memoir of Rnnk- . H 5 H 3 PRESENTED BY Incites Al^^t Ma*-' Benjamin Francis Hayes at about Thirty- Two Years of Age. A MEMOIR of With Brief Extracfts from His Writings By EDWARD CARY HAYES The Morning Star Publishing House Boston, 1907 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED fl*M/HvM»,-o 6#"&C#w*~* to tlj* memory nf oor fatter, lett^amttt Franrfa I?ajj*a» and aofcreaaefr to t|ta poatmtg, ifta frtettoa, ano to any mho mag bertttp aattafartton or inspiration from tlje ronton- plattnn of a aeratr and useful life. "He was, in a great and noble way, the most unique man that I ever knew." —President George Colby Chase CONTENTS CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY 9 CHAPTER II. The Youth .._-..- 20 CHAPTER III. The Teacher - - - - - - - 28 CHAPTER IV. A Helpmate --_.... 47 CHAPTER V. Closing Days of Life - 67 CHAPTER VI. Letters - - - - - 87 CHAPTER VII. An Appreciation of Professor Hayes - - 111 CHAPTER VIII. A Sermon on "The Life to Come." 129 A MEMOIR OF BENJAMIN FRANCIS HAYES CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY. John Hayes, grandfather of Benjamin Francis Hayes, was born at Barrington, New Hampshire. He was one of a family of eight children, and was left fatherless when nine years of age. Subsequently he was appren- ticed to his uncle in the adjoining town of Dover. When John was fourteen years old his uncle was drafted for the Continental Army, to serve in the war of the Revolution. The uncle had a sick wife whom he was loath to leave, and the fourteen-year-old apprentice was eager to take his place. Unwilling to send to war one so young, and his own nephew, the uncle rode day and night through the country- side seeking a substitute, but the able-bodied men, who had not special cause to remain at home, had been drafted or had volunteered. 9 A Memoir of Neither love nor money could secure a sub- stitute, and late in the night before the morn- ing when he must appear in person or by sub- stitute at the rendezvous, the uncle called in a choking voice from the foot of the stairs, "John, you'll have to go." John went, and reached Saratoga in time to be present at the surrender of Burgoyne. One of the Continen- tals at whose feet a British soldier laid down his musket was the lad of fourteen years. But the size of the boy prevented any absurdity in the spectacle. John's stature, when full grown, was two inches above six feet. In the army John contracted smallpox and was discharged; but his spirit of adventure was not satisfied, and with return of health he enlisted as a privateer, sailing out of Ports- mouth, New Hampshire. He served thus for nearly two years, and among the grandsire tales young Benjamin Francis heard were stories of the sea, racy with Scotch phrases and sailor terms. One was the story of a battle with a British cruiser; how both antagonists maneuvered long for a berth to windward, and how the Yankee craft and men out-sailed the man-'o-war, and how grandfather at his 10 Benjamin Francis Hayes loaded gun would wait for the British ship to roll to leeward on a, heavy sea, and then hit her below the water line. John Hayes was one of the few sailors of that time who would have no grog. The war over, he returned to Dover, finish- ing his apprenticeship, married Mary Hanson of that place, and settled as tanner and shoe- maker at Windham, Maine. Many clergymen of the "standing order" remitted their salaries in whole or in part during the hard times of the war, but after the war was over they de- manded their back pay. John Hayes arrived at Windham in time to bear a share of this burden. Having a desire for more land, and having acquired ability to gratify it, he moved from Windham to New Gloucester, Maine, and purchased three contiguous parcels of land with eighty acres in all. One of the houses on this land he turned into his shop. He reached New Gloucester in time to encounter the demand of the parson at that place for his back pay. This double experience of heavy payment to an "established" church may or may not be one reason why he did not remain a Congregationalism 11 A Memoir of One certain cause for the change in his church affiliation was the visit to New Gloucester of the famous Methodist pioneer, Jesse Lee. At the time of this visit, John Hayes had become one of the officials of the local church of the Standing Order, which, having no pastor at the time, was holding no services. When the officer who had the church key refused to open the door, that the visiting minister might preach the gospel in a house dedicated to the worship of God instead of in the open field, John Hayes took his ax and broke down the door, and so admitted the min- ister and the throng who wished to hear him. His Scotch blood would not brook forfeiture, in the new country, of the principles for which the covenanters had fought, and see an estab- lished church exclude from the privileges of the gospel all who did not offer it in the name of the favored sect. He was afterward a class- leader in the new connection. John had seven children, one of whom died at seventeen, and all the rest grew to maturity. Jesse, the youngest of these, born June 2, 1797, was the father of Benjamin Francis Hayes, the subject of this memoir. From the time 12 Benjamin Francis Hayes he was fourteen years old, according to the in- dustrious customs of the period, Jesse took his place among the workers in the shop and on the farm, and thereafter did not enjoy two weeks' continuous schooling until he was "out of his time." Jesse had a hungering mind, and as soon as he was twenty-one he began to go to school, working at home only enough to earn his board; and presently, having by this time become an "extra fine shoemaker," he went to Paris, Maine, to practice that craft in order to earn money for a liberal education. But Jesse was the favorite son. His older brothers had scattered upon their several careers, and the old folks at home urged him, for filial love and duty, to return to them. They did not appreciate his ambition, and he was too conscientious and generous a youth to in- sist upon the claims of his own future. He returned and lived at home for seven years. All those years the passion for learning and a larger life smouldered and burned. At the end of that time, hoping thereby to realize these hopes, Jesse relinquished his claim to the home property to his mother's relative, George Han- son, and a new house was built on the place 13 A Memoir of for the Hansons. But, for some unknown reason, the arrangement did not hold. The Hansons wished to return to their former home, and "the old folks" pined for Jesse. With tears they besought him to return, and with tears he consented. Soon after Jesse yielded thus to what he thought his duty to his parents, and settled down once more at the home in New Glouces- ter, he married Mary Harmon, daughter of Daniel Harmon, of Durham. She became the mother of Benjamin Francis Hayes. Daniel Harmon, whose father, of the same name, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War, was himself a soldier in the War of 1812. When seventy years of age, weighing more than two hundred pounds, he still could lead the pace at the forenoon's mowing, and, as he said, "Had never been so sick that a good dish of pork and beans wouldn't cure him." He had shrewd, practical sense, together with jovial wit and humor. His grandson has said, "I never could afford to get far behind him in the field, for, if I did, I was sure to lose something good in his talk." Once a rogue robbed his cellar after a porker had been 14 Benjamin Francis Hayes killed; Daniel charged his own family not to mention the fact to any one. Next March town-meeting day a man said to him : "By the way, Squire Harmon, did you ever find out who stole the meat out of your cellar last winter?" "Never till this moment/' was the reply. Like John Hayes, Daniel Harmon was for twenty years a Methodist class-leader. He was a representative in the State legislature and a trial justice, and was in elective politi- cal office for at least twenty years consecu- tively. Mary Harmon, born September 25, 1802, was the second among seven children, five sons and two daughters, of whom all but one grew to maturity, the daughters marrying well and the sons achieving eminent respectability as professional and business men in various cities. At the death of the wife of Daniel Harmon, Mary became the housemother. The two youngest brothers had playful quarrels as to which should have the cheek with the dimple in it, of their comely sister-mother. "A daughter of Squire Harmon with those eyes doesn't need any examination" — this is what the supervisor of schools in Falmouth 15 A Memoir of said when she presented herself as a candidate for a position as teacher. Mary filled her place as the feminine head of the large house- hold, not only with fidelity and loving good- will, but also with thrift and executive dis- patch. She was a person of "f orehandedness" and energy. When at the age of eighty-five she broke her hip and for two years was con- fined to her chair, she required to be kept supplied with handiwork, the current periodi- cals, and now and then a learned book ; for, as she said shortly after the accident: "I can't afford to be wasting my precious time." She had a liking for humorous allusions, a gift of insight, and a talent for repartee. She was a kind and sweet-tempered, but forceful and active old lady, deeply religious, and with a live interest in the affairs of the world. Gentlemen visiting New England from "the West" used sometimes to call to express ap- preciation of an earlier acquaintance with her, and gratitude for the uplift of her influence when they were young. Many have testified that she was rare and strong in character and in ability; and my own memory confirms the tradition of the kindness of her heart, 16 Benjamin Francis Hayes the spice of her talk, and the marked personal impression she produced. After Jesse Hayes and Mary Harmon were married and settled at New Gloucester, five children were born to them. Benjamin Francis, the oldest, was born March 28, 1830. "Francis" (as throughout manhood he was called by those with the right to use a given name) has told me how tenderly and pro- foundly his father and mother loved each other. Jesse Hayes, though he had so largely sacrificed his aspirations, was licensed by the Methodists as a preacher. Later, having been ordained by the Free Baptists, he was for two years pastor of the Poland and Danville Free Baptist Church, at South Auburn. Benjamin Francis, just before his death, told me that he still retained a strong impression of one of his father's sermons on, "The Responsibility of Parents for Children," and that he recalled the declaration of one of the leading men of the community, "Brother Hayes is my favorite preacher." It is said that Jesse was a man who greatly undervalued his own ability. It may be that his notion of filial duty made him 17 A Memoir of rob the kingdom of Christ, which he longed to serve, of more than he ever guessed. He was a man, as his son testified, who, as long as he lived, was always learning, increasing both in intellectual stores and in moral insight ; whose character commanded his son's profound re- spect, and, it might be added, his pride. Jesse early resolved that if his son, Francis, developed scholarly tastes they should not be thwarted as his own had been. By the time Francis was seventeen years old he had ac- quired all the town schools could give, and had been away from home for three short fall terms. Then Jesse moved to Auburn and bought a large house, that is still standing, close by the Edward Little High School, an institution which at that time was known as the Lewiston Falls Academy. Soon after moving to this new home, Jesse, in partnership with another man, opened a store. The business flourished until Jesse objected to certain practices of his partner which he regarded as tricky. The reply he received was, "I've come here to make money ; and Pm going to make money." Thereupon the partnership was dissolved. Not long after, 18 Benjamin Francis Hayes Jesse Hayes was made county treasurer of Androscoggin County, of which Auburn is the county-seat, and he was re-elected to this office. While he was treasurer there was a large issue of county bonds, and the present county buildings were erected. During these years also Francis finished his fit for college and took the college course at Bowdoin, where he was graduated in the class of 1855. 19 A Memoir of CHAPTER II. THE YOUTH. During his college course Francis taught a term of school each year, and I have known of at least one distinguished man who owed his awakening to that young teacher. These absences from college made it necessary for him to "make up" about one-third of his col- lege course. This fact, together with the ten- dency to honest self -depreciation which he had inherited, made it a half surprise to him to be designated among the honor men of his class, and chosen a member of $ B K His undergraduate fraternity was V T. Among his fellow students he won the same "respect and love" — to use a class-mate's expression — as in after years. Professor Thomas 0. Upham was in those days the Nestor of New England "Mental and Moral Philosophy," and author of the standard text-books on those subjects. As a student, Francis so commended himself to Dr. Upham that later the old professor be- 20 Benjamin Francis Hayes queathed the copyrights of his text-books to the young scholar, with the task of such revi- sion as might be desirable to keep them up to date. Mr. Hayes accepted no income from these copyrights until after the decease of Mrs. Uphain, but as long as she survived, had all the money paid to her. Not long before Francis Hayes graduated from Lewiston Falls Academy, there appeared among the young lady students at that insti- tution, one with an erect and well-rounded figure, and cheeks like those of the girl who, overhearing a young man exclaim, "By heaven, she's painted !" retorted, "And by heaven only," whose bearing betrayed a pride half at variance with the demure expression of her face, lighted by large, blue-gray eyes. It required no second look to make the observ- er aware that she was "some one in par- ticular." This was Miss Arcy Cary, born August 6, 1827, one of the thirteen children of Francis Cary, of Turner. Her mother, Sallie Phillips, born February 3, 1790, was of the same family with Phillips Brooks, Wendell Phillips and the founders of Phillips Exeter and Phillips 21 A Memoir of Andover. The first Cary 1 in her father's line in this country was John, an Oxford graduate and the first teacher of Latin at Plymouth Colony, which he joined about 1630. John Alden and Priscilla Molliens (so spelled in the Cary family record) were ancestors of Arcy Cary, whose line of descent from them in- cluded Mary Adams, of the John Adams family. Her maternal grandfather, still a mere lad, followed his father and two brothers in- to the army of the Revolution, and was an ^Descended from de Karry of William the Conqueror's Dooms- day Book, through. Mary Boleyn, wife of Sir William Cary, a sister of Queen Elizabeth's mother. The modern spelling dates back to Edward the First's time. Burke's Heraldry contains the following : "In the reign of Henry V., a certain knight errant of Aragon, having passed through divers countries and per- formed many feats of arms to his high commendation, arrived here in England, where he challenged any man of his rank and quality to make trial of his valor and skill at arms. This chal- lenge Sir Robert Cary accepted, between whom a cruel encounter and doubtful combat was waged in Smithfield, London. But at length this noble champion vanquished the presumptuous Ar- agonois, for which Henry V. restored unto him a good part of his father's lands, of which for his loyalty to Richard II. he had been deprived by Henry IV., and authorized him to wear the arms of the Knight of Aragon, which the noble posterity continue to wear unto this day." According to the poem, "Virtute Excerptae," by Rev. Otis Carey, the Spaniard had remained victorious in six days of justing, and then proclaimed that he would fight one more combat, a Voutrance, and if victorious, claim to have vanquished Eng- land's chivalry, as he had already that of Austria, France, and Italy. And after more than one day had passed without a response, because the foremost English knights were already overthrown and disqualified, Sir Robert Cary petitioned to be restored to knighthood for a single day, in order that he might meet the Knight of Aragon. The forfeited arms of the chal- lenge bore three roses symbolizing his triumphs in Austria, France, and Italy, which Sir Robert was commanded to wear, with the Latin motto, "Plucked by valor." This Sir Robert Cary married a lady descended from King Edward I. and his queen Eleanor, daughter of Ferdinand III. of Castile. 22 Benjamin Francis Hayes Orderly in the boat with Washington when he crossed the Delaware at the battle of Trenton. The Carys came from 2 Bridgewater, Mass., to Turner, Maine. Not long after their arrival a high-school was established in Turner, the first in any town of its class in Maine. A pub- lic library was also established, and for several years was kept in Squire Cary's house. He also built, largely at his own charges, a Congrega- tional meeting-house in Turner, which after- wards burned down. In the acquaintance that followed between Francis Hayes and Miss Gary, it appeared that they had a common bond in their zeal for education and in their religious experience. In the family where the young man grew up, God was as constantly recognized, deferred to, and revered as if he had been a visible in- mate of the home. Jesse Hayes and his wife, Mary, thought their thoughts and made their 2 The original grant of Duxbury and Bridgwater, called by the Indians, Satucket, was made in 1639 by Ousamequin, afterwards called "Massasoit," sachem of the Pockonocket Indians, to Cap- tain Miles Standish, Samuel Nash, and Constant Southworth, as trustees, in behalf of Wm. Bradford, John Cary, and fifty-two others named. The consideration mentioned in the deed was "seven coats, a yard and a half in a coat ; nine hatchets, eight hoes, twenty knives, four moose skins, and ten and a half yards of cotton." The tract purchased included fourteen miles square, which was divided among fifty-four people. John Carey's share was one mile wide by seven miles long, lying north and south from the northern boundary of the town. 23 A Memoir of plans from what they conceived to be the point of view of their Divine Friend. Francis had chosen to walk in the way of his parents ; he had formed religious habits similar to theirs, and was looking forward to service in the Christian ministry. Miss Cary's parents were also thoroughly religious, and she herself had had a religious experience remarkable for its depth and intensity. This young man and woman found themselves at one in their faith, in their aspirations for personal devel- opment, and in their plans for service. Upon graduating from Bowdoin, Francis Hayes entered the theological seminary at New Hampton, New Hampshire; at the same time Miss Gary, then his fiance, entered the liter- ary institution associated with it. During his course in the theological seminary he earned at first three hundred and later four hundred dollars a year by devoting a portion of his time to teaching in the literary institution. After one year Miss Cary graduated, and thereupon she also became a teacher in the literary institution. Before going to New Hjampton she had given abundant proof of her power as a teacher, and the character of her 24 Benjamin Francis Hayes service in that institution soon secured her an invitation to become its Lady Principal. When both had thus become teachers, they were married, August 12, 1856. Mr. Hayes had planned, after completing his work at the theological seminary, to take a year's graduate work in New York. But there were four churches, those pulpits he had occupied within his last year at New Hampton, each of which desired him to become its pastor. One of these was in Olneyville, then a suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, now a part of that city. Here the opportunities for both growth and use- fulness were such that the plan of continuing student life was abandoned, and he entered at once upon the pastorate. He had completed the work required for graduation from the seminary the previous June, but lingered to remove what to him seemed deficiencies, caused by the fact that throughout the three years of his seminary course half of his time had been given to teaching. Accordingly it was early spring when the requirements of the new pastorate took him to Rhode Island. Deacon Dyer received the young pastor and 25 A Memoir of his wife. The Deacon was owner of extensive nurseries and an ardent beauty-lover, and the view that extended before his house was one to satisfy the soul. The newly-arrived pair had just left behind them the snows of northern New England; in Rhode Island spring was in the fresh glory of her awakening. As the young wife stepped from the carriage before the Deacon's home and looked across the wide ex- panse of beautiful grounds, she exclaimed, "Why, this is Paradise !" I have heard the ex- perience recounted by her and also by her husband since her death. I never knew an- other woman so ravished by the beauty of flowers as she. Her face would gather into a pucker of intense delight at the sight of a peculiarly sweet blossom or of a mass of flowers. She liked to isolate and dwell upon a single flower. At the same time I never saw one appear to be more inspired by the beauty of an entire landscape, especially of a wide prospect. Oary Hill, where she was born, commands an extensive outlook. Many a time when driving upon the undu- lating roads of Maine, the view from the crest of a hill wxmld lift her into a kind of 26 Benjamin Francis Hayes transport. Mr. Hayes was also a great lover of flowers, and an enthusiastic botanist. When- ever he drove outside the town, save in winter, it was his custom to stop frequently to gather plants and flowers, and he usually brought home a carriage load. I remember sitting with him on a log, after a long walk, when he in- terrupted our talk on a quite different sub- ject, by saying abruptly, "There are seven varieties of ferns about us here," and proceed- ing to name them. I doubt whether any man in Maine was more thoroughly acquainted with the plants that grow out of its soil. Though botany was his special enthusiasm, he loved all "out-of-doors" with both aesthetic response and intellectual interest and curiosity. Of the Olneyville pastorate I cannot say much; it ended long before my birth. Some letters give evidence of the respect and love he won there, and he was sufficiently remem- bered so that at his death, forty-three years later, the Providence Journal recalled his con- nection with the city, and published an ap- preciative account of his life. 27 A Memoir of CHAPTER III. THE TEACHER. The Olneyville pastorate was his only one. It continued four years and three months. At the end of that time Mr. and Mrs. Hayes were called to become Principal and Precep- tress of Lapham Institute, a Free Baptist edu- cational institution at North Scituate, Rhode Island. The appointment was urged as an im- portant matter of denominational policy, and was accepted. After this position had been filled for two years, Mr. Hayes was called to a professorship in Bates College. At the funeral of Professor Hayes, Presi- dent Chase, of Bates, spoke on "The Relation of Dr. Hayes to Bates College." He said : "We who were students at that time were much in- terested in the new professor, and I remember well my first view of him. A group of students were standing in front of one of the college buildings when one said, 'There comes the new professor/ I looked and saw a tall man, moving 28 Benjamin Francis Hayes rapidly, with head somewhat thrown back, and by his bearing, by his dress, which was refined, and by his face, I felt assured that the trustees of the young college had made no mistake in the choice of this man. From his eyes of clear intelligence, and his face of kind- ness, I received a distinct impression of the man, which has never altered." In conversation, about the time of the death of Professor Hayes, President Chase said to me: "In all our matters of discipline, your father was always a man of perfect courage and, at the same time, of great kindness; in- deed his unfailing kindness was perhaps his most marked characteristic. a Only once did he seem to the rest of us to be perhaps unduly severe; and in that case we all found out, soon after, that the man we were dealing with was probably the wickedest one we ever had here." Professor Hayes was one with whom "it never took any courage" to do what he thought was right. It was a matter of course. He was without selfassertiveness, but he liked to ven- ture something. Even as an old man he en- 1 His wife used often to say, "Your father is a hind man." 29 A Memoir of joyed climbing in perilous places, and this venturesome, pioneering disposition, I suspect, had something to do with the freedom with which he moved in intellectual regions from which many ministers and theologians of his generation felt themselves warned away. The official bulletin of Bates College pub- lished May 15, 1906, contained the following: "Professor Benjamin Francis Hayes has been to all, save the most recent graduates, one of the best known and most beloved of their Bates teachers. He came to Bates College in August 1865. He was a professor in the college proper, in distinction from the the- ological school, from that date till 1894, from which time he was employed wholly in Cobb Divinity School. His versatility and breadth of scholarship appeared in the record of his work as a teacher. From 1865 to 1869 he was Professor of Modern Languages and from 1869 to 1873, of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. In 1873 he added to the duties of the chair last named those of Professor of Exegetical Theology in Cobb Divinity School. Yet even this statement meagerly indicates the wealth of his learning. He was an enthusiastic stu- 30 Benjamin Francis Hayes dent and teacher of Botany, and during the earlier years of the College, like his associ- ates, he was often called upon and found ready to teach studies as remote from his special work as mathematics and Latin. He had both the scientific and the literary tastes. All his life he was a practical student both of Botany and of Geology. "Bates never had a kinder or more sympa- thetic teacher. Students seriously ill, in the days when Lewiston had no general hospital, in repeated instances found a home, with most loving and tender care from both Professor and Mrs. Hayes, during many painful weeks. * * * * His satisfactions were those of the soul. Although he enjoyed the good and beautiful things of the world, — his home, his family, his friends, nature, the birds and flowers, the sunrise and sunset, — he saw in them more than mere objects, the present work of God." Probably the most crowded part of his career was the period of twenty-one years, from 1873 to 1894, when he was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy in the College, gave in- struction in Botany during a part of each year by a method that consumed much time 31 A Memoir of in the field and at the microscope, and also filled the chair of Exegetical Theology in Cobb Divinity School. The divinity school, though connected with the college, occupied a separate building, and, with the exception of Professor Hayes, had a separate faculty. When in 1894 his whole time became devoted to work in the Divinity School, the department of New Tes- tament Exegesis, which he had maintained, was assigned to Professor Anthony, and Pro- fessor Hayes assumed the chair of Apologet- ics and Pastoral Care. His work in Apologet- ics and the Philosophy of Religion, during this last period of his teaching, involved the whole problem of adjustment of theological concep- tions to the advancement of historical and crit- ical knowledge and the progress of philo- sophic thought; and he made himself as con- versant with the problems of Old Testament history and criticism as his previous work had required him to be with those of New Testament interpretation. President Chase has expressed the judg- ment — and gives permission to quote it here — that "as a scholar, Professor Hayes was distinctly first among all that have ever been 32 Benjamin Francis Hayes connected with Bates." He adds: "Although students tried sometimes to annoy their teach- ers, finding a flaw in the teacher's knowledge of the subject was a method no one ever thought of trying with him." Great as was the range of subjects in which he was, at one time or another, called upon to give instruction, there is strong testimony, from students and from colleagues, that whatever subject he taught, he imparted the feeling that he was a master in it. Professor Anthony has expressed the judgment that he had learning in each of several departments that would do credit to one who spent his life as a specialist in that single field. There was a gusto and momen- tum, like his gait, in the way he attacked a subject, and the sweep of it took in each sub- script and accent. Some of his associates have speculated as to what distinction this un- daunted and unwearied thoroughness would have achieved if, instead of being subdivided as it was, his life as professor could have been spent in a single department of study — the more as this quality was accompanied by the fertility of mind in fresh suggestions which characterizes the thinker, as distinguished 33 A Memoir of from the mere scholar and patient investiga- tor. He never would treat college students as children needing country-school discipline ; and especially by the less serious among them he was often more highly appreciated in their maturer years, after graduation, than while they were still in his classes. The ex- clamation, "Ah! he was an inspired man!" which was quoted at his funeral as having come from the lips of one of his old college students, upon hearing of his death, may or may not have been uttered by one who lacked full appreciation in the classroom; but cer- tain it is that this teacher was of the kind that succeeds best with graduate students who have already been initiated in the elements of the subject taught, and can be held by intellectual interest to follow abstruse discussion. He spent his force upon the subject rather than upon the situation in the classroom. This method did not at all diminish his success as a teacher in the Divinity School, to which his later years were entirely devoted. At this point should be mentioned one char- 34 Benjamin Francis Hayes acteristic of his intellectual life which could not be omitted from this sketch without for- feiting the hope of giving a truthful impression of the man, and that is the progressiveness of his thought. His doctrine never petrified, his own position and view never became a thing to be defended against further reconstruction. The toil of readjusting his conceptions to new knowledge was never too great; he did not flinch from it. On the contrary, he was always in eager quest of new light and of completer adjustment of his views to the objective real- ity. It may be that in the intellectual history of mankind there never (has been another period, of equal length, in which this trait was so subtly put to the test as it was during the last forty years, while he was a teacher in Bates College and Cobb Divinity School, and it is peculiarly noteworthy that a theological professor of mature age, in such conservative environment, with the deepest appreciation of religious values, met the test so well. His con- tinual interest in the newest books, even dur- ing the last months of his life, was such that one of his colleagues in the faculty of the Divinity School remarked, after his decease, 35 A Memoir of "There is no man left in Lewiston now to whom one can go as one could to him for information about the latest books." I chanced to be visit- ing him at the time when Wildeboer's Old Testament Theology had just appeared in a German translation from the Dutch, and remember in particular the zest with which he was reading it. Every new book that he opened he read in a hospitable spirit, hoping among its pages to find something new and illuminating. The intellectual and ethical quality implied in this trait were reinforced by general zest- fulness and strength of interest. How much one lives depends upon how much one is inter- ested. He retained an unflagging youthf ulness of interest in all interesting things, especially intellectual interest and curiosity. He would stoop and linger like a boy to examine a lizard or a curious insect. Mention has been made al- ready of his interest in Botany. On one occa- sion when he was to join me by taking a fifteen- mile stage ride, soon after starting he became so much interested in the geological forma- tions along the way that he leaped out, told the stage-driver to drive on, and made the 36 Benjamin Francis Hayes journey on foot. He was in his sixties when he took that tramp of more than twelve miles. I have known him to enjoy both coasting and skating after he was well in the seventies. Although his w T as a busy pen, and not a little of his writing was published in one form or another, he never produced such a book as we had hoped. This was due largely to the fact that his life was scattered by the necessity of teaching in so many departments. In spite of this he might perhaps have contrived to put into more permanent and adequate expression the fruit of his study and insight, if he had perfectly organized his ceaseless industry, pro- viding he had ever been willing to call any- thing finished. But whenever he lectured to a class upon a subject that had been covered by the lectures of the previous year, he wanted to rewrite and improve the course in the light of his most recent thought and study. Conse- quently he did not lay aside extensive stores of finished matter ready for the irrevocable permanence of type. The production never be- came an end in itself; he was always in pur- suit of a further view into the truth and a more adequate presentation of it. I am con- 37 A Memoir of fident that no sermon or lecture was ever de- livered by him twice alike. His manuscripts were overlaid with a fresh deposit every time he used them. As often as he returned to a subject, it appeared in new phases and aspects. The fecundity of his mind responded to the theme again and again with fresh suggestions. He quoted with full appreciation the saying of Lessing, to the effect that the search for truth is a life experience more to be prized than mere knowing without the application of knowledge to further advance. Whatever he worked on was always alive and in process. All his works, as one fitly said of him, must be inscribed as were the Grecian statues of the age of Pericles, not in the aorist, but in the imperfect tense: not "Phidias made it," but "Phidias was making this." 1 His long service as professor at Bates had one interruption. He was given leave of ab- sence for the collegiate year 1873-74, and he spent the college year, together with most of the summer vacations of '73 and '74, in Europe. He took with him his entire family — his wife, 1 Laokoon by Lessing, Bohn edition, p. 158, quoting Pliny. 38 Benjamin Francis Hayes the two sons, Francis and Edward, and the daughter Elisabeth. The university year, of eight months, was spent at the University of Halle, on the Saale, in Prussian Saxony, the remainder of the time in travel in Scotland, England, and on the Continent. The profes- sors at Halle who particularly attracted him were Ulrici, the psychologist and philosopher, and Tholuck, then the most famous of German theologians, and Primate of the Prussian Es- tablished Church. (Oberconsistorialrath.) With Doctor and Mrs. Tholuck (who was born the Baroness von Gemmingen-Steinegg) Doctor and Mrs. Hayes formed a strong and lasting friendship, and correspondence was maintained for twenty years after returning to America, until the death of both Professor and Mrs. Tholuck. A similar lasting friend- ship was formed with the family of von Mebuhr. 1 *As a memento of this friendship, there is preserved in the family of Doctor Hayes a Latin copy of St. Augustine's "City of God," printed three years before Columbus discovered Amer- ica. It was formerly the property of von Niebuhr the histor- ian, whose epoch-making work not only contributed largely to the knowledge of Roman history, but also was a chief factor in establishing the modern conception of the methods of histori- cal criticism. The marginal notes written in the book (accord- ing to his grandson) are by the hand of the historian. The historian bequeathed the book to his son, who was von Bis- marck's predecessor as Prime Minister of the King of Prussia. The Prime Minister bequeathed the book to his son, Judge Ger- hart von Niebuhr, who presented it to Mr. and Mrs. Hayes. 39 A Memoir of During the year 1877-78, while Doctor Oren Burbank Cheney, president of Bates College, was absent in Europe, Doctor Hayes was act- ing president. The degree of Doctor of Divinity was con- ferred upon Professor Hayes in 1871 by Hills- dale College. The trustees of Hillsdale College also solicited him to become president of that institution. Throughout his residence in Lewiston other activities than those of his professorship claimed a share of his energy. He attended political caucuses and discharged the duties of a citizen. He was interested in the phil- anthropic movements of the community. Acts of personal kindness to the lonely or unfor- tunate were gratefully reported after his death. "He has called on me every week for the two years since your mother died," said his wife's aged and invalid sister who lived in Auburn. He was beneficently active in the local church and Sunday school, and he participated in the activities of the general organizations of the denomination to which he belonged. He was repeatedly a delegate to the triennial General Conference of the denom- 40 Benjamin Francis Hayes ination, and preached the annual sermon be- fore that body on the occasion of the celebra- tion of the hundredth anniversary of the denomination's birth. He was at one time or another a member of the general boards of Foreign Missions, of Home Missions, of Education, and one of the corporators of the denominational publishing house. He was fertile in projects. Ocean Park and the An- nual New England Assembly of Free Baptists owe their existence to his initiative. The cot- tage which he built at Ocean Park was for many years the summer resort of his family. He preached frequently, either upon special occasions or in pulpits from which the pastors were temporarily absent. His public prayers were genuine prayers and unusually fervent and uplifting. In preaching, what is called "striving for effect/' was utterly absent; in- deed, it was inconceivable in connection with him. He stood in perfect freedom from him- self, a man of unconscious courage, tall, erect, speaking with force and fluency in a rich, masculine voice, that did not desert him to the end of life. The last time he attended church, when he had hardly strength enough 41 A Memoir of to go up the steps leading to the audience room, it was communion Sunday, and, in con- nection with the ordinance, he delivered an address that stirred the congregation pro- foundly. After he had taken permanently to his bed, word came to him that a student, upon the motive evoked by that address, had begun a life of Christian service. His sermons were delivered with great earnestness, they were lighted from time to time by new and exceed- ingly apt illustrations, and were the fresh deliverances of a sincere and earnest intel- ligence teeming with matter. Some fresh as- pect of truth that had fed his own soul seemed always to be calling for utterance. As years went by and his thought pro- gressed, there was change in the mode of his religious experience. From youth he was em- inently a man of faith, forming exalted con- ceptions of the relation between God and men, and carrying out these conceptions to their logical application to practical affairs. He be- longed to a generation which acquired a new view of the method of God's working, as the orderly procedure of the Power that is im- manent and operative in all the processes of 42 Benjamin Francis Hayes nature, and he learned to think of that power not as a too man-like being, irregularly acting upon the universe, but as the essence of all being, continuously acting within it, as the Spirit, "in whom we live and move and have our being." Accordingly, he ceased to speak as if God required to be reminded of his children or of their needs, and prayed, not to increase God's thoughtfulness of him, but in order to increase his own thoughtfulness of God; not that God might be disposed to do greater good to him, or to others for whom he prayed, but that he himself might be disposed to completer cooperation with the divine good- will. He prayed because he hun- gered for heavenly fellowship, rejoiced in the contemplation of God, and in the expression of gratitude, of devotion, and of those desires and purposes, both for individual life and work, and for the kingdom of God upon earth, which, as he believed, can be shared with the head of that kingdom by its subjects. In this brief sketch I have stated simply the most essential facts of a man's life and character. The quality of the effect which he produced in the various relations of life is 43 A Memoir of indicated by others in letters quoted later. I have set forth his shortcomings as well as his excellencies. Some failure to organize his manifold activities with watchful regard for the flight of time, some ignoring of the boyish limitations of undergraduates — these, I think, are the most serious faults that any one can mention in connection with him. Bare enumeration of the most evident qual- ities of his intellectual life requires mention of his gift of lucid and forceful expression; his unflinching thoroughness that could find no apology, and wished for none, to omit or slight anything that pertained to the subject in hand; his zestful interest in everything to which he applied himself ; his openness of mind which, to the last, welcomed new light and the labor of readjustment; his clear and strong rationality, and the fertility and suggestive- ness of his mind. The opinion has been re- peatedly expressed by those whose judgment in such a matter is of weight — and I doubt if any one who knew him would dissent from it — that if at any time he had been transferred to a place among scholars where strict special- ization invites great achievement in particu- 44 Benjamin Francis Hayes lar fields, he would have taken high rank among them. None need regret that he had a place among the teachers who made for Bates College the first half century of her history, even though the position he held among them as a scholar, and the work he did, are evidence that, with the opportunity of strict special- ization and the environment which accom- panies it, important contribution to produc- tive scholarship could with confidence have been expected of him. Beneath and above his intellectual life the essential and unmistakable facts of his char- acter were these : Kind he always was, genuine and simple and dignified he always was, with no empty assumption of the mere manner of dignity. Though not incapable of indignation, he seemed to have reached the point where there ceases to be danger of lapses into un- seemly speech or unmagnanimous feeling. To be of service was his main desire. The Chris- tian ideal was the background of his thoughts, sentiments, aims, and conduct, and as long ago as any of his children can remember, through the habitual sense of loyal companion- ship with a divine associate in whom that ideal 45 A Memoir of is realized, conformity to that standard ap- peared to have become with him a simple matter of course. 46 Mrs. Hayes. Benjamin Francis Hayes CHAPTER IV. A HELPMATE. The twilight of life's day began when the physicians announced to Doctor Hayes that a disease had fastened itself upon his wife which must soon terminate her life. It was rather a golden sunset so long as she lingered, for these two had no fear of the future that lies beyond, though he might dread the separa- tion here, and they rejoiced in "the dear to- getherness" till its last hour, then only did twilight fall ; and even then it was not a star- less night, but twilight with an after-glow, for after her decease the thought of her was so much and so vividly present with him that he seemed to himself, as he often said, to enjoy her spiritual companionship ; and it was more to him, I believe, than the companionship of any visible friend. Marriage had meant much to the parents of these two. The father of Mrs. Hayes, after his wife's death, being appar- ently well, though aged, said to his children, 47 A Memoir of "I do not think that I shall remain long be- hind your mother/' and a week later died as he sat in his chair. The mother of Professor Hayes survived her husband by more than twenty years, but as she lay speechless in the exhaustion of death, her last act was to open her eyes and point, smiling joyously, to the portrait, hanging on the wall, of her hus- band, whom she hoped presently to rejoin. There are as many degrees in marriage as in Masonry, and Professor and Mrs. Hayes were married in the thirty-third degree. An attempt to convey, in few words, a notion of the character and personality of Mrs. Hayes should begin by referring to her religious experience. This daughter of the Puritans from girlhood had an exacting conscience. Nightly she reviewed the day, and whatever her conscience disapproved, she confessed in prayer, asking forgiveness, sometimes with tears ; and often she retired to rest happy in the conviction that she was approved. But before she was sixteen she came under the domination of a theology which, in that day, overshadowed some souls with life-long mel- ancholy and blighted some with hard indif- 48 Benjamin Francis Hayes f erence. If the weekly teachings of her parson were the truth then her scrupulous self-exam- ination and her satisfaction in the sense that God forgave the errors which she confessed, and accepted her conscientious endeavor to do his will, were but the filthy rags of self -right- eousness. If God was good, as she firmly be- lieved, and yet was angry with her every day, and every act of her unregenerate soul was sin, as each Sunday she was assured, with ponderous argument, then must her guilt be dire. That she might realize the hor- ror of her supposed condition, and feel the necessary agony for her own sins and for the guilt of depravity which she was believed to have inherited, she studied all the awakening and alarming books to be secured, wrestling in prayer with strong crying and tears. Mean- while the unflinching Calvinist in the pulpit proclaimed that as the farmer goes to the woods and selects some trees to be cut down for his winter's fire and allows some to stand and flourish, so God, of his sovereign will, selects some men to flourish in eternal life, and some he reprobates for everlasting dam- nation, according to the ill-deserts which they 49 A Memoir of have inherited from Adam — all for his own eternal glory. For years she strove in vain, and in distress of spirit, to secure the ap- proved relations with this awful potentate, until convinced that she could do no more, that if she was reprobate she was reprobate, that her utmost of repentance, submission, and petition had been offered, and that it was use- less for her to ask again. Then deliberately she resolved, "I can pray no more, but I will kneel before him in silent acknowledgment of his goodness." And as thus she knelt, her spirit was filled with revelation. The hard teachings that had troubled her youth were superceded by a diviner insight. Them came to her, as if by a prophet's inspiration, the vision of a brother Christ and of a father God. The austere potentate who, for his own glory, reprobates to eternal torment millions of his creatures, was replaced by the great Kinsman of every loving spirit, yearning to be under- stood and loved by his children. To the God she so conceived her soul responded with re- verence and devotion, and never from that hour did she doubt Christ's thought of God, which had become the vision of her own soul. 50 Benjamin Francis Hayes This experience gave her singular prepara- tion to exert religious influence and to intro- duce others to the fellowship of Christ by a more normal way. True to the appreciations fostered in her home, she had an early enthusiasm for educa- tion, accompanied by a determination that did not wane when the annual sessions of the local school were over. Through a part of her later girlhood, after the school had closed for the year, she regularly used in study a period of morning quiet before the early hour at which the rest of the family were astir, and when friends who spent this portion of the year at boarding-school returned they found her still abreast with them. When nineteen years of age she was solicited to make her first attempt at teaching, by taking charge of the Turner Village school, of ninety pupils. Her success was such that she received, through the agent, a request from every family in her native dis- trict to teach the school in which she had been a pupil the preceding winter, and which was attended by some of her friends who were older than herself. In those days village and rural schools were attended by pupils of ma- 51 A Memoir of ture age, problems of discipline were difficult, and any but a male teacher for a winter school had been unheard of, yet she was repeatedly sought at man's pay for winter terms where men had failed. In the presence of her kind- ness and idealism and the unfailing grace and dignity that were her birthright, problems of discipline gave place to universal affection. The payment of her salary, at the close of one of her terms, came to her as a surprise, so com- pletely had she forgotten that she was doing the work for anything but love of it and her pupils. One winter she declined a larger sal- ary in order to go to a frontier town where there had been no good school. Here young men who had idled away their winters with- out learning so much as the rudiments of arithmetic, though in combination they had driven more than one master from the school- house, were transformed into eager, self- respecting pupils, using not alone the school- hours, but recesses, mornings and evenings in study. The first Sunday after the opening of this school she formed a Sunday school. Before the term ended money had been sub- scribed, a preacher engaged, and regular Sab- 52 Benjamin Francis Hayes bath services established in the town. She taught the village schools at South Paris and at Harrison, and was both teacher and pupil at the Oxford Normal Institute. When she was appointed to a place in the faculty at New Hampton it was no experiment, for her teach- er in the subject regarded as the most difficult in the curriculum at New Hampton said that no recitation of hers in that course had re- ceived any mark but the highest; she held a certificate from a general examination of candidates for teachers, at which her papers had ranked far above all others, and her pre- vious experience as a teacher was both a prep- aration and a guarantee. The veteran edu- cator who, as chairman of the examining committee, followed her work, term by term, the three years during which she taught at New Hampton, declared her "the best teacher of Latin that he ever knew." Later as Pre- ceptress of Lapham Institute in Rhode Island, while her husband was Principal, she aroused enthusiasm as a teacher of Latin and of English literature. It is of some interest that among those who were her pupils were more than half a dozen who became professors in 53 A Memoir of colleges and universities, including Yale and Cornell, besides a United States senator, and several judges. Scores of letters contain grateful testimony concerning the helpful Christian influence which she everywhere exerted. Dr. Richards Colwell, professor in Denison University, who, forty years before, had been one of the students at Lapham Institute, said in a letter written shortly after her death : "I have never ceased to be grateful for the way in which she led me along into the service of Christ. She set me right in more ways than I can enumer- ate, and often when a student comes to me with difficulties, I remember what Mrs. Hayes said to me, and I repeat it to him as the best thing I can say ... I have been in the habit each year of speaking of her in my classes." Dr. W. T. Hewett, professor in Cornell Univer- sity, writes : "Of all my teachers, three linger in my memory with especial gratitude, and one of these became Mrs. Hayes. I have never ceased to retain the memory of the sweetness and beauty of her influence upon me in boy- hood." A graduate of Bates, a man of exalted character and wide influence, once a neigh- 54 Benjamin Francis Hayes bor but now residing in the West, writes : "I never knew one who impressed me as living so near her Heavenly Father." A gentleman, once a fellow-teacher with Mrs. Hayes, whose intimacy with her family has continued to the present, said : "I never knew any other person who gave herself so unreservedly to the inter- ests of others." Miss Ella M. Butts, at one time Lady Principal at New Hampton, now for years a missionary in India, writing of the "beautiful and helpful lives" lived by her and her husband, calls them "the saintliest, most Christlike lives I have ever known." When Professor and Mrs. Hayes moved to Lewiston they purchased a house of ample space, near the college, on grounds which they liberally planted with shrubs and trees, facing the street for one hundred and fifty feet, situated upon an eminence commanding a prospect of fifty miles of the hills, valleys, and mountains of Maine and New Hampshire. This home was altogether untroubled by that form of vulgarity which consists in the wish to appear to have expended money. It had standards of its own. Books and periodicals and accumulations of gifts and of mementos 55 A Memoir of of travel made it a place of livable, lovable atmosphere. An abundant hospitality, es- pecially during the first twenty-five or thirty years, helped to make it a center of helpful- ness. This hospitality included the sick and the stranger, and was exercised always for helpfulness or for friendship. The children of this home received the bene- fit of their mother's powers of instruction and inspiration. Save for one year, the writer had no other teacher until ten years of age, and remembers that she used a number of the methods that have since come to be advocated by educational leaders; for example, sending the child on "nature study" excursions to gather, it might be, as many different leaves as possible to be drawn on returning home, teaching the technical names of their forms and explaining the etymology of those terms ; introducing the child to ancient mythology; causing him to write out what he had seen, heard, or imagined; beginning the study of a foreign language at a very early age; and having the pupil read his Latin with com- prehension without translating into English. For nearly forty years Mrs. Hayes taught a 56 Benjamin Francis Hayes class in the "Main Street" Sunday school in Lewiston. During its earlier years the mem- bership of this class changed frequently, be- cause it was made up largely of young wom- en who were employed for the time in Lewis- ton, but had homes in other towns. These young women entered the church singly and in groups, and scarcely any one ever belonged to this class of hers without becoming a Chris- tian. And for those already Christians it was a school of Christian nurture and enlighten- ment during all these years, and certainly could have been no less so when afterward her husband became its teacher. In 1873 the calls from the India mission field were pathetically urgent, and the re- sources elicited in response were discourag- ingly inadequate. While communing with God in secret prayer, a plan unfolded itself to her for relieving this situation. The work thus outlined in her mind was entered upon at once. Every mail bore letters, as many as she could write between mails, to influential women, to pastors, editors, officers of the home and for- eign missionary societies, and heads of insti- tutions of learning. Those living in distant 57 A Memoir of western States were asked to telegraph re- plies authorizing the use of their names in calling a convention. The New Hampshire "Yearly Meeting" of Free Baptists was shortly to occur. As a result of this correspondence a call, signed by names representing all local- ities, was issued summoning a convention at the time and place of that meeting. It was in June of seventy-three, and Mrs. Hayes and her husband went in their carriage across the hill country to Sandwich, New Hampshire, where the meeting was held. There, after the hard- est week's work of her life, she saw the Free Baptist Woman's Missionary Society organ- ized, its constitution unanimously adopted, its offices filled by sympathetic and enthusias- tic ladies, new life imparted to a cause that had been languishing, and the work of reliev- ing the necessities of the mission actually be- gun. This was the origin of the general Woman's Missionary Society of the Free Bap- tist denomination. At the same time while this agitation for a general organization was going on, interviews were sought with the pastors of her own and the two neighboring churches, and with many 58 Benjamin Francis Hayes ladies in these parishes, which resulted in the formation on a single evening, of three local societies to be auxiliary to the general woman's missionary society when it should be organ- ized. At the same time, also, correspondence was held with ladies in various "quarterly meetings" 1 that were to convene during the summer months, arranging for a missionary meeting at each quarterly session, and also for the formation of local auxiliary societies in the churches within these quarterly meet- ings. She also secured the organization of children's auxiliaries in certain churches, and so directed the activities of the children's mission band in her own church that its con- tribution rose as high as four hundred dollars in a year. About six years after inaugurating the mis- sionary activities above described, Mrs. Hayes presented to ladies of her own community a plan for a society to aid the women and girls, of whom seven thousand were then already employed in the factories of Lewiston, amid perils and limitations of opportunity. The first practical activity of this society x The name used by Free Baptists for a minor ecclesiastical district, as well as for its convention. 59 A Memoir of had been suggested by the predicament of a domestic in her own home, who was about to be married, and who, though an efficient cook, could not make or even repair a simple gar- ment. Hundreds of little girls, with mothers employed in the factories of Lewiston, were growing up in equal ignorance of domestic arts, and in their turn would become wives and mothers of homes condemned by their ignorance to otherwise unnecessary thriftless- ness and poverty, causes of both misery and vice. This suggested to her mind the establish- ment of an industrial school for girls. Such a school was successfully maintained for a num- ber of years. Its enrollment reached three hundred ; and it was a center of cultural in- fluences, in addition to the direct instruction. The society which she founded established a large free evening school, and maintained it until it was taken over by the city as a part of the public school system. The same organ- ization of ladies secured the appointment of a police matron, and supplied the funds for her support until this office had so proved its usefulness as to be regularly maintained by the city. The society also conducted, on the 60 Benjamin Francis Hayes chief business street of the city, a free reading- room, a library, and a sewing and recreation room for girls. Later it purchased a fine resi- dence facing the city park, and opened it as a young women's home. Here, at moderate ex- pense, a haven could be found by those who, to prevent breakdown, must have a period of rest, and by convalescents coming from the hospital. Here also there was provided a tem- porary home for girls arriving in the city in search of work, who otherwise would not sel- dom have been out of money before finding employment, and frequently would have been surrounded not only by serious discomforts, but also by far more serious perils. At the home there was an employment bureau, and it became the center of all the other activities maintained by the society, including Sunday religious meetings, classes in cooking, nurs- ing, dress-making, millinery, etc., and clubs for social pleasure and improvement. After her death this institution received the name of "The Hayes Home," and its work is still effi- ciently carried on. For these undertakings she raised thousands of dollars largely by her per- sonal correspondence. At the back of her busy 61 A Memoir of desk, on a clipping yellowed by time, hung these verse® of Ella Wheeler Wilcox : Let me to-day do something that shall take A little sadness from the world's vast store, And may I be so favored as to make Of joys too scanty sum a little more. Let me not hurt by any selfish deed Or thoughtless word the heart of foe or friend; Nor would I pass unseeing worthy need, Or sin by silence where I should defend. For the twenty-four years preceding her decease she was president of the society just described, which in the interval had become the Women's Christian Association of Lewis- ton. It was founded in 1880, and was one of the earliest of the original beginnings of such work. 1 She not only furnished the initiative to which it owed its existence, but she was also the main guiding force of its successful expan- sion and development; a development, how- ever, which would have been impossible had not rare coadjutors become identified with her in its promotion. An essential of her usefulness was her self- withdrawing delicacy, coupled with dignity. 1 The first working girls' clubs (founded, however, not by work- ing girls, but under leadership similar to that which originated the movement in Lewiston) were formed in 1879 ; and were Miss Eliza Turner's "New Century Club," of Philadelphia, and Miss Grace H. Dodge's "Thirty-eighth Street Club," of New York. It has been stated that the introduction of working girls' clubs into New England came as late as the decade of the nineties. — The International Cyclopedia, vol. 17, p. 480, and Bliss' En- cyclopedia of Social Reform, p. 1421. 62 Benjamin Francis Hayes I think if safe to say that no one ever sus- pected her of proposing any plan for the sake of widening her own sphere or increasing her own importance. On the contrary, she never ceased to have a deprecatory feeling that pub- licity, when necessary, was a necessary evil; and when some one standing beside her death- bed adapting Paul's pean, said, "Henceforth there is laid up for you a crown," she answered with sudden emphasis, "I don't want a crown." While in all her public activities she was without self-assertion, she had serenity and poise, because she trusted her own refined in- stincts and her own clear judgments. She had also, in a note-worthy degree, that indis- pensable trait of the finest womanhood, dis- criminating and eager appreciation of what is beautiful in art, literature, and life. These traits gave her a social quality which insured her the cooperation of choice spirits, and was an important element in the practical leader- ship which she exercised. None who knew her need be assured that in the friendships, which survived the separation of a score of years, with the wife of the Primate of the Prussian Church, and of Bismarck's predecessor as 63 A Memoir of Prime Minister, she was quite as much the sought as the seeker, nor that their rank and title in the monarchy would not have sufficed to attract her to those ladies, who were noble women, not merely by the accident of titled ancestry, but by virtue of the rare quality of their beautiful personalities. While that which she achieved in youth and in maturity evinced intellectual powers, of no mean order, yet her endowment in this re- spect was not so unusual as that possessed by her husband. She had, however, another quality possibly as exceptional in its degree — the practical dynamics of individuality. She had no great temperamental physical courage, and her manner was the exact opposite of all explosiveness ; but she was powerfully moved to action of her quiet sort, by her own judg- ments. People differ greatly in the voltage gen- erated in them by an accepted idea; and it was in this, not the heat, but the steady pro- pulsion of her beliefs that she was exceptional. This was a cause of the intense mental con- centration with which she thought, worked, and wrote, of the long protracted religious struggle of her early years, and the habit of 64 Benjamin Francis Hayes rising to study an hour before the family was astir; and it was the most eminent factor in what she accomplished. Her moral judgments were in an unusual degree sincere, idealistic, and dominant. To her an idea was never merely something to be contemplated with more or less approval; it was already the beginning of conduct. "This ought to be" meant "this shall be," not because it was "her way," but because she believed it was "God's way." She made her plans upon her knees, and did not doubt that in promoting what was good she worked together with God. She had the courage, as well as the determina- tion to act upon her own deliberate judgment concerning what ought to be done and what could be done, notwithstanding the fears and opposition of whoever might dissuade. Her determination was not spasmodic, but lasted as long as the conviction that a course should be pursued, so that she had a sweet and quiet persistence that melted down barriers, and did not flinch though the obstacles might never lessen, but only change as years went by. For forty-eight years these two shared not only their visible experiences, but also their 65 A Memoir of inner life. They read together and discussed many of the books that were causing the world of thought to move forward, and in- timately shared a progressive religious ex- perience. The tendency to shape beliefs ac- cording to her own souPs needs was somewhat stronger in her, and the tendency to be domi- nated by the considerations of reason some- what stronger in him. Yet she did not lack the latter quality, and through the transforma- tions of thought that characterized active in- telligence in the last half century, they went side by side. For each, the conception that life has its main significance as an opportu- nity to serve in promoting the kingdom of Christ on earth, was not only a proposition which commanded assent, but also the habit- ual motive of their lives, which dominated every other. Their tastes, interests, and as- pirations were in harmony. The worth of each to the other was beyond all estimate. Mrs. Hayes passed away on the twenty- second of January, 1904, aged seventy-six. No traveler ever set out on a long journey more calmly or with fuller consent of mind. 66 Mrs. Hayes at Sixty-Eight Years of Age. Benjamin Francis Hayes CHAPTER V. CLOSING DAYS OF LIFE. The disease that took the life of Doctor Hayes was probably contracted by contagion during the winter of 1903. In the following summer he tramped the grounds of the St. Louis Exposition with footsteps from which his wonted elasticity and endurance were measurably abated. During that summer he paid his last visit to the homes of his children in Kansas, Ohio, and New York. Throughout the ensuing year he carried on his work of teaching, studying, and writing, with constant industry, although he felt and said that his energies were "slowing down." In the spring of 1905 he had begun to suffer from discom- fort and distension of the abdomen, which he attributed to indigestion, but which were really due to abdominal cancer and its drop- sical effects. The following winter he sub- mitted to more thorough medical examina- tions, both in Lewiston and in Portland. These 67 A Memoir of examinations disclosed the real character of his disease. On December 12, he received the verdict of the family physician, together with the confirmatory diagnosis which had been forwarded from Portland. It informed him that the close of life was at hand. The correspondence with his family, which followed, is almost too intimate for publica- tion, but some extracts from it afford the only adequate record of the spirit in which he ap- proached the close of his life. The following is from a letter written two days after the report of the physicians : "My precious and honored son and daugh- ter, Frank and Cora : — Out of a loving heart, all the heart which the Lord through ancestry and experience has given me, I wish you and your's a happy Christmas, and I anticipate it, too .... How are you, dear son, in health and vigor? That is a hundredfold more important than how I am. We have neither of us said much about these questions, but I should like to exchange confidences with you; though I have no good story to tell. Indications are that I shall no more strike an up grade, but thank our great Father that 'I fear no evil/ 68 Benjamin Francis Hayes and hope you may all be able to congratulate me when my promotion comes. I deserve more of the opposite than congratulation for the past — but poor scholars do graduate, because our Father is not done with us when we are through here. Oh, the thought of the society and the service beyond at times thrills me with anticipation. ' Shouldn't I be disappointed/ said your mother, 'to pass on and find there was nothing?' and then she laughed at her Hibernianism ; and so say I. "Gott sei mit eucli alien. Meine Liebe geht mi euch. "Father." A letter to his younger son suggested that as an approaching meeting of the American Economic Association would soon take the son to Baltimore, the latter might then visit his father in Lewiston. The apprehension oc- casioned by this letter led to an exchange of telegrams, which were followed by a letter dated December 17, part of which is given below : "I infer from your telegram that the Econo- mic Association meets after Christmas, so this 69 A Memoir of letter will reach you, and the circular also, which I may begin as soon as I close this. 1 "When I wrote you I had just turned a cor- ner in my knowledge, by learning that I need not expect any turn in my road physically from the direction in which I had been going since last July. The revelation caused no alarm, and more joy than sadness, but it made me want to see you and be enveloped for a little in the warmth of your love with no hundreds of miles of atmosphere between. It has been very pleasant, since you spoke of it, to think of spending part of the summer in the warm bosom of your family, and still is, but as to the reality of that, we know not what the summer will reveal. I may spend our fiftieth anniversary with my Allie, as we long expected to do. This has been a delightful thought, often coming to my mind as, for ex- ample, when I read in 'The Thought of God/ 'In Twos/ 1st series, p. 107/ " *It was our custom to write circular letters which started from one home and went to each of the three others that made up our family circle. 2 Poems by Frederick L. Hosmer and William C. Gannett. 70 Benjamin Francis Hayes The "circular" letter, written the same day as the preceding, was as follows : Lewiston, Maine, December 17, 1905. "My Dear Children : — I thank our Heaven- ly Father for you and for all the influence that goes out from each of your lives. I do not murmur that Providence has located you so far from the old home and from each other, delightful as it would be to us all if without other change distance could be annihilated so that we could often see and talk with each other. .... I am happy in thinking of and loving you, happy in thought of how exempt we and ours have all been from that sorrow that is hardest to bear, worse than bereave- ment, the sorrow for loved ones gone wrong; and happy in the belief that in the wisdom that guards and guides in all your homes they will in future be spared that sorrow ; and may we all be able so to take into our thought the whole of existence, both that passed here in discipline and service, and that beyond where we shall display the results of discipline, that we may find each case of promotion an oc- casion for unselfish joy and congratulation." Here follows a detailed account of his de- 71 A Memoir of oline in health, and of his examination by the council of physicians who reported their diagnosis by letter. He continues: ••Well, the doctor's letter seemed to be final I accepted it as such. Of course I thought of my children and their dear families. I thought of niv classes and niv colleagues who would be perplexed as well as burdened to take my work. Then I considered that that which would remain after a few weeks more would not be so perplexing to them as that which we have had thus far — we are nearly through the philosophy. Aside from these considera- tions I do not know as I had one regret for nivself . It would not agree with the testimony of history nor with that of my personal life if there were not better life and more joyous service beyond. Of course the thought of pain and lassitude intermediate had often occurred, but it is not my habit to cross bridges till I come to them, and I have dismissed the thought with *I will fear no evil/ and with a prayer that my patience might not fail. ••When I retired to my room that night — Tuesday, the 12th — the thought that there would be for me no long period of useless 72 Benjamin Francis Hayes weakness was rather pleasant, and I said to myself: 'If it were made known to me that I had been granted a year's leave of absence with a ticket for a voyage around the world to explore Japan, China, India, Egypt, and the Holy Land, should I not expect to be con- gratulated, and would I not gladly risk weeks of continued sea-sickness for the sake of all that is to be enjoyed and learned in such a voyage? But what is all that compared with the privilege of exploring the spirit world, of resuming study there with Allie, as we have anticipated when together, of knowing our Lord as we are known and finding what it is to be like him in the associations and the service for which all the discipline of this life is a preparation?' I assure you I have not for many and many a night lain down more cheer- ful or happier, and I am accustomed to lie down happy and to awake with cheerful hope. "Of course I often think of the sweet as- sociations with all of you, and of the interest and beauty that would fill life for me here, were I to stay in health, and work — as I did to-day when looking over beautiful water- colors in Plummer's Studio and when riding 73 A Memoir of with Professor Anthony — but then at once I say that beauty, society, and love are not limited to material and planetary boundaries ; our Father who loves them and provides them here surely provides them for the spirit world as well, and as spirit is more real and more important than matter, that for the spirit world must be adapted to every spiritual ca- pacity and need. So I think it is not boasting ta say, 'Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,' It is he who brought life and immortality to light. I think with pity of those who lived and died before him, and of the millions who are in that dimness still. I was never more inter- ested in all work that scatters the light. I look back with some regrets to opportunities that were not used, to work that was almost possible^ but not quite; but it was not essen- tial, the world's work will go on, and for what will be for me hereafter I can trust him who doeth all things w r ell. "It would be no surprise to me if the end should come sooner than the doctor thinks. The expectation at present is that I shall carry on my classes next term. My expectation is, 74 Benjamin Francis Hayes and has been for years that I should not stay long after strength to care for myself is gone, and of course it is pleasant to have that an- ticipation. ***** "There, I have tried to give you a frank and full account of the situation. What it implies for me and my estate and you and your fam- ilies has often been in my mind in months gone by, and I hope it will find none of us unprepared and all of us sure that if soon my 'Good-by 'till morning' shall be said to you all, that will not only be best for me, but best for you all. "And if some of you should think next sum- mer, 'We hoped to have father with us now/ you can add, 'How glad we may be that father and mother are together on their fiftieth an- niversary, as for many years they hoped to be/ "Please pass this around ; it goes laden with the warm love of my heart for each father and mother and child in your precious and love-lighted homes. "Father and Grandpa." Soon after the writing of this letter came the visit of his younger son; following that came his daughter Elizabeth, with her daugh- 75 A Memoir of ter Gertrude, then the older son from Topeka, the son-in-law, and finally the return of the younger son, so that all these were with him during the last days of physical decline. Professor Hayes continued his regular la- bors, attended church, and taught his class in Sunday school up to the extreme limit of his strength. A class of divinity students came regularly to the house until about two weeks before the end. Although the weakness and lassitude had become so great that he lay most of the day motionless, with closed eyes, yet he would thoroughly arouse himself during the class period ; and for a short time, nearly every day, he dictated and listened to the reading of selected passages, in preparation for his class. The wasting of the disease was such that finally his muscles were apparently gone, and during the last week he was not able to place his arms, but required one of us to put even his hands in comfortable positions. He was watched constantly by his children, so- licitous to meet the rise of every need or wish. During those days, when the flesh w r as almost utterly wasted away, his iiiind remained 76 Benjamin Francis Hayes unclouded and his voice clear and resonant. The family physician, Dr. Herbert 0. Brad- ford, said that in all his experience (and his experience had been very long) he scarcely re- called a case in which the mind had so retained its powers in spite of such extreme decline of the body. It seemed as if the least expenditure of vigor sufficed to set in motion the delicately- adjusted mechanism of the mind. On the last Wednesday of his life he finished dictating the following article, which was published in the Lewiston Journal of March 8 ; and on the next day he dictated an important and tactfully- worded letter. It was as he lay in the ex- treme of emaciation and weakness that he unclosed his eyes and dictated the following, which was written down as it came from his lips; and the emendation that if afterwards received was confined to slight changes in two sentences. Dean Howe had expressed the wish that an answer from Professor Hayes, to the question with which the article opens, might be published. THE LAST PUBLIC UTTERANCE. "You have asked me to state, if I can do so from experience, whether the transition from 77 A Memoir of the traditional theology to acceptance of the views made necessary by recent progress of science; and to the changed conceptions of the nature, mode of construction, purpose, and inspiration of the Scriptures which has re- sulted from the critical study of them ; and to the world-view that has been gained by the progressive construction of philosophy, are necessarily detrimental to faith in God, devo- tion to Christ, and zeal for salvation of men. "I think I can answer from experience, for both my inclinations from early life, and es- pecially my obligations as theological teacher in recent years, have made it my duty to study and estimate the effects of recent thought upon the traditional religious beliefs, and therefore to accept those which have been wrought out and established upon a satisfac- tory basis for faith. And I can confidently say that the effect of this process has been large increase of faith and joy in the Lord, increased satisfaction and delight in the Holy Scriptures, together with enlarged interest and earnest- ness to carry a knowledge of the gospel to all men everywhere in order to bring them into filial relations to the Heavenly Father. 78 Benjamin Francis Hayes "I have observed, too, a like tendency in other minds. Among many letters that have brought con- solation and cheer to my sick-bed, all more or less similar in tenor, one from the beloved pastor of a prosperous church, contains the following : " 'I have said again and again, both in private and in public, that you have been the one above all others who has unsettled and then resettled my faith on a different basis and truer. * * * * The influence of your life, upon me at least, has been in an intellectual way to show me that honest and kindly analysis is not irreverent destruction, and that the true basis of faith is not even touched by most of the points of theological warfare in scholastic circles. At least this is the way it appeals to me, and as a result of the one-time wilderness that you led me into and out of, I can con- scientiously say that the decision one way or the other of many of the mooted points of dis- cussion does not affect my faith in the mission, message, and claim of the Son of God in this world or the next/ 79 A Memoir of "Personally I am now at the crucial point. One may get on while in health and engrossed in the world's affairs, with traditionary and indefinite beliefs about his relations to God and the hereafter ; he may be content to hold, unexamined, what those around him have re- ceived ; but when face to face with the narrow stream and the great unknown, it becomes a momentous question — Will my faith hold? "I realize that the re-examination of the grounds and substance of Christian faith, during the past ten years, has not weakened but greatly confirmed that faith. That exam- ination has resulted, indeed, in the dropping of some opinions which seem to have no ra- tional foundation, and in the modifying of others. It has resulted, also, in a confirmation of faith resting upon added evidence from many sources, especially upon the discovery that Christianity consists not in the decrees of councils of ancient ages, or necessarily in traditions handed down to us by the church, Catholic or Protestant — not in something from outside of us, but an experience within us, an experience of loyal sonship to the Eternal Father, 'revealed and realized through 80 Benjamin Francis Hayes Jesus Christ/ revealed and realized also in the brotherhood of man — because all men are God's children and he lives in them. This gives assurance that because Jesus Christ lives we have also a life that parallels his, and a fellowship with him in service for the progressive establishment in this universe of the kingdom of the Eternal Father. "It by no means follows that the road into a tremorless faith has to be the same for every one. I'm but giving what is asked for, the testimony of personal experience that the acceptance of the assured results of scientific discovery, of critical study of the Scriptures, and of the reconstruction of philosophy, does not necessarily weaken faith in Christ and his gospel. "I can add, also, from personal knowledge, the experience of my wife, Mrs. A. C. Hayes. At her conversion she entered into a profound experience of love to her Heavenly Father and devotion to the service of Christ. She was also from early life much interested in theological and philosophical questions. Her first intro- duction to the question then agitating the religious world came through reading Presi- 81 A Memoir of dent Hitchcock's lectures on "The Religion of Geology," from which she learned that it was impossible for sane minds, who candidly ex- amined the testimony, to regard the early chap- ters of Genesis either as a historic or a scien- tific account of the creation. She found it to be a vehicle of religious instruction adapted to the childhood of the race, and to childhood in all ages. Later she came in contact with such theologians and students of Scripture as Pro- fessor Tholuck of Germany, Professor Duff, a lifelong student and teacher of the Old Testa- ment, in Airdale College, England, and Pro- fessor Bowne of Boston University. It is not easy to think that scholars of such acumen, such devoutness, such earnestness to know the truth, could be otherwise than honest and sin- cere, or hold views unworthy of intelligent Christians. She also became aware, by her own independent study, that inspiration belongs not to things, books, or words, but to men whom the Holy Spirit moves to speak and write, and that inspiration makes no finite being omniscient, or infallible in judgment. She observed that there were changes of opin- ion and increase of knowledge from one period 82 Benjamin Francis Hayes to another of the sacred history. And it was a great relief thus to discover that many acts and statements once supposed to express the will of God were only human judgment re- specting that will, that the writers of every age could express themselves only in the thought of that age and in accordance with their own education. Hence, she was no longer obliged to find explanations and apologies to justify the cruelties of the judges and of Samuel, or for those fierce and cruel impre- cations in the Psalms that are plainly con- trary to the spirit of Christianity. "It became plain to her that, as we know from the New Testament, God tempteth not any man, but it was equally plain to her from II. Samuel 24 :1 that in the time of the writing of that book this was thought possible, though in I. Chronicles 21:1, written three hundred years later than Samuel, a different view prevailed, and Satan is affirmed to be the tempter. The Bible thus became to her far more consistent, intelligible and interesting upon finding that with the altered and rational conception of inspiration, variation in these minor details of ancient history would really 83 A Memoir of have nothing to do with the essentials of Chris- tianity, with the revelation through Christ of God as the universal Father, with Christ as the divine reconciler, and with our faith based upon his work, his word, and his life. More- over, the philosophic conception of the nature and immanence of God which prevails among modern scholars and makes the omnipresence of God a thinkable reality was an unfailing source of joy in communion, so that to her the words of Tennyson were no exaggeration but literal fact : "Speak thou to him for he hears, And spirit with spirit may meet, Closer to us than breathing, And nearer than hands and feet." "Thus she came to accept the theological re- suits of the philosophical reconstruction and the view of Scripture now firmly established in the minds of consecrated and earnest Chris- tian scholars in all Protestant countries. This transition was effected, according to her own testimony, without an hour's wavering of her faith in the Bible as communicating the es- sential truth to men, and in the love of the immanent God, the source of all truth." 84 Benjamin Francis Hayes On Saturday and Sunday before the Mon- day morning when he died, he still wished occasionally to see a friend who called, and from time to time conversed briefly with us; and he joined in the family worship with in- telligence absolutely undimmed. He asked us to sing, and added; "There is an old hymn that I used sometimes to sing when as a pas- tor I visited the sick-beds of Christians, 'In the Christian's Home is Glory/ " We sang the first stanza and chorus; and then, as we paused, trying to recall the next, he recited impressively : "He is fitting up my mansion, Which eternally shall stand; For my stay shall not be transient, In that holy, happy land." As Sunday was dawning beautifully, he looked out the eastern window and said : "Thy love the power of thought bestowed; To thee my thoughts would soar: Thy mercy o'er my life has flowed; That mercy I adore." Sunday evening, evidently realizing the approach of the end, he quoted, "Deep down in the beautiful valley Where God crowns the meek and the lowly." 85 A Memoir of Later in the night his words, which had be- come few, showed that the thoughts were no longer distinct, or that the connection be- tween thought and speech was disarranged. Monday morning early, February 26, on r& ceiving some slight service, he said, "You are good boys," and he did not attempt to speak again. Two hours later, at a little after ten o'clock, he ceased to breathe, without evidence of suffering, and with nothing to show that the last breath was his last, except that no other came. 86 Benjamin Francis Hayes CHAPTER VI. LETTERS. The daily papers of Maine cities, and of other New England States, and of States be- yond New England, contained appreciative notices that day and the next. The following words published by one of the daily papers, are from an interview with Prof. James A. Howe, D.D., Dean of Cobb Divinity School . Dean Howe said : "A better man never lived in Lewiston than Professor Hayes; a truer man never lived; and few men are there of greater ability. "Professor Hayes has been an earnest Christian man. His Christian character was such a marked feature of his life that it would be recognized by every one as a primary trait. "At the same time he has been a man of pro- gressive thought in the study and adoption of religious tenets. His mind has been scholarly. He has been a careful investigator and con- scientious in every branch of study that he 87 A Memoir of pursued. That made him loyal to the truth as he discovered it. He was ready to welcome new forms of truth commended to him by reason and sufficient evidence. "He had the fearlessness of a conscientious man in respect to his convictions, so that he might depart from traditional forms of belief, though, in the eyes of many, they were very sacred, and were to him until he found reason for supplanting them with more solid truths. "His professional duties required of him an investigation of these themes that led him to take steps in advance of those whose oppor- tunities for such study were more limited. Yet no man held a more steadfast loyalty than he, to the fundamental principles of our evan- gelical faith. To that he has given testimony during his last sickness. ■"As a friend and a companion, I have well known him since I succeeded him at the Olney- ville Church, and I knew him slightly before. He was a man of very versatile attainments. "He was a man of unusual ability as a plat- form speaker. He had the elements of elo- quence under his control. Under proper con- ditions few men could speak more interesting- 88 Benjamin Francis Hayes ly, more persuasively, and more convincingly, than could he. He carried with his thought, feeling and a high sense of responsibility for his utterances. "There was something of the prophet in his fervor, and of the reformer in his readiness to advocate any righteous cause. "In the denomination he has been very anx- ious to have the standard of ministerial edu- cation raised to the highest possible point. He was the author of several useful movements in denominational circles, looking towards a better equipment of the ministry in their work. "When we had a Free Baptist Quarterly he was one of its valued contributors, and to the Star he has sent many a valuable contribution. "To these words much might be added from the standpoint of an appreciation of Profes- sor Hayes' assocation with neighbors, friends, and his fellow townsmen. The key-note of his neighborliness was gentleness and kindness, and the attitude of his life toward others was helpfulness, courtesy, and zeal for the common good. His appreciation of life was sane and generous. Neither cant nor criticism got the better of him. He understood humanity to the 89 A Memoir of measure of its better side, and was loath to know evil or to think evil or to consider it. A pure-minded, sweet, honest, faithful Christian gentleman was he — one who made the world better for his living in it, one whose loss will actively be felt, yet whose influence will live a long time in the world. "He has taught so many, so faithfully, and he has taken the purpose of youth so seriously that he has inspired these qualities in his pupils. With a mental bent towards abstract thought, he still kept in a remarkable degree his love of nature, of the material world, and especially of the young men under his care. They knew him, appreciated and loved him. "What better epitaph can be written of any man?" Appreciative public recognition did not wait until after the end had come. Previous to his decease, the mastery and courage, the loving interest in his associates, and persistent fidel- ity to ordinary duties with which he ap- proached the great transition had elicited ex- tended public comment, and newspaper arti- cles appreciative of his life and character had reached his bedside. 90 Benjamin Francis Hayes The following from an interview with Pro- fessor Jonathan Y. Stanton, the dearly loved and honored senior member of the Bates fa- culty, published three weeks before the death of Professor Hayes, derives special signifi- cance from being the utterance of one who, for forty years, was his colleague: "I cannot refrain from adding my tribute to Professor Hayes through the Journal. I have known him long and well, and my admira- tion has only increased as the years have roll- ed on. The more intimately I have known him the more of his sterling qualities as a Chris- tian gentleman I have discovered. "Professor Hayes is indeed a remarkable man. As an off-hand and extemporaneous speaker I have hardly ever met his equal. Without a moment's preparation he can talk on nearly any subject, and what is still bet- ter he can always talk well. He has a sunny disposition that he imparts to all with whom he comes in contact. His style as a teacher and lecturer is clear, concise, and superb. Pro- fessor Hayes is a man of but few equals and no superiors, and I love him as a brother." 91 A Memoir of The following, clipped from an editorial obituary indicates the spirit that animated his closing days : "There was none of the gloom of the sick room connected with his illness. He absolutely had no fear of death — even met it joyfully, as all know who have conversed with him or who heard his wonderful, inspired address at his last communion at the Main Street Free Baptist Church, or who have read the accounts of him recently published in the Lewiston Journal." At the close of the funeral, at which ad- dresses had been delivered by Rev. Dr. Salley, his pastor, by President Chase, of Bates Col- lege, and by Dean Howe, of Cobb Divinity School, one of the most influential, but least demonstrative citizens of the community re- marked: "I think I never before attended a funeral at which every word of appreciation would be so completely endorsed by every person present." The following letters are selected from among a much larger number of similar tenor, which were received by Professor Hayes after 92 Benjamin Francis Hayes the physicians had announced the near ap- proach of death. The first four of the letters quoted were from former students: "My Very Dear Friend: — I have only to- day heard of your illness, and want to send you at least a word of greeting to remind you that I, too, as well as so many others, am think- ing of you in these days with loving and grate- ful sympathy. "I can never forget all you have done for me, both in the classroom and by your example, and I want you to know that I have always found it an inspiration to look upon you and realize that the character I have so admired in you is but an example of what the Spirit of Christ can do for each of us. "I am sure it must be sweet for you to re- member now how many lives you have in- fluenced so beautifully, and how many young feet you have turned into the straight and narrow path, and set upon the firm founda- tion. "I will always remember with great glad- ness our meeting at Rockland, and the fact that you had not forgotten me. 93 A Memoir of "I trust that you will understand by these few simple words that from my heart I wished exceedingly to send you at this time some token of my love for, and appreciation of you, and to express my gladness that after the day's work, so gloriously done, I can know 'at eventide' for you it is surely 'light.' "Affectionately yours, "G. H." "Professor Hayes, "Honored and Loved Teacher and Friend : — I have read your letter with a strange mix- ture of emotion. Sorrow as I thought of your loss, but joy for you. Oh, your note of exulta- tion running through your letter thrills me through and through ! Yes, I do congratulate you, and "I thank my God for every remem- brance of you." In the class-room, in the home, in the pulpit you have been a blessing and an inspiration to my life, for which I am grate- ful. I hold in loving remembrance your ser- mons and helpful conversations on your last trip to Pittsfield. You brought me at that time 'Halleck's Psychology,' 'Studies of the Soul,' by Brierly, and 'Religion of a Mature 94 Benjamin Francis Hayes Mind/ by Coe. I took the psychology on my vacation and read and studied it through, and enjoyed every page of it. 'Studies of the SouF I kept for the home trip with Mr. T. , and we read it with much pleasure, as did you and dear Mrs. Hayes a few years before. Then I re-read it alone in October. 'Religion of a Mature Mind' I am reading. Should be glad to buy all three books, especially 'Studies of the Soul/ because of the writing on the fly- leaf. "Have received since coming here, 'An Out- line of Christian Theology/ by Clarke, and 'Messages of the Bibles — Daniel and Revela- tion/ by Porter, which I am enjoying. "May these last days be your best days, and the physical suffering the least possible at the close. "With gratitude that I have been permitted to know you, "E. G. T." "My Dear Mrs. Cox: — If your father is able to hear, will you please tell him that in a letter to-day received from J. F., a classmate of Mr. C, he writes: 'The reading of your 95 A Memoir of letter has awakened feelings of sorrow to hear of the death of our former classmates, Littlefleld and Knowlton, and of the alarming condition of that accomplished teacher and scholarly gentleman, dear Professor Hayes. If he is able to receive any message from me, I wish that you would bear to him my sincere love and respect with my heartfelt gratitude for the high ideals and incentives to noble living which his earnest words and Christian example always inspired. "E. F. C." The writers of the preceding letters were students under Professor Hayes in Bates Col- lege. The following letter is from one who has been a student in his classes in Cobb Divinity School: "My Dear Professor Hayes :— Coming through Boston not many days since, I met Dean Howe at the North Station, and he told me that you were sick, and that the doctors do not give you any great amount of encourage- ment as to recovery. "Did I not know from what the Dean told me that the doctors have told you the facts of the case, I should not have spoken that first sentence so bluntly; and did I not have 96 Benjamin Francis Hayes in mind the photograph of a spirit that knows no fear just because the days lead down toward the end of the way here on earth, there might be cause for speaking a little differently. "I send this note, Professor Hayes, not that it can be any aid in the overcoming of a malady that it is not mine to treat, but simply that you may know the kindly regard that some of us boys have for the man we were wont to call, without the slightest implication of dis- respect, "Benny." Also that you may know the sympathy that comes as a spontaneous re- turn for the kindly spirit and inspiration that you have lent to many of us in and around the classroom in Roger Williams Hall, and the regret that cannot be different from a real sorrow at the word which comes through Dean Howe. "As I told Professor Stanton, at least a part of us who once were there bear some hall-marks of goodness which have been im- pressed upon us by the lives of those over us in the capacity of teachers then; yes, more than teachers, elder friends. That we do not bear more of those marks is due to our own unassimilative character. 97 A Memoir of "You have been the instrument of revising my tests of Christianity. What I, as a boy, thought to be two impossibles found union in yourself, and I have learned that a dogma- tic and prejudiced position on one side or the other of a given theory is not the test of a saving and acceptable faith in God through Jesus Christ. "I 3ay these things because they are true, and I hope that they may convey to you some- thing of the esteem in which I hold you, based upon a consciousness of having been helped by your life and teaching. "If in the providence of God it must be that you soon follow, as was said of President Harper, (death's messenger through the open door into life,) then may you go bearing as trophy of the day and time passed here with us, the hearty and loving testimony of help given along the lines of what is best and most abiding in life now and to be. "I recall two or three times of special pleas- ure to me : one, a time when in the classroom we had a little jar over essays, and the spirit displayed in the face of a very harsh statement from some of us was good to have stamped 98 Benjamin Francis Hayes upon our minds ; and another, one night after I had left school, and Mrs. Hayes had taken the journey to the other life, I sat in the library and talked with you during the chapel- hour instead of going in. Two statements made by you at that time I recall : one, that somehow the silver side of the cloud had been out to you all the time during the loss of Mrs. Hayes ; and the other, that you were glad that at such a time your feet touched something in which there was no tremor. "I judge it is so now, Professor Hayes, and the only possible lament which I can think of for you is the one made by Shaftsbury near his death: 'I hope it is not wrong to say it, but I cannot bear the thought of dying when there is so much to be done in the world/ "I must close. If we are not privileged to meet again in this world, then may faith and fidelity in the time of fruition call us together once again in the by and by, and in the "up- per chamber" of His loving plan. Pray for me. I need your prayers more than you need mine. I have life to live. You have only the larger life to gain. "Yours in the bond, born of the faith, "G. E. M." 99 A Memoir of A minister, himself venerable, wrote as follows : "Dear Brother Hayes: — I was very sorry to hear, by way of Dr. Anthony, that you were sick. I have always looked up to you as a father. You have been that to me. When I was but a boy, preaching in Brunswick, you helped me greatly by your wise counsel and encouraging words. All the way along, down to the present time, your fatherly advice and cheerful words have been a help and inspira- tion to me. Your life, as well as your words, has been before me, a living example of a noble and Godly manhood, which has led me to say many times, 'Help me, Lord, that I may live as pure and noble a life as his.' May the same dear Lord and blessed Christ, whom you have held up before others, be your com- fort and joy and strong help in these days of loneliness and suffering. I hope and pray that your work is not yet done, but that you may be raised to a good degree of health and still reflect the goodness of God into other lives. "If it is otherwise appointed, may the bless- ed light so shine before you that you may have a clear view of the heavenly home where all 100 Benjamin Francis Hayes is love and peace and rest. Thank God, your life will live on by your words spoken and written for generations to come, and your influence for ages yet to be. Mrs. E. unites with me in sending our love and prayers. "Yours in Christian love, "B. M. E." A response to a wedding gift contained the following : "My Dear Professor Hayes : — I am sure I want to thank you not only for this present, but, if I may, for all the good you have done me, without knowing it. Ever since I have been old enough to understand anything, the names of Professor and Mrs. Hayes have stood to me for all that is noble and true, and that has been the greatest gift. "Yours sincerely, "M. J. B." The following was from Professor T. L. Angell, for nearly forty years a colleague at Bates, now residing at Washington, D. C. : "Dear Professor Hayes: — I think of you daily and almost hourly, and am anxious to learn just how you are. Untroubled in spirit, I 101 A Memoir of know, but in body I fear it may be far other- wise. My own sad experience in my home leads me to expect this, but I do hope and pray that you may be spared long and severe suffering. Few men, I believe; brought where you now are, have reason to look back upon life with as much satisfaction as you may, and forward to the better land with as calm assur- ance and as soul-satisfying hope. Hundreds of students and hosts of friends to whom you have ministered and to whom your life has been a sweet and constant inspiration, love you to-day with a depth and fervor that I suspect you but imperfectly comprehend. "For myself I thank God for our long years of acquaintance, all of which have been of incalulable worth to me. May God grant a gentle release from earth and an abundant, a glorious entrance into heaven. "Affectionately yours, "T. L. A." A letter written to me after my father's death by one who for many years had been his colleague contained the following : "For more than forty years I have been inti mately acquainted with him, and I deliberately 102 Benjamin Francis Hayes say that to no person whom I have ever known do I yield so genuine respect or more sincere love. His life has been to me an unvarying in- spiration and benediction." The editor of The Times, Los Angeles, Cali- fornia, wrote thus : "My Dear Professor: — I have read in the Lewiston Journal of your sufferings and your bravery, and I believe it's no more than right to let you know that the effect of your godly living is felt on the farthest horizon. "Faith, besides removing mountains, be- strides continents, spans the oceans, and makes of all space a palm's breadth. A great spirit not only lives in all ages, but touches the souls of the whole universe; it is a world- force, propelling and uplifting wherever the breath that God breathed into man is one with the atmosphere of the planet. We little real ize, I believe, how far-spreading and how potent is its unseen but eternal impetus. "I must say, my dear professor, that as a neighbor I learned to love and admire you ; that you have often been in my thoughts dur- ing the past ten years, and that your life has 103 A Memoir of had an influence for good upon mine. God be praised for the largeness and richness of such souls! With the host of these, meanness and pettiness shall be conquered. If I live longer than you, Professor, I shall try to help in some of the ways you would have helped. "With regards to your family, and not ex- pecting an answer, "Sincerely and ever yours, "Harry E. Andrews." The following was from Hon. F. L. Dingley, editor of the most important newspaper in Maine, and a brother of the late Congressman Dingley. "My Dear Professor: — I want to get in touch with you once more before the time of mustering out, and to assure you that your fortitude, patience, and faith in the divine love are a greater contribution to the life, hope, and spiritual development of this community and of all that come within range of your in- fluence, through the printed words, than the ministry of any influence no matter how pre- cious and worthy, that comes to my mind with- in my recollection. The only other voice that 104 Benjamin Francis Hayes stands to me for as much or for near as much as yours is that of the Rev. A. P. Tinker, who though dead yet speaks more competently than when his eloquence fell upon us. What the Journal calls the anodyne of faith in immor- tality has been so modestly but completely il- lustrated in your recent work and words, that no skeptic can gainsay it. It is easy to upset Christian argument until it is backed by Chris tian conduct. The invincible answer to skep- ticism is the Word made flesh. "Having just seen my oldest child pass hence into the eternal life at the age of forty-one years, I have felt more conscious than ever be- fore of the strength and reality of the ever- lasting arms and of everlasting life. I remem- ber, as a lad, attending the old academy, noting your return from college to the old house near by, and I never lost the fine impression which the life of your good father and mother made upon me. That they have lived, not only in heaven, but in your personality on earth, is clear to me. The effacement of pride, spiritual vanity, and the conceit of righteousness is the beginning of wisdom. The simplicity of the child that must be reproduced in manhood, if 105 A Memoir of it be Christian manhood, was embodied in your ancestry, and you lived and breathed and had your being, as it seems to me, in that rein- carnation. As you feel yourself to be in the borderland, and only God knows how near to that border any one of us may be, I am not surprised that you have a special up-lift, celestial reinforcement, and that a power out- side yourself, which all your life has made for righteousness, already gives you the prophecy of the new body, painless and perfected out of suffering. When you cross the borderland you will meet my boy, my brother, my father, and my mother, as well as your own beloved, and there you will see as you are seen, and know as you are known. "Heaven be praised for the example which you set before the faithful and the faithless alike. It is the best sermon because it is the living soul. God help you, as he certainly will, to the last, when death shall be swallowed up in victory. "Very truly yours, "P. L. D." Official messages of condolence and ap- preciation were sent him by various organ- 106 Benjamin Francis Hayes izations or assemblages. Of resolutions passed subsequent to his decease the following are re- produced : To the Children of Professor Benjamin F. Hayes, D.D., "Dear Friends: — At a meeting of the fa- culty of Cobb Divinity School held Friday, March 9, 1906, the following record of ap- preciation of your father, our beloved col- league, was ordered: "He has left behind a finished work and a memory that is noble and pure. His service to the Christian Church and his denomination cannot be estimated. He lives in the life and teaching of many of our preachers to-day. None could be with him, as we have been privileged to be for many years, without ap- preciating and loving his sweet and beautiful spirit, without feeling his firm and simple faith, his penetrating spiritual insight, and, yet, his philosophic cast of mind with its breadth of view, its clear judgment, its power to find the fundamental and the ultimate. He demanded intellectual freedom in the interest of religion and faith itself. The very strength of his religious faith gave him not merely 107 A Meinoir of tolerance and charity, but led him to the keen- est scrutiny of every creed and doctrine of man, and to the rejection of all that was not in accord with the rational character of the mind or was contrary to the laws of thought. He had so much faith in God as to believe that there is such a kinship between the soul and truth that they will know and recognize each other. Many men through him have been help- ed into a larger view of life, and have been inspired by his faith and spirit. "With you we miss him, and yet with you we rejoice in him. The following resolutions were passed by the Pastors' Union of Lewiston and Auburn : "Inasmuch as it has pleased our Father in heaven to take from us and to receive unto himself our fellow-laborer, Prof. B. F. Hayes, we, the members of the Pastors' Union of Lewiston and Auburn, desire to record our appreciation of his mature Christian charac- ter and ripe scholarship. To us he seemed a scholar of the highest type, loving learning for its own sake, and even more as a revelation of the divine thought; with the roots of his 108 Benjamin Francis Hayes belief in the common and ancient facts of our faith, he yet in a wonderful way for one of older years, opened his mind and heart to the newer truths of God's constant revelation of himself through patient scholarship. But even more marked to us appeared the excel- lence of his Christian character. United to an appreciation of the many-sided relations of Christian life, there was a simplicity and childlikeness of faith that approached very near to the ideal laid before us by our divine Lord. With this simplicity of thought was a mature strength, to which the faith and for- titude with which he approached death abun- dantly testify. To us he seemed a faithful disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one whose life and labors have enriched the king- dom of God in the world." Eesolutions upon the decease of Doctor Hayes, passed by the Alumni Association of Cobb Divinity School, at their annual meet- ing in June, 1906, contained the following ex- pressions : "We miss his wise counsel, his loving com- radeship, his profound knowledge of men and books. This association will always cherish 109 A Memoir of his memory as a most learned man and a great saint. As one whose spirituality created an atmosphere in which it was good for his students and friends to live." no Benjamin Francis Hayes CHAPTER VII. AN APPRECIATION OF PROFESSOR HAYES, BY REV. CARTER E. CATE, D.D. Doctor Carter E. Cate, pastor of the Roger Williams Church in Providence, Rhode Is- land, who delivered the annual oration before the alumni of Cobb Divinity School, June 27, 1906, chose as the subject of his address on that occasion the character of Professor Hayes. His address is as follows : I think the word "appreciation" expresses most nearly my purpose in what I have under- taken for this hour — a sympathetic study of the character and some interpretation of the thought of Professor Benjamin Francis Hayes. I could not be expected to give a biograph- ical sketch, nor shall I attempt a valuation of his services as teacher and preacher and Christian citizen. This office must be dis- charged by some one who has a better right than I, a fuller knowledge growing out of a more intimate acquaintance. But if I could ill A Memoir of stand amongst you and, seeing him as he was, report unto you the things I saw as most characteristic of the man, if I could reflect a little of the deep and tranquil light that was in him, this I know would be the greatest service I could render in his memory. Let me say, it has been a blessing to me to have had occasion to rest my thought upon so genuine and saintly a figure — to have seen him moving beside me in all the moments which I have devoted to this writing. I suppose we all feel that personality is the greatest thing — greatest in God our Father and so greatest in man, his child. To know only the outward facts of one's life is very little. Such knowledge is mockingly empty and superficial. But to be able to understand the motive behind the thing done, to catch the accent of the spirit within the word spoken, to feel the glow of a love-saturated heart — this is what the Greeks called "epignosis" — the fuller, deeper knowledge. But the attempt to penetrate thus into the innermost life of a man is often difficult — is like ploughing a New England sub-soil. We cannot be quite certain whether the world and 112 Benjamin Francis Hayes the deed are to be regarded as mere products of the intellect, however masterful, or as sparks glowing with the light and heat of the central passion. We cannot always be certain whether a person is playing a part or living a life. But our revered teacher has lived openly amongst us — seems even with us still. If there were depths and secrets of his nature into which we had not penetrated, this was so not because he was anything, or had anything, or knew anything to conceal, but because of the bluntness of our sight. This, I should say, is one of the most obvi- ous and finest traits of his character, its com- plete openness. It had its moral significance — it defined his attitude toward truth, it reg- ulated his contacts with men and expressed, in part, his relations to God. He had no oc- casion for pretext and subterfuge, for mere plausibilities and tactics. Here we have had amongst us one who was what he seemed to be, one who took least thought as to how he might appear in the eyes of men, one who walked in his integrity. This was doubtless the spring of that 113 A Memoir of charming simplicity of heart and manner which was so marked in him. In this he re- sembled his noble co-laborer of many years, whose blessing is still upon our school, Prof. John Fullonton. The artificialities of our civilization and its intense pressures had not robbed him of a certain naturalness, a certain naivete, which are not always easily preserved in our day — the fresh heart of the child beat- ing in the bosom of the mature man. He found God without going far from nature. His spirit suggested, not so much the voluptuous garden roses, as those that blossom in the meadow. His mind was open to all truth. He wel- comed it from whatever sphere cast, and upon whatever subject thrown. Truths were the branches, truth was the tree, and the tree was rooted in God. Without this comprehensive- ness of view he never could have attained that sense of harmony in the divine order of the universe which was so assured in him. Being thus open to receive, he was also open to transmit. As there was nothing to conceal, so there was nothing to keep. So far from being a dark cave into which the 114 Benjamin Francis Hayes light falls and is absorbed, his soul was a burnished mirror from which the light w T as reflected. There are those who strive forever after a communism in material things where it is quite impracticable. But there is a realm in which communism is the very law of life. It is the realm of our highest being, where our incorruptible treasures are — in which Isaiah and Homer, Plato and Virgil, Dante and Raphael, Shakespeare and Goethe, Sir John Lyster and Pasteur, St. Paul and St. John, and preeminent over all, the Lord Christ, live and rule and offer "without money and with- out price" their respective gifts, even unto Life Eternal. Of this glorious commonwealth of the spirit, Benjamin Francis Hayes was a citizen. Naturally such a mind would flourish and bring forth fruit, even in old age. Indeed, there could be no old age for such a one. For freshness is of life, and life means growth. Even the knowledge that does not grow gets speedily to be "as dry as dust." A mature German scholar said lately, "I am going over to the fatherland again for a year." "Again?" 115 A Memoir of was the query. "Yes," he answered, "I must grow in my knowledge of this people, their literature, their history, their land itself, if I would not fail in enthusiasm and power as a teacher of their language." Ah, this is the open secret of intellectual power and enthu- siasm. And what a superb example of this progressive mind was Dr. Hayes. Surely his thoughts did "widen with the process of the suns." I should say his knowledge was more com- prehensive than that of almost any scholar we have had. He was not only a deeply learned man, he was a most variously and widely edu- cated man. A friend of mine has sometime said that the best educated person is one who has related himself at the largest number of points in the universe. How completely he had found his place — -how thoroughly at home he was in his Father's house of many man- sions. It all lay about him most invitingly. Every outward path led in to God. He grew, not only in reach, but also in depth. His mind was not a mere storehouse for the accumulation of knowledge, it was a laboratory where the facts of knowledge are 116 Benjamin Francis Hayes received and analyzed and classified. Every- thing had its place and meaning in the whole, and the chief interest attaching to the in- dividual part, be it great or small, phenomenon physical or spiritual, was its power to make a little more clear and comprehensive our grasp of that whole as the universe of God. Thus he grew out of intellectual provinci- alism and became cosmopolitan. In this sense he was a Universalist ; for I have often wished that the terms "Catholic" and "Universalist" were emptied of their particular and exclusive meaning, so that they might be available to apply to such a character as that before us to-day. There was nothing close or illiberal about him. No "winds from unsunned spaces blown" swept through his soul. His mind was reflective. Many men know a great deal and yet never seem to get much out of their knowledge. It is, indeed, amaz- ing to see how little culture or power may be associated even with high scholarship. Such minds may lack imagination, or, oftenest, as I have thought, they have not formed the habit of reflection. For it is the long, calm, expectant gaze that pierces into the heart of 117 A Memoir of things and perceives that which is of supreme interest, the relations of things. Am I not right altogether in setting this down as a most characteristic trait of Pro- fessor Hayes? We remember the far-away, abstracted look that came often into his eyes. In those moments he was surveying his sub- ject, sinking his plummet a little deeper, push- ing out a little farther into the untrodden beyond. Sometimes when insight quickens, sight grows dim. Wordsworth has said, "My mind makes pictures when my eyes are shut." There are, I know, limitations upon this, as upon every human faculty. It does not always conduce to clearness. It sometimes leaves the mind as God leaves the atmosphere, with its far and misty reaches. We have always with us many who demand and many, doubtless, who need some sharpness of definition. But, on the other hand, without some der gree of this penetrating power, what a flat, thin, commonplace thing this world would be. It would have neither refreshing depth nor in- spiring height. It would all lie in two dimen- sions. But it is the third dimension that gives power, and grandeur, and glory. 118 Benjamin Francis Hayes God made the universe in the beginning, but I see more and more that every man has to reconstruct it for himself. It is great, and rich, and wonderful, and divine, according to the measure of his own soul. Who wonders that Tennyson should cry out: "What know we greater than the soul !" Ah, it is eternally true that we carry our own world into whatever world we go. It is not for every one who goes out into the sum- mertime that the trees of the field clap their hands — not for every one is the wayside "bush aflame with God." I have often thought I should like to look once through Galileo's little telescope that is treasured there in Florence, and once through the great instrument "that nightly assaults the skies" on Mt. Hamilton. But it would be a vastly greater privilege to look out on life through the anointed eyes of such a man as this man was. Moving serenely on life's voyage he heard "deep calling unto deep." Professor Hayes had in his nature a mystic fiber. He heard words that were unutterable. Truth came to him by the old, trodden, la- 119 A Memoir of beled thoroughfares, and it came also by secret little by-paths. Coming so, it was, like the light, self -evidencing. He could "be still and know that the Lord is God." Indeed, "who by searching can find out the Almighty!" It was given unto man once in the beginning to recognize the voice of the Lord in the cool of the day— and is this not still the truth of the poet's lines : "One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost." How much less a spirit so heedful, so re- sponsive as his. Ah, there is a sphere that lies beyond our formulas and definitions. It is a realm of rich suggestiveness, of subtle cogencies that grasp the soul as with a hand of magic tenderness and strength. Whoever knew Doctor Hayes at all well must have felt that his was the power to draw upon this overworld— this in- ner-world — for elements without which our philosophies and our theologies cannot ex- press the whole of human life. His, too, was a rich sense of beauty. We who heard him speak remember well how 120 Benjamin Francis Hayes musical our mother tongue was as it fell from his lips. There was always a certain choice- ness about it that betokened not only the scholar, but also the artist. You had only to see him, as some of us have, with a trail of arbutus or a spray of delicate ferns in his hand to know how responsive his spirit was to all forms of loveliness. He might have said with old Plato, "God is beauty." He doubt- less prayed with the psalmist, "Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." For it was something more to him than the curve and flash of a ripple upon the surface of things — it was a sort of fluorescence from the very presence of God in his world. He had a Puritan conscience. When we speak of Puritanism our attention is apt to fix itself upon certain excesses of zeal of which it has been guilty. But these are to be regarded as accidents, or incidents, in the course of its development. The thing itself is a progressive moral sense. It is not a mere setting of metes and bounds. It is the implanting of a principle of right- eousness at life's core that shall work out and out, and bring at last "every thought into 121 A Memoir of captivity to the obedience of Christ." With what marvelous exactness has the apostle stated it as "the inquiry" — not the mere an- swer — "the inquiry of a good conscience." Mystic that he was, philosophical as were all his habits of thought, cloistered as his life had been, in a sense, for many years, his was that entire sound-heartedness, that heroic self-mastery, that uncompromising demand for righteousness in church and state, which characterized the Puritan conscience. For him there was not, as for some, a great gulf fixed between the moral and the spiritual; the one was the normal mode of the other's being. And so his powers were saved from dissipation. All was woven up in- to the firm texture of a Christian character. Here was reality ; here was truth in the in- ward parts and the garment undefiled. It was the righteousness of Christ, not so much imputed as imparted, that engaged his inter- est. He, with Banquo, kept "his enfranchised bosom and his allegiance clear," and so there was fulfilled in him a precious word of our Master's, — in him as in few others amongst us, — "thy whole body shall be full of light." 122 Benjamin Francis Hayes But, as I judge, the most distinguishing and impressive trait of his character was his sense of the eternal. To him, eminently, faith was "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen!" I could wish we had before us his own ac- count of his personal faith, how it sprung up in the beginning, what its struggles were and its victories, how it was nourished and what it yielded in his life. It all seemed so natural and spontaneous that one might fancy it was a sort of special endowment, and inheritance, let me suggest, from the radiant spirit of the woman who gave him birth. But, however favorable the natural predis- positions may have been, any such sense of the eternal as his must have been altogether per- sonal and positive. It was not as something cast in a mold, but as something wrought, like Ghiberti's gates, with infinite pains and under the unfailing inspirations of love. It seemed to be the assent of his whole being. In Millet's painting, as you remember, the peasants rise up out of the dust at the call of the Angelus. The man drops his head a little, and awkwardly, but the woman, with 123 A Memoir of a fine, full grace, bends in a curve that touches her whole body from sandaled foot to ker- chiefed brow. So stands this man of God in our sight. Reason and instinct, affection and will, literary culture, and spiritual depth, all united in the great confession — I believe. And this is the reason why there was such spontaneity, such naturalness, such pervas- iveness, such assurance of his faith. It was the verdict, not of one, but of all his faculties. It was achieved not by strangling some and forcing others. Rooted in the depths, it grew up into his whole life and at once possessed and informed his every power. Ah, this is the supreme victory, when all the energies of the soul are so gathered up in the grasp of faith in the living God that they issue as an integer, a unit of spiritual life and power. "Surely thus our heart was meant To beat in vast content, Like chord of one great instrument/' Being such, his faith yielded him, not bond- age, but liberty. It was not a hard-twisted, steel cable, but a great, vital principle. He was not like a ship lashed to an iron pier in the Bay of Fundy, to be racked with every 124 Benjamin Francis Hayes rising and falling tide; he was, rather, like a ship anchored securely in the deep. He felt the currents that flowed about him and the winds that swept his brow; but he was with- out fear, for he knew Him whom his soul had grappled. Professor Hayes went farther in his think- ing than most of us have gone, or could ever go. Having such a grasp on the substance of our gospel, he could safely cast aside many of the physical symbols which are clustered about it. He could distinguish more clearly than many others between the non-essential and the essential. A negative or destructive attitude was impossible to one whose faith was so positive and vital. Drawing ever nearer in his personal experience, and rising ever higher in his moral attainments, he saw more clearly and directly into the very heart of Christ. Simplicity of faith ought to mean inten- sity. Although it does not yield this result for all men, it did for him. It is a bit of child- ish folly that fills one's hands so full of many things that one holds nothing securely. This process of simplification of the beliefs of Christendom has been going on apace now 125 A Memoir of for a generation and it ought to issue in a great access of power. In him we saw what is possible. He moved out and also in, he reached up, and at the same time struck the roots of his faith downward. And so his mind was saved from intellectual bravado, and his soul from spiritual anaemia. Religion and life being so completely one in him, he had, as once I heard him ask in prayer, leisure from self. Conscious of God, conscious of his brother, he was marvelously free from selfconsciousness. When have we known a more transparent, a more beautiful, since artless and deep, humility than his! There was nothing mawkish about it, for he was altogether a man. It was like a garment, but clothed him as the light does the flower. In setting down these reflections I have more than once paused, as if I saw him lift his hand in protest. The words which Mrs. Browning has set upon the lips of the Virgin Mary might have been his own : "Say (of me) blessedest, Not holiest, not noblest, no high name, Whose height misplaced May pierce me like a shame, When I sit meek in heaven." 126 Benjamin Francis Hayes And yet so it was. Faith was in him the sense of the Eternal. "He was very sure of God And very certain of the soul." And so we have known a man who walked with God; whose scholarship was fresh and masterful; and who, not as often, in spite of, but by very reason of all this, believed the more serenely and triumphantly ; one to whom the spiritual was real and the eternal present ; one who, walking the dusty ways of earth, brought with him the fragrance of Paradise. And all was transfused with love, or to use the apostle's figure, love was the girdle that bound up all his varied powers and acquisi- tions into a beautiful symmetry. Occasionally a student has come away from this teacher not quite certain of the teaching, — there was never but one universal Master, and him his own disciples did not wholly understand, — yet I venture that no one ever came near Professor Hayes who did not bear away on his soul the impress of his Christly love. However great a thing it may be to impart knowledge, to enkindle enthusiasm, to liber- ate the powers of the intellect and so lead a 127 A Memoir of pupil on to self-realization, I hold it to be the chief blessing of one life upon another simply to love another as Christ loves us all. Nor can I forebear to mention that dear home into whose hallowed atmosphere we have all been welcomed again and again, or her on whose noble brow there sat the un- conscious halo. It all stands out in our mem- ory as the very apotheosis of consecrated do- mestic life and love. Not apart in a hermit cell, but in the bosom of his family, not in unsocial loneliness, but in the midst of the homely cares and joys this saint achieved his sanctity. Here, doubtless, were wrought those finest qualities of mind and heart that linger with us as "The grace of a day that is done." Nor can we ever forget the reverent fond- ness with which he spoke the name of Jesus. It was as to one sitting above all heavens, and yet "nearer than breathing." Such intimacy, such nearness, few men in the flesh attain. "And when the gates of life swung in, And angels whispered low To bid him hasten unto God, He had not far to go." 128 Professor Hayes at Seventy-Five Years of Age. Benjamin Francis Hayes CHAPTER VIII. A SERMON ON "THE LIFE TO COME/' BY PROFESSOR HAYES. During the two years previous to his death and subsequent to the death of his wife, the mind of Doctor Hayes was exceedingly occu- pied with thoughts of her, and in consequence it turned toward the subject of the future life. He was, however, free from the type of mourning so common among those who have loved, and delighted in sympathetic com- radeship, as he had done ; for he was genuinely sustained by confidence in an immortality of reunion. Just before the warning of his physicians that his own decease was near, he preached in the Pine Street Congrational Church of Lewiston a sermon on life here- after, which produced a notable effect. After the diagnosis of the physicians his thoughts of course continued in the same direction, and the selection of this particular sermon for inclusion in this memoir is according to his own expressed desire. This relieves his children of the responsibility of selection. The 129 A Memoir of theme is one that almost necessitates a some- what speculative treatment. The notes which he left were difficult to decipher, and no doubt quite imperfectly represent his spoken thought, as of course they give no hint of the magnetism of its utterance. The sermon is as follows : i 1 John 3 : 2. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall ap- pear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." In this verse the beloved disciple is telling us how he finds it possible to be entirely con- tent, though he must for the whole of his life remain in ignorance of some things of great importance to himself. He does not know what he will be, how he will live, what his employments or what his enjoyments will be in the hereafter. Unanswered questions, unsolved problems, especially when they relate to human wel- fare or to our destiny, only whet the eager- ness of search in aspiring minds. It is not he who has settled the most questions who has 130 Benjamin Francis Hayes the smallest number of great problems yet to be worked out. It is he who has climbed highest, the horizon of whose vision is the widest, who is most interested in that which doth not yet appear. It is the person of little thought, of low aims, without high hopes, without struggle, without progress, who is perplexed by no mysteries. The poet, Cow- per, thus pictures such a man. "The primrose on the river's brink, A yellow primrose was to him, and it was nothing more." But he whose awakened thought has begun to penetrate the mysteries of nature around him is aware that in the sheen of a leaf, the glit- ter of a drop of dew, the mystery of a crystal's regular form, the plan, the shape, and the hues of a flower, are locked up secrets that it may make him both wiser and happier to know. Such was the thought of Tennyson when he wrote: "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here root and all in my hand, Little flower, but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." 131 A Memoir of If to see through the mystery of the little familiar objects about us is also to solve the problem of man's life and of the indwelling God, in whom we live, and by whom all things consist, it need not surprise us to be told that we cannot yet know what tve shall fee. As soon as we know enough about the outside of things to look beneath the surface, we find that we do not know what anything is in its inner substance and in its relations to other things. All the paths along which knowledge is pursued run out soon or late into regions of impenetrable mystery. Why, for example, do we call a leaf green, a flower red, a dew- drop white, a gem purple. Because some power in each, by the medium of reflected light, af- fects our eye nerves differently ; and not merely the nerves of the eye, but the brain behind the eye and the soul behind the brain. It is the power of the all-wise and the inscrutable God. Wherever there is weight or bulk that can be measured, there is power. Every clod exists "through some higher energy, for from itself alone it could not be." Every atom in the stone you lift is tugging to get toward the earth and every atom in the earth is pulling 132 Benjamin Francis Hayes upon it. This mutual pull is the same power by which our earth and moon and every planet, sun and star, are gripped and held by every other ; and this energy, this support- ting power by which all worlds are kept in balance, as they for eons sweep through the tireless spheral dance, can be nothing else than the omnipresent God, "Whose presence bright all space doth occupy, All motion guide." If we are baffled by the great and still in- soluble mysteries of man's being, and the being of the immanent God, if we are thus ingnorant of what man now is, still less can it appear what we shall be. But the fact that we cannot hope for a com- plete answer does not prevent us from asking the question. When we are children we often try to imagine what it will be to be grown up, to go where we please, to become acquainted with the wide world, and to take part in its great enterprises. We cannot know these things till we come to them in our experience, but this does not prevent us from inquiring. And it is the boy and girl who think about what it is best to be when grown up, who are 133 A Memoir of most likely to be what is best when maturity is reached. It is now, dear children, in the study and the play of childhood, as you study earnestly or carelessly, as you play fairly and kindly, or piggishly and crossly, that you are determining what kind of men and women you will be. Only you need not be discouraged if you find you have failed once and again, and have to be ashamed of yourselves; you have time yet to outgrow your blunders. It is the child who is never ashamed, the child who does not care, that has reason to be alarmed when he asks, "What shall I be?" So also we who are adults, as we see those who have been passing through the discipline of life's school in most dear and intimate association with ourselves, graduating into that beyond which we all must enter soon, can hardly avoid the question, "What are they now?" "What shall we be when we have passed through this ex- perience?" I. WE SHALL BE. Let us notice that though St. John tells us he does not know what we shall be, he does know one thing so surely that it is taken for granted without any assertion. It is the one 134 Benjamin Francis Hayes certainty he holds concerning the hereafter and which we, too, may hold without one tremor of doubt: we shall be. Two children once drifted in a little boat away from the shore of Cape Cod, out into the open sea, where nothing saluted their straining eyes but water, sky, and sun. By and by the sun went down, sunk like a ball of fire in the ocean. It seemed that it must be extinguished; but they knew better, and so in the darkness they lay down in each other's arms in the bottom of their boat and hoped that God would remember them in the morning. So from the beginning of the human race, appearances have seemed to say, when the waves go over a life whose love has been as sunshine to us, "He is extinct, he lives no more." Yet through all the ages the race has been persuaded that it is not so. Despite all the seeming, they believe that the life of our dear ones is not quenched in an ocean of nothingness ; and now since we know that Christ was dead and is alive forevermore, we know that soon, beyond the sowing and the reaping, we shall be. With death always standing before, with grim foreboding, and quenching one by one the lives of men, the race 135 A Memoir of has yet maintained the faith that we shall be. It is no wonder that here and there a thought- ful mind has doubted, that Romans of the Em- pire or Frenchmen of the Revolution, deter- mined to have no guide but reason, faced death as darkness without dawn. Yet even among them the voices of certain of their wisest re- affirm this faith. And reason that looks deeper than adverse appearances insists that whatever the impossibility of understanding how it is that we can continue to be, this greater and more wonderful question is set- tled — we shall continue. Those who study nature And ground for firm conviction that if there is a wise and good Creator, man is designed for a life beyond. This life considered as a preparation for a fur- ther existence is rational — considered as the whole, it is irrational. If unhatched chicks could reason, though they knew only life within the shell, they would have ground for firm assurance that hatching is not death, but birth. Not having eaten food, nor seen the earth, nor breathed the air, they could not know what their larger, freer life would be; but beak and feet and lungs and wings and 136 Benjamin Francis Hayes eyes are evidence that they are preparing for a life beyond their present state. If not, the life and growth within the egg is an irrational absurdity. Of itself the egg-life is not enough ; but it is far too much to be all. In an extensive and well-conducted nursery of trees, the favorable conditions for growth, the selected varieties of trees arranged in or- derly rows, are evidence that some one planned the planting who knew what he was about. And the order of nature is incomparably more complete evidence that man, the crown of creation, did not come into this life by acci- dent. Now the nursery, considered as a final- ity, is absurd and out of harmony with the evident intelligence with which it is instituted and conducted, because as soon as the trees approach maturity they are taken away — there they never get their growth or bear their fruit. And man's life here is likewise only a beginning. They who are here longest feel most sure that "we have to live one life to learn how to live." And they may be con- fident that if the reason that planned our existence is wise, this life is but life's begin- ning. There is such a promise unfulfilled, 137 A Memoir of there is such a beginning left incomplete, that both veracity and wisdom in God must be denied if we are not made for another and a wider life beyond. Creation has been going on for ages and ages, and all its stages were good. The polyp on the bottom of the sea, later the fish swim- ming through its waves, then the saurian with legs instead of fins, then the first birds, those that skimmed the water, then birds that sail the air, then as ages went by the successive orders of land animals that became food and servants to man — all were good ; for each order was a step up in the scale of being and a means of transition to higher life. Yet in their per- ishing no loss is felt, they had no expectations, no aspirations, no capacities for anything higher; and they each gave place to man. Man with his unfulfilled hope, with his capacities just prepared for use, is at the top of the ascending scale of earthly beings. There is nothing higher if man does not go on. Was the nursery for nothing but an amusement? Did the few years' growth in the nursery end all? No, no ; if man is not sent on to fruitful- ness and satisfaction then God has trifled, 138 Benjamin Francis Hayes not merely with capacities for further growth, but with immortal longings which he himself planted. He will have made in man conscious- ness, hope, love, intellectual and moral capac- ity only to be wasted ; and the inscription for this planet, in the cemetery of dead worlds — for this planet will be there in its turn — must be either nature's blunder or God's folly. So sure then as there is a God who is wise, man is immortal. II. WE SHALL BE INDEPENDENT OF THE BODY. In all the argument for immortality there is nothing to imply that the bodies of men will live forever, but only that their conscious life continues, and we may reasonably anticipate that life hereafter will be independent of any material body. Here we are composite of flesh and spirit, and that we continue to be so in the hereafter has been the common belief. Men of Egypt, India, and China, as well as the Mohammedans, have imagined that the life to come would be occupied with carnal pursuits and enjoyments. The Pharisees of old shared the same belief. Such is also the implication of all the Dantean and Miltonic pictures of heaven and hell. The supposition in the 139 A Memoir of preaching of former times, which represented the physical bodies of the lost dwelling in material flames, assumed that we may know what we shall be and that we shall then enjoy and suffer in our physical bodies. The text sets aside all such imaginings. The faith that resurrection life is spiritual, that we are born into it out of our bodies, seems to have been hard for men to apprehend and believe. The Greeks, who called the but- terfly Psyche, the soul, seemed unable to con- ceive that the human soul must not, when coming into resurrection life, like the butter- fly when born out of its chrysalis, take some- thing of its body with it. It is probable that some Christians, from the ancient times down to the present, have continued to take the worm and the butterfly as a type of the resur- rection, and to think that as the whole worm goes into a quiescent state in the chrysalis and by and by comes out with the same matter in his body and the same limbs, so the whole man goes into the grave and waits in unconscious- ness until a new, creative fiat shall reconstruct his body out of the old material. We have all been taught to* use phrases and to sing hymns 140 Benjamin Francis Hayes that teach this doctrine. A few years since a minister and author put forth in support of this doctrine the following as an argument, to him unanswerable: Suppose a living man were to be put in a metallic coffin and sealed up there hermetically, would not the whole man be there? And would not the whole man very soon be dead and all of him in the coffin? I suppose our Lord would say to this, as he did to the Jews : "Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God." And now science is saying the same thing. There, are, it says, powers that you have not consid- ered. You may shut up heat in iron, but the heat passes through the iron. Science tells us that the atoms of no substance, however solid it seems, ever absolutely press against each other, but are always jostling among themselves. If you touch a substance whose particles are quivering more rapidly than the particles of your hand, it feels warm or hot ; if less rapidly than the atoms in the hand, it feels cold. If you grasp the hand of a friend in which the atoms are less tremulous than in yours his hand will feel cold to you and yours warm to him. Light is something very real, 141 A Memoir of but it can move through glass and we can move glass through it. And electricity, if sealed up in metallic boxes, asks for no gate- way more open than the solid metal, and passes through it more easily than through vacant air. The power that thinks and feels and loves and wills is something very real, something very precious to God. It was to come up to it, to come to human minds, that he arranged all the orders of living things that make up the grand ascending scale of nature; but is not this highest, this most godlike power in the creation more subtle than any of the mysterious realities of material nature? Can you imprison it within a metallic coffin? At present, indeed, it takes both the physical and the spiritual to compose the man ; the two act only together, and body and spirit are ever acting on each other ; but the body only is now manifest. Of the spirit we may say that we know that it is, but it doth not yet appear what it is, and so we borrow a manner of speech that may date back to the Sadducees of Jesus' time, and call our bodies ourselves, and we say we have a soul, and sometimes have said to ourselves, "If I persevere in a course 142 Benjamin Francis Hayes of wicked neglect I shall lose my soul." Well, what shall we be and where shall we be when we have lost the soul? Jesus would teach us to say rather, We are souls, just now living in and using our bodies; we shall be souls still when we have finished our abode in the body. It is true that our Lord said, "All that are in their graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth." If man is nothing but a body, and therefore all that man is is in the grave, then the Lord must speak to the body in the grave; but if the man is a soul that is not in the grave, then our Lord in saying, "All in their graves," was just using the common lan- guage of the people, meaning all whom they called dead — a word which our Savior never uses except when forced to do so because his other expressions, such as "our friend Lazarus sleeps," are misunderstood. But if all men are souls and the souls are not in the grave, then it is to the soul that the resurrection call is spoken. Paul expected to hear that call, a call to be forever with the Lord and to obey it, not in the material or earthly body, which was planted in the grave, for he says most emphatically (II. Cor. 15: 37) that that is not 143 A Memoir of the body that shall be, but we shall be clothed (II. Cor. 5) with our spiritual, our celestial bodies. But if man is nothing but his body that may be dissolved in the grave, vaporized in the crematory, taken up into the substance of plants or digested and assimilated in the bodies of fishes, beasts of prey, and cannibals, then to expect a continuity of our present personal life with any life beyond death is to dream the impossible. For if all that consti- tutes a man now be reduced to the atoms of carbon, nitrogen, lime, phosphorus, etc., of which his body is composed, and then God should in after ages reassemble these same atoms and construct from them a man, such man could have no personal interest in the man they formerly composed, and would have no responsibility and no accountability for him, and it never would have been said that we should be "judged for the deeds done in" our bodies. It doth appear, therefore, that we shall not be dependent upon our present bodies for the resurrection life. Many Christians who have believed in a future life and yet held that life is dependent 144 Benjamin Francis Hayes on the body, have been compelled to think that as long as the body is thns dissolved the soul's life is suspended and conscious future life must wait until some remote time when the ele- ments of the body, that for ages have been scattered and playing their part in other or- ganisms, shall be miraculously reassembled and reorganized. Belief in this impossibility is not required of us nor is there any cause for the thought of such a long blank in the soul's life, if once we adopt Christ's view of the spirit's independence of the body. III. WE SHALL BE SOMETHING BETTER. Man's mind may be looked at, at present, as the servant of the body. It must study and direct the exertions that avoid danger and that sustain health and comfort for the body; but it is not the highest use of our minds to take care of our bodies. The needs of our minds are more important. The opportunity to know, grand as it is, the happiness of being, great as it may be here, are only a foretaste, they are but the budding blossom, not the fruition of what we feel our capacity to be. And since we are to be in a state which we cannot know yet, it would be contrary to the 145 A Memoir of will and plan of God, as revealed in all the earth's history hitherto, if that state of fruit- age were not a better life than the present can be. The noblest minds are seldom contented, and never satisfied with all that is gained here. There is sufficient ground for confidence, not merely that we shall be, hereafter, but also that we shall pass to a life of fulfillment that is better than this. God's method in creation declares it. Each period in the building of our planet, and in bringing in the kinds of life upon it, has prepared for, and led up to a bet- ter, a more glorious period to follow. After sowing comes harvest, after blossom comes the time of fruit, the latter is the better time toward which sowing and blossoming always look. This planet, before life came on it, was a bare and desolate orb. When verdure cov- ered the valleys and hills, and living creatures sw r armed in its waters and made vocal its woods, then beauty and pleasure were every- where. Many years ago a large museum was erected in Massachusetts for the sole purpose of receiving rocks from the Connecticut valley that bore the footprints of ancient animals. The rocks of themselves were worthy of no 146 Benjamin Francis Hayes such distinction except for the evidence they bore that ages ago, when the substance of the rocks was still soft mud, living animals walked upon it. So much more interesting was the primeval world made after sentient creatures came upon it; but of how little in- terest after all, and of how little value would have been all that is on the planet and all the wealth that is stored up in it, if there had never been any life here but that of beasts, and if there were never to be any beings here to transform earth into a home for civilized man, who would begin to make it a school for growth in knowledge, heroism, virtue, and human joys! But in this material world human spirits do but make a beginning; here is but the budding, not the fruitage that shall be. Our bodies had an existence before they were born into their present life, but if before birth we had possessed full consciousness we could not have imagined what are the condi- tions and pleasures of that life in light and paternal love into which we were to be born. Just so it may be that our souls, during this bodily life, are preparing to be born out of the body into another and still higher life. Our 147 A Memoir of bodies are called images of the parents who gave them birth, but they -attain that image not before birth, but come to manifest it only through future growth. Our souls are images of God, they manifest it very faintly in this earthly life in the body; they can do it fully only after their birth into, and development in the higher life. IV. WE SHALL BE DIVERSE. We may be sure that whatever we shall be, we shall not be all alike, but there will be dif- ferences as great as the diversities of the deeds done and the characters formed by us here in the body. See an archer send an arrow at a distant hill in the dusk of evening ; it will pass out of your sight in the gloaming long before it begins its descent, but if you also are an archer you can tell from the curve and direc- tion in which it rises whether it will reach or miss its mark. See a thousand such arrows shot and you can tell from the slant of the initial curve that some of them will come to rest much farther up the hill than others and, perchance, may see some that you must know will miss the mark altogether. So do men in the life that now is give some hint of what 148 Benjamin Francis Hayes shall be their characters and their destiny in that which is to come. It is a singular fact, but it is no accident, that the two words in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New that are translated "sin" in our English Bible, meant originally to miss the mark. We can find out, friends, if we are missing the mark, and we can cheat ourselves, too, if we want to. The greedy tradesman who beats a rival by lying, the specious hypocrite who gets credit for honesty or generosity or piety by false pretenses may think he is all right; the men who mistake hatred of others for love of country, and they who think hatred of the persons whose beliefs we do not like is zeal for righteousness, may also think they are very right, for there may be five hypocrites who deceive themselves for every one who, with consciousness that he is a cheat, attempts to impose on others. But however blind to the fact, they are missing the mark all the same. The penalties of sin are the inevitable conse- quences of sin. The only way to be saved from its penalties is to be saved from the sin. Remember that our Redeemer is called "Savior" because he shall save his people from 149 A Memoir of their sins, never from the consequences while they choose to sin. And here comes to view one reason why it doth not yet appear what we shall be — because it is not yet apparent what we shall do. Every day we are weaving the web of our characters, and character com- pleted is final destiny; but it may be that so far the pattern is all wrong and we have not known it. We must examine, and if our work is not according to the pattern, we must cut our web out of the loom, throw away all we have done, and draw what is left of our life into the harness differently, or waste the whole web of life and make a failure more or less total in our character, and make our destiny a disaster more or less awful. It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but every day we are weaving that which shall finally appear. To change the figure, with many of the typewriters the writing is invisible while the work is being done, but if the right keys are touched, the legend will be correct; and if wrong keys are touched the writing will be false. So every act, every purpose, every emotion, stamps its record in God's book of remembrance, which is the human soul. What 150 Benjamin Francis Hayes we are, what we shall be. is of infinitely more importance than where we shall be, and we are sure in all reason that what we shall be hereafter is to be the unfolding of what we do and what we are here. V. WE SHALL BE CONGENIALLY EMPLOYED." If what we shall be is that which we have become in this life, no less what we sJwll do will be that which we have become able to do; for the soul being and doing are correlative. The growth and development of this life is growth of capacities for activity. The^e capa- cities are the precious fruitage of time which a reasonable God cannot waste in eternity. Moreover our activities there will be social activities. Man could not have become man except in society. Man could not continue to live as man except in society. As sure as there is heaven, heaven is the associated life of the heavenly. The activities of heaven will be social participation in social achievements. What the enterprises of heaven will be it is bold to conjecture, but certainly there go out -The notes of this section are particularly imperfect. 151 A Memoir of of life millions of children who need nurture, millions of the ignorant who need teachers, millions of the benighted who, at best, have felt after God and truth in the dark, and whose possibilities are yet unrealized and their capacities unfulfilled. The mere fact of liberation from the flesh cannot fulfill in them all possibility, so that there will be no* need of endeavor by them and for them. We may anticipate unlimited opportunity for helpful service in their behalf. Moreover, even the best developed souls need each other and may employ and increase their powers by helpful cooperation in pursuit of the highest and most inspiring aims. Millions, we are forced to believe, go out of life with capacities blighted, who have missed the mark of the high calling, who refuse noble endeavor and would flee from heaven. We may doubt whether the will that is the sub- stance of all being shall eternally will their continuance ; but those whose life is a part of the fulfillment of God's will are as eternal as his will, and in the activities of the society of heaven they continue to be "workers together with God/ 152 Benjamin Francis Hayes VI. WE SHALL BE LIKE HIM. Is there not a most significant hint as to what we shall be in that the author of our text immediately adds, "We know we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is," What can this likeness be that is important, but likeness to him as spirits, like him in char- acter, like him in knowledge, like him in love, like him in service, like him in what we enjoy. This was the prospect that ravished Paul when he said, "The hour of my departure is at hand!" But is this being like him the prospect and the joy for all of us, for all our race? Alas, no ; for there are so many of our race that do not want to be like him and are not willing to fulfill the conditions of seeing him. Jesus is the perfect image and revealer of God's in- finite unselfishness, compassion, justice, and purity. "He that hath seen me," he said to Philip, "hath seen the Father" ; but he implies that although Philip had been so long a time with Jesus, he had never seen him as he is in his real character; and elsewhere Jesus says, "The pure in heart shall see God." These sayings suggest that our text cannot mean 153 A Memoir of that we shall become like Jesus because we see him as he is, but that we shall be able to see him as he is when we shall have become like him. The child in the kindergarten, in the primary and intermediate school, does not know what his father is as a merchant, as a man of affairs, as a professional man, or as a public official, the boy is not an actual man but only a possibility that may become a man ; it will be manifested to him what his father is only when he has exchanged the boy's imagin- ings for a share in his father's interests, re- sponsibilities, and satisfactions. Beholding with the physical eye is one thing ; perceiving by the soul is quite another. The dog that trots by the master's side, as they return at evening from a hunt, has as bright eyes as the master; the brute can see as quickly as the man, he can look up into the sky as far, but he does not distinguish planets from stars and see the latter as suns sailing in fathomless depths of space. And the master, too, may see without perceiving ; he may see the stars only as so many shining dots fast on the solid floor of heaven, because his mind has not been taught to understand. And one cannot see 154 Benjamin Francis Hayes beauty of character, cannot understand purity, unselfishness, love, holiness unless he has in himself beginnings of all these and sympathy with them. Putting an unprepared soul in heaven would not make him see what constitutes the glory of heaven. Seeing what is in Jesus, seeing what there is in any noble- ness of character like seeing what is in music, in art, in love, in holiness, depends entirely on what we have within us to see with. And many pass out of this life so unprepared for heaven that they would no more see its beauty and no more experience its joy than those occasional travelers see the glories of art, who stroll chatting through the galleries of Dresden and Florence and cast indifferent glances at the masterpieces of Titian, Cor- regio, and Eaphael, and who come away mis- takenly believing that they have seen all that is exhibited there. We cannot see heaven until we have some of the substance of heaven in our own souls, and none of us are heavenlv enough to form beforehand an adequate con- ception of its beauty, of its life, and of its joy. Let us close by further reverting to our text. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." No 155 A Memoir of more important truth concerning the nature of man can come to our thought than this, that we are now children of God; science re- veals nothing else about men, history declares nothing else concerning men, religion claims nothing else for men so significant as this fact that they are children of God. Now are we his sons. Already we are bid- den when we pray to say, "Our Father." In the words of Paul and of the Greeks, we are "his offspring." Jesus, "the brightness of the Father's glory and the express image of his person," is the Way and the Life in fullest manifestation. That manifestation appeared while Jesus lived a man's life, and from that manifestation of the light, those who follow his way differ only in degree, for now are we also the sons of God. It is not necessary to salvation that we hold a particular theory of the trinity, or of the Son of God in the flesh, but it is necessary that we choose and inaugu- rate the divine ideal, revealed by his life, which makes him our Way, our Truth, our Life, and "partakers of the divine nature." What is the difference between the tiny ray of light that, glinting through the foliage of 156 Benjamin Francis Hayes a shower-moistened tree, warms and illumines a single drop upon a leaf, and all the radiance that flows out from the sun, illumining the depths of space? They are one as the life of man and the life of God are one. Beloved, now — in so far as we are like Jesus — we are sons of God, secure that the will of God which sustains us now will sustain us so long as we are not violators of his way — but becoming more and more conformed to it — sure as sons with the Elder Brother to be wel- comed to the house of "many mansions" "where we may be also." The constancy of a Father's love waits to welcome every prodigal back, though even waiting love does not com- pel the prodigal's return. Jesus said little of prodigals that never return, but that little speaks of outer darkness in which the prodigal who disinherits himself and never returns to the Father's way will find himself at last. Here, then, is brought to light the eternal life. We are one in nature with God, endowed by nature with divine life, and heirs of immortal blessedness, if only our will and way are one with the Way of life, and the Will, that is not only the law of life but the very substance and 157 A Memoir of essence of all life. We live as long as he wills it. He ordains us to share in his eter- nity if we but take the way of sons, which in Jesus Christ is manifest. Like children looking forward into man- hood, we see imperfectly the future. We ask, Shall I associate again in glad reunion with those whom here I have loved? Shall I become that which I have wished and striven to be but could not? Shall I rest after years of toil, in abundance of peace and fulness of power? Shall the capacities which I have trained, be wasted, or shall I engage in heavenly enter- prises and know heavenly success? "He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think/' and we are his sons. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard the things which the Father hath prepared." They are prom- ised, but we must wait for the fruition before we can understand all that the promise means. Dear friends, one and all, may we become so much like Jesus here that we may, by and by, know him as he is. And when our sum- mons comes, "Go not like the quarry-slave at night scourged to his dungeon," but with 158 Benjamin Francis Hayes "No dread, no doubt, unhesitating forth, With asking eyes, pure as the bodiless souls Whom poet's vision near the central throne, Angelically manifest to man, So go we forth with smiling, Godward face." While friends who grieve will still give thanks and have for us congratulations. 159 r Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: April 2006 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16056 (724) 779-21 1 1