and carry passengers j but the place produces noth- ing to export. All freight for California is col] from other quarters. At the least, the whaling will languish for a COUple Of year-, with little hut passenger money to supply its place; and if they should commence whaling from San Fran ii would materially damage this city. If there is a bubble and it hursts, why. then all speculation col- lapses also. But is it nut a u r r ,i :it way of founding a new State and id' excluding slave-labor ? and was not tin 1 year ISIS mirabi 112 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. Emerson came down here, and gave the pleasantest, most genial, most natural and generous lecture that I have heard from him, on the English. The appre- hensive New England Platonist magnified discrimi- natingly his beef-eating and sensible, worldly mother. What an eye he has, after all, for national character- istics ! You know they say that all his geese are swans ; but, allowing for a faint tint of rose caught from the hot-house hospitality which received him, he gave them no more than their due, and it was refreshing to hear the fulgid mystic, "who is one slope from head to foot," talking about these men who "clinch every nail they drive," and who pursue Professor Bronson's method of abdominal speaking. Excuse the slender material of this letter, but ac- cept the intention of acknowledging your favor and asking for more. May 28, 1849. Do you think that we up here read much, and settle all questions? Eond delusion! We proceed in the old way, and do not startle each other with great discoveries. We might as well read iEschylus and Peirce as for anything that we do to set forward Christianity another peg. I doubt whether even the Hook-and-Ladder divulges anything. They may look very busy and mysterious, but they have nothing to divulge. Something has kept me from their meetings for the last three or four times, so that my judgment is to be taken as merely that of an outsider, who has observed nothing uncommon in the atmosphere, and heard no explosion. !STor will the tracts of William B. Greene help the matter. They are smart, but do not increase the planet's velocity. One upon Trans- John w: 113 oendentalism contains errors. But lie must write ami publish. B ired, however, that he will not reinforce the total Impression made a] mind by JSschylus ami Benny 1' 1 1 at at- tackin orthodox mil p in Wbr- rnty. By a Bmart and Budden dig in the pit of th«i stomach, he deprives the inoffensive mi wind, so that one hears no i ne is emi- nently useful in this line. Ii any li thrown on the hist ( o by the '• Antiquil j j.t," it h dlen upon your correspondent, who is thus comp Leave you in the dark, merely Baying that 1 from which Bomething may be expected on that point, is m • mpleted. Neith< appear to have modified the current speculation ; and it can hardly be considered as a U cept as supine in (A)tim), Bince it i ufined to himself. The a-priori autobiography is by our friend who knocks the wind out of dying minisl the manner of Mexican nurses, and doubtless with the same humane intention of putting them I pain. Part of it was read to the Hook-and-Ladder, and created inextinguishable peals of laughter, which lie bore so genially that I thought there was Bome- thing in his essay. Bach one can judge for himself. The introduction seems to be a brisk flirtation with Pythagoras and the science (?) of numbers. The autobiography purported to genuine experience of Greene's in Florida, and as such is valuable. . . . Parker does not yet forget his wrongs. That is the • thing I know about him. He flourishes and lias influence ; but he begins to complain of his head again. He works too hard. There is no contro 8 114 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. with him now ; but the Boston Association does not yet fraternize with him, and the whole matter is in abeyance. The Massachusetts Quarterly ought to do what you say, and I am confident that it will come out right. Bipley is reviewing Bushnell. The Ex- aminer will remain about so-so. Parker skims those blue foreign pamphlets, but what he does with the cream is not known to me. I have not seen one for a year or two. By far the most labored work of Weiss's hand was the Life of Theodore Parker, with copious editing of bis correspondence. This was a task which he sought and eagerly undertook as a labor of love, with abundance of generous appreciation of the subject, but with the drawback of too little near personal acquaintance. As a record of Parker's religious life, especially by the free use made of his diary and correspondence, it is incomparably rich, and, in spite of Mr. Frothingham's admirable biog- raphy, it remains as the best source of our acquaint- ance with the man. Those who knew Weiss inti- mately, and had a key to the dialect in which he wrote, were hardly sensible (as it proved) of some things in that book which gave needless prejudice and pain to many excellent persons. It happened, too, that certain material was held back, for personal reasons or in hope of some completer future record, so that on one side the book was left defective, — Parker's relations with Emerson, for example. But, on the other hand, where no sensitive nerve was touched, it was a great delight to see that eager and strong intelligence, colored and heated by so much .mux WEISS. — l . N. KNAFP. 1 1 5 of fervid passion, as interpreted by the fine, kern, and ardent genius of the biographer. And some Bingle chapters in that book restore to ns better than anything else we know the very form and pressure of the time it dealt with. ( >ne think- of W ! a pathetically trum career, when compared with the wealth of his and the brightness of his promise. This impret coiiics partly, no doubt, from the circumstance that | ensitive and - individualism took him away, in the lattei I his life, more and more from the associations and companionships I with; and so the impression may be a fallacious one. Certainly, he was very impatient of the d ment towards a more effective organizing of the Unitarian forces in the years jus! following the and, as -""ii as the " Radical " w a i he replied to the kindly words of Dr. Bellows and others, that his loyalty was due totli.it other, not t<> our older organs "f thought. He fell himself in his | to he more of a 31 I mong ns than he' need t" b done, and said to ..ne of our younger free- thinkers once, half sadly, that he himself, and :i few others, had paid the price of that liberty in think- ing which tin- later generation have enjoyed Frederick Newman Knapp, a cousin "f Dr lows, and t<> many others a very dear friend ami beloved brother, was taken out (^ our Bight on Sat- urday, the 12th of January, 1889, the nervous malady which had caused him severe Buffering through much of his last few years terminating in 116 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. " a clot in the heart, producing instantaneous death." 1 Surely, in the multiplied services which he rendered during his lifetime of sixty-seven years, few can have left a record so full of cheery usefulness. His two brief pastorates, in Brookline and in Plymouth (with the briefer ones at Yonkers, N. Y., and at East Cambridge), were filled with conscientious fidelity, like everything he did, but were hardly the most characteristic or most successful part of his work. The great opportunity of his life was when, early in the war, by that felicity of insight in Dr. Bellows which sometimes came like a great inspiration, " he was appointed Assistant Secretary [of the Sanitary Commission], and created and ruled the Special Eelief department, of which the Soldiers' Home [with which his name was identified through the years that followed] was a very small part." I was with him in Washington for a few days, in the summer of 1864, when he told me, with a detail I wish I could remember now, the forlorn and lamen- table condition of the discharged or disabled men, homesick, diseased, wounded, helpless, friendless, who were to be found by the ten thousand, thronged in those wide streets and desolate squares, on their weary pilgrimage — it might be to their home, it might be to their grave. When Mr. Knapp sought to give his life to what seemed the one great duty of the time, in whatever 1 By the account of a friend, " he was standing in his parlor just after breakfast, talking to a boy, when suddenly he said, Oh ! rather as in surprise than in pain, laying his hand at the same time upon his heart, and dropping dead, apparently instantaneously. He was not, for God took him." FREDERICK NEWMAN KNA1T. 117 field it should be most wanted form of it was just then and there most urgent; and his singular sagacity, sympathy, and genius of administration were put at once to their best use. It has been lately said that a hundred and fifty thousand of those men came into personal relation with him, and received from lu's shrewd, kindly, and practical Lntelli| the comfort and help which only such a friend could give. Be knew very well the risks to health, the danger especially of breaking down with the insid- ious malaria that M walketh in darkness," and his ainst it was an example "i hi I practical sagacity. I occupied In- room one night, while he was absent on Borne remoter charge : it was at: r a sultry September day ; and early in the even- ing his attendant had a glowing Si D the grate almost within arm's reach "t" tin* bed. That, he told me, had been done immer or winter, since he first took charge, and t<> it h cribed his compl lorn from any disabling illness. But his duties often carried him away, t" serve in the crowded horrors of transport vessels or at the front in the edge of battle. It was a delight to hear him tell of what he had Been and shared on such occasions with his associates in the work, Helen Gilson and others, whose names live with us as a benediction; of his kindly relations, too, with tin; colored refugees, and of the slave-woman with her twin daughters, - 1 >ick and Jerry " I named, to fulfil a vow. after her two sons who had been Bold av who became his fast friends for life, Of one Buch 118 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. time it is recorded that when he had been warned, almost ordered, not to push forward into the Wilder- ness with his Sanitary supply-train, — a feat which skirmishing parties in the woods seemed to make impossible, — he persisted nevertheless, and was three days in advance of the regular army supplies, just when they were most needed, after one of those horrible engagements, and furnished all the relief that was required. This is not the only example of that more than military courage which was found among the ministers of humanity in that most try- ing service; but it should be told as one example of what that service often was. In recognition of it, he was (I have been told) the only man who had never worn the uniform, admitted to the honor and fellowship of the " Grand Army of the Bepublic." A marked characteristic in Mr. Knapp was a happy disposition and a buoyancy of heart, which I cannot recall as ever once abating in an affectionate intercourse — first as pupil and teacher — extend- ing over nearly fifty years. Under the burdensome presence of cares, in personal disappointments, or when suffering from sharp illness, that peculiar buoyancy of spirit seems never to have failed him. That, with his singularly kind and sympathetic temper, made a strong point in the personal influence which he brought to bear on anything he had once set his heart upon. When a student in college, he did a thing which it was said at the time no other person could possibly have done, — that is, to build, by willing subscription of all sorts and conditions of men, a neat and much-needed church, without debt, FBEDERU MAX KKAPP. 1 19 in Walpole, X. II.: do othei one mi (lid. the living link tietween the strong, remarkable, and influential family connection, to which he be! by birth, and the many whom he won by the charm of bifl infinite good-humor, and hi- unaffected int in all thai made for the general g 1. I remember that ii was said of him in those days, in testimony of his quick intelligence, — ami it i> confirmed to me now by the ' testimony, — that he knew by fen ■ < 0] tenta] shepherds 1 t<> do | individual sheep of the two hundred that made his father's flock. In college, by his remarkable facility in mathe- matics, he ;it once took rank in a !_: r< • 1 1 j » of thi his own class, their chief being one of the most accomplished men of science in the count ry, Pi denl Thomas Hill, with whom his 1 were those "i' close affection, for I do not think he dreamed of rivalry with anybody. It i- something not quite explained t" me, that with thi- brilliant promise and versatile intelligence he had a] contented himself so easily in the most modest Bphere and the quietest lines of service. After the st rain of war-time he was content t«> undertake for a while the modest toil <>f raising cranberries ; while his chief and most durable success was perhaps teacher of boys, Not long after the war, he under- took the difficult enterprise of the school at Eagle- wood, X. J., but the military methods and traditions of that Bchool were hardly congenial to him; and, after a Bhort stay in Ybnkers, he "carried on his home Bchool a few years at Sutton, Mass., then 120 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. moved it to Plymouth. In fact, he was a teacher from the time he took Theodore Weld's Eacdewood o school at Perth Amboy till death, only combining with it preaching for a brief time at Yonkers and for a longer time at Plymouth." A hand guided by a gentler, braver, and more patient spirit than his never laid down its appointed task ; and the day of his burial was a day of public mourning. The death of President Hill, on the 21st of No- vember, 1891, took from us one of the most marked and remarkable men, if we consider the special qualities of his many-sided intellect, that we have ever known among the members of his profession. It is possible that his withdrawal, of late years, to local activities and into secluded ways, 1 may have made his name less familiar among our younger men than it eminently deserves to be. His presence, however, has been constantly and powerfully felt in the field of education : it was fitting that the flags were displayed at half-mast on the city schools of Waltham the day of his funeral ; and it is very much to be regretted that long before the sum- mons of increasing years came to him (for his age was still a little under seventy-four) his life was almost that of a recluse from the wider companion- ship of his own profession. As it was my joy and 1 He had been for eighteen years minister in Portland, Me., having served for fourteen years in Waltham, Mass., till his ap- pointment as President of Antioch College, Ohio, in 1859, and subsequently six years (1862-68) as President of Harvard Univer- sity. In 1871 he accompanied Professor Agassiz on his voyage to the Pacific Coast. THOMAS HILL. 121 privilege, many j »o, to know him in Borne relatio ery close intimacy, and as I have since from him mental instruction and stimulus me directions more than from anj other com- panion 01 teacher, I desire to do what I may in these Pew memorial words to make him a very little r than I fe tr he is to the memory or the sympathies of many among as, — who certainly, if they had known him, would have gained much from the extraordinary wealth of hi> accurate knowl- li is clear and \> dgment, and his capacity of intellectual companionship and help. It is nearly in Cambridge, — a sturdy unpolished youth of twenty, of rustic training, dimly conscious of grow- ing powers, " a born Unitarian " (as he said of him- self), though brought up among un propitious surroundings, —modestly, simply, and ly de- siring to enter the Divinity School. Wholly a stranger here, he went Bt raighl perhaps the only man whose name had a sound <>f welcome to him, Pi 1 Benry Ware, Jr., who was not Long in detecting his rare qualities of mind, and who urged him to begin at the beginning, and gain the benefit of the entire college cours Taking this encouragement gladly and thank- fully, he was fortunate in spending a little time with Rev. Rufus P. Stebbins, in Leominster, and then, by his advice, something more than a as a student in I. \ d •my. where his faculty brightened and expanded rapidly in the landscape of those hold hills. Here he studii 122 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. he afterwards explained to me) the lights, distances, and atmospheric effects, as well as the commoner field of wild plants and song-birds, 1 with the same curious precision which marked all his observation of nature. " His knowledge of all natural objects," writes the Eev. Samuel May, " was most notable while here, chiefly of plants, etc., wherein even then — an apparently raw, awkward youth — he showed a surprising exactness of knowledge. He seemed to us to know everything about plants and flowers ; could answer every question raised at school or elsewhere." In college he was easily the first man, intellectually, in his class, which included several distinguished names ; in particular, he was chief in a group of three classmates, of rare mathematical talent, one of them afterwards his connection by marriage, Frederick Knapp, with whom his associa- tion through life was peculiarly close and tender. It was in good part by our common acquaintance with this dear friend that I came quite early in his college course to know him somewhat nearly ; and this led, a little later, to a season of close personal intimacy, which entitles me to recall some traits of his character not (I think) very generally known. I refer, in particular, to a quality likely to be hidden from most, not only by the natural modesty and self-respect of a self-respecting man, but by the highly characteristic intellectual self-reliance, or 1 An anecdote told me by Dr. Hedge relates that he first at- tracted the interest of the man afterwards most influential in nomi- nating him for his post at Harvard by his singular skill in imitating the warble of one of our native song-birds. TH<»MAS HILL. 123 Belf-assertion, which accompanied it. I mean, along with a vein of deep persona] i humility of spirit equally profound, an almost morbid sensitive- me forma of moral evil, or peril, and a keenness — almost agony — of self-reproach, such as men of his bold Intellectual temperament rarely betray. This was, purely an inward expei i il: his life, I am certain, was as pure as a child's; but his is the single example I recall, among the companions of >f thai desponding which is ;it the heart of bo much religious 1 phy, and gives their vein of pathos to bo many Christian hymns. It is rarely, in these daj more balanced emotion, that we hear one seriously accuse himself of ing the wrath of an Al- mighty Judge, and the agony of being cast into outer darkness forever, in remora ne imagi- nary guilt. Yet why not that, as well aa Borne men's preposterous claim of a clear title to eel This may probably have been only a passing mood (though a genuine one) presently outgrown. As I think, it waa a mood of that d with which, through life, he habitually thought upon the Infinite and Eternal; 1 might call it a reflec- tion of that phase of experience from the deep background of t lie awakened Conscience. And it Beems not at all unlikely that this was part of the same mental habit that kept him from entering, in later life, into some of those radical forms of thought which have attracted most men of his 124 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. mental calibre in the present generation. The topics which they discuss he discussed also, — freely, famil- iarly, copiously, — but always within what we may call, by comparison, the lines of the old theology. Paley's Horaz Paulinas, which had his absolute esteem in the days when I knew him best, remained (I think) to the last his type of the most convincing treatment of the Christian evidences ; and he adhered, not blindly but with clear critical intelli- gence, to Agassiz's interpretation of the law of organic development, in opposition to anything that might possibly be construed as a quasi-mechanical evolution, under conditions of a scientific determin- ism. He was, it is possible, too much a stranger to the habit of thought characteristic of our time ; at any rate, his plea against it lacks the force that might have been given by accepting it first pro- visionally, and being (so to speak) baptized into the spirit of it, till he should, as has been elsewhere expressed, have " come out on the other side." Thus, as if in a certain distrust of what an un- fettered run of speculation might lead to in a mind of so rare activity and self-reliance, he kept himself, theologically, close moored to the anchorage and held by the fastenings of his earliest faith. This, it may be, weakened his influence with a large class whom it was eminently to be wished that his mind might reach ; but doubtless he felt it to be better for his mental peace, while it certainly helped and widened his true work in the larger community outside. His logic, withal, in dealing with such matters, THOMAS HILL. 125 was in some directions very bold and radical Thus be was bo positive in referring tbe operation of natural laws to the direct act of the Almighty thai he would not admit that < rod could creal elastic Bubstance, — that is, one which would by its own energy: the rebound was the imm< push or pull of a celestial will: u ry wavelet of light or b bricated from instant to Instant by the Bame voluntai God; or, if you brought up the I poisons, contagions, "i - hereditary malady, he would reply that God had so bound himself by the laws which In- has made that we by our own act can compel him to exert bis power in this or that way, and in no other. That is, be would serenely accept this result of his logic, whatever one might suggest to the contrary. <>n the other hand, nothing could be more beautiful and instructive than the ill tions h<' was fond of giving, out of the wealth <>f his knowledge of natural things, -as in the an ment of leaf-buds on the twig of a plant, or from tip- laws stial mechanics, — to show with what infinite forethought and skill the working <>ut of all natural phenomena baa been pre-arranged to solve, as we may say, the problem of the greatest advantage with the Least expenditure of force. And he liked to tell how Profess • P who had pub- lished a college text-book on "Curves, Functions, and Forces" altered the title to " Curves, Functions, And Motions" recognizing that "force" isa"theo- logical term": there is no other Force but God. h illustrates the eager and restless mental ac- 126 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. tivity already spoken of, that the conversation I most distinctly recall in which that mood of con- trite emotion asserted itself led directly (by what channel I cannot call to mind) to a discussion of the elementary grounds of mathematics and physics, which beguiled of sleep the whole of a long winter night, till his accurate reading of the stars startled us with the warning that it was near six o'clock. And it shows, too, the tenacity of his mental habit that long years after, when suddenly called to address a convention of teachers in Michigan, he took up the argument of this same discussion and expanded it into a scheme, or method, of general intellectual training (afterwards published) ; giving credit, also, to the circumstances under which it had arisen, in the meditation of the night-watches upon our bed, so that the assembly, in its vote of thanks for the lecture, included its gratitude for "Aunt Harriet's cup of tea," whose potency, he averred, had nerved us to the debate. While I am upon this point, I will add that his peculiar genius in mathematics had no more charac- teristic expression than in his favorite opinion — not only that the forms of the universe, including in them all types of living organism, are throughout the locioi mathematical formulae known to and con- structed by the Divine Mind, but that every formula which contains a mathematical truth has (presum- ably) its actual realization in existing fact. He has given a very interesting exposition of this as touch- ing the square root of negative quantities (the so- called impossible or imaginary quantities, involving TIlnMAS HILL. 127 the mysl ictor ^/— 1 ), in a paper published in the tt ( Ihristian Examiner," 1 showing how it appears in certain laws of reflected Light. But a still more curious example is Bhown in bis investigation as he called it, " inventing " ol Curves, which I will illustrate by an anec tiling upon him one • the President's office, 1 found him enj me few minutes, and, to while away the time, ked me to contemplate the following formula, p = ar, a and see what I could make of it, — which naturally, nothing. Be then explained the formula, showing bow, by assigning different arbi- trary values to a, a wonderful of curves could be developed, some of them extremely intricate and beautiful. He fully believed that the organic world was made up (so to Bpeak) of t i itions of such curves, in infinite variety, from a like formula existing I it' 1 may bo express myself) in the mind of God. Andhetold mehow Benjamin Peirce, that prince of mathematicians, in whom imagination and reverence kept pace with all the movements <>f hiv thought, found him once engaged in these con- structions, and, being . ited by the theory, brought in A e ; and Agassiz, his being caught by one of the forms, exclaimed, "Why, that is the very shape taken at one of its growth in the nerve-cord of a crab !" The explorer was delighted with this continuation of so dear a 1 In March, l B58, article on " Physical and ( leleetial Mechanics." - Here p signifies th<> radios <»f enrvatnre at a iri\<'ii point, and r the distance of thai from a given fixed point Thus, if p = r (or a=l), tlif curve will be ■ circle. 128 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. theory. And it is possible that some of my readers, who remember President Hill's criticism on the Darwinian doctrine, given at Springfield in 1877, may be interested in the illustration here offered of his way of thinking upon these things. His study of nature, too, was aided by a faculty of observation singularly balanced and keen. He once had charge of a magnetic observatory tempo- rarily set up in the college yard, where I spent many a summer vacation evening with him ; and I remem- ber his telling me that he could in a clear sky see the satellites (or a satellite) of Jupiter with his naked eye. I have mentioned his precision of ear for the melody of song-birds ; and with this was joined a theory that every melodious phrase, or sequence of notes, has its precise meaning to the thought interchangeable with no other, — as he has illustrated in the Christian Examiner 2 by a very curious series of experiments made with the aid of a friend, whose musical organization was equally sen- sitive, but in a wholly different way. And this should dictate strictly, he held, the uses to which any musical phrase might be put. It was falsehood and profanation, for example, to turn a tender oper- atic melody, like " Batti, hatti," to pious use as " Smyrna." " That is not a hymn tune," said his respondent (who was perfectly ignorant of music) : " it is the billing and cooing of two lovers," — which is, in fact, what Mozart meant it for. Under this theory, he composed a tune himself, which (as he intended it should) carried back his sister's memory 1 September, 1855, in an article on " Church Music." THOMAS HILL. 129 >me rural scene of their childhood, not by any nation of sounds, but by the thus Bpelled out in the dialect of music. With tin* same precision he would turn his hand to almosl any form of manual, even artistic skill, sculpture and painting included ; and a little I • out wil h Agassiz upon their to the Pacific, hia first word of Balutation, when I went t«» ood-by, was to bid me take a posture for the photographic apparatus he had set up for ] his barn al Waltham. Still more interesting is the story of his " Occulta tor. 1 D icussing with P Peirce the very intricate problem to pure mathe- matics) of the moon's patb among the stars, he bad maintained that this could b -!it«-nr nterpreter on many of the same lines of thought with th<><«- I have here dwell upon. But I cannot refrain from adding : cially characteristic "t* President Bill, the supreme value which he Bel upon /"' ■• i- the groundwork <>f mental training, as well as the surest guid • to the interpretation of the material universe. 1 have heard him tell how the pupil visibly brightened from month t<> month, and the intelligence ripened, under the tine tonic of this mental discipline, — an experiment the more inter- esting t<> in-', sine- it was told me t*> encoui parallel experiment I was just then making, which had a similar result But these words are not meant for biography or eulogy, only t<> bring freshly into memory some traits of one of our men worthiesl to be remembered. 132 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. Died in Madison, Wisconsin, December the ninth, 1889, William Francis Allen, Professor of History in the State University, at the age of fifty-nine. When a child, I do not suppose that any one ever thought of my brother as precocious, though (as it usually does) the scholar's vocation clearly showed itself in him as early as five or six. In fact, his intellectual maturity was of slow growth, and he was twenty-six when he took his first per- manent position, as classical instructor in a private school. His boyhood would have been described, though sufficiently athletic and vigorous, as grave and gentle rather than robust ; and he would be remembered as one whose candid soul repelled evil (to copy Goethe's phrase) as a duck's back sheds water, — while those inevitable touches leave with most of us a stain that seems, it may be, only skin- deep, but costs the pain of half a lifetime before they are quite washed out. But he certainly lacked neither vigor nor cheer : his interest in the people and affairs of his native town was healthy and keen ; and afterwards, in Gb'ttingen, he de- lighted his companions by throwing in fair wrestle (which he had .learned on the village green) an English visitor rejoicing in his strength, who had ventured to jeer at the lack of manly sports in our Yankee schools. He was, for that day, rather late in college, graduating at twenty-one, above medium rank, but not among the first. But he was not personally ambitious, and he had a noble and dis- tinguished group of classmates, among whom the intimacy through life has been uncommonly strong, WILLIAM FRANCIS ALLEN. rod tenacious. I more deeply indebted, ur in more wi companionship. A lift* of thre< i leaving coUegi private tutor in a New fork family in- nce and refinement, added a pfa tperi- ence which in the Large variety of posts he has since filled proved ol the country- bre 1 youth. A oat aral diffidem (so to Bpeak) in that unobtruding Buavity of manner which remained characteristic of him. In pai lar, however, it . le in giving him the leisure — from lack of which man} suffer through our lives —for weighing wit! lelib- eratioa his convictious, purposes, ami capacitii as t<» lay out clearly his plan of In II. choice would have 1 n the Btudy of theology and the Christian mini-try; hut the theological temper was less tolerant among as then than now, li ism was still weathering the raw air -a' controvi ami he gave ap tin- thought, reluctantly, — partly, perhaps, because he doubted his aptitude for the hardiness of public Bpeech, hut chiefly because his honest thought was tOO •'radical" t'» suit that temper which he would neither conciliate noi sail. He had, as I remember, serious thoughts of tin- law, which shaped his reading for a time; hut he had neither the forensic temper nor the vigor of lit (slightly impaired by illness in childhood) to justify in his own view his choice of that ardu- ous profession. And it was distinctly with tin 1 feeling that he accepted something less than his 134 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. first or perhaps his second choice, that he told me his decision to make a vocation of classical and historical study, which, he modestly thought, might make a useful and a needed service. Having made this election, he spent two years as a student in Europe, finding there some of the most eminent of instructors, — among them the scholar historian Mommsen, — and including in his field of study Germany, Italy, and Greece. There, too, the great privilege attended him, of the best and nearest of mental companionship, not only of those who were his fellow-students here, but of some (as of two friends whom he visited afterward in Basel and in Ghent) who have placed themselves in the very first rank as authorities in their own field. In these pleasant student days there oc- curred, too, a curious evidence of his happy gift to win the confidence of all sorts and conditions of men ; for once, when by a break of correspond- ence I had failed of an appointment with him at Martigny, and had passed by on the other side, he not only was forced to leave his hotel bill unpaid, but, by a miracle of mutual assurance which aston- ishes me to this day, borrowed money of his Swiss landlord, and went cheerily on, to complete his journey. Kome and Athens were not so familiar ground to scholars then as now ; and the opportun- ity of them both, with the delightful companionship of his classmate Professor Goodwin, gave him an advantage which he always felt, in the particular task he had set himself, — the interpretation of antiquity into life. WILLIAM FRANCIS ALLEN. 135 Hia course Bince has been publicly and suffi- ciently told: the course, mainly, of a patient and Bucce cheT for three-and-thirt} with the break of two years' - with the Sanitary Commission during the War, and with the inci- dental tasks of editorship and literary criticism. Engaged in Buch tasks, he may almost be Baid t<» have died, like bo man. scholars, pen In hand; Bince, only a few hours before his last Bleep, he dictated with great precision certain changes to be made in the final proof of a work then going thi the pre I 'or he had Bet bis heart Btrongly, before, on accomplishing two Bcholarly tasks, — a student's edition of the Anna! bus, an author and work that especially attracted him, ihool History of Rome, in which he gathei com- pactly, and Beta forth with Bingulai », the results of intelligent Btudy begun under Mommsen thirty-five years before, and never lost sight of since as his most important single task. For Beveral years he had been the Benior and the most trusted officer of his own university, and con- sequently most Look •'! to for outside work I ' what that outside work meant to him, I venture to give the following hint, copied from a letter written a few days before his death: — U I have been unusually busy this fall with two t proof-sheeta in addition to my regular work, and my duties as church trustee, director of the Free Library, curator of the Hist :.-.. 8 iety, president of the Academy, and superintendent of the Sunday- school. Then, besides, I found there was nobody 136 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. just at this juncture who could be president of the Benevolent Society except myself. Affairs were in a delicate and somewhat critical stage, the process of transformation from a committee of our church to a general charity having been practically, but not com- pletely, accomplished. It seemed that there was no one who could conduct the last stages of this process (or so they said) excepting me ; so I took the place rather than see any failure in the work. I had to appoint a lot of committees from all the churches, and got it successfully done, — every church being now well represented, and the society in good run- ning order. To add to this, I was appointed on the Faculty committee to investigate the hazing disturb- ance, and this has taken a great deal of time [some- times as many as three meetings in a day, and once, the whole of Saturday]. Fortunately, all these jobs are coming to an end." It was, indeed, on coming home from the last of these meetings, that he lay down utterly wearied, — as it proved, with symptoms of a return of pneu- monia, from which he partly rallied, but only to pass away gently, a few days later, as it were in sleep, without a sigh or pang. I will copy, too, these words received from Madison, written three days after his burial : — "I suppose without coming out here one could not imagine the feeling towards him, and if any expres- sions should seem superlative, you may be sure they are not the slightest exaggeration. His special re- finement and courtesy to every one has made a most deep impression among these western people. From the President and all the leading men down to the JCUEL LOl >W. V* . poor German woman who brought her three little children to Bay she w;is going to take them up to the funeral, all seem to have idolized him." I give these words not merely as testimony of the persona] traits that have Left a memory widely beloved, but to add what was equally characteris- tic, — that with this Buavity of manner was joined a judgment true I and hard as flint on all matters of politi bhical concern; and that, with all his devotion to constructs >us work, [ally in his lab i he never forgot his early experience, but remained just as inflexibly, almost resentfully, opposed to anything that seemed, ever so remotely, to narrow the Christian nan fellowship. Samuel Longfellow, again, is best known to the present generation as a leader in the front line of religious radicalism. He even d carded in th<- later edition of his "hymns" those tender lines composed by his brother for his own induction to the preacher's office, beginning M Christ to the young man laid," because he would not, by that one name, disturb the simplicity of his faith in the one Source of the Boul'a higher Ufa And yet, for some time after he left the Divinity School in 1845, he still held, in the devoutest Bpirit, what would now be called a very conservative form of Unitarian theology. Among his later essays and addres reflecting upon phases in the political or social 138 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. conflict of their day, strong with ethical heat and the eloquence of an indignant conscience ; yet, almost to the years of full intellectual maturity, one would have said that his temper was that of a somewhat dreamy piety, and a poetic optimism abhorrent of all revolutionary strife. His con- victions of truth and righteousness were spoken in a tone that lacked nothing to be sturdy and robust ; while his physical constitution, though no way de- void of a healthy vigor, seems especially to have craved " seasons of retreat " oftener than can com- monly fall to the man of a busy profession in our day. The mountains, the seaside, the Azores, a series of long holidays in Europe or elsewhere, all went to the repose and ripening of his mind ; to say nothing of the rare privilege, as it proved, that less than fifteen years of settled ministry, all told, were unevenly divided among three congregations so different, yet each in its way so helpful, as those in Fall River, in Brooklyn, and in German town. His " Lords of Life " seem to have known that he needed a widely varied and a somewhat delicate training. In respect to the quality of his religious discourse, we may call it a very pure and single-hearted pre- sentment of the " Transcendental " faith, in its more positive and masculine type, as it was evolved under the pressure of the controversies that, in their gravest but gentlest form, made part of his life in its shaping period. His expression of that faith is singularly free from any intrusion of a spirit properly critical : it is little, if at all, modified by BAMUKL LONGFELLOW. Ita of historical or economic study. He seems cover to have felt the pressure of that e tific drift, by Borne called "positivist " and by some "agnostic," which has bo powerfully moulded a later mood of thinking; he seems n en to been Beriously tried by the logical conflict between his own buoyant optimism and those wrongs in political or Bocial lif'- against which his ethical judgment was bo Bternly □ A hap- pier mental temperament it would be difficult t«» imagine, in carrying on the actual ta-k it ., him to do, particularly in administering those offices of consolation and cheer which mad*' a frequent and a most blessed portion <»f it. The first impression one m his published - and discoui . perhaps, that of a t"<, predominating gravity. We miss the play "f fancy we might have looked for, and welcome as relief tin' rare though felicitous illustration from travel or works of art The tone of their plea for religious idealism and an exalted ethics we might almost call a monotone. Prom first t<» list they copy his own phrase) an "appeal" in behalf "f those phases in the higher life, and of the realities they assume in the spiritual Bphere, which it was Ids particular mission t<> set forth. To Bet against this sustained and even elevation, we needed the abundant selections given in the "Memoir" from hi< corresponden dally that with Samuel Johnson, his neai ad of forty 1 1 re We find the brighter, kindlier, ami more playful meeds <»f mind which we knew t<> he equally native 140 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. in him. In these the tone and phrase are often what we might call boyish. This temper happily continued with him to the last, and was in happy keeping with what was perhaps his most unique and characteristic gift, — his rare sympathy with boys, even rude and naughty boys, which gave him a joy in their company, and a moral hold upon them such that we cannot easily recall a parallel. When some dear little girls asked him once why he was not quite so kind to them, his answer was, "Perhaps because I never was a little girl myself ! " The name of Edmund Burke Willson, if not so widely known as it deserves, brings with it associa- tions of a singular modesty, purity, and manliness that have endeared it to a wide company of friends. I first met Mr. Willson when we entered the Divinity School together in the summer of 1840 ; and while years have done much to color, warm, and deepen the first impression, they have done nothing, I think, to alter it. Candor, modesty, and clear intelligence were traits as plainly written then on that winning face of his, as we have read them there in all the years since. Some circum- stances brought us especially near together, — though not, perhaps, in the very confidential in- timacy that generally comes to one as a sort of surprise. In age we were only six days apart : he was by so much the elder. And our fathers were country ministers, somewhat widely separated in the same county, each having a share, not very EDMUND BUBKE WD 141 unlike, in the libera] religion their day. In 8om( he had the advantage of a maturity of ch and thi perhaj red by training in a rural academy, which in Borne points may compare to advantage with the hothouse culture Borne immature natures undergo in college til A ain, while he * Beemingly vigorous health and of mpanion- able temper, he lacked something of the phj hardihood and robust] mmon at that ] of life. At least, I do aot remember that either in long walks, rough fun, <»r athl< rts he showed the energy ol I his companions. If it were so, it may possil ly have been due to Borne del of organization, Buch a- we easily i w it li moral purity like his, though we might uot suspect it in a young man of hi- ordhl tllent health. An incident of this time may an indie of what 1 mean. One morning he came into my room Buffering from a Bwollen eyelid, caused by a blow or a Bting,- I forget which ; ami. touching it lightly t<> describe the swelling, he fainted instantly away. Thi- did not appear t" b • due t<» any Budden or acute shock of pain ; ami it seemed t<> reveal a degree of uervoua susceptibility that, perhaps, made a part of his physic 1 OT even moral temperament. On tin* other hand, when I think of him in the little group of eight, which included two men of such very marked and diverse quality of geniu Charles Henry Brigham and John W LS8, it is most interesting to remember how, with his rare modesty, candor, and constitutional self-distrust, 142 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. he always held his own steadily at all points ; so that there was probably not one in the class who so uniformly kept the moral confidence and intel- lectual respect of us all. As a student he was patient, faithful, and diligent, — especially faithful, 1 should say, in what might seem the dryer and more formal tasks of study, rather than enthusiastic or brilliant in any one line. On his feet in actual debate (a severe test to most men of that age) he was what we have always known him who have heard him, too infrequently, in later years, — cool, easy, self-possessed, never in the least confused in argument, clear in statement, with a quiet decision of speech that counts as a far greater force than emotional rhetoric or boisterous declamation. In literary taste I doubt whether refined fancy, splen- dor of imagination, or intellectual depth ever weighed as much with him as what came nearer home to his grave but genial and sunny temper. One might envy him the hours of innocent fun he found in " Pickwick," a new book then ; while some of us were victims rather to the sentimental- isms of " The Old Curiosity Shop." And I do not think that he was ever drawn (as most of us were, sooner or later) into the transcendental vortices of " Sartor Eesartus." One would not do justice to the rare intellectual quality which has been recognized in Mr. Willson through his more than fifty years of uninterrupted public service, — eight in Grafton, seven in West Eoxbury, and thirty-six in Salem, including a brief episode as chaplain in the War, — without knowing MUND BURKE w: something of his still rarer humility of spirit, and tin; d Listrust that saddened some of his more confidential communications. Bis mental tempera- ment was sound rather than robust, and he was not . persuaded of the real strength which was his to put forth if he would. Devout by habit and con- viction, he felt more keenly than most men some of t In- changing phases of belief that we ha v.- witm during those fifty touched moments and moods of his personal experience. That his own faith remained what it was, ^ calm, Btrong, even radiant, — through all the a here implied, lay not bo much in any positive or ve quality of his thought, but rather in an unusually clear, firm, serene, and steadfast reliance on moral princi- ple, chastened (as I think ) by an unusually humble as well as sincere and Living pit - candid of si. ul, which all men Baw in him, was the root of his great and real strength. Willingly as he >rth thai I h in the ted lines of duty, and readily as he assumed any responsibility which this might enjoin, il hard to persuade him, sometimes, to Btretch out his hand for a success or an influence outside that well- defined range, which yet might seem easily within his reach. To Bay that he lacked courage or ambi- tion might oot be quit ; but there was, what many might fail t" BUflpect, a hidden root of distrust The courage he Bhowed at an emergency iheer moral courage, though carrying with it a fine intellectual capacity, winch he was too slow to admit. I never knew, for example, what he was 144 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. capable of in the way of forceful literaiy expression till I read a sermon of his on " Bad Friday," preached after the surrender of Burns in 1854; when I wrote to him at once to persuade him (as I hoped) to more effort in that direction, — purely in regard of the fine, clear, manly eloquence of style in which he had shown himself a master. Another instance was on one of the very few occasions when he stood in a post of special interest or dignity in his own pro- fession, addressing the " Berry Street Conference " in a discourse of " reminiscences " of rare beauty and instruction, — a discourse which, I think, was never given to the wider public. Again, the one literary opportunity of his life seemed to come to him when our classmate Charles Brigham left him, with Dr. A. A. Livermore, in charge of a copious mass of papers, the labor of a busy lifetime, with an under- standing that some sort of a memorial volume would be published. He consulted me — naturally, since I had just been following up Mr. Brigham's lines of work in Ann Arbor — as to his own share in the joint task, which was the biographical, sending me, among other papers, a very unique, curious, and detailed diary, in which our friend had written out in private hours the story of his early life, — espe- cially his Divinity School years, with incidents, confessions, and resolutions, such as to throw a very interesting light on his real experience. This rich and too abundant material seemed to overpower Mr. "YVillson's modest estimate of his own ability to cope with it. I vainly urged the lines on which I thought what was valuable in it might be preserved ; and, to EDMUND BURKE WE 145 my •_• it, a form and scale of memorial were determined on — as I suppose, by judgment of the publishers — which shrank the proposed biography scanty and pallid out I ppointing to those who knew something already of it ami wholly inadequate to portray that vigorous, what wayward intellectual manhood required oot a Less delicate and discrimhi something of a bolder, hand. Further, with hi ind cour- age, and his singularly clear, common nvic- tion "ii points of practical judgment, Mr. Willson was diffident of urging his own opinl *1 the opposing view of his associate .11 red t<» accept their decision, but himself I from the field. Such, at least, was the account I tome of his partial inaction, in latei in mattei denominational policy as t<» which li«' might be Bup- i to carry weight Where, i d I be other hand, tlic question turned on points of principle rather than practice, there was no man whose word placid, firm, generous, serene -was more readily given, or was listened to with more uniform, i donate, and venerating delight by his younger breth- ren, of whom I was always glad to count as one. No one who knew him but -1 him worthy "f the highest conventional honors of his \ i ami probably anticipated them for him. It' th< one thing we could regret in Bucb a life, it is that its entire strength was not put forth in some more widely conspicuous field But this is also its best 10 146 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. praise and truest victory, — that that entire strength was given, with perfect fidelity and without any stint, to the particular work he had chosen ; while its highest reward was found in the loving appre- ciation and perfect confidence of those whom he served in it. With Octavins Frothingham's death passed away the most brilliant and interesting figure — except- ing one — of those who were the younger liberal leaders of the last generation. His services to our common life of thought were so many, and his con- tribution to it was so rich, that it is not easy at first glance to fix upon a point of view for seeing it as a whole. Happily, he has given us the hint of what we seek in the title of the hymn written for his graduation from the Divinity School, — that by which most of us, it is likely, know him best : " The Soldiers of the Cross." This militant phrase strikes the key-note which seems most readily to bring that instrument of many strings into clear harmony. The invocation it addresses to the Al- mighty is that valiant Hebrew one, " Thou Lord of Hosts." The hymn itself is the very finest idealized conception of the holy war that summons the faith- ful and brave. Its imagery is of the arming, the vigil, and the vow of a young knight, to whom the crusade he embarks in is a glorious thing, for the joy of conflict it offers, no less than for the nobility of the cause it fights for. And, then, the proud humility of the knightly temper! for, with all his militant quality, no one ever saw or listened vvirs BROOKS ntOTHINGHAJL 14, to oni friend without being chiefly Impressed by the knight, not the mere soldier, that was in him, — the c >w, the sweetness and court tan. In his eight it Salem, we who knew him at a little distance thought of him, p i tally fitted for the thoughtful, refined, and cultivated companionship which found — by a st ran . -in little provincial «•;*]►£- tala, where life b grown mellow, and ifl even, it may be, slightly touched in It i- probable, however, that these were oot merely years of preparation for the wider, noisier Held, but that just then bis mind mon study than many companions in liis thought. Among his clear-cut recollections who was tin- best of companions, John W ks <-f that goodly fellowship known t«> tin' initiated of that day as | ':.•■ 1 1 k and I. - an ass tion <»f something less than twenty, which included such name- as Dr. II 9 irr hang, William B, Greene, t !hai les T. Bi in Ware, CI rles H. Brigham, Thomas T. Stone, Dexter Clap] W. BriggS, Nathaniel Hall, John Merrick, and (I think) David A. Wasson, of whom only t In • main. lhu. if I can trust my memory here, what he appeared to Beek in it i [uaintance rather than discussion of opinion. It is as a cheery and bright pn • I i all him, as one who seems in the retrospect during thoa held his forces in reserve It had something, accordingly, like the rii. 148 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. a declaration of independence, or the manifesto of a fresli career, when we heard that the wave of the antislavery conflict had reached him in those troubled days, lifted him from his moorings in that quiet haven, and set him afloat upon a wider and lonelier voyage. In the five years that followed, of his residence in Jersey City, he sometimes gave expression to a somewhat forlorn sense of solitude, as if he either did not find the field of work congenial, or else had come to feel that no constructive and sat- isfying outside work was to be done in it ; so that it is easy to imagine that the experience was some- thing like an experience of exile. Still, they were years possibly the most needed and fruitful of all, to save him (if ever there were danger) from grow- ing into a mere man of letters or a mere platform orator, — years that made him, instead, a conse- crated scholar, a well-equipped as well as eloquent interpreter of advancing thought in many of its higher ranges. Of the evidences of this growth, among the first and ablest was his exposition, in 1858, of the great critical work of Baur, which gave the earliest clear indication of the ground he held firmly, ever after, in the disputed province of his- torical criticism. Here, too, in a series of note- worthy papers, he first proved his mastery of the extraordinary fluency, ease, vigor, and brilliant touch which marked his literary handling of topics that in most men's hands lie quite outside the pale of literature. The large opportunity of his life and the full assertion of his powers came with his removal to OCTAYirs BROOKS FBOTHINGHAK. New Fork in I860. The story of his work here should I"- told by some one wbo knew fa that remarkable group in which he w leader, and could report first-hand of a movement that will be better understood and more significant trs go by. The persona] qualities he brought to bear in it were described by Mr. Chadwi well-chosen words in the funeral addre I enture to add to tin's estimate only a few points to me al a much greater distai during those I jaw little "t" Mr. Prothingham personally, and heard only a single address of his in the actual scene of his ministration. It as he is well known to have been a i in, — clear, ready, self | I illy Btudied, but extemporaneous in delivery ; forcible, but not impas- sioned or in the least declamat • than vehement or es] ecially vigorous in grasp ; about an hour in length; in Bubstance an exposition of what Oomte's " Religion of Humanity " really means, at once comprehensive, critical, and sympathetic. It seemed to imply a movement of positive or con- structive rather than merely ■ . and in this view was perhaps a fair example of his ordinary address. It' bo, ;t was quite too purely intellectual, too destitute of appeal to feeling oi to imagination, to do more than hint, in the i of practice, the possibilities of a far-off future. It might even react, in sunn- mind-, toward a certain despondency and Bense of helplessn sss. I wrote to him once, expi >m iwhal warmly my ap- preciation of what he was doing, and of his own 150 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. quality as a leader in such high paths ; and the first words of his reply were, " What good angel inspired you just then to write just that letter ? " implying that it had helped lift him out of a black pit of self-distrust and sense of failure. The " thin sheet of ice," he lamented to his friend Chadwick, was too effective a non-conductor to the rays of common sympathy. It was very likely some expression of this feeling that led to the report, when he left New York, that he confessed his effort there to have been a failure, even if he did not react into a conservative shrink- ing from it as something false and wrong. There is no reason whatever to suppose that his mind as to these matters was altered in the least. Of course he understood that the period he worked in was a " drift period in theology," — a phrase (by the way) sent him, as title and text, by me when editor of the " Christian Examiner," and wrought by him into one of his most characteristic essays ; and, naturally enough, a drift period is not just the time to find firm standing-ground. But it sets its own preparatory task, nevertheless. And that task, in his hands, was honestly and ably done, not needing (we may hope) to be repeated ; while the conviction that it had to be done may well have deepened the sense of weariness that comes in looking back on the patiently trodden way. It may, too, have deepened the grateful sense of relief and repose with which one reverts at sixty to tasks more quiet and genial, better suited to his advancing years than to those when he courted the stress of battle. Wirs r.i UNGHAK 151 To the wearied soldier the furlough was well earne 1. The work of these I peaks pleasantly for itself. The wonder was that the hand we th'>u"ht tired out was -till bo diligent, deft, and swift; that the faculty we feared was permanently lamed was -till so prompt and adequate to what might be required. I had occasion once to su< his name as biographer and editor <>f the unfinished 1 left by our dearly honoi in, not knowing that he was (probably) the one living man competent to tfa 9 ich a memorial as that, or I William ( ban- ning ; such a pair of thick, lable volumes as those which tell his ! q Unitarianism and Unitarians ; such a - as those appearing within thi giving no hint that they w f partial : merit and frequent invalidisi might well make an ample record of a literary life in its noontide, not in its lingering afternoon. A word might here be said to t
h n< . shall be do place for c The truth ia that the American appetite t into Lmerican mind. 1 ual pastry an think i Bhabbily treated. A di< t oi turnips would be bel while, until * ,.-k to an a: mpler things. I thank the provider wh a Liberal repast of plain neither peppered with sarcasm, soured with misanthropy, noi with optimism. . . . < tae'a a orda Bhould b rim of gracious not-saying. His tl hould he like the words on a printed page, with a m of w bite Bilence about t hem. I many whose Bpeech not onlj baa no margin, but quite over the page and spills itself in 1 •• Four Btatemenl of the I ing ten- denciea of thought is, ^«» faraa I am qualified to judge, n<>t only just as an indication of direction, hut in the raresl degree adequate and felicitous. I I can see what, ('. means in Baying t: 'not cheerful reading.' He ia partly right. The fact described ia not, in every aspect of it, and in every mood of the observer, a cheerful one. I don't per- ceive that you at all tried t<> dreSB it up. and make it look cheerful. But erfully confronted it, and saw and said what it is. 1 i afesa that to me the univene, as one must now ems at times appallingly cold, and 1 Look hack with a half-regret to the old fireside view of the world, so snug and warm, with its good Father providing for every want 154 .SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. and soothing every distress, and its divine or semi- divine major-domo aiding with infinite tender care to make things comfortable. But this view is no longer possible ; and besides, I am clearly of opinion that it has become nearly valueless as a means of moral support. At any rate, I must bear testimony for myself that the more of such belief I spare, the more I find myself morally braced. Take the belief in personal immortality, for example. I no longer lean upon it, and find it wholesome not to do so. I do not deny it, but must plant the foot upon what now is, not upon what may be hereafter. Indeed, my experience constantly teaches me more and more the virtue of abstinence in such matters. I speak only for myself ; the case may be different with others. And yet, with the doctrine of immortality run into spiritism, who can help doubting its use in the imme- diate future ? It may one day be re-born and come out better than new. In the mean time, duty and work are enough ; and I find the simple diet invigorating. " It seems to me, then, that you have stated the fact as it is ; and I vote with you for the ' cold bath.' " Mr. Wasson had labored for some years on what should have been the monumental task of his life, a treatise or essay of political ethics, of which the earlier chapters were published with Mr. Frothing- ham's memoir. An increasing severity of judgment, and perhaps the lack of buoyancy of spirits, — an effect of his invalidism, — prevented the completion of this work, to the great disappointment of his friends. The languor, and the disposition to look for a more favorable season, characterizing the weary but delusive disease of which he died, also prevented DAVID ATKINS WAS* 155 — what tin y urged upon him more than once — the gathering of his rare but choice productions in verse into a single volume. The last work of his ited with great difficulty and delay hy n of partial blindni .Mr. Adams's u Emancipation of Massachusetts;" and, as to this, 1 happened to know that he felt more than once unequal to the effort, and even begged a friend to take the Bheets of the book and complete the task for him. Bis writings have appeared in various journals; some of the best, I Bhould Buppoee, in the " Radical ;" but the finest of I I an recall, in though! and >t \ 1<\ i ( Christian Examiner," published during or near the time of the War. Hi- title, "The Sword in Ethics," and a re- view of tli'' care ir "i Wendell Phillips, may perhaps recall to brilliant and strong In a Letter of March, l 363, hi "If 1 write three hours a day for three days in succession, I am utterly pi 1. I ha 1 lying down, ami must pay for every hour of work or plaj more than an hour of extreme pain. Therefi I am slow." But that effort was the one great privi- for which no cost was too dear. The physical affliction fn>m which he Buffered through most of his life has been rightly stated t«» ha due t<> an injury t<> tin- Bpine in hi- early youth. But, as false tali'- have been circulated a- to what occasioned it. — one of them, told in print, that it was the cruelty of a shipmaster under whom he served, — it seems tit that the correct account should 1h> criven. 156 SOME YOUNGER MEMORIES. I called upon him about three months before his death, and found that he had suffered for about a month from an attack which severely affected his lungs (as was, indeed, very evident), so that his family were apprehending then the rapid decline that followed. When I asked him of his condition, he said he thought it was " the old trouble," not knowing the judgment of the physician. I then said I had heard a certain " myth " as to the cause of that trouble, and asked him how much of it w T as true. He answered, None at all. The real cause was this : He was, at the age of seventeen, though not large in person, very vigorous and athletic, and, in particular, an alert and powerful wrestler. It chanced that, at some local gathering in the political campaign of 1840, he was challenged to " try a fall " by a powerful young fellow, over six feet tall, of a quarrelsome clan ; and, knowing the folly of it, at first refused. Under great pressure, he at length consented, on condition of having the usual advan- tage yielded to the smaller man, — putting both arms below those of his antagonist, — which was, however, denied. Then, for more than an hour, he submitted manfully to the taunts of the crowd, till it was offered that the two should stand as cham- pions of their respective parties, when, in an evil moment, his better resolution gave way. Two falls out of three would give the victory. His opponent at first, as he expected, tried by leaping on him to crush him by sheer weight ; but he " knew a trick worth two of that," and brought him in an instant to the ground. Then they grappled ; and, clasping DAVID ATKINS \ 157 liis hands behind Wasson'a back, the other tried to bend him double. It was a d< Bat, by a violent effort, out young David foiled his big antagonist, and threw him a Becond time to the ground, — aa he believed al the time, at t hia own life ; and, indeed, for a fortnight after he could ii"t bo much aa turn himself in bed The life-long consequences of this terrible wrench, and its effect, in particular, in crippling that bril- liant and vigorous to justify the telling of this Btory in detail. The Buffering and Q] however, did nol prevent many a sturdy disp] force in the exacting labors of public oratory, any than the patient and him- sclt' as writer and thinker, [ndeed, no very serious alteration in health waa manifest till within some six years, or thereabout, when hia increasing blind- brought its special symptoms of infirmity. An operation for cataract, in the spring very successful in restoring the r . which wa<, however, imperfect, having been hurt by the Btroke of a cow's born in boyhood, bo that it seemed expedient to repeat the operation on the other eye. This, most unfortunately, resulted in the destruction of the organ and a summer's sickness with much Buffering, and a permanent lowering of eneral health. It was under these infirmities — with the alleviation of friends, books, and the skilful culture of his little vineyard — that the iast victories of his life were won. lie died on the twenty-first of January, L887. Robcrls Brothers Publications. OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT IN THEOLOGY, Chiefly as shown in Recollections of the History of Tni- tarianism in New England Lectures ^iven in the Harvard Divinity SchooL By JOSEPH HENRY am i \. Lecturer M "lid edition. l6mO. < 'loth. 1': ■ It is a i c \ i • w of the history and rlanism, interspei u mon ; 6. The King! ; J. Tl Prophets] 9. The Captivity ; 10. The M andrians; 12. The Messiah. : 1 clear, brief sketch, or out! suits of scholarship ; tli.it .ions, without l>ei: as, or 1 pendencc of scholarly thought, while it shou! Such a want as this the \ 1 A"< ' ; -r. ed to have excited interest enough in the theme to induce readers to take up Mr Alien's admirable book and ma- through all the richness and variety oi his detail the eventful hist • brew thou;;! I with which we have no fault to hud save the very uncommon fault of | crowded and too few, mnO throej light on many thii p which must be Bit now to the unlearned mind; they will also revive the declining respect for a ven- erable people, and f.> r a faith to which we owe much more than some of us suspect. For, however untrammelled Mr. Allen's criticism may be, his thought is always serious and reverential. And the - it their author has cleared away many obstructions in :' that he has only made freer the access to the balk of faith. There is no light or ■nbecooring ■e nt en te in the volume. There is no insincere paragraph. There is no heedless line. And this perhaps ■ rentes! charms of the book ; for it is ran- indeed that both intellect and I A.th the same letters." Sold everywhere by all I ksdlers. Mailed, post-paid, by the publishers ROBERTS BROTHERS, Bo> : W. Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. Outline of Christian History. A. D. 50-1880. By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, Author of " Hebrew Men and Times,' 1 '' " Christian History in its Thret Great Periods ? " Our Liberal Movemeiit in Theology" etc. i6mo, Cloth. Price, 75 Cents. This "Outline" is designed by Mr. Allen, primarily, as a manual for class instruction. It is printed in different sizes of type, and the twelve chapters are to be studied as so many lessons, using only the por- tions in the larger type, — in which the general scheme or course of events are clearly stated, — after which particular periods may be studied in more detail. It is a very valuable epitome, not a history, and will be found a useful guide to more extended study of Christian history. The topics selected as lessons are the Messianic Period, the Martyr Age, Age of Con- troversies and Creeds, the Church and Barbarians, the Church and Feudal- ism, Dawn of the Modern Era, the Reformations, Wars of Religion, the English Puritans, Modern Christianity, the Nineteenth Century, and an Index of Topics and Names. — Journal of Education. The little work, as its title indicates, is designed as a manual for class instruction on the origin, growth, and principles of Christianity from its foundation to the present time. It consists of twelve chapters, and each chapter is devoted to one particular epoch of Christian history. It is one of the most carefully and skilfully compiled volumes of religious history we have yet seen, and will be found invaluable to students, old as well as young. — . Saturday Evening Gazette. It would seem impossible to cover such a space with so limited a manual, but it is happily and ably accomplished by Mr. Allen. His three or four historical compendiums of ecclesiastical events are well known. The present handbook forms an admirable text-book for a class of young people in ecclesiastical history, and will afford to any reader a good idea of the progress of the Christian Church, with its most noted names and de- nominational families, during the whole period from the first century down to our days.. There seems to be a marked fairness in the condensed sketches of men of different sects and their special religious movements. It is cer- tainly a useful little manual. — Zion's Herald. Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of the price, by the Publishers, ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. jlfcssrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. POSITIVE RELIGION. ESSAYS, FRAGMENTS, \NI> HINTS. fi >SEPH HENRY A I ! Author of •' Christian 1 1 ;od>," •' H. brew Men and I I6MO. CLOTH. PRICE, $1.25. NBg the subjects treated tiny be noted the following, vi/. : ligions," " The I .1 Future I " The Bright Sid< Christi at tlw e- ot pain, ol unmi 1 1 known df th common in i This little viiIum lement in • even i hie, and the work 1 \ »1 themes of religion. M him in his 1 fruition in the lives .v. r r Mr. Alhn strikes straight out from the ttural force not only unabati 1. but Sixty : \ New \ years that bring the philosophic mind. B we ma must make .\n arbitrar admiration for the splendid force and beaut] ot mai the product of no artifice, hut are uniformly an inanity which is the writer's constant end and inspiration. In pro; free and full irmth and I jive an intellectual pleasure, hut make the heart leap up with - courage and resolve. — J. N Sol i ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers. Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE'S WRITINGS. EEASON IN EELIGION. Introductory. — Being and Seeing, " Natural and Spiritual." Book First. — Religion within the Bounds of Theism. Book Second. — Rational Christianity. Fourth edition. i6mo. Cloth. Price $t.$Q. THE PRIMEVAL WOELD OF HEBEEW TEADITION. I. The World a Divine Creation; II. Man the Image of God; III. Man in Paradise; IV. The Brute Creation; V. Paradise Lost ; VI. Cain, or Property and Strife as Agents in Civilization ; VII. Nine Hundred and Sixty-Nine Years; VIII. The Failure of Primeval Society; IX. The Deluge ; X. Jehovah and Abraham; XII. The Heritage of the Inner Life. Second edition . 1 6m o. Cloth . Price $ 1 . 50. WAYS OF THE SPIEIT, AND OTHEE ESSAYS. I. The Way of History ; II. The Way of Religion ; III. The Way of Historic Christianity ; IV. The Way of Historic Atone- ment; V. The Natural History of Theism; VI. Critique of Proofs of the Being of God ; VII. On the Origin of Things ; VIII. The God of Religion, or the Human God ; IX. Dualism and Optimism; X. Pantheism; XL The Two Religions; XII. The Mythical Element of the New Testament; XIII. Incarna- tion and Transubstantiation ; XIV. The Human Soul. Second edition. \6mo. Cloth. Price $1.50. ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, BOSTON. _m mm