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 <^ PRINCETON, N. J. *# 
 
 Presented bycjY^cS \J\r\ \ \fcsr.S yV\-A VV^S S 
 
 V<3 
 
 Division 
 Section 
 
TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 
 
TWENTY-FIFTH W°_; JT - 
 ANNIVERSARY ^^wuEtf^ 
 
 RECORD OF THE CELEBRATION BY THE 
 
 £>o^©nOLD SOUTH CHURCH AND SOCIETY OF 
 
 THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 
 
 OF THE INSTALLATION AS MINIS 
 
 TER OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 CHURCH OF REVEREND 
 
 GEORGE A. GORDON, D.D. 
 
 APRIL, MCMIX 
 
 IMPRINTED FOR THE OLD SOUTH SOCIETY 
 BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Sonnet — " My Friend " vii 
 
 gmnbap iHoming &eririce 
 
 Opening Prayer I 
 
 Sermon — ' ' Our Contemporaries " 7 
 
 Closing Prayer 3i 
 
 Hymn — ' ' Years and Aspirations " 35 
 
 itlonbar Ctoemng iWteting 
 
 Hymn — " The Old South Church " 4o 
 
 Mr. Hardy's Welcome hi 
 
 Theological Changes of a Quarter Century 
 
 — Professor Walker 45 
 
 The Man for the Pulpit of To-day — Pro- 
 fessor Evans 67 
 
 The Puritan Church and the Puritan 
 
 College — President Eliot 79 
 
 Informal Reception 91 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ©inner gtoen bv tfje 0ih g>outh Club 
 
 Hospitality — Mr. Noyes 0,5 
 
 Law and Gospel — Mr. Justice Hammond 99 
 
 Christian Amity, A Message from Sister 
 
 Churches — Doctor De Normandie io3 
 
 Literature and Religion — Mr. Perry 109 
 
 Theology and Ethics — Professor Palmer 117 
 
 Pew to Pulpit — Mr. Morss 127 
 
 Retrospect and Prospect — Doctor Gordon i33 
 
 List of Officers i45 
 
MY FRIEND 
 
 W HO is my Friend ? The man with vision high 
 Of utmost good for man, and self-subdued 
 To service of the same, with soul imbued 
 In sympathies benign ; the beaming eye 
 With honor bright, and overhead the sky 
 Of Faith serene and vast ; the goal pursued 
 With steadfast step ; the heart that will not lie. 
 Who is my Friend ? The Life that side by side 
 Marches with mine, that feels the wildness near; 
 That weakness in me knows and doth not chide ; 
 My Brother in this night of time and fear, 
 Who loves me in my sore defeat ; my guide 
 To victory ; comrade in battle's role ! 
 Howe'er I fare, the other of my soul. 
 
 [In response to a request for an autograph and a sentiment 
 for the Menu of the Anniversary Dinner Dr. Gordon wrote 
 the sonnet "My Friend."] 
 
g>tmbap jfllornmg feerbtce 
 
 Efje Jfourtfj of Spril, Nineteen 
 ^unbreb anb j£ine 
 
PRAYER 
 
THIS PRAYER PRECEDED THE ANNIVERSARY SERMON ON 
 SUNDAY MORNING, 4 APRIL, 10,00, 
 
PRAYER 
 
 ETERNAL FATHER, Ancient of Days, Infinite 
 Watcher of men, whose vision is the austere and benign 
 vision of perfect love, we, the children of thy love 
 on our pilgrimage through time, resting here by the 
 way, would praise thee and renew our being from 
 thine, Perfect Grace and Perfect Truth. We be- 
 hold, our Father, the generations and the races of men 
 from the morning of the world until now, appearing 
 in the light of thy day, toiling for a few hours in the 
 fields of time, and passing with thy light still upon 
 them under the shadow of death. We behold those 
 who opposed thy will and whom thou didst convince of 
 righteousness through their sin, and we have hope for 
 them. We behold those who through ignorance and 
 unbelief fell by the way, and we look with compassion 
 upon them. We behold those who knew thy will and 
 did it, took the wages thou didst appoint them and 
 were content, who made the world beautiful with their 
 brave and lovely lives and passed at length with the 
 light of thy face on their brow to meet thee in the awe 
 and greatness of thy eternal world. We see again, 
 our Father, the seven generations of thy people who 
 have served thy kingdom through this church — 
 preachers and their people, ministers and servants 
 
[4] 
 
 together of the cause of Christ — and we thank thee 
 for their faith, their love, their service and their hope. 
 We see again those with whom we have served here — 
 perhaps bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh ; and 
 if not bound to us by the ties of the flesh, bound to us 
 by the greater ties of the spirit. We think of them 
 and their finished work and their peace in thy presence 
 this morning. Father, bring to bear upon us now 
 the whole of thy hallowed eternity and touch the mo- 
 ments as they fly with depth, with dignity, with austere 
 beauty, fill them with contentment and devotion to thy 
 ivill; make them moments so full of thy Holy Spirit 
 that all the days that are appointed for us may be 
 better days. 
 
 We thank thee for the years that are in our mem- 
 ory to-day; for the fellowship of lives together in this 
 church, in faith, in service, in discipline, in pain, in 
 joy, and in unlimited hope. We thank thee for the 
 enrichment that has come to us in our fellowship one 
 with another — the deeper respect as we have known 
 each other better, the profounder consideration, the 
 richer and finer sympathy, the loftier regard. We 
 thank thee that through our life together thou hast re- 
 vealed thyself in thy Son, and us one to the other. 
 And we bless thee that we may hope for other days 
 still of such fellowship and service. We commend to 
 thy care, in Christian faith and in dear regard, the 
 persons, the souls, the families of this church and 
 congregation. 
 
 Oh, be with us in our inmost life; give us that 
 
[5] 
 love, divine and human, without which our existence 
 is poor and miserable. We thank thee for the treas- 
 ure thou hast given us in our homes. Keep it from 
 sordidness ; keep it from becoming common under the 
 evil custom of the world ; keep it fresh and clean and 
 dear, and make it more and more beautiful; make 
 our inmost hearts faithful in those homes and ever 
 more grateful ; and cause them to bloom, especially at 
 this springtime, cause them to bloom anew with graces 
 — the unfading graces of thy Spirit. May all our 
 possessions in human friendship and in our human 
 homes be hallowed by the thought that they are ours only 
 for a little while — till death us do part. And may 
 we so live and so hold our treasure now and here, 
 serve with such large and disinterested minds, such 
 brave and such good wills, stand so high and trustful 
 in thy compassion that when we are borne through 
 death into that glorious life beyond, we shall meet 
 again in greater love and vaster service. 
 
 Hear our prayer for the dead. May we feel the 
 sanctity and awe of their presence now. May we be 
 richer and loftier because of our assurance of their 
 sympathy and perpetual compassion. Hear our prayer 
 for all the interests that are dear to the disciples of 
 Christ : our city, our Commonwealth ; our whole 
 human race. Be with all peoples and all governments ; 
 be with thy servant, the President of the United States, 
 and all with him in authority. Continue to guide us, 
 God, and may thy ministers, the ministers of the 
 Gospel of Christ, be so wise, so pure-hearted, so 
 
[6] 
 
 clean-handed and so brave that they shall speak in 
 concert and with might the things that concern the 
 kingdom of God in the nation and be heard by the 
 people with gladness. Continue with us ivhile we wait 
 upon thee this hour. Hear the prayer that cannot be 
 spoken ; record for us the significance of the memories 
 that cannot be uttered — the food of life within us, 
 deep, happy, ineffable. And answer our life out of 
 thy greatness, and bring us together into the vision 
 and peace of Jesus Christ, our Lord, in whose Name 
 we offer our prayer, Amen. 
 
SERMON 
 
THIS SERMON WAS PREACHED BY DR. GORDON IN THE 
 
 OLD SOUTH CHURCH AT THE MORNING SERVICE, 
 
 4 APRIL, I9O9 
 
OUR CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 Others have labored, and te are entered into their labor." 
 
 — John iv. 38. 
 
 IN the fields of the spirit sowing and reaping 
 go on together; we reap what others have 
 sown; we sow what others shall reap. In 
 any generation of men independence is always 
 wanting, completeness is never present. The 
 generations stand to one another in a vast soli- 
 darity ; every great idea, every noble enterprise 
 has a history. Tradition is a splendid word de- 
 graded in the ignoble custom of the world. Fire 
 has been put out by a line of men running from 
 the flames down to the river from which pails of 
 water were drawn and passed from man to man 
 till poured by the last man upon the conflagra- 
 tion. Such handing onward, such passing down, 
 such tradition from generation to generation is 
 essential to the continuance of civilized society. 
 Human life is itself the great tradition; it is 
 handed down through parenthood ; and when the 
 parenthood is worthy the tradition is divine. All 
 our best ideas upon all subjects are an inheritance 
 and an expansion. When at our best we make 
 clearer and completer what we have received, we 
 
[IO] 
 
 pass on to those who shall come after us a world 
 of thought in its infancy to be raised to maturity 
 and power. In this vast tradition we stand in a 
 threefold order, as predecessors, as contempora- 
 ries, as successors. We who are here to-day are 
 successors to those who preceded us ; we are pred- 
 ecessors to those who shall by and by occupy 
 our places ; we are contemporaries in possession 
 of our world for a few great hours. 
 
 On this significant day I am to speak to you as 
 contemporaries of one another, older and younger 
 indeed, but together sharing the privilege of hu- 
 man existence, moral service and Christian 
 faith. 
 
 i . Good contemporaries do not fail in affec- 
 tionate veneration for the past in so far as it has 
 been great ; they do not fail in pity and sorrow 
 for it in so far as it has been mean. Noble spirits 
 like to rehearse the story of the heroism of other 
 times ; they dwell with pleasure upon the mighty 
 thoughts and deeds of those who were of old ; 
 they love to renew the memory of the gracious 
 and valiant past, to paint upon the canvas of 
 to-day the faces of the brave men and the beauti- 
 ful women of yesterday. It is part of the high 
 privilege of existence to renew together the vision 
 of the thinker and doer, the poet and prophet, 
 the ruler and reformer who wrought to redeem 
 our world. When I was a lad working on a 
 farm there stood in the background of the land- 
 
[»] 
 
 scape a shapely and lofty hill. Much of the time 
 I was too busy to see it, much of the time it 
 could not be seen owing to cloud and storm ; but 
 now and then it rose up in some great sunset in 
 such beauty and majesty that I was constrained to 
 look at it and to love it. I recall, too, many 
 a time walking a mile that I might look upon it 
 at a certain angle, that I might see it at its best. 
 Gradually the feeling grew within me that whether 
 I saw it or not, I knew it was there, the great, dark, 
 stable background of my life, the meeting place 
 of earth and sky, the fountain of refreshment for 
 the fields spread out between it and the sea, the 
 center of wonder and love. So our noble prede- 
 cessors appear. They are the background of our 
 existence. We are too much absorbed to think 
 of them often ; we are imprisoned in the grave 
 interests of the present ; but now and then we 
 have leisure to pause, to lift our eyes to the hills 
 whence our lives have descended, to stand for a 
 few great moments in the vision of the mighty of 
 the generations that have gone before, as of end- 
 less mountain ranges, whose far-soaring summits 
 are transfigured in the glow that sometimes falls 
 upon them out of heaven. At such times we 
 know that without that past we should be noth- 
 ing; without it we should be bereaved of our 
 greatest teachers, our wisest leaders, of the 
 world which they made habitable, fruitful, and 
 beautiful for us. 
 
[»] 
 
 Within this vaster world of historic man, as a 
 circle narrow but precious within the mighty 
 circumference of the ages of the great and good, 
 we recall the background of this church. We 
 think of the fifteen ministers of the church who 
 in various ways and in different measures served 
 it, and who left no stain upon its fair name. 
 Their names are graven on yonder tablet, dim 
 but precious, and in the dim religious light of 
 this edifice, still drawing our thoughts to highest 
 things, and hallowing our rich humanities out of 
 the heaven in which they live. We think of 
 Franklin and Sewall and Samuel Adams, typical 
 of hundreds less eminent but equally worthy, 
 who are forever associated with this church. We 
 think of a nameless multitude, like a vast white 
 cloud rising in the field of vision, glorious in 
 light and purity, men and women who saw here 
 the heavenly vision, who through a thousand dis- 
 couragements pursued it, who found it their in- 
 spiration in life and their hope in death. We 
 turn to that precious past in grateful honor ; we 
 confess with delight that we reap what we did 
 not sow ; that as we bring our sheaves with us 
 we think with affectionate veneration of the 
 seven generations of the noble and wise who 
 went forth weeping bearing precious seed, cast- 
 ing it abroad in this community in a sublime 
 vision of the future. Our harvest is first of all 
 in their honor ; if this were a banquet instead of 
 
[,3] 
 
 a sermon we should rise and salute them in 
 silent, immortal honor. 
 
 2. Good contemporaries do not fail in solici- 
 tude for their successors. On this I need not 
 dwell. The anxiety of all noble parenthood re- 
 lates to the future of the children when the world 
 shall be theirs, and when no father or mother shall 
 be present as a shield against evil and pain. All 
 wise men live out of the future no less than out 
 of the past. The state of the world as they in- 
 herit it is not ideal ; they desire to bequeath it in 
 a better condition than they found it. For this 
 world is like an entailed estate. We receive it 
 from our predecessors, here wonderfully im- 
 proved and there dismally impoverished; and 
 when we are great enough in character we wish 
 to add to the improvements others of our own ; 
 and to undo the work of the prodigal and villain. 
 It is part of the privilege of existence to be con- 
 cerned about the state of the world as inherited 
 by our successors. Our interest in industrial 
 and social reform, in our schools and colleges, in 
 all forms of education, in the total higher char- 
 acter of our city, our commonwealth and coun- 
 try, in religious faith and religious service, is a 
 heart interest in the coming generation of Ameri- 
 cans. Our obligation to the future is vast and 
 solemn ; with the vision of the City of God in 
 our eyes we would work for the Americans that 
 are to be. And as we thus work we say in the 
 
[i'4] 
 
 great words of Webster, "Advance, then, ye 
 future generations! We would hail you, as you 
 rise in your long succession, to fill the places 
 which we now fill, and to taste the blessings of 
 existence where we are passing, and soon shall 
 have passed, our own human duration. We bid 
 you welcome to this pleasant land of the fathers. 
 We greet your accession to the great inheritance 
 which we have enjoyed. We welcome you to 
 the blessings of good government and religious 
 liberty. We welcome you to the treasures of 
 science and the delights of learning. We wel- 
 come you to the transcendent sweets of domestic 
 life, to the happiness of kindred and parents and 
 children. We welcome you to the immeasurable 
 blessings of rational existence, the immortal hope 
 of Christianity and the light of everlasting 
 truth." 
 
 3. After we have suitably honored those who 
 went before us, and tenderly greeted those who 
 shall come after us, it is permissible to dwell for 
 a few moments on our contemporaries. And 
 here it must be admitted that now and then our 
 contemporaries appear a queer lot, in the expres- 
 sive phrase of Burns, " an unco squad." There 
 is profound and incessant competition among us ; 
 there is grave misunderstanding; occasionally 
 there is malice. In cases of transcendent genius 
 or when genius is born out of due season, the 
 hostility of the human environment sometimes 
 
[i5] 
 
 becomes tragic. Here we think of poets like 
 Milton and Dante, reformers like Ridley and 
 Latimer, prophets like Savanarola and Hus, the 
 Christian apostles and their divine Master. In 
 such instances the contemporary world in its 
 leading class is woefully blind and cruel; and 
 the man of genius is compelled to appeal to the 
 supreme court of the future. It is necessary, in 
 such high examples, to call upon coming time to 
 redress the wrongs done by the present time, to 
 intrust one's cause and one's good name to the 
 manhood of the future where the present genera- 
 tion has been so woefully unjust. The world 
 and the ages is the supreme court of appeal; it 
 is forever open to misunderstood, misrepresented, 
 persecuted, and assassinated genius and goodness. 
 On the whole, for the average servant of his 
 time, I look with gratitude upon the severities of 
 the human environment. To serve the present 
 age is all that our Maker requires of most men. 
 If we fail to do good now, it is futile to expect 
 that we shall do good to any future generation. 
 And in qualifying us for service here and now, 
 the severities of our human environment are 
 essential. People sometimes sigh over the fact 
 that the Garden of Eden had a forbidden tree in 
 it, and a serpent ; I think if there had been a 
 hundred forbidden trees in it, mixed with the 
 other trees, and serpents hissing from every bush, 
 Adam and Eve might have fared better. The 
 
[i6j 
 
 universal hostility might have called into being 
 keen and sleepless vigilance and a moral caution 
 always on duty. As I read the tragic story of 
 human failure, I find that it proceeds from a 
 fancied security seemingly warranted by the gen- 
 eral friendly aspect of the environment. It takes 
 but one lion or tiger in a jungle to kill the un- 
 wary traveler ; and if he were told that he must 
 be armed for an encounter with many wild beasts, 
 his chances of escape might be better. Among 
 preachers this is surely true. The human envi- 
 ronment is apt to be too friendly, especially in 
 their youth. The people assume that these 
 preachers are wonderfully good, wonderfully 
 gifted ; some of the people speak of them as if 
 they were saints. In such heavenly love abiding 
 the young preacher is apt to neglect profound and 
 systematic study ; he is apt to think lightly of 
 carefully prepared courses of thought ; he is apt 
 to become extempore in intellect, in character, and 
 in service ; and an extempore teacher and preacher 
 of religion, in the exact sense of the word, is on 
 the way to perdition with his devoted people fol- 
 lowing hard after him. 
 
 I give thanks to-day that I was called to a work 
 greater than the powers w r ith which I came to it, 
 that I saw from the first that if I were ever to 
 equal my task it must be by continuous growth. 
 I give thanks for the general suspicion of my 
 ability, for the widespread sense of doubt concern- 
 
[»7] 
 
 ing the character of my message. I give thanks 
 for the outspoken opposition to my views and 
 purposes on the part of strong and brave men. 
 I felt that I had come to live among men who had 
 convictions, who had the courage to express these 
 convictions, and to stand by them when it was 
 unpopular so to do. I now give thanks that a 
 large minority voted against my installation as 
 minister of this church, that these men gave 
 steady utterance to their distrust of me, that for 
 eight years after my settlement here, I could ap- 
 pear as a speaker in my own denomination no- 
 where without meeting a chill as from the regions 
 of eternal ice. I give thanks to-day and with 
 the utmost sincerity and solemnity for the intrin- 
 sic difficulty of my task, made tenfold more 
 difficult by the atmosphere charged as it was with 
 intense and enduring hostility. 
 
 The reasons for my thanksgiving are easily 
 stated. I knew that I had to prepare for battle, 
 that the battle was to be a campaign. I knew 
 that there must be no trifling. Whatever of ca- 
 pacity lay in me, as thinker, as preacher, as friend 
 to the human soul, as man, was needed in this 
 contest. I must revere and cherish every possi- 
 bility ; I must seek through long years of diligence 
 and honor the realization of power. To do any- 
 thing else would render defeat and disaster inevi- 
 table. And if the result is far less than it might 
 have been, it is much more and higher than it 
 
[i8] 
 
 would have been had not the severe humanities 
 of my environment created vigilance, self-control, 
 and filled the solitudes of existence with divine 
 companionship and protection. Woe to you, 
 young man, when all men speak well of you. 
 You are a mollusk and not a man ; and if you are 
 a man still without prodigious care, that atmos- 
 phere of adulation will surely convert you into a 
 jelly-fish. When Solomon was going down hill, 
 the Lord raised up an adversary against him ; and 
 when that did no good, still another adversary 
 was divinely raised up. Even the wrath and mal- 
 ice of our contemporaries may become help from 
 on high, as a headwind at sea serves to keep the 
 great steamer' s furnaces going at full blast; and 
 the adverse opinions and influence of noble men 
 are a divine force in the evolution of a just, sane, 
 responsible manhood. 
 
 There is room in the human environment for 
 the benign no less than the severe. The mother's 
 caress is always in order, the father's word of 
 love and hope is never out of place ; because 
 the world may be confidently relied upon to 
 administer the antidote. The home with its 
 endearment, expectation, and abounding love is a 
 precious qualification of an otherwise too severe 
 environment ; it is like the flood of June sunshine 
 that tempers the strong east wind into a pleasant 
 and wholesome servant of life. There is room 
 for our friends, and all their exaggeration of our 
 
[i9] 
 
 power and our worth . Their glorious confidence , 
 their shining affection, and their warm hope make 
 the atmosphere of our lives a delight and an 
 incentive. 
 
 Here again I give thanks. The men and 
 women who called me to become minister of this 
 church were one and all friends. The members 
 of the joint-committee of the church and of the 
 society who presented the call, only one of whom 
 survives to this day, gave me steadfast support. 
 When I was received into the church on Friday 
 evening, March 7, i884, the welcome I received 
 was profoundly moving; and it was prophetic. 
 Brave men and beautiful women came forward 
 and gave me the right-hand of fellowship, a hand 
 withdrawn only in death. The adverse feeling 
 in the Council only stirred to a greater depth the 
 loyalty and devotion of my people. Following 
 upon the first Sunday came a Tuesday evening 
 reception. Such functions have not for me an 
 exaggerated fascination ; but the vision that came 
 to me and that brightened forever that evening 
 has remained, and will remain, a heavenly vision. 
 I saw a company of youth, supported by their 
 parents and kindred, to whom it was to be the 
 privilege of my existence to bring the divine 
 illumination and transfiguration. After this 
 beginning in storm and friendship and romance, 
 came the long, hard, laborious years. I can think 
 of nothing finer than the wise support, the noble 
 
[«o] 
 
 friendship, the patient confidence, and the con- 
 tinuous inspiration of hope that came to me from 
 the generation that called me to service here. 
 The names of the leaders of the church in those 
 trying days are engraven in grateful and everlast- 
 ing memory : 
 
 " Again ye come, ye hovering Forms ! I find ye, 
 As early to my clouded sight ye shone I 
 Shall I attempt, this once, to seize and bind ye? 
 Still o'er my heart is that illusion thrown ? 
 Ye crowd more near I Then, be the reign assigned ye, 
 And sway me from your misty, shadowy zone 1 
 My bosom thrills, with youthful passion shaken, 
 From magic airs that sound your march awaken." 
 
 " Of joyous days ye bring the blissful vision, 
 The dear, familiar phantoms rise again, 
 And like an old and half-extinct tradition, 
 First Love returns, with Friendship in his train." 
 
 I have always gone my way in reliance upon 
 the American humorist's beatitude, " Blessed are 
 they that expect nothing, for they shall not be 
 disappointed." I confess to a good deal of un- 
 easiness as to how I was to fare with the next 
 generation of my people. I knew my noble, 
 my incomparable friends who called me could 
 not live forever. They were in duty bound to 
 stand by me. Would their sons and daughters 
 and those coming in from the outside recognize 
 the obligation ? It seemed to me extremely 
 doubtful. Imagine my surprise, therefore, and 
 my delight, when I found the general average of 
 
[,I] 
 
 ability in the second generation higher than the 
 first; the devotion to the church equal in self- 
 sacrifice and intensity, and the kindness to me 
 augmented by the consciousness that I had been 
 the minister and friend of their fathers. I have 
 not yet recovered from this noble surprise, nor 
 shall I ever cease to be grateful for it. Instead 
 of the fathers we have the children ; and the 
 children in devotion to the kingdom of God, and 
 to this church as a servant of that kingdom are 
 worthy of the fathers ; and their friendship for 
 me is an apostolic succession for which I con- 
 tinue to give thanks. 
 
 Many have come to us from other religious 
 communities. They have brought with them in- 
 expressible additions to our power, our richness 
 of life, our friendship, our fellowship and hap- 
 piness. The church has adopted them without 
 let or hindrance, counted them among the faith- 
 ful, and in no case has that confidence been dis- 
 honored ; in many instances it has been rewarded 
 with service as signal, and love as great, as any 
 church could well receive. They have brought 
 with them honor for those older in service here 
 than themselves, and for the descendants of older 
 servants still; they have aided us in the strongest 
 wish of our hearts that we might hold the Old 
 South Church to the great ideal of democracy. 
 This church has been, more than any other, iden- 
 tified in past times with the life of the city of 
 
[»] 
 
 Boston; and we, in our generation, desire to hold 
 the church as the church of the people. 
 
 I am now face to face with another serious 
 question. Am I to gain the love of the children's 
 children? To them I have come down from a 
 former generation ; to them I must seem one of 
 the surviving charter members of the Old South 
 Church. Indeed, we all recall how men far on 
 in the fifties seemed to us when we were where 
 our children are. Did they not appear as part 
 of the original framework of the world? Did 
 we not ponder the question with some anxiety, 
 How can they find their way in this new world, 
 so touched with romance, entrancing light, and 
 hope in which we dwell ? I do not wonder at 
 this question when it concerns myself. I am 
 sure of this, that I can gain access to these pro- 
 phetic minds, aid you in moulding their character, 
 introduce them to the kingdom of the soul only 
 through your devout sympathy. Your fathers 
 moulded your minds in respect and confidence 
 toward me; your homes, while centers of free- 
 dom, were full not of criticism but of gracious 
 commendation of my ideals and endeavors; you 
 were bred in reverence for this church and in 
 friendship for its minister ; and thus through the 
 precious sympathy of your parents I was able to 
 gain access to your thoughts and a place in your 
 enduring esteem. 
 
 Here is one form of the great, continuous de- 
 
[ 2 3] 
 
 pendence of the preacher. He and his people to- 
 gether make what is called his ministry; that total 
 ministry is the product of the preacher's action 
 on his people, and of the reaction of the people 
 upon the preacher. This reaction of my people 
 upon me I regard as one of the chief educational 
 forces of my life. In the light of this experience 
 I contend that the preacher depends upon the 
 gracious Christian homes of his congregation, 
 upon the high dispositions of fathers and moth- 
 ers, upon the atmosphere which they create and 
 which their children breathe concerning the 
 church and the ideals and endeavors of the min- 
 ister. With this sacred service rendered by you, 
 as your parents rendered it to you, I do not yet 
 see why the children's children should not be 
 among my best friends. 
 
 Tell them, therefore, that my sympathies are 
 with the childhood and youth of the world; that 
 I care most to say those things which shall enrich 
 and illumine their existence, open before it vistas 
 of noble power and joy, lend to it steadiness and 
 self-control in the day of battle, set it more se- 
 curely in the possession of essential good, inter- 
 fuse with the passion for time the transfiguring 
 sense of the majesty of the Unseen, attach it in all 
 tender and enduring strength to its best friends, 
 show it the glory and the delight of Christian dis- 
 cipleship, and ground it in the consciousness of the 
 dear, abiding love of the God and Father of men. 
 
t»4] 
 
 The benignity and the hostility of the imme- 
 diate environment recall the same forces at work 
 in the world-environment, especially during the 
 last fifty years. We have been living in a free 
 world ; in this atmosphere of freedom men have 
 spoken their honest thought about the universe 
 and about all phases of human existence. Never 
 before on so wide a scale have reality and frank- 
 ness characterized the intellectual life of civilized 
 man. All established beliefs have been called in 
 question. We have had atheism, agnosticism, 
 naturalism, pessimism, the terrestrial life of man 
 as his only life advocated with great ability and 
 complete sincerity. Haeckel, Huxley, Darwin, 
 and hundreds of others less eminent, but equally 
 confident, have written in revolt from the ancient 
 belief in the spirituality of man and his universe. 
 On the other hand, German idealism has risen 
 up in prevailing protest against the degradation 
 of the human spirit. The British disciples of 
 Hegel, especially Green, Wallace, and Caird, 
 have contended for man and man's world in a 
 great and conclusive way. The scientific spirit 
 has gone everywhere; it has sought facts, sifted 
 them, weighed them, considered what deductions 
 they could honestly be made to bear. History 
 has been largely rewritten; the scientific history 
 of the religions of the world is a new thing under 
 the sun. The Bible and the scientific historian 
 have met, and again vast changes have followed. 
 
[>5] 
 
 Scientists have become philosophers and divided 
 into opposing camps, one set including man in 
 the order of animal existence and finding in his 
 universe a soulless mechanism of matter and 
 force; another set finding eternal spirit every- 
 where, working in the cosmos and living and 
 breathing in the human soul. Here is our Gog 
 and Magog, our intellectual battlefield with two 
 armies face to face, and in tremendous conflict. 
 We note that truth is on both sides the final 
 attachment, the last and best inspiration. We 
 confess on both sides intellectual power, sincerity, 
 character; and we ask how should one think of 
 one's contemporaries in this world-environment ? 
 For myself I give thanks. One great deliver- 
 ance is at hand; the sham-thinker, the sham- 
 believer is going ; the reality of existence is 
 asserting itself, the supreme worth of reality is 
 gaining vaster sway. Truth is the quest of all 
 honest men ; and even when honest men are 
 mistaken in the main errand, the sacred toil 
 through which they pass to their error gives 
 them character out of the Eternal Spirit. The 
 Civil War is a symbol of the nineteenth century. 
 The South fought the North on a mistake; it 
 fought with complete honesty and with unsur- 
 passed valor and sacrifice ; it was defeated ; the 
 cause was a lost cause ; but the tremendous toil, 
 the sacred sacrifice through which it passed con- 
 ferred upon our brothers in defeat a character 
 
[96] 
 
 that has become part of the strength and treasure 
 of the nation. Here in symbol is the intellectual 
 war of this age. The atheists, agnostics, natural- 
 ists, pessimists of our time are generally honest 
 and able men. They love the truth as devoutly 
 as we do. They fight for it as gallantly and 
 they suffer for it as gladly as do their opponents. 
 They are mistaken ; they are hurled back in 
 defeat, upon every fresh assault, by the mass and 
 weight of the religious soul of the world. Yet 
 their fight is not vain ; they compel men to think, 
 to renew their love of truth, to discern between 
 convention and reality, to distinguish essential 
 from unessential, to clear the divine habit of the 
 soul from the foolish and often wicked customs 
 that have grown round it, to admit new light, to 
 undertake revision of sacred books and phi- 
 losophies of faith, to retreat upon the Eternal 
 God and to come forth mailed in his strength for 
 the day of battle. These negative thinkers have 
 done this service and much more ; at the same 
 time they have won a character that has become 
 a new glory in our human world. They are 
 in defeat ; they are bound to be in defeat ; yet 
 in their souls they have won the best things in 
 this earth, clean hands and a pure heart; and 
 they have compelled us to win our fight and to 
 broaden our victory so that it shall include them. 
 
 The successive generations of honest and noble 
 men are like different pieces of rare tapestry. 
 
[^7] 
 The background looks dull, but we know it is 
 essential, and we make it together out of the 
 gray, monotonous fidelities of our fellowship. 
 The figures are brilliant and fine, and again they 
 are woven of the threads dyed in the rich colors 
 of the common heart. This creation of beauty 
 and worth is by our contemporaries ; the con- 
 trasts, too, have their place here, the differences 
 and oppositions; set in with the harmonies and 
 controlled by the spirit of ideal unity, that unity 
 which builds into its fair design all reality and ail 
 sincerity, they are seen to be essential to the com- 
 pleteness of the work. This complete work of 
 grace and worth is the work of our contempora- 
 ries ; hence our supreme regard for them. They 
 and we are sister threads in the same pattern ; 
 they and we are woven together in the same 
 design; they and we are together background, 
 figure, fire, and joy; they and we are together 
 harmony, contrast, peace, conflict, light, shadow, 
 splendor, and gloom ; our existence for better for 
 worse, for richer for poorer, till death us do part, 
 is bound into one. And this it is that makes the 
 contemporary world so great and so precious to 
 the large-minded and generous individual human 
 being. 
 
 When we think of the end, as we are more 
 and more bound to do, we must often wonder 
 over the strange world into which we shall emerge 
 from death. Going as we do from our friends 
 
[ 2 8] 
 
 here, passing from a world that the better we 
 have served it the more we have loved it, into a 
 region unknown, shall we find awaiting us men 
 and women who shall take away the strangeness 
 and the loneliness of that mysterious realm? We 
 hope to make the solitary and wild journey in 
 the happy consciousness, "I will fear no evil for 
 thou art with me," and in the realization of the 
 great promise, "To-day shalt thou be with me in 
 Paradise" ; and yet do we not long for household 
 voices and vanished smiles to greet us there? I 
 think that in heaven we shall not feel quite at 
 home till we stand encircled by our contempora- 
 ries who have preceded us to the world of light, 
 whose comradeship on earth again renewed shall 
 add new zest to the regions of bliss, whose friendly 
 offices will be greatly appreciated by the bewild- 
 ered stranger, whose gracious influence will be to 
 us when we awaken from the stupor of death 
 like a mother's reassuring voice when as children 
 we awoke from some wild dream in fear and pain. 
 As the world into which we awoke in panic was 
 our mother's work and therefore one of peace, so 
 the world upon which we open our vision beyond 
 death will be that of friends, fellow-servants, con- 
 temporaries, and therefore one with the notes of 
 welcome, good cheer, high memory, and divine 
 regard forever ringing in it; and our God will 
 greet us there as here, through our kind, through 
 our kindred, through the eyes and the voices of 
 
[=9] 
 
 dear familiar souls, through the sacred order and 
 
 light of those with whom we stood, 
 
 toiled, suffered, and rejoiced 
 
 in the kingdom of love 
 
 in time. 
 
PRAYER 
 
THIS PRAYER FOLLOWED THE ANNIVERSARY SERMON ON 
 SUNDAY MORNING, A APRIL, I9O9 
 
INFINITE FATHER, Lord God of our fathers and 
 of our brothers who have served with us here, we 
 look backward with regret and with gratitude : with 
 regret that we have served thee so ill — with grati- 
 tude that thy grace has abounded and still wrought 
 through us for light and for joy. We look back- 
 ward to a great, silent, inalienable, and immortal 
 possession. Put it this day forever within our hearts. 
 that silent and beautiful kingdom in which we see 
 fair and lovely lives moving without sound, with the 
 light upon them that comes from thy approving face 
 and thy joy in them ! May that kingdom never depart 
 from us. 
 
 Bless thy people here, and through the tender and 
 noble sympathy of this hour make us more generous 
 and lofty-minded men and women, and whatever be 
 thy appointment for us in the days to come, give us 
 strength to lean upon thy wisdom and walk in the 
 way of thy commandment, and to surrender our 
 powers to thee so that through their use thy love and 
 thy pity may come and abide with men. 
 
 And may the' grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and 
 the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit 
 be with us all, now and evermore, Amen. 
 
HYMN 
 
THIS HYMN, "YEARS AND ASPIRATIONS, WAS WRITTEN BY 
 DR. GORDON FOR THE ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION, AND WAS 
 SUNG TO THE TUNE "ST. BEES " BY THE CHOIR AND THE 
 CONGREGATION AT THE MORNING SERVICE, SUNDAY, 4 APRIL, 
 igOQ, AND ALSO AT THE PUBLIC MEETING, MONDAY EVEN- 
 ING, 12 APRIL, I9O9 
 

 YEARS AND ASPIRATIONS 
 
 EAD me, Lord, through all my days, 
 In Thy great and wondrous ways, 
 Lift my heart to grander hours, 
 
 Hold me with Thy heavenly powers. 
 
 Of the Past may I still keep 
 Things divine both high and deep, 
 Morning light and evening glow 
 That have ever blessed me so. 
 
 Memories that ever shine; 
 Friends unseen but friends still mine ; 
 Service sweet in high reward ; 
 Spirits blest in dear regard. 
 
 Tender sympathies and tears, 
 Precious store of noble years ; 
 Visions wide on pathways wild, 
 Chastened thought again a child ! 
 
 Trust in Thee that surer grows ; 
 Human love that fears no foes ; 
 Faith that to Thy heart belong 
 Worlds now lost in woe and wrong. 
 
 Show me, Lord, Thy word of grace — 
 Christ, Thy glory in his face; 
 That I through my fleeting hour, 
 Serve Thy kingdom in Thy power. 
 
Jttottirap Cbening iWeettng 
 
 W&t Otoelftf) of 8pril, Nineteen 
 ^unbreo anb J^ine 
 
[4o] 
 
 s 
 
 THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH 
 
 TRONG tower of truth against the sky, 
 How strong the soul must stand, 
 When, in God's name, it speaks the Word 
 By His divine command ! 
 
 O House of Prayer beneath the stars, 
 How hushed the heart must be, 
 When, with the Son of Man, it prays 
 For our Humanity ! 
 
 Great Church that from the fathers came, 
 
 Stand ever in man's sight, 
 
 A sign, a witness, and a prayer 
 
 For Freedom and the Right ! 
 
 Straight from the stars thy truth be given — 
 
 Broad as the earth thy plan ! 
 
 The House our fathers raised to God 
 
 He consecrates to man. 
 
 [This hymn, " The Old South Church," was written by Dr. 
 Allen E. Cross for the anniversary celebration, inscribed to 
 the Reverend George A. Gordon, D.D., and was sung to the 
 tune "St. Anne" by the Choir and Congregation at the 
 Public Meeting, Monday, 12 April, 1909.] 
 
MR. HARDY'S WELCOME 
 
AT a meeting, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary 
 of the installation of Dr. George A. Gordon as min- 
 ister of the Old South Church (the Third Church in 
 Boston), held the twelfth of April, nineteen hundred 
 and nine, at eight o'clock p. m., Alpheus H. Hardy, 
 Esq., presided. 
 
 Prior to the Invocation, by the Reverend A. P. 
 Fitch, Mr. Hardy cordially welcomed , on behalf of the 
 Old South Church and Society, all friends who by 
 their presence showed their regard for Dr . Gordon and 
 their appreciation of the work which he had done. 
 
MR. HARDY'S REMARKS 
 
 THE church which welcomes you here to- 
 night is not in its personnel that which 
 settled Dr. Gordon twenty-five years ago. 
 About eighty-three per cent, of the present 
 membership have come into the church since 
 Dr. Gordon was settled ; but about ten per 
 cent, of the then male membership is with us 
 now. Of the nine gentlemen who formed the 
 committee which called him, but one is living. 
 Therefore, in view of the Easter days which are 
 just passed, we believe in the Church above as 
 in the Church below, and we can but feel that 
 if the spirits of the just made perfect can take 
 cognizance of the things which occur here on 
 earth that we, to-night, may be encompassed by 
 an innumerable cloud of witnesses, of those who 
 have loved, and worshiped with, and served the 
 Old South Church during the past two hundred 
 and forty years. 
 
THEOLOGICAL CHANGES OF A 
 QUARTER CENTURY 
 
IN introducing the Reverend Professor Williston 
 Walker, D.D., Mr. Hardy said : The historian of 
 the Old South Church, the late Mr. Hamilton A . Hill, 
 imprinted this simple foreword upon the first official 
 page of its history : 
 
 ' ' For well she keeps the ancient stock 
 
 The stubborn strength of Plymouth Rock; 
 And still maintains with milder laws 
 And clearer light the good old cause." 
 
 You know this church was founded in a question of 
 faith, a dispute about the matter of faith and practice. 
 It has always stood for the right to apprehend truth 
 under the ultimate truth, under new revelations. It 
 is a great satisfaction to us of the younger generation 
 that ive live at a time when there are ' ' milder laws 
 and clearer light." Many of the changes which are 
 implied in this foreword have taken place within 
 twenty-five years and of them Prof . Williston Walker, 
 of the Divinity school of Yale University, will now 
 speak. 
 
PROFESSOR WALKER'S ADDRESS 
 
 THE task to which your Committee has done 
 me the honor to invite me on this occasion 
 when we commemorate a quarter century 
 of a pastorate eminently distinguished in New 
 England, is that of setting forth the theological 
 changes which have occurred in this period of 
 time in the region, and among the churches, in 
 which this pastorate has been fulfilled. The 
 quarter of a century, though but a brief span of 
 time when measured in a nation's development, 
 is long enough, if the conditions be favorable, to 
 witness great changes of thought and modifica- 
 tions of current belief. What a quarter of a 
 century that was, for instance, which followed 
 the posting of Luther's theses on the door of the 
 Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517. How 
 profoundly was thought modified in the natural 
 sciences in the quarter century that followed the 
 publication of Darwin's " Origin of Species" in 
 1859. Such a period in religious thought has 
 been the last twenty-five years among us. Not 
 but that the roots and antecedents of the changes 
 which it has witnessed run back far behind its 
 beginnings. But this period has witnessed the 
 
[48] 
 
 coming into the general apprehension of our 
 Christian public of changes in religious thought 
 more radical and more far sweeping in their 
 effects than had been witnessed in any similar 
 period since the Reformation. 
 
 It is always difficult for those who are a part, 
 themselves, of a great transition, to appreciate 
 correctly its significance, or to estimate at their 
 right value its probable ultimate results, as we 
 can do those of epochs which have become his- 
 toric. We run much risk of mistaking the tem- 
 porary for the permanent, and the relatively 
 non-essential for the important. We are con- 
 fused in our judgments because in any great 
 period of transition in human thought the modi- 
 fication of opinion is very unequal in its distri- 
 bution. Not merely the conservative and the 
 radical labor side by side, but all shades of 
 belief between these two extremes are repre- 
 sented, so that any affirmation as to the changes 
 which have taken place has to be, at best, of an 
 approximate character, and is liable to the criti- 
 cism that it does not represent the position which 
 has been attained by the more eager, or that 
 which the less movable would still conserve. 
 The utmost that one can hope to do in such an 
 estimate is to point out certain general tendencies 
 and to measure, as best one can, the progress 
 which they have made. 
 
 Twenty-five years ago the fabric of belief in 
 
[49] 
 
 our Congregational churches of New England, 
 and it is with them that we have especially to 
 do, was still that of the great thinkers of the 
 eighteenth century, though much attenuated from 
 their pristine intensity. They were a race of 
 intellectual giants, of whom New England may 
 well be proud, that led the thinking of our 
 churches from Jonathan Edwards to Professor 
 Park. Nor have we less reason to be proud of 
 the intellectual gifts and moral earnestness of that 
 other and protesting line sprung from the same 
 New England soil, in which Ghanning was the 
 protagonist. The types of thought which they 
 represented still shaped New England thinking 
 twenty-five years ago, and, in the churches of 
 our Congregational order, the ' ' New England 
 theology," as it was called, which had been 
 wrought out by the older and larger line, of 
 which mention has been made, still controlled 
 the average opinions of our pulpits. It was, in- 
 deed, suffering a process of attrition and disinte- 
 gration. The most adequate statement of the 
 theological position of our churches twenty-five 
 years ago is that contained in the ' ' Commission 
 Creed" issued at the close of i883, less than four 
 months before this pastorate began. It repre- 
 sented the best thought of our Congregational 
 churches at the time, and was approved by 
 twenty-two out of a committee of twenty-five 
 appointed by the National Council, and intended 
 
[5o] 
 
 to be as broadly representative as possible. Those 
 of the commission who dissented from this creed 
 dissented not by reason of the conservatism of its 
 statements, but because it seemed to them too 
 advanced. That creed is indeed a very different 
 statement of faith from what the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century would have produced among 
 us. It may well be doubted whether a Leonard 
 Woods or a Nathaniel W. Taylor would have 
 been at all satisfied with its indefinitenesses, and 
 especially with the absence from it of any of those 
 sharp Calvinistic conceptions characteristic of the 
 historical theology of New England. In many 
 respects it is true that the Commission Greed is 
 still an admirable statement of what is held 
 among us, but its general atmosphere is that of 
 an age which has passed away, at least in this 
 region, and one feels in reading it, not so much 
 through its particular statements as through the 
 general impression of the creed as a whole, that 
 one is breathing the air of an earlier theological 
 age. 
 
 The causes of the changes which the last 
 twenty-five years have witnessed in our theo- 
 logical thought have been general, not local. 
 They have not had their beginnings among us, 
 and we have been drawn into a movement already 
 far advanced in other lands, rather than have 
 been, in any considerable degree, initiators in its 
 progress. To a very considerable extent, New 
 
[5i] 
 
 England paid the cost of the great theological 
 development of the earlier epoch by what may 
 be called, not untruly, a provincialism of mind, 
 which made it only slowly susceptible to modifi- 
 cations that twenty-five years ago were already 
 far advanced in Germany and Great Britain. But 
 at the beginning of this pastorate the changes 
 were at hand, and the influences of conceptions 
 already far developed in other lands were about 
 to come in upon us as with a flood. 
 
 Fortunately the question which first brought to 
 general public consciousness among us the fact 
 that important changes were taking place in our 
 theological thinking was relatively one of unim- 
 portant significance. What ancient history the 
 Andover Controversy now seems, and how rela- 
 tively trivial, as compared with the changes that 
 have since taken place, appear the issues involved. 
 Yet how strenuous was the dispute from the ini- 
 tiation of the trial of Professor Egbert G. Smyth, 
 in 1886, to the dismissal of the case against him 
 by the Visitors of the Seminary in 1892. How 
 sharp was the controversy which turned meeting 
 after meeting of the American Board into theo- 
 logical battle-grounds, till terminated by the prac- 
 tical victory of those who sought a more liberal 
 basis of missionary appointment, at the meeting 
 of the Board, in Worcester, in 1893. Viewed 
 from the standpoint of the present, the question 
 in dispute, as it formulated itself in the popular 
 
[5a] 
 
 mind, seems a relatively remote and trivial spec- 
 ulation. A corollary itself of a theory of rela- 
 tionship of the development of character to the 
 historic Christ, it asserted cautiously, and rather 
 tentatively for the most part, the necessity of 
 some knowledge of His saving personality here- 
 after if not here, before a man's ultimate destiny 
 is fixed. As popularly interpreted, it implied 
 probation after death for those who had not in 
 this life an adequate knowledge of Christ. Yet 
 how great was the sound of the battle in our 
 churches, and how perilously near we were to 
 separation into two warring denominations, each 
 with their separate organs for missionary activity, 
 and each dividing yet further the strength of our 
 already far too much divided American Chris- 
 tianity. From this unhappy fate we were saved 
 by the Christian brotherliness of the contestants 
 on either side of the battle, and by the large de- 
 gree of charity and mutual tolerance which, in 
 spite of occasional signs of a contrary spirit, 
 marked its progress. So notably was this the 
 case, that I think that these episodes may be ac- 
 counted among the most honorable in the history 
 of our New England churches. They who then 
 struggled were men now very generally passed 
 from us to that larger knowledge and closer 
 fellowship of the heavenly kingdom. They are to 
 be held in reverence by us, who fought on either 
 side in this controversy, for, feeling keenly the 
 
[53] 
 
 issues involved, they yet placed Christian unity 
 above success by division, and retained confi- 
 dence in the Christian character of their opposing 
 brethren . 
 
 I have said that the issue brought directly be- 
 fore the public in the controversy regarding 
 teaching in Andover Seminary, and missionary 
 appointments by the American Board, was, in 
 itself, a discussion of a relatively unimportant 
 point of speculation. But the conservatives in 
 that struggle, though not conscious of the further 
 issues involved, which then lay behind the veil of 
 the future, were right in their feeling that these 
 innovations must be opposed if the older fabric 
 of New England thinking was to stand. The 
 tolerance achieved for the more radical wing in 
 the controversy was the opening of the door for 
 the incoming of much more important, significant, 
 and wide-reaching theological changes which have 
 since gone rapidly forward among our churches, 
 practically without opposition. We purchased 
 our present freedom at small cost compared with 
 that which some of the Christian churches of our 
 land are having to pay. 
 
 One such momentous change that has come 
 into the apprehension of our churches in this re- 
 cent period is the practical obliteration of that 
 line once so sharply drawn between the natural 
 and the supernatural. God is recognized as in, 
 and of, His world, immanent in all its on-goings 
 
[54] 
 
 and development ; not simply as one sovereignly 
 efficient over it, as the creator over the creation 
 He has made. Urged by Dr. Bushnell among 
 us in a modified form, more than fifty years ago, 
 the full consequences of this removal of a line of 
 demarcation between two supposedly mutually 
 exclusive realms, have only recently been per- 
 ceived in our churches generally. 
 
 This great transformation, fostered as it has 
 been by the growth of an idealistic philosophy, 
 has undoubtedly its perils. If the old divine 
 transcendence was in danger of passing into De- 
 ism, Pantheism sometimes lurks near the divine 
 immanence. But no great point of view can be 
 free from the possibility of perversion, and be the 
 peril of Pantheism real or no, a wholly new view 
 of the relation of God to His world has silently 
 won its way among us. It may well be ques- 
 tioned whether the most fundamental alteration 
 that has come over our thinking is not its change 
 in the conception of God. In place of a being 
 exalted high above a world separate from Him, 
 whose every act He yet arbitrarily controls, re- 
 vealed in miracle and theophany to ages long past ; 
 we have One in and of His world, in a true sense 
 its life, manifesting Himself in uniform law in 
 what we call the realm of nature, revealing His 
 moral purpose through man, who is the best ex- 
 pression of His character, and above all in the 
 highest and holiest of men, Our Lord Jesus 
 
[55] 
 
 Christ. What man is at his noblest and truest, 
 that must God be, and through what is best in man 
 is God most truly to be perceived. A Jonathan 
 Edwards scarcely raised the question whether the 
 acts of the divine being whose ways with men he 
 sought to explain were to be brought to the test 
 of moral judgment. They were the ways of God 
 as he read them in his interpretation of the 
 Scriptures. Even a quarter of a century ago the 
 question was asked but little among us. But to- 
 day no conception of Gods character which does 
 not justify itself by the test of what is highest in 
 man can be worthy of Him who has made us in 
 His image, and has best revealed Himself through 
 His human workmanship. 
 
 But the tendencies to a new interpretation of 
 the nature of God, which have been mentioned, 
 the present emphasis on His immanent self- 
 expression through humanity and the oblitera- 
 tion of the line between the natural and the 
 supernatural, have profoundly modified tradi- 
 tional conceptions of the person of Christ. The 
 controversies which raged in New England a 
 century ago, the results of which colored our 
 thinking till within the last quarter of a century, 
 are now seen to have been on both sides due to 
 inadequate perceptions of the character of the 
 person with which they had to do. Sharply 
 dividing the creator from the range of created 
 beings, Unitarianism insisted on Christ's classifi- 
 
[56] 
 
 cation on the created side of that separating gulf. 
 He was a man, or more than a man, the highest 
 even of angelic beings, but He was not and 
 could not be divine. The barrier that separated 
 the Godhead from the lower ranges of existence 
 was, to its thinking, forever impassable. Ortho- 
 dox New England conviction, on the other hand, 
 while insisting on a true humanity in Christ's 
 mysterious person, so emphasized the divine na- 
 ture in Him as practically to make that the more 
 important, and to place Him on the Godward 
 side of the divided universe in all the more 
 essential characteristics of His being. His divin- 
 ity was practically exalted at the expense of His 
 humanity, however fully His oneness with men 
 was theoretically asserted. But, in the altered 
 view which the last quarter of a century has 
 wrought among us, the ancient division of the 
 universe has vanished, and with it much of the 
 old demarcation between Unitarian and Ortho- 
 dox. Christ is seen to be not perfect God mys- 
 teriously joined with perfect man, but the perfect 
 revelation of God in all those divine attributes 
 which are capable of expression in a human life, 
 because the highest manifestation of a humanity 
 through which God has been forever revealing 
 Himself. In seeing Him we perceive both what 
 God is and man may be. His office is no less 
 unique, His character no less exalted, the rever- 
 ence which we pay Him no less profound, be- 
 
[5 7 ] 
 
 cause we have in Him humanity's crowning 
 manifestation, which is, just because it is such, 
 our most majestic revelation of the character of 
 God. A God who is not in moral nature what 
 Jesus is, is to us unthinkable ; a manhood which 
 does not see in Jesus the ideal to which it aspires 
 is a manhood that has never perceived the pattern 
 for which it was created. 
 
 No less significant is the transformation that 
 has come over our conception of the nature and 
 place of man. The older Galvinistic view of 
 man as wholly depraved and alienated from God 
 bv nature, powerful in our churches a century 
 ago, had indeed become much attenuated by the 
 beginning of the pastorate which we now honor. 
 None among us would then have asserted, as 
 Jonathan Edwards did, that "wicked men are 
 useful in their destruction only," or as was de- 
 clared in the early days of our great Missionary 
 Board to be a chief incentive to the propagation 
 of the Gospel, that the heathen were dropping 
 hopelessly into hell. A larger hope was even 
 then prevalent. But current Congregational be- 
 lief held that this life fixed the issues of character 
 forever, and, in spite of Bushnell's assertion of 
 Christian Nurture as the normal method of en- 
 trance on the Kingdom of God, widely looked 
 upon a radical "change of heart" as the essen- 
 tial transition from a status of "children of 
 wrath" to that of "sons of God." We owe 
 
[58] 
 
 something of our altered view to Charming' s 
 assertion of the dignity of human nature, and 
 more to the teaching of such leaders as Robertson 
 and Maurice that all men are sons of the Father, 
 needing the realization of their sonship that they 
 may take the filial part. But, most of all, we 
 owe to our changed conception of God Himself, 
 "who hateth nothing that He hath made," who 
 must reach forth with fatherly pity to all His 
 children, not to a chosen people or an elect few, 
 but to all to whom He has given life and made 
 in His image. Wofully defaced that image often 
 is. Rebellious and astray those sons often are. 
 Needing the divine forgiveness, the cleansing only 
 God can give, the utmost grace He can bestow, 
 they yet are sons, whom the Father seeks to 
 draw to the Father's house. If any stay forever 
 outside the Father's home, the cause must be in 
 their resistance to His call, not in any failure on 
 His part to seek, or any decree of omnipotence 
 that they shall be passed by, or any limitation of 
 His efforts for their redemption to the span of a 
 few years of earthly existence. We do not re- 
 gard men as needing the grace of God less than 
 those who went before us did ; but we trust that 
 we comprehend the divine attitude toward and 
 estimate of men better than they. A humanity 
 that is always the object of God's fatherly solici- 
 tude, that in its noblest expressions is a revelation 
 of the character of God Himself, and in its wid- 
 
[5 9 ] 
 est estrangements is not beyond His outreaching 
 love, is of infinite dignity and worth, if not for 
 what it often is, at least for what by His grace it 
 may become. 
 
 No less striking has been the change which has 
 taken place in our New England Congregational 
 churches during the period under consideration 
 regarding the Bible. Here, too, the transforma- 
 tion has been nothing peculiar to this region. 
 It is but a part of a general world-movement 
 in scholarship. Twenty-five years ago the old 
 plenary theory of exact verbal inspiration was, 
 indeed, largely gone, though the speaker remem- 
 bers being taught in the theological seminary, at 
 a time well subsequent to the beginning of the 
 pastorate to-day commemorated, the literal accu- 
 racy of the ages of antediluvian patriarchs as 
 given in the early chapters of Genesis. But the 
 general attitude toward the Bible was then vastly 
 unlike that at present. The results of the patient 
 investigation which we call the higher criticism, 
 first of the Old and later of the New Testament 
 have won their way till they have become part of 
 the mental furnishing not merely of our ministry 
 but of a large portion of our laymen. We see 
 in the Bible the record of the highest religious 
 experience of the race ; written at most various 
 times, and under widely differing conditions of 
 culture, by men of anything but uniform clear- 
 ness of spiritual discernment, — a literature of 
 
[6o] 
 
 religion, not a simple book. We hold it price- 
 less because it gives to us the life of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and the impression which He made 
 on the early disciples. That wonderful picture 
 comes to us not by the medium of historians 
 miraculously kept from error, but as every other 
 great historical portrait is given to us, by the pens 
 of men who strove to hand down what they 
 deemed of value to themselves or of service to 
 their times. Errors in detail, individuality of 
 emphasis we readily admit ; but nowhere else 
 can we go for the knowledge of the noblest life 
 humanity has witnessed, and the certainly assured 
 story is amply sufficient for acquaintance with 
 that life in its essential character. Nor do we 
 now deem it a disadvantage that prophets and 
 apostles seem to us far less mysterious vehicles 
 of a peculiar inspiration than they did to our 
 predecessors, and appear much more those who 
 have drunk deeply of the great spiritual springs 
 which are in some measure available for all. 
 The Bible speaks to experience and life as never 
 before ; but the change in attitude towards it 
 which a quarter of a century has wrought is as 
 great as it is widely extended and apparently 
 permanent. 
 
 Quite as significant as the altered conception 
 of the Bible has been the change which this 
 epoch has wrought in the view of the nature of 
 that salvation which is the purpose of the Gospel. 
 
[6t] 
 
 We no longer regard it as a rescue of a select 
 body here and there gathered from a fallen hu- 
 manity. The development of individual charac- 
 ter, of personal allegiance and loyalty to Christ, 
 must always be a main purpose of the church, 
 but it is no longer, as it was, its exclusive pur- 
 pose. Nor can we view this world as merely a 
 place of trial and struggle, the miseries of which 
 are to be compensated by the joys of a hereafter 
 blessedness. The world itself is an object of 
 redemption. The prayer of the Christian is not 
 that he may escape from it as speedily as God 
 wills ; but that God's kingdom come and His will 
 be done " on earth as it is in heaven." It is no 
 unjust disparagement of the noble philanthropic 
 and reformatory efforts in operation twenty-five 
 years ago to recognize that the duty of the church 
 to labor for a redeemed social order in this pres- 
 ent world is now appreciated as was not then the 
 case. The salvation of the Gospel must be great 
 enough not merely to fit some men for heaven ; it 
 must make this world, what it is not now, a reign 
 of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. 
 The duty of the church to labor to right ancient 
 wrongs, to foster principles of justice in the re- 
 lations of man with man and class with class, to 
 further endeavors for social betterment, is now 
 recognized as it has never been before. 
 
 This recognition of the enlarged obligation of 
 the church toward men as a whole in the social 
 
[6 2 ] 
 
 organizations of the present, involving as it does 
 no small change in the conception of what is 
 salvation, has, for the time at least, put upon the 
 church a burden which its older ideals in this 
 respect have little fitted it to bear. No wonder 
 that the institutions of religion which have grown 
 up among us under the thought of salvation as 
 well-nigh exclusively the rescue of individuals 
 from a mass of fallen humanity, and their train- 
 ing for a heavenly citizenship hereafter, are 
 adapted only with strain and difficulty to the 
 work of social regeneration on any considerable 
 scale in the world of the present. The churches 
 feel the call in ever-increasing measure, but they 
 do not know where to begin or to what work 
 they can effectively lay their hands. Many of our 
 contemporaries, conscious, even though blindly, 
 that the church should be a leader in social re- 
 adjustment, criticise and condemn it as recreant 
 to its dutv, as designed for the service of the few 
 rather than of the many, and as to be superseded 
 by more modern agencies of human betterment. 
 Such criticism is largely unjust if it implies 
 lack of good-will in the church. The spirit of 
 wide-reaching service to humanity, in the better- 
 ment of the world in which we live, was never 
 more felt. The desire to do this Christlike work 
 was never more active or dominant in the church. 
 We may trust that an ever-increasing clearness 
 of vision as to the needs of the world may lead 
 
[63] 
 
 to a rapidly developing efficiency in service, so 
 that the maladjustments and inefficiencies of the 
 present may speedily be overcome, as the church 
 enters on its larger work. For the church alone 
 has those gifts of the Spirit to bestow without 
 which mere material betterment is but imperfect 
 gain, and which are of all good things the best 
 that may be offered to men. We want not 
 merely a more comfortable and a juster social 
 order ; we need to have it suffused with the spirit 
 of Christ, and this must be forever primarily the 
 work of the church. 
 
 The observer of changes in theology dur- 
 ing the period of this pastorate must have been 
 impressed with another fact, that these modifica- 
 tions of theologic interpretation have worked 
 powerfully to foster the spirit of comradeship 
 between the various flocks of our divided Chris- 
 tian heritage. Ecclesiastical barriers which were 
 still strong twenty-five years ago have marvel- 
 ously weakened. The lines of separation, once 
 deemed so vital, are crumbling before the new 
 sense of Christian brotherhood. We see the 
 relatively non-essential nature of much that 
 seemed of supreme importance to those who 
 went before us. Any large degree of unity or 
 even of federation between the far too multitudi- 
 nous ecclesiastical organizations of New England 
 is yet in the future ; but he who has appreciated 
 the changes in spirit one towards another be- 
 
[64] 
 
 tween Christians of different denominational 
 names, which the time of this pastorate has wit- 
 nessed, can but feel confident that a mutual 
 cooperation far exceeding what was once deemed 
 possible is soon to be ours. 
 
 Such a period as we have reviewed is evidently 
 one of transition; and, because so, one of trial 
 and perplexity for many. The process of theo- 
 logical readjustment is always a painful one. 
 For many, it is one of much more than pain. 
 To many during the last twenty-five years, to 
 many now, it seems as if the foundations were 
 being removed. Their faith and hope have been 
 sorely tried, even though they trust that "the 
 removing of those things that are shaken " may 
 be divinely intended ' ' that those things which 
 cannot be shaken may remain." It is impossible 
 not to sympathize profoundly with those who 
 are passing through this experience. There has 
 been not a little of what may be called theologi- 
 cal chaos in the last twenty-five years. More- 
 over, we have come to no completion of the 
 process of sifting and readjustment as yet. We 
 are still in the midst of its onward flow, even 
 if the main characteristics of the newer theologi- 
 cal structure among us may now be regarded as 
 approaching fixity. 
 
 That the perplexing period under review has 
 been so well passed, on the whole, is due to the 
 bold and courageous work of those who, feeling 
 
[65] 
 
 the old was slipping away, have dared to formu- 
 late our faith in altered form and in constructive 
 expression suited to our age. They have known 
 how to restate the verities which are abiding and 
 eternal in terms to which men can now assent, 
 and in presentations adapted to our modern 
 thought. When one surveys their work, the 
 impression is how relatively unimportant after 
 all have been the changes which have seemed to 
 us so great. The mighty essentials of Christian 
 discipleship, loyalty to Christ, filial love toward 
 God, brotherly helpfulness towards one's fellow- 
 men, the achievement of Christian character, the 
 blessedness of Christian service, stand forth in a 
 clearness never before surpassed. We are linked 
 in Christian experience, however we may be 
 sundered in doctrinal interpretation, with the 
 Christian discipleship of all the ages. 
 
 Conspicuous above all other personalities in 
 the constructive forces of New England in the 
 last quarter of a century has been he whom we 
 honor to-day. Our foremost preacher-theologian, 
 he has laid the foundations deep and builded true, 
 and he has thereby placed us immeasurably in his 
 debt. His philosophic insight, his theologic acu- 
 men, his confident faith, have won for him not 
 merely the admiration but the trust of multitudes 
 to whom he has spoken through the written page 
 in far wider circles than even those which he has 
 reached by the living voice. He has witnessed 
 
[66] 
 
 to the dignity of man as the interpreter of God 
 and nature, to the uniqueness of Christ as the 
 revelation of God in the terms of a human life, 
 to the universality of the divine fatherhood, and 
 to the tremendous realities of sin and redemption, 
 with a power and a persuasiveness that have made 
 him a pillar of strength in an age of theological 
 unrest and restatement such as has not been ex- 
 perienced since the Reformation. He has bade 
 us look on this world with a Christian optimism 
 that it may be made the Kingdom of God, and 
 on the next with a confident trust based on the 
 character of God Himself, and adding a glory and 
 a significance to this earthly life. He has made 
 faith easier, and hope more confident, and God 
 more real to many. You of this church of his 
 immediate pastorate may well endeavor on this 
 memorable anniversary to convey to him some 
 sense of the reverence in which you hold him as 
 a preacher and a pastor ; but the honor due him 
 would be incomplete were we of the larger New 
 England not also to express to him, however im- 
 perfectly, our gratitude for his services as a Chris- 
 tian seer and as our chief of living theologians. 
 May the work so nobly carried for- 
 ward for the last quarter of a 
 century be granted many 
 a year of increasing 
 usefulness. 
 
THE MAN FOR THE PULPIT 
 OF TO-DAY 
 
MR. HARDY, in introducing Prof. Daniel Evans, 
 D.D., ofAndover Theological Seminary, who spoke on 
 " The Man for the Pulpit of To-day," referred to 
 Dr. Gordons reputation among clergy and laity alike 
 as one whose ministry was conspicuous for its relation 
 to contemporary life. 
 
PROFESSOR EVANS' ADDRESS 
 
 T 
 
 HERE is a new appreciation at the present 
 time of the significance and the worth of 
 man everywhere. The philosopher is be- 
 ginning to realize that the most significant thing 
 of this universe is personality. Great as the 
 flaming star may be, it is not as great as the en- 
 kindling mind of man, and marvelous as may be 
 the mechanism of this vast universe, it is not as 
 marvelous as the heart of man. And great as 
 may be the light that flashes from the sky, it 
 is not as great as the light that flashes from the 
 conscience of man. There has been a practical 
 recognition of the worth of man parallel to this 
 philosophical appreciation. We are beginning 
 to discover that man is of great worth indeed ; 
 that he is the most important factor in our whole 
 civilization ; that back of the machine there must 
 be a mind, and that the whole machinery of 
 civilization exists for the welfare of man. His 
 character and condition at any age become the 
 standard and test of the character of that civiliza- 
 tion. We know full well, for example, that at 
 the present time the most important fact in our 
 democracy is not the machinery of government, 
 
[?o] 
 
 but it is the man who is ruling ; that the most 
 important fact of our education is not the educa- 
 tional system, nor our great buildings, but it is 
 the living man who is there teaching or there 
 guiding and ruling. It is not strange, there- 
 fore, that in religion the same truth should be 
 recognized, and at the present time we are be- 
 ginning to discover, however great may be the 
 machinery of the church, the church cannot do 
 its work by any machinery, but must do it by 
 the human personality that is behind it and work- 
 ing through it. 
 
 At the present time there is much depreciation 
 of the minister as an ecclesiastic official of re- 
 ligion ; he does not have the same high place 
 that he once had ; his words do not have au- 
 thority — merely because it is a minister who is 
 speaking the words : but at the same time there 
 has been a deepening recognition by the people 
 of the man in the pulpit. Indeed, it is the man 
 in the pulpit who has always had this great 
 power. It is through man that God has spoken 
 his great truth and has imparted his great love to 
 the world ; and you can trace the flaming course 
 of the revelation of God and the upward move- 
 ment of civilization by seeing the course that the 
 procession and succession of the great prophets 
 of God have taken through the ages from the 
 time that man turned his face towards God, con- 
 quered by the vision of the Eternal, to our own 
 
[7«] 
 
 time and generation. Here in New England the 
 churches have been very fortunate in having 
 striking personalities in the pulpits. We conjure 
 up before our imagination, for example, such a 
 mighty thinker and great mystic as Jonathan 
 Edwards, such men as Emmons, Bushnell, 
 Beecher, Ghanning, Parker, and Brooks. And 
 in this great and noble procession and succession 
 is the pastor of this historic church. 
 
 In order to have the pulpit become a power in 
 the community, the church must try to secure a 
 succession of large personalities. I remark that 
 the first quality or element of the man in the 
 pulpit at the present time must be his profound 
 humanity. He must be a man of deep and wide 
 sympathy. He must be profoundly interested in 
 human life. His soul must go out to human 
 beings who are round about him. He must have 
 respect for the people to whom he is preaching ; 
 he must enter into their hearts and understand 
 their lives. The great facts about human life 
 must become the dominant conceptions and great 
 ideals of his own soul. Birth, with all its mys- 
 tery ; childhood, without a cloud in its sky ; 
 youth, smitten by the beauty of the ideal ; strong 
 men and women, upon whose shoulders are the 
 heavy responsibilities and tasks of life; and the 
 old man coming near to the end of his career, 
 with the light of God streaming out from the 
 Eternal world upon him, — all these must become 
 
[72] 
 the great and glorious thoughts and ideals and 
 interests of his own life. 
 
 When I think of the demands that are made 
 upon the minister, the life he has to live, I am 
 profoundly impressed by the fact that he also 
 needs sanity. There are so many currents of 
 thought which are constantly changing : the 
 passion to do good starts so many strange move- 
 ments ; the ambition to make one's church pop- 
 ular makes a man have recourse to unholy 
 experiments ; the effort to crowd one's church 
 by popular methods often endangers a man's hold 
 upon the eternities ; the critical moral situation 
 in which many a man finds himself makes him 
 realize that the one great quality which he must 
 have is sanity. 
 
 No true man in the ministry ever goes very 
 long without thinking seriously about the temp- 
 tations that come to him. There is a strain and 
 sometimes a great moral overstrain. Not com- 
 mon, vulgar temptations of life, but subtler 
 temptations of the spirit come to the man in the 
 ministry. One of the noblest men in the min- 
 istry has said that there ought to be a new peti- 
 tion added to the Litany : ' ' From the ' clerical 
 mind,' Good Lord, deliver us ! ' Now the 
 "clerical mind'' is a mind concerned primarily 
 with the uses of its ideas ; it does not take into 
 account the reality of its ideas ; it is concerned 
 not with the moral worth of impression that it 
 
[73] 
 
 may make nor the moral means it may use for 
 the making of the impression ; it is so concerned 
 about making a point that often it does not care 
 whether it tells the truth ! It is so concerned 
 about the things which are traditional that it does 
 not go back to the everlasting realities which 
 were the moving principles in the minds of the 
 men who gave us their imperfect understanding 
 of them. Intellectual Jesuitism, moral senti- 
 mentalism, and spiritual unreality are the vices 
 of the clerical mind. It was in view of this fact 
 that Bushnell said a man ought to have a talent 
 of conscience for the ministry and ought to have 
 an astronomical conscience, true and steady in 
 its movement in the great orbit, like the stars in 
 the heavens. It is because there has been a man 
 here with a talent of conscience, with an astro- 
 nomical conscience that he and you have been 
 delivered from the "clerical mind." He has 
 hated a lie and loved the truth ; despised senti- 
 mentalism and appreciated sentiment ; he has 
 had light for the man who is perplexed, enlight- 
 enment for the man who is perverted ; and so he 
 has been, as your Chairman says, the man who 
 has spoken to the conscience. 
 
 Another element which the man of the pulpit 
 for to-day needs — strange that I should say it — 
 is to be profoundly religious. Time was when a 
 man could be a minister, whether he was reli- 
 gious or not ; his official position made him the 
 
[7M 
 
 minister. It gave him a strange relationship 
 with God ; he had a private privilege with the 
 Eternal ; but intelligent men, whose consciences 
 are developed and whose souls are sensitive, 
 know perfectly well that as democracy has robbed 
 the king of his divine right, so democracy has 
 robbed the priest of his mitre. And every soul, 
 however humble and obscure its place, has as 
 much divine right with God as the man who holds 
 the highest ecclesiastical position in the world. 
 
 The man who enters the ministry at the pres- 
 ent time must have intellectual greatness and 
 courage. We are living in a new-thought world ; 
 it is infinite in extent, eternal in duration, uni- 
 versal in its law ; abiding ; it is moving out from 
 God, sustained by God and constantly coming 
 nearer to the goal that he has set for it. A paro- 
 chial mind in a modern pulpit when the intelli- 
 gent men of the audience are at home in the 
 universe, is in the wrong place. There are two 
 kinds of minds : minds that are like the fowls of 
 the backyard, whose wings are now of no use 
 and whose only environment is the enclosed place 
 where they move back and forth ; which they 
 think is a big world. There is another type 
 of mind; it is the eagle type, that has as its en- 
 vironment the infinite sky above it and makes 
 its nest upon the craggy peaks, catching the first 
 light of the sun in the morning and receiving the 
 last light at night in its eyes to thrill its heart. 
 
[75] 
 
 So there are parochial minds that are concerned 
 about small things, and there are the eagle type 
 of minds that soar in the great eternal realm. 
 The mind of the man in this pulpit is the com- 
 panion of suns and moons and stars : going 
 through the great realms of truth, having a 
 grasp upon the things which are spiritual and 
 eternal, thinking nothing of wiping off from the 
 slate, as the boy does in school, eons of time, 
 solar systems, the whole shining universe, to get 
 back at the original and aboriginal ground of all 
 being, all thought, and all love. 
 
 It is not surprising, therefore, that there has 
 been a great influence from this pulpit. The man 
 in it has done a great deal to maintain the dignity 
 and honor of the ministry. It is the first duty of 
 every man in any profession to be true to his own 
 profession ; to maintain its obligations, to keep 
 its honor and see that it shall not be degraded. 
 Dr. Gordon has done a great deal to maintain 
 the dignity of the pulpit at a time when people 
 put a decreasing value upon the power of the 
 pulpit, and when rival agencies, outside the 
 church, have become substitutes for a large num- 
 ber of people ; when persons in the pulpit itself 
 have given themselves up to doing the ' ' small 
 work" of the church, some of them going into 
 the ' ' millinery " business. It is a great thing to 
 have a pulpit that stands for the function of 
 teaching and of keeping men face to face with 
 
[76] 
 God at a time when the tendency has been to 
 depreciate the value and the power of the church. 
 
 It is because the pastor of this church has had 
 deep sympathies and wide, that the people have 
 gathered here in such large numbers to-night, and 
 that it is so easy to detect ministers as we look 
 over the assembly. It is because the young min- 
 isters especially have felt that in the pastor of 
 this church they have a big brother to whom they 
 can go for advice and counsel, to whom they 
 can go for inspiration and direction, that we 
 delight to honor him as we do this night. The 
 reason is because he is a lover of humanity ; he 
 does not despise nor condemn the great mass of 
 human beings, but looks upon them with com- 
 passion. He has not forgotten the quarry out 
 of which he was hewn, nor the hole of the pit 
 whence he was digged. There is a song often 
 on his lips, because it goes singing in his heart 
 always, the song of his countrymen — "A Man 's 
 a Man, for a' That ! 
 
 The man in this pulpit has had the Greek 
 virtue of temperance : the mind is central over 
 all the passions and all the powers of the body 
 and of the soul and the will, with its grip upon 
 the rudder, keeping his ship from going on the 
 rocks and ready to breast each successive wave 
 that comes. And the reason why the men who 
 serve the ideal interests of the community have 
 confidence in him is because he has not been 
 
[77] 
 driven by the storm, nor has he drifted with the 
 currents, but has kept his boat directed toward 
 the distant haven before him. 
 
 The passion of the man who preaches in this 
 pulpit is for God ! The only vision he craves is 
 the vision of God — the vision of the mind that 
 is Infinite for the good of his own intellect; the 
 vision of the Eternal heart for the peace of his 
 own heart ; the vision of the power of God for 
 the strength of his own will ; the vision of the 
 absolute righteousness of the Eternal for the 
 everlasting conservation of all the dear, human 
 interests that he cherishes : and that is the secret 
 of his growing serenity and his deepening power 
 and peace as he ministers to you year after 
 year. If the time was when men felt they 
 could not live if they saw God, 
 the time has come when 
 men cannot live un- 
 less they see 
 God. 
 
THE PURITAN CHURCH AND THE 
 PURITAN COLLEGE 
 
MR. HARDY, in introducing President Eliot of 
 Harvard University, who spoke on ' ' The Puritan 
 Church and the Puritan College," referred to Presi- 
 dent Eliot s relation to the committee, which, acting 
 for the church, recommended Dr. Gordon as pastor. 
 " President Eliot," he said, "did early mention Dr. 
 Gordon's name to a member of that committee. The 
 committee investigated for themselves. The Old South 
 Church welcomes the presence of President Eliot here, 
 to-night, for his own sake, and because of his long 
 friendship with Dr. Gordon." 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADDRESS 
 
 THE subject assigned to me to-night is " The 
 Puritan Church and the Puritan College." 
 I want to read as a text the inscription which 
 stands on the gate of Harvard College. It is an 
 extract from a little book entitled, "First Fruits 
 of New England." I read this in order to show 
 what the Puritan College did for the Puritan 
 Church. 
 
 44 After God had carried us safe to New England, 
 and we had builded our houses, and provided neces- 
 saries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for 
 God's worship, and settled the civil government ; one 
 of the next things we longed for and looked after was 
 to advance learning and to perpetuate it to posterity ; 
 dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches 
 when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." 
 
 Observe the order of these provisions. The order 
 is very sane, to use one of Dr. Evans' words. 
 The first thing they did was to build their houses, 
 the shelter from the fierce New England climate. 
 Next, they provided the necessaries for their live- 
 lihood ; like prudent men, thoughtful men, they 
 provided for the livelihood of their families. 
 
[8a] 
 
 Then, they reared convenient places for God's 
 worship ; they built meeting-houses for the Puri- 
 tan people to worship in. And, fourthly, they 
 settled the civil government. Conceive what that 
 meant in the year i63o! Remember what was 
 going on in England at that time I Remember 
 what was going on in France under the mon- 
 archy ! Study the comparative legislation in 
 different nations at that period, and then you will 
 wonder at the achievement of that little group of 
 English colonists. They settled the civil govern- 
 ment. And then they took thought for the col- 
 lege — the Puritan College which was to breed a 
 ministry for the churches worthy to succeed the 
 educated ministers who came from England with 
 the colony. Now that is what the Puritan Col- 
 lege did for the Puritan churches for centuries. 
 The Puritan College provided the educated min- 
 isters for two hundred years : but what prodigious 
 changes went on in those two hundred years! 
 Come down to i836, and how the sentiments of 
 the community had changed ! How the govern- 
 ment itself had changed, settled though they 
 thought it to be in i636 ! How human knowl- 
 edge had developed ! The Puritan College was 
 a very different thing two centuries after the foun- 
 dation of this settled government in New England. 
 The Puritan College had taken to itself a great 
 mass of various knowledges altogether new in the 
 world since the Puritan churches had been estab- 
 
[83] 
 
 lished in New England. The world — the civil- 
 ized world — had learnt the most important 
 lesson it has ever learnt, namely, toleration in 
 religion. 
 
 Let me remind you that it is scarcely more 
 than seventy years since a mob went out from 
 this town of Boston and burnt a Catholic Convent 
 in Charlestown in the middle of the night. Let 
 me remind you that the relations between the 
 Catholic Irish and the Protestant Americans in 
 Boston were so fierce, only about seventy years 
 ago, that a mob engaged in the sacking of Irish 
 tenements in Broad street of a Sunday afternoon, 
 the occasion being the breaking through an Irish 
 funeral by an American fire company. I say 
 that this Puritan community had learnt, when the 
 nineteenth century was half over, the immense 
 lesson of religious toleration. The Puritan Col- 
 lege had learnt another thing, — the most impor- 
 tant lesson as to the discovery of truth that the 
 human race has thus far learnt, — it had learnt 
 the way to truth. I wonder if many persons in 
 this congregation ever heard the delightful story 
 that President Pritchett used to tell to the young 
 men entering the Institute of Technology at the 
 beginning of the year. He told how he was once 
 going over the Gemmi pass, one of the most 
 beautiful and striking passes in Switzerland ; it 
 goes up from Leukerbad, and descends on the 
 other side to a village called Kandersteg. Dr. 
 
[84] 
 
 Pritchett was mounting this pass on foot, and 
 alone. He got to the head of the pass, where to 
 his surprise the way forked, and he did not know 
 which path to take. To a Swiss boy coming by 
 Dr. Pritchett said, "My boy, where is Kander- 
 steg?" "I do not know, sir," said the boy ; "I 
 never was there, but that is the way to it!" 
 That is what the human race has learnt concern- 
 ing truth ; it knows the way to it. It has learnt 
 the patient process of accumulating facts, of draw- 
 ing just inferences from facts, of making an ex- 
 act record of facts, of grouping them, and at last 
 arriving at a generalization or a law. That is the 
 great scientific discovery of the modern world. 
 And the Puritan College had learnt that great 
 lesson — the way to truth, and like that Swiss 
 boy, it had to say, " I do not know where the 
 truth is; I never was there." And it could add, 
 ' ' I shall never get there, but I know the way to 
 truth." 
 
 It was in this way that the Puritan College 
 was still prepared to serve the Puritan Church. 
 It was prepared to be absolutely tolerant and 
 free ; it was prepared to apply to religious and 
 theological truth, to the discovery of it, the same 
 method that it used in the discovery of other 
 kinds of truth, — bit by bit, a step at a time, 
 always advancing toward the truth, never arriv- 
 ing at it, and never expecting to arrive at the 
 whole of it ; looking forward with delight to the 
 
[85] 
 
 perpetual search, the joy of its soul lying in the 
 search. 
 
 I one day received a visit from an old Congre- 
 gational minister, who wished to ask me how 
 the intellectual development of a young man in 
 his employ could be furthered, could be carried 
 on beyond the stage which he had already reached ; 
 and the old man described to me the history of 
 this youth, — what he had learnt, and what he 
 had not learnt, and asked me how that youth 
 could be furthered toward the ministry to which 
 he aspired. I gave such advice as I could, but 
 lost sight of the old minister, and had never seen 
 the youth. A few years afterward I received 
 another call from the same old minister, who 
 told me that George Gordon had been through 
 the Bangor Theological Seminary, and that in that 
 seminary it was not necessary to know any Greek, 
 and indeed that the course of instruction, though 
 sincere and pious, was from the scholarly point 
 of view inadequate for an ambitious minister, 
 ambitious to know, ambitious to be able to teach. 
 Had the Puritan College anything it could offer 
 to a young man whose career was such as he 
 described ? And a little later the young man him- 
 self came to see me, and we discussed together 
 what the Puritan College had to offer to this 
 aspirant to the service of the Puritan Church. 
 
 Now, in two hundred and fifty years the Puri- 
 tan College had become wider and more liberal 
 
[86] 
 
 in its policies, and had greatly increased the range 
 of its instruction, and had opened this great range 
 more freely to ambitious youth. And so the 
 Puritan College was able to accept this young 
 man as a special student, although not as a regu- 
 lar student, because he could not have passed the 
 examinations for admission to the Puritan Col- 
 lege as a regular student, in spite of the fact 
 that he had been through the Bangor Theological 
 Seminary. 
 
 A couple of years passed, and I was astounded 
 one day in the meeting of the College Faculty 
 to have Professor Goodwin, Professor of Greek, 
 indeed the Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, 
 make a motion in the Faculty, the like of which 
 I had never heard. Professor Goodwin had great 
 distrust of special students ; he did not like them, 
 and he thought there should be no such students 
 in Harvard College ; yet his motion was this : 
 1 ' I move that George Gordon be admitted to the 
 Senior Class without examination. It is an out- 
 rage that such a student should be registered in 
 Harvard College as a special student. He has 
 received ioo per cent, in my most difficult course 
 in Greek, — the course in Aristotle." The mo- 
 tion took the Faculty by surprise, but they unani- 
 mously adopted the motion of Professor Goodwin, 
 and thereupon the Puritan College rendered a new 
 and very lasting service to the Puritan Church. 
 
 It was not long after that, on the most beautiful 
 
[§7] 
 evening that I remember ever to have seen, that 
 Mr. Alpheus Hardy and I were watching from 
 the deck of a steamer the entire western sky suf- 
 fused with most brilliant reds and yellows. We 
 were silent in the face of this gorgeous spectacle. 
 But at last it faded away, and then Mr. Hardy 
 told me that the Old South Church should shortly 
 elect a new minister : did I know anybody that 
 was suitable for that church? I said I did, a 
 young man named George Gordon, and that he 
 was then preaching in Greenwich, Connecticut. 
 I advised that a committee of the Old South 
 Church visit Greenwich and hear Mr. Gordon 
 preach. That was the simple suggestion which 
 I offered to Mr. Hardy. However, the Puritan 
 College then rendered another service of a very 
 lasting quality to the Puritan Church. 
 
 Years went by before the Old South Church 
 could induce Mr. Gordon to accept its call, and 
 during that period of doubt and hesitation I had 
 repeated interviews with Mr. Hardy and with Mr. 
 Gordon, and I trust that in those interviews I 
 furthered the interests of the Puritan Church. 
 
 Now what did the Puritan College do for this 
 young Scotchman, son of a farmer, ambitious, 
 open-minded, keen in the pursuit of knowledge, 
 full of natural piety ? If we can answer that 
 question we shall learn again what the Puritan 
 College has been able to do for the Puritan 
 Church. 
 
[88] 
 
 In the first place, it gave this young man an 
 acquaintance with what great men have thought, 
 and done, and hoped for, and aspired to through 
 long ages. It is a great thing for a church that its 
 minister knows as a scholar the ' ' stream of the 
 world," as Goethe called it. It is a great thing 
 for a church that its minister has learnt by study, 
 by intercourse with great minds, by filling his 
 own mind with the story of great epochs, how 
 infinitely precious a thing is freedom of thought, 
 what noble elements in human character are can- 
 dor, sincerity, and the eager, earnest love of truth. 
 Those things the Puritan College was able to set 
 before the young Gordon. 
 
 And then the Puritan College, true to the 
 spirit of its founders, was able to develop 
 a natural feeling of this youth, his sympathy 
 with democracy. I suppose this congregation is 
 aware that Dr. Gordon knows by heart the poet 
 Burns. Therein — in that poetry is expressed 
 the perfect spirit of democracy. And that 
 quality in your minister has been of infinite 
 worth to this church, and to the community in 
 which this church is set. That is a great quality 
 of the Puritan College, never truer than to-day 
 to this love of humanity, this belief in humanity, 
 this hope for humanity. Indeed, the Puritan 
 College has greatly served the Puritan Church 
 through this man. 
 
 And now let us think for a moment of the 
 
t§9] 
 
 reward which your pastor has earned and now 
 enjoys, the reward for all his labors and trials, 
 and for all his varied efforts to serve this people 
 and this city. He has the greatest reward any 
 teacher can have. A teacher he has been. 
 What is that reward? The making of disciples. 
 They may be few, they may be many ; the influ- 
 ential disciples may be few, but few are enough to 
 constitute a great reward. Disciples — men who 
 carry forward the work of the teacher, and better 
 it as time goes on ; the more it is bettered, the 
 greater the reward. This body of disciples, 
 formed here, is by no means confined to the min- 
 istry of the Congregational churches, or of all 
 the churches put together. Dr. Gordon has dis- 
 ciples among business men, professional men, and 
 I am inclined to believe that these disciples can do 
 more to advance and perpetuate his work than 
 the ministers can, much as they can do. The 
 best teaching of this age is done through the 
 practice of the men who conduct great industries 
 humanely ; through the practice of the men who 
 organize honest and efficient governments, 
 national, state, municipal. It is done, in short, 
 by the men who are at work out in the world 
 to better human conditions, to bring society for- 
 ward towards democratic ideals, to advance the 
 human race towards greater happiness and a 
 better life. Many such disciples Dr. Gordon 
 has made, possesses, and enjoys ; and through 
 
[90] 
 them all his work will go forward in this com- 
 munity, and in this nation ; and it will go for- 
 ward without limit of time. The Puritan Church 
 through him will continue to exercise a wide 
 and precious influence in the American commu- 
 nity. He has been a great servant 
 of the Puritan Church : he 
 has been a great mas- 
 ter for many 
 disciples. 
 
INFORMAL RECEPTION 
 
 FOLLOWING the singing of Dr. Cross' hymn, 
 written especially for the occasion, ' ' Strong tower of 
 truth against the sky," and the benediction by the 
 Reverend John Hopkins Denison, minister of the Cen- 
 tral Church, an informal reception of the guests, by 
 Dr. and Mrs. Gordon, was held in the chapel. 
 
Burner gtoen bj> tfje ©lb feoutfj Club 
 at Hotel Somerset 
 
 Cfjc Jf tftecnttj of gpril, Nineteen 
 
 ^unbred and ilme 
 
HOSPITALITY 
 
MR. FRANK W. NO YES, THE PRESIDENT OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 CLUB, RESPONDED TO THE TOAST, " HOSPITALITY " 
 
MR. NOYES' RESPONSE 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen : 
 
 IT is the high privilege of this Club to-night to 
 provide the occasion for speaking words of 
 appreciation of the great work done by the 
 minister of the Old South Church. It is very 
 appropriate that to the Old South Club should 
 be left this duty, this privilege, because the mis- 
 sion of the pastor of this church has been to 
 inspire, enlighten, and guide young men. They 
 have looked for a man who should stand erect 
 and be a man ! — foursquare to every wind that 
 blows ; and they have found such a man in this 
 pulpit. The young men of this church and com- 
 munity have found in Dr. Gordon their guide 
 and their inspiration. 
 
 It is not my function to dwell at length upon 
 our pastor's service or character; but only to 
 extend a welcome, and introduce the Toastmaster 
 of the evening, the Honorable, and honored, John 
 W. Hammond, Justice of our Supreme Judicial 
 Court, who will preside. 
 
LAW AND GOSPEL 
 
HON. JOHN W. HAMMOND, JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT 
 
 OF MASSACHUSETTS, RESPONDED TO THE TOAST, 
 
 ' ' LAW AND GOSPEL " 
 
MR. JUSTICE HAMMONDS 
 RESPONSE 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen: 
 
 I DEFY anybody to go into Dr. Gordon's 
 church and sit down and not listen to him. 
 He compels attention. There is no chance 
 to get asleep. His preaching is very effective in 
 that way. But back of it all, gentlemen, we all 
 know that way down under all and back of all 
 lies the man of integrity and of Christian faith ! 
 Such a man may not agree with everybody's 
 views; but whether he agrees or not, the view 
 which he has is the one which he expresses. 
 
 There are a great many people in this world 
 that never know what people think of them. I 
 know many a man who thinks he is the pink of 
 virtue and truth, whose reputation for truth and 
 veracity is not good; but there comes a time 
 when a man finds out what people think of him. 
 He may be working slowly as the coral reefs are 
 growing, thinking only of the simple work he is 
 doing, and trying to do it as best he can ; if a 
 business man, clerking in a store, some day the 
 employer comes round and promotes him — 
 sometimes to his surprise; but that is the test 
 
[ I02 l 
 
 by which the young man knows that he is sat- 
 isfactory to his employer. Sometimes it is a 
 prominent and useful position in public life that 
 is vacant and a man is promoted to it ; sometimes 
 the appointment is unsolicited ; then he knows 
 whether he has been regarded as faithful in the 
 things which he has done. Sometimes, at the 
 end of twenty-five years, comes such a tremen- 
 dous outburst of enthusiasm and exhibition of 
 love as you have seen this week towards our 
 Pastor. These are not words — these are deeds! 
 and they indicate to him, better than anything 
 else can, the good results of his ministry. This 
 celebration, I believe, will lead Dr. Gordon 
 to go on all the farther and better. 
 He has reached the twenty- 
 fifth post : may he live 
 to reach the 
 fiftieth ! 
 
CHRISTIAN AMITY, A MESSAGE 
 FROM SISTER CHURCHES 
 
MR. JUSTICE HAMMOND INTRODUCED THE REVEREND JAMES 
 DE NORMANDIE, D.D., AS FOLLOWS : IT IS MY DUTY TO 
 INTRODUCE TO YOU A GENTLEMAN WHOM YOU ALL KNOW 
 TO BE A BROAD-MINDED, CHRISTIAN MAN, AND IT IS MY 
 PLEASURE TO INTRODUCE TO YOU REV. DR. DE NOR- 
 MANDIE, WHO WILL SPEAK ON " CHRISTIAN AMITY, A 
 MESSAGE FROM SISTER CHURCHES" 
 
DR. DE NORMANDIES RESPONSE 
 
 Mr. President, Members of this Ancient Historic Church, Invited 
 Guests, Ladies, and Doctor Gordon : 
 
 IT is rather a weighty responsibility you have 
 placed upon me to speak for all the churches 
 of Boston. If it were a matter of theology 
 purely, of the declaration of those things which 
 are surely believed among us, it might be that 
 not every one would quite agree with my views. 
 But it is not a question of theology, but of re- 
 ligion ; of the warm, frank, earnest feeling that 
 we have toward this preacher of righteousness, 
 this preacher of a pure and undenled religion, 
 the preacher of a broad religion which underlies 
 and overtops all narrow or outgrown doctrines ; 
 for it is theology which separates us, and religion 
 which binds us together. It is theology which 
 makes the divisions and discords ; it is religion 
 which brings harmony and peace. And I am 
 quite confident that in these words to this preacher 
 I bring the sincere welcome of every church in 
 Boston, of every church in Massachusetts, of 
 every church in New England, of every church in 
 this country or beyond the seas which has kept in 
 touch with his teachings for twenty-five years. 
 
[io6] 
 
 In our settlement over two of the oldest and 
 most distinguished churches in this country, Dr. 
 Gordon and myself are but a few months apart. 
 He had, as I recall, a little more difficult time in 
 passing the ordeal of his settlement than I had ; 
 but those differences are soon forgotten in these 
 days. He has referred recently, with a good deal 
 of emphasis, to some of the difficulties and trials 
 he had in the early years of his pastorate, and 
 that they were good for him. I am quite sure it 
 is always a good thing for a young man to have 
 something to struggle against, some opposition 
 to try his metal. 
 
 Dr. Gordon during these twenty-five years 
 has been leading us from doctrines pent up and 
 too close for the advancing study and truth of 
 man, on and on to the boundless ocean of diviner 
 truth ! Now perhaps he never could have done 
 this so well and so wisely if he had not been 
 nurtured in the awful strictness of the Scotch 
 kirk, and yet never since Burns, in his "Holy 
 Willie's Prayer," so fiercely attacked and almost 
 demolished the rigid Calvinism of his day has it 
 had a more powerful exposure than in Dr. Gor- 
 don's article on the ' ' Collapse of the New 
 England Theology," published in the Harvard 
 Theological Review. 
 
 The story is told of an eminent Scotch 
 preacher who asked one of his kirk what he 
 thought about the minister with whom he had 
 
[ I0 7] 
 just exchanged. "I did not like him," said the 
 clerk ; " I do not like these ministers who keep 
 holding up to us the Ten Commandments and 
 telling us to obey them : there are too many of 
 them — I never could keep more than the first 
 half of them! " But he continued, "What I 
 like best in preaching is that kind which jumbles 
 the judgment and confounds the senses, and 
 for the like of that, Doctor, I never heard any 
 preaching equal to yours !" There have been a 
 great many persons who have come to like that 
 kind of preaching, for it is rather the mark of a 
 distinguished theologian. They think he is 
 sound ; sometimes it proves to be unsound, — 
 but you have nothing of that in your preacher, 
 and when you add to the strength of his philo- 
 sophical statement a great clearness and simplic- 
 ity in practical bearing, a broad humanity, a 
 deep sympathy and touch of pathos, and poetry 
 the sentiment of religion, — you have 
 found the secret of the ministry 
 which is irresistible, per- 
 vasive, enduring, 
 uplifting. 
 
LITERATURE AND RELIGION 
 
MR. BLISS PERRY, EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, 
 
 RESPONDED TO THE TOAST, "LITERATURE AND 
 
 RELIGION " 
 
MR. PERRY'S RESPONSE 
 
 Mr. Toastmaster, Gentlemen, Friends of Doctor Gordon: 
 
 I HAVE been asked to say a word about ' ' Re- 
 ligion and Literature." A light and passing 
 ten-minute topic ! 
 We are accustomed to say of religion that it is 
 • ' the life of God in the soul of man. " Literature 
 is the life and soul of man expressed in words. 
 Words are poor things. One never realizes 
 more their poverty than when he tries to place 
 them at the service of friendship. And yet 
 words are wonderful things, because they are 
 colored with the thoughts, the experiences, the 
 dreams and desires of men. We have outgrown 
 that old distinction between sacred and profane 
 literature, sacred and profane history. We have 
 learned that there is not and that there are not 
 two laws for the progress of the world. There 
 is but one law ; and yet if it is ever right to use 
 that word sacred for anything save the living soul, 
 we have a right to apply it to those books 
 wherein men have written the record of their 
 search after God. 
 
 This sacred literature was long, as you know, 
 the chief study of the educated clergy of New 
 
[»»] 
 
 England. From the beginning the wisest of 
 them have always maintained that new light is 
 still to break forth from the word of God. 
 Their theories of inspiration have changed with 
 their theology, with the development of historical 
 criticism, with a wider knowledge of the litera- 
 tures of the world. But they have always held 
 steadily to the fact of inspiration — that it is life, 
 and life only, that can kindle life. Trained by 
 this contact with the noblest literature, they have 
 also searched the records of the human heart. 
 They have sometimes made of its dark secrets a 
 too painful analysis, a too morbid Christianity ; 
 they have declared with Browning's hero, that 
 ' ' priests should study passion ; how else cure 
 mankind . . . who come for help in passionate 
 extremes?" They have searched the memorials 
 of human society, and they have found in Baby- 
 lonian clay, Egyptian papyrus, and Greek and 
 Roman parchment and marble corroborative 
 testimony to the will of God seen in history 
 and literature. Our clergymen of New England 
 have chiefly served their generation by preaching. 
 It is a preacher whom we honor to-night, a 
 master of assemblies. I know and you know 
 that Dr. Gordon has written many books ; they 
 are masculine, progressive, reverent discussions 
 of the greatest themes ; they touch on the larger 
 problems of philosophy, history, and poetry ; 
 they are beautiful in workmanship, they are 
 
[ii3] 
 
 magnetic, helpful, human ; you will find a good 
 deal of George Gordon in them when you read 
 them ; you will hear again, back of the phrases, 
 that rich, friendly voice ; you will see rising 
 before you again that noble, bodily presence! 
 
 His chief tool in these twenty-five years of ser- 
 vice to our community has been the spoken word. 
 It has been his task to bring home to the individ- 
 ual conscience the truth as he saw it with all the 
 magnificent resources of the living man. You, 
 who have had the happiness of listening often to 
 him, will not be likely to underestimate that power 
 of the spoken word. Men of letters very often 
 forget it, and yet the audible word still conveys 
 to millions of our fellow-men all that they ever 
 know of literature. He "who spake as never 
 man spake," with flashing imagery and tender 
 beauty, with poetry and satire and hyperbole un- 
 rivaled, never — so far as we know — wrote a 
 line. And to-day the ministers, who, following 
 their Master's example, are content to preach the 
 good tidings of the kingdom of God, find that the 
 common people, who are no mean judges of lit- 
 erature, always hear them gladly. We laymen 
 sometimes confess our dislike of popular preach- 
 ing. What we dislike, I take it, is listening to 
 cheap sociology, amateur political economy, frock- 
 coated melodrama in the pulpit. 
 
 That Dr. Gordon has held this great and in- 
 creasing audience for twenty-five years is a testi- 
 
[»4] 
 
 mony, not only to the earnestness, the power, and 
 devoutness of his utterance ; it is also an evidence 
 of the literary excellence of that utterance. They 
 have been years of labor, incessant, wearying. 
 He has a right to reply as did John Wesley when 
 a woman came — as she said — with a message 
 from the Lord, that he was laying up treasures 
 on earth, taking his ease and minding only his 
 eating and drinking. "I told her," says Wesley, 
 in his diary, " I told her that God knew me bet- 
 ter, and that if he had sent her he would have 
 sent her with a more proper message! " 
 
 Now, gentlemen, when this preaching of the 
 living word is ripened with knowledge, and en- 
 riched by many-sided contact with affairs, and 
 mellowed with compassion for humanity, it pos- 
 sesses the qualities which give literature its per- 
 manence. Literature is an expression of the 
 whole life of man ; and religion is an integral 
 part of our human experience. The writers who 
 affect to ignore it, as so many writers appear to 
 ignore it nowadays, are trying to play upon a 
 harp with muted strings. If you say, as George 
 Eliot did once, that God is inconceivable, immor- 
 tality unbelievable, whatever else you are doing 
 you are just so far sentencing literature to silence, 
 because it is precisely on the topics of God and 
 immortality that literature has thus far spoken 
 with her noblest voice. Dr. George Gordon has 
 long listened to those voices. His own literary 
 
[i.5] 
 
 style, so clean cut, so athletic, so rich with humor 
 
 and pathos, has been formed by reverent intimacy 
 
 with the masters of thought and verse. We love 
 
 to see him turn to Plato and St. Paul, to Burns 
 
 and Browning, with the happy freedom of old 
 
 companionship ; he quotes like a gentleman — 
 
 knowing that he will be quoted also ! He has a 
 
 mind that is nourished on great thoughts, a soul 
 
 fed by deep emotions. He has proved once more 
 
 the truth of that gay-hearted old riddle 
 
 of long ago, ' ' Out of the eater comes 
 
 forth meat, and out of the 
 
 strong comes forth 
 
 sweetness." 
 
THEOLOGY AND ETHICS 
 
PROFESSOR GEORGE H. PALMER, OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 
 RESPONDED TO THE TOAST, " THEOLOGY AND ETHICS " 
 
PROFESSOR PALMERS RESPONSE 
 
 Mr. Toastmaster, Members and Guests of the Old South Club: 
 
 indeed different from that which is assigned 
 
 me : it is the same thing — for it is " The 
 Reverend George A. Gordon ! " 
 
 I wanted to talk about him to-night, and to 
 talk about a special view of him ; for you people 
 of this Old South Church naturally enough imag- 
 ine you own this man — but you do not. It is 
 one of the glorious peculiarities of a great man 
 that he cannot be possessed by any single com- 
 pany, by any single institution : he belongs to 
 his community; he belongs to all thoughtful and 
 earnest men. We should not feel that this occa- 
 sion was properly organized were it not possible 
 for some representative of Harvard to appear here 
 and say that our great University is as truly the 
 debtor to your minister as are you, yourselves. 
 And, indeed, when I come to ask myself why it 
 is that you feel so deeply indebted to him, I see 
 that it is precisely for those reasons that we also 
 are. Analyze in your own minds what are his 
 fundamental characteristics which have so en- 
 
[ I2 °] 
 
 deared him to you. Are they not these? You 
 think of him as a scholar ; you think of him as 
 a preacher ; you think of him as a master of 
 men. 
 
 I remember just thirty years ago this year 
 when he first appeared in the College yard : a 
 hostile person he was at that time ! He had been 
 reading the papers, and from them he had learned 
 that Harvard University was a home of atheism ; 
 it was a place where noble and earnest characters 
 were broken down ; unhappily, also, it was the 
 only place in the country where the young man 
 could devote himself to Greek and to philosophy 
 without taking other studies. The two things 
 that he wanted to know then were the two things 
 that he has wanted to know ever since and on 
 which he has nourished himself — Greek litera- 
 ture and philosophy. He was obliged therefore 
 to come to this dangerous spot of Harvard, and 
 he had not been there six months before he and 
 his sponsor became among the most ardent devo- 
 tees and apostles of Harvard ! 
 
 The traits which have been dominant in him 
 throughout his life with you here manifested 
 themselves with us. He has been a scholar in 
 the ministry — and how rare they are ! how mis- 
 takenly rare ! how eager the public is for instruc- 
 tion ! Those ministers who will think clearly 
 and speak straight — what a profound influence 
 they have ! And yet, how few seek this noble 
 
[HI] 
 
 office ! Early in life he understood the impor- 
 tance of this, and when he left Harvard for his 
 little parish in Connecticut, he went there as a 
 student, and those of you who are familiar with 
 his early call to this great church know how he 
 hesitated for a year because he feared that, coming 
 to Boston, these scholarly aims would be set aside 
 in practical work. But he has known how to 
 reconcile those two, and thus he has gone on to 
 a second great characteristic, which has marked 
 him here. 
 
 He has been a great preacher ; and preaching 
 he has conceived in its noblest terms, as that 
 which must be thought out with elaborate care 
 — yes, with anxiety and toil by the minister 
 himself. And then he has adopted the view of 
 preaching which Martin eau so admirably set 
 forth : that the sermon must be a lyric which 
 has a touch of poetry, which has an imaginative 
 appeal to the feelings and the will of those who 
 hear, but resting on a solid intellectual founda- 
 tion. Surely no one has sat in that great church 
 and listened to those sublime appeals without 
 being swept away from himself — swept away 
 up into the very presence of God by those great 
 lyrics ! 
 
 Only five years after Dr. Gordon took his 
 Bachelor's degree at Harvard he was called into 
 a very venturesome service there. We then de- 
 cided to sweep away all authoritative religion; 
 
t I22 ] 
 
 to make religion an opportunity ; to give it as a 
 privilege to our students, where before it had 
 been something enforced. And, accordingly, we 
 desired to have every aspect of the religious life 
 represented in those who should make this ap- 
 peal. Our Board of five preachers was consti- 
 tuted, and with Phillips Brooks engaged cordially 
 in the same work; and into that Board Dr. 
 Gordon came, only five years out of college. 
 What a venturesome service it was, and how 
 nobly has it been performed. For five years he 
 stayed on that Board, at great personal sacrifice 
 to himself. Then, finding other things urgent, 
 he laid it aside for a brief time ; he has returned 
 to us again, and this is now his third year of ser- 
 vice with us. You can imagine the depth of his 
 influence there. 
 
 I wonder how many of you have seen an ad- 
 mirable little book, by Professor Peabody, on 
 "Mornings in the College Chapel," which he, 
 with great justice, dedicated to your pastor. 
 Thinking not all of you would have seen his 
 friendly words, I copied them off and thought 
 to bring them to you. He writes : 
 
 Twenty years ago we were set to keep the light ; 
 Five of as shared the watch through the first long 
 
 winter's night : 
 One, oar captain, sank in duty s pitiless foam, 
 Two, our veterans, wait by the shore for their summons 
 
 home. 
 
[n.3] 
 
 The years and the faces pass, and the keepers come 
 
 and go 
 Like the sea of life beneath them, with its ceaseless 
 
 ebb and flow. 
 Still at your post yoa stand, high up in the light-house 
 
 tower, 
 Guarding the way of life, speaking the word of power ; 
 Resolute, tender, wise, free in the love of the truth. 
 Tending the flame of the Christ, as it marks the chan- 
 nel of youth. 
 And the task we were set, my brother, has it failed in 
 
 these twenty years, 
 Has the light gone out in the night of doubt, or the 
 
 smothering fog of fears? 
 Thank God, in the shifting tides of life the tower of 
 
 prayer still stands, 
 And in His name the undimmed flame is fed by loyal 
 
 hands. 
 What shall we pledge to the College which trusted us 
 
 so, my friend, 
 But a loving prayer, and a constant care to serve her 
 
 till the end? 
 
 That is the spirit that your pastor has brought to 
 us. You think of him as quickening you; he 
 has quickened class after class of the young men 
 who are going out to lead this country. 
 
 Yes, but his power, neither with you nor with 
 us, has been confined to these two functions. 
 He is a master of men. He has raised your 
 church into something like the Puritan cathedral. 
 We Gongregationalists abolished bishops long 
 
[124] 
 
 ago, it is said. I think rather we abolished the 
 mode of choosing them ; we have them chosen 
 by natural selection, and Dr. Gordon has risen 
 to be almost a bishop of our body. When any 
 of us are in perplexity, we turn to him, — he 
 guides. He steered us through much of the 
 Andover trouble. He has been a beacon light 
 for many in steering their way through these 
 perplexing shoals of modern theology. Yes, and 
 in practical questions no less. Well, long ago 
 we too, at Harvard, discerned these powers in 
 him, and therefore for twelve years he has served 
 us as one of the governors of the College. We 
 have a Board of Overseers — thirty men — picked 
 men out of all our Alumni ; they must be men 
 of such eminence, men so noted for practical 
 sagacity that the great body of our graduates will 
 select them out of all whom they might choose. 
 And for twelve years Dr. Gordon has been on 
 that Board — twelve years of great consequence 
 in the life of the University, It was easy to sus- 
 pect the policies that our great leader, President 
 Eliot, has introduced; it was easy to get up a 
 reaction against them ; it was a matter of vast 
 consequence to the future that they should be 
 preserved. While Dr. Gordon has been an ad- 
 mirable critic of those measures, he has stood 
 firmly by all that made for the strength of the 
 University in those things. 
 
 Such, then, are the three functions in which 
 
[125] 
 
 both you and we have marked him as preeminent, 
 and yet I suppose in the very fact of my calling 
 attention to these I show how small they are. 
 Great as he is, he is a tender and lovable human 
 being ; we go to him for sympathy in small mat- 
 ters ; we honor him, we admire him in our secret 
 hearts ; we are glad when he bows to us from 
 across the way; when we come into his 
 presence we feel raised into some higher 
 sphere. You and we have known 
 these things for years: I 
 hope he is find- 
 
 ing them 
 
 out. 
 
PEW TO PULPIT 
 
MR. JOHN WELLS MORSS RESPONDED TO THE TOAST, 
 
 "PEW to pulpit" 
 
MR. MORSS' RESPONSE 
 
 Mr. Toastmaster, Doctor Gordon, and Friends : 
 
 I SHOULD like to dwell on the benefit which 
 the Old South people have received from the 
 preaching of Dr. Gordon. I should like 
 persuasively to explain how I and others have 
 grown in grace under such preaching. But for 
 all this time is lacking. I had thought to re- 
 mind you of some of the reasons for the admi- 
 ration and regard which we in the pews have for 
 our minister. But here the time limitation is 
 less severe than I first thought. Those who have 
 preceded me have covered much of the ground 
 and you will yourselves think of many reasons 
 which need not, and others which cannot, be 
 enumerated. 
 
 I would, however, rejoice with you for a mo- 
 ment over some of the qualities which endear 
 the guest of the evening to us whom he most 
 directly serves — qualities which would have 
 made us love him in the pew had he never occu- 
 pied a pulpit. We rejoice that he loves a joke 
 and can tell a good story ; that he is a delightful 
 host, a prize as a guest, and, indeed, always com- 
 
[i3o] 
 
 panionable when we would take our ease. We 
 rejoice that he is a man with whom it is a delight 
 to talk on any subject, so stimulating is his reve- 
 lation of intellectual power, his touch with the 
 best in books and life, and his sane and coura- 
 geous judgment. We rejoice that we have a 
 chief with whom it is a real satisfaction to do 
 business, because he is open minded to the pres- 
 entation of fact and argument and possesses a 
 grasp of sound business principles and a common 
 sense rare among ministers, or, for that matter, 
 in any class of the community. We rejoice that 
 we have a pastor to whom we can go with our 
 joys and aspirations, with our griefs and troubles 
 and self-criticism, sure of receiving the under- 
 standing of one profound in his knowledge of 
 human nature, and also of receiving that sym- 
 pathy and wise guidance which can be given 
 only by one who has a high faith in his kind and 
 in God's righteousness and compassion. 
 
 And as character surpasses power, we espe- 
 cially rejoice that here is a man who has no 
 thought of self-seeking and is responsive to the 
 subtlest calls of honor. This is of peculiar im- 
 portance to the Old South, because of the temp- 
 tations to sloth and extravagance which come to 
 us from Madame Norton's endowment fund. 
 From my own knowledge I can testify that 
 our success in resisting these temptations has 
 been greatly furthered — yes — and our accepted 
 
[,3i] 
 
 standards as to what is temptation raised much 
 higher than would otherwise be possible, be- 
 cause Dr. Gordon keenly appreciates our duty in 
 this direction, and by refusing proffered bene- 
 fits for himself unselfishly sets us a good ex- 
 ample. This may not be one of the great 
 achievements of Dr. Gordon, but it surely is 
 of a quality which shows the character of the 
 man. 
 
 In closing, I would say a word of the future. 
 We are grateful for the last twenty-five years' 
 growth of the Old South in numbers, power, 
 and usefulness, and for the leadership which 
 has rendered that growth possible. But I for 
 one do not believe that this anniversary celebrates 
 for Dr. Gordon the culmination of a career, or 
 marks for the Old South the end of a period 
 of progress. To me it is remarkable how the 
 preaching of our minister has been steadily in- 
 creasing in power and effectiveness since he was 
 fifty, and the sermon here is but the mirror of 
 the man. If a man can so continue to grow 
 after a quarter of a century, there is no reason 
 why an organization to which so much is given 
 as to our church, to whose standard our leader is 
 constantly attracting new recruits — there is no 
 reason why such a body should cease to advance 
 unless we in the pews relax our efforts. And 
 we do not intend to relax. On the contrary we 
 hereby pledge ourselves to a service more earnest 
 
[i3a] 
 
 and devoted than ever before. Therefore, I 
 dare prophesy that for many years there can 
 fitly be applied to both Dr. Gor- 
 don and the Old South the 
 words of the poet : 
 "The best is yet 
 to be." 
 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 
 
DR. GORDON RESPONDED TO THE TOAST, "RETROSPECT 
 AND PROSPECT," IN ACKNOWLEDGING THE TRIBUTES PAID 
 TO HIM BY THE PRECEDING SPEAKERS 
 
DR. GORDON'S RESPONSE 
 
 Mr. Justice Hammond, Fellow Members of the Old South Club, 
 Guests of the Old South Church, amd Ladies : 
 
 THERE is a premonitory significance in this 
 meeting, as if it were a rehearsal of a com- 
 ing professional funeral. I have myself 
 frequently assisted at similar obsequies during 
 the last twenty-five years, and now my time has 
 come, as it comes to all. On such occasions I 
 have invariably tried to tell the truth, and while 
 I must confess that I have here and there strained 
 a virtue or an excellence, I have cherished the 
 hope that I might be forgiven because of the 
 tender humanity of my motive. In the proceed- 
 ings of this evening I see a similar elevation of 
 purpose, an equal humanity issuing in a more 
 than equal tenderness toward my work. Of the 
 speakers one and all, misguided as they have 
 been, I say with Burns : 
 
 ' ' But yet the light that led astray 
 Was light from heaven." 
 
 You cannot quite realize my pride and happiness 
 in hearing my former teacher, Professor Palmer, 
 speak about me as he has done to-night. When 
 
[.36] 
 
 I first met him, and during the year in which I 
 was his pupil, I always met him with a Damascus 
 blade in one hand and a laurel wreath in the other 
 — and I never knew whether I was going up for 
 coronation or decapitation 1 He was one of the 
 two completely objective examiners I ever had, 
 and till this evening I always felt that I deserved 
 all that I got from Professor Palmer. I have a 
 right also to say that the body of ideas which he 
 brought before me, both by incomparable exposi- 
 tion and consistent criticism, has been with me 
 for thirty-one years, the foundation of all my think- 
 ing and intellectual growth since. I have never 
 had an opportunity till now to express to Professor 
 Palmer my profound and affectionate thanks. 
 
 I cannot trust myself to thank Professor Bliss 
 Perry for his golden words. I see in them less 
 of a tribute to myself and more of a master' s con- 
 fession of the kinship between literature and re- 
 ligion, a confession too by one who is both man 
 of letters and speaker of the transcendent influ- 
 ence upon human life of true words spoken with 
 sincerity and simplicity and the pressure behind 
 them of a noble character. In the light of his su- 
 perb testimony we preachers see our calling with 
 the halo encircling it that belongs to it by divine 
 right. For this testimony we render Professor 
 Perry our thanks and honor. 
 
 What shall I say in your name and my own to 
 Doctor de Normandie for his noble greeting ? He 
 
[i3 7 ] 
 
 has brought us an expression of the sympathy and 
 good-will of our sister churches in Boston ; no man 
 among us is better fitted for that function ; he is 
 himself the embodiment of affectionate and chival- 
 rous regard for his fellow-ministers and his fellow- 
 Christians. I say to him, for myself and for you, 
 that we are happier because of his presence with 
 us, as the religious life of our city is richer be- 
 cause of the sincerity and purity of his spirit. 
 
 The next speaker represented the Old South 
 Society. He must allow me to use him as a sym- 
 bol of that society. Both Mr. Morse, the chair- 
 man of the standing committee, and Mr. Edward 
 G. Johnson, the treasurer, represent in their de- 
 voted and able services the genius of the Old 
 South Society. More than thirty years ago the 
 Supreme Court of Massachusetts recognized that 
 the trust of the Society was a trust ideally admin- 
 istered. From the beginning of my ministry here 
 I have watched the administration of this trust 
 with grateful admiration. By all the members 
 of the standing committee and by members of 
 the Society on many other committees time and 
 service have been largely and freely given with 
 no thought of compensation, from no other mo- 
 tive than pride and joy in the ever-extending 
 good influence of the Society. It would be a 
 painful embarrassment to me if I were not allowed 
 at this time to express my thanks and my obliga- 
 tions to the Old South Society. 
 
[,38] 
 
 The ministry that has been so magnificently 
 praised here this evening is not mine alone or 
 mainly. For nearly eight years I have been sup- 
 ported by the assistant minister of the church, 
 Dr. Allen E. Gross, a brilliant mind, a willing 
 servant, a devoted friend; and during the present 
 year I have had the noble help of the minister's 
 assistant, Rev. Warren S. Archibald. No minister 
 ever had more efficient officers than I have had ; 
 no minister to-day in the whole country owes 
 more to his officers than I do to the six officers at 
 present serving the Old South Church. 
 
 The work organized and carried forward by the 
 women of the church is in itself a special distinc- 
 tion. Without that work we should be poor 
 indeed ; without it the merciful humanities of 
 the church would languish, its devotional spirit 
 would be distinctly less, and the social fellowship 
 in which we rejoice would be greatly reduced. 
 In the Old South Church from the beginning the 
 women have played a noble part ; their work has 
 been hidden but none the less important, like the 
 mainspring in the watch. For that hidden power, 
 that modest but potent influence, that gentle but 
 inspiring force, we return thanks and honor. 
 
 We have the Old South Club, from whose 
 President we have heard this evening, a club 
 numbering more than one hundred and seventy 
 members, a club in full sympathy with the reli- 
 gious purpose of the church, and while pursuing 
 
[*3 9 ] 
 literary and social ends, reaching out in these 
 days toward ends of social reform. We have a 
 great parish, united, enthusiastic, seeking to serve 
 this community, proud of a church two hundred 
 and forty years old, with men and women happy 
 to be in the church in which Benjamin Franklin 
 was baptized, in which Samuel Adams was a com- 
 municant, in which the great voices of the Revolu- 
 tion rang ; a church whose history more than that 
 of any other in the city has been identified with 
 the character, ideals, and hopes and patriotism of 
 the community. These men and these women 
 have helped mightily to produce this ministry, and 
 I divide with them the honor of the evening. 
 
 Overestimation, undue devotion gives acute 
 pain, therefore I give you, my people, back more 
 than half of what you have given me. It belongs 
 to you ; besides, in dealing justly I give one sub- 
 stantial sign of retaining, what Judge Hammond 
 hoped I might retain, a level head. Macaulay 
 on one occasion said that he did not feel intoxi- 
 cated by his success, but added the discreet re- 
 mark that a man may be drunk and not know it. 
 So far I am conscious of no intoxication, whether 
 warranted in that feeling or not. I will tell you 
 why I think I am immune. The theologians tell 
 us there is such a thing as prevenient grace — 
 which does not effect regeneration, but goes a 
 good way toward it. Now I had my prevenient 
 grace from an austere and noble father. When 
 
[i4o] 
 
 I went forth to seek my livelihood, at the age of 
 eleven, my father told me with such emphasis 
 and sincerity as to leave in my mind no room for 
 doubt, that I was below the average in ability 
 and that my only salvation was in honest, steady 
 work ! And so deeply did his gospel go into my 
 nature that when I went home from the meeting 
 last Monday evening his words came back to me 
 over the expanse of five and forty years with in- 
 expressible tenderness and power. And that great 
 meeting seemed to me a dream, wholly beautiful 
 and wholly incredible ! And yet a dream may 
 serve a great purpose. A man certainly no better 
 than I went out once on a long journey and came 
 to a solitary place and laid himself down to sleep 
 and dreamed a dream of a ladder which reached 
 from the stone on which he laid his head to heaven. 
 On that ladder the angels of God ascended and 
 descended. He awoke and knew it was a dream, 
 and yet he awoke with the feeling, new in him, 
 of a great intention in his life, with the feeling 
 that God was in that place, though he knew it 
 not, and with the further feeling of awe and regret 
 and hope — all in consequence of that dream ! 
 
 And the dream in which I have been living, 
 wholly beautiful, wholly incredible, for the last 
 week — dream as it is — has given me a new sense 
 of the intention of my existence, of its significance 
 for my fellow-men ; a new sense of God in the 
 world — Immanuel — a new awe, a new regret, 
 
[i4i] 
 
 a new hope ! A little book was put into my hands 
 last Monday afternoon which absolutely over- 
 whelmed me. I refer not now to the gift — a 
 gift in anticipation of the time, perhaps, when I 
 can no longer earn my bread, a gift with a sweet 
 and pious reference to the future, a gift with a reli- 
 gious beauty in it to which I can make no further 
 reference now — but the Book itself with five 
 hundred and fifty names, young men and maidens, 
 old men and little children, and others under the 
 burden and heat of the day, a Book that shall be 
 an everlasting memorial, whose names shall be 
 engraven on the tablets of my heart forever — a 
 precious Volume, that, when the inevitable even- 
 ing comes, shall be a gracious fulfillment of the 
 promise, "At evening-time there shall be light" ; 
 that Book is part of the great dream in which I 
 have been living and meeting God in the human- 
 ity of my people. 
 
 A minister lives for his generation. There 
 have been fifteen ministers of the Old South pre- 
 ceding me. From Mr. Thatcher to my immediate 
 predecessor, Dr. Manning, fifteen ministers have 
 had their distinct congregations ; and I love to 
 think of them in that world of light whither they 
 have gone, with those to whom they broke the 
 "bread of life" here, surrounding them there, 
 together, swelling the richness of that mysterious 
 existence upon which they have entered. We are 
 traveling the same path. Others will fill your 
 
[Ifa] 
 
 places and another will soon fill mine: but the 
 richness of our fellowship is forever, and I open my 
 life to your love and your confidence, and I give 
 you back mine without limit, without bound! 
 
 Many warm hearts have wished me another 
 twenty-five years of service here. I indulge in 
 no sanguine hopes for the future. I should like 
 to serve for a few years more if God will. For 
 any minister even among the best of friends the 
 Old South Church must be a great burden. I 
 remember when I came to this country first I 
 dropped into a safe factory and I worked with a 
 good-natured Irishman, whose name was John 
 (I never knew the other part of his name) . John 
 was always looking for a soft job. If there was 
 a piece of iron to be lifted, I had to lift more than 
 half every time. But he was good-natured and 
 a good friend. I did not see him for thirteen 
 years. After my settlement at the Old South 
 Church I was walking down Boylston Street and 
 saw him working in a doorway, and I said, ' ' John, 
 do you know me ? " " Know you ? " — I will not 
 quote literally — "I would know you anywhere. 
 Och! but it's a soft job you've got now ! " That 
 is the popular impression ; I think a good many 
 of my brethren have thought so. I would like 
 as many of these men as might be to become my 
 successors ; that I think would lead them to a 
 change of heart. 
 
 When I came to Boston Phillips Brooks was 
 
[i/13] 
 
 preaching at the height of his power in Trinity 
 Church ; Dr. Duryea, a strong man, was in 
 Central Church; Dr. Herrick, one of the most 
 accomplished preachers our body ever had, was 
 atMt. Vernon Church; James Freeman Clarke, a 
 preacher and a writer of national repute, was 
 in the Church of the Disciples ; Edward Everett 
 Hale was in the South Church, Brook Hereford 
 was the popular minister of Arlington Street 
 Church, Henry Foote was the King's Chapel 
 Saint, and other men not unworthy to be named 
 with these filled other pulpits of the city ; and I 
 a stripling of thirty-one appeared among these 
 sons of the prophets ! Was it a soft job ? I 
 began my ministry in an environment charged 
 with the intensest and noblest kind of hostility, 
 that inspired by the fear lest evil might befall 
 precious interests of the human spirit, and in this 
 environment the task assigned me was called ■ ' a 
 soft job." I never thought of it that way. I 
 thought of it as stern duty, as holding more work 
 than I could do if I had been as strong as Sam- 
 son ; I felt the grind year in and year out ; I felt 
 the isolation, almost desolation, with hardly a song 
 bird to be heard anywhere, except the sweet voices 
 of love and cheer that rang inside the Old South 
 Church ; and all that for ten hard and great years. 
 I am thankful for them. I would go through 
 them again to gain what they brought. They 
 did me a world of good ; they did much to shake 
 
out the chaff from character, from faith, and from 
 the objects of desire; they did much to increase 
 within me the sense of what manhood is, life, 
 service, God, and hope! This kind of warfare 
 is great, but it inclines one who has been in it 
 for twenty-five years to readiness to lay down 
 the sword when the strength to wield it shall 
 no longer remain. Against that day I hope I 
 shall be ever in the watch tower. 
 
 And now, dear friends, I must not prolong 
 these remarks. Let me thank the eminent men 
 who have done us the honor to come hither as 
 our guests. They have brought us inspiration, 
 they have greatened our sense of self-respect. 
 Let me thank again and from my heart the 
 speakers for what they have said. I do not 
 believe their description of me, but I receive their 
 good-will and their love with utmost thanks. 
 
 Let me thank you one and all for this affecting 
 expression of confidence and regard, let me con- 
 tinue to be your friend and servant as I can and 
 as I may ; let us together seek the fresh dedi- 
 cation of the Old South Church to the 
 sovereign interests of this commu- 
 nity, and let us look to God 
 for a higher wisdom 
 and a diviner 
 spirit. 
 
OLD SOUTH CHURCH 
 
 The REV. GEORGE A. GORDON, D.D., Minister 
 The Rev. Allen E. Gross, D.D., Assistant Minister 
 The Rev. Warren S. Archibald, Minister's Assistant 
 
 Deacons 
 
 Arthur S. Johnson Lewis A. Crossett 
 
 William L. McKee William F. Whittemore 
 
 George P. Morris Herbert D. Heathfield 
 
 Clerk: J. Converse Gray 
 
 Church Committee 
 
 The Minister, Assistant Minister, Deacons 
 
 Clerk of the Church 
 
 Richard H. Stearns William H. Robey, Jr. 
 Frank W. Hunt J. Howard Leman 
 
 George W. Merrill Henrt A. Guiler 
 
 Richard H. Stearns, Jr. William H. Hitchcock 
 
 Superintendent of Sunday School : Richard H. Stearns, Jr. 
 Asst. Supt. of Sunday School : John Gordon 
 
 OLD SOUTH SOCIETY IN BOSTON 
 
 Standing Committee 
 
 John Wells Morss, Chairman 
 
 William H. Pitkin J. Converse Gray 
 
 Wolcott H. Johnson Edward R. Rayley 
 
 George H. Davenport Alpheus H. Hardy 
 
 Samuel Carr 
 
 Treasurer: Edward C. Johnson 
 Clerk: George W. Merrill 
 

 Date Due 
 
 
 
 I 
 i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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