John Kelman 
 
 He Gave Thanks 
 
 
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FHE GAVE THANKS 
 
 JOHN KELMAN 
 D.D. 
 

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 AUG 28 1979 
 
 HE GAVE THANKS VjfotoGicALSE*^^ 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 Delivered in the 
 
 Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church 
 
 New York City 
 
 Thursday, November 27, 1919 
 
 By the Pastor, the 
 
 REV. JOHN KELMAN 
 
 D.D. 
 
 Printed by the Fifth Ayenue FreBbyterian Chnrch 
 
Copyright 1920 
 John Kebnan, D.D. 
 
HE GAVE THANKS 
 
 By Rev, John Kelman, D.D. 
 
 He Gave Thanks — Luke 22 : 27 
 
 IN one of her books, Harriet Beecher Stowe has 
 written these words, Thanksgiving sermon, in 
 which the minister was expected to express his 
 views freely concerning the politics of the country, 
 and the state of things in society generally, in a some- 
 what more secular vein of thought than was deemed 
 exactly appropriate to the Lord's day. That I can 
 not do. I must learn before I speak: and no man, 
 except one from whom wisdom has altogether de- 
 parted, would venture opinions upon so complex a 
 web of public questions as that which today excites 
 the mind of America. Instead of any such Thanks- 
 giving sermon I shall try today to offer you a few 
 quiet thoughts as to how his first Thanksgiving Day 
 in America strikes a British man. 
 
 First of all, the fact of Thanksgiving Day, and the 
 very great emphasis laid upon it, and the feelings 
 associated with it and its customs, seem to me to 
 give to all the world the keynote of the nation's 
 thought. This is an attitude of mind, a tendency 
 towards healthy-mindedness, that expresses itself in 
 thanksgiving rather than in any other of the various 
 ways in which you might celebrate your nationality. 
 
 The fasts of old were characteristic; and I dare 
 say it would be good for us if it were possible in 
 
 3 
 
these later days to command something of the grave 
 sweet melody that expressed itself in those self- 
 denying and devotional observances. Yet the fact 
 is that thanksgiving has outlived them, and you cele- 
 brate in that. Jane Austen said of one of her char- 
 acters, He is a very liberal thanker, and I think she 
 must have meant an American. It is a glad and 
 wholesome attitude of mind — very characteristic of 
 this nation. Life is always discouraging enough. It 
 is good to turn from its discouragements, to remem- 
 ber happy things and to bring them together here 
 on such a day. 
 
 It is also a religious attitude of mind. Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti said in some of the saddest words 
 he ever wrote, "I would I knew there were a God 
 to thank, when thanks rise in me." Contrast that 
 with the splendid expression of the old Puritan who 
 said, "That devout thanksgiver David, continually 
 declaring the great price he set upon the Divine 
 favor." Christ was at the head of all the thanks- 
 givers of the world, when He thanked God for the 
 great mystery of redemption, although it was to cost 
 Him more pain and agony than was ever endured on 
 earth before. He thanked Him also for everything 
 else in life that had gone to make the experience of 
 those three and thirty years. 
 
 And surely the words of Jesus are especially rele- 
 vant here today. Am I not right in saying that this 
 festival of yours has always been associated with the 
 harvest thanksgiving from the very first day of it? 
 The harvest thanksgiving includes the thanks of all 
 the year for wayside things, for all that has made our 
 
 4 
 
hearts glad and given food to body, or to mind, or to 
 soul. Am I not right in saying also that Thanks- 
 giving Day is essentially the home day, when you 
 gather together in your homes your absent ones in 
 memory and thought, and consecrate the joyousness 
 of the hour to the love of friends. 
 
 So Jesus, thanking God at that Last Supper at 
 which He sat with His own, gathered together all 
 the passing memories of the years, and the little 
 band of those He loved most dearly. Such an occa- 
 sion of thanksgiving takes rank with many other 
 offices of the same sort, the humbler and simpler 
 ones like that of saying grace before meat, and the 
 reverence of family worship in which a family to- 
 gether gathers round the altar and remembers God. 
 There has been in modern times a somewhat mis- 
 taken idea about these. There has been a tendency 
 to regard them as duties, though not of the very first 
 order, — duties of a minor kind, and therefore, apt to 
 be more or less irksome. In many homes, both in 
 regard to saying grace before meat and to family 
 worship, there has been a certain readiness to ex- 
 cuse and to dispense with, these observances. Really 
 they should not be looked upon as duties so much as 
 a courtesy, the instinctive action of the politeness of 
 the spirit, of the gentility and good breeding of the 
 Christian soul. If God has given us food, if God 
 has closed or opened a new day for us, surely all 
 that we have learned of the decencies of human in- 
 tercourse would lead us at least to acknowledge it. 
 Besides the absolute moral demands of life, these are, 
 as it were, an extra part. God's law commands us to 
 
 5 
 
go with Him one mile; God's gentlemen go with 
 him two. The true aristocracy of behavior, the 
 finer politesse, — these are a sign of innate self- 
 respect. They are courtesy towards God. 
 
 The courtesy of Jesus was continual towards men 
 and women and little children, and towards God 
 Himself. He was always, to God and man, the per- 
 fect gentleman. Bread and wine were not a great 
 deal to expect in such an adventure as that upon 
 which He had set out, yet for bread and wine He 
 thanked God, with His disciples. 
 
 Is not that typical of much else? and is not this 
 our Thanksgiving Day a fine example of it, when we 
 should remember the wayside constant blessings of 
 life, outnumbering all those sadnesses which are so 
 insistent and so easily remembered? Do you recol- 
 lect Rupert Brooke's poem called, The Great Lover, 
 written very shortly before he died ? He said : 
 
 Ere the unthinking silence on that strife 
 Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far; 
 My night shall be remembered for a star. 
 And the star by which he remembers that night is 
 the long and detailed list of the things he had en- 
 joyed, and for which he was thankful — wood, coal, 
 graveness of iron; moist black earth; the strong 
 crust of bread; blue, bitter smoke of wood, and so 
 on — everything that had given him a moment's de- 
 light. His catalogue is like Walt Whitman's cata- 
 logues of all the varied detail of the riches of God's 
 gifts to man. 
 
 So Jesus remembered on that final night the de- 
 tailed incidents of His Hfe — the fresh winds of 
 
 6 
 
Galilee ; the touch of spray upon His cheek on a rough 
 morning in the boat; the sweetness of sunshine, hot 
 and comforting upon wet hands; the scented night 
 breezes ; the alabaster box of ointment and its fra- 
 grance; the look in the eyes of the young man raised 
 to life upon his bier; the shyness of little children 
 whom He blessed ; the cool, refreshing touch of the 
 water on His lips at the well of Samaria— these, and 
 a thousand other memories were included among the 
 things for which He gave thanks— the delicious mani- 
 fold detail of human life. 
 
 And that surely sets a point of view for us all. 
 Gladness and appreciation are the essential Christian 
 note. Every virtue and every experience becomes 
 exuberant when it becomes Christian. He who 
 knows Christ well, knows how to rejoice. Jtist en- 
 joy to the depths of your soul, says one. That's 
 worship. Be thankful for everything! That's prais- 
 ing God, as the birds praise him. Do unto others! 
 That's all there is of love and religion in one fell 
 szvoop. 
 
 Besides these, there is the love of friends, the 
 greatest of all life's prizes : and, amid the friendly 
 greetings of today, I think you will all understand 
 and appreciate it. In our friends the genuine joy of 
 life finds clearest voice. And Jesus was intensely 
 personal. He loved not man, but men. The one 
 thing Jesus asked of life was love. To love greatly 
 and to be greatly loved,— that was His conception of 
 life's perfection. He had got it in very rich meas- 
 ure, for no one was ever so beloved as He was. The 
 poor sinners who loved Him much were precious to 
 
 7 
 
Him, and the dead Lazarus made Him weep for 
 the very pathos of the occasion even though he was 
 on the eve of resurrection. There was Peter with 
 all his blundering hobnailed affection, and John with 
 his mystic passion calm on Jesus' bosom; Martha 
 with her bustling tenderness, and Mary with her 
 silent devotion. 
 
 Here on such a day as this we remember these 
 things. On this day we bring our love under the 
 eyes of Jesus. Those who are in our homes, and 
 who feast with us today — we love them, and thank 
 God for their love. The absent, the scattered fami- 
 lies of the congregation, we gather in tender memory 
 and imagination from the ends of the earth. The 
 departed who have gone from us forever — we love 
 them still, and they are very especially remembered 
 on such a festive day as this. Put no stint on your 
 affection, brothers and sisters of America ; open your 
 hearts wide to generosity and the tenderness of love. 
 Give thanks as you celebrate this day for those you 
 love most dearly. It is a rough and shaggy world, 
 it is a difficult and hard world, it is a lonely and cold 
 world, but love redeems it. Let love go free, and 
 give thanks to God this day for love. 
 
 First of all, then, this day celebrates our ordinary 
 thanksgiving for the daily blessings of life sym- 
 bolized by harvest, the ordinary affections, the gath- 
 erings in the home, the memories of the absent. But 
 in the second place, your Thanksgiving is a day of 
 national events, and a great series of them lies be- 
 hind it. 
 
 8 
 
There was 1621, full of memories of Plymouth 
 Rock, and that first winter of starvation until the 
 ships with food arrived. Think of the monuments 
 which celebrate it, one at Southampton where they 
 set out from, and the other at Plymouth Rock where 
 they landed. There was the harvest festival of 1621, 
 and the spring thanksgiving of 1622, at which the 
 little company of Pilgrims gathered in devout grati- 
 tude around their simple board. Along with them 
 was the Indian chief who was their guest — em- 
 blematic surely, as someone has said, of a festival 
 which is now celebrated by American citizens repre- 
 senting all the races of the world. 
 
 Then from 1777 to 1784, a hundred and fifty odd 
 years later, there were thanksgivings for the various 
 events in the War of the Revolution, until the Peace 
 Treaty was ratified on October 19, 1784. Then 
 George Washington issued a proclamation appoint- 
 ing Thursday, November 26, 1789, the first national 
 Thanksgiving, after the Government in America was 
 established. 
 
 Then there was Lincoln appointing the twenty- 
 sixth of November, 1863, as the national Thanks- 
 giving after the recent events of the Civil War ; and 
 since then every year the President of the United 
 States of America has issued a proclamation for 
 Thanksgiving Day at this season. 
 
 After the great War this Thanksgiving has surely 
 special significance. Never was there a greater oc- 
 casion than this in all the past; never will there be 
 one in the days to come. You are linked on today 
 not only with the harvest and the wayside blessings 
 
 9 
 
of our life, but with the harvest of time and the 
 great events in history. 
 
 The harvest of the Revolution was civil liberty 
 and democracy. The harvest of the Civil War was 
 Union. But the principle of Union had been working 
 all through from the day when the churches at Salem 
 and Plymouth stretched out their hands to one 
 another, lessening the opposition of parties, and 
 fostering unity. Through all the history of America 
 Thanksgiving Day has marked the growing union of 
 the States, while the Civil War finally marked the 
 inherent and essential connection between liberty and 
 unity. 
 
 And now the great War has taken up these two 
 things, the democracy for which you fought one hun- 
 dred and fifty years ago and the unity for which you 
 fought half a century ago, into its great and bloody 
 hands, and has made of them a sacrament and an 
 ideal for all time to come. The words you had found 
 in your earlier history are gone out now into all the 
 earth, and your voice to the world's end. Here is 
 democracy upon the larger scale. Here is unity in- 
 ternational, and not only interstate; and the logical 
 sequel to all your former strivings is the great ideal 
 of today. 
 
 Note that Thanksgiving all along has marked the 
 positive and not the negative elements in these wars. 
 It is said that the Mohammedans have appointed in 
 certain places a prayer to be used in visitations of 
 the plague. When the plague appears in a village, 
 they pray that it will go on to the next village, and no 
 doubt they have a thanksgiving corresponding. Well, 
 
 10 
 
to keep on remembering the points over which we 
 have quarreled, and the bitterness which these quar- 
 rels elicited, is a Mohammedan way of thinking 
 about things. Not the enmities, not the causes of 
 enmity, not the defeats of three hundred years, are 
 worth remembering today; but the principles which 
 these wars established, the things which came out 
 of the furnace of war's affliction, and have been 
 made strong and permanent for good. These are the 
 things that make a nation's history, and these we 
 would remember now. Thus the spirit of the an- 
 cient days still lasts in great facts and ideals that 
 persist and grow. 
 
 But this present year, latest of your Thanksgivings, 
 is surely one that strikes a new note. Britain ren- 
 ders thanksgiving to America today. When men 
 say that we British people are not thankful, do 
 not believe them, brothers and sisters. When they 
 say that we do not understand, pay no heed. 
 The clearest brains, the soundest hearts in Great 
 Britain today know very well what we owe to 
 America. We owe to you, your understanding of 
 the great cause, and of the thing we did when we 
 staked our all upon it at the first; the widespread 
 eagerness to come into the war before it was possible 
 for you to do so; the help you rendered to many 
 thousands of sufferers, and your vast supplies of 
 food and money and munitions of war ; the splendid 
 spirit of your whole-hearted coming in; the trans- 
 formation of your people into an army and of your 
 land into a training ground for war; the fact that 
 
 11 
 
when you came to us — and I was there when your 
 troops first came — you reUt our lamps. We were 
 weary, exhausted with years of fighting in the mud. 
 We fought on still in constancy, but we had forgot- 
 ten something of the light of the old days that drew 
 our boys across the sea. While they had retained all 
 their dogged determination to see this thing through 
 to the end, the interval had been too dreary, too 
 awful, for all those brilliant ideals, for which they 
 went at first so gaily, to retain their clearness and 
 their vividness. You came, and immediately mil- 
 lions of lamps were lit along the darkness of the line. 
 You came, and when our backs were at the wall, we 
 thanked God that you were behind us, as we faced 
 the deadliest our enemy could do. 
 
 For your distinguished service by sea in defense 
 and guardianship, by land in battle; for your heavy 
 sacrifices heroically given and your sixty thousand 
 dead ; for the women of America and for the thing 
 they did when they gave to us and to the world their 
 sons, their lovers, and their husbands, we thank you. 
 We, too, celebrate Thanksgiving Day this day, and 
 we thank our God upon every remembrance of you 
 for your stand for liberty in the ancient days, for 
 your accomplished unity, and for what you have 
 been, and are, and always will be to us and with us. 
 
 The last thing I have to say this morning is just 
 this, that great thanksgiving involves great responsi- 
 bility. Mere thanks without taking up the burden 
 that it imposes is not a thing worthy of a noble spirit, 
 nor a Christian heart. We must translate our senti- 
 
 12 
 
ment and we must translate our language into deeds, 
 if we would worthily celebrate this day. We must 
 live today and tomorrow in the light of yesterday. 
 
 Oh, brothers and sisters, did you ever think what 
 an awful thing it is to render thanks for sacrifice in 
 which you did not share, to render thanks for the 
 death of others while we live? If it evaporates in 
 words, — if we let them die and lie in their graves 
 throughout all the continents of the Old World, 
 and then say "Thanks" and go on our way un- 
 moved, — how shall their spirits, in the silent places 
 to which God has drawn them, regard so poor and 
 miserable a return? Nay, how shall Christ regard 
 it, who gave Himself not for thanks, but for re- 
 demption? If it evaporates in words it will harden 
 the heart and degrade the conscience of a nation. 
 Let us pass it into deeds forthwith. 
 
 Four things especially I would simply indicate in 
 this connection. First is the condition of Europe. 
 Friends and enemies alike, through vast territories 
 of Europe, are hungry today while you and I are 
 fed. While you are eating your Thanksgiving feast 
 they are perishing by hundreds of thousands for lack 
 of that which would satisfy the cravings of their 
 hunger. Let us remember as we eat and drink to- 
 day, that, while our table is so abundantly spread, 
 there are millions of the victims of war who are 
 hungry across the sea. 
 
 In the second place vast sums of money have been 
 made out of this war. Now, all of this is not 
 profiteering. There are some quite legitimate ways 
 in which it was inevitable that there should be an 
 
 13 
 
increase of wealth, and the money made in these 
 businesses cannot be condemned by any such con- 
 demnation. Yet may I venture to say this, that any 
 man who has prospered through the providential fact 
 that his business lay in the line of the war's necessity 
 — any man who has made large quantities of money 
 during this terrible time through which the world has 
 passed — must surely feel upon him on Thanks- 
 giving Day a very special obligation for a very special 
 generosity. If he contrasts his own good fortune with 
 the sacrifice of those by whose wounds and death 
 he is alive and prosperous, he will not withhold his 
 hand. There are others who have profiteered and 
 are profiteering. They are deliberately holding up 
 prices and robbing their fellow-countrymen. They 
 are making the situation difficult for every one, and 
 especially for the poorest. Such have no part in the 
 national thanksgiving. It is not for them. You can- 
 not thank God for that which you have stolen from 
 your nation. You can only restore it, and then go 
 humbly to Him and ask for His forgiveness. 
 
 Third, the War has created an unheard of social, 
 industrial and economic unrest. I am not discussing 
 that problem today at all ; only I would just say this, 
 that any honest thanksgiving on the part of a nation 
 where that unrest is, must involve the determination 
 to face these matters honestly and justly, to see what 
 we can do in the first place to understand them, and 
 in the second place to solve their problems. 
 
 Fourth, and finally, there is the international situa- 
 tion that faces us all on our Thanksgiving. I am 
 not going to talk any party politics, but I want to 
 
 14 
 
appeal to men of every party when I say this, that 
 surely some great international adjustment is neces- 
 sary and is demanded by conscience today. We 
 cannot go on preparing for future wars to the end of 
 time. We must put all decent public opinion into the 
 scale of some arrangement for the end of war and 
 the establishing of love and good fellowship. First 
 of all there are the Anglo-American relations be- 
 tween our two nations that will certainly be the 
 heart of any effective League of Nations, or of any 
 other arrangement whereby war shall cease. I can- 
 not conceive, my brethren, what any man means by 
 Thanksgiving who does not try to foster that. And 
 beyond that Anglo-American understanding there is 
 the wider unity. After all is said, though you and 
 we were forever at one it would eventually be but a 
 challenge to the rest of the world to array itself 
 against us, if this understanding were not universal. 
 There will be the danger of the revenge of peoples 
 now shattered. There is the danger of the increas- 
 ing spread of Bolshevism. There are the yellow 
 races lying beyond, waiting for their time. That 
 time no man can forecast, nor can any of us even 
 imagine what it will bring when future days dawn. 
 All these things are to be remembered on Thanks- 
 giving Day, and any just thanksgiving must involve 
 thought for the far future and the long result. 
 
 15 
 
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