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 LIBRARY 
 
 GIVEN BY 
 
 Mary Angela Bennett 
 
AUSTIN PHELPS 
 
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Austin Phelps 
 
 a riDemoir 
 
 BY 
 
 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1891 
 
^38.3 
 PS/3 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 
5k 
 
 Cfs. 
 It 
 
 " Now I begin to live " 
 
 The Last Telegram 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 It is sometimes complained of a biography that it 
 follows too closely the ancient maxim : — De mortuis 
 nil nisi bonum. On the whole, we may find this 
 rather a noble specimen of human philosophy, and 
 one which we need never be ashamed to respect. 
 
 The writer of this memorial has not thought it 
 necessary to call attention to defects in the character 
 which she has sought to portray. Whatever such 
 existed, it has not seemed to her the duty of a 
 daughter to seek for them ; nor is it in the power of 
 his daughter to recall them. 
 
 E. S. P. W. 
 
 Gloucester, August, 1891. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Parents; and the Child 1 
 
 II. Autobiographic. — Boyhood 13 
 
 III. Autobiographic. — Early Manhood .... 27 
 
 IV. Marriage; and the Boston Parish .... 46 
 V. From Boston to Andover 60 
 
 VI. The Professor 73 
 
 VII. The Home Story 86 
 
 VIII. The Story; and the Home 94 
 
 IX. The Preacher ; and the Author 101 
 
 X. The Cloud Gathers 110 
 
 XI. The Father 119 
 
 XII. Shut In 131 
 
 XIII. Last Years 142 
 
 XIV. Bar Harbor 159 
 
 XV. The Still Hour 170 
 
 LETTERS 185 
 
AUSTIN PHELPS: A MEMOIE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE PARENTS; AND THE CHILD. 
 
 Theee may be two reasons for writing a man's 
 biography. His public service may have been of so 
 valuable a kind as to create a public demand for the 
 details of his history. Or, his private character may 
 have been of so rare an order as to add the materials 
 of inspiration to the public ideals. 
 
 Sometimes it happens that these two motives unite 
 in the formation of one memoir. 
 
 In the case of him whose life these pages will 
 commemorate, the sacred task is made easier to the 
 pen which attempts it, by the assurance that this 
 dual reason for doing so exists in fine proportion. 
 What he did has created the readers who will care 
 to know what he ivas. His professional eminence is 
 reason enough for the appearance of this memorial. 
 But his personal character is as much a greater rea- 
 son, as character is always greater than reputation, 
 and private nobility than public honors. 
 
 Austin Phelps was the child of a strong and also 
 of a sensitive ancestry. He never placed great em- 
 phasis upon his genealogical antecedents, but treated 
 
 l 
 
2 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 them very much as well-bred people treat social posi- 
 tion, — a thing too evident and satisfactory in itself 
 to call attention to, and therefore not worth mention- 
 ing. So far as is known he was contented with his 
 ancestors, but fully aware that one's family tree is 
 not likely to be a subject of general interest. Some- 
 times, when we asked him, he would tell us some- 
 thing about the vague figures of our forefathers, 
 whose footprints on the sands of fact seemed less 
 real to us than those of Robinson Crusoe's Man 
 Friday, and whose relation to ourselves seemed of 
 less importance than the movements of Mr. Great- 
 heart in the " Pilgrim's Progress." 
 
 Certain of these forefathers seem to have been, in 
 the remote past, connected with the Guelphs of Guelph 
 and Ghibelline history ; and while he never found it 
 necessary to deny the diluted drop of royal blood in 
 the family veins, he knew too well how little ancestry 
 signifies to the live people and the live work of Amer- 
 ica to-day, to inculcate in his household much interest 
 in such matters. It was with his own keen sense of 
 the ludicrous that he detected and exposed the little 
 vanity of one of his children who boasted to a mate 
 of being " descended from Queen Victoria ! " 
 
 The family, like most American families who have 
 amounted to anything, sprang from that " one set- 
 tler" who figures so prominently in genealogy, and 
 who came over so early and proved so useful and so 
 eminent in his day. Such items are not of public 
 interest in a memorial like this, except so far as they 
 can give a definite impression of the kind of stock 
 to which the subject of the biography owed his tem- 
 perament. 
 
THE PARENTS; AND THE CHILD. 3 
 
 In a few words it can be said that it was sturdy, 
 clean, intelligent, " well-connected " stock ; we find 
 magistrates, members of legislatures, a trustee of the 
 colony, or, what was considered an equal honor in 
 those pious times, deacons of the church, and so on, 
 — a comfortable, honorable record: the men usually 
 eminent for something in local history ; the women 
 domestic, gentle, modest, and always very religious. 
 Indeed, the stock was devout from beginning to end, 
 with only scapegraces enough hanging to the branches 
 of the tree to serve as a foil to the general color of 
 the blossom and flavor of the fruit. 
 
 The father of Professor Phelps was the son of 
 a Massachusetts farmer of some local importance 
 and influence, — a man whose neighbors called him 
 " Squire," and who gave his sons a college educa- 
 tion, and started them well in life. Eliakim Phelps 
 became a clergyman of the Orthodox Congregational 
 Church, and was a man of ability and of its propor- 
 tional success : both these facts go for what they are 
 worth — in this case they were worth decidedly some- 
 thing — in the history of the son. 
 
 Dr. Eliakim Phelps was a man of sanity, both 
 of soul and body; without an untuned nerve, with- 
 out an undue prejudice, firm, fearless, equable, and 
 lovable. He had the originality to belong to the 
 underground railroad, in the times which tried the 
 fibre of men. Clergymen did not necessarily find it 
 their duty in those days to protect a fugitive slave 
 in peril of his freedom and his life. Dr. Phelps did 
 consider it his ; and that bit of blazonry on the family 
 escutcheon shines as brightly to our eyes to-day, as 
 the useful little religious tale, with the large cir- 
 
4 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 dilation, for which Dr. Phelps was responsible, or 
 the great "revivals" which occurred in his ministry. 
 Possibly this view of the case may be shared by 
 greater and wiser eyes than ours. 
 
 Dr. Phelps's name has been somewhat distorted 
 from its natural association in the public mind, by 
 the painful experience of house-possession, similar to 
 that afflicting John Wesley, which for seven months 
 haunted Dr. Phelps's household, and for thirty -seven 
 years has haunted the columns of the American 
 press. 
 
 This unpleasant fact, it is as well to note, was only 
 an episode in the history of a useful and level-headed 
 man, who bore himself through it with a serenity, 
 and good sense, and simple, undeviated Christian 
 faith, which, taken together, compose the chief moral 
 of the situation. 
 
 Of his father, Professor Phelps 1 himself says : — 
 
 " I have never known a man — I have known a 
 few women — who had a more profound reverence 
 than he had for the office and work of a Christian 
 pastor. To him they were above all other digni- 
 ties on earth. So persuasive was this conviction in 
 the atmosphere of his household, that I distinctly 
 remember my resolve, before I was four years old, 
 that I would become a minister ; not so much 
 because the ministry was my father's guild, as 
 because he had taught me nothing above that to 
 which ambition could aspire. Was not ours the 
 house of Aaron, and ours the tribe of Levi ? " 
 
 " I remember once riding with him six miles into 
 the country in search of a man, not one of his con- 
 l A Pastor of the Last Generation, " My Portfolio." 
 
THE PARENTS; AND THE CHILD. 5 
 
 gregation, but who professed to be an infidel, and 
 whom my father claimed on the principle which he 
 often affirmed as the rule of his pastoral labors, — 
 'The man who belongs nowhere belongs to me, and 
 I must give account of him.' " 
 
 We learn that Dr. Phelps was one of the first men 
 in the county to establish a Sunday-school, much to 
 the disapproval of his deacons ; but he " started one 
 the next day after he heard of such a thing." 
 
 He " organized a temperance society, on the prin- 
 ciple of total abstinence, when only one other member 
 even of the Brookfield Association of Ministers sup- 
 ported the movement. He was the first clergyman of 
 the county to remove the liquor-bottles from his side- 
 board. He bore calmly the charge that he did it 
 from parsimonious motives. 
 
 "An aged clerical associate, who had more than 
 once been seen to stagger up the pulpit stairs on a 
 Sunday afternoon, begged of his young brother not 
 to be wiser than his fathers, nor more temperate than 
 his blessed Master. For one, he wanted no better 
 example than the Lord Jesus." 
 
 " My father, by natural temperament, was not a 
 conservative, and he was not a radical. . . . But if 
 the course of events compelled him to side with either 
 extreme, he was apt to drift toward the side of the 
 radical. He refused his pulpit to an abolitionist 
 lecturer, . . . because, he said, his people had rights 
 there which he was bound to respect ; but, if a fugi- 
 tive slave applied to him, ... he fell back on first 
 principles, and bade his fellow-man welcome. . . . 
 
 " He once employed for several months a runaway 
 negro as a laborer. One morning the rumor came 
 
 \s 
 
6 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 that John's master was at the hotel, within a pistol- 
 shot of the parsonage, that he had obtained a warrant 
 for the arrest of his chattel, and that he had a leash of 
 dogs on hand for the hunt. Geneva attracted slave- 
 hunters at that time ; because, besides being near the 
 border-line of Canada, it was the seat of a negro 
 colony of some three hundred, nearly all the adults 
 being runaways. I suppose it would have cost the 
 pastor his pulpit, if the deed of that day had been 
 known. The United States marshal of the district 
 was one of his parishioners. It is sufficient token of 
 the dominant politics of that period, that it was on 
 the eve of the election of Martin Van Buren, a favorite 
 son of New York, to the presidency. Among the 
 pastor's flock were magnates to whom the ' Union 
 and the Constitution ' were second only to the oracles 
 of God. 
 
 " But the shield was turned now in his vision ; and 
 John appeared to have rights, which, pulpit or no 
 pulpit, must not be ignored by a minister of Christ. 
 He resolved that John should have fair play. He 
 asked him if he wanted to go back to Maryland. 
 John thought not. But had he not left a wife in 
 Maryland ? Yes, but he had ' anoder one ' in Geneva. 
 She was ' black but comely,' and had borne him two 
 children. His Maryland master had not taught him 
 very clear notions of the marriage-tie. On the whole, 
 he thought ' he'd sooner die than leave the pickanin- 
 nies.' ' If he went back, his master would sell him 
 South.' ' He'd rather go to hell.' ' He reckoned he 
 wouldn't be took alive.' ' He'd take his chance with 
 the hounds.' 
 
 " As the market stood in those days, he was worth 
 
THE PARENTS; AND THE CHILD. 7 
 
 taking alive, if the hounds could be kept off from the 
 jugular vein. He was a stout 'six-footer,' in the 
 prime of manhood ; a bright mulatto, with white 
 brains, sound in wind and limb ; his teeth would bear 
 counting on the auction-block, and he was a trained 
 mechanic withal : in return for some teaching- which 
 I gave him, he had taught me how to shingle a barn. 
 The master's title, too, was beyond a doubt : his broad 
 back was branded very legibly. My father told him 
 he hoped nobody would have to die ; but he added 
 some advice, in tones too low for me to hear, but with 
 a compression of the mouth which was well under- 
 stood in the discipline of the family. He then told 
 John to take to a certain piece of woods, and wait 
 there, while he himself went to the hotel to recon- 
 noitre. 
 
 " John crept around the barn of the hotel to a little 
 cabin, where ' the pickaninnies ' were rolling in the 
 dirt, and was soon ranging the woods. A few hours 
 after, the pastor returned, with lips more sternly com- 
 pressed than ever, and proceeded to make up a basket 
 of food for John. He brought it to me, and told me 
 to go with it, and find him. My father's eye silently 
 answered mine when I observed that the knife was 
 not the mate of the fork, that it was too large to be 
 covered in the basket, that, in short, it was the largest 
 carver in the house, — the one with which John had 
 not long before slaughtered a pig. It was as nearly 
 a facsimile of a bowie-knife as the credit of the par- 
 sonage ought to bear. I found John. His eye, too, 
 alighted first on the familiar knife. The grim smile 
 of his savage ancestors gleamed around his white 
 teeth. He played with the food, but treasured the 
 
8 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 knife in his bosom. Said he, as I took his hand at 
 parting, ' Tell your fader that he is a Christian and a 
 gemman, ebery inch of him.' His ideas of what 
 Christianity is may have been rather mixed (he had 
 learned them at the whipping-post) ; but his half- 
 savage intuitions of what Christianity ought to do 
 for a hunted man were not far wrong. So, at least, 
 the pastor thought. It was well for dog and master 
 that they did not find John's trail. Indeed, I suspect 
 the dogs were left at the hotel. Even Martin Van 
 Buren's constituents in a livery-stable would hardly 
 have winked at that business on the soil of New York. 
 Human nature has an innate reverence for the jugular 
 vein. 
 
 " My father's prayer with us that night was unusu- 
 ally solemn. He remembered both the slave and the 
 slave-hunter." 
 
 In regard to the phenomena at Stratford, to which 
 reference has been made, Professor Phelps among other 
 comments makes this one : " That the facts were real, 
 a thousand witnesses testified. An eminent judge in 
 the State of New York said that he had pronounced 
 sentence of death on many a criminal on a tithe of 
 the evidence which supported those facts. That they 
 were inexplicable by any known principles of science 
 was equally clear to all who saw and heard them, who 
 were qualified to judge. Experts in science went to 
 Stratford in triumphant expectation, and came away 
 in dogged silence, convinced of nothing, yet solving 
 nothing. If modern science had nothing to show 
 more worthy of respect than its solutions of Spirit- 
 ualism, alchemy would be its equal, and astrology 
 infinitely its superior. . . . 
 
THE PARENTS; AND THE CHILD. 9 
 
 " To my father the whole thing was a visitation from 
 God. He bowed to the affliction in sorrow and in 
 prayer. He never gave credence to it as a revelation 
 of religious truth for an hour. The only point in 
 which it affected his interpretation of the Scriptures 
 was that of the biblical demonology. When science 
 failed to give him an explanation which deserved 
 respect, he fell back upon the historic faith of the 
 Christian Church in the personality and activity of 
 angels, good and evil." 
 
 It is one of the truisms of biographical literature 
 that men of eminence owe their most marked quali- 
 ties to their mothers. 
 
 There looks down upon the writer from the old- 
 fashioned frame of an older-fashioned portrait, one 
 of the purest, most beautiful, most devout faces 
 that ever bent with happy tears above the cradle of 
 a first-born son. 
 
 Sarah Adams was at once a saint and a beauty, 
 a belle and a devotee ; and when she married the 
 energetic young minister, and went from her village 
 home in Wilbraham, Mass., to his first parish in 
 Brookfield, she took there the best blessing that the 
 sternest law of heredity can select for unborn chil- 
 dren, — the mental and spiritual harmony of a perfect 
 married love. 
 
 In the aged hand of her widowed husband we 
 find quaint tributes to the wife, whom, perhaps, he 
 never viewed apart from the conventional feminine 
 ideal of his times, but whose rare quality he felt to 
 the day of his death, like the perfume in the atmos- 
 phere left by the lily of a vanished angel. 
 
10 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 He tells us what a " domestic and affectionate dis- 
 position " she had ; that she " was never known to 
 have an enemy " ; that she was " fond of books and 
 retirement." He adds with a touch of pardonable 
 vanity that she was "taken to be thirty when she 
 was fifty, and when travelling with her eldest son 
 was often judged to be his wife." She was the "idol 
 of her household," and she " entered into that higher 
 life, the privilege of which few Christians enjoy." 
 He adds by way of climax, that she " had a remark- 
 able sense of propriety, and was never known to do 
 a foolish thing." 
 
 Quite as vivid a picture of this lovely matron used 
 to come to us from his own lips, which never tired 
 of saying, — and we wondered sometimes why they 
 should tremble when they said, — " We lived together 
 in conjugal happiness for almost thirty years. I never 
 knew her, in all that time, to do one unkind or 
 impatient thing; and I never heard her speak an 
 irritable word to any human being." 
 
 It seems, indeed, that she was really one of the 
 few mortals of whom it is not excessive to speak in 
 superlatives. 
 
 In Brookfield, Mass., in the parsonage of his father, 
 Austin Phelps was born. It was the year 1820, — 
 the month was January, and the day the seventh. 
 
 Into the bitter climate of one of the coldest sections 
 of Massachusetts there ventured one of the tiniest, 
 most unpromising babies who ever defied the prophe- 
 cies of wise women or the despairs of anxious parents. 
 It was one of the family traditions that the child 
 was so small that he was put at an early age into a 
 coffee-pot; and the mischievous interest which his 
 
THE PARENTS; AND THE CHILD. 11 
 
 own children took in this bit of genealogy, espe- 
 cially the astonishing legends with which they orna- 
 mented it, never failed to light his sense of humor. 
 The coffee-pot story was one of our little devices to 
 divert the tides of dark hours which always yielded 
 to the ingenuities of tenderness. 
 
 Like many children who " begin hard," this very 
 little baby continued to meet with discouragements, 
 and celebrated his infantile career by a fall from the 
 arms of a careless nurse upon a stone hearth. Con- 
 vulsions followed, and imminent death threatened 
 the child for some time. He himself believed that 
 much of the physical suffering which shadowed his 
 mature life owed its first cause to this accident. 
 However that may be, the child, having made rather 
 a sad entrance through the gates of a life which was 
 to know its full share of human pains, passed on, 
 stoutly enough, to a period of good health and good 
 spirits and good promise. 
 
 We are told that when he was "two or three years 
 old"— the record is a trifle vague just here — he 
 began to read ; and it is noted, without surprise or 
 comment, that this baby " learned all the letters of 
 the alphabet, but three, in one day!" Precocity 
 followed precocity. At the age of four he reads the 
 Bible at prayers with the family, apparently as well 
 as anybody else. At eight he can do any sum in 
 cube root and explain every process in the opera- 
 tion. He himself tells us that he distinctly remem- 
 bers a great public event which occurred when he 
 was about a year and a half old. This characteristic 
 sub-consciousness is conscientiously explained in the 
 autobiographic notes, which he left at the urgent 
 
12 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 request of a member of his family, and which, as he 
 will be always left to speak for himself in these 
 pages, when he can do so, are herein reproduced, 
 (with a few omissions) as they stand. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC. — BOYHOOD. 
 " Reminiscences of my Life. 
 
 " It has often occurred to me that one of the tem- 
 porary and early occupations of a redeemed soul in 
 heaven may be a review of the life spent here on 
 earth : a review in which at least the illumination of 
 a spiritual state, if not indeed some special revelation 
 from God, shall be thrown back upon these earthly 
 scenes, their mysteries explained, their trials inter- 
 preted, the exigencies and divine deliverances which 
 they involved disclosed, and the ways of God vindi- 
 cated to the wondering and grateful spirit. 
 
 "Then the thought has come to me that some 
 remote approach to such a review may be made by a 
 man in this life; after the chief struggle of life is 
 over, his mind is matured, and he can look back with 
 a quiet spirit upon the perturbations of the past. 
 
 "It is with this rather vague purpose that I jot 
 down in these pages some glimpse of my outlook upon 
 my past life as it seems to me at the age of fifty-six. 
 
 " I was born in the year 1820, in the parsonage of 
 West Brookfield, Mass., which my father had then 
 occupied about four years. The place itself made 
 no impression upon my mind which was permanent 
 except the shining of the sun-light on the broad com- 
 
 13 
 
14 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 mon in summer and the raging of the snow-storms 
 in the winter, both of which are among my earliest 
 recollections. Of Brookfield localities and scenery 
 those are the only two things which have entered 
 into my character — the green common in July and 
 the white common in January. 
 
 " Of the people of the village I remember almost 
 nothing, having left them at the age of six years. . . . " 
 Here follows an earnest protest against " the vul- 
 garity, the profaneness, and the obscenity" of the 
 average country district school. " The innocence of 
 rural life was not illustrated in my early surround- 
 ings. I never found afterwards in colleges or in 
 cities such corrupting and vulgarizing influence. . . . 
 To me they were a source of discomfort, even of suf- 
 fering. My earliest impression of social life was that 
 of my own solitude. I felt no sympathy with my 
 companions, and they none with me. As ' the minis- 
 ter's son ' I was a marked boy and suffered no little 
 torment from the rudeness of the rest. 
 
 " My early experience in this respect has led me to 
 question the correctness of the common opinion of 
 the superior vileness of cities and purity of country 
 villages. The absence of social caste in villages and 
 farming towns removes a protection against vice which 
 in cities a Christian family may have. A child is 
 subject to a knowledge of all the wickedness there is 
 in a democratic American town of small population. 
 Everybody knows everybody. The worst have access 
 to the best. The consequence is that a child has no 
 protection through ignorance of vice. I question, too, 
 whether the comparative solitude of country life does 
 not promote the growth of lower and more unmanly 
 
BOYHOOD. 15 
 
 forms of vice than the same rank of families would 
 encounter in cities. At any rate, I count it as a 
 deliverance for me morally that I was removed from 
 the social atmosphere of my birth-place before the 
 most perilous period of my youth came upon me. 
 
 " My memory goes back to a period earlier than 
 that of the majority of children. I distinctly remem- 
 ber my father's announcing one day the death of 
 Napoleon, of which the news had just arrived. Yet 
 that event occurred before I had finished my second 
 year; making allowance for some weeks elapsing 
 before the news could have come from Europe to 
 this country, I must still have heard it some months 
 before I was two years old. The tones and look of 
 my father in speaking of it are very vivid to my 
 mind to this day. . . ." 
 
 The baby seems to have had some imagination as 
 well as a phenomenal memory, for, contemporary 
 with Napoleon, in the intensity of life-long impres- 
 sion, is the sting of "a calico bumble-bee." The 
 record turns aside to this bumble-bee, as if to allow 
 the relief of a little laugh before proceeding gravely. 
 
 "The two things which most deeply impressed 
 me in my Brookfield life were my father's preaching ^ 
 and my mother's songs. Both developed in me very 
 early the religious instinct. My mother was a beau- 
 tiful singer, and my father, even to my childish sen- 
 sibilities, was a magnetic preacher. The best parlor 
 of the parsonage, rarely opened to me except on Sun- 
 days, was hallowed in my thought by my mother's 
 sweet voice in Watts's hymns and in the rehearsal of 
 the Westminster Catechism, only about the first half 
 of which I was thought able to comprehend. It was 
 
16 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 a great deliverance when my half was finished and 
 I was let off to some more congenial occupation, 
 while my elder sister was obliged to plod on through 
 mysteries incalculable. 
 
 " I very early got the notion of my extreme sinful- 
 ness, — too early for such conceptions of guilt as 
 those which tormented me. My father was not a 
 morose preacher, and personally he was one of the 
 most genial of men. My mother was a woman of 
 excellent balance of mind and of gentle sensibilities. 
 I cannot think that they were aware of the despair- 
 ing theology in which at that time I lived. I dis- 
 tinctly believed myself to be the most wicked being 
 alive. I had not a doubt of it. My mind went 
 through the proofs of it again and again. I was the 
 child of Christian parents, born in a Protestant land, 
 a New England child ; and none such ever conceives 
 it possible that any other spot on earth involves the 
 responsibility of such religious privileges as those 
 which belong to a Yankee born and bred. I was 
 the son of a Christian minister too, and this was the 
 height of responsibility, and if not improved in the 
 result, it involved the extreme of guilt. Over and 
 over again I queried whether anybody ever could 
 have sinned against such light as mine and could 
 have been as great a sinner, and my answer was 
 uniformly the same. It was for years a profound 
 reality to me, unhealthful in its influence upon me, 
 and in the result corrupting to my conscience. All 
 forms of religious despair are so. When in later 
 years I became familiar with the life of the poet 
 Cowper, I detected in that many points of similarity 
 to my own. Yet my mother has told me that at 
 
BOYHOOD. 17 
 
 that period I was to all appearances a happy, gleeful 
 child. 
 
 "I do not remember that the possibility of repent- 
 ance ever occurred to me as a reality. I was out 
 and out a fatalist. Doomed to sin, and doomed to 
 suffer, yet with no thought of injustice in it all, I 
 was a curious personification of the dominant theology 
 of that time in New England. It was not until my 
 nineteenth year that I discovered the practicability 
 of repentance. 
 
 " One impression made upon me in the infantile 
 fragment of my life was a morbid sense of the horror 
 of death. It was appalling to me, without a ray of 
 light to illuminate it. Nothing beyond it could 
 surpass it in my conception of its horrors : and noth- 
 ing of joy beyond it could assume any reality to 
 my childish faith, so long as it must be approached 
 through such fearful portals. A funeral was the 
 symbol of all that was repulsive, and to my thought 
 uselessly so. I was compelled to attend funerals, in 
 the hope, I suppose, that familiarity would overcome 
 my morbid antipathy to such scenes. They only 
 aggravated it. At last, it became my habit to play 
 truant and hide myself whenever a funeral was in 
 the prospect. I hear to this day my father's deep 
 voice calling me to the sacrifice, while I lay con- 
 cealed in the barn, or under the hill. It was an 
 unspeakable relief to me when I saw the funeral 
 procession winding its way to the village graveyard, 
 too far away for me to be caught in its anaconda 
 folds. 
 
 " The morbid interest in funerals which is common 
 in rural villages was intensified on its terrific side to 
 
18 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 me by the popular hymnology on the subject of death 
 and its concomitants. The hymn, 
 
 ' Oft as the bell with solemn toll 
 Speaks the departure of a soul,' etc., 
 
 I was taught to repeat, and it was my regular trib- 
 ute to the occasion when the church-bell proclaimed 
 the awful event. I have never recovered from that 
 timidity respecting death and the grave. To this 
 day I seldom see a dead body without having it 
 fastened upon my vision for days afterwards in all 
 sorts of repulsive and hideous postures and grimaces. 
 I never look upon a corpse if I can with decency 
 avoid it. My dearest friends have been laid out of 
 my sight without a look from me into their coffins. 
 Were it not that in my later years my conceptions 
 of heaven as a place, as a world of organized society, 
 in some respects not unlike this world, have become 
 equally vivid, I think the single fact of Death would 
 have made my whole life undesirable to me, as it did 
 make a portion of my childhood. ..." 
 
 Alluding to the effects of the fall from his nurse's 
 arms upon the hearth, he says : — 
 
 " For the first ten years it was no uncommon thing 
 for me to lie awake at night long after a well child 
 should have been asleep. Then began that peculiar- 
 ity by which no small portion of my waking life has 
 been spent at night, when the world around me were 
 unconscious. 
 
 " The second period of my life was a brief two 
 years spent at Pittsfield, Mass. My father removed 
 to that place in 1826, as the principal of the Young 
 Ladies' High School, which afterwards became the 
 
BOYHOOD. 19 
 
 present ' Maplewood School,' if I have the name cor- 
 rectly. The great event of that period to me was 
 the fatal illness of my only sister, who died of heart- 
 disease about a year after our family left Pittsfield. 
 The sadness of that affliction brooded over our house- 
 hold, and by absorbing the time of my mother, left 
 me very much to myself. 
 
 " Then began my acquaintance with men of dis- 
 tinction as educators, under whose influence the 
 remainder of my youth was passed, and to whom I 
 can now trace very valuable results in the forming 
 of my mind. The chief of them are the following : 
 Rev. Dr. Chester Dewey, principal of the High School 
 for Boys at Pittsfield ; Rev. Dr. Wilbur Fisk, presi- 
 dent of the Wilbraham Academy ; Rev. Asa Messer 
 and Rev. Justus French, masters of high schools at 
 Geneva, N.Y. ; Hon. Horace Webber, professor in 
 Geneva College, and afterwards at the head of the 
 College of New York City; Professor A. D. Bache, 
 of the University of Pennsylvania, and afterwards of 
 the United States Coast Survey ; Professor Henry 
 Vethake of the same University, and an author of 
 distinction in political economy ; and Professor Henry 
 Reed of the University, and editor of the Works of 
 Wordsworth in this country, and author of several 
 valuable volumes on English literature ; and Dr. 
 N. W. Taylor of New Haven. 
 
 " I count it among the providential and signal 
 blessings of my life that, in the forming period of 
 my mind, I was brought in contact with so many and 
 so diverse men of high endowments, rich in scholarly 
 acquisitions, and all of them reverent students of the 
 works and ways of God. From them I gained very 
 
20 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 early in life a reverence for learning, and a lofty esti- 
 mate of mind, which have entered profoundly into all 
 my experience. It was of inestimable value to me to 
 have such specimens of mental culture to look up to 
 through those creative years. The influence was such 
 that I do not now remember an hour of my life in 
 which the temptations of wealth, which turn aside so 
 many educated young men from literary and profes- 
 sional pursuits, had any sway of my mind at all, or 
 stirred my ambition. I have had years of oppressive 
 poverty, but my aspirations never wavered from the 
 scholarly and religious aims with which I began the 
 work of manhood. I attribute this, under God, to 
 the decisive and formative influence of those of my 
 instructors who were truly great men and rich in 
 culture. 
 
 " Pittsfield was the scene of the first awakening of 
 my mind to ambition for distinction in anything. It 
 is a great thing for a boy, before religious principle 
 has become fixed and ascendant in his character, to 
 have his ambition roused. It matters little what the 
 aim is, if it be intrinsically worth striving for. It is 
 a great protection against vice and against mental 
 degradation. 
 
 " In my own case, the object of aspiration was ex- 
 cellence in elocution. Why this rather than any other 
 aim quickened me, I cannot say, but so it was. At 
 the age of eight years I became, in the circle of school- 
 boy life, a distinguished speaker. I revelled in decla- 
 mation. It was for years the great delight of my 
 days, and often the subject of my dreams. At public 
 exhibitions I was in demand. Usually my name 
 closed the list of speakers. I remember the hour 
 
BOYHOOD. 21 
 
 at which the conception of a good speech dawned 
 upon me. It was the opening of a new world. For 
 weeks after I lived in the joy of it, more luxuriously 
 than if it had been a mine of gold. To the elocu- 
 tionary enthusiasm of those few years I can trace 
 some of the most powerful jets of influence upon the 
 subsequent formation of my style as a writer. At 
 that period the hope of being some day an orator in 
 public life was my North Star. The loss of it would 
 have been a great sorrow. Declamatory soliloquy 
 became one of my chief amusements. As an elevat- 
 ing and protecting power it was in some respects 
 a grand substitute for religious principle. Vice in 
 deed or thought was an appalling contrast, in my 
 view, to the moments of glory in which I experienced 
 the joy of successful declamation. Of original thought 
 and utterance at that time I had no idea. 
 
 "To the brief period of life in Pittsfield there fol- 
 lowed a still briefer one of one year, as a member of 
 the Wilbraham Academy in Massachusetts. There 
 I continued the classical study, in preparation for col- 
 lege, which I had begun under Dr. Dewey. That year 
 was marked chiefly by the death of my sister. 
 
 " In 1830 I removed with my father's family to 
 Geneva, N.Y., where he was pastor of the First Pres- 
 byterian Church. There were spent the following 
 five years of my life. Most eventful years they 
 were, too, in the development of my mind and char- 
 acter. 
 
 " I became almost immediately sensible of the 
 strange excitant power of a new country. Western 
 New York was at that time of comparatively recent 
 settlement. Land-offices existed for the sale of lands 
 
22 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 by the first purchasers from the government. Large 
 tracts of forest remained, and of pastures picturesque 
 with the stumps of trees. Everything was thrifty, 
 bustling, pushing. The character of the people, 
 though they were largely emigrants from New Eng- 
 land, was that common to emigrant communities. 
 Character in extremes abounded. Extreme sin, ex- 
 -\j treme piety, contended for the mastery. Revivals of 
 religion swept over the whole region. A very power- 
 ful one occurred under my father's ministry. 
 
 " So impressible a nature as mine could not but 
 feel the power of the change from a staid New 
 England village. I was distinctly and positively 
 conscious of rapid mental growth. The beauty of 
 Geneva Lake was the first thing that gave me any 
 notion of aesthetics. The name I knew not, but the 
 thing developed itself with great force. For a time 
 it overwhelmed me. 
 
 " A similar growth in the power of application in 
 study took place. Mathematics was my favorite de- 
 partment. Of. literature I had no conception, except 
 of those qualities of style which make good material 
 for declamation. My chief interest in preaching at 
 that time was in ' eloquent ' passages, which I listened 
 to with the zest of an expert. That early taste for 
 declamation, I think, was the root of the chief defect 
 and the chief excellence of my own style for years 
 after I entered the University. Its turgidity was 
 due to the fact that my taste recognized nothing as 
 superior in quality which would not declaim well. 
 A keen critic of my early sermons once said of me, 
 'That young fellow preaches as if he lived on the 
 " Paradise Lost." : It was true, Mentally I did live 
 
BOYHOOD. 23 
 
 on sonorous periods. I preached a great deal of non- 
 sense in blank verse. But on the other hand, the 
 same taste, extreme though it was, kept my mind for 
 years on the strain against humdrum. Perhaps in 
 the long run the one effect offset the other. Of the 
 fact that the early opening of my powers to mental 
 production was ruled by the school platform, I have 
 no doubt. The same elocutionary taste continued to 
 act as a protection against degrading vices. Among 
 my competitors in declamation in those early days 
 was Bishop Coxe of Western New York. This was 
 at Pittsfield, however. 
 
 " The revival of religion which took place, I think, 
 in my twelfth year, affected me powerfully for the 
 time. I went through the usual excitement of such 
 scenes, attended children's prayer -meetings, took 
 prominent part in them, prayed much in secret, and 
 thought of little else than the salvation of my soul. 
 If any one at that crisis had kindly diverted my 
 thoughts from the idea of regeneration to that of 
 simple right living in the ways natural to a child, I 
 think I might then have become a child of God. 
 What I needed, as I now look back to the state of 
 my mind, was to be made to believe in truth-telling, 
 honesty, honor, unselfishness, care for the happiness of 
 others, as well as love to God and trust in Christ, as 
 Christian things. I had no conception of them as such. 
 They were of the earth, earthy. I longed for, and 
 prayed for, and, worst of all, waited for, some sublime 
 and revolutionary change of heart; and what that 
 was, as a fact in a child's experience, I had not the 
 remotest idea. If I had been trained in the Episcopal 
 Church, I should at that time have been confirmed, 
 
 ^ 
 
24 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 have entered on a consciously religious life, and 
 grown up into Christian living, of the Episcopal type. 
 
 C It was to me a sad misfortune that my Presbyterian 
 culture had not, in add it ton to its high spiritual ideal 
 of regenerate character, something equivalent to the 
 
 \ Episcopal ideal of Christian growth. For the want 
 of that I floundered about for a while in the ebb and 
 flow of the revival, without one jot of good that I 
 know from it. Many of my companions thought 
 they were converted, and they exhorted me accord- 
 ingly. I never so far lost my head as to believe that 
 I had met with any such change as I supposed re- 
 generation to be. I knew too much for that, and my 
 companions found it out for themselves, after a time, 
 and gave up their illusive hopes. 
 
 " My belief is that hundreds of older people did 
 turn to God in that revival. But I have yet to learn 
 of one of my own age who was at all benefited by it. 
 To me it was an unmitigated evil, hardening in its 
 effect on my religious sensibilities, and the prelude 
 to a period of worldliness in which I lived without 
 prayer. That experience has colored my convictions 
 in subsequent life, of the unnaturalness of subjecting 
 very young people to the usual stimulant of a revival. 
 The natural avenue to God for a Christian child is 
 the Christian home, the family altar, the social amen- 
 ities of life suffused by the love of God and man — 
 not the flaming excitement of the inquiry meeting 
 and the place of public prayer. To push a child for- 
 ward into such scenes involves a fearful peril. 
 
 " Indeed, my whole experience in life — and I may 
 as well record it here — has impressed me, not with a 
 sense of the superiority of the Episcopal policy as a 
 
BOYHOOD. 25 
 
 whole, but of our urgent need of those parts of it 
 which contribute to Christian nurture. There is such 
 a thing as coming up into religious living in a natural 
 way. There is an unconscious growth possible to all. 
 The family is the nursery of it ; and the Church is 
 but the family on an extended scale. The Episcopal 
 Church realizes in the life more of the elements of 
 such natural Christian training than any other. The 
 rite of confirmation, the division of the Christian 
 year, the observance of certain natural anniversaries, 
 and the policy of keeping in the background the idea 
 of regeneration in the experience of the children of 
 Christian families, are expedients which I am sure 
 would have been a valuable help to me. 
 
 " The toggery of Ritualism, the strut of ecclesias- 
 tical authority, the fawning upon culture and wealth, 
 the handling of the poor and the ignorant in an au- 
 thoritative way and at arms' length, and the intense 
 exclusiveness and bigotry in religious fellowship, 
 which are found in some sections of the Episcopal 
 Church, have through life repelled me from it. But 
 my experience has, beyond all question, suffered for 
 the want of its power of Christian nurture, involved 
 in its theory of conversion, in some of its ceremonies, 
 its love of ancient ritual and song. I sometimes 
 query whether mine would have been the gain or the 
 loss on the whole, if at the time I now speak of I 
 had been transferred to the Episcopal Fold. 
 
 " I well remember hearing Dr. Finney preach at 
 that time of which I now write. He was then at the 
 zenith of his fame as a revivalist. Western New 
 York was all aflame with the excitement produced by 
 his 'protracted meetings.' He and his measures were 
 
26 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 the standing theme of debate among the ministers 
 who often assembled at my father's house. My father 
 sympathized with and defended him. Others were 
 warmly opposed to him. My boyish opinions went 
 through some pretty severe fluctuations as I listened 
 silently to the clerical talk. 
 
 " I think I received at that time a tendency which 
 I have never lost. . . . For my own religious 
 growth, I do not think I have ever felt the need of 
 the usual methods of revivals, nor have I been con- 
 scious of development in them. For others, I accept 
 them and believe in them. But my own soul craves 
 a different discipline." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC. — EARLY MANHOOD. 
 
 "I was fitted for college at the age of twelve years, 
 and entered Hobart College at Geneva in the year 
 following. I was well fitted according to the curric- 
 ulum of that period, and was able to sustain a good 
 rank in my class, usually being recognized as its 
 
 head. 
 
 " I am deeply indebted to the Hon. Horace Web- 
 ster, then professor in Hobart College, for certain 
 awakening and cheering influences upon me. He 
 gave me lessons in advance of my class and heard me 
 recite them in private. I was greatly aroused by 
 once hearing that he had said to some one else that 
 ' the world would yet hear from young Phelps.' I 
 inwardly resolved that it should. 
 
 " In view of the fact that so much of my later life 
 has been devoted to literary criticism, one other fact 
 in my college life at Geneva is worth recording. My 
 tutor in the languages I observed watching me very 
 narrowly for many days, when I was called up to 
 recite. At length he directed me to remain after the 
 class had retired. I did so ; and he questioned me 
 closely as to my methods of study, and specially in- 
 quired whether I sought aid from translations. I 
 could truthfully answer that I did not. He accepted 
 my word for it with evident pleasure, and told me 
 
 27 
 
28 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 that my translations were so critically accurate that 
 he feared I was using illegitimate helps. I hardly 
 knew what he meant : the virtue was an unconscious 
 one ; but I suppose that whatever success I have 
 since then achieved in literary work is in part due 
 to an innate taste which was then beginning to 
 develop itself. 
 
 " Geneva College was not at that time a safe place 
 for a lad of my age. I entered at the age of thirteen, 
 and found myself in the midst of a rather corrupt 
 life. Many of the students were from the South ; 
 very few were Christians, some were intemperate, 
 some have since then died drunkards. My age, the 
 restraining influences of home, and my ambition 
 served to protect me from degrading vices. I do not 
 remember that I was ever solicited to participate in 
 the revels of my companions. 
 
 " Why my father removed me from Geneva College 
 I have never known. But near the close of my 
 second year there, I was sent to Amherst, with the 
 expectation of remaining there through the remainder 
 of the course. The change was to me a very painful 
 one. I was not only the youngest in a class of 
 eighty, but my classmates were all full-grown men. 
 My chum was nearly ten years my senior. I had no 
 chance for distinction among such mature minds. 
 If I had remained, I should not have risen above 
 mediocrity. I was not at all tried by my peers. The 
 effect was perilous to me morally. The chief pro- 
 tective influence which I had hitherto felt, that of 
 my scholarly ambition, was discouraged by the im- 
 possibility of excelling; and I had as yet no religious 
 principle to take its place. At that time, seven- 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 
 
 eighths of the students in the college were professing 
 Christians ; yet I was really in greater peril of falling 
 into irreligious and immoral ways than I was at 
 Geneva. My invincible homesickness caused me 
 great misery. I was there but six months; and I 
 cannot recall one happy day in the whole time. Nor 
 do I now recall any special influence upon my char- 
 acter which was lasting, though I felt a profound 
 respect for the Amherst Faculty of that period. I 
 was not there long enough to form such relations as 
 had existed between Professor Webster and myself, 
 and afterwards did exist with Professor Henry Reed 
 Yet I had a splendid set of classmates at Amherst. It 
 I had only been their peer, I could not have asked 
 for more stimulating surroundings. Among my asso- 
 ciates there were the Hon. Ensign Kellogg of Pitts- 
 field Hon. Mr. Doolittle of Wisconsin, Hon. Daniel 
 March of Pennsylvania, Hon. Judge Williams of 
 Pittsburgh, Rev. Dr. Poor of Philadelphia, Hon 
 E. B. Gillette of Westfield, Professor Haven ot 
 Chicago, and many other most estimable men or 
 scholarly clergymen. I say associates — they were 
 there and I was there : that is about all. I had no 
 companions, properly so called. I lived in absolute 
 mental solitude. 
 
 "In December, 1835, when I was within a month 
 of the completion of my sixteenth year, I was re- 
 moved from Amherst College to the University of 
 Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. The change was due 
 wholly to considerations of my father's domestic 
 convenience. He had just removed to that city to 
 reside; and, there being a good college there, I 
 naturally went home, and finished my college course 
 
AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 there^\ I think that the day I arrived in Philadelphia 
 ras one of the happiest of my life. In all respects 
 the change was a most valuable one for me. The 
 unnatural solitude of my life at Amherst was broken 
 up. The novelties of city life were a marvellous and 
 healthy stimulus to me. In college I found myself 
 again among my equals in age and culture, and my 
 literary ambition revived. More than all else, the 
 influence of two men became to me an awakening, a 
 corrective, and in every way a creative power to my 
 mind. 
 
 One of those was Professor Henry Reed, who then 
 held the department of English Literature in the 
 University. He first opened to me the 'well of Eng- 
 lish undefiled.' His classic and quiet taste was the 
 first corrective I ever felt to the declamatory tastes 
 of my youth. His enthusiastic admiration of Words- 
 worth, whose works he edited in this country, first 
 taught me to appreciate that wonderful mind, and 
 that kind of literature which his poetry represented. 
 I spent hours in the privacy of Professor Reed's 
 study, while he patiently explained to me wherein 
 consisted the superiority of the Wordsworthian type 
 of literature. I have often thought since that I must 
 have bored him with my crude inquiries. If a grate- 
 ful spirit in mature years could be any compensation 
 for his scholarly patience, he certainly has had some 
 reward from me. I look upon him as one of the 
 rare minds whose influence was ascendant in my 
 early culture. 
 
 " He once gave me a richly deserved reproof, 
 which was characteristic of the man. I had been 
 required to present an essay for criticism. The sub- 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 31 
 
 ject I do not remember. But at about that time I 
 had read with great admiration an address by Edward 
 Everett to some college society in New England. 
 The whole country rang with Mr. Everett's literary 
 fame at that period. The oration in question had 
 taken possession of my mind ; and in my own essay 
 I had made use of fragments of it in a way quite 
 beyond the liberty of quotation. I had not distinctly 
 intended to plagiarize. But I had no definite con- 
 ception of what constituted plagiarism; and I had 
 given way to my admiration of the production of 
 that gifted pen by drafts which I have since sus- 
 pected were plagiarisms of a glaring type. 
 
 " My essay went before the gentlemanly professor, 
 and in less than an hour was returned to me, with 
 criticisms more abundant than usual upon those pages 
 which were unquestionably original with me, and not 
 one word upon the rest. At first I was confounded. 
 But I must have had some obscure consciousness of 
 wrong, for it was not long before the idea dawned 
 upon me: the professor does not mean to criticise 
 Edward Everett. Not one word did he ever say to 
 me on the subject afterwards : no solemn reproof ; no 
 charge of conscious wrong which would have humili- 
 ated me; and no disclosure of my error by public 
 reproof. When, a few days after, I met him, half 
 expecting to be arraigned for literary theft, he met 
 me as if I had been his literary equal. It was a life- 
 long lesson to me. I never afterwards even blundered 
 into plagiarism, so far as I know ; and the professor's 
 considerateness of my youth and ignorance gave me 
 a new conception of a scholarly gentleman. Alas ! 
 Poor man! Years afterwards, I followed the track of 
 
^M 
 
 32 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 his travels in Europe, searching gratefully for his 
 beloved name in the registers of hotels, and mourning 
 over the loss of him by shipwreck on his voyage 
 home. The same ship which had borne me safely to 
 the Old World — the Arctic — was wrecked with him 
 on the voyage back. He met death, with his sister's 
 hand clasped in his, with the same serene faith which 
 characterized his literary tastes all through life. 
 
 " The other mind before which my own made rev- 
 erent obeisance, during the years of my life in Phila- 
 delphia, was that of Albert Barnes. Probably I owe 
 more, all things considered, to his influence over me 
 in those formative years of my youth than to any 
 other one man except my father. Yet I find it difficult 
 now to define wherein his great power over me lay. 
 I surely have known greater men than he, more origi- 
 nal thinkers, more accurate scholars, more instructive 
 authors, and, as the world judges, more powerful 
 preachers. I did not get so near to him, in social 
 intercourse, as to some other men. Still, he repre- 
 sents the focal power over my culture in those six 
 years in which I was one of his parishioners. I found 
 myself drawn by a singular affinity to the man. His 
 personal qualities fascinated me. My mind seemed 
 spontaneously to be working towards the same plane 
 of things which he had reached. My thinking ran 
 naturally in the same grooves. His tastes, his opin- 
 ions, his aspirations, his literary and professional aims, 
 — in a word, the make and culture of the man, — ■ 
 seemed to form a world of thought and feeling in 
 which I felt at home. Whatever he said and did 
 seemed to me just that which it would have been 
 natural for me to say and do, if I could. Then there 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 33 
 
 was a profound intellectual and moral sympathy 
 between us. I say 'moral,' because it extended to 
 the type of his religious character, as well as to his 
 intellectual being. This was true of our relations, 
 from the first time I ever saw him to the last. Even 
 when I had long since learned to differ from him in 
 opinion, my sympathy with the make of the man 
 never wavered or grew less. His preaching in those 
 years moved me as that of no other man ever did 
 before or since. I have heard the ablest preachers of 
 this country and Great Britain, but never one of them 
 has risen so near to my finished ideal of a Christian 
 preacher as he did. 
 
 " In the University of Pennsylvania I was restored 
 to the society of my peers. The unnatural mental 
 solitude in which I lived at Amherst was broken up. 
 Though I was still the junior of all my classmates, 
 yet I was not so vastly below them as to discourage 
 effort. I took rank at once among them as one of the 
 born scholars of the class. At my graduation, the 
 valedictory was assigned to me, but it was not there, 
 as in New England, the sign of the headship of the 
 class in classical learning. Eminence in composition 
 and on the platform was taken into account. As a 
 classical scholar, I took rank as number two — there 
 being above me two men who divided number one 
 between them. 
 
 " I suppose that there was as much vice in college 
 as in other city colleges, but I was never brought 
 into contact with it in a solitary insta nce. J Three 
 men were my most intimate associates — John Boh- 
 len, John Clayton, and John Neal — three Johns; 
 and so far as immoralities were concerned, they might 
 
34 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 all of them have ranked with their saintly namesake. 
 They were pure-minded fellows. I never heard an 
 oath or a questionable story from the lips of either. 
 Yet at that time they were all young men of the world. 
 Bohlen became afterwards a very earnest member of 
 the Episcopal Church, and having inherited a large 
 fortune, he had great influence in that church. He 
 was the founder of the ' Bohlen Lectures ' in Phila- 
 delphia. Clayton was a practising lawyer there (since 
 dead), also a member of the Episcopal Church. Neal 
 became a professor in the Medical Department of the 
 University, and had a large practice in his profession 
 (dead). The influence of these men upon me was 
 good, and only good. 
 
 " It was under the preaching of Mr. Barnes that I 
 made a profession of religion, at the age of eighteen 
 years. What shall I say of that momentous period? 
 To this day it is a mystery to me. It was no fault 
 of my pastor, or of my parents, that I went through 
 a period of despair. My old notion of conversion as a 
 re-creation of moral nature caused me untold misery. 
 It clung to me like Hugo's devil-fish. The make of 
 my mind required a calm, slow, thoughtful conver- 
 sion, like Baxter's. Instead of that, I tried to force 
 upon myself an experience like Brainerd's and that 
 of the elder Edwards. ' Edwards on the Affections ' 
 was my model. And because that ideal of a change 
 of heart was not in me, I mourned in bitterness of 
 spirit. I read all the theology in my father's library. 
 My own theology for a lifetime was formed in those 
 throes of agony. I do not exaggerate. For nearly 
 a year the struggle continued. It was a struggle 
 against nature. After joining the church I sought 
 release from the sacramental vows. . . . 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 35 
 
 " The first relief I obtained was from Rev. N. W. 
 Taylor, of New Haven. He first gave me a glimpse 
 of a theory of conversion which at length rid me of 
 my servitude to the ideals of Brainerd, Edwards, and 
 the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' But full deliverance came 
 in the only way in which it was possible to a consti- 
 tution like mine, — through the slow process of men- 
 tal and moral growth. I have ever since looked with 
 very grave doubts of their value upon the whole class 
 of biographies and manuals which represent conver- 
 sion as a creation, and the Christian life as an emotive 
 ecstasy. To many they may be real, but they have 
 been very hurtful to me. It was an injury that I 
 was taught by them to exalt an emotive experience 
 above that of a will to serve God. If I know any- 
 thing of 'experimental religion,' it is in the form of 
 a principle of consecration to God, which has grown 
 up as my mind has grown. I have never had an hour 
 of ecstasy, never a vision or a dream. If I am a child 
 of God, I am sure that the change did not occur at the 
 time when I once supposed it did. Nor do I know 
 the time when. I suspect that filial obedience to an 
 earthly father is often the medium of regeneration. 
 Piety is character. Like other developments of char- 
 acter, it is a growth. To this simple, unpretending 
 end all my experience has led me. I look upon the 
 old frantic despair of my youth as a revolt of my 
 nature against a false ideal of a soul's relations 
 to God. 
 
 " That experience emphasized in me the theory of 
 revivals, to which I have already referred. That 
 these agitations of the popular mind are often the 
 work of God, I do not doubt. But that they are 
 
 LS 
 
36 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 intrinsically the best methods of growth to the Church 
 I do not believe. They are rather a condescension 
 of the Spirit of God to weakness and vagaries of the 
 human spirit, and to the wild freaks of the human 
 conscience. Large classes of mind, and these the 
 most thoughtful and solid, furnish no natural mate- 
 rial for such awakenings. Our youth will come 
 under a broader and more healthy range of religious 
 influences when the Church makes less of revivals, — 
 talks less and prays less about them, — and concen- 
 trates its thought upon the simple everyday life with 
 God, which enters into common affairs in even and 
 gentle flow. 
 
 " Of this liberty in Christian living I knew noth- 
 ing till long after I entered the University. Looking 
 back now to that dim ' middle age,' I can see that 
 my conscience suffered some violence in its struggles. 
 It was benighted and had to wait for the dawn. At 
 one period the strife within me assumed the distinct 
 form of a conflict between conscience and common 
 sense. Conscience commanded one thing and lashed 
 me for disobedience, and good sense commanded the 
 opposite. Generally conscience gave way. This was 
 an unnatural contest. The real truth of God could 
 never have instigated it. . . . 
 
 "I graduated at the age of seventeen, in 1837. 
 Then followed a year of historical and literary read- 
 ing under the direction of Professor Reed, a most 
 valuable supplement to my collegiate course. It was 
 during and after that year that the religious struggle 
 above referred to took place. When it had in some 
 measure subsided, I went to the New York Seminary, 
 where I studied Hebrew under Dr. Nordheimer for 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 37 
 
 several months. In 1839 I became a member of the 
 New Haven Seminary, and there took complete notes 
 of Dr. Taylor's lectures. At that time I accepted 
 his theology with implicit trust. I have outlived it, 
 in part, but it was then a very timely help to me 
 against infidelity and despair. If he had not thor- 
 ough scholarship he had marvellous intuitions ; and 
 his quickening power over young men was une- 
 qualled by anything that has come under my notice. 
 
 "In 1840 I was licensed to preach by the Third 
 Presbytery of Philadelphia. I preached my first ser- 
 mon in the Old Arch Street Church, Philadelphia. I 
 was then twenty years and three months old. I have 
 never ceased to regret that I entered the pulpit in 
 such a juvenile state of culture. My mind was in a 
 chaotic state of growth. My opinions were preju- 
 dices. I was utterly unfit to assume the religious 
 guidance of others. My own judgment declared this, 
 but friends thought otherwise, and I blundered on 
 to my destiny. My Presbytery sent me an admoni- 
 tory letter, advising my immediate settlement as a 
 pastor. Albert Barnes was the only man who voted 
 against it. Dr. Hawes of Hartford, and several other 
 clergymen, — my father included, — sent me the same 
 counsel. Mr. Barnes and Professor Stuart were the 
 only two men who strengthened me in my purpose 
 to spend the full three years in study, which are 
 commonly given to theological preparation. 
 
 " From the first, I was kindly received by the 
 churches. Lenient judgments of my preaching en- 
 couraged me. I think I must then have expended a 
 great deal of nervous vitality in my elocution. I 
 cannot otherwise account for the favorable reception 
 
38 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 I met with. Overtures were made to me from," — 
 here he mentions some half-dozen prominent city 
 Churches, — "all of which I declined, for the sole 
 reason that I was not prepared to settle anywhere. 
 
 "In March, 1841, the Pine Street Church, Boston, 
 invited me to settle with them, and I declined for 
 the same reason as before. After waiting a year, 
 they renewed the call, and I accepted, and was or- 
 dained in April, 1842. I may mention here, in token 
 of God's great kindness to me, in giving me the con- 
 fidence of the churches, that, in the course of the first 
 dozen years of my professional life, I received over- 
 tures for settlement from churches in" — he appends 
 a list of towns, including New York, Philadelphia, 
 and Boston ; " also from the theological seminaries at 
 
 and to fill their theological chair. With 
 
 the exception of the last two, and two or three of 
 the others, the overtures were informal. It has never 
 been my way to encourage formal calls to a change 
 of service, unless I thought it probable that I should 
 accept them. I name them here, only to record my 
 thanks to God that the Church of our Lord has so 
 uniformly extended to me a kindly hearing. I have 
 never had to wait an hour for something to do in her 
 service. 
 
 " As years passed, and my judgment has matured, 
 I have found it impossible to look back upon the 
 years I spent in Boston with any satisfaction. My 
 people were the kindest in the world. Their judg- 
 ment of my service was lenient in the extreme. In 
 character, in numbers, and in social rank, they were 
 all that I desired. I record it with supreme gratitude 
 to God, that I had the affection of such a people, 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 39 
 
 After the lapse of thirty years, their faces remain 
 very vivid in my eye, and I love them. I can ask no 
 more attractive service in heaven than the privilege 
 of ministering to such minds — why may I not say, 
 to those very men and women? The testimony of 
 some of them on their death-beds, to the good they 
 believed they had received from my words, is very 
 precious to me. God forbid that I should undervalue 
 anything that was good and true in that period of 
 my life ! 
 
 " Still, turning to my own side of the reckoning, as 
 I remember it, I feel only sadness and self-reproach. 
 My mind was unformed, my spiritual culture almost 
 infantile. I had to carry on my work for others, 
 alongside of and under the dead weight of the strug- 
 gles of an undisciplined and uneducated mind to 
 work its way to intellectual manhood. My ideas of 
 composition were crude and false. My theory of 
 preaching was for a time still more so. That any- 
 body can have been really benefited b} r my preaching 
 is inexplicable to me. I cannot see the crevices 
 through which the blessing could have found its 
 way. It was a cruel thing to set so juvenile a mind 
 over such a people in a Christian pulpit. The first 
 night after my ordination I spent in mute despair, so 
 profoundly sensible was I of my intellectual unfitness 
 for my work. Yet I had not religious culture enough 
 to make that sense of unfitness a means of trust in 
 God, so as to get repose in my work from that source. 
 I had no repose in it. I found only the struggles of 
 a wounded spirit, which could find rest nowhere. 
 My experience there is a very sad proof of the need 
 of well-educated mind in the pulpit. Without some 
 
40 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 good degree of thorough education, which shall give 
 a man confidence in his own mental operations, 
 nothing but ignorance of himself and of his work 
 can give him religious confidence. He is exposed to 
 fanaticism of the wildest sort, as the only refuge 
 open to him from his own self-distrust. 
 
 "I was saved from that extreme, but my intel- 
 lectual and my religious culture were at open war 
 with each other. My conscience condemned what 
 my intellect craved, and my intellectual aspirations 
 crushed my conscientious convictions. Repose in my 
 work was impossible. My sermons were — what they 
 were. Three hundred of them I afterwards burned. 
 Those which were most useful to nry people were 
 those which I elaborated least. 
 
 " My removal from Boston to Andover was a revo- 
 lutionary change for me. I had never anticipated it, 
 nor were my tastes and training adapted to the new 
 duties. My whole being was adjusted to the duties 
 of the pulpit. I revered them as I did those of no 
 other profession. Pastoral life ran in my life-blood. 
 It was an inheritance from my honored father, whose 
 success in it bordered upon inspiration. I do not 
 remember ever to have had the extravagant estimate 
 of a professorship of anything, as compared with the 
 pastoral office, which is common among the clergy. 
 My later wisdom has not essentially changed my 
 early convictions on this subject. 
 
 " It was not that I was conscious of any peculiar 
 genius for pastoral duties. On the contrary, some of 
 them were a drudgery to me. The habit of personal 
 conference with men on the subject of religion was 
 never attractive. I shrunk from it with exceeding 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 41 
 
 distaste. I was not expert in it, and knew that I was 
 not. I whipped myself into it whenever I attempted 
 it. My chief usefulness in pastoral service, so far as 
 I could judge of it, was not there, but in the pulpit. 
 I think now that I may have underrated myself in 
 respect to the private ministrations of a pastor. My 
 old people have spoken to me of them as if they were 
 not a waste. But I do not clearly know what they 
 mean by such commendations. Nothing in my remem- 
 bered consciousness sustains them. 
 
 " The thing which bound me to the pastoral office 
 was a downright reverence for it as the first of all 
 human avocations, with no reference to any success 
 of my own in it. Professorship and collegiate presi- 
 dencies never had, to my vision, the glamour which 
 they have in public opinion. 
 
 "I therefore received the offer of service at 
 Andover with immense surprise. I felt no preposses- 
 sions in its favor. I had never sought the office. So 
 far as I know, no friend of mine ever sought it for 
 me. Professor Stuart, who was the only man who 
 would naturally interest himself in my election, has 
 been heard to say that he had no hand in it whatever. 
 I have always supposed that it came about in this 
 manner, viz. : — 
 
 " The pastors of Boston had delivered, in the 
 winter of 1841-2, a series of doctrinal discourses in 
 the Old South Church, each preaching on the subject 
 assigned to him. The subject which had fallen to my 
 lot was that of the ; Sovereignty of God as related to 
 the Responsibility of Man in the Work of Salvation.' 
 I did the best I could with a theme so vast and so 
 complicated. I had a packed audience. Among my 
 
42 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 hearers were Ex-Governor Armstrong and the Hon. 
 William J. Hubbard, two of the Andover Board of 
 Trustees, who happened then to be desperately at 
 their wits' end in search for a successor to Professor 
 Park in the Professorship of Homiletics. My sermon 
 at the Old South impressed those two men very 
 favorably. Governor Armstrong said to Mr. Hub- 
 bard : ' We have found our professor for Andover. 
 There was no nonsense about that sermon. A man 
 who can preach it can teach others how to do it.' 
 
 " My name was thus carried to the conclave of 
 the Andover Trustees. They had recently elected 
 Dr. Hopkins of Williams College, but knowing quite 
 well that he would not accept the office. Rev. R. S. 
 Storrs, D.D., of Brooklyn, was a favorite candidate 
 with some of the Board, but his acceptance, too, was 
 beyond hope. I have been told that the name with 
 which mine came into special competition was that 
 
 of Professor , now of New York. He was in 
 
 reality by far the better qualified man of the two. 
 
 " None of my friends understood the state of my 
 mind on the subject of the scholastic office. Every- 
 body assumed that I should accept. It was a fore- 
 gone conclusion. I could get no help from advisers, 
 in deciding the question, because they all assumed 
 that I needed none. My apparent doubts appeared 
 to them a coy sport with an offer which secretly I 
 meant to accede to. I was in no such state of mind 
 about it. My doubts were real, and my adverse pref- 
 erences strong. I delayed nearly two months in 
 making up my mind. The chairman of the Com- 
 mittee of Election said to me at last : ' What are you 
 waiting for? I do not see what ground you can 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 43 
 
 have for an hour's doubt.' So felt all my friends. 
 It was a grief to me that they would give me no aid. 
 The gist of all they had to say to me was, ' Go ? Of 
 course you will go.' 
 
 " Not so spoke my own judgment and conscience. 
 I believed in my heart that I was made for the pulpit, 
 and nothing else. I felt no inclinations whatever to 
 the professor's chair. When, at my graduation in col- 
 lege, my president had proposed to me to study for a 
 chair in the University, I did not look at the proposal 
 one minute. Something, I remember, seemed to lay 
 a prohibitory hand upon me, and say, ' Not that ! Not 
 that ! ' I saw neither usefulness nor honor in pro- 
 fessional duty, as compared with that of the pulpit. 
 My grand ideals of the greatest men were not 
 chiefly statesmen, nor scholars, nor philosophers, but 
 preachers. I record this now, not to argue the ab- 
 stract question, but only as a fact in my experience 
 at that revolutionary juncture in my life. I knew 
 that the change, if made, would never be reversed. 
 I should never return to the pulpit, if I once aban- 
 doned it. It was like giving up one's first and only 
 love, when the glamour of it was fresh and sovereign 
 in its sway over the imagination. . . . The course of 
 some young men in accepting a pastoral charge beneath 
 their ability, and then waiting and watching for a pro- 
 fessorship, seemed to me supremely puerile. After six 
 weeks of distressing doubt I was no nearer a decision 
 than at first. When I had written my affirmative 
 letter to the Committee, and had gone in person to 
 Governor Armstrong's door to deliver it, I backed down 
 the steps, before putting my hand to the bell, and 
 walked back and forth, hoping for some providential 
 
44 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 indication which would turn the scale the other way. 
 But I saw no cross in the sky ; I heard no voice in 
 the air. The plain truth is that I never wanted to be 
 a professor at Andover, or anywhere. I wanted to 
 stay with my plain people. I loved them ; I revered 
 my pulpit as I did no other spot on earth ; I wanted 
 to abide there and lay my bones with those of the 
 men and women who had chosen me as their spiritual 
 guide. I made the great sacrifice of my life in de- 
 ciding to accept the call to Andover. I felt so then ; 
 I feel so now ; I have never seen the hour when the 
 change did not seem to me a retreat on the inarch of 
 life. 
 
 " Why, then, did I make the change ? One word 
 answers the question, — Health. I knew that I could 
 not much longer stand the strain of the pastorate in 
 Boston. Though up to that time I had scarcely had 
 an invalid day, yet I felt it coming. The break-down 
 could not be far off. I saw that in scholastic retire- 
 ment I could work longer and more efficiently than 
 in a pulpit which so exhausted my nervous vitality. 
 If I could have had half the confidence in my physi- 
 cal endurance that I had in the relative value of ser- 
 vice in the pulpit, I should never have left it for any 
 other profession. My judgment of my prospects at 
 that time is the same now as then. Its accuracy as 
 a foresight of coming events is indicated by the fact 
 that on the morning of the day on which the Council 
 was called for my dismission from Boston, I woke 
 from a sound sleep with a disease of one eye, from 
 which I did not recover for four years. It is con- 
 firmed by the fact that since that time, with all the 
 sanitary helps of professional life and a country resi- 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 45 
 
 dence, I have had more than twenty years of infirm 
 health, followed by premature retirement from profes- 
 sional service. My experience at that critical juncture 
 was a conflict of judgment and conscience respect- 
 ing usefulness and duty in the abstract, with the 
 certain prescience of ill health in the near future. 
 
 " My convictions, confirmed by my own experience 
 and all my observation of the several departments of 
 clerical service, are such that, with few and peculiar 
 exceptions, I have never been able to advise a young 
 man to surrender the pulpit for a professor's chair, 
 other things being equal. That the common opinion 
 of the relative dignity of the two positions is errone- 
 ous, I am as sure as I can be of anything of like 
 nature." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 marriage; and the boston parish. 
 
 Here the record breaks. Whether the characteris- 
 tic objection to discussing himself made too heavy a 
 burden of that autobiographic reverie in which so 
 many minds find holiday, or whether the advance of 
 physical suffering put an end to these notes from sheer 
 weariness, it is impossible to tell. The regret that the 
 manuscript did not cover that later and most pathetic 
 period of experience which would teach us how a 
 man in the prime of his powers bears it to be stricken 
 from their use, is as vain as the effort to break the 
 unfathomable silence, or ask the reason why. Ours 
 is only to take up the broken skein, disentangle the 
 knot, and simplify as well as we can the pattern of 
 a story which has a certain delusive character not to 
 be expected of it at first sight. It would seem an 
 easy matter to relate the events of a devout life which 
 had not a mystery, hardly a secret in it. In truth, 
 the sources of knowledge, covering some of the most 
 interesting portions of his experience, are so few and 
 vague, that the pen almost falls in discouragement 
 before them. 
 
 Not one member of his father's family is now liv- 
 ing. Most of his near friends — of intimates he had 
 so few as to deepen the preciousness of his friend- 
 ship — are dead. Groping among the tombs for 
 
 46 
 
MARRIAGE; AND THE PARISH. 47 
 
 glimpses of his early life, certain winged shadows 
 flap us lightly in the face, and flit away — whither ? 
 It seems as if a dead man would speak, if ever, when 
 the office of giving his personal history to the world 
 has been entrusted to living hands. 
 
 So much as this at least we know : beyond all the 
 delusions of love or the enhancement of time, with- 
 out question or exaggeration, it is true that he was 
 a child almost without a fault, a youth almost with- 
 out a spot. In fact, he was so blameless that one 
 feels a certain compassion for this unnatural superi- 
 ority of character at an age when it is natural to be 
 naughty. What must it have meant of moral soli- 
 tude, what must it have signified of spiritual sensi- 
 tiveness, to be so little, and yet so large ; so young, 
 and yet so old ! 
 
 His old schoolmate and life-long friend, Bishop 
 Cleveland Coxe, writes of him : — 
 
 " I wish I had time to put on paper all I could say 
 of your most honoured father. ... I loved and appre- 
 ciated him heartily. ... He and I were ' rivals ' in 
 Dr. Dewey's School, Pittsfield, a.d. 1828-29, in the 
 matter of elocution and composition. Of course he 
 beat me. A pale, thin, delicate little fellow, with 
 fire too much for his physical power, I thought. All 
 that was good and lovely I could say about him." 
 
 His father often said of him : " Austin never was 
 a child like other children. He was born a man." 
 
 His only brother (who survived him but a few 
 months), in one of the last letters which he was able 
 to write, said : " When father was in his last illness, 
 he called again and again for ' the son who never did 
 wrong.' " 
 
48 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 It is well to think that the theological torments, 
 the throes of the too delicate conscience, the death 
 of the little sister, the unboyish anguish of sensibility 
 which at once created sufferings and enhanced those 
 that already existed, were shadows brightened by 
 their own light ; that the inherent tenderness which 
 quivers so easily into pain had its own correlative 
 delights; that the beautiful mother, who sang on 
 Sunday nights like an angel, and never scolded 
 week-days like a woman, knew, at least, how to 
 " mother," if not to understand, her first-born boy ; 
 and that the adoration in which lie held her like a 
 Madonna to his last hours, and the fact that she did 
 undoubtedly deserve it, were sources of comfort to 
 the lad. 
 
 Too early he left her. While yet a child, he was 
 thoroughly fitted to enter any college existing in his 
 day. The standards have changed, it is easy to say. 
 But even as they stood then, what significance in 
 the fact ! His own review of the situation is more 
 pungent than any guess at it. 
 
 He has omitted to notice all reference to the cor- 
 roding economies which the minister's son was ex- 
 pected in those days to practise at college, and which 
 a conscientious youth like this one would be sure to 
 overdo. No thoughtless demand upon the father's 
 scanty purse came from the boy "who never was a 
 child." It might have been better if there had. The 
 college club, where rice (boiled, or half-boiled, as luck 
 had it) formed the sole staple of too many a meal, 
 was a poor place for a growing lad with a forehead 
 like his. He has been heard in later life mildly to 
 refer to the proportion of salt pork on which he was 
 
MARRIAGE; AND THE TARISH. 
 
 49 
 
 fed in boyhood. But lie always added quickly : " My 
 father did not understand. He was a little differently 
 constituted. He was perfectly well. ... He was not 
 
 to blame." 
 
 We laugh at these old-fashioned deprivations, — 
 they had their funny side, — but there was a deal of 
 unrecorded heroism in the patience with which such 
 silent, unexacting boys bore them. 
 
 It is enough to say of this student's educational 
 experience that he lived through it, and left it with 
 the first honors of his class ; and so, pushed to the 
 front a decade too soon, he entered upon a man's 
 most solemn task when he should have been still 
 serving moral apprenticeship in a boy's irresponsi- 
 bility. 
 
 At twelve (as we have seen), ready for college ; 
 at thirteen, matriculated; at seventeen, graduated; 
 at twenty, having finished his post-graduate course 
 and licensed to preach, — thus open the early chap- 
 ters of one of the most ardent lives that have con- 
 secrated themselves to the mission of a Christian 
 preacher in this country. 
 
 A small portrait in water color by Staigg gave the 
 young preacher of this time to us with successful 
 vividness. The face — delicate in coloring, delicate 
 in the lines of the lip, delicate in all those lines 
 and contours where any hidden coarseness or rude- 
 ness of nature would be sure to tell with the terrible 
 frankness that no amount of culture can silence — 
 looks, nevertheless, with an almost startling power, 
 from a forehead marked and full, and strongly devel- 
 oped above the brows ; the eyes are blue, bright, and 
 "look straight on" ; they have a firm directness and 
 
50 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 fearlessness, an expression which seems to scorn his 
 own youth, yet lightly enough, as if it were a fact 
 hardly worth that trouble. The intensity of the face 
 is marked ; its consciousness of responsibility is almost 
 stern ; it might pass for an imaginative sketch of the 
 Future in the masculine type ; yet one believes that 
 it might melt into a sunbeam of tenderness or play- 
 fulness at the right touch. 
 
 This sketch of a sketch, alas ! can be only drawn 
 from memory, for the beautiful portrait set in the 
 large gold locket long worn by the wife of his youth, 
 and always treasured by his family, was stolen from 
 his house by burglars a few years ago. Nothing 
 exists which can replace it. One wonders sometimes 
 how these gentlemen of the light fingers and easy 
 consciences may like the look of those grave young 
 eyes. Men of that calling are by no means lost to 
 the appreciation of such impressions. Perhaps they 
 may have turned the face to the wall, as in one in- 
 stance known to the writer, they did so dispose, in a 
 robbed house, of a little bust of Guido's Christ. 
 
 At the age of twenty-one, Mr. Phelps accepted the 
 call to the Pine Street Church of Boston, — his first 
 and only pastorate. And here the boy who "was born 
 a man " assumed, and for six years successfully sus- 
 tained, the exhausting demands of a city parish, which 
 other men, even though of marked ability, do not 
 undertake until years have given them the passport 
 to such responsibilities, and experience the materials 
 for supporting them. But the boy was man enough 
 to comprehend his position perfectly. It is with re- 
 spect as well as compassion that we read in his own 
 words how he " spent the night before his ordination 
 
MARRIAGE; AND THE PARISH. 51 
 
 in mute misery," at his consciousness of his "own 
 unfitness to be the spiritual leader of men." 
 
 It is pleasant to know that this spiritual anguish 
 was at least lightened by the consummation of a deep 
 and fortunate human love. 
 
 While in Andover as a student in the Seminary, 
 Mr. Phelps had met the eldest daughter of Professor 
 Moses Stuart. The home of the distinguished Bibli- 
 cal scholar was about as untheological and merry as 
 any eminent home that ever was turned topsy-turvy 
 by seven lively children, who thought their own pref- 
 erences quite as important as a Hebrew education, 
 and a good frolic more to the purpose than the new 
 German lexicon which the head of the family was 
 the first to introduce into this country. The schol- 
 arly father might frown from the study. The sweet 
 invalid mother might mildly protest from her sick- 
 room. But the young people of that family knew 
 what a good time was, and had it when they wanted 
 it. The Professor's parlors were favorite sources of 
 entertainment to the sedate young men of theologi- 
 cal inclinations ; and the Professor's daughters — four 
 in number — were among the sirens of Andover Hill 
 who beguiled the devout mind from Justification by 
 Faith to what they called "justifiable recreation." 
 
 The eldest daughter had a vein of gravity in her 
 vivacity which must have early attracted the too 
 grave young student. She could understand him 
 while she laughed with him, or even laughed at him ; 
 her cheerfulness was good for him ; her own intensity 
 and intellectuality affiliated with his ; they loved — 
 and considered their love thoughtfully, after the fash- 
 ion of their people and their times — and decided, 
 
52 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 after the fashion of all people and all times, to spend 
 their lives together. They were married in her 
 father's house on a September day of 1842, and made 
 their home at once in Boston. 
 
 In the parsonage in Harrison Avenue, long since 
 given over to the Philistines, six busy, blessed years 
 followed. Elizabeth Stuart had been a dignified girl, 
 and she was a royal wife. " To the day of her death 
 she was as much a queen to me as she was the day 
 I married her," he said in one of those rare moments 
 of confidence which were given only to a rare confi- 
 dante. Neither time nor change touched this aureola 
 of youth and the first allegiance of a chivalric hom- 
 age which few women can command, and fewer men 
 render. Something of Mrs. Phelps's strong individ- 
 uality appeared in her queenly carriage and finely 
 poised head. Many called her a handsome woman ; 
 others withheld the adjective. The old daguerreo- 
 types bear it out easily ; but these were taken before 
 care and illness had touched a face whose beauty de- 
 pended largely upon its mobility of expression, and 
 upon the color and verve which health and happiness 
 must supply. 
 
 It has been somewhat superficially averred that 
 everybody's mother is a remarkable woman. Not to 
 linger to dispute a quite disputable assertion, it may 
 at least be said that the memories of a child left 
 motherless at eight years are not likely to be pro- 
 nounced enough to have much value as first-hand tes- 
 timony either way ; and that the impressions rather 
 coolly and dispassionately formed from objective data 
 have something which may be called a disinterested- 
 ness of their own. I do not think that any one who 
 
MARRIAGE; AND THE PARISH. 53 
 
 knew the wife of Mr. Phelps's youth will incline to 
 deny that she was brilliantly adapted to it and to him. 
 Pegasus makes a fine yoke-fellow sometimes, proverbs 
 to the contrary, notwithstanding. Bright blood sets 
 itself to dull duty with a throbbing nerve. The 
 genius which was in due time to find a world-wide 
 expression and welcome in " The Sunny Side," gave 
 itself in those early years of wifehood and mother- 
 hood utterly to the sweet ingenuities of love. Few 
 women can have brooded over a happier home. She 
 was a home-maker born. She poured the opulence of 
 her deep nature right royally and gladly into that 
 one channel of womanly tenderness. The keen intel- 
 lect which could intelligently criticise the young 
 preacher's sermon on Saturday night was quite able 
 to discover ways of amusing and resting him on Mon- 
 day morning ; and in the inventions of little pleasures 
 and ready hopes she was an adept. Domestic trouble 
 and fret she knew how to carry alone. Home com- 
 fort she sprang to offer him as the sunshine sprang 
 into the dark city rooms after a cloudy day. Her 
 nature was rich in expedients, in courage, in imagina- 
 tion, and in that womanly common sense whose ab- 
 sence or presence makes the creative intellect either 
 a torment or a blessing to live with. Marriage under 
 such conditions becomes no idle or leisurely dream. 
 To the usual struggle, to the common human battle, 
 is added a fine, high fever of aspiration, a silent deter- 
 mination to achieve a supreme result, to "be what 
 woman never was before," and to do " what love has 
 never done." Under the movement of a nature like 
 hers a woman may make a man divinely happy. But 
 she may die in trying to do so, 
 
54 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 In Boston their first child, a daughter, was born ; 
 and parentage came, as everything else came into 
 that household, with a conscientiousness so devout 
 as to tip the scale between the privilege and the 
 responsibility somewhat to the graver side. 
 
 That matchless fatherliness in Professor Phelps, of 
 which we shall have occasion later to speak fully, 
 began with characteristic sensibility. From the first 
 hour when the young father watched by the side of 
 the crying baby, authoritatively removed to his care 
 that the mother might have a chance of rest, and 
 when he lay in sleepless sorrow compassionating the 
 week-old infant "because she was so homely," and 
 seemed " so unhappy," to the last " God bless you, my 
 child ! " — the last words written by the dying hand, 
 — his sense of duty to family ties was something su- 
 preme. 
 
 It is to be feared that they weighed a little heavily 
 upon his nerves in those early years of professional 
 struggle and private care ; but the wear and tear of 
 natures like his, in a life like his, is as unavoidable 
 as the friction of steel machinery upon silk caught 
 within the wheels. 
 
 Meanwhile the young pastor was setting his shoul- 
 der to those other wheels which move "the first 
 parish" up the hill of difficulty; and his success as 
 much surpassed his sober expectation as it probably 
 did surpass his comprehension. Too modest ever to 
 rate himself as others rated him, too severely consci- 
 entious ever to indulge himself with an achieved 
 ideal, he gave himself to his people utterly. He was 
 a careful pastor. It is not known that he suffered 
 his tastes — which set strongly toward the intellec- 
 
MARRIAGE; AND THE PARISH. 55 
 
 tual side of his mission, his duty as a preacher, his 
 privilege as a student — to deflect his career from its 
 pastoral orbit. The homes of his people knew him, 
 and their hearts cherished him. Their anxieties, their 
 temptations, their bereavements, never found the 
 young scholar too absorbed to give all that his 
 youth could render of the sacred sympathy of the 
 office which it was born in his blood to set above 
 every other on the earth. 
 
 To this day, after forty-three years of separation, 
 such of the old Pine Street Church as are left in the 
 land of the living to mourn his departure from it, 
 hold his memory in the affectionate pride of an aged 
 and scattered people, as if but yesterday bereaved 
 of him. 
 
 An interesting incident comes to us in the story of a 
 member of the Pine Street Church who had " fallen 
 away " into rationalism, or transcendentalism, or some 
 other kind of " ism," not consistent with any pre- 
 tension to a Christian faith ; and the delinquent, after 
 the fashion of the times, was summoned by the eccle- 
 siastical law of his sect, before the church for exami- 
 nation and discipline. 
 
 The offender appeared upon the appointed evening, 
 bringing with him, as by the Congregational polity 
 allowed, his own chosen counsel to defend his case. 
 The dismay of that comfortable Orthodox committee 
 may be imagined, when the counsel of the skeptic 
 proved to be none other than Wendell Phillips. 
 
 Gray-headed deacons shivered in their pews, and 
 cast quavering glances at their twenty-one-year-old 
 pastor. What would happen ? What could happen ? 
 Visions of impending ecclesiastical chagrin blurred 
 
56 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 before keen eyes that had believed themselves to have 
 discerned the qualities of his position in this boy, 
 their spiritual leader. There was a breathless mo- 
 ment in the old vestry of Pine Street Church. 
 
 In that moment the scholarly orator of a national 
 reputation and the youth of a year's experience in 
 the pastorate of a quiet church regarded each other. 
 Then the young pastor spoke — gently, with dignity, 
 without embarrassment or hesitation. He turned to 
 the erring brother. 
 
 " Mr. ," he said quietly, " our business is 
 
 with yourself, not with your friend." Mr. Phillips 
 made two or three attempts to be heard ; then bowed 
 silently, and retreated from the field as courteously 
 as he had been warned from it. Since, by the eccle- 
 siastical law, the counsel of an offending member 
 must be himself a believer of sound position in a 
 Christian church, Mr. Phelps was as just as he was 
 adroit. It was said that Mr. Phillips afterward paid 
 a manly tribute to the self-possession of the young 
 clergyman. 
 
 " The most remarkable trait in Mr. Phelps," says 
 Mr. Charles H. Warner of Boston, one of his former 
 deacons, and for life his loving friend, " the most 
 striking thing about him was his maturity. He was 
 not like other young men. His maturity and his 
 gravity, — these are the points I remember most 
 vividly about those years. He was always in earnest 
 about everything ; always took the serious view of it." 
 
 Mr. Warner further says : " His connection with 
 the Pine Street Church was a very happy one, and 
 the people were warmly attached to him. His man- 
 ner in the pulpit, though grave and dignified, was 
 
MARRIAGE; AND THE PARISH. 57 
 
 pleasant and attractive, and his sermons indicated a 
 maturity of thought much beyond his years. He 
 was in no sense a sensational preacher, but solemn 
 and earnest. 
 
 " I do not believe he ever preached a hastily pre- 
 pared sermon." 
 
 Mr. Warner recalls also an incident connected 
 with a revival in the church, which bears out the 
 theories expressed by Mr. Phelps elsewhere. 
 
 The excitement had waxed to a pitch where the 
 young pastor thought proper to check it. Without 
 hesitation he did so. The church, unused to such a 
 view of the prevailing fashions of emotional excess 
 in religious culture, sent a delegation to the minister 
 to remonstrate with him. He listened quietly, but 
 wavered not an inch. The case was argued, but he 
 remained firm. After the delegation had talked itself 
 out, the pastor explained his own position at length, 
 in his own quiet and painstaking way. The delega- 
 tion went away acquiescent, if not convinced. He 
 had no more suggestions on that point from his peo- 
 ple, but trained their " revivals of religion " after his 
 own rational and natural methods. 
 
 Mr. Warner adds : " I do not think your father 
 would have been called a popular preacher, but his 
 sermons were thoughtful, spiritual, and helpful. ' I 
 have heard the best sermon that has been preached 
 in Boston to-day,' was the remark of a distinguished 
 preacher (Professor Park) who was present one Sun- 
 day morning. 
 
 " I do not think his people ever knew how painful 
 to him was his separation from them, when called to 
 Andover. 
 
58 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 " The manner in which he regarded his ministry 
 at Pine Street, in subsequent years, was character- 
 istic of him. ' I would give anything in the world,' 
 he said, in one of his letters to me, 'if I could have 
 the opportunity of living over again my six years of 
 ministry at Pine Street Church.' Only about a year 
 before his death he says in one of his letters, ' I 
 am never able to look back to that period of my 
 life with one particle of satisfaction. My ministry 
 there, as it lives in my memory, was a moral failure, 
 which ought not to gratify a Christian pastor; it 
 had in it so little of Christ, oh, so little of Christ ! 
 I think I have been forgiven, and God will not fling 
 it in my face when I stand at His bar. He is a mag- 
 nanimous Judge and I have peace in that assurance.' 
 
 "I need not say that his people formed a very 
 different estimate of his preaching." 
 
 A few years before his death, on a New Year's 
 eve there came to his house in Andover one of the 
 mysterious packages of the holiday time. The sick 
 man, haggard and patient, sat by the fireside where 
 his family loved best to watch his dear and honored 
 face. His happiest moments, we believe, were spent 
 then and there with his dearest near him. His 
 best stories, his most stimulating suggestions, his 
 merriest jests, — and no man could be merrier when 
 the mood came, — were all aroused by such hours as 
 those. The play of the generous fire which he heaped 
 lavishly upon the hearth, the respite from care, the 
 approach of sleep, the chatter of voices that he loved, 
 all helped the sufferer, and gave him, we are fain to 
 believe, some comfort and much peace. 
 
MARRIAGE; AND THE PARISH. 59 
 
 From one of these quiet moments the New Year 
 express aroused him. He had been suffering more 
 than usual, and was sitting with closed eyes listening 
 to our idle talk. He opened the package languidly. 
 
 It contained an album of the photographs of his 
 old Pine Street people, all the living who could be 
 found, all the dead whose portraits could be copied. 
 Their pastor's own young face headed the gallery. 
 
 Professor Phelps took the book, turned the pages ; 
 we saw his hands tremble violently ; he did not 
 speak. In a moment he broke down utterly, and 
 went sobbing from the room. 
 
 So profound, so pathetic, was the yearning of his 
 heart toward his only people, and the personal 
 ministry of the faith of Christ. God only knows 
 how much it had cost him to leave it and leave them. 
 
 Not an honor in his professional life, not a tribute 
 to his literary success, ever took the place of the 
 love of that "plain parish." To the day of his 
 death he went uncomforted because of it. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 FROM BOSTON TO ANDOVER. 
 
 What he was as a preacher, in his pastoral days, 
 is told in the simple fact that he left the pastorate as 
 he did, for the end he did. 
 
 It is almost impossible, so wide has been the havoc 
 wrought by death and change upon his people, to 
 find any such account as we could wish, of the 
 pulpit work of those six years. The most that we 
 know of it is that the Trustees of the Andover 
 Seminary, upon an accidental hearing, elected him 
 to fill the Chair of Sacred Rhetoric and Homiletics ; 
 and we may fairly draw our own conclusions. His 
 own impression of the three hundred youthful 
 sermons which he burned, without remorse for the 
 deed, may pass for what it is worth. That auto-da-fe 
 was very like him. His own account of the con- 
 scientious and prompt self-distrust with which he was 
 moved to decline the election, and of the almost 
 piteous indecision with which he reconsidered, and 
 finally accepted it, are more to the purpose than any 
 words of ours. No young man, harassed by the 
 early decisions of life that gives us so little light 
 upon our choices, while yet so severe upon our 
 blunders, can read without a thrill of sympathy 
 Professor Phelps's description of his going up and 
 down Governor Armstrong's doorsteps in the dark, 
 CO 
 
FROM BOSTON TO ANDOVER. 61 
 
 with his letter of acceptance in his hand; unable to 
 bring himself to ring the bell ; not daring to cast 
 the die which should place him in one of the most 
 brilliant positions that his ecclesiastical constituency 
 had then to offer to any man young or old. Of 
 " position," and what was " brilliant," and what was 
 successful or important in the worldly way of looking 
 at things, he seems to have thought not at all. Of 
 his own ability to do an eminent thing, he seems to 
 have had small opinion. He was a man never 
 without the ambition natural to an intellect like his ; 
 but it was, from the first, an ambition so sanctified 
 that it passed into aspiration, and was hardly recog- 
 nizable by the other name. As he paced the side- 
 walk on Beacon Street before the Governor's door, 
 in irresolute anguish, no vision of name or fame 
 seems to have visited him ; only the angels of a 
 devout heart consecrated to "that something not 
 ourselves," which lifts a man's life above all the 
 self-seeking, small, and satisfied of his kind. 
 
 That prayer to God for guidance, for a single sign 
 from heaven, for a fleck of light on the problem 
 of life, was answered only as God answers most of 
 us in our direst needs. By the resources of our 
 own natures the reply must come. 
 
 Mr. Phelps went to Andover ; and the reverence 
 of more than a thousand pupils whom he trained 
 to the cherished work which he had abandoned for 
 their sakes, justifies his trembling choice, blessing it 
 and him to-day. 
 
 In a private diary, or record, discovered among his 
 papers, and bearing the date of the year which 
 took him to Andover, we find an analysis of his 
 
62 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 own motives so scathing, so honest, that it seems to 
 leave little for the Judgment Day of the biblically 
 trained imagination. In summing up the situation 
 he says : " I think that I feel a strong sense, 
 especially at times when my impressions are the 
 most vigorous, of dependence on God in the effort 
 I am about to make. I am to meet toil, difficulty, 
 criticism, comparison with other men, and God only 
 can sustain me and give me success, and He will not 
 probably do it unless He sees that I am in a measure 
 true to the spiritual character of my work. It is 
 my strong desire to be enabled to combine the true 
 characteristics of an eminent Christian with that of 
 eminent intelligence and mental discipline." 
 
 Professor Park of Andover, being one of the few 
 friends left who can contribute memories of that 
 early period to this memorial, has sent the following 
 reminiscence : — 
 
 " When Mr. Phelps was ordained pastor of Pine 
 Street Church in Boston, I had been intimate for more 
 than ten years with members of that church. I have 
 seldom known a layman so well acquainted with emi- 
 nent clergymen as was Eliphalet Kimball, Esquire, the 
 Senior Deacon at Pine Street. He had ' searched the 
 country round ' for men fitted to be pastors in a city 
 like Boston. Whenever I met him, his favorite topic 
 of conversation was 'our young minister.' Other 
 ministers were young, but were not profound ; other 
 ministers were profound, but were not young. . . . 
 I was pleased to see a large proportion of strangers 
 in the church. They appeared to be men of more 
 than common intelligence. They listened thought- 
 fully to the sermons, which were fitted to encourage 
 
FROM BOSTON" TO ANDOVER. 63 
 
 and reward the most earnest thoughtfulness. Dur- 
 ing the sessions of the Massachusetts Legislature, 
 many senators and representatives frequently listened 
 to the discourses of the deep and youthful preacher. 
 Hon. Mr. Calhoun of Springfield, President of the 
 Senate, was enthusiastic in praise of the young divine. 
 Rev. Joseph B. Clark, D.D., was a member of the 
 Pine Street Church, and was an admirer of Mr. 
 Phelps. When consulted on the question of calling 
 so young a man to the Professorship of Sacred Rhet- 
 oric at Andover, Dr. Clark said : ' Mr. Phelps is 
 older in mind than in body. His youth will expose 
 him to no danger. His pupils will look up to him as 
 a man of wisdom and experience.' 
 
 " The style of Professor Phelps in his later years 
 differed somewhat from his earlier style. There were 
 various causes of this change. One of them was his 
 discipline in studying the materials for the ' Sabbath 
 Hymn Book.' He frequently referred to this dis- 
 cipline as having made an epoch in his use of his 
 mother tongue. It led him to place a lower value 
 than formerly on the Latinisms of an English sermon, 
 and a higher value than formerly on its Saxon idioms. 
 His health had begun to decline, but his language 
 gained a new raciness and grip. Some of his latest 
 letters to me were more powerful than any of his 
 earliest. In one of them, after alluding to the ' Sab- 
 bath Hymn Book,' he wrote words of uncommon 
 vigor and terseness in regard to details of his own 
 history. They were strictly confidential, but if given 
 to the public would attract as close attention, and 
 excite as deep an interest, as perhaps any of the illus- 
 trative paragraphs in our books of rhetoric. They 
 
64 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 flowed from the fountain of his own thoughts, and 
 not from any reservoir of graceful phrases. They 
 were specimens of natural eloquence." 
 
 At the age of twenty-six the young man took the 
 chair which Professor Park had vacated for the theo- 
 logical department destined to become so distinguished 
 under his leadership. At best, this was no ordinary 
 step. At most, it was no small risk. The junior 
 of his colleagues and his comrades, here as every- 
 where, Professor Phelps had still the old familiar 
 battle to fight. It is to be observed of many lives 
 that their discipline has a curious monotony ; the 
 same kinds of difficulty dog them throughout. The 
 strain, not to say the bane, of precocity which had 
 followed the boy, the student, and the pastor, pursued 
 the young professor. He met it with that startling 
 maturity which had so impressed, one might almost 
 say so awed, his people in the Boston parish, whose 
 local poet sang on some ceremonial occasion about — 
 
 " The fountains of that mind 
 
 Whose mighty current mocks thy youth." 
 
 This affectionate poem, by the way, was found, 
 twenty years afterwards, hidden away among the 
 sacred things in the Andover study. 
 
 As quietly as if he had been trained from infancy 
 to fill Homiletical Chairs at snap-shot notice, Pro- 
 fessor Phelps shouldered his life's work. He went 
 in May of 1848 to Andover, with his wife and little 
 daughter, and moved into the old white mansion, 
 the home of his department and the home of his 
 heart, which he occupied for forty-three years. 
 
 Thus stood the situation at this time. Of especial 
 
FROM BOSTON TO ANDOVER. 65 
 
 preparation for his department the young incumbent 
 had absolutely none. It was our American " way " ; 
 let it go for what it was. But a year or two of appren- 
 ticeship for an academic chair is now, at least, usual 
 enough to save us our reputations and those of our 
 institutions. In those days the breathing-space 
 before the spurt was not so comfortably found. At 
 all events, in this case there was none such. With- 
 out training, without experience, without rest from 
 the exhaustions of his parish, lie took his duties upon 
 him. With the almost incalculable amount of labor 
 necessary to such a situation staring him in the 
 face, Professor Phelps stepped into it. Then came 
 the blow — one of the blackest of his sorely disciplined 
 life, and one which was enough to have crushed the 
 heart out of almost any young man of a temperament 
 far more sanguine than his own, never too hopeful, 
 and never gay. 
 
 For now his eyesight suddenly and utterly failed 
 him. The oculist pronounced it a case of amaurosis, 
 gave small hope, and strenuous commands, and with 
 the preposterous sang fro Id of science when brought 
 face to face with the practical facts of life, ordered 
 absolute cessation from work as the only chance of 
 salvation from blindness. 
 
 There he stood : his lecture-room waiting, his de- 
 partment to build — nay, to create ; himself to educate 
 for its occupancy; his institution to be honored by 
 its venture ; his trustees to be justified of their daring 
 choice; his family to be supported; and — but this 
 is the more usual American calamity — he with not 
 a cent in the world. 
 
 All our troubles are relative matters, and most of 
 
66 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 us have as much as we can bear; but this was no 
 very common emergency ; and to the day of his 
 death, though " acquainted with grief " as he was, he 
 never could refer to that period of his life without 
 deep and tremulous emotion. It was the time when 
 the waves and billows went over him. 
 
 He came up out of it, it is hardly known how. To 
 the kind consideration of his trustees who, during his 
 long career in their service, never failed to do the 
 pleasant thing by him, and with whom his relations 
 were always genial, he owed something of his escape 
 from the apparently hopeless complication. To his 
 own unflagging will and the habit of a scholarly and 
 devout life, he owed, at least, as much more. The 
 Seminary waited ; the professor — what did the pro- 
 fessor do ? One who knows anything of his personal 
 religious impulses can divine what his prayers were 
 like in that hour of blackness. 
 
 At the first moment when the leash was broken 
 he sprang back upon his books like the tiger on the 
 prey left for dead, shut himself into his study, and 
 came forth from it white, hollow-eyed, feverishly de- 
 termined, and victorious. His lecture-room received 
 him with acclamation ; and so his work began. What 
 that work was, the religious world of America knows. 
 
 A merely filial view of it is the least that can be 
 brought to the story. 
 
 In the later years of his professional life he was 
 accustomed in one of the closing lectures of the cur- 
 riculum to remind his students who were the lights 
 of the profession. Duly and modestly he instructed 
 them that Professor So-and-so of Such-a-place headed 
 the department of Sacred Rhetoric and of Homiletics 
 
FROM BOSTON TO ANDOVEE. 67 
 
 in this country. The statement was received with 
 quiet smiles and jotted down in the class note-books 
 with exclamatory points. It was well understood 
 that Professor Phelps stood without a peer in the 
 line of his life's work. 
 
 I have heard him speak with stinging recollection 
 of the toil involved in those earlier years, when he 
 and the Rhetorical Chair eyed each other like duel- 
 lists. It has been hinted that he had the department 
 to create. This was to a greater measure true than 
 may be lightly understood. The literature of the 
 department was so deficient that, at the time he 
 undertook to fill it, the young student was sometimes 
 at his wits' end for the barest materials of construc- 
 tion. A few antiquated text-books on rhetoric, and 
 fewer on the art of homiletics, comprised his exter- 
 nal resources. He smarted under the limitations 
 which so dwarfed his scholastic training for the 
 work for which his taste instinctively and imperiously 
 claimed a scholastic ideal. A lower ideal, an " easier " 
 nature, a less urgent inclination toward " best things," 
 would have settled comfortably in the old white man- 
 sion on Andover Hill and jogged over to the lec- 
 ture-room till death stayed the satisfied feet unspurred 
 by the angels of high vision. But to Professor 
 Phelps they came with a kind of remorseless motion ; 
 they were like the " swift one " who visited the 
 prophet of old. With toil "eternal," benedict, 
 "heavy," he struggled after his own unaided and 
 personal conception of what his department ought 
 to be. This, from the first hour, was unsparing and 
 high. To teach young men as they ought to be 
 taught how to preach the Christian faith as it ought to 
 
68 AUSTIN TIIELPS. 
 
 be preached, he regarded as — next to the privilege of 
 preaching it one's self — the most solemn choice that 
 a man might make in this life. In this spirit he set 
 himself to the work, — a youth among the youths he 
 taught, — and in this spirit he wrought till he read, 
 with broken voice, and bowed, gray head, his last lec- 
 ture to his last class, from whom the sick man was 
 compelled to part for life's sake. 
 
 It is more than possible that the very deficiency of 
 building-material, to which we have alluded, resulted 
 in creating some of the most marked and useful 
 features in Professor Phelps's department work. 
 Thrown back, as he was, so largely upon his own 
 nature, it led him into the goodly places where his 
 taste and intellect were at home. Thrust upon his 
 instincts, the scholarly ideals reinforced the religious 
 ones. The tendency of certain religious classes to 
 underrate the value of the intellectual element in the 
 religious occupations of life is something which we 
 all feel, but seldom like to say. 
 
 An eminent theologian once said of a student who 
 was neglecting his class-room for missionary prayer 
 meetings and sewing societies : " He is ruining his 
 theological education for what he calls doing goody 
 Professor Phelps brought to his life's work the simple, 
 human, common-sense standards which regulate the 
 other educated professions. What he was as a Chris- 
 tian teacher, his old pupils turn with tears to tell us ; 
 and of that these pages will elsewhere testify. But 
 what he was as a Christian scholar, it is well that we 
 do not forget. 
 
 It must be an inspiration to any young man who 
 ever knew or loved him, to know how voraciously he 
 
FROM BOSTON TO AXDOVER. 69 
 
 fed the training of those early years at the sources 
 of literary culture. Why should not a Christian 
 sermon be a work of intellectual art? Could not 
 a parish discourse aspire to be a finished oration? 
 Must a man be slip-shod, hasty, verbose, satisfied with 
 the hortatory, and as shaky in his rhetoric as a morning 
 paper, because, forsooth, he would preach the Gospel ? 
 
 The professor in the lecture-room taught the class 
 better than that. The professor in the pulpit on 
 Sunday, when " his turn " came to preach in the old, 
 brick Chapel, told the class other than that. From 
 the first, his ideal of homilectical instruction was, 
 beyond the traditions of the department, a cultivated 
 one, and years enriched it to the end. 
 
 Study enough, toil enough, thought enough, power 
 enough, gift enough, and success enough, went into 
 that Andover professorship in the thirty years that 
 he filled it, to have honored any secular chair in any 
 university in the world. Nor is it given to us yet to 
 discover that the scholar was ever the less of a Chris- 
 tian for the scholar's privilege, and pertinacity in the 
 use of it. 
 
 Professor Phelps showed quite early in his history 
 evidences of that something indefinable in presence, 
 but unmistakable in absence, which we call the liter- 
 ary quality. Into the humdrum task of teaching a 
 motley crowd of ignorant young men how to write 
 sermons, he poured this precious elixir, and the com- 
 mon toil was sublimated. Add to this the intense 
 consecration of intellect, to which we shall have often 
 occasion to refer, the unswerving devoutness, the pas- 
 sionate religious dedication, and we have the elements 
 of a unique career. 
 
70 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 His lecture-room became the altar of his life. 
 Nothing was suffered to blaspheme it. No little 
 diversion or controllable exhaustion deterred him 
 from it. His students may have suspected, but 
 never could have comprehended, the throes of con- 
 science and the pangs of toil which went throbbing 
 into those daily lectures. These were written and 
 re-written and written again. 
 
 Every year saw the beautiful manuscript (who that 
 has ever seen it forgets that handwriting, as clear as 
 print, and more unerring?) remodelled from intro- 
 duction to peroration. No class ever heard just 
 what another class did. Each audience received the 
 tribute of a special revision adapted to itself. There 
 was no shiftless handling of the old duty. The fa- 
 miliar theme was called, like a convict, to the bar of 
 the lecturer's maturing judgment, for every fresh 
 group of hearers. No weariness of soul or body 
 excused the incumbent to himself for any neglect to 
 polish his professional jewel. The too short vacations 
 found the too tired professor doggedly working over 
 the year's lectures. All observers familiar with the 
 life of university towns know how easy it is for the 
 classic ivy to clog these venerable chairs in which 
 the incumbent leans back to take his ease, not for 
 lack of love of motion, but for lack of the necessity 
 for making any. The case of a medical school known 
 to the writer, in which the professor frequently went 
 to sleep while lecturing, and the students picked up 
 the book which his unconscious hand had let fall 
 to the floor, is, fortunately, too extreme for any illus- 
 trative value but that of the laugh ; but there is a 
 
FROM BOSTON TO ANDOVER. 71 
 
 subtler slumber, an easier desuetude, and the nerve 
 habituated to a dull routine may fall into it and may 
 never know the difference ; nor (which is the worst 
 of it) the student either. 
 
 But Andover was not a somnolent place. A live 
 professor makes a live class. Nobody went to sleep 
 in that Senior lecture-room. The air palpitated with 
 excitement. Pens ran fast over those old note- 
 books. Now and then the eyes of the writers lift 
 themselves to take treasured glimpses of the pro- 
 fessor's face ; and other " notes " than the students' 
 scrawl are carried away to help a man in the long 
 battle for which he needs all that he can get of other 
 things than mere instruction in the science of his 
 sacred art. 
 
 The professor, who always stands at his desk, — 
 no weariness nor any conquerable illness allows him 
 what he would call the laziness of a seated lecture 
 — the professor, who will take as much trouble to 
 be a finished orator before a few score students, as 
 if he were delivering the election sermon before the 
 Legislature of the State, or the installation discourse 
 for some distinguished divine, — the professor rises 
 before the perceptive eye like one of the young proph- 
 ets of Hebrew history ; his face flushes and pales with 
 emotion ; his blue eye fires ; his fine lip trembles ; his 
 unyouthful gravity quivers into something too solemn 
 to be lightly explained or lightly forgotten. The pen 
 falls from the hand of the pupil who loves him best. 
 Upward to the face of the young master the young 
 student gazes in a sudden hush. What manner of 
 man is this who teacheth me the way to the holy 
 
72 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 war of my life's work? What unimagined halo falls 
 upon that work ! Is this what I have chosen ? What 
 am I that I should choose it ? What am I about to 
 do? Whom do I serve? Almighty Father of spirits! 
 Guide Thou the service, or I have put my hand 
 thoughtlessly upon the Ark of God ! 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE PROFESSOR. 
 
 Time surprised no suspension in the onward move- 
 ment of his professional career. It cannot be remem- 
 bered that he suffered himself to fall into any of 
 those siestas of content with achievement, to which 
 the academic more than any other kind of life is 
 exposed. " Death, oblivion, or a professorship, has 
 engulfed them all," says Colonel Higginson of cer- 
 tain of his college-mates. There is truth as well as 
 wit in the epigram. In these quiet shades dignity 
 may slip into dulness, and what of it ? There is some- 
 thing of the danger as well as something of the peace 
 of the cloister in the life of a religious institution. 
 
 Professor Phelps had many of the monastic qual- 
 ities in his temperament. But, as we have hinted, 
 he was too live a man to make a good monk. All 
 the pulse of his youth and his prime bounded into 
 his aspiration to sustain the vigor of his department, 
 and throbbed there to the end. We have seen how 
 he created his work. Let a few of his pupils tell us 
 something of the manner in which he maintained 
 it: — 
 
 " The intense seriousness of Professor Phelps," 
 says Rev. E. P. Thwing in the Congregationalist, 
 "impressed me from the time he first met our class 
 in the lecture-room. His vocabulary was opulent 
 
 73 
 
74 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 and his speech vivacious. His mind was alert, some- 
 times elate, but the uniform color of his thought was 
 of a deep, sombre hue. He taught us that life, duty, 
 time, and eternity were solemn verities ; preaching 
 was a vocation, not a profession merely ; that elo- 
 quence was a virtue, not an accomplishment; and 
 that only as our discourses vibrated with moral con- 
 victions, and our whole being was tremulous with 
 their sway, could we move and master men. On one 
 occasion he exclaimed, — I quote from my notes taken 
 at the time, — ' God means to convert the world by 
 truth. We need not mince it, paint it, inflate it ! ' 
 He had no patience with pettiness or prettiness, with 
 tepid or torpid souls. He veiled under a quiet ex- 
 terior profound emotions. His imperial personality 
 he impressed on the class of 1858. They loved him; 
 he loved them. On one occasion he wrote : ' They 
 seem to me to be elect men, set apart for a service 
 which has no equal. . . . God will not suffer one of 
 them to drop out of His hand.' It was an elect class. 
 It has made a noble record. He inspired us all with 
 exalted ideas of God, of the work before us and of its 
 sure success. To our secretary he sent these words : 
 ' Tell your brethren that I have none but hopeful 
 visions of their future. I cannot well express to you 
 how intensely I live in their lives. Their success is 
 my success, and their trials are my trials, though I 
 cannot know them in detail. It is a grand life to 
 live at such a period as that now passing in the his- 
 tory of the Church. Their work is to have a grander 
 ending by and by. God's acceptance of imperfect 
 service seems to me a glorious thing. Work which 
 you and your classmates ask pardon for He is able 
 
THE PROFESSOR. 75 
 
 to bless with unparalleled dignity in the estimate of 
 angels. You all have a glad surprise before you in 
 the great day. Your works will follow you, and you 
 will no longer be ashamed of them. Such is the 
 vision which always comes to me when I think of 
 meeting my pupils at the last tribunal.' 
 
 "As our rhetorical professor, he was in written 
 communication with us, and so brought nearer to 
 our practical work than the others. Type-writers, 
 amanuenses, and other literary luxuries were not as 
 common then as now. The amount of manual, as 
 well as mental, labor involved in correcting the 
 plans and sermons of a class of thirty students was 
 great. The patience, the exactness and thorough- 
 ness of this service, amazed us ; for our teacher made 
 all things new, and returned to us our productions 
 so entirely reconstructed that they could hardly be 
 recognized. He was very considerate, both in his 
 public and private criticisms. The poorest plan re- 
 ceived some commendation to begin with, to soften 
 the rigor with which it was afterwards dissected. 
 
 "Professor Phelps, like Nehemiah Adams, was a 
 master of the sensibilities and knew how to evoke, 
 control, and use the deep, tidal emotions of our 
 nature. He urged us to recognize the subtle, recon- 
 dite factors of pulpit power. Spiritual life and per- 
 sonal magnetism ' are a conglomerate that lie molten 
 together.' A magnetic line, he told us, could be laid 
 down the first five minutes which would vibrate with 
 electric responses all the way through." 
 
 Dr. Charles Ray Palmer in the same paper says of 
 him : — 
 
 "Very vivid is my recollection of his form, his 
 
76 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 mien, his features, his voice, his smile, as lie then 
 was — the very model, as it seemed to me, of the 
 refined and cultured scholar, the modest and dignfied 
 gentleman. Then began an acquaintance which 
 ripened into one of the most helpful and delightful 
 friendships which ever influenced my life. What he 
 first appeared to me I ever found him. The rever- 
 ence and the love he won abide with me. He lives 
 in my memory as one of the most admirable of men. 
 
 " I imagine that those who were his pupils at An- 
 dover, in the high noon of his life, say from 1850 to 
 1870, will always believe they knew him at his best. 
 It is the teacher, the critic, the counsellor, the friend, 
 that they found in the chair of rhetoric, and in the 
 delightful ' study,' of which he lias written so charm- 
 ingly, whom they still revere and love, and now 
 mourn with an abiding sorrow. Of that lecture- 
 room in which they used to meet him, I have written 
 elsewhere words I may be permitted to repeat here. 
 Never did more felicitous relations of instructor and 
 pupil exist than were illustrated there. Never were 
 instructions more quickening, more sympathetic, 
 more genially adapted to find out, and to fetch out, 
 the best of which a pupil was capable. The courses 
 of lectures always seemed to glow with the heat of 
 recent thinking. They were wise, conscientious, 
 scholarly, exhaustive discussions. 
 
 " Of course, a large part of the labor of the pro- 
 fessor with his students was expended in the criticism 
 of sermons, especially of their own early experiments 
 in sermonizing. Every man who remembers his first 
 attempts at all will admit they were often feeble and 
 faultful enough. The thoroughness, the relentless- 
 
THE PROFESSOR. 77 
 
 ness, with which the professor dealt with these rudi- 
 mentary efforts were only equalled by the marvel- 
 lous tact with which he saved the amour propre of 
 the embryo preacher. None escaped the ordeal un- 
 scathed, but never was one humiliated or disheartened 
 by reason of it. The worst hatchelling left behind it 
 a conviction that the victim's case was by no means 
 hopeless. Sometimes it not only ministered to hope, 
 but inspired it in a heart which had been desperate. 
 
 " Another illustration of the benign personal influ- 
 ence of this professor was noteworthy. In the final 
 year of the seminary course, or the post-graduate 
 year, there are many experiences of students in which 
 they need and seek private counsel. Professor 
 Phelps's tact and patience with such as sought him 
 in this way were unique. When you went to him, he 
 seemed to you, by a wonderful intuition, or a wonder- 
 ful sympathy, or a wonderful combination of both, to 
 place himself on the interior side of your experience 
 and see it precisely as you did, and then bring the 
 wealth of his wisdom to the solution of its problems. 
 It is safe to say many of his twelve hundred students 
 remember such interviews as turning-points in their 
 lives. They profoundly appreciated his affectionate 
 fidelity to them. They profoundly loved him. They 
 were conscious of such ' undulations ' from his life 
 into theirs as permanently uplifted them. Many 
 appreciated in their later years more than in their 
 seminary life their indebtedness to him. They felt, 
 as he felt, as if there were a certain continuity be- 
 tween their ministry and his. ' I live over again,' he 
 wrote of one of them, ' in the work of such men as he 
 is.' And, again, in a wider outlook : ' My pupils at 
 
78 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 Andover, some hundreds of whom are in the thick of 
 their labors, are a very precious subject of prayer to 
 me. They are beginning to celebrate the twenty-fifth 
 anniversary of their settlement, or ordination, and 
 they are kind enough to write and tell me of it, and 
 to recall Andover gratefully. I live again in their 
 life.' 
 
 " He was most catholic in his intellectual and his 
 religious sympathies. He was impatient of narrow- 
 ness and of denominationalism. As is shown by his 
 paper on Congregationalists and Presbyterians, he 
 believed those two great communions were naturally 
 one, and would have all consciousness of differences 
 dismissed. He was wont to speak of the rise of 
 Methodism as one of the great eras in the history of 
 Christendom. His ' Study of the Episcopal Church ' 
 was so sympathetic with much which is characteristic 
 of that communion that some made haste to conclude 
 his face was set that way. He never found occasion 
 to emphasize any difference of his with those whom 
 he always called ' our Baptist brethren.' It was not 
 in censure, but in regret, that he spoke of the last- 
 named communions as 'the foci of sectarianism in 
 America,' 'the Ehrenbreitstein and Strasbourg of 
 religious seclusion.' He regarded the divisions of 
 the Protestant world as grounded partly in differ- 
 ences of temperament among men, partly in acci- 
 dental differences of historical development, partly 
 in a providential calling of certain men to emphasize 
 some truth in danger of being forgotten. These 
 differences seemed to him of little real significance. 
 ' At the core of character they mean little more than 
 red hair or a birth-mark.' 
 
THE PROFESSOR. ? 9 
 
 « The religious experience of Dr. Phelps flowed in 
 a deep, a still, a somewhat shadowed, current. His 
 melancholic temperament, his extreme refinement of 
 sensibility, his early sorrows, his later physical in- 
 firmities, the great trial which he so pathetically de- 
 scribes in his paper, entitled 'The Premature Closing 
 of a Life-work,' all had their influence in giving a 
 tone to his religious life on its interior side, which 
 was more subdued and plaintive than those who most 
 loved him desired. But his confidential letters reveal 
 that in his last years there was more and more of the 
 peace which passeth understanding, and of the inward 
 light by which the darkness is chased away. It was 
 with no hesitation that he walked into the valley of 
 the shadow of death." 
 
 From among the loving personal tributes which 
 have poured in to tell us what Professor Phelps was 
 to the men to whom he gave his life, a few have been 
 selected, each for some reason which gives it an in- 
 dividual value. 
 
 As these affectionate words are taken from private 
 letters and have been as spontaneous as tears, the 
 names of the writers are not attached to them. It is 
 enough to say that they cover a wide range of charac- 
 ter and of service. Professors in other seminaries, 
 colleagues in his own, and pastors of busy churches, 
 represent a diversity of gifts and graces ; but are 
 alike in this : that they were all his pupils, that they 
 loved him, and have wished to tell us why, and how 
 
 much. 
 
 "If there is any man whom I hold in more pro- 
 found respect and affection than any other, it is your 
 father ; I shall pray to live long enough to read his life." 
 
80 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 "... Professor Phelps, whose matchless lectures 
 and. wise counsels and beautiful character have con- 
 tributed so largely to the fame and usefulness of the 
 seminary at Andover." 
 
 " I revered him as a Christian of unusual spirituality, 
 a writer of rare beauty and force of expression, and an 
 instructor of marvellous ability." 
 
 " I can say this as part of the truth : his life was 
 the best part of his life-work, grand and rich as that 
 work has been. Up to the last, anything from his 
 brain and heart had commanding power. He can 
 never cease to help us." 
 
 " Of all I owe him, of how much I loved him, I 
 cannot now speak. He was for many years the one 
 I thought of as my wisest adviser and truest friend. 
 . . . He wrote to me (in my bereavement), ; So you 
 have entered into that great and terrible solitude 
 which no man knows until he has found himself in 
 the depth of it.' . . . Long ago I hung upon his lips 
 as upon those of a prophet." 
 
 " He was a rare man. His memory is an inspira- 
 tion, and the thought of the gentleness and sweet- 
 ness of his spirit has been over my life as a benedic- 
 tion. 
 
 " He was so true — so loyal to truth — so faithful 
 in friendship — and in everything artless and guile- 
 less as a little child. . . . He had a large place in 
 the Church. He was a prince among preachers. His 
 wisdom was widely acknowledged in the affairs of 
 churches. His learning was profound, and he had 
 wide influence through his writings. ... I cannot 
 tell you how much I loved him." 
 
 " I listened to his sermons in bovhood. . . . His 
 
THE PROFESSOR. 81 
 
 character helped to make Andover a grand place to 
 be born and grow up in." 
 
 « I went to Andover in 1867 mainly for the purpose 
 of placing myself under Professor Phelps's instruction 
 and influence. Long before that time his little classic 
 ' The Still Hour,' had wrought itself into the very 
 roots and fibres of my being. His lectures at once 
 threw their spell over me so irresistibly that I have 
 never escaped from it. They are still my constant 
 study, models, and inspiration. ... His words of 
 counsel to me as an individual have been a per- 
 petual incentive and benediction in all the years of 
 my ministry. His face, as I knew it, has always 
 hung in my library. ... I have read with avidity 
 and preserved with affection every scrap of his pub- 
 lished writings since my seminary days." 
 
 "A great teacher, to whom my debt is wide as lite 
 
 itself. ... 
 
 « A more polished intellect, a more elegant eru- 
 dition, a more enchanting rhetoric, than Professor 
 Phelps's I never met, The influence of these rare 
 gifts charmed and roused every one of his pupils. 
 They were peerless and priceless. 
 
 " He was a critic, generous, sympathetic, humorous, 
 thorough, and helpful. He was a preacher of devout 
 tone and impressive manner, whose diction of beauty 
 knit to strength, and whose doctrine of granite lined 
 with gold, furnished us with the best of models. 
 He was a counsellor on whom the doubting ami 
 perplexed could lean securely, even as he leaned on 
 the strong and tender heart of his Master. He was 
 a man with his feet solidly on the earth, with his 
 head sincerely in the skies, a fervid lover of his native 
 
82 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 land, a theologian absolutely true to his convictions, 
 an author whose literary and devotional magic have 
 made him a sort of seraphic doctor to thousands of 
 aspiring souls. How well I remember the favorite 
 phrase of his class-room prayer, asking that his pupils 
 might be ' wise to win souls to Christ.' " 
 
 This summed up his holy personality. 
 
 " I represent a host of men, now out in the ministry, 
 who are quick to accord to him the power of a 
 master. He had an almost divine felicity in touching 
 the springs of the hidden life within, that set us 
 agoing. I do not recall another man among teachers, 
 in college or seminary, his equal in commanding a 
 universal authority and admiration. Most men who 
 are eminent have certain drawbacks, but as man, 
 teacher, friend, he had none. It was a mystery to 
 see him set aside in what we would call his meridian 
 by his illness ; but how abundant and helpful has 
 been his service to the world since ! 
 
 " They tell us that when Bunyan died his parishioners 
 besought that they might be buried near him, and I 
 confess that I should like to rise with Professor 
 Phelps when Gabriel's clarion rings." 
 
 Reference has been made by one of his now gray- 
 headed " boys " to the labor which he performed 
 upon the sermons of his class. But no one not be- 
 hind the scenes can form a just impression of the 
 amount and kind of toil which went into their 
 drudgery. Nay, by the time it left his throbbing 
 brain and patient heart and hand it was no longer 
 drudgery. He lifted that dreary task. He subli- 
 mated it. A thankless business, verily, to criticise 
 the callow starts of fledglings too young at their 
 
THE PROFESSOR. 83 
 
 flights to know the sky from the tree-top ! But the 
 professor performed it with a fidelity and a respect 
 which won the gratitude of the student whose much- 
 marked manuscript came back to him with the severest 
 reviewing in the class. 
 
 Those of us who crept silently into the study, and 
 sat patiently waiting for the moment when the 
 criticism should be done, and the dear voice could 
 speak, can testify with what loyalty he treated his 
 students' work. Never in a single instance can I 
 recall his having betrayed, even in those intimate 
 moments, the name of any pupil whom he might find 
 so discouraging, or so amusing, that the pen dropped 
 from his hand, and the impulsive exclamation from 
 his lips. Good work inspired him, and he labored 
 over it with a kind of fatherly pride. A poor sermon 
 seemed to take the life out of him ; but he was quite 
 true to the writer. We have been told that his 
 students have cherished the professor's criticisms — 
 the professor's plans — till they were themselves gray 
 pastors. We cannot be too often reminded that work 
 always tells in this world ; and the sheer amount of 
 faithful toil put into that critical assistance aroused 
 always more gratitude than resentment from the 
 criticised. This custom of Professor Phelps's may be 
 better estimated if it is said that such is by no means 
 universal in the homiletical instruction of theologi- 
 cal students. There is many an easier way of passing 
 the point. He chose the hardest, and his works do 
 follow him. He told me once that he had carefully 
 corrected in this way, with written critiques, I think 
 it was sixty sermons a year, for — I will not say how 
 many years. Really, it may be said that no phase of 
 
84 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 his professional work has lasted longer in the memo- 
 ries of his students. 
 
 Of one other habit of his we cannot omit to speak, 
 before we pass out of the lecture-room. This, too, 
 is tenderly recalled. I refer to the prayer with which 
 he opened his lecture. Nothing was suffered to pre- 
 vent the invocation, which nothing ever seemed to 
 make monotonous. I have listened to it day after 
 day, in the summer, when the lectures on English 
 style crowded the lecture-room with outsiders, — resi- 
 dents and strangers, both men and women, who came 
 to hear him, — and no filial appreciation can over- 
 state the manner with which those prayers were re- 
 ceived. 
 
 Brief, solemn, low of voice, thrilling in intensity, 
 the few words consecrating that service vibrated 
 from heart to heart. With a power which lifted 
 the daily toil into a glorious opportunity, the life's 
 work into a sublime mission, that prayer touched the 
 secret of the heart — his old students will remem- 
 ber how. The professor ministered like a priest be- 
 fore them. That battered old desk was an altar, and 
 it seemed to smoke before the eyes with sacred fire. 
 Sometimes, not often, — weary with what personal 
 burden or untold anguish ? — his voice broke. A hush 
 wrapped the lecture-room. The bowed heads lifted 
 themselves slowly. Eyes too dim to read the notes 
 bent to the page. Thoughts and vows too solemn to 
 be told sprang to the heart. In a kind of awe the 
 students considered what he who taught them meant 
 by consecration. 
 
 " It is enough for me," said one of them, " to take 
 off my hat when I see him go by. I would give ten 
 
THE PROFESSOR. 85 
 
 years of my life to live one year in immediate sight 
 of that man's Christian character." 
 
 His unconsciousness of the personal affection 
 which followed him in every relation of life was the 
 most beautiful thing about it. Once, when some one 
 told him of the admiration, not to say adoration, of a 
 person almost unknown to him, sudden and rare tears 
 bathed his face, and in a voice broken till it was almost 
 inarticulate he murmured : — " When saw we — Thee 
 — an hungered ? " 
 
 Upon the same page in which this little scene was 
 recorded, I find that I have taken further notes of 
 a conversation in which he said : — 
 
 " I think it is reasonable to bring to bear upon our- 
 selves the same principles of judgment that we bring 
 to bear upon other people. Therefore it may be — 
 as artless perfections are the highest — that we have 
 some of the very graces of which we are unconscious, 
 because we are unconscious of them." 
 
 "... Yet for me, as I look back upon my life," he 
 added, with that quick, eager wave of his hand which 
 all who knew him well remember, " I see that it must 
 be blotted out as if it had never been. . . . And I 
 believe it will — I believe it will/" 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE HOME STORY. 
 
 The old metaphysical problem of the duality of 
 consciousness is not more interesting than the dual 
 expression of any common life. The poet was a 
 philosopher who wrote of the two natures : — 
 
 "... One to face the world with, 
 One to show a woman when he loves her." 
 
 The private life of a man of public importance is 
 always approached with eagerness, often with uneasi- 
 ness, sometimes with the confidence that waits upon 
 the believer who sees the veil drawn from the presen- 
 tation of some mystic religious ceremonial in which 
 acquaintance has taught him to trust. 
 
 In dealing with the home life of Professor Phelps, 
 the story must of necessity be gathered, and dropped, 
 and resumed, as the pressure of the professional career 
 infringes upon it ; but it will be found, if rightly pro- 
 portioned and interpreted, to present a narrative not 
 without significance peculiar to itself. 
 
 While the professional struggle and success ran 
 their course in the Andover lecture-room, life went 
 in the Andover home after the manner of professional 
 homes in New England, — hard, but happily. Up to a 
 certain point it did not depart from the more usual 
 incidents and accidents in the lives of brain-workers, 
 and when the divergence came it may be said that 
 
 86 
 
THE HOME STORY. 87 
 
 it came from causes hardly recognizable at the time 
 by the actors in the drama. 
 
 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was well past thirty before 
 either the home or the world found out that she was 
 destined to be anything other than the homekeeper. 
 An ideal one she was, and the imagination of her hus- 
 band, who always retained something of a feudal view 
 of the lines of feeling and action which should be found 
 natural to women, rested in her fireside graces, " nor 
 ever looked beyond." It is entirely probable that, if 
 the genii had never burst from the bottle of domes- 
 tic life, the professor's history had been a different 
 one to tell. It is more than possible that if she 
 had never written a book, the wife of his youth 
 might have lived to share his age. But life and 
 death tell their own secrets only to each other, 
 far beyond our eavesdropping, and to speculate on 
 the "ifs"and "thens" of existence is as unsatis- 
 factory, though it may be as interesting, as an inter- 
 view with a medium of the spiritualistic persuasion. 
 
 Genius was in her, and would out. She wrote 
 because she could not help it, and her public read 
 because it could not help it, and asked for more and 
 got it. A wife, a mother, a housekeeper, a hostess, 
 in delicate health, on an academic salary, under- 
 takes a deadly load when she starts upon a literary 
 career. She lifted it to her frail shoulders, and 
 she fell beneath it. 
 
 Turn back a page or two, and follow the tale 
 before it deepens to its end. 
 
 In the thick of the struggle, while those first 
 years at Andover were at their hardest, the eldest 
 son was born. This is he who was named for his 
 
88 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 grandfather, Moses Stuart, and whose life was as 
 gracious and orderly as his death was shocking to 
 the imagination, and cruel to the heart. His father, 
 from the first, adored the child. 
 
 He was a peculiarly sunny-hearted baby, and his 
 mother took great comfort in him. The corroding 
 cares of maternity gnaw softly when eased by so 
 devout a child-worship as was always given to this 
 happy boy. But love and sacrifice and delight are 
 not nerve and muscle and heart-beat, and the cor- 
 rosion of strength may bite on, although the soul 
 is blessed. 
 
 When " The Sunny Side " was published, it bounded 
 to a sale of over one hundred thousand copies, and a 
 popularity which lasted for many years. The author 
 was besieged by the first publishers, and welcomed 
 by the first critics in the land. The result was inevi- 
 table. Volume followed volume,— " The Tell Tale," 
 " A Peep at Number Five," and plans and projects 
 of literary work whirled through the burning brain 
 and exhausted nervous system which needed the im- 
 possible, for life's sake, and instead, performed the 
 possible. 
 
 Professional families know — no other can — what 
 the life of the mistress of a household is, and was, 
 in these scholarly homes with unworldly salaries, 
 incessant entertainment, country service, and little 
 enough of it; often but one maid-of-all-work, to help 
 lighten the relentless drudgery of domestic toil. In 
 the large, white house on Andover Hill the woman's 
 work of which she wrote in the " Angel over the 
 Right Shoulder," was heavier than in most other 
 homes of its kind. The house was built for a 
 
THE HOME STORY. 89 
 
 mansion, and architecturally meant to be inhabited 
 by a fortune. Mrs. Phelps was too good a house- 
 keeper to be " easy " in her environment. She was 
 too conscientious a mother to let her children " go." 
 She was too tender a wife to forget the tired pro- 
 fessor. She was too hearty a hostess to neglect the 
 least of the thronging guests to whom the household 
 of a professor in any university town is incessantly 
 and remorselessly exposed. And, alas, she was too 
 successful a writer not to write. 
 
 Who could foresee ? Who could prevent ? Who 
 could understand? Not even the husband whose 
 foresight and insight were only equalled by his 
 tenderness and self-sacrifice. Everything that love 
 and little leisure and less income could do, was 
 done to ease the condition of the wife and mother, 
 who dared, with a physique like hers, to be any- 
 thing else; but she had put her hand upon the 
 sacred fire, and it smote her. 
 
 In August of 1852, her third child (named for a 
 family friend, Amos Lawrence of Boston), was born. 
 Her physicians expected the best results from this 
 event. During that year she had lost strength rapidly. 
 Straight through the burning Andover summer she 
 worked on copy and proof of her last book, which 
 was announced for the autumn press. She seemed 
 better for a time after the baby's birth; and life 
 looked strong and sweet and possible. 
 
 Suddenly the overtasked nature began to give 
 way. There was some suspicion that a forgotten 
 congestion of the brain, dating years ago, had bestirred 
 itself to cast the last blow at her enfeebled strength ; 
 but this was not conclusively proved. 
 
90 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 Her husband removed her to Boston, that she 
 might be near her physician, a man of eminence in 
 his time, and because she snatched at that pitiful 
 experiment which the sick call " a change." There, 
 all the last expedients of love were tried, and the 
 last delusions of hope pursued. 
 
 She fought for life with a memorable pertinacity, 
 of which her husband himself has written : " Then 
 began her calm, conscientious, determined struggle 
 for life. ' Now,' she said, ' my duty is to live, and 
 you must help me.' She concentrated the whole 
 strength of her being upon the struggle. Sometimes 
 so stern was the conflict that those she loved best 
 could scarcely catch from her a word, a smile, a 
 look. . . . They feared that she might pass away in 
 the silence of those dreadful hours, unable to speak 
 her last message. . . . Her silent thoughts of her 
 own family would sometimes break from the restraint 
 she had imposed on them. In one instance, when 
 her infant child was taken to her room, it seemed to 
 unlock her prisoned affections — her face lighted 
 with tenderness, her eye assumed that depth of mean- 
 ing which none but a mother's eye ever has, and for a 
 few moments she poured forth her love in the dialect 
 which only mothers know how to use, then fell back 
 as if to renew more resolutely the struggle against 
 the disease that consumed her. . . . She would her- 
 self give directions as to the various remedies she 
 needed, and would mark the time, minute by minute, 
 when the remedy should be repeated. . . . On such 
 occasions there were moments when, as if to proclaim 
 its own immortality, the soul seemed to come forth 
 from that dimmed eye, and, in almost visible pres- 
 
THE HOME STORY. 
 
 91 
 
 ence, to strike at the unseen foe. ... For more than 
 thirty clays she thus maintained the unequal conflict. 
 At length her hope began to wane. ' If it were not 
 for my children,' she said, ' I would not struggle any 
 longer.' It was not till the evening of the twenty- 
 ninth of November that she became convinced that 
 the struggle was a hopeless one. . . . She then gave 
 up all with scarcely a moment's agitation. ' With- 
 out a tear her eye turned on Death. She placed her 
 hand in his.' The closing scene was just like UrT 
 
 Few who were present have forgotten — we are 
 often reminded of it still — the pathetic scene on her 
 funeral clay, when the bereaved husband, with his 
 motherless children about him, brought the poor 
 baby in his arms that the child might be baptized — 
 as she had asked — beside his mother's coffin. 
 
 The haggard, tearless face of the father, the little 
 hands of & the three-months old child clinging to his 
 cheek and breast, long remained vivid to those who 
 could appreciate the touching sight, in which it was 
 not difficult to see the symbol of that self-obliterat- 
 ing tenderness which made, for the greater part of 
 his life, a gospel out of the divinest attribute in the 
 man — his fatherhood. 
 
 There is a pleasant story told us by one of his old- 
 est friends and Andover's greatest teachers, whose 
 observant eyes were the only ones to notice that the 
 western sun had stolen into the windows of the sad 
 room, and, slanting across in one long ray, sought out 
 and rested upon one object only. This was her por- 
 trait. As the sacred water touched the forehead of 
 the motherless baby, and the sacred words, consecrat- 
 ing him to the love and to the service of the God 
 
92 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 who giveth and taketh, fell upon the hushed room, a 
 glory struck upon the pictured face, which smiled as 
 one may who understands and is content. 
 
 The family festival in the white house fell at 
 New Year's time. If this were a relic of the old 
 Puritan objection to Christmas, we never knew it. 
 It only occurred to us that we had a better time 
 than other children, and, naturally, deserved a differ- 
 ent day. Perhaps it struck us as rather an honor 
 than otherwise ; as if New Year's Day, and all that 
 was therein, were our personal property. At all 
 events, the merry-making, inaugurated when the first- 
 born was in long clothes, and thus antedating the 
 memory of all the children, went bravely on, come 
 joy or anguish, life or death. He was the soul of it. 
 He was the fun of it. It was he who planned the won- 
 ders and performed the miracles, who held the child, 
 too sick to lift its head, before the New Year's tree, 
 or romped with the well ones while they tore the 
 strings from the little gifts that were always neatly 
 wrapped by his methodical hands, to deepen the 
 mystery, and prolong the ecstasy. He was New 
 Year's Day; and to him the motherless children 
 turned as confidently as ever, sure of their frolic on 
 that gray morning which ushered in the first New 
 Year in which she had ever left him to trim the 
 " tree " alone. 
 
 We waked, and watched down stairs for him, at 
 some incredible hour long before dawn ; " to catch 
 Papa " first, being the great honor of the day. He 
 slept in the bedroom opening from his study in the 
 wing; and while it was yet dark, we heard him 
 stirring. He came out shivering — it was bitter cold 
 
THE HOME STORY. 93 
 
 to o-o down and start the furnace fire, as he was 
 
 used. We peered at him through the window as he 
 trod heavily down the long hall. He had his study 
 lamp in his hand. Its light struck a face so gray, so 
 ghastly, so drawn with sleepless grief, that one at least 
 of the children shrank with a sudden divination of the 
 truth. The "Happy New Year!" faltered on her 
 lips. What was she doing ? Was the " happy " gone 
 from the year, for him ? An awed consciousness of 
 the suffering that never showed itself to make the 
 children gloomy, suddenly befell her. Then he heard 
 the little voices, and his own rang back, instantly, 
 merrily, tenderly. His face relaxed and shone. The 
 sweet smile that never failed us, answered to our 
 ignorant joy ; and the dear kiss that we never had 
 to wait for, blessed the strange New Year. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE STORY; AND THE HOME. 
 
 Professor Phelps was easily a hermit, and in- 
 evitably a home-loving, home-staying man. His first 
 (indeed his only) trip to Europe was to his tempera- 
 ment, and in his time, something of an event. Now- 
 adays, and to the other kind of man, it would be 
 nothing but an incident. People did not run over 
 then as they do now. We talk of " the other side," 
 as an Andover professor of those days might have 
 spoken of a ride to Lawrence, or a picnic at Haggett's 
 Pond. The overworked, struggling man, driven by 
 the lashes of his bereavement, like so many another 
 solitary traveller, found and took his first opportu- 
 nity to travel in the year succeeding the death of 
 his wife. 
 
 " It is a good thing to see the world we live in," 
 said the much-travelled Longfellow, and it was a good 
 thing for the lonely professor ; yet he seems to have 
 had rather a dismal time of it. He was too much alone 
 to begin with. He sailed in the Arctic, upon the last 
 voyage which she made successfully before she went 
 to the bottom. He was a miserable sailor; of four 
 hundred passengers, the sickest man aboard. Among 
 the letters to his children will be found a vivid and 
 amusing account of his misfortune; he was able to 
 crawl on deck just before putting into port, and, 
 
 94 
 
THE STORY; 95 
 
 mustering such courage as an exceptionally seasick 
 and sleepless man may possess, conscientiously " did " 
 the European tour of his times. He was desperately 
 lonely; he could not converse in any of the Conti- 
 nental languages ; he was taken dangerously ill in a 
 little Italian town, quite alone ; his letters of credit 
 gave out ; he was too ill to renew them ; a lout of a 
 landlord threatened to turn the fever patient out of 
 doors. He did not have a very gay trip, and it is 
 my belief that he often wished himself home again. 
 This he never admitted, but when his duty to that 
 form of culture was performed, he set a joyful face 
 toward old Andover, by whose sedate, scholastic fire- 
 side he rested with the inexpressible comfort of the 
 home-loving nature. 
 
 In April, 1854, he married the sister of his wife, — 
 Mary Stuart. She was in consumption when he 
 married her ; he wished to care for her, and he 
 did so devotedly to the end, which came in a year 
 and a half. His affection for her had been a ten- 
 der one, and the renewed solitude did not seem to 
 be any easier because it was expected and inevita- 
 ble. Sickness, watching, care, death, burial, came to 
 seem the natural scenery of the Andover house. It 
 was not that his fate was worse than many another 
 man's, nor did he ever, at his darkest moments, have 
 the weakness to call himself a man afflicted above 
 his fellows ; but it is true that the current of his life 
 was unfortunate for a temperament like his. He was 
 not by nature joyous. His view of moral responsi- 
 bility was too grave to permit him to be what is called 
 light hearted. His personal sensitiveness was too 
 exquisite to allow him to be blunt of sympathy ; and 
 
96 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 a man of the most refined sympathy cannot, in a world 
 like this, be a glad man. A little easier life, a more 
 natural, unbroken story, less bereavement, less ill- 
 health, less of what we call Providential darkness 
 without, and consequent sadness within, more serene 
 human blessedness, — these things, it seems to us, 
 would have been better for a soul so delicately poised 
 and quiveringly clouded. But God wrought upon 
 him according to His own unfathomable comprehen- 
 sion of the relation of individual comfort to the 
 general need. It is left for us to suppose that the 
 man's work required the sacrifice of the man. How- 
 ever that may be, the story of Professor Phelps 
 moves from sorrow to trial, large and less, revealed 
 and concealed. With the fearless force of the Greek 
 drama which is never afraid of tragedy, nor anxious 
 about " a good ending," life bore him steadily from 
 discipline to discipline, to its trustful, uncomplaining 
 end. 
 
 In June, 1858, Professor Phelps married Mary A. 
 Johnson, daughter of Samuel and Charlotte Johnson 
 of Boston. This union, which gave him a great deal 
 of happiness, lasted thirty-three years. 
 
 Of this marriage were born his two younger sons, 
 Francis and Edward. The former is now resident in 
 Baltimore, and the latter, who is a journalist by pro- 
 fession, in Chicago. 
 
 The home of Professor Phelps at Andover has an 
 interest somewhat peculiar to itself. Many an old 
 theological tradition clings to those stately walls. 
 The mansion, by all odds the most attractive in 
 that town of broad horizons, and comfortable homes, 
 was built by the first incumbent of the department, 
 
AND THE HOME. 97 
 
 with a naive disregard for the pocket of the institu- 
 tion, and a definite consideration for his own tastes 
 as well as for the present and prospective domestic 
 glory of the chair. The house was, for those days, 
 a palace. Its massive foundations and architec- 
 tural solidity, the landscape gardening of its large 
 grounds, its terraces, and arbors, and summer-houses, 
 its coach-house, and other worldly superfluities, 
 shocked the religious sensibilities of the pious breth- 
 ren who held the bag. It is one of the legends of 
 the mansion that the reverend builder put upon the 
 walls of the north drawing-room a papering which 
 cost the then unparalleled sum of one dollar a roll. 
 The scandal which followed was so active that the un- 
 lucky incumbent became frightened, and to atone for 
 his extravagance forthwith purchased a cheap paper 
 with which to cover the sight of his economic blunder 
 from gods and men. This, I think, still remained 
 upon the room when Professor Phelps's family took 
 possession of the house, and it was held to be quite 
 a point in antiquarian research to peer after signs of 
 that "ungodly" papering, when later (and more 
 modest) ventures in household decoration replaced 
 each other, in process of time, upon those lofty walls. 
 
 The house was large ; its rooms fourteen feet high ; 
 its hall of a princely size for its times, and generous 
 for any times ; the wood-work, all carved in those 
 days by hand, was rich in ornamentation both without 
 and within. I think the simplicity of the Hill was 
 even a little disturbed by the bell-ropes. Should a 
 professor of the Faith ring for his servant like an 
 unregenerate man about town ? 
 
 The house was as uncomfortable as it was imposing. 
 
98 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 For years the New England winters had it all their 
 own way in the great hall and gaping rooms. Tradi- 
 tion tells us that a former incument, being of a " near" 
 disposition in the matter of fuel, hung his hall with 
 bed-spreads, and what are called in the country com- 
 forters : these were suspended upon ropes to break 
 the draughts, as the freezing inhabitants dared the 
 climate of the lower halls, or tested the thermometer 
 of the upper stairs. Many other traditions follow the 
 house, more or less of interest, according as one cares 
 for that early Andover life. Perhaps the best of these 
 is that of the pious occupant of the feminine gender, 
 who prayed with everybody, and on all occasions, 
 filling the village with awe. One unlucky girl, being 
 invited to spend her birthday in the mansion, is said 
 to have unwarily accepted the invitation, to find her- 
 self locked into the study by the hostess, fed on bread 
 and water, and warned to think of her sins. 
 
 Professor Phelps had a genius for home comfort, 
 and he made the mansion, which he thoroughly reno- 
 vated, the delightful one which it is to-day. No- 
 where else do we see such supplies of wood, heaping 
 the big woodsheds. Who else builds such open fires 
 nowadays? Save where one must, or disj)ense with 
 what one might, one need never be cold in that house. 
 The fire-places and the hearty Franklin stove in his 
 study never failed to help out the big furnace when 
 the bitter weather blew from Wachuset a straight 
 blast, uninterrupted, against the western side of the 
 house. The dearest memories of the family warm 
 themselves forever before his glorious fires. He used 
 gently, sometimes, to compassionate a certain class of 
 people who "could not afford" to keep their chil- 
 
AND THE HOME. 99 
 
 dren warm and cheerful by that one bright expedient, 
 while a little paring of the upholstery or millinery 
 bill would have filled the happy hearth. 
 
 His own study was in the southern wing of the 
 house. Here the sun followed him as if it loved 
 him, from dawn to dark. Here his books in their 
 simple, painted shelves ran to the ceiling, and his 
 plain table and old-fashioned, rather hard, revolving- 
 chair, stood to their daily toil with sober faces. This 
 room itself was full of shadowy values, dating far 
 before his time. He used to speak with emotion, 
 of the fact that the origin of the great Foreign Mis- 
 sionary Association of America dated from that room ; 
 in which was held the first consultation or prayer- 
 meeting of the men who " conceived the inconceiva- 
 ble " idea of Christianizing the heathen nations. His 
 faith in prayer was, to the end, so utter, so simple, so 
 genuine, that he never allowed a light word spoken 
 of it in his presence. That often-ridiculed form 
 of devotion known as the female prayer-meeting, he 
 treated with a manly and Christian respect which 
 silenced many a flippant word. This little story of 
 the missions and the study always gave him real 
 pleasure, and added a certain idealization to the room 
 which was sanctified to him by the personal toils and 
 struggles of forty years. 
 
 It was an ideal study — a little plain, by the stand- 
 ards of our luxurious bric-a-brac times — a scholar's 
 study. His books occupied it to the exclusion of 
 trifles. A few of the souvenirs of his European trip, 
 the old mahogany sofa on which he spent so many 
 helpless days, his wife's writing-desk, in late years 
 the portrait of his dead son, completed the incidents 
 
100 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 of the room. Eastward, he looked to the old Semi- 
 nary buildings, beyond which lay the church-yard, 
 whose Improvement Association he created, and 
 beneath whose quiet face he rests. The morning 
 sun filtered through the red and gold of the maples 
 which he had planted, and the old chapel bell called 
 him briskly through leaf, and blossom, and shivering 
 bough to early prayers. Westward, his eyes loved 
 to linger on one of the most beautiful scenes in 
 Massachusetts. The afternoon sun rolled in a tide 
 into the study. The long gardens sloped by terra- 
 ces to the grove in which he used to walk and which 
 was dear to him. The foliage outline of elm and 
 apple, pear and spruce and larch, grouped by his 
 design, was very fine, against the western sky. The 
 Andover sunsets, always famous, were, from that set- 
 ting, celestial. Scarcely a sign of human life was 
 visible. Outline beyond outline, the perspective ran 
 over field and forest, light and shadow, to the Berk- 
 shire hills. Peace looked in at that window, and the 
 world withdrew her step. His noble face, when the 
 day's work was done, — or, later, when the day's suf- 
 fering was borne, — turned to that western study win- 
 dow without a word. He had the expression of one 
 who turns to a long-tried friend for comprehension 
 which is certain not to fail him. He lifted up his 
 eyes to the hills whence his help came. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE PREACHER ; AND THE AUTHOR. 
 
 As years consolidated his character, and the re- 
 sults of his power and his scholarship took the slow 
 form of public evidence, it began to become appar- 
 ent that the Homiletical Professor was one of the 
 preachers who sway the Church, and compel the 
 respect of " the World." That prognosis made by 
 the parishioners of the boyish pastor in Boston 
 was more than justified by time. No matter how 
 absorbed by the immediate duties of his relationship 
 to the Seminary, Professor Phelps always took space 
 to retain his connection with a living pulpit. 
 
 " Of their professor's own preaching, his students," 
 writes one of them, " never had enough. They 
 begrudged the loss of an opportunity. Such ser- 
 mons as that which was afterward developed into 
 'The Still Hour,' and so widely cultivated, or 
 those which were combined in the volume en- 
 titled 'The New Birth,' or that entitled 'Man's 
 Extremity God's Opportunity,' live in the memories 
 of their original hearers to this day, and not 
 merely by the impression they made, but by whole 
 sentences and paragraphs. . . . He used fairly 
 to take possession of his audience by the lucidity, 
 the directness, the elegance of his style ; and his 
 
 101 
 
102 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 thought would linger long in the memory, as the 
 tone of a rich bell will linger in the ear." 
 
 His popularity at ordination and other especial 
 services must have been a great drain upon his 
 strength. We find frequent allusions in his letters 
 to these efforts of pure zeal and love. Of funeral 
 sermons he was besought to preach so many that 
 one who loves him thinks of them with a kind of 
 malice ; they took such draughts out of his sym- 
 pathetic life. If soul and body could possibly re- 
 spond, he never declined. Added to his more gen- 
 eral pulpit work, this occasional service counted 
 heavily. His answering conscience gave him severe 
 ideals of his duty as a preacher. The metropolitan 
 pulpits, the wide and thoughtful audiences where 
 his reputation mounted so rapidly in the last fif- 
 teen years of his active labor, never seem to have 
 absorbed his enthusiasm. He would turn aside any 
 time to preach for some sick or wearied brother at 
 a rural desk, where a handful of farmers and country 
 folk sat bowed and awed before the power which 
 shook them with a divine storm. These congrega- 
 tions, touched by the delicacy which respected a plain 
 audience as his did, created for him that reputation 
 so precious to him, of being honored and beloved 
 among " the common people." Of him, as truly as 
 of any man who ever lived, it can be said : — 
 
 " He gave the people of his best ; 
 His worst he kept, his best he gave." 
 
 Sometimes it used to seem as if he turned with a 
 certain relief from the great Boston audiences, which 
 gathered Sunday after Sunday, and as many more as 
 
THE PREACHER; AND THE AUTHOR. 103 
 
 there was any hope of keeping him, to clamor for 
 his sermons, to some little West Parish, or East 
 Parish, or Sonthville, or North Corner, where a few 
 obscure people lifted sad faces out of their narrow 
 lives to bless him. It is known that he preached 
 the same sermons to both types of hearers -with 
 how much or how little change, is not known ; but 
 m y opinion is, with very little, if any. He had an 
 unusual respect for the comprehension of the aver- 
 age parishioner. He had an extraordinary faith m 
 the pliability of the Truth itself. He would deliver 
 his most famous discourses to the few brave and hardy 
 villagers who dared a New England sleet-storm, at 
 its w & orst, to hear him, - it seemed, with rather more 
 than his usual fire, and with all of his accustomed 
 elegance. He never talked down to a small parish. 
 He never slighted a humble people. He never patron- 
 ized the appreciation of plain hearers. 
 
 As a preacher Professor Phelps was pre-eminent, 1 
 should say, for one thing. He was, distinctly, a pul- 
 pit orator. We have the pulpit reader, the pulpit 
 lecturer, the scholar, the exhorter, the pastor, and 
 other familiar varieties of clerical service, each useful 
 of its kind, all honored and honorable, some eminent, 
 a few immortal; and no star disturbeth the other 
 star, or dasheth from its own orbit to try another s 
 
 ellipse. . 
 
 The pulpit orator is rare. He who deserves the 
 title earns the honors which he wears. 
 
 The orator, like the poet, cannot be educated to 
 order. No diploma creates him. The gift of sway- 
 ing a great audience to profound religious emotion, 
 the power to convert that emotion into reflection, 
 
104 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 and that reflection into conduct, is a form of genius 
 which may be as enviable as any that the world of 
 thought contains. It is one open to peculiar diffi- 
 culties, and subject to the severest tests. 
 
 There is no easy step in all that mental journey. 
 No makeshift work can fill his pulpit of whom this 
 service is expected. No Saturday night sermons can 
 suffice for that desk. No hurry, no scurry, no expe- 
 dient of weariness or distraction, can fill the pages of 
 that sermon. It is hard work, it is high work, it is 
 long work, it is close work, it is scholar's work, it is 
 all work, to maintain such a reputation when once a 
 man has won it. 
 
 And, after all, a man of towering pulpit eminence 
 may sometimes turn away disheartened to his study, 
 because his greatest sermon has seemed to brush, not 
 to cut, the soul which it is his duty, above all things, 
 first, to save. A preacher is not in his pulpit to give 
 a literary entertainment; he is there to make good 
 men out of bad ones, and better men out of good. 
 We all know distinguished pulpit orators who are 
 polished till they are like onyx — as cold, as brittle. 
 Their hearers go, and listen, and admire — and forget. 
 These men are in fact better scholars than they are 
 Christians. They are better orators than they are 
 apostles. They raise the standard of taste. How 
 much influence have they on the results of conduct ? 
 It is not an excessive view of the case to say that 
 Professor Phelps stood clearly among the still smaller 
 ranks of spiritual orators. 
 
 This, when all is said, will be found to be his true 
 position in the American pulpit ; and for this legacy 
 to the Christian Church he is beloved as much as he 
 
THE PREACHER; AND THE AUTHOR. 105 
 
 is honored by the generation which has not outgrown 
 the memory of his working years. No one who ever 
 personally knew him doubted the intense trueness of 
 the man when he spoke the Word of Almighty God to 
 the hearer who trusted him for it. It is hard to be- 
 lieve that any such hearer — though drifting in and 
 out, the stranger of an hour's spell under the power 
 of a clergyman of whom he knew no more — could have 
 left the church in whose silent aisles that memorable 
 voice was echoing, without ready confidence in the 
 religious honor of the preacher. 
 
 He was a magnetic preacher, but he was a more 
 magnetic believer. He was a genuine orator, but he 
 was a more genuine Christian. Elegance of diction, 
 fineness of form, power of address, may go a great 
 way to save a soul if the soul is behind them. He 
 did not construct sentences, and create style, and 
 handle an audience, and stop there. He did thus, and 
 did it as few of his cotemporaries have done ; he gave 
 literary value to his expression of religious truth, and 
 memorable force to his appeals to irreligious men, but 
 he gave more. He gave too much more for a man of 
 his physique to bear. He gave too much more to be 
 always understood, even by those who hung upon his 
 burning words. He gave the holy fire of an intense 
 heart. He gave the very coals from the altar of a 
 consecration which must flash, which must blaze and 
 burn his trembling life. He preached the Gospel of 
 Christ as he did, because he lived Christ. The atten- 
 tive soul that listened to him went away saying less 
 "That was a great preacher," than "That was a great 
 Truth." 
 
 In appearance he assisted his pulpit power. He 
 
106 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 was not tall, but in his well and active days not 
 otherwise than agreeably proportioned, and of decid- 
 edly clerical appearance. In figure, he had some- 
 thing of the general traits which we are accustomed 
 to associate with a bishop, or a priest. His head and 
 countenance departed from that type. His hands, 
 not thin, but well formed, and rather white, took 
 easily to the gestures which gave the impression of 
 naturalness and comfort to the hearer's mind and 
 eye. His manner was one of the intensest — prob- 
 ably, to such temperaments as are antagonistic to 
 one like his, it may have seemed too intense. It 
 may have been sometimes said of him that he was 
 too grave a preacher ; that he emphasized too heavily 
 the awful fates of life and death, if not in doctrine, 
 at least in his way of presenting the more tremen- 
 dous issues which must sometimes occupy the gentlest 
 pulpit, if it be a thorough one. I have, in one instance, 
 heard this comment made upon him by an old pupil 
 (of a kind of mind noticeably opposite to his) : it 
 is the only one which has reached me. 
 
 In regard to his pulpit personnel, there can hardly 
 have been two opinions. His fine head, his broad, 
 full brow, his blue eye flashing with sacred fire, 
 his thin, sensitive lips all had beauty. The whole 
 vividness of the man poured itself along his words 
 like molten gold. He seemed to be eaten up by his 
 theme. It ran through him like a fever. Yet his 
 self-possession was perfect. Who ever heard him 
 declaim, or denounce, or do a noisy thing in the 
 pulpit? His manner was essentially quiet, con- 
 trolled, and finished. The fire burned through ; 
 that was all. One felt his emotion more because 
 
THE PREACHER; AND THE AUTHOR. 107 
 
 of what he so evidently restrained, than because 
 of what he expressed. It was feeling in leash 
 that sprang out from the sensitive face, the modu- 
 lated accent, the quivering nerve. Some eminent 
 preachers have been unable to control their tears 
 during their own discourse. He shed none. But 
 probably the most powerful element in his pulpit 
 manner was his voice. This cannot be described, 
 but is not soon forgotten. Low, distinct, and vibrat- 
 ing, it rose to rebuke, or fell to awe, or malted to 
 tenderness ; it throbbed through the hearer like the 
 nerves of a soul. 
 
 It is not easy to be a daughter and a biographer 
 too. One must expect, as a matter of course, to be 
 thought sufficiently alive to the graces which adorned 
 the life that we seek to recall. But, at least, in the 
 impression which these pages have tried to give of 
 the rare quality of his voice, and its power in the 
 pulpit, I am sure that love and taste are not con- 
 founded. 
 
 Professor Phelps's sermons, unfortunately, are not 
 left in any such form that they can be given to the 
 world, as sermons, to speak for themselves. Many 
 he destroyed. Many more he dismembered for mis- 
 cellaneous publication ; some went into the making 
 of the volume which he called " The New Birth," 
 and which had a wide reading. A goodly part of 
 that side of his life's work has flown broadcast in 
 religious weeklies, and other avenues of periodical 
 expression, where a good thing drops, and blows 
 away — whither? It seems a pity that his pulpit 
 work could not, like the work of his lecture-room, 
 have been preserved in a more continuous form. But 
 
108 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 lie decided otherwise, and his instinct may have been 
 right about it. 
 
 But one pre-eminent exception exists to the history 
 of those sermons which some of his old pupils would 
 now be glad if they could hold in their hands. 
 
 One there was on prayer. It found so many 
 friends, it touched so many hearers, that in 1860 he 
 wrought it out into a little book, and gave it to the 
 world modestly, even timidly, expecting little from 
 it, unless, perhaps, the usefulness of a higher kind of 
 tract. Its title was " The Still Hour," and its history 
 the religious world knows too well to need an un- 
 necessary word from me. 
 
 The book bounded into a large and eager circulation. 
 In this country and abroad he thought it had reached 
 a movement of about two hundred thousand. The 
 exact figures of the American circulation cannot well 
 be ascertained, the firm which originally published 
 the book having been disbanded by some important 
 accident — death, I think. 
 
 But that "The Still Hour" has been one of the 
 religious forces of its times, and his, is matter of his- 
 tory. Its literary quality gave at once a new aspect 
 to his life's work. His literary taste was now to 
 receive something of its due. The public recognition 
 gratified him. But the religious usefulness of the 
 literary success was the heart-throb in his delight. 
 He was overwhelmed by letters from strangers all 
 over the English-reading world, laying bare to him 
 their spiritual struggles, and entreating from him 
 further spiritual guidance. He was overcome by 
 their gratitude and their blessing. He was atten- 
 tive to their paltriest criticism. He was awed by the 
 
THE PREACHER; AND THE AUTHOR. 109 
 
 tenderness and the veneration which these unknown 
 friends poured upon him. He took the success of 
 his book tremulously as a mercy straight from God, 
 and far beyond his best deserving. He was profoundly 
 touched by it. At times he could not speak of it, 
 but, at the mention of it, went to his study alone, 
 with bowed head. How he must have prayed, asking 
 heaven's help to use this precious experience nobly, 
 those who understood him can divine. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE CLOUD GATHERS. 
 
 Life had now reached its blossom with him. He 
 was forty years old, and full of the hopes of an age 
 when experience is at its richest and when the phys- 
 ical background of mental power ought to be at its 
 best. He was happy in his home-life and in its 
 promises. He took good courage from his wife and 
 good comfort from his children. His beautiful 
 home grew every year beneath his loving hands into 
 something closer and dearer to the heart. His pro- 
 fessional success was assured. His power as a 
 preacher was at its zenith. The literary form of 
 religious usefulness had unexpectedly opened its 
 bright gates to him. Middle age looked at him 
 gently, and, with a fresh heart-throb, the overworked 
 man turned to greet her kindest pledges. 
 
 But he was an overworked man. There is some- 
 thing awful about the law of physical nemesis. It 
 rides right on, come death or life — come bliss or 
 agony; and the soul most exquisitely constructed, the 
 soul so put together, that, in the nature of things 
 it must suffer most, is the first to succumb to the 
 effects of the ideals which it is the surest to honor and 
 obey. Too many a man has been the victim of his own 
 aspiration. Too many a life has received the deadly 
 sword-thrust at the turning of the bravest battle. 
 110 
 
THE CLOUD GATHERS. HI 
 
 How the darkness first visibly gathered over the 
 working life of Professor Phelps, it was not easy 
 to see and it is not easy to say. About the date 
 which we have now reached in our record the signs 
 of physical surrender began to make themselves mani- 
 fest to that light attention with which we are in the 
 habit of regarding a malaise which is expected to 
 pass away directly, or an exhaustion which requires 
 "a little change" or "only rest." To be "rather 
 tired," to be "only nervous," to "need a vacation," 
 are such common conditions of American life, that 
 neither the patient nor his friends are expected to 
 emphasize them till they become too clamorous to be 
 disregarded. 
 
 He had never been a fussy or timid man about his 
 own health; had, in fact, paid too little regard to the ? 
 subject to know whether he were sick or well. It is 
 probable that he had always suffered much more than 
 any friend suspected. Certain family letters, dating 
 as far back as 1857-58, now reveal how stealthily 
 the approach of his disease had stepped toward him. 
 Once in a while he slips into some confession of 
 physical misery which in the light of later years is 
 pathetic to read. "No sleep last night." "Only 
 two hours." "I am so exhausted to-day that I must 
 make this note brief." "I could hardly crawl to my 
 lecture." Then the postscript merrily runs: "I 
 slept all night, and am in grand condition to-day. 
 Now for work ! " Slowly and insidiously his trouble 
 crept upon him. He had never thought much about 
 it. It was not fashionable then, as now, to call it 
 the "American disease." It took years for him to 
 understand that he was doomed to one of the crudest 
 
112 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 forms of physical discipline — excessive and incur- 
 able insomnia. 
 
 Among the enterprises with which his burning 
 brain kept his body on the strain, we have not men- 
 tioned his labor upon "The Sabbath Hymn-Book," 
 which he compiled in connection with Professor 
 Park and Dr. Lowell Mason. I have sometimes 
 thought that this was the one burden too many. 
 But it is idle to construct "ifs" and "buts" of 
 regret in looking back upon a history like his. "If 
 this had been done" — we say. "If that had not 
 been done " — "If we could have foreseen " — "If we 
 had only understood " — "If anybody had perceived 
 that crisis, or presented this mistake, or insisted 
 upon such a relief." — "Peace! let it be." Words 
 help us no more than tears. It was to be as it was. 
 God had now the silent uses of inaction and suffer- 
 ing for the energy of the strong mind and sensi- 
 tive heart through which he had in so many ways 
 given blessing to a broad world. 
 
 The hymn-book was a severe task; but so were 
 many others. It involved often fifteen hours or 
 more of work in the twenty-four. But so did much 
 of his labor. He did not rest. He could not easily 
 play. He was not lightly amused. His work 
 flogged him along the road that narrows to the cliff's 
 edge so slowly yet so surely that one starts in as 
 much astonishment as horror when the precipice 
 gapes at the feet. 
 
 He took perhaps as much exercise as other scholars 
 did in those days; hut it was little enough. His 
 life was in his study. The demands of his lecture- 
 room, the loving personal care which he gave to the 
 
THE CLOUD GATHERS. 113 
 
 work of his Senior class, his literary labor, his sensi- 
 tive sympathy with and anxiety for his family in any 
 of the little or large distresses which beset a house- 
 hold of seven, the incessant social entertainment of 
 a professor's home, the often harassing care of Semi- 
 nary affairs, the exhaustion of those long and not 
 always harmonious Faculty meetings which every 
 professor in any institution can understand, — all 
 these things required air, diversion, rest, calm, and 
 above all, sleep, to counteract their corrosion upon 
 such a nature as his. He had the strain without the 
 repose ; he seldom put, perhaps he seldom could put, 
 the burden off. At all events, the time came when 
 his great natural vigor bowed beneath it all. He 
 was an insatiable, incorrigible reader. His literary 
 equipment was broad and deep. In a certain out- 
 side view of the man one might say that he was born 
 to be a scholar in a freer air than he ever breathed. 
 He had the tastes and the gifts of a type of cul- 
 ture which one is more accustomed to find in the 
 "world" than in the Church. But this he did not 
 or would not recognize. " Best things " (a favorite 
 phrase with him) were not good enough for consecra- 
 tion to the devout, even to the ecclesiastical ends to 
 which his nature was bent like iron hammered in 
 fire. 
 
 To the end, disease could not calm his stirring brain. 
 He read much, too much, at night. He showed me 
 once certain shelves in his library filled with history 
 and essays — a portentous accumulation. There was 
 Froude, I remember, with his twelve volumes, volu- 
 minous Mommsen and Gibbon and Grote, Bancroft 
 with his — was it thirteen? — big octavos in varying 
 
114 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 shades of old-fashioned red muslin fading back to 
 Number II. and quite fresh and bright at Number 
 XII. There were many other sets, of frowning- 
 proportions, whose names I cannot now recall. 
 
 "All these," he said, smiling, "I have read when 
 the rest of the world has been asleep." 
 
 A rheumatic fever of a violent type which attacked 
 him in 1860 may have 'been (he used to think it was) 
 the accelerating cause of much of his physical misery. 
 It left him with the severe and almost constant pain 
 at the base of the brain from which he was never 
 afterwards released; and it must have emphasized 
 the tendency to sleeplessness which work and care 
 and the intense emotional movement of a nature like 
 his were now pushing to a dangerous expression. 
 
 His fate captured him insidiously as such fates do. 
 No one believed — who could believe? — that this 
 glowing activity was to be coldly quenched by so 
 grim a destiny as now befell it. No one suspected — 
 who could suspect? — that his indomitable will 
 might not compel recovery as it had compelled so 
 many other important phases of his experience. He 
 himself was the last to begin to despair. He took 
 his break-down as a slight thing at first. He ex- 
 pected to be well again shortly, as a matter of 
 course. It was almost impossible for him to under- 
 stand that he needed rest from the professional 
 strain. He had been such a remorseless worker all 
 his days that he lifted a puzzled face when Fate held 
 up her first ominous finger of warning. It would be 
 over soon. He should be better presently. A man 
 must attend to his business. Where was the time 
 or the heart to come from to play at leisure ? If a 
 
THE CLOUD GATHERS. 115 
 
 voice from the powers and principalities of prophecy 
 had said to him at that time, " Twenty years of in- 
 curable invalidism are before you," he would have 
 laughed at the prognosis. 
 
 Let it be said just here, even if we should have 
 occasion to say it again, that Professor Phelps, in 
 common with others, —with almost all other suf- 
 ferers from nervous disease,— was sometimes called 
 morbid. This is the easiest word in the world for 
 health to fling at sickness. It is the usual shelter 
 for the stolidity and ignorance of the temperament 
 which can no more understand its opposite than a 
 dead leaf can understand an electric circuit, or a 
 stone-cutter the creation of Kubla Khan. There is 
 more incredible blundering, there is more refined 
 cruelty, exercised by the well in their judgment of the 
 sick, than is to be found in almost any other form 
 of the relations of modern life. Most others have 
 yielded further to the illuminations of civilization. 
 Pathology remains our Darkest Africa, and sympathy 
 our benighted and belated science. 
 
 Whatever may have been true of a few dark crises 
 in his long experience of physical suffering, — if 
 there came now and then (who could wonder, who 
 could blame?) in those twenty years an hour of 
 gloom or despair, —I am confident that no sick man 
 ever began his battle more manfully, with more cour- 
 age, with more imperious hope, with more persistence, 
 with more confident expectation of a quick return to 
 the full activities of life. As we look back upon 
 the story now, the lip quivers at the recollection of 
 all that silent and vigorous fight. 
 
 Everything possible and impossible was to be done 
 
116 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 and tried. He would leave no venture of the will 
 untouched, no expedient of hope overlooked. Physi- 
 cians and systems and cures and schools ran their 
 turn in his patient experiment. Therapeutic theories 
 in which he had the scantiest faith received their 
 respectful trial, and went their foredoomed ways. 
 The real hopelessness of his case came slowly — per- 
 haps that was merciful — to his consciousness. 
 
 At first the very violence of his suffering led him 
 to believe that it must soon yield to something in the 
 whole domain of pathological science. A man could 
 not live with no more sleep than he had. And since 
 a man must live, surely the cure exists. 
 
 But night after night, month upon month, year 
 into year, the agony grew. He kept on with his 
 work — who knows how ? It is hard to think of that 
 now, — to know that an earlier respite might have 
 saved him to health and to its happy usefulness. 
 By and by he began to try short trips and vacations 
 and the usual expedients. 
 
 He turned to me one day, with eyes flashing fire 
 from his haggard face. "I'll not do it!" he said 
 under his breath. "I won't die here like a hunted 
 creature in a hole! I'll find some place or do some- 
 thing — I will get well ! " 
 
 Once, at a time of peculiar suffering there befell a 
 public excitement over a certain fall of meteorites, 
 which had some unusual character and was uneasily 
 watched. 
 
 "Oh, daughter," he said, with a low, weary cry, 
 "I wish it were the end of the world! " 
 
 This outcry, the only one which I can recall in 
 those twenty years of physical torment, made an 
 
THE CLOUD GATHERS. 117 
 
 impression proportioned to its rarity; the sound of 
 his voice, the look on his face — who that loved him 
 could forget? 
 
 In those first pitiful years — for they seem to me 
 more pitiful than the last — when the torment which 
 no medicine controlled went on, with its little inter- 
 vals of relief, like the long and the short strokes of a 
 bell, he did not often leave home. His chance of rest 
 was better in his own quiet house, for he was always 
 painfully sensitive to noise. A mouse in the wall, 
 the slam of a loose blind, voices in the street, a 
 cough in the house, the bark of a dog, the stamp of a 
 horse, would cost him the night. But we can see 
 now that those scorching Andover summers were all 
 wrong. He needed the mountains, the shore, life in 
 the air, cool nights. Hot weather always exhausted 
 him peculiarly. But it had never occurred to him 
 at this time that he should undertake the upheavals 
 and expenses of summer resorts for his own sake. 
 Everything for his family, anything for a child or 
 an invalid relative. But take all that trouble for 
 himself? It was the last idea which seems to have 
 presented itself to him. 
 
 Thinking of those blazing August weeks, when 
 the thermometer sometimes did not go below 90° for 
 many successive days and nights, we remember what 
 he must have suffered, and how little we understood 
 it. 
 
 Once, I know, there had been nearly a week of the 
 terrible weather. In all that time he had slept just 
 one hour. Try it, if you think this a light experi- 
 ence. His face became something heart-breaking 
 to look upon. He did not complain — he never did 
 
118 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 that. He did not say, "I suffer." He ceased to say 
 anything at all. He took his horse and went off 
 alone for hours for long drives. He came home 
 and shut his study door and bore it as he could. 
 There was nothing to do. Coax the children into 
 quiet by day, and creep down to listen at his door at 
 midnight, lest he have some mortal need of help, and 
 pray one's soul out for the one common mercy which 
 God denied him — but of what avail ? Insomnia is 
 the disease in which tenderness is as helpless as 
 science. There was nothing to be done. 
 
 On one of these burning afternoons I met him 
 coming from the barn where he had put up his horse. 
 I was trying to intercept him, to see about unhar- 
 nessing, that he might be spared the fatigue, and 
 perhaps, not understanding the motive, he may have 
 thought that he was watched with an intrusive sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 He stood still and turned his face toward me. 
 When he lay in his coffin it was not so ghastly, and 
 bore far less signs of suffering. He did not speak. 
 For a moment he regarded me remotelv, like a being 
 from some world of anguish which the common heart 
 of human love could neither comprehend nor enter. 
 Then, lest he should hurt or sadden one of his chil- 
 dren, he tried to smile, and the smile was the worst 
 of all. He passed on and went to his study and 
 locked the door — a vision of such anguish as the 
 memory would forget if it could. It is a comfort 
 even now to remember that on that night the starv- 
 ing brain was fed, and that God sent him sleep. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE FATHER. 
 
 It would be an interesting study in biographical 
 literature to note the proportion of public honors to 
 private virtues. Too many a great man has received 
 the plaudits of a world which knew too little of those 
 elements of personality that do not enter into the 
 world's rough calculations. A man's public work 
 and the ideals of domestic chivalry do not look the 
 same way. How many a saddened wife has drawn 
 the veil over a face that must betray no comment 
 when her husband's professional greatness is glori- 
 fied in her gentle ears ! How many a neglected or 
 unfortunately reared child has bitten a trembling lip 
 to restrain the bitter word that leaps to qualify a 
 father's fame ! 
 
 Wherever the fact of kin and the color of affection 
 may tint the canvas of the portrait, here, at least, the 
 palette cannot be questioned. Home-life is a ter- 
 rible revealer of values. Behind the drawn shades 
 and the closed door dwells the utter truth. If a 
 man's family may not testify what manner of man he 
 was, who should ? who can ? 
 
 It has been with a natural shrinking too profound 
 to bear more than an allusion that the writer of this 
 memorial has ventured to present, as impartially as 
 it could be gathered, the public view of Professor 
 
 119 
 
1^0 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 Phelps's history. It is with proud and perfect 
 assurance that I approach the picture of his private 
 life. 
 
 There has been comfort in the voluntary reassur- 
 ance of an old pupil of his : " Your filial estimate of 
 his character cannot possibly overdo the facts; and 
 to paint him as any less than the man you do would 
 be untrue to them." 
 
 Were the power of the artist but proportioned to 
 the rarity and beauty of the subject, there should 
 result such a picture as should stand framed in the 
 reverence of his friends as long as his memory is 
 honored or his character beloved. 
 
 We all know how hard it is to be all that we seem. 
 Some of us know the especial difficulties which beset 
 the brain-worker when he values the possession of a 
 symmetrical personal character. In a human home 
 centre all the blessedness and too much of the 
 weariness of life. The inevitable jar, the care, the 
 strain, the never-lulled anxiety, the friction of 
 need upon need and nature against nature which 
 every household involves, make more than the com- 
 monplace demand upon the exhausted nerve of the 
 man who must convert creative thought into public 
 respect and daily bread. 
 
 "When I hear one of his great speeches," said the 
 wife of a man more distinguished for his intellect 
 than for his temper, " when I listen to those, I think, 
 my child, we mustn't mind what he says to us at 
 home." 
 
 The great moral power of Professor Phelps's life, 
 to my mind at least, lay in its genuineness. He was, 
 all through, what his priestly calling required him 
 
THE FATHER. 121 
 
 to seem to be. He did not exist creditably in out- 
 side layers and wither toward the core. 
 
 The character which proves attractive in direct 
 proportion to acquaintance has a spiritual force 
 beside which mere professional pre-eminence is a 
 little matter. Such a force his was. The world 
 contains too many good husbands, too many kind 
 fathers, for us ever to lose the evidence of that high 
 home ideal of the masculine nature which is needed, 
 let us say, at least as much as the "ever womanly" 
 to sanctify and beautify the relations of tenderness. 
 Among these manly hearts we used to think that his 
 had certain graces peculiar to itself. 
 
 To an extent not common among intellectual men 
 he respected the claims of home-life upon his per- 
 sonal attention. It never seemed to occur to him 
 that because he was a man, a professional man, a lit- 
 erary man, a man driven by public work to the edge 
 of the last nerve, he was therefore to be released 
 from that individual devotion to the family dependent 
 upon him, which is not within sight when a man has 
 supported and educated his children and treated his 
 wife with affectionate civility. What he gave us he 
 gave with the eager generosity of his nature, and with 
 that matchless tenderness which it were hard to make 
 any child of his believe was not as much his own as 
 the power of his blue eye in the pulpit, or the silver 
 curl that we cut from his dead brow. He was gen- 
 uine all through because he was tender all through. 
 His love was as trustworthy as the rising and setting 
 of the sun beyond the windows of his study. In the 
 common phrase, "we always knew where to find 
 him." He never failed us. 
 
122 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 In sickness his devotion was something extraordi- 
 nary. I doubt if the memory of any of his children 
 goes back beyond his ministrations. In the large 
 and little ailments or illnesses of childhood and 
 youth we were not without good maternal care, nor 
 conscious of any deficiency in that direction ; but 
 which of us can recall a crisis of physical suffering 
 without him ? His was often the first eye to discover 
 the little one's need; his was the most frequent step 
 upon the stairs ; the tireless hand was his ; his the 
 tenderest word; his the loving invention that 
 brought relief or the hope that passes for it ; his the 
 gentlest watch, the dearest smile, the longed-for 
 touch ; and his the melting face, broken by the sight 
 of a child's pain, and illuminated by our relief or 
 recovery into something which we could only ex- 
 press in the old words which he had taught us to 
 revere : " And his countenance was like the counte- 
 nance of an angel." 
 
 How did the exhausted man answer to our igno- 
 rant exactions as he did, and turn to the lecture, to 
 the criticism, to the sermon, as he must? How did 
 the overwrought man lavish himself day or night 
 upon our need in the ivay he spent himself, and yet 
 never neglect the professional duty under which he 
 staggered ? 
 
 Thoughtless and clamorous, we took; spendthrift 
 of fatherly tenderness, he gave. So it was from eldest 
 born to youngest; so it was year upon year, and 
 from need unto need; from babyhood to childhood, 
 from childhood to youth; so it was when he who 
 ministered to us, himself began to need the ministra- 
 tions which he had poured upon the lives of those he 
 
THE FATHER. 123 
 
 loved; so it was even when he had passed heyond 
 the power to render to us what no one else ever did 
 or could. The impulse to call him when we were 
 suffering always sprang to the lips, even if it went 
 no further; it leaps to them yet. His impulse to 
 anticipate our call he never out-lived or out-suffered. 
 Has he done so yet? 
 
 Once, I remember, far on in his invalid life, one of 
 his family, seeking to spare him the knowledge of 
 pain for which he was no longer strong enough even 
 to exercise sympathy, had locked the doors upon the 
 situation and given no sign. The household, all 
 busy, and all ignorant of the state of the case, went 
 their ways as it was intended that they should. He 
 was in bed or upon it. It was one of his hardest 
 days, and he was believed to be quite safe from any 
 knowledge of an incident which would distress his 
 now helpless tenderness to no useful end. 
 
 But by and by there crept down the stairs and 
 sounded through the long hall that heavy, feeble 
 step which could not keep away from the need that 
 his fine insight alone suspected. Then fell upon the 
 door that dear finger-tap peculiar to himself which 
 we all knew by heart, and which none of us could 
 mistake though it fell upon the Golden Gates them- 
 selves, we waiting on the hither side for some one 
 to help us through. There was no denying entrance 
 to thoughtfulness like his. There was no resisting 
 his divine instinct to relieve suffering. In a few 
 moments the sick man, scouring the house for the 
 means of relief, which only he would ever have 
 thought of, had conquered the emergency. When 
 this was done, he crawled back to his own bed. 
 
124 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 In all other forms of need or dependence the story 
 was the same. It ran on, like a beautiful serial, 
 from chapter to chapter of our young lives. Else- 
 where we do not turn such pages. It used to be our 
 belief, and time has not yet shaken it, that he lav- 
 ished more thought and feeling, more study and 
 sympathy, more attention and devotion, upon his 
 children in one year than most of the quite comfort- 
 able young people whom we knew received from 
 busy fathers in six-fold that time. 
 
 The study was never a growlery. It was the 
 heart of home. We were never exiled from that 
 shelter of toil and peace. It was the living-room 
 and it was the loving-room of the house. Often 
 now, we wonder how he worked, with five noisy chil- 
 dren tramping and shouting over that great echoing 
 house, so little checked, so seldom rebuked or re- 
 quired by him to restrain their unhomiletical occu- 
 pations for his sake. 
 
 Of course, at times the key was turned in the 
 study door. Then we knew that the work was too 
 close, or the weariness too sore, for us to be wel- 
 comed. We respected that key. It was our habit 
 to steal on tiptoe (if we were so far thoughtful) up 
 through the dim hall and peep into the lock to see if 
 it were closed. But it had to be to keep us out. 
 Only this definite hint could convince his family 
 that there could be occasions when they were not 
 wanted in that temple of tenderness and rest. From 
 the beginning of the sweet, rare story, he was 
 the first, best, truest — sometimes, we thought, the 
 only — friend we had in the world. If ever a father 
 succeeded in successfully cultivating the acquaint- 
 
THE FATHER. 125 
 
 ance of his children, he was that father. We had 
 few secrets from him. Our young lives turned to 
 him as naturally, as utterly, as the keel turns to the 
 hand at the helm. Had we a trouble ?- Where was 
 he? From a toothache to a heartache, we flung it 
 upon his sympathy, which closed about it and us as 
 the divine power seems to close about the crises of 
 mature life. What was temptation? Take it to 
 Urn. Stern as the angel of the moral law, but melt- 
 ins as the movement of our own natures after that 
 which makes for righteousness," his yearning heart 
 answered to our little faults and penitence. With 
 all that throbbing tenderness and sympathy which 
 would have offered his life to save a child from pam, 
 he never "indulged," as the phrase goes below the 
 standard of strength. The moral ideal the spiritual 
 truth, must not be degraded because father loved 
 their children. Very early we found that out. We 
 never expected namby-pamby sympathy or senti- 
 mental liberality from him. 
 
 To disobey him was incredible. His word was 
 "like the law of the Lord." To tell him the utter 
 truth was inevitable. He and honor were one thing 
 in our minds. The scene in the study when one of 
 his eldest children told the first lie is too well re- 
 membered. The child was seven, and the falsehood 
 was proved and acknowledged. To the young father 
 this commonplace incident was a heart-rending expe- 
 rience. He had come home from a journey, ex- 
 hausted; but the moral crisis must not wait or a 
 man to rest. The awe in the little offender s heart 
 when the fatigue of travel deepened on that sensi- 
 tive face into the deadly pallor of overwhelming 
 
126 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 emotion cannot be forgotten yet. He spoke to the 
 child in a low, stern yet quivering voice such as 
 befitted the solemnity of some tremendous moral 
 event. It ceased to be an event — it became an 
 epoch to have uttered a falsehood. He spoke of the 
 holiness of truth and the beauty of honor; he dwelt 
 in language quite clear to the child's mind on the 
 enormity of that little act. Beneath his breath he 
 touched for a moment upon the tendency of falseness 
 in the heart. Liars, he said, in an awestruck, all 
 but inaudible tone, liars went to hell. But then 
 and there, before the child could cower beneath the 
 moral shock of his displeasure, — a displeasure which, 
 coming from that ideal of fatherly gentleness, seemed 
 like the rebuke of offended God Himself, — this too 
 human father bowed his face and wept bitterly. 
 
 Those heavy sobs, that melting sight, never heard 
 or seen before or since, effected what word or rod 
 could not have done. Awed into shame, silenced by 
 this revelation of the truth that no soul sinneth to 
 itself, the child crept to his feet and sobbed with 
 him. At that hour was the abhorrence of dishonor 
 born in the heart. That lie was the last. 
 
 It might be added that this first lesson in the 
 father's creed of moral retribution was almost the 
 last. No more was needed. That child, at least, 
 required no damnatory hymns or threatening doc- 
 trine to complete a religious training. The father's 
 belief was a terrific, and in so far, it must be owned, 
 a beneficent moral fact in that young life. This 
 union of human theology with what might be called 
 divine tenderness was characteristic of the man. 
 
 As his children gained in years, his power of 
 
THE FATHER. 127 
 
 parental divination gained with them. His matur- 
 ing sons did not grow away from him. That dream 
 of fatherhood which had blessed their childhood pro- 
 tected their youth. The darkest hour of college 
 temptation was shared, first or last, with him. The 
 boyish religious skepticism, inevitable to a thought- 
 ful mind, went as straight to him as the evening 
 prayer had gone when the baby's face hid upon his 
 knee, and the baby's heart, possibly a little perplexed 
 whether one were praying to God or to " Papa," poured 
 out the joys and trouble of a summer day. 
 
 It was a little thing, but it was one of the little 
 tilings that bespeak great ones, that this affectionate 
 title, usually dropped behind with childhood, never 
 left the lips of his grown children. In the fulness of 
 manhood his sons were not ashamed of the dear word 
 by which their infancy had known him. To the end 
 he was to them what the beginning made him. To 
 this day the more stately parental appellation remains 
 a term of formality adapted to the presence of stran- 
 gers. The ineffable tenderness which made him 
 what he was to our young needs, bound our man- 
 hood and womanhood to him with a peculiarly 
 dependent continuity of which this little fact was 
 only the pretty symbol. 
 
 Among the letters, which will form the most val- 
 uable pages of this book, will be found specimens of 
 his correspondence with his children, which cannot 
 be without interest for any one who had interest in 
 him or in the parental type which they express. As 
 noticeable as their tenderness and that sensitive 
 thoughtfulness which he never lost for any living 
 creature who had claims upon him, is the impressive 
 
128 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 evidence of respect which these letters offer to the 
 child. Such lavish expenditure of intellect and feeling 
 is not too usual in the relation of fathers to children. 
 Thought enough and painstaking care enough went 
 into many of those letters, which were never expected 
 to go beyond the pocket of a careless boy or girl, to 
 have formed the basis of a useful piece of literary 
 labor. Let them do their best now to atone for the 
 sacrifice. 
 
 He was an impulsive man, for all his godly qual- 
 ities, and sometimes he spoke quickly. I do not 
 remember that he was ever cross, or that he ever 
 scolded. These common phases of masculine expres- 
 sion seem to have been morally beneath him — per- 
 haps by some high legacy of character, they were 
 unnatural to him. Something of his mother's sweet, 
 uncomplaining temperament was in the sturdier soul 
 of the son. Still, he was not without moments of 
 impulsive ardor, when the exactions or defects of a 
 family would bring the stinging word leaping to his 
 delicate lips. More often they closed in that silent 
 scorn which we felt to be the keenest rebuke we 
 ever had from him. Before a certain turn at the 
 corners of his mouth, any sensitive child would hang 
 the head and creep away, more severely punished 
 than if a sermon or a tirade or a physical pain had 
 struck the offence or the offender. 
 
 Yet, when he did speak a little too soon, he was 
 so afraid that he had wronged the child, he was so 
 grieved lest he had seemed to lose a temper which 
 really, I think, he seldom or never did, that nothing 
 could undo the possible mistake quickly or kindly 
 enough. Then how his heart moved toward us! 
 
THE FATHER. 129 
 
 How that swift tenderness started on wings to ns! 
 It flew and enfolded us like an angel. We crept 
 under it, resolved and comforted and repentant. At 
 those moments a kind of worship arose in the heart 
 of the child who had been treated with a father's 
 respect and regret. It was one of the rare things 
 about him, that he was not ashamed to apologize to 
 the child whom he might have wronged. The few 
 occasions upon which this happened made profound 
 impression upon the moral characters which his was 
 forming. Of that simple nobility, which of us ever 
 took a low advantage ? It was a thing too high. 
 
 More often, when the case did not reach the limits 
 of parental mistake, his fine sensibility quivered over 
 some small scene in which he fancied himself too 
 severe. Then came the little sign of love to be 
 treasured as long as one can treasure anything. 
 Sometimes it was a journey up stairs to the locked 
 room to say the word of reassuring tenderness; or 
 it was a kiss without a word; or it was a silent 
 pressure of the hand. Perhaps it was some little 
 gift — a book, a flower, or a trifle for the always 
 empty pocket of the boy. Again, we found on our 
 table at night a card, a note : — 
 
 "Dear son" or "Dear daughter: I didn't mean to 
 scold you. Good night." 
 
 Or, " My dear child : I have thought much of you 
 to-day. My heart is with you in all your thoughts 
 and longings. Papa." 
 
 Tenderness like this lent a kind of romance to his 
 relations with his children. "He had a magnetic 
 power over all his boys," said one of his grown sons. 
 
 But what can we say? When the pen tries to tell 
 
130 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 the story, it falters too much to tell it as it should be 
 told to give to those who loved him, but knew not 
 why as well as we did, any just estimate of what 
 was the finest, and perhaps in the vision of spirits 
 the greatest, aspect of the man — his fatherhood. 
 This only, without tinge of exaggerated feeling, 
 should be added : That supreme tenderness mingled 
 with that firm rectitude of government, that utter 
 self-sacrifice, that tireless care, that bountiful for- 
 giveness, and that ideal of moral nobility which he 
 translated to our souls through the medium of per- 
 fect love, — these are the memories which have made 
 the conception of a loving God seem reasonable to 
 us in these days when the faith of man is sorely tried, 
 and when clouds and darkness are around the throne 
 of Him whom the religious instinct of the ages 
 searches with bitter tears. We have been taught 
 what parental love at its highest form may be and 
 do. It is not too much to say that this earthly 
 father gave us that solemn trust in, to a certain 
 extent gave us that comprehension of, the fatherly 
 qualities which lead the groping soul to say: "If 
 the Heavenly Father is like that, I shall not find it 
 hard to be His loving child." 
 
 It is apt to be through the best part of us that we 
 receive the worst of earthly discipline. And it was 
 through Professor Phelps's own beautifully devel- 
 oped fatherhood that one of the crudest sorrows of 
 his life was destined to strike home to his heart. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 SHUT IN. 
 
 One of the stories which Professor Phelps used to 
 tell with keen appreciation was that of the man who 
 "always made it a point to keep away from unhappy 
 people." A similar instinct exists in the wel 
 towards the sick. From Goethe, criticising j Schil- 
 ler for his "pathological poetry" down to the last 
 light gossip who tosses the reputation of an invalid 
 neighbor about as the devil tosses the souk of the 
 damned on a pitchfork in the "mad painter s old 
 sketch, runs the same difficulty in comprehending - 
 perhaps the same reluctance to W*^~™ 
 conditions of a being less physically fortunate than 
 
 When a man has been twenty years an invalid, 
 and when much of his work has been done at the 
 odds of such a history, it is impossible to ignore the 
 uncheerful fact. One cannot altogether "get away 
 from the unhappy" circumstance. A few words, 
 however, will cover the subject better than many ; 
 and into these few let us compress what we have left 
 to say about the invalid years of Professor Phelps. 
 
 It should be clearly understood that his battle tor 
 recovery was as brave, long, and vigorous as his 
 patience under defeat was memorable. In the course 
 of a varied experiment of medical treatment, he was 
 
132 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 the subject of some professional mistakes, which, 
 while they may have prolonged his life, added in 
 certain respects to his sufferings, or substituted 
 others in their places. The ignorance of our most 
 enlightened science in the management of nervous 
 disease is nothing less than appalling. Anything 
 else may be understood; almost anything else may 
 be intelligently controlled. There are ruffian souls 
 that cast the word "hypochondriac " — a vitriol — on 
 the bare nerve of suffering nobly borne and ignobly 
 interpreted. 
 
 It is a matter of history that in the days of the 
 Most Holy Catholic Inquisition there was found one 
 torture supreme above all others ; one surest to com- 
 pel the renunciation of faith, the sacrifice of honor; 
 one which human nerve found itself most helpless to 
 resist, and human will most hopeless of defying; one 
 above all the ingenuities of intelligent cruelty most 
 dreaded by the accused, and most abhorred by the 
 quivering memory of the victim. This was the tor- 
 ture of enforced sleeplessness. It is said that four 
 or five nights and days of this ecclesiastical amuse- 
 ment were sufficient to bring the most refractory 
 heretic to abject terms. 
 
 As the illness of Professor Phelps advanced, cer- 
 tain traits in his character never half appreciated, 
 perhaps never half perceived by his friends, began to 
 develop in him, like militia under drill for an unex- 
 pected war. 
 
 First and finest of these was his heroic patience. 
 It is doubtful if he had ever been thought a particu- 
 larly patient man before ; this high grace had lacked 
 
SHUT IN. 133 
 
 the chance to perform her perfect work upon the 
 busy, stirring man. Now came the opportunity to 
 achieve that close moral conquest, — to an active 
 brain and urgent will and feverish aspiration one of 
 the hardest in life. 
 
 It is the peculiarity of this quality, that its very 
 essence leads to forms which prevent early or easy 
 recognition. A virtue that speaks or shouts or does 
 or dares we cannot overlook. The grace which says 
 nothing is the last to attract the attention of speak- 
 ing, shouting, doing, daring spectators. How long 
 had he been so still, so gentle, so uncomplaining, 
 before we found out that one of God's most patient 
 souls dwelt like a dumb angel in that tottering 
 house of clay ? 
 
 To some of us the discovery came in a moment's 
 revelation. What was it? — a turn of the head? 
 the falling of an eyelid? or a quiver in the voice? 
 To some it was a slower lesson. We learned it early 
 in those long years when pain and sympathy con- 
 fronted each other, daily guests in the old white 
 house ; or we did not learn it till the end approached. 
 To all of us it was a gospel — that gospel of unself- 
 ish endurance which, once received into the heart's 
 life, never eludes it. " You draw a picture of what I 
 try to be," he said gently once, when something was 
 said to him of this marvellous patience. 
 
 His incessant thoughtfulness for other people, his 
 eager effort to save trouble, his silence about his own 
 worst suffering, his unvarying — one might almost 
 say celestial — sweet temper, were in high contrast 
 with the spirit in which he was sometimes misun- 
 derstood by those who did not know him. We who 
 did, have our facts, and we hold them precious, 
 
134 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 Is it ever worth while to be the prisoner of pain 
 for the better part of a man's life, — to be stricken 
 from the ranks of the righting, down into the dust, 
 underneath foot of horse and soldier, there to lie 
 
 " Unable or to move or die " ? 
 
 Is it ever worth it in God's awful economy of spirit- 
 ual forces in order to teach the restless " insolence of 
 health " what patience means, what resignation is, 
 what trust may do ? If it ever is, those twenty years 
 have not been wasted. 
 
 It is touching to remember how little he said in 
 all that time of what it cost him to surrender his life's 
 work in the prime of his strength and at the summit 
 of his usefulness and success. 
 
 In his books he has once or twice given to his 
 public, as a reserved soul sometimes will, a kind of 
 pathetic confidence withheld from the nearest friend. 
 
 In the essay which he calls " The Premature Clos- 
 ing of a Life's Work," 1 he says of such sufferers: 
 "They are peremptorily stopped in their career of 
 usefulness. The work so dear to them, never dearer 
 than now, is passed over to the hands of others. 
 When everything promises to them prolonged suc- 
 cess, and the winding up of their career by some 
 achievement of signal value to the world, they come 
 suddenly against a wall of adamant. They are shut 
 in; cannot take another step. . . . Such unlooked- 
 for disappointments, which no human wisdom would 
 have planned, often come violently. They seem like 
 a buffet in the face. They resemble the dislocation 
 of one's very bones. 
 
 1 "My Portfolio," 
 
SHUT IN. 135 
 
 "With one consent they all say, 'We never were 
 so well prepared for our work as now. ' These for- 
 bidden builders are a great multitude. Others rear 
 with songs the superstructure of which they have 
 laid the foundation with tears. Their work is un- 
 derground, out of sight. Their more fortunate suc- 
 cessors are the men whom the world knows and 
 honors. They have gathered the gold and the cedar 
 and the ships of transport and the cunning work- 
 men ; but others have the glory of using these to the 
 grand purpose, and, what is vastly more, the joy of 
 the doing of it. Look around; you find the world 
 full of these arrested, rebuffed, disappointed, though 
 willing — oh, how willing ! — workers. 
 
 "Why is it that some good men must go down 
 life's last decade with the tottering limbs of a sec- 
 ond infancy? Sad, unspeakably sad, is that com- 
 ment which we sometimes have to make upon one 
 whom the world has honored with its trust in high 
 places : ' He has been a learned man, a wise man, a 
 great man; but now — ■' So strange a humiliation 
 of a great mind and an heir of God must have some- 
 thing to do with its preparation for an immortal 
 youth. ' Except ye become as little children. ' 
 Some may not be able to become that, except 
 through the vale of second childhood. That earthly 
 silence may be the great opportunity preparative to 
 fitness for a service in the coming life, compared 
 with which the grandest service of this life is but 
 infantile. The sleep of the chrysalis is the fore- 
 runner of golden glory. If one can but believe that 
 God's plan is made up of such inspiring mysteries ! 
 Yet why not? . . . Why should we not believe that 
 
136 AUSTIN" PHELPS. 
 
 God's reasons for things are like Him ? ' It must be 
 His doing,' as Charles Kingsley said, 'because it is 
 so strange and so painful.' None but an infinite 
 mind could plan some things as they are in the lives 
 of us all, and yet make them come out right in the 
 end." 
 
 Elsewhere 1 he has spoken more frankly and more 
 pathetically : — 
 
 " The bodily sensations which no well friend can 
 understand; the inexpressible mental weariness 
 which a healthy brain cannot conceive of; the abso- 
 lute forgetfulness of what healthy sensation is, which 
 makes it impossible for a sick man to enter into the 
 spring-tide of life around him; the suppression of 
 speech about his own condition through fear of being 
 a discomfort to his friends ; the struggle to be silent 
 when speech if indulged would be irritable; the 
 nights of watching when he can almost hear the 
 breathing of the world asleep, and when he seems to 
 have more companionship with creatures of the dark- 
 ness than with his own kind; and, above all, the 
 forced withdrawal from the labors of past years, with 
 the closing up of the little space which he occupied 
 in the world's thoughts, and the drooping of his 
 friendships because of his inability to cultivate them, 
 ■ — in short, that consciousness, premonitory of the 
 grave, that the world is sweeping by him and over 
 him, — all these peculiarities of an invalid's life 
 force him back, perhaps from all human ties. 
 
 " They tend to create a sense of isolation, from 
 which no relief is practicable if it does not help him 
 
 1 "The Solitude of Christ." 
 
SHUT IN. 137 
 
 to come into sympathy with Christ's solitude, and 
 help him to know Christ's sympathy with him. 
 
 "It is well that an invalid should be sensible of 
 the danger of a morbid piety in a morbid body. 
 Jealousy of himself just here can do no harm. Yet 
 when disease plainly crowds him into moral loneli- 
 ness, he cannot be mistaken in using it as one of 
 God's expedients for schooling him. You cannot 
 go wrong if practically your soul comes nearer to 
 Christ. We do not know that it matters much 
 whether we get there by the easiest way or not." 
 
 In 1873 Professor Phelps removed for the summer 
 to Ripton, Vt., where for several seasons he seemed 
 to gain strength in the tonic of the mountain air. 
 When his failing system had exhausted this expe- 
 dient, he was taken, as a desperate experiment, to 
 Bar Harbor, Me. The long journey was serious for 
 so ill a man, and it was certain to none of us that he 
 might not die upon the way. In this grave and 
 difficult decision his eldest son's was the deciding 
 voice, to which his father listened with the docility 
 of the peculiar love which he always cherished for 
 this treasured child. 
 
 With the utmost tenderness to us all and the most 
 conscientious desire to treat every child of his with 
 equal devotion, it was always true that he held his 
 son Stuart in a kind of heart's relationship with 
 which conscience and equality have nothing to do. 
 This we all understood. No word ever said it, no 
 act of undue partiality ever betrayed it ; but the fact 
 was accepted readily as it was happily by us all. 
 The sunny-hearted, cool-headed boy, whose tempera- 
 ment was so congenial to his father, and whose filial 
 
138 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 service was so useful to him in emergencies where 
 no one else knew just what to do or how to do it, 
 had woven himself too deeply into that life, already 
 overborne with sorrow. 
 
 This eldest son, still well remembered by his 
 pupils and in collegiate circles as a promising young 
 psychologist, was at the time of his death the Pro- 
 fessor of Metaphysics at Smith College. Well 
 trained for his specialty, and succeeding in it, he 
 had gratified his father's natural ambition for him, 
 and gave every pledge for a future full of intel- 
 lectual power and practical value. With a very lov- 
 able personal character, he had — we never wondered 
 why — endeared himself pathetically to that which 
 is more clamorous than ambition in the soul of a 
 loving man : he was his father's treasure, he was the 
 well-beloved son. 
 
 During the inevitable perplexities of those invalid 
 years this child had been the staff of life to the 
 shaken man. The management of all doubts and 
 difficulties arising out of the question of resigning 
 the chair at Andover which beset that troubled time, 
 came eventually into this young man's hands. 
 Through them went at last to the trustees of the 
 institution, in 1879, the irrevocable decision by 
 which Professor Phelps abandoned his active con- 
 nection with the Seminary, retaining the Emeritus, 
 and the hope of being able to accede to the urgent 
 wish that he might continue to give occasional lec- 
 tures. This hope the advance of his disease soon 
 thwarted. 
 
 It is pathetic to find carefully preserved among 
 his papers both the official and the personal letters 
 
SHUT IN. 139 
 
 coming from the Board of Trustees when it was finally 
 forced to accept his resignation. 
 
 These letters express a bereavement which is not 
 so common under such circumstances that it did not 
 deeply move the sick and sensitive man. 
 
 " I cannot allow our vote as a Board of Trustees to 
 go to you," ran one of these letters, "without adding 
 a personal word as one of the number, expressing, I 
 am sure, the feeling of every gentleman upon the 
 Board. . . . We regard the loss as irreparable. . . . 
 We only submit to what seems to be inevitable. . . . 
 No words from the Board of Trustees as a body, or 
 from any member of the Board, can ever express what 
 we all feel — our gratitude to God for that tower of 
 strength which the Lord has enabled you to be to 
 Andover Seminary for more than thirty years." 
 
 The effort to give occasional service was consci- 
 entiously made. There was something pitiful about 
 those last struggles to meet the needs and wishes of 
 the Seminary. Sometimes the class came to his own 
 house, he being too ill to leave it; and there, in his 
 large dining-room, his affectionate students took 
 those few final notes which many of them cherish to 
 this day. Often he rose from his bed and tottered 
 into his carriage to reach the lecture-room. It was a 
 distress to him that he could no longer stand at his 
 desk. His broken voice faltered in the few words of 
 prayer with which, as his wont was, he opened the 
 lecture hour. 
 
 It is said that a touching scene took place in that 
 old Senior class-room when, after a prolonged absence 
 from service, he returned for one more — it proved to 
 be his last — experiment at his post of service. The 
 
140 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 students had abandoned hope of any more instruction 
 from Professor Phelps, and the announcement of an 
 actual appointment to meet them was an event in 
 the Seminary. The lecture-room was filled and 
 quiet. As the sick man came in, supported by his 
 son, and turned feebly toward the platform, the 
 audience rose by one instinct to its feet. In perfect 
 silence, and with bowed, reverent faces, the stu- 
 dents received the beloved Professor whom God had 
 stricken. Alwa} T s sensitive — too sensitive — to the 
 signs of affection in his pupils, he was overcome by 
 this little tribute. His blanched face quivered, he 
 tried to speak, but bowed his head on his desk and 
 struggled to regain himself before his class. He 
 never could refer to that moment after it had passed ; 
 it meant 
 
 "What lip of man can never frame, 
 The prescience that hath no name." 
 
 What it signified of desperate hope and mute de- 
 spair, what it held of gentle acquiescence in the will 
 of God and of untold entreaty that the cup might 
 even yet pass from him, God only knows. What 
 such a moment was to such a man, one must pass 
 through a similar situation with a kindred tempera- 
 ment to understand. 
 
 In these dark hours the good judgment and loving 
 aid of his first-born son drew father and child to- 
 gether with a bond so close and so tender that we 
 did not even tremble or wonder or say, "What if 
 this came to an end ? " It never occurred to any of 
 us that it could end. 
 
 In August, 1883, Professor M. Stuart Phelps 
 
SHUT IN. 141 
 
 went to the forests of Maine for his vacation hunting- 
 trip. He was a good shot, an experienced woods- 
 man, and a cool, cautious, unimpulsive man. No 
 one gave an hour's anxiety to his vacations. He 
 was the last one in the family on whom we thought 
 it necessary to expend a worry or a rational fear. 
 
 He went to Bar Harbor, to the cottage which Pro- 
 fessor Phelps had built in that beautiful spot, and 
 which he loved probably more than any home he 
 ever had on earth. There father and son endeared 
 themselves to each other anew for a little space, in 
 the blessed ignorance of fate which God vouchsafes 
 to our weakness; then, without a fear, without a 
 premonition, they parted. 
 
 The young professor went into the woods with his 
 friend, Rev. Newman Smythe, of New Haven. He was 
 gone but a few days. On the morning of August 
 29th he called to his Indian guide to row down the 
 lake with him alone for a time. "Come, Joe," he 
 said, laughing, "let us go on." His foot slipped in 
 the mud; the trigger of his loaded gun caught on 
 the gunwale; the full discharge lodged in the base 
 of the brain ; he fell on the shores of the lake, sixty 
 miles in the forest, and as far from sign of human 
 habitation or chance of human help. 
 
 By the mercy of God death was instant. Borne 
 on the shoulders of his Indian guides, and accompa- 
 nied by his shocked and shaken friend, by canoe, and 
 through "carry," he was brought out of the wilder- 
 ness, and the telegram went that night to his poor 
 father. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 LAST YEARS. 
 
 "It will kill him! It will kill that invalid 
 father ! " 
 
 From friend to friend the prophecy leaped. Few 
 of us expected any other result. Those who knew 
 the full extent of his physical decline, and who 
 knew what the cherished child was to the sinking 
 man, looked hourly for the despatch which should 
 say, "He, too!" 
 
 In the thickest of that black hour his still healthy 
 and strong soul took us all by surprise. It arose 
 like a dying soldier, and struck out with its crippled 
 power and hewed about it, and fought mightily for 
 the trust and for the courage of a Christian believer, 
 whose God could do no wrong. He won his battle 
 — all who knew him well remember how. After 
 the first mortal cry he closed his trembling lips and 
 bore the vital stroke as a brave man may. 
 
 On the night when the word reached the cottage 
 at Bar Harbor, his wife, whose devotion and affection 
 were the staff and comfort of his invalid years, 
 sought to keep the truth from him till morning, hop- 
 ing by one night's possible rest to secure a little 
 strength for him whereby to meet the blow. Her 
 face betrayed her, and when she came in her usual 
 self-possessed way to offer the evening reading with 
 142 
 
LAST YEARS. 143 
 
 which it was her habit to minister to him, he turned 
 suddenly, and said : — 
 
 "Mary! one of the children is dead ! . . . Which 
 is it ? Is it Stuart ? or ? " 
 
 "After this," he wrote that autumn to a friend, 
 "after this, anything may happen." 
 
 Perhaps the worst hour of all was when the locked 
 trunk came from the Maine forest to the gay Bar 
 Harbor shore. 
 
 The father would suffer no hand but his own to 
 touch those pitiful relics. For hours he remained 
 locked into his room with them. Even his wife was 
 denied entrance, and those who listened without the 
 door, fearing a mortal turn to the scene which no one 
 could interrupt, cannot trust themselves to recall the 
 memory of that sacred agony. Into that " chamber 
 over the Gate" who could intrude? 
 
 He used to speak of the gun which did the deed 
 as "that fearful yet sacred thing." He looked upon 
 it, he said, something as he might have looked upon 
 "the Cross after the Crucifixion." He wished it to 
 be buried in the new-made grave, but yielded gently 
 to the wishes of some other member of the family, 
 and this was not done. But, after that first inevi- 
 table moan he sprang to his Christian privilege of 
 cheerful faith. Friends of his, men experienced in 
 the tragedies of life, refer to-day to the " marvellous 
 letters " which he wrote in answer to their expres- 
 sions of sympathy. From the beginning, he seems 
 to have determined to bear his sorrow as one who 
 trusted God to the uttermost. 
 
 Men have done this before, and will do it, bless 
 
144 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 God! to the end; but it was not expected, for evi- 
 dent reasons, of him. His temperament was natur- 
 ally tragic. Life had not gone easily with him. He 
 was not superficially what is called "cheerful." He 
 was a broken and a dying man. 
 
 In view of these facts, we stood astounded before 
 his courage, before his patience, and before his 
 strong, almost triumphant good cheer and good hope 
 and good sense in the endurance of his grief. We 
 learned lessons from it never to be forgotten. His 
 thoughtfulness for others then, as ever, came upper- 
 most, and came steadily. The birthday of one of his 
 absent children occurring upon the day following 
 that on which the tragedy took place, he found it 
 possible even to remember to send the solemn, tender 
 telegram whose " God bless you, my child," held such 
 twofold, heart-moving significance. It was like him. 
 
 To the amazement of us all, his health after that 
 August day did not immediately or rapidly decline. 
 On the contrary, it might even be said that he 
 gained. His summer had been more than usually 
 a comfortable one. He used to say that God had 
 been storing up strength for him wherewith to bear 
 what was to come. For some time his whole being 
 sublimated itself into a kind of religious rapture. 
 The bodily frailty bent, like a demon yoked, and 
 seemed to be the subject of the ecstasy of soul which 
 overtook him. He became exalted, and "walked 
 with God." Perhaps it was at this time that he 
 wrote : " But in our darkened homes and in the awful 
 solitude which makes the packed streets a wilderness 
 to us, we need some other friend than Nature." 
 
 For a long time after this grief befell him, his 
 
LAST YEARS. 145 
 
 condition was as practical a triumph of Christian 
 faith over mortal weakness as the protest of any 
 skeptic need ask to witness. This, we like to think, 
 was a part of the usefulness of those many secluded 
 and suffering years. In the view of some of his old 
 friends, these were by no means the least useful por- 
 tion of his too active life. 
 
 As he became slowly convinced that his profes- 
 sional labors could never be renewed in this world, 
 his mind concentrated itself upon the "next duty" 
 with the intensity inseparable from his nature. 
 
 At first, the conviction came hard enough. Over- 
 tures from other posts of labor reached him so thickly 
 as almost to delude him into the belief that recovery 
 was still a bright possibility for him. In the course 
 of his Andover career in his best years it may be 
 briefly and generally mentioned, without specifica- 
 tion, that he had received calls or their equivalents, 
 some of them urgent and persistent, from every 
 important theological institution in the country. 
 Almost every desirable academic chair within his 
 department, and some outside of it, had been offered 
 to him. Influential metropolitan pulpits had not 
 failed to make efforts to decoy him back to the pas- 
 toral work. Among his private notes are records of 
 these calls or overtures to calls ; but he seldom spoke 
 of them even to his family. He had a delicate mod- 
 esty about his own professional value. It was a 
 thing which he left to speak for itself. 
 
 Now, in his failing days, suggestions that he give 
 such work as he could, filling any lectureship which 
 might be possible to him in another institution, came 
 to him with especial force. I think he was deeply 
 
146 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 touched to be reminded, at the very crisis of his de- 
 cline, that the stirring world of thought and labor 
 still remembered and needed him. He even con- 
 sidered seriously whether the fact of working in a 
 new atmosphere — climatic, intellectual, and aca- 
 demic — - might not start the dying tires and give the 
 power that the old environment could no longer be- 
 stow upon a shattered nervous system. But the 
 physical facts were inexorable. He surrendered this 
 last dream with God knows what unspoken strug- 
 gles, and bowed to his fate. 
 
 It was now that he turned his failing strength 
 steadily in the direction of those literary and relig- 
 ious labors which occupied the latter part of his life. 
 He wrote — one is astounded to see how much. He 
 wrote when he was fit and when he was unfit. He 
 would rise from his bed to get to his desk, finish the 
 article, and go back to bed. Sometimes he wrote in 
 pencil, propped up on his pillows. Several of his 
 last books were prepared during those years of retire- 
 ment and pain. A full list of his publications, or 
 as full a one as can be now secured, will be found 
 elsewhere in this volume. 
 
 He wrote much for the religious organs of his 
 denomination, chiefly for the Congregationalist, with 
 whose editor, Rev. Dr. Dexter, he was in strong 
 sympathy. His publishers, the Messrs. Scribner's 
 Sons, brought out his books as fast as he could pre- 
 pare them, and in these peaceful toils his last years 
 passed quietly. 
 
 Professor Phelps was, more distinctly than some 
 other men of equivalent general culture and personal 
 power, a sectarian in his habit of mind. Yet when 
 
LAST YEARS. 147 
 
 we recall his tolerant interest in other denomina- 
 tions of religions belief, we seem to have chosen the 
 wrong word. We might rather call him ecclesiasti- 
 cal. But, again, that seems too narrow a term for 
 his intense Christianity. Religious he was to the 
 last atom, Orthodox he was to the last heart-throb, 
 Evangelical to the last fibre. It was in the blood; 
 it was in the brain ; and it was in the trend of his 
 academic life. It is doubtful if any life would have 
 entirely shaken out of him that instinct to estimate 
 affairs theologically which the atmosphere of a uni- 
 versity town strengthens in far more worldly men 
 than he. 
 
 At all events, that was the fact. His published 
 work to the end was colored by it ; and more at the 
 end than at the beginning. The world-wide popu- 
 larity of " The Still Hour " was not to be expected of 
 books of a more restricted character, but they found 
 and held their own public, and performed a valuable 
 service to the last. 
 
 In the affection of a certain class of his readers — 
 not the largest, but perhaps the surviving fit — there 
 remains one book (the poet E. R. Sill would have 
 called it a "booklet") beloved above the rest. I 
 refer to the tiny volume from which we have already 
 quoted. Always excepting "The Still Hour," in 
 whose behalf the voice of the people seems to have 
 been the voice of God, the tract — for it was scarcely 
 more — known as "The Solitude of Christ" seems to 
 me to have folded in its little covers some of his best 
 work. 
 
 Of course, from the conditions of the subject, it is 
 not a gay book. Light readers have been known to 
 
148 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 put it aside, saying, " It is too sad." Such a criticism 
 from such sources is enough to allure to the book the 
 type of soul to which life is too real to be a gay 
 affair. Sensitive organizations possessing that kind 
 of religious culture to which his work appeals will 
 have found in these refined and sympathetic pages a 
 spiritual gem to be worn out of sight and cherished 
 silently. 
 
 His most important work, professionally speak- 
 ing, was, of course, the publication of his Andover 
 lectures. Under the titles " The Theory of Preach- 
 ing 1 ' and "English Style in Public Discourse," 
 he gathered from the lecture desk the work of his 
 lifetime, and gave it to his public. This has 
 proved a kindly, faithful public, crowded with his 
 old pupils, and loving as much as it has valued the 
 permanent form of that flitting service which the 
 Professor rendered at the old Senior desk on Andover 
 Hill. 
 
 It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that these 
 volumes have become the standard text-books, and 
 bid fair to become the classics of the department 
 which he represented. The quiet and steady demand 
 for the efforts of his pen stimulated and gratified 
 the sick man, and helped to protect him from falling 
 into that quicksand of despondency and inertia which 
 engulfs too many an afflicted creature whose world is 
 bounded by a doctor's order and four hospitalized 
 walls. He wrote persistently and studiously — as 
 he always had; he wrote vigorously. Some of his 
 best work, intellectually considered, was done in the 
 last five years of his life, and he wrote till the utter 
 end; the hand dropped before the pen did. 
 
LAST YEARS. 149 
 
 During the time of which we speak, he vibrated 
 between the two homes, both deeply endeared to him 
 n0W5 — that in Andover and that in Bar Harbor. 
 
 By the courtesy of the Board of Trustees the use of 
 his house at Andover had been voted him for life. 
 A similar consideration was extended to Professor 
 Park, to Professor Moses Stuart, and, I think, to Dr. 
 Woods, of the earlier regime. In Andover he spent 
 his winters. But the increase of his exhaustion re- 
 quired each year an earlier and earlier departure to 
 the invigorating air of the Maine coast. The unpre- 
 tending little cottage which he had built in Bar 
 Harbor became a paradise to him. For the last two 
 years of his life he migrated during the first weeks 
 of March, and he remained by the sea till nearly 
 November. He longed with exceeding longing, 
 toward the end, to avoid that hard journey, which, 
 in his enfeebled state, took three days, and to hiber- 
 nate peacefully beside his beloved waves and moun- 
 tains. But his thoughtf ulness for his wife and 
 nurse restrained the active expression of this wish. 
 
 Nothing could exceed the kindness with which he 
 was received upon those painful pilgrimages by the 
 corporations of the railways which bore the patient 
 sufferer, year by year, at such unfashionable dates 
 that it was impossible to forget him. To Mr. James 
 T. Furber, of the Boston and Maine Railroad, and to 
 Mr. Payson Tucker, of the Maine Central, he was 
 indebted for generous courtesies which touched him 
 so much that we are grateful to remember them 
 now. Certain of the conductors and captains of 
 steamers troubled themselves so far and so heartily 
 for his comfort that we cannot see their faces to-day 
 
150 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 without the heart-throb that calls a blessing upon 
 the cordial sympathy of men not too often thanked 
 for their faithful service to the public. The em- 
 ployees of the road came to look for the feeble form 
 and pale face of the passenger whose sweet smile 
 never failed to bestow the acknowledgments which 
 he might be unable to speak. 
 
 We have not spoken — there may be no better 
 place to do it — of the beautiful relation which 
 existed between Professor Phelps and classes of peo- 
 ple not always understood by educated men. To 
 his mind there seems to have been no beneath and no 
 above ; he was essentially a Christian democrat. 
 
 In commercial transactions he was not easily 
 duped; he was clear-eyed, firm, and attentive to his 
 just interests. A prominent Chicago lawyer who 
 conducted his affairs for many years testified that he 
 had never met in his whole experience a professional 
 man, more especially a clerically professional man, 
 whose business judgment equalled that of Professor 
 Phelps. 
 
 There is a certain form of consideration for the 
 poor and ignorant which (in their minds, at least) 
 consists chiefly in an infinite capacity for being im- 
 posed upon. His philanthropic impulses were not of 
 that kind; but he had a certain moral beauty of 
 manner in his treatment of those less fortunate than 
 himself which worked like a magnet. The pauper 
 at the door might be privately sheltered in the barn 
 over nisrht — - the master of the house half ashamed to 
 own up to it, but found immovable. It was no fit 
 night to turn a fellow-creature from his threshold, 
 
LAST YEARS. 151 
 
 and it should not be done. Tramps by the score re- 
 ceived their dinner at the back door of the old white 
 mansion, whose stately appearance was sure to attract 
 them in more than common proportion. 
 
 We were instructed even at the height of the anti- 
 tramp agitation never to turn away a hungry man 
 unfed. No harm ever came of that innocent social- 
 istic imprudence. Not infrequently he came out 
 from his study and talked with these waifs of for- 
 tune. Certain victims of the war, with sad eyes and 
 hollow chests, honest, disabled soldiers, whose pen- 
 sions had not yet "come round," turned year after 
 year to his door, — less, I think, for any other help 
 which they received than for the overflowing sym- 
 pathy which they were sure of at that house. They 
 would watch his tender face as that high illumina- 
 tion which everybody knew who knew him mounted 
 from quivering lip to filling eye, and listen for his 
 melting voice with a kind of infantile trust and 
 adoration. If his life had thrown him into active 
 relation with the large suffering forces and classes 
 of our American poor, he would easily have been a 
 memorable philanthropist. He had the sacred fire 
 in him. As it was, he came in contact with " the 
 common people " only in the ways natural to a 
 scholar and a recluse. Something suppressed and 
 denied in his nature, some high passion, some rare 
 enthusiasm of humanity, always struck aflame when 
 opportunity called it. "I want to have my good 
 name associated more with my heart than with my 
 head," he had said. 
 
 In those less obvious forms of Christian service 
 which are sometimes considered a little beneath the 
 
152 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 attention of distinguished minds, lie was indefatiga- 
 ble and unforgetting. Servants adored him. It is 
 doubtful if one ever entered his house who did not 
 hold him in a peculiar veneration and affection. 
 " For the dear Professor " was the watch-word of the 
 kitchen. His thoughtfulness for those who minis- 
 tered to him was something very beautiful to see 
 and inspiring to remember. Traditions among these 
 humble folk report little legends of his consideration 
 which are treasured like the feats of ecclesiastical 
 saints. He was the preferred banker of many a 
 Catholic economist, who trusted him as devoutly as 
 Holy Church herself; and his interest in these little 
 transactions was enthusiastic. In one respect, per- 
 haps, he had a peculiar hold upon the Celtic heart. 
 He was never known to try to proselyte a Catholic 
 servant or to disturb her simple faith. 
 
 He treated the Catholic religion as represented in 
 an honest, faithful household servant with a genuine 
 respect which could not be mistaken. In the latter 
 years of his life, his consideration for those who 
 ministered to him received its high usury in the ser- 
 vice of a rare and touching devotion to which we 
 shall have occasion later to refer. 
 
 In the current of publication toward which his 
 mind swept during those last years, he encountered 
 what was to him something of a novel experience — 
 severe public attack. 
 
 This brings us grazing the outlines of a subject 
 which it is not possible either to avoid or to handle 
 as one miffht wish to touch so difficult and delicate 
 a matter, — that unfortunate development in the 
 
LAST YEARS. 153 
 
 recent history of the Seminary with which he had 
 been connected, which is known as the Andover 
 Controversy. 
 
 With the main facts of this agitation — probably 
 the most important which has shaken the Protestant 
 world in this country since the departure of Dr. 
 Channing from the old Orthodox ranks — the public 
 is already too familiar. It could add nothing to the 
 interest attending a deplorable ecclesiastical conflict 
 were the writer of these pages to attempt to multiply 
 the details which the press and the courts of New 
 England have given to him who runs and reads. 
 
 They are quite enough. So far as the subject of 
 this memorial is concerned, the fact should go on 
 record as distinctly as it is in the power of this 
 volume to stamp it, that his sympathies with the 
 conservative element in the controversy were unmis- 
 takable from the first, and became more emphatic 
 toward the last. It seems, indeed, almost a super- 
 fluity to say what his own voice and pen have pro- 
 claimed with no wavering sound ever since this pious 
 war began to trouble the frontiers of Christian faith. 
 There was never anything timid or halting in his 
 speech. It rang. Once let him be sure of his con- 
 viction, and his tongue was a clarion. Down 
 through the confused and struggling ranks of this 
 long battle his dying voice has cried above the din, 
 in no uncertain tones. He sought the truth; he be- 
 lieved that he had found it ; he spoke as he felt that 
 God bade him. "The Voice said, Cry!" and he 
 obeyed. None of us can do more; none should do 
 less. 
 
 In the early portion of his life, and, indeed, until 
 
154 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 those later years, Professor Phelps had been the lib- 
 eral of his denominational faith. In what was known 
 as the conflict between the Old School and the New 
 School of the Orthodox Congregational Church, he 
 stood distinctly in the van of the New School. He 
 never taught nor preached the ghastly doctrines which 
 have sorely troubled the growing faith of thousands 
 of New England's young and honest minds. He did 
 not educate his people or his children into theo- 
 logical contortions. The fear of an ungodlike God 
 never haunted us. Dogmatic horror never dogged 
 us. We were not taught that we sinned in Adam, 
 or that babies were damned, or that God elected 
 some of us to hell and some to heaven without our 
 personal consent. We were never taught that all 
 heathen went to hell. In creeds we were not over- 
 much instructed. The Westminster Catechism we 
 never learned. Our religious training was natural, 
 easy, pleasant, — if one may say so, — comfortable. 
 It never occurred to us that God was not affectionate 
 and lovable. We feared no doom which we did not 
 bring upon ourselves. We were taught to think 
 much of Christ — of what He sacrificed, of what He 
 suffered. Much was said to us about His tenderness 
 and His purity and His comprehension of those mys- 
 teries in our natures where even father's love must 
 hesitate and retreat. We were early given to under- 
 stand that if we had a Friend anywhere, we had one 
 in that crucified Nazarene whose story we heard 
 read at evening prayers. The low, awed voice, the 
 suffused eye of the reader, meant as much to us 
 as the story, and gave that human element to the 
 divine tragedy, that unutterable tenderness to Eter- 
 
LAST YEARS. 155 
 
 nal Justice, which lasts for life in the theology of the 
 sensitive heart. 
 
 Thus were we reared by the wise and loving mind 
 whose stand upon the darker doctrines of faith be- 
 came toward the end so resolute. 
 
 It is not to be said that his views underwent any 
 change — at least, none conscious to himself; it is to 
 be said that they did not advance with the movement 
 of certain bodies of modern religious belief. In 
 "the eternal punishment of the finally impenitent," 
 to use the technical phrase, he had always believed. 
 He had always taught it, and he taught it to the 
 end. Perhaps he did not emphasize it so much in 
 those early years. I think he dwelt more often and 
 more eagerly upon the merciful meaning of the 
 Christian faith. 
 
 But we were taught that we were little sinners, 
 and that sin was abominable and abhorred by God 
 and men. "The worst thing in the world, except 
 sin," was a common phrase with him. I find among 
 my notes of talks with him, dating back to 1866, 
 these words : — 
 
 " I never expect to understand future punishment 
 entirely, in this world or another; but I expect to 
 understand enough of it to see the wisdom and the 
 justice and the necessity of it." 
 
 When the theological crisis, complicated as it was 
 with technical legal points affecting the governing 
 power of the Seminary, deepened to an unexpected 
 conflict between the Board of Trust and the Fac- 
 ulty on one hand, and the Board of Visitors on the 
 other, — a conflict so serious that the Supreme Court 
 has been called in to adjust it, — then the consci- 
 
156 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 entious Professor, whose theological education had 
 not been completed in modern German schools, could 
 not follow the new departure. After watching it for 
 a while in the anxious, and perhaps somewhat bitter, 
 silence which men of a past belief feel toward the 
 pioneers of a future, and after making such fruitless 
 private efforts as he could to quell the disturbance, 
 he spoke. 
 
 His published articles upon the subject of the 
 retributive elements in God's justice are well known 
 to those who feel an interest in the controversy; and 
 nothing in the way of comment upon them need be 
 added here. 
 
 By the secular press, and to some extent by the 
 radical theological party, he was, of course, attacked. 
 The Andover Faculty, several of whom had been his 
 pupils, treated their old Professor with respect and 
 courtesy during this theological war; he, in turn, 
 never lost his kindly feeling for them or trust in 
 their Christian conscientiousness, and the disputants 
 have many a gentle memory to teach them how 
 religious controversy may be conducted by Christian 
 gentlemen. 
 
 Nevertheless, he spoke, and he had to bear the 
 consequences. Some of the attacks of the press 
 upon him — I have never read them, and cannot 
 personally judge — are said to have been very 
 severe. From what I know of American criticism, 
 I should think this more likely than not. The sick 
 man, already sinking to his death, could not be 
 shielded from them. The great wheel of life in the 
 Buddhist carving grinds on, Avhirling all created 
 things in a common overthrow, to a common fate. 
 
LAST YEARS. 157 
 
 There is no shield in this world for the sensitive, for 
 the sick, for the dying. Conseqences follow causes, 
 and laws rule accidents ; and we learn " to take the 
 thing that is " without surprise or protest. 
 
 He took the results of his defence of the old faith 
 which he had preached all his life in this way, 
 quietly, without evident anxiety or annoyance. 
 Sometimes his fading eye would flash, and he would 
 say, "I should like to get well enough to answer 
 that!" Sometimes he smiled and said nothing at 
 
 all. 
 
 We are often called to respect the courage of the 
 radical who breaks from the traditions, opens Pan- 
 dora's box of heresy, and faces the buzzing, sting- 
 ing consequences for the truth's sake, — or that of 
 what he believes to be the truth,— and he may de- 
 serve our respect. 
 
 Let us remember that the man gray in the service 
 of an ancient and honored faith which has become a 
 part of his being, and lifting a trembling hand to 
 protect her if he may, before he go hence, for the 
 truth's sake, — or that of what he believes to be the 
 truth, — may be courageous, too, and that his cour- 
 age also may deserve respect, and gain it. 
 
 The history of the last few years at Andover gave 
 great pain to Professor Phelps. It seemed to him, 
 from his point of view, that grave dangers threatened 
 the institution to which he had consecrated his life 
 and his faith. 
 
 The personal differences not amounting to es- 
 trangements, between good men, all trying to do the 
 right thing, troubled him, I think, more than he 
 told us. 
 
158 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 On another occasion, at the time of a divergence 
 of opinion in the Faculty, when, in the judgment of 
 the majority of the Christian world, he would have 
 been held unquestionably right in diverting a seri- 
 ous catastrophe (not theological), he wrote to a 
 friend : — 
 
 " It grieves me more than I can tell you to leave 
 these dear young brethren with their confidence 
 turned from me. I know some little part of what 
 St. Paul felt when he said, 'I have great heaviness 
 and continual sorrow in my heart.' I rejoice that 
 there is a world where good men cannot distrust 
 each other." 
 
 So, perhaps, could he speak, he would answer us 
 now. To an onlooker at these theological convul- 
 sions, it seems as if death might teach something to 
 troubled life, and the great Silence fall like a sacred 
 amnesty upon our little wrangling. 
 
 Would to Heaven that the holy spears of the An- 
 dover warfare could be thrown down upon the new- 
 made grave of him who so long loved and served her, 
 and who so well loved those who battle for her, both 
 of this side and of that ! 
 
 Would to God that the flowers and the snows of 
 the old chapel churchyard could cover all that sore- 
 ness and sadness as utterly and as quietly as they 
 cover his calm face ! 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 BAR HARBOR. 
 
 When a man has been ill for twenty years, nobody 
 expects him to die. This is the common fate of the 
 long sick, and Professor Phelps did not escape it. 
 He was not one of those invalids who are accustomed 
 to call the family together for premature farewells. 
 Sometimes to an intimate friend he tvrote some justi- 
 fiable fear which was more than usually present to 
 his consciousness ; but he spoke little to any one of 
 the end, which he himself foresaw, but in whose 
 approach he seems hardly to have believed that any 
 one else would believe. It came on so gradually, it 
 came so quietly, it came so happily, that we are 
 comforted to be able to think that those last years 
 were the most peaceful of his life. 
 
 The happiest part of them was passed in Bar Har- 
 bor. He suffered so much less there than in any 
 other climate which he had ever tried, that it was 
 touching to see his longing for the time when he 
 could make the pilgrimage. All through the win- 
 ter, across the Andover study those dimming eyes 
 watched the calendar that pointed toward the date 
 when he felt that he could ask those who cared for 
 him to accompany him to the beautiful shore for 
 which "his heart and his flesh cried out." Acute 
 and dangerous accelerations of his disease were apt 
 
 159 
 
160 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 to come in the breaking of the winter. His fear 
 that he might become too feeble to be moved over 
 the long distance which separated him from the 
 death-defying ozone was piteous to witness. It is 
 probable that he prayed more for strength to make 
 that journey once again with each year's new risk 
 and added weakness, than for any personal blessing 
 left to him on earth. 
 
 An almost fatal illness in the spring of 1888, an- 
 other in 1889, gave him grave warning; but he 
 fought his way up from these crises with the vigor- 
 ous vitality and with the vigorous hope of which he 
 had so much more in his nature stored away, like 
 masked electricity, than those who did not know 
 him very well understood. While we hung over 
 him in the Andover home in March of 1888, expect- 
 ing every hour to be his last, he himself showed no 
 concern whatever about his own condition. 
 
 "I knew all the time," he said afterwards, "better 
 than any of you, that my time had not come. I never 
 for a moment thought I should die. I expected to 
 go to Bar Harbor in ten days. I mean to now." 
 
 And he did. 
 
 But the next year the relapse was longer and left 
 deeper traces. This one occurred in Bar Harbor, 
 where he had contracted, from some imprudence, a 
 violent bronchial affection, which shattered his little 
 store of strength ; and after this he spoke with less 
 emphasis about his future; in fact, he spoke less, 
 whether of living or of dying, as the solitary path- 
 way narrowed to his feeble tread. 
 
 At Bar Harbor he was pathetically happy. In all 
 that great, gay Babel of summer-seekers it may be 
 
BAR HARBOR. 
 
 161 
 
 doubted if there was another heart so grateful or 
 so blessed as his. His consciousness of suffering 
 seemed there to be altogether in abeyance to his 
 sense of privilege. 
 
 Dr. William Rogers of that place, long his faith- 
 ful and trusted physician and friend, says of this 
 period of his life : — 
 
 " For ten years, and for many years before I knew 
 him, he suffered and endured pain from an incurable 
 malady with great patience and courage, and with a 
 resolute determination not to allow others, so far as 
 he himself could help it, to share the burden of his 
 affliction. 
 
 " But few of the many friends who loved and ad- 
 mired him can fully appreciate his devotion to the 
 work he felt called upon to perform, when other men 
 with less strength of character and less force of will 
 would have laid aside the labors and cares of life. 
 His convictions as to his duty to his fellow-creat- 
 ures; his purpose to bear up patiently under the 
 heavy affliction of pain and sickness without a mur- 
 mur and without a doubt as to the divine plan of his 
 life and his death when that should come ; his great 
 faith in the peace and happiness waiting for him in 
 the life to come, endeared to us all the memory of 
 one in whom there was no guile." 
 
 Dr. Rogers alludes to his "keen sense of humor" 
 as a trait of character not always fully appreciated in 
 him. The doctor often came away laughing at the 
 " quaint things " said by the patient whose anguish 
 he had come to relieve; and the physician, if any- 
 body, knows how to value the sense of fun which 
 defies a suffering life. 
 
162 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 Dr. Rogers mentions Professor Phelps's deep in- 
 terest in the affairs of the village, and his generosity 
 to the little Congregational Church recently estab- 
 lished there, adding : — 
 
 " He was very much beloved here in this village 
 by people who knew him only as their friend and 
 neighbor. Very many were the kind things said of 
 him when he was among us and after he left us by 
 those who had never read a word, perhaps, that he 
 had written. During his last sickness, when but 
 little hope was had of his recovery, his neighbors 
 showed the tenderest solicitude about him, as if he 
 had been their brother. One of these, a man near 
 his own age, mourned, he said, 'for the best man 
 who ever lived.' " 
 
 His companions at Bar Harbor were chiefly three. 
 His wife lovingly fulfilled the privilege which gives 
 to a wife the first care of the precious sufferer, to 
 whom so many would gladly minister. Her fidelity 
 and cheerfulness were invaluable to him, and her 
 name continually upon his lips. As he grew fee- 
 bler, his dependence on her became very touching. 
 In that low, uncomplaining voice, which never 
 fretted or exacted, he would call gently, "Mary, 
 are you there? are you coming back?" as often as 
 he missed her. Much of the time his son Francis 
 (toward the last his only unmarried child) was with 
 him, and seemed to have a special power to divert 
 and interest the sick man. 
 
 His son Lawrence, 1 now his eldest living son and 
 only representative in the ministry, slipped into the 
 
 1 Rev. Lawrence Phelps, pastor First Congregational Church at 
 Chelsea, Mass. 
 
BAR HARBOR. 163 
 
 sacred place of the dead, and relieved his father of 
 the harassing cares which press so heavily toward 
 the end of life. In the summer vacation the other 
 children, to such extent as his strength permitted 
 him to receive them at the seashore cottage, were 
 some of them always with him. 
 
 But these were temporary visitors at the Bar Har- 
 bor home, and his condition required more steady 
 care and nursing than it was possible for the family 
 to maintain unaided. They were re-enforced by 
 one of the most beautiful, and what we call provi- 
 dential, devotions that could fall to the lot of a 
 dying man. 
 
 This came from a young Catholic woman, who, 
 entering the family as a servant in the house, devel- 
 oped such an aptitude for the care of its master that 
 she became his nurse, and for six years served him 
 with a fidelity, with a tenderness, with a comprehen- 
 sion of his needs — one might say, with a compre- 
 hension of his nature — marvellous to witness, and 
 sustained with a kind of beatified unselfishness, so 
 unusual in the history of American domestic service 
 that she was to that household little less than an 
 angel of the Lord. 
 
 I am glad to take this opportunity to offer a word 
 of tribute to the possibilities of the elder faith, as 
 the Protestant gratitude of one family has studied 
 its higher effects upon this sister of charity, who saw 
 God's service in caring for the sufferer dependent 
 upon her, with that celestial spirit which is neither 
 of church nor of creed, but of the very Christ. 
 Heretics though we are, let us be the first to add our 
 " Julia " to the calendar of those unknown saints who 
 
164 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 deserve canonization at somebody's hands whether 
 they ever get it in this world or not. 
 
 Professor Phelps had always been a man of more 
 than usually prayerful temperament, but as the great 
 rack of his long suffering wrought its work upon 
 him, I think that he came into a state of what may 
 be really called constant communion with the Un- 
 seen God. 
 
 Death has deep forethoughts of its own, and from 
 behind the curtains of its secret chamber works 
 strange alchemies upon its elected. One of those 
 radiant transformations, or, we might say, transla- 
 tions of character not uncommonly witnessed in the 
 departing life, fell upon his. 
 
 Devout of faith, spiritual of instinct, manly Chris- 
 tian as he was, might he have been — it was some- 
 times thought so — a happier one, a little less 
 anxious, a little more trustful, more at peace with 
 the discipline of life ? 
 
 Within those last years that natural sadness almost 
 inevitable to a sensitive and imaginative tempera- 
 ment, and impossible to be understood by any other, 
 yielded to the intense dedication of his secret soul to 
 the will of God, and yielded with a completeness 
 significant to see. 
 
 From the secret shadow of the Most High strength 
 visited him. From unknown resources of spiritual 
 vitality peace magnetized his worn-out nerve. He 
 worried over little or nothing. Anxiety for himself 
 was blotted out; anxiety for his dearest became a 
 secondary pang. He learned to leave even his chil- 
 dren's troubles to the thoughtfulness of that other 
 Father whom he had taught us how to trust. Little 
 
BAR HARBOR. 165 
 
 cares and. large fears seemed to stand back now from 
 his too responsive heart. In their place stole on a deep 
 repose. "It has taken me forty years," he had once 
 said, " to grow into that state of mind as regards dis- 
 cipline in which I can see my children suffer without 
 flinching." Now "I must leave you to God, I must 
 leave you to God," he wrote so often, that the phrase 
 came to be a benediction which we looked for at the 
 end of his letters. To those who knew him well 
 this temperamental change had a significance that 
 moved us very much. It should be remembered 
 that to the end his mind remained unimpaired, and 
 retained to an astonishing extent its clearness and 
 vigor. This peace which we saw in his high eye 
 and felt in his failing voice, and noted even in the 
 gentle wave of his wasted hand with which he re- 
 manded a painful subject into silence, was not the 
 apathy of a dulled brain. 
 
 Speak the word, draw the spark, and the fires of 
 youth shot from his face ! The deepening trust and 
 calm which we witnessed in every expression of his 
 nature was not what Hume calls " the decline of the 
 soul." It was the ascent of the Christian spirit. 
 He had conquered his wiliest enemy; he had over- 
 come the fearfulness and forecast of a too finely 
 sympathetic organization; he had given "life and 
 all that was therein " to God and to God's plan for 
 him and his ; he had won his last battle ; and from 
 this hour his spiritual victory "marched with a 
 charging step." 
 
 "A beautiful spot," he had written on his first 
 entrance to Bar Harbor. " This is a beautiful spot 
 cither to live in or to die in. 'Not my will! ' 
 
166 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 Early in March of 1890 he started as his wont was, 
 for his beloved seashore home. It rained, and the 
 day had a dark forecast; but he was excited and 
 happy. He had escaped the too frequent serious 
 illness of the breaking winter, and started with good 
 hopes. He was very weak, but his courage was 
 higher than usual. His strong eye looked out long- 
 ingly for the white fire of the breakers where its first 
 glimpse could be caught from the railroad train. 
 At the breath of the salt air at Portland, where he 
 spent the night, his heart leaped for joy. The won- 
 derful power of the sea wrought upon him, as it al- 
 ways did, an almost startling effect. From the hotel 
 he telegraphed to his daughter in her own home : — 
 
 "Now I begin to live.'''' 
 
 It was the last of those thoughtful telegrams, 
 eagerly awaited for now so many years at the crises 
 of those hard and dangerous journeys. 
 
 What indited that message? His own prophetic 
 heart? or the whim of fate? or the Power beyond 
 himself that knew when the patient soul might say 
 to the tyrant body, "Thus far; no further"? Only 
 this we know: That long death-in-life, borne only 
 God ever understood how uncomplainingly, was 
 almost over. In deed and truth he had begun to 
 live. 
 
 The journey, finished by another night in Ban- 
 gor, was overcome with more than usual success; 
 it seemed, even, with less than usual suffering. 
 He reached the home of his longing in relative com- 
 fort, and with shining eyes and happy smile, tottered 
 from the little ferry steamer and up the landing 
 which he was never to tread again, 
 
BAR HARBOR. 167 
 
 From the moment that he set foot upon Bar Har- 
 bor soil his soul bounded, and the usual miracle of 
 the rugged climate seemed to promise its usual work. 
 His letters were full of hope. Everything was as it 
 should be. 
 
 Winter met the little party; a blinding snowstorm 
 had overtaken them ; but the furnace worked like a 
 charm. The wind was bleak, but the view from his 
 chamber window was precious to his heart. The 
 thermometer ran down, but the big open fires kept 
 summer in the house. 
 
 This was the spring following the weakest and 
 warmest of New England's recent winters. Our 
 new climate had gone so hard with him that he wrote 
 with emphasis, " I am thankful to be in a civilized 
 climate where it snows in winter as it ought to! " 
 
 On March 18th, he writes gleefully that the snow- 
 drifts are "five feet high on his lawn." When other 
 people were looking for wraps, he sat on his cottage 
 piazza with his coat off, smiling and serene. He 
 was perfectly content. The cruel journey was over 
 once again ; did he know that it was over forever ? 
 He said nothing. If any celestial foreknowledge 
 visited him, he kept the secret to himself. Whatever 
 his foreboding or forehoping, he did not share it with 
 
 us. 
 
 But when one of his children went in April to 
 occupy the old home at Andover for a few weeks, 
 certain significant discoveries were made. In the 
 ordering of his household were remarkable omis- 
 sions. He who was the most methodical and far- 
 seeing of providers had left this and that undone. 
 The great coal-bins of the mansion, always gener- 
 
168 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 ously filled the season "beforehand," were empty. 
 For the first time in the remembrance of the family, 
 the report came up from below, " No fuel. The Pro- 
 fessor hasn't got ready for another winter." For the 
 first time in all those years when he had walked 
 hand in hand with death, he had quietly put the 
 cares of this earth aside. He knew there would be 
 no need of furnace fires in the dear old home next 
 winter. He had "set his house in order." "I 
 dread," he had said, "to have the last days here." 
 
 For reasons which have seemed good and wise, the 
 letters of Professor Phelps, such as have been gath- 
 ered for publication in this volume, stand by them- 
 selves at the close of the book. But one has been 
 selected from the package, which is inserted here. 
 The letter was sent to one of his absent children. 
 After reading it, who else could choose the language 
 in which to close this chapter, now the last but one 
 in the story of his life ? 
 
 " Here again, safe, and with a new chapter of the 
 goodness of God in little things. At Portland, 
 when the wind had been dead east for thirty-six 
 hours and a howling snowstorm just beginning, my 
 courage gave out for an hour or so, and I wanted to 
 stay there till I could have some hope of still water 
 on the Bay. But something within me said: 'Do 
 not try to care for yourself, and He will take better 
 care of you. ' So I kept my soul in patience. The 
 wind shifted, and by the time that I reached the 
 ferry, it had been blowing off shore for twenty-four 
 hours. The sun was bright, and water like a sheet 
 of glass — to use a simile which it seems to me I 
 have heard before. A day in June could not be 
 
BAR HARBOR. 169 
 
 more quiet, although the thermometer stood below 
 zero. I remained on deck all the way. Captain 
 Oliver took me across without stopping. I found the 
 cottage warm and cosey, the little furnace doing its 
 work as well as the big one at Andover. When the 
 sun had been shining just long enough to bring me 
 here under bright skies, an easterly snowstorm set 
 in again — the very thing I most enjoy. 
 
 " I do not often deluge you with letters of descrip- 
 tive travel; but my heart is so full of a sense of 
 God's care in little things that I can think of noth- 
 ing else. 
 
 " But I must neither preach nor prose any longer. 
 If I could sing, I should break forth with, ' O that 
 men would praise the Lord for His goodness and for 
 His wonderful works to the children of men ! ' I am 
 one of the 'sparrows.' ' 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE STILL HOUR. 
 
 "I wish I could do something for you. But all 
 I can do for anybody is to die, and that is as God 
 wills." 
 
 In a dark moment he wrote the words, but the 
 mood and the expression were now both rare. The 
 high and fervent feeling of the Bar Harbor letter 
 dominated him rather, not as a mood, but as a state 
 of significant peace. He lost nothing of his inces- 
 sant care for those whose lives had been the burden 
 and the joy of his. Almost to the end we find him 
 writing little thoughtful bulletins for our comfort, — 
 what to do if the house were damp, or the horse were 
 lame; orders to tradesmen, for somebody's conven- 
 ience; advice in money matters; cautions about 
 health ; or it was a confidential hint how to preserve 
 newly married happiness ; or it was a card tucked 
 into the sealed enveloj)e to repeat the pleasant things 
 he had heard about the last sermon or the new book 
 or the new position. 
 
 There were no corroding family anxieties now to 
 dog his last hours. Comfort and happiness had fol- 
 lowed his children. His sons were successful and 
 useful in the ministry and in journalism. Most of 
 his dearest were well, and all were happy. Still, to 
 the end his never-resting tenderness was astir, — one 
 170 
 
THE STILL HOUR. 
 
 171 
 
 should say, athrob; but bis feverish anxiety for our 
 welfare was now forever quelled. During those last 
 months Foreboding had napped her dark wings and 
 fled utterly from his heart. And now there brooded 
 upon it the peace of the living God. 
 
 "Suffering is not the hardest thing," he had said 
 years before, "nor is death." 
 
 He suffered— one must have been more finely organ- 
 ized and more sorely racked than most of us to know 
 how much. In August a serious turn came to his dis- 
 ease, but his great will and courage overcame it, and 
 he struggled up again. His patience, always open 
 before us like a leaf written in a celestial hand, now 
 became something of which the lip can hardly speak. 
 The bowed head, the transparent face, the attitude 
 of the wasting hands, the gentle smile, the low, 
 sweet voice, bespoke the very essence of Christian 
 endurance. 
 
 His reluctance to give trouble, his silence about 
 his own bodily anguish, his pathetic consideration 
 for those who cared for him, increased with the accel- 
 eration of his sufferings. He had always thought 
 that he should have made a poor martyr, but he came 
 out from that long inquisition of soul and body a 
 shattered victor. He who had taught us how to 
 live, was now teaching us, although we knew it not, 
 and teaching from the sweet art of his own spiritual 
 refinement, how to die. 
 
 That he had dwelt a good deal, in a quiet, health- 
 ful way, upon the prospect of death seems to be evi- 
 dent from records dating twenty-four years back, in 
 which I find this : — 
 
 " What human soul could have originated the con- 
 
172 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 ception of death as a natural process or wise method 
 of transition from this world to the next? Yet I 
 imagine that we shall find it to be a unique system, 
 fitted to its purpose with marvellous dexterity. It 
 will be found, I think, the only condition which can 
 bring the soul out of itself — feeling itself of no use 
 to itself — - God alone left for it to cling to." 
 
 He continued to work all summer and into the 
 early autumn. He revised the proof-sheets of a 
 new edition of "The Still Hour," and sent some 
 new material for the little volume to the publisher 
 who had it in charge. Upon his last complete book 
 he toiled persistently to re-write and arrange it to 
 his mind. A letter to his son-in-law and daughter, 
 written in the spring, asks for their personal correc- 
 tion of the proof-sheets if he "is taken before he 
 consults " his publisher. He directs with his method- 
 ical clearness just what he wishes to have done if 
 he himself can never do it, ending with the sugg-es- 
 tion which shows how conscious the sick man was 
 of his failing vigor, "If you find anything not worth 
 saying, strike it out. I think it a more suggestive 
 book than my last," he added, modestly. "It is the 
 last of earth." 
 
 September came, and still he worked. It fled, and 
 he worked on. At last, on the first of October, within 
 less than two weeks of his last hour, he wrote with 
 his own hand the prefaces and letter to his publisher 
 which should accompany his manuscripts, and him- 
 self directed the disposal of the package. With this 
 his care for his earthly work rested; he now gave 
 himself time to die. 
 
 Yet still he was not expected to die. He was up 
 
THE STILL HOUR. 173 
 
 and about and sometimes out of doors. Even in 
 September he was seen at the village church in 
 Bar Harbor. He lived in a quiet dream. His anxi- 
 ety about the winter had ceased. He no longer 
 said much — indeed he never had said much — about 
 his longing to remain in his "dear cottage," but fell 
 in quietly with the plan for his return to Andover 
 about the middle of October. His eloquent eye 
 wandered from his windows far over the horizon of 
 the autumn sea ; he and it spoke together ; the dying 
 man and the dying year understood each other; why 
 intrude upon that harmonious comprehension ? 
 
 And still, why should he die? Who but God and 
 the ocean understood? Those of his family who 
 were in attendance upon him felt no apprehension, 
 and strongly inculcated upon the absent children the 
 belief that there was nothing to fear, and no reason 
 for coming to Bar Harbor. His devoted physician 
 had a year ago put a limit of time to his disease 
 which the patient's vigor had overleaped, and the 
 doctor had wisely ceased to offer any further prog- 
 nosis in a case whose vitality defied all the records 
 of the schools. Peacefully, kindly, and unsus- 
 pected, the Best Friend came to meet the ex- 
 hausted sufferer. During those last weeks one 
 significant signal waved from the approaching hand. 
 His eyes suddenly and strangely began to fail him. 
 In one, he became almost wholly blind, seeing but 
 portions of anything. This cost him some disturb- 
 ance, but little anxious distress. Talk of meeting 
 an eminent oculist who chanced to be in Bar Harbor 
 came to nothing ; he seemed unaccountably to shrink 
 from the useless and wearying effort ; but when the 
 
174 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 darkness increased, he allowed one of his children to 
 consult a Boston specialist, who reported evasively 
 that he feared "a dangerous lesion of brain or optic 
 nerve." This diagnosis was never sent to Bar Har- 
 bor; some vague phrase supplied its place. For, ah! 
 the "lesion " was the great "lesion " for which exist 
 no therapeutics. The blindness was the last dark- 
 ness, which no light but the ray from the Mount of 
 Transfiguration has ever pierced. 
 
 It was upon the subject of this darkened earthly 
 vision that the last letter (so far as can be learned) 
 ever penned by his hand was written. It bears date 
 on Saturday. Upon Sunday morning the final stroke 
 smote him suddenly. He did not leave his bed 
 again. 
 
 The note is written in pencil, quite distinctly, but 
 with a strange blur upon the letters never seen in 
 that neat and clear-cut handwriting before in all 
 those feeble years. One word omits the final letter 
 — an unprecedented circumstance. One sentence is 
 incomplete. 
 
 "I had no idea of asking Dr. to come here. 
 
 I asked only to get an opinion. . . . But wait now 
 till I return, if I ever do. Can't write more. God 
 bless you! " 
 
 For some time he had kept a little blank-book 
 in which, unknown to any of us but his wife, 
 he had written certain private prayers adapted to 
 his own needs and to those of people whom he 
 loved, or of interests which he wished to help. 
 These prayers Mrs. Phelps used to read to him at 
 his own wish. As he grew weaker he asked for 
 some one of them every night. Here are some of 
 
THE STILL HOUR. 175 
 
 these sacred outcries upon which his soul went out 
 to God : — 
 
 "Our Father, Which art in heaven, hallowed be 
 Thy Name! 
 
 "My Lord and my God! Do Thou make it a 
 reality to me that Thou in Christ art very near to 
 me and mine, my Friend, my Helper, my Comforter, 
 my Teacher, my Strength, and my Redeemer! 
 Amen, O Lord, Amen ! " 
 
 "Do Thou give me a conscious love to Thee, such 
 as I feel to earthly friends ! Help me to sympathize 
 with and adore Thy holy Nature, Thy hatred of sin, 
 Thine infinite love to all that is pure and good and 
 true! Fill me with grateful sympathy with Thee, 
 O Christ, in Thine atoning pains ! Make me grate- 
 ful for Thy promises, and help me to trust them in 
 my times of need! Do Thou bestow upon me that 
 love which casts out fear ! Enlarge my heart, and 
 finish my character in holy likeness to Thine ! Let 
 not my passage to another life be fearful and fore- 
 boding! Do Thou work such changes in me, O 
 Thou Holy Spirit, that heaven and its employment 
 shall be homelike to me ! Grant me these gifts for 
 the sake of Him who has chosen me to be His friend! 
 Amen, O Lord, Amen!" 
 
 " I am very weak about the closing scenes of life. 
 Thou knowest my fears. Do Thou save me from 
 them! Give me a painless and quick departure 
 when my appointed time comes! Save me from a 
 prolonged and exhausting decline ! Do Thou grant 
 me my desire in this thing! Why not to me as to 
 others ? I shall be sadly disappointed if it may not be. 
 But be it to me as Thou wilt ! Amen, O Lord, Amen ! " 
 
176 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 " Through all my life Thou hast been my most 
 constant, timely, and faithful Friend. I have count- 
 less blessings for which to thank and praise Thee 
 forevermore. For my existence ; for my godly an- 
 cestry; for my father and mother; for our family 
 prayers ; for the Sabbath and sanctuaries of my youth ; 
 for my protection from degrading vices ; for my col- 
 lege life and honors ; for the great and good men who 
 directed my education ; for the choice of my profes- 
 sion; for my acquaintance with Albert Barnes and 
 Dr. N. W. Taylor and Deacon Kimball and my be- 
 loved church in Boston ; for the favor of the churches 
 to my early ministry; for my election to the professor- 
 ship and my success at Andover; for the circulation 
 of my books ; for ' The Still Hour ' and the ' Sabbath 
 Hymn Book 1 ; for the writings of my closing years ; 
 for my home, my family, my summers at Breadloaf 
 and Bar Harbor ; for safety in my journeys ; for my 
 narrow escapes ; for my tour in Europe ; and for the 
 crowning of all these mercies by a comfortable hope 
 of heaven, in the repose of which, for the most part, 
 I have been able to do my life's work; and finally for 
 the singular peace which God has given me under 
 the supreme affliction of my life,— for all I do praise 
 and bless Thee, my undying Friend, forever and for- 
 ever ! Amen, O Lord, Amen ! " 
 
 " I also thank Thee, O God, for Thy condescend- 
 ing watch over my pecuniary interests. I commit 
 them anew to Thee. Do Thou continue to save me 
 
 from losses ! Give discretion and integrity to ! 1 
 
 Protect my estate at Bar Harbor and save me from 
 discomfort and misfortune there ! Deliver my sum- 
 
 1 Here follows the name of his trusted and devoted attorney. 
 
THE STILL HOUR. 177 
 
 mer home from flames ! 1 Thy will, not mine, be 
 done in these things. Yet Thou knowest that I need 
 them without my asking. Do Thou grant them as 
 Thou dost care for the falling sparrow! Amen, 
 O Lord, Amen ! " 
 
 "O Thou infinitely pure and holy God, I have 
 sinned against heaven and in Thy sight. I acknowl- 
 edge Thy loving justice in the endless punishment 
 of sin. But I beg for Thy forgiveness, I plead the 
 promises of Christ. Let me not perish! . . . Re- 
 member not against me the sins of my youth ! Bury 
 from Thy sight their more awful continuance in later 
 years ! Let them be blotted from the record of my 
 own conscience ! I plead the atoning blood of Thy 
 beloved Son ! Amen, O Lord, Amen ! " 
 
 "O my Father and my Friend, Thou hast given 
 me my home ; do Thou bless those who have made it 
 beautiful and dear to me ! I am very helpless about 
 them. I can only commit them to Thy loving care. 
 Do thou spare my wife to me ! Reward her for her 
 fidelity through the long years of my invalid 
 life! . . ." 
 
 (Here follow specific prayers for each member of 
 his family. These, which are too sacred to be shared 
 even with his loving friends, are omitted. Immedi- 
 ately follows this beautiful petition for his students, 
 who kept the "next place " in his heart:- — ) 
 
 " I implore Thy blessing on my pupils and on the 
 churches committed to their charge! Do Thou 
 remember them with elective and loving care! 
 Strengthen them in their toils ! Cheer them in their 
 
 1 This was probably written after an accident which threatened 
 a conflagration in the cottage. 
 
178 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 trials! Protect them in their temptations! Give 
 them peace in their work! Reward them for their 
 fidelity! For Jesus's sake, Amen, O Lord, Amen!" 
 
 " O Thou who art the Head of Thy Church and 
 its auxiliary institutions, I beseech Thee to watch 
 over the Seminary to which my life's work has been 
 consecrated! Do Thou deliver it from destructive 
 errors and incompleteness of belief ! Make it true to 
 the ancient faith! May the mind of Christ inspire 
 the opinions taught there ! Let the heart of Christ 
 sway the sympathies cherished there! Remember 
 the prayers and sacrifices in which it was founded! 
 Make it a tower of strength to Thy Church to the 
 end of time ! May those who go from it to preach 
 Thy Gospel go in the energy and faith of apostles ! 
 Let them be preachers of those truths to which Thou 
 hast pledged the conversion of this world to Christ! 
 Amen, O Lord, Amen ! " 
 
 " This country of my birth I commit to Thee, the 
 Lord of Hosts and the God of Nations ! Look down 
 in Thy great strength and wisdom upon our rulers, 
 our judiciary, and our schools of learning! Have 
 compassion upon our freedmen, upon the Indians, 
 upon the workingmen, and upon the capitalists! 
 The great tides of popular opinion and passion in 
 this land I commit to Thee! Do Thou make this 
 nation an elect people to do Thy bidding! Only 
 Thou canst protect interests so vast and in such 
 deadly peril ! Do Thou remember the prayers of our 
 godly ancestry! Amen, O Lord, Amen!" 
 
 " O Thou great Head of Thy Church in all lands, 
 do Thou bless the missionary churches and their 
 chosen ministry! In heathen lands, in our Western 
 
THE STILL HOUR. 179 
 
 territories, among alien races and infidel immigrants, 
 do Thou look down, in faithfulness to Thy promises, 
 upon infant and struggling churches! Cheer dis- 
 heartened pastors! Strengthen weak believers! 
 Give wisdom to Sunday-school teachers! Put en- 
 ergy and tact into all Christian workers ! . . . 
 Amen, O Lord, Amen!" 
 
 " Almighty and Everlasting God, the Father, the 
 Son, and the Holy Ghost! I desire to unite with 
 Thy Church Universal, on this Thy sacred day, in 
 ascribing to Thee glory and honor and power and 
 the praise of all Thy creatures both now and forever, 
 world without end! Holy, holy, holy, Lord God 
 Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come! 
 Amen, O Lord, Amen!" 
 
 "O Thou Infinite Saviour, who didst give Thyself 
 to die that this lost world might be redeemed, do 
 Thou come in Thy might to fill Thy Church with 
 the glory of Thy Presence, that all nations and races 
 of men may be converted unto Thee! Amen, O 
 Lord, Amen ! " 
 
 " O Thou who hast a Father's compassion for all 
 Thy creatures, do Thou have compassion upon the 
 neglected and suffering and tempted children, with 
 whom this world abounds ! When father and mother 
 forsake them, do Thou take them up! Remember 
 their helplessness! Consider their comparative in- 
 nocence — that they have come to their perilous life 
 by no choice of theirs ! Shall not the Judge of all 
 the earth do right? Do Thou comfort them in this 
 world! Do Thou save them in the life to come! 
 Visit not upon them the sins of their fathers! O 
 Thou loving Saviour, who didst take them in Thine 
 
180 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 arms and bless them, do Thou take pitiful account of 
 their inherited disabilities! Let the great mystery 
 of their being be solved to the glory of Thy Name ! 
 Amen, O Lord, Amen!'" 
 
 " Thou hast taught us, O Lord, to adore Thee as 
 the God of Israel. Do Thou remember Thy promise 
 to Thine ancient people ! Pity them in their wan- 
 derings ! Give them grace to see in the world's Re- 
 deemer, their long-lost Messiah! Turn their hearts 
 speedily to Him! Let their conversion be hastened 
 as the pledge of the world's salvation! May they 
 look on Him whom they have pierced and accept Him 
 as their Lord and their God! Amen, O Lord, Amen! " 
 
 "Do Thou look down in Thine infinite pity upon 
 the despised races of mankind ! Teach superior 
 races and dominant nations that Thou hast made of 
 one blood all the dwellers upon earth! Make it a 
 reality to Thy Church that the blood of Christ has 
 been shed for all! Turn to Christ the millions of 
 China, the tribes of Africa, the freedmen of Amer- 
 ica, and those who dwell in the islands of the sea! 
 Give especial force to Christian missions among 
 them! Amen, O Lord, Amen!" 
 
 " Wilt Thou have special mercy upon the Church 
 of Rome! Lead into the full glory of the Gospel 
 those of its members who are regenerated by Thy 
 Spirit! Deliver them from the entanglements of 
 inherited errors! Let them speedily become a 
 power of reform among the nations! Let pure re- 
 vivals of religion overspread all Catholic lands! 
 Give larger success to the Mc'All missions in 
 France, to the Protestant churches of Italy! For 
 the sake of the Lord of all truth! Amen! " 
 
THE STILL HOUR. 181 
 
 (In Pencil.) 
 
 " Now I lay me down to sleep, 
 I pray the Lord my soul to keep ! 
 If I should die before I wake, 
 I pray the Lord my soul to take ! " 
 
 (In Pencil.) 
 
 " O Thou who art a Friend who sees in secret, 
 Thou knowest certain private thoughts which 1 long 
 to say to my father and my mother and my precious 
 boy! Do Thou send some messenger to tell them all 
 that is in my heart! Give me this as Thy special 
 token of considerate and condescending love! For 
 Jesus's sake." 
 
 The little missal closes with another prayer for his 
 wife, touching beyond words. But with that who 
 shall intermeddle ? 
 
 Suddenly, on Sunday evening, October 12th, the 
 telegraph flashed to the distant children the terribly 
 unexpected truth. He could live but a few hours. 
 "Stay where you are/' 
 
 So he had his wish. He died beside the sea. 
 
 His wife, his nurse, and his physician were with 
 him. Unconsciousness mercifully did its work for 
 many hours. But at noon, when the others had left 
 the room for some momentary errand, he twice softly 
 called his nurse by name, adding, "Are you there?" 
 
 " Yes, Mr. Phelps, right here. Do you want any- 
 thing?" 
 
 "Nothing — nothing," he answered, in his old gen- 
 tle way, — so thoughtful not to give trouble to the 
 utter end ! 
 
 The nurse continued to speak to him from the in- 
 stinct of her religious nature, saying something to 
 
182 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 him about heaven. She tried to ask him if he 
 wished to go — if he wished to go to-day? He 
 bowed his head and clearly answered, "Yes — yes!" 
 
 But after this he spoke no more. 
 
 During the night, as he sank steadily, Mrs. Phelps 
 and the nurse stood on either side of the bed, and 
 together sang his best beloved hymns, " Jesus, Lover 
 of my Soul," "Nearer to Thee,*' and "Jerusalem, my 
 Happy Home." 
 
 At half-past two o'clock, on the morning of Mon- 
 day, it being the 13th of October, 1890, he " began 
 to live." 
 
 At the final moment his Catholic nurse read aloud 
 the Prayer for the Sick and Dying, from the rubric of 
 her own Church. It was her own devout impulse, 
 and he, could he have heard it, would have been the 
 last to gainsay this sweet effort of an alien faith to 
 comfort his departing soul. 
 
 Upon Wednesday, the 15th of the month, he was 
 laid to rest in the churchyard of the Andover chapel, 
 beside the wife of his youth and the son of his love. 
 
 On the night and at the hour when he passed on, 
 there came to one who loved him a vision as fair 
 as the skies. Suddenly, behold! for he was walking 
 up and down in front of his Andover home, under 
 the maples which he had planted. He walked a 
 little feebly, but like one who gained strange 
 strength at every step. His eyes shone with un- 
 utterable radiance. His smile had its old sweet 
 curve. Forgotten health ran like rapture through 
 soul and body. He looked like one who trod to 
 meet eternal life. He seemed glad to be at home. 
 
THE STILL HOUR. 183 
 
 For so many years have we watched the turning of 
 the seasons with his eyes, felt the excesses of our 
 capricious climate with his failing strength, and re- 
 ceived the impressions of daily life with his quiver- 
 ing nerve, that the kind meaning of death comes 
 slowly to the consciousness. When the south wind 
 blows over the scorching marshes, it is still the first 
 impulse to say, "This is a hard day for him." Then 
 we remember that the sun does not light on him, nor 
 any heat. When care knits her wrinkled brow, and 
 anxiety lifts her trembling finger, and the friction of 
 existence strains the endurance of the strong, the 
 heart leaps to say, "How will he bear it?" Then 
 we remember that there shall not be any more pain. 
 When the night is jarred by some needless disturb- 
 ance, still there stirs within us the old instinct to 
 spring and hush the sound for his sake. But we 
 remember that God's beloved sleep, and that he who 
 starved for rest has found, past losing, the repose of 
 The Still Hour. 
 
LETTERS. 
 
 The writing of letters is becoming a lost art. 
 
 "It is so much cheaper to telegraph," said a busy 
 man ; and most Americans at least are of his opinion. 
 
 Professor Phelps was one of the few who retain 
 and honor this graceful and old-fashioned gift. In 
 reading his letters, sent from many sources and deal- 
 ing with many matters, I have been freshly made 
 aware of the fine respect which they offer to his cor- 
 respondent. Like Napoleon, he never allowed him- 
 self to seem in a hurry. The finish of his lightest 
 note was as careful as proof-reading, and his friend 
 received as conscientious attention as his public or 
 his publisher. 
 
 One can hardly appreciate, who has not read his 
 letters en masse, how noticeable and how lovable is 
 their cheerfulness. 
 
 As a rule they took — or they gave, which is more 
 — the bright view of things; they record him as 
 quick to see the best side of a difficulty, or to say the 
 courageous word of a sorrow, or to offer the brave 
 hope to an anxiety. 
 
 As he has not, perhaps, received full recognition 
 of this side of his nature, I cannot forbear alluding 
 to the impression which the study of his correspond- 
 ence has made upon its editor. 
 
 The letters and extracts from letters which are 
 given here have been chosen by a law of selection 
 
 185 
 
186 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 which has sought to meet the eye of personal friend- 
 ship as well as that of general interest; and it is 
 hoped that both friend and stranger may find in the 
 pages which will close this volume something that 
 "each after his kind" will claim and value. 
 
 Letters to Me. Charles C. Barry (a Boston 
 parishioner). 
 
 "Andover, Mass., October 1, 1877. 
 
 "I cannot permit this semi-centennial of our 
 Church to pass by without expressing to you, as the 
 only one now left, as I understand it, of the band 
 which welcomed me to the Pine Street pulpit thirty- 
 five years ago, somewhat of the feeling which the 
 occasion awakens in me. 
 
 " I find that years only deepen the interest I feel 
 in those dear friends, so many of whom have passed 
 beyond our sight. Their names have become sacred 
 to me as no others of equal number can. I feel that 
 my part of the relation between pastor and people 
 was very poorly sustained, but theirs most faithfully 
 and devoutly. So things look to me as I picture 
 them in the past. It seems to me that when we meet 
 in that world where things will all see?n as they are, 
 they will appear to have been the teachers, and I 
 the learner, so much more do I seem to myself to 
 have learned from them than I can possibly have im- 
 parted to them. 
 
 " They were a noble set of men and women ; gen- 
 erous in their treatment of their pastor, and still 
 
LETTERS. 187 
 
 more so in their judgments of a young man's infirm- 
 ities. I shall never cease to be grateful to them for 
 the kindness with which they looked on my crude 
 efforts and overlooked my defects. I was to some 
 degree sensible of this at the time. I labored usu- 
 ally under an overwhelming sense of inability to do 
 the work that was needed. I saw it as clearly as 
 any of you ; I felt the reasonableness of your expec- 
 tations ; but never for a day did I feel equal to the 
 task. 
 
 " This view has been confirmed by my later convic- 
 tions of what the ministry is and the work it requires. 
 I am not sure that now I should feel any better qual- 
 ified to take Mr. Wright's place than I felt then. 
 The work of a pastor of a Christian Church looms 
 up before me as one of awful grandeur, from which 
 any man may reasonably shrink. I understand how 
 Moses felt when called by God to the deliverance of 
 Israel. 
 
 "I cannot but feel, therefore, that God was spe- 
 cially considerate of me in giving me such people as 
 I had, and in allowing them to be so blind as they 
 sometimes were to my deficiencies. Never was a 
 young, inexperienced, unformed, and untried man 
 provided with a more charitable and generous tri- 
 bunal to sit in judgment upon his work. 
 
 "I recall, too, the differences of opinion which 
 existed among us, with none but feelings of 
 brotherly affection. Though I do not know that I 
 could think very differently, if it were all to be done 
 over again, yet I should do differently in many 
 things ; and it seems to me I could now soften those 
 differences more discreetly than I did. They were 
 
188 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 not really so great as they seemed, and I needed only 
 more knowledge of men to make all parties sensible 
 of that. I am sure that our hearts were much more 
 nearly one than they sometimes appeared. How in- 
 significant do the differences of good men seem when 
 Eternity lets in its blaze of light upon them! 
 
 "I have often wished I could once more have the 
 
 chance to deal with our friend without a whit 
 
 of change in either his theory or mine. I do be- 
 lieve that he might have been saved to the church 
 if I had only known then what I know now of 
 human nature, its weaknesses and its virtues. 
 
 " I need not tell you that among my most faithful 
 friends I number your name. I was too inexperi- 
 enced in the ways of the world — had lived too ex- 
 clusively among my books — to appreciate then as I 
 do now the pecuniary service which you rendered me 
 in prompt payment of my salary, when often, I doubt 
 not, you had to use for the time your own funds. If 
 irregularity and delay in pecuniary affairs had been 
 added to the inevitable burden of that pulpit upon a 
 young man, I should certainly have broken down in- 
 gloriously. Nothing saved me from such a disaster 
 but your generosity, which I feel all the more deeply 
 because you never said one word of the service you 
 were rendering me. It was the work of a true and 
 faithful friend. 
 
 " May God bless you for it, and for all your fidel- 
 ity, my brother." 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., September 18, 1889. 
 
 " You speak of your diffidence, and the trial it was 
 to you. In my early life I suffered from it im- 
 
LETTERS. 189 
 
 mensely. I do not think T got over it till I was 
 forty years old. And in public prayer, I have not 
 got over it to this day. It is one of the hardest 
 things I ever do, to lead the devotion of others. At 
 one time I canvassed the question of going in the 
 Episcopal Church, chiefly for that reason. 
 
 " But do you not know that in your case the rest 
 of us never found you out in that respect?" 
 
 To S. E. Bridgman, Esq. 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., July 30, 1881. 
 
 " Thanks for your pleasant words about my article 
 on Spiritualism. I am glad to know that even one 
 appreciated the need of it. I have never in the 
 course of my life known so serious an evil to he so 
 unwisely ignored before. It has been treated by 
 good people who disapprove it, much as Mormonism 
 has been by our Government. 
 
 " You ask why I do not publish upon it ; I have 
 done so, and my tract on the subject has been cir- 
 culated largely at the West through home missionary 
 organs. There is really little to be said about it, 
 except for the pulpit and private Christians to keep 
 before the public the fact that the evil is as old as 
 the world, is distinctly recognized as fact in the 
 Bible, and always with condemnation. The whole 
 business of seeking to unveil the future by means of 
 'familiar spirits ' is forbidden as a sin. The curi- 
 osity which prompts it is a sin. 
 
 "Good people have as clear a warning in the Bible 
 to avoid it as they have to avoid lying or profane- 
 ness. I do not think that our Christian people real- 
 
190 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 ize this. The reaction from the Salem witchcraft 
 has made this later necromancy come as a novelty. 
 
 " I do not think it necessary to express any opin- 
 ions, or to have any, as to the origin of the spiritu- 
 alistic phenomena, — whether Satanic or not, — 
 though on that point I have myself pretty clear con- 
 victions, to be held till science gives some better 
 explanation. But it is not necessary to believe that. 
 It is enough that here is a business which the Bible 
 condemns — no matter whose it is. We are bound, 
 as believers in God's Word, to deny our unhallowed 
 curiosity about the future, and live in faith. This, 
 it seems to me, can be pressed home on the con- 
 sciences of all. I never yet have seen the man who 
 fairly met the points of resemblance between the 
 modern necromancy and the ancient, from the Witch 
 of Endor to Simon Magus. Something is condemned 
 in the Bible of this sort, all the way down. What 
 was it, if not kindred to spiritualism? and what is 
 this if not kindred to that?" 
 
 Letters to Mr. Broughton. 
 
 " September 24, 1889. 
 
 " I feel the truth of your remarks in your last let- 
 ter. When men tell me that the public mind will 
 not bear this or that, I think of the reply of Dr. Ar- 
 nold: 'I do not see how the public mind can help 
 bearing anything that an honest man has the courage 
 to say. ' 
 
 " I think evil days are before us, but they are in 
 the near future. Beyond them there is a coming 
 reaction. My faith does not waver for a moment. 
 If we have God's truth in our hands and on our lips 
 
LETTERS. 191 
 
 and pens, He will take care of it. I never reply to 
 criticisms of what I write. I am only too grateful 
 for the privilege of saying what He gives me to say. 
 If men assail it, I take that as a sign that they feel 
 it. Mr. Finney used to feel that he was not accom- 
 plishing much if nobody got angry. But, my dear 
 brother, it depends on you laymen what your min- 
 isters should preach. The churches will have such 
 preachers as they want. If they want prophets who 
 prophesy smooth things, they will have them. But 
 the time will come when silken theology will not 
 satisfy men. What then ? " 
 
 To Rev. Dr. Dexter. 
 
 "I am preparing for you a sequel to 'Non-Inter- 
 vention,' etc. How much better — in some things 
 — a man knows himself than other men know him ! 
 They call me Pessimist in my sick old age, do they? 
 I have too much — in my views — of the blood of a 
 long-lived and cheerful stock, to have any other than 
 a hopeful outlook upon the world's future. Though 
 liable to drop out of sight at any moment, I never in 
 my life felt more serenely young than I do now. 
 
 "But I am giving you a sign of dotage in my 
 garrulity." 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., July 16, 1889. 
 " When I discover that I have possibly wronged a 
 man in my statements about him, I feel that it is due 
 both to him and myself to retract those statements 
 till I have more conclusive evidence, meanwhile 
 either believing nothing, or inclining to the more 
 kindly judgment. 
 
192 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 "I have recently heard an alleged fact about the 
 man of whom I wrote to yon last year which is in- 
 consistent with what I then believed to be true. I 
 cannot reconcile the two reports, and I have about 
 as much evidence of the one as of the other. I prefer 
 to think the better thing, if I think anything, and 
 therefore I will withdraw for the present the state- 
 ment I then made to you. A possible calumny is a 
 burden which I do not wish to retain on my con- 
 science or my sense of honor." 
 
 "Bak Harbor, Me., September 8, 1888. 
 
 "Since receiving your last letter, I have thought 
 it not unnatural that you should attribute my ex- 
 treme solicitude to a morbid state of the brain. You 
 know the great affliction which befell me a few years 
 ago, in the tragical death of my son. Although it 
 was accompanied with every alleviation which could 
 attend such a sorrow, yet ... he was taken in a 
 fearful way, and in a moment. 
 
 " Now one effect of the event on my mental habits 
 has been to create a singular sense of insecurity from 
 other sorrows yet to come, which has never left me 
 since the telegram came announcing his decease. It 
 has become the permanent habit of my mind to feel 
 that after such a blow anything may follow. Noth- 
 ing can be too improbable or too frightful to be sent 
 by Him who doeth all things well. 
 
 "I will not trouble you with the details in which 
 the anticipation clouds my future. But one of them 
 made itself felt in my apprehensions about the mat- 
 ter of which I wrote to you." 
 
LETTERS. 193 
 
 To Rev. Dr. Wellman. 
 
 "Riptox, September 4, 1878. 
 
 " I have therefore of late been waiting to see what 
 God would do with me. I confess that disease has 
 shaken my resolution, and greatly increased the trial 
 of leaving my home, which has become sacred to me. 
 I have hoped and prayed that the end might come 
 soon, before I should be compelled to quit service, 
 and that my weakness, if such it be, might be thus 
 provided for. 
 
 " They have treated me with uniform kindness in 
 all such affairs, as in all others. I trust I shall not 
 be left to requite it with a grasping spirit. And as 
 to the retention of my house, my conviction is very 
 strong that it could be but for a little time that I 
 should need an earthly home. If I may with entire 
 propriety retain the one which has been so dear to 
 me, I shall be grateful." 
 
 « March 9, 1879. 
 
 " My life-long conviction, often expressed, is that 
 my department, above all others, demands nearness 
 of sympathy with the students, and therefore by all 
 means young blood. 
 
 " Elect not later than thirty-five, and turn him out 
 not later than sixty-five, is my principle, and I mean 
 myself to abide by it. Any other department will 
 bear age better than this." 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., July 1, 1879. 
 
 " I need not tell you how grateful to my feelings 
 your letter is. I am more than content with the 
 recent action of the Board, and now I look to the 
 
194 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 future with a courage and resolve which are singu- 
 lar in nry experience. In my fifty-ninth year, I feel 
 that it would be wrong in me to throw ten years of 
 life into the grave, unless the Voice from beyond the 
 stars calls me more imperatively than it has yet done. 
 I look forward, therefore, with great courage to im- 
 proved health, and better work than I have yet done. 
 Be this an illusion or not, I thank God that I have 
 it now. 
 
 "I wish to say to you a thing in confidence, re- 
 specting my future work, if I have any in reserve. 
 It shall be given to the Seminary if the Seminary 
 needs it. I went to Andover in great doubt of my 
 duty ; I left the work in which my heart was and has 
 been ever since. Comparing the two things, I was 
 made for a pastor, not a teacher. Whatever success 
 I may have had as a professor has been at the cost of 
 yearnings of my nature which have lain deeper than 
 my work. I have never had a chance to go back to 
 the pastoral office, in ever so humble a sphere, which 
 I did not take into serious consideration. It has 
 therefore been a dream of mine for years, that if it 
 should please God to give me a period of tolerable 
 health after my Andover work was done, I should be 
 very grateful for it. It has been an object of my 
 prayers a long while. For a dozen years or more 
 my feeling about it has been intensified by my recol- 
 lections of my brief pastorate in my youth. 
 
 "Those years are a source of unmitigated pain to 
 me; my ministrations seem to me to have been in 
 such glaring contrast to all that they ought to have 
 been. The memory of them has become such a bur- 
 den on my soul, that it has often seemed to me that 
 
LETTERS. 195 
 
 I must not, cannot, die, till I have had one more 
 opportunity to carry into a pastoral pulpit the views 
 of my riper, and by the grace of God I hope better, 
 years. 'Oh, for another chance ! ' has been the often 
 unutterable cry of my soul to God. I must not in 
 my weakness dwell on this. 
 
 " Bear with me, my brother, for saying even what 
 I have. The bearing of it is this : that if God does 
 see fit to give me my desire, I must preach. I do not 
 care where, or to whom. If I can find a little flock 
 anywhere that will hear me, without compensation if 
 need be, I must go to them. Nothing that I can 
 now do for Andover can be worth to anybody what 
 such a brief pastorate would be to me, if blessed of 
 God, as I almost know it would be, in rounding out 
 my life's work and lifting from me a most grievous 
 burden. 
 
 "I know this seems like a dream. Probabilities, 
 as men judge of them, are all against it; yet I do 
 not despair, for all that. God has some meaning in 
 giving me the exercises of soul on the subject which 
 I have had for so many years. It may relate to 
 another world than this, but I hope not." 
 
 " August 12, 1879. 
 "It is a sad thing to put one's self out of the line 
 of God's work prematurely. I earnestly wish to 
 avoid that, if I may. To me the chief motive is 
 work — work! I don't want to be half buried before 
 my time comes'to lie quietly! " 
 
 " Andover, Mass., October 20, 1883. 
 "... Yet I check myself in saying ' desolation. ' 
 For God has been wonderfully faithful to me. He pre- 
 
196 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 pared me by some months of improving health to sus- 
 tain the blow His hand was keeping in reserve ; and 
 when it came, almost instantly He disclosed to me 
 so many tokens of His love in it, that I think I can 
 truly say that my almost constant feeling is one of 
 peace and gratitude. That God should have cared 
 enough for me and mine to do this strange thing, to 
 think of it ages ago, to plan events so that they 
 should converge to this point, — it seems wonderful to 
 me ! There must be some immeasurable good some- 
 where to be served by it, to induce Him to do this 
 thing to me and mine. I hope I am not presump- 
 tuous in taking joy in the thought that 'whom He 
 loveth He chasteneth. ' Why should I not believe 
 and appropriate it as so many others have done and 
 been comforted ? So, at least, nry mind runs, and I am 
 at rest. I rejoice in God; 'let Him do what seemeth 
 to Him good. ' 
 
 " There is an immeasurable depth of blessedness in 
 the thought of Grod. You know this more profoundly 
 than I can say it, but I feel that I owe it to His great 
 faithfulness to me to tell what He has done and is 
 doing for me. I understand what Charles Kingsley 
 meant when he said, in the prospect, as he believed, 
 of his wife's death, 'It must be God's doing, because 
 it is so painful and so strange.' " 
 
 " Axdover, November 27, 1883. 
 
 " You knew my son ; you saw in one interview 
 what he was, and you know what he is to me. I 
 thank you for telling me your thoughts of him. I 
 owe it to God's great faithfulness to say that I am 
 supported in this trouble beyond all my hopes. Not 
 
LETTERS. 197 
 
 that I have any very great emotional uplifting such 
 as some are blessed with. That would not be natu- 
 ral to me, and I should not trust it much if I had it. 
 But I have a calm sense of rest in the assurance that 
 God has done this thing. 
 
 "My boy was my favorite child, so far as it is 
 right for a father to have such, — one of the symmet- 
 rical and rounded characters from which the world 
 has most to look for. He never gave me a half-hour 
 of trouble. He was one of the chosen ones, and 
 must have begun his immortal life, with all the 
 great and conscious currents of his being flowing 
 towards God and identified with God's plans. It is 
 a great thing to have had such a son to give back to 
 Him who made him. My impulse is to say with one 
 Duke of Ormond, 'I would rather have my dead son 
 than half the living sons of Christendom,' but I 
 don't know that I ought to. Yet I may properly say 
 this : That if half the fathers in Christendom have 
 such sons to lose, they are a select company blessed 
 of God exceedingly. God permits me to rejoice with 
 them." 
 
 "March 31, 1885. 
 
 " Their unity of worship is better than our strug- 
 gling heterogeneousness of belief. Their litany 
 keeps alive in the hearts of the people the great 
 essentials of truth in liturgic form. That is better 
 than no form at all. They pray right at any rate, if 
 many do not believe aright. . . . 
 
 " I do not know that I have ever expressed to you 
 one thing which always comes to my mind when I 
 think of you. It is my deep sense of your kindness 
 
198 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 and considerateness to me in all the relations we 
 have sustained to each other. Far back, when you 
 were nominally my pupil, but really my equal, — for 
 I could not then really teach my classes much, and I 
 knew it, — you were considerate of my youth, and 
 generous and attentive to my infirm efforts. I was 
 very grateful to these early classes, and especially to 
 four or five men, of whom you were one, whose de- 
 meanor gave character to that of the rest. You do 
 not know how affectionately I have followed your 
 career and rejoiced in your success. And since you 
 entered the Board of Trust, and have been one of my 
 directors, I have always found you a true friend and 
 brother. I have felt that I could go to you Avith 
 any tiling which a man can tell to a brother-man, to be 
 assured of your sympathy and counsel. The knowl- 
 edge of this has been a help to me through all these 
 years. 
 
 " Do not think I mean to flatter you — I can have 
 nothing to gain by that, if I found it in my heart; 
 but ... I want to tell you what you have been 
 to me, before I go. 
 
 "May God befriend you for it! " 
 
 From Letters to Miss Susan Thompson. 
 
 "April 15, 1852. 
 
 "For myself, however, I cannot wholly sympa- 
 thize with the prevailing feeling around us. It 
 seems to me that there is more gloom about the 
 usages of mourning which death creates than about 
 death itself. A funeral seems to me more sad than 
 dying." 
 
LETTERS. 199 
 
 " November 3, 1853. 
 
 " It is to me one of the most painful mysteries in 
 God's Providence that a child should ever lose a 
 father or a mother in early youth. The severest 
 doctrine of our faith is not so dark to me as this 
 simple, every-day occurrence." 
 
 " St. Gall, August 19, 1854. 
 
 "I am enjoying very much more than I expected 
 to when I left London. My residence at the Uni- 
 versities on the Rhine was exceedingly valuable to 
 me in every way. It has been my good fortune to 
 meet with more genial and attractive specimens of 
 human nature than travellers generally mention in 
 their books. I have had occasion in my letters 
 home to speak of this often. I certainly have seen 
 the kindly side of the human heart almost invariably 
 since I came into this world of strangers. Among 
 travelling gentlemen residing in the places I have 
 visited, innkeepers, traders, postilions, servants, 
 everywhere I have met uniform kindness and good- 
 nature ; often, too, a delicacy of interest which as a 
 stranger I could not have claimed. It elevates my 
 respect for the race to see so much that is attractive. 
 I am disposed to think that the complaints of travel- 
 lers are due quite as much to themselves as to the 
 people of these lands." 
 
 "Andover, Mass., October 14, 1883. 
 
 "I have not felt able till now to acknowledge 
 your kind letter which came to me at Bar Harbor. 
 And now I can do little more than to thank you. 
 
200 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 There is nothing for one to say under a sorrow like 
 mine. 'I was dumb because Thou didst it.' So I 
 feel like burying my grief in the grave of my boy. 
 But I should be untrue to the faithfulness of God if 
 I did not add that my faith was never stronger than 
 now, or my trust in the God of my fathers more pro- 
 found and restful. There must be somewhere some 
 immeasurable good to be served by such a waste of 
 good here to justify it all. I shall one day know it, 
 and till then I wait. The faith I have preached does 
 not fail me, and it never will." 
 
 To Rev. S. Lewis B. Speake. 
 
 " Andover, Mass., March 17, 1881. 
 
 " I thank you for your kind words about my little 
 waif— 'Sabbath Hours.' I am grateful if anybody 
 has obtained from it a helpful word, or a momentary 
 uplifting towards the things unseen. You know 
 enough of such work to know that whatever is really 
 worth the saying, is the fruit of living. It must be 
 pressed out of us by emergencies which only He can 
 help us to meet who sends them — and I doubt 
 whether such fruit is very large — in the seeming — 
 in any man's life. We really know but very little 
 of the universe of truth; most of our ministrations 
 are touches upon a few strings of which life has 
 taught us the melody. At least, it is so with me. 
 1 know vastly less than I once did, and seem to have 
 at command less and less, as the years go by, which 
 can possibly be helpful to anybody. And besides, 
 the best things are things that cannot be said. They 
 must wait till we get command of some other than 
 
LETTERS. 201 
 
 human language. We should seem to other men, to 
 be fools, or insane, so jagged are the incoherencies 
 which are our best approaches to an utterance of that 
 which is within. If, now and then, the Spirit help- 
 eth our infirmities, we take courage and — we print! 
 Is it not so?" 
 
 To Rev. Mr. Lane. 
 
 "Indeed, it always stirs all the youthful blood 
 that is left in me, to witness the ordination of a 
 young man. 
 
 "I covet the honor and the joy and the toil of 
 entering upon one's ministry in times like these. It 
 makes me think of Scott's couplet, — 
 
 " ' 'Twere worth ten years of peaceful life, 
 One glance at their array.' 
 
 "I thought I had some conception of the truth, 
 when I preached my first sermon. But it is marvel- 
 lously magnified by time. 
 
 " As to my sermon, I am glad if you found any- 
 thing in it that chimed with your feelings on the 
 occasion, but I really am ashamed to send the manu- 
 script out of my hands. Do excuse me. 
 
 " You tempt my cupidity by one statement in your 
 letter. That chair of Dr. Hopkins! Is there no 
 way in which I can steal it? I have the table, desk, 
 chair, and watch which Professor Stuart used for 
 nearly forty years. I am reserving them to put into 
 our new library building, for which we are now col- 
 lecting funds. That chair of Hopkins's ought to be 
 added to the group. There is no other spot in the 
 
202 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 world to which it would be so becoming, or where it 
 would be revered for ages, as it would be in this old 
 Hopkinsian Seminary. Do you suppose that your 
 friend can be induced to part with it? Please make 
 inquiry for me. Can it be purchased? If not, can 
 it be begged? If not, can it be safely stolen on some 
 dark night? If not, could Louis Napoleon take it 
 by a 'coup d'etat ' ? I am ready to start almost any 
 earthly power, to obtain it." 
 
 " I thank you for your kindness in forwarding 
 to me the relic of Dr. Hopkins. Time has used it 
 gently, considering its age and the weight of divin- 
 ity which it has borne. I do not marvel that it has 
 broken down under the weight of its memories." 
 
 To Miss Emeey. 
 
 " May I tell you a bit of my own experience in 
 such matters ? I was once very wide awake to the 
 errors of the Church, the sins of good people, the 
 cant, the narrowness, the bigotry, and all the rest of 
 it which has become the staple of the sceptical lit- 
 erature about the Church and its orthodoxy. I was 
 all alive to it, and honestly believed that some great 
 revolutionary change was approaching which would 
 sweep away, well, pretty much everything that I had 
 been taught to revere! and give us in the place of 
 it, I never could exactly see what, and I cannot now, 
 but something very grand and superexcellent; and 
 which at all events would rid us of all the annoy- 
 ances of human imperfection in the Church. I was 
 very honest in it all, but very egotistic, very bitter, 
 very uncharitable, and often very morose. 
 
LETTERS. 203 
 
 "Well, I have lived a good many years since then, 
 and think I have learned a thing or two which a 
 better heart and a holier life would have taught me 
 long before. Specially it seems to me now, that God 
 does not work and does not mean to, by abandoning 
 His Church and creating something new out of its 
 ruin. He works in the Church and by means of it; 
 yes, in the old 'effete' 'shell' of outward organiza- 
 tion. It is a better concern than it seems to be. Its 
 imperfections are among God's means of teaching. 
 It is purer than anything outside of it which the 
 world has to show, with all its failings. God con- 
 descends to live in it. It is, therefore, a higher 
 and nobler thing than any other form of organized 
 humanity. It represents in its ideal the purest 
 truth. It has less of cant, of bigotry, of narrowness, 
 of malicious judgment, and more of all that good 
 men love, than I can find elsewhere. God is exalt- 
 ing it and trying it as by fire. He sits by its side as 
 a refiner of silver. An honest and loving heart, with 
 even a tolerable clearness of head, will see in it more 
 of God's own image than in anything else. There- 
 fore, I cast in my lot with it, and love it and hope to 
 live and die in its embrace. Its denominational 
 forms and all ? Why, yes ; why not ? Numbers ne- 
 cessitate separating, with such materials as human 
 nature gives. I can tolerate these if God can, and 
 so long as I can peep over all the fences and see so 
 much of noble living and earnest praying ; so much 
 of patience among the poor and benevolence among 
 the rich, so much of enterprise among the young and 
 wisdom among the old ; so many and so lovely devel- 
 opments of downright and upright holiness of life, 
 
204 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 adjusted to old conditions of men and varieties of 
 temperament, I haven't much heart left to ferret out 
 abuses, or to analyze motives, or to help Anti-Christ 
 in any form of it, by playing into its hands in my 
 judgment of the Church. 
 
 "] was once a very stout Congregationalist — a 
 blue Presbyterian. I thought Episcopacy a sin, and 
 Romanism of the devil. I don't find much time to 
 think of such things now; I use the prayer book 
 daily; I have given up the old interpretation of 
 Scripture which thought no good of the Catholic 
 Church. I find a great deal of piety there and 
 everywhere where Christ is owned as the living 
 Head. I work Congregationally, because I must 
 work somewhere, and am neither wise enough nor 
 strong enough to work alone, and am not such a fool 
 as to throw away nine-tenths of my power for good 
 by trying to work in ecclesiastical solitude. But 
 I could work just as well in half a dozen other or- 
 ganic forms of Church life. 
 
 "But the Church life in some form I must have. 
 Something or other in the Church as it is, is very dear 
 to Christ. He always has worked and lived in it, 
 and He always will. Therefore I grow to be more 
 and more of a churchman as the years go by. I love 
 her ancient life and her noble history. Her old 
 songs thrill me, and I find more poetry in her life 
 to-day than all literature discloses to me. The 
 Sandwich Islands and Madagascar are poems tome; 
 Moody and Sankey are others. 
 
 "This is the lesson which my life has taught me, 
 and is confirming me in all the while: that God is 
 in the Church as He is nowhere else, and that this 
 
LETTERS. 
 
 205 
 
 world sinks or swims with this divinely formed em- 
 bodiment of holy living; and that so long as God's 
 patience can bear the infirmities of the Church, I 
 ought to bear them with loving charity." 
 
 " ' Go out into ethereal space, revolve around some- 
 thing else than self, obey, serve, do fealty to the 
 great silent laws of God's love, s<> shall thou know 
 that thou art Christ's and Christ is thine' Such 
 seems to be the voice from on high. Every test of 
 character turns at last on this freeness from self as an 
 object of concentration." 
 
 "Andovek, Mass., April 0, 1872. 
 
 "Eternity, I fear, will make sad havoc with the 
 images of some of us, as we are in the mirror of our 
 friends' judgment of us. I would give a great deal 
 for a half-hour's consciousness of the qualities you 
 see in my photograph. As to my health, I am in 
 such a quandary I cannot answer your inquiries very 
 intelligently. I do not suppose there is any struc- 
 tural disease, as yet; but that I am living in a worn- 
 out condition of the nervous system, somewhat like 
 that of Dr. Holmes's 'One I loss Shay.' Meanwhile 
 disease skirmishes with almost every organ of the 
 system by turns, and manages to keep the brain in a 
 constant state of irritation. My hope is that some- 
 thing else will give way before that. I wish to go 
 out of this body thoughtfully when the time comes. 
 It would be very sad to go raving or drivelling. 1 
 have a dim conjecture that somewhere between this 
 and heaven, a departing soul gets a glimpse of, per- 
 haps a contact and conflict with the Powers of Evil, 
 in which it obtains an indelible conception of what 
 
206 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 sin is — its own sin especially; so that it enters on 
 an eternal career with a sense of sin and of Christ 
 which is as eternal as its life. I want to meet the 
 change with all my 'wits about me.' But it will be 
 as God wills, and so would I have it. 
 
 "If my 'wits ' go, it may make more room for His. 
 A sense of unimportance and unworthiness should 
 keep one very still in a matter so exclusively belong- 
 ing to the hidden things of God." 
 
 " Ripton, Vt., September 2, 1877. 
 
 "I have just sent off to the Congregationalist 
 six articles, the fruit of my vacation work, and my 
 winter's contribution to the weekly press, — a sort of 
 penance which I pay for my seclusion from the 
 pulpit. 
 
 " The last one has been goading me to a deliver- 
 ance for the year past. I call it ' The Theology of 
 the Marble Faun.' In reading that marvellous pro- 
 duction of Hawthorne's, I was impressed with the 
 fact that with no religious design, still less with 
 theological design, he has painted a most thrilling 
 picture of sin as it is, and as it works in human 
 souls. Our old Puritanic theology on the subject is 
 there, without abatement or apology. 
 
 " So it is with genius everywhere. To make any- 
 thing thrillingly true, men have to fall back on the 
 old theology. The Greek drama, and the tragic 
 drama from that time down to ours, dealt with the 
 same problem of Destiny and Sovereignty, which has 
 given to Calvinism its imperial sway in the world. 
 So Dr. Holmes, while sputtering at that theology on 
 one page, has to fall back on 'original sin ' when he 
 
LETTERS. 207 
 
 wants to make something powerful in 'Elsie Ven- 
 ner. ' So George Eliot, while her own faith is expir- 
 ing, still has to retreat to it and raise it from the 
 dead to give artistic truthfulness to the dissection of 
 the hypocritical banker's conscience — what's his 
 name? Then when the book comes out, the whole 
 corps of literary critics — Westminster included — 
 fill the heavens with the exclamation, 'How true to 
 nature ! — what real life ! ' 
 
 " Now either the critics and the authors are right, 
 or they are not. If not, so much the worse for their 
 literary discernment ; but if they are, what becomes 
 of their flings at Calvinism? Calvinism assumes 
 that sin is first what Genius says it is in its reading 
 of real life. On those facts of sin the whole struc- 
 ture is built. So, gentlemen, I am alert to ask, on 
 which turn of the dilemma will you toss ? Such is 
 the drift of my article." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., April 5, 1883. 
 "I have revised and put to press a book the last 
 winter which will soon be out. I have not done 
 more work than that, in equal time, for a dozen 
 years. Yet, at the age of sixty-two, the end cannot 
 be far off, and though I prefer this world to anything 
 I know of any other, yet I have great peace in having 
 no will about the 'time of the end.' I feel an un- 
 speakable pity for the poor wise men who haven't 
 found out whether there is a God, or whether they 
 have souls or not. God have mercy on them! " 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., September 8, 1888. 
 " I have for twenty-five years been impressed and 
 oppressed by a sense of our home work for the world's 
 
208 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 salvation. When I went to Andover, I found there 
 a morbid feeling about the superior godliness of the 
 foreign missionary service, a relic, I suppose, of the 
 romance of its infancy. Young men were made to 
 believe that if they meant to be pre-eminent Chris- 
 tians, they must go to India. I think a good deal of 
 unconscious self-righteousness went out with some 
 very good men in that notion of the relative value of 
 the two departments of the great work. 
 
 "I became, from the first, imbued with the idea 
 of divine election in the destiny of this country. We 
 were and are an elect people, as truly as ever Israel 
 was, and good strategy required the Christianizing of 
 this nation first. Whatever else might lag, the work 
 here must not lag. Indeed, the most fatal wa} r to 
 make everything lag, was to let the home work be 
 secondary. This has been my theory. I have fought 
 for it at Andover, by trying to create a truer balance 
 of religious feeling among the students. It some- 
 times required a good deal of quiet pluck to defend 
 the right of a man to stay at home if he wanted to, 
 and to save him from the sense of having lowered his 
 standard of character in doing so. Now and then, if 
 a first-class man debated the question of going abroad, 
 — as I taught them all to do, — if he decided not to 
 go, it was a cause of mourning among the friends of 
 foreign missions. The feeling was like that of men 
 who see a flag at half mast. 
 
 "Even so late as when Dr. W., of Dakota, chose 
 that field rather than Western Asia, I found it nec- 
 essary to defend him. 
 
 " I am making a long story of it, but this has been 
 my estimate of this country as the centre of the world 
 
LETTERS. 209 
 
 in Christian work. The success of the Civil War 
 removed the chief obstacle to a practical applica- 
 tion of the theory. Since the war things have gone 
 with a rush which is awful. No words can express 
 my conception of the crisis, the peril, the oppor- 
 tunity. 
 
 "I don't know whether I ought to thank you for 
 3^our sketch. Do you know, I couldn't get through 
 it without tears of humiliation ? Oh, if it could but 
 be made true ! I mean to write an article, if I ever 
 have the vim for it, on 'The lessons to be learned 
 from the exaggerated estimates of good men by their 
 friends and admirers.' Yet I wonder if some of it 
 isn't true — a little! We cannot all be fools in our 
 thinking of men and women to whom we are grate- 
 ful for intellectual or moral help. No, it cannot be ; 
 yet — and yet — if it is 'what thrice-mocked fools we 
 are ! ' So much of the best that is in us consists of 
 our great ideals of the great and the good, living 
 and dead! I know a man the thought of whom 
 has been my North Star for fifty years. Then think 
 of the mothers of the world, the saints and angels 
 to their children. How easy it would be to pray 
 to them." 
 
 " Bar Harbor, Me., July 3, 1889. 
 
 "I am not yet able to write much more than to 
 thank you for your letter. 
 
 "Why is it that physical pain is so hard to bear? 
 It is almost the only thing about which I am cow- 
 ardly. I think I have some moral courage. I do 
 not remember a time in which it was a trial to me to 
 be one of a minority. ... As a boy I could never 
 
210 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 fight; but in college I was the only anti-slavery man 
 in the crowd, and I enjoyed the solitude of my 
 opinion. You are nearer heaven than I am. You 
 wish to go there. You do me honor overmuch in 
 thinking that I do. I do not, and never did. No 
 suffering has ever yet made me wish to die. I 
 sympathize profoundly with the Englishman, an 
 excellent Christian, who was comforted on his death- 
 bed by friends who reminded him of the better world 
 to which he was going, and who answered, 'Yes, I 
 believe all that ; but I would rather stay in a world 
 where I am better acquainted. ' 
 
 " I have never attained a nobler height than to be 
 able to say that the Lord's time for me to go is my 
 time. I have great peace in that consciousness of 
 oneness with Him." 
 
 " Bar Harbor, Me., June 17, 1890. 
 
 " I wish I were able to write at some length about 
 your Southern and mountain work. It is the only 
 line of work in which I see any hope for the regen- 
 eration of the South. I feel very little hope in any 
 political experiments, elections, laws, and the like. 
 If they do not initiate another civil war, I shall re- 
 joice. We began at the wrong end in giving the 
 ballot to the freedmen, educating them by means of 
 it instead of educating them as other voters are, by 
 preparatory working. The man must have a singu- 
 lar confidence in his earlier wisdom who has learned 
 nothing from the last twenty-five years. If there is 
 one hopeful sign outside of the moral and educa- 
 tional work for the freedmen, I have failed to dis- 
 cover it. 
 
LETTERS. 211 
 
 " I took my pen only to thank yon for your letter 
 and papers. But I am already exhausted. Frag- 
 ments of an article on the duty of the North to the 
 South lie unwoven in my portfolio. Whether I 
 shall live to finish it I do not know. But oh, there 
 is so much to be said and done, that one longs to 
 live and have a hand in it! Yet how silly it is to 
 feel so, God has so little need of the best of us. I 
 have been listening to my good wife's reading of the 
 best story of Dr. Livingston. If the great dark con- 
 tinent did not need him, how little does this world 
 need us ? No ; let us abide our time, and go when 
 the call comes, to a world where we shall see things 
 as they are. You do not know how my soul longs to 
 get into closer friendship with Christ and to pray — 
 which is about the only mode of usefulness left to 
 me — as He prayed! To touch the springs which 
 move the universe as He touched them ! — one can 
 almost feel the electric thrill of it. What have these 
 poor creatures to live for, to whom such a thought is 
 only a meteor from an unknown world?" 
 
 To Rev. Dr. Ray Palmer. 
 
 " Andover, Mass., March 22, 1865. 
 "I have been driven to the conviction that this 
 whole subject of ministerial education is embarrassed 
 by the fact that so large a proportion of our religious 
 young men start from a wrong level, either of relig- 
 ious experience or of information about the pastoral 
 service, or both ; and that any great improvement in 
 respect to the numbers of the right kind of men in 
 the ministry must be effected by striking very far 
 back in the history of young men. 
 
212 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 "You will not think me severe, I hope, in the 
 judgment which is implied by what I am about to 
 say. I have not come to my opinion on the subject 
 till years of rather painful observation have com- 
 pelled me. 
 
 "I think I speak within bounds in saying that 
 four-fifths of our young candidates for the ministry 
 come to their work with very exaggerated ideas of 
 the worldly comfort, the advantages of position, the 
 amount of pecuniary emolument, and opportunity of 
 social culture which they shall probably command in 
 the ministry. Disappointment in these respects, I 
 think, is a good deal more general than the ministry 
 themselves would be willing to confess. I judge 
 this from conversations with young men before and 
 after their settlement in the ministry, from the tenor 
 of a very large part of my correspondence with minis- 
 ters who are seeking places of settlement, or who 
 wish to leave the places where they are, and from the 
 statements of committees of our larger churches as 
 to the applications they receive for the use of their 
 vacant pulpits. 
 
 " La*>t week a young minister came to me for aid 
 in rinding a place of settlement, who had just left an 
 excellent people and a salary of a thousand dollars 
 because he wanted a larger amount ; yet he had no 
 family but a wife. A short time ago another came, 
 having just left a good farming parish, where he had 
 eight hundred dollars, because he wanted to be 
 nearer to some large city. This morning a letter 
 reached me, asking for an introduction to some 
 church where a large and cultivated audience can be 
 found. A minister from Vermont writes me that he 
 
LETTERS. 213 
 
 'feels stifled' by the want of culture among his 
 'average of five hundred hearers ' ; he wants to go to 
 Cambridge. Another from Maine, three from Massa- 
 chusetts, one from New Jersey, one from Ohio, one 
 from Pennsylvania, and two from Connecticut, occur 
 to me among my correspondents, who are all op- 
 pressed with the same sense of a 'call' to preach 
 either to city congregations, or to audiences of culti- 
 vated tastes, or to the wealth of the land. One man 
 has been without a settlement four years, and another 
 seven years, because they cannot find a place large 
 enough for their aspirations, and each has declined 
 several calls in the meanwhile. 
 
 "These are specimens of facts which I could 
 enumerate more largely. Alongside of these I must 
 place the fact that to a large majority of the applica- 
 tions I receive from churches which are few in num- 
 bers, with small audiences and small salaries, I am 
 obliged to give a negative answer: I can find very 
 few men for such parishes. 
 
 "Do not misinterpret here my opinion of these 
 young brethren in the ministry, and approaching it, 
 to whom I refer. I do not in my heart suppose that 
 they are worse than the rest of us. Many of them I 
 know to be earnest and godly men. Generally there 
 is a simplicity in the way in which they acknowledge 
 their wishes and motives, which indicates plainly 
 that they are unconscious of wrong in the matter. 
 It seems to them that they are pursuing the proper 
 and legitimate way of 'improving their condition' 
 in the ministry, as they would in any other profes- 
 sion. I am often led to ask myself whether they are 
 not a fair sample of the stratum of clerical and 
 
214 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 Christian experience from which they come, and of 
 which we are all a part. I am very keenly sensible 
 of the disadvantage which I labor under in endeav- 
 oring to correct their views, while I live in a 'ceiled 
 house' and wear 'fine linen,' and live in compara- 
 tive luxury, with every advantage for personal cul- 
 ture which I can desire. It may be that I am one of 
 the last men in the world who ought even to be writ- 
 ing these lines. Yet somebody must move for the 
 accomplishment of this definite object, viz. : to reduce 
 the competition of ministers for 'good places,' and 
 to provide ministers for poor ones. 
 
 " This leads me to the point where my suggestions 
 cross the line of your report. Cannot something be 
 done, somehow, to work this idea into the minds of 
 young men who may be induced to think of the min- 
 isterial work, that city churches, parishes in large 
 towns, iv ell-paying places in general, and positions of 
 superior facilities for culture, are in no want of min- 
 isters ? That is to say, that the benevolent and chari- 
 table efforts of the churches to raise up a ministry, 
 need not be directed that way ; that the law of sup- 
 ply and demand will, in the long run, take care of 
 such positions ; that we are not at all anxious to seek 
 out young men for them, or to induce men to enter 
 the ministry with the expectation of filling them; 
 that we want men for poor parishes, with hard labor 
 and small remuneration ; and that of such men there 
 is practically no limit to the number we need. We 
 want men for a strictly missionary service, — a more 
 self-denying service than that of four-fifths of our 
 foreign missionaries, — and practically we don't want 
 ministers for any other service. That is to say, I 
 
LETTERS. 215 
 
 repeat, the law of supply and demand will take care 
 of all other service. You will understand these 
 strong statements with all necessary qualifications. 
 I am very solicitous to get the main fact strongly 
 before the Christian mind of the land; that we want 
 an unlimited, supply of home missionaries, and nothing 
 else, so far as the home field is concerned. . . . 
 
 "I must beg you again to make all the necessary 
 qualifications of my remarks, as they seem to affect 
 an opinion of the Christian character of our ministry. 
 My heart opens to them very warmly, and I do not 
 judge them in this thing otherwise than I would be 
 judged. Whatever they are, I am one of them, and 
 all my preachments on this subject I have tried to 
 take home to my own conscience a great many times. 
 Yet it does seem to me that clerical opinion of the 
 clerical office among us is in danger of drifting 
 towards the ideal of it which is so common in the 
 Church of England. . . . 
 
 " I have not alluded to the palliations of our cleri- 
 cal shrinking from home-missionary fields, found in 
 the criminal neglect of congregations to pay their 
 clergy to the extent of their ability. Such pallia- 
 tions are abundant, as everybody knows. But, after 
 all, my mind falls back upon this principle: that 
 we, as ministers of Christ, must take the world as 
 we find it, and, well-paid or not, we must preach. 
 The palliation does not help us much as practical 
 men, intent on doing the work we are sent into the 
 world for. 
 
 "How ancient everything and everybody seems 
 that lived and worked before the great Rebellion! 
 The Old Testament and the Ncav are hardly sepa- 
 
216 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 rated by a bolder or broader line of demarcation than 
 that which divides the 'Ante ' and the 'Post ' of that 
 terrible epoch. What a stupendous life is ours 
 which extends on both sides of such a line as that!" 
 
 " Andover, Mass., April 8, 1865. 
 
 "I cannot but congratulate you on the eternal 
 inheritance which a man receives in being made the 
 author of one good hymn which lives in the hearts 
 of God's people. Cowper's lifelong insanity has 
 sometimes seemed to me hardly too much to pay for 
 the authorship of 'There is a Fountain.' So of the 
 very dear hymn which commences your volume : it 
 is a great thing to" have been permitted to write it." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., March 8, 1868. 
 
 "I thank you very sincerely for your recent letter, 
 and for the kind words you speak about my little 
 tract. It was the fruit of one of my invalid Sab- 
 baths, of which I have spent so many in my study, 
 often with the sound of the chapel worship coming 
 to my ear very sweetly through the open windows. 
 I have no idea that the tract will reach any larger 
 number of readers. Most of us are too busy for such 
 thoughts to seem very real. Some, too, whom I 
 know, seem to have a sense of fellowship with 'the 
 saints, ' — -living and departed, — which makes utter 
 solitude, apparently, an unknown experience to 
 them. I published, however, at the suggestion of 
 two or three invalids, and hope the little affair may 
 do some good to such. The longer I live, the more 
 highly I value the privilege of putting even one 
 Christian idea in away which makes it real — per- 
 
LETTERS. 217 
 
 haps a lifelong reality — to a few Christian souls. 
 It is but little subsoiling that any one man can do in 
 the great field in a lifetime. It will not surprise me, 
 if, when our work is tried as by fire, we should find 
 that the choicest good we have done has been in 
 things which went from us spontaneously, and of 
 which we did not think much in the doing of them. 
 Yet they may have been the secret fruit of many 
 struggles. 
 
 " I have been reading lately a book of Isaac Tay- 
 lor's — 'Ultimate Civilization' — which, though pub- 
 lished in England some ten years ago, I had not seen 
 before. What a marvellous fund of original thinking 
 that man had! I doubt whether there has been an- 
 other man of our times to whom the clergy are in- 
 debted unconsciously for so much material of thought 
 as to him. He has a curious speculation about the 
 help which non-professional minds have given to the 
 world's progress, theology included. He makes out 
 a good case in some respects — starting with the fact 
 that most of the heroic characters under the Jewish 
 dispensation were not of the tribe of Levi. If you 
 find time to look at the book, you would find much 
 to stimulate thought, if you have not already seen it." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., January 11, 1877. 
 
 " I have tried in my articles to do the fair thing, 
 as between the foreign and the home work. In doing 
 that, I justify the general preference of students for 
 the latter, as being at least a choice which does not 
 deserve rebuke. I wish you would observe the bear- 
 ing of my articles on that subject, and if they suggest 
 anything to you which would help to rectify the pro- 
 
218 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 portions of the home and the foreign work in the 
 estimation of the public, by all means publish your 
 vision. 
 
 "In the Seminary I have had to contend in more 
 ways than one with the romance of foreign missions, 
 and the disposition to coddle them. In the effort to 
 teach the true ideal of the pulpit everywhere, I have 
 had to cross the track of that spirit which makes 
 preaching to the heathen a work of special grace and 
 a sign of special piety. I suppose that this is the 
 real cause of my imagined 'indifference' to the for- 
 eign service. 
 
 "I would not utter a word to cool the ardor of 
 anybody in the foreign work; yet I confess that the 
 home work does loom up before me with a painful 
 and threatening magnitude, which suggests the 
 query whether it is reasonable to expect much ex- 
 pansion of the foreign service before the home field 
 is more thoroughly mastered. There is a law of give 
 and take in these things which is as inexorable in 
 the work of the world's conversion as in any other. 
 We cannot convert Asia without a certain amount of 
 spiritual power at home. We cannot give what we 
 have not received. And the power at home must 
 come from a broader and deeper spiritual culture ; 
 and this must take time, money, and labor, and 
 prayer. What other view of it can be either philo- 
 sophical or Scriptural? 'Beginning at Jerusalem': 
 such was our Lord's direction to the apostles at the 
 outset of the great work. There is the central law 
 of missions, as it seems to me, for all time. We 
 must keep the home work well in hand, and uplifted 
 above all chance of failure, or we cannot get the 
 
LETTERS. 219 
 
 power to impart anything to the heathen mind. 
 Every missionary in Nebraska, left to struggle for 
 dear life, and every church left houseless in Dakota, 
 represent just so much deficit of spiritual force in 
 Japan. To begin at the other end, exalting the for- 
 eign work to the head of the column is reversing the 
 law of gravitation. I do firmly believe that that 
 drift of inquiry and decision which results in giving 
 to the great majority of our ministry home work to 
 do, is rather obedience to a deeper law of spiritual 
 success than to any selfish tastes. It is simply the 
 power of the Holy Ghost moving the men to the 
 places where the greatest results are practicable. 
 
 " But I am preaching ; and to one who least needs 
 it from me." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., February 12, 1878. 
 
 "If I were to live my life over again, I think I 
 should emulate your example in the matter of corre- 
 spondence. It is certainly true that, in the later 
 years of culture at least, one's best thoughts come 
 to one in the easy hours of fraternal conference. 
 Did you ever philosophize upon it? Why is it that 
 we find richer thoughts and more versatility in Ar- 
 nold's letters than in his histories ? Why are Leonard 
 WithhiQ-ton's conversations so much more brilliant 
 than his sermons ? Recreation in these men is more 
 fruitful than labor. I suspect we are all of us in 
 some degree subject to the same law. It is a curi- 
 ous phenomenon in literature at any rate. I think 
 I got from Professor Stuart and Albert Barnes, both 
 of whom were penurious letter-writers, a lurch ad- 
 verse to such work, which I am sorry for. 
 
220 AUSTIN" PHELPS. 
 
 " I write of what happens to be fresh in my mind. 
 I am glad if you like my Articles on Creeds. I 
 wrote them three times over, lest I should say some 
 unwise thing." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., October 26, 1880. 
 
 " I wish I could respond to your welcome letter in 
 its own contented and cheerful strain ; but honestly 
 I cannot. Though I am not conscious of a murmur- 
 ing thought against God or man, yet I do feel that 
 the hand of God is heavy upon me, and mysteriously 
 so, in withdrawing me so early from the work I love. 
 Think of it! At the age of fifty-nine! Just the 
 time when most men begin to ripen, when intellect- 
 ual culture begins to gather round itself the mellow 
 graces of maturing character; just then, to be called 
 to enter a valley of suffering and of humiliation, in 
 the consciousness of premature decay ! I do feel it 
 — I cannot help it. Time does not yet lighten it. 
 It rather grows in weight. 
 
 " Much of this, I doubt not, is due to the fact that 
 I am rarely for an hour free from pain, and all brain- 
 work aggravates it. Of course I must expect a mor- 
 bid outlook on the future, so long as this condition 
 of things lasts. I have good reason to hope that it 
 will not last to the end of life. But even for a year 
 of it, one needs a closer nearness to God than I have. 
 One needs to feel grateful for suffering: and that I 
 have not gained. Submission, trust, reverence for 
 the mystery which I would not change ; all this I 
 feel, but this seems to me the infancy of a life that 
 is hid with Christ. . . . 
 
 " The Litany of the Episcopal Church has become 
 
LETTERS. 221 
 
 very precious to me. It is a wonderful example of 
 precative style; and the depth of its meaning, it 
 seems to me, nobody can fathom who has not experi- 
 enced some great sorrow. We have lost much in 
 parting with some of the prayers of the old Mother 
 Church. And what have we gained in their place ? 
 I read this week the prayer of ordination by Professor 
 
 at a recent Council. It was perfect in its way; 
 
 perhaps as faultless a specimen of extemporaneous 
 prayer as can be well conceived. I find no fault in 
 it, — absolutely none: yet I do not feel in it the 
 deep undertone of devotion which rings out from 
 some of the old Collects of the Church like the sound 
 of ancient bells. The Church takes a great risk in 
 severing herself ever from her history. Nothing else 
 in this world lias such a history; with so much of 
 man's immortality in it, and therefore so much of 
 God's Eternity! I wonder if the destiny of some of 
 us in heaven may not be a reverent and studious liv- 
 ing in the Past? Can we conceive of any other 
 world as having such a Past for the education of 
 infant races ? 
 
 " Even the secularities of life here become sacred 
 things if seen in their real perspective towards 
 Christ's life. I am impressed anew with this in 
 reading, this week, Dr. Hamlin's 'Among the 
 Turks.' A laundry and a bake-house, built into 
 such a life as his, become Temples of the Holy 
 Ghost. What can Gabriel, or the Angels of the 
 Four Winds, be doing more sublime than that work 
 which was going on on the banks of the Bosphorus, 
 in the Crimean War? Ah! it is a sad thing to lie 
 still, and wait, and look on, and suffer, in a world 
 of such possibilities ! 
 
222 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 " Yet do not think of me as one mourning without 
 hope. I am only passing through the Valley of 
 Humiliation : that is all. I accept it — I dare not 
 ask deliverance from it. Be it as God wills, I say 
 with all my soul. Often, all the prayer I can say is, 
 ' Thy kingdom come, and Thy will be done ! ' The 
 beginning and the end of all a good man can desire 
 are wrapped up in that. Yet I do hope the time 
 will come when I can say it more happily than now. 
 
 "I have no news to tell you. I have sent for 'Dr. 
 Hodge's Memoir,' and look for a grand treat in lis- 
 tening to it. Dr. Duff's 'Life and Letters ' has been 
 the glory of the summer to me at Mt. Desert. What 
 a magnificent fellow he was ! And what a splendid 
 result he had to show for a life's work! To follow 
 on within dim sight of such men is a great inspira- 
 tion. I am not sure of very much in the way of self- 
 knowledge; but one thing I do know — that I thank 
 God for the great men in the kingdom; those whom 
 He calls great, and honors as such in the leadership 
 of the Church. My whole soul springs at their call. 
 I rejoice to believe that probably the Church has liv- 
 ing, to-day, greater men than St. Paul, and better 
 men than David. It must be so." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., November 30, 1880. 
 
 "As to position among men, — professional repute, 
 and all that goes with that, — I think I can honestly 
 say, that for a long stretch of years I have been so 
 used to subordinating the name of a thing to the 
 doing of it, that I am never painfully sensible of loss 
 in seeing the name grow dim, if but the conscious- 
 ness of the doing 1 is clear and luminous. It is the 
 
LETTERS. 223 
 
 loss of the doing that troubles me; not that men 
 think less of me, but that I can no longer do any- 
 thing that can give a reason why they should not. I 
 am not exactly in the mood — but in some distant 
 approach to it — of the man who complained of the 
 treatment he received in the court-room in which he 
 had appeared as a witness: 'They charged me with 
 lying, and they — proved it.' So I sink out of sight, 
 and the trouble is that I am doing nothing that 
 ought to keep me in remembrance. If I could still 
 have the doing, though underground, seen only by 
 the Eye that seeth in secret, I think I should be con- 
 tent. But who knows ? Perhaps not. Yet so it 
 seems to me now. These 'Emeriti ' men seem to me 
 distinguished mainly as men who have ceased to do. 
 The world pays them the good-natured compliment, 
 but other men wink at each other and say, 'We get 
 on very well without them.' The very mark of 
 honor to them is the sign of the loss of that com- 
 pared with which the honor is as a tuft of thistle- 
 down. 
 
 " By the way, speaking of the honor paid to good 
 men, is it not time to plead for a reform in the writ- 
 ing of biographies ? Do you ever see one that seems 
 to your sober sense strictly true ? They are my favor- 
 ite reading, yet I am amazed at their exaggerations. 
 And those of good men, and written by good men, are 
 among the most brilliantly fictitious. The last is the 
 
 Memoir of Dr. . A good man, a useful man, a 
 
 great man if you will, but the image which the biog- 
 rapher adores cannot be the honest likeness of any 
 mortal man. Yet such is the general strain of the 
 biographies I read. They remind me of Horace Wal- 
 
224 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 pole's fling at history: 'Read me anything but his- 
 tory, for that I know to be untrue.' Taking this 
 one, for example, there are lines between the lines, 
 which one who has known much of public men can- 
 not help seeing, and which indicate that he could not 
 have been the saint he seemed to be to his reverent 
 son. An old man riding nine miles in his feeble- 
 ness, to cast his solitary vote against the reunion of 
 a sundered church! That showed honesty, pluck, 
 the dead-set purpose of a man not used to being over- 
 ruled, but the clear vision and loving heart of a man 
 living in the upper atmosphere of God's presence it 
 does not show. Biography is not true which lifts 
 him up to that plane." 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., September 27, 1881. 
 
 " I have been reading novels lately as a sedative. 
 I am amazed at the amount of mental force which is 
 in our days expended in the department of fiction. It 
 is not only one department, but is fast becoming the 
 department, overshadowing all the rest. If you are 
 interested in pictures of old Egyptian life, you will 
 be entertained, and profited too, by two or three of 
 George Eber's recent stories. He is one of the most 
 learned Egyptologists of the age, and his imagination 
 is of no mean order. I have obtained a good deal 
 of knowledge from his books. 
 
 " Of more solid literature, Professor 's book for 
 
 which the Scotchmen have rapped his knuckles, and 
 Dr. Smyth's two books, are about all that I have seen 
 since I came here. This is not a place of books, but 
 of mackerel. 
 
 " What a magnificent disclosure is made of a great 
 
LETTERS. 225 
 
 nation's heart in these last few days! It lifts one's 
 conception of human nature. It is an interesting- 
 psychological problem, — what proportion of sorrow 
 for the great President's departure is genuine ? How 
 much does it measure of real heart ? Am I wrong in 
 the feeling that it represents more of the best ele- 
 ments of a nation's character than we have ever wit- 
 nessed before? more even than the response to the 
 loss of President Lincoln ? If I am right, it certainly 
 is a sign of the world's progress in things pure and 
 lofty and loving. 
 
 "I remember hearing one of Professor B. B. Ed- 
 ward's inimitable sermons, on the 'Evidences of Hu- 
 man Progress, ' the first of which, as I recall it, was 
 'The Birth of the Greek Idea of Beauty.' It is upon 
 that plane of thinking that I am inclined to place 
 a development of the national being such as we are 
 now witnessing. It is more than thought: it is soul. 
 It may, to appearance, be short-lived. But all great 
 emotions are that. It is none the less a great and 
 good thing to have lived through it. A nation's 
 secret life cannot but be elevated and purified by 
 it." 
 
 [Not dated. Received in 1884 or 1885.] 
 
 "Andover, Mass. 
 
 " You are a born correspondent, as I am not. You 
 keep letters, as I do not. You write for the pleas- 
 ure or comfort of it; I commonly from necessity. 
 What a volume of interest your correspondence with 
 Dr. Hopkins would be to those who come after you ! 
 I, alas, have no such record of the industry of my pen ! 
 I sometimes wish I had. Yet very early in life, 
 when I did keep letters and had copies of my own, I 
 
226 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 was one day overwhelmed, on looking them over, by 
 the discovery that even in a few years I had outgrown 
 them and was ashamed that I had ever written so. 
 Then there was a bonfire which almost set my chim- 
 ney on fire. And that I might not live in the bond- 
 age which I know some good men are under, of the 
 fear of writing what I should be sorry for, I fell into 
 the way of men of business who write what must be 
 written, and there stop. I resolved that so far as I 
 did write, I would write fearlessly as I would talk, 
 but I would not write much. Hence arose my seem- 
 ingly negligent ways. You are almost the only man 
 to whom I write letters such as Wordsworth would 
 have classified as 'letters of sentiment and affection.' 
 But yours to me are always welcome, I need not say. 
 
 " Bar Harbor, Me., September 6, 1885. 
 
 "My friend Bishop Coxe has called my attention 
 to your letter on Christian Catholicity. I did not 
 see the letter when it first appeared. But I have sent 
 for a copy and have read it with great interest. It 
 cannot fail to do good. 
 
 " Your kindly mention of my articles on the Epis- 
 copal Church gratifies me exceedingly; and all the 
 more because I know your staunch fidelity to the faith 
 and polity of our fathers. It is encouraging to see 
 the softening of ancient prejudices which have alien- 
 ated brethren of different proclivities. I have been 
 greeted with great cordiality by the Episcopal Cler- 
 gymen who congregate here in the summer. There 
 is an Episcopal temperament, and a Methodist tem- 
 perament, and a Calvinistic temperament, from which 
 sects grow by natural evolution. At the core of char- 
 
LETTERS. 227 
 
 acter, they mean little more than red hair or a birth- 
 mark. The Master will know His own only by the 
 name in the forehead. 
 
 " It gladdens me to hear of your improving strength. 
 The years seem to count slowly with you. Do you 
 not think that often the work which a man does in 
 his closing years of life has a spiritual vitality in it 
 which that of his busier manhood had not ? Lookers- 
 on may not estimate it so, but perhaps the 'witness 
 of the Spirit' does. I prize every hour of mellow 
 thought and restful prayer which I sometimes have 
 given to me. I hope I am not mistaken. It seems 
 to me that I recognize the evidences of such more 
 abundantly in the closing labors of other men. A 
 suggestion here ; an aspiration there ; a bit of poetry, 
 rythmic or not, now ; and a prayer then ; seem to beto- 
 ken a ripening soul, even a corruscation of intellect, 
 struck out by a glowing heart; and to disclose the 
 fact that some of God's best uses of a man may come 
 after he has begun to feel most useless himself. I 
 bungle in saying what I mean. But I obtained one 
 such look into the soul of a preacher here a week ago, 
 and I lived upon it for many days." 
 
 " Bar Harbor, Me., October 13, 1885. 
 
 " I have been much impressed recently by a more 
 vivid idea than I had before, of the value of prayer as 
 a means of usefulness to men whose life's work, like 
 yours and mine, is mainly finished. This oppressive 
 sense of useless living is relieved by it. My pupils 
 at Andover, some hundreds of whom are in the thick 
 of their labors, are a very precious object of prayer to 
 me. They are beginning to celebrate the twenty- 
 
228 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 fifth anniversary of their settlement or ordination, and 
 they are kind enough to write and tell me of it, and 
 to recall Andover gratefully. I live again in their 
 life. If I could but feel more sure that my prayer 
 can help them, I should feel grateful for that way of 
 continuing the old service of my life. 
 
 " It cheers me to think of God's interest in little 
 things. We do not need to move a world to please 
 Him. A gentle thought lodged in a child's mind 
 will do it as well. So a momentary aspiration upward 
 in ejaculatory prayer, for a Pastor in his work, may 
 achieve more than we think. Is there any better way 
 of winding up the labors of a lifetime, than to set 
 some little rills of intercession running in behalf of 
 good men ? May they not experience some hours or 
 moments of refreshing, when they need it most, but 
 do not know the source from which it comes, and 
 least of all, the hand that unsealed the fountain ? 
 
 "Your suggestions respecting the needless isola- 
 tion of Christians from each other, are very true. 
 What with dulness of temperament, reticence of 
 habit, the fear of orhciousness, and what Charles 
 Lamb calls 'imperfect sympathies, ' we are apt to mope 
 or stammer our way through a Christian experience 
 which would be larger if it were freer. 
 
 "Is it not true, also, that we are, many of us, 
 checked in our Christian speech, by the consciousness 
 of a gulf between our words and our experience ? Or, 
 if that states the case too strongly, by the conscious- 
 ness that our real life in Christ is fitful, and, there- 
 fore, that our best words are only occasionally true 
 to the facts ? I confess to a humiliating sense of this, 
 Avhich often suppresses words at my tongue's end. 
 
LETTERS. 229 
 
 Some things which I have published even humble 
 me whenever I think of them. They seem to me to 
 express a very exalted and holy ideal, but often it 
 seems as if nobody else could be so much a stranger 
 to them as I am. Laudatory criticisms of them, 
 implying that they spoke the author's experience, 
 have shut my lips tight. One good lay-brother 
 positively relieved me once, by saying to me of 'The 
 Still Hour,' 'You must be a very good man, or you 
 must have been a very wicked one. ' He, at all events, 
 gave me leeway for finding a spot where I could feel 
 honest. 
 
 " Does not this kind of painful consciousness keep 
 us still, often, when we ought to trust men more 
 largely to bear with our infirmities, and trust God 
 more deeply to control them? Robertson speaks in 
 one of his letters of the 'fatal facility' of religious 
 speech, in a way which shows that he suffered from 
 the cause here named. I imagine that it drives a 
 great many good men into reticent habits, and as they 
 grow older, into a moral seclusion. 
 
 "When I am shut in by such thoughts, I love to 
 think of David and Peter — very imperfect men they: 
 but how grateful we all are to them for their grand 
 thoughts and grander aspirations, and how much we 
 should have lost if they had concealed them ! Why 
 cannot the Christian brotherhood have a sort of tacit 
 compact among themselves ; that they may all feel 
 free to speak the best they know, and we will not 
 rebuke them, even in our hearts, for speaking better 
 than they are ? One is ambitious — one is vain — one 
 is avaricious — one is lazy — and so on — miserabiles 
 nos ; — but, 'brother, if God gives you a thought or a 
 
230 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 desire above the level of your life, out with it; let 
 us all have the benefit of it; and we will not think 
 you a hypocrite, if you do not succeed in living it. ' 
 We are all patients in one great hospital. Sometimes 
 we are constrained to retire, and call the Physician 
 that we may see him alone and at midnight. But 
 why should we not all come out together, in the days 
 of convalescence, when the sun shines, and sit in the 
 corridor or the great hall, and tell each other 'how 
 well we are to-day' — 'how hopeful; how sure of 
 health by and by' — each making the best of his case, 
 for the good cheer of the rest ? That man was a hero, 
 and more, who struck up 'When I can read my title 
 clear,' on the field of Shiloh after the battle. Proba- 
 bly he may not have felt like singing when he began. 
 Perhaps he would rather have buried his face and 
 groaned. But he had his reward, when he had set 
 hundreds mere to singing: and that 'Psalm of Life' 
 rolled over the whole field." 
 
 To Rev. H. J. Patrick. 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., September 25, 1885. 
 
 " I am glad to tell you in this fraternal way, how 
 cordially I rejoice with you. You are one of the 
 chosen ones, honored by prolonged service, in an 
 office which, as I believe, has no superior in Christ's 
 Church. I wonder if you appreciate it as seems to 
 me ! I used to think with trembling, of its respon- 
 sibilities and its perils. Now I revere it for its oppor- 
 tunities. A halo surrounds it like that of the old 
 paintings of the Virgin Mother in Italy. Some of 
 those Madonnas were the fruit of days and nights of 
 prayer. They were painted by men who worshipped 
 
LETTERS. 231 
 
 her. It is with a feeling akin to worship that I look 
 upon a Christian pulpit. Every one is a Mount of 
 Transfiguration to my vision. 
 
 " I remember hearing of an incident related of the 
 
 preaching of Dr. , some thirty odd years ago. 
 
 He had a profound sense of the person of Christ, such 
 as few men whom I have known have experienced. 
 On one occasion, in the midst of a sermon, he paused, 
 grew pale, trembled, as if in a trance. Said he sub- 
 stantially, — I do not give his words, — 'I do not know 
 what it means, but I seem to feel the presence of 
 some heavenly Being. Is it possible that Christ is 
 here — here in this house — here where I stand — as 
 if He would preach to you ? Let us pray!' The ser- 
 mon, I think, had no other ending. So I love to 
 think of all pulpits filled by those whom it has been 
 my privilege to commune with at Andover. I seem 
 to see Our Lord standing by their side and fulfilling 
 His promise. 'It shall be given you, what ye shall 
 say. ' I do believe it, my dear Brother, with all my 
 soul! You never speak a truth for Him or utter a 
 prayer in your pulpit which He has not put into your 
 mind to say, so far as it is a genuine offering of 
 service for His sake. You have a premonition every 
 Sabbath of the coronation which awaits you by and by ! 
 
 "It is a grand calling, is it not? But you know 
 all this — I am preaching to one who does not need 
 it. But your letter has unsealed the fountain of my 
 feelings about your work, which I do not often have 
 a chance to express. 
 
 " May God bless you for another silver age, as he 
 has done in the one just closing! I can ask for you 
 no higher joy." 
 
232 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 " Bar Harbor, October 8, 1886. 
 
 " I am glad to know that some of my young breth- 
 ren — for you all seem young to me — are cheered by 
 any words of mine. I am living a very useless life. 
 To put one ringing cheer into the ear of one brother 
 who is down on the plain in the dust and heat of the 
 battle, seems to me a thing to be grateful for. I 
 thank you, too, for telling me of it." 
 
 To a College Student seeking Advice in a 
 Period of Scepticism. 
 
 '• Axdover, Mass., June 3, 1879. 
 
 " I am sick ; I write in my bed. I cannot say what 
 I wish to. Your letter commands my deepest sym- 
 pathy. I think I know your trouble. I have been 
 through it all. But the most that I am able to write 
 now, and probably for some time to come, is this, 
 please to read the Memoir of Rev. Dr. Norman McLeod 
 and the Rev. Dr. Thos. Guthrie of Scotland ; and then 
 please read Porter's ' Life of Aaron Burr.' The object 
 is to help you to realize Christian faith as a fact in 
 one life : and the want of it in another. The contrast 
 may help you, — I do not know. God can make it 
 helpful. 
 
 " To me the contrast of Burr's character with almost 
 any humble Christian of the faith which Burr aban- 
 doned, was overwhelming. 
 
 " When I closed the last volume I felt as if I had 
 been looking into hell, and my soul rebounded with 
 gratitude that there is a God and a Heaven, and char- 
 acter fitted to it. 
 
 May God help you, as I cannot ! " 
 
LETTERS. 233 
 
 To a Pastor who wrote him asking, "What 
 Thought brings you most Consolation in 
 Old Age?" 
 
 [Undated, but known to be written in the spring of 1890.] 
 
 " You doubtless are familiar with the incident re- 
 lated of Sir Walter Scott, that, when on his death- 
 bed, his son-in-law, Mr. Lockhart, proposed to read to 
 him, and asked what book he would prefer to hear ; 
 he replied in substance : ' How can you ask ? There 
 is but one for me now.' 
 
 " So in response to your inquiry I must say : There 
 is but one thought which leads all other sources of ' con- 
 solation,' as you call it, to a man who has just passed 
 his seventieth birthday, as I have. I call it rather a 
 source of youthful hope and supreme assurance. I 
 do not yet feel the need of consolation under old age 
 as an affliction. That thought of regal strength is 
 the reality of Christ as One ever living to save, and 
 as a Personal Friend to comfort and to cheer. The 
 one thought which oppresses me with most profound 
 regret, when I recall my brief ministry of six years in 
 Boston, is that I gave to my people so little of Christ, 
 oh, so little of Christ! And now the chief joy I have 
 in my penitent reminiscences is that He returns me 
 good for evil by a sense of His personal friendship ! 
 
 " I think I may truthfully say — for why should I 
 not take Him at His word? — that He is never absent 
 when I seek His presence ! What can I ask for 
 more ? " 
 
 To Rev. Samuel W. Dike. 
 
 " Andover, September 17, 1877. 
 " My own feeling is that the men who are to give 
 the Church, and through that the world, the right in- 
 
234 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 struction on this theme, are now young men. My 
 observation is, that God gives to young men usually 
 early in their public life, the great reformatory ideas 
 which are needed for their generation, if they are the 
 men chosen to great reformatory work. I welcome, 
 therefore, all such work which seems to come from 
 youthful thinkers with the air of a revelation which 
 they ?nust deliver. The new minds must originate 
 the new truths." 
 
 To Mrs. S. S. Robbins. 
 
 " I think my sympathy grows, as time carries me 
 on, with the beginnings of young men. I never 
 could face mine again with the courage I had when 
 it came. 
 
 " My doctors all forbid my working, but I cannot 
 see it as they do ; anything is better for me than what 
 people call rest. There is no rest in it — it compels 
 me to read the Psalms half the time to keep my soul 
 in patience." 
 
 "Andover, Mass., February 19, 1865. 
 
 " I am reading Lady Blessington's ' Conversations 
 with Lord Byron.' Have you ever seen it ? A very 
 readable book, rambling and diffuse, but it softens 
 one's sense of the wickedness of the man, at the 
 expense of one's respect for his intellect. I ' guess ' 
 he inherited all the ' devil ' there was in him." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., March 25, 1872. 
 
 " If I had not lived ten years with the feeling of 
 Death in me most of the time, I should say now that 
 I have no chance for another year. But life is the 
 most obstinate thiner alive." 
 
LETTERS. 235 
 
 "June 10, 1S7G. 
 "Your life has been given in piecemeal to other 
 people. You will find it so by and by. It will come 
 to you as a discovery. 'When saw we Thee sick 
 and visited Thee ? ' ' Inasmuch as to one of the 
 least of these.' That tells your story. Do try to 
 get some comfort from the assurance now. To me 
 the clay of judgment seems more valuable for its 
 righting the self accusations of good people, than for 
 its condemnation of the wicked. I am glad there 
 is to be one. These awful tribunals of Conscience 
 need an illuminating from infinite Love, and they 
 are sure to get it." 
 
 To his Wife (before marriage). 
 
 "Andover, December 1, [undated.] 
 " I passed through Boston this afternoon and down 
 the Charles Street Mall at sunset. A more mellow 
 and benevolent sunset I never witnessed, even in Italy. 
 ... Is there another spot on earth like Boston 
 Common? ... I am to preach to-morrow at the 
 ordination of a young man who comes back to suc- 
 ceed his father in the ministry in his own birthplace. 
 It seems to me as if I should enjoy the retirement of 
 just such a settlement in the pastoral office — I get 
 so weary of incessant excess of responsibility. But I 
 fear that ... if I were once thrust into such a place 
 I should be as ambitious and restless as Csesar. I do 
 hope I may live to see the day when I can preach a 
 sermon without a consciously selfish thought." 
 
 " Andover, January 6, 1858. 
 " It seems to me I have been working like a shuttle 
 ever since I saw you, and I am tired of it. . . . I 
 
236 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 went to my tea table to-night after having read aloud 
 and talked, almost without cessation, for ten hours. 
 I was exhausted and faint, and felt as if I wanted to 
 lie down on the floor and think a while of my mother, 
 who used always to observe my birthday as a day of 
 fasting and prayer for me." 
 
 "... I am naturally less buoyant than you are, 
 and, under any circumstances, should have a less ex- 
 uberant flow of spirits. There are, however, pecu- 
 liarities about the life of a minister (if he really 
 makes his ministry his life, and not an appendage 
 merely) which I do not think you fully understand 
 in their workings upon such a mind as mine. The 
 effect of them is to deepen all feeling of every kind. 
 I cannot explain it to you with the pen. I only 
 know that life has an intensity of reality to me, which 
 often makes it impossible for me to be otherwise than 
 deeply, intensely, earnestly happy, and for that reason 
 
 quietly happy." 
 
 " Andover [undated]. 
 
 " Here are Dr. Mason and Professor Park in my 
 study six hours a day, and this must continue for 
 several weeks to come. ... I had an interesting day 
 in Dover — good and solemn audiences. I preached 
 the Law sermon by request, and I think never before 
 preached it with so obvious an effect upon the au- 
 dience — a really solemn impression. I had some 
 scruples about preaching it, for I have once or twice 
 thought its effect was rather intellectual than reli- 
 gious. . . . But I think I cannot be mistaken that it 
 was the earnest conscience of my audience which 
 responded. ... I left them with a feeling of relief, 
 for I do dread this preaching which does nothing but 
 
LETTERS. 237 
 
 make an audience gaze in wonder at the preacher. 
 I have sometimes felt like hiding my face in shame 
 when I heard the commendations of my auditors. 
 Oh, it is not that which a preacher needs to give him 
 joy in his work ! 
 
 "Perhaps I am wronging my feelings — I fear that 
 I am a little selfish ; but I do have a very strong 
 desire to have now a period of happy, buoyant, and 
 loving life ... it seems as if I needed it to develop 
 all that is in me. It is not best that a man's life 
 should be all a struggle." 
 
 " Andover, March 20, 1858. 
 
 " I am more than ever sensible of the uselessness 
 of a mere enjoyment — or suffering, as the case may 
 be — of religious sensibility, if it does not add some- 
 thing permanent to our characters. It seems to me 
 that even this warm glow of Christian sympathy which 
 is now suffusing so many hearts, may be debilitating in 
 its effects if God's spirit does not employ it to deepen 
 Christian experience and consolidate Christian prin- 
 ciple. ... I was rather painfully sensible, at our 
 meetings here last evening, that this luxuiy of feel- 
 ing and talking does not amount to much after all, 
 unless it is the index of a real and growing vigor of 
 resolution in God's service. I wanted to say to all 
 these young men that they should go home to their 
 closets and seek a holier and more calm and more 
 childlike intercourse with God there. 
 
 " I find it costs me a struggle to be willing to be 
 thought by others just what I am. The judgment of 
 my friends is more important to me than it ought to 
 be. . . . I wish I could be more self-possessed, and 
 
238 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 content to be just what God has made me. It is 
 humiliating to think of feeling otherwise. I do not 
 mean to if I can help it." 
 
 "Andover, April 16 [probably 1858]. 
 " Dr. Mason arrived this evening, and we are to 
 have some further consultations upon our work. . . . 
 I dislike the drudgery of the printing, though, pro- 
 digiously. It really gives me a new sense of the 
 clumsiness of this whole method of communicating 
 thought by speech, and writing, and printing. Don't 
 you suppose that they have more simple and direct 
 methods of intercourse in Heaven ? I do. . . . Per- 
 haps it is by some language like the language of the 
 eyes here. Perhaps spiritual being, in its nature, is 
 transparent to all beholders. Perhaps the celestial 
 body has a physiognomy, which is as much superior to 
 that of the ' human face divine,' as respects its quick- 
 ness and truthfulness of expression, as it is superior 
 in point of immortality. What a paltry affair the in- 
 vention of the art of printing must seem to be to angelic 
 minds, less wonderful, perhaps, than a beaver dam or a 
 honeycomb seems to us. Such are some of the lucu- 
 brations started in my mind by the blurred proof-sheets 
 I had to correct, and by my having to spend two 
 hours first to convince myself, and then to convince 
 others, of what is the real difference between ' O ' and 
 ' Oh.' " 
 
 (After Marriage.) 
 
 "Amherst, August 9th. 
 " I am lonely in the midst of crowds. I do not know 
 that it is best for me to cherish so much as I have of 
 a feeling of dependence on the endearments of my 
 
LETTERS. 239 
 
 home. It prevents my throwing myself as heartily as 
 I want to into the thoughts and sympathies of others 
 beside my own dear group. . . . Last evening I at- 
 tended the Prize Declamations as one of the Commit- 
 tee for the awarding of prizes and I was out-voted 
 in every case ! The speaking was good; but I would 
 have given the prizes to the more quiet and manly 
 speakers. The majority preferred the more noisy and 
 dramatic ones." 
 
 " Amherst, August 10, 1858. 
 
 "My address is delivered, and I am relieved, — 
 perhaps as much as my audience are. I have no 
 means of knowing what reception it met with, ex- 
 cept that I had good attention, and one man, a young 
 clergyman, came to me afterwards and simply said 
 to me, with a hearty grasp of his hand and a manly 
 effort to repress the tears that were swelling in his 
 eyes, ' You have done me good — I shall not for- 
 get it.' That is enough. I do not care now whether 
 the rest liked it or not." 
 
 "Andover, September 3, 1862. 
 " The news to-day is a little blue ; but I trust I grow 
 more calm about it as the peril deepens. I do not know 
 that my feeling is a Christian trust, but it seems to 
 me so evident that God is working for moral ends, 
 that I am willing to see other interests sacrificed to 
 them if it seems necessary to Him. I do not think 
 that the loss of Washington would shake my faith 
 now in the ultimate result." 
 
 "Andover, September 5, 1862. 
 " I am sorry you are blue about the war. I have 
 a great deal more faith now than I had when we 
 
240 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 seemed to be victorious, but with a proportionate 
 victory of the old conservative feeling which would 
 put us back to where we were before the war began. 
 I think we were in an awfully degraded state two 
 years ago, and I do not believe that God means to 
 permit us to go back to it. My only doubt is whether 
 the nation has principle enough to bear the necessary 
 conquest of the South, and whether God may not, 
 therefore, permit a temporary division. But that, 
 either by present conquest or as the result of divis- 
 ion, we shall be one people, twenty years hence, I 
 have not a shadow of doubt. My hopes are strong 
 that we shall succeed in the war, — but if not, let the 
 division come, with all its consequences. Suffering 
 may do what victory cannot. 
 
 " Anything is better than to go back where we 
 were, when prosperity was accumulating and prin- 
 ciple was nothing. I should have still more hope if 
 the wealth of the country were cut down one-half." 
 
 " Washington, April 13, 1862. 
 
 " To-day we were too weary to go to church more 
 
 than once. We attended at Dr. 's church this 
 
 morning, where we found a large audience, a tame, 
 
 rigid, old-school sermon — and President Lincoln. 
 
 I was more interested in the President than in the 
 
 preacher, and I was sorry to have him listen to such 
 
 an exhibition of evangelical religion. He looked as 
 
 if his good sense were saying all the time, ' I can't 
 
 go that doctrine.' I think he is the homeliest man 
 
 I ever saw." 
 
 "Geneva, April 19. 
 
 "... I write, talk, and think as little as possible 
 
 about Mr. Lincoln, — to save my brain. It is shock- 
 
LETTERS. 241 
 
 ing beyond expression ; yet I have strange joy in it 
 after all, somewhat as I have in the Crucifixion : 
 it proves that God is so near to us as a nation. Such 
 crises indicate His determination to save us. I feel 
 as if the millennium were a hundred years nearer 
 than it seemed a week ago." 
 
 "Andover, July 28, 18G5. 
 
 " We had a Church meeting yesterday, for organ- 
 izing anew. They have requested me to prepare a 
 Creed and Covenant for them. If it should be my 
 last work for Andover Seminary, it will be a pleasant 
 duty to remember, — i.e. if they are liberal enough 
 to adopt it. I shall give them none of the ' antique.' 
 It they need to be governed by dead men they must 
 get some other exorcist than I to call them from 
 their graves." 
 
 " Andover, September 13, 1867. 
 
 " It awakens some painful regrets in me, to think 
 that my pulpit labors may be over. I should be glad 
 to have another period of such work, to correct 
 some mistakes in the past, if no more. I think I 
 envy no man anything but youth and strength for 
 a life's work — it seems to me so useless, and but for 
 the compulsion of disease so unworthy, to live as I do." 
 
 Of Dr. Taylor of New Haven. 
 
 "Andover [undated]. 
 " He was a noble heart, and a real father to me. 
 He lived and died a poor man . . . and yet I do not 
 know that he had a superior in the land, as a man 
 of mind and character ; and probably two thousand 
 souls trace their salvation directly to his labors. That 
 is what I call living.'" 
 
242 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 " Ripton, September 14, 1874. 
 "... I am not unhappy. On the contrary, I 
 have great peace — like the stillness of the beautiful 
 hills on which the summer sun lies dreamily ; and so 
 does the light of God's love beam down upon my 
 head. ' Evening, and sunrise, and at noon, will I 
 pray ' comes to me as an invitation and frequent 
 committal of my soul and body to God. And some- 
 how I cannot help feeling that I have his promise for 
 the preservation of both. In this hope I am waiting 
 
 happily and trustfully. ... I think much of 
 
 and his first long absence from home. My love goes 
 roaming over the world, wherever I have a loved 
 one to think of." 
 
 To his Son Stuart. 
 
 " June 26, 1879. 
 
 " Yours of the 24th received ; I cannot write at 
 length, but I hasten to express to you my entire 
 approval of all that you have done — the preliminary 
 interviews as well as the final action. In no one 
 thing would I have had you act differently. You 
 have conducted a difficult and delicate matter to a 
 result honorable to me and creditable to yourself. I 
 count it as one of the signal blessings for which I 
 thank God in this emergency, that I have a son whose 
 judgment and culture have enabled him to act for me 
 so wisely. 
 
 " You have done me a great favor, my son ; God 
 bless you for it ! 
 
 " I am glad to be able to tell you that after the 
 first day I have not felt disheartened at all. I find 
 a new spring of hope and resolve about my health 
 
LETTERS. 243 
 
 rising in me. I am determined to get up again. I 
 mean to preach within two years. I have no idea 
 of throwing ten years of life into the grave, nor of 
 spending it waiting in my shroud. ' Now is life less 
 sweet and death less bitter ! ' was the exclamation 
 
 of when the acceptance of his resignation 
 
 was announced to him. I don't feel a bit of that. 
 I am able — and I thank God for it — to look upon 
 the future with strong confidence and courage. The 
 process will be slow, but I believe it will be sure. 
 The last two nights I have slept sweetly ; to-day, 
 after a walk, had my first feeling of healthful tired- 
 ness, which gave me a nap of an hour. 
 
 " And be sure that none but kindly words are 
 heard from any of my family about the trustees." 
 
 To his Son Francis. 
 
 " Clifton Springs, N.Y., October 26, 1874. 
 
 " Do not worry over your standing in the class, 
 but do your work quietly and take what comes with- 
 out disappointment. Be glad if others do well, and 
 be content if you do your best. My visit to Geneva 
 brought back my own boyhood to me very vividly. 
 Did I ever tell you of my college life there ? I was 
 just at your age when I entered college. My father 
 lived a mile away from the college. I had to board 
 and sleep at home. The consequence was that I had 
 to get up in the morning at half-past five o'clock all 
 winter, and at five in the summer, and walk before 
 breakfast to the college for a recitation. Often it 
 was so dark and stormy that I had to take a lantern 
 to see the way. Then back to breakfast ; then drive 
 
244 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 the cows a mile to pasture ; then to college again for 
 another recitation ; then home to dinner ; then to 
 college for a third recitation ; then to tea ; then back 
 to college, after driving the cows home ; then, after 
 an evening's study, go home again about ten o'clock. 
 That was my day's work, day after day and month 
 after month. I do not remember that I ever lost a 
 recitation during the whole time. When you feel as 
 if your work were hard you must think of mine. I 
 was glad enough when vacation came, though I re- 
 member spending one vacation sawing and splitting 
 and piling up twenty-eight cords of wood — I and a 
 cousin of mine together. 
 
 " My father could not buy me an alarm-clock, so 
 I made one to wake me up in the morning seasonably. 
 I was sleepier in those winter mornings than I have 
 ever been since. I used to have to count one — two 
 — three — and then jump out of bed at the word 
 'three.' I do not speak of it as anything to boast 
 of. Many boys have done a great deal more, and 
 many men have accomplished more in life. But I 
 did the best I could, and I want you to see that your 
 life is not a hard one, and that if you do your best 
 all things will turn out right in the end. I had a 
 happy time of it, and so may you if you will think 
 so." 
 
 " Clifton Springs, N.Y., November 6, 1874. 
 
 " I want you to be an elegant letter-writer. It is 
 one of the accomplishments which mark a gentleman. 
 Another gentlemanly rule in writing letters is never 
 to use contractions. Write every word in full. Con- 
 tractions belong to ignorant or half-educated people. 
 
LETTERS. 245 
 
 They say 'gents ' instead of ' gentlemen.' They write 
 ' Shall see you to-morrow ' instead of ' I shall see 
 you to-morrow.' A true gentleman is supposed never 
 to do things in a hurry, so he takes time to write 
 out in full what he has to say. It is a silent mark of 
 respect to your correspondent to give him enough of 
 your time and care to say things completely, and 
 make it easy for him to read. It is said that Edward 
 Everett never used a contraction in his life. He 
 never signed himself 'Your Aff. Friend' or 'Your 
 Obt' Svt',' but ' Y'our Affectionate Friend ' or ' Your 
 Obedient Servant.' The very few letters which I 
 had from him did not contain a word which was not 
 perfectly formed and legible. Bonaparte once, when 
 his army was defeated and in full retreat, and when 
 he had to run to save his life, wrote a despatch pro- 
 posing terms of surrender to the Duke of Wellington, 
 and one of his aides-de-camp proposed that he should 
 seal it with a wafer because that could be done more 
 quickly. 'No,' said he, 'give me some sealing-wax; 
 nothing should ever be done in a hurry.' It was the 
 style of a gentleman in those days always to use 
 sealing-wax. Will you try to remember these hints 
 about letter-writing ? " 
 
 " The more refined we become the more delicate is 
 our sense of what is due to our superiors, and the 
 more ready are we to pay them their due." 
 
 " Clifton Springs, N.Y., December 5, 1874. 
 
 " I think a great deal about my boys, while my 
 health is so infirm and the future so doubtful. Of 
 late two things have been much in my mind, which 
 
246 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 I should wish to say to you if I should never live to 
 recover my health. One of them is this, that I fear 
 that the state of my health may often have affected 
 my method of speaking to you. It is very hard, in 
 such long-continued feebleness, to preserve one's 
 patience, so as never to speak harshly or fretfully. 
 I know that I have been often unable to be in good 
 spirits with my boys ; to talk cheerfully, and to 
 laugh and jest so as to make their boyhood a happy 
 one. And sometimes I may have spoken hastily and 
 blamed you too severely. 
 
 " If you recall any such things, you must try to for- 
 get them: and at all events, attribute them to my ill 
 health, and not to any want of affection for you. It 
 is not for me to speak of my own virtues, but the 
 older children will tell you what I was before my 
 health failed. I will only say that I do not know 
 any father who seems to me to love his children more 
 tenderly than I do mine. You have been a very dear 
 boy to me ever since you were born. I think you 
 have generally tried to please me ... I shall love 
 you always very deeply, in another world, if I am 
 not spared to live very long with you here. ... I 
 pray God to spare me if he sees it to be best, for 
 my dear son's sake. So think lovingly of me, my 
 dear boy, when I am gone, and be assured that 
 you have no more loving friend, except your 
 Saviour. 
 
 " The other thing which sometimes troubles me is 
 the idle life to which sickness compels me. I am 
 sorry to set such an example before you. You have 
 no remembrance of me as I was in my working days. 
 Of this also I cannot speak as well as others can. I 
 
LETTERS. 247 
 
 will say but little more than this — that I have never 
 desired an idle life. 
 
 " When I could work I loved to work. It was always 
 a joy and a privilege to me ; and as I look back on 
 my life, while I see many things which I wish had 
 been different, I do think that I lived industriously 
 as long as God gave me the strength to do so. If 
 my conscience were as clear about all other things as 
 about that, I should have nothing to regret in the 
 past. 
 
 " I remember very well when I was a young man, 
 and was forming my plans of life, I resolved that I 
 would not ask of God an easy life, nor the means of 
 making it so. I did not pray for wealth, nor do I 
 remember that I desired it, or expected or planned 
 for it. It was right for some other men to do that. 
 God called them to it. But I thought he did not call 
 me to it, and I did not wish for it. I felt entirely 
 content to be poor, to work hard, to spend all my 
 days in labor, if God would but give me the suc- 
 cess in my profession which I did crave with all my 
 heart. I thought I had Solomon's example for this 
 when he came to the throne and asked God to give 
 him ivisdom above all things else. 
 
 " In looking back upon my life I do not regret my 
 choice. I am very glad of it. I am thankful that 
 God helped me to choose that rather than a life of 
 ease. You must therefore take my example as it 
 was — not as it is now, when I can no longer work. 
 
 " One old writer says that, ' in such a world as this, 
 nobody but the angels should be spectators.' 
 
 " Will you remember this when I am gone ? Will 
 you try to learn how your father lived when he was 
 
248 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 young and strong, and imitate his example in that if 
 in nothing else ? You will never regret it when age 
 and sickness and death come. 
 
 " One rich young man I knew who devoted nearly 
 his whole time to visiting among the poor. He re- 
 lieved their wants, visited them in sickness, prayed 
 with them, read the Bible to them. In short, he 
 tried to do just what Christ did when he was on 
 earth. After a few years he died of disease, con- 
 tracted in one of his missionary visits. But he never 
 regretted it. He lived longer than Christ did. His 
 was a noble life. It was worth a hundred years of 
 such life as that in which men make it their business 
 ' to enjoy life.' 
 
 " If this ever becomes a practical question to you, 
 do not go to any man or woman to settle it for you. 
 Trust rather your own conscience and God's teach- 
 ing. Ask yourself, 'How would Christ probably 
 live, if he were in my place ? ' Answer that question 
 honestly, and act upon the answer, and you cannot 
 go far wrong. Will you remember this too when I 
 am gone ? It is among the last things I would say 
 to you on my death-bed if I could." 
 
 " Clifton Springs, N.Y., December 10, 1874. 
 
 " Here is another ' sermon ' for you. Reserve it 
 for Sunday, if you choose, but read it carefully when 
 you have time. It relates to one of the things which 
 I want you to remember as the years go by. 
 
 "It is that I want you to live, if possible, an intellect- 
 ual life. Get the best education that money can buy. 
 Choose one of the educated professions for the business 
 of your life. Be a man of books. Live in the midst 
 
LETTERS. 249 
 
 of books. Cultivate tastes which will make books a 
 lifelong pleasure to you. Have a library and use it 
 faithfully. Do not be drawn aside into a different 
 life, if God makes it possible for you to become a 
 learned man, and to live by your learning. I do not 
 mean by this advice that you should look down upon 
 an uneducated life, or despise uncultivated people ; 
 nor that you should despise money and money- 
 making. It is very weak to despise anything by 
 which good may be done. Men sometimes talk 
 proudly about despising money ; but every man's life 
 contradicts that. ... It takes a strong character to 
 make money and more still to keep it and to use it 
 unselfishly. 
 
 " True respectability consists in doing well the 
 work to which God has called us. A young upstart 
 once tried to insult an eminent lawyer by saying to 
 him, ' I remember the time, sir, when you blacked 
 my father's boots.' ' Well,' was the reply, ' I did 
 them thoroughly, didn't I ? ' That is the right spirit. 
 
 " You will not misunderstand me therefore, when 
 I advise you to choose an intellectual life. What I 
 mean is, that valuable as other modes of living may 
 be, the intellectual life is more so ; it makes more of 
 a man, more of his mind, more of his thinking power, 
 more of all there is in him which is immortal. The 
 power of such a life, if devoted to God's service, is 
 much greater than the power of wealth. It is more 
 lasting, more elevating, and it goes deeper in its means 
 of doing good. It is attended also with less temptation 
 to evil courses. A thousand men have been tempted 
 to their ruin by too much money, where one has been 
 ruined by too much learning, or too broad a culture. 
 
250 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 In the old Continental Congress, which made the 
 Declaration of Independence, there were two men, 
 John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson ; Hancock was 
 the richest man in New England. He was sent to 
 Congress on that account ; he was not a highly edu- 
 cated man; he could not make good speeches; he had 
 not much influence in Congress, except what his 
 wealth gave him. They made him president of the 
 Congress, not because they thought him their ablest 
 man, but because he was a man of fine personal 
 appearance, and because they wanted to compliment 
 Massachusetts. They all respected him. They all 
 felt that he did a very noble thing when he told 
 General Washington to bombard Boston if necessary, 
 though the great bulk of his (Hancock's) property 
 was in the city ; yet he did not stand among their 
 ablest men. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, 
 had not half the property of Hancock. He was 
 always in want of money, always in debt ; but he had 
 the best education the country could afford ; scarcely 
 a ship went to England which did not carry an order 
 from Jefferson for books. He had the best library in 
 Virginia. He loved books. For that day he was a 
 very learned man. The consequence was that he 
 became the leading mind of Virginia before he was 
 thirty years old. I think he was president of the 
 House of Burgesses before that age. In Congress, 
 too, his was the leading spirit ; he did more than any 
 other man in controlling the action of that body, and 
 when they came to the drafting of the Declaration of 
 Independence, and felt that they needed the ablest 
 mind of them all to compose a document which was 
 to be their defence before the world, and to found a 
 
LETTERS. 251 
 
 great nation, they turned unanimously to Thomas 
 Jefferson. From that day to this, I think no other 
 mind, not even Washington, has exerted so power- 
 ful an influence on the politics of this country as 
 that of Jefferson. Yet he, when a young man, had 
 the opportunity to become the richest man in Vir- 
 ginia. If he had given himself to it, he could have 
 had a princely fortune, and could have lived a luxu- 
 rious life, as the possessor of rich plantations and a 
 thousand slaves ; but if he had chosen that mode of 
 life, you and I should never have heard of him. 
 Which do you think was the nobler life of the two ? 
 
 " Professor Agassiz was once invited to engage in 
 mining speculation, in which his scientific knowledge 
 would give him the means of making a fortune in a 
 year. He turned upon the man who proposed it and 
 said impatiently, 'I have no time to make money.' 
 Once when one of his pupils showed a disposition to 
 turn his scientific studies to account in money-making, 
 he replied angrily, ' Go, sir, you have no place here if 
 your mind is bent on money.' That was the spirit 
 of Agfassiz's whole life. 
 
 " So far as the main object was concerned, — the 
 sacrifice of his pecuniary interests to science, — he 
 was right. It might not have been right for some 
 other man, but it was right for him. He would 
 never have done his life's work in any other spirit. 
 He died a poor man ; but on both sides of the Ocean 
 his name is honored for what he has done in the ser- 
 vice of science. 
 
 " The respect of the world for him, and the common 
 sense of what his life was worth, are expressed by the 
 fact that our rich men are about to found an institu- 
 
252 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 tion in honor of him, which is to cost two hundred 
 and fifty thousand dollars. He lived a noble life ; 
 they are doing a noble thing in thus honoring him ; 
 but which would you rather be — Agassiz himself, or 
 the giver of a fortune to commemorate his worth ? 
 
 " Do you understand, then, exactly why I advise you 
 to choose the intellectual life in preference to any 
 other ? It is simply because that is the best life, the 
 noblest in itself, the most useful to the world, the 
 most serviceable to God's cause, and the most help- 
 ful to those things which a man can carry with him 
 into Eternity. 
 
 " This is enough for the present ; I have some other 
 things to say in another ' sermon.' 
 
 " Clifton Springs, N.Y., December 23, 1874. 
 
 " I have several subjects on which I wish to write 
 to you. If my letters do not interest you, will you 
 keep them? I think perhaps they will when you are 
 older, yet then I may not be able to give you advice. 
 
 " In this letter I wish to add to one of my recent 
 ones (on the intellectual life). Gifts of mind are noth- 
 ing to be proud of. They are gifts of God, which 
 you are responsible for using in the best way, as you 
 would be for using a fortune wisely, if you had that. 
 Your thoughtful mind may be all the fortune you 
 will ever have. It is worth more than a fortune, if 
 you use it well. It is right for you to see just what 
 God has given you, and then put it to the best uses. 
 It would be wrong to do otherwise. 
 
 " Does this seem like advising you to be ambitious ? 
 Well, in one sense of the word, you ought to be am- 
 bitious. You ought to be aspiring. I once heard a 
 
LETTERS. 253 
 
 sermon on the duty of ' Willingness to be Little.' 
 That is the duty of some men. But it is a dangerous 
 duty. It is safer to set our aim high and aspire to be 
 all that God made us capable of being. It is safer 
 to aspire above our abilities than to aim beloAv them. 
 One is a mistake of judgment ; the other is indolence. 
 I think that young men more frequently mistake 
 through self-distrust and willingness to live an easy 
 life, than through excessive ambition. So thought 
 Dr. Arnold, a celebrated teacher of boys in England. 
 I would say, therefore, to all boys, 'Aim high in 
 everything you undertake ; whatever else you fail in, 
 put mind above body, and make the most of it.' 
 
 " Another special reason why I would have you 
 choose an intellectual life is that the present current 
 of feeling about it among young men is in the wrong 
 direction. Young men now have a morbid craving 
 to be rich. They are dazzled by fine houses, gaudy 
 furniture, costly pictures, luxurious living ; what the 
 Bible calls ' the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the 
 eye, and the pride of life,' are tempting many away 
 from better things. 
 
 " As a consequence, many who are able to become 
 ministers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, professors, 
 teachers, authors, are becoming merchants, bankers, 
 brokers, speculators, for no reason except that they 
 can get rich more easily in these latter ways. It is 
 all right to do this, if God calls one to it ; but if not, 
 it is all wrong. 
 
 "... It is never right to do a good thing if you 
 can do the better thing. You will be tempted, as all 
 young men are, when you grow older, to choose 
 riches above all things else. My charge to you is: 
 
254 AUSTIN THELPS. 
 
 don't do that thing, unless it is clear that God calls 
 you to it. The intellectual life is better, more use- 
 ful, more enjoyable, nobler in every way. Multi- 
 tudes of young men are suffering a lifelong loss by 
 not choosing it. 
 
 " Two or three examples will show you what I 
 mean. A young man, the son of a New York mer- 
 chant, was once entreated by his father to join him 
 in his business. The firm was rich. The father 
 offered him a fortune outright if he would enter it 
 as a partner. The young man wanted to go to col- 
 lege. The father protested against it. He wanted 
 to be a minister. The father opposed that more 
 strongly yet. The young man persisted. That 
 father lived and died a rich man. Perhaps he was a 
 good man and died peacefully. But suppose that he 
 did, what was his life's work worth compared with 
 
 that of his son ? The son is Dr. , late president 
 
 of College. He has preached the Gospel for 
 
 thirty years. He has aided in educating more than 
 ten thousand students, many of them the ablest men 
 of the country. He has written books which are doing 
 vast good, and will do it when he is dead. He has 
 become the chief authority in political economy among 
 our statesmen. He has led the scholarship of the 
 country for a quarter of a century, and is revered all 
 through the land as one of the most pure and modest 
 Christians that ever lived. Such a life is worth a 
 hundred like his father's. Which is the best record 
 to carry into Eternity ? 
 
 " Another young man began life with me. He 
 was poor and an orphan. He had a wealthy uncle in 
 Boston, who promised to make him his heir if he 
 
LETTERS. 255 
 
 would go into business there. He wanted to get an 
 education. He persisted, and was educated in part 
 by charity. He became a minister, and soon after 
 was threatened with blindness, and had no property 
 to live on. ' What is your college learning good for 
 now?' asked the uncle. The minister trusted to 
 God for help. His eyes were restored. He became 
 
 pastor of one of the largest churches in . He 
 
 is now Rev. Dr. , of the Home Missionary 
 
 Society in New York. His work has been blessed 
 with revivals of religion. He has been the means of 
 saving many souls. Missionary churches are founded 
 every year through his labors in part. Now which 
 was the wise man, the uncle or the boy ? Which life 
 was worth the most? 
 
 " A man in the State of New York, within sight 
 
 of , had two sons. He gave to each of them 
 
 three thousand dollars, and told them that was all he 
 could spare them, but that with that they might do 
 as they pleased. The older one went into the lum- 
 bering business, was very prosperous, and became a 
 rich man. The other spent his money in going to 
 college, became a minister, settled first in the little 
 village of , then was professor in Col- 
 lege, then professor at , then pastor of one of 
 
 the largest churches in New York, and is now Prof. 
 
 , of the Seminary, and is sending 
 
 into the ministry thirty young men every year, and 
 writing books which are read on both sides of the 
 Atlantic. The last time I saw the older brother he 
 had lost his property, had failed in business, was out 
 of employment, and was lamenting that he had not 
 spent his three thousand dollars on a college educa- 
 
256 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 tion, as his younger brother did. Which of these was 
 the best life ? Which had accumulated the most to 
 carry into eternity ? Both those boys were qualified 
 for an intellectual life. They were the sons of a 
 clergyman. They ought to have appreciated learn- 
 ing. One chose it, the other gave it up for wealth 
 and lost both. Now I do not expect rich uncles or 
 fathers to offer you a fortune. But you will be 
 tempted in other ways to seek wealth as the chief 
 good of this world. I do not expect to be here to 
 counsel you then. But remember what I advise you 
 now. Choose the education and the intellectual life 
 if God gives you health for it. Be willing to be 
 poor in pocket if you can be rich in intellectual 
 culture. Accumulated property is not at all neces- 
 sary to a healthy man's happiness. You can be per- 
 fectly happy living on a salary from year to year. 
 
 " I have tried both ways, and thankful as I am to 
 God who has given me the means of living now that 
 I can no longer earn it, yet all the money you could 
 count would not tempt me to give up the joy of my 
 educated manhood. If the choice were forced upon 
 me to-day, between educated poverty and uneducated 
 wealth, I would say, without thinking a second time, 
 give me the poverty. Sick as I am, I would take my 
 chances of the poor-house, without a dollar to carry 
 me there, sooner than give up the memory of the life 
 I have lived." 
 
 " Clifton Springs, N.Y., December 3, 1875. 
 
 " I do not like to delay longer a letter expressing 
 to you some of the very many thoughts I have about 
 your religious character. You know how much I prize 
 
LETTERS. 257 
 
 this, above all other gifts for you. No worldly for- 
 tune, no eminence among men, no amount of learn- 
 ing or of mental power bear any comparison, in my 
 view, with the possession of a humble Christian heart. 
 I would rather see you a poor man, an unhonored man, 
 an ignorant man, with the love of Christ in your heart, 
 than to see you in the Senate of the United States 
 or on the Bench of the Supreme Court, or possessor 
 of Mr. A. T. Stewart's fortune without that love. It 
 has become one of my habitual prayers that God will 
 withhold from my children worldly rank or fortune, 
 if he sees that to be necessary to their salvation. I 
 have never prayed for riches, either for myself or my 
 children. I dare not do it in view of what the Bible 
 says of the temptations and dangers of wealth. The 
 prayer of the Psalmist, ' Give me neither poverty nor 
 riches,' seems to me the true and safe one. Then, if 
 God sends riches, they are to be accepted like any other 
 responsibility, and any other temptation. In all prob- 
 ability, you will be a happier man without them. 
 But whether you have them or not is a minor matter, 
 and on this subject I want you especially to remem- 
 ber two things, — will you try to do so ? 
 
 " One is, that you will find, as you grow older, 
 two sorts of Christians, between whom you will have 
 to choose which you will be, and on the choice you 
 make will depend your joy in religion, your useful- 
 ness among men, and your rank in Heaven. 
 
 " One class of Christians are contented with re- 
 ligion enough to keep their conscience from unrest, 
 with not enough to make them very devoted or whole- 
 hearted in it. They try to unite a hope of Heaven 
 with as much and as many of this world's pleasures 
 
258 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 as they dare to indulge in. Their religion seems to be 
 an appendage rather than the business of their lives. 
 They are not very fond of prayer, not very fond of 
 the society of Christian people, not much given to 
 self-denial. You might be in their society a long 
 time, and not discover that they profess to be Chris- 
 tians. They do not make the impression on the world 
 that they are Christians. We hope many of them 
 are such, but men of the world do not see that there 
 is much difference between such Christians and them- 
 selves. The world does not see but that such Chris- 
 tians are as fond of this world's pleasures as other men. 
 They seem to be just as eager for wealth, for honor, 
 for fame, for good comfortable living, as men of the 
 world are ; and what they gain by their religion, it 
 is hard for the world to see. Such Christians ex- 
 cite a great deal of unkind criticism against all religion 
 and religious people. They are not very useful, and 
 cannot be. The good they try to do is balanced by 
 the evil of their own example. The world feels — 
 and it is right — that that is not Christ's way. Christ 
 did not live so, and he would not if he were to come 
 to this world now. 
 
 " The other class of Christians consist of those who 
 make a business of pleasing God in everything. Re- 
 ligion is no appendage to their life ; it is their life. 
 They are whole-souled in it. All that they do, they 
 try to do religiously. Be they merchants, lawyers, 
 doctors, they try to make their business serve God 
 as much as if they were ministers. They love prayer 
 and Christian people. The more religious people are, 
 the better such Christians like them. 
 
 " They are not afraid of self-denial, nor do they care 
 
LETTERS. 259 
 
 much for the pleasures of the world in comparison 
 with their enjoyment of God's service. If they are 
 rich, they use their property for God, — not mainly 
 for their own pleasure. If they are poor, they are 
 contented and happy, and in their poverty often shame 
 their superiors by self-denial. There is a difference 
 between such Christians and the world ; and the 
 world feels it. They live in good measure like 
 Christ, and the world sees that they do. Say what 
 they may, worldly men knoiv that such Christians 
 have something which they have not. 
 
 " Now between these two classes of Christians you 
 will have to choose which you will be. You can be 
 either. The temptations of life will be all one way. 
 The promptings of conscience all the other way. If 
 there is a denomination of Christians which is more 
 devoted than the rest, see to it that you belong to 
 that. If there is a group of Christians which seem 
 to you more Christ-like than others, seek their society ; 
 be one of them, if you can ; make the religious ques- 
 tion the chief one in deciding all social matters. Seek 
 your personal friends among the poor, if you find the 
 best Christians there. Do not allow social rank or 
 worldly popularity to weigh with you a moment against 
 deep and true godliness of character. God will ex- 
 alt you if you exalt him. 
 
 " In this, as in other things, be whole-hearted. Why 
 is it any more respectable to be half-hearted in reli- 
 gion than in other things ? It is not half as much so. 
 Don't try to be a Christian at all unless you mean to 
 give your whole soul to God. 
 
 " Probably the first time when you will be severely 
 tempted about the matter of which I have now written 
 
260 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 will be in college, if you go there. Let your few inti- 
 mates be Christians above all things else. Trust to 
 your scholarship for respectable rank among the boys. 
 They will all respect that. When I was in college 
 in Philadelphia, I was the poorest in my class but 
 one. I dressed poorly. Everybody knew that my 
 father was a poor clergyman. But I had no diffi- 
 culty in associating with whom I pleased. ... I did 
 nothing to seek it, except to get my lessons well. Re- 
 member that in college you can always trust to schol- 
 arship to take care of your social position. 
 
 " You will have no difficulty, in any college to 
 which you will be likely to go, in finding gentlemen 
 among the religious boys. This is desirable. Piety 
 and gentlemanly culture are necessary to the intimate 
 friends of a scholar. Beyond this, don't you care a 
 farthing whether they are rich or poor, from one 
 family or another." 
 
 To One of his Children. 
 
 A NIGHT ON DECK. 
 
 " Arctic, Tuesday Evening, May 9, 1854. 
 
 " I went up from my stateroom one evening about 
 eight o'clock, and found a crowd of sailors and pas- 
 sengers around the smoke-pipe, which you know is 
 the large iron chimney of the boat. It was raining 
 and chilly, and that was the only warm spot. I 
 edged my way in among them, put on one surtout, 
 and rolled up the other for a pillow, and lay down flat 
 on the deck. It was the only position and the only 
 place in which I could be comfortable. The heat 
 from the pipe kept me warm, and the rain I did not 
 
LETTERS. 261 
 
 mind, and the air refreshed me. It was unusual for 
 a gentleman to camp out in a rainy night, and the 
 fellows did not know what to make of it. I suspect 
 they thought at first I might have been drinking too 
 much brandy. They made all sorts of talk about me ; 
 some laughed and joked about me, and some jab- 
 bered in French. ' Hilloa,' said a newcomer, who 
 almost stumbled over me, ' have you got a dead man 
 here ? ' ' Pretty near it,' said another. ' He wouldn't 
 mind being pitched overboard, I reckon,' said a 
 third. ' Well,' added another, ' that man gets his 
 money's worth for crossing the Atlantic' So they 
 talked away, but I did not care if they would let 
 me alone and would not step on me. At length one 
 rough fellow with a cigar in his mouth, but with a 
 pleasant, beaming black eye, bent down over me, and 
 said as he puffed a whiff of tobacco-smoke into my 
 face, 'Sick, eh!' 'Yes.' 'First voyage?' 'Yes.' 
 He looked near to my face. ' Well,' said he, ' you 
 are the sickest fellow I ever did see. Did you 
 want to lie here ? ' ' How long can I stay here ? ' I 
 asked. ' As long as you like,' he replied. ' Then 
 I'll stay till morning.' ' Well, don't you want 
 something to lie on ? ' I told him yes ; but I had 
 asked one of the men to get a piece of sail-cloth and 
 throw over me, and he did not get it ; perhaps he did 
 not hear me. But this man sung out, 'Boys, here, 
 bring along that settee yonder.' ' Aye, sir ! ' Soon 
 two boys brought a settee, and the mate said, ' Put 
 it here ; twist it round, close up, so as to bring it 
 near the smoke-pipe. Now would ye like my old 
 coat?' he asked, turning to me. 'Don't you want 
 it yourself this stormy night? ' 'No,' he answered; 
 
262 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 4 I've got two or three of 'em, thank God.' So he 
 brought me a thick, heavy coat for a mattress, an- 
 other oil-cloth coat to throw over me, sent down to 
 the steward for a howl of gruel for me, and then sat 
 down on a stool by my side to take his turn in watch- 
 ing that part of the vessel for the night. I lay there 
 till morning. Every hour or two the mate sung out, 
 ' Heave the log, Tom ' ; and Tom heaved the log and 
 said, ' Aye, aye, sir ! ' ' All right ! ' 
 
 " At last the morning came, and I came down again 
 to my berth. It was one of the most comfortable 
 nights I have had on board the ship. 
 
 "They (the spiritualistic phenomena) do attend 
 and follow certain conditions of disease. Thus 
 much I think is pretty sure. I would, therefore, do 
 nothing to enlarge that crevice in the nervous make- 
 up through which the thing may find its way. I 
 
 have never been convinced that in 's case, he 
 
 did not aggravate the evil by meddling with it. I 
 would, at any rate, wait till there is nothing else 
 to do." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., Saturday Morning, September 21. 
 
 " At ten o'clock last night I had one of the mo- 
 ments of consciousness of interchange of thought 
 with you, which the mesmerists tell of. It was so 
 vivid that I laughed outright, as if I could see you 
 through a long tube. I felt much as I did when I 
 was a boy, and first learned that by putting my ear 
 to one end of a long piece of timber, I could hear 
 another boy scratching the other end. I am as sure 
 that I saw and spoke to you, as — well, as I am that 
 
LETTERS. 263 
 
 the mesmerists see through millstones — which, to 
 be sure, is not saying much. But the illusion was 
 very perfect and very pleasant. 
 
 " Remember me to your sick minister, if he cares 
 to hear from me. I do not know him, but claim 
 brotherhood with all the Yankee parsons, and don't 
 ' make fun of them.' I am one of them." 
 
 " Andover, Mass., September 7, 1864. 
 " is begging to be let off from grammar, and 
 
 is going through the anathematizing process, which 
 all youthful drudgers at our mother tongue experi- 
 ence. If the love of children for a man is any sign 
 of his character, next to being a dentist, to have 
 been Lindley Murray, must be the summum malum 
 of earthly misfortunes. 
 
 "I have been reading 'Haunted Hearts,' and am 
 agreeably disappointed in it, as it respects the ability 
 with which it is written. The plot is ingenious and 
 well sustained. The theology of it is another thing, 
 though it is true enough as she puts it, and so is 
 almost any error which is aimed, not at truth, but at 
 a caricature of it. The falseness of the book is the 
 old Unitarian inability to understand what the truth 
 is, founded upon incompetence to meet it as it is. 
 We Orthodox should be fools if we taught or be- 
 lieved what she opposes. I never heard of the man 
 who did." 
 
 " Andover, July 22, 1869. 
 
 " To-night it is like an evening in October. I am 
 weary, but not excessively so. I am feeling the 
 usual reaction from the excitement of anniversary 
 
264 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 week ; the usual sadness at parting with my class ; 
 and the usual questionings of what may be written 
 in the Great Book of duties undone, motives unsanc- 
 tified, opportunities unimproved. My lecture-room 
 has a great many voices, silent to all ears but mine. 
 
 " has a new dodge at his devotions ; he 
 
 prayed last night that he might be as good a man as 
 Moses, and might write as good a book as Deute- 
 ronomy. There's inspiration for you ! " 
 
 "New York [undated]. 
 
 " To-day I called on an old classmate whom I 
 have not seen for twenty -five years; and what do 
 you suppose I found him doing? Selling whiskey. 
 Think of a collegiate education to help a man in the 
 whiskey business ! This man was a good scholar, 
 read Greek finely, was good in mathematics, and was 
 a fine speaker, yet here he is. He has never married, 
 has accumulated a large fortune, lives by himself, 
 spends his days in a little dingy counting-room in 
 one of the most repulsive streets of New York, sur- 
 rounded with piles on piles of whiskey barrels. We 
 rolled hoop together when we were boys ; fished, 
 sailed, flied kites, flirted, went to Sunday-school, to 
 boys' prayer-meeting, to debating club, to college to- 
 gether ; yet how our paths in life have diverged ! 
 He did not know me nor I him, and I presume we 
 have now met for the last time in this world." 
 
 " Do strive against the curse of a narrow heart. I 
 think that of all narrow-souled mortals, a contracted 
 literary person is the narrowest. Men of business, 
 from being knocked around among men, often get a 
 
LETTERS. 265 
 
 broader culture of all manly traits than some bookish 
 men get from their libraries." 
 
 " Geneva, April 18, 1865. 
 
 " I suppose you have been thrilled and saddened 
 by the murder of the President, as everybody else 
 has. It is a fearful blow to the country as man 
 judges. But if the prayers of God's people gather 
 around the new President, as they did around Presi- 
 dent Lincoln, the result may prove a blessing on the 
 whole. Much as I have loved Mr. Lincoln, and 
 trusted to his good sense and honesty, I still cannot 
 help conjecturing that God saw he was too kindly a 
 man to deal with conquered rebels. He was just the 
 man to lead the nation through the educating process 
 up to the abolition of slavery, but perhaps we need a 
 sterner man, and one who has suffered more from the 
 slave powers, to punish traitors. Who can tell ? At 
 any rate, I have settled down in a calm utterance 
 that God saw that it was good to permit the deed. 
 A strange thought has impressed me too. The 
 assassination took place on the anniversary of the 
 Crucifixion. Who knows that there is not some 
 infinitely remote resemblance between the two events? 
 May not the deliverance of a great nation have 
 required some great sacrifice of innocence to guilt?" 
 
 " Geneva, April 19, 1865. 
 
 " It is a good thing that good men die when their 
 work is done ; good for their own reputation, good 
 for their usefulness, and good for their generation. 
 They bungle if they live to try to do a work which 
 somebody else was created for, and not they. Let us 
 
266 AUSTIN" PHELPS. 
 
 watch the teachings of God in coming events, and do 
 it prayerfully ; we shall soon see what his meaning 
 is in these fearful developments. What rapids we 
 are living in our time ! We are making history for 
 poets and novelists to celebrate, and for the church 
 of Christ to bless God for, I trust, a thousand years 
 hence. I hope all the good men and women of the 
 land will concentrate troops of praying hearts around 
 President Johnson ; who knows but that God's grace 
 will make the right man of him if we ask it? And 
 if not, we can still pray that God will use him. We 
 can pray, as the Boston minister did of whom you 
 have heard me speak, one of whose congregation was 
 sent with very important despatches to Europe and 
 a gale sprung up soon after he left the port, ' O 
 Lord, save thy servant from the fury of winds and 
 waves if it be thy will ; but whatever becomes of 
 him, do thou save the despatches and speed them on 
 their way.' 
 
 " It seems hard-hearted, but it is only deep-hearted 
 to be willing to let God sacrifice men to a nation's 
 life. 
 
 " I have, too, a feeling of congratulation towards 
 the late President, that he is so removed as to ensure 
 to him a home forever in the hearts of the people for 
 whom he died. I think I will not write more about 
 the great tragedy now ; it agitates me ; no, not that, 
 for I have not a doubt of the salutary fruits of it ; 
 but it excites my brain because of its grand and 
 awful connections with God's providence over this 
 nation. I feel as if the millennium were a hundred 
 years nearer than it seemed a week ago. 
 
 " My advice to you about writing is not to write 
 
LETTERS. 267 
 
 now ; wait till the feeling of horror subsides, or 
 rather gives place to the deeper one of trust, and hope 
 for the future. It is always better to write under the 
 arch of the rainbow than under the chain lightning:. 
 Poor Mrs. Lincoln and little ' Tad ! ' don't let us 
 forget them. But I must stop, or another long, 
 dreary night is before me. Happy dreams to you ! 
 These are grand historic days to live in and to die 
 in too. Gloria in Excelsis! 
 
 " Another of your ' Lincoln letters ' from Clifton 
 this morning. Don't you get into a worry about Mr. 
 Johnson. We must not expect everything from one 
 man, and I start with the theory that a rough-shod 
 man is wanted for the presidency in these times. 
 The men of silken sense of the appropriate are apt to 
 have silk in the backbone. 
 
 " Oh ! you do not know how heavily sickness 
 weighs upon me in such a time as this. It is a grand 
 thing to live through such a revolution if one can 
 only do anything for the right in it. I long to preach 
 again before the crisis is over. 
 
 " does not go back to the war. The regiment 
 
 refused to go. All the officers above refused to 
 
 go, and that would have made a reorganization nec- 
 essary, and so there was less inducement for the men 
 to go. Two-thirds of the men would have gone if 
 their officers had led them enthusiastically. I do not 
 think that we who stay at home ourselves can blame 
 them, yet I wish they had gone. But it illustrates a 
 law of Providence that select instruments of man's 
 choosing are not in the long run the most reliable. 
 God doesn't estimate so highly as we do the 'crack' 
 
268 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 regiments, and ' crack ' churches, and ' crack ' ser- 
 mons. ' Not many mighty, not many noble.' 
 
 " At any rate, keep nothing from me. I am very 
 dependent on the feeling that my children are my 
 friends, and that they do not conceal their inner life 
 from me. May God in His infinite compassion do for 
 you what I cannot ! " 
 
 " Monday Morning, June 21. 
 
 " Things go on in the usual startling and revolu- 
 tionary way at home. We eat, drink, and sleep just 
 as if nothing had happened. Everybody went to the 
 Peace Festival last week, and it is about all that 
 they talk of now. The usual superlatives of the 
 musical vocabulary are flying about in the air. I 
 think so too ; no doubt of it. I agree with General 
 Grant, who thought the artillery was the best part of 
 the music, though I think I should vote for the 
 anvils, always excepting Ole Bull's fiddle. I hope 
 some thoughtless ones will get some idea of the Day 
 of Judgment from such crowds. 
 
 " It will not surprise me, if I know what is going 
 on here three hundred years hence, if I find that 
 Shakespeare no longer holds his throne ; the world 
 may have outgrown him. It will not be strange 
 if we discover some time that literature, hitherto, 
 has been on the wrong track." 
 
 "Andover, Mass., September 22, 1869. 
 
 "The evils of such meetings are all on the surface. 
 Underneath the ' gassing ' there is a flow of Christian 
 feeling which is the stronger for being expressed in 
 ever so poor a way. So long as people talk in relig- 
 
LETTERS. 269 
 
 ious meetings as well as they do in secular meetings, 
 we have no reason to be ashamed of their religion : 
 and they do that as a general rule. As well try to 
 stop prayer because it isn't always classic, as to stop 
 religious talking for the same reason. We have all 
 of us a great deal more of childhood, and conceit, 
 and anything but ripe sense in religion, than we 
 think for. I suspect that to angels we seem like 
 great babies, sputtering over the little grains of 
 knowledge we pick up ; but the sputtering does us 
 good, nevertheless." 
 
 "Andover, Mass., January 24, 1870. 
 
 " I never knew a worse day. It was like living in 
 a bath of dish-water. I had to take to reading hymns, 
 somewhat as disappointed Episcopal ladies in the 
 
 novels take to charity schools. came home this 
 
 noon, silent and pitiable as a drowned robin." 
 
 " I must tell you of one of my follies. You know 
 my superstition about direct messages from the Bible. 
 I cannot defend it, yet I do get comfort from it. Well, 
 yesterday, when you left me I felt as if the bottom of 
 the universe had fallen out, and all of us were sink- 
 ing into the original chaos. I groaned in spirit. 
 Half mechanically I took my Bible and begged for 
 something to hold me up, and I opened to that very 
 gem of the whole book, Psalm 91 : ' He that dwell- 
 eth in the secret place,' etc. Is it all humbug? I am 
 weak enough to be unable to part with it, as I fancy 
 many a good papist clings to the material nature of 
 the virgin. All goes right to-day, anyhow. 
 
 " God bless you ever and everywhere." 
 
270 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 "I have again read 'Stepping Heavenward.' I 
 close the book with a deeper conviction than ever 
 that it gives the true secret of a joyous Christian life, 
 the personal love of Christ and to Christ. Heaven 
 is that, if nothing else. I ought to have known it all 
 these years. I get glimpses of it now. If the long 
 stretch of the intermediate Sahara, of which we know 
 so little, could be blotted out, and our catechism could 
 prove true, — ' do immediately pass into glory,' — the 
 change would lose its dreariness. The critical point 
 is not whether resources of blessedness are there, 
 but have we the tastes which can enjoy them? And 
 that is only asking in another form, Do we love 
 Christ with such a sense of His personal presence 
 that we are content? 
 
 " I went to church to-day for the first time this sum- 
 mer. Heard a ' good ' sermon without a scintilla of 
 original thought or sign that it came from a mind 
 that ever had such a thought, or would know it if it 
 had. It is a marvel to me how much of solid, moni- 
 tory, helpful truth is afloat in the common Christian 
 atmosphere. Genius is not needful to good preach- 
 ing." 
 
 "Andover, Mass., October 28, 1879. 
 
 "News from my father is very dubious. If the 
 end is near, what shall I do ? The thought oppresses 
 me with strange and uncontrollable weight. One 
 record of sixty years of memory carried on into the 
 awful silence ! I ask myself, is it necessary for a 
 man to shrink as I do from it all? And God gives 
 me no answer. The terrors of fifty-five years ago, 
 when I cried with unutterable horror at the sisfht of 
 
LETTERS. 271 
 
 my grandfather's corpse, seem just as real to me 
 now as they did then. I don't understand it ; other 
 people do not feel so ; why do I ? " 
 
 On the Death of his Son. 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., September 3, 1883. 
 
 " You doubtless have thought of many alleviations 
 of our sorrow, for which we have reason to be grate- 
 ful. I have counted them over and over, and almost 
 every hour discovers to me something new. I want 
 to write some of them here. 
 
 " His absolute freedom from suffering : what an 
 unspeakable blessing is this, and on the whole not 
 a very common one ! That he was not conscious 
 through that long and awful journey of a day and 
 a half in an open canoe, with no covering from 
 the sun, no physician and no anaesthetics. What 
 agonies he would have endured ! Blessed be God 
 for all His great thoughtfulness ! He remembered 
 our frame, that we are but dust. Then, that he had 
 no time to suffer mentally on our account ; no neces- 
 sity of gasping out in syllables last messages, such 
 dismal ones to the sufferer. That he had not even 
 the ordinary struggles for dying breath; he went 
 from a happy recreation to a more blessed one, from 
 which there is no return to drudgery and trial. 
 Again, that he has left behind, on the whole, an un- 
 usually happy life. I asked him but a few weeks ago 
 if he had had a happy life so far. He replied, with 
 great positiveness, ' Yes ; an uncommonly happy one.' 
 
 " If sometimes I ask in the lowest depths, when 
 the waves and billows roll over me and I go into 
 
272 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 his room to pray to God and to Mm, ' Why was 
 the precious young life taken and the old one left?' 
 I am able to answer : ' It is the Lord, let Him do 
 what seemeth to Him good.' Let come what may, I 
 must, I will, cling to a Covenant-keeping God. What 
 else is left to cling to, and what more do we need ? " 
 
 " Bar Harbor, Me., September 8, 1883. 
 
 " Thanks for your letter addressed to us all. It 
 is the bravest and most comforting thing I have had. 
 I will try to follow its suggestions. Thus far I have 
 been able to do so. In truth, underneath the terrible 
 ' waves and billows ' of this storm, there is, down 
 deep in my heart, a feeling of rest ; a sense of relief. 
 You know how largely my love for you all has par- 
 taken of the feeling of compassion. I feel it for him. 
 
 "... Every mail brings a package of letters 
 about him. One thing is a great comfort to me. 
 It is the uniform expression of trust in him as a 
 noble man, of respect for his scholarly attainments, 
 and of expectation of great things to come from him. 
 Much as I knew of all this, the testimony in these 
 respects even surpasses my knowledge. . . . And to 
 me the choicest thing of all is that, with such abilities 
 and such prospects before him, his heart was turning 
 from them to the humbler, yet really nobler, work of 
 a Christian pastor. Oh, I do bless God for His secret 
 dealings with my boy ; no, not mine, but Thine ! " 
 
 [Undated.] 
 
 " I cannot help seeing that I am not so strong as a 
 year ago. This place is more noisy ; I lose more 
 sleep, and my last May in Andover was a more 
 
LETTERS. 273 
 
 serious let-down than ever before. But the next 
 two months here are usually my recuperative months. 
 It remains to be seen what they will do for me ; and 
 to be true to my recent moral reasonings about it, I 
 must add, what the Lord will do. It is 'borne in 
 upon me,' as George Fox used to say, that the Lord 
 and I can rebuke the causes of my decline. But if 
 I may but have a painless death, I do not care now 
 how soon. 
 
 " I have no ' exercises ' about the boy, except that 
 it requires but a thought or a hearing of his name to 
 picture him to my eye in a window or doorway, any- 
 where, at any hour of night or day. My faith does 
 not make it real to me that he knows when or what we 
 think of him. Logically, I cannot prove it, and there 
 is much to say against it. Specially, I doubt whether 
 he has any consciousness of time as we understand or 
 feel it. There are so many more negations and 
 silences than affirmations about the state he is in, 
 that I find it more restful to think of him as being 
 with Christ and learning how to enjoy Christ ; a 
 thing which we know very little about in our busy 
 life here." 
 
 " May 27, 1884. 
 
 "I am slowly picking up, though it is a harder 
 rub than ever before, yet I see through, I think. 
 Only you outlive me if God wills. . . 
 
 " The Boy looks out at me here through every door 
 and window. . . 
 
 " You must not feel anxious for me. 
 
 "You don't know how ardently I long for Mrs. 
 Prentiss' sense of the reality of Christ. If it was a 
 
274 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 possible experience to her, why not to us? I am 
 sure that our conquest over sin and wretchedness 
 lies there, and is not possible without it. If death 
 does not give us a new power to see and enjoy Christ, 
 I do not see how that life can be very essentially 
 different from this, except in the very small matter, 
 relatively, of bodily pain. I am often oppressed with 
 the feeling that He is near, within hand reach, and 
 that I lack the power to see and feel Him as He is. I 
 wait for the hour of discovery ; it will come when I 
 am able to know it, not before." 
 
 " Bar Harbor, May 18, 1884. 
 
 " Safely here. Everything worked together for 
 good to one who tried to trust in God. Our rooms 
 were all right ; weather made for invalids ; sea still 
 as glass till the last hour, when it behaved as if it 
 wanted to, and couldn't. I ivilled it through, count- 
 ing moments. The house was all open and warm ; 
 the rink still at half-past ten. I am very, very grate- 
 ful. It is in little things that God cares for us little 
 beings." 
 
 " Poor Professor has written me again. He 
 
 says, ' It is to me one of the darkest of Providential 
 mysteries, that we are born. I am sure I never 
 wanted to be born anyway, and there has been 
 scarcely a year of my life in which I should not have 
 been glad to pass into entire nonentity ; but I love 
 Christ and trust Him implicitly.' What do you think 
 of that ? I thank the Lord that I never saw an hour, 
 except when I was in religious despair and thought 
 there was no chance for me, when I did not feel 
 thankful for existence. Come what may, being is an 
 
LETTERS. 275 
 
 unspeakable gift to anybody who knows and loves 
 Christ. Do you take Papa's word for that, and in the 
 'sweet fields beyond' remember 'I told you so,' and 
 let the dear Lord have the good of our blind gratitude, 
 if we can muster no better as we go along." 
 
 " December 14. 
 
 "I am very grateful for your loving care about me. 
 But I really think you had better not try to come 
 again. To tell the truth, I am a little glad to evade 
 the good by. I never part with you without a sink- 
 ing at the heart from the fear that it may be the last 
 time. Yet why should I fear anything ? God is so 
 unspeakably good to me and mine. I reproach my- 
 self if I feel anything but love and trust. You don't 
 know how much I see now of Christ's loving presence 
 all my life through ! Led — led by His loving hand 
 from beginning to end ! I ought to have been the 
 most quiet and trustful man alive. 
 
 " You ask how I am : as well as I can be till I 
 get back to my ' dear cottage.' " 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., October 6, 1886. 
 " I am fascinated with Mr. Blaine. He called on 
 me, and I made an exception to my rule and called 
 on him. He is one of the most magnetic talkers I 
 ever met, and knows everything that is knowable." 
 
 " October 12, 1886. 
 "Every day here is a part of the golden age to 
 me." 
 
 "I hope you have burned that bit of raving I sent 
 you. I was ashamed of it long before it reached you. 
 
276 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 A man who has been walking along the 'silent shore' 
 so long as I have, looking off upon infinitely great 
 and holy things, ought not to become so slipshod, 
 even for an hour. Do not think of me so when I am 
 gone ! Oh, it is so great a thing to be worthy of 
 existence among such surroundings! Usually i feel 
 it, and not without great peace." 
 
 "Bar Harbor, March 31, 1887. 
 
 " I felt the usual tonic of the air the first day I was 
 here — voice improved — strength increased — sleep 
 good. All will go well unless the time for the end 
 has come. If it has, that will be well. I do not yet 
 feel that it has come ; but God's will is my will. 
 Think of me therefore as being at rest, come what 
 may. The bay seemed, when I crossed it, as if He 
 who said to the waves which swamped Peter, ' Peace 
 be still,' were there. A snow-storm raged overhead, 
 not exceeded by any we have had in Andover, yet 
 the water was as still as in mid-summer ; it was mar- 
 vellous. A close carriage waited for us on the wharf. 
 On the whole journey such incidents constantly oc- 
 curred. Thank God that I can die here, if die it is to be. 
 
 " May God be always at home with you both ! " 
 
 "Andover, Mass., December 18, 1888. 
 " You ask about me. You know I don't like to 
 talk of ailments. Emerson says it is not civilized to 
 do so. I am in trouble, and am losing a good deal 
 of sleep, that is all." 
 
 "Bar Harbor, Me., May 16, 1889. 
 " I mourn the loss of this beautiful spring in a 
 sick-room. But everything else has been so well for 
 
LETTERS. 277 
 
 me that I am grateful beyond words. The countless 
 little things on which a sick man's comfort de- 
 pends are marvellous tokens of God's condescension. 
 ' What is man that Thou art mindful of him ? And 
 what is a sick man's easy-chair that Thou carest for it, 
 and for the pillow on which he rests a weary head ? ' ' 
 
 " Bar Harbor, May 26, 1889. 
 
 "The goodness of God to me is something wonder- 
 ful. I am speechless before it ; it is as if He existed 
 for me alone. For what end He is giving me some 
 return of strength, I do not know. He will disclose 
 it to me. 
 
 "... About the autumn : if I leave here I fear 
 that I shall never get back. It is very faithless in 
 me to be downcast about it, after all that God has 
 done for me." 
 
 "Bar Harbor, July 20, 1S89. 
 
 " My strength improves slowly ; I cannot yet 
 walk far without weariness. But I putter over the 
 woodbines, and stroll on the piazzas ; a noble object 
 of life, isn't it ? 
 
 " One thought has assumed a new reality in my 
 mind of late, as an offshoot of my useless life. It is 
 the value of prayer as a means of usefulness. It is 
 fixed in the everlasting purposes of God that this 
 world is to be converted to Jesus Christ. It is to be 
 brought about mainly by believing prayer. When 
 a man can do nothing else, he can add his little rill 
 to the great river of intercessory prayer, which is 
 always rolling up to the throne of God. The river is 
 made up of such rills, as the ocean is of drops. A 
 praying man can never be a useless man." 
 
278 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 "Bar Harbor, August 25, 1889. 
 
 " It is very thoughtful in you to express your 
 sympathy with me on the approach of the anniver- 
 sary which must forever make this month of August 
 sacred to us. 
 
 " I am for the most part at peace about him. Yet 
 there are times when I would give my life for an 
 hour's talk with him — to tell him . . . My faith 
 does not permit me to pray for the departed, but I 
 do often pray to God that He will send some mes- 
 senger to my boy, to tell him what is in my heart. 
 When Daniel prayed, Gabriel went swiftly to relieve 
 the burden of the prophetic anxiety. I love to 
 believe in the eagerness of God, and of ministering 
 angels, to give us the help we need. But every year 
 drops a link in the shortening chain that holds me 
 here, and soon I shall see the boy again. 
 
 " It is good in you also to tell me of the pleasant 
 things which people say of me. I only wish I could 
 
 think them true. But I understand 's feelings 
 
 when he said, ' Oh, I am a fraud ; they haven't 
 found me out ! ' I do not mean to indulge any mock 
 modesty, but I am drawing near to the world where 
 we shall be seen, and shall see ourselves as we are; 
 where every other being's thought of us shall be 
 a reflection of God's thoughts and not a reflection 
 through human judgment. My anticipations are 
 very, very moderate. Yet I do not think that God 
 will fling my record here in my face when I see Him 
 there. He is a magnanimous judge of character. 
 He sees unconscious graces which we do not. 
 
 " I write, not because I have anything to say, but 
 to keep up the habit." 
 
LETTERS. 279 
 
 "June 10, 1890. 
 
 " As to my health, I do not know what to say. I 
 am weaker than ever before. I feel an intense re- 
 luctance to return to Andover. I think I should 
 suffer more there than here ; should be unable to 
 return ; should linger on till August, and die. But 
 I dread to ask anybody to stay with me here." 
 
 " September 8, 1890. 
 
 " My strength slowly but surely declines. My 
 eyes are discouragingly blind." 
 
 " September 17, 1890. 
 
 "But I do not think there is more than an even 
 chance that I can leave here at all. I am very weak. 
 
 " I would as soon see your oculist as any one ; but 
 it would be of no use. Amaurosis is like chipping a 
 piece of the enamel out of a pearl ; it never grows 
 again. 
 
 " It has been raining day and night here for a week 
 or more. Either that, or my eyes make it dark at 
 two P.M." 
 
 " September 20, 1890. 
 
 " I think too that the near future is very doubtful 
 for me. It will not surprise me if the end is near. 
 If I did not think it unmanly to think much about it, 
 I should say that I hope it is so. But the love of life 
 and the resentment of the mind to dying are so in- 
 tense, that I think there must be some other reason 
 for them than the obvious ones. The wise way is to 
 wait till it comes. 
 
 " God bless you always ! " 
 
280 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 To a Friend. 
 
 " If it may be, I should be glad to leave this world, 
 if not in the light of a golden sunset, at least in the 
 silver twilight which shall be the emblem of a coming 
 rest." 
 
ADDENDUM. 
 
 In June, 1891, a service in honor of the memory 
 of Professor Phelps was held in Andover Chapel. 
 The Address was delivered by Rev. Dr. D. S. Furber. 
 Rev. Professor W. J. Tucker and Professor J. W. 
 Churchill took part in the occasion. 
 
 Of the books published by Professor Phelps, the 
 following list contains the most important: — 
 
 The Still Hour. 
 
 The Solitude of Christ. 
 
 The Sabbath Hymn Book (with Professor Park 
 
 and Dr. Mason). 
 Sabbath Hours. 
 The New Birth. 
 The Theory of Preaching. 
 Men and Books. 
 
 English Style in Public Discourse. 
 Old Testament Studies. 
 My Portfolio. 
 My Study. 
 My Note-Book. 
 
PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS' 
 
 ESSAYS AND STUDIES. 
 
 MY NOTE-BOOK : Fragmentary Studies in 
 Theology and Subjects Adjacent Thereto. 
 
 i vol., i2mo, with a Portrait, $1.50. 
 Contents: Fragmentary Studies in Theology. — The Personality 
 of a Preacher. — The Materials of Sermons. — Methods and Adjuncts of 
 the Pulpit. — Conscience and Its Allies. — Our Sacred Books. — Theistic 
 and Christian Types of Religious Life. — The Future of Christianity. — 
 Methodism : Its Work and Ways. — Miscellaneous Topics. 
 
 A peculiar interest attaches to these studies in the fact 
 that almost the last act of Dr. Phelps' life was in connection 
 with his preparations for their publication. In the Preface 
 to the volume he says : " By far the major part of every 
 man's thinking is fragmentary. The best thinking of some 
 men is so. They are seers of transient and disconnected 
 vision. An educated man who practices literary frugality 
 in preserving the ideas suggested by his reading, will find 
 after years of professional service an accumulation of them, 
 in which he will recognize some of the most robust products 
 
 of his brain These remarks are suggested by 
 
 the origin and resources of the present volume. It is 
 literally what its title indicates." 
 
 MY STUDY AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1 vol., 
 
 I2H10, $1.50. 
 
 Contents: My Study. — Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs.- — 
 Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. — Retribution in Its Biblical 
 Atmosphere. — St. Paul on Retribution. — Correctives of Popular Faith in 
 Retribution. — Retribution in the Light of Reason. — Endless Sin Under 
 
Professor Phelps' Books. 
 
 the Government of God. — The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. — 
 Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. — The New England Clergy and the 
 Anti-Slavery Reform. — Massachusetts and the Quakers. — Does the 
 World Move ? — Is the Christian Life Worth Living ?— A Study of the 
 Episcopal Church.— Prayer as a State of Christian Living. — Why Do I 
 Believe Christianity To Be a Revelation from God ? 
 
 " Whatever Phelps w ites is worth reading and preserving. Each of the essays of 
 this volume bears the unrr istakable mark of his thought and style. Nearly every 
 paragraph betrays the touch of a master. In vigor, in richness of thought, as well as 
 in neatness and clearness of style, these essays are almost incomparable.*' 
 
 — The Lutheran Observer. 
 
 MY PORTFOLIO: A Collection of Essays. 
 
 i vol., 121HO, $1.50. 
 
 ■ Contents : A Pastor of the Last Generation. — The Rights of 
 Believers in Ancient Creeds. — The Biblical Doctrine of Retribution. — 
 The Puritan Theory of Amusements. — The Christian Theory of Amuse- 
 ments — Is Card-Playing a Christian Amusement ? — The Question of 
 Sunday Cars. — Woman-Suffrage as Judged by the Working of Negro- 
 Suffrage. — Reform in the Political Status of Women. — The Length of 
 Sermons. — The Calvinistic Theory of Preaching. — The Theology of "The 
 Marble Faun." — The Debt of the Nation to New England. — Ought the 
 Pulpit to Ignore Spiritualism ? — How Shall the Pulpit Treat Spiritual- 
 ism ? — Foreign and Home Missions as Seen by Candidates for the 
 Ministry. — Foreign Missions, Their Range of Appeal for Missionaries 
 Limited. — Congregationalists and Presbyterians : A Plea for Union. — 
 Methods of Union. — The Preaching of Albert Barnes. — A Vacation with 
 Dr. Bushnell. — Prayer Viewed in the Light of the Christian Conscious- 
 ness. — Intercessory Prayer. — Hints Auxiliary to Faith in Prayer. — The 
 Vision of Christ. — The Cross in the Door. — The Premature Closing of a 
 Life's Work. — What Do We Know of the Heavenly Life ? 
 
 " To say that sound wisdom, broad and exact learning, profound spirituality and 
 practical adaptation to current needs are all blended in these essays, and are rendered 
 the more impressive by a literary style of such purity and force as seldom are illustrated 
 by any one author, is to say only what is familiar already to everybody who has read 
 anything from Prof. Phelps' pen. Such a volume is a substantial addition to that lit 
 erature which, by broadening and strengthening the true foundation of belief and 
 character, is 'preparing the way of the Lord' upon earth. "■ — Congregationalist. 
 
Professor Phelps' Books. 
 
 MEN AND BOOKS : or Studies in Homiletics 
 
 Lectures introductory to " The Theory of Preach 
 
 inc.." One vol., crown, 8vo, $2.00. 
 
 Professor Phelps' second volume of lectures is more popular ant 1 
 general in its application than "The Theory of Preaching." It is de 
 voted to a discussion of the sources of culture and power in the profes- 
 sion of the pulpit, its power to absorb and appropriate to its own uses 
 the world of real life in the present, and the world of the past, as it 
 lives in books. 
 
 "It is a book obviously free from all padding. It is a live book, animated as well 
 as sound and instructive, in which conventionalities are brushed aside, and the author 
 goes straight to the marrow of the subject. No minister can read it without being 
 waked up to a higher conception of the possibilities of his calling." 
 
 — Professor George P. Fishct . 
 
 "It is one of the most helpful books in the interest of self-culture that has ever 
 been written. While specially intended for young clergymen, it is almost equally 
 well adapted for students in all the liberal professions."— Standard of the Cross. 
 
 " We are sure that no minister or candidate for the ministry can read it withou. 
 profit. It is a tonic for one's mind to read a book so laden with thought and sugges- 
 tion, and written in a style so fresh, strong and bracing." — Boston Watchman. 
 
 ENGLISH STYLE IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE. 
 
 With Special Relation to the Usages of the Pulpit. 
 
 12010, $2.00. 
 
 English Style is broad and comprehensive, and is particularly fasci 
 nating from its stores of happy illustrations and its frequent discussion.-; 
 of matters that everyone is interested in, but which few are competen, 
 to decide for themselves. By far the greater part of the volume relate.: 
 to English style in its widest acceptation, and the entire work is a mosl 
 valuable contribution to the subject. 
 
 " It would be difficult to match this book for practical value and literary merit in 
 the English language." — The Evangelist. 
 
 "This volume may be read, and not only read, but studied, with much profit by 
 everyone who has occasion to speak in public or to write for the public. . . . Wt 
 have here a treatise on pulpit style broad enough to be that and something more — a 
 satisfactory treatise on all English style. It will be a great help to any who arc 
 striving to learn how to write and speak their mother-tongue with precision, force anu 
 grace." — The Exa7niner. 
 
Professor Phelps Books. 
 
 THE THEORY OF PREACHING: Lectures 
 on Homiletics. By Professor Austin Phelps, D.D. 
 One volume, 8vo, 600 pages, $2.50. 
 
 This work is the growth of more than thirty years' practical ex- 
 perience in teaching, reinforced by suggestions arising from inquiries of 
 students, which feature is especially to be noted as giving an intensely 
 practical and living character to the discussion. It is probably the most 
 thorough and masterly treatment of the preacher's art that exists, cer- 
 tainly as adapted for the American pulpit it is unequalled. While pri- 
 marily designed for professional readers, it will be found to contain 
 much that will be of interest to thoughtful laymen. The writings of a 
 master of style and of broad and catholic mind are always fascinating ; in 
 the present case the wealth of appropriate and pointed illustration ren- 
 ders this doubly the case. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " In the range of Protestant homiletical literature, we venture to affirm that its 
 equal cannot be found for a conscientious, scholarly, and exhaustive treatment of the 
 theory and practice of preaching. . . . To the treatment of his subject Dr. 
 Phelps brings such qualifications as very few men now living possess. His is one of 
 those delicate and sensitive natures which are instinctively critical, and yet full of 
 what Matthew Arnold happily calls sweet reasonableness. . . . To this character- 
 istic graciousness of nature Dr. Phelps adds a style which is preeminently adapted to 
 his special work. It is nervous, epigrammatic, and racy." 
 
 — The Examiner and Chronicle. 
 
 "It is a wise, spirited, practical and devout treatise upon a topic of the utmost 
 consequence to pastors and people alike, and to the salvation of mankind. It is 
 elaborate, but not redundant, rich in the fruits of experience, yet thoroughly timely 
 and current, ard it easily takes the very first rank among volumes of its class." 
 
 — The Congregationalist. 
 
 " The volume is to be commended to young men as a superb example of the art in 
 which it aims to instruct them." — The Independent. 
 
 " The reading of it is a mental tonic. The preacher cannot but feel often his heart 
 burning within him under its influence. We could wish it might be in the hands of 
 every theological student and of every pastor." — The Watchman. 
 
 *#* For sale by all booksellers, or sent, post-paid, upon receipt of 
 fit ice, by 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 
 743 and 745 Broadway, New York. 
 
c^UOtyf * 
 
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 This book is due on the date indicated below, or at the 
 expiration of a definite period after the date of borrowing, 
 as provided by the rules of the Library or by special ar- 
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 DATE BORROWED 
 
 DATE DUE . 
 
 DATE BORROWED 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 C28239) M 100 
 
 
 
 
V 
 
 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 0035520698 
 
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 BRI 
 
 9§w