- 
 
Ctbravjp of Che Cheolo^ical ^emmarjp 
 
 PRINCETON * NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev. John B. Wleainger 
 
 BR 85 .S39 
 
 Shannon, Frederick F. 1877- 
 1947 . 
 
 A moneyless magnate 
 
t 
 
I 
 
A MONEYLESS MAGNATE 
 
 FREDERICK F. SHANNON 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 \ 
 
 https://archive.org/details/rnoneylessmagnate00shan_0 
 
A MONEYLESS MAGNATpTmS^;- 
 
 and Other Essays 
 
 4 
 
 A 
 
 MAY 25 1848 
 
 BY 
 
 
 ^OSICAL ^ 0 " 
 
 FREDERICK F/SHANNON 
 
 MINISTER OF CENTRAL CHURCH, CHICAGO 
 
 Author of “Sermons for Days We Observe“The Soul's 
 Atlas,” “The New Personality,” “The 
 Country Faith,” etc. 
 
 NEW 
 
 YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1923, 
 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 A MONEYLESS MAGNATE. I 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
TO 
 
 MR. and MRS. EDWARD B. BUTLER 
 
 LOVERS OF THE BEAUTIFUL, 
 DISCIPLES OF THE TRUE, 
 
 FRIENDS OF HUMANITY, 
 SUPPORTERS OF CENTRAL CHURCH. 
 
I 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I A Moneyless Magnate . n 
 
 II Beethoven in the Back Yard .... 31 
 
 III Morning Tourist, Ltd! . 52 
 
 IV An Artist in Living . . . . . . 71 
 
 V Bryanism . 89 
 
 VI A Letter to <( Main Street” . . . . 107 
 
 VII Henry Ward Beecher . 127 
 
 VIII Phillips Brooks . . ... . . . . . 157 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 \ 
 
 
 
A MONEYLESS MAGNATE 
 
I 
 
 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 M Y boyhood memories are redolent of an eve¬ 
 ning with H. T. Stanton, the Kentucky poet. 
 Unlike many of his poetic brethren, he had the art of 
 reading his own productions in a voice and manner 
 full of charm. Among the selections he read that 
 evening was ‘‘The Moneyless Man,” probably the 
 best known of all his poems. I thought, as I sat 
 under the rise and fall of his melodious voice, that 
 he made a strong case for the man with an empty 
 purse; and, within certain limitations, I still think 
 so. He took our empty-handed friend into banquet 
 halls of light, hung with velvet and trimmings of 
 gold, and flashing with mirrors of silver; he led him 
 up the aisle of a fashionable church, wherein his rags 
 and patches seemed ill at home amid such pomp and 
 pride; he gave him a look in the banks, bulging with 
 “piles of the glittering ore;” he presented him to the 
 Judge, robed “in his dark, flowing gown,” who 
 smiled on the strong and frowned on the weak. Al¬ 
 ways, no matter where he introduced his dollar-poor 
 
 ii 
 
12 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 pilgrim, there was no smile, no pew, no credit, no 
 justice—nothing whatever for “the moneyless man.” 
 At last, however, when life’s fitful dream was over, 
 and blithely, almost gayly, oblivious of ethical con¬ 
 siderations— 
 
 “There’s welcome above for— 
 a moneyless man” 
 
 Now no sane person, surely, manifests any dispo¬ 
 sition to depreciate the value of money. For money 
 is not only absolutely necessary, but in some true and 
 noble sense a part of the “good things” offered at the 
 feast of life. However, one’s quarrel is emphatically 
 with the philosophy of life which dominates the 
 poem, because, if for no other reason, it is one of 
 those subtle, taking half-truths which verge on the 
 abyss of falsehood. Schiller’s familiar saying that 
 the artist is known by what he omits, belongs to the 
 same questionable mental progeny. As a matter of 
 fact, no genuine artist is known by what he leaves 
 out, but by what he puts in. To omit is, at best, noth¬ 
 ing more than negation; to put in is creation. For 
 example: Is Raphael known for what he left out of 
 his “Sistine Madonna”? To ask the question ought 
 to evoke a sensible answer; certainly a glimpse at 
 those two cherubs lifts it beyond the realm of dis¬ 
 pute.. No: the merest dauber can leave out; only 
 an artist can put in the ideas worthy of genius. 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 13 
 
 Yet, whether in the matter of money or painting 
 or morals, the soul of man, as Montaigne long ago 
 affirmed, “discharges her passions upon false objects, 
 where the true are wanting.’’ Now the only way to 
 dislodge the false is to install the true; but the false¬ 
 ness of things, like the poor, is ever with us, and it 
 has such an insatiable appetite that it sometimes 
 threatens to devour the true altogether, leaving not a 
 wrack of the permanent values in the wake of its 
 greedy and materialistic triumph. This paper, there¬ 
 fore, is the crass confession of “A Moneyless Mag¬ 
 nate.” If either the moneyed or moneyless man de¬ 
 nies its major postulate, calling it a paradox and such 
 like, he is thoroughly within his verbal rights. Only, 
 I would gently remind my pragmatic and easily 
 overheated friends, that one of the definitions of a 
 paradox reads as follows: “That which in appearance 
 or terms is absurd, but yet may be true in fact.” 
 
 1 
 
 To begin with, and speaking as becomes a modest 
 man, I own huge blocks of real estate. All of that 
 downtown section in New York, between the Brook¬ 
 lyn Bridge and Battery Park, is in a special sense 
 my own property. The view of it from my study 
 window is simply enchanting. There is probably no 
 such skyline on earth, no such pile of concrete, stone 
 and steel on the planet. Looking out from the south 
 
14 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 side of the East River, I find my sky-scrapers in¬ 
 variably punctual (except on a foggy day), cordial, 
 majestic, awe-inspiring. Had Pericles seen them, he 
 would have said that they were built by the gods, not 
 by men. They do not savor at all of architectural 
 monotony. Each is a law unto itself; many colors 
 urge their claims; many shapes assert their popular¬ 
 ity. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature in the 
 matter of similarity, if similarity there be, is this: 
 Each one seems struggling to be a little higher than 
 all the others. For example, when the Municipal 
 Building attained a height of 560 feet and 1 inch, the 
 Singer Building crawled up to a distance of 612 feet 
 and 1 inch. You see, my tall buildings are so jealous 
 of their height, that they even claim all the inches due 
 them! Of course these cloudy aspirations stirred the 
 Wool worth Building into a towering, climbing rage, 
 whose wrath never cooled until it reached the dizzy 
 height of 750 feet! I am not revealing these family 
 secrets in a fault-finding spirit; for I don’t mind the 
 ambitions of my lofty steel and stone neighbors. 
 They might perhaps achieve more of architectural 
 harmony if their heads were all about the same 
 height. Still I take satisfaction in their variety, even 
 in their rough raggedness and stony jaggedness. 
 Nor is their attraction one whit less by night. For 
 then my skyscrapers are transformed into illuminated 
 cliffs, brilliantly twinkling canyons casting their lumi- 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 15 
 
 nous loveliness across the shadow-hung river. Then 
 also, though a modern, I am suddenly changed into a 
 cliff-dweller, living with my ancestors of the dim and 
 antique past. 
 
 Now, on analyzing the terms of my ownership in 
 these colossal buildings, I affirm them to be most sat¬ 
 isfactory. Indeed, after much reflection, I am con¬ 
 vinced that my terms are very much better than the 
 terms imposed upon their legal owners. For in¬ 
 stance : I was not put to the trouble and expense of 
 building them. Most obligingly have others planned 
 and invested and toiled for me. Furthermore, hav¬ 
 ing built them, my generous friends promptly pay the 
 taxes on them, keep them in repair, and graciously 
 assume all the responsibilities connected with their 
 maintenance. So, I am satisfied with my terms of 
 ownership; and thus far I have heard no protest 
 from those who hold title deeds to the buildings. But 
 there is one other item in which I claim to have a 
 distinct advantage. The owners, certainly most of 
 them, lack my opportunity of appraising the beauty 
 of their real estate. Their realty may yield them 
 much gold, but if it fails to yield them the dividends 
 of beauty as well, of what permanent value is all 
 their yield in gold? And 196 Columbia Heights, 
 fourth floor, back room, offers the best outlook on 
 earth. If you don’t believe it, come in and see for 
 yourself! 
 
16 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 ii 
 
 Another fraction of my material capital is in the 
 great steamship lines. Shipbuilding has a long and 
 interesting history. While traveling through Colo¬ 
 rado, it was my good fortune to fall in with a capti¬ 
 vating young man. Learning that I once lived in 
 Pennsylvania, he said that he was reminded of this 
 story: A man who went through the Johnstown 
 flood, talked about that terrible disaster as long as he 
 lived. After dying and entering the New Jerusalem, 
 he continued to recite some of the thrilling episodes 
 in the tragedy of Johnstown. However, he discov¬ 
 ered that among his listeners there was always a ven¬ 
 erable, long-bearded gentleman who, after patiently 
 hearing the recital, religiously shook his hoary head 
 
 and remarked: “No flood at all.” Naturally, the 
 
 * 
 
 former citizen of Johnstown was considerably piqued 
 by this chilling and ever-ready comment of the 
 ancient one. So one day he ventured to ask: “Will 
 somebody be good enough to tell me the name of the 
 man who, every time I recite my story of Johnstown, 
 shakes his head and says: ‘No flood at all’ ?” 
 “Why,” answered a voice from the crowd, “that’s 
 old Father Noah.” And Noah was the pioneer ship¬ 
 builder, a first-hand authority on floods. We must 
 go back beyond the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, even 
 the Phoenicians themselves, and pay tribute to the 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 17 
 
 man who built the ark. It is a long journey from the 
 twentieth century queen of the seas back to the dug- 
 out, the raft, and the log, from the Delaware and the 
 Clyde to water-courses whose shore-lines have either 
 changed or quite vanished from the earth. In this, 
 as in other realms of life and progress, evolution is 
 slow but steady and forward-looking. Therefore, as 
 I look out and behold my gigantic and graceful 
 vessels coming and going, why should I not rejoice in 
 my spiritual investments in these stately, floating 
 palaces of the deep? They visit every land and peo¬ 
 ple; they return laden with commerce, food, gold, 
 and gems from the ends of the earth. Why, the sail¬ 
 ing of any one of them is enough to shake one to the 
 roots of his being, setting the looms of imagination to 
 weaving thought-tapestries from invisible threads 
 that bind the peoples into one! And mark you: It 
 costs me nothing to enjoy this drifting, movable feast 
 of beauty. Somebody, of course, has gone to vast 
 expense to make it possible. Generations of high and 
 brave and courageous souls lie behind it all. What a 
 mean, stingy nature one must have not to rise up and 
 say: “Thank you, brothers, whoever you are and 
 wherever you be, for lending me your brains, your 
 hands, your years. Having given me much, let me 
 not make it necessary for you to forgive the sin of 
 ingratitude and unappreciation.” 
 
 Assessing steamship lines at their supreme values, 
 
18 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 I naturally claim a large share in the Bay—a vast 
 dimple of silver set in a vaster cheek of beauty. 
 Henry Ward Beecher used to say, watching the white 
 flocks of gulls breasting the blue: “There go my 
 gulls.” I have decided to yield him his claim on the 
 gulls and to keep the Bay for myself. Yes; yonder 
 go the immortal preacher’s snowy gulls, and yonder, 
 too, goes my Bay—always flowing, always going, 
 but never gone! Above the Bay, and higher, much 
 higher, than the gulls, human birdmen ride in their 
 throbbing machines. Sometimes they perform gyro¬ 
 scopic feats, drop from great heights and make 
 straight for the Brooklyn Bridge, threatening me 
 with heart failure in their apparent aim to smash 
 into one of its arches. But I have learned that there 
 is no use worrying—crossing the bridge before we 
 reach it—for with graceful, swanlike motion the 
 birdman flyingly dives under the bridge. Thus is my 
 apoplectic attack postponed until the daredevil comes 
 back again! 
 
 But with all the many-toned life and kaleidoscopic 
 scenes along river, bay, and harbor, I mourn the ab¬ 
 sence of one of my noblest ships. Above all other 
 vessels that have sailed the seven oceans, her blood¬ 
 stains are the deepest, the reddest, the most unpar¬ 
 donable. Her innocent blood will crimson the seas 
 until Time drinks them dry. As Joyce Kilmer, that 
 white and brave and lamented soldier-poet, sang, she 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 19 
 
 did not go forth to battle; she carried friendly men; 
 children played about her decks and women sang. 
 In this unsuspecting mood, the Lusitania was waylaid 
 by inhuman monsters, and sent to her ensanguined 
 grave in the deep. Never again shall I see her come, 
 as of old, stately, magnificent, triumphant, into this 
 hospitable port. But above the unforgetting years, 
 above roaring billows and howling tempests, I shall 
 hear the accusing voice of this murdered queen of the 
 seas: 
 
 “My wrong cries out for vengeance; 
 
 The blow that sent me here 
 Was aimed in Hell. My dying scream 
 Has reached Jehovah’s ear. 
 
 Not all the seven oceans 
 Shall wash away the stain; 
 
 Upon a brow that wears a crown 
 I am the brand of Cain. 
 
 When God’s great voice assembles 
 The fleet on Judgment day, 
 
 The ghosts of ruined ships will rise 
 In sea and strait and bay. 
 
 Though they have lain for ages 
 Beneath the changeless flood, 
 
 They shall be white as silver, 
 
 But one—shall be like blood.” 
 
 hi 
 
 You may begin to think that my riches are so 
 fabulous as to be embarrassing. But let me reassure 
 
20 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 you on that score; for the more I try to measure my 
 wealth the more I revel in it. Consequently, I am not 
 satisfied with the sea only, and the many kinds of 
 vessels that traverse its fluent paths. I claim to be, in 
 my way, a heavy investor in the railroads of the 
 United States. To say nothing of the tremendous 
 capital invested, it costs billions every year to operate 
 American railways. They represent 230,000 miles of 
 steel strung over cities, towns, plains, hills, and val¬ 
 leys. Think of it—enough steel to engirdle the 
 earth more than thirteen times! I have a friend liv¬ 
 ing in New York who invited his father to come on 
 from Ohio to visit him. He told his father, who was 
 as transparent as noonday and as candid as sunlight, 
 that he must make the journey from Ohio on one of 
 the best trains. The old gentleman accordingly 
 boarded the fast express and was directed to hand¬ 
 some quarters by the porter. Soon the conductor 
 came in, punched his ticket, and informed him that, 
 in case he wished to occupy his present seat, he 
 would have to pay something extra. “How much 
 extra ?” retorted the passenger. “Eighteen dollars,” 
 replied the conductor. Now I have already said that 
 the old man was frankness personified, the dispenser 
 of a Lincolnlike simplicity that smites one blind by its 
 splendor. Thus, recovering from his surprise, the 
 venerable passenger exclaimed: “Eighteen dollars for 
 a little cubby hole like this to spend the night in! 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 21 
 
 Why, man, I get only ten dollars a month for an 
 eight-room house back in the town where I live. No, 
 sir, I’ll have none of your fancy cubby holes at 
 eighteen dollars per night.” 
 
 Yet there are many who are glad enough to pay the 
 extra fare on these luxurious hotels on wheels, 
 palaces that roll and whizz through space at a be¬ 
 wildering speed. But before many years, passenger 
 trains will be comparatively out of date. We shall 
 think no more of traveling through the air than we 
 now do of traveling by automobile. Utopian? Why, 
 the ox-cart and canoe were once utopian, while the 
 steamship, the locomotive, the submarine, and wire¬ 
 less waves were perplexingly so. Man has only be¬ 
 gun to extract the multiplied secrets hidden away in 
 the cosmic storehouse. If nations will come together 
 in a federation of brotherhood and mutual coopera¬ 
 tion, thus averting the disaster of race extermination 
 by war, there is hardly a limit to man’s possible 
 mastery of the physical forces. Meantime, I am a 
 sharer in these marvelous railroad systems—one of 
 the most stupendous engineering and commercial 
 achievements in the history of mankind. For a few 
 dollars, an investment of billions is offered for my 
 use, day and night, year in and year out. And what 
 shall I say of our street railways and subways? I 
 once rode in a subway train with the president of the 
 system. If I am not mistaken, he bought a ticket, 
 
22 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 just as I did, walked in and sat down. He may have 
 occupied a little more space than I required; but as 
 far as I was able to judge, I traveled as fast as he 
 did, felt much happier than he looked, and paid only 
 five cents into the bargain! Why, I felt like a culprit. 
 There I was, utterly free from public criticism, un¬ 
 terrified by lockouts and strikes, gliding along forty 
 miles an hour, and all for five copper cents, while the 
 man who bore the burden of it all had to pay his own 
 fare and also sit alongside of me! Having nothing, 
 yet am I beginning to think, with Paul, that I possess 
 all things. 
 
 IV 
 
 Nor must I overlook my possessions in our beauti¬ 
 ful parks. I love them all, but I love Prospect Park 
 supremely. I have set out and grown enough ser- 
 monic plants in the Vale of Cashmere, the Great 
 Meadow, and the Old Fashioned Flower Garden to 
 put several and sundry congregations permanently to 
 sleep! Planners and builders of our cities knew that 
 the great majority of us could not have either large 
 or strikingly attractive gardens and yards. There is 
 simply not enough space on this particular part of 
 the earth’s surface. There is plenty of room up in 
 the atmosphere, if you can manage to live at great 
 altitudes; there is plenty of room, also, on the heav¬ 
 ing breast of the Atlantic, if you are fond of leading 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 23 
 
 an aquatic life; but here on the ground there is so 
 much blasting, digging, running, tooting, driving, 
 yelling, crunching, grinding, jostling, and crowding, 
 that yards are almost lost in the chaotic mix-up. 
 Therefore, we have these splendid breathing spaces, 
 perfumed gardens and timbered tracts, undulating 
 swards and lilied ponds, animal haunts and flower 
 houses, in our parks. Now I do not own a great 
 yard; but I possess what is far grander than any yard 
 owned by any millionaire on these two islands; I own 
 one of the most beautiful parks on earth. The Bor¬ 
 ough of Brooklyn, in the city of New York, says to 
 me: “Mr. Shannon, all these roads, walks, lakes, 
 trees, birds, and flowers are yours. You will oblige 
 us very much by coming in and enjoying them.” 
 
 “But,” some croaker protests, “there is a string 
 to that invitation.” “What is it?” I ask. “They 
 don’t permit you to take anything away,” he replies. 
 Don’t they, indeed? Not being a vandal, I have no 
 inclination to haul away the trees, or lead away the 
 lions and tigers, or steal the lily pond, or kidnap the 
 lakes. Yet I defy the Mayor, the Board of Aider- 
 men, the Borough President, and the entire Police 
 Department to prevent me from carrying out of 
 Prospect Park the very best things in it! Would you 
 like to know what some of those things are? First 
 of all, studies in human nature. Old and young, rich 
 and poor, good and bad, happy and sad—all are met 
 
24 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 together in this fragrant out-of-doors. Second: 
 Memories of birds singing at evensong—birds that 
 have long since returned to the Summerlands of the 
 Unreturning! Years ago I listened to a robin sing¬ 
 ing his vesper song to the silvery patter of the falling 
 rain. Recalling it now, it seems as vivid and fresh as 
 if it were only yesterday. Sitting there on the edge 
 of the night in his tree-loft of green, that little min¬ 
 strel of God sang into my soul the sense of calm 
 breathing out of the Supreme Dawn, brought me 
 little winds of peace blowing gently down from the 
 tranquil Hills of Morning. And then I bring away 
 something else, too. I gather up heartfuls, armfuls 
 of loveliness and carry them home with me. No park 
 policeman has ever yet objected to that! But this is 
 an essential part of that sublime and moneyless barter 
 in which we may all profitably engage, improving 
 the timely admonition of Sara Teasdale: 
 
 “Life has loveliness to sell, 
 
 All beautiful and splendid things, 
 
 Blue waves whitened on a cliff, 
 
 Soaring fire that sways and sings, 
 
 And children’s faces looking up. 
 
 Holding wonder like a cup. 
 
 Life has loveliness to sell, 
 
 Music like a curve of gold, 
 
 Scent of pine-trees in the rain, 
 
 Eyes that love you, arms that hold. 
 
 And for your spirit’s still delight, 
 
 Holy thoughts that star the night. 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 25 
 
 Spend all you have for loveliness, 
 
 Buy it and never count the cost; 
 
 For one white singing hour of peace 
 Count many a year of strife well lost, 
 
 And for a breath of ecstasy 
 
 Give all you have been, or could be.” 
 
 v 
 
 Moreover, I count myself especially rich in my lur¬ 
 ing libraries—public repositories of the learning and 
 wisdom of countless ages. If matter is dead mind, 
 books are the souls of the dead dressed up in living 
 garments of glory. Books are the embodied voices 
 of the past crying aloud in the teeming present, in¬ 
 struments through which minds, ejected from brain- 
 houses fallen to dust, still inspiringly function. 
 Books are helpful servants, but autocratic masters, 
 and no freeman has the right to be ruled by an auto¬ 
 crat. Doctor Hillis told me some years ago that he 
 had stopped reading books. I replied: “I am not sur¬ 
 prised at that. Does not a man stop eating, after he 
 has eaten everything up ?” However, I think that my 
 dear and noble friend is still able to read a book now 
 and then! While I have not stopped reading, I do 
 not buy as many books as I once did. One reason is 
 this: Either I or my books must move out! There is 
 no longer room for all of us. Rather than dispossess 
 old friends, it seems easier to invite new ones in for 
 a short visit. And this is quite practicable through 
 
26 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 my ownership in several libraries. Think of that 
 great building on Fifth Avenue, with its more than 
 thirteen hundred thousand volumes and pamphlets— 
 a library and art gallery under one roof. Do you 
 not think old Plato would like to have broken into 
 those green literary pastures and ravenously eaten his 
 way out? Not for Platos only, but food is there in 
 satisfying abundance for ordinary people in pursuit 
 of extraordinary aims and ideals, angels that guide us 
 out of the humdrum into the divinely enchanting. 
 Formerly there was scarcely a limit to the number 
 of volumes that a student could take out; at present, 
 however, patrons are limited to a definite number. 
 Even dearer and nearer are the libraries here at 
 home. I have been in the Montague Branch so often 
 that I fear my shadow will disfigure the walls. 
 Besides the books, there are the weekly, monthly, and 
 quarterly reviews from America and foreign coun¬ 
 tries. What an absorbing exercise to sit down and 
 enjoy (or perhaps quarrel with) the Spectator, the 
 Athenaeum, the Edinburgh Review, the Hibbert 
 Journal, and numerous other publications. Finally, 
 if you are afflicted by a kind of disease—the biblio¬ 
 maniac will readily understand!—for rare manu¬ 
 scripts and odd volumes, the libraries will also help 
 to assuage, if not entirely cure, your malady. At any 
 rate, cured or uncured, you will want to repeat “The 
 Bibliomaniac’s Prayer,” by Eugene Field. Once, 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 27 
 
 when Doctor Gunsaulus was undergoing an acute at¬ 
 tack of “bibliomania,” the special symptoms of which 
 assumed a contagious craving for certain copper¬ 
 plates, (one never can tell what extravagant and 
 glowing forms the treacherous disease will take!) 
 Field wrote this prayer and dedicated it to his beloved 
 friend and sorely afflicted victim. The original 
 manuscript of the prayer is now the property of the 
 University of Chicago Library, having been pre¬ 
 sented to it by Doctor Gunsaulus, the text of which 
 follows: 
 
 “Keep me, I pray, in wisdom’s way 
 That I may truths eternal seek; 
 
 I need protecting care today— 
 
 My purse is light, my flesh is weak. 
 
 So banish from my erring heart 
 All baleful appetites and hints 
 Of Satan’s fascinating arts, 
 
 Of first editions, and of prints. 
 
 Direct me in some godly walk 
 
 Which leads away from bookish strife, 
 
 That I with pious deed and talk 
 May extra-illustrate my life. 
 
 But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee 
 To keep me in temptation’s way, 
 
 I humbly crave that I may be 
 Most notably beset today. 
 
 Let my temptation be a book 
 
 Which I shall purchase, hold, and keep, 
 Whereon when other men shall look, 
 
 They’ll wail to know I got it cheap. 
 
28 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 Oh, let it such a volume be 
 
 As in rare copperplates abounds— 
 
 Large paper, tall, and fair to see, 
 
 Uncut, unique, unknown to Lowndes.” 
 
 VI 
 
 Henley speaks of Romney’s work as “something 
 which is only almost done.” Still, I must not finish 
 this bare outline of my material capital without men¬ 
 tioning the “little towns” I own. Country born and 
 bred, I love the cities. There is soul-shaking power 
 in their terrific energy, their splendor and squalor, 
 their righteousness and wickedness, their wealth and 
 poverty, their pathos and tragedy. But between the 
 cities—the inspirers of the cities, the saviors of the 
 cities—are the little towns, villages, and hamlets that 
 dot the land from ocean to ocean. Sometimes they 
 sit back from the great highways, as a vine-covered 
 cottage sits back from the roadside; sometimes they 
 lie hidden among the mountains, like precious gems 
 waiting to share their beauty with every practiced 
 eye; sometimes they nestle along the plains, sweet as 
 the golden wheatfields billowing away to the horizon; 
 sometimes they kneel upon the banks of a mountain 
 river, most of the citizens never having a glimpse of 
 their rustic river’s wide and hospitable sea; some¬ 
 times they bow in quiet, nun-like valleys, faithfully 
 guarded by high hills, over whose peace-crowned 
 
A Moneyless Magnate 29 
 
 heights discordant voices never sound. But oh! my 
 little towns—wherever you be, north, south, east, or 
 west—the very thought of you brings me the bread 
 of beauty, the wine of hope, the apples of Eden. 
 Long ago Emerson suggested that it is embarrassing 
 to wake up some morning and discover that some¬ 
 body else has expressed your own thought, even 
 though it is expressed better than you yourself could 
 express it. Nevertheless, I am quite willing to par¬ 
 don Hilda Morris for visiting me with such an em¬ 
 barrassment in the form of her poem called “The 
 Little Towns”: 
 
 “Oh, little town in Arkansas and little town in Maine, 
 And little sheltered valley town and hamlet on the 
 plain, 
 
 Salem, Jackson, Waukesha, and Brookville, and 
 Peru, 
 
 San Mateo, and Irontown, and Lake, and Waterloo, 
 Little town we smiled upon and loved for simple 
 ways, 
 
 Quiet streets and garden beds and friendly sunlit 
 days, 
 
 Out of you the soldiers came, 
 
 Little town of homely name. 
 
 Young and strong and brave with laughter, 
 
 They saw truth and followed after. 
 
 Little town, the birth of them 
 Makes you kin to Bethlehem! 
 
 Little town where Jimmy Brown ran the grocery 
 store, 
 
30 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 Little town where Manuel fished along the shore, 
 Where Russian Steve was carpenter, and Sandy Pat 
 McQuade 
 
 Worked all day in overalls at his mechanic’s trade. 
 Where Allen Perkins practiced law, and John, Judge 
 Harper’s son, 
 
 Planned a little house for two that never shall be 
 done— 
 
 Little town, you gave them all, 
 
 Rich and poor and great and small, 
 
 Bred them clean and straight and strong, 
 
 Sent them forth to right the wrong. 
 
 Little town, their glorious death 
 Makes you kin to Nazareth!” 
 
II 
 
 Beethoven in the Back Yard 
 
 W HILE passing a certain house, my eyes rested 
 upon a statue of Beethoven in the rear of it. 
 At first I was keenly aware of the disharmony of the 
 thing. Here was one of the immortal names in 
 music; and here, also, at the back of the house, and 
 in a yard distinguished for nothing save the com¬ 
 poser’s head done in stone, was the silent, stony, 
 majestic face of one whose very name is synonymous 
 for moving melodies. 
 
 As already intimated, my first impression was a 
 kind of mental discord, a feeling that the sense of 
 fitness had been violated. But I hold that opinion no 
 longer. Many times since have I gone by that house; 
 each passing has tended to do away with the feeling 
 of inappropriateness. Now, remembering the de¬ 
 light of seeing Beethoven in his back yard, I go out 
 of my way for the pleasurable sensation of resting 
 my eyes upon that materialized symphony in stone. 
 There he sits, calmly looking out on his surround¬ 
 ings. He seems quietly determined to turn them all 
 —the ugly and the beautiful, the chords and the dis¬ 
 cords—into rolling rhythms of harmony. 
 
 3i 
 
32 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 It may be that my inward change was wrought by 
 the words of a quiet man to whom I unbosomed my 
 original repulsion. “Discord!” he exclaimed, with 
 scarcely any sign of exclamation in his convincing 
 tones. “There’s no discord at all. Beethoven needs 
 the back yard; the back yard needs Beethoven; and 
 we need both.” Unable to forget the man’s words, 
 I have decided to set down some random reflections 
 upon Master Beethoven in the back yard. 
 
 i 
 
 “Beethoven needs the back yard.” Well, at any 
 rate the master was acquainted with the back yard 
 of things long before anybody dreamed of chiseling 
 him in stone. His father was a drunkard; his 
 mother was the daughter of a cook—which is re¬ 
 called, in this connection, just to remind ourselves 
 what glorious things proceed from the kitchen; he 
 was deaf before middle life; he endured the stupidity 
 of a churlish brother. What a delicious story is that 
 of his brother calling upon the composer and leaving 
 his card worded thus : 
 
 JOHANN VAN BEETHOVEN, 
 
 LAND PROPRIETOR. 
 
 On returning home the musician found the card, 
 wrote the following words on the opposite side, and 
 sent it back to his pompously stupid kinsman : 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 33 
 
 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, 
 
 BRAIN PROPRIETOR. 
 
 One might indefinitely extend the list of ugly back 
 yards through which the mighty genius was doomed 
 to pass in his pilgrimage across the years. There 
 were jealous teachers; there were designing women; 
 there was that scapegrace of a nephew; there were 
 kinglets and princelets and—well, so many glorious 
 and inglorious obstacles in his way that it is simply 
 enchanting to stand at a meaningful historic dis¬ 
 tance and see him overleap them. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, I think, with my deep- 
 seeing friend, that Beethoven needed the back yard. 
 How much did life’s back yard have to do in lending 
 the deathless note to his compositions? Having 
 asked that question, we are thrust headlong into the 
 mystery of human life. Not, if you please, human 
 life in its celebrated expressions—not the Beethovens, 
 nor the Shakespeares, nor the Lincolns only; but 
 worthful, red-souled, clean-motived, high-minded 
 human life in its common, everyday, universal might 
 and majesty. 
 
 Once I went to minister to a sick woman. There 
 were miles and miles of gray stone to travel, remind¬ 
 ing one of Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night.” 
 The house was not much, but it was artistically tidy, 
 immaculate in its cleanliness. Occupied by two 
 
34 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 maiden sisters, they had fought with poverty, hard¬ 
 ship, and menacing environment the long years 
 through. And now one of them was desperately ill. 
 But the well one—the one who was still struggling to 
 keep the vanishing remainders of their home-life 
 together—was not content to have a doctor and her 
 own watchful love at her sister’s beck and call, day 
 and night. A trained nurse must also draw upon her 
 scanty savings. Reminded that perhaps this was an 
 unnecessary expense and that there were “rainy 
 days” ahead for her, she said: “What are a few dol¬ 
 lars to me, after my sister is gone?” With the going 
 of her sister, a part of herself was being passed on 
 also—a something which neither few dollars nor 
 many could alter in the least. 
 
 Within that toiling woman’s face there was a 
 power of immortal reserve—a splendor, a radiance, 
 a Godlikeness—that one could well go far to see, and 
 be handsomely overpaid at the end of his journey. 
 What, for example, is “the light of setting suns” to 
 the light of love that beamed in her patient eye? 
 What is the fragrance of heliotropes to the aroma 
 of self-forgetfulness distilled from her heart? What 
 is the grandeur of mountain summits to the moral 
 height of her unfaltering will? Unacquainted with 
 the luxury of self-dispraise, as Wordsworth might 
 say, she was so unconsciously and yet so nobly 
 planned, that any soul having an appetite for what 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 35 
 
 is finely beautiful could not possibly have missed it 
 here in this bloomingly spiritual back yard. 
 
 “But there was nothing unusual in her unselfish¬ 
 ness,’’ the cynic may interpose. “Such cases are very 
 common.” And is not the cynic half right? At the 
 same time does not all half-rightness disclose the in¬ 
 exhaustible wonder of the wholly and holy right ? It 
 is even so here. For the unusualness of unselfishness 
 could only be truly seen by its absence. Just let the 
 world jog along a single day without these common¬ 
 place and usual tokens of goodwill and at nightfall 
 our planet would be conspicuous by reason of the 
 enlarged areas of hell upon it. Therefore, the deadly 
 and deadening power of the familiar is to be shunned 
 like a plague. The fact is, we have learned to call 
 that something genius in people who can paint a 
 halo around the brow of the ordinary. Is not this in 
 itself sufficient proof that, beyond all cavil, there is 
 really no ordinary; everything is extraordinary, as 
 every perceptive and receptive nature thrillingly 
 knows. It is just our ordinary, hum-drum, no-vision 
 of things that makes it possible for us to snub the 
 back yard with its commanding Beethoven. 
 
 The reaches of our Lord and Master into this 
 prolific realm are, of course, unparalleled. Christ’s 
 awareness of the living universe is immense. Any¬ 
 where and anytime He throws a window open toward 
 the Infinite. It is all the more impressive by the very 
 
36 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 economy of the words He employs in reporting His 
 world-consciousness. Adjectives are not popular in 
 the Master’s vocabulary. He is so perfectly alive 
 that He seems fearful lest He should waste a breath 
 of His being through a meaningless word. Reality 
 pressed so strongly upon the centers of His soul that 
 nouns, uncolored and unqualified, are the verbal 
 sluiceways through which He pours the tides of 
 eternal life. Yet, according to accepted standards, 
 did not Jesus spend His earthly career in the back 
 yards of the world? This fact, commonplace as a 
 matter of history, becomes positively acute with 
 wonder and awe for every thoughtful person who 
 tries to grasp it. Born in a manger, toiling with His 
 hands, teaching by lakeside and in market-place, 
 surrounded by a company of unlettered peasants, 
 frowned upon by the important and misunderstood 
 by the ignorant, forsaken at last by His own and 
 crucified by His enemies, the story, in view of its 
 deepening, transforming hold on the human heart, 
 is almost incredible as it is entirely unimaginable. 
 John Stuart Mill is right—only the fact of Jesus can 
 account for the story of Jesus. The human mind, 
 said Mill, was incapable of inventing it. One might 
 as well talk of inventing stars or oceans or mountains 
 as of inventing the character, words, and deeds of the 
 God-Man! 
 
 And not the least invigorating and uplifting 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 37 
 
 thing about it all is this: He needed the back yard; 
 which is just another way of saying that God Him¬ 
 self, for any truly humanizing revelation of His 
 Godhead, could not avoid the back yard. Personally, 
 I have scant sympathy with that theological doggerel 
 which pictures God as out in the universe looking for 
 Himself, not yet arrived at the point of self-con¬ 
 sciousness, a kind of hectic, emaciated ghostly be¬ 
 coming, without having fully arrived! That sort of 
 thinking advertises the quality of mental milk-and- 
 water mushiness some of us are capable of stirring 
 up. Of a different grain, however, are those New 
 Testament strata of thought upon which the Incarna¬ 
 tion immovably rests. “Though He was a Son”— 
 yes, the Son, the only Begotten Son—“yet learned 
 obedience by the things which He suffered.” And 
 what were the things He suffered? Some of them, 
 unquestionably, were these: Human dullness, mean¬ 
 ness, slander, hatred, jealousy, lying, misunderstand¬ 
 ing, misinterpretation. He suffered them all, and 
 some of them in the Bethany household. “For even 
 His brethren did not believe on Him.” When He 
 died on Calvary, His brothers, James and Jude, in 
 common with every other mortal, thought that an 
 end had been made of Him. More than once, His 
 mother undertook to revise His plans, being naturally 
 and motheringly proud of such a Son. Verily, the 
 New Testament is full of the things He suffered. 
 
38 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 Whatever the un fathomed immensities contained in 
 the unique and solitary death on Calvary, that was 
 not all He suffered. But—in all and through all the 
 things He suffered—He learned; and He learned, 
 though He was a Son—the Son of God! 
 
 So I infer that there was more than the mere 
 human need—awful and profound as that is—of our 
 Infinite Beethoven in the back yards of time. If God 
 underwent a new experience in the Incarnation, as 
 Christian philosophy and revelation lead us to believe, 
 then the back yard, and all that it signifies, has taken 
 unto itself a value that the human generations can¬ 
 not exhaust. What if the back yard has already be¬ 
 come a suburb of the New Jerusalem, and we know 
 it not ? The final greatness, argues a philosopher, is 
 not with the man who alters matter but with the man 
 who alters mind. And does not the true altering of 
 mind rest with Christ, and Christ alone? It is a 
 gigantic task. It will require other ages and other 
 worlds than ours for its complete realization. But 
 both the ages and the worlds belong to Him. Con¬ 
 sidering our own world, it is not always easy to dis¬ 
 cern how and where He is altering its mind for the 
 best. But He is, just the same. Not without loss— 
 great and immeasurable, perhaps irretrievable loss; 
 but none the less with gain—deep, golden, and im¬ 
 perishable. 
 
 There are more things, truly, in the back yard 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 39 
 
 than the casual observer sees. Oh, yes, the wash is 
 there, to be sure! And the rubbish! And the 
 croaker! But the clothes are in process of cleansing; 
 underneath the rubbish there is the unspeakable mys¬ 
 tery of life; at the feet of the croaker blooms the 
 crocus, and he sees it not. So I am glad, after all, 
 that Beethoven needs the back yard. For one thing, 
 his deaf ears may hear better there. Anyway, the 
 stars look down upon him by night; the sun lights 
 up his forward-looking gaze by day; April rains wash 
 his massive cheeks, as if tenderly striving to mingle 
 their drops with tears not yet all unwept; playful 
 winds whirl about his dead ears, and he looks as if he 
 might be listening to harmonies that would “create a 
 soul under the ribs of death.” I am grateful that he 
 beckons me to come and visit with him betimes. 
 Standing in his mute presence, his lips of stone seem 
 to be saying: “Who has more obedience than I mas¬ 
 ters me, though he should not raise his finger. 
 Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of 
 spirits.” And then— 
 
 “All suddenly the wind comes soft, 
 
 And Spring is here again; 
 
 And the hawthorn quickens with buds of green, 
 And my heart with buds of pain.” 
 
 Yet is there not something poignantly creative in 
 these “buds of pain” ? Does not one look with other, 
 
40 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 deeper eyes upon the groaning, travailing universe? 
 Even groaning within ourselves, do we not already 
 have the “first-fruits of the Spirit” ? If so, then the 
 crimson buds of pain are unrolling into spiritual 
 buds of green! Wherefore, we shall make no terms 
 with Giant Despair and his obstreperous myrmidons. 
 Rather, we shall go on our way in quietness and 
 hope, reinterpreting the pilgrim-rune of David Gray¬ 
 son : “I am living deep again” 
 
 ii 
 
 “The back yard needs Beethoven.” That was the 
 second idea flashed out by my unassuming monitor. 
 Just what he meant by it, or all that he meant, I do 
 not pretend to understand. But it is one of those 
 cryptic sayings which lend themselves to various 
 interpretations. 
 
 Did he mean that there is a kind of drab, monot¬ 
 onous variety in the life of the back yard that needs 
 to be awakened to something higher by the breath of 
 the artistic? If he did, my answer was ready. 
 “What!” I should have exclaimed. “Do you mean 
 to say that here, close to the heart of things, there is 
 any need whatever of art? Look at Mother Nature 
 waking her children up! Is it not a sight for gods 
 and men to see then scrambling out of their wintry 
 sleep? There is that dandelion this moment thrust¬ 
 ing its saffron bonnet through the soil; there is that 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 4 1 
 
 dream-haunted hedge, alive with a million buds, fair¬ 
 ly opening their green eyes upon the April-colored 
 world; here is this emerald-streaked carpet of grass, 
 daily unrolling its velvety splendor in patterns of 
 soothing, nutritious greenness; there is that lazy 
 worm, capable of losing both its head and tail and 
 then uncomplainingly growing each again, as if 
 worm-surgery were foreordained to keep human 
 surgery on the brink of despair. And then—look! 
 quick! There goes the first bluebird, like a winged 
 flower dipped in vats of heavenly blue! What is art, 
 if you please, to all this?” 
 
 From the harvest of his quiet eye, my friend 
 seemed to say: “Nature can only come to its deeper 
 self through the aid of the human. Apart from 
 Beethoven, how long would it take your flowers and 
 worms and bluebirds to arrange themselves into a 
 Ninth Symphony?” 
 
 He was getting me into the deep waters of 
 thought, beyond all question; so deep, indeed, that I 
 had no mind to follow him just then. Like a bare¬ 
 foot boy with his first Maytide vision of the old 
 swimming hole, I, too, was whooping things up in 
 the quivering out-of-doors. For who dares to say 
 that there is no excitement in watching the brown, 
 wintry earth turn green before our very eyes ? Who 
 is willing to confess that there is no emotion whatever 
 in considering the marvel of unfolding buds? And 
 
< 
 
 42 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 who, verily, could behold that feathered miracle 
 named the first bluebird in Spring and not fanatically 
 believe in God and angels and saints and fairies and 
 everything else that is lovely and of good report? 
 
 Still, I am willing to concede, notwithstanding my 
 unbridled fanaticism toward prophetic bluebirds and 
 evangelical shrubbery, that this matter of 'the back 
 yard’s need of Beethoven cannot be ignored. For 
 are not the back yards of the world pathetically in 
 need of an interpreter? One can scarcely restrict 
 the application of this thought; it is so wide-winged, 
 so class-defying, so vastly human in its appeal. 
 Plainly, the need of an interpreting, harmony- 
 haunted Beethoven is universal. Take my two 
 friends of “the cloth”—well-worn cloth, too, very 
 black, very long, and very shiny! I saw them for 
 the last time as they rounded a curve on the hill-road 
 in that long-vanished West Virginia morning. I 
 was on my way to my first circuit, a callow youth, 
 with all the extra meanings attendant upon callow¬ 
 ness. The saving grace of it all is, in the mellow 
 light of memory, I was so eager to make the venture 
 that I spent a well-nigh sleepless night. Long before 
 the morning broke its heart of silver over the Ken¬ 
 tucky hills, I was fording the mountain river that 
 separates West Virginia and Kentucky. My wagon 
 was not hitched to a star, but to an old bay mare, 
 driven by a faithful, half-witted servant who lived 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 43 
 
 in the home of my beloved Grandmother Sullivan. 
 Within a few hours I reached the railroad station 
 and the train that bore me on my way rejoicing. 
 
 It was on this first lap of the journey that, quite 
 suddenly, these two veteran scouts, who had already 
 guarded the lone outposts of Zion for three or four 
 decades, came driving around a bend in the road. 
 Their greetings and godspeeds were memorably cor¬ 
 dial ; their “God bless you, brother!” and “May you 
 follow in the footsteps of your noble Grandfather!” 
 —these are still soft and vivid notes in the music of 
 memory. 
 
 Now, those two noblemen of God probably 
 worked their lives away at a yearly average compen¬ 
 sation of less than five hundred dollars. One of my 
 own appointments having paid me twenty-five cents 
 —a shining, silver quarter of a dollar for the year!— 
 I rate myself an authority in estimating such bud¬ 
 gets ! But inasmuch as the problem of keeping soul 
 and body together has grown more acute, even for 
 ministers, in these latter days, I am setting the 
 stipend of those two circuit-riders a trifle high. Yet, 
 it is not of their pitiable salary that I am thinking, 
 chiefly, at a distance of twenty years. I am think¬ 
 ing, rather, of this : They had stuff—genuine, clean- 
 through, human Godlike stuff—in them. They were 
 big, burly, oaklike, hickory souls that knew how to 
 wrestle with the spiritual storms that swept through 
 
44 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 those lonely, whispering hills. Up the hollows and 
 down the creeks and over the mountain spurs and 
 into the schoolhouses and log cabins they carried the 
 Good News of God. Fleet-footed couriers were 
 they sent straight from the News Bureau of the 
 Heavens. They reported what they had seen and 
 heard in first editions direct from heart-presses 
 mightily moved by the Spirit of God. There was 
 considerable crudeness, to be sure; but the down¬ 
 right, challenging, smiting, eloquent reality of the 
 thing—that is what stabs the human soul wide 
 awake! 
 
 But oh! the pathetic incompleteness of their lives. 
 There were hungry depths within them forever un¬ 
 fed. There were suppressed longings but brokenly 
 realized. There were high thoughts, stammeringly 
 spoken at best, yet refreshingly original withal. Was 
 it because the ears of the speakers lay closer to the 
 nature of things than is customary in a more driving 
 and mechanical age? “To believe your own thought, 
 to believe that what is true for you in your private 
 heart, is true for all men—that is genius.” That, 
 also, is one of the shining memory-nuggets I picked 
 up during those hill-days. Yet do not the men and 
 the saying prove the necessity of an interpreting 
 Beethoven in our back yards of the world? Nature 
 leaves so many things unsaid; life begins and ends 
 with a host of problems unexplained. Look where 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 45 
 
 we will, the interpreter is much in request. We do 
 well not to forget the ‘‘sky-born music”; we do ill 
 if we fail to remember the music that comes from 
 behind the sky. 
 
 Yet my friends, who long ago laid their tired 
 bodies down within the bosom of those wooded hills, 
 are not the only ones requiring an interpreter. In¬ 
 deed, these suppressed lives do not argue so insist¬ 
 ently, after all, for a clew to the tangled skein of 
 human mysteries, as the unfolded, ripened men and 
 women of the ages. If Paul could make such apos¬ 
 tolic gestures in less than threescore years and ten, 
 what might he not accomplish in threescore and a 
 million? If Shakespeare could drag into the open 
 such ordinarily concealed and yet such extraordi¬ 
 narily great thoughts, within less than threescore 
 years, what may he not report as he becomes 
 seonianly familiar with the Archives of Eternity? 
 If Frederick Robertson could think and preach so 
 gloriously in less than twoscore years, shall we be¬ 
 come foolhardy enough to set any limits to the ser¬ 
 mons and expositions he may make after spending 
 ten thousand years in the presence of the Original 
 Text? If Raphael could paint a Transfiguration 
 while yet scarcely removed from the swaddling bands 
 of his earthly youth, what may he not achieve in a 
 universe whose solar sunsets are relatively blurred 
 canvases, knowing that in the spaces there are flam- 
 
46 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 ing blue suns as well as flaming red suns—worlds so 
 unimaginably colored that our seven prismatic colors 
 do not begin to tell the beauty of them? 
 
 Anyway, Beethoven himself needs an interpreter 
 even more than the spinner of jazz melodies. And 
 was he not grandly sure of finding Him? Equal 
 to any music Beethoven ever composed, I think, are 
 those last and dying words of his, spoken as he was 
 mysteriously moving out of his house with its dead 
 ears into his house not made with hands: “I shall 
 hear in Heaven “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
 neither have entered into the heart of man, the things 
 which God hath prepared for them that love Him. 
 But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit.” 
 I am more than half inclined to wonder if there 
 are not blended prophetic and apostolic deeps hidden 
 away in these words which can never be entirely 
 sounded by the psychologist and the psychoanalyst? 
 If the back yard really needs Beethoven, the back 
 yard verily has Him! “The sun,” says Bacon, 
 “though it passes through dirty places, yet remains 
 as pure as before.” I wonder if music, though it 
 passes through dull, human ears, remains not only 
 as musical as it was before, but obeying what the 
 great German was fond of calling the law of spirit¬ 
 ual increase in the universe, becomes even more mu¬ 
 sical ? Well, anyway, the Infinite Beethoven knows. 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 47 
 
 hi 
 
 “The world needs both.” Without too large a 
 generalization as to what is implied by “the world,” 
 I prefer to confine the meaning to the speaker and to 
 myself. Strikingly minute editions of the world as 
 we are, this method offers the advantage of being 
 concrete. Human life, being what it is, and in the 
 process of an immeasurable becoming, I do not 
 hesitate to affirm that all of us need both—Beetho¬ 
 ven, who speaks for the ideal, and the back yard, 
 which hardly needs to speak for the practical, being 
 in itself so loud-toned that we can with difficulty 
 miss its meaning. 
 
 Are not most of us inclined to be somewhat impa¬ 
 tient with the ideal, with the larger significance inev¬ 
 itably attaching to life and things? Particularly is 
 this true in a time such as ours, when the planet is 
 in a sort of human upheaval, when there is so much 
 brawny work to be done, and rather brusquely crowd¬ 
 ing us on every side. But does not the very fact 
 that there is so much to be done make it all the more 
 imperative that we keep perfectly clear the reason 
 why so much should be done ? That world-deep why 
 hurls us immediately beyond the boundaries of the 
 so-called practical. We are at once in the presence 
 of Beethoven—of music, of art, of prayer, of faith, 
 of hope, of love, of soul, of God. Why, then, 
 
48 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 should the millions moil and toil? To build faster 
 railways, more efficient banks, larger machine shops, 
 taller, sun-hiding skyscrapers, more sanitary cities, 
 more convenient houses ? That we may do all these 
 and not do enough, is a commonplace of progress, 
 ethics, and religion; but that while doing all these we 
 may also become dead souls is the spiritual revenge 
 which the universe invariably takes upon us. “How 
 shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?” 
 The question is not simply evangelical; it is cosmic, 
 scientific, historic, profoundly human. And the 
 answer comes, from a thousand voices, that there 
 is no possible escape—not as long as the universe 
 bears the semblance of order. Every day I meet 
 cultured, successful men who have no more of a 
 spiritual roof over their heads than the veriest hobo, 
 who boasts not a single physical shingle for his. As 
 I view it, the latter is replete with physical and 
 human pathos; but the former is black with terrible 
 spiritual tragedy. For the physical tramp is sordidly, 
 repulsively dead; the spiritual tramp is smoothly, 
 subtly, gayly, icily, splendidly, hopelessly dead, 
 though unburied. Frequently he is a cynic; under¬ 
 neath his fine exterior there is dourness and sourness; 
 and I modestly submit that a pickled cynic, though 
 preserved in a strong brine of gold, can never acquire 
 a delicious taste on any planet in the known universe. 
 
 Truly, my friend, we need Beethoven; our human 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 49 
 
 nature must have superhuman nature within, around, 
 and underneath it. “It is the province of a great 
 poet,” Wordsworth once said to Klopstock, “to raise 
 people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs.” 
 It were not less truly said of the statesman, the 
 Christian preacher and reformer, or indeed of any 
 Christian whatsoever. But to lift people at all— 
 aye, there’s the rub! If there is so much sheer dead 
 weight in any other realm known to avoirdupois, 
 average people like ourselves, people whom we meet 
 in the stress and press of everyday, seem to be com¬ 
 placently unaware of it. 
 
 And yet there is a Lifter! He carries the worlds on 
 His shoulders and His sin-smitten, death-wounded 
 children in His heart. If the old Greek geometrician 
 discovered the principle of the lever, declaring, “Give 
 me where to stand, and I will move the world,” our 
 Uplifted Beethoven reveals the moral center of God 
 and Man, takes His stand upon it, saying: “And I, 
 if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
 unto Myself.” Thus, while I can see the dead weight 
 in the average man, especially as it does not require 
 much visualizing power to do that, He senses, even 
 from his riven, shuddering hill of red rain, the pos¬ 
 sibility of all men being lifted to heights beyond 
 which heights there are none—Himself! 
 
 So, I think, we need both—the ideal and the real. 
 The problem of life is to keep the two in proper 
 
50 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 focus. Our capacity for spilling over on the wrong 
 side of each is ever with us in exasperating dimen¬ 
 sions. Some want to be hermits and others never 
 want to be out of human haunts; some are shriveled- 
 up book-worms and others carry brains alive with 
 the worms of ignorance; some are riotously social¬ 
 istic and others are egocentrically individualistic; 
 some want to pray all the time and others want to 
 work all the time. And so we go—mis-seeing, mis¬ 
 doing, mis-living. Yet the unwithering secret of 
 life is the legitimate marriage of these two facts, 
 which are deeply one at heart. I once saw a librarian 
 have a child expelled from the reading-room of a 
 library while the librarian himself kept right on talk¬ 
 ing louder than a half dozen children. Thus the 
 abyss between theory and practice must be continu¬ 
 ously bridged over. But the Bridge-builder has 
 come; He has never gone away; He has wisely van¬ 
 ished behind the horizons of sense that He may 
 more perfectly, universally, and transfiguringly home 
 within. That myth of the sibyl and Tarquin the 
 Proud is instructive here. Having nine books, she 
 offered to sell them to the king. As he refused to 
 buy them, she went away and burned three. Then 
 she came a second time, demanding as much for the 
 six as for the nine. Still the king refused to pur¬ 
 chase. The sibyl went away and burned three more., 
 Returning with three, she asked as much for them 
 
Beethoven in the Back Yard 51 
 
 as for the nine. At last the king’s curiosity was 
 excited, and he bought the remaining three. And 
 well that he did! They contained the destinies of 
 the Roman Empire. 
 
 Without a single touch of myth, but with the very 
 soul of reality, the destinies of humanity are revealed 
 in words as simple as they are sublime, as heartening 
 as they are unexplorable, as modern as they are more 
 than sixty generations old. They were spoken to 
 Thomas, a severely practical man—a man prone to 
 linger overmuch in the back yard of being. “Jesus 
 saith unto him, I am the way, and the truth, and the 
 life: no one cometh unto the Father but by Me.” 
 Thomas did not readily understand; but after the 
 Light of the World had gone through the apostle’s 
 endungeoned parts, the Sun, to recall Bacon’s figure, 
 was just as pure as before, while Thomas was in¬ 
 finitely cleaner. At least one thinks so, when, eight 
 days later, the man of doubt had his gaze lifted from 
 the muck and mire and accepted, whole-heartedly, 
 the Lordship of that eternity-tuned Beethoven, Who 
 was dead and is alive forevermore. 
 
Ill 
 
 Morning Tourist, Ltd! 
 
 W ELL, what did you see this morning?” 
 
 The question was asked by the wife of the 
 Morning Tourist. 
 
 “Ask me something easy,” he answered. “I 
 have seen so much that my mind is all in a har¬ 
 monious whirl.” 
 
 And yet the Tourist was limited in more ways 
 than one. He was limited for time, a most impor¬ 
 tant element in all true sight-seeing. He was lim¬ 
 ited, also, in respect to territory. For it was only 
 a nook in the blooming, melodious out-of-doors that 
 he had been able to visit. Most of all, as the sequel 
 proves, he was limited in the matter of eyes. If he 
 had owned a thousand eyes instead of two, he knows 
 that something would have managed to escape 
 them. So, fully recognizing the handicaps he suf¬ 
 fered, here is an attempt to set down a few of the 
 Morning Tourist’s observations. 
 
 i 
 
 The first item has to do with what the wise ones 
 
 call the inorganic. Whether they understand all 
 
 52 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 53 
 
 that might be said about this mysterious realm, I 
 shall not tarry to debate. It was the belief of Plato 
 that poets utter great and mysterious things which 
 they themselves do not understand; it may be even 
 so of the savants and the inorganic. But, like the 
 poor, the inorganic is ever with us. And with us 
 in surpassing wonder, too. For is it not a miracle 
 too great to be told to watch this world of soil and 
 roots change before our very eyes? Snow covered 
 the ground a few weeks ago; the earth was stiff with 
 ribs of ice; the razor-like winds shaved one’s face 
 with keen edges. Yet behold! The only snow visi¬ 
 ble anywhere today is in the white blossoms waving 
 in the domes of swaying, wind-rocked trees; there 
 is not a sign of frozen stuff in the ground, this busy 
 merchantman having bartered away his icy wares 
 for tender grasses and flowering shrubs; the wind no 
 longer smites—it is soft, wooing, and priestly, bear¬ 
 ing a million seeds upon its invisible wings to 
 nuptial bowers hidden away in every part of the 
 wedded and wedding Springtime. 
 
 Do I believe in miracles? With all my heart! 
 As long as snowbanks are lifted into bowers of 
 green; as long as icicles are changed into fragrant 
 twigs; as long as the wild tunes of March melt into 
 the building songs of May, I shall remain an incur¬ 
 able believer in miracles. I refuse to be mentally 
 and spiritually brow-beaten by polysyllabic terminol- 
 
54 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 ogy about inviolable laws and cosmic forces. While 
 some people use the big words only, I am highly 
 resolved to enjoy the Big Fact also! 
 
 Still keeping close to the inorganic, here is a sight 
 worth inscribing upon the tablets of memory. Let 
 me illustrate what I mean by something familiar 
 in our human world. Some friends came in to see 
 the new baby—not mine, I am sorry to say, but 
 somebody’s dimpled, wonderful baby! But the little 
 creature was asleep. Having slept long enough, it 
 was high time the darling was now wide awake and 
 engaged in the enchanting business of cooing—busi¬ 
 ness, by the way, no honest bachelor can understand 
 except through an interpreter. Still the baby slept 
 on. Then did I see the Mother bend over that cradle 
 and gently call her child back from the Sleeplands 
 of Babyhood into our noises. Likewise, have I not 
 seen Mother Nature brooding above her ten thousand 
 cradles? Putting on her robes of mothering glory, 
 she goes mysteriously forth and says : “Get up, Dan¬ 
 delion ! Rouse yourself, Tulip! Come out and greet 
 the sun, Heliotrope! Wake up, Hyacinth, and 
 sprinkle the air with your fragrance!” And do not 
 all the floral children know their Mother’s voice? 
 Yes; down to the last syllable and tone. A still 
 better answer is in the whole wide-verdured world 
 named gardens, fields, valleys, and mountains. For 
 in Maytime the earth is one vast, many-colored vase 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 55 
 
 wafting its blended odors up to the Throne of 
 God. 
 
 Yet I dare not pass from the inorganic without 
 asking a question which fairly haunts me every 
 springtime. It is this: Where does the tulip begin to 
 get its red or white or yellow ? Is the color concealed 
 in the soil, the root, the stamen, the pistil, or where ? 
 And when does the color begin to steal into the rose, 
 the violet, or the orchid? I asked a gardener this 
 question as he spaded up the soil about the roots of 
 the rose-bushes. Truly, the look upon his face was a 
 study in human botany! But never mind! I am 
 slyly resolved on putting the same question—at the 
 psychological moment, of course!—to my botanical 
 friend, justly renowned for his knowledge of the 
 plant world. Only, I am going to couple with my 
 question concerning the birth of color in flowers, a 
 second one which troubles me not a little. It runs 
 somewhat as follows: At what point does the fra¬ 
 grance get spilled into the jar of a hyacinth? There 
 is, no doubt, a scientific answer to these questions; 
 but even after they have been answered in the latest 
 word of botanical technique, I somehow feel that I 
 shall go right on from Spring to Spring, asking my 
 foolish questions concerning the origin of color and 
 fragrance in flowers. For, as someone has said, it is 
 exactly where biology leaves off that all religion 
 begins. Yet why not have all—botany, biology, and 
 
56 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 religion? That is the question the Morning Tourist 
 was asked by the blossoming inorganic world. 
 
 But if so many awe-provoking sights are visible 
 in the inorganic, what is one going to do when he 
 invades the organic realms? Intellectually stam¬ 
 peded and emotionally overwhelmed, certainly, if he 
 does not watch his step! If roots and petals are 
 baffling, are not wings and warblings gloriously 
 bewildering? If colors on trees and bushes are 
 exquisite, colors on wings—singing flowers in feath¬ 
 ers, floating through the air and winging from tree 
 to tree—are lovelier by far than the most fragrant- 
 sounding words can picture them. For, while fields 
 and gardens are unfolding their panoramas of color, 
 have not birds also been dipped in glowing vats of 
 beauty and marked with every imaginable tint and 
 tone ? In a single tree I have seen a goldfinch and a 
 bluebird holding forth at the same time. It was a 
 momentary study in unconscious beauty; for no 
 man or woman could possibly have flaunted so much 
 finery on Fifth Avenue without the happy, accusing 
 consciousness that everybody in the universe was 
 looking straight at them! Yet was not that a holy 
 trinity of color that I saw? The green of the tree, 
 the blue of the bluebird, and the gold of the gold¬ 
 finch ! 
 
 One of the most royally marked creatures that 
 travel on wings is the flicker. He is drawing worms 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 57 
 
 out of the earth by the yard, some distance away, as 
 I sit here writing. His large body only helps to 
 display his rich colorings. Still, neither that flaming 
 red spot above the head, nor that black scarf across 
 the breast, nor that whiff of white on the tail, nor 
 the shining, russet-colored suit worn by the large 
 body—these do not disclose the unforgettable beauty 
 of the flicker. It is when he springs from the ground 
 and unfolds his ample wings in rhythmic motion, 
 that his unrivaled beauty breaks upon the eye. His 
 underwings are of gleaming gold, and the gold is 
 visible only in flight.' Often, as I have watched him 
 careering through the air and revealing his golden 
 parts, I have two monotonously familiar thoughts. 
 Foremost, that he deserves a more euphonious name; 
 some mortal has inflicted a verbal wound upon this 
 glorious bird by naming him the flicker. Why not 
 call him a licker or a kicker, a whacker or a cracker, 
 and be done with it! A rose may smell as sweet by 
 another name; nevertheless, I would not take advan¬ 
 tage of the rose’s unprotesting, innocent sweetness 
 by fastening a harsh, unmelodious name upon it. 
 Why, if the flicker were dependent upon its name as 
 a guarantee of its position in the scale of creation, 
 it would most assuredly flicker out! The other 
 thought this golden-underwinged bird flashes into me 
 is this: How like a human he is at his best! As 
 the bird discloses his gold only in flight, so man dis- 
 
58 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 closes his true qualities as he makes for the Infinite. 
 Knee-deep in its muck and mire, human nature has 
 no beauty that either God or man should desire it; 
 but when human nature, with unfolded wings of 
 aspiration and endeavor, makes for the highlands of 
 destiny, it flashes forth from its hidden depths splen¬ 
 dors of divinity and arguments of immortal worth. 
 
 Yet more than rainbowed colors make overtures 
 from sod and wings. There is correspondence of 
 the most irresistible and intelligent kind. I had to 
 take off my hat one Sunday morning to Valiant 
 Mr. Woodpecker. I was out in the open getting 
 tuned up for my sermon in Central Church, but lo! 
 this gentleman in feathers was already in tune and 
 preaching furiously from his tree pulpit. There he 
 was, walking up and down, over and around the body 
 of the tree. I soon found that the tree served him 
 for his breakfast table, and he was swallowing in¬ 
 sects as gormandizingly as John Barleycorn swallows 
 “hooch.” Ever and anon he paused at his feast and 
 sang; as he sang, he listened; and while he listened, 
 he got his answer. For, a considerable distance away, 
 Mrs. Woodpecker was also serving herself at an 
 oak-tree cafeteria. Each time my nearby friend sent 
 his vocal wireless, she answered promptly in the clear, 
 spontaneous woodpecker code. Did they under¬ 
 stand? Now, don’t be foolish, friend! The consti¬ 
 tution of the universe would violate itself if it failed 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 59 
 
 to keep faith with a pair of woodpeckers on a May 
 morning. 
 
 So, there is hope for you, provided you do not 
 insist on being the living prototype of the gentleman 
 whose brief but significant biography was written 
 millenniums ago: “The fool hath said in his heart, 
 There is no God.” And does not the fool always 
 go wrong, first, in his heart? Becoming a moral 
 cripple, he begins to pull down the blinds in the 
 house of life. Then, in that morally smothering, 
 spiritually vermin-infested atmosphere he exists 
 rather than lives. And therein, with no window 
 open toward the Infinite, he inwardly rots. The 
 foul contagion of his foolishness, creeping from his 
 heart to his head, produces gradual death. At last 
 he blatantly screams that there is no God. In a 
 living universe he alone seems to have been neglected 
 by the undertaker, being thoroughly dead, but un¬ 
 buried. And the combined paradox, satire, sarcasm, 
 irony, and idiocy of it all is: If a man says, There 
 is no gravitation, we reply, Shut up, you fool, or 
 you’ll get yourself shut up in an asylum for the 
 insane! But let some materialist or atheist proclaim 
 from the cellars of life, There is no God, and there 
 are many good-natured, easy-going, foolish folk who 
 say, He is a smart man; he says there is no God; 
 therefore, God is not! 
 
 As for myself, I prefer to accept the conclusions 
 
60 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 of Mr. Woodpecker and his faith-keeping mate. 
 Without being able to read Tyndall on the science 
 of sound, they instinctively assume that sound was 
 made to answer sound. Thus, in our human world, 
 wise men assume God; they act as if He were; they 
 invariably find that He is. But fools never do. In¬ 
 tellectual smartness is too clumsy to survive in a 
 universe which, as Job suggests, hangs on nothing. 
 Just outside my study window I sometimes see a 
 big, prosperous-looking spider hanging on nothing 
 also—nothing save a thin, filmy stuff without which 
 modern astronomy would be seriously handicapped in 
 its study of the interstellar worlds. Strange as it 
 may seem, does not the fool become a wise man 
 when he learns that the soul, as well as the universe, 
 ultimately hangs upon the mighty but invisible 
 threads of faith, hope, and love? “The path of 
 science and letters is not the way into nature,” says 
 the seer. “The idiot, the Indian, the child, and the 
 unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light 
 by which nature is to be read, than the dissection of 
 the antiquary.” Consequently, when I go out in 
 the splendor of the dawn, I invariably leave my 
 electric flashlamp at home. Then it is easier, some¬ 
 how, to find God, the True Master of the Inn, Who 
 takes “a man who doesn’t want to live and makes 
 him fall in love with life.” 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 6l 
 
 ii 
 
 The Morning Tourist, limited as he was, could not 
 confine himself to nature only, however interesting 
 and appealing. There were examples of human 
 nature abroad clamorously refusing to be ignored. 
 As our own is the age in which the factor of human 
 life upon the earth is much in evidence, it is perhaps 
 appropriate to consider this phase now. 
 
 But not from the viewpoint of the specialist! That 
 smacks too much of the authoritative—and the 
 Morning Tourist is not an authority. Long ago the 
 biologist, the sociologist, and the psychologist in him 
 were summarily killed by the humanitarian and the 
 latitudinarian, aided and abetted by the vegetarian. 
 It was all caused by the aforesaid conspirators rising 
 up to destroy the joy and fun of the human in him. 
 Little by little they were getting the better of the 
 fight; but one day an unexpected ally suddenly leaped 
 up out of his subconscious pool and smote those ugly 
 enemies hip and thigh—if not with the jawbone of 
 an ass, then probably with an infinitesimal but highly 
 effective sword wrought from the by-products of a 
 gram of radium! Ever since, those conspirators 
 have been serenely quiescent, if not entirely null and 
 void. If they are still in existence, they have cer¬ 
 tainly changed their forms, obeying the natural 
 behest of things that change but never die. 
 
62 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 Moreover, it may be that he has been encouraged 
 in this matter by some words of Richard Grant 
 White. “Newton saw no better,” avers the Shake¬ 
 spearean scholar, “rejoiced no more in the beauty of 
 color, than other people because he analyzed the sun¬ 
 beam.” Add to these words that saying of O. Henry 
 about prosperity, and you, too, gentle reader, will 
 be disposed to seriously weigh my altered viewpoint: 
 “When a man’s income becomes so large that the 
 butcher actually sends him the kind of steak he 
 orders, he begins to think about his soul’s salvation.” 
 Now, if two such diversified minds as Doctor White 
 and O. Henry, functioning in such widely differing 
 realms as spectroscopy and beefsteak, arrive at prac¬ 
 tically the same conclusion as my own, do you won¬ 
 der that I am inclined to be a bit puffed up, even 
 vainglorious, because I have foresworn the devious 
 ways of the specialist and adhere strictly to the paths 
 of the untutored human ? 
 
 At any rate, I hasten to exhibit a few of my 
 human specimens, assembled from my out-of-doors 
 laboratory. I had almost said library, remembering 
 that old but ever new story of Wordsworth and his 
 morning caller. “Is Mr. Wordsworth in his 
 library?” asked the visitor. Pointing to the hills of 
 Rydal Mount, over which the poet was walking, the 
 servant said: “Mr. Wordsworth’s library is all out- 
 of-doors.” As the Morning Tourist can scarcely 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 63 
 
 lay claim to either laboratory or library, suppose we 
 agree on naming his quiet nook just a Lovable Loaf¬ 
 ing Land. 
 
 I venture to name my first exhibit specimen A. 
 He is a boy on the verge of fifteen. In one hand he 
 carries a fishing-pole; in the other a can containing 
 worms. Assuming myself to be a member of what 
 the mystic called the Lord’s Happy Boys, I forthwith 
 undertook to be facetious. “Well, boy,” quoth I, 
 “the fish are already so frightened by your coming 
 that they have sought refuge on land.” “You don’t 
 say!” snarled back this digger of slimy worms. 
 “Gee! That’s fine! The land is always a good 
 place to catch suckers!” 
 
 From the emphasis he threw into that last word, 
 I divined that he meant me. So we parted at once, 
 worsted as I unquestionably was in the verbal skir¬ 
 mish. Later on, however, I encountered him again. 
 Now he was standing by the side of the lagoon, bare¬ 
 footed, his pants rolled up above his knees, and in 
 the act of wading out into the cold water. “Don’t 
 do that, boy! Please don’t!” I shouted. “You will 
 be dead of pneumonia within two weeks.” 
 
 This time I won. For the boy, discreetly recon¬ 
 sidering his venture, withdrew from the water’s 
 edge. And yet my victory was short-lived. A voice 
 out of the Land of Nowhere—much sharper and 
 
64 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 more accusing than the lad’s sharp thrust about 
 suckers on land—asked: 
 
 “Why did you yourself strip stark naked and go 
 swimming in the Big Sandy River in the month of 
 February?” 
 
 I did not answer. The question was most embar¬ 
 rassing. The boy’s obedience to my earnest plea 
 was in itself somewhat accusing. Like the man in 
 the Master’s parable of the wedding feast, I, too, 
 was speechless. 
 
 Very different is my second specimen. He is a 
 thoroughgoing man, successful to the ends of his 
 finger-tips. We often meet in our morning strolls 
 and talk things over. “I should rate you a very 
 happy man, Mr. Ferguson,” said I, in the course of a 
 discussion hinging upon the subject of success. 
 “You came to this city from the country a poor boy. 
 By dint of hard work and ability, you now stand in 
 the forefront of your line of business. It must be 
 very satisfying to have succeeded as you have.” 
 
 Not in the least given to excitement or unmeas¬ 
 ured words, he replied: “It depends altogether on 
 what you mean by success. That is an elastic term, 
 which contracts as well as stretches. True, I have 
 played the game. It was furious, and not entirely 
 devoid of fun, I confess. But now that I have more 
 leisure, I think less of the fun and more of the 
 fruit.” 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 65 
 
 There was an undercurrent of deep meaning flow¬ 
 ing through his quiet speech. Just then a brown 
 thrush—much to my surprise—flew threateningly 
 down and drove away a robin, which was dining at 
 the Early Worm Restaurant. The worm was doubt¬ 
 less a necessity for the music-making of the thrush. 
 Yet there was something so impolite and ill-mannered 
 in the way the thrush helped himself to the meal of 
 his winged brother, that Ferguson’s eye did not miss 
 its suggestiveness. 
 
 “Yes,” he continued, “there is a certain satisfac¬ 
 tion in what we men call success. To come into a 
 town like this, ignorant, poor, unknown, and by 
 pluck to wrest a living and then a fortune from the 
 arena of things—that requires industry, courage, 
 and manhood. But there comes a time, as modern 
 industry is organized, when rolling up a fortune is 
 somewhat after the method practiced by that thrush 
 on the robin. The robin found his worm, pulled 
 him out of the soil, was in the act of enjoying him, 
 when that bandit thrush appeared, helped himself to 
 another’s earnings, and flew away. Naturally, the 
 robin, if he could reason, would ask the why and 
 wherefore of such a system.” 
 
 Meantime, I was wondering what the worm might 
 have to say! 
 
 “Now what I am driving at,” he continued, “is 
 this: Industry is a cooperative affair. We are learn- 
 
66 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 ing that society is dependent on all its parts, not just 
 a few; that heads, hearts, and hands are not neces¬ 
 sarily exclusive, but economically and humanly 
 inclusive. The same is true of nations. The evolu¬ 
 tion of society makes it utterly impossible for modern 
 nations to get along without each other; therefore, 
 they must get along with each other, or perish 
 through their selfishly competitive and destructive 
 antagonisms.” 
 
 Pretty tall talk that! And all from a self-educated 
 man, successful to the core of him, but not altogether 
 pleased with his success. 
 
 “You’re a preacher,” he went on. “Would to 
 God that I myself were an ordained minister of the 
 Gospel! Night and day, in village and city, on farm 
 and in factory, in school and governmental houses, 
 I would proclaim the way of Jesus—not simply as 
 the only way out of our educational, industrial, and 
 
 political tangles, but”- here he paused for an 
 
 instant, as if weighing every word he spoke—“but 
 the way of Jesus is the only way in to success that 
 does not leave regretful memories.” 
 
 What a revelation was this man! Had I come 
 in contact with a new angle of the modem mind ? Is 
 there an unchurched, creedless section of our human¬ 
 ity, prosperous but disappointed with its prosperity, 
 seriously aware that the law of Christ, which is the 
 Spirit of Love, is not merely the only way out of our 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 67 
 
 international desert, but the only way in to the 
 paradise of human satisfaction and achievement? 
 Anyway, this modern mind has compelled me to read, 
 with new eyes, some words from a little book which 
 I have carried in my pocket for many years. “The 
 atmosphere of moral sentiment”—so the words run 
 —“is a region of grandeur which reduces all ma¬ 
 terial magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch 
 that has reason the doors of the universe.” And to 
 these words of Emerson I cannot resist adding the 
 words of David Swing: “The human soul must have 
 freedom. By a gateway of wonder man came upon 
 this earth; by the same gateway he passes out. The 
 supernaturalism in Jesus is the best wisdom of our 
 life in this world and in the world to come. He is 
 the place where the earth blends with heaven—the 
 line where sea and sky meet. He is the only miracle 
 we need, but our need of Him is infinite.” 
 
 There are still other specimens—so many, indeed, 
 that there is not room to label them all in this imper¬ 
 fectly constructed verbal cabinet. There is the little 
 girl whose mother was feeding the blackbirds, which 
 followed the peanut-bag around with all the cringing 
 brazenness of professional beggars. While the lus¬ 
 trous black tramps followed the bag, the child fol¬ 
 lowed the birds, vainly striving to pick one up. Al¬ 
 ways barely missing the elusive citizens on wings, the 
 child grew angrier by the minute, finally stamping her 
 
68 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 foot with indignation. As the mother and the maid 
 laughed, I joined in. Yet, could one, in justice, 
 limit such childish outbursts of indignation to my 
 unknown little friend? There is too much of this 
 in grown-ups for one to be unduly severe on the 
 child. I have seen the temper of politicians, scien¬ 
 tists, philosophers, physicians, preachers, editors, 
 and millionaires fired up by kindred trivialities. The 
 astute blackbirds of desire failed to play into their 
 hands, and mercy! what an explosion! If somebody 
 had just roared with laughter at the proper moment, 
 the peeved child of larger growth may have been 
 shocked into a wholesome reaction to common sense, 
 and laughed also. Is there not entirely too much bad 
 temper in the world, and among people, too, of whom 
 we have the right to require better manners? “Bad 
 temper/' observes a thinker, “is the vice of the virtu¬ 
 ous.” Bad temper is not confined to the virtuous, 
 by any means; but the virtuous have no right to 
 succumb to such a vice. “Anger,” said Plutarch, 
 “turns the mind out of doors, and bolts the door.” 
 There is, of course, a righteous anger—not mere 
 personal resentment nor undisciplined human explo¬ 
 siveness—that burns deep and strong. Its seat is in 
 the bosom of God and in the soul of every genuine 
 apostle of justice. Therefore, in all ultimate think¬ 
 ing, the wrath of the Lamb is to be dreaded more 
 than the roar of the lion. 
 
Morning Tourist, Ltd! 69 
 
 To sum it all up in a sentence, the Morning Tour¬ 
 ist saw just as many editions of human nature as 
 there were human beings. Each of us brings his 
 own map of the universe with him. There is resem¬ 
 blance everywhere, but always difference, too. As 
 Carlyle said, Newton and his dog Diamond looked 
 out upon a different pair of universes. But it is not 
 true of dogs and philosophers only; it is equally true 
 of philosophers and hod-carriers. The whole seems 
 to have been symbolized by that versatile musician 
 in the top of a lilac bush. My favorite soloist of the 
 trees is the mocking bird. A Caruso on wings, he 
 is so glad to sing that he gives you, free of charge, 
 a ticket calling for a front seat in his embowered 
 opera house. As is well known, he is a master imi¬ 
 tator, singing the songs of other birds as well as his 
 own. I thought I had never heard him sing so 
 deliriously and with such versatility. For repertoire, 
 he was a combined Mozart, Wagner, and Beethoven 
 in feathers. He seemed, as he proceeded with his 
 many-sided program, a kind of feathery vocal expres¬ 
 sion of the universe; for he displays marvelous 
 variety in harmoniously concentrated unity. 
 
 So, is not the world itself one vast mocking bird, 
 wherein each soul may hear its own song, and as 
 much of the music of every other soul as he is 
 capable of hearing? Stars differ in glory, said Paul; 
 and so do humans; they exhibit as many trillions of 
 
70 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 differences as there have been human individuals in 
 the sweep of the ages. Yet the universe is one 
 throughout its million-toned variations, because, 
 within the dazzling splendor of His infinite various¬ 
 ness, God is one; and the heart of His oneness is 
 Love. 
 
 But here we are entering a field which reminds 
 the Morning Tourist that he is limited indeed! If 
 may be well, therefore, to close with the song of 
 “The Never-Old” : 
 
 “They who can smile when others hate, 
 
 Nor bind the heart with frosts of fate. 
 
 Their feet will go with laughter bold 
 The green roads of the Never-Old. 
 
 They who can let the spirit shine 
 And keep the heart a lighted shrine, 
 
 Their feet will glide with fire-of-gold 
 The green roads of the Never-Old. 
 
 They who can put the self aside 
 And in Love’s saddle leap and ride. 
 
 Their eyes will see the gates unfold 
 The green roads of the Never-Old.” 
 
An Artist in Living 
 
 P ERHAPS you think the phrase should read, 
 “An Artist of Life.” That sounds excellent; it 
 also reads well, capturing the eye. Moreover, it 
 smacks of the classic; and most of us are partial to 
 classicalism, even when we have to take a second 
 glance to definitely distinguish between Alpha and 
 Omega. We are like the erstwhile laundress who 
 married a rich man. Both were determined, despite 
 the handicap of illiteracy, to shine in the realms of 
 culture. They bought cartloads of books—classics, 
 history, science, poetry, philosophy, best sellers, and 
 everything. One day a guest was admiring a new 
 edition of Homer, with its accusing, uncut pages. 
 Still, the hostess, feeling that some comment was im¬ 
 perative, glibly remarked: “Bill and me sure do love 
 this Homer guy. He pulls off more fights than John 
 L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain ever heard of.” 
 
 An artist of life, however, suggests the painter 
 only, while I have in mind something altogether 
 superior to the artistic dealer in colors. He is a 
 greatly successful human being; he is a radiantly 
 white soul in a dark-skinned body; he has, for more 
 
72 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 than a score of years, tended the wash-room and 
 shoe-shining chair of a large New York store; he 
 is now almost threescore years and ten, and “going 
 west” with good hope and a morning face. 
 
 “I am not going to make any suggestions As I 
 entered, he was talking to a friend, who had been 
 asking him certain questions. “My employer has 
 always been good to me, and I can and will trust 
 him now/’ 
 
 On inquiry, I found that he had just been placed 
 upon the firm’s pension list. “How long have you 
 been here, Uncle?” I asked. 
 
 “Twenty-three years, sir. If I do say it myself, 
 I’m a little bit proud this morning. They have j ust 
 told me that I have the best record of anybody in the 
 establishment, white or black. I tell you”—he re¬ 
 peated it almost tearfully—“I’m awfully proud of 
 myself.” 
 
 After telling me where he attended church and the 
 name of his pastor, he went on: “You know I don’t 
 have to be here today. My pension began last week, 
 and the rules do not require me to come down now 
 at all. But I’m just coming down for a few days 
 anyway— doing a few extra things that need to be 
 done.” 
 
 But there were no italics in the tones of his voice. 
 It was all said in simplicity, piquancy, beauty. 
 
An Artist in Living 
 
 73 
 
 i 
 
 Certain things stand out in the old man’s character. 
 I think they are of quite permanent worth. They 
 write him down in the catalogue of distinguished 
 souls. They place him, it seems to me, high up in 
 the class of artists in living. 
 
 The first thing is his fine sense of appreciation. 
 Asked if he had any demands to make of the busi¬ 
 ness which he had faithfully helped, and which had 
 helped him as well, he was perfectly content to leave 
 the matter in the hands of his employer. “Cer¬ 
 tainly,” the cynic may rejoin. “Why not ? Does not 
 the old negro know that he will get a better deal 
 thereby?” An unintended tribute to the employer, 
 yet the remark is thoroughly unjust to the colored 
 man. While it is not wise to “bank” absolutely 
 upon human nature, I am sure that the old shine- 
 man’s decision represents a habit of mind, an 
 attitude toward life, the invaluable temperament of 
 appreciation. 
 
 Are not half the uglinesses of life born out of 
 the womb of ingratitude, out of our obstinate blind¬ 
 ness to the beauty and goodness calling upon us day 
 after day ? How else, for example, are we to account 
 for our stinginess toward Nature? Generation after 
 generation the old Mother stands with outstretched 
 hands patiently begging her children—for what? 
 
74 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 Just a few pennies from our toy banks of apprecia¬ 
 tion, that she may give us undreamed wealth in 
 return. “Nature is the only book,” said Goethe, 
 “that has a great lesson on every page.” And is it 
 not because both Goethe and Wordsworth saw and 
 read Nature’s great lessons, that we hold them for¬ 
 ever in our hearts? As for the latter, he suggests 
 reality—Wordsworth’s chief contribution to the 
 world, as indeed high-toned reality is any soul’s 
 supreme offering to God and men. Stripping away 
 the veneer and frescoes with which artificial rime- 
 sters had overlaid the poetry of the time, Words¬ 
 worth said: “Come, now. Be genuine. Look into 
 Nature’s soul and she will smite you through with 
 strokes of her own majesty and loveliness.” And 
 it was so. A new school of singers, quite able 
 to forsake the dusty nests of custom and fly abroad 
 in the pure, bracing skies of truth, came to birth. 
 
 Appreciation is therefore the foundation of the 
 artist in living. He is no longer deceived by the 
 camouflage that mars certain huge ships of culture 
 sailing artificial seas. Admitting the greatness of 
 art, he knows that all true art is fathered by life 
 and mothered by character. False teachers say that 
 I must first go to the library to discover greatness. 
 But William Shakespeare and Oliver Cromwell, 
 Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee were great 
 long before their names were caught within the four 
 
An Artist in Living 75 
 
 walls of any library. They say that I must first go 
 to the art gallery to discern beauty. Where do stars 
 and daisies and children’s faces come in? They 
 say that I must first go to the orchestra to hear 
 music? What did God make larks and nightingales 
 for? They say that I must first go to the forum 
 to learn wisdom. A fine proposition truly; it looks 
 well in text-books on rhetoric: but it assumes that 
 God is dumb and that I am deaf. Nay; all of these 
 are second, because life—the warm, budding, bloom¬ 
 ing breath of life—is first, even as God is first and 
 the universe second. 
 
 Moreover, the arts owe their being to the simple 
 and glorious truth that they embody some phase of 
 life. Both arts and institutions keep the even tenor 
 of their way only by keeping up with life; other¬ 
 wise, they become mere shells cast upon the shores 
 of oblivion, while the sea of life flows calmly on 
 through the channels of infinity. Only life counts; 
 existence is of little worth, or at least far down in 
 the scale of being, as the worm lazily proves. Stu¬ 
 dents know how reading of greatness may degenerate 
 into self-indulgent pastime; but an honest endeavor 
 to be great—great in simplicity, great in helpfulness, 
 great in lovingkindness, great in truthfulness, great 
 in trustfulness, great in mental hospitality, great in 
 humility—this is indeed that industrious idealism 
 which brings from the mines of the Infinite the dia- 
 
76 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 monds of character, the glowing rewards of high 
 and faithful living. Such endeavor may be likened 
 unto the grease plate attached to the wonderful 
 machines at the Kimberley diamond mines. All sorts 
 of things tumble over it—emeralds, opals, nails, solid 
 substances; but when a diamond strikes the grease 
 plate it sticks. There is a strange affinity between 
 the grease and the diamond. Similarly, the appre¬ 
 ciative nature picks up spiritual diamonds at every 
 step in life’s journey. And these jewels are always 
 gleaming through the dust of the commonplace, 
 always shining in the fields of the extraordinary. 
 The elder Hallam says that his son Arthur was espe¬ 
 cially deficient in the power of memory. “But,” he 
 adds, “he could remember anything, as a friend 
 observed to the Editor, that was associated with an 
 idea.” Did not my colored friend, all unconsciously 
 but most impressively, thrust one of life’s major 
 ideas fairly at me? Henceforth I shall count him a 
 benefactor. I am resolved to strengthen my own 
 memory on the side of appreciation. 
 
 ii 
 
 There is another truth shining through the fea¬ 
 tures of this lustrous man. It is the imprint of soul- 
 satisfaction made by a splendid fidelity. “If I do 
 say it myself, I’m a little proud this morning. They 
 have just told me that I have the best record of any- 
 
An Artist in Living 77 
 
 body in the house, white or black.” If this be pride, 
 then it is the pride Heaven adores. For I know not 
 what else can yield one such unalloyed satisfaction 
 as an honest, bravely wrought record. It produces 
 a feeling in the soul akin to the loveliness of the 
 sunset’s afterglow. It is spiritually diffusive; it is 
 the shine of character upon the daily deed; it affirms 
 the loyal devotion of precious hours to the matter 
 in hand; it utters the soul’s amen to the joy and 
 necessity of work while it is yet day. Therefore, 
 the night comes quietly, luminously on; it is so full 
 of stars that the darkness can scarcely find room 
 within their mellow interspaces. “We work till 
 the evening,” Doctor George A. Gordon wrote me 
 in the most beautiful of letters, “and then for pay 
 we receive the freedom of the universe!” 
 
 Yet I am sure that my colored friend, justly proud 
 of his record, is not a disciple of those masters who 
 teach salvation by character or by works. Indeed, I 
 soon discovered the secret of his loyalty. Like 
 Charles Kingsley, he, too, has a Friend. That 
 Friend is the Saviour; that Saviour deals with his 
 sin; consequently, that Saviour makes his salvation 
 vital, deep, personal. And is there not unassailable 
 ground for believing that all the rich character which 
 worthily and permanently avails, in man’s long pH- 
 grimage through an infinite universe, grows out of 
 this always new, impregnable reality? 
 
78 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 “A man called Dante, I have heard, 
 
 Once ranged the country-side; 
 
 He knew to dawn’s mysterious word 
 What drowsy birds replied. 
 
 He knew the deep sea’s voice, its gleams 
 And tremulous lights afar. 
 
 When he lay down at night, in dreams 
 He tramped from star to star.” 
 
 We are all out on a Dantesque journey. Going 
 away to spend the night, a handbag will do; but 
 going away to spend Eternity, we require large 
 equipment. Tramping from star to star is not a 
 task that can be triumphantly performed by a spirit¬ 
 ual tyro. 
 
 As this is not just a diversion, a curious byplay in 
 intellectual gymnastics suggested by a lowly human 
 being as human beings are measured by the world’s 
 inadequate yardstick, I wish to recall the words of a 
 g<reat scholar and a lofty soul upon this point. 
 Speaking to Christian people in Carnegie Hall, 
 Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton Uni¬ 
 versity, said: “I speak on controversial ground here, 
 but before I got to this platform I spoke a few 
 minutes with several gentlemen of those faiths which 
 teach salvation by character. I regard such an enter¬ 
 prise as one of despair. Just how you feel about 
 your character I do not know, but I know how I 
 
An Artist in Living 79 
 
 feel about my own. I would not care to offer it as 
 a certificate of salvation.” 
 
 Three things stand out in this thinker’s statement. 
 So long as men teach salvation by character, denying 
 the altogether unique and saving act of God on 
 Calvary, the ground will remain controversial. There 
 can be no salvation without character, that is not 
 even debatable; but to make salvation by character 
 the chief cornerstone of a theology or ethic, mis¬ 
 construes the facts behind the towering men of 
 history; it ignores the profoundest problems in con¬ 
 science and consciousness; it negatives the method of 
 the Incarnation, if not its backlying purpose; it 
 proves, if not a clear-cut shallowness, at least a 
 lack of spiritual and mental inclusiveness in the 
 make-up of those sincerely holding it. To gayly as¬ 
 sert, as so-called liberals do, that the New Testament 
 conception of salvation is wooden and mechanical, 
 and forsooth needs to be corrected by the modern 
 man’s unfolding religious consciousness—well, it is 
 gay assertiveness, anyway. To be told that Paul, for 
 example, was hopelessly entangled by temporary 
 thought-forms that have been forever superseded, is 
 not thoroughly convincing. And why? Because 
 such reasoning, if it be worthy of the name, fails to 
 reckon with Life—the Life so deep, so rich, so fiery, 
 so eternal that no verbal vehicles could contain it. 
 As to the phraseology, what man does not use the 
 
80 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 speech of his time ? Were he to fail in this, he would 
 be of little use to his own or any age. But the 
 verbal drapery, the thought-molds are secondary. It 
 is the Fact we want; and the great Fact of history 
 is “Jesus Christ, and Him crucified/’ Throw away 
 the forms, if you choose, and create better, if you 
 are able, O liberal souls; but the Fact refuses to be 
 tossed away; it is as unworn as the atoms, as un¬ 
 dimmed as the galaxies, as fresh and green as April 
 buds. 
 
 The second thing: Salvation by character is ulti¬ 
 mately a hopeless quest. “I regard such an enter¬ 
 prise as one of despair,” says Mr. Wilson. So has 
 every greatly perceptive and profoundly desirous 
 soul. There is, unquestionably, a type of life— 
 gracious, sweet, amiable, refined—that journeys 
 along the paths of being in outwardly excellent form. 
 It stands for good citizenship; it symbolizes culture; 
 it is richly humanitarian and winsomely philan¬ 
 thropic. No man can say that it is not good; nor 
 would any dare say that it does not make for a better 
 world. What one is compelled to say, however, in 
 canvassing all the facts, is this: The type, though 
 good, fails of the best; and it evidently fails of the 
 best because it carries a closed mind to those mighty 
 spiritual forces which produced Paul in one age, 
 Augustine in another, Luther in another, Wesley in 
 another, Westcott in another, Fairbairn in another, 
 
An Artist in Living 8l 
 
 and Denney in another and later still. The difference 
 is not one of scholarship; there have been just as 
 able and eminent scholars in the opposing schools; 
 the difference is one of distinctly definite Christian 
 consciousness as set over against distinctly indefinite 
 Christian consciousness. In a word, it is the kind 
 of life wanting in what Bagehot said Augustine had 
 —“an experiencing nature.” At any rate, it is lack¬ 
 ing in the power, perhaps due to the closing of cer¬ 
 tain sides of the nature, to experience in the classic 
 and eternal worths of a full-orbed and undiluted 
 Christianity. 
 
 The third statement is also worthy of considera¬ 
 tion. “Just how you feel about your character, I 
 do not know; but I know how I feel about my own. 
 I would not care to offer it as a certificate of sal¬ 
 vation.” Is not this the mood of every thoroughly 
 rational life, face to face with sin, death, and des¬ 
 tiny? We know how expert is the soul in conven¬ 
 iently shutting its eyes; it has rare facility, also, for 
 putting on false faces; and it knows how to clothe 
 itself in Emersonian transcendentalisms. But the 
 soul has an inner ear, even when it blinds its eyes; 
 it can hear, when it cannot see, and it knows the 
 crack of doom when it sounds; and doom cares not 
 for spiritual rhetoric or generous make-believe. For 
 then Man cries unto God in earnest. Matthew 
 Arnold sings the undying truth: 
 
82 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 “When the soul, growing clearer, 
 
 Sees God no nearer; 
 
 When the soul, mounting higher, 
 
 To God comes no nigher; 
 
 But the arch-fiend Pride 
 Mounts at her side, 
 
 Foiling her high emprise, 
 
 Sealing her eager eyes, 
 
 And, when she fain would soar, 
 
 Makes idols to adore, 
 
 Changing the pure emotion 
 Of her high devotion, 
 
 To a skin-deep sense 
 Of her own eloquence; 
 
 Strong to deceive, strong to enslave— 
 
 Save, oh! save.” 
 
 Very much more Christocentric is Browning. 
 Speaking of his own religious convictions to Mrs. 
 Orr, his biographer, he closed by reading to her the 
 “Epilogue to Dramatis Personnse.” “It will be 
 remembered,” she goes on, “that the beautiful and 
 pathetic second part of the poem is a cry of spiritual 
 bereavement, the cry of those victims of nineteenth 
 century skepticism for whom incarnate Love has dis¬ 
 appeared from the universe, carrying with it the 
 belief in God. The third part attests the continued 
 existence of God in Christ, as mystically present to 
 the individual soul: 
 
 That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 Or decomposes but to recompose, 
 
 Become my universe that feels and knows. 
 
An Artist in Living 83 
 
 ‘That face/ said Mr. Browning as he closed the 
 book, ‘that face is the face of Christ: that is how 
 I feel Him/ ” 
 
 It is so of Paul, of Browning, of the humble 
 negro. The unknown, as the well known, has a 
 good record because he has a good God. That 
 explains my obscure friends sunset saintliness. The 
 dew of the morning and the heat of the noontide 
 survive in the tranquil splendor of the evening. An 
 artist in living, and not just an artist of life, he jour¬ 
 neys west with little baggage and much integrity. 
 There is a thrushlike note in his voice, a note blown 
 from far-off heights, and it rings, as Swinburne 
 might say, “like a golden jewel down a golden stair.” 
 
 hi 
 
 Surely, not the least important side of the man is 
 revealed in the fact that he had come to the store 
 that very morning. His presence was not required, 
 having already earned his vesper holiday. “But,” 
 he said, “I’m coming down for a few days anyway— 
 just doing a few extra things that need to he done 
 
 Ah! that word “extra” is alive with great 
 thoughts; it is vibrant with spiritual music; it sug¬ 
 gests a quality of genius that cannot be unduly cele¬ 
 brated. Were the world robbed of the souls profi¬ 
 cient in the fine art of doing more than is required, 
 earth would be as vacant as summer chairs on March 
 
84 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 verandas bleakly waiting for June’s return. For the 
 extra-doing life is of paramount worth. It is the 
 index to all the noble mothers who have carried the 
 children of men under their hearts. “The only bad 
 thing Mother ever does is to die, go away and leave 
 you!” exclaimed an understanding soul. But even 
 then we hear the melody of their sacred feet falling 
 upon heavenly floors. Mothers give us peeps into 
 glory, as Henry Vaughan suggests, tuning our heart- 
 lyres to the victorious chant: 
 
 “Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just, 
 Shining nowhere but in the dark; 
 
 What mysteries lie beyond thy dust, 
 
 Could man outlook that mark!” 
 
 Nor is it otherwise with opulent fatherhood. Many 
 a man’s inalienable soul-possession is the memory of 
 a father who seemed never to weary of dispensing 
 lovingkindnesses to his unworthy son. Now that 
 he has disappeared, gone in behind all forms and 
 horizons of matter, his memory irradiates the filial 
 heart with a splendor surpassing twilight skies, after 
 the sun has done its “dying so triumphally.” 
 
 Then, too, when I think of certain shop-girls, 
 wrestling with the unangelic giant of Modern Com¬ 
 merce for the blessing of a livelihood, I wonder if 
 there is not herein abundant material for some new 
 Iliad of heroism. I think of one who is the sole 
 support of aged parents; of another, the head of a 
 
An Artist in Living 85 
 
 household, feeding and clothing her two orphan 
 sisters, and struggling to keep them in school; of a 
 third, a woman of sixty—her hair is as white as 
 Easter lilies and her voice is supernally sweet—who 
 made a home for her aged Mother so many years 
 that the saint once said to me: “Well, it does look as 
 if God had forgotten to come and take me Homed’ 
 Her voice of ninety odd summers and winters had 
 a far-away sound, like the soft sigh of a spiritual 
 wind blowing in from Invisible Seas. She was one 
 of those rare souls of whom my friend Doctor Wil¬ 
 liam Francis Campbell says: “The old-fashioned 
 woman is the only woman who never grows old- 
 fashioned.” Yet do each and all of these unsung 
 heroines bear their burdens unmurmuringly. I will 
 leave the sentence as it stands; yet I know that it 
 does not tell the whole truth. The fact is, these 
 characters are all grateful for the privilege of serving 
 in Love’s White Army of the Unconquered and 
 Unconquerable. 
 
 What about our soldier boys as exemplars of this 
 royal law ? Have they not spoken the extra word of 
 goodness and done the extra deed of heroism? 
 Focus your gaze on Flanders Fields, Chateau 
 Thierry, and the Argonne Forest. Those terrible 
 nights are sown so thick with stars of gallantry that 
 the darkness shines like the day. Our newspapers 
 were filled with columns of names of both officers 
 
86 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 and privates distinguished ‘‘for devotion beyond 
 duty.” It is a thrilling chapter in America's golden 
 book of heroism. We read in terse official language 
 how “at all times this officer rendered loyal and 
 intelligent support to the division commander and in 
 battle demonstrated high qualities of personal cour¬ 
 age.” And another: “Though suffering from ill¬ 
 ness, he volunteered and performed valiant service as 
 a telephone operator under heavy shell fire.” And 
 this: “Under fire from enemy artillery, machine 
 guns, and snipers, Private Hopp crawled out in the 
 open within fifty metres of a hostile position, remain¬ 
 ing three several hours, and returning with valuable 
 information concerning the enemy’s movements.” 
 Private Lee and Corporal Caldwell were separated 
 from their company in a smoke barrage. Finding 
 themselves face to face with the enemy, Lee lifted 
 his gun to his shoulder and tried to fire. But the 
 gun was jammed and would not shoot. However, 
 Lee’s brain was in first-class working order, for he 
 held his shootless gun dead on the Huns, who threw 
 up their hands, while Caldwell rounded them up and 
 disarmed them. Call it a Yankee trick if you choose; 
 but it helped to save civilization. Second Lieut. 
 Horace B. Scanlon is placed upon the valor roll for 
 “exceptional gallantry and inspiring example.” 
 Organizing the most advanced units of his company, 
 he shattered an enemy counter-attack under heavy 
 
An Artist in Living 87 
 
 machine gun fire. Mortally wounded, he exhorted 
 his men in the unforgettable words: “Go on fighting; 
 never mind what happens to me.” And so it runs— 
 a gloriously monotonous battle song of freedom 
 chanted amid the blazing hells of No Man’s Land! 
 
 These, then, are the degrees we bestow upon the 
 artist in living: A fine sense of appreciation, a splen¬ 
 did fidelity, and a genius for thinking and doing 
 “extra” things. One February morning I chanced 
 to witness their embodiment in a colored brother. 
 For me he has abidingly taken his place in God’s 
 ranks of the unknown great. Therefore, I offer no 
 apology for elaborating certain truths which his 
 resonant personality set afoot within the precincts 
 of my own mind. I recall that Doctor Carpenter 
 once sent Sir Charles Lyell a monograph on an 
 obscure specimen of natural history. Fearing that 
 the scientist might think he was exaggerating the 
 importance of the insignificant, Carpenter also sent 
 an apology along with the specimen. Much to his 
 surprise, he received from the geologist this reply: 
 “Any single point is really the universe.” If this 
 be true of the natural, it cannot be less true of the 
 spiritual, and especially the spiritual as focused in a 
 human being. We may not agree with Emerson 
 “that everybody knows as much as the savant”; but 
 we must agree with him when he says: “The walls 
 of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with 
 
88 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 thoughts.” And it is our privilege to go on to a 
 Greater than Lyell or Emerson and hear Him ask 
 and answer one of the most amazing and sublime 
 questions ever heard by mortal ears: “Are not two 
 sparrows sold for a penny ? and not one of them shall 
 fall on the ground without your Father: but the very 
 hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not there¬ 
 fore : ye are of more value than many sparrows.” 
 
V 
 
 Bryanism 
 
 M R. BRYAN’S exposition (?) of the philos¬ 
 ophy of evolution is interesting from several 
 standpoints. First of all, it reveals the Commoner’s 
 uncommon genius for getting hold of the fragments 
 of a proposition and trying to prove that any one of 
 the fragments is more important than the whole. It 
 also illustrates how a greatly useful man may con¬ 
 sistently and continuously exercise an essentially un¬ 
 traveled mind. Some people take their bodies around 
 the world, carefully leaving their minds at home, 
 because, as one unsophisticated globe-trotter ex¬ 
 plained, “I didn’t have much mind to bother me when 
 I started.” Moreover, it discloses what an impor¬ 
 tant factor temperament plays in the conclusions 
 which we form, whether religiously, philosophically, 
 economically, politically, or even scientifically speak¬ 
 ing. For not even the mental discipline and rigor 
 supplied by diligent training in the study of uncol¬ 
 ored facts can altogether ignore the individual’s 
 temperamental strain. 
 
 Furthermore, does not Mr. Bryan’s crusade mani¬ 
 fest how deeply the roots of medievalism are planted 
 
 89 
 
90 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 in wide sections of the so-called modern world; and 
 the kind of medievalism, too, that invariably puts the 
 minor before the major premise. Recently it was 
 my duty, in going from one city to another, to pass 
 through Zion City. As is well known, the “boss” of 
 that rather curious community, Mr. Voliva, teaches, 
 and commands his teachers to teach, that the earth is 
 flat. Somehow or other, as I drove through Zion 
 City, my thoughts insisted on flying away to other 
 cities. For example, Lincoln, Neb., Tampa, Fla., 
 and—oh, well, so many others that are being cru¬ 
 saded by a similar intellectual hypothesis that I could 
 
 not count them. Yet Zion City, Voliva, and-! 
 
 Well, at any rate, as the psychologists teach, the law 
 of association is surprisingly strong! 
 
 Therefore, Bryanism quite readily lends itself to a 
 definition: It is a form of human myopia. I pro¬ 
 pose to outline this human nearsightedness in its 
 religious, educational, and political aspects. Such a 
 study will, I believe, throw some light upon the men¬ 
 tal backgrounds, the intellectual roots, of many of 
 the propositions which are being debated throughout 
 the country. 
 
 i 
 
 Bryanism is nowhere more pathetic and injurious 
 than in its religious bearing. Going forth in true 
 Don Quixote fashion, it fanatically spends its energy 
 
Bryanism 91 
 
 on windmills instead of deadly fortresses crying 
 aloud for destruction. For what is the cardinal point 
 of the Christian religion? It is love, because God is 
 love. “By this shall all men know that ye are my 
 disciples,” says the Master, “if ye have love one to 
 another.” “If any man hath not the Spirit of 
 Christ,” says Paul, “he is none of His.” The Chris¬ 
 tian, then, is a human being dominated by the love of 
 God, the Spirit of Christ. Possessing everything 
 else but lacking these, he is not a Christian. He may 
 recite all the creeds; give all he has to philanthropy; 
 be an ardent patriot, a Darwinian evolutionist or a 
 Biblical literalist; he may be rich or poor, old or 
 young, learned or ignorant, white, black, red, or yel¬ 
 low. But if he has not love, the Spirit of Christ, he 
 is none of His, he is not a Christian. 
 
 Yet Bryanism, with its myopic emphases, excom¬ 
 municates everybody who does not accept its inter¬ 
 pretation of God, Man, the Bible, the Universe. It 
 insists that the method of man’s creation is more 
 important than the fact that man is already created. 
 Following this tangential lead, it flies off on its non¬ 
 sensical lark of turning the Bible into a text-book on 
 physical science. But the Bible—the good and great 
 and unique and unwithering Bible—rebels. There is 
 something almost motherlike in its tender plea: 
 “O foolish man, do not abuse me. Do not force me 
 to do a work for which God never intended me. I 
 
92 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 am to the race what a true woman is to her child—a 
 wise and spiritual mother. I am the record of good 
 and bad things in human life. I grew up out of life 
 itself. I am as I am because holy and unholy souls 
 are as they are. My service is infinitely greater than 
 to tell men how they were made; science can do that; 
 but the province of religion, of which I am the 
 uniquest custodian, is to teach men why they were 
 made—to obey God and enjoy Him forever/’ 
 
 Still, Bryanism has no sense for this august dis¬ 
 crimination. It cannot distinguish things that differ. 
 It glibly says: “The Darwinians cannot make a 
 monkey out of me.” The obvious reply to which is: 
 The Darwinians do not have to make a monkey out 
 of that kind of thinking: the monkey is there already, 
 self-made, and unblushingly proud of its monkey- 
 ism. And this is said with entire respect for the 
 monkey. This much-abused animal has a real place 
 in creation. I believe this because I believe that the 
 Bible and the universe of life teach that God is the 
 creator of all things, sin alone being excepted. Was 
 not Peter an apostle of Bryanism—a victim of 
 human myopia—when he had his vision “of four- 
 footed beasts and creeping things of the earth and 
 birds of the heaven”? Commanded to kill and eat, 
 Peter answered: “Not so, Lord; for I have never 
 eaten anything that is common and unclean.” It was 
 then that Peter was given a lesson in physical, men- 
 
Bryanism 93 
 
 tal, and spiritual hygiene that men have been Bryan- 
 istically slow to learn; for we read: “And a voice 
 came unto him again the second time, What God 
 hath cleansed, make not thou unclean.” Notwith¬ 
 standing the fact that God has cleansed the heavens 
 and the earth, the vast human tragedy and blindness 
 is that we industriously make common and unclean 
 that which has been smitten through and through by 
 the splendor of Deity. No! I will not have the 
 monkey slandered. He at least has physical and 
 mental agility, if not spiritual imagination. The 
 fact is, I find much in common—and in a universe 
 going slowly on to democracy I do not hesitate to 
 confess it—with my brother anthropoid, even as 
 Francis of Assisi acknowledged a certain friendli¬ 
 ness toward his little brother, the ass. The ape and 
 I breathe the same air, drink the same water, bathe 
 in the light of the same sun, are impartially acted 
 upon by the same law of gravity. We have certain 
 physical kinships that all the Bryanism in the universe 
 cannot bawl down. The same God made us both— 
 the monkey and me. I think he did a good job on 
 the monkey. 
 
 While I do not ignore the rightful position of the 
 monkey in the cosmos, I do not overlook the infinitely 
 greater dignity of man in the scale of creation, even 
 though some men do persist in thinking childishly 
 of the physical beginnings of the race to which they 
 
94 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 belong. The distinction of man consists in the fact 
 that God created him in His image. As God has no 
 physical image—a truth which large sections of 
 Bryanism ignore—this means, of course, that man’s 
 likeness to God is in his ability to think, will, and 
 feel. Now, whether there has been such a thing as 
 mutation of species or not, my big hairy brother 
 chimpanzee and I are sustained in physical being by 
 blood of the same color. As a matter of fact, some 
 of his senses are much keener than my own. He can 
 climb better, see better, and hear better. But where 
 the champanzee and I part company, by the wisdom 
 of the same Creator, is in the realm of mind. The 
 monkey’s body is married to little mind; man’s body 
 is married to more mind; God’s mind is so great 
 that it wears the universe as a garment, immanent in 
 all things, transcendent over all things, limited by 
 neither matter nor space. I infer that the same God 
 guides me and the monkey; I believe that we shall 
 arrive sometime; I think He has other uses for me 
 than merely those embodied in my earthly career. If 
 the same good God has other uses for the lower 
 orders of creation in this wonderfully glorious and 
 evolving universe, I shall offer no objections, be¬ 
 cause “God is the Personal Spirit, perfectly good, 
 Who in holy love creates, sustains, and orders all.” 
 
 But the most serious defect of Bryanism is not in 
 its misinterpretation of the philosophy of evolution. 
 
Bryanism 95 
 
 That is serious enough, to be sure; but the truly bad 
 thing about it is its spirit. Mr. Bryan himself is a 
 case in point. Witness his “reply”—if we may dig¬ 
 nify his rejoinder by such a phrase—to Professor 
 Osborn and others. Mixing them all up together, 
 having no eye for thinkers that differ as widely as 
 the poles, he places the atheistic Haeckelian and the 
 Christian theist all in the same boat, and shoves them 
 out into Bryanistic seas of perdition. “I presume,” 
 he says, “no rejoinder is expected (because, evi¬ 
 dently, Bryan had overwhelmed them so completely 
 within his roaring floods of knowledge) to the an¬ 
 swers of Professors Osborn and Conklin, but I am 
 sure you will pardon me if I trespass upon your time 
 long enough to thank you for the compliment you 
 pay me in having two professors write in their effort 
 to reply to one layman. (But think of what a lay¬ 
 man, Mr. Bryan! The editor doubtless measured 
 the force opposed to the professors and knew it 
 would be necessary to have double forces on hand to 
 resist such an attack!) . . . The answers of the pro¬ 
 fessors whom you selected have exhibited all the 
 characteristics of their class. They misrepresent 
 their opponents, look with contempt upon all those 
 who do not exhaust the alphabet in setting forth their 
 degrees, and evade the issue which they pretend to 
 discuss. The evidence upon which they condemn the 
 Bible would not be sufficient to convict an habitual 
 
96 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 criminal of petty larceny in any court in Christen¬ 
 dom. . . . But as far as evidence can be drawn from 
 what they do say, it is evident that they regard the 
 discovery of the bones of a five-toed horse as a 
 greater event than the birth of the Christ.” 
 
 This sort of thing may smack of wit, satire, and 
 sarcasm all combined. The fact remains, however, 
 that there is a glaring error somewhere. Professor 
 Osborn not only does not condemn the Bible; he 
 makes a noble plea for it. He does it in the Chris¬ 
 tian spirit, too; but not, fortunately, from the myopic 
 viewpoint of Bryanism. The Bible in the hands of a 
 dogmatist is as unseemly as a swan on the shore. No 
 wonder distinguished souls have ever preferred a 
 hell populated by open-minded thinkers to a heaven 
 overcrowded by dry-as-dust dogmatists. 
 
 ii 
 
 Yet there is another application of the principle 
 of Bryanism. Does not a large section of the educa¬ 
 tional world lay itself open to just censure for teach¬ 
 ing a one-sided and inadequate conception of human 
 life? It assumes an ultra-intellectual attitude 
 towards everything. It lays claim not to an out¬ 
 grown philosophy of the universe, such as Mr. Bryan 
 zealously defends; rather does it lay claim to and 
 stridently teach a scientific mechanism and material¬ 
 istic philosophy ill-adapted to man’s many-sided 
 
Bryanism 97 
 
 nature. What is this but human myopia on another 
 side? 
 
 Here, indeed, is the cause of much of this half- 
 baked scientific protest against misnamed scientific 
 teaching. Living in an age of specialists, teachers 
 are readily turned into human machines, grinding 
 out only a portion of the grist of truth. They look 
 at one side of a proposition so constantly that they 
 acquire the habit of mental and moral nearsighted¬ 
 ness. Such may be the price we have to pay for the 
 expert. But is not the price exceedingly high ? Are 
 we not making our experts unconscious profiteers in 
 one-sided intellectual wares? Moreover, are we not 
 compelled to admit a certain truth in the wag’s defini¬ 
 tion : An expert is a man a long distance from home. 
 
 Now this mistaken emphasis began more than two 
 generations ago. With the dawn of Darwinism, man 
 was compelled to make a new reckoning of the phys¬ 
 ical world and of human society. With this new 
 clew to the processes of nature and mankind, the 
 temptation to study not only the biological aspects 
 of plants and animals but the purely physical side of 
 man, was inevitable and irresistible. The world 
 never before witnessed such an army of scientific 
 plodders and diggers. But a man cannot give him¬ 
 self entirely over to digging without getting a 
 stooped body. Nor can a company of scientists de¬ 
 vote themselves exclusively to a consideration of the 
 
98 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 physical side of human life without developing minds 
 with a decisive spiritual stoop. Mr. Darwin him¬ 
 self is an example of this law. His familiar and 
 melancholy confession of the decay of his youthful 
 love of music and poetry is most saddening. Indeed, 
 few generations have witnessed a deeper spiritual 
 tragedy than that enacted by Darwin, Tyndall, Hux¬ 
 ley, and Spencer. By their monumental work on 
 behalf of science and truth they have made mankind 
 their debtor forevermore. Yet were they themselves 
 so blinded by the dust flying from the stones cut out 
 of their enormous scientific quarry, that they failed 
 to give their own souls that genuine and definite 
 opportunity for spiritual development to which they 
 were entitled—not because they were great natural¬ 
 ists, but because they were human beings. 
 
 The tragedy was all the more poignant because it 
 was unnecessary. Multitudes of Christians have 
 thanked God for the philosophy of evolution. It 
 has not only furnished them with an intellectual key 
 opening many bewildering doors in the immense 
 house named the universe; it has vastly enlarged their 
 conceptions of God, their appreciation of the world, 
 and their vision of human destiny. As Professor 
 Osborn reminds us, Augustine was a true disciple of 
 the philosophy of evolution. So was John Wesley, 
 Lord Kelvin, Henry Ward Beecher, Henry Drum¬ 
 mond, and a host of others. All of these conclusively 
 
Bryanism 99 
 
 prove that one may be a high type of Christian and 
 at the same time enthusiastically accept the doctrine 
 of development. They also show that men like 
 Bryan and Haldeman, while unquestionably entitled 
 to their own convictions, merely add to the gayety 
 of nations by verbally dechristianizing those who do 
 not share their own parochial prepossessions. 
 
 Nevertheless, the myopic and pedantic attitude of 
 certain professors towards religion, even morality 
 itself, is to be deplored and discountenanced. Dog¬ 
 matic ignorance is no more repellant than scholastic 
 atheism. Religious fanaticism is quite as tolerable 
 as religious scorn. The one has at least the sanctions 
 of morality, while the other grazes over fields of 
 immoral license. These untoward conditions in 
 academic circles, we are reminded, have been alarm¬ 
 ingly set forth through Professor Leuba’s widely 
 discussed questionnaire. Let us frankly admit that 
 here is a moral situation that should excite the grav¬ 
 est concern. I am using the term moral advisedly 
 and in its deepest implications. Because such indif¬ 
 ference, narrowness, learning, and ability, all 
 strangely sputtering in one huge academic melting 
 pot, and directed against religion, mankind’s abiding 
 and transcendent interest, is a menace to the founda¬ 
 tions of society; it is nothing short of a moral and 
 religious calamity. “Wherever the sentiment of right 
 comes in,” says Emerson, “it takes precedence of 
 
ioo A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 everything else. For other things I make poetry of 
 them; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me.” 
 And yet, with the aid of Doctor Leuba, we are intro¬ 
 duced to a large company of intellectuals seemingly 
 bent on knifing “the moral sentiment” to death! 
 That is decidedly what the leaders of thought ought 
 not to be engaged in. 
 
 And what but a tawdry, tinseled, rhetorical Bry- 
 anism—a provincial, nearsighted, upstartish outlook 
 on life—could have thrown these misled and mislead¬ 
 ing gentlemen into such a wayside ditch ? To assume 
 that man is an intellectual machine solely is at once 
 the height and depth of superidiocy. “Abundance of 
 accomplishments in an unsanctified heart,” we read 
 in the letters of William James, “only make one a 
 more accomplished devil.” It would seem almost 
 incumbent on Doctor Leuba’s group, in view of the 
 bigger, better, wiser, and more learned men who have 
 hilariously believed in immortality, to offer more 
 valid reasons for being caught in such malodorous 
 moral backwash on the River of Time, stoically 
 missing the “murmurs and scents of the infinite Sea.” 
 Is it because they are only one-third men who have 
 learned to manipulate a clever mental trap, and are 
 not, in the true sense, educated at all ? This habit we 
 moderns have grown of calling people educated who 
 are the possessors of one or many scholastic degrees, 
 is perilously overdone. Profound reverence for 
 
Bryanism IOI 
 
 scholarship is one of the marks of true education; 
 profound disgust for its counterfeit—a lop-sided, 
 conceited, one-idead Bryanism—is the inviolable 
 right and duty of common sense. Why, therefore, 
 do these gentlemen give such inept and shallow an¬ 
 swers to questions involving the deepest issues of 
 human welfare and destiny? Surely, it is not be¬ 
 cause they are more learned and vital thinkers than 
 Roger and Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Wil¬ 
 liam Ewart Gladstone, Lord Acton, and William 
 James! Reason forces us to base this tragic delin¬ 
 quency on other than sheer intellectual grounds. The 
 fact is probably this: These so-called educated men 
 are terribly miseducated men. They are clever intel¬ 
 lectuals, only superficially schooled in moral and spir¬ 
 itual values, blithely Bryanesquing through chemical 
 laboratories and university halls. They do not be¬ 
 long, notwithstanding their cap and gown, scalpel 
 and retort, to what one of the greatest and most 
 learned Americans has characterized as man’s abid¬ 
 ing necessity. “It is this free capital of mind,” he 
 says, “the world most stands in need of—this free 
 capital that awaits investment in undertakings spirit¬ 
 ual as well as material, which advance the race and 
 help men to a better life.” No man belongs to the 
 free capital of mind who fails to develop the whole 
 of him. Without a just and harmonious unfolding 
 
102 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 of all his powers, he is only a mutilated edition of 
 human nature. 
 
 However, Mr. Bryan’s conclusion that these men 
 are atheists or skeptics because they accept the hy¬ 
 pothesis (which, by the way, as Doctor Fosdick has 
 shown, is not just a guess, as the Commoner asserts) 
 of evolution, is thoroughly unsound. They are what 
 they are for the same reason that Mr. Bryan and all 
 the rest of us are what we are: that is, they and we 
 are one-sided, prejudiced, and only partially devel¬ 
 oped. “We talk a great deal,” says a real thinker, 
 “about being governed by mind, by intellect, by 
 intelligence, in this boastful day of ours; but as a 
 matter of fact, I don’t believe that one man out of a 
 thousand is governed by his mind. Men, no matter 
 what their training, are governed by their passions, 
 and the most we can hope to accomplish is to keep 
 the handsome passions in the majority.” 
 
 hi 
 
 * 
 
 A third field for the mischief of Bryanism is pol¬ 
 itics. Herein does it execute some of its most absurd 
 as well as its most serious capers. Not only Mr. 
 Bryan (though perhaps he has had a broader experi¬ 
 ence in this field than most people), but a large 
 majority of men and women, approach our political 
 obligations with a kind of sixteen-to-one mental cal¬ 
 iber, seasoned with the acrimony and side-stepping 
 
Bryanism 103 
 
 of an Article X debate. Or, in plain English, our 
 much discussion has not really hinged upon a prin¬ 
 ciple at all; we are almost entirely interested in ap¬ 
 proving or disapproving a person. Our loud 
 affirmation of principles consists very largely in the 
 readjustment of our personal prejudices. National 
 policy, after all, may be only a stalking-horse to run 
 over a man. In doing this, we exhibit on a national 
 scale the capacity which George Meredith attributes 
 to one of his characters. “She had the art,” he 
 says, “of charging permissible words with explosive 
 meanings.” Only, it should be added, we strain our 
 ears to catch the full roar of the explosion, let the 
 meaning be what it will. Thus, while warmly dis¬ 
 cussing aspects of political action during the past 
 three years, now and then somewhat distantly ap¬ 
 proaching a principle in our purblind wanderings, we 
 have been constantly and invariably aware of a per¬ 
 son. Lodge’s “Down-with-Wilson!” at Chicago 
 struck the keynote of our political and national psy¬ 
 chology at the psychological moment. Subtle and 
 yet tremendous forces of jealousy and hatred, con¬ 
 fined to no class and to no political party, but per¬ 
 meating all classes and parties, had been in operation 
 before the Chicago convention; but that was the 
 hour when all the politically disgruntled and the in¬ 
 sanely jealous began to have their day. And what 
 a day! And, also, what a company of political bed- 
 
104 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 fellows America has entertained during this stygian 
 night of partisan, myopic Bryanism! 
 
 Never, surely, since the planet came out of the 
 firemist, did such a motley gathering of human beings 
 crawl into such a political bed and emit such snores 
 of patriotism! Politics do indeed make strange bed¬ 
 fellows, but never did the stars in their courses gaze 
 upon such a strange lot as managed to pile into this 
 infamous and historic political bed. Just one glance 
 through the door, gentle reader, and you will speedily 
 pass on a sadder if not a wiser man. Behold Lodge 
 and Bryan cheek to cheek and snore to snore: be¬ 
 hold the out-and-out Hun clasped in the loving em¬ 
 brace of the dyed-in-the-wool-America-first Repub¬ 
 lican; behold the ruby-cheeked son of Erin, in the 
 normalcy of things a stickler for dollars and doings 
 Democratic, snuggling up to that stalwart Roosevelt 
 Republican, James Roscoe Day; behold those golden- 
 ly greased machines, Thompsonism of Chicago and 
 Murphyism of New York, grinding out their anti- 
 Wilsonian music in the contented ear of the Honor¬ 
 able James Beck—he of ‘‘The Passing of the New 
 Freedom” fame; yea, behold, and take a parting 
 glance at “the whole damned crew”—to borrow a 
 Miltonic phrase—German, Irish, Italian, French, Re¬ 
 publican, Democrat, Progressive, Socialist, Bolshe¬ 
 vik, Anarchist, seasoned with George Sylvester Vie- 
 reck’s “Hymn of Hate!” And then say, whether the 
 
Bryanism 105 
 
 bed of Procrustes, with its occupant duly “trimmed” 
 in the matter of length, long or short, ever slept such 
 a motley, fantastic, international group of amalga¬ 
 mated American patriots! Yet, do linger just one 
 moment longer, I beseech you, and hear these holy 
 patriots talk in their sleep! “Down with Wilson!” 
 —this is the phlegmatic night-call of Lodge and 
 Harvey answered by the myopic duet sleep-call of 
 Beck and Viereck—“Down with Wilson!” 
 
 Once there was a man by the name of Athanasius. 
 Whether rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, he 
 had the good fortune to cause somebody to invent 
 the phrase: “Athanasius Against the World!” It 
 would seem to mark the one suggestive thing in the 
 meanest, most stupid, most vitriolic, most unreason¬ 
 able, most un-American period of American history. 
 For it has been and still is: “Woodrow Wilson 
 Against the World!” No loftier tribute, I think, 
 could be paid to that victorious man. He looms up 
 as the one sublime success in a world of dismal fail¬ 
 ure. He is not coming back. Providential men do 
 not come back. They wait upon the High Hills of 
 Tomorrow for the backward to climb up to their 
 heights; and when the stragglers have reached their 
 clear and lofty summits, behold! the prophets they 
 stoned are not there! Already they have pushed on 
 ahead! On and forever on they follow the Gleam! 
 Slowly—very slowly—the struggling multitudes shed 
 
106 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 their poisoned Nessus-robe of hate and misunder¬ 
 standing. They, too, lured on by the Light that 
 never was, on sea or land, begin to pursue the ideals 
 for which it is sometimes harder to agonizingly and 
 disappointedly live than it is to quickly and tragically 
 die. But Bryanism, whether in religion, or educa¬ 
 tion, or politics, is painfully slow to grasp this truth. 
 
VI 
 
 A Letter to “Main Street" 
 
 E DITOR Big Sandy News :—Inasmuch as I was 
 among the disappointed ones, I have it in my 
 heart to set down some afterthoughts concerning the 
 memorable centennial and home-coming week re¬ 
 cently celebrated by the dearest town in the world. 
 But these afterthoughts are after only in the sense 
 that they are being written after the golden week; 
 they have been entertained and thought through be¬ 
 fore. It is not too much to say that they fairly 
 haunted me when memory was especially quickened 
 by the events which were crowded into the week 
 itself. I had hoped that it might be convenient for 
 our efficient committee to set the date in September 
 rather than August, as I had an engagement of a 
 year’s standing for the latter month. At one time 
 it seemed possible for me to come anyway, and I 
 was just ready to wire the program committee, ask¬ 
 ing for the privilege of a sermon appropriate to the 
 occasion. But the tide of events turned against me. 
 Nevertheless, I did come home in spirit, though my 
 bodily presence was detained at a distance of a 
 thousand miles. 
 
 107 
 
io8 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 i 
 
 My first afterthought centers about the Big Sandy 
 News and its remarkably fine memorial number. 
 Having been a printer’s devil myself, and knowing 
 something of stoking the fires of energy necessary 
 to getting out an average newspaper, I was pro¬ 
 foundly impressed with the skill and toil, both mental 
 and mechanical, which went into the making of an 
 edition that will be long treasured by every loyal 
 Louisaian. The work of going over the files of the 
 News for many years past that we might have a 
 kind of historic moving picture film in personal and 
 general references, was immense. As the edition un¬ 
 rolled its glowing pages before my admiring eyes and 
 grateful heart, I felt like shouting, not merely, “Big 
 Sandy Against the World,” but: “The Big Sandy 
 News Against the World!” 
 
 Nor can I resist adding, in this connection, that I 
 am heartily proud to have begun life, even before 
 the “teen” age was upon me, in the printing office of 
 the Big Sandy News. I count those among the 
 happiest days of a happy life. Even the memory of 
 the enthusiasm with which I pursued those influential 
 and formative years as devil, printer, foreman and 
 assistant manager is of the essence of pure delight. 
 Should I live to be a centenarian, no day will stand 
 out more clearly in mental perspective than that first 
 
A Letter to “Main Street" 109 
 
 morning when the Editor set me to sorting “pi.” It 
 was a radiant Monday morning. On the previous 
 Saturday or Sunday—I am not sure which—Uncle 
 Henry Sullivan told me that arrangements had been 
 made for me to begin work the following Monday; 
 that I was to receive one dollar per week for six 
 months; that I was to come and live at Grand¬ 
 mother Sullivan’s and pay my board by carrying up 
 the coal and kindling from certain rather dark re¬ 
 gions, as my boyish imagination pictured them, un¬ 
 der that dear old brick house, now long level with 
 the dust, but which will ever be synonymous with an 
 exceedingly happy childhood. Such a grandmother, 
 and such kind-hearted, indulgent uncles it would be 
 hard to surpass! To have been enriched with a noble 
 parentage—that is something to be everlastingly 
 thankful for; and then to have had this supplemented 
 by such additional parental hearts—why, it makes 
 one feel, with Wordsworth, that vows had been taken 
 for him, indeed. 
 
 But getting a job with the News and a place to 
 stay did not solve the whole of the problem con¬ 
 fronting me. It was also necessary to obtain my 
 father’s consent. Having reached the rather callow 
 age of twelve years, it is quite possible that I did not 
 go about this phase of the matter very diplomatically. 
 At any rate, on going out home Sunday afternoon 
 and telling my father of the new realms of inviting 
 
no A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 adventure awaiting me in the form of a printer’s 
 devil, I found him decidedly unfavorable. Yet, as 
 everybody knows, he had a soul of velvet under an 
 apparently harsh exterior. His children knew this 
 both by instinct and experience and habitually took 
 advantage of it. So, having gotten my meager be¬ 
 longings together in a kind of improvised knapsack; 
 and realizing, moreover, that my bare feet and the 
 open gate might see me safely through the danger 
 zone of switches that were frequently threatened 
 and rarely applied, I made for the dusty road, the 
 town hill, and the land of my dreams—which hap¬ 
 pened to be the old red brick clerk’s office in the 
 court house square. 
 
 All these hopes and fears, mark you, were pressed 
 into that fateful Sunday. So eager was I to enter 
 my career of deviltry that I slept little that night. 
 Consequently, Monday morning found me up before 
 the dawn and Captain Freese’s most alert roosters. 
 Taking up my position on the Main Street stile of 
 the old fence surrounding the court house, I began 
 a long period of “watchful waiting.” Now, to be 
 perfectly frank, and in the interest of keeping this 
 record straight,—and moreover, if hard pressed, I 
 could subpoena Miss Willie Burgess that was as a 
 material witness in the case—in those days the Edi¬ 
 tor of the Big Sandy News was not up as early on 
 Monday and Thursday mornings as on other morn- 
 
A Letter to “Main Street” hi 
 
 ings of the week. Hence my waiting from about 
 four a. m. until sometime between eight and nine 
 a. m. At the time, of course, I was blissfully un¬ 
 aware of the reason for this somewhat tardy ap¬ 
 pearance of the Editor on Monday morning. But 
 we learn much in the come and go of the years. 
 Past midlife now, I have concluded that from the 
 days of Helen of Troy down to this good hour, 
 young men have been inclined to reach their places 
 of business rather late on Monday mornings; and 
 if all the young men in history have been as fortunate 
 as those following the unwritten but very effective 
 laws of Louisa’s social code—inasmuch as Wednes¬ 
 day evening happens to precede Thursday morning 
 —the latter may likewise be included in this observa¬ 
 tion ! 
 
 Two outstanding days of these seven or eight 
 years have marked themselves in my memory quite 
 definitely. One was the late Thursday afternoon 
 when the Editor and Mart Conley (no “devil” ever 
 had a better foreman than he!) concluded that I was 
 physically sturdy enough to “ink” that queer little 
 old Army press. Talk about the thrill that comes 
 once in a lifetime! I can feel the effects of that en¬ 
 chanting experience after more than thirty years. 
 My self-importance took on such obvious dimensions 
 that the Editor, foreman, Boyd Ferguson, Jeff Wil¬ 
 son, Ben Strachan—as well as John Stewart, Milt 
 
1 12 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 Burns, Noll Garred, John Ratcliffe, and Arthur 
 Hughes, who often came in to “josh” me—must 
 have had serious doubts of the future capacity of 
 my hatband! 
 
 The other unforgettable day was that Thursday, 
 some years later, when the News came out, bear¬ 
 ing this significant line in the upper left-hand corner 
 of the editorial page: 
 
 Fred Shannon, Asst. Manager. 
 
 Well, I don’t know how John D. felt when he 
 became the richest man in the world; or how E. J. 
 Buffington—another Big Sandian almost!—felt 
 when he was chosen President of the Illinois Steel 
 Company; or how Woodrow Wilson felt when, as 
 the late Joseph Choate says, the great President pro¬ 
 duced state papers than which there have been no 
 greater since the foundation of our government. 
 But this I do know—not one could have felt any 
 bigger than I did on that historic day when man¬ 
 kind were appraised of the fact that Fred Shannon 
 was henceforth assistant manager of the Big Sandy 
 News! If we are really no bigger than we feel, 
 I was vastly bigger on that day three decades ago 
 than I am this morning. 
 
 Quite seriously, however, those were deeply fortu¬ 
 nate days for me. In the first place, I was enamored 
 of the printing business. William Morris, poet, 
 
A Letter to “Main Street ” 113 
 
 decorator, and translator of the Icelandic sagas, once 
 exclaimed: “Would God He had made me a printer 
 from my mother’s womb!” Possessing not even a 
 vestige of the Englishman’s artistic genius, yet my 
 early love of typesetting and the printing art has 
 given me a slight appreciation of the ardor glowing 
 through his words, which were thrust into my mem¬ 
 ory many years ago. In the second place, no lad 
 was ever more fortunate in his employer. Naturally, 
 by virtue of appreciation if not by any personal con¬ 
 tribution on my own part, I have continuously en¬ 
 joyed a large share of the success which has justly 
 crowned our local newspaper’s handsome career! 
 
 Here I have rambled along too much already, and 
 only one “afterthought” has been exposed, while 
 there are very many more in the background! “Space 
 is as nothing to spirit” is excellent poetry; but 
 “space,” as reckoned by editors, cannot be measured 
 by such intangible rods. However, I am going to 
 ask for room for one other afterthought, even though 
 it may have to be run “solid.” (Ed. Spencer, at 
 least, does not need an interpreter for this shop 
 talk!) 
 
 11 
 
 The other thought relates to the spiritual phase 
 of the centennial and homecoming week. I do not 
 use the term in any narrow or exclusive sense, but 
 
114 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 rather in its inclusive and enriching content. As a 
 matter of fact, the joy of the homecoming lifts the 
 spiritual feature into high and beautiful relief. It 
 reminds us that human beings are chiefly moved 
 and ruled by noble sentiment, which is essentially 
 spiritual. And once we have set our feet upon this 
 path, how quietly and surely our best memories turn 
 to the Christian Church, and those who were and 
 are fellow-helpers in the Kingdom of God. Take 
 the churches out of Louisa during these hundred 
 years, and what a different homecoming it would 
 have been! Indeed, one wonders if the town would 
 have survived its hundred summers and winters at 
 all? For even the people who never enter a church 
 would be the first to move away from a churchless 
 town. 
 
 Yet all this is rather negative, when my heart is 
 filled with positive gratitude to those who were 
 “found faithful” in the days of my childhood and 
 youth. One of the first and best teachers I ever had 
 was Hannah Lackey. I have reminded that heroic 
 soul more than once of my somewhat informal 
 matriculation into her classes in the Masonic Hall. 
 When the bell rang on that first morning of my 
 school days, I rushed in with a company of other 
 little savages and preempted the first convenient seat. 
 After much tribulation, she mastered the noise, or¬ 
 ganized her classes, and got down to business. 
 
A Letter to “Main Street” 115 
 
 Things were going along famously, when lo! the 
 organized stillness was broken by the most ear- 
 splitting and shrillest of whistles! With a sort of 
 Lord Kitchener judgment seat in her face, Hannah 
 calmly asked: “Will the boy who made that noise 
 please stand up?” Evidently thinking that school 
 was a place in which to display one’s ability in pro¬ 
 ducing the loudest noise, and proudly convinced that 
 I deserved a reward, I promptly stood up. Sum¬ 
 moned to the teacher’s desk, I was told to remain 
 standing. Somehow, in the stress of her work, the 
 teacher forgot to countermand her order in due sea¬ 
 son and I just kept on standing. Now, standing on 
 your feet, after a little, becomes quite irksome. Then 
 follows a period of shifting the weight from one foot 
 to the other. That, too, after a while, fails to give 
 the desired relief. To make a long story short, when 
 the kindly teacher’s attention was attracted by the 
 suppressed whining of the very tired human midget 
 behind her, she dried his tears and sent him back to 
 his seat. So far as I recall, that was the first and 
 last time that I ever turned the atmosphere of a 
 schoolroom into a shrill, whistling screech! 
 
 I think of other teachers, too—Davis Holt, now 
 an honored minister of the Gospel, John Hibbard, 
 R. C. McClure, W. D. O’Neal and Doctor G. W. 
 Wroten, who, though I was too young to be in his 
 classes, in later years exerted a most helpful influence 
 
n6 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 over me, as he did over a host of others. Two 
 teachers leaving a distinct impression upon the public 
 schools of Louisa were Professors Anderson and 
 Welch. I was working in the printing office during 
 their time, but participated in the Friday evening 
 debating society which they organized and fostered. 
 Jay Burton, Will O’Neal, John Akers, Professors 
 Anderson and Welch and myself were the ring-lead¬ 
 ers of these weekly talkfests. Once Uncle Will 
 Moore—the very thought of him is like delicious 
 fragrance rising from October gardens!—was pres¬ 
 ent when I had a declamation on Joan of Arc. Uncle 
 Will was nothing if not movingly appreciative, and 
 no doubt placed a much higher estimate upon my 
 youthful effort than it deserved. Nevertheless, his 
 enthusiastic commendation gave me a taste of the joy 
 of moving people by the power of speech. 
 
 It is evident by this time that I intend keeping the 
 schools and churches together. These two great in¬ 
 stitutions properly belong together, in no formal 
 and sectarian manner, to be sure, but by the far 
 deeper and more vital ties of shaping and creative 
 ideals they nourish. Any education that is not in¬ 
 spired by Christian principles becomes a curse and 
 ultimately pulls down the house of civilization in 
 ruins. Therefore, one can scarcely overestimate the 
 religious tragedy of a nation that fails to inculcate 
 
A Letter to “Main Street” 117 
 
 the spirit and teachings of Christ in the training of 
 its youth. 
 
 Turning from the schools to the churches, I recall 
 some of the ministers to whom I am greatly indebted. 
 Among these were the Revs. Cook, Cox, Simpson, 
 Hiner, Jolly, Williamson, French, Reid, Switzer, and, 
 in a special sense, Rev. John Hampton and Rev. 
 Ernest Robinson. And then when one turns from 
 the clergy to the laity—those lovely, cultured, conse¬ 
 crated souls who are spiritual jewels in Louisa’s 
 crown of rejoicing—there is simply not space to 
 mention all of them! Where would the ending be 
 were one to begin expatiating on his indebtedness to 
 those who blessed and inspired his boyhood and later 
 years? I think of such families as the Wallaces, 
 Northups, Stewarts, Borders, Waldecks, Laynes, 
 Yateses, Burchetts, Snyders, Burgesses, Burnses, 
 Castles, Freeses, Conleys, Sullivans, Thomases, 
 O’Briens, Gunnells, Lackeys, Vinsons, Garreds, 
 Billupses, McClures, and—well, is it not a fragrant 
 human lane that has no turning ? Plainly, one is con¬ 
 fronted by a process of elimination; therefore, I am 
 going to speak of one or two concretely and in par¬ 
 ticular. They will serve as specimens. Thus held 
 up, Louisa may paraphrase the words of the Mother 
 of the Gracchi: “These are some of my jewels!” 
 
 The first is Uncle Roll Burns. Among my earliest 
 memories is the unfading picture of him as Suoer- 
 
Ii8 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 intendent of our Sunday School. He was one of the 
 best any school ever had, I know. Lovable, devout, 
 familiar with the Bible, and gloriously faithful, he 
 wrought himself into our affections. One of his 
 outstanding qualifications for that high office was 
 his deep-down love of little children, young men and 
 maidens. I am still keenly aware of the fine ecstasy 
 that fairly possessed him as he worked in the school. 
 He had a sweet, mellow voice for singing, and he 
 used it as one who sang with the spirit and the un¬ 
 derstanding. Somehow, in thinking of Uncle Roll, 
 there comes to mind an incident in the life of the 
 great Lister. In one of the children’s hospitals in 
 which he practiced, one little tot, says his biographer, 
 was asked what he thought of the great surgeon. 
 “Oh,” exclaimed the child, “every time he comes in 
 he just seems to be looking for a little head to pat!’" 
 How many little heads Uncle Roll managed to pat I 
 And in that gentle, kindly pat did he not leave some- 
 thing akin to sweet apostolic memories for some of 
 us who are still climbing, however falteringly, the 
 upward way? The summer before he went away, I 
 took him for a little drive about town and out into 
 the country. On returning home, and just before 
 getting out of the car, he said: “Fred, I want the 
 Lord Jesus to be able to say, ‘Roll, there is something 
 that you can still do for Me down in Louisa that no 
 one else can do, and I’m depending on you to do it.’ ” 
 
A Letter to “Main Street” 119 
 
 Little wonder that the dear man of God kept his 
 spiritual greenness until he slipped away into “the 
 Land of Beginning Again!” I shall never be able 
 to fully discharge my indebtedness to Uncle Roll. 
 As I have gone over the country telling “the old, old 
 story,” his name and influence have wound through 
 it like a lovely song that sometimes steals unbidden 
 into the music that comes only in dreams. 
 
 The other character is a woman—and still in the 
 flesh, I am thankful to say! We are in the habit of 
 reserving most of our good things to say about the 
 dead. This habit has got itself coined into such 
 phrases as, “Speak kindly of the dead.” One has 
 no quarrel with the fitness thus suggested; the criti¬ 
 cism comes by way of contrast in the fact that we 
 refuse to the living those tokens of lovingkindness 
 which we lavish all too freely upon silent forms and 
 faces. Long ago I resolved to spend more time in 
 making garlands for the living and less time in 
 botanizing over graves grown rank with flowers 
 of regret. I believe that the thing is Christian, and 
 I know it to be goldenly rewardful. 
 
 High up in any list of the great women it has 
 been my privilege to know, the names of my Grand¬ 
 mother, Mrs. C. C. Sullivan and Mrs. F. T. D. 
 Wallace, must inevitably appear. What I owe to the 
 first by inheritance and training, and to the second 
 by inspiration and example, is far more than can be 
 
120 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 put into words. Of the many generous character¬ 
 izations in your centennial number, Mr. Editor, there 
 was none truer than this: “Louisa has no more 
 highly prized citizen than Mrs. Wallace.” The fact 
 is, I could take your words as a text and write a 
 three-column sermon on Christian citizenship, with¬ 
 out so much as moving my position one foot farther 
 back from the resounding shore of Lake Michigan. 
 I would guarantee to prove that if the average citi¬ 
 zenry of Louisa and the world measured up to the 
 standard attained by that elect lady, several thousand 
 preachers in America would be forced to look for 
 other jobs! When I recall some of the crowned 
 queens of history, and then set alongside them this 
 and other uncrowned queens of Louisa, I seem to get 
 a new understanding of Christian queenliness. 
 Spontaneously do the Master’s words spring up in 
 the heart: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto 
 thee even as thou wilt.” 
 
 Just a word concerning our little colony of Louisa- 
 ians here in Chicago. Mrs. Doctor Funk and her 
 daughter, Pauline, are well known and helping the 
 world along. As to my neighbor and boyhood 
 friend, Luther Walter, were we not all proud to 
 have him bring back home such a splendid edition 
 of manhood? He is one of our big, upstanding 
 lawyers and citizens. It is not for me to say how 
 much Luther owes to his noble wife, but I fancy that 
 
A Letter to “Main Street” 121 
 
 he would say: “Everything that’s good!” Do you 
 wonder that I am happy to have such homefolk near 
 by? 
 
 hi 
 
 And now, truly, was not the homecoming greatly 
 worth while? What friendships were refreshed! 
 What acquaintances renewed! What eloquent by¬ 
 gones recalled! What memories transfigured and 
 reverently deepened! What vanished faces kept 
 coming tenderly near! What defeats forgotten, 
 what victories glorified! These were among the 
 thoughts that continued winging and singing in the 
 soul of one who was far away and yet constantly 
 near during Old Home Week. I measure my words 
 when I say that such a feeling and atmosphere as 
 were there generated and manifested is one of the 
 supremely deep needs of the whole world. Suppose 
 such a feeling of fellowship and friendliness should 
 descend like an atmosphere upon our own and other 
 nations. I tell you it would do more toward solving 
 mankind’s tremendous problems than all the patched- 
 up social quackeries, national cunning and political 
 cleverness can ever hope to accomplish. Every move¬ 
 ment worth while must be fed upon the vitalities of 
 good-will. “Interest,” said Woodrow Wilson, in his 
 great Manchester speech, “does not bind men to¬ 
 gether; interest separates men. There is only one 
 
122 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 thing that can bind people and that is a common 
 devotion to right.” And how can this common de¬ 
 votion to right be exalted, lifted up to great heights 
 of highmindedness and unselfish beauty, save in the 
 sweet, clear, sunny atmosphere of the soul’s home¬ 
 comings and fellowships? 
 
 Therefore, more and more as the years run swiftly 
 away, one Louisaian is highly resolved to tell men 
 and women of every creed, color, nation, and politics, 
 that the only solution of right-living and happiness in 
 this or any other world is that given by our Lord 
 and Master. It is close at hand, eager to be tried, 
 and as sure to win as the tides run in and out at the 
 moon’s mysterious call. When statesmen learn that 
 the Kingdom of God is bigger and more important 
 than nationality, and the sole secret of all true na¬ 
 tionality; that fraternity is fairer and more efficient 
 than blind partisanship; that right-doing is more to 
 be desired than getting back to the state houses of 
 London, Washington, Paris, or Berlin; that, in the 
 long run, it is the highest wisdom to practice right¬ 
 eousness and turn away from iniquity—why, the 
 world itself shall then feel the thrill of such a fellow¬ 
 ship as throbbed through Louisa’s homecoming 
 week. But let us not forget that the vast majority 
 of our leaders are precisely what we want them to 
 be. Now and then there are sublime exceptions— 
 a Washington, a Lincoln, and a Wilson point us to 
 
A Letter to “Main Street” 123 
 
 the uplands whether we follow them or not. But in 
 these white-hot modern years, when history is being 
 made so fast that it cannot be written, mankind can¬ 
 not subsist upon its unique exceptions. How im¬ 
 perative, therefore, that the vision of the average 
 man and woman should be cleanly Christian. For 
 if our citizenship becomes Christian, it will drive 
 from public life, with a whip of cords knit of 
 righteous thongs, every time-serving politician who 
 dares defy its commands and better instincts. What 
 a mountain-high responsibility rests upon the citi¬ 
 zens of America this very hour, when war-clouds 
 again blacken the horizon of the world! If, after 
 all, they should be woven out of the treacherous 
 shreds of our international phariseeism, the Lord 
 have mercy upon us! We may nonchalantly say that 
 it is none of our business. Nevertheless, righteous¬ 
 ness, judgment, and doom do not pause to parley 
 with our smug and ignorant self-satisfactions. Once 
 the conditions of the law of “the sudden leap” have 
 been fulfilled, they descend as swift as lightning and 
 as irrevocable as death;, and in their wake there is 
 the desolating evidence of ruined cities and mounded 
 wheatfields. And all because Jerusalem knew not 
 the day of her visitation! 
 
 If these more sober reflections are a part of my 
 expression of gratitude and devotion to the town of 
 my childhood and youth, it is because I there learned 
 
124 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
 reap.” The years have taught me that this unbend- 
 able law is not merely individual, but social, indus¬ 
 trial, political, national, and international as well. 
 That is why I pray the spirit of homecoming may 
 come sweetly home to every heart in the wide, wide 
 world. Therein is hope for despair; forgiveness for 
 hatred; love for misunderstanding; peace for storm 
 and fury. It is God’s way of bringing Heaven to 
 earth and of lifting earth up to Heaven. There is no 
 other. Then why should we not begin again, and 
 right where we are? Tell me, all ye who have been 
 a part of these hundred years, some of whom have 
 increased in goods and attained what we call worldly 
 success,—tell me if, in journeying about the world, 
 you have come upon any words so big with hope 
 and wonder and fruition as these: “Verily, I say unto 
 you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye 
 shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” 
 Consider that here is the secret of all true genius: It 
 is just the art of carrying the spirit of childhood, 
 with its simplicity, its freshness, its trustfulness, its 
 forgiveness, into the outlooks and purposes of ma¬ 
 ture life. And this is what I am going to tell that 
 great congregation assembled from many states and 
 countries and walks and stations, in Central Church 
 next Sunday morning. One does not have to go 
 anywhere in quest of the Angel of Happiness; he is 
 
A Letter to “Main Street” 125 
 
 standing upon our own doorsills pleading to be let 
 in. Then is it not yours and mine, O friend, simply 
 to open the door and let in our waiting Angel that 
 we may experience the joy of our own deeper home¬ 
 coming? And however imperfectly I tell the story 
 to that great throng, I shall accusingly feel that I 
 might have done better because I had in dear old 
 Louisa such a happy childhood; because there my 
 loved ones either live or sleep; because there life’s 
 richest friendships began and continue; and because 
 I think Pine Hill Cemetery as good a spot to hear 
 the golden tones of the Angel of the Resurrection 
 as any bit of God’s Acre in the wide, wide world. 
 Wherefore, as we begin the second century of 
 Louisa’s career, let us think much of “The Child in 
 Me,” so wondrously sung by May Riley Smith: 
 
 “She follows me about my House of Life, 
 
 (This happy little ghost of my dead Youth!) 
 
 She has no part in Time’s relentless strife, 
 
 She keeps her old simplicity and truth— 
 
 And laughs at grim Mortality, 
 
 This deathless Child that stays with me— 
 
 (This happy little ghost of my dead Youth!) 
 
 My House of Life is weather-stained with years— 
 (O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay.) 
 
 Its windows are bedimmed with rain of tears, 
 
 The walls have lost their rose, its thatch is gray. 
 One after one its guests depart, 
 
 So dull a host is my old heart. 
 
 (O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay!) 
 
126 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 For jealous Age, whose face I would forget, 
 
 Pulls the bright flowers you bring me from my hair 
 And powders it with snow; and yet—and yet 
 I love your dancing feet and jocund air. 
 
 I have no taste for caps of lace 
 To tie about my faded face— 
 
 I love to wear your flowers in my hair. 
 
 O Child in Me, leave not my House of Clay 
 Until we pass together through the Door, 
 
 When lights are out, and Life has gone away 
 And we depart to come again no more. 
 
 We comrades who have traveled far 
 Will hail the Twilight and the Star, 
 
 And smiling, pass together through the Door!” 
 
VII 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher 
 
 T HE outstanding dates in Beecher’s life are as 
 follows: He was born in Litchfield, Ct., June 
 24, 1813; he graduated from Amherst College in 
 1834, and from Lane Theological Seminary, Cincin¬ 
 nati, O., in 1837; he was ordained at the Presbyterian 
 Church in Lawrenceburg, Ind., having supplied the 
 church from May, 1837, to November 9, 1838; he 
 was installed at Indianapolis July 31, 1839; he was 
 dismissed from Indianapolis September 19, 1847; 
 he was installed at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, 
 October 10, 1847; died in the same city March 
 8, 1887. 
 
 Thus, within these dates lived and wrought this 
 dateless man; for Beecher is like an immense opal. 
 One has to view him from many angles to get any¬ 
 thing like an adequate measurement of his colossal, 
 innate genius. As of the precious stone, so of his 
 many-sided personality—with each new turning 
 some hitherto unrevealed splendor breaks out. His 
 genius contains so many facets that he stands quite 
 apart from ordinary mortals. And it is this very 
 
 profuseness of his nature that makes it so hard to 
 
 127 
 
128 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 write satis fyingly, dispassionately, and at the same 
 time proportionately, of him. Almost a generation 
 ago, Doctor Thomas Armitage said: “Mr. Beecher 
 will be better understood in coming generations than 
 in this, for now, to a certain extent, the universality 
 of his work hides his universal success.” 
 
 i 
 
 It is a singular fact that both Lyman Beecher, the 
 father, and Henry Ward Beecher, the son, were 
 bereft of their mothers in infancy. The elder 
 Beecher’s mother—a woman “of a joyous, spark¬ 
 ling, hopeful temperament”—died of consumption 
 two days after his birth. Lyman was a seven- 
 months’ child, and when the woman attending his 
 mother saw what a puny creature he was, little effort 
 was made to keep the future theologian alive; in¬ 
 deed, he was actually bundled up and put aside. At 
 last a woman, urged by the curiosity innate in her 
 kind, peeped in to see if the infant were still breath¬ 
 ing. Discovering signs of life, she compassionately 
 remarked: “It’s a pity he hadn’t died with his 
 mother.” Fortunately, the verdict of history is 
 against her! Thinking of those far-off, mystic be¬ 
 ginnings, Lyman Beecher said: “So you see it was 
 but by a hair’s-breadth that I got a foothold in this 
 world.” Yet these hair’s-breadth affairs are trans¬ 
 actions of no small moment, considering that God 
 hangeth the earth upon nothing. Not once nor twice 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 129 
 
 in this fair world’s story, has the hair’s-breadth 
 cause paled down to the vanishing point only to un¬ 
 cover the clear-shining purposes of destiny. This 
 seems to be emphatically true of the Beechers; for, 
 if the Something behind the best-laid schemes of 
 mice and men and fate, had not been silently but tre¬ 
 mendously active in caring for that New England 
 Moses, tucked in his ark of flannels and set adrift 
 on the Nile of being, all history could not have ral¬ 
 lied to the speculative question of Henry Ward 
 Beecher: “Father, if you had not been, where would 
 I be?” And echo answers: “Where?” 
 
 Happily, however, there is no need of wasting 
 time over such a conundrum. Breaking out of his 
 infant flannels, Lyman Beecher went in due time 
 to his Uncle Lot Benton’s farm in North Guilford. 
 Intending to make a farmer of young Beecher, Mr. 
 Benton introduced him to a plow drawn by oxen 
 never designed to solve the problem of either per¬ 
 petual or rapid motion. Plowing fifteen acres three 
 times over in one summer tended to foment re¬ 
 bellion in the coming reformer’s soul. He did not 
 feign madness as did Ulysses while plowing his cele¬ 
 brated semi-cloven-hoof team; but his uncle and 
 father were so impressed by his dissatisfaction and 
 restlessness, that they decided to send him to school 
 in preparation for Yale College. More than once the 
 great Lyman Beecher said: “Oxen sent me to col- 
 
130 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 lege.” What an excellent sacrifice they made upon 
 the altars of theology, and what a gracious ministry 
 they accomplished for their day and generation! 
 
 Like his father, Henry Ward Beecher was also 
 left motherless in early childhood, being but three 
 years old when his mother died. And while he was 
 nobly fathered, he was magnificently, gloriously 
 mothered. Notwithstanding the strong traits of 
 their sires, one ventures nothing in the assertion that 
 both Phillips Brooks and Henry Ward Beecher 
 owed their largest and most dynamic qualities to the 
 mothers that labored them into life. In Beecher’s 
 mother, Roxana Foote, there was a beautiful union 
 of those intellectual and spiritual powers which fitted 
 her to mother more genius than is usually allotted to 
 a single woman; and when her gifts were married 
 to those of Lyman Beecher, it is not strange that 
 their children should have such extraordinary en¬ 
 dowments as to cause Boston to make a new classi¬ 
 fication of the human race, viz., “The good, the bad, 
 and the Beechers.” More than a half a century ago a 
 college literary society debated the question: “Which 
 is father of the most brains, old Mr. Burleigh or old 
 Dr. Beecher?” Old Doctor Beecher won the day, of 
 course. 
 
 Of his mother, Beecher said: “There are few 
 women born into this world that are her equals. She 
 was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 131 
 
 woman not demonstrative, with a profound philo¬ 
 sophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, 
 and with a serenity that was simply charming. From 
 her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic 
 temperament; from her also I received simplicity and 
 childlike faith in God. Do you know why so often 
 I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of 
 woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were 
 to live a thousand years, I could not express what 
 seems to me to be the least I owe to her. Three 
 years old was I when singing she left me and sung 
 on to Heaven, where she sings evermore. I have 
 only such a remembrance of her as you have of the 
 clouds of ten years ago—faint, evanescent; and yet, 
 caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have 
 heard of her and by what my father’s thought and 
 feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me 
 that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the 
 Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has 
 been a presence to me ever since I can remember. ,, 
 Studying while she spun flax, with her books tied 
 to the distaff, Roxana Foote became well read in 
 literature and history, was acquainted with the prog¬ 
 ress of science, which was just then beginning to 
 interest scholars, learned to write and speak the 
 French language fluently, accompanied her voice on 
 the guitar, used pencil and brush in painting portraits 
 upon ivory, was an adept in the arts of the needle, 
 
132 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 and was so skillful in all manner of handicraft that 
 in coming years “neither mantua-maker, tailoress, 
 or milliner ever drew on the family treasury.” 
 
 These, then, were the parental strains from which 
 Henry Ward Beecher sprang—strains that wrought 
 powerfully in producing this big, vital, capacious hu¬ 
 man. For let it be said at once that one of the out¬ 
 standing characteristics of Beecher, and one of the 
 secrets of his many-sided genius, was his compre¬ 
 hensive, thoroughgoing, palpitant human quality. 
 There was in him a tug of the cosmic, a touch of the 
 human, a tone of the divine. In a letter written 
 when he was seventeen months old, his mother has 
 left a cameo of which his seventy-five years were a 
 continuous enlargement. “I write,” she says, “sit¬ 
 ting upon my feet with my paper on the seat of a 
 chair, while Henry is hanging round my neck and 
 climbing on my back.” Hanging about the neck of 
 the mother-wonders of life, climbing over the backs 
 of the never-old, ever-young mysteries of human 
 existence—that is what Beecher did for more than 
 three quarters of a century. After their mother’s 
 funeral, the Beecher children were told at one time 
 that she had been put under the ground, at another 
 that she had gone to Heaven. Putting the two things 
 together, Henry decided to dig through the ground 
 and go to find her. One morning he was found 
 under a window of the parsonage, digging with all 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 133 
 
 the might his three years could command. Asked 
 what he was doing, he lifted his curly, golden head 
 and replied: “Why, I am going to Heaven to find 
 ma!” And all his life long he was putting severed 
 things together-—now great thought-facts which 
 seemed, in the minds of average folk, to be entirely 
 unrelated; now knitting up human and divine real¬ 
 ities, showing their essential correlation; now bring¬ 
 ing together nations and sections, sundered by half¬ 
 views of whole principles; now uniting individuals, 
 blinded by prejudice or misunderstanding. A 
 binder-up of the needlessly separated—that is what 
 this infant grave-digger, smiting the tombs of life’s 
 buried mysteries with childlike simplicity and in¬ 
 vasive faith, will give the strength of his manhood’s 
 years to accomplishing. 
 
 Now his vast, inborn human sympathies aid much 
 toward making so large a place in the world for him. 
 Even as a chubby, bare-footed, rosy-faced four-year- 
 old, battling with the alphabet in Widow Kilbourne’s 
 Litchfield school, he saw and did things behind 
 Webster’s spelling-book which made his tell-tale face 
 a strong witness for the prosecution. Going in the 
 morning to school, Harriet, Henry, and Charles 
 would string out along the village street like Brown’s 
 cows coming home at milching time. Holding each 
 other by the hand, morning by morning they let fall 
 from their wondering lips, as a kind of manna feed- 
 
134 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 ing childhood’s imagination, this hair-raising ques¬ 
 tion: “What if a great big dog should come out at 
 us?” Invariably Henry Ward, with the big-bow- 
 wowishness of a full-grown Sancho Panza, would 
 make answer: “I would take an ax and chop his 
 head off!” What a pity that George Washington’s 
 hatchet was not firmly clutched in his bloodthirsty 
 hand! 
 
 About this time he wrote a letter which, if it fails 
 to exhibit the politeness of Chesterfieldian epistles, 
 has certain elements of originality in spelling which 
 might have made its author a forerunner of the 
 phonetic method. A facsimile is preserved by his 
 biographers, showing the large, heavily shaded, 
 firmly printed letters. An effort is here made to 
 reproduce only the spelling and composition: 
 
 “Der Sister 
 
 We ar al wel 
 Ma haz a baby 
 The old sow haz six pigs.” 
 
 Beecher’s was nothing if not an observant nature, 
 and this letter is proof positive that the gift did not 
 wait for development until late in life. 
 
 From childhood he was soon going the ways of a 
 healthy New England boyhood. Nobody was par¬ 
 ticularly interested in his future, for the very good 
 reason that there was nothing in his present that 
 even hinted a distinguished future. He was awk- 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 135 
 
 ward, dull, a bad writer, a terrible speller, deficient 
 in verbal memory, with a thick speech, and a bashful 
 reticence bordering upon stupidity. That he would 
 ever make an orator was a possibility so remote that 
 it did not tinge the realm of future probabilities to 
 those about him. His aunt said: “When Henry is 
 sent to me with a message, I always have to make 
 him say it three times. The first time I have no 
 manner of an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw; 
 the second I catch a word now and then; by the third 
 time I begin to understand.” 
 
 But wait! Many things are going on under the 
 sod these winter days no eye can see. The mystery 
 of next April’s violets; the splendor of wheat-waving 
 meadows; the green of June valleys and mountains; 
 the gold of autumn cornfields—ten thousand mystic 
 stirrings and upward strivings and fragrant bloom¬ 
 ings are potential in the frozen clods of January. 
 So, also, this stupid New England lad is full of un¬ 
 imagined wonders, is packed with undreamed possi¬ 
 bilities, is planted with seeds of vision, eloquence, 
 moral power and spiritual insight which will one 
 day break forth upon the world and make it exclaim: 
 “Behold, what hath God wrought!” 
 
 In truth, two boys were already imprisoned within 
 the stout, stocky body of this youth. Over against 
 the mischievous, frolicsome, prank-playing, fun-lov¬ 
 ing, book-dull boy stands a youth of exquisite 
 
136 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 delicacy, velvet tenderness, and winsome shyness. 
 Even now he is watching things grow out in the 
 wonder-teeming world. He knows where the robin’s 
 nest is; he knows how the crow flies; he knows how 
 the squirrel barks; he knows where the rabbit’s hole 
 is; he knows where the sweet flag is; he knows where 
 the sassafras, the hickory, and the chestnut trees 
 are; he knows how the wind sings through the trees, 
 blowing the poplars white; he knows how the sky 
 wooes the stream, and how the stream flirts back 
 with its sky-lover in wind-blown kisses; he knows 
 how the moon climbs to its silver tower above the 
 Litchfield hills and valleys, spreading a mantle of 
 old gold across their enchanted loveliness; he knows 
 how, when the green has gone, the invisible assassin 
 named Autumn steals through the domes of the trees 
 and stains their leaves with the innocent blood of 
 Summer. Ah! he knows a number of things not set 
 down in his blue-back spelling book; and he is 
 working out several problems for which there are no 
 answers in his yellow-back arithmetic. 
 
 A lover of Nature, he was not only passionately 
 fond of, but a devoted student of human nature in 
 its manifold expressions. Henry Ward Beecher was 
 so natively, so grandly human in the noblest sense, 
 that he was peculiarly qualified to interpret the divine 
 to men. The seen and the unseen were wondrously 
 intersphered in him. Uniting so perfectly in himself 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 137 
 
 the two foci of spiritual reality—the human and the 
 divine—he spoke with unique authority of the things 
 revealed by Him who spake as never man spake. He 
 fulfilled Goethe’s dictum that, if one would enter 
 into the infinite, he must first of all go out to all 
 points of the finite. From his childhood Beecher 
 displayed an inclusive humanness that made him a 
 veritable magnet, drawing all sorts and conditions 
 of people within the zone of his personality. Did the 
 pugnacious Boston Salem-Streeters need a captain 
 to lead them against their doughty Prince-Street 
 enemies? Lyman Beecher’s eighth child is their 
 chosen champion. Did the Freshmen class of Am¬ 
 herst College need a debater to defend them from 
 the brow-beating Sophomores? Young Beecher, 
 hearty, whole-souled, humorous, takes up the task. 
 Did Cincinnati call for volunteer policemen in 1836, 
 when the pro-slavery riots broke out? This Lane 
 Seminary theologue turns policeman and patrols the 
 streets night after night. Did the little church at 
 Lawrenceburg need a sexton as well as a pastor, and 
 did the pastor have a young wife and no parsonage? 
 Very well. The pastor becomes sexton, and an 
 abandoned loft over a stable becomes a home for 
 the pastor-sexton and his young bride. Did the 
 royal guild of beggars want help? One, three thou¬ 
 sand dollars to lift the mortgage from his farm; a 
 second—a distressed clergyman—wanted only a 
 
138 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 thousand, offering as security the assurance that the 
 Lord would repay it; a third, a school girl, requested 
 a composition; a fourth, a seminary student, wished 
 Beecher to write him a lecture he might deliver and 
 from the proceeds thereof obtain a ministerial educa¬ 
 tion ; a fifth journeyed from a distant state, making 
 the modest request that he adopt and educate her, 
 and having spent all her means coming to see him, 
 he had to buy her a ticket back home. And so the 
 story goes. It is laughable, ridiculous, almost in¬ 
 conceivable. 
 
 Yet is it not an undisguised tribute to the brother- 
 ing, opulently human quality in this man? Every¬ 
 body—even his inveterate enemies—felt a kind of 
 special ownership in him. He heard the newsboy’s 
 tale of sorrow; he listened to the merchant prince’s 
 unrequited yearnings; he turned the prodigal’s back 
 upon the far country and set him facing about home¬ 
 ward; he talked the look of despair from the Magda¬ 
 lene’s shrunken cheek and lo! the lilies of virtue 
 bloomed again; little children brought him flowers, 
 wicked men brought him thorns, but to each and to 
 all—the outcast, the forsaken, the forgotten, the 
 scholar, the statesman, the teacher—he was so preg¬ 
 nantly, so radiantly human that an other-world 
 melody wound through his speech, while the gentle¬ 
 ness of his great soul warmed through his clasp. 
 One afternoon I counted thirty-seven sparrows hop- 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 139 
 
 ping about on the sidewalk in front of Ward’s statue 
 of Mr. Beecher in City Hall Square. Just then a 
 dog came running by, the little creatures were fright¬ 
 ened and hastily flew away. Looking up to see what 
 had become of them, I found that all but three had 
 taken refuge on the head, shoulders, arms, and feet 
 of Henry Ward Beecher’s likeness in bronze. It is 
 beautifully symbolical of the many frightened things 
 —causes, institutions, and individuals—that sought 
 and found refuge in the life of this most human- 
 hearted man, who was at once passionately loved and 
 desperately hated. 
 
 11 
 
 In 1863 Beecher wrote to Mrs. Stowe: “The will 
 of the Republic is to be the law of the world.” He 
 believed this with all his soul; indeed, it is the key- % 
 note of as profound a patriotism as ever indwelt a 
 great nature. Whether one agrees with his par¬ 
 ticular viewpoint or not, one is compelled to admire 
 the depth and steadfastness of his conviction, burn¬ 
 ing with the rage and fury of an internal fire, just as 
 fair-minded men are compelled to acknowledge the 
 patriotic grandeur that shouldered Robert E. Lee to 
 those august summits, whither the poisoned darts of 
 obloquy can never reach. 
 
 Coming out of the Brooklyn City Hall one day 
 with a friend, he pointed to Beecher’s statue facing 
 
140 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 us a few yards away, and said: “Look at him! He 
 stands there as immovable as the foundations of the 
 earth!” Now, in a fresh and somewhat compre¬ 
 hensive survey of Mr. Beecher’s life, nothing has 
 impressed me more profoundly than the absolute 
 independence, the Gibraltar-like firmness which char¬ 
 acterized his patriotic stand and activities preceding 
 and following the Civil War. For in 1850 the man 
 who dared lift his voice, even in the heart of the 
 North itself, in favor of legislation against slavery, 
 generally met with a reception as cold as if it had 
 been conceived in an iceberg and tendered by residents 
 of the polar regions. There were many reasons 
 which fostered such an attitude on the part of North¬ 
 erners. Well-grounded fears as to the possible out¬ 
 come of an open rupture between the two sections; 
 the depth and strength of ties uniting the descendants 
 of the New World pioneers of Jamestown and Ply¬ 
 mouth ; the incapacity of the average man to appre¬ 
 ciate a new epoch in history, even after it has 
 dawned, and the world-old timidity born of a deep- 
 seated conservatism; the disturbance of commercial 
 values and the financial disasters involved in war— 
 these, and other equally influential considerations, 
 did not make a congenial atmosphere for one who 
 opposed slavery as ardently as the most conscientious 
 slaveholder upheld it. And yet, while the vast ma¬ 
 jority of his Northern brethren hedged and dodged, 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 141 
 
 Beecher dared speak out his inmost convictions. Not 
 infrequently he spoke when his life was openly 
 threatened. At Elizabeth City, New Jersey, the 
 Copperheads declared they would kill him rather 
 than permit him to speak. Amid indescribable up¬ 
 roar, Mr. Beecher entered the hall, advanced to the 
 platform, and said: “Gentlemen, I have been in¬ 
 formed that if I attempt to speak here tonight I am 
 to be killed. Well, I am going to speak, and there¬ 
 fore I must die. But before you kill me, there is one 
 request I have to make. All of you who are going to 
 stain your hands in my blood just come up here and 
 shake hands with me before you commit the crime, 
 for when I die I shall go to Heaven, and therefore 
 I shall never see any of you again.” He spoke for 
 two hours, talking the murder out of the hearts of 
 desperate men. 
 
 Convinced of its own rights and the justness of its 
 cause, the South had taken a position from which it 
 could not be easily dislodged; its course was fixedly 
 determined, and nothing could swerve it from the 
 purpose animating its very being. On the contrary, 
 there was no such definite and uncompromising pro¬ 
 gram at the North. Henry Clay’s Omnibus Bill, 
 introduced in 1850, including the Fugitive Slave 
 Laws, was as heartily approved in many sections 
 of the North as in the South; and the same was true 
 of Daniel Webster’s speech on the 7th of March, 
 
142 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 1850. But notwithstanding such mighties as Clay 
 and Webster, Beecher wrote his famous paper on 
 “Shall We Compromise?” for the Independent of 
 February 21, 1850. As John C. Calhoun lay upon 
 his sick bed, the article was read to him by his clerk. 
 Raising himself up, the great statesman said: “Read 
 that article again.” When it was read again, he re¬ 
 marked : “The man who says that is right. There is 
 no alternative. It is liberty or slavery.” Even ten 
 years later, and three days after Mr. Lincoln’s elec¬ 
 tion, the New York Tribune, the acknowledged or¬ 
 gan of the Republican party, said: “If the cotton 
 states decide that they can do better out of the Union 
 than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. . . . 
 We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one sec¬ 
 tion is pinned to the residue by bayonets.” 
 
 This, then, was the situation Beecher faced in his 
 own section of the Republic. Notwithstanding the 
 efforts of agitators like John Brown and William 
 Lloyd Garrison, there were vast areas of pro-slavery 
 soil north of Mason and Dixon’s line. And of all 
 the men who broke up this fallow ground, sowing 
 it with the seed of sentiment for the Union cause, 
 not one takes precedence of Henry Ward Beecher. 
 His untiring physical energy; his comprehensive 
 grasp of principles; his inexhaustible resources of 
 mind and soul; his fearless stand for the right as 
 he saw it; his marvelous eloquence, abounding with 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 143 
 
 argument, invective, zeal, and persuasion, stamp him 
 as one of the great patriots of history. 
 
 But it still remains to be said that the star of 
 Beecher’s patriotism climbed highest and shone 
 brightest while he was sojourning in a foreign land. 
 England’s open and enthusiastic espousal of the 
 cause of the Confederacy is well known. What 
 might have been the course of history had the old 
 mother taken up arms in favor of the southernmost 
 of her warring children ? With this question belongs 
 another: What, in all human probability, kept Eng¬ 
 land from turning her deep sympathy into practical 
 help of the South? Henry Ward Beecher is the 
 answer. Going to Europe for a much-needed rest in 
 1863, the pastor of Plymouth Church rendered im¬ 
 measurable service to the Union cause. He did not 
 go, as is sometimes averred, at the behest of either 
 President or Cabinet, or any other Government offi¬ 
 cial. Worn with the unremitting toil of many years, 
 his Church simply sent him away to rest. He went 
 purely as a private citizen; and upon arriving in 
 England in July, 1863, he refused invitations to 
 speak in Manchester and Liverpool, going on to the 
 Continent. Returning to England the following 
 September, he consented to speak in Free Trade Hall, 
 Manchester, on October 9th. Met at the station by 
 two Northern sympathizers, they said to him: “Of 
 course you know there is a great deal of excitement 
 
144 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 here.” Great placards, denouncing Beecher and the 
 North, and printed in anarchic red, had been sown 
 broadcast. Beecher said: “Well, are you going to 
 back down?” “No,” they replied, “but we didn’t 
 know how you would feel.” “Well,” he answered, 
 “you will find out how I feel. I’m going to be heard. 
 I won’t leave England until I have been heard.” 
 
 And he was heard—heard in Manchester, heard 
 in Glasgow, heard in Edinburgh, heard in Liverpool, 
 heard in London, heard clear around the world, 
 heard to all coming generations. Measured by the 
 tremendous odds against him and the venomous 
 hatred manifested, by the opposition gradually over¬ 
 come and the victory ultimately won, what other 
 speeches, or what other eloquence, can stand along¬ 
 side Henry Ward Beecher’s patriotic addresses in 
 England ? They are verily without a parallel. Doc¬ 
 tor William M. Taylor—and Scotchmen are not 
 given to exaggeration—gave it as his deliberate and 
 well-reasoned conviction that such eloquence as 
 Beecher’s has not been in the world since Demos¬ 
 thenes. Turn again to the Oration on the Crown, and 
 consider that the old Greek was never really tried 
 out as was this nineteenth century American by those 
 howling, hissing, jeering English mobs; consider, 
 furthermore, that in his English speeches every stop 
 in the organ of eloquence was pulled out at some 
 time or other, ranging all the way from pathos, hu- 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 145 
 
 mor, argument, sarcasm and defiance up to the sub- 
 limest expression of humanitarian principles, loftiest 
 patriotism and religious zeal; and consider, finally, 
 that measured by actual results, history holds no 
 such victory won by the human tongue as was ac¬ 
 corded to Mr. Beecher in England and Scotland. 
 Joseph Parker says of the Manchester speech: 
 “When Mr. Beecher appeared the scene baffled de¬ 
 scription ; the cheering, stamping, clapping, shouting, 
 and partial groaning, made the hall shake again. 
 Mr. Beecher rose to speak, but the audience must 
 needs cheer; once more he got to ‘Mr. Chairman,’ 
 and once more the cheers rang out in wild and all but 
 unanimous harmony. Mr. Beecher quickly caught 
 the groans and hisses of a clique at the far end of 
 the hall, and intuitively seizing the temper of his 
 audience he laid aside his elaborate manuscript and 
 went right at his work. For something like two 
 hours he went on, making his triumphant but far 
 from interrupted way through facts, statistics, 
 policies, and arguments, without so much as refer¬ 
 ring to a memorandum. As an effort of memory, 
 as an effort of the voice, and as a miracle of wisdom 
 and good-nature, I never heard the equal of that 
 massive and overwhelming oration. From that mo¬ 
 ment we knew the greatness of the cause, and we 
 felt that its advocacy was in the strongest possible 
 hands. There was life in every tone, so much so 
 
146 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 indeed that the whole effort seemed to be part of the 
 very battle which it described. Truly, it was no ama¬ 
 teur eloquence; it was no attempt at scene-painting; 
 it was a fight, a heroic onslaught, and, from my 
 point of view, a victorious assault at arms.” 
 
 In short, it was like kissing the lips of a blazing 
 cannon; but he spiked the belching, flaming thing 
 with his trumpet-toned speech. He found the throne 
 against him; he found even that man who, in the 
 estimation of many, is greater than any throne— 
 William Ewart Gladstone—against him. But he 
 triumphed over both, not only taming the fury of 
 the British Lion, but actually training it to play the 
 part of friend rather than enemy to his cause. No 
 wonder Gladstone said of Beecher, the patriot: “To 
 his undying fame the world and his memory stand 
 in no need of witnesses.” 
 
 hi 
 
 “All the bells that God has put in my belfry shall 
 ring!” One need hardly be told that the words are 
 Beecher’s own. But the amazing thing, in going 
 about his belfry, is the number and tone-quality of 
 the bells hanging therein. Charles Haddon Spur¬ 
 geon was so impressed with this fact that he char¬ 
 acterized Beecher as “the most myriad-minded man 
 since Shakespeare.” For one, I used to regard the 
 statement as a bit of Spurgeonian exaggeration; but 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 147 
 
 a new appraisal of Beecher’s mind has made me less 
 skeptical, if it has not prepared me to altogether 
 accept the English preacher’s statement in its bald 
 literalness. So varied were his gifts, and so deeply 
 did they impress themselves upon men, that both 
 critics and admirers have said that Beecher would 
 have made a great author, a great politician, a great 
 editor, a great lawyer, a great farmer, a great actor, 
 a great anything—almost! He was an acknowledged 
 expert in his judgment of horses, arboriculture, hor¬ 
 ticulture, precious stones, oriental rugs, and various 
 other things. That he would have been great in all, 
 or many of the departments mentioned, is largely a 
 matter of speculation, while sober students deny any 
 such probability. But that he was a great—a su¬ 
 premely great—Christian preacher, is all but uni¬ 
 versally admitted. 
 
 What, then, were the hidings of his power? In 
 general, they are two : first, the personality of the 
 man; and, second, preaching upon great themes in 
 a great way. 
 
 Now, when an effort is made to define, to weigh, 
 to measure personality, there is much straining after 
 wind without unveiling the reality itself. Evidences 
 we know, manifestations we see, but what is the 
 thing? Modern chemistry makes heavy draughts 
 upon the credulity of ordinary men in teaching that 
 an ounce of matter contains enough of radiant energy 
 
148 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 to lift ten thousand tons one mile. But the lifting 
 power of a radiant personality is more wonderful 
 still; its might, its spell, its riddle savors of that 
 which lies behind all matter, whether done into sys¬ 
 tems, galaxies, and stars, or atoms, electrons, and 
 ions. John says that one of the seven angels com¬ 
 missioned to show him the splendors of the Holy 
 City had for a measure a golden reed; but the walls 
 and gates, length and breadth of the holy city named 
 a great human personality, with its fathomless river 
 of life flowing through the midst of its streets of 
 genius, refuses to yield its real dimensions to any 
 reed, however golden. Astronomers say that that 
 undiscovered planet beyond Neptune and Jupiter 
 would have a year equal to a thousand of our earth- 
 years, because it would require a thousand years to 
 make its revolution round the sun. Thus with all its 
 glow and near-at-hand brilliance, a vast human per¬ 
 son remains a kind of undiscovered planet trembling 
 on the confines of being. Who shall measure Plato, 
 with the dim memories of eternity singing in his 
 
 t 
 
 soul ? Who shall measure Da Vinci, challenging the 
 world to contest his superiority in painting, drawing, 
 or chiseling? Who shall measure Shakespeare, the 
 thousand-souled, or Goethe, the thousand-eyed ? 
 Who shall measure Mozart, hearing sounds it is not 
 lawful to utter, and yet playing symphonies that lift 
 the gates of melody off their hinges and let the floods 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 149 
 
 of music pour down all sides of the world? Truly, 
 more than a golden reed is required for taking the 
 dimensions of these mystic, metropolitan cities of 
 Man-Soul. We can only say, as of John’s city, that 
 the glory of God is in them, and their light is like 
 unto a stone most precious, as it were a jasper stone, 
 clear as crystal, and measureless as clear. One might 
 as well attempt to photograph the quiver of last 
 May’s young grasses; or to preserve the fragrance 
 of roses dead Junes ago; or to analyze the song of a 
 mocking bird fluting in the sunset from the topmost 
 twig of a Tennessee apple tree, as to measure the 
 cryptic, indefinable, esoteric quality in lofty human 
 personality. 
 
 But that Henry Ward Beecher possessed this 
 nameless charm, this subtle something that emanates 
 from distinguished souls, his worst enemies could 
 not deny. Many went to scoff, and not infrequently 
 to hiss and howl, who came away suggesting the 
 ancient inquiry: “Is Saul also among the prophets?” 
 To take a concrete illustration, an ex-Confederate 
 soldier went with Rev. Frank Russell to hear Mr. 
 Beecher in Plymouth Church on a May Sunday 
 evening in 1865. “Yes,” said he, “I am going to 
 hear Beecher, for I never saw him. It would do 
 me good to take a rifle along and just send a bullet 
 through him as he stands in the pulpit pretending to 
 preach the Gospel. If some one had done it years 
 
150 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 ago, the country would have been a heap better off, 
 but now that his influence is all gone, I don’t know 
 but that he may as well live.” Seated at last in the 
 church, the speaker railed at the crowd packing the 
 building, and even the building itself; railed at the 
 organ, the style of the pulpit, and its furniture; 
 railed even at the flowers that adorned it. Though 
 the wonderful singing failed to conquer, the prayer 
 rather subdued the rebellious auditor. Mr. Beecher 
 prayed for those who carried bitterness in their 
 hearts; for those who had been disappointed, and 
 hurt, and defeated. The prayer over, a new look 
 was on the man’s face; but when the sermon was 
 over, a new man walked out of the pew. Arm in 
 arm, the two friends walked in silence to the ferry. 
 The erstwhile recalcitrant was the first to speak. ‘‘I 
 swear,” said he, “I believe I have been most egre- 
 giously mistaken about that man.” “No proposition 
 was ever clearer to me,” replied the other. “It don’t 
 seem put on,” continued the first; “he seems to feel, 
 and that deeply, everything he says.” The next Sun¬ 
 day he requested an introduction to Mr. Beecher, 
 heard him at every prayer meeting and preaching 
 service during his stay in New York, and ever after¬ 
 ward, though two thousand miles away, he would 
 not permit an unsavory word against the preacher 
 whose “influence was all gone.” But this is only 
 typical of many cases. Families moving to New 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 151 
 
 York and Brooklyn from afar, and acquainted with 
 Beecher only through slanderous newspaper reports, 
 first went to Plymouth Church as to a menagerie. 
 In due time, however, the expulsive power of his 
 personal charm claimed them as enthusiastic friends. 
 Then it was that his old neighbors humorously 
 shrugged their shoulders, heaved an awful sigh, and 
 exclaimed: “What? They, too, bewitched? What a 
 fearful influence that man does exert!” 
 
 Like all men of the first order, Beecher the man 
 was ever greater than his works. There are gifted 
 men who are fully able to express themselves in their 
 words and deeds; we somehow feel that their effects 
 are easily as great as their causes; they lack the leo¬ 
 nine strength of reserve power; they do not say: 
 “What we have revealed to you is only a hint of 
 the untapped energies lying behind.” But this is 
 what Dantes and Coleridges and Beechers always 
 say: “You think our Infernos and Conversations and 
 Sermons are grand; but O, what New Paradisos yet 
 unsung, what Ancient Mariners yet unborn, what 
 Sermons yet undelivered!” Now, Beecher pos¬ 
 sessed this unexplored, unexpressed self in a remark¬ 
 able degree. Beecher never preached a sermon that 
 was equal to Beecher. There was in him what David 
 Swing characterized as an “inborn, vast genius”; 
 what George William Curtis called “his exuberant 
 vitality”; what John G. Whittier recognized as 
 
152 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 “warm, tender, and irresistibly attractive” ; what At- 
 ticus G. Haygood termed “so creative a mind and 
 fascinating power”; what Haweis named a com¬ 
 pound of Spurgeon, Bright, Maurice, and Robert¬ 
 son; what Richard Salter Storrs defined as “his 
 power so constant and so vast, only because the 
 sources of it were so manifold and so deep.” In 
 other words, Beecher was just Beecher. He was a 
 kind of human cube—the length and the breadth 
 and the height of him are equal. Guthrie was called 
 the silver-tongued and Chrysostom the golden¬ 
 mouthed. Now, Beecher’s tongue was tipped with 
 silver and his mouth was filled with gold; but the 
 striking power of Beecher the organism is partly 
 seen in this, as pointed out by a discriminating stu¬ 
 dent : “He was never spoken of by his acquaintances 
 as either a silver or a golden-tongued orator. It is 
 not to disparage Guthrie or Chrysostom that each 
 bears one of these appellations; but it is to indicate 
 the wholeness and integral character of Mr. Beecher 
 that his eloquence must be spoken of as an effluence 
 of his entire nature rather than the superb activity 
 of some particular power” This phase of his char¬ 
 acter bulks so large, and illustrates so emphatically 
 one of his many sources of power, that it is difficult 
 to leave it without further development. But a few 
 words more on this point from one of his letters must 
 be sufficient: “Only a few days more and we shall 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 153 
 
 be on our way to Peekskill, where I will roll on the 
 grass, frolic with the dogs, rejoice in the flowers, sit 
 under the big pine tree and superintend laying 
 out the road, and we will have a good time generally. 
 
 But having had it I shall return to my church ready, 
 
 ♦ 
 
 happy and eager to resume my labors, and with a 
 heart all the richer in love for it and my people for 
 these few weeks of rest.” Any man who can tumble 
 in the grass, play with dogs, dream with flowers, 
 nod under a spreading tree, boss the building of a 
 new road, have a good time generally, and can at 
 the same time draw this epigram from the greatest 
 English preacher of his time, who is comparing 
 him with Mr. Gladstone: “When Mr. Beecher con¬ 
 cludes it is rather out of deference to custom or con¬ 
 venience than because the subject is exhausted”— 
 that man, I say, has something—a vast, vital, inner 
 opulence—which lifts him to the first rank of 
 supreme personalities, nor is he unduly awkward in 
 such high fellowship. 
 
 Still, a man may have a personality as unique as 
 Shakespeare himself, and yet fail as a Christian 
 preacher. A great authority in such matters has 
 gone so far as to assert that a man may even speak 
 with the eloquence of men and of angels, have the 
 gift of prophecy, know all mysteries and all knowl¬ 
 edge, and yet, lacking love, he may be but a lone, in¬ 
 flated cipher in the universe—simply nothing. Nor 
 
154 ^ Moneyless Magnate 
 
 is it otherwise with Christian preaching. Until a 
 personality, however great, is colored, saturated, 
 soaked in the inmost essence of the truths of God, 
 man, and the universe as declared in Christ, he shall 
 not stand in the Congregation of the Evangelists of 
 Eternity. The upperworld facts and forces must 
 meet and mingle in his own being, forming a holy 
 majesty of society within his possessed and pos¬ 
 sessing personality, before he is that timeless, un¬ 
 earthly, and uniquely distinctive personage named a 
 Christian preacher. 
 
 Here, then, we come upon the second secret of 
 Beecher’s power. His themes were many and varied, 
 but his ruling ideas were splendidly limited. Doctor 
 Newell Dwight Hillis, who has made a careful 
 analysis of Mr. Beecher’s seven hundred published 
 sermons, collected out of fifty preaching years, and 
 embracing doctrinal, philosophical, biographical, 
 expositional, narrative and imaginative themes, tells 
 me that Beecher’s dominant ideas are really four in 
 number, viz., the Suffering Love of God, the Deity 
 of Christ, the Sanctity of the Individual, and Man’s 
 Immortality. Moreover, a critical study of his great 
 predecessor has yielded Dr. Hillis this further con¬ 
 clusion : Every three years Beecher went the round 
 of Christian truth and experience, treating the great 
 epochs of the Christian life and covering the great 
 themes—God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Man, his dig- 
 
Henry Ward Beecher 155 
 
 nity, his need, his ignorance and sinfulness, the 
 nature, number, and order of the spiritual faculties, 
 the method of quickening a sense of sin in men, the 
 development of love, the growth of faith, and nour¬ 
 ishing the hope of immortal life. 
 
 Notwithstanding, therefore, Beecher’s variety of 
 subjects and his myriad-minded treatment of them, 
 I think that the contention that his overruling ideas, 
 as given, is in the main just and true, and will be 
 borne out by a comprehensive study of his sermons. 
 It would be interesting and profitable to let Mr. 
 Beecher speak upon his four regnant ideas for him¬ 
 self ; but at least two things forbid—the limitation 
 of space and my utter inability to choose wisely from 
 such riches. I used to visit a friend, a Maiden Lane 
 jeweler, for the purpose of admiring his precious 
 stones. As he put out a single tray of opals, I was 
 not unduly excited; but as he went on setting case 
 after case of flashing gems before me, insisting that 
 I should drink in the beauty of all, I was so intoxi¬ 
 cated by their luster as to become esthetically dizzy. 
 Instead of saying, “This particular amethyst, or 
 pearl, or opal, or diamond is beautiful,” I usually 
 wound up with the prosaic statement: “It is time to 
 go home.” So, it is not poverty but wealth—bound¬ 
 less, amazing, overwhelming riches—that forbids 
 our pulpit prince speaking for himself in this con¬ 
 nection. Suffice it to say that the men in Christian 
 
156 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 history who have visioned a holy, loving, suffering, 
 sympathetic God; who have understood and inter¬ 
 preted the nature and mind of Christ; who have pro¬ 
 claimed the sanctity of the individual; who have set 
 ringing the sweet chimes of immortal hope in the 
 hearts of men, equal to that of Henry Ward Beecher, 
 are considerably less than the number of centuries 
 which have come and gone since the angels sang 
 above the Cradle in Bethlehem. Of Christ he said: 
 “I put my soul into His care, even as when I was 
 born, my father put me into the arms of my mother. 
 He is the only God I know.” 
 
VIII 
 
 Phillips Brooks 
 
 I N searching out the foundations of the greatness 
 of Phillips Brooks, we must reckon with his 
 ancestry. For he nobly fulfilled the saying of 
 Holmes, that a man, in order to be great, must select 
 his parents two and a half centuries before his birth. 
 On the Phillips side, we can trace Brooks’ ancestry 
 back for nine generations. And they are a great 
 people. We find in them a fine blending of thrift, 
 uprightness, intellectualism, and spirituality. The 
 eighth generation flowered out in the beauty of a 
 character rarely equaled in the person of Mary Ann 
 Phillips, the mother of Phillips Brooks. In spiritual 
 passion and sacrificial devotion, she ranks with the 
 great mothers of all time. In spiritual-mindedness, 
 she recalls the mother of Saint Augustine, of John 
 Wesley, of Horace Bushnell. “She had a deep in¬ 
 terior life of the soul,” says Professor Allen, “whose 
 phases were more real and vital than the phenomena 
 of the passing world. . . . From his childhood to 
 his death, the inexpressible tenderness of Phillips 
 
 Brooks for his mother was one of the deepest char- 
 
 157 
 
158 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 acteristics of his being, as her influence was one of 
 the higher sources of his power.” 
 
 For nine generations, also, we can trace the ances¬ 
 tral stream of the Brooks family. On this side of 
 the house there is, indeed, a different atmosphere. 
 Negatively, there is an absence of predominant devo¬ 
 tion to intellectual and spiritual ends. Positively, 
 there is a prevailing tendency to practical affairs. 
 They are men of business, men of patriotism, men 
 of unflinching integrity. When, therefore, William 
 Gray Brooks and Mary Ann Phillips were married 
 in North Andover in 1833, there was the union of 
 two strains of as pure, unadulterated Puritanism as 
 perhaps ever commingled. And so it was into an 
 unpretentious house, but a true Christian home, on 
 High Street, Boston, that Phillips Brooks was born 
 on December 13, 1835. We propose, in our study, 
 to gather his life about the three periods measuring 
 his wonderful career: First, the Period of Self- 
 Discovery. Second, the Period of Unfoldment. 
 Third, the Period of Ripening. 
 
 1 
 
 No matter what is revealed later on, one of the 
 profoundly interesting periods of a great man’s life 
 is that of self-discovery—those strange, mystic, awk¬ 
 ward, aching years in which a boy of genius is trying 
 to find himself. Like all healthy children at the age 
 
Phillips Brooks 159 
 
 of three, we find baby Brooks wanting something. 
 His father is away from home, and his mother 
 writes: “Phillips says, ‘Tell Papa I have learned to 
 use a fork/ and wants you to bring him a red- 
 handled knife and fork/’ Red, by the way, con¬ 
 tinued to be his favorite color through life. At four, 
 he comes home from a private school crying. He 
 explains the cause of his tears by saying the teacher 
 had told him to write a composition on “The Ele¬ 
 phant.” At seven, he writes a letter to his mother 
 and signs it, “Your affectionate friend, Phillips 
 Brooks.” About this time, there is a pencil story 
 worth recalling. One night the boys were in the 
 back parlor, with their slates and pencils, preparing 
 lessons for the morrow. Phillips had a new pencil, 
 which he continued to thrust further and further 
 into his mouth. Finally, it went down his throat. 
 He at once asked his mother what would be the 
 result if any one swallowed a pencil. She told him 
 that he would probably die. Phillips said nothing 
 more. But nothing more was ever heard of the pen¬ 
 cil, either. At eleven, he entered the Boston Latin 
 School. He may not have been, at the outset, the 
 best of students. For in his twelfth year, he wrote 
 on a scrap of paper, which is still preserved as a 
 precious document, the following resolution: “I, 
 Phillips Brooks, do hereby promise, and pledge my¬ 
 self to study, to the best of my ability.” It was in 
 
160 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 this Latin School that he received fine training in the 
 classics. It was here, also, that he began to manifest 
 that literary style, which is peculiarly his own, and 
 which gives such distinctive power to his sermons 
 and addresses. 
 
 He was in his sixteenth year when he entered Har¬ 
 vard College. His Harvard career shows that he 
 had ability for genuine scholarship. Yet it also 
 shows that he did not aspire to maintain high rank 
 in his class. He stood fifth as a freshman, sixteenth 
 as a sophomore, thirteenth as a junior, and sixty- 
 sixth as a senior. He had no inclination for math¬ 
 ematics, exhibited some taste for natural history, 
 succeeded in chemistry, indifferently endured the 
 natural sciences. He was, however, a true lover 
 of history, especially in its biographical form. But 
 he cared nothing for dry-as-dust historic facts as 
 presented in the class-room. He despised elocution, 
 because he thought that it begot self-consciousness. 
 He maintained a high grade in intellectual philos¬ 
 ophy, rhetoric, and logic. But there was one depart¬ 
 ment in which he was the acknowledged leader, and 
 that was the languages. He toyed with French, 
 respected German, stood very high in Latin, and 
 uniformly excelled in Greek. Now, his biographer 
 sums up this phase of his career by saying that 
 Brooks could have been what is technically known 
 as a scholar. But “what stood in his way was his 
 
Phillips Brooks 161 
 
 love of literature as the revelation of man, the 
 yearning to enter into the deeper experiences of life, 
 to know the world he lived in.” And yet, I think, it 
 is not too much to say, in the light of his after 
 development, that the very thing which stood in his 
 way as an all-round scholar, was also the very thing 
 which enabled Phillips Brooks to discover the person 
 for whom he was searching—himself. For, like 
 many another youth, deaf and dumb to mathematics 
 and the natural sciences, the voice of the world’s 
 supreme literature found a rich response in the 
 depths of his being. He at once obeyed that voice, 
 rose up and followed on to those shining heights, 
 where he began to forever associate with the master 
 spirits of the ages. 
 
 But just what of a distinctly religious character 
 was going on in the boy’s soul at this time, it is 
 impossible to say. On both sides of the sea, the pre¬ 
 vailing mood was one of religious doubt. We are 
 told that in the nineteenth century religious faith 
 and hope reached their lowest point. Matthew 
 Arnold describes it as “the wandering between two 
 worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” 
 As Brooks failed to join the Church, though the 
 proper age was “from sixteen upwards,” and though 
 he knew that the consuming desire of his mother 
 was to have him confirmed, it is possible that he 
 was undergoing some inward religious struggle. 
 
162 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 After all, I confess that this is nothing more than 
 inference. For, in studying Phillips Brooks, we 
 must remember that from childhood to the day of 
 his death, he scarcely ever shared with a human 
 being, not even the mother whom he adored, those 
 profound secrets of his inner life, which were known 
 only to God and to his own soul. While simplicity 
 was the key-word of his youth and manhood, his 
 “was a character singularly complex despite its sim¬ 
 plicity, a career wherein there were epochs and dis¬ 
 tinct phases of development.” 
 
 As we know, his first attempt to accomplish some¬ 
 thing in practical life met with conspicuous failure. 
 I refer to his brief career as a teacher in the Boston 
 Latin School. I have a first and a secondary reason 
 for explaining that failure. But I mention, in 
 passing, only the secondary, which is this: The 
 crowd of boys over which he was placed as teacher 
 deserved the argument of a pugilist, rather than 
 the classical refinement of the future preacher, fresh 
 from college. Bare recital of a few tricks that class 
 played upon the inexperienced young teacher will, 
 I believe, enforce my conclusion. One boy threw a 
 handful of shot into Brooks’ face. Looking around, 
 the frustrated pedagogue saw an innocent-looking 
 youth, holding up the very hand which had thrown 
 the shot. But the young imp seemed to have been 
 suddenly regenerated. For he was in the deferential 
 
Phillips Brooks 163 
 
 attitude of one who wanted to make earnest inquiry 
 concerning school work. Another lad plugged up 
 the thermometer with snow. After the mercury had 
 fallen below the freezing point, the rascals com¬ 
 plained of the cold until the room, already hot, was 
 made unbearable by piling more fuel upon the fire. 
 “Then,” we are told, “the windows were thrown 
 open and the opposite process begun, till the ther¬ 
 mometer, reinforced with snow, called for a reversal 
 of tactics.” After prayers one morning, he looked 
 up and saw his boys bedecked with eyeglasses, made 
 of strips of tin, filched from a neighboring tinshop. 
 Then he discovered that he was locked in the room 
 with that wicked class. He was also compelled to 
 let a boy down from the window to the ground, at 
 the same time beseeching him to remove the obstruc¬ 
 tions from the plugged-up key-hole. Frankly, is it 
 any wonder that Phillips Brooks failed as a teacher 
 in the Boston Latin School ? 
 
 But because this very failure as a teacher marks a 
 crisis in his life, it must not be lightly considered. 
 For the awful desperation, the unutterable despair, 
 the untold agony he experienced during the six 
 months following his resignation as a teacher—these 
 are things which make one uncover in the presence 
 of a soul endeavoring to understand its majesty and 
 its mystery. He was at this time a chivalrous youth 
 of twenty, possessed of a sensitiveness of nature but 
 
164 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 seldom paralleled, and handicapped by a reserve 
 which was profound indeed. With radiant face and 
 high ideals he had walked joyously up to the Palace 
 of Life, rung the door-bell and waited for an answer. 
 For a brief moment, a mystic door stood slightly ajar. 
 Then an unseen hand rudely slammed it in his face, 
 leaving him without in the deepening gloom. But 
 it was while standing there in the vast gloom of 
 his aching disappointment, that he visioned that 
 Light which lighteth every man, coming into the 
 world, heard a Voice sweet with the melody of an 
 infinite music, beheld a Face he was to love and be 
 loved by forever. It was now that he sought that 
 true confessor of souls, President Walker, of Har¬ 
 vard College. The details of that sacred interview 
 were never given to the world. But we do know 
 this: Doctor Walker advised Phillips Brooks to 
 study for the ministry. Coming out from that inter¬ 
 view, he was seen by a young tutor named Charles 
 W. Eliot, who was on his way to Doctor Walker’s 
 home. Eliot says the face of Brooks was of “a 
 deathly whiteness, the evidence of some great crisis.” 
 In 1881, our world-famous preacher called upon this 
 same tutor, now president emeritus of Harvard Uni¬ 
 versity, to decline the offer of a professorship. 
 Again his face was strangely white, and President 
 Eliot remembered the vision of 1856. 
 
 On the eve of his departure for the seminary at 
 
Phillips Brooks 165 
 
 Alexandria, Virginia, Phillips Brooks wrote these 
 words in his journal: “As we pass from some ex¬ 
 perience to some experiment, from a tried to an 
 untried scene of life, it is as when we turn to a 
 new page in a book we have never read before, but 
 whose author we know and love and trust to give 
 us on every page words of counsel and purity and 
 strengthening virtue.” Now, I cannot stay to ana¬ 
 lyze those three years in the seminary. Suffice it 
 to say that many of his friends thought the coming 
 great preacher was throwing his life away, and 
 frankly told him so. Fortunately, as I have already 
 said, Phillips Brooks was mothered by a true mother. 
 She not only labored six sons into life—she also 
 prayed six sons into the Kingdom of God. She, 
 too, believed that her marvelous boy was throwing 
 his life away. But he was throwing it away, she 
 thought, only to find it again, multiplied an hundred¬ 
 fold. She wrote: “Keep close to your Saviour, dear 
 Philly, and remember the sacred vows that are 
 upon you, and you will surely prosper.” Love-lyrics 
 like this flowed from her mother-heart into the life 
 of her noble son, until she ceased to walk with God 
 here to abide at home with Him forever. 
 
 That the change from Boston life to the seminary 
 was a marked one, may be gathered from the young 
 theologue’s letters, many of which abound in humor. 
 On the day of his arrival at the seminary, he wrote 
 
166 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 that his lordly apartment was a garret in an old 
 building called the Wilderness. Its furniture con¬ 
 sisted of a bedstead and a washstand. He says: “I 
 looked in, threw down my carpet bag, and ran.” 
 Speaking of bedsteads, we recall that they were a 
 bone of contention throughout his life, no matter 
 in what part of the world he traveled. And it is 
 only fair to say that the fault was not always with 
 the bedstead. For Phillips Brooks, during almost 
 two-thirds of his life, was six feet and four inches 
 long. He says he escaped from bed once at an 
 untimely hour because, to use his own words: “I 
 could not stretch out straight or make the narrow 
 bed clothes come over me.” He wrote from Athens: 
 “The classic fleas fed on us through the dewy night.” 
 We learn, also, that the seminary furniture and bill 
 of fare were in perfect harmony. For he writes to 
 his father: “Did you ever eat tomato pies? Well, 
 they alternate with boiled rice, which is troubled 
 with water on the brain, as our daily dessert.” 
 Already allied to the spirit of progress, which was 
 manifest throughout his career, he adds: “Last night 
 a new dish made its appearance, which looked like a 
 flapjack that had tried to be a loaf of brown bread 
 and failed in the attempt.” 
 
 Now, it was in the seminary that Brooks exhibited 
 a capacity for scholarship, which had been somewhat 
 lacking in college. From the graves of Greek and 
 
Phillips Brooks 167 
 
 Latin, no longer dead languages to him, there flamed 
 forth the resurrection power of new worlds of 
 thought and experience. Entirely distinct from his 
 class work, the scope, the variety, the strength of his 
 reading at this time is nothing short of marvelous. 
 Why, he reminds one of Macaulay, eating and 
 digesting books as a ravenously hungry boy eats 
 buckwheat cakes, whose blessed adhesion is assured 
 by an abundant supply of delicious country butter, 
 whose haunting flavor is far removed from the realm 
 of probabilities by genuine soakings of pure maple 
 syrup. And his notebooks show that he was not 
 engaged in mere discursive reading, however wide. 
 Rather, that the tremendous impact of the world’s 
 thought had shaken the depths of his nature, that 
 his very soul was being shaped into a kind of sensi¬ 
 tized plate, which would in coming years photograph 
 with exactness, fineness, and majesty, the life of 
 God in man’s soul, and the life of man in history. It 
 was at Alexandria, I think, that Phillips Brooks 
 discovered himself. Through self-discovery he also 
 discovered the master principle of his life-work, 
 viz.: The principle which proclaims the eternal value 
 of the human soul, revealed by the incarnation of 
 God in Jesus Christ, and redeemed by the passion 
 of God on Calvary. Having found his principle, he 
 moved steadily forward in his own magnificent in¬ 
 terpretation of it. He held that the human soul, in 
 
168 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 order to be loved, must be known. And it was for 
 qualifying himself to interpret this truth to men, 
 that he wandered up and down the highways of 
 literature. “But wherever he went, from great writ¬ 
 ers to those less known, heathen and Christian, 
 ancient and modern, he never failed to extract judg¬ 
 ments of value, unsuspected revelations of the 
 beauty, the dignity, the greatness, the worth, of the 
 human soul.” 
 
 And, mark you, when Phillips Brooks, at the age 
 of twenty-one, had discovered himself, he had done 
 it forever. Of course he expanded, he broadened, 
 he deepened, he heightened, he ripened. But it was 
 only more of the same kind, rather than more of a 
 different kind, of the stuff out of which great life and 
 character are wrought. I think his words concern¬ 
 ing John Henry Newman give keen insight into 
 his own life. He said : “Newman was a remarkable 
 man, by no means of the first-class, for he never got 
 a final principle, nor showed a truly brave mind; 
 but there was great beauty in his character, and his 
 intellect was very subtle.” Now, his journals reveal 
 that, fortunately for the world and for himself, 
 Brooks got hold of final principles in his boyhood. 
 For example: He believed in his boyhood that the 
 Incarnation meant that God and man had met to¬ 
 gether in the person of Christ, the fullness of God 
 and the complete perfection of humanity; and he 
 
Phillips Brooks 169 
 
 believed it always. Again: He believed in his boy¬ 
 hood that Christ’s death on the cross was in some 
 mysterious, organic way connected with the forgive¬ 
 ness of guilty human sin; and he changed worlds 
 with the same conviction. In a word, Brooks dis¬ 
 covered in his youth the unity of life in Jesus 
 Christ. And with increasing splendor, he preached 
 “that all life is one great harmonic chorus, appealing 
 to the individual soul to join in the universal strain.” 
 Blessed is the man who discovers a final principle at 
 life’s threshold rather than at life’s end! 
 
 11 
 
 Now, if I have dwelt overmuch on the formative 
 years of Brooks, it is that we may approach the 
 period of his unfoldment with a just appreciation 
 of the backgrounds in which his life and ministry 
 were cast. I believe no man ever came to his work 
 with more thorough equipment. The subject of his 
 first sermon was: “Christ as the Centralizing Power 
 in the Spiritual Life.” The text is II. Cor. xi. 3: 
 “The simplicity that is in Christ.” He afterwards 
 said the sermon was a twofold failure—first, it was 
 lacking in simplicity, and, second, it had nothing in 
 it of Christ. Yet I think a study of the sermon will 
 bear out Professor Allen’s statement that it has “the 
 evidence of a marvelous maturity.” He was less 
 than twenty-three when he wrote it, and still in his 
 
170 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 seminary course. But he strikes with masterful and 
 prophetic power the truth that Christ is the center 
 toward which all roads lead—“all truth, all reality, 
 in whatever sphere manifested, in literature, art, or 
 science, all the positive acquisitions of man in the 
 long range of history, all great events and move¬ 
 ments, have their affiliation with Christ.” 
 
 This, then, was the style of preaching to which 
 forty or fifty people were listening in the Sharon 
 Mission, three miles from Alexandria, in 1858-59. 
 One Sunday two strange faces were seen among the 
 Virginia mountaineers. They were men who had 
 come to hear and then to call Phillips Brooks to the 
 Church of the Advent in Philadelphia. In July, 
 1859, he preached his first sermons there, having 
 agreed to supply the pulpit for three months. Many 
 years afterwards, he playfully recalled an incident of 
 those first weeks of ministerial experience. Walking 
 home with a vestryman one Sunday evening, Brooks 
 suggested that perhaps he had better not remain 
 even for the three months. The vestryman gave 
 him the chills by answering: “Well, as long as you 
 have begun, you had better stay out the time for 
 which you were hired.” 
 
 However, he had been in the Church of the 
 Advent only seven months, when he received a call 
 from St. John’s Church, Cincinnati, at that time the 
 largest and wealthiest Episcopal Church west of the 
 
Phillips Brooks 171 
 
 Allegheny Mountains. At the beginning of his 
 second year in the ministry, his fame had crossed the 
 continent. He received urgent calls, extending from 
 Newport to San Francisco. The little church on the 
 corner of York Avenue and Buttonwood Street had 
 become a veritable magnet, drawing people from all 
 parts of the city. On Sunday evenings, the streets 
 in the locality of the church were filled with car¬ 
 riages. And lest the admiration of the Quaker City 
 should spoil the darling of her heart, once again 
 we hear his mother’s voice saying to the brilliant 
 young preacher: “I had rather hear you praised for 
 holiness than for talent, though of course that is 
 unspeakably precious when used in God’s service. 
 But, my dear Philly, let no human praise make you 
 proud, but be humble as the Master you serve, and 
 never forget what an honor it is to be the servant 
 of Christ.” Among the greatest ordination sermons 
 ever preached in the history of the Christian Church, 
 are the sermons preached by the mother of Phillips 
 Brooks to Phillips Brooks himself! 
 
 What, then, was the secret of this young physical, 
 mental, and spiritual giant, whose ministry was now 
 beginning to throb through the nation’s life? As 
 this question was asked for over thirty years 
 throughout the English-speaking world, I shall 
 answer it in the words of the truest interpreter of 
 Phillips Brooks: “The world was right in fastening 
 
172 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 upon his true and genuine manhood as his pre¬ 
 dominant characteristic.” Back of all he said, back 
 of all the wonderful manner in which he said it, 
 stood his total manhood, all of his faculties unified 
 in Christ, who “had taken him, as the sovereign 
 harmony takes the wandering tone.” He believed 
 that a man whose mind and heart are not working 
 in unison gives no true, abiding light. Such a man, 
 he said, is like a match which will not strike without 
 the box; and you haven't got the box. The world 
 was saying then, as it has ever said, as it is saying 
 today: “Remove first the obstacles which stand in 
 the way of human progress, and then men will be 
 able to live.” Young Phillips Brooks laid his ax 
 at the root of this fallacious tree. He struck it hard 
 blows, and his weapon had a keen edge. And while 
 the decayed chips were falling all around him, he 
 cried: “The world, humanity, has already been re¬ 
 deemed by Christ. The opportunities of the divine 
 sonship are open to every man. Live! Live greatly 
 now.” He gave us our greatest definition of preach¬ 
 ing in three words. What is Christian preaching? 
 He answered: “Truth through personality.” He 
 defined liberty as “the genuine ability of a living 
 creature to manifest its whole nature, and to be 
 itself most unrestrainedly.” And truly, these defini¬ 
 tions put on flesh and blood in the unfolding man¬ 
 hood of this pulpit prodigy. “Now,” he cried, “here 
 
Phillips Brooks 173 
 
 is a truly new conception of life: Man is something 
 to be lighted, and to be obedient to the flame that 
 illuminates him.” Do we wonder that the students 
 of the University of Pennsylvania, coming out of 
 the Church of the Holy Trinity on Sunday after¬ 
 noons, imagined they beheld a rosy splendor on the 
 face of the late afternoon sky? One of them says: 
 “The very heavens were on fire, not because the sun 
 was setting across the Schuylkill, but because the 
 preacher had projected a light into the open sky 
 of the heavens—the light of the mystic, the light of 
 the prophet, the light which never was, on sea or 
 land.” 
 
 Here he was, then, at twenty-six, the most dis¬ 
 cussed preacher in Philadelphia. Moreover, his in¬ 
 fluence had broken the bounds of his parish and 
 denomination, overflowing the city. He was not 
 only the foremost preacher, but one of the Quaker 
 City’s foremost citizens as well. Is there not some¬ 
 thing strangely beautiful in beholding this brave 
 youth, this clerical Sir Galahad, associating with 
 men from all walks of life, old enough to be his 
 father? And yet, there seemed nothing incongru¬ 
 ous in such fellowship. While he held a high posi¬ 
 tion and represented strong social influence, chiefly 
 did these older men gather around him because his 
 personality was simply invaluable. His “fascinat¬ 
 ing eloquence gave a new and potent charm to the 
 
174 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 cause so dear to them.” And what was that cause? 
 Why, the deathless cause of human freedom! Al¬ 
 ready the black clouds of civil war were hovering 
 over the land. Next to Abraham Lincoln, no soul 
 felt a deeper dread than did the soul of Phillips 
 Brooks, lest their unsheathed lightnings should 
 blight and blast our national tree. And now it was 
 that our White Knight’s soul seemed to expand into 
 a vast cathedral, along whose invisible aisles he 
 heard the tramp of a million feet, he heard the rain 
 of bitter tears, he heard the sacrificial flow of the 
 nation’s most precious blood. But from whose heav¬ 
 enly dome he also heard the voice of the Lord God 
 of the nations thundering: “Let my people go! Let 
 my people go!” And when Phillips Brooks had 
 heard that voice, this young idealist, this velvet- 
 souled poet, this snow-hearted Saint John became 
 an ancient Moses coming down from a modern Sinai, 
 with the tables of God’s eternal law in his hands, 
 with the music of God’s eternal truth in his heart, 
 with the splendor of God’s eternal light in his face, 
 and the people were afraid to come nigh him! 
 Though he wist not, like Israel’s leader, that the skin 
 of his face shone, none the less did he flame and 
 flash like an incarnate Vesuvius! 
 
 Now, Brooks was at this time exemplifying what 
 had become the synthetic principle of his life- 
 method. What was that principle? “The nature 
 
Phillips Brooks 175 
 
 and source of power, how it was to be fed, how 
 ideas and truths and beliefs were to be transmuted 
 into power.” As of Jonathan Edwards, it is also 
 true of Brooks: “There was in him something of 
 the seer or prophet who beholds by direct vision 
 what others know only by report.” He was richly 
 endowed with the historical imagination, which 
 enabled him to enter into the life of the race. And 
 this, in turn, made it possible for the racial life to 
 flow back into his own individual being. He ad¬ 
 mired physical power wherever manifested—in 
 worlds, in mountains, in seas, in men. It was one of 
 his habits to stand as close as possible to the majes¬ 
 tic rush of a giant locomotive, thundering onward 
 with the great express train, as if it in some strange 
 way reflected the power within him. When asked 
 in later life what he would rather have been if he 
 had not become a preacher, he answered: “I would 
 like to have been the captain of a great ocean steamer, 
 or, better than that, a young girl in her teens, awak¬ 
 ening to the consciousness of her beauty, and with¬ 
 out effort subjecting to her sway those who came 
 into her presence.” 
 
 But into the higher realms of power it was his 
 ruling passion to go. He was always reading while 
 traveling. Finishing a book, he threw it out of the 
 car-window. “You might trace him in his journey- 
 ings,” says his biographer, “by the trail of books.” 
 
176 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 He loved to meet and greet the spirit of the strong 
 man wherever he trod the pathways of history. He 
 claimed him for his elder brother, though he were 
 Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shakespeare, Wesley, Ed¬ 
 wards, Robertson, Bushnell, or Beecher. He pos¬ 
 sessed an ingrained admiration for power. Com¬ 
 bined with his spiritual genius, this inborn admira¬ 
 tion enabled him more fully to reincarnate the power 
 of the Highest, which overshadowed and made him 
 a moving tabernacle of power. Henry M. Stan¬ 
 ley once heard Brooks preach. He confessed that it 
 was not only the most rousing sermon he ever 
 heard, but that it actually made him feel excited. 
 He affirmed that, as a young man, such a sermon 
 would have stirred him to action. This, then, was 
 the man who stood in the Church of the Holy Trin¬ 
 ity and spoke these words, which still burn like a 
 subtle fire: “The devil of slavery had kissed the 
 strong shoulders of the Republic, and the serpents 
 sprung from his defiling lips were preying upon her 
 life. It was agony to tear them off, but it was death 
 to let them remain. Despite our anguish, we had 
 taken courage to rid us of the abomination.” And 
 then, while Lincoln’s dead body lay in the City of 
 Brotherly Love, the scorching, raging fire of the 
 prophet’s eloquence was subdued into the sobbing 
 tones of the broken heart and the saint’s vision. He 
 then said of the martyred President what men are 
 
Phillips Brooks 177 
 
 saying still of the mighty preacher: “In him was 
 vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the 
 goodness of real greatness.” Thus, in those un¬ 
 folding years, Shelley’s words best describe him : 
 
 “All familiar things he touched, 
 
 All common words he spoke, became 
 Like forms and sounds of a diviner world.” 
 
 hi 
 
 Coming now to the period of his ripening, I am 
 aware that you have already asked the question: 
 “Why does he not say something about Phillips 
 Brooks and Boston? For is not Phillips Brooks 
 Boston, and is not Boston Phillips Brooks?” Now, 
 your question is entirely valid. But it is well to 
 remember that behind life’s foregrounds lie life’s 
 backgrounds. What I mean is this: For Saint 
 Augustine, the Milan garden lay behind the diocese 
 of Hippo. For Chrysostom, the desert and the cave 
 lay behind Constantinople. For Edwards, North¬ 
 ampton lay behind Stockbridge and its deathless 
 books. For Robertson, Winchester, Cheltenham, 
 Heidelberg, and Oxford lay behind Brighton. For 
 Maurice, Bubbenhall and King’s College lay behind 
 Cambridge. For Liddon, Wantage lay behind Ox¬ 
 ford and Saint Paul’s. For Beecher, Indianapolis 
 lay behind Brooklyn. For Bushnell, New Haven 
 lay behind Hartford. For Simpson, Greencastle 
 
i 7 8 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 lay behind the Episcopacy. For Matheson, Innel- 
 len lay behind Edinburgh. And so, for Phillips 
 Brooks, Cambridge, Alexandria, and Philadelphia 
 lay behind Boston. Of his Boston ministry, I wish 
 to speak of Brooks the preacher and the man. 
 
 He was thirty-four years old when he went, as 
 rector, to Trinity Church. I have not time to con¬ 
 sider the struggle in his own soul, the anxiety of 
 his father and the attendant sickness of his mother, 
 because he refused the first call to come back to his 
 boyhood home. And, finally, on his accepting the 
 second invitation, how his own Church and the City 
 of Philadelphia were fairly stunned, as if they had 
 been the victims of some dire catastrophe, so deeply 
 and intricately had he woven himself into the 
 organic life of the community during his ten years 
 there. It is not too much to say, however, that Bos¬ 
 ton—the “Hub,” the immovable—was moved at his 
 coming, and began to revolve around his ministry 
 as have few cities in the history of Christian preach¬ 
 ing. On Sunday, October 31, 1869, he preached his 
 first sermons as rector of Trinity Church. His 
 morning text was: “I must work the works of Him 
 that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when 
 no man can work.” His afternoon text was: “My 
 meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to 
 finish His work.” I recall the texts, because they 
 are an index to the new power, they pitch the key 
 
Phillips Brooks 179 
 
 of the new music, they suggest the new and deeper 
 spiritual splendor now enfolding him, they strike a 
 new note of passionate urgency, which increased in 
 volume, depth, and grandeur for the next twenty- 
 two years. 
 
 Before he had become well settled, somebody— 
 and I am half inclined to believe it was Almighty 
 God—cleaned up his Boston parish by sweeping the 
 old Church away with a broom of fire, that he 
 might have a building in some sense adequate to 
 his own greatness and majesty. I never enter the 
 new Trinity Church, I scarcely ever think of it 
 except as Phillips Brooks dressed up in the splendid 
 clothing of that stately stone pile. And so, when 
 this preacher-prophet, with his boundless hopeful¬ 
 ness, with his exuberant vitality, with his mental 
 and spiritual flame, swept like a holy, glowing radi¬ 
 ance over Boston, what happened ? Why, all 
 churches and creeds rose up at once to claim him. 
 Unitarians said: “He belongs to us.” Baptists said: 
 “He belongs to us.” Methodists said: “He belongs 
 to us.” Presbyterians said: “He belongs to us.” 
 Congregationalists said: “He belongs to us.” Prot¬ 
 estant Episcopalians answered, with pardonable 
 pride: “You are all mistaken, he belongs to us.” 
 All of which, I think, is but another way of saying 
 that Phillips Brooks belonged to no one denomina¬ 
 tion. For the Lord of All anointed him and pre- 
 
i8o A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 sented him as a gift to the Universal Church of our 
 Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! 
 
 Let us now examine some individual witnesses to 
 
 « 
 
 the power of his preaching. One says: “As he is 
 lifted by his theme into a rarefied atmosphere, and 
 with a marvelous faith catches a glimpse of still 
 higher summits to be reached, like a mountain 
 climber, scaling from crag to crag, you are rapidly 
 borne along with him, till the worries of earth look 
 very trifling from the crest where he pauses.” An¬ 
 other : “Out of twenty or more of his sermons which 
 we have heard, there has not been one which would 
 have been unsuitable for a revival meeting. What¬ 
 ever the subject, the central thought is always the 
 cross of Christ—the goodness of the Gospel to a sin¬ 
 ful soul.” After hearing him preach in Grace Church, 
 New York, in 1870, a writer in the New York 
 Evening Post said: “He preaches the humanity of 
 Channing with the creed of Jeremy Taylor, and 
 strikes at the shirks and shams of our day with 
 the dashing pluck and full blood of Martin Luther.” 
 Principal Tulloch, after hearing him in Boston in 
 1874, wrote to his wife: “I have just heard the 
 most remarkable sermon I ever heard in my life (I 
 use the word in no American sense) from Mr. Phil¬ 
 lips Brooks, an Episcopal clergyman here: equal to 
 the best of Frederick Robertson’s sermons, with a 
 vigor and force of thought which he has not always. 
 
Phillips Brooks 181 
 
 I never heard preaching like it, and you know how 
 slow I am to praise preachers. So much thought 
 and so much life combined; such a reach of mind, 
 and such a depth and insight of soul. I was elec¬ 
 trified. I could have got up and shouted.” Dean 
 Stanley once invited Brooks to preach in Westmin¬ 
 ster Abbey on a Fourth of July, which fell on a 
 Sunday. Many felt that Brooks had been asked to 
 perform a difficult task. Stanley himself was by no 
 means assured of the outcome, with such a red-hot 
 American in such a pulpit on such a day. Happily, 
 Lady Frances Baillie, a sister-in-law of Dean Stan¬ 
 ley, has recalled an interesting incident connected 
 with the service. Immediately after its close, she 
 slipped into the deanery by the private door, reach¬ 
 ing the drawing-room before any of the guests who 
 were to come in from the abbey. She found Dean 
 Stanley, with tears running down his face, a most 
 extraordinary thing for him. On her appearance, 
 he burst out with expressions of intensest admira¬ 
 tion, saying: “I have never been so moved by any 
 sermon that I can remember; and, oh, the wonderful 
 taste and feeling of that passage at the end!” When 
 asked how Brooks compared with the great preach¬ 
 ers of Scotland, Professor A. B. Bruce replied: “It 
 is this way: our great preachers take into the pulpit 
 a bucket full or half full of the Word of God, and 
 then, by the force of personal mechanism, they at- 
 
182 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 tempt to convey it to the congregation. But this man 
 is just a great water main, attached to the ever¬ 
 lasting reservoir of God’s truth and grace and love, 
 and streams of life, by a heavenly gravitation, pour 
 through him to refresh every weary soul.” I once 
 said to Doctor David Gregg, himself a great 
 preacher, and former pastor of the Lafayette Ave¬ 
 nue Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn: “You knew 
 Phillips Brooks: how did he impress you?” His 
 face lit up as he made this answer: “I lived in the 
 same block with him for several years. How did 
 he impress me? Why, Brooks was big all over— 
 big at the top, big at the bottom, big at the center— 
 a towering physical, mental, and spiritual colossus.” 
 Then, pausing a moment, he added, with charac¬ 
 teristic discrimination: “The first thing that hap¬ 
 pened to you after hearing Brooks finish a sermon 
 was a kind of collapse, which was immediately fol¬ 
 lowed by a majestic feeling of bigness in your own 
 soul.” Ah! I do not wonder, when our White 
 Knight visited Japan, the children shouted, as he 
 was borne along the highways: “Look! There goes 
 the image of the great Buddha!” Thus was he 
 greatly unique, splendid, incomparable. As a 
 preacher, Brooks can, of course, be imitated by no 
 man. But what is far better, he is a fountain from 
 which every man may drink, because he gives match¬ 
 less expression to the vast undertones and over- 
 
Phillips Brooks 183 
 
 tones of the human heart. For he believed and 
 taught, with his twin brother in the spirit, Robert¬ 
 son, of Brighton, that— 
 
 . . . “All the past of time reveals 
 A bridal dawn of thunder peals 
 Wherever thought hath wedded fact.” 
 
 But great as he was as a preacher, Phillips Brooks 
 was even greater as a man. He was not an expert 
 in aristocratic littlenesses, but he was a prince in 
 manly nobilities. The late Doctor Weir Mitchell, 
 not only a specialist in nervous diseases, but a spe¬ 
 cialist also in his judgment of men, says: “I have 
 known a number of men we call great—poets, states¬ 
 men, soldiers—but Phillips Brooks was the only one 
 I ever knew who seemed to be entirely great. I 
 have seen him in many of the varied relations of 
 life, and always he left with me a sense of the com¬ 
 petent largeness of his nature.” After lecturing to 
 the students of Andover, he closed by saying: “Let 
 us pray.” One of the students told Bishop Law¬ 
 rence that, praying from the same desk at which 
 they had heard professors pray, Brooks “offered a 
 prayer which, as compared with theirs, was so beauti¬ 
 ful that he had to open his eyes to see how a man 
 looked when he prayed like that.” A mother in 
 Israel, ninety-three years of age, told me that she 
 used to go to Boston once a year just to hear Phil¬ 
 lips Brooks pray. She said he was even a “greater 
 
184 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 pray-er than a preacher.” A workingman once 
 wrote him : “To me you reveal God as no other man 
 does. What I mean by that is, I can’t think of you 
 for ten consecutive minutes without forgetting all 
 about you and thinking of God instead; and when I 
 think of God and wonder how he will seem to me, 
 it always comes round to trying to conceive of you 
 enlarged infinitely in every way.” A woman who 
 scrubbed the floors of Trinity Church asked him that 
 her daughter might be married in the chapel. He 
 said: “Why not take the Church?” “But that is not 
 for the likes of me,” sighed the poor soul. Then 
 Brooks towered like a mountain of celestial glory 
 as he answered: “Oh, yes, it is, for the likes of you, 
 and the likes of me, and the likes of every one. The 
 rich people, when they get married, like to fling 
 their money about. But, my dear woman, that is 
 not necessary in order to be married at Trinity 
 Church.” And the wedding took place in Trinity 
 Church. The great organ was played, too, as if the 
 bride’s rags had had the rustle of silk or broadcloth. 
 And I doubt not that God’s angels looked on while 
 God’s true priest made them man and wife. Two 
 poor, ignorant Roman Catholic women lived in 
 Salem. One was bemoaning the fact that her son 
 had fallen into evil ways. Though neither had ever 
 seen him, the other said to the sorrowing mother: 
 “My friend, the thing for you to do is to take your 
 
Phillips Brooks 185 
 
 boy to Phillips Brooks.” One Sunday morning, a 
 dying colored girl sent for him through her sister. 
 As he was then ready to enter Trinity pulpit, he 
 sent his assistant, who explained why the rector could 
 not come just then. The dying girl said: “Then you 
 go back and tell Phillips Brooks I won’t die until he 
 comes.” And she didn’t die, either, not until he had 
 come and administered the Holy Communion! On 
 a Christmas morning, Brooks watched from his win¬ 
 dow a street urchin, who was having great fun ring¬ 
 ing door-bells, and then running away before any 
 one could open the door. When the lad reached 
 the rectory and rang the bell, the preacher, who had 
 concealed himself in readiness, at once opened the 
 door. For a moment the boy stood speechless at 
 such an unexpected revelation of avoirdupois and 
 kindly, beaming countenance. Finding his tongue 
 at last, he said: “Why, is that you, Phipps Brooks?” 
 He treasured this as one of the finest tributes he ever 
 received. He was touched to tears to think that a 
 homeless, ragged, little child should take his name 
 upon his innocent lips as if it were a household word, 
 as if it were as natural as to greet the morning sun 
 and say: “You are God’s dear gift to the world.” 
 
 And now I must bring to a close this imperfect 
 interpretation. So many things have been inade¬ 
 quately said. So many things, also, remain unsaid. 
 Brooks’ life was not an unbroken flow of joy. No 
 
186 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 truly great life is, or can be. He was ofttimes a 
 lonely man. He never married. But he adored one 
 woman—his mother! Sometimes he was misunder¬ 
 stood. Once he was publicly hissed in an Episcopal 
 Convention. But he always carried the heart of a 
 child, the purity of a saint, and the greatness of a 
 great Christian. I never saw him in the flesh. But 
 I have often seen him in the spirit. Many years 
 ago, while sitting as a boy under a Kentucky apple 
 tree in midsummer, I saw the picture of his noble 
 face for the first time. To me, he began that day 
 to make manhood majestic. Ah! his manhood was 
 so magnificent that it dwindled skyscrapers into 
 atoms and compressed worlds into the dimensions 
 of marbles! He blinded the devil of envy by the 
 splendor of his smile. He made love captivating. 
 He made virtue beautiful and bewitching. He made 
 faith natural. He made goodness contagious. He 
 made religion vital. He made spirit, soul, and 
 body unite in his own imperial nature, until he be¬ 
 came a walking melody inspiring the lives of men. 
 He made the Fatherhood of God more winsome than 
 the bosoms of all the mothers who have labored all 
 the children of men into life. He made the Saviour- 
 hood of Christ Jesus mean more to the soul than 
 the sun means to the day. He made the reality 
 of the Holy Spirit, the ever-present Comforter, 
 Strengthener, and Illuminator, to be more sweet and 
 
Phillips Brooks 187 
 
 lovely than any lovely song. I know you will for¬ 
 give me for saying that I shall always be glad that 
 I first met Phillips Brooks under an apple tree. And 
 some day, please God, I expect to meet him again 
 under the Tree of Life. If I do, it will not be far 
 from the throne of white and the river of crystal. 
 Then will I thank him for showing me, in the years 
 of earth and time, to better love and serve the Lord 
 and Master of us all. Just six months before he 
 died, out there on the ship plowing the great deep, 
 he wrote his dear song called, “The Waiting City.” 
 One time I remember well the song refreshed my 
 soul with its delicious sweetness. I was walking 
 at the dark end of the day. I was also out in the 
 vast open spaces of being. My feet were on the 
 meadow and my dreams had stolen in behind the 
 stars. I was saying over and over again those golden 
 words of George Borrow: “The wind is on the 
 heather, brother: life is sweet.” I looked up, and 
 the evening star threw its silver kisses right down 
 into my face. I looked back, and the full-orbed 
 moon shot its old lustrous glory right across my 
 path. I looked up, and out, and around, and yonder, 
 underneath the evening star and the full moon, lay 
 a many-colored sea, whose amber, violet, hyacinthine 
 waves washed all the shores of night. I thought the 
 musical color-sea was chanting a requiem for the 
 dead sunset. It was then and there that Brooks' 
 
188 A Moneyless Magnate 
 
 song stole into my heart like a rhythm of unearthly 
 peace. Then I repeated it aloud. But as its melody 
 went drifting down the winds of sunset, it did not 
 fail to leave a holy hush in my soul. Written on the 
 bosom of the tumbling deep, “The Waiting City” 
 has none of the ocean’s storm. But it has much of 
 Heaven’s deep, sweet, inner calm: 
 
 “A city throned upon the height behold, 
 
 Wherein no foot of man as yet has trod; 
 
 The City of Man’s Life fulfilled in God. 
 
 Bathed all in light, with open gates of gold, 
 
 Perfect the City is in tower and street; 
 
 And there a Palace for each mortal waits, 
 Complete and perfect, at whose outer gates 
 An Angel stands its occupant to greet. 
 
 Still shine, O patient City on the height, 
 
 The while our race in hut and hovel dwells. 
 
 It hears the music of thy heavenly bells 
 And its dull soul is haunted by thy light. 
 
 Lo, once the Son of Man hath heard thy call 
 And the dear Christ hath claimed thee for us all.” 
 
 Within half a year after writing the song, Phillips 
 Brooks entered “The Waiting City.” I shall always 
 be glad that he left the dear earth for the dearer 
 Heaven just at dawn. As morning came, he went. 
 Not many hours before his death the servants found 
 him, his mind wandering, climbing the stairs leading 
 from his own room to the topmost story of the rec¬ 
 tory. Asked where he was going, he replied: “I am 
 going home!” O, beautiful, glorious, fulfilled 
 
Phillips Brooks 189 
 
 prophecy! For with the breaking of that very dawn 
 he went home, and— 
 
 v 
 
 “Never to the mansions where the mighty rest, 
 Since their foundation came a nobler guest.” 
 
 Yes; thanks be unto God the Father, God the Son, 
 and God the Holy Ghost—that ineffable Trinity 
 whose unspeakable glories he preached so match¬ 
 lessly—thanks be unto the Great Three in One: 
 
 “He died when dawn was sweeping o’er the land, 
 When morning glories lit the gleaming wall; 
 
 And one who watched him, holding his worn hand, 
 Whispered: ‘Alas! that he should miss it all!’ 
 
 The early sun, risen from his dark night, 
 
 Flamed his great banners when he went away; 
 
 And one said: ‘Lo! at coming of the light 
 
 He hath gone forth and lost the beauteous day!’ 
 
 But our White Knight, from mortal house of pain 
 Gladly released, went singing to God’s place, 
 
 And cried, ‘Dear Lord, after the bleak world-rain, 
 I cannot bear the splendor of Thy Face!’ ” 
 
 THE END 
 



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