In pulpit and parish

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BV 4211 .B83 1896

Burton, Nathaniel J. 1822

1887.
In pulpit and parish

gale lectures on $reaci)tng-

In Pulpit and Parish

BY

NATHANIEL J. BURTON, D. D.

Late Pastor of Park Church, Hartford, Conn.

EDITED BY

RICHARD E. BURTON.

WITH MEMORIAL ADDRESSES BY

Pres. TIMOTHY DWIGHT, of Yale University.
Rev. J. H. TWICHELL, of Hartford, Conn.
Rev. E. P. PARKER, D.D., of Hartford, Conn.

Congregational H>tmtoap=H>cl)ooI anB publishing ^>ocictp,

BOSTON and CHICAGO.
NEW YORK. MINNEAPOLIS. SAN FRANCISCO.

1896.

PREFACE.

Of the Yale Lectures which make up the larger part of this
volume, the first twelve were delivered at the Yale Theological
Seminary, in the year 1884 in the Lyman Beecher course for that
year. The remaining eight were delivered in the years 1885 and
1886, as especial Lectures outside of the regular course above
mentioned.

It is the aim of the present volume to present selections from
the miscellaneous writings of the author, and not to confine the
contents to sermons alone, in which department he was best known.
There remains material for one or more volumes devoted entirely
to pulpit utterances on themes organically connected in subject and
treatment, and it may be deemed best in due time, to prepare such
for publication.

The manuscripts of Dr. Burton were never prepared by him
for publication ; it, therefore, follows that many changes which he
would inevitably have made have been rendered impossible. In
editing his works, it has been deemed wise to err on the side of a
too literal retention of what he has left, rather than to destroy his
strong individuality by any considerable alteration.

RICHARD E. BURTON.

Johns Hopkins University, April, 1888.

CONTENTS.

FUNERAL ADDRESSES.
President Dwight's Address .
Rev. J. H. Twichell's Address
Rev. Dr. E. P. Parker's Address .

Page.
II

YALE LECTURES.

The Call to the Ministry .
Making Sermons
Originality in the Preacher
Imagination in Ministers
Imagination in Sermons
Short Sermons

Extra- Parishional Faithfulness
Parish Inconveniences .

31
47
64
81

97
118

i33
151

YALE LECTURES.

Page.

Ceremonial Occasions 169

The Right Conduct of Public Worship . . . 187

Liberty of Thought Within Congregationalism . . 205

The Vague Elements in Language . . . . 222

The Service of Art in Religion (I) . . . 247

The Service of Art in Religion (II) . . . . 266

Order in Sermon Topics 284

Assimilation of Sermon Material .... 306

Veracity in Ministers 326

High-Heartedness in the Ministry . . . . 351

Legitimate Elements of Variety in Church Service . 369

Routine : its Perils and its Values . . . . 387

ADDRESSES.

Henry Wilson
Horace Bushnell, D. D.
James A. Garfield
Leonard Bacon, D. D. .
Fourth of July Oration

409
4i7
43°

441

45 2

ESSAYS.

Page.

Worship 465

The Love of Truth 480

Agnosticism 4S9

SERMONS.

The Church of the Living God 509

Life a Dream

Modern Inspiration .

The Fellowship of Christ's Sufferings

The Coming of Christ

5r9

The Transit of Venus . . . . ' . . . 5:

539

551

Nature Expressive of God and an Instrument of Self-

Expression for Man 564

577

Christ's Supremacy in the Heart . . . . 591

Jesus Weeping over Jerusalem four days before his

Crucifixion 600

FOREIGN LETTERS.

Extracts from Letters Written to Hartford Evening

Post in the years 1868 and i860 . . . 611

FUNERAL ADDRESSES

DELIVERED AT THE FUNERAL

i

OF THE

Rev. Dr. BURTON,

AT THE PARK CHURCH, HARTFORD, CONN.
October 17, 1887.

ADDRESS

President TIMOTHY DWIGHT,

OF YALE UNIVERSITY.

We loved him, and he loved us : — it is with this thought that
we meet together this afternoon, for the simple and impressive service
of the hour before us. The friend whose mortal part we lay tender-
ly and tearfully in its peaceful resting-place, and whose immortal
living self passes to a larger, grander life as we bid him farewell,
was a common friend to us all. Strangers to one another, it may
be ; having our homes in many different places and our work in
many different lines ; some of us coming into this time of sorrow
from the joy of an almost daily communion in thought and hope,
and others recalling to our remembrance the delightful association
of earlier or later years, we turn our footsteps lovingly to this con-
secrated house and find ourselves united in a bond of sympathy as
we enter within its doors. The spirit of the dead, yet living, friend
seems to rest upon us all. We look upon his face and say : What a
large-minded, large-hearted, generous, noble man he was. The
world, we whisper sadly to each other, has lost out of itself for us
something that it will not regain, and becomes poorer and emptier
to our thought as one more of those, whose minds and souls appear
to us peculiarly fitted for a higher life than this, moves onward to
another sphere.

What more shall we say concerning him ? Only what friends
may say in the first hour of separation from one whom they remem-
ber with the vividness of yesterday's life, and whose deepest regret is

12 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

that they are to see his face no more. The hour for a record of our
friend's work as a preacher or as a man, or for a picturing of his
mind and character, has not yet come. We all hope that, after a
brief season, some friend whose intimate acquaintance wit?h his
daily living in these thirty years past may give him fitness for the
task, will render this kindly service to the ministry and the church.
But to-day is not the time for this. To-day is consecrated wholly
to sorrow and to friendship, and we tell to-day only what we feel.

Our friend has always seemed to me to be equally interesting
in mind and spirit, and to be wonderfully interesting in both. His
mind was filled with delight in every new vision of truth which
opened to him. He seized upon the truth with the eagerness of a
child and made it his own in a peculiar sense, as compared with
most of the men whom I have known. The moment it came to
him, it was taken up and transfigured, as it were, by a mysterious
working of mental power, so that it gained a freshness and a beauty
which made it a thing of life and joy. It continued, also, a living
thing. It did not remain to-day what it was yesterday, but with
each new morning, as we might almost say, it presented itself in
some new aspect, and thus awakened the mind to see within it a
new charm and a new blessing. Thoughts came to him respecting
it as sweetly as the flowers come in the summer, and with the ex-
haustless fullness of a fountain. The outlook seemed to reach ever
farther into the distance, as the thoughts were richer and deeper,
and beyond what could be seen by the utmost stretch of present
vision there was a greater glory to inspire and allure the seeking
mind in the future. The constantly arising thoughts, also, seemed
themselves to be subjected to the same mysterious process of which
I have spoken. They were filled therefore with a new force, or took
upon themselves a fresh coloring, as the days passed on. They en-
riched the mind, as the mind by its own vitalizing energy appeared
to enrich them. They made life an ever fresh and ever bright
thing. I remember hearing him say once, that sometimes, after he
had been thinking upon a subject in the evening hours without find-
ing it open itself clearly before him, he would lay it aside and fall
asleep for the night, and that, when he waked in the morning, the
thoughts would be waiting for him in their due order and moving
towards the light. And I can think of no man whom I know, of
whom I can more easily believe this. His ever active mind we can
almost picture to ourselves as restlessly pressing on in its course

FUNERAL ADDRESSES. 13

even while the body slept, and reaching out after that which it
might gather into itself, and make the man conscious of, when the
day should return. As a man thinketh, so is he. How true these
words of Scripture are, not only in the sense in which they were used
by the sacred writer, but in other views of them also. The more
happy thoughts a man has, the happier is his life ; the richer his
thoughts are, the richer his life. Surely our friend, as he held com-
munion with truth and with his own mind, must have realized in
himself the possession of a true happiness and wealth which few men
know so fully — a happiness which none who have experience of it
would change for the best of the outward gifts which the world has
to bestow. I can only think of him now, and in the coming time,
as taking every new revelation of truth and every new measure of
knowledge into his mind, as he was wont to do while with us here —
only more eagerly and more confidently — and as turning the newly
known thing or the truth imparted to him on every side to see its
own beauty or its fitness in relation to other truths and things.
Some one has told me that his last words, as the shadows of the un-
seen came suddenly upon him, were, What is this ? May we not
believe that what seemed to us the shadow was to him an inbreak-
ing of the heavenly light, and that when his spirit followed the voice
that called him, it was that he might receive an answer of love and
of truth to every questioning of his eager mind? The other life
united itself closely to this life in his case. We cannot doubt the
reality of the other life as we see him passing into it, and we cannot
think of it, as it seems to me, except as bearing him forward in the
fullness of happy thoughts.

But his spirit was as interesting as his mind. He had a rich,
generous, magnanimous nature. The royal generosity of his soul
affected his thinking as well as his living, his living as well as his
thinking. He was free in his thought. But he never moved for-
ward without giving due weight and influence to what lay behind
him. If he turned to the new, he did so with tolerance for the old,
and even with a reverential regard for it. He did not forget the
fathers' thoughts, while he was moving so joyously and often so
boldly onward in his own. He was a man who grew larger and
healthier in his spirit, in this regard, as he grew older, and therefore
moved safely toward the truth, rather than away from it. He was
liberal in his thinking, because he was generous in his feeling. He
saw what was good on every side, and was so affectionate towards

14 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

all men and all ideas, that he could not be bound by any party or
limited by narrowness of any sort. I once heard him say that he
could, in a sense, accept any Christian creed, whatever minor faults
there might be in it, because he liked to look at it on the good side
and in the large way. His large-heartedness refused to quarrel with
his Christian brother because of the little differences. It rather im-
pelled him to sympathy and kindly fellowship, because behind and
beneath the differences lay the great common and fundamental
truths. The wideness and the narrowness of Christian thinking are
alike safe when the spirit which accompanies the thinking is like his.
And so I suppose that no man, whatever were his opinions, ever
looked upon him as an enemy. Indeed, I can hardly think of any
two combatants engaged in angry controversy and fierce debate as
coming into his presence without finding their hearts beginning
after a little season to warm towards him, and even towards each
other. He was so full of love that his own spirit was infused into
those who were with him, and even unconsciously to himself he be-
came a peacemaker.

How generous and loving he was,1 also, where there was no con-
troversy. When his friends or his brethren in the ministry met to-
gether, what a rich influence of friendliness and good feeling and
warm-hearted appreciation of every man on his best side came from
his very presence in the company. No matter what view he took
of any question, we all were glad to hear him speak and we all found
him as full of kindly sentiments at all times as we could ever hope
to be ourselves at any time. Wonderful and often delightful as his
humor was, there was no sharpness in it to be painful to another.
It was the play of a generous mind rejoicing in its own thoughts and
wishing joy only to abide in the thoughts of those who were wit-
nesses of it. He had the tenderness of magnanimity in his lighter
moods, as in his more serious ones, and was in the truest sense a
friend of man. The humanity of a large soul inspired by Christian
love was manifest in him to every one who knew his daily life. But
his generosity of nature did not tend towards weakness. Where
truth and righteousness were concerned, he was strong. In my own
relations to him I feel deeply the loss which we sustain in this re-
gard by reason of his death, and I am sure that many others who
have met him in the various walks and works of life share in the
same feeling. He was a large-minded lover of the truth and a gen-
erous defender of righteousness, as all men ought to be ; but no one

FUNERAL ADDRESSES. 15

could doubt for a moment that he was an earnest defender of the
one and an ardent lover of the other. What a striking face he had
— one that marked him as a man of power in any assembly where
he found a place. As he rose to speak in such an assembly, he at-
tracted attention immediately. But the impression on the hearer,
at the beginning, was always that a true man was before him ; and, at
the end, the same impression was deepened because the man, had
spoken so truly, so fearlessly, and yet so kindly towards all.

The Christian life grew stronger and more graceful and beauti-
ful in our friend as the years carried him forward in his course.
The members of this church to which he ministered in sacred things
so long and the friends who met him in the intercourse of daily life,
and with the interchange of thought and feeling, will bear a more
full testimony to this than is possible for us whose home has been
elsewhere. But the witness which we bear, though less complete, is
no less confident than theirs. I have myself known him well enough
for a long period to know that Christian love has been constantly
penetrating, more and more, all the recesses of his generous soul
with its heavenly influence, even from his earlier manhood until this
latest season. The richness of his thinking, the tenderness of his
feeling, the kindliness of his spirit towards all around him, the earnest-
ness of his working for the good of men, have all been more and
more infused with the influence of a living faith in the Divine Mas-
ter who long since called him into his service and his spiritual king-
dom. We all know this and rejoice to know it. The earthly life
ended suddenly, but not too suddenly for his soul's highest welfare.
The change which came to him when he was not thinking of its
nearness, only carried him into another place of living, where the
things which he had prepared himself for, and had hoped some day
to find his own, were waiting for him to enjoy them in their fullness.
I can only picture him to myself in that larger life as becoming
greater and better, indeed, but as still the same man whom we
knew — with a mind full of rich and continually new thoughts, with
a spirit ever joyful in the fresh discovery of God's truth and God's
love, and with a heart so overflowing in its love towards all that the
peace which passeth understanding must come to it evermore as a
divine benediction.

But why, I say to myself, should I speak even these few words
in the presence of the two friends who are to follow me and who can
bring a testimony and an offering from the innermost circle of an al-

16 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

most life-long friendship ? It is more fitting that I should be silent
here, and silently bear witness, as I stand beside the open grave, of
my own pleasant memories of the friend who has gone from us and
my sympathy for those who were nearest to his heart. And yet I
ask the privilege of adding one word more to those which have been
already uttered as a friendly farewell. When I heard last Thursday
evening of our friend's sudden death, my thoughts turned back-
ward to the early days, when he and I and the men of our
own age with whom we lived and studied began our work.
We seemed, all of us, as the vision of the past and the pres-
ent rose before my mind, like a company of loving friends who had
long since started on a journey and had been moving forward
through sunshine and storm, amid hopes and fears, with sorrows and
joys toward the realization of our youthful dreams. Suddenly on a
bright morning a voice came out of the sky, and one of the company
vanished from our sight. How strange it seemed that we could see
him no longer ! But the voice which called him said to us : Move
forward still, as earnestly and hopefully as before. One and
another of those who remain will be called after a season, and at
the last the realization of the dreams will come — but not here. The
life of the future is in that place beyond the skies to which this
friend of your early days has just been summoned. And so we
moved onward as manfully and hopefully as we could, and we said
to one another, as we left the sorrowful place and hour of our part-
ing from him who had been taken from us : Surely there is joy for us
in the time to come ; for we may bear with us ever the remem-
brance that he loved us and we loved him, and in the memory of
this and every other pure earthly love, which gathers into itself
somewhat of the heavenly, we may find the promise of the future.

ADDRESS

BY

Rev. JOSEPH H. TWICHELL,

OF HARTFORD, CONN.

One called, as I am now, to speak of a man long and dearly-
beloved in the relation of private intimacy and but just gone,
hesitates to follow his impulse and say the things that come to him
first and ask to be said, least he seem to speak overmuch of him-
self. For naturally and inevitably in such a case, the thoughts and
feelings that rise uppermost, and with which one is preoccupied,
are prevailingly personal.

Yet, what else can you do ? And perhaps, after all, it will be not
so entirely amiss. For I do not know but that one to whom on
personal grounds this is an occasion of love and sorrow, uttering
his own heart, is as likely so to utter the general heart as any way.

If I eulogize Dr. Burton here to-day, it is because eulogy is the
word that is in my tongue. And it does but represent the habit
of my thoughts and the habit of my speech about him these many
years. Again, if in the few minutes allotted to me, I pass by many
things and even most things that are in the public mind concerning
him, all that made us as a community, and each one of us, proud
of him, it is because the things in him now most present to me are
those that made me reverence and love him.

Twenty- five years ago this past summer I was up from the Army
of the Potomac and spending a Sunday in Hartford. It had been
a good while since it had been my privilege to partake of the Holy
Communion, and I greatly desired to do so. Upon inquiry I

18 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

learned that that was Communion Sunday in the Fourth church.
So thither I repaired, and so it came to pass that the first time I
ever saw Brother Burton was at the Lord's table ; and that the
first act that ever passed between us was the ministering on his
part, and the receiving on mine, of the sacrament of Divine Love
and Christian Fellowship. Though I was an entire stranger I went
up to him after the service and spoke with him. And then, for the
first time, I looked in his eye and saw the light of his smile, and
heard the brother-tone in his voice ; little thinking what of
cheer and heart's delight were in store for me in after years from
that eye, that smile, that voice ; little thinking that to miss them
would one day bring me into such sorrow.

But I can say, and do say, that the whole story of those after
years, as relates to him and me, has been answerable to that begin-
ning. He has given and I have received. I have been partaker
of the free hospitalities of his wealthy and generous spirit. All ye
to whom he was wont so long to break the Bread and pour out the
Cup of the Sacred Feast, and who are now in grief because he is your
minister no more, be sure there are many of us who are in the fellow-
ship of that grief, for he was our minister too. And there is no one
left who can be to us what he was, who can do for us what he did.

What I am most moved to say — to testify — at this time is, that
the man whose body lies before us was one of the best men, one of
the most Christian men that God, who, in the ordering of my lot, has
given me to know many good men, has ever made me acquainted
with. And that I have long been accustomed both to judge and to
say. Nor, I feel like saying, though I am aware that it is my feel-
ing that dictates it, was there ever, or could be, a more utterly
lovable man than he. And this on account of his own great and
wonderful gift and power of loving; and of loving with that
supreme kind of love that St. Paul depicts in the thirteenth chapter
of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Each separate lineament
of it was reproduced in him. Whoever came to know him came
into the atmosphere of it and perceived it. The generosities, for-
bearances, forgivenesses, unselfish humilities, the magnanimities all
round, that are so hard to most of us, and that it is a victory to
practice, appeared to be easy to him. His spirit was always sweet
with the fragrance of good will.

He was not a soft man. He was capable of vast indignation
and deep wrath, for cause. But he was incapable of animosity, or

FUNERAL ADDRESSES. 19

grudge, or resentment, or envy, or of a petty feeling of any sort
toward a fellow man under any circumstances.

No, not incapable. He would have earnestly forbidden that to
be said. He was a completely conscientious man. I find that
nothing has been more impressed upon me than that ; not even his
beautiful and universal magnanimity. He might not, indeed, do
what another person thought he ought to do, but what he thought
he ought to do, what he saw was right, that he did, and no matter
what it was. As the result of knowing him well you felt that here
was a man who doubtless would die, if it came to that, rather than
do a wrong thing. My certain conviction that that was true of him
bred in me, as time went on, a respect for him that was immeasura-
ble. And this integrity he carried as unaffectedly and easily as he
did his charity. Yet whenever anything occurred to give you an
insight of his judgment of himself, you were moved to discover
how lowly minded he was. I once heard him say that every time
he read a fresh story of crime in the papers he acknowledged to
himself that it was not a thing inconceivable that he should have
committed that crime. I heard him say that — dear Burton.

Naturally and without his effort as the nobilities of his dis-
position seemed to reside in him, and much as nature may have
contributed to them, they were spiritual graces, his second nature,
the mark and work of Christ in him. And they were rooted in the
very depths of his being : they were the man.

Last July he told me a thing about himself that I never shall
forget. It was the third day after the accident that befell him, in a
conversation in which he gave me an account of it. He said that
when he came out of the insensibility produced by the fall he had,
and regained consciousness, his first impression was that he was
mortally hurt. That thought, however, did not discompose him in
the slightest degree. " For," he said, " dying is an affair I have
discounted for a good while " — that was his precise expression —
"and it's nothing I'm anxious about" — or something like that.
But, he went on to relate, this marvelous thing happened : there
rose in him right there at that moment the surge, the flood of an
all, all-inundating tide of unspeakable, yearning affection that swept
out in measureless universal overflow toward all objects of affection
whatsoever, — the friend who was with him, the people who pres-
ently rendered him assistance, everybody he thought of, all the
world. It was not in words to describe it. It had been a great

20 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

experience and blessed beyond conception. And by and by he
imparted — which was a strange thing for him to do, for he was a
man of much reserve on the subject of his interior life ; his doing
it showed what an immense experience it had been, — what a sense
of it remained with him ; and how glad I am he did it, — he im-
parted his interpretation of it. "Wasn't it," he said, "the most
fundamental thing in me coming to the surface under pressure of a
great emergency?" Of course it was. It was a pulse of eternal
life ; a waft from heaven. There was a heart that would bear dis-
closing to the bottom. Its deepest passions were its purest.
Certainly they were, for they were the offsprings of his Christian
faith and lived from it.

What a believer he was ! He was free in his faith. He bor-
rowed it from no man. It was his very own. He was honest as
the day. His mind was perfectly open. He was not afraid to
think. He looked on all sides. Toward those differing with him
in opinion he was toleration itself. And he was a Christian
believer with his whole heart. He was born a poet and was
endowed with a spiritual imagination that gave him a free wing in
the upper regions of thought. We often sat spell-bound to watch
his flight. He could mount up to meet and commune with the
heavenly revelation as far as any man we have known or shall
know. But it was the least of his concern with the truths of
religion that they were a congenial field in which to exercise his
splendid powers. To be near him, near enough to make his moral
acquaintance, was to discover that the practical fact of this universe
to him personally was Jesus Christ, the Lord and Saviour who died
and rose again.

He was characteristically so unconventional in his ways and
expressions that to a casual, outside observation this might not
appear. But when you got close to him, there it was, quite unmis-
takable. You saw, by one token and another, it was witnessed to
you, and continually witnessed, that faith in Christ was the ground
under his feet, and on which he was living his life ; that the solid
realities of existence to him were the Gospel realities. When he
said that dying was an event he cared not for, he meant — that was
my construction of it at the time — that he had put his hand into
Christ's, and therefore was in the rest of an absolute confidence
respecting what awaited him when he should pass the mortal
boundary.

FUNERAL ADDRESSES. 21

Oh, what enthusiasms he had on the high themes of the faith !
What seasons of rapt converse with its solemn, joyful mysteries !
His people will remember on how many Sundays after Easter, two
years ago, he continued to speak to them of the Resurrection, turning
the subject every way, exploring it in every direction. He told me
then that he was not able to get away from it ; that it held him by
a resistless fascination. And he said that while he pondered it,
week after week, there were hours when he could scarcely restrain
himself from crying out, so mightily was his spirit moved with the
sense of the glory of the things it was given faith to know, and so
intense the ardor of longing that seized him to know more. Oh,
dear, true, loving, guileless, believing, rejoicing, hungering soul ;
how good and precious a gift from God it has been to share thy
riches with thee ! He had a genius for friendship, and an exhaust-
less capacity for it. And none, I may be permitted to say, had
more reason to know this than we, his brethren in the ministry.
None had more occasion to prove it. How wide he opened the
arms of his sympathy to us ! He took us all in, and there was room
for us all in his big heart. And now by his removal God has taken
away our head, and we are sorely, very sorely, bereaved.

There's nothing whatsoever about him that we remember, and
shall remember, as we do certain things that at one time and
another opened to our view the depths of his affection. I recall,
for instance, the scene — and there are others here who will recall
it — when after Dr. Bushnell, at a meeting of the Ministerial Asso-
ciation to which he belonged, had read a sermon, of which he said,
before he began, that it was probably the last sermon he should
ever write, and it came Burton's turn to pass judgment upon it, how
after an ineffectual struggle to say something, he paused an instant,
and then lifted up his voice and wept. Sweet must be the reunions
of heaven prepared by such a love ! How little a while it seems —
how little a while it is — since he stood here where I stand, and we
heard from his lips — those silent lips yonder — in such words as
only he could speak, the farewell in anticipation of which he that
day wept. Nor are there any words anywhere that I know of —
certainly none that I can frame — that, to my feeling, are so fit for
this hour, that so perfectly express the thought toward himself
that is now in my heart, and in all our hearts, as his closing words
on that occasion. Let me repeat them :

" What a mind," he said, " his must be to enter heaven and

22 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

start out upon its broad-winged ranges, its meditations and dis-
coveries, its transfigurations of thought and feeling, its eternal
enkindlings of joy as the mysteries of redemption unfold ! I look
forward with immense expectation to a meeting again with this man
in his resurrection life. I want to see Horace Bushnell in his
glorified, immortal body, and note the movements of that mighty
genius and that manful and most Christian soul thus clothed upon
and unhindered. " Meanwhile, and until then, farewell. O master
in Israel, O man beloved. . . . God bring us to thee when the
eternal morning breaks ! " So do I bid thee farewell, and so say
I of thee, Nathaniel Burton, to whom that morning has come, and
whose expectation God has now fulfilled.

ADDRESS

Rev. Dr. E. P. PARKER,

OF HARTFORD, CONN.

It has been my privilege to live in an intimacy of both
ministerial and personal fellowship with Dr. Burton for more than a
quarter of a century. Nevertheless I find it difficult to describe
him, nor does my heart-ache at his loss diminish the difficulty. He
was a great, good, dear soul, but strange and mysterious. He was so
large and manifold in his manhood, so unique in many respects, so
rich in a diversity of gifts whose exercise was strangely limited here
and there, so reticent and reserved concerning much that was funda-
mental in his personality, so abundant in resources lying back in
the unexplorable interior of his nature, and so paradoxical at certain
points of mind and character that any account of him given here
must be inadequate.

But we are not here for nice discriminations, least of all for
that result of analysis which gives us " for the real Caesar the ashes
of Caesar's urn." Nearly twenty-eight years ago I first met him and
was at once drawn to him as if magnetically. He had already made
some stir in Hartford and many good people in the churches
regarded him with suspicion and alarm as being an eccentric and
heretical genius. It is true that he had changed since then, but
chiefly in the way of growth and development. But what a change
in the atmosphere of Hartford since he was classed by prominent
church members with Theodore Parker ! and this change is in great
measure due to that same Nathaniel J. Burton. More than many

24 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

have suspected, his fragrance of character, his luminous life, and
the breadth and wisdom of his teaching have operated to expand
and ennoble the religious thought, and faith, and fellowship of our
people.

Dr. Burton's physical form in these latter years symbolized
about as well as flesh and blood could — the real manhood within it.
It fitted him well. It was ample, stalwart and substantial. From
head to foot there was no sign of narrowness or infirmity. His
brain required a noble expansion and out-building of the forehead,
and the jutting eyebrows were just bushy enough to make his large,
deep, liquid and wonderful eyes remind one of oriel windows over-
hung with ivy and opening into sacred precincts full of glooms and
glories. There was something both formidable and fascinating in
his resolute attitudes, his movements were those of vigorous ease,
his manners were dignified and gentle and his aspect in general was
grave and majestic, yet winsome withal. There was a striking
resemblance between some features of his face and that of Haw-
thorne, whom he otherwise resembled, and his voice was rich and
resonant and full of all best musical qualities. And so a good deal
of what was in him was revealed in his visible and audible being.

The manifold, marvelous, intellectual endowment of this man
deeply impressed all who came within the sphere of his influence.
Magnificent as much of his work was, he never seemed to be
putting forth more than a part of his power, never seemed desirous
to complete or perfect his work. He impressed one with the almost
boundless possibilities of his mind, and with the great diversity of his
powers. He had a metaphysical subtlety like that in Hawthorne.
He was capable of great oratory. He had bubbling springs of spark-
ling humor. He might have written essays that would have given him
a permanent place in literature. He was pre-eminently a poet. He
may have made no rhymes, but some such poetry as one reads in
Jeremy Taylor and John Milton's prose was commonly heard both
in his discourse and conversation. He never tired of describing
the imagination as the royal faculty of the human mind, the original
and creative part of it, and Dr. Burton's mind was pre-eminently,
essentially imaginative. It was even luxuriantly, tropically so. He
not only spoke but thought pictorially. If here and there his
rhetoric seemed audacious, gorgeous or grotesque, so is the flying
buttress of York Minster bold, so are some of its windows gorgeous,
so are its gargoyles and misereres grotesque. His mind was gothic,

FUNERAL ADDRESSES. 25

cathedral-like, and all its rhetorically sculptured expressions so
various and beautiful, from gloomy crypt to top-most pinnacles
among the stars, were the natural and yet artistic efflorescence of its
substantia] thought.

In discourse upon congenial themes he seemed to be chanting
rather than reading or speaking, his periods became cadences, and
what a music there was then of voice melodious and mellifluous
phrase ! And underneath and through it all the Orphic music of
masterly thought, in obedience to whose influence vocalization
became intonation, sentences became rhythmical, and all his forth-
trooping figures, in russet or in purple, took their places at once, as
in a processional order and array. There were full-flowing streams
of it, like Jeremy Taylor or Mendelssohn j long ocean waves of it
rolling on to a far-off climax, like Milton or Bach ; startling origi-
nalities and crashing discords of it, as in Carlyle or Liszt ; sudden
explosions of it, too, that soon sent forth showers of golden spray,
as in Ruskin or Wagner ; but it was always great thinking, grandly
expressing itself or endeavoring to do so, orchestral-wise or as by
minster-choirs and organs.

How often have we seen him as, touched in his solemn
musings by some taper-like suggestion, he broke forth into full-
flaming fire of speech. His preparations seemed always complete.
I see him now as, challenged by some breezy strain of remark, he
weighs anchor and gets underway in the deep-sea course of
thought, sail after sail, fore and aft, below and aloft, shaken out and
set to catch the gales of inspiration, till all his white wings are
spread and he plows his furrow through the main so swiftly and
majestically! Could anything be more beautiful? And at such
times they that heard him — and often they were few in number —
" looking steadfastly on him, saw his face, as it had been the face of
an angel."

The amazing fertility of his mind, no less than its originality,
marked him as a man of genius. Like such peers as Bushnell and
Beecher, and Brooks, he was not so much troubled to find subjects
as to select from those that thronged his mind. Only the man of
genius has this comprehensive and easy grasp of great subjects.
He often reminded me in his lighter intellectual moments of some
great leviathan lazily but gracefully disporting himself in his native
deep. In his case there was no pecking or nibbling at truths.
They were taken up, turned about, handled with reverent familiar-
3

26 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

ity, opened and disclosed with least possible delay or fumbling.
There was something oceanic in his breadth and depth, in varying
moods that never seemed petty, in his large placidities and
tumultuous perturbations. He saw the other sides and aspects
of things, believed in that unity which comes of comparing
and combining various views, and put his emphatic veto on all
narrowness and exclusiveness. If he took Calvinism on board his
train, he took along with it many other qualifying things, and the
whole train ran, as by predestination, on the unalterable lines of the
broadest gauge.

One noted in him, as in Scripture, apparent paradoxes of
doctrine that had their harmony in higher truths — hemispheres
sundered in map-statements that are one sphere in reality. He was
orthodox and heretical, conservative and progressive, broad, high
and low churchman, Calvinist in dogma, but Christian in spirit and
Catholic in truth. And with all his fine speculative and large imagi-
native powers there went hand in hand a cool common sense, a clear
sagacity and an excellent judgment in the practical affairs of this life.

Touching briefly now Dr. Burton's naturally robust and highly
spiritualized character as we knew it after many years of faithful
self-discipline under the tutelage of Divine grace, what a strong,
massive, beautiful character it is, on the whole ! It looms up in
loftier grandeur and symmetry than ever before in the twilight
beyond which he has suddenly vanished. Distinguishing his
natural characteristics from his natural temperament, I should say
that in the former, Divine grace had splendid materials wherewith
to fashion a glorious manhood in the likeness of Christ, and in the
latter, some considerable and unusual hindrances. As Christianity
found the centurion of Capernaum a just, devout, and faithful man,
so it found Dr. Burton with all the natural elements of a great and
good character. It found him constitutionally reverent, sincere,
true, courageous, kind, loving, and open to conviction on every
side. How it wrought in him with these materials, you know.
There were thunders and lightnings in his law. There was self-
sacrifice and abiding love. There was inflexibility in his righteous-
ness, there was no bound to his tender mercy. He was immovably
fixed in the great immutabilities of God's truth, but there was never
a heart more tremulous with over-brimming human sympathy.

He did "let brotherly kindness continue." How quickly, at a
word, those mournful, tender eyes became dewy with tears. How

FUNERAL ADDRESSES. 27

suddenly, sometimes, under an inner emotion of his own thought,
those firm lips quivered and grew silent. He could not utter the
love that surged within him. For that love was no brook babbling
over its shallows, but a well, like Jacob's, full of living water of
which Jew and Samaritan might drink freely, — only, one must needs
have something to draw with, for the well was deep.

Susceptible in an unusual degree to the mysteries encompassing
us all, mystic in his piety and delighting in the large vagueness of
revelation rather than in the small compass of definitions, he stood
four-square to all the winds that blew, but not blown about by
every wind of doctrine. He had rooted convictions that were
ineradicable, and the courage of them. I think he dared look any-
thing, mortal or immortal, fairly in the face. "What is it?" he
exclaimed — with the pallor of death on his face ; but I am sure he
was not afraid if he saw Death looking him there in the face.
That courage was one of the noblest traits in his character.

As to his natural temperament there was a strain of something
unusually if not abnormally sad in it, by virtue of which rather than
because of uncommon outward afflictions, he was, on the whole,
" a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."

Men marked the sunshine in him, the substantial sanity, the
rare humor, the tumultuous mirthfulness, the almost riotous play
of sportive feelings at times, but there were deep, dark recesses of
his nature, into which few could look. There were mournful possi-
bilities therein, great billowy emotions and perturbations. And
therefrom arose into his sky, heavy, overhanging clouds, making
obstinate, gloomy depressions of mind and spirit. In these long
seasons of thick weather and storm he held his course, but as baffled
and impeded. Partly, perhaps, in other reasons, but chiefly, as I
think, in reasons grounded in this fact, the well-known limitations
of Dr. Burton's genius have their explanation. Here was a clog on
his ambition and enthusiasm, an embarrassment of his expression, a
check to his apparent aggressiveness, an insurmountable bar to the
full outpouring of his great mind and heart, and the secret of his
strange and sudden shrinkings from prominence and publicity, and
of his frequent abandonments of half-finished tasks.

Dear soul ! He never knew how many loved him, nor how
much. He could not be made to believe how much good he was
doing, and though he believed in the bright side of things with all
his faith, he saw the dark side, and it had a mournful fascination for

28 FUNERAL ADDRESSES.

him. He stood peering out into the dark, questioning it, until the
shadow fell athwart his way and wrapped him in its silence and
solitude. Do not suppose that for all this Dr. Burton was like Mr.
Fearing or Mr. Despondency of Bunyan's story. One might as well
liken him to Mr. Feeble-Mind. No! he was rather like "Old
Honest," and still more like Mr. Valiant-For-Truth, and still more
like Great-Heart, prince and leader of that pilgrim band, and like
them, often "played upon the well-tuned cymbal and harp for joy."

We leaned on him and loved him as those pilgrims regarded
their Great-Heart soldier and leader. He has gone yonder, I
suppose, because his Master had need of him there — and " was not
willing that he should be so far from Him any longer."

Our music is hushed into low and mournful strains because of
his departure, but all the trumpets of the ransomed in heaven
surely sounded for him on the other, brighter shore. Let us not
fail to listen and catch the echoes of those victorious notes of
welcome and be comforted concerning him. He has simply ceased
to be seen of us. That is sorrow enough and hard to bear. But he
has gone up into the Holy City through the beautiful gate that opens
over all graves, and we can but rejoice for and with our Great-
Heart, and follow his path of translation with mingled tears and
joy, lamentations and thanksgivings, prayers for consolation and
praises of divine wisdom and love.

Dr. Bushnell and Dr. Burton ! Have they met once more in
that clear and holy light, in that land of health and holiness ! And
what a meeting that has been ! Master and disciple in the presence
of their common Master !

" Now I saw in my dream that these two men went into the
gate, and lo ! as they entered they were transfigured ; they had
raiment put on that shone like gold, and crowns were given them
in token of honor ; and all the bells in the City rang again for joy,
and it was said unto them, ' Enter ye into the joy of our Lord,' and
as the gates were opened to let them in, I looked in after them and,
behold ! the City shone like the sun .... and in the streets
walked many men with crowns on their heads, palms in their
hands, and harps to sing praises withal .... And after that
they shut up the gates ; — which, when I had seen, I wished myself
among them."

YALE LECTURES.

THE CALL TO THE MINISTRY.

My Brethren, as a matter of fact, men go into the Christian
Ministry — go in genuinely I mean — by the pull of numerous forces ;
sometimes in considerable blindness, sometimes in considerable illu-
mination ; sometimes by their own private cogitations in the main,
and sometimes with great quantities of advice (and sometimes
against quantities of advice) ; sometimes by a rational, prolonged,
and orderly process of investigation on the subject, and sometimes
hap hazard ; sometimes against the stress of external circumstances
and then again as drifted on by strong circumstances almost against
their own will. When the anniversary of this theological institution
comes around next May, and the ministers assemble in this chapel,
for a free discussion of some topic, as their fashion has been, I
should like to have them cease from topics for once, and each man
just honestly tell how he happened to become a minister. Of
course some would not want to tell, because it might lead some
young man present (and I should want all you students there), to
feel that he might go into the ministry just as they did — that is with
as much uncertainty and solemn wondering whether he was not on
the wrong track. Of course too, numbers of the ministers, in the
present great joy of their vocation, and their present sense of what
a holy thing it is to be in it, would be in danger of overstating signs
and tokens which are really necessary to a valid call ; and overstating,
too, perhaps, the number of tokens that they themselves had when,
in the days of their youth, they were considering the question,
"Shall I go in."

But, taking all those clerical witnesses together, I feel sure that,
out of their miscellaneous biographies, you, my young brethren,
would get an enlarged view of the variety of God's operations in
selecting and constraining his servants. That would overtake you

32 ( YALE LECTURES.

which overtook me as I went on in my ministry. I went out of this
Seminary, as I had previously come out of the house of my father and
mother, with a distinct view of the mode in which souls come
into the kingdom of God ; and of the spuriousness, of course,
of all incomings which had not on them the regulation marks of
that mode. But presently I began to discover scattered instances
of what appeared to be other modes of conversion. Then I found
more. And then more. For quite a while I dismissed them as un-
doubted spurious cases. They must be. But when they grew
thicker and thicker, and when on selecting some of the best cases of
ripe piety that I knew, and inquiring of them how they came in, I
learned one thing for certain — namely, that it was not by my way,
I gradually emerged into the idea that God was not so narrow as I
was, but worked in grace, as he does in visible Nature ■ along cer-
tain great established lines, to be sure, as for example that
spring and summer shall come once in about so long, and with fixed
general features ; but within those lines, in a most vast and beau-
tiful diversity, just as the spring and summer give us almost more
sense of diversity than of uniformity.

And as God calls men into his kingdom in more ways than one,
so does He into his ministry ; as you would find, I say, if you could
get a chapel full of honest men to tell their story.

I knew a man, who took it for granted always from his youth,
that he was to be a minister if he ever became a Christian. And
why did he take it for granted ? God only knows. He had never
been so instructed by his father and mother. His father was him-
self a minister, but he had not conversed with this son as to what he
should be. For some reason, right or wrong, he had not. And so
far as the son knew, these parents had not been moved to ask God
that this particular one among their sons, should follow in the foot-
steps of his father. And yet, that young man was as settled in the
idea that, once a Christian, he should be a minister, as he was that
once born, he should have to die some day. And he was so disin-
clined to the profession that he refused to be a Christian, with such
a corollary attached to it. He refused until near the" end of his col-
lege course. But then he yielded and moved easily and without a
struggle to his predestinated work, and in that work had many most
clear and comfortable certifications that he was in the way of God's
choice for him. Now that man was under a curious bondage, and
the question is, was it a divine bondage. The conviction which held

YALE LECTURES. 33

him was not rational, in the sense that it rested on perceived reasons,
but it may have been none the less a divine conviction. God is not
tied up to processes of rationalization in getting men to do what he
wants them to, and means to have them. On the contrary, three-
quarters of his work in ordering human affairs is covert, we must
suppose. If his power were put in only in those few instances
where we see it, or are conscious of it, all things would go to wreck.
No ; he moves invisibly in the great kingdom of human wills, and
bears the creation on to his own issues ; notwithstanding the va-
poring of men, and their swollen self-consciousness, as though they
were lording it here, shaping their own destinies, and preparing
the future of the race.

Now I do not present the example of that young man as an ideal
towards which other young men are to strive. I will even admit,
if you insist on it, that his call was pretty nearly the minimum of all
calls — and dangerously small — but I name it as an encouragement
to any here who have not been able as yet to make their call as
large as they would like ; for this man of mine seems to have had
proof enough in his subsequent experience, that that first dim expe-
rience, and blind energy of conviction which tied him to the Chris-
tian Ministry, was indeed God, choosing a blind way, rather than
an open one to accomplish his ends.

It were possible to prepare a whole lecture on God's blind ways
with men — he preferring that way in numerous instances, in part, I
suppose, because if he undertook to explain to his small and
fumbling creatures, they would not half get hold of it ; and in part,
because the way of faith as distinguished from the way of sight, is
full of wholesome discipline for us ; and in part, too, because the
magnificent surprises of God's eventual disclosures as to the benig-
nity of his obscure methods with us, will make us feel more than
contented that we were detained here in a long twilight, and stretch of
guess-work. We know that all our personal affairs are in his hands,
and all eternity will be filled with tokens of his most blessed man-
agement of them.

But I am discoursing on the numerous ways in which God gets
his ministers — and I wish to make them seem numerous in order
that I may comfort all earnest hearts here present, in which God is
really making out his call, whether distinctly or only darkly as yet ;
and while I am willing to acknowledge the value of a resounding call,
something full of symptoms supernatural and therefore full of im-

34 YALE LECTURES.

perative persuasion, I much desire to bring out the unquestionable
facts of unresounding calls, thousands of them, calls that cannot be
heard at all except as you listen closely ; but which, reverently
heeded, may grow at last to thunders of assurance.

Dr. Horace Bushnell, in tracing his own pedigree, and minis-
terial outstart, could not, with all his fine imagination, make out for
himself a regulation call. To be sure he had a mother, who carried
him in her heart, body, soul, and spirit, mother-fashion, but silently
in the main. He was in the way of knowing that she had great de-
sires for him of all sorts — or rather he was in the way of feeling that,
because she scarcely spoke of it, as I said : — these deep mothers
with their unfathomable, speechless broodings, are not without a
witness, especially where their boys are particularly clairvoyant ; and
their undeclared will and longing works like a fiat often, and makes
destiny for their beloved three times more than much hustling would,
and an officious clatter of teaching and entreaty. At any rate, Bush-
nell always felt a certain stress upon him, mother-born somehow,
and he became a Christian, and then a collegian, and then a gradu-
ate, and then after a little, he clearly settled his mind to be a law-
yer, and not a minister. And he wrote a decisive letter to that
effect. At that juncture, that long-silent mother broke silence. The
fact was, in all the mothering of that boy antecedent to his birth,
she had mortgaged him to a particular service and that service was
not the law, and she, being about to have all her sacred thoughts and
clear assurances thwarted, apparently, by the eccentric snap-judg-
ment of her mysterious Horace, took a sudden hand in the fulfill-
ment of her own prayers, and spoke out — all dumbness is not of
inability, but, as often as any way, of wisdom, and of God's seal set
on the lips — she spoke, and said : " You have settled this question
inconsiderately, so far as I can see. I ask you now to wait till you
can consult your own mind. I think you had best accept the tutor-
ship in Yale College that has been offered you." There she
stopped in mid- volley. A lesser woman would have marched on into
an argument for the ministry — the opening for it seemed good —
but a person who could hold her peace twenty-six or seven years,
could wait on God a little longer ; peradventure, the law being
staved off for a year sure, various gracious pressures would have their
chance to get in on her son (which they did) ; and so, on that
whiff of chance wind, one of our greatest men was lodged where he
belonged ; and was able to write nearly half a century afterwards :

YALE LECTURES. 35

"As I look back on the crisis then passed, it seems very much
like the question whether I should finally be. No other calling but
this ministry of Christ, I am obliged to feel, could have any wise
filled my inspirations, and allowed me sufficiently to be."

So, this man was not misplaced among human callings, by the
wilfulness of his mother, moaning and wandering in false inspirations,
but he was set to his life task — well, by many things ; some of them
plain enough, some dim, some very dim, and some absolutely un-
discoverable at present, no doubt ; but whether it was the constitu-
tion of his mind shaped in all sorts of gestations ante-natal and other,
or the many inworkings of the Holy Ghost, or the force of external
circumstances, all the causes head up in the far-away choice, selec-
tion, and will of God — this primal all-knowing will started for its
chosen and choice man by innumerable paths, by ten thousand inter-
mediates, by straight marches now, and now by the most laborious
and mysterious indirection, by delays, by reverses, by apparent total
defeats ; but like the tortuous river, it failed not to find its way, and
reached its end, and I insist that God not merely permits his minis-
ters to find their calling in these groping and accidental ways, but
delights in it — not as unable to delight in other ways more illumined
all along and more full of comfort, therefore, to the anxious man,
but as pleased to make his providence on earth a versatile thing.
And while I am on this subject of small calls, I might as well
mention to you that Dr. Bushnell, telling the story of his mother's
mother, related that, up in the wilds of Vermont, whither she had
emigrated from these parts, she started a religious public service,
laying it on her timid husband to offer the prayers, and putting in,
to read printed sermons from Sunday to Sunday, an Unchristian
young man, whom she had quietly sized and sampled. She seems
to have been a woman who had some look of faith in her eyes, so
that men succumbed to her bidding ; and when after a time, she had
concluded that her young man had the natural making of a minister
in him, she proceeded to furnish the supernatural, by a notice
served on him one day as he came from the pulpit, that he must be
a Methodist minister. " But I am not a Christian," said he. " No
matter, you are called to be a Christian, and a preacher both, in one
call, as Saul was." Of course, this peremptory woman did not
deliver this summons till she was sent to do it. This youth had
been much in her prayers, and she thought she knew what she was
about. Therefore, the blessed spirit, when he had caused young

36 YALE LECTURES.

Hedding to be assaulted in front in this way, did not fail to assault
him in his soul also, and he was not disobedient to his call, but fell
in straightway, and when I, a little boy, saw him as Bishop Hedding,
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, I thought he was the greatest
man I had ever seen, up to that date ; and he certainly was one of
the most respectable and serviceable men in the communion where
he spent his life. I do not deny that Bishop Hedding's call grew to
be large enough, by and by, but when it was first delivered to him it
seemed to him little — too little to go on — only the sudden dictum of
one woman, and she not infallible, one would say. But, fallible or
infallible, God used her. And he used that sermon-reading to get
Hedding ready for the crisis that was to come. And, if we could
get back into all God's secrecies, we should find that the fuse for
that explosion had been laid long ago, and had not been permitted
to be blown out by the thousand winds of heaven.

I give you these personal instances, my brethren, which might
be multiplied to any extent, because I would like to have it appear,
beyond a peradventure, that God uses his liberty, in moving men
along into his service ; uses it clear to the borders of eccentricity,
as men would say. If he wishes to secure an ambassador and
newsbearer of his grace, by a hand laid on him heavy as doom, he
does it — and oftentimes precisely that is his wish — but if he wishes
to secure you or me by a touch scarcely discernible, as some almost
unstatable impression in our feeling, an impression which we cannot
make seem tangible and solid to anybody outside of ourselves, or
some slight concurrence of circumstances which seems to have
omens in it, then He takes that way ; — and if a man's ministerial
call takes the whispered and scarcely articulate form, let him not
despise it, and if it comes to him like seven trumpets, let him not be
made proud, and be brought to the conclusion that God's whispers
have no authority in them.

But now, having said so much by way of leading you along
into an elastic conception of God's ways in this great business of
multiplying ministers, I am willing to spread out before you the ele-
ments and items of what is customarily considered a full-toned and
ideal call. I can see no hurt in mentioning them, especially as I shall
try to forestall all hurt from them by an occasional remark by the
way.

First, then. If a man has gifts, he may be a minister — and
examining committees always feel bound to start the question of gifts.

YALE LECTURES. 37

Has the candidate any intellect, and has the moral region of his
head any size ? Can he think ? And when he thinks does he pro-
duce anything, ordinarily? Is there any ethical sound to the move-
ment of his mind? Does he know anything? Can he tell to other
people what he knows ? Can he tell it in an engaging manner, so
that if we start him out as a preacher, somebody will be likely to
want to hear him.

And then passing from his mind to his exterior make-up, what
physical gifts has he ? Is he a person whom one can look at with
any comfort ? What sort of a voice has he ? Has he lungs, and a
degree of digestion, and an affirmative physique all around, rather
than a physique negative and peeping.

These, and the like, are the endowments that we like to see in
a young man who begins to surmise that the Christian ministry is
his proper pursuit.

At the same time, in order that we may not be too knowing in
this matter, and may not fall into the delusion that God is shut up
to ten-talented people, for the accomplishment of his works, behold
what mighty men some weak men are, in his kingdom and work-field.

I was considerably instructed by what I once heard from the
lips of the Rev. William Taylor, the Methodist evangelist who has
preached his way clear around the world, once at least, and has not
found even unknown languages any bar to great spiritual success.
He paused, in his journey, at South Africa, and soon found himself
at the head of a powerful movement of God among the natives of
that region. And one night down in the bush, there was heard a
phenomenal outcrying, the like of which no man ever heard before.
It created some alarm, as though some wild animal might be in the
woods there ; but a company of the bravest men started for a
search ; and the animal proved to be a deaf and dumb Zulu, on his
knees, in great agony of guilt before God. They reverently withdrew,
and left him to his lonely wrestling ; and after two or three days,
and a few more religious meetings, the man came out in great joy,
a Christian convert. And they took him into the church, a clear
trophy, and baptised him William Taylor. And, after things had
gone on a little, William applied for a license to preach. He had
no conceit about it, as though he was a suitable minister for the
settlements, but he thought he could push out into the back country
among the dark-minded inhabitants, and do some good. After one
of the public services, the missionaries were discussing his strange

38 YALE LECTURES.

case in the chancel, William standing by and earnestly watching their
faces to see what the upshot might be, when one of the ministers,
touched by the sight of him, handed him a testament as a present :
whereupon William was delighted as being now licensed, as he sup-
posed, and he pushed straight off for his preaching ; and Mr.
Taylor testified that God used the man, most evidently. Of course
his oratory was meager. Many of you, young gentlemen, have felt
that yours is, but you are all very eloquent compared to him. He
could do nothing but pantomime. But what there was of his
oratory was so sincere and earnest that men heeded him, and
caught the sense of the few fundamental things that he tried to
teach ; and some were conscience-smitten, and sent to God for his
mercy, by this poor incapable soul, imprisoned in eternal silence.
To be sure, some of the back-country people came down to the
station at last for a change of ministers ; just as in the case of most
of us, a change of parishes is found to be best after a certain time ;
but so long as he lasted, William was as much sent as St. Paul was.
This is the strongest case of weak things made mighty in the
ministry of reconciliation, that I ever heard of; but I have heard of
a good many like it — and, in running over the list of my acquaint-
ances who have unquestionably succeeded in our calling, I have
found so many who had no natural right to succeed as being par-
ticularly able men, that the question of gifts has long ago ceased to
be the major question with me. It is one question, but not the
decisive one. Settle it either way, in any given case, and the exam-
ination had better proceed all the same. If the candidate is a
genius, very well, and if he is not a genius, very well ; let us look
him over still further.

The second sign of a real ministerial call is found in a certain
convergence of the man's circumstances towards the work ministerial.
Perhaps he has absolutely no money wherewith to get a suitable educa-
tion for the work. Perhaps he is tied to some present duty, which
hinders ; as the care of his aged parents, for example, or the
carrying of a business from which he cannot withdraw equitably.
But these obstructions, and a hundred more, are not entirely deci-
sive, as many a strongly-resolved and powerfully-pushing man has
found. The ways of money-getting, if you are thoroughly con-
cluded in your own mind to get it, in order to the service of God,
are almost perilously numerous in these days. The young student
burning to be a minister is the delight of the Christian world.

YALE LECTURES. 39

Societies are organized for him. Dying men remember to estab-
lish permanent funds for his benefit. Sewing circles consider
his case. Uneducated relatives take pride in it, that a person of
their own blood starts out to represent the family in the educated
walks of. life. Adult ministers all about, recollecting their own early
struggles, are filled with pathos towards him. And in addition to
these ordinary, natural, calculable furtherances, if he be a true
man, he will have windfalls dropping in on him now and then in
such a curious way as to seem preternatural. They come from un-
known sources perhaps. Or they come from eminently unlikely,
and humanly impossible sources ; from the pocket of a life-long cur-
mudgeon it may be, a man never known to relent before, a man
whose relenting in the one case was the wonder of the town. I
knew an instance where a divinity student was overtaken by just that
phenomenon. Yes, all things are possible to God, and from the day
that the smitten rock opened out its floods for the watering of all
Israel, the men of God are entitled to look for dashes of the uncom-
mon in their own lives, together with many good strokes of the
common and the natural, so that our second sign of a real ministe-
rial call, namely, the co-operation of circumstances, is a good
enough sign if you have it, but not a cause of despair, if you do not.
What hosts of us can rise up and testify to that. The modern ma-
terialistic philosophy is pounding away on the imperative domina-
tion of circumstances, and we are all set, soul and body, in the rut of
a mechanical fatalism, but every living man of us knows, that while
the press of circumstances is very cogent sometimes, yet the chief-
est circumstance in the creation of God after all, is the free-born,
and puissant soul of man, and that the ordering of one's own circum-
stances, especially as the individual man is yoked in with the will of
God, is the one splendor and the one zest of life ; the heroism of
all heroism, and the magnetism of all living history.

The third indication of a young man truly called, is the
united advice of judicious friends. That is very valuable. Often a
man is better known by others than he is by himself. He under-
rates himself — or perchance, he overrates himself — and which is
worst for a minister I hardly know. Sometimes I think that, in-
asmuch as exact self-measurement is just about impossible, the
exaggeration of conceit is more profitable than the exaggeration of
humility. But, take advice, brethren — take advice. Bystanders are
more unprejudiced than you are. People of large experience in the

40 YALE LECTURES.

affairs of life — old ministers, and so on — know what sort of men are
fitted for affairs, and whether you are, even approximately, that kind
of man.

Find out, too, what the church in which you were reared
thinks of your adaptations — and what the congregations all about
think, to whom you have incidentally exposed your abilities, on whom
you have laid out your earnestness from time to time, and, possibly,
practiced your oratorical arts. When I came to the serious work of
shaping myself for life, I found that the rustic assemblies in several
country school-houses, before whom I had discussed questions
during the long winter evenings, for the relief of my own mind, had
made up a silent verdict on my case, which they were now willing to
put in as a makeweight in my favor, on the whole — and I leaned
back on them, or rather on certain persons in those assemblies, with
a satisfaction, made up partly of pride, partly of gratitude, and
partly of an unanalyzable pathos towards the rank and file of human
nature.

But, friends, we must not lean too much on even so good a
thing as advice. I like the saying of one of our ministers : Advice
is to help a man do as he pleases. That is putting the matter un-
qualifiedly, but all the sententious and golden sentences of the
world, are made sententious by their heroic suppression of qualifiers.

Who advised our Lord to go on? What Christian in those
parts took any stock in Saul of Tarsus as a preacher, when he first
set up to be one ? Who was ready to license that deaf and dumb Zulu ?
Who could persuade the church-bishop of York to accept as candi-
date for deacon's order that non-collegiate old slave-trader and
man of sin, John Newton ? And when scores of us now living were
approbated as gospel ministers, what a considerable negative vote,
spoken or unspoken, was rolled up against us.

On the other hand, what scores of men have been wafted into
the ministry on unanimous gales of judicious advice, and have
practically shown the miserable fallibility of that advice. I myself
once had under my hand a theological student in the first stages of
his education, over whose head all the stars of destiny seemed to
conjoin ; and we supported him, prayed for him, and boarded him
around in our houses, free board ; but the root of grace in his heart
proved feeble, there was a constitutional strain of unmanliness in
him, and he grew slovenly in his ethical distinctions ; and to tell the
truth mildly, we could not any longer put up with him. " I have

YALE LECTURES. 41

entertained a Devil unawares," said one of our Christians, where
our young man had had some months of good board for nothing —
and we all took back our judicious advice that he go into the Chris-
tian ministry.

The advice of mortal men is valuable, but not infallible.

Up to this point, now, I have delayed in the region of what
may be called the natural signs of a minister, but now, at last, I
propose to have a word with you on the signs supernatural.

There are men in the world, who hold that all the call into the
ministry a person needs, or had better exert himself to get, is a good
concurrence of those naturals on which I have discoursed. Let him
put his unexcited common-sense out among them, and see how they
stand, just as he would coolly settle any secular question on the hard
facts presented. Let him enter our holy calling in that reasonable
and not particularly inspired way, and do his work there conscien-
tiously; and all the supernatural things that are desirable, lights,
warmths, empowerments, gifts of the Holy Ghost, will come in and
do their part to make him a success in the world.

Theoretically, the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Dutch Re-
formed Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist, the
Baptist, and I do not know but every church on earth, Greek,
Latin and Protestant, holds to the coefficient presence of the
natural and the supernatural in every veritable ministerial
call. And their offices for the ordination of ministers are all
shaped to that idea; but in the Greek or Latin branch of
the Catholic Church, and even in the Protestant Episcopal branch
of it, if all the requisites of good order, and church order, were
met and satisfied in the case of a young man, they would receive
him into their ministry with less supernatural marks upon him and in
him, than the Methodists, for example, would demand. And if a
young man seemed to have any amount of those marks on him, and
in him, but at the same time, had somewhat disorderly and un-
churchly about him, or had in him any strong exuberances of mys-
ticism, those grave and cautious churches first mentioned would
want to look him over three times, before they admitted him to
holy orders — whatever of the Holy Ghost there might be in him,
they would disrespect to that extent ; but the Methodists on the
other hand, and numbers of other denominations, would admit him
more easily — not doubting that so sane an influence as the spirit of
God in that young man would ultimately reduce his unbalance and
4

42 YALE LECTURES.

his irregularities. Meanwhile, life, even in an occasional rampancy,
is better than the first-class property of death, and no inspiration at
all, they would add.

So easy is it, under much unity of abstract doctrine on this
subject, and much sameness of ordination forms, to have a certain
amount of practical diversity.

My brethren, having now stated the different particulars of a
valid call, as partly natural and partly supernatural, and having spent
some time on the naturals, I desire to put in an energetic testimony
in behalf of God's direct and explicit part in the calling of his ser-
vants and ambassadors. Of course our natural gifts are his gift —
and our circumstances are of his providing and our good advices
are his messages — and therefore there is a sense in which these
natural things are all supernatural, and that sense of things we need to
bear in mind, with reverence and gratitude ; but over and beyond
all that, God may serve a notice on a man in wonderful ways — in
ways that force the man to say, "Lo ! God is here with me — in me
— all through me — through and through — calling me — pressing me
— making me seven times willing, expectant, and self-consecrate."
The leading instances of that sort of call in Holy Writ, are pretty
familiar to you. Abraham had one, when he left Mesopotamia to
become the father of us all ; and having had one, he went on to have
many — notably his summons to sacrifice Isaac. And inasmuch as
this stateliest of primitive men, and original corner-stone of a uni-
versal divine kingdom, was a man of repeated calls from the skies,
we naturally look to see his successors distinguished in the same
way, and so they were. Isaac was. Jacob was. Joseph was. Moses
was most remarkably. He undertook to beg off from one of his
vocations, on the ground that he was no orator, just as many of us
plausibly might, and as that South African dumb man certainly
might. " I cannot go to King Pharaoh, I am slow of speech and
of a slow tongue," said he, (Ex. 4, 10) ; whereupon his vocation
was reiterated upon him in a very moving and compulsory manner.

All the Prophets, too, had calls — calls marked by a strong array
of externals and naturals in some cases, but marked by supernatural
tokens and special inner movements in all cases. I wish there were
time to recite the picturesque accounts which numbers of them
have given of their own calls. Isaiah was in the temple when his
came — and he saw God there in visible, high enthronement, and
he heard God speak in the speech of men actual and understanda-

YALE LECTURES. 43

ble ; and there were visible seraphim and seraphic voices, and the
poor awe-struck man's lips were touched with a living coal by one
of those strange, superhuman personages ; and taking the whole
scene together, there was enough of the transcendental and amazing
in it to more than furnish forty modern men with a call of the
rather rationalistic and purely common-sense kind which some con-
sider sufficient. (Isah. 6.)

Jeremiah too, had a similar elaborate call, wherein he was in-
formed that from a point anterior to his very birth the predetermi-
nations of God had lighted on him for the prophetic office. (Jer.

i,5-)

Which reminds me I ought to have said that Samuel, the first in
God's line of official seers, was a very emphatically called man — or
boy rather, for God drew nigh to him when he was only a boy — and
looking back along the history of that boy we discover that God,
working through the prevision and the holy yearning of Hannah,
his mother, had him consecrated to His service ere he saw the light,
(i Sam. 3, 14.)

And we are told that even the mechanics, and skillful workmen,
who were to put up and adorn God's holy temple, had certain mysti-
cal empowerments vouchsafed to them.

Of course the stiff church idea of ministerial calls gets some
comfort for itself out of the fact that the Jewish priests were born to
their function, the office being hereditary ; but in the original conse-
cration of the Aaronic priesthood, once for all, God came forth in
explicit marvels to give, on the spot, a supernatural authentication
to the proceeding, and make out a call that had in it every conceiv-
able aspect of a call ; " which, when all the people saw," (says the
history,) " they shouted and fell on their faces ; " (Lev. 9, 24) ; they
were awe-struck by the miracle there wrought in sanctification of
Aaron and his posterity. Moreover, all along the line of those
priestly generations, God threw in his special attestations now and
then, and even in the routine of their priestly service, worked in as a
part of the structure thereof, there were incessant corruscations of
the supernatural.

But I must make haste into the New Testament period, and as
we enter it, are we not pressed upon by an irresistible preposses-
sion that the glory of the old system, in the matter of which we
have been speaking, will be at least kept up in the new, inasmuch
as the new is but the old brought on to its fullness and final re-

44 YALE LECTURES.

splendence. So we should naturally judge, and so it is. The New
Testament conception of a call, is particularly strong on its super-
natural side. We have moved down now into the era of the Holy
Ghost, and, because we have, we notice a slackening of marvels ex-
ternal. There are enough of them — Saul had them in his call —
Jesus had them in his — all the Apostles had them sooner or later in
confirmation of their ministry — still, things went to the interior
more, and the idea of the' inner light came to be more emphasized.

However, all I care now to insist upon, as in the line of my
subject, is that God's ministers in those days did not get into their
ministry by a deliberate and business-like consideration of pru-
dentials on their part, and then a decision to go in, making out
their own call as it were ; but they had laid upon them a supernat-
ural compulsion, or a rather irresistible stress — a voice out of the
sky in Paul's case — a personal call from Jesus in the case of the
Apostolic twelve — a solemn casting of lots in the case of Matthias
to take the place of Judas the Apostate, (which lot-casting was an
old time divinely accredited method of discovering God's will, and
not a piece of mere hap-hazard, by any means) : these were the ways
of God in those times, when he would fill up the number of his ser-
vants— and on these New Testament and Old Testament data, the
church at large has always stood and preached the doctrine of min-
isters supernaturally called. Called of God as was Aaron, and not
self-sent, must they all be. The doctrine has been carried over clear
into moonshine in individual cases ; and possibly whole denomina-
tions of Christians have landed in vagaries of mysticism on the
point, for the time — and these personal and denominational vagaries
have been such a standing warning to all beholders, that many, being
much determined to be thoroughly sensible, and a little more, have
studiously eliminated from God's calls every least suffusion of the
direct supernatural. It is the indefeasible privilege of finite and
foolish man to swing from one exaggeration to another ; but in the
midst of all extremes on this subject, the thunderous great voice of
the general church has persistently affirmed the right of God's min-
isters to be called — by earth-born voices no doubt, such as circum-
stances, mental gifts, personal piety, committees, councils, the arch-
bishop of York, and all the rest — but by heavenly voices as well,
and principally.

My brethren, I started this lecture on a low key, perhaps you
thought, but I have got it up now, you see. And yet not so far up,

YALE LECTURES. 45

I hope, as to disavow my first thought, that men may become minis-
ters on a small and feeble call. I gave some instances of the small
call, you may remember, and I showed some sympathy with those
instances — but I have great sympathy with instances more sky-born.
Feeble calls are not things to be aimed at, and striven for, but
things to be put up with rather, when our higher aims and strivings
do not seem to bring us into the whole fullness of God. God's full-
ness is what we want. Calls may begin feeble (they often do,) but
as the years go on, and our work goes on, the call ought to go on,
too, from strength to strength, being more and more articulate,
affirmative and inspiring. Men who are young, and of only a few
years of religious experience, and a few years of religious study,
may innocently have less vision, less sense of God, less ability to
tell a divine thing when they see it, or separate a still, small voice of
celestial authority from the ten thousand terrestial noises with which
it is mixed up — may innocently have less of everything, than those
who are far on in the ministry ; but a minister whose call begins
feeble and stays feeble, never had a call in all likelihood. There
come lulls in everybody's call. We are fearfully and wonderfully
made. And we behave fearfully and wonderfully sometimes. And
whether it be ourselves or our circumstances, or the machinations of
creatures invisible, the truth is we have sinkings, and collapses, and
comatose moods, and general retirements of our faculties, spiritual
and all — nevertheless, every minister ought to have a growing sense
of mission, on the whole ; he must not be all lulls. If he loses his
call some day, he must get it again, and if he be a true minister, he will.
There is a band of music moving about the streets of the
city, and it is curious to notice in what alternating swells and falls it
comes to you. Now you hear it, and now you hear it not. A waft
of wind has caught it. A line of buildings intervenes. Or, possi-
bly, the musicians themselves have ceased from their strong blasts,
and are moving through their gentler and half-inaudible passages.
So is it with this other, and more heavenly music ; the music of
God's voice inviting us to be co-workers with him in the Gospel of
his Son. That great, authentic voice comes to us through this and
that medium, even as the air at large is made to deliver itself melo-
diously through the several instruments of the band ; but for various
reasons, some innocent and some not, that one dearest music of our
life, as chosen men of God, finds its ways to our ear inconstantly.
Various unpardonable winds sweep in. Various infirmities, whereinto

46 YALE LECTURES.

we were born, and from which we cannot wholly escape, interpose
their confusion. Possibly an occasionable miserable gust from the
outlying hells of the universe points this way, to hinder our hearing.
And, possibly, God himself, at intervals, for wise reasons, slackens the
clear vigor of his call and we are left to listen for his gentler tones.
All this is incidental to a life on earth. But no real minister will
consent, or will be called upon to consent, to a life-long loss of his
supernatural commission. By and by, the old music will come back.
In some watch in the night, in some moment of prayer and
mourning, in some studious hour, in some praying assembly of
God's people, by some bed where a saint lies dying, in the uplifted
delivery of some sermon ; somewhere and before long, he will catch
again that voice of voices, that call of his Heavenly Father, and
straightway his work will be transfigured before him again, and he
will bear into it as with the strength of ten.

Blessed be God that he does not forsake his servants.

MAKING SERMONS.

If almost any preacher should offer to tell me just how he
managed in making his sermons, I should certainly say : " Go on
brother, I am eager to hear you." I have heard quite a good many
tell, some common and some uncommon ones ; and I have settled
my own habits so that no amount of testimony would be likely now
to make any serious improvement in me ; nevertheless, just as much
I should want to have that man give me his story. " Nothing apper-
taining to humanity is foreign to me," said a Latin writer long ago ;
and in like manner, I do not know that there is anything on earth
so interesting as a preacher and his habits, to preachers.

So then I have concluded to raise courage to give you who are
here present my notions and my methods in sermon making. My
methods are the result of my notions, and my notions are the result
of my methods. There is a reciprocal motherhood there, which
does not seem quite natural at first, but is natural enough when you
look into it.

We start out into our methods in all fields of effort, under the
push of some preconceptions, there being no reason why we should
take one course rather than another, in sermon-making, or in any-
thing else, except those foregoing, and more or less established ideas ;
and then, if it so happens that those ideas, subjected to experiment,
are practically validated, behold they (the ideas,) get great refresh-
ment out of those validations, and are set up in their own conceit
as though they were made for the first time, self born ; as is
copiously illustrated in the realm of science, where some tentative
thought, some bright hypothesis, starts a line of explorations, and
those explorations, in their turn, confirm the hypothesis. A mutual
motherhood you see.

Ah, well, mutuality is the greatest law we know of !

48 YALE LECTURES.

I. The first thing to be considered in a sermon is the getting
of a topic ; and on that I would exhort you to a large range of free-
dom. Keep within the lines of Christianity ; you had better, no
doubt, because you are Christian preachers ; but be careful to see
those lines as sweeping a very large circuit, and be careful to hold
yourself privileged to plunder all creation beyond those lines for
material wherewith to enrich your truly Christian discourse. There
is a powerful and most miscellaneous immigration to these North
American shores, but there are forces here to Americanize these
multitudes ; it is all right, let them come. And if preachers are
energetically Christian, the immigration into their discourses of the
total population of the world will do no hurt, but, on the contrary,
will load them up with valuable stock.

I find that topics come to me from all points of the compass.
Time was when I preferred they should come to me from the Bible,
and I had a kind of guilty feeling if they did not, but I could not con-
trol the matter. Everything started my mind off in discoursings ;
my newspaper, my secular books, my contact with all sorts of men,
the accidental things of my life, and the accidental things of other
peoples' lives, the talks of my brethren in the prayer meetings,
politics, my walks abroad on the face of nature, my summer
outings — a thousand things — the mind has front doors on all sides
— and pretty soon I began to keep a book of subjects, wherein I
put down everything that seemed to have large and discoursible
contents in it, whether Christian or heathen. I did it instinctively,
and I see now that I was right. Do not be afraid of a cosmopolitan
accumulation of material, but look out that you diligently grind it all
down in the hopper of a regenerate and Christianly determined mind.

II. Well, you have selected your topic I will suppose, and
what you now want is a host of thoughts on that topic — the more
the better.

On reaching that crisis I do this ordinarily ; I go to my desk
and my pen and my paper, and there sit waiting for thoughts. I
open all my windows hospitably, so that if they want to come in
they can. And they almost always want to. Somehow they hear
that I am there. Why do all the winds of heaven pour down towards
a vacuum ? Why do all the birds of heaven pour down through
zones and zones seeking the summer? Why do all the waters of
the world drift down towards any hollow anywhere ? And why does
all heaven move towards beseeching souls ? No matter why. So it

YALE LECTURES. 49

is, and that is enough. And it is enough for me to know that some-
how my waiting mind there in my study is universally advertised,
and excites a universal good will towards me, so that my windows
are filled with inflocking thoughts, according (I am compelled to
say,) to the size, and what not, of my mind. Exactly here, comes
in the differences between men. I can conceive of even a minis-
ter's sitting there, with all his windows lifted, and no inflockings.
Some physical stupidity has hold of him. Some exhaustion has
come, some anxiety, some clatter in the street, possibly some mis-
chievous unembodied spirit from out the Somewhere that skirts this
life of ours. But a man cannot have been a minister a great while
without getting on to a point where, ordinarily, the currents of crea-
tion will begin to flow his way when he takes his place there at his
desk. His mind may be a plain one and not over-sizable, but if
there was enough of it to start in the ministry and get on a short
time — really get on — it will have thoughts, more or less, when it
takes its position and waits for them. Sometimes they will come in
multitudes. Another day they will simply straggle in. And anoth-
er day, as I said, for special reasons, they may not come at all.

But, come they profusely, or come they very scattering, all that
do come I record on the spot. I record the large and magnetic
thoughts, of course (if any such happen along,) but I record the
little ones too. I record everything that can be spoken of as
amounting to a thought on that chosen subject of mine. And I
keep on in that way so long as thoughts come at all. No doubt by
that time I have what some would call a very heterogeneous and
unusable mass of material — a perfect chaos precipitated there on my
paper. But they are mistaken. They know not the beautiful sanity
of the human mind and the beautiful coherencies on which it insists,
always and instinctively. All those items there recorded are strung
on one string, and are no hotch-potch at all, because the mind that
waited for them at the desk and got them, waited in a certain status
— it was not a vacuum by a good deal, but a mind occupied by a
chosen subject, as the love of God, or the ruin of man, or the pas-
sion of Jesus on Calvary ; and whatever thoughts come to a mind
thus preoccupied, and in that particular status, come they from
here or there or yonder, or from regions most remote, will assured-
ly be in every case, and without one exception to all eternity,
congruous to that mind in that particular state. A rather striking
fact when you look at it. I heard a lecture many years ago on The

50 YALE LECTURES.

Laws of Disorder, and this fact which I have just given you, the
profound fact that all minds have thoughts harmonious with their
nature, and on any given occasion harmonious to their special state
for the time being, so that the thoughts are not a medley, but an
affiliated multitude — that fact I say, may well come in as one illus-
trative item under that brilliant caption — The Laws of Disorder. I
energize on this point a little because I have heard of men objecting
that this way of securing the stuff of sermons secures a mass of
unrelated items, and makes a sermon just an omnibus of unclassifi-
able particulars. I say it is not so. And I give a good reason for
saying it, to wit : that, in the nature of things, only those ideas drift
into a waiting mind preoccupied by a subject, which are germane to
that mind in its special mood or state as thus preoccupied ; and if
all the ideas floating in are thus germane to one mind, they must
be germane to each other ; and there is no getting around it.

When I speak of a waiting mind I do not mean a non-affirma-
tive, non-energized, Mr. Micawber sort of a mind, waiting for
something to turn up, but a mind intent, a mind that goes to its
windows and looks out and longs, and thrusts forth its telescope to
find something. A mind thus intense, investigatory, and practically
beseeching, amounts to a tremendous loadstone in the midst of the
full-stocked creation — full-stocked with the materials of thought —
and when this or that comes into the windows of such a mind it is
stamped by that mind, and specialized to its uses, with a threefold
vigor, and all the incomes thus explicitly stamped are the more
explicitly germane to each other, and visibly of one species.

I insist on this original exertion, this doing of one's best with-
out the help of books or anything else ; I insist on that, as the first
step towards a sermon, because only by that kind of exercise does
a man grow to be a real and fertile thinker, whom endless produc-
tion does in no wise exhaust, but does continually replenish rather ;
the mind of man being not a pond that can be drained off by a few
years of sermonizing, but an artesian well, a constitutionally up-bub-
bling thing, so long as life and health hold out. I congratulate you,
young gentlemen, that you all have that practically infinite thing in
you ; and that as you go on in your ministry you may be more and
more conscious of this inexhaustible exuberance, and may move in
the joy and courage of that consciousness.

I insist upon original effort ; that, rather than reading to begin
with, for another reason. In every mental act there are two factors

YALE LECTURES. 51

involved ; the thinking mind, and the external materials which it
manipulates ; and men may be classified as original and productive
thinkers, or as copyists, plagiarists, and forms of echo, according as
they dominate this their material, or are dominated by it. But the
most ignominious person in all the world, if so that he have one re-
maining spark, or last flicker, of manliness in him, desires to be a man
of supreme generative force and not an echo ever ; and this he can
secure only as in the handling of subjects he thinks with all his
might before he reads, as I have already described. Let him go
from that desk of solitary effort on his theme to any amount of
reading on it, and those readings instead of overloading him and
smothering him, and making his whole movement stupid and un-
wieldly, and giving every listener to his sermon to know that it
is in reality a borrowed one, will be athletically, victoriously appro-
priated, assimilated and turned to use, being coined and made his
own visibly in the mint of his own vigor. Moreover, coming to the
books bearing on his topic — the commentaries and all the rest — his
mind within him will be so vital and informed by his preliminary
meditations and creative acts, that it will gather up the parts and
elements of those books that are suitable to his purpose, and usable,
with a double rapidity. I have been surprised many times, after I
have diligently gestated a subject myself and then have started out
into my library for the say-so of other men on that subject, to
notice not merely in what a lightsome and expert way I handled
them, but also in what a swift facility I utilized their many volumes ;
— sometimes one glance will answer — and if I encounter a book
wherein the entire subject is opened out profoundly and in a com-
plete treatment, considerable portions of the book I catch up with
a touch and go, and the denser parts cannot very long delay me.
This sounds boastful, but it is not. Almost any man may make the
experiment for himself. And I advise you all to make it — and to
keep making it so long as you live.

Some of you perhaps would like to say to me, " now that very
rule — first think and then read — does not apply equally well to all
kinds of sermons ; " so let us look at that.

If the sermon is purely expository, our one duty is to tell
exactly what the sacred writer meant to say in the passage before us
— where then does that original and generative effort of which I
have spoken set in, and can it come in at all ? I answer, it is a
notorious fact that one man will find three times as much in a

52 YALE LECTURES.

passage as another — find it, I say, not put it in, as the manner of
some inventive gentlemen is, whose spirit is imaginative more than
historical and to whom the Bible is a partially hollow vessel requir-
ing to be humanly filled. No, they will find large contents in the
passages that they expound ; because they are men well trained in
creative thinking, and bring that training to bear on scriptural passages.
My practice in expository work, is, at the start, always, to expound
the scripture in question myself with what strength I can muster at
the moment. Somehow that gives me a good glow, the Bible and I
get on to brotherly and joyful terms with each other, I have laid
myself down on the heart of it and felt its vigor first-hand ; and
now if any commentator wants to speak a word with me, very well,
let him speak ; it will not embarrass me at all.

Or, perhaps, the sermon to be produced is an altogether histor-
ical one ; a sermon of information. Very well, in that case, I
acknowledge the first step is to get that information — and that brings
in reading. But there are two ways of reading ; one the memoriter
way, the mere gathering up of facts, and the other the thoughtful,
brooding, creative way ; the way that finds great subjects all along
in the stark events of history, so that they are not stark (not at all)
but eminently relational and prolific. The sand-atom is stark, the
seed-atom is not, and history is a seed-ground — it is so in fact, and
it is so as read by original and originating minds.

So I do not see but my — Think first, and read afterwards, holds
pretty well all around.

III. We have now reached the third step in the making of a
sermon. We have our topic ; we have assembled our materials ;
and the next thing is to organize those materials ; for let it be said
to the credit of human auditors and congregations, they refuse to be
blessed to the full by unarranged and disorderly masses of sermon
matter, thrown out with whatever fine delivery, or whatever moral
earnestness. It must be organized. And in that business of organi-
zation, a real master-workman has a good chance to show himself.
Anybody, almost, can drag together the timbers for a building, but
only a person of skill and invention can do the next thing.

Now, the materials which you have amassed, can be put together
and made an orderly unit, in half a dozen ways — perhaps more ;
on what principle therefore shall you select one way rather than
another? I reply, if you are going to organize your subject simply
as a subject, and not as a means of good influence on your hearers,

YALE LECTURES. 53

perhaps there are a number of ways of doing it ; but as God's ser-
vant sent for the salvation of men, you do not want to be a man of
subjects and no more ; you will surely fall out of your vocation and
be a lecturer, and intellectualist, if you go on that principle — one of
the most mournful forms of suicide ever heard of; a called man
lapsed from his calling ! God save you from that.

So you must ask yourself, in every case — what do I wish to
accomplish with this sermon-stock that I have on hand. When that
is settled, the form of the organization to be made begins to be set-
tled. Get your aim, and every least item of your stock of material
spontaneously shapes itself to that aim ; as all things followed the
music of Orpheus. A clear aim, firmly held, works the following
results.

It saves you from treating your sermon as a work of art, and
fashioning it under an artistic impulse merely. When it is finished
it may be a work of art, sermons frequently are ; but it has come to
be so incidentally and not of your set purpose. Your purpose was
to bless men, and in so far as your discourse is after the forms of art,
and is therefore beautiful, that high and lordly intention of yours
did it. Let it not be thought a strange thing that a God-fearing and
noble intention should thus show an esthetic result — the pitiful thing
is that such an intention does not always secure an esthetic result.
Every minister has a right to have his mind work beautifully as well
as truly, so that while truth-lovers shall admire it, people of taste
can too. In the several provinces of art, literature, painting, music
and sculpture, it is often said that the artist ceases from real art,
necessarily, the moment the thought of utility or human advantage
in his work is permitted to take hold of him. If he undertakes to
be a preacher to men he is no longer an artist, and his work shows
it. That is the idea.

No doubt, many who were by nature preachers, and who greatly
desired to do good, have resorted to art-forms, as the means to their
end, and have marred and mutilated art by thus harnessing her in to
their purposes of utility ; but that was because they were preachers
and not artists — it being possible (though not easy) to be preacher
and artist in one ; possible but not easy — not easy, for example if you
write a novel to impress a truth, and would never have thought
of writing the novel excepting as that truth had possessed you ;
almost certainly the strenuousness of your moral intention will warp
you away from the absolute exactitudes of the beautiful — so that the

54 YALE LECTURES.

safest rule for ministers and sermonizers is, take a good aim at the
needs of the congregation and let high esthetics take care of them-
selves, considerably. If they get into your sermon, very well, but
do you keep your utilitarian intention as a preacher, high up,
strong, steadfast and solemn.

The second use of getting an aim before you proceed to shape
the materials of your discourse is, that you thus save yourself from
all divergencies and rhetorical dallyings as you pass on, from all
unprofitable self-consciousness. Multitudes of sermons are much
occupied with their own selves. They stop to make nosegays.
They stop to posture and make themselves agreeable. They stop to
see how good an argument they can make. They fall into a mania
for minute elaboration. They are detained in forty allurements.
Meanwhile, the people out there who are listening to that sort of
sermon have a great deal of leisure to admire the fine points made
and praise the rhetoric, and say within themselves — " What a tre-
mendous preacher we have." That preacher has forgotten to have
any aim. Those men in the pews, if really addressed and yearned
over, could not get a chance to make those leisurely remarks of
theirs. Preaching is in order to salvation, in God's idea, and if the
sermon went for that point-blank and forever, it could not be
otherwise than a sermon of a certain sort — a sermon that is, free of
every dallying, every ambitiousness, all posy- work, all self-con-
scious smartness.

And I may add, it would be likely therefore to have unity,
which is an indispensable virtue in all expression expected to take
a mighty hold on men.

And once more, in a single word — an explicit aim, as you begin
to consider your materials of discourse and try to pull them into
shape, will show you what parts of the mass may be omitted from
the organization you are about to make — omitted as not relevant to
the purpose which you have chosen.

I want to testify, though, from out of my own experience, that it
is curiously little of that material you will be called upon to discard
ordinarily. As a rule, you can work in nearly the whole of it, and
make it serve an orderly use in your discourse — the reason being, I
suppose, that each item of the whole is related to every other item ;
that relation being caused by the fact mentioned by me before,
that the entire accumulated mass came in as brought in by a mind
in a particular state, as filled by a selected topic. It is a pleasure to

YALE LECTURES. 55

know this, for when we have laboriously got our sermon together in
the crude stock of it, our feelings are hurt to be compelled to throw
away any of it.

It has been the sin of my life that I have not always taken aim.
I have been a lover of subjects. If I had loved men more and
loved subjects only as God's instruments of good for men, it would
have been better, and I should have more to show for all my labor
under the sun. As I look back upon this defect, the principal con-
solation I have is that a Christian subject, even when it is unfolded
simply for its own sake, may have some wholesome magnetism for
the people who have contact with it.

I have spoken thus far of a supreme aim at the welfare of your
hearers, as a very great advantage in several respects, but especially
in this fundamental business of getting your sermons organized ;
but that business is so fundamental, and your sermon is something or
nothing so entirely according as it has some good shape or" not, that
you must pardon me if I din on organization a little longer. Given
an aim, some things are settled, but not all. It is settled that no
sort of stock and stuff must come into your discourse that is inhar-
monious with that aim. And it is settled that whatever stock and
stuff you do put in, shall be so put in as to consort with that aim,
and further it.

But very likely there are several conceivable forms of organiza-
tion under which these necessary particulars will be reasonably
well-secured ; and we want to know now how, out of these several
forms, the right one may be hit upon.

Here I bring you face to face again with the differences be-
tween men — the differences original and the differences acquired.
In some kinds of mental work, one man is as good as another — just
as in the humdrum of ordinary life a coward is hardly distinguish-
able from a hero ; but as in a great emergency, (in shipwreck, for
example,) the awful dissimilarity in men suddenly stands out, and a
day of judgment is come, so in certain sorts of intellectual perform-
ance there are men and men, and a single hero may be worth an
acre of ordinaries.

One sermonizer has but to look at his sermon-matter and it
straightway trots into organization, like the horses ;of a fire engine
when the alarm bell rings ; but another man fumbles his materials
for hours, and then hasn't much of a sermon. The first man's
sermon is a shapely tree, the other's just manages to be a tree,

56 YALE LECTURES.

but in all sorts of disproportion. Still, the intuitiveness of that first
man, and his supernatural mastery over the stuff in hand, while at
first it may seem to you just an ultimate fact, and beyond all ex-
planation, a simple, direct endowment of God, it being God's
prerogative to elect A to intuitiveness and Z to fumbling and the like ;
behold, it certainly is not altogether an unanalyzable fact. The out-
springings of intuition are the composite result of original en-
dowments, and of good training, and of much practice.

Millions of people had seen apples fall from trees before
Isaac Newton saw his apple and guessed the law of gravitation — a
magnificent out-jump into the unknown. Why did not they all
make the jump ? First, I confess, because they were not the jumping
kind, perhaps, most of them. We are not all born to the same thing.
But secondly, because Newton by long study, and a large ingather-
ing of scientific data had provided for himself a first-rate standing
place for a great and infallible jump. He did not launch forth from
the known bito the immeasurably unknown, on the gush of a simple
impulse to launch. That sort of stone-blind irrepressibility is of no
account. There is no law in its movement, and it never comes to
anything. It would not guess gravity in a hundred thousand years.
But Newton, I say, while he did not lack impulse, had a considerable
knowledge of the secrets of the physical universe, and quite an ac-
quaintance with the way things are wont to go on out there — just as I
can prophesy on the as yet unknowable parts of a man's life, whom
I have summered and wintered with, and variously taken to pieces
in my analysis.

So then, your intuitive organizer of sermons, is thus expert
because he has studied his business, and has exercised himself a
good deal in experimenting on the principles he has discovered.
He has discovered that an aimless organization is void of one first
principle of organization in pulpit discourse. He has discovered —
perhaps some one told him and perhaps not, but he has found out,
some how — that there is a philosophical way of formulating a dis-
course, and an unphilosophical way ; a way in which one thing leads
on to another according to the eternal and universal laws of thought,
and (what is more), according to the profoundest of those laws,
and a way in which one thing springs out of another by a connection
so shallow as to amount to practical incoherency ; and he has dis-
covered that the incoherent way confuses the people who listen to
him, and thus steals away their right to get some good out of the

YALE LECTURES. 57

time they spend together — also he has discovered that his own mind
when called to make a discourse on an unphilosophical plan, has
seven times the labor and affliction to get on, and get out, that it
need to have, just as you and I may tug ourselves to death trying to
handle great weights that a porter will manage easily, because he
applies his strength in a rational manner. Also, our sermonizer has
discovered, that if for any reason he or his people wish to remember
his sermon, if it is philosophically put together, they can remem-
ber ; whereas, if it is unphilosophically put together, neither he nor
they can retain it except by one of those absolute and stark acts of
memorization which may be very interesting as phenomena and as
showing what the human mind can do when thoroughly put to it,
but which are a dreadful strain to the average man, and are of no
special value, either, in the general development of the mind. Per-
haps the minister preaches memoriter, or perhaps he preaches from
a brief, and in either case his work of recollection is trebled if his
sermon is fortuitously thrown together, or is developed from point
to point under the lesser and more trivial laws of mental association,
rather than under the great laws ; as where his score of memoranda
gathered by original effort at his desk, or gathered from books, are
made to root all in one comprehensive thought and sentence.

I could illuminate this matter much more, if I could take time
to spread out before you actual specimens of rational work, and of
incoherent work, in sermon-making.

But I was praising the intuitive organizer, and trying to let some
light in on his secrets. First, he has brains to some extent, though
not necessarily to any alarming extent ; and secondly, his discoveries,
one and another — such as I have just enumerated — he has experi-
mented on. He has made aimed discourses — and unaimed ones.
He has made discourses on philosophically articulated skeletons, and
he has made them on ram-shackling and forbidden skeletons.
These forbidden and impossible skeletons he invented when he was
young and had not practically learned the differences of things, or
when he was too weak to do other than impossible things. Latterly,
since he became knowing, he has practiced the logical sort of plan,
the philosophical, the genetic plan, wherein one thought vitally out-
branches from the thought foregoing ; the plan rememberable, the
plan that is a plan (and the only one that deserves the name) .
And now his mind walks in among his accumulated memoranda,
like a farmer into his harvest fields ; and lays things out in orderly
5

58 YALE LECTURES.

swaths, in absolute unconsciousness of the principles on which he
operates. See that girl pound that piano ! She knows the principles
on which she is operating — to her sorrow, and may be to the
sorrow of all listeners. But see her ten years later. She just
careers, without a thought of principles. She has passed out of
love into gospel and moves unlaboriously and lyrically. Likewise
there may be a lyrical organization of a sermon — a spontaneous
rightmindedness therein ; a philosophical movement full of melody
to the inner ear, because philosophical — for a profound orderliness
is always musical to the appreciative mind.

The question is sometimes raised, how plainly a preacher had
better show to his congregation the skeleton in his sermons. I
should say, as a rule, just about as plainly as he shows his own
skeleton. If there should ever come up a serious doubt among a
people whether their minister has any skeleton, he had better show
one. A purely unformulated and gelatinous physique in a public
man were disagreeable, and fitted to give his congregation a painful
sense of insecurity. I have heard numbers of men complain of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, when they had just heard him lecture, that his
mind meandered from point to point in almost unmitigated hap-
hazard. Said a clerical friend of mine — a bright man too, — " it
sounded as though he had opened his scrap-book and given us page
after page of that, consecutively — for a lecture." I knew better —
for there was never born a more coherent man than Mr. Emerson
in all the substantiate and profundities of coherency — and I never
could have had the face to ask him to appear any more consecutive
than he did ; but, perhaps preachers do well to show their skeletons
often enough to create a general feeling that they always have them.
In some instances it may be desirable, for some reason, that the
people carry away the sermon in a form to report upon ; in those,
let your plan come forward into unmistakable visibility — the heads
and all the members, italicized and full-spoken. But more often than
anyway I think it is just as well to keep your frame-work a little retired.
I do not believe that the highest kind of discourses, the intensely
vital and powerfully magnetic ones, the sermons that are most full
of their author, in his totality and his inspired v.ehemency — I do
not believe that kind enjoy being shown skeleton- wise. They do
not care to be remembered, in their details, by the people. If only
they can make all minds alert, and all souls warm and assimilative,
while they go on being delivered, they are satisfied — those sermons

YALE LECTURES. 59

are — as convinced that they have thus accomplished their highest
possible good. Sermons of instruction, systematic courses of sermons
on points of divinity, may well be put into a form to be easily
remembered, but sermons of quickening are different. They can
quicken enough, without much display of structure. If a sermon
is a real birth and out of a man's living interiors, and not a mere
mechanical result of the constructive intellect working among ob-
jective material, it will always have a thoroughgoing, reasonable
plan ; precisely as each individual of each species of animals, as
being an outcome of life, will have an unmistakable, and specific
and satisfactory skeleton ; but these vitally-born sermons will always
incline to be a little Emersonian, and modest, in their display of
plan. And they can afford to be, that is, they can afford to lose
what force and consolation there may be in a plain skeleton, because
they are so charged with the elements of life, and are so life-giving.

It is time for me now to remark :

IV. Fourthly, and lastly, on that agony and despair of many
inexperienced sermonizers, called amplification ; amplification, I
say, which in strict definition is not making a few thoughts go a
long way, by powerful inflation, but clothing your outlined sermon
in a full-sounded corporeity of actual, ponderable thoughts, all of
them relational, of course, to that outline with its first, second,
third and fourth, of main thoughts.

Let me draw an illustration of this matter from the lecture I
am now delivering.

First, I resolved to give a lecture here on sermon making.
That was exceedingly notional, and well nigh inevitable, because I
was to address for a few weeks here, a congregation of embryo
sermonizers.

Next, I resolved to have the scheme of my lecture on sermon
making stand thus : The topic of the sermon — The accumulation of
the material — The organization of it in a suitable scheme — The
amplification into the full written form. That scheme grew out of
the fact that a sermon has in it those essential particulars — and it
was therefore just about forced upon me. It is good to have the
path of duty made plain by a powerful press of circumstances.

Under the first head — The Topic — I got all the amplification
I could delay upon out of the idea that sermonizers had better be
quite free and copious in their range of topics. And there I might
have stopped, but I paused long enough to put on a rider in the

60 YALE LECTURES.

cautionary remark, " You must be careful to make this your wide
sermonizing, your selection of topics from the entire creation, safe,
by keeping your ever-sermonizing mind intensely Christian." Sev-
eral other items of amplification occurred to me which I did not
use. This, for example — how shall a man determine the order of
his topics ; by the order of the Christian year as in the Protestant
Episcopal Church ; by the ever-fluctuating state of his congregation ;
by a pre-arranged round and round of theologizings, and appli-
cations thereof to life ; by the to and fro of his own mental
idiosyncracies ; or by what ? — a fruitful inquiry, you see, and having
amplification enough in it for an hour. Moreover, I had thought I
might mention this curious little fact : — that a topic selected on
Monday, say, snugged away in the mind, and let alone there,
absolutely, for three or four days and nights ; not being brooded
and worked over at all, I mean ; on examination at the end of that
time, will be found to have sprouted into a very considerable affair
— your mind has seen to that unconsciously — you have had nothing
to do with it — and (what is stranger still) experience proves, (my
experience does) that if you had been sound asleep all those four days,
some sprouting would have come to pass. Scores of times after I
have gone to bed Friday night I have made a little stir in me, and
got my next Sunday's sermon decided on, and then on waking
Saturday morning have noticed a marked advance in me of that
topic — it has swollen — it has put out feelers and drawn in correlative
thoughts — very likely it is all ready for me to begin writing on.

That was one of my intended amplifications. And still another
amplification that invited me, was a careful statement of the reasons
for my assertion, that a wide array of topics is better than a narrow
one.

Now notice ; another lecturer, even if he had had the same
scheme, would have made a different amplification of that first
head, The Topic — where then do amplifications come from, and
how can a poor, dry-minded, constipated mortal get them ? I answer :
there is only one way, and that is to amplify the man. At any rate
that is the first thing. I know, some if amplified to the extreme limits
of human amplification, would not be voluminous amplifiers. Their
organ of language is small. Or they have an inborn silentness like
Gen. Grant, and the North American Indian, and like many a big-
headed and much-thinking man in the back-country. Thomas
Carlyle used to preach that amplification is the worst known cure,

YALE LECTURES. 61

and Mr. Emerson seems to have been caught in the same sorrowful
idea now and then — as for instance, when he wrote : — " come now,
let us go alone a whole Pythagorean lustrum, and be dumb."

That doctrine may do for some, but not for ordained preachers.
What they want is volume and facility. And the way to get it, I
say, is to make the preachers themselves voluminous. That first.
Any natural silentness in them can be dealt with after we get them
enlarged. We don't want the dam opened till there are waters back
of it. That was what angered Carlyle ; that there should be so
much openness, and sound, all around, and so little real flow.

The amplification of men, as preliminary to solidly amplified
discourses ! A large subject. But there is where discourses come
from — from men !

For example : — When I said — a preacher's subjects should be
taken from a wide field, I said it out of the observation and study
of many years. When I said, a thoroughly Christian mind in a
preacher will surely christianize all subjects that come into it, I said
it as having noticed that, hundreds of times. When I said, a whole
Friday night's unconscious incubation on an idea, will hatch out a
sermon often, I said it because I have hatched them, and know.
When I said, under another head, that if a man goes to his study
and sets his mind bubbling on a subject, and faithfully records every
bubble, those recordings will be mutually related, and will take their
place naturally therefore in the sermon which he proceeds then to
organize out of them, and not one bubble be lost very likely ; I said it
out of my own experiences on the point, repeated hundreds of times.

An amplifier then — a real one — a solid one — a nutritious one
— an amplifier, who, while he has some diction, is not all diction —
an amplifier whose movement is a reiterated birth-throe and an
eternal refutation of Carlyle's doctrine of silence, — such an one has
lived years and years (this business takes time, and a young man need
not despise himself if he does not feel absolutely inexhaustible right
off) — he also has read a good deal, has read digestively, and with a
constant appropriation of facts, principles and vitalities — moreover
he has done mountains of solitary thinking — he "has become a me-
thodical thinker ; that is, when his mind moves down upon a subject
it does not go helter-skelter like a flurry of volunteer citizens into
an enemy's country, but with the organized orderliness of an army,
wherein each man is a two-fold force because a unit in an organi-
zation. Method is power ; — he has become a methodical thinker,

62 YALE LECTURES.

also he has learned that most teeming of all secrets, the secret of
analysis ; and now, whatever subject comes under his inspection,
suffers what the nebulae of the firmament suffer when brought under
the astronomer's glass ; what is single becomes plural, and the
plural more plural, in an endless process of separation. In nothing
are sermonizers more differenced than in this ; one moves in large
and excessive discursiveness, and gets his amplification by sweep-
ing into his sermon a great amount of external material, anecdotes,
history, personal recollections, the last book, the last murder, and
so on, (all good when well used,) which he has come across in his
objective travels ; — the other man chooses a single thought, or
principle, (the more single the better,) and proceeds to explicate
it, fundamentally ; he runs it back to its roots, he knows before he
begins that that thing so simple and innocent-looking on the face
of it, has any amount of contents ; more contents than he will
know what to do with when he gets into them. So he gets into
them, he defines, he analyzes, he analyzes again, he pursues things
into their relations, he finds that the universe is one great ganglion
and that any subject is a universal subject ; — the good amplifier has
learned to analyze, I repeat ; and finally (for I must hasten) he has
been through a multitude of joys and sorrows, he has known love
with its many zests and its many inevitable lamentations, he has
seen the dying die, he has looked out on the wide woe and mystery
of life, he has become full-hearted and full-minded, and now, when
he is called to face assemblies of mortal creatures and speak to
them, he has somewhat to say, and he feels sometimes as though he
could speak forever. He may not be voluble, (God forbid) but he
is heavy laden with meanings, and oftimes in his common sayings
you will catch the flow of a deep undersong, just as in many a
word of Jesus, given us especially by St. John, it has sometimes
seemed to me, for the moment, that I could scarcely endure them,
they are so fraught with seriousness, and tenderness, and forebod-
ing, and moral firmness and majesty, and I know not what besides,
as of a man speaking out of an infinite experience, out of an
infinite meditativen'ess, and out of infinite agitations of sensibility.
A great man makes a great sermon, and O ! what clear effects of
greatness are made now and then by quite measurable and even
moderate men, who have turned their powers into the service of
God with a complete consecration, and have opened themselves to
the infioodings of his blessed Spirit.

YALE LECTURES. 63

My Brethren, I should naturally end here with some attempt
to discriminate between a sermon and a lecture, my idea being that
a sermon gets to be a sermon, and saves itself from being a lecture,
by being made, and delivered in the Holy Ghost.

I had thought to cover that ground on another occasion, but I
shall not, I see now.

ORIGINALITY IN THE
PREACHER.

I am about to speak to you on originality in the preacher and
I will try, to begin with, to get down to some clear and vindicable
conception of Originality. Accepting a clue from the word itself, I
should say that an original sermonizer is one who originates the
thoughts that he uses. That seems obvious. But a man who does
that is sure to have certain other peculiarities springing out of that ;
and, in the popular apprehension of the subject, therefore, an origi-
nal man is one who not merely originates the thoughts with which
he stocks his sermons, but also has thoughts in practically unlimited
quantities — they swarm him ; and, moreover, they are very observa-
bly different from those of other men.

An original preacher then, has those three marks. First, his
thoughts are his own ; next, he is fertile in thoughts ; and next, he
is different from other men. Those three elements, I say, enter into
the general idea of Originality. In strictness, he is original who
originates ; but he who originates, is therefore prolific, and unique ;
and it is sufficiently exact for our present purpose, if we include all
that under the one term original.

But now, as to that rather great matter of origination, let me
ask : — Where do our thoughts come from ? When a preacher origi-
nates his own, where do they come from, and when he gets them
somewhere else, where is that somewhere else? An important
question for men who are public preachers and who are required to
speak ten, twenty, thirty, and more years to the same congregation,
except as the perpetual play of death and birth withdraws a familiar

YALE LECTURES. 65

face now and then, and sifts in an occasional new mind : Where
shall thoughts be found, and where is the place of them ? Many a
young man in the first agonies of production, feels like replying, in
those other words of Job : " Man knoweth not the price thereof,
neither is it found in the land of the living. The depth saith, it is
not in me, and the sea saith, it is not with me. * * It is hid
from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air.
* * Where, O where, shall wisdom be found and where is the
place of understanding." And even middle-aged ministers, of a
certain second-grade sort, are not without a touch of the same
lamentation at times. " Why did you leave Philadelphia," said I to a
partially light-weight doctor of divinity — " Because I had nothing
more to say," he replied, frankly, from the bottom of his heart.
And after a few years, I noticed in the newspapers, that he had
moved on again. He hadn't yet discovered the hiding place of
wisdom. A friend of mine summed up that whole class of preach-
ers under the head of "squeezed oranges." Their first one, two or
three years, exhausted their entire sap, and since that, they have
been in a condition more easily felt than described. A condition in
which, let me add chirkly, no man has any need to be. I consider
it no egotism to say that I never saw the day when I was not
pretty conscious, that the fountain which gave me my last discourse
was more than able to give me another, and then another and
another, in everlasting undiminished flow. Of course when you
have taken out of yourself several thousand sermons and small talks,
you know your own mind something better than you did when you
had taken out only a dozen ; and are more assured of its bottomless
fecundity ; but I courageously maintain that every mind (except a
fool) is bottomless, and as non-exhaustible as the waters of the sky ;
and if that Philadelphia man touched bottom in his mind, it was a
delusion — it was not bottom — he did not know how to handle his
own mind — he had not come into the secret of generative intellec-
tual methods — he might as well say he had gone down the whole
sub-marine five miles of the Atlantic Ocean, and was able to declare
its shallowness.

But where do thoughts come from ? They come from just two
sources, namely : from your own interiors, and from the manifold,
endless exteriors, by which all men are surrounded : — these exteri-
ors being gotten hold of by reading, and by observations and by
experience. As to thoughts from the interiors, I may say of them,

66 YALE LECTURES.

that doubtless even they are heavily charged with exterior elements
— that is, all of a man's reading, observation and experience, his
whole life-long, has gradually passed into his structure and substance,
to make his originating mind exactly what it is at any given moment
of origination, and to make any given product or thought of his
mind precisely what it is ; but those exterior elements are not in him
in any way of recollection ; in that thinking of his from the interior he
is not conscious of exteriors ; his whole feeling is like Belshazzar's ;
I did this — this idea is mine — nobody told it to me — I never read it
anywhere — or, to draw on Job again, this path no fowl knoweth,
and the vulture's eye hath not seen it ; it is my secret, my child,
bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh — just as the spider says
proudly : — " that web is this individual spider spun out," although
all the while he knows, if he is an educated spider, that the inward
material of those fine yarns, are the amazing result of the vital pro-
cesses of his body, taking the various external spider-foods and work-
ing them over by some unsearched chemistry into a brand new
form ; a form as unlike the component foods of which it is made, as
mud is unlike the heaven-white lily into which it runs up.

It is the one distinction then, of the class of thoughts which I
have called thoughts from the interior, that they seem to themselves,
and are, in-born, in-generated, not beholden to any conceivable
thing in the universe for their origin, excepting to that live mind there
privately thinking.

Now, I suppose that most persons, at first, would say : — only
such a thinker as that is original ; and the preacher who gets his
sermons from the great second source of possible supply, the source
objective, books, nature, life, the million-voiced say-so of the much-
speaking human family, he is not original ; he is a borrower, and
very possibly a plagiarist : — he is not a conscious plagiarist in most
cases, but if his discourses are remorselessly looked into, it will be
found that they have a strong savor of other people, and do not
savor enough of his own self — he certainly is not original ; — the
original man pours forth always from his own contents.

All that is true, but it is as possible for the profusely objec-
tive man, the great reader, the great observer, the great man-of-
affairs, the great memorizer of facts, events and minima, the excur-
sive and wide-plundering man, it is as possible for him to be origi-
nal in the profound and self-evolving way already described, as it is
for the man who never reads, and never observes at all, but sits in

YALE LECTURES. 67

his studious solitude, in severe abstraction, and takes good care that
what thoughts he has shall be his own and shall smack most relish-
ably of his personality.

I admit that, if a man leads an intellectual life strongly exter-
nal, and is a diligent in-gatherer, there is danger that his original
powers will be buried under by his acquisitions, and he therefore
not be original ; but this bad result is not necessary. If he thinks
more than he reads, if he spends more time over his riches of mate-
rial when collected than he does in collecting it ; if while he is col-
lecting it, he is analyzing it, searching for its underlying principles,
generalizing upon it, in short, rationalizing on it in the use of all the
higher forces of his mind ; if he reads reflectively, critically, rumin-
atively, judicially, and does all his excursive work in a thoroughly
attent and vital way, then inevitably what happens to the spider
happens to him ; the foods of his mind become mind, they increase
his mass and his potentiality, they modify the quality of his intellect,
they are subtly distributed through his entire mental organism, his
entire personality, in fact, just as all our physical food atoms, after
proper transmutation, are infallibly distributed for the repair of our
bodies and the replenishment of their vigor. And when all this has
happened to our much-reading man, and he is called upon to put
himself forth in discourse, behold ! there is nothing plagiaristic
about him ; he falls now under the first class of thinkers, the indis-
putably original men, he is not conscious of his materials, neither is
any one else aware of them ; the fact is, those materials have eter-
nally disappeared in him, and all you see is a man ; an originating
man : — theoretically we know that there are a great many good books
in that man and a great grist of other things, a sort of maelstrom he
is ; but visibly we cannot prove it, we cannot lay our hand on the
books and the grist ; when he speaks, it sounds just as Adam
sounded in Paradise before he had read a thing or fairly seen anything ;
his contents are all vital and assimilated, and the only way you
know he ever read anything in particular, is the same by which you
know a strong and digestive eater, namely, his mind has blood in it,
and endurance and endless performance and when he gets hold of
you, you feel that your doom is at the door.

I like to describe this sort of God's creature. There is some-
what magnetic in him and the touch of his splendid virility is enough
to make one feel himself immortal.

I suppose you have seen these thick-set, sappy, disgusting green

68 YALE LECTURES.

worms, that stretch themselves out on the .twigs of the trees and
lazily eat the green leaves, and eat, and eat, forever ; and are so
lazy that they will not take the trouble to transform their green food
into a decent flesh color, but lay it around on their miserable bodies
unchanged (so it looks — I use the language of appearance, of
course.) Well, those creatures represent the preachers who are
overloaded with undigested externals. The leaves they have eaten
show everywhere. You can tell what they ate last. Sometimes
they put it forth in plain lumps, the original thing without a pre-
tense of reductio ad pabulum, though more often it is disguised un-
der some show of transformation. But it is a low and stealing
piece of business — the whole thing — and they have no right to
preach.

But whereunto shall I liken the better sort ? They are like
yonder flowering bush. It has lived on several kinds of rather un-
promising food. It has eaten dirt. It has even taken up the insuf-
ferable rankness of animal decomposition. And, better and more
decent, it has nourished itself by the air and the light, and the rain,
and the subtle cool ministries of the night. x\nd lo ! the rose.
That plant had life, and vital cunning, and knew what it was here
for. That plant was original. It needed much material, but it did
not propose to be lumbered by it. No, it struck for a complete
victory over its material — and got it. For what can be more com-
plete than to make over dirt, and the like, into a rose-leaf, that
blooming, beautiful, fragrant, and almost spiritualized thing, a thing
so exquisite that God might pluck it for himself in heaven. There
is originality for you.

The flower is original ; the green worm is a visible plagiarist.

If I have now sufficiently defined the original preacher, I am
ready to draw out a list of considerations in defence of originality
and in praise of it.

And, First. Referring to the original man, as different from
other men — dwelling a moment on that particular element of origi-
nality, I submit to you this fact — that every mind born into the
world is specifically unlike every other, by the operation of irresis-
tible causes ; — as much unlike certainly, as each human face is unlike
every other that ever was or ever will be ; which fact does not look
at all as though God meant his creatures to be otherwise than dis-
similar one from the other. If the new-born mind is in every case
unique and unprecedented, why should it not be developed in the

YALE LECTURES. 69

line of that original start. Why rub down its face-marks in a blas-
phemous attempt to make everybody alike ? Why conventionalize
it by slow degrees ! Why work over its aboriginal tone, till you
could not tell it from all other tones. God does not operate in that
way in Nature, neither does he thus work anywhere. Every animal
has his race-lines, every tree has its race-lines, every plant its char-
acteristic career. Even that sappy green worm — to tell the truth at
last — is a perfectly individualized creature, and when he is green, it
is not because he has consented to let the leaves he eats register ex-
actly their own color on him, but because as he proceeds with his
digestion and what not, it is a peculiarity of his constitution to pre-
fer to be green, just as it is constitutional in the lily stalk to prefer
to blossom white, and in the rose to prefer that fascinating flush of
which I spoke. Likewise, every spring is itself and no other, and
every morning is, and every cyclone ; and every tide-swell has its
recognizable idiosyncracies. Likewise, in the unfoldings of history,
God strikes in to make the great movement racy ; each era has its
own features, each crisis gets to be a crisis by foregoing preparations
that are original, and each crisis dissolves away into the common
flow of events again in a manner quite its own.

Why then should any one be afraid of originality in men, and in
preachers. Why want to have us all twins, and fac-similes ! all
think alike, express ourselves alike, look alike, sound alike, in a
weary, universal humdrum of thought and life. I recollect the perils
of originality, and shall throw in a cautionary word or two on that
point by and by. Meanwhile, let us all accept our birthright, and
calmly be ourselves.

Again, only those who are original speak with authority. There
is a tell-tale tone in the hearsay man, which he cannot suppress. I
suppose it is the ineradicable integrity of the man's nature, refusing
to put off on the public a stolen thing. He wants to do it, and in-
tends to do it, and tries to do it, but lying is cross to certain princi-
cipal parts of our nature, and no bad thing can be perfectly carried
out, thank God. Murder will out. So will borrowed preaching.

When I said, those who are original speak with authority, you
thought of our Lord, I presume ; as you well might, because the
entire secret of his weight of speech, was that he spoke what he
himself had discovered and nothing else, and had discovered a good
deal to speak. There were traditions enough in his land, and in his
training ; there were prepossessions, prejudices, bigotries, a powerful

70 YALE LECTURES.

quantity of book-lumber oppressing the public mind and a thoroughly
elaborated and imperious conventionalism, after the manner of all
very old countries and races ; and into this great system of fixed
things, and respectable things, and things prescribed, Jesus came
with his wise, direct, intuitive eyes, his absolutely unbiased mind, his
eyes of infinite, original discovery, and what he saw he said, with the
calmness and courage of first-hand knowledge. On the one hand no
egotism and on the other hand no flinching ; and those people who
massed about him and listened, felt a power which they could not
explain, in any full analysis, but which they explained well enough,
and better than they knew, when they said : — " He speaks as one
having authority, and not as the scribes." He was an original man ;
and his ministers have a right to be, in their measure.

Every now and then the travelling agent for some book wants
me to put my name down in certification to the value of his volume.
" But I never read the book," say I, " and I am so situated at
present that I cannot read it." " But here is a list of eminent
clergymen and others who have read it, and are all delighted with it.
It is the safest thing in the world therefore for you to give me your
name." To which I reply : — " Nothing were safer, as respects the
risk that I shall lend my name to a poor and sloshy volume ; but
my name there written in your great array of names will be taken
by many people to mean that I have myself examined your book
and do therefore and thus know it to be a good thing. Not one in
a score of the people, taken as they run, would surmise that I am
not an original witness in this business. Almost the whole value of
my name lies in their lamb-like trust in me at exactly that point."

So the man never gets my name. I am not going to be a
public preacher for that book merely because a body of intelligent
doctors of divinity, a hundred strong perhaps, together with a hun-
dred laymen equally intelligent, have discovered it to be an excel-
lent publication, and are preaching for it.

And I do not see but, in all preaching, the original witness is
the only one. My Brethren, it is one of our main distinctions that
we are witnesses for Christ. Theoretically, that is according to all
Biblical teaching on the matter, we are that ; and then, so far as
public power is concerned, we do not amount to anything first-
class, and irresistible, except as we are witness bearers. In other
words, we must deliver our own thoughts — or what is the same
thing, we must be original. If we dispense theology, it must be

YALE LECTURES. 71

strictly the theology which we ourselves have been able to discover ;
or if we passs over into the emotional field and discourse on matters
of experience, we must get our great emphasis out of our own expe-
rience, and in so far as we preach the experiences of other people,
unverified as yet in our own hearts, our perceptive hearer will note
that there is somewhat hollow in the resound of our emphasis. A
photograph of a landscape is one thing, and the photograph of that
photograph is another, always and most visibly. It may be a nice
picture, this last — in fact it generally looks smoother and handsomer
than the other somehow ; moreover the natural scene of which it
professes to be a representation is plainly there — nevertheless every-
body much prefers the first photograph — there is a refreshing real-
ism about it — it is a transcript of the originality of Nature herself
— it is, as we say, an original picture.

So the preacher ; in order to be realistic, he must tell what he
knows, and not be dressing up the discoveries and experiences of
other men.

But here some one of you in his own mind will interpose the
suggestion — " We young men, have not had time to discover much,
neither have we had any great range of experience ; nevertheless we
are on the eve of being preachers, and we are on the eve of being
overhauled by an ecclesiastical body, which will want us to have a
clear opinion on all theology, and will very likely withhold ordina-
tion if we cannot stand up to all the Articles of Faith of the Chris-
tian body to which we belong ; And now, Mr. Burton, what shall we
do ? We can't be original very much, we can't be witnesses more
than about so far, and yet we seem to be about to be forced to talk
very large, and talk from one to two hundred times in a year.

Well, that does seem to be a crushing state of things, and I shall
enjoy remarking upon it.

I think it is plain that you must retail some hearsay, but in so
far as you are incorrigibly honest to the bottom of your heart, you
will instinctively put forth your hearsay with some subtle indication,
somehow, that it is hearsay.

A friend of mine was once put in a tight place. He was called
upon to act as showman to a stereopticon, for an evening. Half of
the views to be exhibited were taken from Europe north of the
Alps, and half from Europe south of these mountains. Now
it chanced that my friend had never been south of the Alps, and,
as I had, he urgently besought me to mount the stage when

72 YALE LECTURES.

he had done northern Europe and do the rest. But I
declined, feeling and saying that he could beat any of us,
whether he had visited the scenes or not. For he had, in large
measure, the gift of speech. So I went to the lecture with perfect
confidence, but awondering in the secret depths of my mind, after
all, whether the lecturer would slow any when he crossed the Alps.
At first he did not. He had got up a good momentum, and he
went over kiteing and struck Italy with the realistic air of all ob-
servers. It seemed to me that he was going to take us through that
new country and not let out his ignorance. But he had been in the
ministry a good while, and his conscience began to bother him, I
suppose, and he pretty soon seemed tired, and at last stopped and
confessed. He said he had not been there, but would go on as well
as he could. And he went on and was most interesting, too. I
would not have had him stop for the world.

Gentlemen, when that council ask you, as a member of my or-
daining council asked me by way of determining my soundness on
the subject of the Trinity : — " If the Holy Ghost were killed would
it kill God ; " do you say : — " I will make shift to answer, but I am
young to the councils of God." Because it will be interesting to
have you answer ; and a comfort. And after you are settled, and
must preach on many things that you have not been able as yet to
explore in thoroughly original effort, when you go over the Alps ,
you may reasonably slow up a little. I should certainly go over.
There is a south-lying Europe — a rich, beautiful, historical region ;
and the fact that you have not been there does not alter that. Mil-
lions have been there. So you had better glib along and tell what they
say. It would be dreadful to confine your congregation to Northern
Europe, merely because that is the only part you have visited.
God's creation is pretty large. And his grace-region is pretty
large. And what we cannot personally visit, we had better read
about, and then proclaim as hearsay. There are plenty of wit-
nesses to certain points of doctrine and experience on which you
are not a witness ; you are too young and you have not thought
enough nor prayed enough — and you thoroughly believe their testimo-
ny, and therefore, when you give it out to your people you need not do
it in a half and half way, though you can never really thunder and
boom, and jump into the emphasis with your whole weight and in
perfect gusto, except when you are displaying the north country

YALE LECTURES. 73

And your people will let it be so. They are not fools, neither
are the ecclesiastical councils fools. All sensible councils prefer
that the young man should not be too knowing. They like to hear
which way he is headed, and what he best likes, and a few things of
that sort — and they like to toll him out into deep-sea soundings to
find how well he can tread water, and whether he is honest enough
not to pretend that his feet touch bottom — and after that, and pos-
sibly a flirt or two of gymnastics among themselves, unnecessary but
entertaining, they are ready to go on and do the thing that ought to
be done, namely, put the young man into the ministry with con-
gratulations, thanksgivings, and their best love.

It is not easy to draw the line between Authority in religious
things, on the one hand, and Individual Liberty on the other — or
rather, the line is easy enough, but it is hard to live exactly upon it.
The line runs thus :

In so far as I can search for myself I must do it — in all things.
That is Originality. Next I must diligently take counsel of other
men, and listen to them with absolute openness of mind. And
now, having gathered in all possible data, I must next fall back upon
my own self, in perfect absolutism ; or call it individualism if you
like — in perfect individualism I must fall back. Perfect I say, that is,
in a spirit as absolute as though no man but me had ever thought a
thought ; — and I must decide — decide my doctrine, decide what is
real, divine experience. Whoso flinches at that point of absolutism,
waives his indefeasible right, and smirches his own majesty. I tell
you there is no manhood that does not begin just there. Surrender
there, and you have opened the way to every conceivable self-sur-
render and worthlessness, both moral and intellectual. I know
the risks of Individualism, and what a force of disintegration it often
is ; social life is not possible, the state, church and family are not
possible, history as an organized development cannot be, and
civilization itself in its highest forms must die, where the Ego is
pushed as some would push it. But I know, also, that where men
cease to do their own thinking and make their own decisions in the
manner and under the conditions just explained, there are no longer
any men, and the various social organisms are not worth keeping
up. Their constituent units have dissolved into imbecility, and so-
ciety is like a rotten-timbered ship.

It is much asserted now-a-days, that the spiritual Ego is not
much of a thing anyway. In the first place it is not spiritual, but
6

74 YALE LECTURES.

material. In the next place, it is not self-directing and free, but is
the slave of irresistible conditions, its environment, and all that.
In the third place, of course this Ego is puffed out at death into
eternal non-entity.

And now what are the sure barriers against this flood of mate-
rialistic philosophizing ? The first barrier is a supernatural religious
experience in millions of men, and the glorious self-consciousness
that comes of it. A man regenerate, and full of regenerate experi-
ences, always believes in his own spiritual existence, his own free-
dom of will and his own eternal perpetuality. And he just as much
believes — and cannot help it — in a personal God. Those three
faiths, hang together, logically and in life, and the more regenera-
tions there are on earth, the less materialism there is.
That is the first barrier, and the greatest.

But close to that, is that resolute Individualism, of which I was
speaking — that manful assertion of the Ego, which is involved in
private judgment. If I think for myself, if I produce my own
thoughts, if I settle my own principles, if I make my own discov-
eries, and if, even when I consult other people, and genially con-
sider their dicta, I come back at last to the plain ground of my own
kinghood, and make up my affirmative, the whole thing is so in-
tensely self-asserting and so amplifies and classifies my self-con-
sciousness, that I cannot in the least endure this modern scientific
attempt to minimize the inner Me, and woodenize it, and make it
a two-penny item in the inevitable grind of mechanical cause and
effect.

Possibly the point I make here will seem to some speculative,
rather than practical, but I believe that the true way to resist ab-
sorption into the creation, as a part of its dead machinery, is to
magnify the personal interior man, practically, first by filling it with
the life of God through Jesus Christ, and then by original energiz-
ing in the form of truth-searchings, and in the form of independent
judgments.

And if I might turn aside a little here, I could speak of indi-
vidualism as indispensable to civil liberty, and as the only foundation
of a masculine and powerful literature. But, I was praising origi-
nality in the preacher, and to that I return and once more announce
to you, that originality in our ministers secures a many-sided con-
sideration of all subjects— and nothing else will secure it. It is a
peculiarity of our subjects that they are many-sided ; and the heavi-

YALE LECTURES. 75

est pull that I have, I find, is to get on to all sides, by the help of all
sorts of men. Left to myself, and following the impulses of my own
constitution, I select certain aspects of the Christian Religion, in
front of them sit down, and there enjoy myself forever. But along
comes Mr. John Calvin, and invites me to take a turn with him,
He has numbers of things he wants to show me. " Your position is
good enough so far as it goes," he says ; " God is love and the will
of man is free enough to make him responsible, but God is justice,
too, and God foreordinates in the most impressive manner, and I
want you to walk all around that, and mortise that into your theolog-
ical system, and let your system have the advantage of it ; and
you too."

But, by the time John Calvin is through with me, Horace
Bushnell wants him. He has discovered some things, he thinks.
And before they have finished with each other, Huxley, Tyndall, and
Herbert Spencer, are waiting for them both. Calvin and Bushnell
with all their divergency, one from the other, are agreed that Chris-
tianity is a supernatural system from first to last, and those three
naturalistic gentlemen just named have come to expound the side of
Law, to them, and to show that the law-system of God has never
been breached in one instance. All religions are a natural devel-
opment, they say, Jesus of Nazareth was a product of his race and
his circumstances : — a splendid product confessedly, so that unre-
flective, unscientific, and wonder-mongering men and generations,
naturally enough got him deified, and encompassed his earthly way
with marvels, heaven-descended and miraculous.

Christianity, (these gentlemen go on,) Christianity has been ex-
hibited by theologians as a system so without parallel in other re-
ligions, and in Natural Religion, that it seems a kind of strange
work of God, an eccentricity, an irruption ; whereas, in truth, Chris-
tianity is an orderly factor, and an organic factor, in God's vast
framework of things, and all it needs is time and study, to show its
many affiliations with all the great Faiths of the world. That is
their talk, and the two theologians listen to it, and get a new sense
of the law-side of things, and they begin to wonder — many theolog-
ians do at any rate, whether, in preaching the supernatural and the
miraculous, we have not been too prone to show the irruptive and
abnormal element in it, rather than its large normalism. A miracle
is a startling and unclassifiable thing, certainly, on its hither side ;
but if it be looked at on its transcendental side also, may it not be

76 YALE -LECTURES.

found Uj be part and parcel of a thoroughly-established, universal,
undeviating orderliness ; so that while a miracle, when it comes into
sight on the earth-side, is very sensational in its rupture of the cus-
tomary flow of things, it is even more imposing as a law-abiding unit
in that totality of created things of which one hemisphere is the
natural, and the other the supernatural. When the supernatural
plunges into the natural there is a commotion and the dust flies, and
we say God has started up suddenly to do by direct fiat, what would
not have been done had he kept his repose, and permitted his crea-
ted laws to move on ; but he has not started up probably ; the
scientists are right ; his laws are moving on and it was they that
made this plunge, and this dust.

I have drawn out this illustration rather fully, because it does
illustrate my idea that many minds working independently con-
tribute to the unfolding of truth in all its phases. My joyful con-
viction is that the perilous rationalism in the field of natural science,
which is one of the most obvious and most striking features of the
intellectual life of the present time, will do forty times more good
than hurt in the expansion and enrichment of our conception of
Christianity. And it will do it in two ways. It will secure a just at-
tention to aspects of truth which have been too much retired ; and
it will cause such a hard-headed, and scholarly re-examination of
truths which have not been retired, but have been held prominent,
and made to be the Malakoff and Redan of the Christian position,
that they will be reconfirmed with shoutings.

Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible is. Nature
is an immense theological statement — and every attribute of God is
found in that statement, but some attributes more distinctly than
others. Those distinct attributes the unbelieving naturalists are
bringing out — though they do not intend it, for they take little stock
in the idea of a personal God — they are doing good theologiz-
ing for all the rest of us : — and if our theology has confined itself
too much to a Book (as I suppose it has,) the labors of these bright
gentlemen will surely supplement our deficiency.

And then as to the broader establishment of old truths by the
laborious gainsayings of these men, take this example : — they say
that Jesus was a purely natural result ; given the Jewish race, the
Jewish land, the Jewish history, Mar)' the Virgin, Nazareth, a few
simple this-world things like that, and the great Nazarene is fully
accounted for. So then we are all invited to study, exhaustively,

YALE LECTURES. 77

those this-world things ; and the more we do it, the more it stands
out as never before that Jesus came from out of the sky in the main,
and could not have been born of Palestine only.

In like manner, various disparaging assertions touching the
origin of the Bible, and touching numbers of sacred things, have led
to such a sifting of the same as was never known ; and continually
the result is, that our Religion, in all its substantials, is gloriously
vindicating itself.

And if we come to the controversies among the men of faith,
as to the inspiration of the Bible, and the Passion of the Lord Jesus,
and the eternal lot of sinners and all the rest ; these controversies
have sprung up because our men are intellectually independent and
original — when they put their eyes on a thing, it is their own eyes
that they put on, and that thing therefore is seen in all sorts of pos-
sible ways, and some impossible ones ; but no matter — what Ed-
wards does not see, Wesley will, and what Wesley does not, Edwards
will. Some sensitive man does not cordialize with Calvin's view of
God's penalties. That is his personal specialty ; to be sensitive.
Whether it was that his mother was the woman she was, or that he
happened to fall under special forces of training, I do not know ;
but there he is all in a quiver against the Calvinistic theology at that
point. But he is a good man, and a man of mind and scholarship ;
he begins certain hypothetical reasonings on the old doctrine, to
see if he cannot get it into some sort of sufferable shape ; and per-
haps not tear the heart out of it, either. Now, what I say is, that
that man, moving freely and having no doubt of his right to be in-
dependent, will be likely to hammer out some statements that even
Calvin will be willing to hear. In his horror of the thought that
God should come out against his finally impenitent creatures, in ob-
jective strokes eternally laid on, he will carefully unfold a man's
Hell from his own interior, and show him as forever in the grasp of
intellectual laws already well known. And what other ameliorations
defensible or indefensible he will surmise, we cannot tell ; but it is
good to have just that man — that kind-hearted (perhaps over-kind
hearted and over-shrinking,) well-furnished, determined man, tug-
ging with all his might at just that point. Multiply these indefatiga-
ble explorers by thousands, and you see what is seen in newly-dis-
covered gold lands ; every rod of the theological landscape is nu-
merously searched, and every ounce of its dirt, for a thousand miles,
is microscopically sifted in some gold-searcher's pan. And that is

78 YALE LECTURES.

what we want. Our theology will be a whole orchestra, when all its
tones are discovered, instead of a squeak here and a squeak there
of some sectarian view, or some provincialism or some passing
aberration of the century.

I have spoken in praise of originality, in a pretty affirmative
way, you have noticed, but I have no objection to slip in a touch of
prudence here at the end.

Egotism and vaporing, and a despising of authorities in the in-
tellectual and religious world, is a thing easy to fall into when your
soul gets full of the doctrine of originality which I have preached
here to-day • and self-assertion, and an opinionated air, and a brag-
ging way of exhibiting one's originality, is not beautiful either in
young men or in old ones — therefore consider a moment.

If you pursue originality for its own sake, or because it feels good
to be original — or if you pursue it for the sake of a sensation, among
the people, and because that feels good ; then you are clean out of
the way, and your originality is disgusting. It seems to me I should
not pursue originality at all. There are many things that are good
to have but you must not pursue them. You must go straight along
about your business, and let them come of themselves, if they want
to, just as right-minded maidens get their lovers. But what is the
business that you are to go straight along about, and in which origi-
nality may incidentally come to you ? 1 might give several answers
to that. If you are in passionate pursuit of the truth, all strutting as
of originality will be taken out of you. Or if you have a passion to
do good to the congregation to whom you preach, that will do it.
Can I think of my sermon in a conceited way when my whole heart
is out in the assembly before me ? As well could the runner in the
games think of his gait, or the swordsman in the duel delight in the
glitter of his sword. My Brethren, God puts us, his ministers, in a
very testful position. On the one hand, we must make sermons ;
we must make good sermons, we must ram into them tons of stock,
we must spend days on each one, and work over it in such a con-
centrated and devoted way that, when at last it is finished
and the agony is over, we cannot help feeling a mother-
like self-satisfaction in it ; and then when we go into the
pulpit, we must deliver it decently, and give enough attention to our
ownselves to secure that end ; and yet, on the other hand, we just
as much must keep clear of self-consciousness, and a loving sense of
our own discourse, if we are tc please God and bless the people.

YALE LECTURES. 79

There we are. And the curse of the preaching of many of us is,
that we have not the strength to do those two contrary things, and
do not go to God sufficiently to be led out by him into the great
motives and enthusiasm in which self is swallowed up ; the enthusi-
asm for Truth, and the enthusiasm for Humanity. You see your
peril, Brethren, and you see your remedy. Sermon-making is in
order to salvation. Sermons are instruments, not ends. " A good
sermon is a sermon that is good for something," as I once heard an
old minister remark.

And Originality is for use. You want to be original because
that is God's method for the intellect, because thus you are a dis-
coverer of truth, because thus your mind is made prolific, because
thus you are saved from plagiarism whether formal or virtual, be-
cause thus you do your part towards the eventual exhibition of
Christian truth in its many-sided entirety ; because thus you are a
real witness for God, because thus you continually increase your
personal mass and momentum ; and because all these particulars
bear on the glory of God, and the welfare of man.

Some would say, it is well enough for great men to be inde-
pendent and original thinkers, and to move before the world in that
gait — their size saves them from being ridiculous — a sort of impe-
rialism is becoming to them, and people put up with it ; but for
little men and young men to assume to be original, and courage-
ously do their own thinking, is rather intolerable. It can be made
intolerable, but it is as possible for a small mind to work by the
method of originality as for a large one, else I should not be deliv-
ering this lecture ; for more than half of the ministerial minds are
smallish. Moreover, a little man has his duty to his own mind, and
to his congregation, as much as anybody has. You might say : —
yonder bit of a man has no moral obligation because of his lack of
size ; but he has. And in like manner, yonder undergrown intel-
lect must take good care to think rightly — not in servile dependence
on strong men, but originally — and if he does, his intellectual forth-
puttings, while they will not be stupendous or over-numerous, will
be always fresh and have a sound of authority.

But in making them our own the point of strain, as I said, is,
to keep ourselves perfectly modest, and perfectly receptive of the
light of other minds. Absolutely firm on the one hand, and abso-
lutely genial and inoffensive on the other. Striving to be firm, we
may seem conceited, dogmatic, and repellant. Striving to preserve

80 YALE LECTURES.

our intellectual integrity, and the courage of our opinions, in the
stress of the world's innumerable yea and nay, we may get accused of
intellectual pride and forwardness, and of many things ; especially
if we are young.

Well, let us watch and pray, and do the best we can.

I look back with amusement, now, to the intellectual self-con-
fidence with which I left this Seminary after Dr. Nathaniel Taylor
had spent a couple of years or so getting me on to my own legs ;
and whereinsoever I stood a little more than perpendicular, I take
it back of course, but I bless the memory of that very affirmative,
self-centred, and undoubting old man notwithstanding. He knew
in whom he had believed, and why he had believed, and he made
us all feel that truth is discoverable, and that we could discover it,
every man of us, and that we did not need to be badgered out of it
by the noise of gainsayers ; and that a man's a man, in theology as
in some other things ; and that it is better to go to the judgment
after a life-time of manful strugglings with the truth albeit with some
errors, than to go there with whatever amount of truth held in mere
languid receptivity. And he was right.

IMAGINATION IN MINISTERS.

I am here to day to make a plea for Imagination in Ministers
considered as Theologians.

I do not know whether any previous lecturer has made a whole
speech on that faculty or not. Some of the lecturers have had
the faculty themselves, in great size, but perhaps they would be
afraid to encourage people generally to have it. I heard so con-
siderable and judicious a man as the late Rev. Dr. Joel Hawes,
Pastor for a life time of the First Church in Hartford, Connecticut,
give an account of his high-handed proceedings, in the days of his
youth, against imagination in his own mind. He found, he said,
that he was pretty strong and exuberant in that trait, and that his
sermons were showing it. So by and by, when traveling alone and
thoughtful in his carriage all the way from Hartford to New Haven,
he improved the occasion for a solemn deliberation on the ques-
tion : — " how can I do the most good in my life time, preaching
imaginatively as now, or otherwise." I need not say to those who
knew him, which way that debate went, nor with what success he
enforced on himself his resolution then made, to extirpate that
perilous endowment of his.

Dr. Hawes stands for a multitude. They are afraid of imagi-
nation. And they have good reasons for it. I am afraid of it. I
am afraid of every power of the mind. I am afraid of mind — and
body too. All things have their risks and perversions. And I had
thought that I would say to you here, to-day, just where the danger
comes in, as respects imagination in the preacher. I could tell
you all about it ; but I believe that the dry vision, and the one-
eyed vision, the literalism and the non-creative habit of the un-

82 YALE LECTURES.

imaginative men has cursed theology and the pulpit even more
than the sky-flying and moonshine of the imaginationists.

But I cease from comparisons, and from all preliminaries, and
proceed directly to illustrate the wholesome function of this great
power of man in the minister considered as a theologian — or a man
theologizing. And under that head I notice :

First. That, the imaginative man — and he only — is able to
handle, and draw out, biblical doctrines historically — to take it, that
is, in its entire historical setting. For the word of God on theology
is not an absolute utterance straight down from the skies, and direct
from his lips, but it comes to us very circuitously through human
lips, and many human lips, and through all sorts of human and
earthly intermediates ; and a full-visioned and creative grasp of
those numerous intermediates is an essential part of good theologiz-
ing. When God would make himself known in his fullness, he
chose to be incarnated in the person of his eternal Son ; that pre-
existent and infinite personage took upon himself the conditions
of time and sense ; he dropped into an order of things historically
prepared for him by a long and laborious process, he became a
vital factor in that order of things, he accepted all the relations
prepared to his hand, spoke in a certain language for example, was
of a certain country, dwelt on a certain spot, in a certain home, was
nursed and cultured in a certain religion, — and, in short, made his
whole manifestation on earth a relational and conditional one, so
that he cannot be fully understood in the least word he spoke, or
the least act he performed, except that he is interpreted by those
conditions, or relations in which he stood. We must resurrect his
era ; not only in its outlines, but in all its essentials. We must res-
urrect Judea, as it then was. And when we get hold of Judea to do
that, we shall find that Judea intertangled with other nationalities,
so that we have undertaken, in fact, a kind of general resurrection.
And if Judea intertwined with contemporary peoples, so it did, O !
how wonderfully, with the peopled and providential past ; so that
to possess ourselves of Jesus of Nazareth, as he actually and totally
was, a time-man and historical phenomenon, we need the magnifi-
cent clear vision and creativeness of the imaginative faculty, as
these modern times (to their praise be it said) are finding out.

Historical imagination ! an indispensable first thing in the
theologian.

But some one in his heart may say to me here : — " Cannot any

YALE LECTURES. 83

man of good sense and decent memory, without a grain of imagi-
nation, by diligent study of any past — as the past, for instance, in
which Jesus organically stood — re-construct that past, and have it
live before him in its full-toned actuality, so that any one of the
many forces and personages of which it is made up shall be judged
by him in a valid way. Is it not claiming too much for the imagi-
nation to say that it only is able to draw out the theology of the
Scripture, and the theology of the Christian ages, in a strictly his-
torical spirit and method ! "

In answering this question, I must make a little analysis of that
mental power which we call imagination. I will not undertake a
complete definition, but I will point out some of the marks by
which it may be known. For all the purposes of this present dis-
course, imagination may be divided into imagination recollective,
and imagination creative. Imagination recollective, places before
the mind things absent or past which we have personally seen, or
which have been brought to our knowledge by hearsay and study.
Imagination creative, takes those re-produced absent or past things,
and out of their many elements makes new combinations ; as when
a painter puts into his landscape not any one natural scene, but
particulars and parts of many scenes with which he is familiar.
As regards the historical construction of theology, whereof I have
been speaking, imagination recollective figures there ; that to
begin with ; and if I am asked, — how does imagination recollective
differ from memory, and does it differ at all, — I reply, only in this,
that it presents to the mind things absent or foregone in a vivid way,
and after the manner of literal vision. Things merely recollected
seem distant and cold, and to that extent void of result ; things imagi-
natively recollected seem near, warm, vital, and inspiring. A
recollective theologian, by virtue of an enormous gift of memory,
may have an encyclopedic hold on the theologic past, but he holds
the past as Encyclopedias are apt to, in a colorless way, and with
no special human interest. The imaginative theologian moves
among those by-gones, all and utterly alive, and visional, — as much
so as though he had been personally among them, and of them,
originally. He cannot see that a man, or a deed, or a nation, or a
social process, or a system of thought two thousand years away, is
any less actual or thrilling than the same thing in these days.
When some one disparaged Plato in the presence of Dr. Arnold,
Arnold's lip quivered with grief. A memoriter man could not have

84 YALE LECTURES.

been moistened in that way, by whatever outrage against all con-
ceivable Platos. He would be abundantly acquainted with them,
the Platos, of course, but as frigid historical entities, and not in
any flesh and blood warmth and nearness.

A few years ago, accidentally, it was found that underneath old
St. Clements in Rome — itself one of the most antique of churches —
was another St. Clements, which had been buried and unknown for
over a thousand years. When I was there, the portico and nave of
that edifice had been dug out, and Father Mullooly, of the Domin-
ican Monastery near by, conducted a party of us through it, with
explanations. As we passed in he called our attention to the mar-
ble threshold, half-worn out by the passage of countless feet in the
long-gone times, and said : — " there are a good many foot-prints
on that stone ; " — and to me, instantly, those living generations were
there again, and I felt the mysterious pathos of human life in their
persons as deeply and emotionally as I could in any human com-
pany of to-day. That sentence of Mullooly's was coined in the
imagination — distinctly. It was not memory. It was not his
intellect grasping a fact. It was feeling warmed up to vision. It
was imagination, one of whose distinctions is that it is always suffused
with sensibility : — it was imagination revivifying triumphantly those
dead and shadowy great multitudes by a single unconscious master-
stroke— such as are easy to that imperial faculty.

And Father Mullooly by this little touch, classed himself right
in with Shakespeare, in many a passage of his plays. It required
precisely the same mental qualities to re-people that old Nave, and
tie a thousand human years to that foot-worn marble, that it did to
make Hamlet reclothe the bare, dead skull of Yorick which the
grave-digger had thrown out, and which Hamlet held in his hands,
saying : "Alas poor Yorick ! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infi-
nite jest, of most excellent fancy ; he hath borne me on his back a
thousand times. * * Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I
know not how oft. Where be your gibes now ? — your gambols ?
your songs ? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the
table on a roar." Is Hamlet remembering there? Anybody could
do that. Perhaps Yorick's dog could. But the dog could not thus
re-enflesh that skull ; re-create those living lips, and make them
merry again ; and give poor Yorick a live and actual visit to the
earth once more.

That was imagination ; in one of her minute works to be sure ;

YALE LECTURES. 85

only manipulating a skull ; but herself entirely, nevertheless — her
intuitive and total vision, her deep feeling, her weird mastery of
materials. It required only a glimpse of her stately gait to reveal
Juno, only his perfect O to reveal Giotto, only the one tone " Mary,"
to reveal to the Magdalen the risen Jesus ; and in like manner, one
slightest word may suddenly disclose a royal imagination in its
entire characteristic power.

But, to get back to theology once more, I want to say — what I
have already slipped along into — that when imagination recollective
has done her whole work in any given case — as in the reproduction
of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the Christian theology — and has put the
past before the mind with great clearness, it has in fact passed on
into imagination creative. We may have a clear knowledge of the
constituent elements of an era ; those elements may stand before
us in the most vivid and visional reality ; but if we stop there, we
are not in full possession of that era. We are right where the
painter is when he has assembled the several views, and snatches of
color and rude studies, out of which he will make his landscape.
I spoke of imagination creative as that by which we combine things
recollected in such shapes as they never had before ; and that was
a true description. But I must say now, it is likewise a creative
act, to take the contents of an historical era for example, the hun-
dred details which you have gathered in their separate literality,
and organize them into a conception of that past as it stood when
on the stage here, an organized and living unity. Am I making
myself as clear at this point as I would like ? It were possible to
assemble the elemental contents of a rose. There they are as plain
as day. But you are not within a hundred thousand miles of a rose.
Can you organize your elements? Can you get them together and
make them grow and flush, and be fragrant, and be, in fact, a rose?
No — only a Creator can do that.

Well, call the era of our Lord a rose. I, a memoriter historian,
have heaped together for myself that miscellany of information
touching that era, which is the era, in its atomic form. And there
I am. I have imagination enough to look at those accumulated
atoms in a pretty living and warm way. They are invisible, but I
see them. They are long-past things but I get them near. And I
brood them with quite a fructification of interest. But I have not
my era yet. This sand-heap of atoms of mine is not that era as it
was to the people who took part therein. They did not dwell

86 YALE LECTURES.

much on atomics when they were laughing and crying, loving and
hating, and tugging in the thousand-fold thrill of their living-time.
What I want is, that time with its thrills, flushes and throbs, a cor-
porate unit of life ; and to get that I must be a Creator. I must
have creative imagination. That final act of the mind by which
the era — that inert Adam — is made a living soul, is beyond all analy-
sis, I presume ; as much so as God's act when he made the first
man. And I do not know whether any serviceable rules can be
given for the creation of that creative faculty. I should not wonder
if a man must be born to it. But if it so happens that he is born
to it, then he can cultivate it, or kill it (as Dr. Hawes killed his) .
My notion is that he had better cultivate it — and I am using this
lecture to show the splendid uses of the faculty, in order that I may
make you feel that you had all better cultivate whatso of it you
may have. It is a high-blood steed with a fearful amount of vigor
and possible rampancy, but so much the better if only you once get
it harnessed and at work. A horse might be so lumbering and
sleepy as not to be worth harnessing. In theology we do not want
any such faculties as that.

But dwell a moment longer on imagination creative. Perhaps
there lingers in your mind a doubt whether the living reconstruc-
tion of an era after the manner just described is a creative act — is
it not rather a purely formulative act. Well, you would not call it
a formulative act merely if a painter worked up a dozen different
scenes into one original scene. That would certainly be creative.
He has made something never before seen, or thought of.
But I cannot see that his work is any more truly creative
than is the painter's who throws upon his canvas any one
view in nature provided he gives the view in its entire and pro-
found significance. As a matter of fact, the greatest landscapes
the genius of man ever produced, are, as a rule, copies of single
actual scenes — their greatness consisting in this : that they have
made those scenes the medium of all expression, whether moral,
spiritual, or esthetic, that can be thrown into them. And when I
read the great Poets of Nature I find the same thing. By their
profound and phenomenal sensibility they perceive nature's utmost
possible meaning, and tell it. That is all, generally. Coleridge
looks up to Mt. Blanc, with a vision most open-eyed and sympa-
thetic, and veraciously relates what he sees. Of course, the poem
is an eminently subjective one, because in it he has imputed to the

YALE LECTURES. 87

mountain many feelings of his own ; but the mountain is capable
of having those feelings put into it ; in other words, the mountain
in its various aspects, movements, and manifestations, is a natural
vehicle of expression for those human feelings, and may be said to
have been created unto that end ; and poetry reaches its highest
expression when the spirit of man and the spirit of the universe
thus completely flow together. When Coleridge, Wordsworth, or
whoever, reaches that synthesis of those two, and that final ecstasy,
the creative imagination has done a work than which there is none
greater ; — and yet the work is simply interpretative ; — it is not the
making of something out of nothing, neither is it the combining of
forty familiar somethings into a brand-new result.

So I like to insist that when the imagination of man is engaged
in the work of historical reconstruction, making the dead past live
again, and departed personages revisit the earth, and exhumed
skulls put on the red and rose of life, she is operating in her su-
preme, creative, function, and is wonderful beyond all words. The
annalist does not know much about this. The mechanical historian
does not. Many a theologian does not. Some teachers of theology
do not. Some teachers of church history do not. History is in-
tensely vital ; and moves on by a vital advance, and addresses itself
to the imagination as much as it does to the reason — and in fact the
reason is not able ever to be thoroughly reasonable until she has
taken into herself the warmth, vivacity, and sudden-flashing intui-
tiveness of that other great faculty. It has been thought that in the
cold fields of science only reason and the remorseless exactitudes
of logic have place ; but, the truth is, poetry is not more indebted
to imagination than science is. The brilliant guesses of the sons of
science, which, used first as working hypotheses, have at last gone
in among the eternal substructures of knowledge, were the unreas-
oning outsprings of the imagination, and proved themselves more
than guesses because of the large and luminous sanity which is
native to that faculty, and because of its constitutional hunger for
the real and the true. And as to exactitudes, while the reason has
hers, the imagination has hers — the only difference between them
being this, that the exactitudes of the reason are formal, while the
exactitudes of the imagination reach back to the spirit of things,
and are the more profoundly exact on that very account. This
point, however, will get some illustration when I come to the third
head of this address.

88 YALE LECTURES.

My second head runs thus :

The man of imagination, and he alone, inclines to see doctrines
in their comparative importance. It is in this as in picture-making.
In order to picturesque effects, a painter must have an eye to light
and shade, and proportion, and perspective, and the manifold rela-
tivities. The cow in his landscape must have her place, and the
castle must have its place, and the strong wind in the trees must
have its place, and the over-flying scurry of clouds, and the human
persons, and the river winding out into the dim and unsearchable
distance, must all have their thoroughly discriminated position and
value, otherwise we are treated, not to a picture but to an outspread
of exaggeration, confusion and nonsense. Some men paint in that
way considerably. A Chinese man might, I fancy. His landscape
is just a flat surface of unassorted magnitudes. It has no maxima
and minima, but an insufferable array and pressure of maxima. So
in theology. It is possible to have such a solemn sense of the
value of doctrines as to make them all infinite, and defend them all
therefore with the same earnestness ; and insist that they shall all go
into the creeds, and all be presented in the pulpit, in the very fore-
ground of discourse ; that there shall not be any background in
theology, in fact — for what do we want of a background, when we
have nothing to put into it, no doctrines, that is, that deserve to be
subordinated by being located in that partial retirement.

Now, my Brethren, all this flat-surface work comes of unimag-
inative minds. I knew an able preacher once who was unto his
people, pretty soon, wherever he went, exactly as though he were
not able, because his entire presentation of himself and his topic
was a piece of flat-surface work. His solemn voice had no light
and shade in it. It was just solemn. Neither had his delivery
light and shade. It was one prolonged and unvarying earnestness.
His diction had no light and shade in it. It was all first-class.
The first sentence was as good as the next one, and the next, and
the next, clear through ; the last being an unexceptionable duplicate
of all that went before. If that Homer could only have nodded
sometimes ! But he didn't. If he could have slackened his
seriousness, or his diction, or his holy voice, or his determination to
do good — if some gentle cloud of humor could have precipitated
its dewiness upon his discourse at points; if some infirmity of
colloquialism could have overtaken him ; if the grand sum-total of
his emphasis could have been distributed less evenly ; sometimes in

YALE LECTURES. 89

cumulations and sometimes in hollows, just as the seas, abhoring
flatness and endless levels, climb up in great tides and storm-lifts,
and then sink back and consent to be tame a little, while they get
breath for another run — why ! he would have been far and away more
effective. Imagination is limber, and variable, because it sees all
things relatively, according to the laws of the picturesque ; it delights
in cows, castles, clouds, winding rivers and human beings ; and in
universal geniality it is willing to have them all powerfully painted ;
but it knows the difference between a cow and a man, and proposes
to have them painted accordingly — and when imagination goes into
theology, she knows the difference between those doctrines that are
of the essence of Christianity and salvation, and those that are not ;
and between the spirit of a doctrine and the form. But this will
come out more evidently under the next division of my subject.

My third head, then, is that imagination is necessary in order to
the interpretation of the imaginative parts of the Bible, and a clear
hold on the realities that lie back of its oftimes highly poetic vocab-
ulary.

To illustrate. How often in that Book is God spoken of as
angry and raging, as revengeful, as impatient, as punctilious and
easily affronted, as blood-thirsty, as treasuring up a personal insult for
many generations, and as being many things a man certainly never
ought to be. And the prose man — the unmitigated prose man —
thinks there must be some element of literality in this, — that God
has in his mind, something like those several inclemencies. But
the poetic theologian knows that these mighty adjectives are but the
tumultuation of the imagination, piling up her sensational images —
to express something to be sure ; something, but, of a truth, not
this — that God actually has in his feeling the literal counterparts of
those awful human terms. God is infinitely genial. God is uni-
formly and eternally genial. God never had a first flutter of impa-
tience. God never stands on his dignity and resents insults. God
never in one instance laid an affront away in his memory and
watched for an opportunity to get in a killing return-stroke. And
how could his creatures survive another minute if he were such a
terrific being as that. But, in the way God enforces law throughout
his dominions, we have a state of things as though all those adjec-
tives about him were true words. When we transgress law we smart
for it, and it hurts us and frightens us, as though back of the law
were some great personal anger. When the misdoings of some
7

90 YALE LECTURES.

ancestor of mine report themselves in my diseased body, it is as
though God had remembered those misdoings of his back there,
and now had a chance to gratify his revenge. When I resist the
Holy Spirit, and therefore quite lose that Spirit, it is as though
God would not endure an insult, had lost his patience, had grown
sullen towards me, and had left me — perhaps forever. The hither-
side of these realities is such as to justify those lively and fierce
adjectives concerning God which I have quoted from the Scriptures ;
and those adjectives become infelicitous and intolerable only when
innocent literalists get hold of them, and forgetting the essentially
figurative character of all language when applied to supersensible
objects, proceed to practically demonize the Divine Being by think-
ing of him as actually living up to the whole import of those
discreditable descriptives. And it seems particularly curious that
they should thus literalize those descriptives, because the Bible has
thrown in a whole other class of descriptives which talk in a way
precisely opposite to those first ones, and seem to be striving with all
their might to save God's honor from the aforesaid imputations of
literalism. The reason of man is a poor broken thing but there is
enough left of it to see that when the Scriptures set forth God as
infinitely amiable, and also set him forth as a being of rage, resent-
ment, touchiness, implacability, and the like, both of those pictures
cannot be literally true. So the honest, and sturdy old Bible, fairly
forces us into figurative renderings, if only we have enough of im-
agination, with its elasticity, to be forced. Back of these strong,
antithetic terms in regard to God, there is some sort of nature in
him which they are both trying to describe, and in which they are
both harmonized. Some fumbling, in so great a matter, is pardon-
able— inevitable at any rate, considering what lame faculties men
have — but it is not pardonable to select those eminently anthropo-
morphic images, hate, vengeance and the rest, and declare them literal
and no images ; and then fall upon the blander and sweeter words,
love, patience, tenderness, mercy, long-sufferance and forgiveness,
and condemn them to be images, with no great and comfortable
reality behind them. Only just let us have imagination in this bus-
iness, and we are all right. We can find our way to a fatherly and
dear God, who, like all fathers, does many a thing that hurts, be-
cause his heart is so unfathomably tender that he cannot do otherwise.
Well, the non-imaginative theology, after it has got its Deity of
wrath, and other traits germane to wrath, proceeds to find in the

YALE LECTURES. 91

Bible a correlative doctrine of atonement, and the gist of the me-
diation of Jesus is made to be its placation of just that Being.
None of us want to deny a propitiary element in the work of
Christ ; the manifold language of propitiation found in Holy Writ
is good and precious language ; it is not language misused, any
more than all those wrath-terms are, on which we have dwelt ; it is
language designed to point us to some sort of reality in the nature,
and in the administration of God. What that reality is, I might
undertake to say if there were time for it, but this I am determined
to say (and would if it took me a month) : namely, that the pas-
sion of the Lord was not exacted in any spirit of hate, or blood-
thirstiness, or inappeasable hunger for penalty, or irritability as of
offended dignity ; and if that passion of the Redeemer had a look
as though it were thus demanded, or if any language of the Bible
has that look, it is because the passion and the language alike, are
images, or terms of imagination ; and what the eternal facts are
to which they would direct our attention, we must discover by
accumulating all heaven-given terms, types, and acted tragedies,
and sifting them down to that ultimate and sufficiently awful real
thing in God, wherein they all terminate and agree. A piece of
work in which imagination has a principal part.

But, if a Deity of rages and terrors, implies, and leads on to,
an inadmissible doctrine of atonement, so also does it lead on to
an inadmissible doctrine of decrees — election and reprobation —
and an inadmissible doctrine of Hell, and to a whole system of in-
admissibles ; which inadmissibles I do not mention as wishing to
combat them. I care nothing for that to-day, except as in illustra-
tion of what theology may come to when it is wrought out without the
limberness, largeness, insight, geniality and intuitive vigor of the
imagination. Hell is bad enough in its reality, without its being
gloomed additionally by the over-hanging presence and the glee of
a Deity such as has been secured by the petrification of the live
images in such words as anger, and the rest. What men suffer in
hell, here and hereafter, is so hard to bear, and is so full of terror,
that, taken in its simple first-aspect, it makes one think of a terribly
offended, and terribly strong-willed, law-giver ; and this natural
first-thought is worked up in the Scriptural imageries of Hell.
Then again as to decrees — it is a fact that a certain part of the
human race are saved, and a certain part are not. There stands
that fact, overshadowing all life ; mysterious and sorrowful to the

92 YALE LECTURES.

last degree. The universe of God, man included, is so constituted,
and the government of God is so administered, that that stupen-
dous and pitiful result is incessantly coming out, — I was going to
say, is incessantly secured, as though there might be some intention
in it, and a theology has been found that has the courage to say
there is intention in it. Well, the whole thing is so terrific, and
works on so as with the sureness of fate and purpose, that the
Bible writers, who always freely use the language of appearance,
have spoken of God as electing some and cutting off others in an
exceedingly willful and irresistible sovereignty ; at least, plenty of
the expressions used by them are such as have led many to say : —
God is that kind of a being, and does such things. And this notion
of his fateful sovereignty in the moral field, is able to get a good
show of support from his indivertible, awful, straightforwardness in
the field of natural law. Imagination says : As Jesus sobbed over
doomed Jerusalem, so it must be God tenderly reluctates from all
hard dooms in the creation ; and these ten thousand shows of hard-
ness in him, and these Scriptural words of hardness, do not mean
hardness, except as love itself is compelled to be very firm some-
times in order to be really love, and compass its loving ends, and
make all worlds glad.

I do not forget that imagination, in her free way of interpreta-
tion may smooth down some fearful facts too much, sometimes ;
taking the love-words of the Bible too literally and unqualifiedly,
and subjecting the words of wrath, fear and doom to an unjustifiable
disembowelment ; as though, being images evidently, and disa-
greeable ones, too, they had no rights, as message-bearers to men.
That has often been done ; I confess it. But what I aim to bring
out is, that the whole vocabulary of divine revelation, as regards
things spiritual and transcendental, is imaginative, and must be
imaginatively received. Without imagination, theology is always
wrong — with imagination, theology may be right, (approximately),
and often is. When your terms of revelation are images, and when
as being images they are gloriously contrary one to the other, on
the face of them, (as it is their right to be, it being of the genius
and essence of language that they should be, and as they must be
if they would communicate the facts of God in their largeness),
then it is only the image-making faculty in man that can take those
terms, and get back to their ground of unity in the supersensible
fact or facts which they are all striving to set forth ; just as in a law-

YALE LECTURES. 93

case, when a hundred witnesses testify, each speaking from his own
standpoint, it needs a mind of some flexibility, and some experience
of contraries, to find the undoubted kernel of things under that
mass of information and misinformation.

My Brethren. I have not half unfolded the use of the imagina-
tion in Biblical interpretation.

You are reading your Scriptural Lesson in your pulpit ; no
matter what it is, but I will suppose it is Jesus at Jacob's well con-
versing with the Samaritan woman. Take that, out of scores.
Well, read it with your imagination. You see the scene : — see it, I
say, as though you were there. The spot, the surrounding land-
scape, the appearance of the well, the face, form and attitude of
Jesus, and of the woman, the tone of Jesus when he speaks, calm,
kind, communicative and deep ; the voice of the woman replying,
her changing face as the Master leads her on, her curiosity, her
wonder, her rising earnestness, her longing, her vague grasp of his
spiritual profundities — the whole picture, considered as a picture, —
you using all you ever learned of the topography of that region,
and all you ever learned about Samaritans, and all your study of
Jesus, using all to make that picture complete, and vivid to your
mind ; read the lesson thus, and it will not be historical but present,
not abstract teaching but the teaching of life, not Jesus remembered
and read about, but Jesus. O ! it is wonderful, how real, and interest-
ing, such passages are sometimes. I have often been so filled by
them that I could hardly read at all. My conviction of the divinity
of the Scriptures has been gained by these realistic touches, these
imaginative reproductions of scenes and conversations in Jesus' life,
more, I think, than in any other way. I shall never be able to de-
scribe the impression I have sometimes received of the depth,
tenderness, and grandeur of Christ as a spiritual teacher, and a
more than man, when I have been simply reading and listening to
him in his frequent dialogues with the people he happened to meet.

I heard a Lecture once from a certain man, on his first visit to
Europe, from which he had just returned He was a professional
elocutionist, and he dwelt considerably on the public speakers of
England, and imitated them. And among the rest, he recited a
vain-glorious temperance speech which he heard at a mass meeting
in Exeter Hall, London. And he did it so well, and I listened in
so much exercise of imagination, that I saw the whole situation as
plainly as though I had been there. What the lecturer omitted, I

94 YALE LECTURES.

furnished. I even saw the clothes the temperance orator wore ;
noticed how they fitted him, and of what fabric they were made.
That, and numbers of other things, I furnished, because my imagi-
nation was stirred, and I instinctively sought a full picture. And
the result was this ; two or three years after, I told a circle of people
that I attended a mass temperance meeting in Exeter Hall ; that I
there heard a certain man speak, and that he said this and that,
which I went on to recite precisely as I had received it from the
lecturer. I sincerely told that lie, in complete forgetfulness at the
time, that I did not myself hear the speech but had only been told
of it. I had been in England, and in Exeter Hall, and that assisted
me to imagine the situation, I suppose, but the point I am after is,
that the imagination has an almost unlimited capacity to see things
— absent things — historic things — faces that disappeared long ago —
paintings, buildings, natural views, — vanished sunsets, — death scenes,
— Jesus at the well, — Jesus at the grave of Lazarus, — Jesus at his
last Passover in Jerusalem that moon-lighted night eighteen cen-
turies ago. I do not know that it is best to have your imagination
make pictures so good that after a little you cannot remember
whether they may not be realities you have once seen rather than
the weird work of the mind ; but I think I had rather be carried to
that extreme occasionally, and tell some lies about Exeter Hall ora-
tors than to hear things, and read history, and pass through life with
no visional energy, and reproductive enthusiasm, whatever. When
I read that Judaism and Christianity are highly elaborated corre-
lates, and am shown point by point the amazing details of that
correlation, I want at last to gather up that complex thing, Judaism,
as in one vast unit before my mind, and that other complex, Chris-
tianity ; and play them off against each other back there in history
as in a visible back and forth. When I read that we all rose from
the dead in the rising of Jesus, I get my best impression of it, by
picturing it — a magnificent scene. When I read of the Judgment,
let it be a scene to me. So Heaven, — so Hell, — so the millennium,
— so the intercession of Christ at God's right hand, — I do not want
to hear about them, I want to see them. And in many of these
things, the Bible assists us to see, and means to make us see. Wit-
ness its diversiform imagery in regard to Heaven ; a place of
pastures, sweet-waters and plenties, a place of choirs and hosannas,
a four-walled metropolis of solid great measurements, and of
precious decorations and resplendencies, gorgeous as an oriental

YALE LECTURES. 95

dream. There are the figures in profusion, and you will do well to
use them for the refreshment of your mind, and the vivification
of your conception, and not decline them as sensuous, and confused,
and too likely to physicalize Heaven.

Now, so much I have said on the value of the imagination in
interpreting the imaginative parts of the Bible, (which include
pretty much all parts).

I shall add, at present, only one thing more. Years ago, when
John Bright had just made one of his massive, unflinching, reform-
atory speeches before the people of England, a displeased conserva-
tive Journal in London complained that he had no "moral imagi-
nation " as they called it; by which they meant, as was explained,
that he had not the imagination necessary to put himself in the
place of an opponent, and appreciate his views. A great omission,
that, in the make-up of anybody. If some desperate work of
reform is to be done, — as when Wm. Lloyd Garrison began against
slavery — perhaps the man who is to do the work had better not see
the other side too plainly. Horses go best with blinders. What is
wanted of them is to go along, and not be getting broad views, and
diversified views, to confuse their minds. So, if old school Calvin-
ists and new school Calvinists, should sympathetically understand
each other's arguments, it might weaken them both, and perhaps
destroy the schools. Still, I should rather not be a reformer at all,
or an effective polemic, than to come short of " moral imagination."
A theologian who cannot carry himself over into another and con-
trary theologian's ideas, so completely as to be mitigated and
temporarily weakened as it were by his plausibilities, has not a
complete and well-proportioned mind, is not in the way to make
discoveries, and is an unprofitable leader of the public. Of some
use he is, I have admitted ; just as sometimes a military leader is of
special value because all he knows is, to fight the enemy imme-
diately before him, might and main ; and, if whipped, to keep on
fighting as though nothing had happened ; and therefore never be
whipped. However, who would choose to be that kind of useful
man, rather than a captain of all-including comprehension. Speak-
ing of discoveries, the way to know Calvinism is to go there, and
the way to know materialism, or dualism, or atheism, is to go there ;
disagreeable spots to visit, some of them, but you must go — and of
all the faculties of the mind, it is literally true, that the only one
able to go is imagination. You may have so much imagination,

96 YALE LECTURES.

and may stay so long on these sympathetic visits, as to be devital-
ized by them, and never have any settled opinions ; (you will meet
such people out in the world, and they are the worst kind of afflic-
tion to the unimaginative brethren, who always know exactly what
they believe, and why nothing else has the least reason to be
believed) — so keep watch of yourself, in your imaginative excursions
among the Isms, but make the excursions, and get to yourself the
big sense and human-heartedness that come of them.

This gift to "put yourself in his place," is quite indispensable
to the preacher. Hundreds of able men just miss of success all
their lives, because they cannot limber themselves to that. The
point was hit very well for substance by an eminent man and
speaker, whom I heard thirty years ago say : — The young preacher
cries — "Be good — be good," — the old preacher says : — " My dear
friends, if you cannot be good, then be as good as you can." Life
has taught him what human nature is, and what human nature's
difficulties are. He has had some rough times getting his own self
to be good, and certain parts of him are not even yet made willing.
Also he has moved about among men, and tried to lift on them,
and coax them to try to lift on themselves ; and therefore when he
stands up in his pulpit, he is like a cannonier, who before he
opened his guns had reconnoitered the position he was to bombard,
so that he dropped in his shells just right. And then there is such
a luxury in preaching, when you preach sympathetically ; — such a
luxury for you and such a luxury for the people. They do not like
to be fired at by a glib expert who knows guns perfectly but does
not know men, — who makes first-rate arguments but does not hit
anybody, because nobody stands just where he aims. Every
preacher's eyes are more or less askew, for shooting, until he has
been over among the people, and appreciates their situation.

Hence, misshots. The imaginative and sympathetic preacher
(sympathetic because imaginative) , has two good and straightforward
eyes.

IMAGINATION IN SERMONS.

In my last Lecture I called you to consider the function of
Imagination in theology ; I now ask you to consider Imagination in
Sermons.

It may seem inordinate in me that I give one mental faculty so
much space, in a brief series of discourses, especially as that faculty
is by no means the supreme one in the minister's outfit ; but I had
some things requiring to be said as to pulpit diction, which could
come in under the title I have just put forth as well as under any
other, and so I have ventured it.

I think that in organizing the materials of a sermon, and get-
ting a skeleton that shall be alive and physiologically articulated at
all the joints, one goes through a mental operation precisely like the
painter's when he makes a picture — an original landscape. The
painter has in his mind the several features that are to go into that
picture ; — in other words, he has on hand the materials for it from
out of Nature's boundless storehouse. It shall be a sunset in the
Adirondack wilderness, in the autumn, when the whole warm
air shines, and is in a sweet swoon of peace, and pensiveness ;
a region he has often visited just at that season. In his memory
and happy mood is everything that goes to make that late-year
northland what it characteristically is. He will get his lay of
the land from one locality, his forest features perhaps (some
of them) from another, his touch of water from another, his
mountain distances from still another, and possibly he will shed
through all an individual feeling from his own heart, which those
places cannot quite furnish ; but which is in no wise incongruous to
those places : — some added tenderness in the half-sad autumnal
splendor, it may be, drawn from his experiences in this weary world.
Now those constituent particulars must come together in his picture

98 YALE LECTURES.

imaginatively. It is not carpenter- work he is called to. First, he
must imaginatively see those sober glories of the Autumn, those
waters, those trees and those heights. Not remember them. That
is not enough. That is too cold. He must remember them emo-
tionally, lovingly, with the vivid reality of a thorough-going interest,
and that is Imagination as distinguished from recollection. Or, to
use the terminology of my last Lecture, it is Imagination recollec-
tive.

Next, he must combine those clearly-seen, beautiful remem-
brances ; — and he must combine them in such a way that, although
the counterpart of the picture can be found nowhere in all broad
Nature, yet it shall be natural ; after the precise manner of Nature ;
just what Nature would have done if she had happened to think of
it ; Nature's very style.

He might throw on to his canvass all those artistic recollections
of his, and thus get what combination there maybe in juxtaposition ;
but that is nothing. That does not make a picture. There is no
life in it ; no coherency, no proportion, no answering of part to part,
no naturalness, that is, nothing that Nature ever did or would ever
consent to do. Nature, as we see her, is the silent rhetoric of God,
his way of expressing himself, his practical testimony as to what He
likes ; and all human art, (real art) is simply a loving conformity
to, or reproduction of his style : which style we suppose was not
taken up by him arbitrarily, but in deepest reason, or because he
could not remain a reasonable being and not take it up, if he took
up any style and expression at all.

Well, how shall our painter get his divine combination. He
cannot tinker it up, as I have already said. He needs more than a
good mechanical intellect ; more than reason even : — he needs
Imagination in its creative function ; not its recollective function,
its creative — exactly the faculty which God had when he filled the
primeval voids with his picturesque creations, great and small and
numberless. I have struck now an ultimate fact of the human mind.
I asked, how does that man combine ? Nobody knows. He does
not know, himself. He has in him, as a man made in the image of
God, a power to create pictures that are not a blasphemy against
Nature, and therefore are pictures. That is the whole story — the
whole explanation, I mean. His mental movement in that creative
act is spontaneous, unreflective, instinctive, instant, and emergent,
like a birth ; a great joy, but a great mystery ; a man-mother he is,

YALE LECTURES. 99

and who shall tell how growth goes on in the creative womb. It is
amazing that a feat so complex as that combination can be per-
formed so uncalculatingly, and so at a stroke ; a feat so complex, I
say, for, when he throws his parts together, they modify each other,
and are therefore no longer the same things that they were when in
separation. Certain colors kill each other. Stand up a tall man by
a short one, and the tall one tails and the little one shortens. So
our painter must discount all those mutual modifications of parts,
on the instant when he conceives his picture. It will not do to
rush in all the parts and clip and hew and match afterwards. That
were botchy. That were to be a mechanic. That were unlike the
Infinite Creator. No, he must rhyme part with part, and make the
whole thing sing by a stroke of the Imagination exercising herself
in her most awe-inspiring function.

Now a sermon, in its highest idea, is a work of art, if there ever
was one. It need not be made for art's sake, or with a predomi-
nant artistic impulse, the moral earnestness of the minister may fill
his whole consciousness, so that he has no thought of art and would
abhor himself if he had — nevertheless when you come to examine
that outcome of his mind and soul, behold it is artistic ; it is not
merely truthful, it is esthetic, it pleases the taste ; unbeknown to
himself he has wrought a work satisfactory to all the gods ; it has
the effect of a picture ; his numerous items of material are in there,
in juxtaposition to be sure, but (ten times more than that) in con-
gruity, in organic coherency, in a wonderful mutuality, each item
fashioning every other item with which it stands related. So in
the Apollo Belvidere, limb is joined to limb and function to func-
tion in an elastic harmony and mutual support and fine equilib-
rium, which fascinates one like a poem. That is the sermon in its
perfect form when the Imagination has done its whole work upon it.

Sermons are oftimes formed in a mutilated way. The forma-
tive instinct in the author was not strong enough, and the result is a
living thing, with numerous disproportions. Perhaps it is all dis-
proportions. The man haphazarded along through it, and you
would say, that it has no law and order at all, did you not know that
even disorders have their laws. The higher sort of mind moves in
philosophical order, and that we all call order, as though there were
no other. But if the sermonizer moves in the utmost possible incon-
sequence, and gets from point to point by connections the most
trivial, — as where the word that happens to be last in each sentence

100 YALE LECTURES.

is permitted to suggest the next thought, — even there, there is law, a
law of association between the thoughts ; so that you have in the
production an artistic element — a slight one — and are pleased. It
is not utter madness — though even in madness there are obscure
links of coherency in the thinking, whereby the mind makes
known that it still resists confusion and absolutely will not surrender
to chaos and be a personal entity no longer.

I might give you illustrations of discourses unimaginatively or-
ganized— though I need to leave this part of my subject pretty soon.

Sometime since I prepared a line of discourses on Old Testa-
ment personages, in which I proposed to know, myself, all that
could be known about those several men and women. So I made
my studies rather prolonged and minute and accumulated more
material than I could use ; which furnished me a good opportunity
to see whether or not I had any imagination for the work of pict-
uresque organization of material. The prose way of discoursing on
those characters, would have been to start in at their birth, or earlier
(among their ancestors) and after getting them born, travel right
along down their lives chronologically, telling everything, little and
great, thing after thing in stupid faithfulness and garrulity like the
chattering nurse in Rome, five minutes on a little quiet thing and
five minutes on a great one, mechanically conscientious and equit-
able— for is not a thing a thing, forever — that is the prose way, I
say, of doing such discourses (and all discourses). But the way
of Imagination is thus : — She selects from her superabundant mate-
rial, as that painter did ; and she puts to the front those things — a
few — which show, and contain, the life, soul and essential spirit of the
person to be portrayed, in his distinctive attributes. There are words,
and there are deeds and passages, in every one's life, whereinto are
compressed his entire self; by them you know instantly his whole
compass, his essential temper, his determinate rank in the creation ;
and after that to search through the vast minutiae of his career is
unnecessary : — or, if you do search, there is no need to take it all
into your public discourse. Life is not long enough. The intellect
and patience of human hearers are limited. You must stop speaking
sometime ; and while you are speaking, you must make headway
along your road ; you must not pick every flower, and point out
every view, and sit down on every green spot ; you must rapidly
gather the general bloom of things ; and whereinsoever you intro-
duce into your picture of the man in question, the secondary, and

YALE LECTURES. 101

little, in his career, you must do it by a touch ; put those trifles in
the vistas yonder, in the background. That, I repeat, is the way of
the imagination.

And what I noticed in myself was this (to tell the whole story) :
when I was not fagged and limp, I had the stamina to see that idol
and strive for it, and partially reach it ; but when my brain had gone
all and utterly into preliminary work, I inclined to tell all I knew,
stringing it along in a dull, petty, chronological manner, which had
in it the somnolency and endlessness of the flow of time.

That is one illustration of unimaginative organization, and I
might give many. It is unimaginative to have your sermon taper
instead of cumulate, like the breaking away of waters, tremendous at
first and feeble at last ; or like a thunder-burst, magnificent, and
followed by a long patter of ineffectual rain-drops. It is unimagi-
native to swell one head of your discourse, to the injury of the
others. An eye to proportion — an artistic eye, would avoid that.
It is unimaginative to fall in love with the portico of your sermon,
and elaborate it till, in the nature of things, the sermon itself
cannot amount to much, comparatively. That is setting up a tall
man along side of a little, to the injury of both. These unbalanced
developments are caused, sometimes by redundant vigor and some-
times by lack of vigor. A man full of fire, and full of matter,
enjoys an unfenced range, like a swollen spring river, and inclines
to take it. A man feeble, on the other hand, when he comes
to sermonize, is like a feeble man carrying a ' burden ; he stag-
gers about, and the lines of grace and proportion he knows not.
But in the case of men weak and of men strong, the more defi-
nitely they have the idea of a rightly organized discourse, and the
more they discipline themselves on that idea, the more will they
come to move artwise ; until after not many years one may find it
almost impossible to be otherwise than substantially artistic. The
gondoliers in Venice, navigating forever along narrow canals
bounded by the stone walls of the buildings, and compelled to shy
those walls, will graze them to a hair, hundreds of times a day, and
never strike ; as though the prudence and skill of the boatman
had at last passed into his craft, and given it the self-preserving in-
stinct of a human soul ; and it is one of our satisfactions that by
dint of much effort, and much repetition, and that self-restraint
which is one of the most difficult of lessons for powerful and ebullient
minds, law-keeping and rigid art-work may become second nature.

102 YALE LECTURES.

I wish to repeat once more, that, although I use the word art a
good deal in relation to sermons, I do not mean that sermons are
to be made in devotion to art as the supreme enthusiasm of the
preacher's soul — surely he has grander inspirations than that ; — but
sermons are to be fashioned into some shape, either good or bad ;
and while a badly formed sermon may not wholly fail of good
effect, yet the good effect is not the result of the bad form ever —
but in spite of bad form rather; and always, other things being
equal, the sermon artistically constructed most pleases God, and
most powerfully reaches men. That is the reason I am talkative on
this subject and urgent.

But let us pass now to the language of the pulpit, and to Imagi-
nation as related to the use of language.

It has been generally agreed that words, most of them, are
physical things, in the sense that they were originally descriptive of
physical phenomena. They were descriptive of those phenomena,
either as imitating the sound of them — for example, plash and
dash mimic the noise of waters, and rush and buzz and whizz the
noise of wings ; — or as being mysteriously fitted in some other way
to express those phenomena. I cannot enter into the acute con-
troversies of scholars at this point ; — as for instance, whether the
great body of terms are strictly imitative in their origin. It is
enough for me that the specialists in this department incline to
unanimity on the idea that, in one way or another, human language
began in physical's, and in all subsequent use has smacked of
the same. The first use of language, naturally, was to indicate
things visible, tangible, and audible ; the things of sense ; but by
and by, as man developed into self-consciousness, and reflected on
his own states of mind, it became necessary for him to devise terms
descriptive of those states ; — and behold ! then it was found that
the physical terms before mentioned were suitable to that purpose.
Somehow, they were. Somehow. And how? Some say, the words
to voice the supersensible were arbitrarily chosen, just as mathema-
ticians chose the letters of the alphabet to express the quantities
which they manipulate, when there is not the least thing in those
letters making them more fitted to the use in question, than forty
other conceivable signs might be. But whether the truth or not, the
most fascinating opinion seems to be that if the words which express
physical phenomena are also convenient to describe immaterial phe-
nomena, and have actually been put to that use, it is because there

YALE LECTURES. 103

is some subtle, ordained similitude between those physicals and those
immaterials ; something which makes them the best instruments to
that end. Of course by long use words tend to lose their original,
sensuous flavors, and the average man is likely to be confident that
all words which have been applied to supersensible uses for ages,
have had the face-marks of their original, physical coinage entirely
rubbed off, and are now insignificant and arbitrary terms, like the a, b,
c, and y, z, of the algebraist. And the average man is right, to this
extent : — that the mass of men use language without recognizing or
caring to recognize, the primary import, and suggestion, of each
term they speak. It is enough, they think, to say, reflect, without
recollecting the fact that it means turn back ; and distract without
recollecting that it means pull apart, and prefer, without recollecting
that it means set before. Why should we recollect these things
(say they) : — what use is there in it, when the mental states indica-
ted by reflect, distract, and prefer, are unmistakably pointed out,
and fixed, without recollecting.

In regard to this view, I put in two observations — and by those
observations get to the point in this subject which I am concerned
to reach.

First. That words themselves seem to have an instinct of their
origin, in that each word is inclined to refuse forever to be applied
to any use in the vocabulary of the supersensible, which is contrary to,
and destructive of, its primal and physical import. Reflect, for in-
stance, meant turn back ; — well, reflect never can be brought to
consent to being applied to a forward-reaching action of the mind ;
it knows its own meaning if the average man does not, and it pro-
poses to stand by its own first meaning, whether men care anything
about it or not. There is that fine and curious persistency in words.
They do not ask for any combinations of scholars to preserve them
from perversion ; they preserve themselves. They are not afraid to
be used profusely by the unthinking and inexact multitude ; they
know that they rule their own destiny and can never be confused.
That first.

Secondly, it is the privilege of every man — and every preacher
— to enter into this secret of primary significances, and, when he
uses a word, to use it with a relish of its origin ; a thorough-going
test in many cases — a zest similar to his who handles antique manu-
script, or an old missal, or a piece of armor worn by a world's hero
in some world-convulsing exigency ; or any other thing that is

104 YALE LECTURES.

wonderful and full of pathos by reason of its history. Words are not
sounds but things, when you track them back to things. The signa-
ture of the Duke of Wellington, was so many letters plus the Duke,
and all terms of language are so many words plus things, solid things,
concrete indestructible actualities.

It may be questioned whether, in the swift run of utterance,
especially of public utterance, any man is capable of tasting his own
words in that way, and enjoying their ground flavors, and hearing
their primeval undertone. But all men have some sense of the words
they use, else they could not go on ; and nobody would want them
to go on. They may not sense the physical element therein, but
they sense something in them. They do it with infinite rapidity.
Even when they utter hundreds of words a minute, they are sprightly
enough to catch up some honey from each term. And if they can
catch some, they can catch more ; — in fact a practiced and schol-
arly man can catch enough to keep him in a sort of intellectual in-
toxication. I have listened to men in public discourse who have
sometimes jerked me from my sitting almost by some heavily-charged
word, or some sudden compact and fiery sentence. Language
spoken is not a flight of dull, wooden balls, but an outgoing of
bells, sonorous meanings old and new, tones of time, tones faint and
far-away sometimes, but distinct and good like the clear whistle of
the boatswain in a hurricane.

And, as I have implied, when a man uses language in that per-
ceptive and pregnant way, all people who listen to him catch the
contagion of his gusto. The most ignorant feel that something is
going on ; that the man is not showering forth X's, Y's, and Z's,
which, as simple letters, signify nothing, so that so far as effect
is concerned he might as well vociferate inarticulately ; but that
there is a boom in all he says.

Why is it that old sermons are such unusable ammunition, the
abhorrence of the preacher and the soporific of the hearer. When
first preached they were good enough ; first-rate, every one thought,
perhaps. What has happened to them ? Nothing. There they are
in their aboriginal grandeur. But something has happened to the
preacher. When that discourse first came from him, he was in the
full sense of its terms : — he finished it Saturday, and by Sunday
the birth-warmth was not dead in it — he spoke what he knew, and
what he knew as he went along ; — every common word was alive to
him, and he was alive in it ; but since then time has slipped in, and

YALE LECTURES. 105

many events, and he has lost his connection with his words ; they
were his at the time, he gathered them up from the general stock
and mass of language and made them his, but now they have gone
back into the general and public stock again and are not his, and
therefore when he uses them he feels like a hypocrite — he is saying
what he does not feel, dispensing words that he has not refilled.
They are hollow, and sound hollow, and he wishes he was out of it.
The only way to make an old sermon an honest thing and mag-
netic again, is to pass it through a re-gestation ; let it enter a second
time into its father's womb and be born.

And I have had a fancy that sermons delivered memoritor
must be ever more in the curse of old ones, more or less. I never
memorized a sermon, but I have memorized speeches — long ago —
and when I spoke them, I always felt that I was shamming ; and to-
day, when I listen to such an orator, I am seized with a painful feel-
ing of unreality. I imagine I am, at any rate. I must not be too
dogmatic about this, because eminent men, I believe, are advoca-
ting the memoritor practice. Possibly, enough practice and some
native facility takes a preacher at last beyond the unrealism of this
business : — for it is unreal to be talking to your fellow men in the
use of only one mental faculty, the memory — or in the use of that
mainly. When you stand before a congregation you profess that
you are there and that it is you who speak, whereas there is noth-
ing there but your memory, I am supposing, (your memory and
your body,) which is not you by nine-tenths, or more.

But, as I said before, I must not make myself offensive to
wiser men than myself. When they speak of their freedom, and joy
and effectiveness in this kind of preaching, I love them, and
believe what they say ; but I am not convinced.

I spoke of using words in the delight of original relishes ; but
I must add, as a part of my subject, that these root-relishes are not
the only ones a preacher may have in his sermonizing.

When a word has started and passed into use, it begins to have
a history, and after many years it has gained a great history ; — it
has had to do with great men and great events, and it has the same
interest that an eminent personage has. Let William Gladstone
land on our shores, or Victoria, or Alfred Tennyson, and it would
not be the landing of so much flesh and blood, five to six feet high,
weighing from one to two hundred pounds ; but it would be the land-
ing of the Queen of England, the Poet Laureate of England, and the

106 YALE LECTURES.

Statesmanship of England ; — it would be the arrival of incarnate Eng-
land, as you might say. In like manner, words have arrived in our
century, all moss-grown, and festooned with associations, picked
up in their long journeyings down from times of old ; and it is so
much added to a man's pleasure in the use of them and so much
added to the force of his expression, if his mind detects, and savors,
those precious additions.

And another thing. Supposing I admit that all this thought of
mine in regard to root-relishes and historical relishes (as I have
called them) is visionary ; and that, however perceptive and imagi-
native a man may be, he simply cannot get back into those old
contents of the words he uses. Grant it to be true that the greater
part of human words, in the long attrition of use, have been rubbed
down till their coinage is not visible, and they therefore are simply
conventional signs, which could be just as well exchanged for nu-
merical signs : — the particular mental act now called reflection being
called i, and the act called perception 2, and the act reverence 10 ;
supposing that to be so. It is a highly afflictive supposition, but
we will put up with it for a minute or two. Has imagination there-
fore ceased to be of great account to the writer and speaker, in his
choice of language, and in his joy while he uses it? I tell you nay.
For, as these empty conventional signs are employed to designate
this and that, — as, reflection, perception, reverence, and the like,
among things spiritual and physically imperceptible, and thou-
sands of things likewise in the physical domain ; it is of great im-
portance that those numerous designated things should be lumi-
nously and intensely seen, at the instant, by the man speaking and
writing ; and it belongs to Imagination to do just that thorough and
fervid seeing. If that seeing is not done, or in proportion as it is
not done, words have no sense at all. I have already supposed that
they have no historical and derivative meanings, and that they are
like human beings without an ancestry or a creator ; and now their
only other possible significance is taken away from them. The
preacher writes them down and delivers them to his people, as so many
Zeros. He has no interest in them ; — for how can he have an in-
terest in terms that came from nowhere, and are practically pointed
at nothing. And as he has no interest in them, the interest of his
hearers cannot amount to much, and I do not see why preaching
should be any longer continued. No, no. If I say a word to mean
something, I must distinctly see that intended thing — the more

YALE LECTURES. 107

distinctly the better — and that seeing, in so far as it is realistic, and
emotional and picture-like, is the work of Imagination.

While I am on this matter of language, with its coinage all
effaced by centuries of use, permit me to refer you to old creeds and
old liturgies as frequently examples of that thing. The creeds and the
liturgies, in themselves, are well enough ; but reiteration tends to
dull a man's sense of words ; — if he does not watch, and incessantly
energize upon them, he loses not only their genetic meaning and
vigor, and not only their historical meaning and vigor, as understood
by the theologians and their generation who wrote them, but also
their present meanings ; and, in this loss of all meanings, the reci-
tation of these forms is as useless as an inarticulate monotone.
Even that monotone might have some good influence in it, pro-
vided it was solemn, and I should advise people to congregate on
the Lord's day and go through that, if nothing better could be had.
The sound of the wind in pine forests is moral ; — all grave tones
steadily prolonged are moral ; and liturgies will live and creeds will
keep on, for the sake of the sound of them if for no other reason ; —
but it must hurt their feelings dreadfully to be reduced to that,
when they are conscious that they are live things ; that they had a
parentage and a powerful parentage, and have had a career, too ;
that they did mean something on the lips of those who made them,
and were intended to describe forever certain august realities.

I should like to spend about twenty-four hours of continuous
speech here in your presence, running the terms of the Nicene
Creed back to their radicals (so far as possible,) reproducing the
history too of that great symbol, and especially its origination, and
then when you and I had come into full possession of the dear old
thing, standing up all together and reciting it. We should hardly
be able to contain ourselves. The familiar drone of utterance
would be changed to a play of thunderclaps, comparatively. We
should have a Mt. Sinai here, and an awfulness as of God made
visible and audible.

We sometimes deplore the theological discussions that come
up, and are afraid that the phraseologies of the fathers will get
pounded into dust by the combatants, and we shall never have them
any more ; but these contentions are one resounding way of notify-
ing men that they must not any longer use their old phrases in an
imitative and numb manner ; that they must get themselves back
into the sense of their creeds, the historical sense, and see whether

108 YALE LECTURES.

they are willing to subscribe to that sense wholly — if they are, it will
be good for them to have been forced to do it afresh ; and really
their creeds now will be the very breath of their life ; while if they find
themselves not willing to subscribe, they are put into a wholesome
live struggle to make something whereto they can subscribe, and can
voice in assembled multitudes with a holy awe, and a holy jubilation.

For one, I have ceased fearing that time-honored forms in the
church, creedal and liturgic, will suffer permanent damage, in the
vehemency and crush of debate. The Catholic symbols are the
common-sense of the Christian ages, crystallized and solidified ; and
they will bear a good deal of knocking about. They are the survi-
vals of the fittest, and are therefore likely to survive. I do not know
what verbal modifications may be forced upon them, nor how far
their phrases may be refashioned ; but I certainly do not look to see
any breach in their substance. And as to forms less hallowed, what-
ever they are, forms provincial, forms denominational, forms philo-
sophical, I am glad to see them put through the threshing mills of
debate, at intervals, so that the immortal in them may redemon-
strate its indestructibility, and the partial and ephemeral in them
may be compelled to show its insufficiency. Not all insufficient
things are worthless. The butterfly needs a worm-form by which
to climb to its winged state ; and Truth seems to be willing to put
up with imperfect statements, by way of transition to something
higher. She is a veritable butterfly, though, in heart and fact,
whether detained as yet in her worm-life, or all emerged and fair.

Another service which Imagination renders us in our sermon-
izing, is her prolific contribution of images, and imageries, drawn
from life and from Nature.

It is thought, by some, to be dangerous to accept these contribu-
tions and let them into our pulpit language. And it is dangerous,
provided we are going to be so delighted with them as to use them
for their own sake. If we abjure all esthetical dairyings, all dancing
up and down in a twitter over our pretty things that we have thought
of, our analogies, and decorations, and fanciful outflowerings ; if we
just robustly turn all our devices of words in upon the ends of God,
the benefit of men and the setting forth of his glory, then Imagina-
tion is not merely innocent, but it is the very life of speech. And
see what things she does.

First, mark in what an omniverous and rich way she works up
into utterance, all the familiar things of human life, — even its homely

YALE LECTURES. 109

things ; though, to tell the truth, the moment she touches them they
are no longer homely, but are transfigured in the light she sheds.
Did you ever watch the workings of prose minds and observe how
undaintily they handle the common, and are vulgarized by their con-
tact with it. They bring it into the sanctuary sometimes, and it
does not fit the holy place and is an offence. They cannot enter
the common, without wallowing in it and drowning ; whereas the
imaginative mind is like the birds that cut the water, and even the
puddle, with their swift wing and toss it up into the shine and
sparkle of the sun. William Wordsworth undertook a good deal of
that kind of work, (the working up of the common into noble ex-
pression) and did not always succeed, some thought ; but, in larger
part, he did succeed, and beautified life at many points. Robert
Burns succeeded. Thomas Carlyle succeeded pretty often. What
pile was there in which that man would not grub, when his rage was
on him ; but how rarely his grubbing soiled him, and how full his writ-
ings are of the affairs that surged around him ; full of the great and
noble, full of the minute, and the lowly and the mean ; full of human
life as it literally went on in his day and land, whether in palace, or
bog hut ; its tragedy, comedy, pathos and glee.

This charging of rhetoric with the strong stock of daily and
humble things, is often seen in uncultivated and even vulgar men,
who are under no bondage of conventionalities and speak their minds
with absolute veracity, and point-blank. Witness that western bor-
der-man, described by Mark Twain, a man earnest and coarse, but
affectionate, who sought the services of a minister just on from the
East, well-dressed, civil-spoken, and proper, to attend the funeral of
a prominent rough whom all the rude men believed in, and loved,
and who must be spoken of in funeral speech with force and enthu-
siasm. Read what he says and take in the vividness and reality of
it. I rode with a New York omnibus driver once upon a day for
some miles, on the top of his vehicle, and heard his opinion on
many things ; and noticed, first, that he had opinions sharply de-
fined and reserved ; next, that he had no fear of mortals in showing
them ; and finally, that he had a powerful vocabulary, part slang and
part English ; but all of it bottomed on concrete, on stage-driving
or other plain and ponderable realities.

Sailors speak in the same way often, and hunters, and the mob,
seasoning their talk with terms drawn from their own craft, and
putting in sledge-hammer emphases, like the heavy strokes of their

110 YALE LECTURES.

daily toil. Of course, nothing can redeem such talk as that about
Buck Fanshavv's funeral, and we must all keep wide away from the
absolutely gross ; but a refined man with poetic capacity — with
Imagination, I mean — can touch and turn almost anything into
gold — he can make the dirt blossom into a beauty that seems sky-
born ; — and he does it in ways that are easy to his faculty ; as, for
example, where a thing is too gross for direct expression, and yet
has value in it, he just alludes to it, in a far-away manner, in the use
of some term that is itself high and fine, it being a curious fact that
the purest and most cultured minds will receive a quite unmention-
able thing, provided it is conveyed by indirection, and with a self-
evident non-fellowship with its mere grossness.

But life is full of things not gross, but only common, and lowly,
and those we may easily use — and men most scholarly and fastidi-
ous may take these up into their speech profusely, and had better.
A man of horses and stables in my congregation, long ago, left
the church after one of my sermons, saying : — " Our Minister is
pretty strong on the bit." Now there was no harm in that.
After an evening of uneasy and uncomfortable debate, wherein
a certain Mr. Blank had been combative and unpleasant, a man said
to me as we left : — " He had the hay on his horns to-night, sure
enough." Could anything be better than that, drawn from farm
experiences? To say : — " Blank was combative," would have been
abstract and decorous ; but Imagination brought in a contrary-
minded and punching, horned creature, who punches for sheer
punching's sake, and just because she is overflowing with wicked-
ness ; as is shown by the fact that she lunges into innocent and un-
resisting haystacks. You see the animal with her head bestrown,
and her look of general belligerency. It is pictorial. It is like
Dr. John Brown's description of the great dog Rab, whom he has
made immortal in that sweetest, and realest, and deepest of sketches,
"Rab and his Friends." "He belonged to a lost tribe" (said
the Doctor.) " He was brindled and grey like Rubislaw granite ;
his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's ; his body thick-set like
a little bull — a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have
been ninety pound weight, at the least ; he had a large blunt head ;
his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth
or two being all he had, gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His
head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of
fields of battle all over it, one eye out, one ear cropped as close as

YALE LECTURES. Ill

was Archbishop Leighton's father's ; the remaining eye had the
power of two ; and above it, and in constant communication with it,
was a tattered rag of an ear, which was forever unfurling itself like
an old flag ; and then that bud of a tail, about one inch long, if it
could in any sense be said to be long, being as broad as long ; —
the mobility, the instantaneousness, of that bud, were very funny
and surprising, and its expressive twinklings, and winkings, the inter-
communications between the eye, the ear, and it, were of the oddest
and swiftest. " Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size ;
and having fought his way all along the road to absolute supremacy,
he was as mighty in his own line as Julius Csesar or the Duke of
Wellington, and had the gravity of all great fighters." Dr. Brown
then goes on to compare Rab's look with the look of the great
Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller, and declares them alike. That
is what the Doctor said about Rab ; and anybody who cannot see
that pictured dog, ought to be bitten by him.

I am speaking of Imagination dealing with lowly things, and
making the lowly interesting and even noble, and I made this quo-
tation under that head ; but I cannot help diverting long enough to
point out the fine interfusion of that faculty through almost every
word of that piece of writing. First of all, and before he began, the
Doctor evidently with his mind's eye saw his dog, in his total pre-
sentment and rounded majesty and vigor. There he stood gnarly
and real — all dog. There is a sort of genius in that. Then notice
his word-work. He compares the dog's color to that of Rubislaw
granite, but in that comparison, after the true manner and instinct
of Imagination, he secures more than color ; he gives a foreshadowing
of the dog's massiveness and solidity. Rubislaw granite, said he.
Next, he compares his hair to a lion's hair, and in that he secures hair
for Rab and a leonine element. A distinct imaginative advance in the
description. Another man would have said : — " his hair was short,
hard, and close," but Brown added : — " like a lion's." Then : — " his
body, was thick set, like a bull, a sort of compressed Hercules of a
dog." Mark those vigorous concretes, bull, and Hercules — and that
splendid adjective, compressed. If he had simply said Hercules, he
would have done a strong thing, and touched Rab off with a sort
of dignity ; but when he added, compressed Hercules, he got his
description down to the dimensions of a dog and at the same time
dropped out not a single penny-weight of the Herculean strength,
but only condensed it and made it more awful. Then his mouth,

112 YALE LECTURES.

a midnight abyss and mystery, made more dark by two white teeth
in it. And his head mapped with battle-fields, (his fighting
character still amplified upon, you see, that is, kept, in the foreground
in the midst of all comparisons, and by them) ; — his ear close cut
off (more fight) — like the father of Archbishop Leighton (a humor-
ous and affectionate assimilation of dog life, and human life, wherein
the man, (the bishop's father) lost nothing and the dog got a
love-lift. Then : " the other eye had the power of two " — how har-
monious that is with all we have already been made to know of
Rab : — it is an addition to the picture, but it is an addition con-
gruous with granite, lion, little bull, compressed Hercules, and
scarred head — a tremendous eye. And his one remaining ear was
torn, and tattered, and flag-like, but fearfully vital, and moving yet :
(more fight, and more energy and compressed Hercules.) And
his little tail was vital and moving, and knowing — it twinkled and
winked just as anybody might, and it interchanged cute winks with
that wide-awake ear — the realism of the thing is enough to make a
dog laugh — the personalization of those small members is so com-
plete that you cannot take your eyes from them, you would almost
be willing to be a dog yourself, to have so much sense in your
humble members. No mere man ever did. And then lest Rab
might seem to be nothing but a fighter and so be vulgarized, the imag-
inative and deep-hearted Doctor informs us that he was dignified,
grave, and simple, and looked like the Rev. Dr. Andrew Fuller. It
would have been prosaic to say that Rab had some mental qualities
like men. Of course, he had. All dogs have. That is a fact in
nature — a bald, common fact. But Imagination loves to get in her
bald, common facts, and make people see them, in a way of her
own, in a way so that they shall see them and take to them, and be
thoroughly pleased, melted and won over. So in this case, having
given us a plain painting of Rab's face — a strong face, but not
really pious — she breathes a mild transfiguration over it and leads
you to embrace it, in a burst of laughter, by mentioning the dis-
tinguished and excellent Dr. Fuller, the great and mighty Baptist
Rab.

In all this, my Friends, you note the distinctive marks of that
faculty on which I have now said so much : — its vigorous and visional
perception, its creative combinations, its heart and heartiness, so
that it can be warm and fond over a dog and can drag Julius Caesars
and eminent men of divinity into dog-likeness, and not belittle the

YALE LECTURES. 113

men either — true imagination would never do that ; and its capacity
to put itself in his place, whether the place be Rab's, as in this case,
or Dr. Chalmers', or dear little Marjorie Fleming's, as in other essays
of this same John Brown — than whom no better compacted, or more
divinely-tender and true man was ever brought forth of the great
Brown stock, I venture to say.

I have really now no time left in which to speak as I ought of
the images, and imageries, and numerous enrichments, which Imagi-
nation can bring into the diction of the pulpit, out of endless Nature.
We preachers have just as much right to Nature as poets have. To
be sure, when we go to her, we go on serious business, and we are
after grave material therefore, and poets had better go in about the
same way — all the great ones do ; — moreover, Nature is grave, any-
way ; her most festive shows do not start a man into any frivolity or
thin giggle. Nature is never jocose. She makes us laugh some-
times, but it is in some sort as the melodious thunders laugh, not
in jollity, but in the soberness of a great joy.

And what can we get from Nature ? Well, read the Poets and
see. We can get her repose ; and a really restless diction is not pos-
sible to him who is in habitual communion with her. He insensibly
gathers up into his speech the spirit of her tranquilty. Also, we get
rhetorical truthfulness and reality. I have praised Imagination a
good deal, but an imagination that does not live in Nature, and in
real life, and start all her flights from that solid ground is a phan-
tasmal and moony creature, an inadmissible wild one in the pulpit,
in poetry, in art, and in all human expression.

We have seen that it is the instinct of the Imagination to make
original combinations, as in landscape painting ; but those original
combinations must be strictly conformable to Nature, in all respects.
They must be made up of natural material, of actual trees, flowers,
seas, green fields, hills, skies, showers, and commotions — and they
must organize those actualities as Nature herself is wont to organize
them ; otherwise the picture is an insane thing. Well, how shall we
get this truthfulness, but by much companionship with Nature. In
other words, we get naturalness from Nature. And an Imagination
that conserves its naturalness by an habitual stand in Nature, is sure
of itself, and sure to do realistic and acceptable work, when called
(as the Imagination often is,) to move out into the supernatural,
and picture things over there. A man not thoroughly naturalized
in Nature is utterly flighty and ridiculous out there. A writer

114 YALE LECTURES.

introduces some supernatural character into his drama, I will suppose.
Well, that supernatural personage must be made to speak, and be-
have himself, something different from a man, for in that way only-
can it be shown that he is not a man, but a superior being ; never-
theless he must be made to act naturally after all — that is, in the
general manner of human nature, else all human readers will spew
him out. Imagination projecting herself into the unheard-of, and
spinning stories of that land, must keep her two feet down solid,
all the while, on the heard-of and familiar, and in that way keep up
some sort of congruity between those two lands. And all imagina-
tive rhetoric — in the pulpit or elsewhere — must perpetually rationalize
itself and make itself valid and acceptable to good taste ; to Nature
in Nature, and to Nature or the natural, in human life as well.

I repeat, we can get from Nature truthfulness and reality in
our pulpit expression.

And again, we may diversify and beautify our expression, and
make it pithy and rich from the same source. The forms and
activities of Nature are a vast language prepared to our hand, and it
is as legitimate to express ourselves — all the realities of our souls and
all the realities of our total life on earth — through her forms, as it is
to studiously keep away from her, and use only conventional terms
out of which the Nature element has evaporated at last, so that they
are supposed to have a dry and colorless precision. I am not argu-
ing on the. question of their superior precision, otherwise I might
deny it, but what I am particularly after, at this present, is the
variety, and beauty, and vividness, and celestial pith of the natur-
alistic diction. Dr. Brown called Rab a bull, a lion, a Hercules, a
mass of granite of a certain color, a series of old battle-fields, as far
as his head was concerned ; a Julius Caesar and a Dr. Fuller — and
several more things. He might have said — Rab — and stopped.
But that would not have been much to us who never saw Rab. He
might have said lion, or bull, and stopped. Or he might have
named the Duke of Wellington and Julius Csesar, and stopped, But
I would not have had him omit Andrew Fuller for anything. What
would Rab have been, without Fuller added. Don't you see,
Dr. Brown knew the value of natural comparisons, and what hun-
dreds of them there are, and what endless modifications may be put
upon a dog by using them freely ? So in that case where Hamlet
addressed the skull of Yorick. First he said he had ridden on Yo-
rick's back a thousand times. (That is a good many more than he

YALE LECTURES. 115

ever did ride — but Imagination may speak with liberty and she
never seems to be lying:) in fact it was truer to say a thousand,
than to tell exactly how many times he did ride. Next, Hamlet
said : — " Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft."
Next : — " where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?
Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar."
Hamlet, in this instance, drew his particulars from human life and
not from Nature, but how every added touch increased the visibility
of Yorick to our eyes and made him to us an interesting human
thing.

I plead for this versatility and profuseness in ministers. Turn
all creation into your diction. Thomas Carlyle ended his life of
Oliver Cromwell by calling England an ostrich, with its " head stuck
into the readiest bush of old church-tippets, king-cloaks, or what
other sheltering fallacy there may be, and so awaits the issue." He
closes his life of Robert Burns, with this eulogy, and tender simili-
tude : " While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like mighty
rivers through the country of thought, bearing fleets of traffickers
and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves, this little Valclusa foun-
tain will also arrest our eye ; for this also is of Nature's own, and
most cunning, workmanship, and bursts from the depths of the earth
with a full-gushing current into the light of day ; and often will the
traveler turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its
rocks and pines." His life of Richter he ends with this natural
touch : — " In the moral desert of vulgar Literature, with its sandy
wastes, and parched, bitter, and too often poisonous shrubs, the
writings of this man will rise in their irregular luxuriance like a
cluster of date-trees, with its green sward and well of water, to refresh
the pilgrim, in the sultry solitude, with nourishment and shade."
He puts in this comparison in the last sentence of his life of
Heine — referring to Heine's victorious struggle against adverse
circumstances : — " It is but the artichoke that will not grow except
in gardens. The acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness,
yet it rises to be an oak ; on the wild soil it nourishes itself, it
defies the tempest, and lives for a thousand years." In the last
sentence of his life of Schiller, he speaks of him as likely to be " a
towering land-mark in the solitude of the past, when distance shall
have dwarfed into invisibility many lesser people that once encom-
passed him, and hid him from the near beholder." Near the close
of his life of Walter Scott, he speaks of the pecuniary adversities of

116 YALE LECTURES.

Scott's latter years and of the manful, strong and fatal drudging which
he did to redeem himself, and says of him : — >" The noble war-horse
that once laughed at the shaking of the spear, how is he doomed to
toil himself dead, dragging ignoble wheels." And in the final sentence
of his sketch of Baillie.the covenanter, he calls him — "a rather
opulent, but very confused, quarry, out of which some edifice might
in part be built." An ostrich with its head hidden in church tippets
and so on. A Valclusa fountain. A cluster of date-trees in an oasis.
An artichoke as contrasted with an acorn. An ever-visible great
landmark in the great past. A proud war-horse condemned to wheels.
A rich confused quarry, out of which something might be built.

I select these at random, of course there are a thousand more —
and they illustrate a rhetorical habit — a naturalistic habit — a sensu-
ous and metaphorical habit — that is particularly good for preachers.
It is legitimate. It is going straight to the original store-house of
language. It is resorting to a vocabulary that can never stale. It
is speaking to people in a manner they can understand. It makes
the things supersensible and metaphysical stand out, and cease to
be abstract and remote. It weds Religion to Poetry, and Poetry
to Religion, where they belong. It is imitation of the Bible — an
oriental, image-freighted, and picturesque book — which has done
wonders for man as revealing a salvation for him, but has done a
good deal also to keep alive in the cold, reflective, precise and
abstract Western intellect, the flush and luxuriance and many-sided
metaphorizing, of the fresh youth of the human race.

In this multifarious play of analogies, it is possible to overload
your utterance and give your hearers a feeling that their minister
was originally designed for a kaleidoscope, and mostly enjoys being
that, rather than the bearer of a plain and unconfused message from
God to perishing sinners ; but it is easy to avoid that ; — the Bible
avoids it — thousands of luxuriant rhetoricians avoid it — and they
avoid it in the same way that you must : — namely, by having a high
practical end to the which they are pushing with every ounce of their
strength. St. Paul tumbles along like a spring freshet sometimes,
and his language cannot be parsed by any known rules ; — but he
does not pile up any confusion, because the objective to which he
drives pulls him on mightily, and pulls him clear out of all word-
mongering and all thought of it. As well could Jesus climbing Cal-
vary take pride in his own gait, as this his consecrated Apostle, work
up an over-elaborate and showy diction, full of confused glories.

YALE LECTURES. 117

Alfred Tennyson does not lack in these natural imageries of
which I am speaking, but he is as simple and easy to understand as
a piece of Ionic Sculpture. I opened his book of lamentation over
Arthur Hallam the other day, and thought I would show you how
this most opulent of word-masters keeps himself within the lines of
absolute simplicity and perspicuity ; but I find I have no time
for that. See the excellent Imagination of John Henry Newman,
but how chastened, orderly, and limpid his utterance is. Jeremy
Taylor is not so self- restrained. And I have felt that our Dr.
Bushnell would have helped the world to understand him faster if
he had not set an image in his almost every word like the face and
flash of a diamond. Of course, this is the peril of affluence, even
as overflows are the peril of well-watered lands ; but dear me ! let
us have waters anyhow. We will dam them. We will hew channels
for them. And we had rather be drowned in them, than to dry up
and die in the sand-wastes of a diction absolutely and forever arid.

SHORT SERMONS.

If I say, as I now do, that I am going to fill this present hour
with some remarks on short sermons, I judge that it will seem a
rather minute subject to some of you. But I hope to make it sizable
gradually, by intertangling it with numbers of things roundabout ;
for all things are great if only their relations are opened ; — and
then none of the congregations to whom we are sent with our
preaching, have any notion that short sermons is a small title, I
fancy ; — the most inferior man that listens to us has his mind all made
up on the long sermon business, — he may be confused in theology,
but on that he is clear. And he is so numerous in these days that
we preachers are forced to give some sort of heed to what he says ;
especially as all the superior people are in with him and think just as
he does.

A short sermon is a sermon that seems short ; it may be fifteen
minutes long or it may be an hour. Time has nothing to do with it.
If a man is unconscious no speech seems long to him. The hearer
fast asleep is willing you should go on till you are tired out. And,
what is the same thing, the hearer so absorbed by what you are say-
ing as to be unconscious, does not charge the sermon with being
prolix. Time is measured, not by clocks, nor even by the rotation
of the earth, but by the state of our minds, and the things going on
therein. All experience proves that. Absolute mental vacuity has
no time-measure, neither has mental concentration much.

But, I pass from these scattering remarks, to the sad work of
drawing out a list of the things that make sermons seem long : —
things in the minister, I mean. To be sure, there are some things
outside of the minister that will do it. Bishop Potter, of New York,
went to dedicate a very fine church ; — and after the service, when
the people were gathered about in a bubble of happification over

YALE LECTURES. 119

the goodly edifice now completed and sanctified, it was noticed that
he was silent. And when some one at last ventured to inquire : " Do
you not like our Church," he said : — " O yes, it is a grand estab-
lishment,— and has only three faults." Of course they wanted to
know right off, what those were. " You can neither see, nor hear,
nor breathe in it," said the Bishop. As good a description of a
first-class, modern, gothic meeting-house, as was ever given perhaps
— so far as it goes.

Well, sermons are apt to be long inside of such structures.
The preacher's face is full of holy emotion, but nobody can see it.
The preacher's sermon is full of the best sort of material, and is
solidly phrased, and charged with edification ; — so that one would
naturally say : " the more of such a sermon the better." But the
people do not say that who sit in those parts where the speaker's
voice rolls around in reverberations and half of his articulations
are lost. The preacher is wide awake, demonstrative and impressive,
but not to those who are sensitive to bad air, and are semi-comatose
on account of it. My church in Hartford is a little inclined to
some of these weaknesses, and I have always felt that my people do
not know what a preacher I am. When I take my natural swing I
preach about forty to forty-five minutes ; but a sermon of that
number of pages in that edifice takes an hour, because I cannot
speak with any rapidity where each word is going to be reduplicated,
and rolled around, and take five minutes perhaps in getting down
from among the fascinating arches into people's ears, well lodged and
articulate.

I could tell you a great deal about such things, from experience
and from hearsay, — the miserable external things that diminish our
pulpit power, and make us tedious ; — however, my purpose does not
lie in that direction, but rather in the direction of our faults, whereby
our sermonizing has a look of too much length.

A montonous voice makes length, enormously. There is noth-
ing that gives such a sense of eternity as a well continued sober
monotone. Always at the sea-shore, I think of that. Always, too,
in pine forests. The hum of a distant factory will do it, if only
the hum has depth and solemnity. I stood among the graves around
Melrose Abbey and heard the Abbey clock strike off the hours ;
and ruminated on the old-time, and all-time sound of those pro-
longed bell-strokes. They were mellow enough, and not unalluring
to the esthetic ear ; but I forgot all about esthetics, and all about

120 YALE LECTURES.

the graves that encircled me, some of them interesting enough ;
and all about the dismantled and pensive Abbey, and everything
else on earth or in heaven, and just considered that unvarying bell,
and the resound of time in it.

So a sermon : — it may be esthetic, there may be supreme
melodies in it, it may be architectural, Abbey-like or whatever, and
festooned with luxuriant church ivies ; — a perfect love of a sermon ;
but if, through it all, there drones on a pulpit voice, impressive
but eternal, — it must be that all men will say : — " is not that a little
long, — would not our minister, good man, be more edifying if he
knew when to stop." Well, he did stop. He was only half an
hour, but they had a feeling, all through, that he had had them in
hand twice that time.

Now, Brethren, there are some things continually operating on
preachers to make them monotonous in the voice ; — some things
particularly hard to resist. Our themes require a solemn voice in
the main ; — and we speak on holy days, and in a holy place, and
after preparatory holy exercises in our closets, — we are in the pres-
ence of God, and we must cause the people to feel that they are ; —
and a voice dramatic, a voice colloquial, a voice humorous, a voice very
various anyway, seems utterly ruled out in the nature of the case.

Some twenty years ago, one Communion Sabbath in my church,
my wife, not being strong, thought she would not arrive till the
close of my discourse. But she arrived some minutes before the
close, and there in the porch she listened to my goings on. She
could not hear the words, but she heard the voice, and noticed the
voice all the more because that was all she could hear. And I was
much surprised, and much grieved, to have her say that I moved
that morning in a perfectly measured and wearisome cadence ; —
the thing I hated, and always had. It showed me that our kind of
work will cadence, and measure off, and make tiresome almost any-
body— if he does not look out.

But how shall he look out. First, let the theological seminaries
put their fledgelings into the hands of an elocutionist, a knowing,
determined, immitigable man, who will not take no for an answer ;
and thus let some incipient good habit be worked up ; a glimmering
possibility, (if not probability), that the young men will begin right
in their ministry.

And when they have begun, let them cultivate a theology, and
a general way of looking at things, that permits some flexibility and

YALE LECTURES. 121

human warmth of voice. Methodists never preach monotonously.
They believe in some terrible things, just as we do ; — no man can
look out among the facts of the creation and honestly deny forty
terrible things ; — but they believe in forty gracious things and
lovely, super-eminent over all terribles ; and believe in them in such
heartiness and constancy that it keeps their feeling in a shout ; —
their sermons shout ; — they weep, but they shout ; — they preach
Perdition with a gospel underflow of hallelujah. I heard them all
my youth, and left them in my youth, but I believe they are more
right than we are (many of us) in this thing. Christianity is not a
Jeremiad — not exactly. It premises Jeremiads, and a sad state of
things indescribable, but those Jeremiads it proposes to drown and
it is in the world for that one purpose ; — and we, her messengers,
ought not to voice her in a manner contrary to her genius. If we
let into our voices the monotone of the sea (as I suppose we must
a little sometimes), let the " floods clap their hands" also therein,
and let an occasional land-sound slip in, and land-smell, as flowers,
mown grass and the breath of the dewy night ; the creation is not
all pitched on one key. The God of dooms is the God of beauty
and delight, too — if there be Hells, and Hell-glooms, as there every-
where are, there be also Paradisaical radiancies and cries of joy ; —
and in so far as a preacher is in the love of God, continually show-
ered forth on created things, it will modulate his utterance — it will
break the flow of his monotony — his voice, always sufficiently
serious, will range the entire scale of normal voices ; until perchance
by much use and the advance of age, his vocal chords are unelastic
and unresponsive to the versatility of his mind. Then he must
look what he can't speak — and by that time his face will have be-
come facile to such uses and able to serve him a good turn.

Another way to make a sermon seem long, is analagous to the
first one ; — namely, — make your thought monotonous, and your
delivery. In my address on Imagination in Ministers, I mentioned
that, for substance, and I will refer to it again only a moment. The
thought and the delivery of a sermon may be monotonously excellent,
as easily as monotonously worthless. It is monotony in either case,
and has in it all the well-known effects of this killing quality. I por-
trayed, you may remember, a monotonous man whom I knew —
whose sermonizing had no light and shade, no perspective, no power
of the picturesque, but worked on a flat and was all foreground. Hu-
man nature cannot endure that. I would bring humor into the
9

122 YALE LECTURES.

pulpit in careful measures before I would permit it. I would let in
dialogue and great vivacity of gestures. I would diversify my
themes extremely. I would make one sermon a story ; and one a
portraiture, and one a criticism, and one a conversation, and one a
dream, and one a poem even, (if I could write poetry). Doubtless
we do not want to lower preaching from its divine nobleness ; but
pokiness lowers it pretty effectually ; — or if it cannot be said literally
to lower it, it does make it of no account, so that the question of
high or low ceases to be of much interest.

Again, a device for making short sermons long is, to have but
slow progress through your subject. I look back to my early work,
and I find several things, by which, unwittingly, I slowed myself
and made those sermons undeliverable in all after years. I had one
habit like this : — after putting forth a statement and expressing an
idea, I proceeded directly to state that thing, with some slight
meaning added, or in some minute new aspect ; I was mincing,
and microscopic ; I did not make a long, free stride and get
on — I do not know but my father helped me into that. He
was a preacher himself, and he often declared to me that the average
hearer is slow, and needs to be nursed along into a thought by a
large reiteration of it in changed form ; — not the bag-pipe exactly
(I don't think he meant that), but the bag-pipe with two or three
small-voiced attachments. Moreover, I had been under the teach-
ing and under the example of Dr. Nathaniel Taylor, and sympa-
thetically too, who was a sharp reasoner and metaphysician, and
advanced by short steps well taken, after the manner of metaphysi-
cians ; — a good thing when you are proving a point and do not
intend to have your process of argument broken at any link by the
onset of all other metaphysicians combined. But congregations
do not like that ; — they like a bold brush — never mind your small
touches — strike out your idea in mass, and go along.

Another slowness discovered by me in those first discourses ■
was a habit of showing forth all the steps by which I arrived at my
conclusion ; as though your physician, whom you had called, should
spend an hour telling you just how he reached your house, whether
on foot, wheels, or the back of a horse, and by what path, or cross-
lot cut-off. What you want is he and his medicine. And what the
people want in ministers, is their conclusions mostly, and not the
laborious rationalizing by which they stepped along to them. There
is too much of that preaching. It is a good mental exercise to

YALE LECTURES. 128

those who will bear it, but the nineteenth century is an impatient
time, and if you have anything to say, wants you to say it and let
explanations go. A third way by which I spun out, was in proving
things. Proving them. They did not need to be proved very likely,
but I wanted to prove them. " O, we admit it, we admit it all,"
the people were ready to say ; " but why do you admit it," thought
I. " I am afraid you do not know the reason of the hope you hold,
and I am going to tell you." And inasmuch as it frequently is the
case that accepted beliefs lie in the soul the most non-germinant
and useless things conceivable, because they have been accepted
traditionally and conventionally, and not as having been searched
out ; who shall say that I did not do some good by my arguings on
the truisms of Religion. On the other hand, who shall deny that
an outright affirmation simply, from a man who knows what he says,
is not generally as illuminating and as quickening to blind and dor-
mant believers, as the logicking that we practice on them at such
length.

Again, long introductions was a form of tediousness with me.
And then many preachers call their hearers to chew the cud of their
sermons over again, in extended applications at the end ; — too ex-
tended, because too repetitious of what has gone before. A subject
well wrought out is already applied, and if the minister squares
around to the work of formal applications, he must give a distinct
impression in them of substantial addition to what has already been
said. The boy who was whipped by his pious mother, and then
exhorted, begged that the exhortations might be left off. He felt
that the subject had been sufficiently applied in the whipping, and
exhortations were tedious and unedifying.

Another form of tediousness in sermons is lack of substance.
An unsubstantial discourse is always long. Some men are unsub-
stantial because they have too much facility of thought, and too
much facility, especially, of expression. If you have the gift to work
up a small-sized thought — an atom of a thing — into a voluminous
rhetoric, you are dreadfully tempted to do it. The days are short
with ministers, — the working hours in each day, — and their labors
are many, and sermons must come along at the rate of several a
week, (old or new, or both), and heavy work is not congenial to the
unsanctified parts of the ministerial heart, so, if one fair-sized
thought can be spread over four Sundays, by force of words, the
man feels as the prophet did when he had miraculously expanded

124 YALE LECTURES.

the widow's oil. It is a brilliant thing to expand ideas ; — and if you
can do it with a suitable detonation, as when gunpowder suddenly
springs into gas and increases its volume from a kernel the size of a
pin-head, to fill the whole world — why ! how can you withstand the
temptation. Probably you will not. And so, after a while, your
people will be looking around to find what makes your wonderful
sermons, half an hour long only, feel as though they had been
holding forth a week.

Extemporaneous preachers are quite exposed to thinness. But
that would lead me into a long and delicate discussion, and I dread it.

The only way to make substantial sermons is to work. Of
course you have genius, but you must work. You are to be a settled
minister I suppose ; — how settled, time will tell ; — but I can give my
word for it now, that if you stay any, anywhere, you must work.
And you must work by right methods. Only right methods are
fruitful methods. Operate your intellect according to the laws of
intellect and it will teem forever. For example, work excursively,
and you run thin at last. Work incursively ; that is being inter-
preted, penetratively, analytically, in the long-bore fashion, and you
will find the artesian reservoirs of the creation, and all congrega-
tions will rejoice in you. And I want to add, the penetrative habit
is as possible for small brains as for large ones. I do not mean that
small brains can do all that large ones can ; but they can do all that
they can ; while if they do not get into the artesian secret they will
never do half in their power.

If you speak with a slow utterance, you will make yourself long ;
— long by the church clock, but longer yet in the feeling of your
audience. When I was younger than I am now I did not think so
much of this, but having been pricked on it myself in these latter
years, since I commenced to accommodate my speaking to a high-
class gothic interior, I am sensible of the importance of the subject.
The force that slows your articulation may be gothic, or it may be
approaching age, or it may be an extra solemnity on your part, or an
intense appreciation of what you are saying, so that you want to take
time to hold on to each word until each word has passed into your
mind its whole benediction. As to that last, I find that I am caught
in it most when I am reading the Scriptures in the public service.
I am in some deep chapter of St. John, say ; and I know that
I am travelling over bottomless beds of ore. I do not know it
simply as having been told that there are great beds there, I myself

YALE LECTURES. 125

see the gleams of them, and I cannot bear to just mn along. So I
pause, and I pause, and when I do move I scarcely move, and the
people out before me in their pews who are less perceptive than I at
the moment, see no sense in my delaying and wish I would go on.
Well, on the whole, I had better go on. If I alone were involved in
the reading, I would take all necessary time, even as in steam-travel
through beautiful countries I would like to slacken the train to ten
miles an hour, or less ; but in Bible readings and sermon preachings,
as in trains, there are hundreds of others on board — some who care
little for beauty, some who cannot possibly sit more than about so
long, some who cannot concentrate their minds more than a few
minutes. Many classes indeed, together with some children, to
whom we ought to accommodate ourselves a little, it may be.

As to slowness caused by solemnity, I have noticed that often
on ceremonial occasions. I remember administrations of the
Lord's Supper where several clergymen took part ; — special occa-
sions they were, so that ordinance was impressive beyond the
common ; — and all those officiators took on, and were loaded by,
that exceptional impressiveness, and they abated their natural speed
accordingly, (real speed being unsolemn, essentially) ; but when they
all did that, and every man of them got on slower than I ever saw him
before ; and when moreover, every one of them, in my judgment,
struck a gait so deliberate that all show of vigor was lost out of it,
and the occasion seemed more likely to be languid than affirmative
and heart-filling, I sunk away into wearisomeness. And, I fancy,
that our congregations (the congregations of some of us) are
habitually afflicted in the same way. Sermons are solemn things,
and ordinances are solemn, and worship is solemn, and it is a solemn
thing to live at all, but we must not be so oppressed by it as to be
dumb, and when we do speak we must not drag behind a certain
natural and seemly briskness.

I am reminded here of that to-and-fro of Scripture reading
between the minister and the people which has come into many of
our unliturgical congregations. I believe in it, and have in it my
own church, where it is carried on heartily and unanimously ; but
I have noticed that the greater part of the congregations that prac-
tice it, are so slow in the delivery of the words that they feeble the
whole thing. They cannot keep step together well at such a pace,
and they lose the inspiration of concord and a solid march ; and
the blessed Scriptures themselves seem to tame down from their

126 YALE LECTURES.

native force under such a languid handling. Perhaps the liturgical
churches incline to the other extreme. I have felt so when I found
myself unable to take breath often enough to keep up with them,
but then the breathing of a Congregational Minister is peculiar to
himself, and ought not perhaps to be enforced on all Christendom.
That to which we are habituated is easy for us, and seems rational.
And it is curious to notice how little strange and open to criticism,
a service different from our own seems, when we have been in it for
a while and have caught its rhythm.

My next specification as to sermons made long by various
devices, is, that if your whole thought in preaching is to unfold your
subject, without any special aim at any person or thing in the con-
gregation before you, a chasm is opened between you and them,
and they look at you across that chasm, as a spectacle principally ;
an interesting one, perhaps, but not half so interesting as you would
be if you eyed them with a determined intention ; your eye roam-
ing from pew to pew, and from face to face, so that each listener,
soon or later, is likely to feel himself addressed and individually
pressed upon in a sort of thou-art-the-man urgency. If you look
long and intently into the face of a person asleep, it will wake him,
it is said, and many preachers have an eye-power that makes a man
feel as though the Judgment Day had come when they light on him ;
and I have heard ministers say that they could actually stir up a
man asleep, and clean gone away, by focusing their discourse on
him ; — not in any personalties, of course, but in a stress of inten-
tion. These ministers have no more magnetism and galvanic thrill
than you or I, but they avail themselves of the oratorical privilege
of taking aim, by voice and by eye, and silent, imperious volition.
When I began to preach I did not know this ; — and for years I did not
know it ; — and at times I even prided myself on the fact, (for it
was a fact), that I could speak to a small assembly as enthusiasti-
cally as I could to a larger one, because I drew my inspiration from
my subject and not from men, — and I got myself into a miserable
habit of not seeing the faces into which I was speaking ; so that a
person might sit ten feet in front of me a year without my knowing
he was there, or whether he was a man, a woman or a child. Now,
that is a great loss ; — a loss to me, and a loss to my hearer ; — he
might almost as well have a phonograph speaking to him. When
croakers say that preaching is dying out, and that the printing press
is going to take its place, we are accustomed to reply ; " preaching

YALE LECTURES. 127

never can die out, because it has in it what the printed page never
did, or can have ; — namely, the personal element, man dealing
with man, soul on soul, in a divine inter-wrestling, and forty-fold
mutuality," but if the preacher sees nobody, and is after nobody in
particular, nor even after the congregation at large, that boasted
personal element is gone and preaching may be ousted from its
function at last.

I have confessed my own sins pretty freely, but of course you
will not understand me to say that I take no aim. I do ; but A,
B and C would certainly feel, each one, the shock of me more, if
he more felt the seizure of my individualizing eye, and the occa-
sional jerk of my will grappled on him ; — instead of being compelled
to content himself with the general roar of my subject only. It
may be a sublime roar, but it tends to make my speech seem
longer than it is.

Close along side of this is the failure we make, when our
themes, and our way of handling them, and our diction, are faraway
from the customary thinking and the daily life of the mass. Put a
young man to school from his youth, let college have him four
years, and the professional curriculum as many, and then let him go
out to address human beings ; and what can be expected of him at
first, but more or less separateness from the people ; — who, nine
tenths of them, have had no full education, but have had the drill
of concrete labor, and the powerful school-mastering of joy and
sorrow ; — sorrows deep as the grave, and joys high as heaven. Ex-
actly how much good does it do, to take a whole Sunday morning
demonstrating to such, the freedom of the will, or the precise sub-
jective contents of a man going through this and that important
experience? — especially if you use a metaphysical and scholastic
terminology, or a theologic terminology brought down from some
eminently respectable but remote antiquity. A year ago, I delivered a
discourse against the naturalistic school of thinkers, on a certain point ;
and I wished to turn on them one of their own guns ; — the doctrine
namely, of the relativity of knowledge. So I defined that doctrine
— and defined it well ; I have looked back since to see ; well, I say ;
that is, with absolute clearness and terms that had color in them,
they not being blanched in the round and round of long metaphys-
ical use. I was much pleased with the definition. After church
I met one of the brightest women in my assembly, who had been
really edified she said, and intellectually stirred up by what I had

128 YALE LECTURES.

preached ; and I ventured to see where that definition had hit her.
" I listened to that (said she) with all my might, but when you had
finished, I felt the wish that you would begin and go right over it
again." So she was hit, and I had a victory in that she now wanted to
know what the relativity of knowledge is, (she never did before) ;
but for the present, she was just dazed. I am not quite prepared
to say I am sorry I went into that business of defining ; it seems too
bad to think of that labor as lost ; — still, it may answer to illustrate,
in a general and inexact manner, the way we educated, philosophi-
cal and bookish preachers have (and we all tend to be so)
of climbing up on to our seven-storied topics, and from that awful
height raining down our grandiloquent rhetoric on the parched
ground beneath ; — the parched ground looks up in a reverential and
stunned way, and sometimes feels as though it were being really wet
down, and then again does not know whether it be so or not, like that
confused and wondering woman whom I named.

A sermon let fall from that height and in that disguise seems long.

And I know no way to avoid such, and get close to men, but
by going among men a great deal, and learning to love them man
by man, as the redeemed of God committed to your care, and on
their way to the eventualities eternal, along a path burdensome and
full of ambushes. When a preacher comes to feel that his subjects
in the pulpit are the select packages of a divine dispensary, pro-
vided for the sick and sorrowful, and the weak, he will be the most
practical of mortals, and church-going in his congregation, will
seem to mean business every Sunday. I was greatly instructed by
a speech I delivered once to a full assembly of sailors in the city of
New York. It was the anniversary of their temperance society, and
I was the orator of the occasion. I wrote what I had to say, but
kept the manuscript in my pocket. And I humbly judged that I
had adjusted myself to the occasion, — to a good degree. They
listened to me in entire silence and with perfect respect. I presume
they were impressed. But when I closed, the presiding minister,
who knew what he was about, called up a thick-set sailor-man for a
ten minutes talk ; and then they were impressed beyond bounds,
and beyond all the proprieties of silence. I felt my superiority
even yet, in respect of brains, and culture, and the power to write
a good-looking manuscript ; so that I did not propose to exchange
with him and be he, but I would like to know for all time the
straight cut to men's minds, hearts and wills.

YALE LECTURES. 129

I think we may count on the blessed Spirit of God to assist us
in this, provided we open ourselves to him, and never consent to go
into our sermoning and our preaching without seeking him.
Preaching is not lecturing, but is differenced from that by several
marks, and by none more distinctly than by this : that if it is indeed
preaching, in preaching's full idea, it is speaking in the impulse and
the light of the Holy Ghost. I do not think that sermons of the
Holy Ghost are likely to seem long ; partly because their topics are
divinely given to us, partly because our style in them is divinely
chastened and brought near to the people whom we are inwardly
moved to try to bless ; partly because nothing makes the mind of
the preacher fruitful, versatile and unmonotonous, like the Holy
Ghost, so that we can stand the strain of years and years, minister-
ing to the same congregation without tiring them ; and partly
because, when that Spirit of God has done all these things for the
preacher, he is sure to go into the minds of the people also, to make
them interested and receptive. I gave a sermon on Effectual
Prayer, which certain clerical men declared to me was the best
argument on that subject they ever heard. Well now, there was no
argument in it. It was just a statement of my opinions, and it was
written on Saturday morning and in the play of my customary
intellect merely. But I never in my life was more authentically
moved from on high than in that sermon, and my opinions were
mine as given to me, and I spoke by authority ; I and my sermon
were instruments of the Holy Spirit ; and I knew that we were, at
the time, and what those people called a great argument was a
common-place argument made great by supernatural interfusions in
both them and it.

Every minister has these experiences. And he needs them.
Why ! if you are but a lecturer in the pulpit you are in competition
with first-class strong men who spend a life-time perfecting them-
selves in some speciality, and then consume a month (perhaps
months) in preparing a single lecture. And then, there are printed
essays, and monographs, and elaborate, powerful volumes which
discuss all conceivable subjects ; and the people who listen to you
read them ; and your lecturing they insensibly gauge by those high
standards with which they are so familiar ; and there, O man, you
are, condemned to speak at least twice a week, in an intellectual
race with these athletes. I tell you, you cannot do it. Your
genius may be great, and your industry gigantic, but you cannot do

130 YALE LECTURES.

it. You must come into the secret of small discourses made mighty
by the mighty God in them.

And made reasonably short, too. For, while God the Spirit in
a man makes him to be fertile of thoughts, and gloriously commu-
nicative, so that you might naturally say : — " He will speak for
hours," — behold ! he does not. That same Spirit that starts him,
stops him ; — precisely as in Nature — in the whole circuit of living
things — God observes bounds ; — a tree is only so high ; you can see
the top of it — there is vitality enough in it to push up a mile,
but it rounds out its idea and stops ; and an animal is so long ;
and a summer is so many months, and no more ; — and it lies in the
very idea of a living organism that it is definitely circumscribed,
and not boundless. And a sermon God-given and God-wrought
is an organism and has sensible limits. In fact, I imagine that a
whole course of lectures, which should discuss every feature of good
sermons, might be made by simply unfolding that one idea — The
Sermon a living Organism.

I will spend the few moments that now remain in giving three
rules for shortening sermons. Virtually, I have been giving rules all
along, but I have three more.

And first. One way to make a short sermon is to stop. That
is a second-grade, and mechanical way, though — and I do not think
much of it. Live things ought to stop, for the good and respectable
reason that they have reached their term ; and they ought not to
stop before that. If they do, it is a case of stunting. However, if
your sermon cannot be stopped in any other way, you must stunt it.
Strike it by lightning. Put a worm to the root of it. Any way to
get it stopped. If it is a sermon that has been carpentered together
a mechanical way of stopping is as good as any other.

But, secondly, a good way to get brevity is to choose just one
thought, and resolve that when you have opened that one, in a fair
practical statement of it, you will pull up. Do not take one of
those vast and infinitely plural thoughts, like the love of God, but
a little one — a very little one, because, the minute you begin to look
at it, it will swell. Years ago, I read that at the Massachusetts Ag-
ricultural College in Amherst, they had put an iron harness on a
squash and hitched it to a certain mechanism by which they could
tell how much the squash would lift by the expansive force of its
growth — and it lifted several thousand pounds. It was bound to
grow. So an idea, diligently considered, tends to grow and cannot

YALE LECTURES. 131

be repressed. You plant it in a pint pot and think that is enough,
but it is not. So you must be careful to get a thought little enough,
else you will have a sermon too enormous for anything. Or if you
take one of the vast thoughts, take only one aspect of it, and work
that. Aim at twenty to twenty-five minutes ; — and then, all the first
minutes, push on through your material rapidly — use it up fast — so
that when you come to the last half of your discourse you may be
sure of spinning out to your goal, in somewhere near your predeter-
mined time. Most of the half hour sermons I ever wrote were started
for about twenty minutes, and grew the other ten minutes by the irre-
sistible dilation of life. I fashioned them for the time mentioned,
by selecting an apparent mustard-seed of a topic, and then, when
it began to get big, throwing out half the things I might say on it.

This leads me to my last rule — or word of caution. Do not
think you must put in to your sermon everything that belongs to the
theme you are on, and all you can think of; — nor even all the im-
portant things. You will speak again on that subject some day.
You are a settled minister probably — which, in this nineteenth cen-
tury, is a sarcastical term, meaning a few years. But you will stay a few
years. And some day you will come up to that theme from a dif-
ferent direction, and then you will work in the material that you
discarded on that first occasion. I often keep my redundant mem- ,
oranda against such a day as that. Consider too, that your people
have no sense of loss when you incorporate in your discourse only a
part of the ore you had dug out. You have a large and full-toned
conception of what your sermon ought to be, because you have care-
fully looked into the topic, and discovered the magnitude and multi-
tude of its points ; but the only conception of the topic which your
congregation have, is that which you give them in that sermon which
seems to you so disemboweled, for brevity's sake. It is not disem-
boweled, to them. No one has any sense of loss when he does not
know that he has lost anything. I have missed hundreds of things
in life which I might have had, and it was necessary to the ideal
fullness of my life that they should come into it ; but my life seems
now about as full as I can stand, and, not having heard generally
what those things are which have escaped me, I do not pine.
Neither do your listeners pine, O preacher, for anything you left
out — not ordinarily. We torment ourselves too much at this point.

Consider also that a genuine sermon, though it be but twenty
minutes long, has in it all the essential juices of the subject which it

132 YALE LECTURES.

expounds. Tap one sugar maple, and you have the entire secret of
maple sap. You do not need to drink the whole grove dry, nor
even the one tree.

The truly divine subjects that belong in sermons, do all curi-
ously cohere, one with another, and are nourished by the same essen-
tial circulation. Let a real preacher preach on election, and his
people will have a cup from the Gospel spring. Let him preach on
Hell, and they will taste the same waters. And if that is so, much
more plainly is it true that any one theme, fragmentarily stated,
because there is not time to state it entirely, will have the authentic
taste of the whole great theme. I continually increase in my sense
of the sufficiency of brief statements in the pulpit, so that they be
direct, swift-moving, out of the warm interiors of the subject in
hand, and not from its outskirts ; and, further, contagious with the
personal energy of a man who is in his subject, and has his subject
in him, by good study of it, by the Holy Ghost, and by an experi-
ence which makes him absolutely know what he is talking about.

I am speaking, you will understand, of the preaching which we
are called to give our people, Sunday by Sunday, and year by year.
Sometimes we are called to open matters to the bottom sands, and
from shore to shore, as where St. Paul preached all night, or where
Jesus prolonged his last passover utterance till the moon, the dear
Paschal moon, was far on in the sky, and the night well spent.
When the occasion demands it, or even when our own divine irre-
pressibility demands it, we will not fear a long pull ; some may not
be willing to listen (one man fell asleep when Paul preached that
time), but others some will listen, as being able to see the move-
ment of God in us, and the glory of his message through us.

Gentlemen, to-day for the first time, I have spoken to you less
than an hour, and I am therefore a beautiful illustration of my own
subject.

EXTRA-PARISHIONAL
FAITHFULNESS.

I wish I might give to the young men present something of my
own sense of the importance to them, to the churches of which they
may be pastors, to the denomination in which they may stand, and to
the general cause of Christ, that they each one attend, faithfully and
cordially, the rather numerous convocations, conferences, associa-
tions, consociations, ministers' meetings, councils, and general coun-
cils, to which they will find themselves related, as they pass on in
their ministry. Time was when I should have been a very unsuita-
ble lecturer to you on this subject, because I did not appreciate
these extra-parishional obligations and privileges, and sinned against
them with a high hand and an outstretched arm — doing it deliber-
ately, and because my ideas about such things were wrong. But,
now, I do so plainly see that they were wrong, and have been so
ashamed of them for a good while, that I consider myself to have
great qualifications for speaking to you, and exhorting you, and giv-
ing you a right trend, here at the start of your clerical career.

Now why did I, when I started, eschew these wholesome
assemblies ? If I say, I did it because I was a fool, that would be
the truth, but not the whole truth. I was shy. I dreaded to meet
men and exchange opinions with them. Shy, I say. Shy about
everything in fact. When Dr. Fitch resigned the pastorate of Yale
College, and the next Alumni meeting was considering that notable
event, I heard one of the speakers say : — " It was once asked how in
the world a man so scandalously timid as the doctor, ever raised cour-
age to accept such a position as that ; and the reply was, because
he was too timid to reject it." Well, I understood that remark.

134 YALE LECTURES.

And, young gentlemen, perhaps I had better drop in a parenthesis
here, and tell you, out of my own experience, that the fear of man
can be considerably outgrown by ministers. What you are compelled
to do, you can do — and keep doing, and gradually men and assem-
blies are not so clothed with terrors as they used to be — that is,
provided you have a sufficiently obstinate will, and also a physique
that does not miserably give way under you when you lay a strain
on it. The legs of a certain marshal of Napoleon the Great,
always trembled on the edge of battle in the most unedifying manner^
we are told ; but he never paid any attention to them, he said.
"He gave them their own sweet way, and while they trembled he
fought." Not all legs of men will stand such treatment as that, but
most will, if they are edged along and humored a little. A friend
and relative of mine, facing his first considerable assembly, became
blind and felt his neck shortening down to his shoulders, and had
to be led off and never became an orator ; but ministers are not
out before assemblies on business of their own, they being divine
ambassadors ; and that sense of mission would keep the tiniest
boat, head on to any gale. Moreover, it is a curious fact that often
a soul, constitutionally timorous in the presence of the private man,
loses all that when those private persons are massed before him a
thousand strong to be addressed. The speaker seems to pass out
then into the grandeur of impersonal considerations, and in the
enthusiasm of them he is sublimed and fear has no hold on him.

Thus much on ministerial courage, my young and apprehen-
sive brothers.

I abjured convocations for fear's sake, I was saying. Also I
abjured clerical bodies, because I did not rightly esteem ministers.
I had somehow picked up that precious piece of misunderstanding
and practical slander, which has latterly had some special ventila-
tion in the public prints ; the notion that preachers, as a class, do
not frankly speak their minds on the great matters of doctrine and
religion, but put themselves before the public as more all-believing
persons than they really are ; declaring, oftimes, what they are
expected to declare, or think they ought to declare, rather than
exactly what they are able to see and rest in, and live for, and stake
their eternity on.

Well, beloved, I have come out of that, and I wish you would
take my word for it, that ministers are no such second-class and
time-serving men of God as such talk implies. My discovery in

YALE LECTURES. 135

regard to them is, that while they are earthern vessels, and had bet-
ter be — so long as they are ministers — even as the Eternal Son of
God, when he would serve men, took on himself their nature, and
many of its infirmities — nevertheless those earthen vessels are not
so earthern as to be good for nothing ; but are of the better sort,
decidedly. They are honest. They are frank — just as frank as
honesty requires. They are magnanimous. They are brotherly —
with each other, and with all men. They are truth-seekers and
lovers. They are intelligent and candid. They are clean in their
lives. They are gentlemanly. They are conversational and agreea-
ble. They show well in emergencies, and are able to be martyrs.
They are well-informed. They are fitted for the leaderships of all
sorts to which they are called. I will not be choked down by any
modesty in this matter. Neither in this lecture will I be choked,
nor in conventions of lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or
women, or anybody else ; — we have no need to fear any of them,
and, my brother, if ever you fall to thinking of your own demerits,
and your own insignificance, and get so shame-faced that you are
tempted to make a slack testimony for your order before a wicked
and gainsaying world, do you impute to yourself the merits of the
better members of the order, long enough to deliver a rousing tes-
timony. For the men in question deserve it, — visibly they do ;
and then, if they be looked into historically — that is, along all the
nobler lines of history, it will be found that society and govern-
ment, and all welfares, have been as much indebted to them as to
any one.

After this preliminary skirmish of mine, you are prepared, I
hope, to go on with me, while I draw out in form, some of the rea-
sons why you should be very duty-full towards church and clerical
assemblies. You will notice that I speak as a Congregational min-
ister, considerably, as I reasonably may before a body of men, the
most of whom are likely to serve in the Congregational field. The
principles, however, which I lay down, apply equally well to all
Christian communions.

First, then, observe ; if Congregationalism — as distinguished
from Independency — is to exist, it must be by denominational con-
vocations ; these are the forms and the means of corporate life and,
if they are kept up, somebody must keep them up ; and if some-
body must, why not you, A, B, and C ? It is as much your business
as it is mine. On the question whether Congregationalism ought to

136 YALE LECTURES.

exist, I will not argue. Independency is impracticable, in regard
of the great ends of Christian propagandism ; and, in the last analy-
sis, it is contrary to the Christian Spirit. When I was remarking on
my own aversion to convictions originally, I forgot to say, that I had
nursed myself along into the solitariness and repellancy of Indi-
vidualism. I thought a man's religion and his religious opinions
were a matter between himself and his God, and did not admit of
intermeddlers. I even declined church membership for a time,
being afraid that the clear lines of my own personality might get
confused, and I suffer some mergence in other people if I joined
myself to anything. You will detect the kernel of truth in my posi-
tion ; a man must maintain himself an unmistakable integer ; cohe-
rence and cohesion, and the agglutinous instinct may be carried
clear to the point of self-loss ; — and local churches may agglutinate
inordinately, and bring up in an impersonal corporeity, national,
provincial or other; and yet Individualism, pure and simple, is
indefensible abstractly, and when it is brought to the proof of
experiment, it shows itself the quintessence and first principle of
disorganization and anarchy.

We must get together, then, in many kinds of assemblies.
There must be councils, conferences, associations, synods, general
conventions, and the like. These various congresses have duties to
perform, that are indispensable to the general life. Duties to per-
form. Young men who surmise that they are right for ministers,
must be inspected unto the uttermost. Churches which surmise
that they have hit on a right minister for themselves, must be
advised ; — sometimes that they have, and sometimes that they have
not ; and sometimes that they both have and have not. Disorder-
liness must be advised. Heterodoxy must be labored with and
voted on. Great questions of morals must have a more than indi-
vidual yea or nay pronounced on them. Ecclesiastical precedents
must be made. Many things must be thrown into the mill of a
national handling, in general assemblies, in order that what is wide-
afloat in single minds may get formulated in a formulation of size
enough to be visible and ponderous ; — it is astonishing to what a
ripeness the general mind may come by the separate and scattered
gestations of large numbers of private minds ; and yet have no con-
sciousness of it until some general body meets and makes a deliver-
ance. It is like an orchard which is red-ripe, all through, but needs
a good general wind to shake it down and make all beholders see

YALE LECTURES. 137

that the day of completeness has come. By these means Individ-
ualism is Christianized into Catholicism, self-consciousness into con-
sciousness corporate, localism into universalism, bush-fighting into
regiments, brigades, and divisions, preaching alone, into a conscious
voicing of the whole church of God, creed-saying, a ripple here and
a splash there, into the sound of many waters, and the august em-
phasis of all generations.

Go to the councils then, and the meetings, and the regular con-
ventions, and whatever else may be provided for you to take a hand
in. Councils get joked in these days as self-conceited and pom-
pous futilities, but these jokers know not what they say. It does
expand a man's self-consciousness to be a councilman, and he may
even go so far as pomposity in certain cases ; but as to these bodies
being futilities, that is not so. In the Roman communion, certainly,
they are not ; and even in a communion so intensely individualis-
tic as the Congregational, councils are yet capable of making a
good deal of trouble, for those that deserve it, and much good for
those who deserve that ; — as you will find if you go to all you are
ever called to. Go to them, I say, once more. Do your duty ■ —
your denominational duty, and your inter-denominational duty, —
and your international duty, if you should ever get appointed
Christ's delegate to other lands. And your own people must let
you spread out on these. They will be wanting a council themselves
some day. And if the principle of shirking gets shed abroad among
ministers, how will councils and the rest be made up ?

My second reason for faithfulness to your corporate obligations,
is, that if you decline them, and just converge yourself upon your
parish work, and there stick year after year, it narrows you, both your
views, and your feelings. It may make you conceited as to " your
parish," "your congregation," " your people," "your pulpit,' "and
your Sunday school," or it may, on the other hand, weaken your
hopefulness and your courage, and slacken the energy of your
stroke. I judge that this localization of one's self, works in the
direction of conceit as often as any way, I thought of that while
conversing with a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, all worn out
because he did not dare leave his pulpit for a moment (he said)
lest some ministerial brother coming in there might, in a single
sermon, wipe out his months of careful labor on a class which he was
preparing for confirmation. Perhaps your first impulse on hearing
such talk as that is to admire the man's devotion. Certainly
10

138 YALE LECTURES.

that confirmation class was well followed up, and I presume they
were nourished on substantial truths ; — but one's second thought
is, that they were followed and nourished by a man so intensely
specialized as to have lost his breadth, and his bigness ; — and
always in teaching, the teacher is quite as much as his doctrine.
He was not so important to that class as he thought. Thousands of
clergymen could have handled them as well as he. He was so
much of a parish minister that he was nothing else. He had so few
outings that he misestimated his ministerial brethren. He did not
know the kind of sermons they were preaching. He mismeasured
the importance of that class of his. It was very important, but
there are such classes without number all over the world ; and there
are other congregations, all about, and while the particular must not
be undervalued, the general is surely more than the particular ; —
and no man can make any just judgment on anything, unless he is
conversant with generals. Moreover, while a home-staying, and
home-laboring minister, runs a risk of being thus made small and
full of a puffy estimate of his own services, his congregation, on
their part, may suffer in the same way. If their minister circulated
widely, in the various assemblies of his denomination, and of other
denominations, he would bring in wafts from those outlying regions ;
bits of information, movements of sympathy, intelligent judgments
of his own, founded on this wide survey of his ; — and by all this,
that particular people, while remaining sensible of themselves, would
be made sensible of the rest of the creation ; would like to hear
other ministers, and would run the risk of ruining a confirmation
class ; would consider that a religious service was not spoiled if
their minister was absent for once ; and, speaking generally, would
get a valid gauge on their own selves and their own labors, and
affairs. But their minister declines to circulate, does not feel the
need of a wide contact with Christendom through its many charac-
teristic assemblies, thinks it takes too much time to attend to these
things, and that his local duties are all he can carry ; — so, while he
is circumscribed and belittled, and at the same time is dilated in
self-importance, they run into the same infirmities.

I want to speak a word concerning the enheartenment which
one may get by an extended familiarity with Zion at large. One
Monday morning in 1872, I boarded a train bound from London to
Liverpool to take ship for home, and I found myself facing an old
man, who proved to be a clergyman and an American. Were you in

YALE LECTURES. 139

London, yesterday? said I. Yes. And where did you attend
church ? At Mr. Spurgeon's. Did you hear that sermon of his in
the morning, from the text : " He is a root out of a dry ground."
Yes. And what did you think of it? Thereupon he was so filled
with emotion that he could not reply. But his wife took it up, and
said : — We cried all the way through it. And why did you cry ?
said I. Then it came out, at last, that he had been a missionary in
Turkey all his life, and to come up now, as he had within a few
days, out of Turkish surroundings, and all the depressions thereof,
where there is not one Christian to a hundred square miles, and get
into that immense assembly with its immense unity in the Holy
Ghost, and hear them singing in a great swing like the final hallelu-
jahs of the redeemed ; and then to hear that truly wonderful dis-
course (and I think it was wonderful, and I shall never lose the
sound of it), in which, point after point, it was shown wherein
Christ was a root out of dry ground, but was also shown how this
unpromising One had made his victories, and was on his way to a
kingdom that shall fill the whole earth, — why ! it was more than
the old man's heart could endure ; — he overflowed — he took the
occasion up imaginatively, after the manner of high feeling always,
and made it signify and seem the ultimate unity of man in the
blessed Jesus, according to that grand sentence of St. Paul in his
Epistle to the Ephesians, the first chapter, and the sixteenth verse :
" That in the dispensation of the fulness of times, he might gather
together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and
which are on earth, even in Him." In the seership of that sen-
tence, the man sat and wept, while the great service went on. And
I myself have often felt a similar enlargement and a similar joy.
Even under circumstances so disadvantageous as a high service in
St. Peter's at Rome, I have been able to rise into a sort of Millen-
ial feeling. The mighty multitude, made up of all lands and all
nationalities, and all ranks, under the whole heaven ; the jubilate of
choirs reduplicated through the echoing great spaces of the cathe-
dral, and even the spectacular elements of the occasion, were woven
together into a vision, I found, of Christianity universalized and tri-
umphant, fulfilling what I read afterwards on the base-stone of the
Egyptian obelisk that had been set up in the great square in front
of the church, and surmounted by a cross, namely : — " Behold the
cross of the Lord — lo ! the Lion of the tribe of Judah has con-
quered." Tugging forever in my own parish, looking out forever

140 YALE LECTURES.

on my one comparatively little congregation, and seeing only such
minute results of labor as are possible to a single man on a single
spot, my sense of the majesty of Christianity, and its dominion,
prospectively as well as to-day, may slip away from me a little ; but
when I walk about Zion and survey her towers and catch the
uplift and hosannah of her masses, multitudes, and millions, I am
restored to the largeness that belongs to me. I have comprehen-
sion and vision. I have insight and foresight and sight all around.

It is not every day we can get into these ecumenical and vast
meetings, and have our idea of what Christendom is, and what
Christianity means thus suddenly enlarged, and made transporting ;
but you can accomplish something of the same sort by slow degrees,
in frequenting many kinds of lesser meetings. In a gathering of
the ministers of a city, on Monday morning, with an inter-mixture
of Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and about everything
you can think of, each one ready to make an argument for his spe-
cial Ism, and all ready, also, to flow into the one grand current of
undenominational thought, the occasion works beautifully to pull
you out of localism, and out of all your special rages, and make
you a sizable and round-a-bout man. I attended a May meeting of
the Quakers in New York, years ago, and came away with a
renewed sense of several things whereof my own parish might not
have reminded me in forty years. I attended every session of a
Methodist annual conference that met in my city once, and had
restored to me considerably the days of my youth, when I was
familiar with the Methodistic stride, and did not know but I was
myself foreordained to that movement all the days of my life. It
is good to take another man's gait sometimes. It advises you that
several gaits are possible, and several legitimate, and that there are
several, of which one is substantially as good as the other. A friend
of mine with me in Europe, accompanied me to the sen-ice of a
certain eccentric communion (as he would call it), and some things
done by them seemed very amusing and ridiculous to him. Well,
they were not amusing and they were not ridiculous. He was
stiff-jointed by a life- long tread-milling in Congregationalism, and
was not equal to the versatile movements of that truly beautiful and
very plausible ritual.

It does a man good even to exchange pulpits, once in a while.
He sees how Israel looks in all kinds of costumes. He manifolds
his conception of church edifices, and choirs and liturgies. He

YALE LECTURES. 141

learns how possible it is to preach in unprecedented pulpits. He
comes home a limberer and a wiser man, and walks into his work
again with a certain catholicity.

Great contact with Christians in your own body, and Chris-
tians at large, is a rich re-enforcement of your doctrinal feeling also.
The divisions of Christendom are numerous, but the concords of
Christendom are more. I do not know that they are more numeri-
cally, and I do not care. You cannot measure things by count.
Lilliput counts one, Caesar counts one and one only. The true meas-
ures are moral, and the unanimity of the Christian world on the
great momenta of faith, utterly drowns out all discords, if only you
have an ear to hear. Standing on a rocky sea coast, the shatter of
the waves might fully fill your ear ; but how light is mere shattering
compared to that one grave, and immense ocean-tone which eter-
nally fills the whole sky. Thus open your ear to the tone of the
ages, as with unvarying unanimity they speak forth the great facts
and formulations of our faith, and all lesser sounds are silenced, and
you feel yourself re-established in the mighty main things. And
the way to get your ear open is to attend' assemblies. I have often
felt, in the general meetings of the Christian body to which I
belong, that I wanted the assembled brethren to stand up every time
in some grand creed-saying, in which they could all agree ; some
creed, too, in which the general church always has agreed, so that
voices absent might be added to voices present, and the innumer-
able departed might strike in with the living — what an edification
it would be ! how we should be doctrinalized afresh ! for we are
creatures of sense, and what is spoken seems authenticated by being
spoken, especially if, in the speaking, all redeemed voices combine.

Again, be sure to frequent all legitimate meetings, for nu-
merous little reasons, such as the following : It is something, to
put your eyes on the men of celebrity, and the good men, whom
you are likely to meet there. It is a fine thing for young men to
have heroes — and for old ones, too — theological heroes — heroes of
reform — men of great and admirable learning— men of noble
eloquence — men of great endowments of magnetism. The advance
of years tends to lessen one's heroes, I suppose ; — some heroes
it quite obliterates, and others it reduces ; and some sad and
disagreeable old men confess that they have no admirations
left — poor old creatures ! I say to you, there is no need of
these wholesale disenchantments. I am old enough to know,

142 YALE LECTURES.

and I say it. I do not know how many men there are whom
I would go thousands of miles to see and hear, and feel the touch of
their vigor. I see their limitations, but I see also where they round
out towards the infinite. They represent to me the better forms of
strength, and the better forms of virtue ; — they represent to me, in
short, those great abstract truths, principles, and virtues, which are
the enthusiasm of life ; and they represent them in that way which
is most impressive to all men ; namely, as personalized, and lived
out. So, Jesus could say : — " I am the Truth and the Life ; " and
His victory lay in His incarnation of these great things. And some
other men, in their measure, and with a difference, can say the
same thing. And we like to look at those men ; it is a miserable
day for us when we do not like to. My memory is full of such
meetings, and it always gladdens me and strengthens me to recall
them.

Moreover, let me say to you, privately, it may be much practi-
cal advantage to you some day to know, and be known, by these
men and brethren whom you meet — say, in the assemblies of your
own denomination. Young men have their difficulties, in which
they need assistance and protection. They have entanglements in
their parishes, controversies and contentions against which they
cannot make head, self-sufficient and uninspired deacons (though
I am obliged to say that deacons are a maligned class — they aver-
age excellently well) ; but sometimes a monstrous one will spring up,
and then a young minister needs some old, bulky, herculean brother-
minister in whom to hide himself. Yes, often, the beginners need
help in their parishes.

Or they come into perturbations and uncertainties of thought.
Or they go so far as to adopt opinions which they suppose to be
inharmonious with the current doctrine of their sect ; and then
they grow self-conscious and unhappy. The more peculiar they
seem to themselves, the more disinclined are they to move about
freely among their brethren, and you never see them in the general
assemblies. They are afraid. They feel themselves black sheep,
and they have the touchiness of all black sheep. If any one makes
a shy at them they do not think it is humor, but a dig at their pecu-
liarities. And there is no telling into what retirement and misery
and explosiveness they may go at last. Probably it will occur to
them that they must leave their denomination, and see if they can-
not find better adjustments somewhere else ; — and they even wish

YALE LECTURES. 143

they were out of the pulpit, for good and all. I have more than once
seen men of this sort. And more often still, I have noticed young
men who were putting forth the first symptoms of this unhappy state.

Well, the remedy for this — if it has not already passed beyond
remedy— one remedy at any rate, and as good as any other,
is to mingle much in the assemblies, and rub against other men —
and to take counsel of the principal men, perhaps privately, or more
likely in public discussions, where they may be heard expressing
themselves. As likely as not you will find that you are not the
utterly eccentric person you had supposed. Other men have
thoughts as well as you, and they know the wrench of doubt, and
the daze of a man when he does not see how the conclusions
whereat he has arrived can be harmonized with the standards.

These matured and broad-shouldered men whom I am recom-
mending to you in your predicaments, have succeeded in extract-
ing from life several precious bits of wisdom. They have learned
how to manage a parish, so that now it would be a very monstrous
deacon that could unhorse them. They have learned how to
cherish numerous views of their own, without inflicting them on
their people, or on their denomination ; or striving to make them
agree with the standards or the standards with them. Standards, if
they are fit to exist, are as celebrated for their omissions as for
their affirmations — and the whole, large field of their omissions, is
left for the private thinker to expatiate in, and indulge his idiosyn-
cracies. Moreover, these mature brethren have discovered that
even the great points of Catholic doctrine, the glorious indisputa-
bles of the Christian church, may be held by the private thinker in
their substance, while he makes pretty free with their form. Now,
the substance of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus is, that He
interposed between man and God in such a way and in such travail
of soul, that all difficulties, whatever they were, by which God was
hindered, and could not pardon and save men, were utterly and
forever taken away ; — but that magnificent generosity which is
enough to melt all human hearts, has been reduced in some creeds
to a much more particularized statement (whether true or not),
which is not scripturally binding on the faith of anybody, and is to
be subscribed to, if subscribed at all, only out of respect to that
underlying great truth just mentioned. What the creed is after is
just that, and I believe in the creed because it is after that j and as
to its specific forms of conception for that infinite, its patented

144 YALE LECTURES.

abridgements of it, I will not quarrel with them, any more than I
will with its use of this or that single word in its effort to get out
what it plainly intends ; as, but for nevertheless, or, nevertheless
for but. There are various ways of getting one's liberty in this
awful world ; — and old men have found that out. There is no need
to secrete yourself within the confines of your own parish, and feel
sore and scared, and never go Anywhere, and by and by get your-
self off into some other vocation, because you are such a black
sheep. Come up to the meetings. Confer with the chief men who
have earned the right to speak by authority. Listen to their essays.
Listen to their unconsidered outgushings when they are excited, and
under excitement let out the whole truth. Ask them privately for
some history of the development of their own opinions. And
when they get through, ask them if they think it is right to hold
such a budget of views that they never mention, and hear every
man of them say yes. Young men — and it is sweet in them — con-
ceive that it is not frank and honest not to make an exposition of
your entire interior so often as you can get a chance, and especi-
ally before councils, who have come together on purpose to ravage
said interiors ; but, Brethren, all that councils, or anything else,
have a right to know about you, are those views in your circle of
views that are determinative essentially of your spirit and charac-
ter ; and, which introduced into your preaching, will be determina-
tive of the spirit and character of the people who listen to you. At
any rate, come up to the meetings. That is my refrain.

It may be, that you have gone into some off-color movement
of thought, that is really and substantially unorthodox. Well,
come up to the meetings and let us look you over. Perhaps you
are worth saving. Perhaps if you can be protected a few years,
and have your freedom, you will be able to come out where
we would all like to have you. And there are men among us who
can protect you. Our annals are pretty full of instances like that.
When a certain friend of mine, then a boy, was installed pastor of a
certain church in a city hard by, where he still is after some twenty-
four years of continuous service, certain councilmen voted against
his orthodoxy ; and the case went into the public journals ; where-
upon, an old and eminently orthodox man, pastor for a lifetime
of a neighbor-church in that city, came to his deliverance, and put
the entire weight of his venerable authority in for a bulwark around
the young man. And his unabated old age stirred itself up into a

YALE LECTURES. 145

lovely indignation on the subject. Whether my friend's solid twenty
odd years have vindicated the defence then made for him, judge
ye. But I want you to see that young men had better know the
old ones, and have the old ones know them. The above-mentioned
grizzled warrior fired up, and opened his guns, because in a pro-
tracted council he had arrived at some knowledge of the young
man ; — and perhaps his youth reminded him of his own days of
youth, and made him tender and easy to be drawn into an honest
quarrel.

So, go to the councils, to the associations, and the general asso-
ciations, and the conferences, and the church congresses, and
whatever is up. If you are worth defending, you will be defended.
And if you need straightening out before you can be defended very
much, why, the meetings of the Brethren are good for that. There
is nothing that enables one to see his own views about as they are,
more than to toss them out into assemblies, and watch the men
there battle-door them about. Opinions are valid or not, accord-
ing as they will stand battle-dooring. When I left this Seminary, I
understood the introduction of moral evil into this universe, first-
rate and perfectly. I had a way of putting the subject which I
considered iron-clad, and was willing to put into action in any com-
pany. But, pretty soon, I put it in, in a debate with a Methodist
layman, a man prone to tender-hearted views, but intelligent
withal ; and he made a single remark, which I thought and have
thought ever since made an utter ruin of my iron-clad. Men can
do such things for us. Common men can. There is not an
uneducated day-laborer in New England — so that he has native
sense — who may not be a good person to try your theology upon
and see what he says about it. You do not believe in Materialism.
Well, go and talk with the Materialists. You have rigged a pretty
boat of your own, full-sailed, full-sparred, shapely, and flag at high
mast ; now send her to sea, and let the Materialists blow on her
with all their winds ; — not by printed essays, and formal volumes
(all that you have looked into, every leaf, before you made your
boat), but by arguments, face to face, and by conversations, and
the whirl of general debate. In that free way all points are hit,
and all the lights and shades of things are brought out as they
never are in books.

Clarify your opinions then in the gatherings of your brethren.
Give them a chance to sift them for you. They are experts.

146 YALE LECTURES.

Certain ancient bones, which had been dug up years ago, went wan-
dering around the earth to have some man identify them as belonging
to this or that animal ; and no one knew them ; even Hugh Miller
could not tell ; but at last they found their prophet in Professor
Agassiz, who recognized them directly. So much for having Agassiz
to carry our bones to ; — and so much for having the sense to carry
them. Go to your wise men with your notions, my Brother. Go
to the conventions, where you can find them. Go to the councils,
where their wisdom is likely to come out.

And much acquaintance with the brethren, makes them valua-
ble to you in many other ways. When you want a new parish they
will help you ; — and how can they help you to much purpose, if
they have never had an opportunity to sample you ? When you
want formal advice on some personal matter, or some matter eccle-
siastical, they will be glad to obey your call on them, and come to
you, and put their sympathetic minds into your case. Yes, this guild
of ours is one of the best. Close-knit, manly, tender, and true, are
the ties that bind our men together, when we know each other, have
exchanged pulpits, have worked along side and man to man, have
stirred up conventions together, have gone out in the Autumn, as a
general conference, quartering ourselves for days on the unresist-
ing inhabitants, have fought each other in councils, and, in the
midst of all, have kept up the flow of our love feasts.

And speaking of love feasts, reminds me that I intended to
make a whole separate fifth head, on the kindliness engendered
among ministers by the meetings they have ; — which kindliness ,
while it is enjoyable, very, as a mere feeling, works out also into
many utilities. I have said as much, but I have some other thoughts
in my mind about it. For, instance, how personal contact leads
on to esteem and affection for those who are opposed to you theo-
logically, and who have been a little disagreeable to you on that
account, as likely as not. Or, something else has made them disa-
greeable. You have heard things about them ; — that they are
combative — that they cannot preach much — that they gush — that
they are inexact thinkers — or fanatical reformers — or voluble — or
ambitious. Many things get afloat, first and last, taking all ministers
together, and the first movement of the depraved human intellect
is to generalize upon the whole man from a single unpleasant bit
of information like that. Perhaps that single thing is all you know
about him. Some twenty or more years ago, a woman where I went

YALE LECTURES. 147

to preach refused to go to the church, because I was a Sabbath-
breaker, she said. All I did, in those days, was to take a walk
Sunday afternoons, which I must take or burst, I usually had so
much steam on. Moreover, she ought to have recollected my
numerous virtues, and she would have done it if I could have made
her acquaintance. I shall never forget the first time I saw William
Lloyd Garrison, and heard him speak. He was a much more lamb-
like man in his face than I expected to see, and more mild-voiced,
and more considerate, in fact, in what he said. I had imputed to
his person the deformity (as I thought it) of his political opinions.
I fancy that many persons were similarly surprised when they
first met in private the late Dr. Leonard Bacon, and felt the suffusion
of his geniality and his uncontentious utterance, and his humor
and sparkle. All they had known was the pound of his trip-ham-
mer movements against slavery, and other nefarious things. They
had not been told that his heaven-shaking hammerings, were made
to be the sounding and awful things they were, by the great heart
that was in him ; — a heart that did not often cry, but saved itself
for those strokes of Thor.

It is best to meet men, and size them on all sides, and take a
taste of all their qualities. Then, most likely, you cannot hate them
if you want to. The earnest theology of Father Taylor, the cele-
brated sailors' preacher in Boston (it is an old story), had led him
to locate Ralph Waldo Emerson in a future Hell ; but when he
had met him, and felt his pulse, he did not know where to put him ;
he said, Emerson's opinions kept him out of Heaven, and his
good character kept him out of Hell, and there did not seem to be
any place for him ; though it was evident that Taylor was in danger
of landing him in Heaven, notwithstanding all his Paganism,
Pantheism, and big-headed Jupiter-like dubiousness. Dr. John
Brown of Edinburgh, in his biography of his father, gives some
account of a dear old Scotch clergyman, his Uncle Ebenezer,
who was shaken from his foundations one day, a little as Father
Taylor was. In his not strong old age, he started across the
open country, on his pony, in a heavy snow storm, to fulfill an
engagement to preach. Nobody could dissuade him, and he went.
And he tumbled over at last, pony and all, and was wallowing in
his helplessness, when there happened along some rude fellows cart-
ing whiskey to the town. And they tugged him up and lifted the
pony, and put the old man on, and dusted off the snow, and ran for

148 YALE LECTURES.

a drink of the whiskey for him, which he swallowed gratefully, and
made a downright tender time over him, rough creatures and
wicked though they were. " Next presbytery day " (says Dr. Brown)
"after the ordinary business was over, Uncle Ebenezer rose up (he
seldom spoke) and said : — Moderator, I have something personal
to myself to say. I have often said that real kindness belongs only
to true Christians, but (and then he told the story of those men)
more true kindness I never experienced than from those lads. They
may have had the grace of God, I don't know ; but I never mean
again to be so positive in speaking of this matter." Well, that is
the effect of knowing people. It is easy to reason on the wavering
of Father Taylor and Uncle Ebenezer, and prove that this talk of
theirs was mere weakness, and that if meeting men leads to compro-
mising one eternal truth in that manner, we were better not to meet
them ;— and the less assemblies we have the better — assemblies, that
is, where various theologies are mixed together. Let Old School
Calvinists meet only Old School men, and New School men their
sort, and Armenians their sort, and let ministers who do not know
what they do think, have assemblies of their own and enjoy their
own confusion. That seems sensible, perhaps, but not very, to my
mind. A theology that does not include all the plain facts of the
creation, as Uncle Ebenezer's did not, had better be rolled about
on a snowy moor, and receive gifts of comfortable whiskey from
the sons of Satan ;— and a theology which does include all facts,
had better meet in convention, and council, the theologies that do
not, in order that it may learn to hold the truth in love, by being
made to love, personally, the false theologians. There is no need
to surrender anything. It never makes any impression on me, to
meet an Old School Calvinist — that I could ever see — except that,
loving him, as I am generally forced to, I take on a habit of stating
my own theology with the air of a man who has heard from the other
side, and knows that there are Old School errorists in the world.
In the North American Review some time since, Robert Ingersoll
made a deliverance on and against Christianity, which called out an
article in reply from Judge Black ; and then Ingersoll spoke again,
and then there came a word from your own Professor Fisher. And I
know of no better example of right and wrong polemics, in respect
of touchiness, dogmatism, and personal animosity, than those two
pro-Christian articles. Both of those writers show distinctly that
they have heard from the other side, to wit — from Mr. Ingersoll ; —

YALE LECTURES. 149

they both stand front-face to that man, but, O ! the difference in the
faces ! One was almost enough to make Ingersoll glad he is a
Pagan, and the other ought to make him a Christian. Not merely
is the intellectual weight of the professor's statement very great, but
there is not a flush of emotion throughout the whole which could
not be conscientiously and gladly undersigned by all Christendom ;
and Ingersoll himself could not help loving the man who took
his life so Christianly.

Now, my thought is that contrary kinds of men be thrown
together as much as may be, in order that under the persuasion of
each other's perceived good qualities, they may not sacrifice their
principles, but maintain them with a certain lenitude. There is no
more real push in a battering ram than there is in a Spring sun.
The ram would pulverize ice effectually, but so would the sun ; and
there would be so much cushion in the push of the sun, as to make
the ice almost happy to die under the pressure.

And, after all, Brethren, the whole end of Theology is love. It
seems hard to realize that that is so, but so it is. If your theology
does not make you loving, it has not Christianized you, and to that
extent is not a Christian theology. All ecclesiasticism, and all doc-
trinalizing, is in order to character, and the soul of character is love.
Preach the truth in love, and for the development of love. Go to
the assemblies of your brethren, for love's sake. In some cases
seeing a man may make you dislike him, but I do not think it
works so with ministers, as a rule. While I write this sentence, I
am trying to think of a minister whom I know well, that I really
and rather totally dislike — and I have not recalled one yet. Robert
Burns wrote an address to the Devil, which ends up with the follow-
ing bewitching touch of benevolence. Burns had spent some nine-
teen verses, giving his Majesty a plain statement of his mean opin-
ion of him, ending with this irreverent snapper :

An' now, auld Cloots I ken ye're thinkin
A certain Bardie's rantin', drinkin,
Some luckless hour will send him linkin,

To your black pit :

But, faith ! he'll turn a corner jinkin,

An' cheat you yet.

But, suddenly now, from that height of impiety the Bardie
drops to this flow of the heart :

150 YALE LECTURES.

But, fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben !
O wad ye tak a thought an' men' !
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken —

Still hae a stake —
I'm wae to think upo' yon den,

Ev'n for your sake !

Tt seems to me that we ministers had better keep going to
assemblies until we have just about that feeling towards the most
questionable of the brethren. Attack their errors, rebuke their
faults, lay on and spare not. Do not fail to see the false opinions
of ministers and other Christians, and their erroneous practices, and
the flaws and disproportions which make them imperfect in charac-
ter ; but, and at the same time, be lenient and accept them, in the
large receptivity of love, even as God, for Christ's sake, has excepted
both them and you.

PARISH INCONVENIENCES.

I shall lecture to-day on what I call Parish Inconveniences,
using a mild term in order not to frighten you too much at
first. And as there are a good many of these inconveniences to be
mentioned, I will plunge into their midst as soon as possible, and
call your attention, in the first place, to the great subject of small
salaries : — a subject on which my views have greatly changed since
I was first compelled to take an interest in it, long years ago. I do
not know but a little income seems little to me -even yet (I wish it
did not,) but my feeling about such a thing for ministers is cer-
tainly different ; and of course I want to impart to you, that dif-
ferent, and wiser, and less depressed state of mind.

When I went out into the Christian Ministry, I was not very
hilarious in regard to this whole business of the money. I had not
the least ambition to grow rich ; — I gave that up totally when I con-
sented within myself to this special Christian service, and when a
bright lady in New Haven said to me, then a theological student
there, — " I had as lief take a ticket to the poor-house as to marry a
minister," I could not deny that there was a certain show of sound-
ness in her. I expected to be poor, and was willing to be. That
did not deject me. But I had been led to expect to be worse than
merely poor. I thought I might be indecently poor. I thought
that a great many churches were willing their ministers should be
indecently poor, and miserable. I did not see why I might not
strike on just such a people as that. A young man, looking out on
life, that practical unknown, is easily impressed and needs chirking,
I found. Whereas, just at that time, certain books had come out,
in which the shady side of ministerial experience — especially the
financial side — was presented with a pre-raphaelite realism and
vigor quite appalling. Those books I read, marked, learned, and

152 YALE LECTURES.

inwardly digested, as the Liturgy says, and believed in. And I sup-
pose now that they told the truth, though they by no means rose to
the full height of a witnesses oath : — " the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth."

In addition to these books, for a comfort, I had some recol-
lection of my father's pastorates when I was a young thing and
followed His fortunes while he circulated about the country as an
itinerant Methodist. As a boy, I contemplated the ministry in its
utilitarian aspects in the main, and when my clothes were not as
expensive as I would have liked, and my spending money was
limited, and when my father had offers from well-to-do childless
women to adopt me for their own, I charged the whole thing on the
parishes that we served, and thought they were mean. I now see
that we were in less want than I thought, and that the parishes were
not mean ; but so far back as that great day when I stepped forth
from this Yale School of Divinity, those early prejudices still lin-
gered with me and assisted the melancholy books just mentioned
to get an exaggerated hold upon me.

I tell you those things, my friends, because you are where I
once was — that is, about to begin life — and may be tried by feelings
similar to mine, and I want to give you my later, and more mature
and final views on this matter, as fitted perhaps to head off any
downheartedness on your part as you survey the years to come.

Now, I shall admit at the outset, that you must not look to
make money in the Christian Ministry; — for the following plain
reasons. First, your income will not be large enough for that,
especially as you will, every man of you, see the divine beauty of
the early, but never-obsolete scripture : — "It is not good for Man to
be alone," — and proceed to be married so soon as possible! I have
often thought it would be good to have a celibate class in the ranks
of our Protestant Ministry, with a view to service in feeble parishes
— temporary celibates — but it is a plain case that we cannot have
them. So ministers cannot make money. Their wives and their
other luxuries will keep them right up to the limits of their limited
resources. Next, you will not be parsimonious enough to make
money on your moderate income — I hope. Next, you will not be
sufficiently worldly-wise. You will be piously absorbed in your
subjects, and your parochial work, and what knack for business
you may have by inheritance from thrifty and managing ancestors,
will gradually die out of you, probably — until you have only head

YALE LECTURES. 153

enough left to draw your salary and pay your debts. Of course,
once in a while there comes up a minister who defies all these
rules, and stores away some money ; — he is very saving and
watchful, and his wife does a world of hard work, and all his
weaned children are turned to immediate use, and he does
not squander anything on philanthropies — or possibly nothing can
kill out of him a natural aptitude for infallible investments, so that
his minute savings swell, as by an inherent and irresistible expansibil-
ity of their own ; but men of this stamp are rather the exception in
our profession, and most likely none of you will ever be rich ;- — un-
less you have been born so. And if you have, I am not sure that it
will be any benefit to you.

But be not alarmed ; — you will not starve. In other pursuits
men do, but somehow in ours they do not. The raft is the type of
our condition ; it is a very wet thing, but it never sinks. Ships do —
the bravest of them. You may serve most poverty-stricken parishes,
but you will never starve. I never saw the day when my father's
table was not more than sufficiently supplied. I never sat at a min-
ister's table which did not have on it more than anyone needed.
The most meagre one I ever did see — it had such humble signs
about it that I felt glad to move on and relieve my kindly host —
was the board of a man with flesh on his bones enough to bring his
weight to the substantial figure of two-hundred pounds and over ; so
that, after all, he could not have been much cramped.

If you happen to become the Minister of a people who are
decidedly indigent, they will at least be sure to keep you as well as
they keep themselves, and if they live, you can. Yes, they will try
to keep you a little better, out of that respect and love for your holy
office, which is as strong in a poor man's heart as in anybody's.
And, Brethren, it is curious how comfortable one can be on an un-
comfortable salary. I was once reduced to living on potatoes,—
and even they were carefully counted out, our supply was so small.
But I suffered no hurt, — neither did any of my party. Some of
them grumbled, but it was ridiculous. It does us good to get down
to the simplicities of life, and see exactly what human nature needs.
More than potatoes, in the long run, 1 suppose physiology would
say, but ministers always do have more than that. My first salary
was eight hundred dollars, but I was as well supplied as I am now
on six times the amount. Because I had not the wants that I now
have. And if I had been kept to eight hundred, I never should have
ii

154 YALE LECTURES.

had the wants — many of them. It would hurt me now to be
squeezed back into eight hundred. I have sprouted far and wide
since then — a sort of banyan tree — and that original pot would not
hold me ; but I could have lived without sprouting, if I had had to ;
and I presume now that some day I shall be called to lop off, and
lop off, to even less than those original dimensions. And if I am, it
is in likelihood that I shall feel like a tree that has been trimmed, or
like a man who has lost his legs. The trimmed tree looks as it did
before it pushed out those branches, but the having pushed them out
has gone into its experience permanently, and it will never feel as it
did before ; — it feels larger, and richer, and much more of a tree — and
it is a well known fact that a limbless man has a sense of limbs as
much as he ever had. A human being has a great amount of ca-
pacity of self-adjustment to changed circumstances, and that is one
of the tokens of his high rank in the creation. If he is planted in a
fat soil he blossoms, and if hung in mid-air, he has the persistency
of a cactus, and keeps green and blossoms, more or less.

The point at which an educated clergyman most longs for
money is his library. There you may be called to some real self-
denial. Possibly you would be a larger man if you could buy more
books and possibly a more useful man. That last is more doubtful,
though. Books and wide reading, often make men more heady, and
unhumble and great-gun-like in the pulpit, than is profitable to the
hearer who is more stunned than edified if guns shout too loud.
Still, I must not run down books. We do want them, and many of
us want more than we can get. It would disgust me to be confined
to the one and only full commentary that adorned my father's
library, to wit, Adam Clarke's ; — a commentary of so much less worth
than many others of to-day that I never think of looking into it.
There it stands on my shelf, six octavos, like Caesar's dust, to stop
a hole to keep the wind away, I might almost say ; — though I would
not disparage it. But I need more than such a help certainly ; and
we all do.

Well, My Brethren, however large your library, you will still be
called to much intellectual self-denial, if you are to be a thoroughly
effective Minister of Jesus Christ. You cannot spread abroad into
general culture. Much in Science you must omit. Much in Litera-
ture you must omit. Much, too, in Art. Many modern specialties
you must be ignorant of, substantially. Scattered along through the
pews in your congregation, there will be numbers of men who know

YALE LECTURES. 155

more than you do along certain lines ; lines, too, whither your
tastes run as strongly as do theirs. That is true of the broadest,
and strongest and most informed, of us, with our great libraries.
We must narrow ourselves, in order to force ; — read less than we
desire, and think less excursively than we desire. You cannot get
rivers to tide on deep, swift and heavy unless you shut them in nar-
row runways.

But that is the doom of all men. Self-denial and self-speciali-
zation, with a view to chosen ends, is the law to which the lawyer
and the physician, the merchant, mechanic, financier, teacher,
farmer, musician, engineer, and all the rest, must submit. Civiliza-
tion gets on by these distributions of labor, and these intense and
narrow concentrations. But, Brethren, I beg you to notice how
little narrow our specialization is as compared to that of some men ;
— a banker's — a tradesman's — a sea captain's — a soldier's — and
many more. First of all, our vocation means brain-work, and not
mere fingering in some craft, or brute tugging. And it means brain-
work in the exercise of all the nobler parts of the brain, the in-
tellectual parts, the affectional parts, the moral parts. I do not
think of any pursuit in which a man is more often called to put his
entire and royal self into the field. Our themes are of the largest.
The interests we handle are of the largest. The motives we wield
are large and high. The satisfactions of our office are of the sweet-
est and purest. So, we can afford to contract ourselves in our read-
ing a little, and subject ourselves to the loss of some esthetic
delights and some culture ; — to accept the fact of few costly pictures
on our walls — and few of those household decorations and furnish-
ments that are so full of art and so exquisite to the cultivated eye.

But at this point I make another turn on the money question,
and inform you that ministers do have secured to them by the work-
ings of providence a long list of real prosperities. Often they have
no money to educate their children, but the children get educated.
My father could not help me much, but that made no difference,
except to give me the discipline and delight of doing for myself.
Minister's daughters are generally considered very marriageable
girls — no catch pecuniarily, but the loveliest kind of a catch other-
wise ; and after all, wedded life does not live by bread alone. Min-
isters have a good many windfalls. What is a windfall ? It is God
doing the unexpected and surprising. If you pry into a windfall far
enough, you can explain and show it to be just what might have

156 YALE LECTURES.

been looked for ; but you had better not pry ; — let it stand as wind-
fall, and you have the good sensation of it. I had one such when
in Yale Seminary. Right out of a clear sky dropped that lightning.
When I was married I had another. It was only two hundred dol-
lars a year added to my salary, but it showed that windfalls were
possible in my case. I must not run into the particulars of my own
life too much, but I wish I might relate to you some things which
have been told me, by some of my much-straitened fellow ministers.
The Lord takes care of his own. Serve him, and he will do won-
ders for you. "The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the
whole earth to show himself strong, in behalf of them whose heart is
perfect toward him." (2 Chron. xvi, 9.)

Thy power is in the ocean deeps

And reaches to the skies;
Thine eye of mercy never sleeps,

Thy goodness never dies.

Perhaps you think I am working an optimistic vein. Gentle-
men, that is the vein to work when speaking of our calling. If we
were freebooters, or corrupters of men, or landlords grinding the
poor, there would be no optimism about it ; but we are God's am-
bassadors of salvation, and we glory in our calling and we know
that all things work together for our good. You may say to me that
my lot has been an easy one, and that therefore, it is easy for me to
indulge in these high-colored remarks ; but as high-colored remarks
as I ever heard have come from ill-conditioned men, to whom I
have said1 in amazement : — How do you live? They have told me
sometimes in detail, and have made me both to laugh, and cry
and inwardly shout ; laugh and cry at the mingled pathos and humor
of their stresses and distresses, and shout at the way they emerged
from their emergencies, and at the strong spirit of life and gladness
in their souls in despite of everything, and, in fact, because of every-
thing and all. I saw a letter from a good and true man, whose
parishes had always been noticeably undesirable ; and it was
written on chance scraps of paper of various shapes, so that
it was difficult to track him ; but he came out at the end
with this remark : — " Brother, I hope you will not look on these
small bits of paper as in any wise disrespectful to you, but rather as
one more indication of my spirit of economy, and of the ability I
have always had, to live without any visible means of support." So
you see, he was not crushed. He could laugh at his own exigencies,

YALE LECTURES. 157

and he could pray, and he could trust God. It is not best that
the worldly prizes in our profession should be remarkably glittering.
They are glittering enough ; and if they were more so, we should
have a glut of self-seeking men whom God could not use as the
vehicles of his grace. I hope now, that without sacrificing truth, I
have given you a touch of contentment in your minds, in regard to
the pecuniary side of your life as ministers.

You will remember I began to speak of Parish Infelicities ; —
I recall you to that idea, and declare unto you in the second place,
that you will strike an occasional infelicity in the form of inconve-
nient persons ; such as the disagreeable deacon who has been much
celebrated in prose and verse ; — and the family that crave an extra-
ordinary amount of attention ; — and the precise and obstinate lay
theologian out there in the congregation watching you ; and the
vehement politician who does not wish you to preach politics, as he
says, — and the contrary person of whom John B. Gough has said to
us, that when the prayer meeting prayed that he might be removed
to Heaven, he spoke up from his knees and told them he would not
go ; — and the men and women that like office and must have it : —
and the purse-proud pewholder and the penurious pewholder ; — and
the immoral man whom you have hit between the eyes by way of
discipline, and who on that account feels sore — he and all his rela-
tions— and needs floods of Christian love poured out on him, to
keep him along — that is, to keep him from making a permanent
surrender to sin and Satan in desperation, and to keep him in your
congregation, where, of course, he had better stay, and live down
his ignominy — O ! there is a good deal of human nature in Chris-
tian Congregations ; sanctified in some part, to be sure, but not
perfectly sanctified ordinarily.

My receipt for treating all these cases, I will postpone for a
little, while I mention as a third possible infelicity which will over-
take you, that your correctness as a theologian may be heavily ques-
tioned and you be thrown into some parish peril. Sometimes that
questioning starts in your parish and gets serious headway, but
as often it makes its first headway among people outside, who listen
to you only now and then and know you but fractionally ; and they
carry the disturbance into your congregation, and set them wonder-
ing whether they can trust their own ears for the soundness of
their minister. The short-cut rule for suppressing such riots is just
to be sound theologically ; — that is all. Think just as they think.

158 YALE LECTURES.

That will stop them. But that rule may seem coercive to some of
you ; so I will name certain other easements pretty soon.

Again, an unwelcome theology may not be your only unloveli-
ness. Your conscience may seem to force you into public deliver-
ances on various practical subjects in which your people have an
irritable interest. They are irritable because they are guilty of
something, or because the thing you discuss has been carried into
politics and struggled on at the polls, or because some single per-
son of their number is a conspicuous example of the particular
matter which your sermon holds up ; or because the whole denomi-
nation to which your church belongs is tumultuated on the subject
you are moved to unfold ; — it may be temperance that you are on,
and there right along your middle aisle, in a powerful row of
respectability, may sit, and sit straight up, half a dozen or more
men whose ability to purchase a seat at all in that metropolitan
position depends on the traffic in intoxicating liquors, in one way
or another ; or you may speak on divorce, because that matter is all
abroad and it seems therefore a good time so to speak ; but right
before you is some one who has been divorced and has been mar-
ried again with the apparent general consent of the community ; —
or something you say touches the choir, and next Sunday they
refuse to sing ; — or you do what a friend of mine once did, you
discharge a battery at these nefarious, cheap stories and colored
pamphlets that infest the world ; honestly thinking that perhaps, no
criminals are more plainly criminal than those wretched books ; but
you have not been long in your parish, and have not learned that
one of your oldest deacons drives a trade in that Literature ; there-
fore he feels hurt, as he ought to, and you do not feel so penitent as
he thinks you should, and there you two men are, to fight it out
according to the measure of grace given unto each of you.

Years ago we all had the subject of American Slavery for a
standing discomposure and risk ; and you young ministers can
hardly imagine what a time we full-fledged birds had over that.
Some of the ablest and best ministers in the lands were ecclesias-
tically silenced because they would not keep silent in respect of
that great sin and outrage. Some ministers were voted down,
and others were pushed on from parish to parish. I look back
to my own ministrations at that time, with amusement, amaze-
ment and admiration. I was willing to be blown into the
sky by parish convulsions on that subject, and there are numbers

YALE LECTURES. 159

of fine people still living who would have been glad to see me
go. But as a matter of fact I never went, and here I am, to tell
you, Beloved, how it is that men satisfy their consciences as
preachers and still stay on the earth not more molested than is
good for their patience and welfare.

Still harping on infelicities, I want to take a moment to refer
again to the ticklish matter of church discipline. I consider that
one of the very hardest things to get through in peace. A certain
lenity, which amounts to laxity in some cases, has come into our
practice in this regard, so that if you wish to ease yourself along
and wink at many things and keep the people all quiet, you can do
it, I suppose. But, now and then you will have the plainest kind of
a duty to perform ; and then comes the strain on your wisdom
and courage. The hard navigation of a case of church discipline,
comes of the following particulars, I have found. You yourself are
tempted to slip along from a strictly judicial feeling, into the feeling
of a prosecutor. This person now up for trial has disgraced the
Christian Religion and disgraced your church, and you cannot bear
that he should be let off with no mark of displeasure on him what-
ever ; — so you shoulder into the case in a manner that is remem-
bered against you. Again, it is difficult to bring on witnesses. You
cannot compel people to testify, and where they consent to appear,
they will go as far as they please and no farther. Again, the jury
before whom cases are brought, (I speak of Congregationalism,) are
a mass meeting of men of various ages, and perhaps women — the
poorest court conceivable in some respects.

Again, even the officers of your church, the picked men before
whom the offender is primarily brought, often know little of ecclesi-
astical law and usage, and even on the. common-sense of the case,
that range that lies outside of law and usage, you will be greatly
surprised sometimes to see how they will bewilder themselves by a
confused palaver and outgush of heart on the duty of Christian
forgiveness. My impression is that most Church Boards will dis-
charge almost any sort of criminal, if only he declares himself peni-
tent for what he has done ; unless in the person of the minister or
in some single hard-headed member, there is found a man of robust
perception, who pushes the case.

Again, after the offender is properly disciplined, it requires a
great deal more tact, and large wisdom and divine good feeling
than many ministers possess, to embrace the culprit-brother and all

1G0 YALE LECTURES.

his friends, with a heat of affection adequate to their hurt feeling.
For they will feel hurt. No matter what the man has done, they are
likely to feel injured because the church has taken him up so. In
every case that I have had to do with, that has been true. And
probably a considerable part of your church will think on the whole
that he might have been handled more gently. I wonder whether
there ever was an instance, since church members began to fall from
grace, where discipline was administered by a unanimous vote.
Charles Lamb tells of a " gentle optimist," who could never be
brought to criminate anyone, very much ; and his friends secretly
agreed to invent a most horrible instance of brutality and state it to
him, and see if they could not wake up in him some flicker of ethical
vigor ; but when they had finished, the kind creature only said —
" How eccentric ! " And that is about as far as many a church
trial can be brought along. And that is not extremely strange
when you recollect what a lackadaisical view of Christian Charity and
Forgiveness has got abroad and what great obstacles ordinarily
hinder the putting in of clear and overwhelming evidence before a
Church Court.

This subject of discipline is so many-sided that I ought not to
have introduced it all perhaps, unless I could spend an hour on its
aspects ; but I have done it, and in the few moments so spent I
fancy I have succeeded in convincing you that when you strike a
personal church case, you will be likely to feel that you have sailed
into a storm zone, where you must close reef and steer like a hero.

I hope, now, that I have not multiplied and magnified the dif-
ficulties of a minister's lot till you are weary and ready to be
alarmed. There is nothing to be alarmed about. All through my
young days, I heard the church people sing : — " Must I be carried to
the skies, on flowery beds of ease," and so on — and who does want
just that? Who, that is anybody. Remember that these difficulties
which I have massed before you, do not all come in one day ; they
are scattered along the whole length of the years, here a little and
there a little, according as you are able to bear them ; and perhaps
there are some of these trials that some ministers escape altogether.
And if you do not escape them, they will not kill you, provided you
remember to put into practice a few sentences of sense which I now
lay down. I did not invent these wisdoms ; they are just a digest of
what ministers generally find out sooner or later. And the sooner
the better.

YALE LECTURES. 161

And, first. You must preach such solid and good sermons all
along, and live such a solid and good life, that any parish storm
that comes up by and by will find it hard to upset you. I have in
mind at this moment a most laborious and lovely parish minister
with whose affairs I was conversant. He was dislodged from his
office in quite a gale, simply (as I judged,) because his sermonizing
had always been more emotional than brainy. He was affectionate.
He was spiritual. He visited his people with marked zeal and
acceptability. He served them in their sorrows as no other man
could. And they could not help loving him. And that tie of love
was a heavy anchor to windward, when that blow arose. But it
could not save him. There was a company of particularly intelli-
gent and also admirable people in his assembly, who had pined on
the diet he dealt out and had not the heart to hold on to him with
both hands, when the wind was taking him away. People are afraid
to touch a powerful man, so to speak. They are in a sort of awe
before him. It is profane to meddle with him. In that complex
thing, a powerful man, it may be questioned which is most powerful,
and most contributes to hold him firm in his parish ; his powerful
preaching, or his good pastoral work whereby people are made to love
him ; — in other words, whether it is respect for a minister, or love
for him, that principally makes permanence in his position ; but
for now, all I care to say is, that anything which binds the man and
his flock together is so much preparation against that evil and dis-
tressing day, when he and they, in some agitation, begin to pull on
the bands which bind them together. People will put up with a
great deal from some men. The Pastor has made a mistake ; he
has mismanaged a case ; he has preached an inadmissible sermon,
he has showed favoritism, he has let fall a word of personality, he
has lost the customary fine poise of his temper ; he has developed a
touch of infirmity that no one had ever thought of in connection
with him ; but they think as Henry Clay said his constituents ought
to think of him ; — that gun of ours has been an excellent one
hitherto, and has not been wont to miss fire ; so we will pick the
flint and try it again. That is the way it works. That is one of the
incidental and unsought advantages of doing one's duty with one's
might, straight along, for duty's dear sake. There seem to be
cyclones in these days, and in some parts, that can almost pull up
the foundations of the globe ; — and such a whirl as that may get
into your parish and make all moorings snap ! In that case you must

162 YALE LECTURES.

go with the wind, and land where you happen to. In some better
parish perhaps.

My second advice is ; — keep your temper — always. There is
no exception to that. You can do it. You are inflammable, but
you can do it. I have done it. I was never angry with a
parishioner yet. I have been grieved — a little — and indignant per-
haps— but no man of my congregations will say that he ever saw
me angry with him. I spend my anger on outsiders. I have
expressed my mind. I have resisted my parishioners. I have
characterized their doings with a full force of adjectives occasion-
ally. I have presided in their public meetings when they were hot
and have argued against them from the chair in a square contest of
main strength, holding back nothing for fear's sake ; we had all
passed beyond fear we were so much engaged ; — but neither in
public nor in private, have I lost my good-naturedness. When you
lose that you have lost your best strength and your best defence.

And when I say these things, I do not say them boastfully, but
only to show that any minister can maintain, I will not say his
equability, but his temper. It is a dreadful state of things if a man
must not get excited. I claim the privilege of being roiled as much
as I please, provided the roiling stops short of outward rages and of
unbrotherly feelings. It is not unbrotherly to be indignant at a
man, and call him by the names that he deserves ; — not necessarily.
You may do all that and have that man feel, in the very moment of
your roaring, that you have no malignity towards him. Keep your
temper. When you preach on some explosive public question, keep
your temper. When your soft-hearted church lets off some mis-
creant, keep your temper. When some one says that your sermon
was long, or sophistical, or dull, or that your prayer was tedious, or
that you have no oratory, or that you do not know how to read the
scriptures in the congregation ; or that you are dreadful at a funeral,
or not stylish enough in a marriage service, or not an easy conversa-
tionalist when you make calls, or that you are " seven-eighths a
magnificent man and the other eighth a hole," (as I knew a prom-
inent church member to say of his minister) — yes, young gentle-
men, I draw all these illustrations from life ; — but when these
insufferable observations are made, do you quietly pocket the
remark, and look as bland as though you had been kissed, and day
after day consider whether it be not true, that remark, or partially
true ; — there is great profit in criticism, if you only candidly hunt for

YALE LECTURES. 163

it — but be tranquil tempered, I say. " Never resent an insult,"
said a sensible old minister in my vicinity who had spent a long
life successfully in one parish ■ — he meant, that is the rule for a
minister. And he did not mean, be a milksop, either ; he was no
milksop himself, but a man of views and vigors. A man of views
and vigors, but always self-restrained, is always respected ; a man in
whose composition no downrightness can be discovered, a man of
timidity and pliability, and no possibility of noble indignation, is
never ranked so high.

This keep-your-temper-doctrine which I have been preaching
I will add to a little and say ; — treat all men in an amiable
manner ; the unlovely parishioner so well as the lovely one ;
the ungentlemanly, the bad, the one who has treated you ill, the
one who has got wrathy and left your congregation for no good
reason — no matter who he is ; bow to him on the street, bow to
him on the street when he will not bow to you, say good morning,
do his family a kindness, speak well of his excellencies ; show him
that you are not spending your short three score and ten years in
nursing antipathies and grudges. I have heard of ministers, and
known some, who, when they feel themselves wronged by somebody,
will show it in their manner habitually. It is poor business. It is
imprudent business. It makes you feel unwholesome in your mind,
and not quite sound morally. It is so much deducted from your
capacity to manage a parish.

I know right well how this idea of indiscriminate amiability
may offend some young men, who are particularly honest and frank.
They think that you ought to show that you do not feel alike towards
all people ; that it is conventionalism, in one of its meaner forms
not to ; that a minister who scatters his blandness right and left in
the fashion that I recommend has come to be professional and un-
manly, a supple manager more than a man. Let us be sincere if
we do sour some people, and make some parish losses, say these
fine-spirited youth.

Well, I myself used to feel like that. And I acted on it a little,
in some cases. I never much troubled myself about affronts to me
(I hardly feel that I ever had any,) but I did enjoy letting some
folks know that I had a small opinion of them on account of their
general character and ways. But I have changed ; — changed on
principle and changed by natural drift. I see now that there is a
large Newfoundland-dog way of treating such matters, without any

164 YALE LECTURES.

loss of self-respect, or lessening of moral perspicacity and moral
energy. I should dread to be a parish manager, a distributor of
flattery and lies and hypocritical affection, for the sake of parish
prosperity ; I should rather swing clear over into gruffness and a
disagreeable honesty — but there is a midway course that avoids both
of those extremes.

First of all it is possible to feel kindly towards all men — really
feel it, and not imitate it for professional purposes. And how shall
we feel it? In several ways. If you have a growing sense of your
own imperfections it will much modify your exasperation at the im-
perfections of others. Also, if you have a growing habit of recog-
nizing the praise-worthy traits that are apt to illuminate and beautify
the worst characters, it will tame down your spirit of criticism in a
measure. That stingy pewholder of yours, is truthful, clean in his
habits, honest in his business, and a loyal husband. That highly
combustible politician, the terror of his precinct, is generous money-
wise beyond most men. So it goes. People are mixed. There is
slag in them ; — wholesale sometimes, but there is gold in them too.

Moreover, it will assist you to be genial with all classes and
kinds, to just move upon them with spiritual intentions. Begin to
minister unto them the salvation of the Lord Jesus, and they will
become wonderfully interesting to you. You cannot hate a man
whom you are striving to bless. Just there you enter into the secret
of Christ. He was tender to all, because on a mission to all.

Still farther, it will assist you to be tranquil and kindly in the
presence- of imperfect men and women, if you put yourself habit-
ually with a heavy stress into the great themes that belong to your
vocation. I was never in a fret yet which I could not utterly
smooth out by looking steadily and long into the grandeurs of the
sky, or out upon the shoreless magnificence of the sea, or into the
sublimity of the mountains. And like those infinites are our
spiritual themes ; — vast, majestic, serene ; — and communing with
them, all small frictions end, all trivial interests are forgotten, all
mortal passion dies away.

When you get close to a man by these several devices, you
begin to have a sort of enjoyable interest, even in his faults. You
are amused by them, perhaps. They manifest themselves in ways
that are humorous to a humorous eye. A high-tempered man is
an object of seriousness and pity to be sure, but you are often
shaken by uncontrollable laughter over him, too. All large-natured

YALE LECTURES. 165

ministers — ministers of the big-dog build — have some side-shaking
stories to tell about queer people they have had in their flock, and
miserably flawed and blameworthy people ; and about disparaging-
remarks which free-spoken and ungracious souls have put forth in
regard to them, their sermons, and their services, and their well-
meant efforts to do exactly the right thing. O ! these terrible things
are not terrible, unless you let them be terrible. Just take them
right and they are of no particular account. Even at the time
they are as small as you please to make them ; and when they are
looked back upon through the mellowness of many years, they are
scarcely more objectionable than the irregular forms in a landscape ;
they melt into the picture of the dear past harmoniously enough.

I must do my whole duty, I suppose, and exhort you now,
thirdly, to keep your tongue with all diligence. I heard a much-
experienced minister say in a charge to a young one whom we
were installing ; — my brother, as you go about your parish, keep
your ears open and your mouth shut. It is as hard to hold your
tongue as it is to hold your temper. You might think that an even
tempered and amiable minister would be able to rule his tongue,
but it is not always so. High temper runs into speech, of course,
but so does geniality,

Many things grow worse by being talked up. That criticism
on your sermon wants nothing better than to have you squirm and
mention it to one and another. As the head of your parish, you
will naturally be made a confidant by many people, and when you
have been a long stretch of years in a place, you will be just rich in
information concerning almost every one about you ; and it will be
a serious strain on you sometimes, not to use your information and
set your knowledge afloat. In some conversations you will nearly
burst with your knowledge. Both parties to a controversy will come
to you by night, separately and unbeknown to each other, and load
you up with their sorrows ; and you must sit through it all with the
silence of a hypocrite ; only taking care not to be so silent as to
seem unsympathetic. It is close work and involves a great amount
of ability, though there need be no guile in it. You must be a
sphinx, and a vocal Memnon at the same time. It is easy to be
vocal ; but to be silent and vocal both, to speak words just few
enough and just numerous enough, and to have the spoken ones go
to the spot exactly, and do no hurt on the passage thereto ; that is
the problem. A rifle ball goes to the spot fast enough, but it may

166 YALE LECTURES.

kill half a dozen on the road. Let your words be numbered and
well chosen. Do not peddle hearsays. Do not have your people
feel when you meet them, that you are a man that likes to converse
on personalities. Even innocent personalities one may have too
much of. Persons are immensely interesting to consider and
remark upon, but so are subjects and principles and general
movements, if you once get in the way of them. I had rather die
than spend my life in a perpetual dribble and run-about of
personalisms. It fritters your vigor. It fires your curiosity. It
takes you away from the grandeurs and tranquilizations of legiti-
mate subjects. It injures your serviceableness. It makes you the
depot into which the talking people all about feel called to bring
their chatter. It turns a man into everything that a minister ought not
to be. Keep still. When trouble is brewing, keep still. When slan-
der is getting on to its legs, keep still. When your feelings are hurt,
keep still, till you recover from your excitement at any rate. Things
look differently through an unagitated eye. In a commotion once, I
wrote a letter ; and sent it, and wished I had not. In my later
years I had another commotion, and wrote a long letter ; but life
had rubbed a little sense into me, and I kept that letter in my
pocket against the day when I could look it over without agitation,
and without tears. I was glad I did. Less and less it seemed
necessary to send it. I was not sure it would do any hurt, but in
my doubtfulness, I leaned to reticence, and eventually it was
destroyed. Time works wonders. Wait till you can speak calmly,
and then you will not need to speak, may be. Silence is the most
massive thing conceivable, sometimes. It is strength in its very
grandeur. It is like a regiment ordered to stand still in the mid-
fury of battle. To plunge in were twice as easy. The tongue has
unsettled more ministers than small salaries ever did, or lack of
ability.

My last item of advice, I will name but not expand very much.
In your preaching you will be independent and courageous, and
have your people understand you cannot be suppressed where your
conscience is involved ; but through all this affirmative and down-
right habit of yours, this frankness of opinion, this freedom to speak
of their faults and their duties and their mistakes, they must be
made to see that, in your heart, you are an advisor and not a Pope ;
that after you have spoken forth your word, and put in your influ-
ence, they are at liberty to hold their own opinions and go their

YALE LECTURES. 167

own path ; having perfect assurance that you will not hector them,
not fall out with them because they do so. My observation is, that
churches and congregations here in New England, will receive almost
anything from an honest and sensible man, provided they are con-
tinually sure of that one concession from him. Ministers sometimes
feel so responsible for their people, that they cannot let them alone
when they think or do what they cannot approve. " I must give an
account of them before God," say these anxious men ; and they
interfere, not in the large way of counsel only, but in pestering ways ;
in sputterings, in contrivings and stratagems, and pious circumven-
tions of their people, and affectionate irritabilities — the fidgeting of
a nervous mother rather than the masculine largeness and repose of
a man who means to do his duty, and then fall back on God, and let
Him defend his own truth.

It is possible to carry great loads of loving anxiety for your fellow
men, and want them to do thus and so, tremendously, and preach
about it, and yet not let your desire carry you into pettifogging endeav-
ors, and puttering and lying awake nights, and seeming to have a con-
trary spirit, and a desire for your own way. A man in the leader-
ship and presidency of a parish, is in a position so responsible that
the longer he lives the more insufficient he feels ; but after he has
done his duty in an earnest and manly way, in any given case, the
responsibility passes over upon God, and upon that person, or that
people, to whom he has ministered, preached his sermons, re-
iterated and urged his doctrine, addressed his private entreaty,
and fairly exhibited his pastorly heart.

I have now finished my rules for getting along with parish in-
conveniences. And for your encouragement, I will say ; — I
personally know many ministers who are practical exponents of
these rules. And for your still farther encouragement, I will add,
I can point you to a large number of ministers who fail more or
less in some of the things I have mentioned, but who manage
parishes with large success nevertheless. They are weak at one or
two points ; — being too sensitive for example ; — but they are so
strong at all the other points, that when you come to add them up,
(and that is just what their parishes gradually do) ; their preaching,
their pastoring, their executive ability, their advisory weight and
skill, their felicity on special occasions, their shining qualities at a
genteel tea-party, their serviceableness in the affairs of the town, and
all the rest of their powers, faculties, attributes, and decorative

168 YALE LECTURES.

uses ._add them, I say, and get the sum of them-they are truly
m n'who, once settled in, over, and on, a congregate, can stay
There as long as a man is apt to care to stay anywhere m thrs
migratory generation.

CEREMONIAL OCCASIONS.

I shall spend an hour with you this time on the ceremonial
occasions in which ministers are so often called to officiate.

I began life myself as an extreme anti-ceremonialist, and look-
ing back for some explanation of that, I find the following things to
have been true ; — and I mention them, because some of you may
be in the same darkness and misconception in which I was, and as
I have come out of it, and know why and how, I have a conceit
that, if I am speeded, I may at least start you out of it. Speaking
in a Congregational Seminary, I should not feel free to carry you
all off into downright Ritualism, if I could ; but I do feel free to
give you some liturgical and ceremonial exhortations, it having been
unanimously agreed even by Congregational churches, that cere-
mony and order, in some kind and measure, are both necessary and
wholesome.

I think that my individualistic theorizings went a long way to
make me an enemy of ceremonies. If my personal relations to
God make the whole of religion for me, and all associational relig-
ious life is a profane intermeddling with my sacred privacies, of
course public religion and ceremonies are out of the question, for
they are associational ; they are a combination of numbers of per-
sons to do certain things together, in the same place, and at the
same time ; their being in them throughout an implication that
religion is as much a man ward thing as a Godward. When we
move in ceremonies, (I speak of religious ceremonies) we are after
three things ; we seek the benefit to ourselves of self-expression ;
we seek the benefit to ourselves of the united expression of others,
by word or act or both ; in our presence ; and we seek a benefit for
others in the same two-fold way, they expressing themselves each
one and having the good of it, and at the same time having the
12

170 YALE LECTURES.

immense good of seeing and hearing all the rest. In all this action
and interaction there is a combined movement on God, to be sure,
and a responsive movement on his part ; but what I expressly wish
to bring out is the intensely social and corporate character of all
ceremonializing. It is as completely opposed to individualism in its
absolute form, as anything can be ; and in so far as a man is indi-
vidual and insular, he must abhor ceremonies ; and even Quakerism,
with its silentness, is too ceremonious for him.

Another dissuasive from ceremonials which had much strength
with me, as it has with millions more, was the tendency of such
things to Formalism ; that instinctive make-shift of the human soul
when it would ( seem pious without being it. I thought, the more
ceremony is amplified, the more inevitably will formalism get in —
so that our only safety is to back off from the whole thing into
speechlessness, and non-expression, so far as practicable. Particu-
larly in the case of ministers, I said that ceremonies full, sonorous,
and spectacular, must be disadvantageous. They (the ministers)
stand at the head of the multitude, the major-generals of the occa-
sion, their voice leading all the voices, their pantomime leading all
the pantomimes, and they swollen with the same feeling that a rud-
der must have when, by the least motion of its own little self, the
great bulk of the great ship is made to sway. And I think even
yet that there is a considerable force of self-consciouness and strut
in this officialism, if the minister does not look out for himself. I
have felt it in the plain and modest liturgies and pomps of my own
congregation.

Another thing that condemned ceremonials for me, was their
unwieldiness when we want to move out aggressively upon the mas-
ses, the non-church goers, and the mighty multitudes and majori-
ties who have never been schooled in ceremonies, do not know
their meanings, and look upon them therefore as an elaborated
pomposity in the main.

Also I was averse to ceremonials, because I was, soul, body
and spirit, part and parcel of a democratic social order. In a state
of society where the theory is, and the feeling is, that one man is as
good as another, it is unavoidable that ceremoniousness between
man and man will decline ; manners will simplify ; obeisances, saluta-
tions and the innumerable forms of elaborate respect, will be
abridged ; — officials will be inaugurated in simple ways, and after
they are inaugurated will not be hedged about by awful observances ;

YALE LECTURES. 171

they can be approached without a half hour spent in formalities,
and they can be spoken to in ordinary respectable English and
even in slang if the visitor does not know any better, rather than in
the inflated adulation of an Oriental court ; while the costume
you wear on the august occasion, may be according to your own
fancy pretty much.

Well, in this decadence of stateliness and high-wrought gen-
tility and formalism, under the influence of the democratic idea,
the people fall out of the habit of ceremony and the relish of it,
so that even when they pass into the field of religion and approach
the Most High God, and make up rounds of worship wherein they
shall operate together in congregations and in multitudes, they dis-
incline to detail, copiousness, resonance and pomp ; and trust to a
few plain things.

If any of you, my Brethren, are cordially averse to ceremony,
I presume you have felt now, as I have passed on in the explana-
tions, that I was touching the depths of your case. Very well, how
did I get out of these depths. I think that being a minister, and
being compelled to speak and act and officiate, and go on parade
sometimes, whether I wanted to or no, (as at weddings for example),
demoralized me somewhat and made me feel that creatures of sense
may reasonably indulge in a spare amount of form. What was said
of error, may be said of ceremonies : —

Seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

And this movement of mine was assisted by the plain failure
before my eyes of individualism, when applied to life. I saw that
individualism amounts to the dissolution of society and a practi-
cal nullification of the second great commandment : — " Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself." It cannot be defended. Moreover,
I saw that all Christian bodies had consented to ceremony and were
in it ; — some of them all over, — so that the question : — " Shall we
have ceremony? " has been decided by the common sense of man-
kind ; the sanctified common sense and the unsanctified ; the only
question remaining to discuss being the quantity and the quality ot
the thing. The only Christians that undertake not to consent to
ceremony are the Quakers ; and with what success I will answer.
The two forms in which ceremony embodies itself are, words and
gestures or acts, said words and gestures being assisted to be all
they can be by our various surroundings. Our Quaker brethren have

172 YALE LECTURES.

gone in on those two points with all their might and have given us
public services without architecture and the colors of art, without
ecclesiastical costume, without music, without formal and united
acts, and often without one word spoken ; nevertheless I never felt
myself under such an incubus of ceremoniousness as in their assem-
blies. In the first place, their worship is evidently a prescribed
thing ; no such result as that worship of theirs could come of any-
thing but a conspiracy ; and the moment a service is prescribed, it
begins to take on a formal character. Let one of our Congrega-
tional churches, accustomed to worship in the unpompous old-
fashioned way, do so simple a thing as to print its order of service
and put it in the pews, thus notifying mankind that it has an order,
and does not move in pure spontaneity ; and that act is distinctly
formalizing in its influence. It originated in an increase of the
liturgical spirit in that church and it fosters that spirit. So the
Quakers. That service of theirs is carefully and rigidly fore-
ordained ; and you feel that it is fore-ordained all through you,
when you sit in it ; and you are ritualized to that extent. That, in
the first place, I say.

Next, while they repudiate vestments, they are costumed in an
almost more than fore-ordinated uniform ; — a religious uniform,
because although they wear it on all social occasions yet it is put
on from a religious impulse and for religious purposes, as much so
as the solemn robes of a nun.

Next, they are massed in their meeting-house in a certain
noticeable order, men together and women together, and dignitaries
together always ; as much ordered, thus and so, as the guests at a
state dinner with a king. And those artificial rows of human
beings work an effect on the mind of a sensitive beholder precisely
like the effect of that elaborated action which you see in ritualistic
assemblies.

And next, their silences are immensely vocal, so far as all the
ends of impression are concerned ; — and are meant to be. They
are a powerful preaching of their particular doctrine of the Inner
Light ; that, at least. I do not think of any way in which it could
be better preached than by resolutely sitting still and waiting for it.
They thus eloquently say : — God in the mind is indispensable, and
all utterance on religion without him is mere human forwardness
and very near an awful crime ; moreover, to have God in the mind
is feasible and to be looked for. That is very loud doctrine, even

YALE LECTURES. 173

if they adopt a silent form of saying it. I beg you to believe that
I do not say these things as disposed to fault that excellent body of
Christians. I am only earnest to show that non-ceremoniousness
may put itself forth in a powerfully ceremonious manner, and may
even get to itself the whole essence of formalism in a formal, com-
bined effort to put formalism down. I believe that is often done ; —
and not alone among Quakers.

Here I am liable to be asked : — Why should we desire to
increase Form, if the whole effect of Form can be secured under
usages uncomplex and bare, as in the case of Quakers. To that I
reply : — There are many truths and many feelings that cannot be
expressed by a silent sitting in premeditated rows, and other like
simplicities. Neither can we get full expression for our myriad-
minded selves, even through words, to whatever extent they are
multiplied. A great advance in expression is made when words are
joined to music and they together, carry a theme. I am not
going to say anything against the possibilities of expression and
impression that are in preaching ; but I have been made to know a
thousand times in my own experience that music can beat us all,
especially in its play on the feelings and in its power to voice the
feelings.

But in addition to words and music, we need ceremonial
actions and routines of action, in order to a really complete formu-
lation of ourselves and a full stroke on our sensibilities. The Inner
Light is profoundly worth preaching, but so are the Incarnation,
and the Cross, and the Resurrection, and Regeneration, and a score
more ; and they never get preached in their full strength and with
its own proportionate emphasis on each one, except through a cere-
monial that has variety, and amplitude and the completeness of
real art. You do not like to have me speak that word Art in con-
nection with worship, but I speak it because I know that expression
is an art, and in any case where expression is not thoroughly artistic
in the sense of thoroughly conformed to the established laws of art,
in its structure and organization, as also even in so secondary and
superficial a matter as its ornamentation, if it has any, there is a
failure as respects those great substantial uses which expression seeks
to secure.

These are some of the reasons why I have come to see some
sense in ceremony. Being a religious official I had to see some
sense in it, or leave the ministry. Being brought to see that indi-

174 YALE LECTURES.

vidualism, as I held it, was practically un-Christian, and that asso-
ciated worship is as important as private worship, there was nothing
left for me but to fall into the ceremonies by which alone associated
worship can formulate itself; especially in any complete and bal-
anced formulation. Being brought to see that the minimum of
form does not necessarily imply the minimum of Formalism, and
that ample Form does not necessarily imply a corresponding ampli-
tude of Formalism, but that we may have Formalism in its entire
spirit, its entire self-obfuscation, pride, and curse, under a ritual
whose one boast and joy is that it is not a ritual at all; being brought
to see these things demonstrated in life, and demonstrated by rea-
sonings on the motive of the case, as well as readings in the Bible,
I was not disobedient to my light, but succumbed ; and there stay.

As to the unwieldiness of an expanded ritual for purposes of
propagandism among the un-Christianized, all I have to say is that
those Christian bodies, if there be any which will not go out to the
battles of the Lord except as accoutred just so always, must suffer
the disadvantage of their own stiffness. I am not familiar with all
communions, but I have an idea that Romanism, with all its devo-
tion to externalism and precision, has generalship enough to limber
itself to the circumstances of almost any situation, so that while in
St. Peter's she will give you a first-class specimen of ritual, with all
possible accessories for the eye and the esthetic sense, she will also
on occasion strip herself of these and stand out bare in fighting
trim, absolutely unencumbered and athletic. When I was in her
queen city, Rome, Sunday after Sunday in the afternoons, I heard
her much praised orator, Father Tom Burke, address a large assem-
bly in English, on the points of controversy between Romanism
and Protestantism ; — and I recollect this admirable fact, that the
time spent in ritualizing us was not so long as a good, solid Con-
gregational long prayer. At the end of that brief prelude the priest
went into the pulpit and argued with us for an hour. That was
sense. We were not there and were not invited there to see
Romanism in the full glory of her ceremonial, but to be labored
upon by the reason, and Father Burke confined himself to the busi-
ness of the occasion. Let us have ceremony, but let us be all
things to all.

With respect to the dislike of ceremony among democratic
peoples ; while the decline of ceremony between man and man
may be admissible, on the ground that ranks are abolished and

YALE LECTURES. 175

every man is as important as his neighbor , surely it is no inconsist-
ency to magnify ceremonial, when we come to Him to whom all
earthly personages are less than nothing and vanity.

You have noticed thus far that while I have shown myself not
unfavorable to ceremony, I have not undertaken to make precise
statements as to the amount of it that we, non-liturgical people,
were well better admit. My opinion is, that there is a preparedness
in the Congregational mind (let me speak of that as being ac-
quainted with it) for a ceremonial advance in two directions ;
namely, in the quality of what ceremony we already have, and in
the quantity' of it. Better, and more of it, that is the idea. First,
better.

Under that head, I can hardly speak my whole mind without
seeming ungracious. I continually admire the liturgical success of
my clerical brethren under the difficulties of their situation. The
one gigantic difficulty is the habitual. extemporization to which they
are committed. It is required of them — that is, the ideal of Chris-
tian worship requires of them, as do also the congregations as they
advance in the graces of civilization — that they make their worship-
ful utterances and lead the people in lucid English, in orderly
English, in simple English, in solid English, in English sufficiently
copious and yet not jejune, in English that knows how to stop in
ten minutes at the most and yet that can in that time sweep the
circuit of the entire creation ; in unrepetitious English, in English
that while it is standard and beyond substantial criticism, is so far
suffused with the personality of the author, his thought and his feel-
ing, that it is fresh and relishable ; in English that recollects both
God and the congregation, but in recollecting the congregation does
not succumb and make a speech instead of a prayer ; in English that
ranges the entire assembly sympathetically and gathers up the
thoughts of many hearts and the burdens of many souls and car-
ries the whole to the Heavenly Father in a true intercession ; in an
English, in short, which no mortal ever spoke extemporaneously,
except in good moods and in good wafts of the Holy Spirit. And
even then . the moods and wafts may be so good as to carry him
along into an affluence which seems redundant and protracted to
unsympathetic sinners. The demand for the best is growing, I say.
The real best — not the artificial best. No slovenliness of utterance.
No bad grammar. No untasteful allusions. No words with over-
mundane associations clinging to them. No colloquialisms. No

176 YALE LECTURES.

free-and- easiness in the presence of the Most High. No senti-
mentalism of religious affection. No windiness of self-conscious
rhetoric. No listening to the modulations of your own voice. No
rages, as though you could not hold in your own Godly emotions.
No dreariness and soliloquizing instead of praying. No lashing
yourself up to a hypocritical animation. No personalities. No
photographic description of all the virtues of the deceased in your
prayer at funerals, and no extended recognition of all his relatives.

And while you are careful of your speech, you must be careful
how you act. I saw Mr. Spurgeon officiate at the Lord's Supper,
seated throughout and with his two legs lifted into a neighboring
chair. I did not ask him whether it was the gout that did that, or
his preliminary few words of talk on the fact that Christ's last Pass-
over was a familiar meal whereat the participants half reclined. I
do not criticise him ; but you must behave, where you are master of
ceremonies. I was at an ornate and numerous wedding in a church
where the officiating minister stood eater-cornered to the bride and
groom, instead of in absolute face-to-face. He should have been
more ceremonious. Perhaps he did not like the very considerable
show before him and took that way to say so. Perhaps he had
been wont to assume irregular attitudes in his pulpit, by way of get-
ting himself into liberty. Perhaps he did not care how he stood,
and having happened to strike that sidelong position at the begin-
ning, kept it ; a little thing. But we had better care.

I was told of a Congregational minister who would place his
hat on the communion table always when he passed into the pulpit,
and of a remote deacon (a Baptist he happened to be) who was
seen to bring the bread of communion to the church in his pocket
handkerchief and cut it with his jack-knife ; and I have officiated
in a few churches where, when I said let us pray, to my amaze-
ment almost no one bowed, so little sense of ceremony had the
Christians there ; all of which cases and forty more I would men-
tion as strong illustrations of what unceremoniousness or lack of
the ceremonial feeling may lead to. The gravity of these misde-
meanors lies right there, in their lack of ceremonial feeling. The
minister who liked to have his hat stand on the consecrated table
and who was driven out of his parish, at last, in a quarrel that
started in that persistent act of his, was not a sacramentalist, you
may be sure ; he did not believe in Formalism but in a spiritual
religion. What is a table ? — so much wood fashioned into a certain

YALE LECTURES. 177

shape by a carpenter ; — and what are bread and wine and why
should there be any particular parade over them ? What they sig-
nify is important, but they are simply bread and wine, and no act
of any official can make them more than that. So ran his mind
doubtless, and any act of minor irreverence which he committed,
was a growth from his unceremonialism. Not every unceremonial-
ist will violate decorum and come short of the full ideal in his
ceremonial ministrations, in really gross ways ; but in lesser ways
they all are apt to fail. Many men have not the ceremonial instinct
in them strong enough to really get into the meaning of a service,
— and if they are not thus in the service they are sure to blunder
in conducting it. Take prayer. Prayer has in it certain essential
elements. It is made up of confession, intercession, and kindred
ideas, and the minister knowing that, has a perpetual guide in his
public outpourings ; and while in any given prayer he may press
confession, or thanksgiving, or some other one part, more than he
does the other parts ; take him year by year, he is sure not to vio-
late the proportions of things and lead his people in the line of a
one-sided culture. He knows what prayer is, constituently, and
thus his knowledge of the ideal is his constant safeguard.

Or take a whole service, in its many particulars. Those par-
ticulars are to be thrown in together in some sort of order, but why
in one order more than another ? Why should the sermon come
here, and not there ? If there are three or four prayers in the ser-
vice, how should they differ from each other? Should they differ
at all ? Should a Christian service move towards a climax, like that
supreme and awful moment in the Roman mass when the Host is
elevated ? Is there any natural crisis in our communion service, or
any gradation of interest whatsoever — or shall we strike the major
chord of the occasion, and strike it with all our might, when we
first open our lips, and spend the rest of the hour in just a tiresome
reiteration of that main stroke ?

So in a wedding. What is a wedding? We stand up and
some transaction is to be gone through with. What we are after is
plain enough. We intend to make that man before us, and that
woman, one for life. But that end is to be made sure by a certain
complex formality ; quite complex, if it be looked into enough.
What are those complexities — exactly ? A prayer is to come in,
one or more, probably. Well, how much of possible prayer shall be
let into that prayer? Shall you spread abroad upon the general

178 YALE LECTURES.

themes of the Christian Salvation? Some officiators seem to feel
that all the great topics they may omit, are thereby dishonored. So
they aim always to at least allude to those momenta, no matter what
the occasion nor how specifically limited. And that is the reason
that prayers on express occasions are often so enormously spun out.

I once saw a minister baptize a child ; and what did he do ?
Do? As near nothing as possible. I suppose he baptized it,
because he sprinkled the little head with water and repeated the
customary Triune sentence. And he did offer a prayer one minute
in length. But he spoke the formula and he spoke the prayer in
a tone that had no atmosphere about it, it was as bare of sugges-
tiveness and magnetism as the human voice could be when recit-
ing a table of statistics. I say, that minister had not studied the
significance of infant baptism and gone into the subject so that he
could see it from the inside, the vast inside. If he had, he would
have swelled a little and vibrated ; and not merely would he have
personally dilated, but he would have been inclined to swell his
ceremony most likely, by certain quite feasible additions. Suppos-
ing he had called on his choir to chant : — " Suffer little children to
come unto me and forbid them not ; " or supposing he had himself
read that passage. Supposing he had said a few words to the
parents. Supposing he had expanded his curt prayer to include
the undeniable items and ground facts of child-baptism. Supposing
he had Romanized the occasion to the extent of half a dozen inno-
cent little particulars which I might name, winding up with a suita-
ble shout from the choir — yes a shout : " Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost !" For what in all life more
deserves to be shouted over, than such a scene as that, with its
unutterable, tender and glorious implications.

What I am insisting on all along here is, that ministers need
to perceive the real contents of a service or ceremony before they
can be trusted to conduct it. Except as they grasp the rationale
of it, they are likely to mar it, any minute. They put in imperti-
nences, or leave out pertinences, or shackle along under the law of
haphazard, or their movement is a hitchetty-hitch when it should
be flowing. How much there is in that last ! A service often will
have pauses in it and misjoints that amount to breaks and jolts
and are to you like riding over a rough road ; — the clergyman and
his choir do not lap on to each other perfectly j — he does a thing,
and then they do something, and then he does something else, and

YALE LECTURES. 179

the transitions from thing to thing are jerky ; whereas they ought
to be like the silent flow of curves. Or the minister and the peo-
ple, take up the Psalter responsively and the two do not seem to be
in the same key of feeling ; they operate independently of each
other ; he and they responding should make a melodious oscilla-
tion, whereas it is crank-work they are in, more nearly — and he is
responsible for it ; — for if he really understood his service and had
a good warm ceremonial consciousness and enjoyment of cere-
mony, a delight in seeing it move according to its own instinct (for,
evermore, ceremony because it is ceremony, likes to move off
beautifully and impressively), then these infelicities in his service
would not appear, he would get himself and his choir settled to-
gether in a close co-ordination, and he would pull his people out of
their mechanicalism by the inspiration of his voice and the elan of
his leadership.

Our non-liturgical churches more and more demand these
gifts in ministers — I say again. They want their traditional forms
made the most of. They want them to be operated in a cultivated
manner. It is as easy to save souls in the use of good English, as
bungling English ; in the use of good taste as coarse taste, in the
enjoyment of an ordered and commanding ritual as in the enjoy-
ment of a ritual whose pride it is to be no ritual, but spontaneity
and lawlessness.

If there is among us this desire that our inheritance of Forms
be used in the best manner, it is to be looked for also that our peo-
ple will tolerate some addition to our old forms. I believe they
will. They are doing it in many churches. They are ready to
make a great deal more of music than the Fathers did. They see,
as they were not used to, that music is a substantial element in
worship, and not a mere decoration and a dangerous one. The
old plain hymn tune that anybody can sing is good, and countless
souls have been helped on by their privilege in that plain work ; but
music that nobody can sing save a trained vocalist, may also be
good — first-rate — and if the choir and their minister can start a
back-and-forth between them, wherein some godly theme shall be
tossed to and fro in a manner to make it shine and show all its
phases, that also is first-rate and fascinating ; — and if the congrega-
tion please to make a unison movement on some creed that they
like, or on the Lord's Prayer, that is good ; — and if they enjoy
handling the scriptures responsively, there is no hurt in that ; — and

180 YALE LECTURES.

if they want to flush the ceremony of the Holy Supper with some
new colors and extend its particulars till they fill the whole time of
the Sunday morning, as feeling that a rite so central and so stocked
with holy and tender meanings, and so full of grace for sinful men,
will bear a whole morning put upon it ; very well, let them expand ;
there is nothing uncongregational in that. And if they abjure bar-
ren baptisms, both infant and adult ; — and if in this advance of
ceremony in ordinary worship their extraordinary occasions begin
to advance ; their weddings, their funerals, their dedications, their
anniversaries, their days of Easter and Christmas and the like ; it is
no wonder and who can prove there is any disadvantage in it ? I
select these illustrations from what I have seen among our people
in these latter years. I was at a communion service recently in
one of our own churches, which went on in this manner : There
were various exercises of a general nature, which consumed more
than half an hour. They were general, as not taking the assembly
into the very heart and full stress of the Supper; and yet they
artfully and sweetly preluded the Supper. Then the minister
descended to the table and read that rich passage in Isaiah : — " He
was despised and rejected of men," the choir chanting the alter-
nate sentences in a quiet minor movement ; — which minor move-
ment rose into something more joyful as the minister led on into
sentences of invitation : — " Come unto me all ye that labor and are*
heavy laden," and the like. Then a short address was read from
the Communion office of a certain branch of the Christian church,
also the history of the institution of the Supper from the same
Office. Then an extemporaneous prayer was offered, not two min-
utes long ; — a prayer of consecration strictly. It could be thus
brief because it simply asked God to turn those natural elements,
there offered to him, to a divine use. Then the bread was broken
and distributed in silence ; and after that, while the minister filled
the cup, the choir chanted in a subdued and refined passage : "O,
the sweet wonders of that Cross, where my Redeemer loved and
died." The cup was passed, and then the minister moved forth
into a large and free range of prayer, through every word of which
though, you could hear, now near and now afar off, the tone of
Christ's mediatorial passion. There was a considerable mention of
persons and classes, and among the rest an express commendation
of the departed, made express by a preliminary noticeable pause, a
dropping of the voice, and a use of the beautiful collect for All

YALE LECTURES. 181

Saints' Day in the Protestant Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.
Then all stood up and chanted together in a full, unanimous out-
pouring, the good words of the Gloria in Excelsis ; — " Glory be to
God on high, and on earth, peace, good will towards men." And
the service closed with the benediction.

Now let alone the exact philosophy of that Order, and even
admit if you want to, that it was untruly organized here or there,
you can see in it a tendency towards ritual liturgical touches, coy
dallyings with Form, longings to get the Supper out into a generous
statement ; — and you can see, I submit, how practicable, harmless
and serviceable, well-managed dallyings may be. And this kind
of thing is going on all about, and is permitted to go on and will
be ; and you, young gentlemen, are going out into this world to
favor it, or to oppose it. My hope is that you will favor it, and
direct it and make it reasonable.

I have indulged myself in two lectures to you on Imagination
in ministers, as theologians and as sermonizers — I hope you will not
feel totally worn out with that word, if I gratify myself a little once
more, and conclude this hour with the thought that no man can
manage ceremony as it deserves to be managed, except as he enters
into it imaginatively.

Take a wedding. The atmosphere of the occasion requires
some suffusiveness and glow on the part of the minister ; and mag-
nanimity— magnus, animus — a mind sized up to the height of the
hour. Well, how shall he be sized up, that poor, limited mortal?
In one way only ; — by a solar vision of the tremendous contents
of a wedding. The flowers and the music and the gorgeous
costumes, and the showy bridal procession, and the manifold
pulsation, are a brilliant notice served on him that the occasion
has contents ; but it is a notice addressed to his imagination, chiefly.
It is an occasion of delight, of anticipation, of memory, too, of
uncertainty, of solemn and tender certainty ; the whole preceding
life of the parties concerned is in it and their whole coming life
and their eternity ; there is in it their youthful view of the act and
also the parental view, also the rather numerous views of the emo-
tional spectators manifested in nameless out-bubblings, great and
small ; — it is a time of delights and it is a time of tears ; — and a
clergyman who stands in front of all this, without the faculty to
read these glittering signs and signals hung out, without the faculty
to enter realistically into the feelings of the parties and all parties,

182 YALE LECTURES.

and create the occasion from the interior, is a sad piece of insuffi-
ciency. He may make some observations, he may proceed to invent
a prayer produced from the depths of his own unperceiving mind, a
prayer born of hearsay as to what it probably ought to be at such a
time ; or he may assist himself by a printed ceremony which he
reads ; but all he does fails to rhyme with the surroundings \ — he is
outside of the surroundings, and they are outside of him ; — he is
Mr. Gradgrind consciously discharging a function, but this specta-
cle has no Gradgrind element in it ; his tone as he reads that
printed page is literal and colorless, and the liturgic page therefore
is outraged — what are those old offices in the books, in reality?
printer's ink and white paper spread out ? forms of far-away hear-
say? is that the whole account? No. In these carefully preserved
and dear forms, we have, first, a pretty entire condensation and
practical digest of the main realities of the several occasions which
they profess to voice ; and besides that, a sound of foregone ages,
a mighty murmur of assemblies back and back, tones of the living,
tones of the dead, holy offices are they verily, most plural, plenary,
mystical and immeasurable, and the voice of the clergyman who
officiates in them must in some measure show this plenitude of
things, else they are robbed, and a wedding or a funeral, or any-
thing else, that tries to get itself spoken forth through them is
defeated and comes forth in insufferable abridgements, mutilations,
and unvoluminous and unrotund pretenses of utterance. So have I
myself heard these forms dishonored by individual clergymen,
even in liturgical churches ; — and, parallel to this, I have heard
extemporized forms made to labor in the same disability ; the fun-
damental infirmity in the whole business being that the clergyman
could not be a bit inflamed in his imagination.

It might seem that an occasion so sombre as a funeral, does not
give much range for this bright faculty, these visions, and these crea-
tive flights. Imagination is not a bright faculty, any more than
memory is, or reason, or conscience. They are all bright or dark,
according to the ranges in which they happen to be called to fly.
See Dante, see Milton, with a gravity deep as the grave, when treat-
ing grave things. See all great poets when they address themselves
to that thing of glooms and gleams, human life. The truth is, Imag-
ination is essentially serious and, in her utmost blithesomeness, there
is never a touch of levity. A funeral has its imaginative tokens, its
symbols and vocal signs, its various externals very stimulating to a

YALE LECTURES. 183

perceiving and responsive person ; and it were long to tell (too long)
into what realms of vastness and shadow these externals lead back ;
— but quite as much into realms of illumination is he led back who
has the faculty to be led, when standing by the dead and among
the sorrowful ; and an unimaginative mind proclaims itself by an
excessive and monotonous lugubriousness in these scenes of lam-
entation, as often as in any other way. A funeral occasion has in
it certain elements, or contents, mixed contents, as I have said ;
and the secret of ceremonial fulness, propriety, flow, and satisfying
completeness all around, is just to get at, grasp, and master, those
elements. In full possession of those data, in conscious and
emotional possession of them, you are released from the bondage of
fear, fear of man, fear that you will hurt some bleeding heart, fear
that you will make some infelicitous allusion, fear that some word
will fall from you that is not in absolute taste, fear that you will
express yourself more joyfully than you ought, in view of the fact
that several persons just about you are not joyful at all ; — and when
you come to read your suitable Scriptures, you interpret them in
your reading according to their greatness ; by your cadence, your
in and out of inflection, the tranquil warmth and fulness of your
tone, or perchance by your march of energy — by all those subtle
tokens whereby the human mind declares its thoughts and emo-
tions, with their innumerable shadings and vicissitudes.

What I have said of weddings and funerals, applies to all cere-
monies. Their true impressiveness is violated if you do not use
them in an ideal way. The Protestant Episcopal service begins : —
" Dearly beloved " — what ! all those undeveloped and miserably
flawed and often personally disagreeable saints out there in the
assembly, dearly beloved ! How can the man say that ! Some of
them are dearly beloved, easily enough. Anybody can see that.
But the rest of them, scattered about ! How can he ?

That is good reasoning, is it not? I used to deal with that
affectionate expression in that way, and many do. But now I can
say ; — dearly beloved, to all church people and to all mankind, and
it does not wrench my sincere conscience, at all. I like to say it.
When I say, dearly beloved, I address the Church ideal — I speak to
those imperfect people as potentially and prophetically perfect, and
perfectly lovable, by the inworking, sure grace of God. I imagi-
natively impute to them the excellence of their coming better day.
I see them in Christ Jesus just as their God does. I address Him

184 YALE LECTURES.

in them. I do it not by a sophistication of my own faculties.
Imputation is not sophistication, but a four-square reality, a reality
of the imagination, a valid, instinctive, and inevitable movement of
feeling.

And Christian worship is full of these imaginings ; — these
glorious and glorifying imaginings. All men are dearly beloved on
the same principle. Jesus bore them all in his own body on the
tree, and they are redeemed, — and, seeing them as redeemed, I can-
not avoid a warmth towards them. It is his warmth reproduced in
me and mine is as valid and rational as his. Jesus loves them with
a love of pity because they are so imperfect — that is so — but he
loves them with a love of admiration also, looking forward to the
beauty of holiness to which they may come, by force of redemp-
tion and redeeming grace. I might show you this same instinctive
play of ideality, here and there, through the whole liturgy. The
service corruscates with it. And it is the one thing that sustains
ceremonial, and makes it other than a hollow thing. When Richard
Cobden died, the Earl of Beaconsfield, in the English House of
Commons, delivered a memorial eulogy on him — which I read with
admiration. It was only a few minutes long, but it rose to the
occasion as no other speech on Cobden then and there did. John
Bright tried, but his grief broke him down. Beaconsfield saw Cob-
den in his whole magnitude and in his whole remarkable quality,
and he saw Cobden's industrious, manly, and fruitful life ; he saw
mourning England ; he saw the great, sad, irreparable vacancy in
the world made by that death ; and in masterly vision and compre-
hension, of all the several realities of the occasion, he spoke ; and
the utterance was adequate and memorable.

There are many things that we call occasions. The assembly
in our National House of Representatives, in memory of President
Garfield, when Mr. Blaine spoke so well, was one. When Wash-
ington bade Congress farewell and surrendered his sword, there was
another. When Luther met the Diet at Worms, when England tried
Warren Hastings, when Lincoln spoke on the field of Gettysburg,
when Chalmers and his friends left the General Assembly of Scot-
land, when Frederick Robertson looked down from the gallery o
the theatre at Oxford and saw William Wordsworth come in to
receive an honorary degree in a tumult of the multitude that almost
shook the Island : these were occasions, and all of us are likely to
be overtaken by such, and possibly pushed into the forefront of

YALE LECTURES. 185

them, as their orator or their master of ceremonies. And what I
say is, that some men are good for an occasion, and some are not ;
— those that are being made so (other things being equal), by
their large-minded, high-minded, fine-minded, hundred-eyed, intui-
tive, ideal, imaginative comprehension of the exact facts of the
moment. And religious ceremonies are no otherwise than secular
ceremonies, in this regard. A minister at the sacred table needs
just Beaconsfield's ability to enter into the situation. Some men
will dedicate a church in a manner to change your feeling towards
that building forever ; — or they will excommunicate a church mem-
ber with a similar impressive ceremoniousness — or they will receive
a deputation or address an outgoing regiment in the name of God ;
or ordain, a deacon ; or consecrate a field of graves, or welcome a
world's Evangelical Alliance, or voice the good-by of a great con-
gregation looking for the last time on some trans-Atlantic visitor —
as when Bishop Simpson, in the name of American Methodism
in New York assembled, poured out a valedictory on Dean Stanley
— it does not make much difference what they are called to (these
ceremonial men) ; they know how to distil into their speech the
entire spirit of the hour, with its multiplied circumstances ; — they
may be very simple, they may be robed in no official dress, whether
lawn, powdered wig, cocked hat, or priestly stole, they may read
out of no book, but out of their mind only ; they may eschew
sounding titles and all pomps of conventionality. Nevertheless
they have great effect on all witnesses, as having visibly gathered up
into their minds whatever goes to make the occasion ; — gathered it
up for their own enlargement at the moment and their aggrandize-
ment of feeling, and for the ennoblement of their diction.

Great is this gift in the house of God. Happy is the man who
always sees and feels the import of a Christian service. Blessed
is he who cannot be staled by routine ; — who feels the pathos of his
last baptism as much as he felt the pathos of his first — and more —
who never goes to a burial but the whole burden of it and the
whole consolation are on him ; who officiates at the Lord's Supper
for the ten hundredth time with the tides of Calvary in undiminished
flow about him ; who lifts all ceremony into the ideal — who takes
whatsoever of noble architecture, or noble music, or pictorial
beauty, may happen to surround him in his service, and weaves it
into the texture of his feeling, as harmonious with his soul's holiest
experiences and indeed serviceable thereto ; while he moves before
13

186 YALE LECTURES.

his people, and with his people, in the endless rounds of his office ;
simulating in little and so far as he may that other and perfect
worship, into which all our ceremonies shall merge at last.

THE RIGHT CONDUCT OF
PUBLIC WORSHIP.

My Brethren, I am here to-day to address you on a theme
which you have heard discussed before, with more or less fulness, I
suppose. Nevertheless, I speak right on, as knowing that the multi-
plication of witnesses on any given point of truth may be a service-
able thing, especially if the witnesses have had a good deal of
experience of that whereof they affirm, and out of their experience
have managed to thoroughly make up their minds.

You will observe as I pass forward, that I understand myself to
be addressing a body of young men, the larger number of whom by
far are expecting to take service in non-liturgical churches, churches
of the sort with which I myself have been connected all my days ;
though let me say, I shall distinctly avoid any special comparison
between the worship of our churches and that of the more liturgical
and ritualistic bodies. I have almost any amount of fellowship with
them and could discuss their ways with entire candor and geniality,
I fancy ; however, I do not feel myself called to that on this
occasion.

When we speak of Public Worship, we mean often the entire
service of the Sanctuary ; but I shall use the word a little more
strictly to-day, and shall exclude the sermon, as not in exact defini-
tion, worship. The sermon is a subject by itself, and a large one
too. And first, let me consider the prayers, of which in our usage,
there are three ; — the invocation, the central and main prayer (often
described with fearful truth, as the long prayer,) and the closing one.
And concerning these three, I remark to begin with : That they
should be kept distinct — absolutely so, as a rule — in the minister's

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190 YALE LECTURES.

interior and central Christianity, so that we might be in a process of
real preparation for the feast ; then two fundamental things would
have been effectually secured. First, that underflowing unity which
is so precious in any service, and which he was after so earnestly ;
and secondly, that unwasted vigor, that full and fresh play of faculty,
on the part of the congregation, which makes the Lord's Supper a
heart-filling and strengthening observance.

Perhaps some of you, My Brethren, will doubt my statement
that unity in a service is secured by preamblings that do not come
right to the main point. Well, look at the great Historical Liturgies
and see how they are constructed. This notion of so many that the
sermon is the great feature of the hour, and that all things before and
after must chime about that, and from that get their color and tone,
is not provided for in the Liturgies ■ for they move on in their
diverse exercises, in a free, multifold and unhindered way, as though
real acts of worship, though they be of a general nature, were a good
and sufficient preparation of the heart for listening to any sort of
sermon that deserves to be preached. Take the Prayer Book of the
Protestant Episcopal Church and observe how that undertakes to
get its congregations on to the Lord's Supper. Why, during the
first hour, more or less, no one who was not informed beforehand,
would surmise that the supper was coming at all ; — and then, when
it does come, the first stroke of the ritual is as far off as the reading
of the ten commandments ; then comes a prayer, also far off; then
the collect for the day, which may have a special flavor of Christ's
Sacrifice or may not, just as it happens ; then the Epistle and the
Gospel for the day, (for the day you notice, and not for the sacra-
mental occasion ;) then a Creed is read, a Creed suitable to any
service of course ; then, after a little, a most general prayer for
the Christian church is offered ; — and finally, after all this, notes
from the Holy table begin to break in. Now I do not stand
here to eulogize these details and pronounce them perfect ; but
only to put forth the observation, that the great liturgical
bodies of Christendom have practically expressed themselves to
this effect ; that, in order to have all the specific acts of a
Christian service proceed upon a fundamental tone, and in that
tone have their perfect unity, and therefore their utmost impression,
it is not necessary that they should be so exceedingly particularized
as my friend who led us in the Communion service that day particu-
larized. And I have no doubt that this great consenting judgment is

YALE LECTURES. 191

right, and that any practice contrary to that judgment is injurious.

I may seem to you, to be spending a good deal of time on a
minor point, just here ; but if I could run the subject out into all its
relations, I might make it appear less minor than you think. If we
submit ourselves to the perpetual drill of a routine which is unphil-
osophically organized, we may save our souls, to be sure ; but we
shall be insensibly cheated out of some benefits which we might just
as well have. Indeed I think there are forms of piety in the world
partially disagreeable and unprofitable, which came to be so as de-
veloped under this theory of concentration and particularization,
whereon I have been remarking. Give us a broad, diversified
rational service ; and not too much music on one string for the sake
of impression. My remark sometime ago, that the three prayers in
our service should be kept distinct, led me to speak of weariness of
mind under them when they are all run together pretty much, and
cover the same ground ; and from that I was induced to spend a
moment on the weariness and lack of impression of a service, which
in its endeavor for unity makes its every act, beginning with the
invocation, sound alike.

And, now, still confining myself to the prayers, I would like to
consider the " long prayer," and throw out some hints in regard to
public prayer in general.

And first, while you keep on calling the long prayer " long " if
you want to, do you be very watchful that it never deserves that
sonorous adjective. Soon after I commenced ministerial service, I
was told of a neighboring brother who prayed fifteen, twenty and
twenty-five minutes, almost any Sunday, and had been known to
go as high as thirty-five, on a sufficiently august occasion. I, in my
inexperience, lifted up my hands in amazement. I could not see
what he could have to say to keep him so long, or how he ventured
to call the congregation to an effort on their own part so extended.
But in less than four years I was wiser ; and found that I, myself,
was almost equally affluent, and was being timed by brethren who
were not so devout but that they could look at their watches ; and
not so awe-struck before the minister but that they could tell him
of it. So I commenced to reform, supposing that all I had to do
was to say the word to myself and the thing was done, but, behold !
the force of habit, and the force, too, of a deep interest, intellectual
and other, in the mighty themes of prayer, and the mighty blessings
which prayer goes out to seek ; I did not much reform. Good reso-

192 YALE LECTURES.

lutions availed little. The moment I closed my eyes and began,
time was cheap. However much it might be worth thinking of, as
a matter of fact I did not think of it, or at least not enough to
frighten myself and stop. Then I undertook praying by the watch,
putting it at my side, looking at it as I commenced, and looking at
it again as I closed ; but in spite of everything, it registered usually
fifteen minutes or more. After a sufficient trial of this, I made up
my mind to deliberately omit numbers of things which really belong
in any full prayer, for the sake of getting through. I would sacrifice
my idea of prayer and work in only a fraction of its rightful con-
tents, rather than destroy my prayer altogether as an exercise for
the people, by making it burdensome ; just as a man loads so many
thousand tuns into his ship instead of twice as many, because he
judges it better to get across the ocean with three thousand than to
sink with ten. But, strange to say at first, the two or three items
of prayer to which I confined myself, under my handling, expanded
to ten thousand tuns ; — the secret of that being (I suppose) that in
my sense of having shortened down my circle of topics, I felt it safe
to amplify each one a little more and in the bliss of that amplifi-
cation took no measure of time.

I must not be too long in giving you the details of this expe-
rience, but it ended in my getting a phonographic reporter to plant
himself in my gallery, and take down my prayerful utterances verba-
tim, in order that I might see objectively what I had been about all
those fifteen or twenty minutes. For on running them over in
simple recollection, I could not understand by what meanderings
or other leisurely works I had succeeded in being gone so long.
This reporter brought me to my senses. There was the whole thing
in black and white, and I recognized the prints of my own feet, and
the earmarks of my own diction, all the way. I was a convicted sinner,
and I started out in a still more energetic repentance ; and I want
to say for your encouragement, that in due time I brought myself
within what I conceive to be proper limits in this very important
part of public worship ; — so that, three or four years ago, when a
certain gentleman, in my congregation, timed me on Sunday morn-
ings for three months or more, it was found that ten minutes was
my maximum swing. I confess though, with mortification, that I
have not ability enough to condense into ten minutes, or less, all
the particulars of a truly encyclopedic prayer — that is all that
belongs in a "common" prayer (as our Protestant Episcopal

YALE LECTURES. 193

friends call it.) Neither do I consent to be confined to such brevity
on all occasions ; but I make that general aim ; and I do not do it
in mere cowardice before an impatient and unleisurely generation,
who insist that everything shall be short, sharp and decisive, (a kind
of touch-and-go-movement even in our holiest things, the newspaper
article being the divine model for the minister;) but I am con-
strained to strive for a certain brevity, as convinced that the
nineteenth century sincerely cannot pray more than ten minutes or
so. It can keep its head down and be respectful twice that time ;
but its mental exercise for the last half of the same it were unprofit-
able to explore.

Now, My Brethren, I bear down on this thing, and give you
my experience and beseech you to be brief, because you are
certainly on your way to have your feelings hurt unless you take
counsel, and begin your career with a conscience in the matter of
brevity. It seemed a sort of sacrilege to me when people began to
animadvert on the length of my prayers ; but they kept on all the
same, (never harshly though, in a single instance,) and by-and-by I
went over to their side, and have had a comfortable amount of
peace ever since.

But I wish you to understand, I do not deliver this exhortation
in behalf of brevity, because I am sympathetic with those people
who would squeeze the worship of the church to death, in order
that the sermon may have room to magnify itself almost without
limit. We, on the one hand, and our liturgical brethren on the
other, are still in the midst of the old debate, which shall be the hub
of the wheel ; the worship or the sermon ; but we are not so far apart
on it as we used to be ; and the growing opinion among us now is,
that while the sermon is not to be belittled, the worship is to be
amply provided for, more amply in some respects than in the old
times. And following in the line of this opinion, I insist that the
sermon shall take heed unto itself, and call a halt (on all ordinary
occasions) not very far beyond thirty minutes. Let it aim at thirty,
and if, at the end, it finds itself in a genuine gale, a true wind from
Heaven, and cannot stop, why nobody will want it to. Let it sail
on. But I notice that these heaven-born winds are generally
willing to be reasonable and let a congregation off in about half
an hour.

In my efforts to shorten my sermons in order that worship may
have fair scope, I have found it very serviceable to me, to keep

104 YALE LECTURES.

before my mind numbers of considerations like the following.
First, that in the course of my ministrations year after year, it
is not necessary that I should exhaust the subject I happen to be
handling at any one time. If I have thoroughly studied it, I have
discovered a good many important points in it ; and partly because
they are important and partly because I myself have discovered
them and do therefore have the feelings of a mother towards
them, it is a bitterness to me not to bring them all into my
discourse. Moreover, it is an affliction to my taste, as an
intellectual man, to make only half a statement of a subject ;
like a snatch of music from a grand oratorio. But I remember that
I am a settled pastor, and (God willing) am to have other chances
at that same subject, so that in the course of time I can get my
whole oratorio moving, and give my congregation the advantage of
it ; — a mutilated advantage you may be inclined to say, because they
have not taken it in all at once ; and yet not very mutilated I fancy.
For not half of them are disciplined sufficiently to take anything in
its entirety at one effort. And in the next place, while I may be
painfully conscious of omissions in my treatment of my subject
because I have carefully looked it all through, they (as not having
done that) do not feel any omissions. It sounds to them like
the whole oratorio. In the Easter Service in my church last Sunday
morning, my sermon had five heads ; but the choir and I had done
so many things, and had been so long about it, that I was compelled
to omit the first four. Nevertheless that fifth head I found had
marched out into the air as though all the preceeding four were
sounding therein. Nobody seemed able to imagine that anything
had been left out. I presume there were reverberations of those
departed and invisible four heads running through that fifth one,
because I wrote the fifth as energized and fructified by my pre-
ceding converse with the four ; — and that is true of all our sermon-
izings. We make a full study of a theme, and then deliver only half
our thoughts on it, or less; but in that half, our entire prepara-
tion resounds. Three years ago, at the installation of a pastor, I
heard one of my brethren deliver an extended charge to the people,
and the other evening, at another installation, I heard him deliver
it again. But as he was crowded into a late hour by me and others
who had preceded him, he was compelled to abbreviate his deliver-
ance ; badly, he thought ; and he told me beforehand that he felt
unhappy. He shortened it fully one half I should say. But I did

YALE LECTURES. 195

not miss anything. And I venture to say, nobody in that house
missed anything — excepting always himself. He did not give us
the whole loaf; only a slice ; and of course, such a proceeding as
that is grievous to the feelings of a generous man. He felt mean,
but the fact was, the whole taste of his loaf was in that slice.
His entire mind was in it, his spirit, his magnetism, his love of God
and man, his whole feeling about the relations of a people to their
pastor. So, friends and fellow-brethren, whenever I feel that I have
done injustice to a subject and perhaps bereaved my people, by a
partial presentation of it, I recover myself by reflecting that I am to
have other opportunities to preach on it, most likely ; and that
meanwhile in what limited bread I have distributed, there is the
identical smack of the loaf.

And that reminds me to say, that it greatly assists us to brevity
in sermonizing, to omit all those preliminary skirmishings about our
subject, (like General McClellan's famous earth-works creeping
slowly up the Yorktown peninsula towards Richmond, in the days
of our war;) to omit all these skirmishings, I say, which have not
in them the real heart-beat and quintessence of the subject, and are
only like the dry burr on a nut ; to omit them, and make a straight
march for the center, and give the people the very relish of the
thing in the first sentence if possible. That saves a great deal of
time and does no damage either.

Another thought wherewith I have comforted myself in my
efforts to be brief is, that my people neither require nor need that
I should consume much time in giving them the processes of my
thought, the steps by which I arrive at results. What they most
need are results ; assertions from a man who has looked the case
up and knows what he is saying. I am making haste along here,
and cannot expound this idea as I would like, and put in suitable
qualifications ; but I look back and see that in the first years of my
sermonizing (to say nothing of later days,) I wasted a good deal
of my time in the pulpit, and a good deal of the time of the people,
in mapping before them minutely the path of my own mind through
the subjects. I made lengthy arguments in support sometimes
of axioms and sometimes of truths, which, although not axioms
exactly, yet, for all purposes practical and popular, are better argued
by an outright statement glowing with the heat of personal ex-
perience. There is that in the constitution of mankind which
responds to the main affirmatives of the Christian religion. Say Sin.

196 YALE LECTURES.

and every human soul echoes your word. Say God, say Eternity,
say Sorrow, say Jesus, and put it home with the weight of your per-
sonal knowledge, and how can wire-drawn reasonings, and philoso-
phizings and goings to Richmond by a circuit of half the continent,
add anything to it. So much on keeping the sermon within proper
dimensions with a view to give worship a large place.

My second remark on prayers (whether long or short) is, that
in them we should conceive God very distinctly, and make our
whole movement out towards Him. I sometimes almost think it
would be better to have before our eyes a visible representation of
God in such form as reverent art has been able to devise ; and on
that form, idealized and transfigured perhaps, by our holy imagina-
tion, fix our eyes and there hold while we pray ; this, rather than
to be conscious chiefly of the congregation, and have half our
prayer just a speech to them. A parishioner of mine in one of our
conference meetings, went into such a deep and absorbed movement
of prayer, that (for quite a space) he entirely forgot the rest of us
all about him, and continually used language that implied that he
was alone, as in the privacy of his room. That seems hardly the
thing to do, but I submit, that ignoring the congregation in prayer
is better than ignoring God, especially as prayer is ostensibly an
address to God, and not an address to man at all. I think that
God, from his stand-point in the Heavens, is more pleased with a
man-ward lapse of memory than a God-ward ; and is more likely to
grant a request that goes straight to its mark in that concentrated
and absorbed way.

The advantages of a clear vision of God in prayer, and an
absolutely resolved holding of the mind to Him, and never dropping
to the assembly, are such as these. It lifts you above all human fright
— which is apt to be rather severe sometimes in a young and inex-
perienced man, especially if he be constitutionally timid. It pro-
duces in you just that self-abasement which is not only suitable in
prayer, but necessary if it is to be true prayer, and to bear in upon
God's mind effectually. It rules down your diction to a godly sim-
plicity, saving you from oratory, and rhetorical vaporing, and all those
posturings, and tones and tremendous originalizations, which are fitted
to catch the ear of men but are most unseemly in anything that pro-
fesses to be prayer ; and which in addition to that, render it impos-
sible for the congregation to follow you in any other way than they
follow an oration. They may be greatly entertained and greatly

YALE LECTURES. 197

stimulated, both intellectually and religiously, by prayers of the sort
that I am criticising ; but as for praying under such a lead, they
cannot. Perhaps numbers of them will think they do, (not having
analyzed the matter,) and perhaps whole congregations, under the
pernicious education of a favorite minister, may come to feel that
prayer is hardly worth listening to, unless it puts itself forth in fresh
and ingenious expressions, in touches of fancy, in exuberant illustra-
tions, and in re-statements of Christian Doctrine that are brand-new
and unprecedented ; but their view is sufficiently shown up by ask-
ing the one question : Are such outpourings fitting if conceived as
actually addressed to God, and in so far as a praying man senses
God, can he — in the nature of things, can he — use such devices of
expression? No, he cannot. He will be burdened by the awful
presence wherein he stands, and the solemn personal business that
sends him into that presence, and his utterance will be simple, and
lowly and not too profuse.

I wish now to speak of a few things that tend to full, various,
rich, easy, and right- flavored prayer, on the part of the minister
leading his congregation. And first, I should advise much familiarity
with the Catholic Liturgies ; — with the liturgies, I mean, of the Church
general. I think it is a wholesome thing to read them and study them
habitually, especially for a young minister, who, as being young, has
not yet formed his habits. He need not go under any bondage to
them. He need not publicly use them in form. If, at any point, they
savor of doctrinal or ecclesiastical theories which he ought not to
accept, very well, let him be on his guard against them. But let
him read them, again and again ; and catch their devout spirit and
suffuse his mind with their seemly phraseologies ; and indoctrinate
himself in the broad variety of their worshipful acts, and feed his
religious imagination on their old-time precious associations, hearing
in them, as he may, the voice of long-gone generations, the innu-
merable millions of God. They will insensibly chasten his taste,
mold his style, bring his extemporaneous doings into orderliness,
abate his eccentricities, and make him a man whom it will be a
means of grace to be led by in public worship. That will be their
tendency at least, if they are used judiciously and with discrim-
ination.

Then again, I think that a minister would do well to consider
his public prayers beforehand, if he would have them what they
should be. If I am asked : should he write them ? I say no ; —

198 YALE LECTURES.

much less memorize them. On special occasions let a man do
what seems to him best, and let the rest of us not pick at him much.
But as a general rule, it seems to me decidedly, that the wisest
way for us unliturgical ministers, is to premeditate our prayers,
and prearrange them in their outlines and headlands ; and leave
all the rest to the moment. Prearrangement secures brevity.
Prearrangement and premeditation secure thoughtfulness, and save
us from the waft of accidental sidewinds as we go on in our prayer,
(like unforeseen and unmanageable spurts of emotion, and sudden
ideas which, as being sudden, fascinate us, and swing us off into
digressions of whose meanderings and outcome nobody can be
sure.;) and prearrangement also saves us from omissions that ought
not to be made. The only danger in premeditation, that occurs to
me now is, that it may destroy our spontaneity, and make us feel as
though we were speaking a piece ; or searching for our prayer in a
corner of our pocket. Of course if our preparation is quite elabo-
rate and formal, it tends strongly to that bondage ; a bondage which
I should advise you never to submit to. Let your preparation be
less formal. Do as I often do (if you cannot do any better)
namely, digest the Scriptural lesson which you are going to read,
until you are full of its vitality ; and make your prayer start from
that lesson and there have its roots. Somehow, I find there is a
reality in that kind of start ; my mind comforts itself in it, and
seems to have a real business on hand ; and although it might seem
that your prayer, thus born, would have too much local color and
not reach the full sweep of prayer ; that is, not get in all its ele-
ments, and all the proper details — as for example, if you root in
some ringing imprecatory Psalm, how shall your prayer get over into
Christianity and there expatiate as it ought — nevertheless, as a
matter of fact, I never saw a Scripture yet that was not a good
enough starting-point. The old Bible is full of one blood. Prick
it anywhere and you have struck its inmost reservoirs of vitality.
Or, if that figure be not quite accurate, then let me say, that a
truly christianized mind turns everything that it touches into honey,
and especially cannot fail while ranging the manifold clover-gardens
of Holy Writ.

Again, much private prayer makes public prayer a veritable
divine thing ; and a right thing everyway. I affirm unqualifiedly
that a public praying that does not rest back on habitual prayer, is
always a less solid, deep- moving, fresh, diversified, effectual and

YALE LECTURES. 199

fructifying thing, than it ought to be. O ! how important this is,
and how I ought to dwell on its deep import !

Still again, pastoral visitation makes a good leader of worship.
How can a man be self-conscious and formal, in his prayer, and
full of flighty excursions of rhetoric, and an ear-catching minister
everyway, when he knows by having been into the houses all about,
that down in yonder seat before him is a mother in agony over her
wayward son ; and over there a person feeling his way along
anxiously to the light; and yonder a family heart-stricken by
bereavement ; and there a man so poor that he cannot sleep nights ;
and beyond, another so spiritually insensible and lost that you do
not know but he is lost forever ; and all about in front of you, men
and women in full bloom for the heavenly life, whose faces are a
benediction, and whose thanksgivings you want to voice in your
prayer. The innumerable touch of human hearts makes a good
prayer, I say.

Once more, a profoundly Scripturalized mind makes a good
prayer. We cannot use liturgies much ; therefore let us use the
Bible ; memorize its passages, season ourselves with its doctrines,
enrich ourselves with its imageries, read and study its wonderful
histories, consort with its illustrious personages, live in its poetry,
domesticate ourselves in its old Ritual, analyze its texts and single
words, and find how vital they are to the last shred and atom, and
how they magnetize and empower the mind ; — then shall our wor-
ship move on, as in the most robust and historic of liturgies ; — our
thought will be charged with the authentic flavors of God, and our
language seem heaven-born sometimes; for it shall go to the heart
as being redolent of the one and only universal Book.

Finally, and as underlying all the rest ; all prayer has the
privilege of being in the Holy Ghost ; and is prayer in proportion
only as it is thus originated and sustained. Many well-intentioned
ministers do not seem to fully understand this. Theoretically they
admit it, but in their practice they do not quite launch out into its
mid-waters. Possibly rationalism has palsied them a little, (some
of them) so that they are scarcely more than speculative super-
naturalists. Possibly they are shy of letting into their life the full
doctrine of the Holy Ghost, because they have seen instances of
wildfire. Possibly, in some Communions, they have gone over to
externalisms too much, making them the vehicles of God's grace
pre-eminently, and not so much dwelling on his direct and subjective

200 YALE LECTURES.

approach to the soul. Of course, all these classes of men have
their plausibilities to present, and some truths ; and I should like to
display their logic for them here to-day, and see what reply I could
make. But, in lieu of that, I lift up the experience, the holy
inspired experience of innumerable men, who have preached, and
prayed, and led their assemblies many and many a time, and thou-
sands of them habitually, in a fulness of the spirit of God which
has carried them above the fear of man, as the stars range the sky,
and has let them into great sweeps of liberty, and great visions of
truth, and great confidences of faith, and great victories over the
minds committed to their care. So that when a man has once entered
into this experience, all rationalistic or other arguments designed to
show that ministers had better be calm-minded, and careful, and
reliant mainly on a plodding conscientious use of their own faculties,
and their much learning, and their oratory, and their culture ; all
that line of thought and talk, I say, rolls off from him like pebbles
from iron-clads. While a committee of the English Parliament
were demonstrating to the world that steam roads were impossible,
Stephenson was getting one ready, and running it. There was the
argument on the one hand, and there was the road on the other.
The argument was first-class, so good that I presume some of the
committee stood by it till they died ; but the people who consented
to try the road never cared much for that argument afterward.
Experience is better than all the Parliamentary Committees on
earth.

And, My Young Brethren, I advise you to seek an experience
of God's supernatural and direct empowerment for your work, the
moment you begin it ; — not a half-and-half experience, but one
that shall go to the bottom of the subject and settle it in your mind
for all time, and forever.

I have now spoken to you of the prayers in public worship.
The minister's management of the other parts, as hymns and music,
and choirs, and the use of the Scriptures, is a subject for another
address. I presume you would all be glad to have me give you a
recipe for managing choirs. And, on the other hand, your choirs
would like to get from me a recipe for managing you. I do not
know but I should be a good enough man for advising you, because in
twenty-eight years of service I have never had a single quarrel with
a choir. I do not think a minister needs to be a technical musi-
cian in order to stand supreme over the worship of song in his

YALE LECTURES. 201

church. If he is thoroughly grounded in the eternal principles of
worship (as very man may be, and should be) , and continually shows
it by his manner of conducting the worship, on occasions both
ordinary and special, and by his wise discussions of the subject
from time to time ; then his weight with his people will be such
that they will follow him and not the choir, in any question, or dif-
ference, where fundamental principles and good taste are involved.
Of course, if he is by nature an intermeddler and a picayune Pope,
with no tact to deal with men, his choir will be likely to make him
unhappy now and then ; as will also his whole congregation for that
matter. And probably they ought to. But if he bears rule in
God's house a little as a good mother does in her realm, that is
with an affectionate firmness, and also with a timely blindness to
numerous small irregularities which are only skin-deep, and are not
worth calling a court-martial upon, he will be more likely to move
on, and hold his seat in the saddle, forever.

But I had better pass all this, and conclude with some running
observations on the state of things liturgically in our churches, and
the possibilities of improvement. Let me speak particularly of the
Congregationalists. You will find, when you get among them, that
they are resolutely attached to the old-fashioned ways, for sub-
stance ; but you will also find, I am sure, that they are more and
more ready to receive and incorporate into their worship, this, that,
and the other excellence of other Communions. They do not
believe in a priesthood, they are not very energetic sacramentarians,
they honestly think that prayers read are not the most useful ; they
are watchful against any such advance of rites and ceremonies as
will make formalists of them, and undermine the old Protestant
doctrine of Justification by faith ; but there are numerous minor
things (new things, for them) towards which they are beginning
to be hospitable. The Cross, used as a symbol, does not much
alarm them. They are importing into their music some of the
old standard riches and practices of the church at large. They
are quite widely diversifying the ancient order of their service ;
insomuch that now when I exchange pulpits with a Congrega-
tional minister I always have to ask him what his particular
practice is. Also, if a minister flushes up a little his ritual of
the Lord's Supper, with a view to have the externals of a thing
so significant and so precious correspond more nearly with the
thing itself, and more forcibly address the feeling of the congre-
i4

202 YALE LECTURES.

gation ; they are likely to put up with it. I think there is a distinct
advance among us on the doctrine of a real presence of Christ in
the Supper ; and that on that account it is feasible to introduce
some expansion of ritual at the table, and some new emphasis.
Whether these expansions are really profitable, I do not now dis-
cuss. I only say they are practicable ; as has been already proved
in numerous cases. Perhaps my own church is an extreme illus-
tration of limberness in these matters (though I fancy there are
many a good deal like it in our cities) ; — but in that church there
are I do not know how many things done that did not use to be,
and could not be. Not that I have labored with them very much,
though I touch the matter now and then, but if an innovation
seems to me really good, and not inconsistent with any essential
feature of our Congregational system, I slip it in sparingly, on my
own authority, and let it speak for itself. I am pretty careful to set
on foot only what will speak for itself, in actual use. If you call a
mass-meeting of your church to discuss whether the Apostles'
Creed shall be introduced in the congregation ever, or whether a
book shall ever be used at the Communion table, or whether there
shall be any back and forth of responses between the minister and
the choir ; in every case some man will be found to object, and there
you are. But if you have their confidence to this extent that they
will endure the first sensation of a new thing, put in on your own
wisdom, and if it so happens that you have the wisdom to select
the best things, and the easiest, and the most beautiful, and those
most commended by long use in other branches of God's church,
and if you have the patience to hold back numbers of things that
you think excellent, and not swamp the people by your inventions
brought in flood-wise, then in course of time you may establish in
your congregation almost anything that you desire ; — that is, unless
you are out-and-out an uncongregational man — in which case you
ought to leave the denomination. Some of you here present will
never have any impulse to introduce deviations from the primitive
way of our churches, but others of you will, just as sure as you live ;
and our Congregational system is elastic enough to accommodate
you, most likely.

As an illustration, let me give you the order of the Easter ser-
vices at my church last Sunday morning : — I do not consider it a
triumph of holy art at all, for it is visibly unphilosophical at one or
two points, on account of the stress of certain circumstances that

YALE LECTURES. 203

were upon me. It opened with introductory services by the minis-
ter : — " How amiable are thy tabernacles," and the like. Then fol-
lowed the invocation. Then the Venite : — " O come let us sing
unto the Lord," the minister reading one verse, and the choir chant-
ing the other. Then the first Scripture lesson, an account of the
Resurrection of Christ, by St. John, followed by. a corresponding
anthem of the Resurrection. Then the second lesson (ist Cor.,
xv), followed by an anthem which amplified upon the theme of that
incomparable chapter. Then half a dozen texts were read, in rela-
tion to Christian faith, and confessing that faith, whereupon the
choir intoned the Apostles' Creed. Then I spent a few moments in
what to me was a most sweet and holy commemoration of those
who have departed in the faith of the Resurrection. I took the
substance of it from the liturgy of the Catholic Apostolic Church
years ago, adapting it to our needs. I have no time to repeat it,
but it went on in this way : —

First, I read a Scriptural selection which began : — " I would
not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are
asleep." Next, I made a general mention of the saintly dead, to
which the choir responded in a solemn Amen.

Next, I mentioned them in several classes, with a like choral
response to each. Those classes were the Old Testament saints,
and the immediate fore-runners of the Lord ; the mother of the
Lord, the Apostles, the Evangelists and Pastors, the martyrs and
confessors, that succeeded ; — and, finally, those of our own church
who had left us during the year, their names being solemnly re-
peated, and the choir following with these words : — " May they
rest in thy peace, and awake to a joyful resurrection." Then came
a congregational hymn : — " Let saints below in concert sing, with
those to glory gone."

After that the service swung back into its general path again
and there were prayer, responsive reading of the Psalter by the
minister and the congregation, a Gloria Patri ; a collection, with
offertory sentences, (which sentences are sometimes delivered by
the minister alone, and sometimes by the minister and choir in
alternation), a hymn, a sermon only fifteen minutes long, because
what went before had been uncommonly protracted, a hymn again,
sung by the congregation, and then the benediction.

Now every year, on special days, like Easter, and Christmas,
and Thanksgiving, I have sent to me from Congregational pastors,

204 YALE LECTURES.

and Presbyterians, and Baptists, printed special programmes, anala-
gous to that which I have just recited in your hearing ; — which shows
to me that there is at least a scattered liturgical movement among
us (as you may call it) . I have no idea that we are on the way to
the introduction of a liturgy proper ; [there are profound reasons why
that will never come to pass ;] but I am sure that within certain nor-
mal limits our ancient service is to be diversified and enriched, the
present individual instances of that being multiplied far and wide.
Years and years ago I heard a Congregational pastor telling of
a sermon which he had recently heard in New York, from a well-
know Protestant Episcopalian, on the reasons for the exact order of
the successive acts in the worship of that church. And this Congre-
gationalist remarked with much contempt on the insignificancy of
such a pulpit theme as that. He ridiculed such topics as " debilita-
ting topics." That is what he called them. And I recollect that I
at the time had a certain amount of sympathy with him in his view.
By which circumstance I am reminded that some in this
assembly may think that the present lecturer has spent a good deal
of time to-day, and on points, some of which at least, are so sub-
ordinate and minute, as to be open to that ridicule involved in that
word, debilitating. Nevertheless, I stand fast in my conviction
that so small a matter as the law of before and after in the ongo of
public worship, the reason that one act comes here, another there
and another there and not otherwise, is abundantly worth discours-
ing upon, even as God discoursed to Moses on the precise details of
the Jewish tabernacle and its worship ; and that our congregations
cannot have the advantage of a full- toned cultus if the study of
that subject is belittled. The masses of the people cannot be
expected to be students of the subject. They sail round and
round in the routine which is provided for them ; thanking God
and making no complaint so long as their prepossessions are not
jostled, [and who can describe the endless riches of holy nurture
which they receive] but we, the ministers, ought to be students of
the subject, in order that our churches may be rationally defended
against the enormous and increasing pressure of the great ritualis-
tic bodies of Christendom (their doctrinal pressure and their liturgi-
cal pressure) , and at the same time may have the intelligence and
the catholicity to receive from those bodies whatever contributions
ot thought or worship may profitably be incorporated into our
system.

LIBERTY OF THOUGHT WITHIN
CONGREGATIONALISM.

When I stood about where you do, my Brethren, I had an anx-
iety like this :

I began to study theology under the doctrinal prepossessions
of my religious training, as we all do, and it seemed to me that
candor required I should now disengage myself from those prepos-
sessions, and address myself to all inquiries in that beautiful blank-
ness and innocency of intellect in which our great original father,
Adam, was, when he landed in this strange world. I had hitherto
believed in a God, and did yet, but a knowing class of men had
always contended that there is no such Being, so I must wrench
myself if possible into a totally judicial position and throw upon my
instructors the task of showing me, in my assumed ignorance, that
there is a God. And the whole system of Christian truth must
similarly validate itself before my unbiased mind. So, I came to
this Seminary rather than to any other, in part, because I had an
idea that Dr. Nathaniel Taylor here, took contracts of that sort
and enjoyed them.

I cannot conscientiously recommend to other men this at-
tempted philosophical impartiality of mine. It had its uses, but it
had its mischief. We have no right to disavow our pious training
and our personal experience of God, even to the extent of tem-
porary non-committalism ; neither do I believe it can be defended
on philosophical grounds.

However, I was in constant fear that I should somehow lose
this philosophical balance of mine. Some teacher might get in on
me with his seductions. Or some tenderness towards my father

206 YALE LECTURES.

and mother, now away from me, might undermine my thinking.
Of course, as I went on, I accepted a goodly list of things as pro-
ven ; so that I was willing to undertake a Christian pastorate, and
did ; but I knew several things even then whereon I doubted, or in
which I did not believe in just that complete and enthusiastic way
that I desired. So, now, my fear was that the position of a preacher
and pastor, with its obligations to a pretty full orthodoxy, and its
fine advantages of all softs, which I certainly should not want to
forfeit by any too great freedom and independence of inquiry, would
incessantly and insidiously operate on me as a bribe to conformity,
and make me non-judicial, thus vitiating all my thinking and disin-
tegrating the foundations of my manhood. In fact, I sincerely
thought myself in some peril at that point. And so my first years
of service were years of self-watchfulness, and perhaps of inordi-
nate self-assertion, as against this supposed liability to encroachment.

Now I am going to speak to-day to that state of mind, think-
ing it not unlikely to be here before me full-blown or in the bud. I
shall say certain things which it would have done me good to hear
in that early time from a man who had been in the world and
among the churches long enough to discover how matters go on
out there. I have been exposed to that tremendous danger for thirty
years and I still live and I have never felt freer in my life, intellect-
ually, than I do now. That is the simple truth, my young friends ;
and I will explain it to you.

First, I found that our Congregational churches concede to
their ministers — well, sometimes even an indefensible amount of
liberty, as it would seem to me. I have preached everything that
I wanted to ; everything that seemed to me true and entitled to a
place in the pulpit. No committee ever visited me to tame me
down to their own views of things ; or beg that I would reef in,
in my speculations on the wide ocean of the doubtful or the un-
knowable. I sailed to all points of the compass, and landed on all
distant shores, wherever the excursive impulse took me and I seri-
ously thought it my duty ; only one man ever made a formal call
upon me in the interest of more prudence. He was a good man,
and particularly ignorant, and naturally circumscribed, and repre-
senting nobody on earth but himself. He treated me well, and I
treated him well and extracted profit from his talk and loved him
till God took him.

No doubt you must get into your teaching the substance 01

YALE LECTURES. 207

the Christian religion. You must show that you are not exploring
to the ends of the earth under a sheer vagabond impulse, but in
the interest of truth. You must concede to the people the same
liberty that they concede to you, and not conceive of your pastor-
ship as a lordship and practical right of tyranny. You must make
it plain that you are after their welfare, whatever you say or do.
Take heed unto these few, obvious things, and then no man in the
world, who holds himself under any responsibility at all to other
people, is freer than you are as a Congregational minister. That is
my experience.

Again, I have attended ecclesiastical councils these many years,
as faithfully as any other man, and of the scores, young and old,
whom I have seen appear before these bodies for ordination and
for installation, I never knew but one to be rejected, and he lost his
case because he had not character enough to carry him through.
As a theologian he was a fair success and would have been set in
office by a unanimous vote. Occasionally I have seen individual
votes recorded in the negative, and in one instance the majority for
the candidate was but one, while after the council was dissolved a
stricter count seemed to show that the body did really divide
exactly in the middle. But no matter, he went in. Also on the
far horizon I have heard reverberations of negative majorities, as in
this city within a year ; and in other States over the hills and far
away, but near enough to be suggestive ; still these adverse majori-
ties are as exceptional as cyclones and earthquakes, and, unlike
cyclones, they are often mitigated by facts like these : — the majority
in the negative is small ; — or it is numerical and not moral ; or the
majority leaves on record so many cordialities towards the defeated
man that he is almost more in honor than he would have been
under the glorification of a major vote ; or the church which had
sought him is so confident of its own right judgment on his merits,
and is in such a state of Christian exasperation withal, that it pro-
ceeds, right or wrong, to secure his services as though nothing had
happened. It took us till midnight to reject that one minister
whom I saw rejected, and he was backed by such a high-wrought
multitude of free-born Congregationalists that all of us, members
of the council, whose home was in other cities, took the earliest
train next morning out of those parts — and then that multitude had
an installation of their own ; — their deacons and other chief men
took it in hand, and performed the necessary offices and duties at

208 YALE LECTURES.

the service ; and so the choice of that people was triumphantly ful-
filled. And a thoroughly foolish piece of business it was, as they
themselves discovered at last. Congregationalism seems to have
these little contrivances in the interest of liberty, or is made to
have. In one case within my knowledge, a council pronounced
against the installation of a man, on the ground of theological con-
fusedness, and did it by a strong vote ; but the people immediately
called another council, the old one and much more, and by that
council the man was successfully brought to the haven where he
would be. And the association of ministers to which I belong,
licensed a young man (I think, unanimously) who had just been
refused by another association for theological reasons. A discus-
sion arose outside, on the comity of that proceeding, as there rea-
sonably might, even as that second council which over-rode its pre-
decessor was discussed, as it also reasonably might be, but no one
was killed in either case, and the succeeding ministry of both of
those men indicated that somehow, and sooner or later, they should
have been put into service. In another case it might not happen
so, but in this case it did. It is an entertaining sight, sometimes,
to s|ee the way men among us get their liberty. Congregationalism
has some fine old expedients for heading off interlopers ; but it is
not often that a good and substantially sound man of our order is
really abused.

If he is young, earnest, and interesting at all, most likely some
old minister of renown and weight will have his bowels of compas-
sion moved in his behalf, and will defend him, before the council
and before the public. A candidate whom I wanted to vote against,
and thought I might, had a hearty champion in Dr. Joel Hawes, a
man of divinity, as careful and sound and respected as you could
find. On another occasion, where I was present, an equally respec-
table minister burst forth in indignation at what he considered the
pettifogging and hectoring attempts of certain councilmen to reduce
a young candidate to his ultimate atoms, and, perhaps, in the last
analysis show him to be unsound.

Gentlemen as you go out to your ministry and move along
the years, if you are at all what you ought to be, you will find the
country full of these natural defenders of you against any real
wrong ; — sometimes they are men who have had to fight a fight
themselves ■ sometimes men who, although pretty full of theology
are even more full of affection : sometimes rational liberalists, and

YALE LECTURES. 209

again latitudinarians ; sometimes lowly, hard-working pastors whom
the practical toils of life have taught that a large part of current
theology is speculative, and not binding ; and again it will be some
scholar who has not spent his life in parish service, but whose stu-
dious investigations have taught him the same thing ; — and then,
back of all individual defenders, stand ever the great generous
masses of the Church, with their rough and ready judgments, their
quick recognition of character, and stamina, and high motives, and
their fine inflammability on occasion.

I have no disposition to disparage the Congregational polity as
a working system, but it has several excellent escapes for men who
ought to escape. Some of these escapes were not intentionally
provided by the generations who elaborated the system, but like
seams in ships they open of themselves when the system falls into
a rough sea of circumstances ; — open providentially, as some would
say. Of course, reason declares that a ship like that must sink,
but it is one of the features of this craft that it sails on, with an
occasional open seam and parting of its timbers, about as well as
any other — in practical safety, at all events. When a sociologist
notices the thousands of incoherent and hap-hazard phenomena
that emerge in human society, he might say that such a chaos and
wide welter could work out no benefit whatever on the whole, and
had better not be started at all ; — as, for example, how can there
ever be any equilibrium of the sexes — numerical equilibrium — when
each birth, in the sex of it, is such a pure fortuity ; — nevertheless,
behold ! somehow this 'infinite jumble of all kinds works along into
eventualities most orderly and benignant — the sexes are counted
off as though some mathematician had that interest in hand ; and
all other things are counted, measured, weighed, assorted, and
manipulated with most excellent precision, as by a very discreet and
million-handed somebody, ever at work just back of this visible,
vast whirl, criss-cross, and heigh-ho of luck and disorder. Like-
wise, Congregationalism seems to some critics and anxious specta-
tors, to have infirmities enough in its constitution to make it a fail-
ure the moment it is set running ; but just out of sight, somewhere,
is a something or other that saves her. And I should like to give
one lecture here on the prudential and conservative elements in
Congregationalism. Again, within a few years it has come to be a
fact that a majority of all our churches are served by men who
were never put in their places by a council ; — another convenient

210 YALE LECTURES.

circumstance for those jealous for their own liberty of thought.
Those of us who have been accustomed to the old way of councils
of installation, dislike this new device, and think we can show why
we dislike it ; — but here it is, beloved, and if any of you are con-
cerned lest you be cramped in your freedom when you harness
into our dear old system, there is a ray of light for you. No, you
will not be cramped, any more than is good for you, and if you turn
out a Methodist minister, you will not be. Please tell me how often
there comes a trial for ministerial free-thinking in the Methodist,
or the Baptist, or the Protestant Episcopal persuasions ? And it is
not because those bodies are getting loose, either, but rather that
their ministers are practically sound. If you are a Presbyterian,
the grip on you may be a little more strangling and dangerous, but
if you find yourself coming to your last breath in that body, here
outside are these other communions, with wide-open breathing for
all the Presbyterians on earth, if only they will appreciate their
opportunities and come over.

I have treated this subject of freedom in the Congregational
Communion in a care-free spirit and without melancholy, as you
have noticed, because I am convinced of two cheerful things ; first,
that the schemes of prudence and reaction, which have been organ-
ized of late against whatever excessive freedom there may be
among us, will not be permitted to endanger our liberties. This
reaction may go to excess, it may billow and career, and toss up its
foam ; it may raise a feeling within itself, that it is about to deluge
the planet ; but there is in Congregationalism a rock-bound coast of
Individualism, and local Church-Independency, on which these
towering reactions are sure to dash and shatter when they get far
enough.

Secondly, I am convinced that this shatter of the various con-
trivances of prudence and conservatism, will not end in license
under the name of liberty. There will be scattered cases of top-
heaviness, and vaporing and heresy, among our ministers — and
among all ministers ; — but the bulk and body of us will retain our
substantial sanity and our wholesome effect on the children of
men. Taking us all together, we are a hard ship to wreck, as I said
before.

So much have I put forth as fitted to soothe a young minister
alarmed as to his liberty and as to the possible loss of his judicial
temper ; — as I used to be. The churches will not oppress him.

YALE LECTURES. 211

Another thing I discovered, which tended to bring ease to my
mind in regard to my doubts and my possible inability to be en-
tirely conformed to what might be required of me, and in regard to
my general peace in life, was that a thoroughly profound and satis-
factory religious experience may be had by a man who is a good
deal inexact in his philosophical religious thinking. For instance,
it used to be thought that the sacrifice of Christ was a ransom paid
to the Devil, who had us all. That was doctrine good enough in
evangelical circles once, and the piety of pious men nourished itself
on that view. It has been taught, in the same circles, that Christ
in His passion endured exactly what we sinners would have been
compelled to endure had He not interfered. It has been taught,
too, by evangelical teachers, that while He did not endure the same
that we must have done, He did endure the equivalent thereof. And
so on. I need not mention all the fine thinking that has centered
on that adorable mystery, the mediation of the Son of God. But
under all these evangelical theories, human souls have had great
gladness, great tenderness, great liberty and vigor and growth in all
directions ; — and they have had this because those different hypoth-
eses have all abundantly magnified the Redeemer and his work ;
and in magnifying Him, have magnified by inevitable implication
all the essentials of the Christian theology. As respects the mere
matter of gratitude to Jesus Christ, with all of piety and salvation
that that involves, either one of several evangelical modes of con-
ceiving his sacrifice is as good as any other of the several. So
then, we have great freedom in our philosophy of the Atonement.
We are not compelled to settle it. We would like it settled, but we
can live, and live to all eternity blessed for evermore, if it is not
settled.

And the same is true of some other doctrines. There is a
great struggle to get an infallible Bible. And there is a special
anxiety at present concerning the final state of obstinate sinners.
If it is not one thing we are wrestling on, it is another, and this
never-ceasing human endeavor is full of uses ; but the substance ot
what the Infallibilist is after, is a Book that gives us — really gives
us — God's way of salvation for men ; — and that we have, whether
Infallibilism and the Infallibilists are true or not. There are sev-
eral views of that Book besides his, several more or less important
variations from his view, that are conservative of all necessary doc-
trine and conservative of all the main interests of the Kingdom of

212 YALE LECTURES.

God. And as regards the eternal doom of sinners, what we want
is a view that does not diminish penalty beyond its maximum im-
pression on men, and that is secured alike by several minor varia-
tions of doctrine.

I have struck a precarious line of thought here and ought to
pursue it something farther, if I am to do it justice and make all
snug and safe ; — but it must answer to say, as I have, that you pro-
vide for your release from a great deal of bondage when you dis-
cover the distinction between the substance of a doctrine, the thing
therein that makes it valuable, and the philosophical formulation in
which it happens to put itself forth for to-day. In the proposition
God is light, it so happens that the three words are English. They
might have been Spanish, or German, or Arabic, and they were
Greek ; but who cares for the particular language in which they
stand, if only in every language we get the fact back there in the
nature of God, that He is Light, and in him is no darkness at all.
So, the substance of the Atonement is that Jesus Christ somehow
removed all difficulties whatever they were, on all sides, to our eter-
nal and complete salvation ; and these refinings as to a ransom paid
to Satan and so on, are but the man-made Greek, Spanish, and
English, in which that glorious Fact, or Substance, is costumed.
This Substance is binding on us and to fly from it is heresy and
spiritual death, very likely ; but the terminology is not binding.
Voice the Atonement, O man, in the philosophical tongue that suits
you, and let no one abridge your liberty there.

A third discovery. I found that whereinsoever I was uncer-
tain, doctrinally uncertain that is, as to the philosophy of doc-
trine, I might keep still about it ; still before my people, still before
my brother ministers, except here and there a chosen soul, still
everywhere and all the time. A young man is not apt to know
that silence is very often his privilege. He cannot see why such a
proceeding is not deception and duplicity. He wants his flag
afloat in the upper air and not hidden in the darkness of his
pocket. But may not men and ministers have some privacies?
This spirit of outrightness is beautiful and let us keep full of it so
long as we live ; especially let preachers be brave and transparent,
and let their congregations have the unconfusedness and comfort of
feeling that they are so ; but we must have our outrightness confine
itself to matters on which we have something to affirm. Now if a
man has gone so far as to educate himself in theology, and put him-

YALE LECTURES. 213

self in some pulpit to preach ; presumably he has a list of things
whereon he has got his foot firm down, so that he wants to preach
them. It may be a small list, but it is sufficient to make him an
affirmative man, and sound affirmative when he speaks, provided he,
in his preaching, just keep within that list of beliefs. I agree with
the frequent remark, that a preacher must not be a negative, nor
even an agnostic ; — his general tone must be declarative and un-
qualified, rather than hesitating, or even deliberative ; — but a young
man has not ripened to unqualifiedness on all points that ever occu-
pied the human mind. He has not had time to think himself out
into the largeness of the universe ; neither has he yet found his way
into all godly experiences. Still, it is time for him to begin to
preach. He cannot wait till he reaches full stature and is sixty or
seventy years old. Moreover, the churches do not want him to wait.
They like him while yet downy and callow and chirping.

But even now he has learned a few things. He has learned
the doctrine of depravity and the helplessness of man ; his own
heart has taught him that. And he has learned that there is a
Redeemer. Out of his studies and out of his experience he has
settled that. He has learned that there is a Hell and a Heaven ;
he has been in them both. He has no doubt that God is, and
holds men responsible. He believes the Bible a divine Book. He
has found it so. He has looked out on the world and noticed that
the Christian religion has force among men. He sees that the men
of God must be organized in the Holy Ghost for God's work. He
has had his communions with God. There are a score of points
on which he is solid, and in some of them he is enthusiastic. Well,
let him preach them. If he knew ten times as much as he does
and had ten scores of points, instead of one, the one score that he
now has would be the ones he ought to preach nearly all the time.
The most mature affirmative theologian gets his affirmativeness from
these very truths that this young man has already grasped ; — be-
cause they are the chief truths, they are the Christianity of Chris-
tianity ; they are the working forces of the Gospel. If only a man
is full of the idea that Christianity is a supernatural religion — that
alone, it carries enough in it to make him a powerful preacher ; —
a man of faiths, and not an Agnostic, mooning forever in the vast-
ness of his own dubiousness ; — a man in contact with whom other
men are stimulated and helped in all the confusion and weariness
of life, yea, helped on their way into the final glory of God. Why

214 YALE LECTURES.

consume Sunday time in opening your unsettled questions, when
you have pulpit topics already more than you can ever get through ;
— and those the essential topics, too ? Why is it a part of manli-
ness to proclaim your unconcluded thinkings on matters which it
would not be supremely important to proclaim if they were con-
cluded ? Keep still, I say again. Have sense. An English gen-
tleman traveling in this country for the first time, accompanying
Dean Stanley, had spent his first Sunday in Boston, and had lis-
tened to one of our eminent preachers there, a man of several very
mentionable gifts ; but what most impressed the Englishman, as he
said, was that man's good sense. " After all," said he to me, " after
all, the greatest quality in a minister is good sense." Possibly that
has been said before by somebody, somewhere ; it rather sounds so,
and yet it seems fresh, somehow. Have sense. I wish it did not
take half a lifetime to get it.

A fourth important discovery that I made, and made a matter
of ease to my mind, was with regard to creeds. I feared I might
not be able to accept them sufficiently, and might be uncomforta-
bly pressed towards acceptances from which I reluctated, as I have
already said. My church might press me. My denomination
might press me. The importance of preserving my influence for
good might lead me to Creed subscriptions that I was not up to
with all my faculties. But when I came to see what sort of a thing
a Creed is, in some respects, then I could sign an ample variety of
them. A Creed is a storm-born child generally, and there are
storm marks on it. If it had been born in pleasant weather ; — in
the deliberativeness, meditativeness, and tranquil undebative tem-
per of peaceful sunshine, it would have been a spherical affair ;
whereas, it is hemispherical, one-sided, a partial utterance. When a
man says to me, good morning, and I reply, good morning, sir, that
expression of mine is not the whole of truth, by any means. It
was a reply, and was narrowly limited by that fact. So a Creed, the
Nicene for example, a most noble and much-used symbol ; but
mark the thunder-stroke movement of its Trinitarian clauses : — " I
believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God,
begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of
Light, very God of very God, Begotten not made, Being of one
substance with the Father." I do not know that any human com-
position does me more good to articulate ; but no breath of man
ever shaped itself into just such a shape as that, except as divinely

YALE LECTURES. 215

stirred up by some denial, as the Nicene fathers in fact were.
After this burst of polemical energy, the Creed swings into the
broad Catholic movement of the Apostles' Creed, in the main, the
only Creed I recall at this moment which does not lie open to my
remark as to their polemical origin, and their resultant partialism.
That has the true earmarks of Catholicity, and is therefore good to
use under all circumstances and in all ages.

I have lying open before me, as I write, the Creed of the Theo-
logical Institute of Connecticut ; which I mention with entire
respect and simply for illustration's sake. It is a Creed which I
could myself sign, as all members of the Connecticut Pastoral
Union have, though I never did sign it. But if I did, I should do
it in distinct remembrance that the document was originally a pro-
test against certain phases of doctrine which it was supposed might
get headway in the Congregational body in this State ; and that,
starting in such a motherhood, it must be a decent child and show
its mothering, as it honestly does ; so that it has nothing near the
breadth of the two Creeds to which I have already referred. Of
course every subscriber to that Creed, when he gets his name writ-
ten, in the secret places of his own mind adds numbers of things ;
antithetic truths, qualifiers and wholesome expositions of the docu-
ment, thus making another Creed, as long as the one he has signed,
until he gets himself into the wholeness of Christian doctrine after
all, into the sea, instead of being detained in a puddle. And that
is my point ; that Creeds must be signed in that way — not with
mental reservations, I do not mean that, but with mental additions,
ordinarily, that all Christian people could assent to. I will illustrate.
The article in this Creed, that describes God's election, runs on in
this familiar and innocent manner : — " God, from eternity, elected
some of our fallen race to everlasting life, through sanctification of
the Spirit, and belief of the truth, not for any foreseen faith or obe-
dience in the subjects of election, but according to his own good
pleasure." According to his own good pleasure ! Now when I say
amen to that, I interpolate a cogitation of my own, to the effect that
God is a supremely good, reasonable Being, full of love, and finds
his pleasure in going by the constraint of sweet and loving reasons
always. And that is exactly why his " pleasure " in election — as the
Creed calls it — is a good pleasure. Behold ! what a flood of the
milk of Heaven's kindness is carried into the interiors and very
entrails of an Article on Election, by a little legitimate and friendly

216 YALE LECTURES.

amplification of the saying, " His pleasure." The object of the
makers of the Creed was to get men suitably humbled under the
sovereignty of God in Election ; but I have made an exegesis that
also melts men ; for a " pleasure " so infinitely " good " is enough
to melt anything.

Appending to the Creed a little meditation of my sort, a medi-
tation which I should expect the authors of the Creed would them-
selves approve, I manage to globe my conception of God in salva-
tion, and save the formula of the Pastoral Union from doing me any
hurt. If it had gone on and declared that many are elected to be
lost, as numerous Creeds have declared, I should be willing to sign
that, because it is so ; — in an awful rational sense, it is so — but I
should have my private appendix to that ; namely, all lost men elect
themselves to be lost. One is as true as the other, and no theodicy
is entire without both ; so that self-election should stand in the fore-
front of every Creed, as conspicuous, as loud-spoken, and fondly-
spoken, as God's election.

You see my thought about Creeds now, and how I seem to
myself to have a good deal of liberty in them — honorable liberty, I
claim. If my Church has one that she would like subscribed by
me, I am ready. If the Congregational National Council pleases
to promulge some restatement of doctrine, by and by, I agree
beforehand to give my name to it. They could invent something
that I would not sign, but they will not. No Council, Synod, or
General Convention, in these days, that is, of the Evangelical type,
would issue a Creed which a man might not sign, in the main at
least ; — sign and accept in the real meaning of its words and even
in the intended meaning generally. By the way, what is the differ-
ence between real meaning and intended meaning? Is there any?
If you subscribe to a Form, are you not honestly bound to sub-
scribe according to the intention of the authors of it ? Is not that
its real meaning? I volunteer a small cogitation on that — since it
seems to lie in my path through this subject — thus : —

The authors of a doctrinal statement may have launched out
in that statement into something considerably bigger and grander
than they meant, or supposed at the time they had got. Blessed
be God, men are liable to these unconscious expansions, when their
souls are in great travail with a Creed. You see something analogous
to that in the experiences of the Biblical prophets sometimes.
They forged expressions intentionally local and narrow, but behold

YALE LECTURES. 217

those expressions are susceptible of universal uses, and the Spirit
of God that presided over those prophesyings designed just that
largeness. Or, take a modern illustration. Some strict, and pretty
denominational Calvinistic theologian goes upon his knees for
prayer. He is a godly man and God moves in him as he prays.
Perish the thought that he there, face to face with God, would say
one word adverse to his own theology which he has solemnly elabo-
rated and spent a lifetime on — but he almost does. Yes, he prays
in such a way that an Arminian could join him. He is asking God
to save a certain man, and in his earnestness, while the doctrine of
decrees is not denied, and need not be, it is retired for the time
being and other doctrines, just as true, are brought to the front ;
and the effect is as though his theology were getting modified,
dropping its denominational marks, and taking on Catholicity.

Anybody may be overtaken by these enlargements. Secular
men are. They coin sentences that reverberate forever. They
make speeches that go in among the classics of the race. They
intend nothing. They had not a thought of ambition. They had
not the least premeditation, very likely. But all the more because
thus unconscious and void of purpose, they were open to the spirit
of the age, or the spirit of history, or the spirit of a great national
movement, or the spirit of God — call it by whatever name you
please, I fancy that on inspection it will be found to settle down to
that last, the spirit of God in a man. Witness Lincoln's speech at
Gettysburg. Witness many a hymn, and many a national hymn.
Witness some music, in which the soul of mankind will speak itself
forth forever.

Also witness some Creeds, I say. The writers intended Fatal-
ism of the most insufferable species, let us suppose ; but they shot
clear over into Christianity, and Christianity ever after could use
their Creed as a vehicle of her large meanings. After they had
finished their production, they looked it over and pronounced it
good — there was their Fatalism all out in elaborate black and white,
all they could ask, so they think, but are deceived generally. In
Creed-making, when the authors have made sure of the specialty
most on their hearts, they start out into a pleasant excursion in
some other parts of Christianity ; paying their respects to this and
that doctrine not necessary to be very powerfully stated just then
they fancy — moving therefore unpolemically — and it is in those ex-
cursions, if nowhere else, that they are likely to trip and fall out of
IS

218 YALE LECTURES.

their specialty in a measure ; and all succeeding generations have
the advantage of their misfortune, and sign their Creeds. The
great God who notes the sparrow's fall is unlikely to take no inter-
est in a body of men in travail with a Christian Creed ; and while
for wise purposes, He sometimes stands aloof and leaves them to
bring forth a phenomenally mean result, at other times He passes
into their spirits by His Spirit, and gives them a victory they never
prayed for ; a Creed for the ages, a Creed to be chanted through all
the tribes of Israel ; and when we chant it, we do not chant their
intentions alone, but their magnificent inadvertency, their unknow-
ing seership, their service in the will of God made articulate through
them. What would not the Fathers say, if they could get up from
their graves and see how their partial works have swept the world
sometimes, the local and denominational widening into the univer-
sal, the individual made great and representative of the whole
Church on Earth.

I think, then, that Creeds sometimes have a double sense ;
man's sense (the sense of their author) and God's sense ; and you
may sign which you please. If an ancient symbol proves large
enough to hold all discoveries made since it was issued, very well,
put the discoveries in mentally, and sign the whole thing. I repeat,
a free use of Creeds is one of the ways by which we secure our
liberty as thinking men.

I come now to the last head in this discourse, and inform you
that any anxious doctrinal questioning you may now have, will be
likely to be eased by the simple lapse of time, provided you go
forward in your plain duty, preaching what you know, bringing the
Gospel to bear on men as well as you can, and looking constantly
to God.

How often does the following come to pass in the interior his-
tory of ministers? During their years in the school of theology,
and for some time thereafter, they lay themselves out full-strength on
certain questions that seem to them to lie at the very threshold of
theology ; requiring therefore to be settled before the business of
preaching can be taken up in earnest. I hung for a long time to
the inquiry touching the existence of a God, such as I had tradi-
tionally received. I proposed to have that problem thought out,
before I took one step in active life ; and then I proposed to make
daylight shine through the incoming of moral evil into the universe
of God. It could not be much satisfaction to discover a God to

YALE LECTURES. 219

be preached, unless I could discover that he is a good one, and
worthy to be preached — and looking out on a creation in such ter-
rible confusion, and distress as this one of ours, how could I find
my way to the solid conviction, God is infinitely good ? And so on.
Questions and questions — and prime questions many of them, to a
man about to spend his life in telling men about God and his ways.
But, for various reasons, a man may find (as I did) that some of
his questions cannot be solved by him at present ; whereat he falls
back tired out and lets them go. He has done his best, and they
must go. In the case of some of them he accepts that slender
preponderance of probabilities which he is able to raise in regard
to them, and goes on with his work. In the case of others, he
makes a complete adjournment to some far-away and more lumin-
ous future ; and proceeds to preach just so much as he has discov-
ered. His new work, with its splendid motives, and its successes
very likely, wakes enthusiasm in him, and his old energy for un-
wieldy questions therefore slackens. In a hand-to-hand fight with
evil he forgets to discuss how evil broke in on us originally. In his
joyful proclamation of the Christian salvation, he forgets some of
the intricate questions as to Biblical inspiration. There in the
Book, beyond mistake, is the salvation, and that is enough to fill a
man and keep him speaking with all his might. But by and by
out of the pigeon-holes of his mind tumble by accident this and
that old question of his ; and to his amazement, when he tests him-
self on them he finds that they are settled, and he could not tor-
ment himself with them now if he tried. Some of them are set-
tled as being solved. When his present mind looks them in the
face, they seem to have no special perplexity. He has not studied
them since those old days of mental tribulation ; nevertheless they
are clear — pretty clear. He has had personal experience of God,
and that former debate — is there a personal and good God — is to
him as though a man should fumble an axiom, and pretend to feel
dreadfully because he could not understand it. Experience goes
where logic cannot. Perhaps I cannot demonstrate that my will is
free, but I feel it free in me ; so no matter about your demon-
strations. And particularly in the things of religion, demonstra-
tions become superfluous as experience enlarges. Experience
makes you intuitive. Experience makes you a large and know-
ing theologian. Experience enables you to sit back, high and
lifted up and omniscient, in a sort of Olympian superiority, and

220 YALE LECTURES.

look down on the thinkers in the plain below, who in much dust
and confused endeavor are wrestling with each other on the
problem of a personal Deity, and the reality of an external world,
and the facts of consciousness, and the probability of any kind of
life beyond these present horizons, and the possibility of being
saved from what we at present are, by the power of Jesus Christ.
There they are, and up there he is — raised thereto by the actual
doings of God in his soul.

But experience does not solve all things, and so our minister
finds that some of those old trying subjects of his are settled, not
as being explained, but as seeming now not especially necessary of
explanation. If I have no interest in getting a thing explained, it
is as if explained, for all practical purposes. These indifferent sub-
jects I dare not mention in full, lest I appear to belittle some that
others think of solemn consequence. The philosophy of the
Atonement is an interesting matter, but one can live and save his
soul if he postpone it to some convenient eternity. Large areas of
philosophical divinity need not be traveled now, and need not be
preached. And as to what we do preach, there is this to say, that
preaching a doctrine with a view to save souls by it, and not with
a view to get a subject systematically unfolded, is just the Baconian
way of discovering exactly what that doctrine is and whether it is a
doctrine. A doctrine that cannot be used, is a false one. A true
doctrine which, in use, seems not to serve God's ends, and bless
men, is misconceived at some point by the preacher. If all minis-
ters were retired scholars, intent on theology and nothing more, I
do not know in what misconceptions theology would not at last
bring up. The salvation of theology is trying to preach it. Will
it work? Put it to men. Does it convince them ? Does it bring
them to God ? When I read some of the essays and books issued
by professors of theology, I say — blessed be studiousness and the
cloister. When I go among the churches and see the preachers, I
say — blessed be service in the field. Well, every man ought to
have something of both. Persons made as I was could never
get to a large and comfortable settlement in the truth, I fear, by
the labors of seminary life. Inquiry is in danger of being fruitless,
unless brought continually to the test of life and manful striving.

Young Gentlemen, all through this hour I have carried an
implication that some of you may be as I once was, and I have
done what I could to show you the ways of liberty out in the world ;

YALE LECTURES. 221

and possibly in my earnestness for so long, on that one point, I
have seemed to provide more liberty than any one needs, or should
take. I have no idea that many of you will find yourselves pushing
and discomforted to get your liberty when you fairly come to the
sacred and sweet ministries of your office. You will have passed
through your curriculum, and in it will have become affirmative,
and Creed-bound to a certain extent, and in an intelligent and
wholesome way. You will have had some spiritual experiences
which have confirmed your faith and enlarged your religious intelli-
gence as much as the teaching of your teachers. And, back of all,
as being earlier than all, stand (I hope) the faiths of your child-
hood, your home nurture, the old nest-warmth, the magnetism of
your mother, to mortgage you to God forever and make all serious
Creed-wandering impossible. How we tug on those first moorings
(the home-moorings) sometimes, but how they hold ; and after we
have sufficiently roamed the realms of inquiry and had our strain
and peril there, how peacefully we return to our first rest, and wor-
ship the God of our fathers. These conservative influences will
work to make you not afraid of Creeds ; and that, joined with the
fact that the theory of Creed subscription in these days is quite
elastic in almost all Christian bodies, will give you a good sense of
freedom. " I commend you to God, and to the word of His grace,
which is able to build you up, and give you an inheritance among
all them that are sanctified."

THE VAGUE ELEMENTS IN
LANGUAGE.

Gentlemen, you are to be preachers some day not far off.
Some of you have begun already in a scattering and tentative way,
and it is impossible you should too thoroughly understand the instru-
ment, Language, whereby you are to get your impression on men.
So that I fancy I may do you a service if, to-day, I discourse before
you on the Vague Elements in Language, and the value thereof.

I suppose you are already advised that it is your privilege to
be clear, and convey ideas, definite ideas, when you speak, but I
say unto you, it is your privilege also to be dim and misty, and
convey no sharp-cut ideas at all, but only impressions ; which
impressions in your hearers will be deep or not just according as
you are dim and not clear ; the current doctrine, the doctrine I mean
of the average man, that the sole function of language is to carry
ideas into people's minds, being a dreadful untruth, an untruth
which has miserably circumscribed many a preacher and many a
theologian, and has caused many an extremely lucid creed to be
worshiped three times more than it deserved.

I have nothing to say against clearness, as you will notice
while I go on. Contrariwise, I should have been willing to speak
to you to-day on : — The lucid elements in language and the value
thereof; — as willing as to undertake the cause of mistiness, were it
not that the true, great function of Mist is not appreciated by the
most and does not get its real place in courses of lectures here
and elsewhere.

This is a great and special era for insisting on perspicacity, and
the disciples and enthusiasts of the perspicacious, in the scientific
field, many of them at least, have got on now to the following pitch

YALE LECTURES. 223

of impudence ; namely, they are claiming that whatsoever is not
absolutely visible, hearable, touchable, tastable, smellable, or what
is the same thing, material, physical, and therefore demonstrable,
is, on that account, not at all to be relied upon ; and so in one
grand affirmation, the entire kingdom of supersensible entities,
including God himself, that crown and sum-total of imperceptible
realities, is obliterated by these gentlemen. Now as against the
modern agnostic position, and against the more outright doctrine of
absolute denial, I on this occasion lift up my doctrine of Mist,
the legitimacy of vagueness, the sterling use of vagueness, the
indispensability of vagueness indeed, in order to the highest impres-
sion on the human mind. It is nothing against a thing that it can-
not be explicitly formulated. It may be as real a reality notwith-
standing that. And that it resists formulation is, as likely as not,
one of the tokens of its immensity.

But let us now carefully edge along into our subject and see
what we find. A picture, gentlemen, is a statement, in a termi-
nology addressed to the eye and not to the ear. And whereinsoever
it has force and arrests the beholder, it gets its hold first of all, of
course, by its distinctness. That stands central. A painted tree
must be a tree to the eye, beyond a peradventure ; a man a man,
a leaf a leaf, an animal an animal, and nothing else. If the artist
starts to say tree, and leaves you debating whether it be not a human
shadow that you are observing on the canvas there, that artist there-
by advertises his own confusedness, and is in a vagueness that no
lecturer can defend. For I should have said, there are two kinds of
mist ; the mist of a weak and essentially misty mind ; and the mist
of minds large, rational, lucid, who are as capable of clear statement
as of fogging, and who never let in a shred of fog save as attendant
upon, and an envelope of, a sunlit statement.

So then the picture of which I am speaking • the good picture,
the powerful picture, has something to say, and says it in a tone
that is crystalline and ringing. That to begin with, doubtless. So
much as that I concede to the cause of perspicacity. But now
behold how the real and effective artist gets himself on beyond the
finiteness of perspicacity, into the larger ranges of impression. For
there is no use in talking to the contrary, whatever can be stated is
too small to carry us completely away. However limited we may
be ourselves, thank God, we have a life-long, constitutional hunger
for the unstatable. Give us some token of that, O artist. Hang

224 YALE LECTURES.

out a flag over where the unstatable lies hidden. Draw for our eye
a hand that points out into the vast which you cannot explore.
Show us a wind blowing that way. Anything, anything, to tell us
that beyond all that can possibly be formulated in the terms of your
Art, there sweeps an Unknown ; and that you are not yourself in
the conceit that the statable is anything more than a dot to the out-
spread unstatable. Some signal to notify us of that we must have,
if we are to bow ourselves clear to the ground before you.

A few days ago, with this thought foaming in my mind, I
stepped into my parlor to see how my paintings there hung, showed
in this great matter. The first one I chanced upon was a copy of
Rosa Bonheur's " Changing Pastures ; " — a work full of space, light,
clearness, and beauty ; — no metaphysical theologian ever made an
argument more translucent and incontestable than that woman's
showing of her wide stretch of waters, her crowded boat-load of
sheep in the foreground, her sweep of mountains in the distance,
her human figures, the old shepherd and his oarsmen in the boat,
and all the rest. Her realism and the bare, large vigor which she
manifests in that out-standing and massive reality, are most admir-
rable ; — and manly. I mean disrespect to nobody when I call
such work as that manly. But Rosa Bonheur does not stop there.
No. Here and there is a rent in her realism, through which we
walk out of the real, and out of the narrowness of visibility, into
the ideal with its immeasurable scope, its absolute openness and
feeling of openness ; — the region wherein the soul of man is most
at home and most elate, always. For example • the painter might
have bounded her picture by a wall solid and high as heaven, and
she might have arched over the entire scene by a great dome of
stone, and shut us down under that to contemplate forever her well-
painted, literal sheep — so literal that you can hear them bleat all
packed together there ; to these literalities of several sorts, I say,
she might have confined us, with not a ghost of an outing any-
where ; but — dear Soul ! she wouldn't do it, in truth she could not ;
she could not herself endure to be imprisoned in that way. So, in
place of a dead surface of wall, or any hindering thing, she set a
brave, great sky ; a veritable God's sky ; not a leaden, eye-confining
thing, almost as bad as a wall, but a sky full of Beyonds and outly-
ing infinitudes, a sky that beckons the impressible beholder into
these roomy outings ; so that while her picture is an earth-scene
and tells an earthly story, and not the highest kind of one either,

YALE LECTURES. 225

but a lowly, rather, enlivened and glorified by no definite touch of
sentiment or pathos ; nevertheless it widens away into the heavenly
spaces, as all of earth ought to.

So much for the sky. Then under the sky and on the earth
such touches as these occur — all of them outings for the contem-
plative beholder, you notice. Of course, if the beholder wants to
stop at sheep, and in sheep have his whole satisfaction, I do not
know that he can find a lot more to his mind than these of Rosa
Bonheur's. If he knows a sheep when he sees it, and if sheep
know him as a friend of sheep, as all dogs knew John Brown, and
all breathing creatures loved Donatello, then he may sit down in
this boat on the waters, this sheep-boat, and stay and have his per-
fect bliss. He will escape all perils of the imagination, and be on
first-rate terms with those scientists who cleave unto the finite and
pooh-pooh all else.

But most picture- lovers like to spread a little and wander, and
get far-off, and be let forth into the unhorizoned ranges. They
fancy that life's literalities do themselves get a lift somehow and a
transfiguration, if only in looking at them and dealing with them
we have in us at least an obscure sense of something other than
they ; other, vaster, and more dim. Therefore this painter of ours
comforts us by opening valleys back into her mountains ; great val-
leys ; valleys not painted but suggested by the top-lines of the
mountains ; and as they are only suggested and not closely defined,
you are at liberty and are invited to send forth your musing mind
into them and expatiate to your heart's content ; a performance
this, on the part of the painter, much more stimulating and satis-
factory to you than though she had gone up the valley with you and
told you all and everything, as she did in the case of her sheep.

Moreover, by way of otherwise indicating her valleys, and not
actually plodding along up them and showing you every step of the
road, she starts her waters flowing back, and up, and when she
gets those waters well started she stops them, but she stops
them in such a way that when you notice exactly where they stop,
it is plain as day that they do not stop there, but range on, you
cannot tell how far ; just as a winding road when it goes out of
sight gives you the clearest kind of a notification that it is still
moving on. Now what a cunning and masterful way of painting a
valley it is, not to paint it, but hint it, somehow. How much more
sizable and bewitching is a hinted valley than a painted one !

226 YALE LECTURES.

It is like a veiled lady ; her indistinct face gives you a chance to
glorify her; but if she lifts her veil, the facts are all out. The
unveiled facts may be ravishing, but they cannot be so ravishing as
your idealistic creation of that face when so far concealed that
there is a chance to work your imagination upon it.

But pass from Rosa Bonheur's mountains and valleys and sug-
gestive sky, to her treatment of the waters over which she floats her
sheep. It was in her fond heart to make those waters lustrous
under the slant lights of her sky ; but lustres are likely to detain
the eye on the surface and hold it away from the much more seri-
ous and impressive thought and feeling of awful depths and glooms
underneath. It were too bad to give us a stretch of sea with no
fathomless mystery below, merely that certain soft hues might waver
before us and shine and please. Therefore along the waves now
and then she makes a submarine hint, and in the far foreground
where the shadows of three human forms are cast upon the water
from the boat, she, the painter, instead of reflecting them to' us
from the surface merely, as she might have done, carries them down
and down ; as much as to say : — " See now, this water is no shallow
thing, but a shadowy abyss, it runs down, dimness below dimness, it
widens away in tracts and tracts of gloom, it sequesters hordes of
creatures, it treasures old wrecks, and the dead and the lost things of
long ago, heaps on heaps ; " — " yes, it is a sea," she says ; " I can-
not paint it for you, what terms are large enough for stating such a
thing as that, but just you follow those three shadows into the
depths and see what sort of a feeling they raise in you ; — it is not
necessary you should have any clear ideas as you follow those
shadows, it is better you should not ; what you want is a great
impression of submarine realities, and that is best secured by escap-
ing the realism of detail and all distinctness, and all sense of
boundaries."

I have spent an unconscionable time on this picture, you may
think, but you are mistaken. In this one and particular study thus
long-protracted I am getting some principles established which
open a path for us into the innermost of my subject. I had
thought to mention the vague elements in other pictures on my
walls ; but I must not delay. There hangs there a copy of Church's
" Sunrise in the Tropics," which begins with an exhibition of tropi-
cal foliage as veracious and full of fact as the multiplication table.
But then, immediately back of that in the picture, everything goes

YALE LECTURES. 227

into haze, a lovely illumined haze, deeper and deeper as you follow-
on into the remote. The forms of things struggle through it with
great difficulty, and by and by they disappear altogether and your
eye buries itself at last in complete confusion, a golden confusion ;
but that confusion is by no means like a stone wall to end at. You
cannot see through, I grant you, any more than you could through a
stone wall — that is true — but unlike the wall, it does not stay your
mind ; nay, it projects your mind into regions outlying, and you feel
very much as though you were actually seeing breadths, and
breadths and breadths of equatorial luxuriance and splendor.

These illustrations of the indeterminate, and the function of
it, taken from the painter's art, are fascinating and endless, but I
want to take you now over into the field of music ; peradventure,
that will help me on my way a little and still more confirm my doc-
trine of the vague.

I do not refer now to music wedded to words, and made to
carry a theme contained in those words. I am playing off and
away from words and language as yet, with a view to come down on
that when I am ready for it, with a good momentum gathered up in
these perambulations through the other arts or modes of expres-
sion, wherein I am now indulging. For, language, painting, music,
sculpture, architecture, pantomime, all conceivable instruments of
expression, have certain common features and in so far as they have,
a study of one is a virtual study of the others.

The majority of those who have a heart for music and receive
imperative and dear impressions from it, are not themselves musi-
cians. They understand neither the terms nor the grammar of the
art. The whole thing is a foreign language to them, and therefore
they cannot speak it ; and if those who do speak it have any dis-
tinct ideas whatever in that speaking of theirs, this horde of igno-
rant but fond listeners know not what those ideas are. I appeal to
the experience of many here present, if that is not so. I am one
of the ignoramuses in question. And yet, there is no sort or form
of utterance, or noise-making, which works on me even approxi-
mately as music does. I listen to it always when I can. I follow
it about. I surrender my emotions to it. I was never yet in a
state of rage which could not be utterly put down and made
ashamed by music ; never in a grief which could not be profoundly
ameliorated, for the moment at all events ; never in a levity that
could not be chastened, nor in a perplexity or general state of dis-

228 YALE LECTURES.

trust that could not be led on and out into serenity ; and never yet
was I in any seven-by-nine confinement in the finite, and there
chafed, but music could infallibly toll me off towards and into the
amplitude of the Infinite, where I could really get my breath and
could mysteriously take on an imputation of its magnitude, and
have some sense of possessing magnitude myself. But not one
idea gets into me through that whole performance. Not one. If I
listen to a preacher, I must attend to his meanings. Meanings are
his one and only contrivance for getting at me and doing anything
with me. Up there in a great sweat he stands conveying ideas, and
down there in the pew I sit in a responsive sweat, trying to get
ideas, so as not to lose the whole occasion. A twofold wretched
tug, just because we are shut up to having ideas. I was told of a
boy who, after a great deal of labor to make a composition, began
one with this truly affecting remark : — " It is rather difficult and
pretty impossible, to convey unto others those ideas of which you
are not yourself possessed of." Now if that boy had been a musi-
cian, there would not have been a bit of need that he should con-
vey ideas to anybody. His composition would have been as good
without them. Whether musicians must themselves have ideas
when they speak forth in that almost celestial language of theirs, is
a nicer question. Exactly what idea, now, lies back of each term
of that cabalistic eloquence, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do? Please
tell me that. And when those eight emptinesses get themselves
together in all sorts of twist, double-twist, intertwist, and labyrin-
thine elaboration, and thereby make people cry, and sometimes'
laugh, and sometimes rend heaven with their indignation, what real
thought or thing is there to which that miraculous complexity cor-
responds. When I throw out among you a sentence of this lecture
of mine I am able to point you to some concrete thing which my
words — most of them, not all — stand for. If I say, "Gentlemen,"
you know what that means. It is not like do or re or mi, mere
articulate noise. If I say, " Gentlemen, you know nothing about
music," the words : — Gentlemen, you, know, nothing, and music, all
instantly suggest some reality that you can put you finger on, or
your thought at all events. The term nothing in that sentence
comes nearest to a failure in that respect. It would take a long
hunt to find the tangible counterpart of nothing, I fancy ; and I
may say, as I pass, that that is one of the numerous words at
which those vaguenesses get in wherewith, I contend, language is

YALE LECTURES. 229

saturated. But I am speaking of music, and I am charging vagueness
on it — for is not a language vague which accomplishes its victories
of influence without carrying ideas, and without being able to point
to any perceivable thing in heaven or earth, that its do-re-mi's, or its
overwhelming combinations of do-re-mi's, signify. The necessities
of my subject to-day do not compel me to prove that musicians
when they compose or musically perform, whether by their own
tuneful throats or by instruments, are totally empty of ideas. All I
am forced to say is, that all much-impressed but unmusical listeners
to their goings-on are not so impressed by ideas conveyed. As a
work of supererogation, however, I do hint, that musical composers
and musical performers when they address us, are not in just that
distinct labor to embody ideas, ideas clearly formulated in their
own consciousness and anxious to be delivered, that writers and
speakers are in who use ordinary language. Of course I do not
say this as intending to disparage music in comparison with the
other arts of expression. On the contrary I put it foremost ; —
beyond Painting, beyond Literature, beyond Oratory, beyond every-
thing. I like what Matthew Arnold says in one of his poems : —

Miserere Domine !

The word's are uttered and they flee.

Deep is their penitential moan,

Mighty their pathos, but 'tis gone.

They have declared the spirit's sore,

Sore load, and words can do no more.

Beethoven takes them then — those two

Poor, bounded, words; and makes them new;

Infinite makes them, makes them young,

Transplants them to another tongue,

Where they can now, without constraint

Pour all the soul of their complaint,

And roll adown a channel large

The wealth divine they have in charge.

Page after page of music turn,

And still they live, and still they burn,

Eternal, passion-fraught, and free

Miserere, Domine !

Thus much in glorification of music. It is wonderful, unique,
Heaven's solitary child and darling. But in the midst of all this
that I say about it, I ask you not to forget what I am chiefly after,
namely, this ; — that Music holds this lovely and radiant queenship of
hers, by reason in part of the fact, that she courageously dispenses

230 YALE LECTURES.

with the service of ideas and cleanly-minted conceptions ; as
often as any way not using words at all, as in instrumentation for
instance ; and where she does use them, as in her do, re, mi, taking
care to select arbitrary and utterly meaningless terms, that cannot
be tracked back to any physical root like most terms ; terms that
cannot be traced to any particular association that explains their ori-
gin, (as where a certain special new color recently came to be called
magenta, because a certain great battle had just happened to be
fought at an old-world place whose name was Magenta) : selecting
terms, I say, that owe their origin to the stark, inexplicable, lawless
volition of man, terms therefore as bare of associations or foregoing
history, as a new-born babe ; — that is the vocabulary of Music, in
so far as she has any. Nevertheless, let me say it once more, she,
most nearly of all voices, voices the infinite, she most successfully
raises in us those feelings whose chiefest peculiarity is that they feel
in us exactly as though they had no limits, and would be blas-
phemed if ever limits should undertake to circumscribe them. I
tell you, Men and Brethren, we are all pretty small, but the small-
est of us every now and then has emotions which, as we turn and
look in on them, seems to be measureless — exactly that ; I have felt
that a thousand times — measureless — or if on the remote outskirts
of these emotions in us we observe some dim similitude of metes
and bounds, they are so dim that they do not distress and suffocate
us ; — they are like Rosa Bonheur's sky, which is the end of her
picture to be sure, the point at which her brush stopped ; but the
point also and moreover and a good deal moreover, at which we
are passed triumphantly on and out into whatever illimitable voyag-
ing we have the sensibility and imagination for.

I was getting off the substance of this statement not long ago,
to a very practical and concrete woman, a woman of every-day,
remorseless sense ; and she told me she wished I would stop talking
in that way to her. She listened attentively, and was vexed, because
she discovered nothing in her own experience that corresponded to
those big moods and mental states that I pretended to be describing.
Gentlemen, if any of you are vexed, I cannot help it. Perhaps
some day, when you are old enough and impressible enough and
reflective enough on your own inward state, this thing will begin to
glimmer into you. Blessed be God for music, or for whatever thing
has the knack to abolish horizons and let us out into the Infinite ;
which, after all, is our native air.

YALE LECTURES. 231

Speaking of sounds, and of their power according as they are
indefinite, consider a great, booming bell-stroke, or the go-off of a
great cannon. When they first hit the ear, those sounds, they are
even painfully definite and mind-piercing ; as excruciating as a
creed that assumes to get God defined completely and made porta-
ble in the finite ; but after a little that clear first crash has the
decency to fine away and fine away and widen off into space, and
grow vast, and by and by misty and wavering, till at last it hovers
and pulses on the very verge of silence ; there it stands trembling
as though loath to jump off and be eternally still ; — finally it jumps
and is gone forever, and then it comes back and is not gone — then
it dies again — then returns a very tenuous and phantasmal ghost of
a sound. It reminds one of Tom Hood's lines : —

We watched her breathing thro' the night,

Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life

Kept heaving to and fro.

Our very hopes belied our fears,

Our fears our hopes belied —
We thought her dying when she slept,

And sleeping when she died.

So that vanishing sound thinned out through the whole
immeasurable air, and when it expired no mortal could tell ; — but
I ask you ; when is that bell-stroke, or that explosive cannon, most
powerful ; when in the first crash it is separated from the encom-
passing silence of the creation by a line of distinction like an abyss,
or when its confines have come to be dubious, when it has reached
the border-lands of Silence and is melting into silence, like snow
into the river ? Its vagueness is its glory. Its vagueness makes it
seem large. Its vagueness holds us in a hush of emotion. Its
vagueness energizes upon us and in us and produces emotions that
are the duplicate of its own dreamy magnitude. And it is just so
with many other inarticulate sounds.

But let me now carry my doctrine of the vague over into Lit-
erature, and observe how the case stands there. Take that poem
of two verses, written by Alfred Tennyson, and called by him,
"The Poet's Song." I think you will say, Gentlemen, that it
requires good courage in me and all sorts of faith in my dearly-
beloved vagueness, to go to that man for specimens of it. For who

232 YALE LECTURES.

that ever wrote is more crystalline than he, who more nearly ap-
proaches the beautiful finiteness of Greek sculpture, who has cut
more cameos, and who more delights in cameos, with their explicit
particularity and their ever-legible lines of limitation ? Yes, that is
so ; but Tennyson is a great man ; — he is no cameo himself and he
cannot confine himself to cameo work. As a matter of pastime he
may toss off a jewel like that, and there stop ; but when he brings
all his powers into the field ; after he has done his fine cutting and
given you a scene, a thing, a man, a thought, so that it stands out
like a dog's head on a door-knocker for distinctness ; he proceeds
to call you off into regions circumjacent and large and misty, as
likely as not, like the sea-begirt and fog-bestrown island on which
he lives ; — tones far-away you will hear — tones indeterminate — bells
that are of earth perhaps and perhaps of heaven, wind-sounds " from
unsunned spaces blown," yes, revelries of the imagination, ordered
and melodious revelries, he will give you, and in your joy you will
forget cameos and crystals and all clear-cut forms whatsoever.

I do not think that the poem — " The Poet's Song " — is so good
an illustration of all this as I might find, but it does furnish a good
etching, an absolute picture ; and at the same time there is a noble
off-look or two in it, which gives a sense of room and range ; —
exactly as Rosa Bonheur,- after she had painted her sheep with Ten-
nysonian fidelity — there they are, sheep all over, precisely as God
made them — indulges us in brave sky-lines and great suggestive
chasms and valleys in her mountains, and great watery depths, and
so on ; — so that we are in the expansibility of the Creation a little,
and not in the belittlement of a cameo.

Tennyson undertakes to tell us in the two verses mentioned,
that a poet went forth from the city into the country, seated him-
self, and poured forth a poetic melody. And the melody was so
fascinating and amazing, that a wild swan, a lark, a swallow, a snake,
a hawk and a nightingale, all paused and listened, and declared
they never conceived the like. As I read now, just watch these
creatures. You can see them as visibly as though I had them here
with me to pantomime the thing over again for your edification.

The rain had fallen, the Poet arose,
He passed by the town and out of the street,
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he sat him down in a lonely place,

YALE LECTURES. 233

And chanted a melody loud and sweet,
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,
And the lark drop down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
The snake slipt under a spray,
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak
And stared, with his foot on the prey,

(It must have been marvelous singing that arrested him in his
greediness there.)

And the nightingale thought, " I have sung many songs,

But never a one so gay,

For he sings of what the world will be

When the years have died away."

Now I do not know but that utterance is perfect, artistically
and everywise. But that in it which engages my attention at the
present, is first the author's absolute conception of his scene ; no
cameo I say was ever better cut ; there is a statement for you as
firm-lined and obvious as though made under oath, by the most
incorrigible of realists ; — all the rights of perspicuity are religiously
secured, — no holy creed were ever better in that regard ; but see
now secondly, how Tennyson slips in a magnitude or two, and gives
us an offing here and there, an outrun into the majesty of the dim,
a touch of atmosphere which like all atmospheres ever seen of man,
comes just short of complete translucency ; and we all know that
the one feature by which atmospheres get those lovely shows and
carnivals of color wherewith they so intoxicate us, is this short-
coming of theirs in the matter of clearness.

When our poet has taken us into the country and spoken of
the wind blowing from the gates of the sun, and of the cloud-
shadows traveling across the wheat, he has therein and thereby
given us a feeling of height and space out there. We are not
invited to any small scene, like an etching hung in a gallery, but the
whole creation is called in to make an occasion worth while. And
that is a good start. Plainly it is no mere cameoist that has us in
charge. Next he proceeds to inform us that this same whole crea-
tion is made to be attent and is, in fact, just ravished by that out-
poured melody from that man there seated. The prose way of
stating that, would have been to state it straightforwardly, just as I
now have. But to hint it, by picturing three or four animal crea-
tures as arrested and attent, is three times as effective as any
16

234 YALE LECTURES.

statement. To our quick feeling, those intensely concrete and lively
specimens of the creation are more than the creation, on the prin-
ciple sometimes mentioned, a part is more than the whole ; as that
veiled lady, you remember, was more revealed when partly veiled
than when her entire unobscured face rose on us.

By that cunning device, then, of the selected animals, Tenny-
son takes us on an unexpected walk through the creation, a walk
not precisely marked out either, but vague, vast and alluring. I do
not say that we are wide-awake to all this, and consciously say to
ourselves : — It is through the creation we are now going ; — no, the
author does not wish us to be in such a state of clear intelligence
as that. All he wants is to start a creation-feeling in us, while we
concentrate on his four, interesting live creatures.

Two releases, then, we have had already from the finite and
narrow ; — both times into the outlying creation. But now comes a
third release, not exactly into the creation this time, but into the
future ; and not into any finite and comprehensible future, the
future, that is, of dates and days and periods, and generations, and
slow great cycles ; the future that can be held in clear idea — no,
not into any such terminable and little thing does he project us,
but hear him : —

The nightingale thought, I have sung many songs,

But never a one so gay,
For he sings of what the world will be

When the years have died away.

When the years have died away ! Are we detained on larks,
hawks, swans, snakes, and nightingales now ? We started with them ;
for we must start on some solid and real thing always ; and men of
mind always give us some clear thing like that to begin with ; — or
as I said before, in every picture there needs to be, for a central
fact to tie up to, a statement, a cubical nugget of reality ; — but this
nugget having been secured in this poem and we having gone all
abroad from that, in a flourish or two, as I have explained ; we are
caught up at last and shot forth and forward, farther than cannon-
balls ever went, farther than space ever stretched, beyond the roll of
time, into a nebulous Somewhere, so nebulous as to be next thing to
Nowhere, and in that half — somewhere half — nowhere, our minds roll
about in just that big confusedness which the poet wants us to be
in. He might have said or had his nightingale say : — ten thousand

YALE LECTURES. 235

years away, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Perhaps Jonathan
Edwards, in his more acute and analytical moments, would have
liked that better. There is a relishable, factual quality in that, that
I can see myself. But I do not want to look at it long. I would
rather be ballooned in the Infinite, to the sound of: —

When the years have died away !

There is also a touch of the supernatural in this poem, which I
have not mentioned. How easy it is to construct a first-rate argu-
ment wherein it shall be proved that the supernatural and the infi-
nite cannot be set forth in natural and finite terms at all. Natural
terms ! Physical terms ! Limited terms ! They embody the
unlimited ! Why is not that a contradiction in so many words ?
By whatever laborious devices you carry this earth-bound, small ter-
minology of yours over towards the supra-mundane and its immen-
sities, and howevermuch you sublimate these terms of yours, as is
often done in poetry, will they not distinctly savor all the same of
their earth-born pedigree ? Can they go beyond themselves ? Must
not all sky-piercing human structures stand on the earth and there
keep standing however high they go, and rock when the earth
rocks? What are God, angels, heaven, hell, and all the rest over
yonder, as we conceive and describe them ; and what can they be,
but materialistic and anthropomorphic projections, long-stretching
shadows of things here, that we have come to know about ? An
angel, conceived by a man, is a magnified man. And even God,
in all our descriptions of him, is simply or mostly a powerfully
idealized man, we might say. We call him a person and thus make
him head up in a bounded consciousness, like us ; — an awful and
large consciousness, to be sure, but the moment he is alleged to
have consciousness at all, he is represented as fenced in from the
great All of being, a section of the All, nucleated and organized ; —
in fact, made little in order that he may be made conceivable to
little folks like us. A friend of mine asked Matthew Arnold when
he was among us recently, how he came to invent that much-bela-
bored definition of God, which he has put into his books. He
calls him you recollect, " that power other than ourselves that makes
for righteousness." And he replied "that he did not invent it in
the interest of agnosticism or unfaith, but in the interest of a larger
faith." He had grown sick of the current belittlement of the
Almighty in the customary religious talk about him as a person, and

236 YALE LECTURES.

so on. He thought that the pious masses are under the delusion
that when they have said person, and a number of other strictly
human and cameo words, they have actually got God. Therefore
he proposed to throw them out to sea and get some size into
them, bereaving them utterly of their old, circumscribed lingo, and
calling them to take note of, and be awestruck under, this rather
finely conceived and first-rate vagueness ; " That power other than
ourselves that makes for righteousness." What a sudden lift out of
the smallness of personalism, that expression the not-ourselves is !
Whether it is in every respect a safe and wholesome thing to be
lifted into the eminently thin ether of Mr. Arnold's definition, I
will not now say ; but as to the whole notion that supersensible
things and persons cannot be set forth to any good purpose by a
naturalistic and human language ; I say they can. What terms,
pray, dues Mr. Arnold himself employ when he sets out to take
away the people's God, and give them another and larger one?
Was the sentence " The power not ourselves," made out in this
unknown that we all want to get into and talk about? I venture
to guess that it was devised in the library of Matthew Arnold,
and that every word of it is nothing but English — not divine, not
even angelic, but earthly to the last degree. I presume you could
trace those words into the earthly past a thousand years, and very
likely find where they first came up out of the soil of earth and
time.

But I was remarking on Mr. Tennyson's poem, " The Poet's
Song " — and saying there is an element of the supernatural in it ;
and in it you will see one of the ways by which the supernatural
may be and often is set forth in the machinery of the natural.
Those birds, snakes, and what-not, that were so captivated by that
chanted melody — that human song so immensely transcending all
songs of larks and nightingales — did not behave after the natural
and well-known fashion of such creatures. Whether they have such
intelligent and listening birds out in the invisible I do not know.
Perhaps they do. Perhaps these that Mr. Tennyson saw were astrays
from that land other than our own. At any rate, they are no birds
of ours. And, don't you see, we are just enough confused as to
whose they are — whose and whence — to feel ourselves carried out
and away and far away from the strictly terrestrial. It is precisely
another other-than-ourselves contrivance. We go astride of such
magnificent negatives and mind-puzzlers, and ride the realms of air

YALE LECTURES. 237

— not into the invisible literally, perhaps, but into very imposing
mist, wherein the effect on us is considerably as though we had
become conversant now with trans-mundane territories.

If I might take time for it, I could show you this same thing,
this arriving at the supersensible by earthly means, in a much more
striking development in Coleridge's Christabel — where quite a
number of weird and unclassifiable occurrences come in to lift our
feet away from the ground and make us know that, wherever we
are, we are not in this world merely. For instance, there is a mas-
tiff that every night of his life, when the castle bell strikes twelve,
puts forth just sixteen howls, twelve for the hours and four for the
quarters. Where did such a dog as that come from, every rational
human being proceeds to ask. And how is it that that barking of
his is done always at the very hour, the awful hour, when his mis-
tress of the castle died years and years ago ? Now Coleridge has
half a dozen or more inventions like this in that poem. And what
is the result? He does not take you to any particular shore, land,
coast, or remote station of the universe by these inventions, and
definitely land you ; but he takes you away from this time-land ;
yes, that is the trick of it ; he carries you off and leaves you no-
where, and the nearest you can come to any description of your
feelings, is to say — " Well, here I am, but where am I ! " and that
is a pretty good description of the unearthly, the beyond, the
invisible, in finite terms.

But not merely in night-howling mastiffs and in birds bewitched
by poets' melodies, may the " country other than our own," and
the unperceivable people and personages off here " other than our-
selves," " that make for righteousness " some of them, and some of
them not, be expressed, but in single words also something of the
same sort can be done. If I say of God, he is infinite, that is,
not-finite, I think I have made on your mind a decided impression
concerning him as he really is. I have taken an earth-born, finite
word, and negatived it, and doing that, have pitched you out of
the finite totally. To be sure I have given you no more spot to
land on than had Noah's weary dove, but that is precisely what I
aimed at. If Noah's dove had found a place for his anxious feet,
he would not have thought it much of a flood that he was sailing
over ; and if my in-finite, should set you down on any determinate
thing or spot, you would certainly underestimate the divine ; just
as when the Creeds say "persons," and "three persons in one

238 YALE LECTURES.

nature," they (according to Mr. Arnold) almost minimize the
Being they are describing. The truth is, as soon as we have said
persons, we must pour in the glorious confusion of our negatives,
like non-finite, and start the people out of their comfortable earth-
built snuggeries, (like persons and so on) and set them careering —
not to say careening — across the uncharted expanse of the Bound-
less. We want to leave them about where that old definition of
infinite space leaves the mind ; namely, " Infinite space is that
whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere."
That is just about what it is. Gentlemen, I am not the man to
deny the legitimacy of Creed terms ; person, three persons, and all
the rest. I do insist, though, that while you are regaling yourself
with your small bottles of water, you shall not be permitted to think
that in those neat and delightful half-pints you have the ocean.
And in order to prevent your thinking it, I say, let the ocean in on
you, and paddle confusedly about in it and get to know its great-
ness. Often one and the same word, or expression, may be made
to have in it a clear, finite affirmative, and withal a flicker of the
infinite ; as where the Nicene Creed declares the eternal generation
of the Son of God. Generation is a terrestrial term, and a term of
beginning applied in the non-terrestrial field, where terrestial flavors
are impertinent; but when you add the word " eternal," and deny
a beginning to the Son of God you have somewhat purged your
terminology of its earthly taint and made it serviceable in that
region of the immaterial.

You have often noticed the clear western sky illuminated by
the sun descending, or quite gone down, and have felt that that sky
led you off and back and through and on, as to the very throne of
God. But I submit you do not get so far back in a clear sky as
you do in a sunset sky that is heavily clouded, but is revealed, a
touch here and a touch there, through rents in those cloud-forms.
How deep and holy and sometimes awful in their splendor are those
narrow in-looks. Gentlemen, our language of the supernatural,
unseen and illimitable are cloud-terms ; in which there are hints
of those Beyonds : mere hints, rents, partings of the finite, in-looks
therefore, on-looks, through-looks, all the more intense and over-
powering because thus framed in ; — as in picture-galleries you see
better by looking through tubes.

I make a turn now in my general subject and come up to
vagueness in language from another direction.

YALE LECTURES. 239

When I was discoursing on music a little back, I made the
point that the effect of music is preeminently emotional, rather
than intellectual ; an impression on feeling, without any ideas car-
ried over into the mind. I now have to say that while language is
certainly a vehicle of ideas, and carries swarms of them into hosts
of minds, clear ones, splendidly clear and satisfying sometimes ; it
also in innumerable instances consents to be like music exactly ; and,
while it talks on, and sounds intelligent enough, as a matter of fact
secures in the listener emotionalism only, and no sense of ideas
whatever. And that service of language is as great as any other,
and ought not to be spoken against as though it were something
unsolid and beneath human beings ; especially educated human
beings, like theologues in their third year, or learned professors in
their many years. My mind is that great men who are void of just
this mooniness do miss one of their chief bignesses, and had better
begin right off to size out into the obscure, and take impres-
sions that they cannot give much account of at the time, —
impressions, I mean, that they do not at the moment trace to ideas
received.

Now language often prevails by the musical quality in it con-
siderably. My yacht on the waves rocks me in the loveliest curves
of motion conceivable. And rhythm in language rocks me. And
rhyme rocks me. And the kiss and kiss of Hebrew parallelism rocks
me. And the structural balance in the movement of many a prose
writer rocks me, I find. I am not intellectual under it —at least, it
is not that feature of the effect which I am considering now — I am
not intellectual, I am a babe and rocked. Robert Browning begins
one of his poems thus : —

Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles,

and we are all delighted. But why ? Because of the clear scene
in it, of course, the lovely distance, the expansiveness of the whole
thing and the beauty spread over all. But there is more than that
in it. There is a flow of melody. Hear those ravishing liquids
and vowel-sounds murmur along together, — the evening smiles,
miles and miles. And while I am on this passage let me name to
you another subtle power in it. By the monotony of that melody,
our feeling, unbeknown to ourselves, is chastened and made seri-
ous, and thus brought into accord with the pensiveness of the

240 YALE LECTURES.

evening. We are put into an evening mood, so as to look at the
quiet-colored horizon off there, and at

The solitary pastures where the sheep

Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop —

to look at the whole, I say, with adjusted and suitable eyes. Now
Browning did not think out all this contrivance of expression for
getting the upper hand of us. No, it was not stratagem in him,
but spontaneity, — cultured spontaneity. He felt thus and so him-
self, and he simply poured this his feeling forth ; and we are
caught. It is not a matter of ideas on either side, — his or ours.
You add up all the volumes that Shakespeare ever wrote, and it
would not begin to equal the volumes that Shakesperian commenta-
tors have written to explain his cute ways of fascinating us ; whereas
most often he wasn't cute and intentional at all. Is a bird cute and
intentional when he sings ? Is a flower full of plans on us when it
blooms ? Is God premeditative and strategic when he loves ?

Now Brethren, keep hold of my exact point. I am running
down ideas, conscious, clear ideas as necessary factors and sole fac-
tors in self-expression, and in receiving impression from language.
Dr. Elisha Kane relates that during one of his long winters in the
vicinity of the north pole, a certain sailor on his ship was observed
to be weeping over Tennyson's : —

Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, oh Sea,
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

I never asked the sailor, but I will engage that if he had spent
his whole winter trying to find out wherefore he cried, he could not
tell. He could tell some things ; as that the " Never come back to
me," started his heart homeward, and also set him wondering
whether he should ever see home again, and get away from that mis-
erable old inscrutability, the north pole. But it would not have oc-
curred to him that Tennyson's music was stealing into him, and the
gray tone of the music, the monotony, the sombre refrain ; also the
bright images in the background of the poem, on which these gravi-
ties were projected and made more grave : — also never could he
have devised the connection of thought between these two lines : —

YALE LECTURES. 241

Break, break, break
On thy cold gray stones, oh Sea.

(Just hear the lament in those vowels — " thy cold, gray, stones,
oh Sea ") and these other two lines of the same verse : —

And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

What is the connection, anyhow? Most people cannot tell. No
matter what the connection is. Stop trying to get ideas. You can
cry without them, just as well. The first real, old, luxuriant English
ivy that I ever saw, an ivy that covered every inch of a church
tower several feet deep, was at Muckross Abbey, in Ireland ; and I
cried. What did I do that for? Was not that being more mooney
than was really necessary? Did I cry under a sudden uncommon
access of ideas ? I never was emptier of ideas in my life. Men
and Brethren, do you not know that three quarters of the chords
that vibrate in us are below our consciousness ; that more than half
of our experiences come from strokes made on those sub-conscious
chords ; that preaching, or old ivies never reach their utmost power
till they reach them and play on them ; that those chords are
reached without ideas even better than with them ; that a Creed
partially fails, if, while it states thoughts as clear-cut as a minted
dollar, it does not at the same time start the mysterious depths in
us, the sleeping sub-bass strings, the strings of mystery, the strings
that talk large and talk vague, like that bell-tone that I described as
widening abroad through the infinite air, so spiritual and unmeas-
urable at last?

I can tell now about that ivy business, in part at any rate,
because I have analyzed it. I have been down into myself with a
search-warant, and after I had read Browning's " Love Among The
Ruins," I did the same thing ; and I have no objection to self-
search, in itself considered ; but I resist the doctrine that emotions
not thought-born are illegitimate ; bastards and not sons ; that there-
fore language must bend its whole strength to begin clear ; when
the most superfine and celestial instrument of expression that we
know of, (music) has its main strength in not being clear ; I resist
the doctrine for many reasons. The first reason is, that I know
better — know it by having thought it out, and know it by a hundred
experiences of my own. The second reason is, that everbody else
knows better, if he is old enough to examine his own contents and

242 YALE LECTURES.

will calmly do it with this matter in his mind. The third reason is,
that religion cannot live without my doctrine of vagueness. It may
have a name to live, in the form of cold-blooded, finite and small
propositions ; but religion in its fulness and full power is a thing
saturated with awe ; and how can awe keep itself alive while look-
ing up simply into the small face of a definitely-stated immaterial,
invisible, immeasurable and divine. My fourth reason is, that if
preaching is content to be propositional, lucid, exact and religious
in the canned form only ; an eternal display of cameos ; it can have
no such efficacy among men as it ought to. When you come to
that particular kind of work and declare it the only kind that has any
right to be done, you have practically and in principle gone over to
materialistic scepticism ; which has settled down on the theory that
only the thing which can be brought into measurable dimensions,
and really grasped, is a thing at all, and entitled to our respect.

Now Brethren, in the progress of my thought to-day I hope
I have not accidentally disrespected clarity in expression, and
those extreme labors of clarification which are so congenial to
many minds both eminent and common, in the pulpit and out of it.
I listen to them sometimes when they are simplifying things and
putting them up in minute packages, — " breaking the bread up small
and putting it on a low shelf," so that the most undeveloped of us
can get the good of it — I listen to them, and watch them, and
notice how manfully they contend with the universal haze of things,
with a thorough-going gusto ; and when with much tugging they
push back the line of haze one space farther, and widen the hori-
zon of the definite, I am as pleased as anybody , but I cannot help
reminding them every now and then, that what I have often noticed
in the brightest days of the year in London, may be noticed also
in those areas of thought which they have most triumphantly clari-
fied and flooded with daylight, to wit ; — the very daylight never
fails to have a sweet blue haze in it. Look up into the dome of St.
Paul's, and there it is, and no mistake. Out of doors I said, What
a perfect and shining day this is, in this celebrated old fog-land !
But all the while the haze was there ; and likewise in subjects, when
you have reached the acme of translucency, you need to wash your
sunshine once more ; and then and moreover, we all know, and
these gentlemen themselves admit, that a few miles back in the
subjects which they have so cleared, there begins a gloaming which
deepens back into midnight.

YALE LECTURES. 243

It is interesting to remember that every word they use is
stocked with several meanings and is likely to be a bit muddled on
that account. First of all, it has more or less of its primary and
physical meaning, the taste of the earth from which it sprung ; and
some man who listens to them will detect that aboriginal flavor.
Next, the word has lingering in it its historical meaning, the savors
it has picked up in its passage down ages and ages of use ; and
some listener will be ferretting out that. Next, if it so happens
that the word is an inspired one, because the man who utters it is a
temple of the Holy Ghost, it will have in it a God's meaning,
which meaning perhaps the speaker himself has no thought of, and
which most of his hearers also may not perceive, while some truly
sensitive and clairvoyant perceiver in the assembly will get hold of
it. Next, (and finally — for I cannot mention all the contents and
cargoes in each word of man) — next, I say, that word thrown out
among the people, is like the shadows in a lake caused by the
trees, heights and buildings on its banks. Those trees, heights and
buildings are fixed and stationary things, in the main, and are there-
fore able to cast stationary and restful shadows, if only they can
have a restful surface on which to cast ; but the lake is mobile and
unstable — it lies still and glassy when it wants to ; and then those
shadows look like their originals on the bank ; — then again it rip-
ples, it rolls ; then clouds float over and kill those bank-shadows
altogether ; and so it shifts on.

"The shadows on Loch Katrine's breast
Are neither restless nor at rest."

Thus words ; they go out upon a thousand different minds and
take their luck. Say Imagination to one man and he scowls ; say
it to another and he smiles all over. It is sometimes said that a
man sees in Europe only what he takes to Europe. Well, a man
sees in a word only what he takes to it. One day in my congrega-
tion, Dr. Horace Bushnell took his hat and left, in a spurt of honest
wrath, because I asked the people to sing the tune America. They
stayed and rolled out America with a great noise, but he would not
hear it, because it was God Save the Queen, one of the national airs
of England, stolen and rechristened America. So it is with all things.
They have the bad luck to fall on different minds, making peace
sometimes, and sometimes a pother. I amused myself this morn-
ing thinking about you students, and what variegated impressions the

244 YALE LECTURES.

sight of you in a body here in this chapel makes on this miscella-
neous fringe of people, right, left, and all around. I know what I
think of you, but Bob Ingersoll looks on you with mingled pity
and contempt. And alongside of him sits a minister who has
averaged you and concluded that you do not seem as intellectual
as the students of his day. So that he is afraid the ministry is flat-
tening out. Another minister knows better, he thinks. He says
you look first-rate. One brother out there has himself had a hard
and depressing time in the ministry, and your hopefulness, as you
look forward to your work, makes him almost sick. One old min-
ister, who has had just strength enough left to get to this Chapel
and sample a few of my lectures, is mightily pleased because the
gaps made by the fading away of the old men are so sure to be filled.
Another man weeps because you remind him of his son who died
while in his divinity studies. And then the ladies over here have
their views. Some of them just mother you. Some have " thoughts
too deep for tears " — on William Wordsworth's principle, perhaps —

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

That is the manifold picture you make, Gentlemen. It is not your
fault. You are solid and immutable enough, as an object. These
brick buildings are hardly more so. But these minds that gauge
you, they are regular Loch Katrines : —

In bright uncertainty they lie,
Like future joys to Fancy's eye,

and you have to suffer. People find in you, and in words, just
what they take to them and to you. And that is an element of
incertitude in language.

Then too, the clear speakers, who make a god of clearness and
think there is no other, for I am addressing myself to their case at
present, cannot themselves define one in a hundred of the words
they use. They cannot define them extempore and at the moment
when they use them, nor later (ordinarily) when they have had
time to think on them with all their might, can they define them.
When I came to make a Lecture or two for you on Imagination, I
thought, in decency, I ought to tell to a dot what Imagination is,
and I found I did not know. Then I consulted two or three meta-
physicians, and I found they did not know. Then I came back to
my own wisdom, took a deep dive into my own consciousness and

YALE LECTURES. 245

strove to evolve a definition from what I myself might inwardly have
of Imagination. I evolved three corners of the thing — enough for
my purpose as a lecturer — and the other corner is under water yet.
Generally from two to three corners are under. I had all my life
been wont to speak of Imagination ; and all my life the listeners to
me had conceived that they knew what I meant ; but not a man of
us could draw a clear line around that thing, and make it stand out
in absolute separateness from every other human faculty.

Such is language, Young Gentlemen, — the instrument we are all
using so fully, and looking intelligent while we use ; the instrument
you will do your preaching with and draw up Creeds with, and wreak
yourselves upon with great enthusiasm sometimes. Well, wreak on.
I have no objection. I myself have been wreaking on it for the last
hour or more. But let us not pretend that these dice we play with
are perfect. If only they were, some questions would have been set-
tled thousands of years ago. But how can they be settled when the
coin of interchange is of indeterminate value ? How much are those
dimes and half dollars and dollars, that are flying about in such helter-
skelter fashion ? Nobody quite knows. Often, when a speaker passes
a dollar, as he supposes, the man in the pew sees but ten cents in it.
And occasionally the speaker's ten cents is worth a hundred dollars.
The fact is, language as used is a semi-chaotic flux of incertitudes,
wherein we are exercised most wholesomely for something better yet
to come ; beatific visions, and other visions. Of course here and there
in the welter there emerges a limited spot of solid land ; the ascer-
tainable and ascertained ; and on those spots we sit down and have a
dear good time. Not because such unsizable and stingy spots are so
much in themselves, but being all we have they are valuable ; and be-
sides, they show that spots emerged are possible in our case. If they
are, we may hope for more of them gradually. At any rate, they are
good spots to jump from and take with us when we are called to go
out of this seeing in a glass darkly and knowing but in part.

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith; we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from Thee,
A beam in darkness; let it grow.

246 YALE LECTURES.

I do not quote these lines as accurately consecutive to what I
have just been saying, in the form of them, but because in their
spirit they are consecutive enough, and because in them I find that
mingled confidence and half-pensive sense of limits which I find to
be habitual within myself — that mental state which led me this week
to write out this my last lecture to you for this year. I bid you
farewell.
.v

THE SERVICE OF ART IN
RELIGION.

That body of Christians with whom it has been my lot to be
connected, is infested by what I consider a prejudice against the
use of the beautiful in the service of religion ; which prejudice de-
clares itself in divers ways, such as :

First, an altogether too powerful array of unarchitectural and
unadorned church edifices : — edifices that may shelter the people
from storms, but do not in the least minister to culture, besides
being deficient in several other respects.

Secondly, in a strong dread of — not to say contempt for —
everything decorative, or symbolic, in connection with religion and
religious worship ; the entire elaborated symbolism, painting, and
sculpture of the Church of God at large, being lumped together as
suspicious and swept away at a stroke : — the Cross, as recalling the
passion of the Lord and the deepest idea of the Christian life, being
repudiated almost as energetically by some, as the more far-fetched
and artificial symbols whereon men have doted. There must be
no sculpture in the house of God. And there must be no painting
— none, at least, that has any meaning in it. There may be frescoes,
perhaps, and in scattered instances profusions of color have been let
in ; but the rule has been that the instant those colors proposed in
any wise to express some divine thing, some scene in the life of the
Lord, some great historical figure like an Apostle or a Martyr, some
thought dear to the heart of universal man ; that over-vaulting am-
bition has been stamped upon, and stamped to death. So, not' long

248 YALE LECTURES.

ago, in a certain city when I stepped in to look at the rejuvenated
interior of a sacred building belonging to an historic and opulent
church, lo ! I found myself in a gorgeous bar-room, or saloon, so
far as the coloring was concerned ; and not even the well-chosen
texts of Scripture strung along below the cornice in suitable, strong
colors, could in anywise begin to redeem the thing and make a
church of it.

Thirdly, our antipathy to the beautiful, shows itself in a four-
square resistance of all hands to that most serviceable of the arts,
Christian music, in its higher forms — in those forms, that is, which
represent as no other contrivance of expression can, the inward life
of man, in its multiformity, multiplexity and immeasurable yearning.

Fourthly, we are shy of all liturgical advance among us, sus-
pecting that if public worship starts out deliberately and consciously
to be decorous and perhaps beautiful, some enervation will manage
to creep into our piety, some luxuriousness, some esthetic volup-
tuousness, at any rate some stiffness of formalism and resulting
awful chill of death.

These are some of the tokens of our denominational suspicious-
ness towards the beautiful. Perhaps there are others ; but these
are enough to indicate our trend. If I have seemed to speak
pointedly of this matter, and with a flavor of disrespect, it is not
because I want to be impudent or unfair or unloyal to my denomi-
nation. No ; what I am most after, is to make the thing I mean
stand out and be distinctly visible. That I am not unfair, or un-
appreciative of these views whereof I have spoken, will appear, it
may be, as I proceed now to name some of the sources of our Con-
gregational aversion to esthetics — an aversion, I may add, wherein
we have the sympathy of some other pious bodies of people.

I. To begin with, we are the descendants, both lineal and
spiritual, (numbers of us lineal and all of us spiritual) of a certain
historical, much-buffeted, resolute and solid people, who by the
grace of God discovered that the religion of their clay and land had
gone into affiliation and whoredom ( an affiliation that amounted to
a whoredom) with Art — fine art — the arts of expression and impres-
sion— so that in that three-fold, good classification of all thinkable
realities which Plato made out for us ; namely, the True, the Beauti-
ful and the Good — the Beautiful had gone into the saddle, and was
riding the other two — a most preposterous and profane thing, our
Fathers said. So they shouldered in to right that. And after the

YALE LECTURES. 249

frequent manner of reformers, they righted it more than was neces-
sary. Not merely did they unhorse the Beautiful and seat Religion
in her vacant place, but they proceeded to have Religion ride over
the prostrate Beautiful till her breath was clean gone out ; her
sculptures and paintings and millinery and pageants and even her
innocent decorums, they annihilated ; and her great and venerable
cathedrals — the four walls that had harbored all the aforesaid frip-
pery— came in for a share of their mighty disrespect. The reality
in that movement was its sound intention to exalt religion, by sepa-
rating it from its too great reliance on the esthetical, and establishing
it on its own colossal and very sufficient foundations.

The noise of that contest has died away, and all is still as we
look back there, but the heat of it keeps up, and it makes us who
are successors of those men — I will not say hot, but obstinate. And
yet, you see, there was an idea there. Even if our Fathers could
have been persuaded to confess that Art has a legitimate function
on earth, and even in religion a good function, they would have
gone straight on to add : — Nevertheless, as things now are, the
Church must be pulled away from all that, and totally weaned.
Only thus can her salvation be secured, in the present emergency.
Moderate drinking may be defensible, but she, the Church, has got
where she cannot drink moderately. Her lust of beauty is too
strong. If she takes one drop she is drunken. Let her be put on
to bread and water, and there kept — perhaps forever, for her soul's
health.

II. Moreover, the Fathers did not make this trenchant gen-
eralization against Art on an inspection of English Christianity
alone, but on a survey of the ages. They looked abroad and afar
and they noticed that the submergence of religion in the esthetic
element had occurred a good many times and in many nations, and
they surmised that there was a law of deterioration therein : — a rule
that a religion must grow effeminate and carnal if she does not
eschew Art pretty thoroughly. Witness Romanism, and the great
Church of the East. Witness Greece, where fine Art reached such
a splendor as the world never saw before. Did her Art save her?
Did it not rather ungird her, slacken her sinews, enfeeble her hold
on higher ideas than that of beauty, and enfeeble their hold on her,
so that she must rot away in her entire substance and cease forever
from among men. Go into the museum at Naples and look at the
art-works of exhumed Pompeii. Mark their excellence. Notice
17

250 YALE LECTURES.

what a sense of the Beautiful that Pompeiian people must have had .
But observe at the same time their unspeakable demoralization —
their obscenity even in their art ; their fitness to be suddenly buried
by the wrath of God, using his volcanoes to do the work. That was
the way the Fathers were prone to reason. And we cannot deny
that great devotion to beauty and Art, and great moral enfeeblement
and corruption, have existed together often, whether one was the
cause of the other or not. There was Lord Byron, there was Rob-
ert Burns, there was Tom Moore, there was the poet Shelley, and
numbers more, three times worse than they, in whom the feeling for
beauty, the sensitiveness to beauty, and the power of beautiful ex-
pression, the art instinct, was exceeding strong. Burns, Byron and
Moore even wrote religious hymns, and did it well — much better
than the average saint ever did ; but all these refined gifts of theirs
did not make high-toned men of them. Beauty and the love of
beauty did not establish the kingdom of God in their hearts.

I do not know but I am getting out the Puritan's argument for
him in a way so strong and fascinating that I can never overthrow it.
But I want to be fair, you see. I had rather make it overstrong and
take the consequences, than to be mean enough to make it too weak.

III. Again : Puritanism claims sometimes, when it argues this
subject, that the passing of our ideas, thoughts, feelings, forth into
material embodiment in architecture, painting and all the rest, does
by the necessity of the case make a materializing influence on the
mind — an influence adverse to spirituality. That is the supreme
peril of artists, it is thought. They deal with form. That is, their
business is to formulate. If they could only be content to leave all
human ideas and feelings unformulated, not made visible, not
physicalized, in color and in lines and in all the cunning contrivances
of their craft, all would be well ; but the plastic instinct in them is
uncommonly strong and gives them no peace until they have re-
duced the ideal to a finite and sensuous statement of some sort ; and
they must take the curse of this their own restless inability to just
abide in the ideal, the unstated, the unphysicalized. If only while
they were stating they did not supremely concentrate their attention
on form, they might still be saved ; but it lies in the nature of their
business that they should thus concentrate ; they would not be artists
unless they did. So on they go, poor things, preparing the means
of a quite possible ruin for themselves, and an equal danger for all
people who are very much given to beholding their beautiful works.

YALE LECTURES. 251

The physicalization of the mind, incident to all artistic expres-
sion : — that is the argument.

And similar to that is the notion that many great Christian
ideas, when circumscribed by the terms, color and what not, which
the artist uses, are so much circumscribed as to be belittled and
almost or quite profaned. Let them remain forever unexpressed.
In the Vatican Palace at Rome, I recollect seeing somewhere a
representation of God the Father, by Michael Angelo, if I remember
aright. God the Father, was set forth by this most insufficient and
awfully minimizing device ; namely, the head and shoulders of a
respectable looking old man. There are many things which one
might say about such a performance as that ; — and some things
might be said in regard to the frequent efforts of ancient art to
portray our blessed Lord ; but all I need to say just now is what all
of us do probably feel, that while numberless religious truths, events
and persons, cannot be put into form adequately, some cannot at
all, and had therefore better be carefully let alone, even by such a
magnificent genius as Michael Angelo, and much more by that
swarm of lesser men who have ventured upon divine themes.

Well, people of the Puritan way of thinking, enlarge that obser-
vation to cover all efforts of art in the religious field. Religion suf-
fers, they say, by being subjected to expression in the close-cramped
terminology of the painter's and sculptor's art. I suppose they
would concede a little more to music. So I should hope, at all
events.

IV. Once more, we Congregationalists revert admiringly and
lovingly to a certain solid, world-impressing cultus generations back
in our denominational history ; an immensely seminal affair as re-
gards the civilization that has unfolded on this continent, to our
great glory before all nations ; a cultus full of God, and every con-
ceivable moral tonic. But that very cultus, we remember, was
associated with great bareness of Art, as was natural in view of our
very Protestant origin in England (as already explained), and so now
we find ourselves tender in our hearts towards bareness of Art, and
not unwilling to have it perpetuated among us, as it visibly is ;
we impute to that bareness the renown of that great cultus back
there, with which it was connected ; we are under the beguilement
of association. A white meeting-house is a staring discord of color
in any green landscape, and nothing better than a monotony in
any landscape of snow ; but those redoubtable progenitors of ours

252 YALE LECTURES.

worshiped in such, and we want to. If they had been puling creat-
ures, and nothing to be proud of, we might have given in on the
white meeting-house question and let the laws of color have their
way and our church edifices melt harmoniously into the color-tones
of Nature ; but they were not puling, but great, and they shall not
be dishonored by having anything abolished that belongs to the
thought of them and their life, whether building, psalm tune, ritual,
ecclesiasticism, or anything else. A quite noble feeling in itself
considered, no doubt. The only question is whether that ancient
cultus cannot be preserved in the core and power of it, without an
everlasting sanctification of its incidentals in this manner.

V. Another thing. Our Fathers were burdened by great prac-
tical tasks in this new country, which consumed their entire vigor,
so that it was not possible for them to indulge themselves in even
innocent flirtations with Art — and we their descendants are in
something of the same difficulty.

VI. Moreover, in those scattered instances where we have
emancipated ourselves from that primeval art a little, we sometimes
have committed the fundamental mistake of discarding utility for
the sake of beauty, building fine churches under a supreme medie-
val impulse, which were indeed very fine to look upon, but very
faulty in regard to air and light and hearing : all essentials to healthy
worship. Also in music, when we have pulled away from the tune
"Mear," and from "China," and from other like solemnizing strains
wherein the ancients worshiped, we have occasionally been taken
with headiness and vaporing, (not to say capering) and have let
music run away with us ; and in the matter of decorations (as in
that saloon church that I inspected) we have sometimes done things
that make the simplicity of the Fathers seem good and sweet. All
mistakes of that sort get quoted profusely, of course, as so many
arguments against mingling esthetics with religion. I have no time
to make a list of these mistakes. Neither have I time to draw out
all the other strong points made by the Puritan reasoner on the
subject of Art and Religion. I will only add on this general branch
of my theme :

VII. That we, the Congregationalists, have no such special
connections with a transatlantic Christian body, as the Protestant
Episcopalians and the Romanists have ; so that while they are
greatly influenced, on the side of sacred art, by the art culture of
those foreign bodies, we have the advantage of almost no foreign

YALE LECTURES. 253

influence whatever. Their church art is almost dominated by the
old-world civilization. Whereinsoever, under the limitations of
American life, they can expatiate in Art, they are apt to expatiate
along historic and accredited lines. Among us, on the other hand,
each parish committee expatiates along its own lines. Not only are
the committee mostly unconscious of the art-wisdom that for ages
has been accumulating in foreign lands, but they are largely una-
ware of what wisdom has happened to accumulate here in their own
denomination ; because the denomination is, perhaps, the least
organized, and the least compacted into a corporate consciousness,
of any on the continent. In matters doctrinal we manage to diffuse
through the whole body the sense of the whole ; but in matters of
religious art we diffuse much less, so that misbuilt church edifices
and misconceived rituals, and misbegotten church music, and in-
expressive and indefensible ornamentations, and a stiff-necked local-
ism, are more common among us than is agreeable.

My Brethren, I make* a complete turn now, against this whole
prejudice in regard to Art. That side has had the floor long enough.
I perceive its plausibilities. I acknowledge the realities that are
sprinkled along through its argument. I agree that as between
Religion and Art, art must give way to religion in every contest. It
must, and it ought to. Moreover it does. Sooner or later it does.
And it always will. For religion is superior to art. We can live
without art. We cannot live without religion.

But I contend that God meant art to be the handmaid of religion,
and if, in any instance, they are found to be adverse one to the
other, it is the work of perverse men and Satan ; even as good
marriages are sometimes muddled by intermeddlers, and men and
women who are made to pull together do not.

On the general question of beauty and its function, and whether
it has a function, I submit the following observations. I hope they
will go to your hearts. Even if they do not convince you, may
they go to your hearts and trouble you and start inquiry.

First, what does it mean that a perception of the Beautiful,
and a sensitiveness to the Beautiful, is a universal feature of the
human race? Given any development whatever, that feature
emerges. The lowest savage has his esthetics, such as they are.
An animal has not. The beaver and the bird and the squirrel and
the bee do some praisworthy building. The carpentry of the beaver
will bear examination, as well as the architecture of Giotto. The

254 YALE LECTURES.

nest of the bird and the honey-cell of the bee and the structure of
the coral are in curves, and have that appeal to our sense of beauty.
But it was not the beauty of the curves that those creatures intended ;
their utility, rather, if they intended anything (which they did not.)
The bird's curved nest fits his body snug and good ; and makes
him feel well in his long broodings there in the woods. And the
cell of the bee is good structure. And so on. As to intention, all
that was in the God who made the creature and fitted him to do
wise things without being wise. But even God seems not to have
intended beauty in this matter so much as use ; unless you go clear
back and say — he made the bird in curves instead of rectangularly,
In < ause curved birds are most beautiful; and then having curved
creatures on hand, inspired those creatures to fashion their homes
to correspond. But what I wish to get to is, that man alone among
creatures has esthetic perception and sensibility. He knows a
zig-zag when he sees it, and he does not like its look. He knows
that certain colors do not blend and that others do. And the un-
blended jar him. The blended affect him like music. He knows
the difference between a space enclosed by an arch and a space
enclosed by right lines, and evermore gravitates to the arch. It is
of no account for the present, why he does it ; I simply say he does
it. And what does it mean that he is forever doing those things ?
Why did God make him in just that fashion? In order that he
should eschew the Beautiful and turn it to no account in his own
development, and make no use of it in the way of joy? Did God
give hunger in order that we should never eat, and ears in order
that we never hear, and feet for the solemn purpose that we always
sit still? No, all constitutional faculties, love of beauty among the
rest, are for something ; that is, to be exercised.

Secondly, why has the Creator created such a delightful world
and universe as this all about us? It looks as though he himself
were a beauty-lover. Of course he is. Shall he make a beauty-
lover — man — and not be in that respect like his man? Is that
credible? If God does not like rainbows and the gracious sweep
of horizons, and the sparkle of dewdrops, and the tinges, tints and
celestial purities of skies, why does he flood such fairnesses forth ?
Also, why has he established that unchangeable mathematical basis
on which musical harmonies repose, if he had not real interest in
harmony. Then, too, why does he make this overwhelming appeal
of created beauty to us, if he did not desire us to respond to it? Is

YALE LECTURES. 255

God a man that he should be a tempter, and lead his feeble offspring
into that which must injure them?

Thirdly, why did he do a similar venturesome thing and impel
his chosen writers of the Bible to walk abroad upon the creation in
such unrestrainable delight in its beauties? The more he inspired
them the more they put forth just that trait. When he left them
alone to write honest history, in the exercise of their own honest
faculties, there was nothing particularly esthetic, imaginative, poetic,
ideal, tuneful, lyrical in their movement ; but the moment he Idled
them with his Spirit, for some transcendent spiritual purpose, they
were lifted out of all that. Their language became cadenced, it
was singing, they rhymed. Next, they tilled their tuneful outtlow
with personalizations of the forms and forces of Nature, and with
those personalizations they affectionately communed, as with very
persons.

Next, they filled all creation with God, and made it alive ; the
thunders were his voice, the clouds and the thick darkness were Ins
pavilion, the stars were his tlocks which he led out shepherd-like
— in short, their utterances were supremely beautiful. Poor old
Jacob when he was dying, had no natural strength to make a poem,
even if he ever had ; but he did make one, and the way he luxu-
riated in the images of Nature was wonderful : — what he undertook
to describe was far away and transcendental, not physical ; but un-
consciously his vocabulary was concrete, naturalistic- and imagina-
tive to a high degree. Judah, thou art a lion's whelp, said the
prophetic old man ; Issachar, thou art a strong ass, crouching down
between two burdens — Dan, thou art a serpent in the way. an adder
in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that his rider shall fall
backward — Naphtali, thou art a hind let loose — benjamin, thou art
a ravening wolf — Joseph, thou art a fruitful bough, even a fruitful
bough by a well, whose branches run over a wall. But it was that
predestinated and preeminent Son, Judah. upon whom he most laid
out the strength of his seership, and most affluently covered with
his imager}-, l'erhaps we cannot minutely interpret all his words,
but listen to the sound of them ; Judah is a lion's whelp ; from the
prey, my son, thou art gone up. lie stooped down, he couched as
a lion and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre
shall not depart from Judah. nor a lawgiver from between his t'eel until
Shiloh come, and unto him shall the gathering o( the people be.
Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine,

256 YALE LECTURES.

he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes :
his eyes shall be red with wine, and his teeth white with milk. What
a luxuriant effusion ! How instinctively when God's Spirit was flood-
ing him he ran forth into God's world, its exuberance, its freshness,
its exhaustless multiformity, its pure beauty, for his materials of
expression.

And coming down to the New Testament it must suffice to say
that our Lord himself evidently had a deep satisfaction in the fasci-
nations of Nature, and did not hold himself back therefrom. I
plainly hear the beating of his heart towards all beauty, in such a
passage as : " Consider the lilies how they grow ; they toil not,
neither do they spin ; and yet, I say unto you, that even Solomon
in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these." No man could
make that comparison between Solomon and the lilies, and so praise
their array, whose eye and feeling were not at the moment saturated
with their beauty. I have heard that sentence — ' Consider the lilies,'
sung so often and with such impressive sweetness, that I cannot dis-
sociate it from the music ; and am liable therefore to find in it heart-
warmths and many things that are of the music rather than of it —
the influences of such associations being very insinuating and subtle ;
— but I chose rather to think that music has done in this case what
it is able to do, and was designed to do, in all cases where it carries,
explains upon and unfolds divine themes ; namely, it has but taken
me into the otherwise undiscoverable profundities of the words of
Jesus ; it has given me to hear the flow of their inner melody, it
has told me how he felt when he spoke as he did.

My exegetical commentator on the passage, informs me that
the language indicates that Jesus, when he said lilies, did not mean
lilies in mass, or the genus lily, but that he fixed his attention on the
individual lily. Well, I knew he did without being told. My music
which I have heard seemed to tell me as much as that. A general-
ized love is a good thing, but a love that individualizes is much more
fervid and touching. When the word, Consider the lilies, springs
from a specific observation of lilies at the moment and a brooding
on them one by one, it needs music for the rendering of its whole
precious sense.

But I return to my question, if beauty has no great and useful
function, why did God, when he inspired men to write, set them
revelling in it as he did ?

Fourthly, still speaking of things that I find in the Bible, please

YALE LECTURES. 257

tell me why God commanded that the place where he was to be wor-
shiped by his people Israel should be such a very fine place?
There was goodly architecture, as good and costly as could be at
the time. There was great carefulness of ornament — carefulness
and cost. The whole matter was specifically laid down and en-
joined ; a hanging, a touch of color, a socket, a nothing-at-all (as
we should say), as precisely and imperatively laid down as the
Mercy Seat and the Cherubim in the Holy of Holies. And then,
inside of all this glory, a ritual was forever to move on full of cir-
cumstance and decorum, more circumstance and carefulness, three
times, than was necessary to any ends of use. It is thought by many
in these days that beauty is too much of a beguilement to be let
into God's house and service. It tends to materialize the mind. It
leads off into sensuousness. It fixes our attention on things that
can never save the soul. God's service has come to be a spectacle
— a physical spectacle — in the Roman Church. And how can that
be avoided, if you multiply physicals, and set people rejoicing in
their eyes and their ears. Well, what people were ever more facile
in getting themselves out of spirituality into sense, and even into the
bottomless ditch of carnalism, than the Jews, unto whom God
appointed architecture, ceremony, beauty, pomp, spectaculars and
so on? Why was he not more cautious? If esthetics are a
spurious element in religion, essentially and eternally ; or if while
not necessarily spurious, the bearing of them is bad practically and
on the whole, human nature being so perverse that it can turn a
good thing into a curse, any time, — how could God institute that for
his Jews, that external religious system to which I have adverted ? I
am glad that he has given us such a full account of it as he has, so
that we may know for certain and forever, how far art, beauty, orna-
mentation, cost, sumptuousness, gorgeousness, sublimity and the
rest, may reasonably go, in helping religion. Of course all the arts
when they start out to benefit religion, in any given time, place
nation or Christian body, must be wise as serpents in adjusting
themselves to said time, place and people. We Congregationalists
do not want any Holy of Holies, nor any High Priest, nor sprink-
lings, nor incensings, nor arks ; but we may well have as much as
these in other forms suited to our rather austere and perhaps grim
peculiarities. Speaking of grimness, I can recollect the time when
to me, the young son of a Methodist minister, the Congregationalists
were the grimmest thing I had yet ever heard of. We did not call

258 YALE LECTURES.

them Congregationalists, my Father and I, no, we called them Cal-
vinists ; a word of terror much more than the other — as indeed it is
to this day. Well, when Beauty undertakes to prepare something
fitted to Calvinists, she must look out for herself and not be too
ornate. The glory of Solomon and his temple are too much of an
array for them. Calvin himself would endure a more elaborated
externalism than these his children. The building where he preached
so long in Geneva, was and is quite a building. And the liturgy
that he used was quite a formal instrument of worship. Either one
of them would almost shock a Calvinistic congregation back in one
of our steadfast hill towns, with their weekly Lord's day extempori-
zations and their right-angled edifice with its undimmed white light,
its white paint, its green blinds and its dear Puritan memories.

I know the stock argument against all this that I have been
saying, in regard to the decorous and decorative aspects of the
Israelitish system : — it is said that a new era came in when Jesus
came, he being opposed to those foregoing indulgences in the
sensuous, and desirous that the interior and the spiritual should now
come to the front and have its day. No doubt there is a grain of
truth in that view. And that grain of truth is exactly this, that
while under the old order, all such things as institutions, ceremonies,
seemlinesses and beautifications, were secured by objective com-
mand ; under the blessed order of this Messianic period, objective
command has gone into comparative disuse, and in lieu thereof we
have what the elder world never had, the indwelling Holy Ghost,
the first gift of the ascended Lord, to set all things in order in the
Church ; all things I say ; doctrines, polities, rituals, clerical orders,
religious art, everything you can think of — which subjective method
is inferior to the old one, as letting in a more or less occasional
fallibility, the old one being precisionism made perfect. For ex-
ample, there was absolutely no chance for the builders of the taber-
nacle or the architects of the temple, to mistake God's desire
touching the structure thereof at any least point, or as to any least
touch of adornment ; nevertheless, the new method, the method of
the Holy Ghost, operating in souls and in the Church to get things
done, is, beyond all expression, an advance on the old one as
respects the supreme things to be secured — as much in advance,
for aught I know, as the anti-typal Lamb of Calvary was an advance
on all preceding sacrifices. My Brethren, there was never a great
teacher or founder on earth who was less an institutionalist, in the

YALE LECTURES. 259

sense of personally instituting things, reforms, systems and all sorts
of exterior elaborations, than Jesus ; but there was never on earth
an institutionalist so prolific as he, in the sense that from him and
his resurrection life, carried into individual souls through the Holy
Ghost, institutions were to come — institutions, rituals, arts, litera-
tures, laws, philosophies — a prodigal outflowering, wide as the
world and as perennial as the tree of life by the "pure river of water
of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of
the Lamb." Ah yes ! he is the tree of life. All earth-born growths
must wither. Only the fruitages of the Holy Ghost abide. Even
the arts, that have no supernatural root, are perishable, or wherein-
soever they survive they serve a distinctly second-rate use. And if
you ask me what I have to say in respect to the perpetuity and the
eternal monarchy of Greek art, this is my answer ; that in so far as
Greek art, at any period, or in any instance, was the product of relig-
ion, it had in it that condition of longevity on which I insist ; and
in so far as it was not, but was moved by a finite impulse, and con-
fined itself to a finite range, while it is the best thing of the kind the
world ever saw, I suppose, yet the kind is secondary, and it were
possible to show that, adding together all the elements of transcend-
ent art, such as technical ability, formulative power, noble aims,
profound feeling and wealth of ideas, Christian Art is immensely
the queen over classical ; and whatever may be the value of classical
models (and certainly it is very great) , if Christian Art does not take
the lead by far, as a factor in modern civilization, the reason will
be, that too many Puritan folk contrive to get themselves born —
persons, that is, that do not see all sides of the salvation which is
provided for modern life.

I was speaking of the era of the Holy Ghost ; of its fallibility
as compared with the old era and of its superiority, nevertheless.
It would take me too far out of my way to expand that matter, and
forestall all possible misapprehension of what I have said. I do not
deny that the great Teacher laid down some objective standards.
Certainly he did. Still, it is true, as a general remark, that the work
of formulation, doctrinal, institutional, ritual, ecclesiastical, esthetic
and all the rest, was left to men in whom the Holy Ghost should be.
when the Holy Ghost had finally come in that phenomenal coming,
which made all prior comings so inconclusive and incomplete that
Jesus could freely speak of them as no comings at all.

I come now to my fifth head of argument against what, for the

260 YALE LECTURES.

sake of convenience, I have called the Puritan urgency for the di-
vorce of beauty and religion. I hope I shall not use that word
Puritan so often as to create an impression that I have an uncon-
genial and unbrotherly feeling towards the people referred to — for
I have not. For rhetorical purposes, I want to use them. And
they are such a stalwart folk that they can bear a good deal of using
— and even unjust use. They are inured to it, for generations.

But fifthly, I say : — that idea mentioned some time since, that
over and over again, in the history of the world, the highest develop-
ment of the Beautiful has coexisted with a low state of religion, and
that therefore, the Beautiful, speaking by and large, is not only not
nourishing to religion, but probably withering, I would like to make
head against still further, by several running remarks, thus : if secular
education tends to keep men out of the criminal class, as the statis-
tics of that class do prove that it does, and as we should natur-
ally expect it would ; is it not likely that the influence of beauty, con-
sidered merely as a secular force now, would also have a good moral
bearing ? And again, how often do we see persons of the highest es-
thetic development, who at the same time are sound, strong, inflexi-
ble and sweet religiously ! I have in mind now a man whose piety is
a most admirable compound of staunchness and tenderness, a man
who would rise to martyrdom on a fair call with absolute spon-
taneity,— all the moral grit of his New England progenitors is in him
undiminished — so much so as to be a matter of remark — and yet it
is almost an amusement to notice how intoxicated that heart is in
the presence of the goodly scenes of Nature, how sometimes his
soul within him will almost liquefy before a choice painting, and how
a use of language, in a public speaker, for instance, that is terse, pat,
vital, full of noble intention, and in supreme art, will give him so
much pleasure that he can hardly utter his feeling. These instances
are common enough on earth, my Brethren. And in every great
public emergency that comes up, like war after a long period of
peace, culture and easy living, during which a great many men and
women have given a good deal of attention and interest to the em-
bellishments of life, or life in its esthetic aspects, and have come to
be considered dilettante, unrobust, lisping, people of the rosebud and
perfumery order — so considered by the uncultivated multitude — be-
hold, these supposed man-milliners and fashion-plates, these enervate
creatures, these New York Seventh Regiment ornamental men, go
down to the field of death as gallantly and cheerily, and with as iron

YALE LECTURES. 261

a manhood as though they had never once seen a picture or a party,
or a fashionable coat with a rosebud in the buttonhole thereof — side
by side they go with the men of the shop, factory and farm, these
sons of culture, these emasculates, facing all things of peril and en-
durance. How very often that is so. Often enough, at any rate, to
show that the influence of high civilization is not necessarily de-
grading and enfeebling.

Consider, once more, that aside from material beauty, we have
no images wherewith to represent the beauty immaterial, the beauty
of a thought, the beauty of an intellectual structure (as an essay or a
discourse or a poem) , the beauty of innumerable beautiful feelings and
the beauty of holiness. It cannot be that material beauty is debauch-
ing, or that it is so far dangerous that we had better keep away from
it, when all these beautiful , holy and precious interior things — (the
things of the soul for whose preservation beauty external must be
shunned, it is thought) — cannot be at all formulated and put into cir-
culation, except in the use of the material, the physical, the sensuous.
The deep subject of language I cannot enter ; especially as I did try
to enter it when I spoke to you last year and had some points to carry ;
but how far does one need to enter it to discover the divine use of
beauty as a vocabulary for the soul ? When I look at the eternal
whiteness of a far-away Alpine summit, I call it holy and awful in its
holiness ; but that only means that yonder immaculate mountain-head
is an image ; a suitable and therefore ordained image of a certain su-
preme moral quality in God, angels and men. Some Sybarite, be-
holding that Alp, may not be moralized by it ; it is even conceivable
that he may simply turn it in among his luxuries and there stop ; just
as many a Church goer makes the means of God's grace to be a savor
of death to his miserable soul ; but that is not the fault of the Alp.
The Alp is all right. That snow is holy. So holy that many of us
are nearly heart-broken while we stand down in the valley and look
up at it. Down in the valley ! Sure enough, there we are. In the
valley of unholiness ; cleansed by the washing of regeneration, per-
chance, but not stainless — and yet not hopeless quite, because from
skyey heights out infinitely beyond the utmost Alp, there comes to
us a word of hope, saying, " Though your sins be as scarlet, they
shall be as white as snow, though they be red like crimson, they shall
be as wool." Isaiah understood imagery, and he knew that white
is one of God's chosen soul-terms — a touch of the sensible whereon
there plays forever a touch, a glory of the supersensible.

262 YALE LECTURES.

And so I might move through the entire creation and find
everywhere the moral and spiritual. The creation and we stand
over against each other in an appointed, detailed, wonderful corre-
spondence. It was my privilege last year, in my lecture on the
Vague Elements in Language, to show how even the infinite may be
effectively set forth in finite contrivances of expression. And I
doubt whether any impression of the infinite ever received by man
is wholly void of a moral element. The infinite, at any rate, is
serious, grave by its very size ; and when you get as far as serious-
ness, you cannot be far from the border-lines of the moral. Now
the sweep of curved lines is one of the ways of indicating the infinite
— not the sweep of circles, because they are too full of the intima-
tion that they get around and come full circle by and by ; the moment
a curve completes its curve and joins, it becomes a finite image ; but
these curves that curve slowly and take forever to get around, are,
to our feeling, as though they never did get around. For a thing
that moves on and moves on and never stops moving, that shadows
forth the infinite for us ; and all my experience is that when I get
upon such a journey as that, I feel pretty solemn, and as though I
wanted no reprehensible thought or emotion to come into me.

A similar moral or semi-moral effect can be wrought upon us
by the skilful use of colors ; and it is the very divinity of pictorial
art that it can do such things. Many landscape painters understand
all about this. And a painter does not amount to much unless he
does. He who paints a bare boulder even in simple definiteness —
that is, in an exact, cold reproduction of its finiteness, has abused
the boulder. What did that boulder ever do that entitles it to such
treatment ! Nobody ought to be painted in his utmost literalness.
That is knowing him after the flesh, as St. Paul expressed it. A
human face should be painted suggestively. A face at any given in-
stant, at the instant, say, when the artist is looking at it in order to
paint it, has a certain kind and amount of expression, but that man
there sitting to be looked at and painted, has in him quantities ot
kinds and amounts of things, not present in that one moment, or
one hour, of that face. Therefore it is an exceedingly fragmentary
and insulting performance to paint him as he then is, and have that
pass down to all generations, as the man. It is not the man. It
requires a very roundabout exploration to know a man. Moreover,
when you do know him, in his actualities, you have no right to paint
him so. If we all had in us nothing but our actualities, we should

YALE LECTURES. 263

be small affairs ; and hardly worth painting. Our potentialities are
the greatest thing about us. That is so even with heathen men.
But since Jesus has come and redeemed men, their potentialities
have been greatly enlarged and manifolded ; and they must be
painted accordingly. Paint a man at his best ; not only as what he
has made himself to be so far, but paint him according to what he is
germinally, and what he may be when those precious germinals have
received the whole stimulation of the grace of God. In other words,
idealize him. Or, in still other words, make a little show of the in-
finite in him, here and there. Those who love the man will applaud
your fine veracity in the matter, your ideal veracity, if nobody else
does.

So the boulder, so anything. Treat all suggestively. Spread a
little warmth over your rock. Mellow it. Put a heart into it. Foi
it is a curious and beautiful fact, that every visible thing has a heart,
when closely studied ; like Alfred Tennyson's tree that the maiden
kissed and kissed and then kissed again, because she found a dear
name cut on it ; until the tree could stand it no longer but spoke up
and said :

Her kisses were so close and kind,

That, trust me on my word,
Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind,

But yet my sap was stirred ;

And even into my inmost ring

A pleasure I discerned,
Like those blind motions of the spring,

That s,how the year is turned.

Tennyson can hardly be charged with exaggeration here. Every
thing has a heart. And there is nothing more admirable and whole-
some in fine art, from the beginning, than modern landscape work,
for the one reason that it has passed clear beyond the bewitching
finitude of Greek achievement, into the deeper and more solemn
witchery of a statement from the interior ; which statement of Nature
from the interior is large, vague, vast and practically infinite, because
it is from the interior ; or, in other words, because it takes Nature
in its expression as having meanings, meanings intellectual, mean
ings moral, meanings spiritual, meanings affectional.

I was saying that as lines have power to suggest the infinite, so
have colors. And how do they do it? In various ways. Please
remember, I am trying to illustrate the thought that material beauty

264 YALE LECTURES.

cannot be, to be shunned, as some claim, because beauty supersen-
sible, the different forms of soul-beauty, are not to be set forth other-
wise than in terms of material beauty, or the beauty of the world ;
and I have drifted into a cognate thought, by way of illustration, the
thought that material things can represent to us and make us feel
the infinite. Lines can do this and so can colors. When a painter
starts you down a vista that has no end, he has started in you the
vagueness of the infinite. When a painter has hinted, but not painted,
the depths of the ocean, he has done the same thing. When a
painter, along his far away sky-line, has drawn a color-tone which
says that beyond the horizon there, out of sight, sweeps a boundless
stretch of sea, he has given into your soul the whole immeasurable
suggestiveness of sea. Not even when you stand on the sea-shore,
and look off, are you so immersed in the infinite, as when you mark
that painter's line of color. On the shore, outlooking, your eye
reaches an horizon. To be sure, you do not stop there, still that
horizon jars you and mars the full impression of infinity upon you
from the endless waters. But in the picture, you see neither sea
nor horizon, but the sea is suggested without a thought of horizon.
Everything is left without boundaries. You have a statement whose
main value is in what it does not state. These are some of the ways
of impression open to the color-master.

I have heard the superiority of classical art attributed to the
finiteness of classical subjects. It is possible, it was said, to formu-
late perfectly, as the Greeks did, ideas as limited as the Greek ideas
were. But since Christianity has come with its glorious enlarge-
ments, its many ideas that shade off into mystery and have their
principal effect as being mysterious, the old-time, absolute Greek
formulation — that has been the fascination of the world ever since —
must be given up, of course, and art, as art, must take an eternal
inferiority, it is thought. Why undertake to harness art to religion,
when the chief contents of religion are essentially unstatable by art.

That difficulty and some others, I may get at in another lecture.
Meanwhile, have I not at least nibbled around the edges of it, in
what I have said? Modern art can state the large Christian ideas.
It had better let alone trying to state the Almighty in a Vatican
fresco of an old man. And a few more impossibles it had better let
alone. But nine-tenths of all that Christianity has brought in, can
be stated in a way to make about all the impression a human soul can
bear. And even the Almighty can be set forth, if we cease from the

YALE LECTURES. 265

folly of bodily parts and just describe on the canvas the great works
that so reveal him. I never look at the ocean or at a terrible storm,
or at the sky of night, or at the mighty mountains of a land like
Switzerland, without an impression of God that is practically
infinite. And in so far as such things can be painted, God is made
known art-wise. The modern machinery for embodying the infinite
is good.

I have spoken of lines and colors, but I have said nothing of
music. And music is the one art that is most serviceable for the
setting forth of those Christian ideas and experiences whose dimen-
sions, and whose celestial qualities, are supposed by some to be
unstatable essentially and forever. I say they are not. I imagine
that music was born for that purpose, principally. What did the
Greeks know about music, comparatively? Nothing. No, music
was waiting for the Messiah and his kingdom. Waiting for the Holy
Ghost to get into souls, and start there all sorts of mysterious com-
motions ; penitences, exultations, aspirations, expectations, sweet
loves, a whole world of life that the ancients did not know. Music
waited for that ; and when that came she came, last-born of God,
with her hymns, anthems, oratorios and marvels many ; marvels of
composition not only, but marvellous new instruments, and instru-
mental combinations ; instruments that almost articulate and often
seem to know and be glad for the divine service they are in. God
hasten the day when every Christian man shall know music.

THE SERVICE OF ART IN
RELIGION.

(II.)

It is sometimes mentioned as a reason why art should never be
invoked in aid of religion, that the very act of putting ideas or in-
ward experiences of any sort into form, as in art, is deteriorating in
its tendency to the man so doing and to all people who consent to
commune with and enjoy his work. Ideas or feelings, if let alone
and left to be in the mind simply ideas and feelings, are less danger-
ous morally than they are if externalized, and especially if external-
ized in terms of beauty. Perhaps if they were externalized in
thorough-going ugliness, they would be less to be feared, but the
moment they are charming or even pleasant, the trouble begins, and
all concerned are demoralized unless they set a guard against the
beguiler. Well, those of us who are conversant with Holy Writ, do
not need to be told that the physical is quite an inlet of evil for men ;
and even those of us who are simply observant of what goes on in our
own selves, have come to know the same thing ; Holy Writ in this
case, as in many others, being simply an authoritative statement of
what is true and easily discoverable, Bible or no Bible. But if the
Bible is explicit on the dangers of the physical, the external, the
sensuous, it is equally explicit on the more subtle and vastly more
unrelishable point that evil has its seat and all its potency in the soul
of man, and not in externals ; so that ideas unformulated, unexternal-
ized, unembodied, are not always such tremendously innocent things
after all. Leave them alone in the mind and never speak them forth

YALE LECTURES. 267

in any form, and they would fester there and work corruption as ener-
getically as you please. However, I am not disposed to insist upon
that, to-day. It is so, but let it go. I grant that formulation has its
perils. Formulation is the occasion — the occasion if it is not the
cause — of religious degeneration in countless cases. It is claimed
that it tends to degeneration in all cases. Well, admit even that. I
do not feel myself compelled, in order to reach the ends I seek here,
to resist the very radical statement, that always when tangible em-
bodiment of soul-facts is attempted, whether in art or in anything
else, a distinct moral risk is incurred ; and that therefore all the arts
of expression are to be diligently watched.

But now just notice a few plain things. First, that our Maker
in giving us bodies, has indicated his wish that we should externalize
and take the risk of it. He externalized us ; then why should we
not proceed to perpetually externalize ourselves in all kinds of utter-
ance, pictures, sculptures, music, rhetoric, architecture, gesture,
oratory : and in that ofttimes most affirmative and impressive of all
utterances or self-embodiments, silence ; that fine-art which occasion-
ally a silent man like Grant has perfected. A soul taken singly and
alone is not a man. A man is an incorporated soul. There is a
good deal of talk abroad about " saving souls." Christ Jesus did
not come into the world to save souls, but men. And the gist of the
scriptural doctrine of the resurrection is, that each man of us is
saved in his totality — not a ghost but a man (which a ghost never
was). Well then, if a man is not a man except as he is corpore-
alized, neither is a thought a thought, nor a feeling a feeling, unless
it is corporealized or embodied or formulated. I will show that
more minutely a little farther on. For the present I assert it and
say moreover, that whether that assertion be true or not, it is tree
that God's creating us soul and body, points to, suggests and legiti-
mates the bodying forth of our inner and spiritual selves in suitable
forms ; such as our wit can devise and such as seem to effectually
do the business for us.

Further I wish to ask, how are we ever to have the least human
intercourse, if we do not get out into these embodiments whereof I
speak ; into language, into painting, into music, into abiding struc-
tures and so on ? I sometimes notice that the horses in the field
put their noses together and have a protracted season of silent fellow-
ship. We have not yet come to that fine clairvoyance. Or rather,
I should say that we are capable of silent fellowship, but have

268 YALE LECTURES.

numerous things to say for which mere silence is not enough. When
a man's wife is silent to him sometimes, it is a saying to him as much
as he can stand at the time ; but in the long run of life our minds
and our hearts get full of things that cannot begin to be expressed
in the simple alphabet of silence. The horse is not so. His
consciousness is pretty simple on the whole, I judge, and a simple
language therefore answers in his case. Our consciousness has a
hundred-fold more contents and more complexity and we must have
a hundred devices of expression, some of them very complex.
There is no intercourse, I say, if externalization ceases.

But remember that only a part of our intercourse is with our
contemporaries. I do not know but I have to do with the departed
more than I have with the living. I read their books. I contem-
plate their arts. I listen to their music. I sit still and absorbent
under the venerable influence of their cathedrals and their memorial
structures. I go to their graves and read the inscriptions over
them. I go up and down the earth on pilgrimages to those cities
where the precious vestiges of them are particularly accumulated.
But suppose these men and all the men of the past had been preju-
diced against externalization, had not believed in memorials and
vestiges and precious accumulations, but had consulted the horse —
as Solomon said, Go to the ant — and had refused everything save
the mutual touch of noses, so to speak. That would have answered
a certain purpose for them, but not much of a purpose for us who
o recall them and realize them and get some profit from their
1 ce. If each generation refuses to express itself, then every
' *i must make the experience of life entirely uninstructed
experiments. What an unaccumulative and unprogressive

' 'nan race would then be, like to the very animals of the
not need to b.

and even those . ... ,-, .1 . • ,

. ng a little while ago, that as a man is not a man unless
own selves, havt ,

i thought is not a thought unless embodied. And
case, as in many

what is true and \ . . . . . , . ...

... d question whether the mind of man can think
Bible is explicit on ? , . , . _

.forms of the outward — sense-forms — I am not
sensuous, it is equah, , , . . , ,

.. , ' , . , nit on the question whether the mind does
unrehshable point that . .. , . . . . , .

, . ally draw on the external for its moulds 01

of man, and not in externa . , L . . , , x

, ,. . ^eak who ever took the trouble to examine

lzed, unembodied, are not ai „. . . , . , ..

„ ' , , :ter. We think in words, generally we

after all. Leave them alone 11 „T , 4

mstinctive with us. We were made to.

YALE LECTURES. 269

If all men breathe, they were made to breathe. And if they all think
embodied thoughts God meant they should. But if my unexpressed
thoughts are thus formulated in fact within me, and proceed in
terms of structural coherency and logic, and in terms of beauty
often ; behold I am already in the perilous trap of a practical
externalization — interior and mental externalization. Perhaps I am
not much degenerated by it ; nevertheless there is a sense-process
going on in me. I am in commerce with externals in the privacy
of my mind. The matrix of my thought savors of the physical. I
may comfort myself with the notion that I am particularly unphysical,
because I have not put my thought into any form that can be touched
with the hands ; but I am deluded. Jesus went to the root of this
matter when he taught that a man need not advance so far as an
overt act in order to be corrupted, but that the instant a reprehen-
sible thought emerges into his consciousness, the whole strength of
corruption is in him.

I say again : the instant I think a thought, the jeopardy of
physicalization has begun, because that thought, following the cus-
tomary process of human thought, clothes itself in a body borrowed
from the outward. Metaphysicians sometimes fancy when they use
language for the sharp purposes of their particular business, that
they have triumphantly purged their terms of the colors and flavors
of the outward world. They have eliminated the physical, or at any
rate, whatever physical there may be left in their words they do not
use in their processes of thought. But language is loth to be expur-
gated in that way. It was sense-born. It was physical in its origin.
And it knows it and is not ashamed. So it holds on to its physical
parentage. It holds on ; there is an indestructible physical image
in each word of it. The metaphysician may try not to have any-
thing to do with that image, but the image is the vital essence of
the word and when he is dead and gone and another generation
come to read what he has left, often they hunt out his suppressed
images, in order to get down into his real meaning ; the fact being,
after all, that those images, those physical elements, did always
secretly determine even that metaphysician's use of language. There
is a curious pertinacity here : a persistence as of a thing alive and
wilful.

I said at the beginning that I was willing for the sake of argu-
ment to admit that there is in all cases a tendency towards an evil
influence on men in all the arts of expression.

270 YALE LECTURES.

The moment a mind moves forth into embodiment, artistic or
otherwise, it perils itself and everybody else. Let that be conceded,
whether we need to concede it or not. And now it becomes very
important to know what are our securities against that miserable
tendency and especially in fine art ; what is our security? Are there
any securities that are so secure as to make it worth while trying to
wed art to religion ever? I propose to answer that question.

And first we must not undertake to get security by minimizing
form, as the Congregationalists incline to do sometimes and other
bodies much more. Form we must have on all accounts, and if we
are to secure the ends of self-expression fully and the ends of impres-
sion fully, we must have of form not a little. The fact is, in several
denominations those ends are not secured with any fulness. One
might make a good lecture on the exact points of short-coming
among the Quakers, for example, in that regard. There can be no
complete and symmetrical doctrinal development, except by a com-
plete and symmetrical development of form. Neither can there be
any well-balanced and full-toned development of the religious life.
Indeed there would not be such things as denominations, with their
contrary polities and their contrary theologies, were it not for the
inadequate and fragmentary rituals and form-systems of the Christian
bodies. There would only be the Church Catholic, as there ought
to be. I do not say that all men would think alike as to doctrine
and polity, if they were all put into the discipline of the same forms ;
absolute uniformity of opinion could never be ; but they would think
alike so far, and particularly would be developed along the same lines
and into the same types of religious experience so nearly, that they
would have no heart for denominational subdivisions. I say sub-
divisions to indicate my sense of the disgraceful multiplicity of the
separated folds. I have heard many fine arguments to show the
great value of denominations ; but in my judgment, all real values
could be better secured in a Catholic, or universal Church. I did
not know that once, but I have known it for some years now. We
must not undertake to defend ourselves from the possible debase-
ment incident to Form by any extreme abridgement of Form.

Secondly, confining myself now to the arts that carry in them
influences of beauty, I remark : beauty is safe enough always/and no
one is morally relaxed by it when neither the artist nor the observer
makes it an end in itself, but on the contrary, seeks ends intel-
lectual, ethical and religious, and holds beauty strictly subordinate

YALE LECTURES. 271

and contributory thereto. I have struck now a fundamental
chord in this whole matter. In any just and wholesome arrange-
ment of the arts of expression, beauty is a subordinate element.
And how do we know that? By what considerations do we show
that beauty belongs down there under those other things ; and
begins to be a dissolvent of character, directly it is let out from
under the same ? Comparing the moral and religious influence of
simple intellectualism with the moral and religious influence of
beauty, it seems to me there is not much choice between them. A
man under the supremacy of intellectualism is as much a sinner and
as much in hell as a man under the supreme rule of beauty. It does
not seem so at first ; and if Jesus Christ had not come among us and
given us the benefit of his awful stroke of moral analysis, we should
never have got into this matter to any practical purpose. But he
has come, and now intellectualism as the reigning purpose and joy
of life has little to say for itself. It carries a man down always. It
does not make him lackadaisical necessarily. On the contrary he
may be exceedingly athletic and formidable. When John Milton
portrayed Satan, he did not consider it necessary to make him a
milksop nor to effeminate him at any point. He, Satan, was a very
gifted person, and what he could not do no finite creature could.
But intellectuality, a life moulded, modulated and marshalled under
intellectual influences pure and simple, is perdition in every essential
element of perdition. How then does it deserve to be put above
the Beautiful as a supreme formative force ?

I reply, the Beautiful, if let alone, does work emasculation in
the matter of simple strength. It gradually kills the more strenuous
elements in character. It undermines heroism. A solid nationality
like the Puritan commonwealth cannot be built on it. Moreover I
think it may be true that the Beautiful, as being more distinctly
sensuous than the intellectual has a more direct affinity with practical
sensualism than intellectualism has. I suspect that an examination
of the facts of history, a reference to peoples and periods that have
surrendered to the Beautiful, might show that to be so. So that the
Beautiful does stand second to the intellectual as a good force in
life. And it stands second to the ethical, of course. To settle that
we have only to refer to the experiments made by individuals and
by communities, with the ethical as a dominant factor of develop-
ment. Let a man put his conscience and his religious nature of
which his conscience is a part, in the ascendant, and what does he

272 YALE LECTURES.

come to ? As a matter of fact, what does he come to ? What kind
of a man does he make ? And how does he feel within his own self?
Is he a happy man ? Do his faculties in him act as though they
felt that a spurious king was set over them when conscience was
enthroned ? Do they not rather show an utter contentment and
pull along in their own particular function, each one blithely, sing-
ing even as the worlds sing, because they are marshalled so orderly?
Also in every case what is the national result of an enthroned con-
science ? History has but one voice in this matter. On the other
hand, what is the uniform consequence when such a faculty or impulse
as vanity or combativeness or love of dominion or bodily lust reigns
in a man or among a people ? The innumerable intermeddlings with
the monarchy of the conscience and religion, by the several other
powers of man, overwhelmingly settle the question of the de jure
power. So then the Beautiful must abdicate.

Or try the question in this way : Conceive the Beautiful as
eliminated from the physical creation ; would there be anything
worth while left ? Yes, we should still have structure and mass and
utility. Quite an array of things solid and sizable ; that is, if we
include in the Beautiful only the esthetic conception. When we
speak of structure, and of utility as resulting from structure, we have
passed into the realm of intellectual beauty, to be sure, but we have
not passed into esthetics strictly. A perfectly neutral universe, as
regards esthetics, would be quite a universe, I say. So might an
unesthetic man be quite a man, as is numerously proven every day.
And a Deity too might be very adorable who did not love beauty
and cared not to create a beautiful universe. But take from the
Deity and from the man and from the universe every shred and
semblance of the moral, or the intellectual, or the true, and what is
there left? It would take a whole week's thinking to determine
whether we had anything left. Certain it is that what was left would
not be worth retaining — even as a man when dead is no longer
worth keeping.

I propose to give now some concrete illustrations of an undue
surrender to beauty. And as I have a company of embryo preachers
before me, I will begin with the sermon. A man starts out to make
a beautiful sermon. That is what he is after. I am ashamed to
have anything to do with such a person, even for the purpose of
illustration ; but as such persons occasionally appear, and particu-
larly as any preacher (especially a young one) is liable to be caught

YALE LECTURES. 273

in a temporary passion for the beautiful some day, and to get up
discourses accordingly, I think I had better take hold of the case.
Well, the beautiful sermon is started, and I will tell you what the
man will do. He has already surrendered all intention of utility or
usefulness. The homiletical impulse has vacated and the esthetical
impulse has come in. A man who has come along so far as that
may be looked to to do anything. First he proceeds to forget
that the first beauty of a discourse — the first chronologically and the
first logically — the beauty in fact without which no other real beauty
is possible — lies in organization, and is not sensuous but intellectual.
When God would make a beautiful man, he provides a frame for him,
not any frame, but a frame that will hang together and be specific,
a man's frame, not a brute's, and a frame not only that will hang
together, but will hang together creditably, proportionally ; no one
member too long for the rest, or too short for the rest, or too heavy
or too light ; a skeleton which when clothed on with flesh will be
seen to be beautiful and will pay for all the fleshly decoration. To
decorate a malformation would be incongruous. Every malformed
man, if he could have been permitted to put in a single word before-
hand, would have said, " Please omit decoration and give me a
form." I should like to be decorated and formed both, but if that
is too much to ask, as between the two give me form. And that
sermonizer ought to feel in the same way, but he does not. He
wants decoration ; decoration irrespective of the frame ; decoration
whether there be any frame or not.

As I am upon the subject of beautiful organization, I might as
well say here, parenthetically, that I know of no one rule for secur-
ing it so important as this. Take the good of your congregation for
your aim ; not merely their general good, but their specific good
through this subject you have chosen ; get your intention high up
in that way ; clarify it ; simplify it ; state to yourself exactly what
you are after ; and then shape your materials, organize them hero-
ically on that objective. And it will require some heroism. Your
fondness for this and that in your accumulated material, will make
you want to put it in. It is something you have labored on and
dug out perhaps ; or it is a scrap of learning ; or there is a glitter
of the ideal in it that pleases you ; or it is a touch of pathos which
might melt somebody. There are numerous temptations and you
will need to be a hero and ask only, does that item bear naturally
and directly on my objective? Moving among the heaps of good

274 YALE LECTURES.

stuff that you have got together, in that constant, courageous self-
denial, you are apt to develope a plan of your subject that is simple,
coherent, orderly, compact, with an all-engulfing trend, like the pull
of a raceway ; a veritable organism, a thing of beauty indeed —
intellectual beauty. You did not aim at beauty. You aimed at use
and God rewarded you for it by carrying you unconsciously into
beauty, as he always does.

But our man whom we left a moment ago, does not propose to
waste himself on such plain work as that. He does not choose to
get beauty unconsciously, or to put up with a kind of beauty so little
obvious to the multitude as beauty structural. If he can only get
flesh, real pink flesh, something pretty and posy-like, he will run the
risk of the frame. Well, it is an instructive fact that even posies
have to have something to grow in or on. In order to satisfactory
ornament, there must be something to ornament. Ornament con-
sidered as an independent beauty-spot, is one of the most ineffective
and ridiculous of things. Ornament — ornament legitimate and
telling — is simply and always the natural and spontaneous efflores-
cence of structure. How that one definition damns scores of ambi-
tious art-works, sermons, buildings, paintings, musical products !
It is a truism in architecture that all adornments must be congruous
to the buildings that they undertake to adorn ; a rule which I
expressed in the essence of it, when I said adornment is structure
efflorescent. That is, there must be so perfect harmony between a
building and its decorations, that it is as though, and makes one
feel as though, the building had blossomed. The congruity in
question lies in several particulars. The ornaments must be suitable
to the intention of the building. A gothic cathedral must not be
called upon to blossom into ungothic or unreligious or pagan embel-
lishments. Also the ornaments must be suitable to the structure of
the building ■ and to its position and surroundings ; and to some
other things perhaps. But I must not get too far away from sermons.
However I am not far away when I am naming the laws of congruity
in art. For example, a sermon may be gothic or Moorish or Greek,
or of the New England meeting-house type. Christianity is pretty
diversified in its aspects and contents and admits a good variety of
sermons, but Moorish embellishments on a gothic sermon, or Jeremy-
Taylorisms festooning Jonathan Edwards, were grotesque. And a
Moorish sermon at a funeral were scarcely the thing.

When it is once settled that a discourse is to be a sermon, a

YALE LECTURES. 275

multitude of beautiful things are ruled out. That one decision
excludes them. Were it a political speech or a Fourth of July Ora-
tion, or an address of courtesy or a military proclamation or a nuptial
discourse it would be different ; certain flowers might then be let in,
which now must be foregone, and even an occasional spangle might
not be offensive. But the precise point I wish to press just now is,
that when the sermonizer has made the structure of his discourse
beautiful he has virtually provided for every other beauty of pulpit
utterance that is suitable and is possible to him. The mind that has
the grace and the vigor and the moral purpose to organize such a
structure as I have described, will find always as it moves along in
the process of amplification upon that structure, that those very
mental qualities which originated the structure, do also joyfully
originate all along the decorations thereof; congruous decorations,
of course, because structure and decoration are the issue of the self-
same mind ; the fine purpose in the man, that presided over his
work of organization ; the purpose to do a definite good to a certain
congregation, by the use of a certain subject, on a certain occasion.
That purpose also presides over his entire movement through the
subject when he comes to write it out, and infallibly selects suitable
details of beauty, if indeed it be proper to say that he selects at all.
He does not. No, out of such a mind as that, agitated by the work
it is in, beauties spring of themselves. The man does not call them ;
he simply ferments in the stress of noble endeavor, and they come.
As he is but partially sanctified at best, and but imperfectly disci-
plined and cultured in his intellect, the probability is that some
things will spring out of him that are more sumptuous than suitable ;
heavy dabs of color that need to be reduced, heavy tones that do
not harmonize with the general flow of his music ; ramping, sudden
growths that spoil the proportions of his landscape ; spurts of energy
that spurted before he knew it ; but such a man as he, will certainly
see these things and go back upon them with a swift vengeance.
He knows that a mere detail has no business to be springing into
the foreground and attracting all observers, even if it be a bewitching
detail in itself considered — it cannot be considered in itself; it is
but one thing in a great whole, and when one thing in a great whole
sets up to be considered by itself, it has outraged the whole ; in
proper subordination and congruity to the whole it can make its own
valuable addition to the solid effect of the whole. Perhaps no one
can detect that contribution, but it is there ; even as in a perfectly

276 YALE LECTURES.

blended chorus the most peeping voice tells to a mathematical cer-
tainty, though no mortal could find the same. But an insubordinate
detail is a practical nuisance. It nullifies a sermon. That is, its
whole effect is towards nullification. And when a sufficient number
of insubordinate details assemble themselves in a sermon, with a
conceit of their own fascination, a sermon is unshapely and spoiled.

And the man who starts to make a sermon that shall be beauti-
ful, lands just there ; in no sermon at all, but in a miniature of what
the universe would be, provided structure and structural melody were
ignored all through it and the Creator had directed his undivided
attention to sensuous beauty-effects. By the way, I suppose that
word beauty, if we are going to be strict and further our own con-
venience in the discussion of beauty, should be confined to sensuou
impressions and not be permitted to include any supersensible reality
whatever. However I have shackled along so far without confining
it, and possibly I can go on so to the end. By my reference to the
sermon I have now illustrated our great means of security against
beauty. It must be subjected to that intellectual thing, truth, and
to that good thing, religion. Artists must go for intellectual and
ethical ends supremely and for esthetic ends secondarily. And
Churches and Christian denominations must seek art for moral ends
and not just for the luxury and the ravishment of beauty.

Take it in architecture. First, certain utilities must be thor-
oughly made sure in a Church edifice. The building must accom-
modate the assembly. It must not be built in a way to tumble
down, either the day of dedication or any other day to come. The
materials must be as indestructible as is convenient and they must
be put together to stay. The space enclosed by the walls must be
convenient for the particular uses of the people who built them. The
possibility of seeing and hearing must be attended to. Then again,
in a building to be used for God's service, as that building is, every
visible thing must be real. There should not be pretended cornices
and pillars and architectural effects accomplished by hypocritical
frescoes ; which frescoes are supposed to be most satisfactory
according as they most nearly succeed in deceiving somebody. But
after all these points of construction, utility and moral honesty are
covered, the question of beauty comes in well.

May beauty come in ? May art have a chance ? The masons
and the carpenters and all the utilitarians have had their chance or
are to have, and now is there anything more? May we put any cost

YALE LECTURES. 277

on that building, over and above any conceivable utility, and make
that cost simply an offering to Him? Will He feel like rejecting
our precious ointment, if instead of selling it to convert heathen, we
wastefully pour it out in that pious way? Moreover inasmuch as
this building is for the one end of personal salvation, can we further
that end by some efforts now that are artistic ? Is a man saved as
much as he might be when he is simply converted, or even sancti-
fied? Is it any good to have his converted and sanctified soul
refined ? A refined saint seems to be more current in the world
than an unrefined one. If you are about to come to close quarters
with him, marry him for instance, you like him refined. If you are
going to transact business with him, or do anything with him that
brings you near enough to catch his insensible emanations, his mag-
netism as it is sometimes called, the more refined he is the better.
You have no prejudice against his holiness or his good principles,
but if in addition to that he is civilized, you have no objection.
There is no such civilizer as regeneration by the spirit of God, taken
in its effect, both direct and remote. That is so. Still, a person
civilized to the extent of being regenerated, may for the time being
be austere, uninformed, in part unmodulated and unrelishable.
Therefore is there any way by which the Church building where he
fondly worships can be turned in upon him for purposes of culture,
and at the same time not retard his piety ?

First of all, knowing as we do the rather stiffening effect of
right lines, supposing we try curves on him a little, in the construc-
tion of the building. You get that man travelling along a curve and
he has got to be graceful. Curves have insensible emanations as
well as men, and the insensible emanations of a curve are very con-
genial and very improving, as compared to the insensible emana-
tions of a zig-zag. Also if this curve that has taken hold of this
man, winds off into mystery, as curves often will, that will do no
hurt. That being led off into mystery may be an advantage to his
present square-cut and realistic make-up, it may be, even modify his
theology. It need not injure or alter the substance of his theology,
but around that substance it may throw an atmosphere which, while
it might not make much of a show on Fairbanks' standard scales,
could easily be as valuable to this man as though it did. And then
there is what John Milton has called a dim religious light, meaning
to intimate, as I understand, that the light in question is religious
because dim ; though of course, as was also intimated by this same

278 YALE LECTURES.

Milton, the light gets a part of its religiousness from the fact that it
is strained through

Storied windows richly dight —
through windows, that is, that have some sort of religious story to
tell, and tell it ornately, in colors. Supposing we experiment on
our man with that. Probably he is a strenuous and busy person all
days, save Sunday, and cannot in the week be caught in that leisure-
liness of mind which is quite necessary to a full and deep impres-
sion upon his sensibilities by any good and Christian story. But
here now in his pew he sits, with his work laid aside, with his best
clothes and their silent culture on him, voluntarily offering himself
to be impressed. To be sure, he mostly faces towards his minister,
determined to receive impressions from that particular quarter ; but
when a man is intent in one direction, looking out his front door, all
his side and back doors are so much the more exposed ; just as
people are run over by watching approaching trains more often than
in any other way ; the train they are not watching then gets its
chance at them. Multitudes of people you cannot run over except
as you get them looking out for a particular train. For example,
there is many a hater of art and beauty in Churches, who has it for
his established principle to watch the minister and repudiate the
gothic or other fine architecture all about him as he sits, and the
storied windows and the heavenly preaching of the choir ; but I say
unto you, verily, his side and back doors are exposed, and to such
an extent that after a few years he is not the man he used to be, as
some accidental test applied to him shows.

It is proposed to abolish the choir and to have congregational
singing ; and to his own surprise and alarm he discovers that he
does not wish that to be done. Or his artistic edifice wherein he
has sat so long burns up, and the disheartened and economical
congregation are inclined to put up now that infinitely reiterated,
unsculptured and unbedight edifice wherewith we are all familiar,
when lo ! he finds himself going over to the mystical Babylon again
and advocating her fornications. He is the victim of insensible
emanations. He knew that his preacher emanated. He always
knew that. That is the preacher's avowed business. But he had
not known that all these other influences were emanating ; that the
Gospel, when preached in a white-light interior, is not the same
that it is when preached in a dim religious light, that dim religious
light being also supported and carried home by the numerous other

YALE LECTURES. 279

esthetic blandishments which are apt to characterize a Church
interior that has ventured along so far as to invoke the aid of stained
glass and blazoned holy stories. The Gospel remains the same in
whatever light, as regards its substantial grandeur, tenderness and
efficacy ; but remember always that the Gospel may be received by
a person in two modes : first, by eruption, secondly, by saturation.
And when you come to that second mode, these esthetics that I am
describing get their chance.

Even preachers may be divided into two great classes, the
irruptive and the saturative, the last getting their saturative quality
largely by their culture, their tone, their art-quality, their likeness to
storied windows and religious architecture and the sanctified com-
positions of the great tone-masters of the world. Some four years
ago, when I delivered a lecture here on our Congregational worship
and proposed some enlargement of ritual among us, the late Dr.
Bacon, who was present, said that I had been spoiled by my Upjohn
Church. Which was only what I am now saying, that the saturative
form of impression is one of the forms, and a strong one too. I
wish my Upjohn Church had got at me fifty years ago and that my
constitutional irruptiveness had had fifty years of chastisement. As
it is, I must irrupt, more or less, so long as I live. However I have
come at least to recognize the other more silent and gentle process,
the process saturative, and to be willing to speak a word to you in
its behalf, as I am doing this day. I do not know that I should feel
that I had risen to the full size of such an occasion as this if I should
spend my whole hour expounding so small a detail in the general
subject of beauty and its influence, as a dim religious light; still I
have noticed that an entire large topic is often contained in some
single one of its elements, even as a tree is completely discovered
in its smallest leaf. Just let a man discuss the storied window ques-
tion clear to the bottom, and he has broken the back of the whole
difficulty in the matter of esthetics and religion. It is frequently
taken for granted that these elements of impression for which I plead
— the art elements — are not so much elements of impression or use,
as elements of fancy, entertainment and enjoyment, and are not
worth considering strenuously, on that account. But it is not so.
Take that inconsiderable circumstance, the storied or colored win-
dow, as an illustration. The light thus secured has the following
not at all trivial recommendations.

It sequesters an assembly seven times more than does an untoned

280 YALE LECTURES.

light, that is, it makes them feel that they have left the street, shop
and home, the flow of daily and common life, and are now shut in
with God and things divine. Next, it immerses them, unperceivedly
perhaps, but none the less on that account, in the mysterious ; that
feature of religion which saturates the sensibilities as profitably as
any other feature, it may be. At any rate no one has taken the full
stress of his religion till he has felt the touch of its mystery. Blessed
be anything that helps bring that about. Next, so much of dimness
as any reasonable interior is likely to have is promotive of mental
tranquility ; that one thing most necessary to get, before a man's
religious privileges begin to soak in very much. That is physiology
in part. The eye here must have repose, the rest of shadow, before
the mind can have repose and the mental receptivity thereof. I do
not understand however, that this mental advantage of shadow rests
wholly on physiology ; I fancy it is an ultimate fact of the human
mind that dimness inclines one to meditativeness, brooding, senti-
ment and movements of the soul far-out and away. Behold the
genial influences of the night. The numerous staring visibilities of
the day are then withdrawn. They no longer occupy the mind.
And with that the numerous noises of the day are hushed. And
thus released, the intellect no longer operates as simple intellect,
but the sensibilities are called in. A man's deeper self and his
honester self and his tenderer self and all his better and choicer self
comes forward and begins to play. Therefore the night is a rare
time for lovers, as has been immemorially understood. And just as
rare a time is it for piety to expatiate upon its holy and nourishing
themes and search out its waters of comfort. It is a time for remi-
niscence too ; a time, in fact, for everything sedate and mellow and
saturative. So then, a sacred interior that borrows a little of this
same night-witchery, has done a good thing. It has prepared an
atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, wherein the Gospel can do its
very best. For the Gospel has not done its best when it has simply
iaid down its propositions. Those invulnerable propositions do not
more need to be uttered forth in and through a vibratory medium,
the air, than they need to go forth through what I will call an
esthetic medium, made up of the impalpable influences of softened
light, strong and refined architecture, truly religious, chaste and
rational decoration and an order and movement of service harmo-
nious with them all.

It may occur to some of you that Christianity is an essentially

YALE LECTURES. 281

cheerful religion, and is imposed upon therefore when domiciled in
any the least sombreness, such as dim lights and gothic effects. I
think we shall come to the truth in this matter, if we take one look,
fair and square, at Him who is Christianity impersonated. God
forbid that we should call him uncheerful. But God forbid also that
we should call him cheerful in the same sense that birds and squir-
rels are, or even the ancient Greeks, who have so filled the world
with their incomparable happy art. Jesus was a man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief; not alone as bowed down under a heavy
Mediatorship which reached its climax on Calvary, and then melted
away into the flow of a great triumph ; but as essentially, constitu-
tionally and forever a chastened person. Go back to that date in the
dateless eternity when the triune God alone was, and why was God
not even then what for lack of a better word I will call chastened ?
What should we think of a Being who, standing at that point, con-
templating the fact that his own good and blessed nature made it
incumbent on him to originate by and by such a universe of contin-
gencies and shadows as this universe of ours, could be otherwise
than toned by it ? Go forward also to that forthcoming and eventual
date when that apostolic word, " Where sin abounded grace did
much more abound," shall have been completely fulfilled, and the
whole groaning and travailing creation shall have been brought out
of its pain into the glorious liberty of the children of God ; the best
time, on the whole, the creation ever saw : and even then there
will be something not unlike a minor chord in the universal re-
joicing. Even as Hillhouse meant to hint, I suppose, in that hymn
of his where he addressed the angels who never fell, and said to
them :

Earth has a joy unknown to heaven —
The new-born peace of sin forgiven.
Ye, on your harps, must lean to hear
A secret chord that mine will bear.

That reminiscent element in earth's final joy, the remembrance
of sin, will eternally differentiate it from all other joys, and it is
impossible not to believe that the enthroned Jesus, gone victoriously
to the right hand of God, in his undiminished and unchangeable
humanity, will evermore be something other than he would have
been, other in his feelings, other in the entire play of his soul, by
reason of what he has passed through ; and also by reason of the
J9

282 YALE LECTURES.

tremendous fact that in spite of all he has passed through, hell is
not yet obliterated from the map of the universe, and if our ortho-
doxy be true, never will be.

My Brethren, gothic architecture, with its seriousness and
grandeur, its sombreness, as some would say, is an inevitable influ-
ence from Jesus of Nazareth. The Greek temple is not. The Greek
temple is not formulated on a serious back-ground. Greek archi-
tecture is not the product of spiritual struggle. Once in a while a
Church building committee, caught by its historic renown and
deluded by the idea that grave architecture may come to be weari-
some if profusely repeated, proceed to set up a Greek form to wor-
ship in ; just as painters and sculptors sometimes think they have
chosen their best possible subject when they have selected some
figure or scene from classical mythology and have laid themselves
out on that — on some pagan Deity, some Bacchus, some Faun,
some Mercury or some Venus. The truth is, we have Bacchuses
and Venuses enough of our own, if it is important that art should
keep ori in that way. But really and soberly, when you come to
religion and religious subjects, I humbly venture the remark that
Christianity need not knock under to heathenism. We will take
what is good, refined and great in the classical civilizations, and
make what use of them we can ; and we will even borrow ideas from
their sacred buildings ; but Christianity has developed an architec-
ture of her own ; an architecture severely chaste, moral and sublime
in its fundamental tone, but quite capable of being warmed and
illumined with sober touches of cheerfulness, by various devices not
necessary now to specify ; touches superimposed on that solid founda-
tion-tone. I do not know anything much simpler than the great
cathedral at Cologne, so far as its interior structure is concerned.
I shall never quite recover from those unsculptured stone pillars that
there bound the nave and stretch away into the upper spaces. The
whole moral strength of simple lines is there developed. But there
is a great glory of windows in that edifice, that for one thing ; and
when in 1872 I attended an early morning service there, and the sun
in the east inundated all, and especially the sufficiently adorned and
beautified choir-space, where the service headed up ; I felt that I
never saw such a combination and sweet mutual interfusion of sub-
limity and beauty ; the sublimity made mellow and melodious by
the beauty, and the beauty made strong, unenervating and moral by
the sublimity. I am not here to be fanatical and say that any the

YALE LECTURES. 283

least departure from the gothic type in Church edifices is unpardon-
able ; but as I am taking time to show how the Beautiful may be let
into religion, without letting in softness and debility and ultimate
demoralization, to wit, by subordinating it to the supremacy of the
true and the ethical, I do like to insist on gravity as an underlying
quality of the architecture of the Church — gravity, that great tone
which so comes into the gothic, for one. Let gravity be made sure,
and certain sane and robust things implied therein ; and the florid,
the sensuous, the artistic will not be likely to run away with us.

It is like what I said about the sermon ; make sure of structure ;
get into you the true structural spirit, and the decorations will come
along inoffensively and in right measure.

ORDER IN SERMON TOPICS.

Gentlemen, we learn by the mistakes we make ; that for one
way ; but when a man has spent a half century or so making mis-
takes and getting wise in that expensive manner, he turns to those
who are young, with a feeling that they ought to learn by his
mistakes and not be at the miserable expense and waste of time
of working out a great list of mistakes of their own. Hence this
constant procession of lecturers through this desk, men covered all
over with the scars of their mistakes and desiring to tell you where
each scar came from, and how they might have avoided it as well as
not had they only known what they now know. Each lecturer
is seized with a deep fear, now and then, that you will all go straight
along to make mistakes for yourselves and that nothing short of
actual decapitation will stop you ; and yet none the less does
the lecturer's heart within him yearn to lecture, I notice, just as
though there were some good in it. Well, perhaps there is. If the
universal desire of man for immortality rather indicates an actual
immortal life, may it not be that this universal instinct to lecture, on
the part of gentlemen rich in mistakes, is a hint that men as young
as you are benefited by being lectured — one in a dozen of you, at
least.

These thoughts, pro and con, came to me as I started out
to prepare for your benefit the warning in black and white which
lies here before me now. A particular, clear warning which no
man happened to deliver to me when I stood where you stand.

My Brethren, on a given Lord's Day, a minister preaches on
a certain topic, and on the next Lord's Day on a certain other
topic, and the next day on another ; and so on so long as he lives.
But what determines the succession of those topics? Do they

YALE LECTURES. 285

cohere by any coherency however attenuated, or do they stand
each one in absolute cut-off from everything before and after, like a
solitary island in mid-ocean? Probably there is some sort of
coherency in the business : so much at least as prevails in a string
of beads which, although they are not in a very vital connection
and cannot be said to hang together, are at least hung together ; as
the cord on which they are strung very well knows ; but is the
preacher's coherency intentional, methodized, bottomed on princi-
ple, and therefore persistent and uniform? Probably not. Mine
never was. And so far as I could tell, most of the preachers whom
I knew were just like me. They had come out of the theological
seminary with no thoughts at all on the subject, and they skittered
along accordingly. That was a whole generation ago, when things
were darker than they are now, and young men had more facilities
for not knowing everything than they have at this present time.

I shall distribute the material of what I have to say to you now
in regard to the succession of the preacher's topics, most con-
veniently for myself and most conveniently for you who must listen
to me, if I remark ; that all conceivable laws for methodizing this
succession classify under two heads, first, laws subjective, secondly,
laws objective. That considerably threadbare terminology, subject-
ive and objective, is so convenient that one dislikes not to use it
occasionally. If it were not convenient it would not be threadbare.
Roads that most accommodate the public want are those that have
the grass all worn off, of course ; and their bareness is their glory.

Let us in beginning consider the subjective laws of before and
after in pulpit topics. They are such as the following: First, you
may get your themes and the succession of them from the abso-
lutely unregulated impulse of your own individuality. Years ago I
was about to marry a certain eminent gentleman whom you all
know ; and the appointed hour had come and he and I were in
a room by ourselves composing our minds for the event, presum-
ably ; and presumably rehearsing our parts for the impending cere-
mony. Not at all, Gentlemen, not at all. He was discoursing
to me with all his might on a certain very remote intellectual
subject, as though marrying and giving in marriage were already
over with and ended for this world, and we were all like the angels.
"My friend," said I, interrupting him at last, "do you not wish to
know what particular ceremony I am about to use?" "No, Mr.
Burton, I am not one of these stereotyped men, you know. Follow

286 YALE LECTURES.

your own genius, and it will be perfectly satisfactory to me." Well,
sermonizing may go in that way. The preacher opens to his
congregation the special matter that he does open at any given
time, because he, the preacher, is exactly the man that he is.
If he had happened to be a different man, he would have opened a
different subject. That is the whole explanation of what his people
get that day. A most precarious state of things, one might say.
Being fed by ravens were not more so.

Secondly, a preacher may follow the impellings of the Holy
Ghost in his own soul, and may have it for his rule that his theme
shall be given him, every time, supernaturally. He refuses themes
gotten by study, or human conversation or any sort of public or
private hearing or seeing. He has no objection to study or to
the voluminous say-so of authors, conversationalists or lecturers ;
but when he comes to that one and critical act of selecting next
Sunday's discourse, he proposes to just empty himself of all mortal
accumulations, and take in only sky-born things. A beautiful atti-
tude that. And a fruitful one, too. For the Holy Spirit has no
aversion to souls thus heroically made empty. On the contrary, he
delights to enter such ; and when he is once in, he is delighted
to find there, after all, great treasures of honest accumulation ; and
out of those treasures to pick topics for the man's use and mark
them sometimes so that he can know them. Almost all preachers
— all real preachers — can tell of experiences they have had in that
line. Not more was the stock and stuff of prophecy given to
the Hebrew prophets, than the substance of sermons is given
of the blessed spirit to men now, over and over. These then are
the two, great subjective laws of choice, as regards our subjects.
They are chosen in a supreme individualistic impulse, or they
are chosen as chosen for us by the Holy Ghost.

And now a word as to the objective laws of choice.

First, the minister may move about much among his people
and quietly hunt his themes in their hearts and lives. Being their
minister rather than another people's, he naturally wants to preach
to their necessities ; their necessities are his subjects and his great
business is contact with them, with a view to know them and make
his discoursings touch their case. Now that is pastorly and sweetly
Christian in the intent of it : moreover it is oratorical, for the
power of oratory lies one-half in adjustment at the moment to the
assembly in hand. The abortiveness of misadjusted oratory and

YALE LECTURES. 287

the death-sweat to the speaker himself, if he is sensitive enough to
have a death-sweat ever, is often a recollection for a life-time.
This pastorly preacher whom I am now describing, not only hunts
hearts and lives from house to house and along all the ways of life,
with a view to suitable discourses, but he watches from afar and in a
general way ; peradventure, the public mind of his parish may
be moved by a common wave of feeling, by some occurrence
of common interest, as a conspicuous and impressive death, or
a startling accident or a great crime or a special jubilation or a
presidential election or an earthquake or an outrageous heresy
or a crusade of the women of the community. Many things
happen ; and the pulpit can rehearse them, or if it does not
exactly rehearse them, it can shape itself to them in the abstract
discussions of truth that are full of application to the present situ-
ation. Of course, there is no coherency in such subjects as they
come on one after another ; but then there is no coherency in the
successive interesting events wherewith they deal.

To be sure, the sensationalist has his special glee in pulpit
topics based on present passing phenomena in this way ; but a
decenter minister than the sensationalist may also get his topics
thus, considerably. On the whole, it does seem rational that a
public speaker should indicate somehow that he knows what partic-
ular world he is in and what the present, passing circumstances are
wherein he stands and speaks. "I speak to posterity," said a cer-
tain disgusted member of Congress, when his fellow members
did not incline to listen to him ; and we are all familiar with Charles
Lamb's account of Coleridge's getting him by the button in the
Strand, in London, to talk to him at length on a favorite philo-
sophical subject. Lamb says that he took out his knife and cut off
that button that the absorbed philosopher held by, and went his
way for the day ; and at night found Coleridge on the same spot,
going on as briskly as ever. Well Brethren, it is not best for
preachers to be too much absorbed in present and transient circum-
stances, but we had better, on the other hand, not preach to
posterity alone, nor to the empty air. I can recollect the day when
I prided myself that my pulpit interest, for me, was drawn from
my subjects, so that in that respect I did not care whether I had
many to listen to me or not, or whether my congregation had all
cut off their buttons and left. That was going too far — as I think
now.

288 YALE LECTURES.

But secondly now still dwelling on topics selected on object-
ive principles ; a minister may take this for his rule ; he will spend
half his year, the winter, for example, in sermons directed to revi-
valistic ends, and the other half of the year in sermons that shall
have a wider range and bear on culture and edification. That is a
simple path and numbers there be that enter thereat.

Thirdly, we can formulate a complete system of doctrinal
topics, and take our people through a wholesome round of theology,
year by year ; that for Sunday mornings. Then in the second
services we can move more miscellaneously ; making free with
all subjects the more freely, because we have piously observed our
appointed routine of the morning and given the hearers a sure loaf
to masticate : the centre and substance of a full divine meal. That
plan has one virtue for certain, namely, it is a plan. It makes a
preacher consecutive because doctrines are consecutive ; and it
tends to make consecutive Christians in the pews. The people are
insensibly methodized under that treatment, and they grow to be
knowing and systematic in religious truth.

Again, preachers may follow the recorded career of the Lord
in their sermonizing ; or lastly, they may do what comes to much
the same thing and take the order of the Christian Year, as laid
down in the liturgies of the Church at large. I run over these last
specifications rapidly because I shall get back to them again, and to
all my specifications, when I turn back in my subject and consider
the desirability of these subjective and objective methods. And first,
the methods subjective. Let me give them a rapid run through the
mill once more and point out some of the chaff and grit in them.
Take the doctrine: "Just follow your own genius," as the great
doctrine for preachers. No doubt a preacher of that kind will
be likely to be full of flavors, to be marrowy and real ; and con-
sidered simply as a galvanic battery, he may be first-class. But
a personality formulated on the principle of individualism, as his
has been, is likely also to be circumscribed, lop-sided and more or
less eccentric. A man who has so much respect for his own interi-
ors as to make them the law of his pulpit subjects — the law of their
selection and succession — has reached that advanced stage of
self-respect by an individualistic course of education as distin-
guished from a catholic education. That is, in his choice of*books,
lines of study, methods, teachers and everything else which has
gone in to make him what he is, he has supremely followed his own

YALE LECTURES. 289

genius. In preserving his own precious individuality and standing
guard against influences that might obliterate or enfeeble it, he has
kept out influences that would have universalized him and made
him an organ with several hundred pipes, instead of a solitary and
eccentric bagpipe. Now a bagpipe in the pulpit tends to make bag-
pipes all around. I do not know anybody who more needs to
be an organ than a preacher of the Gospel. The Gospel is as
capable of innumerable tones and tunes as the vast atmosphere is,
if only it can have a many-piped man to tone and tune through : a
man who is an organ and not a pipe. I do not now dwell on the
disadvantage that the preacher himself suffers when he is a pipe.
No, what I object to is the multiplication of pipes and pipers
among his hearers by his being what he is. They take the fashion
of his doctrinalism and his spiritualism and his entire limited cul-
ture. As though a deformed man should inflict his type on the
whole community. This highly original preacher whom I am
deprecating, not only selects his topics and their order by the law
of his own originality, but he selects his Scriptural lessons for
his pulpit and his hymns by the same law ; and the prayers in
which he leads his congregation are simply self-evolutions once
more ; they are his experience and his circumscribed religious
thinking spoken forth, and the bowed congregation must conform
themselves to that unique pattern, or else not pray at all. Usually
they do not pray at all, but watch that interesting evolution. The
danger is that they will come to like watching it and to supposing that
to be prayer, and to feeling that prayers which are catholic rather
than individual are tame and formal and maybe not acceptable
to God.

I wish I had time to illustrate at large the evil of following
your own genius too much. I am afraid you will laugh at me when
I tell you that at Easter 1884, in early April, I began to write and
preach on the Resurrection of our Lord ; and on that theme
and its branches and corollaries staid, steadfast and rooted till the
last Sunday in July — four months — averaging more than one sermon
a week on it and writing on nothing else. I presume you will
charge the bagpipe infirmity on me. I could explain and defend
myself partially, at least, but I will not. Rather I prefer to hasten
on and say, that I can refer you to scores of important Creeds,
Church Creeds, Creeds of theological seminaries and denomina-
tional Creeds, in which the Lord's resurrection is not mentioned

290 YALE LECTURES.

at all, and nobody would know from them that he did rise, save by
inference or implication. And that although the doctrine of the
life of the risen Lord, communicated to dead human souls by the
Holy Ghost, to make them alive, is the doctrine pre-eminently
that differences Christianity from all other religions. Now is not
that playing something less than full organ ? Those Creeds are
very resounding on the passion of the Lord and on some other
themes, but they pitifully die away on that one event which is the
forth-flowering of all preceding events. We need a speaking pulpit
which is not limited by the private genius of the man in it, a pulpit
that discusses topics that any given private genius might forget, or
touch too lightly, if he were not made aware of them and attent
by the voice of the Holy Catholic Church ; the godly wisdom
of the whole Kingdom of God ; the teaching ages ; the Holy
Ghost in the ages. The preacher who goes by his own genius,
does not much hear this great teaching. He has picked up some
things — some great things probably — and on them he puts his
whole weight. They suit his mind. He can preach on them
con amore. On other topics he would be listless. So he abides in
these his specialties. I must work the truths that I can work, says
he, and what other truths there may be must be worked by men
who are born to it, as I certainly am not. And his people, instead
of sitting at a full table, sit stinted ly at his ; and bear the stamp of
his specialization. So much for that.

And now, how about getting our sermons by the direct gift
of the Holy Ghost? Will that do? Shall I open this particular
thought or text to-day, because the Holy Ghost operating in the
secrecy of my mind, has authentically designated that subject for
this day; and shall I insist on that as the rule of my selection
always? No. And why? For various reasons. To begin with,
God has confessedly provided various externals for the guidance of
men ; the Bible, for instance ; and human advice, and his provi-
dence working on the large theatre of history; and ordinances
which are practical digests of information ; and the teaching
Church. I do not need to name all of them, but if there is only
one — just one — the Bible, say — that one is conclusive to the point
that God did not intend men should walk by the inner light simply.
And I do not know but the same thing is indicated quite as clearly
by the fact that men are made of soul and body, and not of
soul alone. Why am I clothed upon with this external outfit with

YALE LECTURES. 291

its several outlooking organs, by which I am related to the vast and
multifold external and am perpetually externalized — why all this,
except as my Creator wanted me to lead a double life, and be
doubly directed in all that I do : first, by the blessed Spirit, no
doubt ; but again, by authorities exterior to myself ! Moreover,
why is it that, while the operations of the Holy Spirit in souls are
certainly favorable to sanity, sweetness and discretion, the forth-
puttings of the persons thus operated upon are frequently neither
sane, sweet nor discreet — why is this unless God means to notify us
that a man must not go by interiors alone ? The Apostles and the
first disciples were full of the Holy Ghost and of power, even
the power of the Holy Ghost, as they needed to be considering
the tasks they had on hand ; but this fullness of the Spirit did not
save them from error always, and was not meant to. They had
differences among themselves in respect of the things of the King-
dom, wherein both parties could not be right, although they were
re-born of the Holy Ghost. Mary, the blessed Virgin, was much
inspired when she improvised the Magnificat ; so was Zacharias
when he chanted his Benedictus ; but both of those God-given
hymns are strictly nationalistic rather than universalistic and
Christian, and it took quite a long time to get even the Apostles out
of a nationalistic conception of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. It
is difficult to speak of all this without seeming to disrespect the
Spirit of illumination, the light of God in the mind ; but we must
speak of it, otherwise men all about will be undertaking to go
by the Spirit of God and nothing else. Evidently the Spirit does
not wish any such thing. He enters them and then yields to their
ignorance and persistency and lets them blunder. A ship all sail
capsizes. Sails and good gales are good, but ballast is good too.
And when God's gales are on us, the gales of his Spirit in the mind,
we must steady ourselves by the ballast of authority and by the
wisdom of that same Holy Ghost embodied in the Book, in
Christian history, and in Christian institutions, notably the Church.
The secret of equilibrium lies in a due balance of the outward and
the inward.

You see now, my young Brethren, why I cannot advise you to
get your sermons from Sunday to Sunday by any merely subjective
law of choice. Well then, how shall you get them? They must
come somehow, for the Sundays come and the congregations come
together. If the ministers were all Joshuas, every now and then

292 YALE LECTURES.

some sore-pressed soul of them would be halting the sun, stopping
the Sundays and taking a rest in his subjects ; but the Joshuas are
all dead and gone ; and no preacher ever escaped the next Sunday.
Brethren, I do not think we need to escape it. Subjects are as
numerous as Sundays are. And while I would not lay down a too
strict and iron rule for getting subjects, and locating them, one
on this Sunday, and the other on that ; I have slowly settled to the
idea that, for an outline of our march through the year, nothing
is better on the whole, perhaps, than the life of the Lord chrono-
logically followed ; as it is followed, indeed, in the Christian Year
laid down by those Christian bodies which give attention to such
things. At any rate that may do for one outline. The life of the
blessed Lord, I say, beginning with the Advent and ending with the
Ascension ; and yet not ending there, for his invisible career is
a part of his human career as truly as his birth was. The Man
Christ Jesus, that veritable man, in his humanity intact and undi-
minished, has gone up to the right hand of God, has sent forth
thence the Holy Spirit, and now waits till his enemies be made his
footstool by that Mighty Spirit ! In even just mentioning this out-
line for sermonizing, I feel my heart caught in the warmth of it and
made glad.

The first advantage secured by such a course of preaching
is, that it sweeps the entire circle of Christian truth, and does
not leave the minister and his people exposed to the perils of a
partial and unbalanced cultivation. A man who had never exam-
ined the subject might say, and would be likely to say, that a
following of the life of Jesus in our sermonizing must result in less
breadth and less variety than some other plans : the plan of a
doctrinal curriculum, for instance. Are there not large parts of
Holy Writ that do not get treated by us in our pulpits provided we
simply run the round of the Christian Year ; such as the civil legisla-
tion of Moses, and many a report of battles, and numerous touches
of personal portraiture, and a great many religious hymns in the
Psalms and elsewhere which have not the remotest reference to
Christ ; and any amount of national history too in the Old Testa-
ment? I reply, of course, the Bible in its entirety, and not in
selected parts is our text book. We must be careful on that point.
The whole educated world has come out of the notion that all parts
of the Book are equally profitable to be preached upon, so that
a minister must take for his topic Paul sending for his cloak to

YALE LECTURES. 293

Troas, as often as he takes the sending of the Holy Ghost, and so
often as he preaches on the cloak must be just as enthusiastic as
though the Holy Ghost were his theme. Nevertheless, the whole
Bible, cloak and all, is to be turned in and utilized when we speak ;
and if it cannot be utilized on the Christian Year plan, then that
plan is conclusively exploded. But consider now the following.

A loving student of Christ and his career will find himself
carried, by that study, into an amazingly large fraction of this
volume : — carried by a movement direct and inevitable. The most
unpromising portion in which to find him is the Old Testament,
but the moment we accept the Old Testament record as organically
one with the new, and admit that the day of the Messiah was
preluded and introduced by a gigantic preamble, a long-continued
toil of miscellaneous forces which were systematized and made co-
efficient by the blessed purpose of God running through the whole
thing, and converging the whole to the Advent ; and admit further
that the Old Testament is our authentic history of all that ; we have
implicitly declared the presence of Jesus in innumerable places in
the old record. He was the outcome of the ages and to interpret
him we must search those ages. And while we shall find him very
obviously manifested in numerous events, personages, institutions,
prophecies, and allusions back there, we shall as truly find him in
still more places : Psalms, histories, sentences, incidental utterances,
and what not, wherein no mortal at the time suspected any other
meaning than that meaning constrained by their time and locality.
If God chooses to elaborate a terminology full of present signifi-
cances and then thousands of years thereafter, in the providential
unfolding of events, makes that old terminology carry vastly
expanded significations, which significations it is now plain enough
that terminology was designed to carry, if God pleases to take that
way of gradualism, and would not have his Old Testament speak
forth all its contents till the fullness of time ; who are we that we
should undertake to criticize him ; and why may we not better
thank him that we are privileged to explore a Book so germinant
and phenomenal?

And so the New Testament. If Christ and his life is our
appointed circle of topics, to be sure we must resort primarily
to the histories of him given by the four Evangelists ; but hardly
more to them than to the Epistles, those inspired expositions of the
very things we are after concerning the Lord. If I am speaking on

294 YALE LECTURES.

the birth of Christ or his circumcision, or his baptism or his temp-
tation or his transfiguration, or his death or his resurrection or his
ascension, or on any scene in his life or any slightest word that ever
fell from his lips, my experience is that the whole volume begins to
swarm about me ; not every passage of the whole, perhaps, but
there is such a swarming that I feel as though every and each were
swarming, precisely as the Samaritan woman said, "Come, see a
man that told me all that ever I did," because Jesus had told her so
much in the few words he did say, that she was sure of his ability to
tell more, and felt that already her entire secret consciousness had
been opened out. If you press me hard, and ask me at what point
in the Christian Year I am accustomed to bring in Paul's cloak,
I answer, I bring it in when I bring in the man that wore the cloak.
And if you ask me where I bring him in, I answer, I can bring him
in wherever his life connects with Christ's life, or even with the
Kingdom of Christ. It is not straining matters much if when
speaking of Christ, I speak of one of his Apostles, especially such
a sizable and interesting Apostle as St. Paul. Moreover, how that
little accident of sending for the cloak helps light up the whole
early situation, the exact situation wherein both Christ and all his
friends found themselves. The truth is, we depend on trivial inci-
dents for a large part of our information whereon to build an histori-
cal and realistic conception of the day of Jesus and his co-laborers.

I should say here, that if there are some parts of the Scriptures
that cannot be directly connected with a life-long round and round
of Christ-sermons, as perhaps there are, those parts can certainly
be drawn upon and made of use in the way of illustration and
enrichment for the Christ-sermons — and I suppose it was one of the
special designs of God in getting the Book written, to have it used
in that way. A preacher with eyes on all sides of his mind, may
and will use material collected from the whole breadth of created
things and human life ; but his pre-eminent storehouse is the Bible.
The Bible has more contents than any other book. And it has
more of God in it. And it was more intended for moral and relig-
ious use therefore and for homiletical material.

I said to you at the beginning that in laying down the circuit
of the Christian Year as one of the most serviceable of circuits for
the preacher to follow, I did not mean to be more than cast-iron on
the subject, and I therefore desire here to slip in the suggestion,
that if only we traverse that circuit in one thorough-going discourse

YALE LECTURES. 295

each Sunday, we have fulfilled all righteousness perhaps, and made
sure of a roundabout education and indoctrination for our people ;
and on the numerous other occasions when we are called to speak,
may spread abroad upon such topics as do not come into a follow-
ing of the life of Jesus — if any such there be. I doubt whether
there are. I wish this body of students would appoint a committee
to hunt for some and let me have the list they make out and see
what I think of it. If I cannot find a scene in the life of Jesus, or
some sentence that he spoke, or something else directly connected
with him, that will make a natural text whereon to unfold every
object on that list of yours, young Gentlemen, then I will give up
the case. But supposing I cannot. Suppose there are numbers
and numbers of good, preachable subjects that do not easily get
into the cycle of the Christian Year. I should say march through
the Christian Year, that for one thing ; make sure of that — and
then right along parallel to that substantial movement, just march a
more miscellaneous and unforeordained movement, skirmish-work,
Zouave-fighting, hitting things as they fly : such as the last earth-
quake, Paul's cloak, politics, dress, the theater, the social evil,
Ecclesiasticism, the advantages of celibacy on the part of the more
poverty-stricken and roaming of the clergy, anything you please ;
only, my Brethren, you will always notice that the Christian Year
kind of preachers never want to discourse on equivocal or unper-
missible themes. Their constant companionship with the Lord in
the round of his life disciplines their taste and sharpens their
hunger for themes full of Gospel fatness and gusto, themes that are
not scrappy and remote and queer.

At the same time they will not be narrowed and made monoto-
nous by this companionship with the Master, in their prescribed
round of discoursings. When Dr. Horace Bushnell had served his
people twenty-five years, he preached a sermon to them, afterwards
printed, in which he said that some of them had complained that
he preached Christ too much and did not range through as large a
diversity as a preacher reasonably might. He defended himself a
little, but I presume they were right. At least they had an idea
which they were feeling after. Never did there live a more versa-
tile man than he, in the constitution of his mind ; he was wonder-
ful in that regard ; but for various reasons, the heavy attacks made
upon his orthodoxy among the rest, he had labored supremely upon
certain aspects of truth and had partially retired other aspects.

296 YALE LECTURES.

Some subjects he not merely did not discuss, but took no
interest in ; important subjects, too. Various things that quite
fascinated a ritualist, he simply despised as topics for a strong man
to consider. The continuing and undiminished manhood of the
ascended Lord, he esteemed a small matter, apparently. The vari-
ous questions that center in the atonement enthused him mightily
and pervaded his sermonizing to any extent for a long time ; but it
would have been better had he widened his sweep by something
like this on which I am this day insisting : a selection of his
themes of discourse, not by the accident that his theological stand-
ing at certain points had been impugned, nor by the accident that
he had become a Congregational minister ; nor by that primary and
fundamental accident, his being born with an Olympian head and
with steam on from the first, so that he could create full-veined
subjects for himself, as the profuse prairie creates flowers — in no
such ways as these could a man like him, or any other man, in
truth, be widened to his utmost and made all-including in respect of
topics : but rather by some external, authorized curriculum, put
upon him as a bondage at first, if need be. It does not hurt these
giants to harness them and make their huge strength move along
roads that former generations have laid out ; it is interesting to see
them canter across the open fields and disport themselves in simple
exuberance ; and it makes the rest of us proud that one of us is
thus exuberant and gigantic — but when you come to solid use — or
to the greatest solid use — why let us have them harnessed ; har-
nessed into some objective round ; the Christian Year, for example,
or even into some of the other objective systems which I have
named ; the yearly course of doctrinal sermonizing for one.

I do not mention Bushnell as a pre-eminent sinner in the
respect named, neither have I the heart to emphasize against him
anyway. He is only one of hundreds of us. I myself am one of
this wicked class naturally. Some subjects I like and some I dis-
like ; and if I do not keep watch, I preach all the time on the
former. And I select Scriptures to read to my people that I like,
and do not at first see, perhaps, what some parts of the Bible were
written for at all. Of course, my pious intention is to preach on
everything that deserves it ; and to do it proportionately ; dwelling
on the uplifted Cross more than I do on the Roman soldiers at the
foot of it ; but I am like the converted Indian who was put to trial
before a police court for whipping his wife. " I forgot," said the

YALE LECTURES. 297

poor fellow ; and when I as a preacher come to look back over any
year of my preaching, or over a stretch of years, I notice that I
"forgot" all along and followed my nature too much, rather than
my solemn good principles in the matter.

Many of us are carried away by the special rages of the period
in which we live, or of the nation to which we belong, or of our
denomination or of the local community where our home is : and
we preach more than we ought on those rages : on the rights of
man more than on his obligations, (how natural that is in an Ameri-
can !), on individualism more than on solidarity, (how natural that
for a Congregationalist ! ) , on Church organization, apostolical suc-
cession and the force of sacraments, more than on doctrine and
life (how natural that for a ritualist !), on the love of God more
than on his holy rigor (how natural that in this day!), on sins
against the social state, like theft, lying and adultery, more than on
the sins that are purely spiritual and an injury against God.

Now as a corrective of all over:specialization, all disproportion,
all narrowness, all provincialism, denominationalism or localism,
all private personal impulses, in preaching ; I present the Christian
Year and praise it ; and if I cannot have that, then I want some
similar thing ; some contrivance which represents, not the extem-
poraneous wisdom of some single John Smith, however intelligent
or inspired, but the aggregate wisdom of all the Smiths ever born,
if we can get at it ; a wisdom that is the aggregate of something ;
of a. synod or a general Conference or a Caucus of Presiding
Elders — anything to 'get ahead of Smith. Not that I would be so
uncongregational as to want a bondage provided for Smith, but I
would like something set up for him to look at and turn over in his
mind, and perchance freely choose ; something portentous enough
to make it a conceivable thing that he should choose it and go by it,
by and by and when he has looked long enough ; if not implicitly
then approximately or by fits and starts ; so that his listening con-
gregation shall notice every now and then that he is in the throes of
something foreign to himself — that is, something that he did not
altogether originate himself.

Again, if you as a preacher distribute your emphasis upon a
large and various list of subjects, as you will if you follow the plan
I have been speaking of, you will save yourself and your people
from all unwholesome religious excitements. Yes, and from all
revivals, some man speaks up and says. Yes sir, that is so ; from
20

298 YALE LECTURES.

revivals that depend on an exclusive, prolonged, persistent presen-
tation of two or three doctrines. And in my judgment that is not
one of the least of the uses of the Christian Year. It does not
forestall all fluctuations of feeling. It does not prevent seasons of
special feeling, real swells, in fact, as at Advent or Easter-tide
or Passion Week or Lent. I do not understand that God wants
the fixity of the solid plain in the ongo of the inward life of men,
but rather the beautiful mobility of the sea. But the mobile sea
needs steadying, somehow, does it not? Mere mobility, mobility
unharnessed, mobility uncontrolled by any objectives whatever, that
certainly is not best. Standing as I do among a kind of creatures,
namely, human creatures, who are three times too dead in spiritual
matters, I have never felt called upon to make all the ado I could
against what has come to be known as revivalism ; but if anybody
asks me my cool opinion on the subject — my opinion on the whole
— if he will bear with me, I am willing to say that all the revivalism
that is really wholesome in the long pull, and will add up large in
the day of Judgment, can be secured and naturally is secured in
that annual circuit of preaching which I am trying to glorify this
day ; and that one of the reasons why I glorify that scheme is, that
it is sure death to certain styles of revivalism — to those styles, I
mean, which are begotten of whole winters of direct bombardment
on the consciences of men, in the use of a certain few missiles
of terror and the like. Perish the thought that these missiles are in
any wise unscriptural, but perish the thought also that these volum-
inous Scriptures of ours and the truths they contain, enjoy being
retired for months at a time, while a limited selection therefrom is
made and trundled to the front and opened in a special cannonade.
Years ago, I was calling on the late Rev. Dr. Jonathan Brace
and he, happening to be in a reminiscent mood, said to me :
" Thirty-seven years ago this very week, Dr. Hawes took me in his
carriage, drove me over from Hartford to Litchfield and preached
my ordination and installation sermon. It was in the time of
the theological controversy over Dr. Bushnell. On the way I said
to Dr. Hawes : ' Do you know, Doctor, what Dr. Bushnell says
about your preaching?' "Why no." :He says that you have but
three topics, Death, Judgment and Eternity.' Hawes dropped his
lines and said solemnly, ' Could a man have three more important
topics, Brother Brace?' " Those of you who knew those two emi-
nent men, and how powerfully they were differentiated from each

YALE LECTURES. 299

other, will see the points of relish in that anecdote ; but I intro-
duce it here for the purpose of saying : Three topics are not
enough. They may be enough for one day, but they are not enough
for three hundred and sixty-five. They are enough to make an ex-
citement with, as one hurricane is enough to tumble up all the
waters of the globe ; but the waters of the globe do not need to be
tumbled up in that way. There are a good many forces where-
with to operate upon the waters ; forces uneccentric and serene,
forces that leave the oceans so that we can navigate them and not
be drowned, all of us : — the sweet moral suasion of the moon,
and the complex swing of the moving earth. There is no danger
of stagnation if the whole roistering brood of hurricanes stay
away forever. Let them stay away, I say. Just carefully follow the
Lord and have your meditations rise and fall with the fluctuations
of his life and teachings, and you will have all the vicissitudes that
are good for you. When I come along into the Spring and keep
step with the events of Passion Week, I find myself submerged in
as much emotionalism as I can comfortably carry. The whole air
about me seems to be in a swoon sometimes under the stress and
suffusion of the great themes of the season. And I am left in that
suffusion just so long as is healthful for me, and then Easter pulls
me out of it into another suffusion ; and yet the beauty of it is
that that other is not another, as being contradictory to the first,
but another as purple is something other than red, being red plus
blue. The red is all saved and the blue is super-added. Blessed is
that scheme of holy culture in which each stage melts into the next,
like a tributary into its river, swallowed up but not lost.

Thus much on the tranquillity breathed into us by the Christian
Year. Our whole emphasis is not heaped up on three heads ;
whether Death, Judgment and Eternity, or some other equally
solemn three. All the mental over-heat ever heard of was caused
by inordinate concentration on one or a few thoughts ; and the
only remedy for over-heat is counter-irritants or heat started up at
other points. Warm a man up on a whole cycle of themes and he
will never run wild on one. Wheel him through the Christian
Year and he will be sane and peaceful, though not torpid, the whole
year through. And what better can you have than that : peaceful
but not torpid !

The only other advantage of that scheme of pulpit topics of
which I have been speaking, that I will ask you to consider to-day,

300 YALE LECTURES.

is that it will make your preaching concrete and factual, rather than
abstract, philosophical and remote from the thinking of the average
listener. I think pretty well of a doctrinal syllabus along which to
conduct our people year by year, if we cannot have anything better ;
as the preachers of the Reformed Dutch Church are ecclesiastically
required to get through the Heidelberg Catechism once in so long.
But there is something better. It is one of the perils of that plan,
the plan doctrinal, that it tends to take the minister off into intel-
lectualizing in philosophical theology ; dropping the personal ele-
ment, the Lord Jesus, considerably, and losing thus an immense
advantage. My Brethren, most of us who are brainy and investiga-
tory, incline to cease from tangibilities and expatiate in the intan-
gible. We like to manipulate propositions better than we like to
manipulate things. We are afraid of color and the flash of imagery
and the beguilements of physical analogy in our diction. If we
could only get a terminology as colorless as that of the algebraist,
and swing along in his absolute exactitudes, when we speak, we
should be happy. But nobody else would be happy, save some
tenth man out in the pew, the algebraist himself perhaps, sitting
there to see how near we come to a scientific demonstration in
what we say. Is there much passion or much that smacks of the
ground in mathematic symbols? No, you will say, neither do those
cold terms suggest any living person. They not merely suggest no
person, but they do not seem to have been devised or invented by
any person, human or other. All such flavors as that are purged
out somehow. But preachers want to suggest a person, such should
be their wish. They want a vocabulary that is full of the taste
of the ground, of affairs, of things, of visibilities, of life. We had
better have a fairly spectacular vocabulary, than to pale away into
x, y, z, and trade in them. Neither do we want the square-cut
exactitudes for which those terms stand. Our subjects all widen
away into the indefinite and their border-lines are wavering lines —
wavering and misty. We are to deal in concretes, to be sure,
things that a man can get his grip upon; but large concretes,
so large as to be nebulous on their remote circumference.

Well, how likely is all this to be accomplished on the syllabus
principle? An annual course of doctrinalizing? After I had grad-
uated from college, and had gone so far into theology as to intend to
study it in a few months and was therefore a rather advanced and
capable person as compared to the average of any miscellaneous

YALE LECTURES. 301

congregation, and supposed that I knew a good sermon when I
saw it, I chanced to hear a discourse on Election, by one of the
ponderous and admirable Princeton Alexanders. It was in a
Presbyterian Church in Newark, New Jersey, that I heard it, before
the customary congregation of that Church, and on an unspecial
Sunday. And it made a dint on me that is a dint on me yet. Not
on account of the truth conveyed by it, but rather because of the
supreme ability of Dr. Alexander, then manifested, to shy the audi-
ence he was addressing and have the subject all to himself. He
was clear, O ! yes, he was clear. And he was acute. And there
was not an ounce of padding in the whole long discourse. And
there was not one person of all his hearers who could have begun to
make such a solid, killing essay as that. But the language was
sternly intellectual and scientific and purged of all warmth ; an
elaboration from out of the cloister and not from out of any place
that the mass of his amazed hearers had ever been in. And
the thought was closely consecutive. If you stopped to wink you
lost something. Everybody seemed to know as much as that. So
nobody did wink ; though as I looked about on the faces to see
how they were all getting on, I noticed that they seemed to be
about where I was ; in a dulled-down and humiliated way, as
though they wanted to wink a good deal.

Now no sermon like that was ever preached by a Christian
Year man to an ordinary and unselected assembly. His manner of
getting his topics has externalized him and dragged him away, dic-
tion and all, from scholastic methods of dealing with his congrega-
tion. He may be dull enough by force of having been born dull,
and limited and sealed up, but so far as his training in topics is
concerned, it has tended all to carry him near to the apprehension
of the people. I am not getting this point out as I meant to, but
it has some value if only it could be got at. I have great respect
for intellectually able preachers, powerful theologians, redoubtable
essayists, stalwart Alexanders and all the rest. It would be a
pitiable thing if the Christian Church did not produce such ; they
have their place and function. But preaching is not essaying nor
theologizing nor philosophizing, but a dealing with men, women and
children, in mass and unassorted, for their salvation. Wherefore,
our instrument must be their vernacular for substance, the English
language in its most living and picturesque forms ; the English
language perpetually freshened by the speaker, in that he uses it

302 YALE LECTURES.

with a thorough-going sense himself of the precise, live contents of
its swarming forms, a sense of their radical contents as reaching
back to a physical base, a sense of their acquired contents, acquired
by ages of use, and a sense of what I will call their homely contents,
derived from human life in its homely average.

And our materials of discourse must be not merely real
entities ; simple, abstract, thoughts are that : but entities vigor-
ously externalized and made to seem like facts : after the manner
of the Bible, which continually clothes the unseen in the drapery of
the visible. Hell, for example, is a well-known, deep valley and
revolting catch-all, where the fire never goes out. And if Jesus had
some spiritual truth to convey, he wrapped it up in a familiar inci-
dent or bit of common experience ; or he pointed with his finger to
something then and there present. No Alexandrine monograph on
election from him ever. Many of his hearers thought he was
ridiculously simple, I dare say, or at least did not fathom the
profundity of his simplicities — and many of us, when we were
younger, have failed in the same way. But now it is coming to us
that there is no teacher like him for massiveness and reach ; and
that no man, however philosophical, theological, solid and able,
need feel himself circumscribed or let down from his intellectual
and scholarly dignity, if he formulates the riches of his mind
in terms that are concrete and unrarefied earth-growths and growths
from daily life.

Now, my dear young Brethren, I have made a long labor, and
whether it is a mouse that you have from it all, judge ye. I am
certain though that it is something more than a mouse, provided it
serves to wake you to the serviceableness of some sort of plan in
your preaching ; that, as distinguished from planless on-goings. I
have no undue attachment to the scheme I have been eulogizing ; I
hope I have not. I like it pretty well, but you can do a good deal
with other schemes. My particular enthusiasm is, I say, that you
get some objective order by which to march, and be not left a prey
to your own spontaneity, or left to skew this way and that by the
touch and touch of accident : like a boat adrift on a river, which
bumps now one bank and then the other, and gets its devious
course in that unbeautiful way. The people in that boat keep
moving and see a good deal of landscape first and last ; but it
must be a deal confusing to take their landscape thus, at all sorts of
obliques ; sometimes head on to it and sometimes backing up.

YALE LECTURES. 303

When they come to make a map of it, by and by, it will puzzle
them, I fancy. Of course, when you set yourself to study plans,
you will see that there is a choice between them and some of them
you will reject. And when you have selected the best one, as
nearly as you can get at it, and are fairly in the midst thereof, per-
haps you will find it useful to season it with touches of admixture
from other plans. When you are in the movement of the Christian
Year, should you settle on that, you must not fail to let into yourself
the Inner Light, the Holy Ghost : partly because, on almost any
Sunday of the Christian Year, any one of several subjects may
be germane to that day, and the blessed Spirit may assist you to
just the one of the several ; and secondly, if the particular subject
for the day is given you by your chosen curriculum, the Holy
Spirit is infinitely able to warm up your subject for you, as you
revolve it in your mind ; making it most dear to you and most dear
and irresistible among the people.

The two heaviest objections to all this that I have been saying
before you to-day, are that an elaborated order, covering the whole
year, is fatal to that revivalism which many believe in and love ; and
that an external order, let down heavy on the preacher, is likely to
impair his elasticity and make his sermonizing drudge-work too
much : a speaking on this or that because the time has come for
the same and not because his mind has happened to kindle to it.

As regards revivalism ; let us be left to just those natural and
sweet and fruitful vicissitudes which come of a reverent and tender
pause, now on the Advent and now on the next eventuality and the
next and the next, in the great history of the Redeemer of the world.
As regards the damage to one's spontaneity by the superimposition
of an order, I observe, first : — ■

It is found in experience that no such damage is incurred. In
that thoroughly detailed system for getting through the year which
is presented to us in the liturgies, for example, of the liturgical
denominations when any Christian season arrives — as Advent, say —
there is provided, among other things, a pertinent selection of
Scriptural Lessons to be read and thought about : and what sort of
a mind must a preacher have if, with the solar thought of the Incar-
nation before him and with the Advent Scriptures, than which
nothing was ever more lyrical and contagious, pouring themselves
into him, he cannot raise a free flow and settle to his theme with
delight? A man who, thus stimulated, feels himself bondaged, is

304 YALE LECTURES.

not fit to be a preacher of the Gospel at all. You need not tie
yourself to the particular round of Scripture Lessons provided
in the liturgies, but you had better tie yourself to some provided
round and not make your own selections always in the interest
of spontaneity. An individual selection, extemporized from Sunday
to Sunday, is always a partial one. Only a selection deliberately
marked out by the Church, or by the general sense of some repre-
sentative body, is likely to compass all Holy Writ evenly and so
furnish an even culture to all concerned. As a matter of fact,
I repeat, a curriculum does not destroy spontaneity. On the other
hand, it immensely increases it. Each Sunday, in the annual speci-
fied circle of Sundays, presents numerous points of stimulation to
the mind and calls the mind out and makes it sing in its theme. I
have heard very able ministers of my own denomination say that
the most wearisome and distasteful of all their mental work was the
work of choosing topics whereon to preach. They were at liberty,
ordinarily, to preach on any one of ten thousand ; and that was the
trouble. It would be a mercy to them, in the dubiousness of this
unbounded range of theirs, to nail them right down, even to Paul's
cloak. That would be a challenge. And instead of consuming
their vigor in a vagabond movement through all topics to get the
right one, they would instantly set themselves to direct, resolute
digging on the cloak ; and something would have to come. Con-
centration is wholesome. Each summer, when my vacation draws
nigh, I am distracted, I notice, by the great numbers of summer
resorts to which I may go ; but on that particular summer when I
am compelled to use my vacation for the production of one to
a dozen lectures wherewith to torment you the following winter, I
am much less distracted. I select, of necessity, some place in the
country on the railway, not far from my study in Hartford, not far
from that familiar desk and chair wherein my poor old mind feels
most at home.

Me this unchartered freedom tires

said William Wordsworth. There is no liberty worth anything
which is not a liberty under law. "Thy statutes have been my
songs," said the Psalmist. Which goes to show that objective law
may be transformed into spontaneity. Statutes into songs ! The
prescriptions of the Christian Year into a furtherance to the preach-
er's mind. Statutes into songs. I do not know that the Psalmist

YALE LECTURES. 305

could have bettered that if he had spent years upon it. I do not
believe he knew how good it was. In that sentence of his he inad-
vertently plumped out the innermost feature of the Christian life ;
namely, the law of God as a restraint or bondage, utterly dissolved
away in the free flow of a delighted obedience.

ASSIMILATION OF SERMON
MATERIAL.

Gentlemen, most of you feel your own limitations, I dare say.
If you do not, I feel them for you. So do your professors. But I
am willing to believe that you feel them yourselves ; your limitations
of character and your limitations of intellect. In other words the
grace of God has not finished with you yet. Neither have your
teachers and the various other forces of tuition. And in your present
circumscribed and half-and-half stage of development, you have times
of looking forward to the forth-coming days of your service as Chris-
tian ministers, and saying, " who is sufficient for these things, who
has character enough, who has brain enough, and who, in fact, has
a sufficient body for a really victorious handling of all the great works
and tasks that seem to belong to our calling."

On the great question of sufficient bodies I will not dwell. My
private opinion is that bodies are useful and had better be kept up.
Indeed in the last analysis, success in ministerial service is a question
of bodies. With no body at all, that is, if a man is a ghost pure
and simple, no church wants him. For various reasons they do not.
But supposing he has a body ; but a very attenuated, undigesting,
shattered and inefficient body ; a body that has no voice, no push,
no courage, no ability to sleep nights and all that : why, that man's
church calls will be few and ought to be. So then, dear Brethren,
I should lecture on your bodies, and warn you and exhort you and
tell you my experience and point to illustrious examples. But I
pass it all, as I shall also the exceeding great question of sufficient
character for good service in the ministry. I think character is
more possible to be had than intellect. There is less of it in the
world, but that is not because it cannot be had. Every man can

YALE LECTURES. 307

be good ; ever so good ; good enough, as you may say ; so good in
fact, that his parishioners will hardly care to have him improved ;
but not every man can be very bright and very massive, weighty
and awe-inspiring, in his mind.

And another thing, your goodness, when you get to be minis-
ters, can be used every day among your people and not grow stale ;
that is, if you are honest, truthful and pious to-day, and then to-
morrow are honest, truthful and pious over again, and so on, putting
forth the self-same qualities, honesty, truthfulness and piety the
whole year through, nobody wants you to change, because you have
been at that so long and have grown so reiterate in it. No, you
are just as relishable the thousandth time that you are honest, truth-
ful and pious, or the ten-thousandth, as you were the first time.
Whereas, on the contrary, if you promulge the same idea every day
in the year, or the same set of ideas, you grow tame, and the parish
gets tired, and you must say something different ; and right there
comes the pull on your mind, and you need a good deal of mind,
the more the better ; an unlimited mind almost you begin to feel.

So, although character is indispensable, yet, since by the good
grace of God it is so feasible, and when you get it, is not staled by
every day wear, so that it is not necessary to start out into something
brand-new in order to keep your people interested, I will pass on
to consider the much more distressing question of your intellect : —
that instrument whereby you satisfy the terrific clamor of your con-
gregation for ideas ; new ideas ; ideas that you never put forth
before, exactly or ideas, at any rate, so costumed, decorated and
disguised, that your hearer will have a feeling that he has fallen on
something original ; the same old Gospel perhaps, but the old Gospel
so freshly expressed as not to be a whit threadbare.

I would not ridicule this craving for freshness, neither would I
intimate that the craving cannot be gratified. I think it can. Any
old truth, re-lived on the spot by the man who speaks it, seems
original always and goes out with authority. Or put it in this way ;
whoso utters that which is given him to utter by the Holy Ghost
operating in him then and there as he speaks, makes an effect on
his listening congregation precisely as real news would, notwith-
standing the news he tells is simply the exceedingly old and very oft-
told tidings of salvation by Jesus Christ. There is something very
dear and encouraging to ministers in that curious fact.

I will pass, I said, to the question of your intellect and how you

308 YALE LECTURES.

shall handle it to make the most of it, in both size and productivity,
so that your congregation shall never be worn out under your
preaching.

Two years ago, when I was speaking in this place, I said in a
certain lecture : where do our thoughts come from ? when a preacher
originates his own thoughts, where do they come from ; and when
he gets them somewhere else, where may that elsewhere be ? And
I went on to try to answer these questions, saying for substance,
that our thoughts come from our interiors and from the manifold
endless exteriors whereby we are surrounded ; not as though the
thoughts of interior origin are not made up largely of external
material, for they certainly are ; but in those thoughts that are dis-
tinctively mind-born and interior mind-born and interior as con-
trasted with thoughts sense-born and exterior, the exterior material
has been so digested and assimilated and made the man's own, that
he is not in the least conscious of exteriors, but seems to himself to
be originating absolutely. So then, although at first it seems super-
ficial and inexact to speak of two sources of thought, namely : the
mind itself and the world of outside material, nevertheless, so far as
our own consciousness reports on the matter, that distinction is exact.
We do consciously, that is, taking consciousness as our text, origi-
nate many ideas, whereas many other ideas that we have and put
forth we consciously do not originate, we being at the time aware
that they come from beyond our own minds ; they are external
things ; we are in debt for them to books, men, nature and God.
If I had not already spoken here at good length on ideas subject-
ively originated — in the sense now explained — I should want to do
it to-day. But I must not repeat, (you may repeat honesty, truth-
fulness and piety, but not ideas,) and I have more than enough to
do in discoursing on Materials external, and the way we must use
them, love them and beware of them.

Well then, I am going to speak from this time forth until the
hour ends, on Mental Assimilation, bearing down all the while on
externals, even as in that former lecture I bore down on internals.

You have noticed, I take it, that some preachers are very sub-
jective in their discourses, dealing a great deal with Mental processes,
discussing what that Mental movement and state called faith, pre-
cisely and consciously is and what repentance is and how it feels and
how it gets started in a man, and wherein it is distinguishable from
numerous other things that look and feel in us a good deal like it,

YALE LECTURES. 309

and what " full assurance of faith " is, and what remorse is and how
conscience in us can be known from other attributes, and how con-
science works under either one of a hundred different sets of circum-
stances ; and in the complicated mental process of turning to God,
what and how many separate elements can be traced by a long-
headed, acuminated analysis of the matter. Subjective preaching,
I say — mental philosophizing in the pulpit — sharp, detailed, hound-
like, endless, able, amazing, philosophizing — you have seen some of
it and heard of a great deal more, for it is a kind of utterance that
was more prevalent in the old times than now but it still lives ; in
some strength, here and there, and although it is highly respectable
in its intellectual aspects and although a certain strong cultus may
be built on it, yet on the whole there is a better way for preachers
than the subjective way. A better way.

The subjective method breeds an over-self-inspecting and anx-
ious piety. A man led by his minister to concentrate on his own
interiors, must be anxious. What is there there that has any
particular cheer in it ! At first sight one's own self is depressing
enough to him, but when that first sight is carried on into a minute,
indefinite, mental and spiritual self-analysis, the thing gets worse
and worse and no good and sweet peace is possible under such
a regimen as that.

Moreover, a preacher very prone to subjectivity, and therefore
not cordially prone to externals and intellectual incomes from that
quarter, gradually formulates for himself a narrow individuality — of
course he does — the only way to expand and multifold one's self, is
to get out of one's self and take note of other individualities, and
hear what they have to say ; giving our own say-so the advantage of
rectification by theirs ; but this preacher of whom I am speaking, is
averse to all that ; introspection is his forte and delight, and so far
as expansion is possible by introspection, he expands, but by that
alone, for these subjective persons are not unlikely to be earnest
and persevering, and what individuality they have is as strenuous
and resolute as you please. But I say again and must insist on it,
they are narrow — they are strong theologians as likely as not — they
know precisely what they believe and why they believe it, and why
you and I ought to believe it, and why we are distinctly less than
first-class persons, if we do not so believe ; and they are formidable
champions to deal with in a theological wrestling match ; however
they are narrow and a considerable part of their strength comes from

310 YALE LECTURES.

their narrowness, from the concentration of narrowness, from the
ignorance of narrowness, just as when you look at a picture through
two tubes, so that you can see nothing in the wide creation but the
picture, it immensely brightens your sense of the picture.

And being circumscribed themselves, their preaching tends to
circumscribe those who listen to them ; and circumscribed individ-
ualities thus get multiplied and theology becomes stationary in those
congregations, as theology ought, no doubt, in its gist, substance and
core, but as theology ought not as respects the way men grasp,
handle, express and apply that substance and core. Think of
evolving your theology from your own consciousness and from the
materials of your own experience, and making it thus of just your
own size and no more ; when thousands of first-class men in all
ages have been laboring in that field and have reported their labors,
and when theology, as it now stands, is the result of a long historic
process organically unfolded under the ever-present and orderly-
moving influence of the Holy Ghost, more or less ! Think of the
implied egotism and practical impudence of such a proceeding ! It
is only implied ordinarily, I am happy to say. The men are not
conscious of what they are doing. But if they just would consent
to make one trip beyond their private and interior selves, to see the
size of the creation, and count up the host of other thinkers abroad
upon the face of the Earth and back in Christian history, they
would be conscious of their egotism, and of their disrespect to a
great company of exceedingly bright and honest souls.

There are other evils of this thing which I have found it con-
venient to call subjectivity, but I must hasten along with you.

I have prepared the way now to deal directly with the external
materials of thought — the thousand elements that our minds are
privileged to take in, grind down, vitally transmute, assimilate and
make sermons of.

First of all, how are we to get hold of all that external stock
and stuff? Not by being intellectual hermits, building our cabins
in the little sequestered nook of our own consciousness and having
a quiet, happy, self-conceited time all to ourselves. That will not
do, as we have just seen. No, we must go forth among men and
multiply to the uttermost our points of contact with human life and
thought.

Specifically, we must take advantage of wide conversation on
every subject of human interest, not omitting all possible converse

YALE LECTURES. 311

with common people, for there is scarcely a man anywhere in these
parts, however illiterate and unthoughtful, who is totally devoid of
"views," (as they are called) and stubborn views at that; views
that he will fight and die for, if you would have him ; views that he
has assimilated somehow and made to be the pith, push and throb
of his personality ; and then underneath his views, lies that great
human nature that all men have ; a very respectable and even
august and pathetic thing ; get yourself into conversable terms with
that, O preacher ; listen to what he has to say ; try your theology on
it, and see that nature squirm as likely as not and express itself and
fly at you ; and thus illuminate both the excellencies and the defects
of your theology, more than a course of lectures could, perchance.
And while you converse with all sorts of persons, do it genially,
receptively ; not as perpetually shocked by many things that you
hear ; nonsensical things, infidel things, malignant things, shocking
things — supposing they are shocking, you are around after ideas, not
to be horrified and paralyzed ; this is God's world after all and truth
is God's truth, and He has everything firmly in hand, and you are
permitted to share His tranquillity in the midst of errors and terrors
and about all that is believed, said and done, here and everywhere.
Move about. Get around. Travel your parish. Do not be one of
those much-cursed and much-despised "literary fellows," whereof
we have heard in these times from the many lips of the Philistines ;
recluse thinkers, unpractical men, do not be of that sort. Meet
everybody whom you can ; and when you meet him assimilate him
and make sermons of him — as I heard Mr. Beecher say at a dinner
of mutton, "the next time that sheep bleats, it will be in a pulpit."
Again, I insist that you attend the regular and irregular and
never-ending meetings of the Clergy and of the Churches ; the
Associations, Conferences, Synods, Conventions, Congresses, Clubs
and all the gregarious manifestations of religious, ecclesiastical and
theological men and women. I say attend all, that is, attend habit-
ually and numerously. Attend the stated and organic convocations
of the Christian body to which you belong, always — make that your
rule — and then, as to the assemblies of Sister bodies, attend often
enough at least to show that you are a light-seeking and promis-
cuous person. The American Tract Society has always circulated
tracts against what it calls " promiscuous dancing," but never a tract
against promiscuous Christian fellowship and comparison of views.
Your brethren of other communions can teach you many things.

312 YALE LECTURES.

So can the elect and expert, assembled brethren of your own Com-
munion ; the ministers gathered in council to anatomize some
young pulpit candidate ; the Church Congress, where the wolf is
very particular not to lie down with the kid, but to stand up and
debate with the same and keep on loving him all the while — the
district meeting for spiritual commingling and for the discussion of
practical methods — my experience of the modifying power of all
these things on one's thinking, to say nothing of their several other
forms of power and of the love-feast aspect of them, leads me to
speak very favorably of them to you who are on your way to the
time when you will be preachers, and when, therefore, all grists
that can be induced to come to your mill will be valuable to you.
I even like to see Christian ministers dropping in to " Ninteenth
Century Clubs," as Dr. McCosh and others did the other day in
New York. There the steadfast old gentleman sat to hear what
Infidelity had to say for itself, and decide within his own mind anew,
whether or not to give Christianity up. Being a Scotchman and a
doughty one, he did not give it up, and went away from the discus-
sion still a Christian ; but not the same Christian that he was when
he went in. He had more light ; more light on the impregnable
solidity of the Christian system ; more notion how to put truth to
the minds of men in these days ; more sense of the way Calvinism
is unrelishable to the natural man ; more per-fervid determination
to cry aloud and spare not on the eternal truths.

Again, you will find much in books to put into your hopper as
sermon-makers. The first of books is the Bible. More grists are
for you there than in any other one place — or any ten places. I do
not say that because it is the proper thing and necessary to make
this lecture of mine acceptable at this particular point, but because
I have myself discovered it to be so. I shall be referring to the
Bible again in a few moments and therefore shall not say about it
now so much as I might. But note this one thing : that if you
have a habit of going to this Book to see what it teaches, rather than
to see how copiously it supports and can be made to support your
own theological and other prepossessions, preconceptions, prejudg-
ments, then continually you will find yourself inclined to read
numerous human books that try to expound the Bible and that take
up single Bible themes and expand them into whole volumes ; —
and even those Books that do not seem to you scripturally founded,
you will look into. In short, you will be a multifarious reader and

YALE LECTURES. 313

your sermon-stuff will come from God's enemies, not as frequently
as from God's friends may be, but almost so.

I do not suppose it is our bounden duty always, when we
approach the Bible, to unload all our life-long precious preposses-
sions and read as though no point of truth had ever been settled
and as though it were impossible to conceive what the Book, which
we are now reading, is likely to say to us on this or that or the other
point. We go to the Bible for a good many purposes and at any
given time we approach it in a state of feeling accordant with the
specific purpose that we then happen to have in mind ; but I claim
that one state of mind in which we ought to approach the Bible, is
absolute teachableness and hunger for light. Absolute teachableness
implies that we have discharged from our mind all bias, all prejudg-
ment, all previous knowledge, as the basis of opinion. You are not
in a state of perfect docility if you are full of opinions already, no
matter how rational and biblical those opinions may be. Well, per-
fect docility in the presence of this teaching Bible makes you want
to know exactly what the Bible teaches, if you go to it with a con-
firmed conscious prepossession that it teaches this and that, you are
not in a state of inquiry as to what it teaches ; but if you are docile,
you are in such a state, and if so, then it is inevitable that you take
counsel of your fellow men, the theologians and others, who have
studied the Bible and have written out in books what they have
found there. That is my idea. And I should advise a wide reading
habit. Read the writers with whom you agree, if you want to, but
just as much, perhaps, read those who you think have gone off from
exact foundations, if only they are honest and really have ideas.
They are as able as anybody to stock your mind and make you a
productive sermonizer.

The external materials of thought are inexhaustible and preach-
ers are entitled to them all. History furnishes material ; philosophy
furnishes some ; science some ; poetry some ; all the multiplying olo-
gies some ; civil affairs contribute ; everything contributes ; even the
humble minutiae of daily life are very filling to the right kind of a
mind and may be worked over into sermon form — the thinker is a
universal devourer, or may be, not for purposes of gluttony, but for
purposes of self-nutrition, and ultimately for the nutrition of others.

But let me come a little nearer now to this subject of nutrition
— mental nutrition — the thing that the fecundity of preachers
depends on so much.

314 YALE LECTURES.

These externals whereon I have been remarking, these mate-
rials for the omnivorous mind you may possess yourself of in two
ways — two and no more, so far as I now see — you may have them
memoritively, or you may have them assimilatively ; in addition to
that, you may have them in both ways at once. Quite as often as
any way, however, the strongly memoriter men are not very assimi-
lative, and on the other hand you may see prodigious assimilators,
men chock-full of the ail-about plunderings they have made, who,
nevertheless, cannot remember much of anything, especially in
detail. If they had no way of accumulation but the memoriter way,
their emptiness would be pitiful and practically embarrassing both
to them and to us.

But they have another way. A man has not lost his food
because it has disappeared from his stomach ; neither has he lost
the mental food which he has gathered in, because it has disappeared
from his memory. The food disappeared from the stomach because
it would go more fully and really into the man's possession, being
vitally distributed to the different parts of his system, and in the
distribution being made over from merely material and dead atoms,
into vital atoms ; atoms not unworthy of a resurrection to eternal
vitality, when the Lord shall come. The difference between memo-
rized mental material and assimilated mental material, begins now
to come out.

The disadvantages of the memorized sort are more than you
would think at first.

Memoriter possessions you may lose. Most of them you must
lose. And you may lose all of them some day. To recover them
again, possibly, in the resurrection state, but for the present we are
incessantly dropping our memorized accumulations. The Rev. Sam
Jones in one of his peculiar sermons recently, spoke of a feeble
little Mississippi steamboat so weak in her steam appliances that
whenever she whistled it stopped her engine ; and similarly, the
limited memory of man is not strong enough to take in a new
thought without letting out some old one, once laboriously taken in.
A most miserable and ridiculous faculty in that one aspect of it.
How fast does a man get rich and powerful in his mind by that pro-
cess of taking and dropping, like the mill-mind hopper? How
much does he grow? How long would it take to make an able-
bodied thinker of him, a man of real weight and respectability ; a
powerful preacher, for example, provided this curious faculty of his,

YALE LECTURES. 315

his memory, threw overboard every day exactly so much of her
cargo as would balance what she that day took in. Providentially
the memory does not do that exactly, but on the contrary, retains
more or less of the old when new materials are shipped — after all
though, this being unable to whistle without stopping your engine,
this constant losing from recollection more or less, while you are at
work to acquire, makes one ask as I did, how long it would take to
make a person full-grown and sufficient, if his mental possessions
were all of that fugitive memoriter sort. And how many men, and
even ministers we have seen who are scarcely larger at fifty, in the
great particulars of intellectual manhood, than they were when they
left the theological seminary ; because they have, for the most part,
led a memoriter life. They have read enough and been told enough
to amount to something, but as the hopper grows no richer for the
grist that is in it, and therefore after ten thousand bushels have been
thrown in has not advanced in the least beyond its original hopper
state, and would not have advanced if the whole ten thousand bush-
els had stayed in it forever ; so the memorizing men, however
repeatedly they have taken in the grists of the mind, and even if
they are endowed with those phenomenal memories that hold on to
grists like a resurrection memory, do not grow very perceptively
greater, do not weigh in a conflict, do not preach ponderously, do
not get home on anybody with any special efficacy — with any efficacy,
I mean, corresponding to their years and their privileges and their
unlimited consumption of excellent outward material. Sir William
Hamilton in his lectures on Metaphysics, while discussing the mem-
ory and telling what it has been able sometimes to do, mentions
a young Italian who could have thirty-six thousand words read to
him hap-hazard out of a dictionary, just once, and then could start
off and repeat the thirty-six thousand in the precise order in which
he heard them, and could turn the list end for end and repeat it
backward ; and could recite the list skipping every other word and
could do all these things after a year or two had passed away ; and
I do not now remember what else he could do — and do not want to
remember — the thing is frightful enough already. But did you ever
hear of that man among the really great men of history? Did those
thirty-six thousand words prove to be of the nature of an increase to
that miserable young fellow in any respect? Sir Isaac Newton and
Lord Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, Homer and Plato, Daniel
Webster, William Gladstone and President Porter, could not all put

316 YALE LECTURES.

together recollect a thousand words ; so the Italian was at least
thirty-six times the man that they would be if all rolled into one
corporeal unit, or would have been they twenty-five times over,
provided that the gigantic accumulator in his constitution had been
able to assimilate the materials of all sorts which it was able to take
in. But, so far as heard from, it was more retentive than assimila-
tive ; and the Italian stands forever a solemn sermon to the world
on the comparative uselessness of unassimilated possessions. There
he is, a plethoric nobody and a warning.

That distinguished Englishman, William Carpenter, I recollect,
in his work on Mental physiology, also gives some striking illustra-
tions of the insufficiency of mere memorizing to increase a man's
size, weight or quality ; or more particularly, he enforces by numbers
of anecdotes the idea that strictly memoriter acquisitions, or things
gained by "cramming," as a collegian would say, do not stay by one
very long. In they come and out they go and the man is a simple
sluiceway, except that of course some small amount of material
sticks to the sides of the sluice and stays — to no good purpose
however, as it is not taken into the man's circulation, but only sticks.
Now, Brethren, I have brought you to a day of judgment and
I want you to decide whether you will be memorizers or assimi-
lators. If you are good memorizers, your people, as you preach and
talk to them, will get a good deal from you no doubt. Perhaps you
can stand up before them and run off thirty-six thousand words as
straight as a string. But I want to mention to you some of the
drawbacks in that kind of preaching. I have more than hinted
some of them already, but the subject is not used up.

First, if you get your homiletical materials by cramming, using
a great deal of memory and not much of anything else, your personal
increase will be likely to be small — I have said that once and now I
say it again, your personal increase will be small. It is a pity to
spend several days making a sermon, and then to take aim and fire
it, while you remain as empty as a fired gun, when you might fire
your whole charge and yet retain the whole charge for your private
use ever after ; retain it as completely as though you had not fired
at all. If only your ammunition were assimilated ammunition, firing
would not decrease it, any more than pumping exhausts a living
spring. Pump away, the spring knows where to get more. Preach
away too, you are just as rich. Is not that worth knowing, for a
man who may want to preach forty years in the same pulpit.

YALE LECTURES. 317

Secondly, preaching in the use of memoriter materials does not
bring much gusto to the preacher himself. What is the gusto of a
sluiceway as compared, for instance, to the gusto of a growing plant ?
Or make this comparison. A plant stands in the ground and
takes up the mold and rejects the dead grit, and takes the rain and
the dew and the air and the sun, and secretly makes them all over
into just what it wants — namely, into life and living forms, with a
murmur of inward joy the while, that anybody can hear and share
who has the ears for it ; and then right along side of the plant, stands
a stake driven down for some purpose ; and what does the stake
do? Does it sing at its work? No, it is doing no work. It has
nothing to sing about. It just stands there a mere stick ; good to
hitch too perhaps — a sound and safe stick, and therefore respectable
— but a stick. Live things are liable to eccentricities in their grow-
ing and forth-pushing ; sticks are not ; but which of the two is the
happier, in all likelihood, the live things or the sticks? So the
preachers. He who speaks from out of the vital stores of his mind
and nature, has his own private glow and gladness always ; enough
to pay him well for his work, salary or no salary.

Thirdly, since memoriter material lumbering a minister's mind
and preached at stated times does not make much heat and vital
joy in him, it does not over-much do it for his hearers. What is
preached out of the memory, is apt to be received only into the
memory. How can an unvital man vitalize other men ? The idea
is absurd. He may instruct them. He may drill them. He may
exercise their patience. But as respects vitalization he is a failure.
And after all, my brethren, vitalization is the greatest work of
preachers. I had rather be alive with little information, than dead
with tons of it. I had rather hear a preacher of limited contents,
so that his contents have been turned into life and personal force,
than to hear a man whose contents run up to thirty-six thousand,
but are in him simply as stored in a warehouse. It is sometimes
debated whether preaching will not die out before long, because
books and periodicals are so multiplied. When you can get as good
a sermon as was ever written, in printed form, for five cents, why go
to the church, spend a hundred dollars a year for a seat and consume
an hour each Sunday, to hear the local minister, a limited man and
not a natural orator, preach a much poorer sermon? How are you
going to answer that? By saying that the risen Jesus formally
appointed preaching. But he appointed it for some substantial

318 YALE LECTURES.

reason ; and what is that reason ? There are numbers of answers
to that ; but the one that I want to bring out at present, is this : that
while the contents of a book, or that five cent sermon, coolly read
in the quiet of one's home, may be powerful and useful, the self-same
contents, or even much lesser contents, may be still more stimula-
tive and useful, if taken into a vital mind and there transmuted in
the mysterious processes of life into personal substance and fervor,
and then preached. I think we preachers will have to surrender to
books and periodicals, if we intend to go by memory and mechan-
ical public rehearsals of what we have read. Of course the Holy
Spirit could use any sort of a preacher to secure effects ; but accord-
ing to all observation thus far, he will not. The Holy Spirit is a
reasonable Spirit. It respects certain well-known laws ; and if it
uses a certain man or preacher, it is able to explain why it uses him.

Well, dear brethren and gentlemen, I must have some words
with you now on a matter that, I presume, you have been wondering
I did not come to before ; on the question, namely ; how this famous
business of assimilation is to be accomplished. Is there any recipe
for it that a reasonable man and even a young man can compre-
hend and put to practical use. Are not assimilators born, not made ;
or if they are not made, can a person make himself to be an assimi-
lator, otherwise than by many years of effort, experimentation, fum-
bling and mistakes? If it takes nearly the whole life-time of a
minister to fashion himself into this so desirable thin^, had he not
better give up before he begins and lay out what strength is natural
to him in some other direction.

I propose to answer that. It does not take long for our bodies
to begin to assimilate. It is a success from the start. And things
vegetable make a success of it. A live slip set into the ground is
as cunning in the matter as is an old wise tree. Assimilation is
deeply mysterious, but it is feasible ; and a man does not need to
be old, nor to be a philosopher to do it. So much encouragement
as that we have, on the very face of the subject. Mr. Drummond
has written an ingenious book on " Natural Laws in the Spiritual
World," and I fancy that if our bodies can assimilate and do it
instinctively and commence so soon as they are born, then our minds
— and all minds — can do it ; and can begin pretty early, and that
they will do a large part of their assimilation instinctively, if we give
them a good chance.

I do not claim that a man can sit himself down and say to his

YALE LECTURES. 319

mind — "go to now, do you just assimilate" — and then have that
mind march right off and do his bidding. No, he must get at it in
ways different from that.

I will not spend any time on it, but I am compelled to say that
highly assimilative minds, as a general rule, are not found in unas-
similative bodies. It is a mortifying fact, but a literal, that your
physical nutritive processes are the foundation of your mental nutri-
tive. An imperfectly nourished brain does not receive impressions
absorptively. A brain not supported by a rousing stomach, doth
not drink up all kinds of mental aliment, like a sponge. Make a
note of that and act accordingly. Even the memory fails if physi-
cal nutrition fails. I have had some experience of that myself, at
times.

But let us lift out of physicals and note the following things. I
hardly know where to strike in, but perhaps a thing as fundamental
as any to be said, is, that time is an indispensable element in assim-
ilation. Time ! The one vice of "cramming," — the reason that
cramming never made a scholar — is that the deposits made in the
mind are made to be used right off, used and discharged. A vice
of some preachers is, that they cram for the Sunday immediately
before them, amassing great store of material, but not giving their
minds the time necessary to grind, vitalize and appropriate it. The
question of time in physical assimilation was looked into long ago.
A good many years back, a certain Alexis St. Martin, (if that was
his name,) had the covering of his stomach shot away and there was
a life-long healed opening there, so that the doctors for the first time
in the history of the world could leisurely enter a live man with their
interesting experiments. And they went in. They dropped in all
kinds of food at the end of strings and then through the opening
they watched how matters went on ; how long it took to get diges-
tion along to this, that and the other stage ; how much longer it
took some foods to get on than it did others and how some sub-
stances never got on. It was a wonderfully edifying opportunity.
But whatever they dropped in, took time, they found, and could not
be much hurried. They could cram the man and then beg him to
get the cram worked over by the next Sunday, but the man could
not. Nature was too strong for him. Nature knew that she was
entitled to just so much time, carefully measured out, and she took
it, Sunday or no Sunday, and would make no haste.

Well, minds know the same thing. If you read largely for an

320 YALE LECTURES.

immediate purpose — your next sermon for example — your intellect,
(or to speak more profoundly, your nature,) has no opportunity to
do that brooding which it dearly enjoys, that it surely will do when
permitted ; and that it must do if it is going to make itself fat out
of that reading. And just here I mention it as a curious fact, that
this brooding business done by your mind, when it gets a chance,
is not a volitional effort, as a rule ; you do not do the brooding,
your mind does it ; you go off about your business, perhaps, you
give scarcely a thought to that inwardly deposited material, you are
too much occupied ; but all the while your mind is manipulating
that mass, that intellectual stock, brooding it, fructifying it, coaxing
it to be vital, sucking it up into its own circulation by a thousand
capillaries, raising it from the memorized matter to matter assimi-
lated and organized ; a very amazing operation ; amazing and inscru-
table. I like to dwell on it ; it is so subtle, so effectual and so useful.
I recollect telling you here once, in some connection which I have
now forgotten, that many times when I have been shut up to just
Saturday morning for the writing of my Sunday's sermon I have
made special effort to select my topic for that sermon, Friday eve-
ning— sometimes on my bed in the few moments before I went to
sleep — because I knew by long experience that if the topic was
only lodged in me, my mind during all my hours of unconscious-
ness, would be turning it over and in the morning when I woke I
should certainly find my sermon well on its way. How often that
has happened to me.

But, to come back to my thought. Assimilation requires time.
Therefore, you must read a great deal and take in materials also
from other sources than books, (and the sources are numerous) ;
you must gather in much, not in view of a near day when you will
use those accumulations, but in view of the welfare of your mind
for all time ; and you should even ingather often for no purpose
whatever, but only for enjoyment at the moment. You may read
much poetry in that way ; and there are kinds of poetry that do not
give you anything, unless they are read in that way. Those kinds
were produced in the meditative and leisurely mental moods of the
author ; and they speak only to corresponding moods in the reader.

Or take that bewitching American man, John Burroughs ; when
he goes abroad upon the face of Nature, his travel does not sim-
mer down to the strenuous and fierce questions, which is the
shortest road between two given points ; and which is the swiftest

YALE LECTURES. 321

conveyance from place to place, or how soon can I pick up the stuff
for an essay. Not so. He idles along, with hardly any conscious
intention ; knowing that any spot in the whole open world where
he may happen to find himself at any given moment, is inexhaus-
tively rich in almost every element that can nourish and fascinate
the mind of man. Therefore his contact with Nature is eminently
rewarding. She saturates him. He gives her time to saturate him.
He sits down in her bounties and beauties chin-deep and soaks.
He lets time-measures go. He knows nothing but Now. Practi-
cally he is in Eternity. At any rate, he has passed beyond dates
and periods, and engagements and beginnings and endings and
responsibilities and the importance of making haste to get his mind
where it can repeat thirty-six thousand words ; and there is nothing
left of the universe but first, Burroughs ; second, Now and third, the
flower at his feet, the insect humming in his ear, the soft wind on
his cheek, the grass, the talk of some near bird ; the dear natural
things.

Now it is wholesome to read such books as his. They are the
outcome of a peculiarly assimilative mind. They are leisurely and
they require leisureliness. No matter about next Sunday. No
matter whether his book will work into sermons or not. It infallibly
will, but if you read it as intending that it shall, you have fallen
totally out of relations to that book and Burroughs can do little for
you. What you want is to cease from intentions, especially from
immediate intentions, and thus secure leisureliness and absorption.

It is implied in this absorptive or assimilative reading, that your
mind at the time is in a state of more or less energy. Absolute
torpidity and snoring over a book ; suspends all capillary action of
the mind, or at least retards it, and it is as though you were not
reading. However, it is not necessary in the particular kind of
reading that I am now trying to describe, that you be in any formal
effort over it. No ; please loaf through the book. The mind that
wrote it loafed ; now do you loaf. Only please keep awake while
you loaf.

But there is a little different kind of reading, of which I wish to
speak. It is assimilative reading, too ; and assimilative partly
because it lets in the element of time. In the reading last men-
tioned, you are receptive, in the main, but in this kind you are more
affirmative. You actively inquire. You take time to do it. You
say, is this author's position sound? Is he exactly fair towards

322 YALE LECTURES.

opponents ? Is he exact in his facts ? How do his notions har-
monize with the great immutable points of religion ? There are fifty
questions you can ask — and if you ask them it will slow your move-
ment and make you ruminative ; and possibly some single state-
ment of your author will lead you into a whole day's rumination.
You are not consciously amassing stock for sermons. You are not
cramming to meet some engagement. You are simply not letting
that man sluiceway through you his ideas and propositions, and
leave nothing behind for your enrichment. However, you are not
specifically resolved to assimilate. The word assimilation does not
enter your head. All the assimilation you accomplish is incidental
and unwitting. All that you know yourself to be doing is, drifting
along those pages considerately ; sifting, questioning, judging. But
sifting, questioning and judging, carry assimilation in them. They
give the lengthened and drawn out time requisite for assimilation.
The mind can not assimilate by a simple touch-and-go contact with
anything. Newspaper reading is the greatest touch-and-go move-
ment in these days. And it breeds a touch-and-go habit, which is
apt to be carried into all other reading. It may almost be doubted
whether the exceedingly increased reading-habit of the public, in
these latter times, has made the intellectual fatness and personal
weight of each reader more than the fatness and weight of his less
bookish grandfather. It seems like another aggravated case of
sluiceway. I often think of it when I read the statistics of books
drawn from circulating libraries and find that seventy-five per cent
and over of the drawings are novels ; and also, when I recollect
various young persons of my acquaintance who, each Saturday, take
from the public library, one, two and three books, to read over Sun-
day. If a person does that last, you may know two things ; first that
his books are slosh ; and secondly, that if they are accidentally not
slosh on any given Sunday, he will make slosh of them, so far as his
own mental increase is concerned, by the unruminative way in
which he reads them, coursing through on a run, so as to be sure to
be ready for two or three more books by the next Sunday surely.

I say then, in order to assimilation by reading in order that
you may be more plump, full of color and puissant when you end a
book than when you began it, you must either read it in the
leisureliness and tranquillity of simple enjoyment — as I explained a
little back — or in the determined, robust use of your several faculties
of analysis, comparison, reflection and judgment ; all this being

YALE LECTURES. 323

carefully unpractical to this extent and in this sense ; that you are
not consciously getting ready for anything — as next Sunday's sermon,
for example — but are doing the work for its own dear sake. The
moment you let next Sunday into the business, that particular, low-
class performance known as "cramming" is apt to begin; that
operation which is infested by these two vices ; that it is too pre-
dominantly memoriter, and that the necessary time-element is
eliminated.

You will understand, brethren, that I dwell on books simply as
one of the external sources of intellectual supply. There are num-
bers of others, but the principles that should govern us in availing
ourselves of them, are the same as those just mentioned, with regard
to remunerative contact with books. We must give our minds time.
We must discharge ourselves from immediate intentions a good
deal. We must resolutely inquire, sift, judge and slowly chew our
cuds. To be sure, our people are waiting for our last cud, so that
we are tempted to feel that we cannot chew it, but must lump it
right out on to them and then run for another ; still a preacher's
salvation as a man good for fifty years in the same pulpit,, depends
on his putting himself under a rather iron rule, that his very last
cuds positively shall not be used, but only those that having been a
good while in his system, are no longer cuds at all, but fat, muscle,
bone, marrow, pluck and fire. That is what cuds are for. A sermon
of cuds is profoundly inadmissable. A sermon of materials that used
to be cuds, is all right. More than once in the course of my life, I
have had young ministers, yet in the first years of their service, ask
me whether they should sermonize from the level of their general
information and power, or should get largely above themselves each
Sunday, by force of a specific exaggerated preparation for that Sun-
day ; and always, by God's help, I have had strength to say, just
what I have said to you, to wit : — no cramming — as a rule, no
cramming — you can prepare enough without slipping into that vice
which we so call.

There are several qualifying remarks which I would like to
introduce here, but I must take a final movement now to observe
that some materials are more assimilable than others. The plant
rejects grit and takes up mold. Animal digestion also is very par-
ticular about what it undertakes to dissolve and put to vital use.
And the mind is full of a similar fastidiousness, or spirit of discrimi-
nation. The thirty-six thousand words of that young man, or a table

324 YALE LECTURES.

of logarithms, or the thin and pompous little homily of the Rev. Mr.
Chadband, when he gets on to his saintly and feeble legs, are not so
nourishing as a great poem, or a passage out of human life, or a judi-
cious selection from Holy Writ. And when I commenced this lec-
ture I meant to point out what it is precisely that makes one food
assimilable by the mind and another not — but no matter ; we all
know an assimilable food when we begin to chew on it — if it is
gravel we find it out and if it is real meat we find that out. I would
not slander even gravel. It may be good for exercise and for
mental discipline in mathematics. Moreover, men of phenomenal
digestion can eat it. Hens eat gravel ; and must have it I am told,
if they are to keep up their usefulness. Speaking of those thirty-six
thousand words, I suppose Professor Whitney would not ask anything
better that to be turned loose among them to spend his eternity.
But most of us are like the Italian, to whom they were gravel. Of
course, to some minds, pretty much everything is gravel ; but the
general run of us have our good foods, which we know as the ox
knows his master's crib. Good foods — good foods ! Very good !

But perhaps the word most worth saying here and at last, is,
that the best food in the world for assimilative purposes is the Bible,
Put that in your pocket to make an essay on — the Bible as a food
— not a guide, not a treasury of important information, not an arsenal
for fighting men to draw on ; but a food to make men thick-set,
strong, healthy, sizable and handsome. Some eminent ministers
have been described as, " Men of one book." Well, supposing their
one book had been the New York Sunday Tribune, or Tupper's
poems, (good as they be), or Edwards on the Will, (powerful as it
is), or the Algebra of Professor Loomis ; or any one of the now
numerous solid books put forth by the fertile Faculty of this great
University. Would those eminent ministers who spent their lives
in the Bible and felt their enthusiasm grow to the very last and
came to be admired for their stature, sap, leafage and heaven-like
bountifulness, have achieved all that on any conceivable book save
The Book — do you think — even although multitudes of men's books
are books Bible-born ? Now why is this ? In that essay that you
write, just dig that out.

It is thought by some that if they can explode Christianity,
they will have exploded the Book that enshrines it and reduced it
to the level of other interesting old volumes. On that I should say,
they surely will have exploded the main strength of the Book ; but

YALE LECTURES. 325

I fancy it would survive and forever transcend all other productions
on account of the immense human elements that are packed into
it, to say naught of anything else. The elements of human life as
it is — the universal human elements — the elements fitted to carry it
home to the business and bosoms of the entire human family, not-
withstanding that family are dispersed abroad in dissimilar tribes,
nations, races and individuals. I wrote a sermon the other day on
Rebecca and Isaac, confining myself to the simple old story of how
Isaac got Rebecca — and I could hardly live through it, the whole
thing was so fresh, dewy, self-evident and sufficing ; so heart-to-heart
with all hearts that know what a heart is. And all through the Bible
you find quantities and quantities of the same sort of thing — that
something or other which makes the Book the spokesman of the
human family ; the interpreter of the soul of man, man's congenial
other self, the Book that finds him, warms him, strengthens him,
goes into his circulation and makes his blood red, virile and copious.
I feel often that I would go on taking texts from the Bible, carrying
the Bible around in my pocket, putting it in my trunk when I travel,
handing it to the bride for a present, reciting it to the sick, reading
it at the burial and getting its sentences immortal sculptured over
the dead, even if Infidelity succeeded in large measure in reducing
its supernatural contents. Anyway and always, it is the best thing
we have ; the best Book to feed on — the only Book that a man can
exclusively live on and yet be broad, deep, high, manifold and very
great.

VERACITY IN MINISTERS.

The subject that I desire to unfold before you to-day is the
rather important one of Veracity in Ministers.

I wondered at first whether I would not say inveracity, but
after a minute, I saw — or thought I saw — that you might see or
might think you saw a sly flicker of suggestion in that to the effect
that ministers are inveracious sometimes ; and I did not wish to
begin with even hinting such a thing. Doubtless they are so, some
of them ; doubtless all of them have their temptations to be inve-
racious ; and doubtless the best man may lose his footing for an
instant, and speak or act in a manner that does not bear looking at
afterwards : we are all human, I suppose ; but the clerical class,
taken as a body, are among the most honest of men, they being
almost simple sometimes, so that lay-folk take advantage of them.
Not only do they keep out of jail pretty unanimously, not only do
they get themselves up to the conventional standard of veracity, the
standard that will answer for lawyers and merchants and society
people, but they valiantly wax honest a shade beyond that, and
speak and act considerably as though they felt they might die be-
fore night. That is the kind of persons, on the whole, that they are.

They have some special advantages for being honest.

The vocation which they have selected takes them necessarily
out of the companionship of the dishonest classes and sets them in
a good moral atmosphere, where they certainly ought to behave.
To be sure they mingle with the dishonest, but it is as having a
moral mission to them and not as comrades and affiliated souls.
Pitch never sticks to any one who goes nigh it in that way. Again,
ministers as having an assured social position, do not need to prac-
tice the numerous small insincerities and time-servings which many

YALE LECTURES. 327

do practice in order to secure a desirable standing. That is a
blessed let-off.

Also, they are quite looked up to as authorities ; and where a
man's dictum has that advantage, he may put it out frankly and not
turn and squirm, and dispense an hypocritical palaver in order to
make himself acceptable.

Also they are not men hired by the day, and liable, therefore, to
be dismissed if they happen to speak forth some unpleasant truth.

Also, by moving around among men and women a good deal,
and lending a hand in innumerable social assemblies, they come to
a social poise and tact which saves them from being surprised into
swarms of little lies, that are popped out by way of recovery from
emergencies. If a lady of great blandishments and great nerve
forces them into a sudden corner, instead of lying to get out of it
as millions of bashful and unpracticed souls would and could hardly
help doing, they, these ministers, are apt to have the self-command
to parry and eel their way out ; and if things grow really desperate,
they have the vigor and the character to just settle into a silence
which, while it is very good-natured and gentlemanly, is also very
baffling to the enemy. This is a small matter to discourse upon,
but I have myself been saved from so many falsehoods in precisely
that way, that I quite dote on it, and like to mention it as one
of the felicities of the clerical situation.

And there are others, I suppose. But ministers have their
disadvantages, too. There are a good many reasons why they
should not be perfectly truthful — a good many forms in which they
can lie if they want to. And some of the forms are so subtle as to
be hardly perceptible, while some are so plausible and wholesome-
looking, that the most pious preacher might be taken in by them.

In the first place a man's energetic desire to do good and
save souls may induce him to resort to the following devices :

He may use exaggerated language. No matter about the lan-
guage, he says, if I can only get God's very truth into these sleepy
souls. I must exaggerate, otherwise I shall not get any hold at all.

Or he may cater to his hearers' prejudices by lines of argument,
illustrations, quotations, and numerous contrivances of speech, that
he does not himself quite believe in and enjoy; — for if this hearer
is stirred up and made to bristle, if he is not stroked the way of his
fur, all communication with him is cut off. What is the use of
preaching then ? You can not save his soul ! Did not Jesus him-

328 YALE LECTURES.

self, and his Apostles, put in reasonings on their assemblies that
were not absolute, but were the nonsense of the people themselves,
taken for granted for the moment and for a purpose. It was an
oratorical adjustment to the case in hand. If the Jews believed
that insanity and so forth were the result of demonization, why
might not the great Teacher speak of it in that way; — not as
affirming demoniacal possessions, but as manipulating a people who
did affirm such things. You see how cleverly a preacher may salve
his conscience with the doctrine that the end justifies the means ;
especially when the means are nothing worse than an argument not
so faultlessly excellent and irresistible as the hearer thinks it to be.
Again, there is nothing more melting to a congregation, and
more likely to get their souls clear open, to what their minister may
say for their good, than to notice that he has a thorough-going
interest in them — not in them as a multitude or mass, but in them
as individuals ; so that he cannot refrain from shaking hands with
them often, looking into their eyes, asking about each member
of their families, weeping with them when they are in trouble, and
putting forth all sorts of emotional concentration upon them one by
one, week in and week out. This is natural and beautiful and there is
nothing to be said against it. But do you not see what a temptation
the minister is under to furnish precisely the thing his people want, and
in quantities to suit the purchaser ! Perhaps this man was not born
very emotional. Perhaps he was born well enough, but has been
cooled off since he was born by a long-continued devotion to
study, to things intellectual rather than affectional, so that now he is
more brainy than hearty. A good many things are supposable, but
no matter about supposables ; — here is this daily call for pastoral
effusiveness. And for effusiveness in the pulpit, too. He must
preach tenderly, yearningly and all that. He must have a tone in
his voice that can reach clear to the place of tears on occasion. I
say must ; not as meaning that he absolutely must, but that he had
better. And there he is. He can heroically refuse to go any
further than he can in this business, and thus save his own soul ; or
he can overdraw his reservoirs to save their souls. And all that I
have to say about it is, that he is invited to be inveracious by an
invitation about as seductive as a man ever gets. If he succumbs, he
becomes "professional" as it is called : — professional ! — a terrible
word that ought to make a minister squirm as if the shirt of Nessus
were on him.

YALE LECTURES. 329

Again, a preacher is continually invited to be more orthodox
than he may happen at heart to be. All the world over, conformity
is a fine advantage to any man. Where there is a state Church, as in
England, and Russia and in Italy in the old times, conformity is the
one balm of life. If you take into account both the other world and
this, conformity to God is the best thing ; but if you leave out the
world to come, and consider the one matter of comfortable circum-
stances in this present Kingdom on Earth, there is nothing equal to
conformity to the reigning religion. Conform or die, was the racy
alternative they used to put to people. Afterwards, that was miti-
gated, and took this shape ; conform or die socially and politically,
and in respect of facilities for getting your daily bread. At pres-
ent the pressure of the most advanced parts of Christendom upon
the more laggard parts and even upon such as China, Madagascar
and the " unspeakable Turk," is so severe, that what is called "relig-
ious liberty," is enjoyed almost everywhere. Still, some remainders
or semblances of rigor, left over from the grim long-ago, are to be
discovered anywhere you please to look. This country is as toler-
ant of dissent as any, I presume ; but even here I should rather be
a Congregational minister than some others I might name. In
Philadelphia there are well on towards a hundred Presbyterian
Churches I am told — almost more than is really necessary, a Con-
gregationalist might be mean enough to say — but what I will say is,
that in that city it were perceptibly better to be a Presbyterian
minister than a Unitarian. You would get more invitations out —
more appointments on important public committees, (those small
exaltations that keep a man advised of his own importance) ; more
furtherance all around in any enterprise you might start. The kind
of invitation out that Roger Williams had when he tried to stay in
Massachusetts, that Unitarian man would miss in these improved
and clement times ; but almost as totally might he miss the whole
miscellany of agreeable invitations — just as one of those hundred
Presbyterian ministers would miss a good deal probably, if he should
undertake to set up in Salt Lake City. More than a generation
ago, Dr. Horace Bushnell — if I may mention him once more, as
having known him and his case so well — was a more than suspected
man, as regards his conformity to Congregational or even evangeli-
cal standards ; and that dispute cost Bushnell a world of trouble.
It did not unhorse him, because he was an athletic rider and had a
good horse under him, in his faithful North Church of Hartford —

330 YALE LECTURES.

then, too, he had an unweariable pugnacity of his own that kept
him from being too humble under attack, to say nothing of the good
conscience and the love of truth that were in him, but the ado over
him was a noisy and distressing one — bad enough at all events to
show how important a reasonable amount of reputation for ortho-
doxy is. If the pressure on a man towards orthodoxy took the
form only of a single, belligerent, heavy attack, one square fight
might and main and then over with, it were not so bad ; but fre-
quently it is not an open war at all, but simply an impalpable some-
thing or other in the air, a something that keeps on year after year, and
in the which the poor man breathes. It does not exactly kill him —
he almost wishes it would, but it does not ; — it merely takes the
caloric out of him, slowly and effectually, and makes life something
less than life ; just as when you go into those great art galleries in
Rome, in the winter, where no fire has been since the morning of
the creation ; at first you are entirely comfortable, but by and by
you begin to notice that a process of devitalization has set in. It
does not amount to anything on your entrance, and you have no
idea of leaving the gallery on account of it. You are not really
uncomfortable, you say, but you wish there was a fire. Ah ! well,
you are a slightly-scuttled ship, and you will disappear. So is it I
fear as regards that imperceptible mist of distrust which envelopes
a minister who is a little strange doctrinally. This air is good
enough, he says at first, courageously — pretty fair — I can stand it if
they can. But in the course of years he discovers that they can
furnish more cold mist than he can breathe with any comfort. So
you see the strain on him to conform may be just awful at last, and
as likely as not he starts out to overhaul his opinions, peradventure
he can reformulate them in a manner to have them sound like the
good old traditional truth divine.

And while he is in this business of revision, he is curiously
helped to make it thorough by numbers of weighty arguments,
among which this stands out as large as any ; that if the people to
whom he preaches are the least bit shaken in their opinion touching
his soundness, his ability to benefit them by anything he says, how-
ever true, is impaired, if not ended. That Greek there in their
pulpit they fear, even when he brings presents. Therefore he must
just stop being a Greek, as fast as he can.

Again, piety is of much value to a minister. A little piety
even, goes a great way — and a great deal goes still further. There-

YALE LECTURES. 331

fore he must furnish it. And the temptation is to furnish more than
he has. And that is inveracity in one of its inoffensive forms. I
call it inoffensive with reference simply to the fact that the man's
motive for being more pious than he is, is the glory of God through
the salvation of the souls committed to his care. He cannot bear
to have his people no more pious than he may happen to be.
What a low piece of business it were for a minister to make him-
self the standard for his people. In his sermons he always says :
"Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." There
is no implication in such utterance that the man who speaks
it forth is perfect. That were an absurd idea. No ; he is simply
holding up that measure of character which is authoritatively given
him to hold up. Well, if he preaches beyond himself in that man-
ner, why may he not act beyond himself, and take on just that holy
tone that he knows to be so impressive upon the children of men.

My Brethren, I am showing you, or giving you a picture of
the Devil weaving his nets, because I remember what Solomon said
— "Surely, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird."
My dear young birds, there is one of Satan's nets for you in plain
sight. He will want to persuade you to be pious beyond the facts.
He will never spur you to be pious in more than seeming, that were
to build up the Kingdom that he hates — but he will edge you along
to be hypocrites if he can,

And here is another net. Often you as a minister may feel
that certain views held from of old in the religious community, ought
to be modified. They are too stringent. Those views have respect
perhaps to the manner of keeping Sunday, or to the precise kind or
amount of infallibility there is in the Bible, or to the question of
the punishments of God ; but you sincerely fear that if the com-
munity begin to relax from the old-fashioned rigor, they will relax
for good and all before long ; and you cannot have that. So you
wink at their present ignorance and let them stay ignorant. You do
not dare do otherwise. You do not exactly advocate these ideas of
theirs, but you somehow manage to let the people go on supposing
that you think as they do on these matters. You say — "The truth
is not to be told at all times," and other old saws of prudence and
sanctified common-sense you hunt up, and calm your mind with
them.

Or it may be that the public mind is not so affirmative as it
ought to be on some point. Men have come to have sleazy

332 YALE LECTURES.

notions about penalty and hell, about the propitiatory element in
the work of Christ, about the moral and doctrinal authority of the
Church, about the over-observance of holy days, about owning
slaves, and speculating, and divorcing, and leaving their prayer-
meeting to go to the ballot, and raffling to support the Gospel. It
is interesting to look back and also look around and see how good
people have grown bewildered occasionally and doubtful, on pretty
plain things, and have given Satan the benefit of the doubt. Well,
the minister thinks that men and women in these confusions,
cannot be jerked out of them by a sudden application of stark
force. No, you must toll them out. You must lay down a long
line of corn — corn that they like — even as partridges in the woods
are beguiled into snares ; — all they see is kernels of grain, strung
out and they follow on. In other words, you must rather pare
down, or razee the truth, and deal it out simply as they are able to
bear it. There is quite a good deal of this done in Christian pulpits.
And it is so easy to slip into it.

I have now mentioned some of the advantages and some of
the disadvantages of the minister in the matter of veracity. And I
hope I have taken you along far enough to make the situation seem
an anxious one. It is an anxious one. The ordinary and average
honesty is not enough for a minister. Of course he is not going
to tell lies, nor steal, nor forge, nor murder. Crimes like those
end him — and he knows they do — and therefore he is not going to
commit them, even if he wants to (which he ordinarily does not).
But simple seemliness and straight walking is only the shell of
honesty, and this man of God is not a man of God, unless he can
show truth in his inward parts. So then let me undertake a little
close remark.

I define veracity to be a supreme intention to see and describe
things as they are. A supreme intention to see and describe things
as they are ! Many see pretty well, who are slippery when they
come to tell about it, whether by word or act. On the other hand,
many tell well — that is, what they see they report straightforwardly —
but then their seeing is poor. That though may be an intellectual
fault. The poor seer may get to heaven ; the poor teller never
will. And it is these poor tellers that I am after mainly to-day.
Stupid ministers are one thing ; dishonest are another. The stupid
ones we can get along with (we have to, at any rate) but the
dishonest are different. Permit me to give you a rapid list of

YALE LECTURES. 333

hindrances to exact seeing, and describing. In all seeing there
are two factors : — the seer and the thing seen. But let us look at
the seer and the hindrances to exactness that lie in him.

First. — He may be a constitutionally gushing seer. Did you
never know such ? They suffuse the whole creation with their own
rosiness, and report the creation accordingly.

On the other hand a man may be a cold seer, by nature, and
the creation that he reports is by no means the same creation that
the gusher has just reported. But the thing that interests me, as
set to unfold my subject, is that neither of them reports the actual
creation. There is a chronic inexactness in the statements of such
people, which you must always figure on and remorselessly elimi-
nate, before you can really know anything from what they say.

Again, the present transient mood of a seer is likely to qualify
his perception and make it inaccurate, and that inaccuracy must be
discounted in the report he brings of the object he has observed.
One morning in December, 1869, I mounted a hack with the driver
thereof and drove ' from Naples to Pompeii — my first visit to that
fascinating place — and my last. But the day was cold. It had
snowed. The streets of the disentombed city were white a little.
The dust flew too, on the road out, March fashion. I was physic-
ally miserable. Therefore Pompeii is substantially a blank in
my memory. It is pitiable that a supreme thing can be made
to be' nothing by some grumpiness in this vile tabernacle that
we have on us for a time ; for an uncomfortable man is always
a misreporter. But if only we are comfortable what may we not
see? We can even see things that are not. What the Baths of
Caracalla in Rome amount to in fact, I do not know ; but one
sunny and warm day in late March, I, with a friend, climbed to the
top of that great structure, and there, reclined and buried in the
green growths on the roof, I dreamed and absorbed and blossomed
for hours, thinking such reminiscent thoughts and luxuriating in
such imaginings as a man of some sensibility might, with the his-
toric city not far away, and with his own mortal body in a state of
perfect warmth and perfect repose and contentment — in a state of
prolonged purring, to express it so. So now that building and that
day are not blanks in my mind. I could make a sumptuous report
of them.

Not always though do our moods come from our bodies. A
man's view of a good cause may be qualified and made a practical

334 YALE LECTURES.

lie, by some irritation he has had sometime in connection withTthat
cause, or with some one engaged in its advocacy.

A man's view of the fitness of a certain person for a certain
office, may be quite wrong (though honestly wrong) because that
candidate has happened to cross him in some respect.

Our moods are numerous and spring from diverse sources, but
a mood is as much a mischief-maker, in the matter of true seeing,
as color-blindness is, or purblindness.

Again, the philosophers tell us, when they discuss the relativity
of knowledge, that all things show themselves to the human eye,
not in their total reality, but in so much of their reality as the
human eye is constitutionally able to get hold of. And when they
say this, sometimes they say it with a general look on their faces
and a suggestiveness in the tones of their voice, which is equivalent
to an additional piece of information to the effect that what we see
when we look at an object, is to the realities stowed away and hid-
den in that object — hidden forever very likely, from us — as one
leaf is to all the leaves of the leafy world. There we are again !
Accepting the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, what a baby
report any report we make is ! The fault is not in the object but
in the observer. The object stands there in its absolute bareness,
offering itself to be looked at through and through, but it sarcastic-
ally suggests that it cannot furnish eyes and object both.

But even where we are able to get into the interiors ' of the
object considerably, and see it in several aspects rather than in one,
we, for the time being, are not at the right point of observation for
all that many-faced seeing as likely as not, and cannot be ; and on
that account, any report we make must be inadequate, and in that
sense inaccurate. This remark applies especially to our contem-
plation of religious truth. In the New Testament there are many
references to the resurrection of man, and the subsequent resurrec-
tion state. St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, makes quite
an effort to flood that subject with light by his reasonings and
analogies. Also by his touches of exultation as he moves along, he
reveals the dimensions of the resurrection fact quite as much as he
does by anything he directly says about it. He, as an inspired
man, sees something that we do not, and by the glow on his face
and his joyful gesticulations, we are made to know how this thing
is no small affair. So then, we have a doctrine to the resurrection.
We talk about it, we preach it, we put it into our creeds. But a

YALE LECTURES. 335

very powerful sort of relativity of human knowledge comes in here.
It is not permanently in, but it is in for the present. So long as we
stay on the earth, the earth is our view-point in respect of the resur-
rection. But the view of the resurrection from here, compares
with the view of it which we shall have after the resurrection is
past, or after we have gone around to the other side, as our view of
a cloud when under it compares with our view when some balloon
has taken us up and around, on to the sky-side of that cloud. A
man looking up at a cloud takes his oath that it is dark and dismal ;
a man looking down on a cloud swears that it is one of the
brightest and most beautiful things he ever saw.

So much for the power of standpoint, as determinative of per-
ception, and of the reports founded upon perception.

And this thing that I have called standpoint so often as any
way runs into and becomes identical with that thing that I have
called mood ; a person's mood at the moment of observation.

I recollect that when our war of the rebellion was on, twenty or
more years ago, the strong cursing in the book of the Psalms
seemed to all loyal people to be dealt out about right, — none too
hot. In peace, such talk sounds severe. Our first feeling is, that
David and the others permitted their emotions to speak up more
than was necessary. But when our Southern brethren began to
shoot us, and we were as indignant as ever was David, we saw the
Psalms more as they are. Our changed mood was an advantage to
us as interpreters.

So when the Spirit of God steals into the heart of one of our
circle of unchristian children, and converts him, leaving the rest,
the doctrine of election seems a more real thing than it did when
we heard it abstractly discussed and proven by our minister.
Speaking of election, we should say about it now what we should
not have said, save for that thunder out of a clear sky, that con-
version in our family.

In like manner the right of a minister to take part in politics
— a right which we never denied, I will suppose — seemed not at all
what it used to, the moment he in the fervor of an election, when
we were more moved in our minds than we ever were before, actu-
ally took part — an influential part — and worst of all, took part on
the side opposite to us. In our abstract and judicial mood of
mind, taking part was one thing, in our political mood of mind it
suddenly became another.

336 YALE LECTURES.

Now Brethren, I have made a display of these incertitudes in
seeing things and reporting on them, in order that you may discover
what a fiery trial of our honesty we are all in, in this present world.
The unprincipled man lets these numberless forces shoulder him
about as they please, and he sees things pretty much as he happens
to, and when he comes to describe them he is equally loose. And
the principled man, ofttimes, is net principled enough to resist this
confused stress of forces ; especially as half of them are particu-
larly obscure. These thousand-and-one subjective moods that
determine our perception of this and that, are very often uncon-
scious moods, like a vessel headed straight towards port, with all
sails set, and a comfortable assurance in her own mind that she
is making the port ; when, in fact, a secret ocean current is carrying
her leagues and leagues away.

Now, a minister, of all men, is under moral engagement and
obligation to see well and tell a straight story.

First, to see well. — To see well ! I rather think that, ordina-
rily, when we speak of veracity, we do not get back so far as that.
Veracity is reporting a thing as we see it, and that fulfills all right-
eousness, most persons would say. But it does not. We are
as much bound to see things as they are, as we are to report them
as we see them. That is the starting point of veracity ; to see them
as they are. Right there, at the root, that moral quality, honesty,
begins to come in. I have expounded the difficulty there — the
complicated and awful difficulty — but no matter, God entangles us
in difficulties on purpose to find whether we have the integrity to
get through them. The integrity ; not the perspicacity except
as integrity makes perspicacity. No doubt our difficulties develop
our intellects, and that is one of God's ends in letting difficulties
try to snarl us. He wants us to be bright. But still more and
mainly, he wants us to be honest. So he tempts us. He shows up
before us all sorts of objects, in bewildering phases. They are
bewildering in themselves, those objects are ; and they are bewilder-
ing because our moods and our constitutional idiosyncrasies do,
unbeknown to ourselves, drift us this way and that, and make us
like astronomers studying the sky through their telescope from the
rolling deck of a ship. I think it was Samuel Johnson — the great
Samuel — who said that if a child of his, looking through the window,
remarked that there were four objects out there, when in fact there
were but three, he would whip the child ; so important to any good

YALE LECTURES. 337

development did he judge accurate observation to be. To say four
even, when there are three, is a demoralization as distinct as to
forge a complete lie, and say there are none. But perhaps the
observer was simply mistaken, you reply. He had no right to be
mistaken. He was careless as to whether he was mistaken or no ;
and with only that carelessness to stand on, he proceeded to make
an affirmation outright and definite. There is a play of moral
quality through the whole business.

Here is a minister. He is preaching a good many things.
Most of them he has examined to the full extent of his faculty
and his opportunity. But some of them he has not, (I will sup-
pose) ; still, they are conventionally considered parts or items in a
roundabout and full-toned orthodoxy. Therefore he preaches
them. Like the child looking out of the window, he says four, at a
venture. Four is what he is expected to say, and he says it. I
will not condemn that minister as a lost soul because he has so
done ; but he has tampered with himself in a manner all the more
perilous, in that it requires a little push of analysis and acumen to
get at and spot its essential turpitude. Or if that is too strong,
then say (more mildly) that his underpinning of character would
be less worm-eaten if he stopped doing such things. Perhaps that
is no milder. Perhaps a worm in an underpinning is as dangerous
as a worm in a living root. Most of the demoralizations of men, if
searched out, would be found to have their beginning in some sub-
conscious, imperceptible minute defect like that.

I have now spent all the time I can conveniently spare on that
primary and foundation matter, seeing well, seeing exactly, seeing a
thing as it is ; — for I have yet to deal with veracity in the use of
language. Veracity in the use of language ! That to which the
term veracity is generally supposed to apply, particularly and prin-
cipally. A man who makes a good honest start at that radical
point, seeing ; is just the man who wants the language he uses in
giving an account of his seeing to correspond to the facts ; close-
fit — not a grain overdone, not a grain underdone. There is no
intellectual joy like the joy of that close-fit, but the moral joy of it
to a moral man is still greater. That absolute rhetorical veracity
exhilarates like a play of electric currents through one's bulk and
being. Often, when after labor or by a stroke of spontaneity I
have wedded word to fact, in a match of one to the other as com-
plete, self-evident and triumphant as though one had been eternally

338 YALE LECTURES.

predestinated for the other, every faculty in me has shouted for the
moment ; — it is so satisfactory to have exactly the right thing done,
and to have the Tightness stand out incontestible. I think that the
way in which the human mind coins words for its thoughts and per-
ceptions, in a steady, copious run of coinage, without the least
premeditation or conscious anxiety (more often than any way, and
always if inspired and vital) is one of the most marvellous of things ;
and indeed no mean image, but a finite duplicate rather of the
creative fertility of Almighty God. As his great energies teem and
teem and never tire, so do we his creatures teem ; word after word,
pat and full, exact and well-rounded, the words fitting the thoughts
to the last touch of fitness and the thoughts filling the words to the
last touch of fullness.

Veracity in the use of language, shows itself in such particulars
as the following :

First, — In a burning desire to get at the exact meaning of a
word before we consent to use it. It is easy enough to heedlessly
pour out words, flood-like and incontinent ; but this is an irresponsible
and immoral procedure. Words were not made to toss about care-
lesswise any more than dynamite is. When an honest man speaks,
he pledges his honor to the validity of the meanings which he puts
into his expressions ; and he feels that he does, as truly as he
pledges himself when he signs a note. I want to tell you of a little
fraud that I committed — only some two years ago too, when I was
old enough to know better and should have supposed myself man
enough not to have done such a deed. God found me out in it
though, and I do not intend to do so any more. I was delivering a
course of Old Testament historical lectures Sunday evenings, and
was on the career of David. And having come along so far as the
death of Saul and Jonathan, I wanted to turn to a particular good
use among the people, David's beautiful song of lamentations over
those two, beginning: — "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy
high places" — but my good use could be best secured by accepting
the old-fashioned interpretation of that composition at a certain
point, although I knew that said interpretation had been attacked
by scholars and considerably demolished ; nevertheless I put on an
honest face and turned in on my confiding hearers that old-fash-
ioned view ; muddling my conscience with the convenient off-hand
thought that the authorities were not agreed on the point in
question. But providentially, off in one of the pews there sat a

YALE LECTURES. 339

hard-headed strong man from another parish, who of late had been
minutely digging out that whole history, and he mentioned to one of
my parishioners this performance of mine. That parishioner knew
he was mistaken of course, and told him so. His trust in my ability
and scholarship and other things, was sufficient to enable him to
take a stout stand against him, and in favor of me. However, he
wrote me a note about it, and then I wrote him a note, telling him
that the man was right, that he had the weight of authority on his
side. You see I had fallen, but I got up quick ; so soon as I was
caught, at any rate. Well, in relating this incident, I have opened
quite a swarm of questions. For instance, the recent revisers of the
Bible have witched with numbers of our old passages that we have had
the joy of quoting all our lives. Some passages they have caused
to disappear entirely. Others they have left in, but not till after
such an overhauling of their primeval supposed sense, that one feels
like a criminal if he stands to that primeval sense, uses it in preach-
ing, and says nothing. Is it as honest as a minister of the gospel
should be, to be reading from his pulpit an old version whose little
infirmities here and there have been so exposed ?

And this brings up the whole subject of Biblical quotation.
How far may we use texts and passages rhetorically, rather than
exactly. Does the Bible like to be dragged in to assist oratory
in that way; even though it be sacred oratory? Is it "sacred"
oratory, with these devices scattered along through it ? And when
you come to preach from a text, may that text be made to do a
duty it never thought of till you got hold of it and had a present
and particular good you wanted to accomplish by its teaching. Of
course anybody can see that we must not stand up and squarely say
" Dearly Beloved, this text teaches so and so," when it does not.
We may say, "It suggests to me the following twelve heads," and
then we may go on to make our whole discourse on those twelve
heads. There is no lying in that ; but how must that text feel all
this while ? Doubtless it is flattered that an educated and cultivated
and religious man is so crammed with suggestions by its humble
self; at the same time must not that text be mournfully remarking
in its own mind now and then ; " But I have a meaning of my own
(so I always supposed), a God's meaning; and on the whole I
should be pleased if you would make a thirteenth head on that,
and let me serve to that extent, as my original self; and not as a
mere suggestor."

340 YALE LECTURES.

These points of equity are confusing to an undisciplined con-
science, but to a man who is honest in every atom of him, the
appeal of that Bible text is full of pathos.

Now you see in a moment that in order to the truthful use
of language, we are carried directly to philological and exegetical
study. All people would agree that preachers need to be up in
those studies as a matter of information ; but I say unto you to-day
it is a matter of integrity also. What is slander? Well, one form
of it is reporting that a man said something that he did not say.
And why is not the Bible slandered when some inaccurate and
unexegetical fumbler spends hours every week in public discours-
ings on what the Bible says. Unquestionably the Bible does say
many things that he declares it does. The general tone of its
teachings on the principal topics of doctrine and life, he gets at.
But the Bible is like a person. It has in it, so to speak, virgin-like
and elusive qualities and shades of quality which must be perceived
in order to a complete and completely relishable acquaintance with
the Book. A merely English scholar may get a good deal from the
Bible ; but a Greek and Hebrew scholar can get more. Words
fairly quiver with delight when you hunt them out clear to their
radicals. When I take my food in a rather wholesale and bolting
fashion — so much food in so many minutes — I taste it, certainly, and
wish I had more ; but my tongue does not at all reach those ultimate
flavors of my bread and my meat, wherein and whereby, princi-
pally, meat is meat and not bread, and bread is bread and not
meat — those ultimate flavors that the bread and the meat do most
pride themselves on. It is impossible to get the whole marrow of
Greek or Hebrew or Latin thought in an English rendering of it.
Hebrew thought in an English dress, is Anglicized-Hebrew thought
always — more or less. Thought, that essence of the mind, instinct-
ively takes on a body of language that is surcharged with its own
idiosyncrasies, and any other embodiment would be a misfit to a
degree and so far not an embodiment. We should not say that
any living thing was embodied, when some sort of externality was
mechanically put upon it. No, embodiment proper is the unem-
bodied vitally and therefore characteristically expressed.

So then our very veracity forces us to philology, to exegesis, to
profound interpretation. If we intentionally misrepresent meanings,
we are liars, plain as day. But if we misrepresent meanings through
carelessness, or through laziness, it shows that we have in us the

YALE LECTURES. 341

making of a liar. We are willing to make statement after statement
that we have never taken the trouble to verify. We are leaving a
large part of the significance of our Bible — many a savory term,
phrase, turn and idiom, unused and undetected. It is not right,
I say.

Secondly. — Veracity in the use of language shows itself in the
avoidance of overstatement — not to say understatement. Over-
statement comes : From a real desire to lie : From an innocent
over-rosiness of mental constitution from the womb. From an
innocent over-endowment of sensibility. From ignorance, often.
From a religious desire to make a strong impression and do good.
Finally, and omitting, doubtless, some causes ; from an over-done
concentration on the particular object which we are trying for the
moment to report. Please grant me a little pause on that last —
thus :

Each object of thought is variously related to other objects of
thought, and that one object cannot be seen accurately and accu-
rately reported except as its numerous relations are perceived and
weighed, and duly let in with their influence. For example :

Now it is a habit of multitudes of minds — preachers and all
sorts — to contemplate things unrelationally. It is the curse of
theology — one curse — that so many fail to contemplate its several
momenta systematically. It is the curse of preaching — one curse —
that the men, so many of them, sharpen their attention right down
to the one truth or topic they happen to be on for the moment.
It is the justice of God that they have up I will say, and if you had
never heard of God before you would conclude that justice is all
there is of him.

I know it is one of the inherent and necessary infirmities of
any statement of a truth, that you isolate it more or less from other
truths. Formulation is simply a setting of boundaries around
the thing you formulate ; and those boundaries would not be
such if they did not fence off that thing to a degree from all those
things to the which it is in fact related. If you say — "God is
Justice !" — you have selected a single attribute of God from out of
his many attributes, brought it into the foreground, magnified it,
lifted it for the moment out of its real place in the organism of his
attributes and committed an exaggeration, a temporary exaggeration.
Formulation is exaggeration, always. If you preach on an attribute
of God you cannot, at the same time, and in that single half-hour,

342 YALE LECTURES.

preach on his every other attribute, and thus avoid disproportion.
No, you must bear down on the thing in hand, and accept what
disproportion may occur. And then at some other time you must
have God's Love for your topic, and bear down on that. And so
on. But in all this your specific bearing down, you may tone your
statements and reduce exaggeration to a minimum by being your-
self a relational thinker — a man accustomed to recollect that God is
manifold, made up of several great powers in magnificent equilib-
rium and co-ordination. The equilibrium and co-ordination of the
forces of the created universe is but his harmony of living, pro-
jected and made visible. A being like Him when he came to cre-
ate, could not do otherwise than have his universe like unto himself.
I repeat, the way to reduce exaggeration to a minimum is to make
yourself a relational thinker. One of the chief objects of education
is to get young men into this relational habit. A man is not educa-
ted till he be brought to that. One of the tokens whereby you can
tell a great man from a man little and scrappy, is that the latter
takes truth in scraps, or single phases ; and when he speaks gets
right down on his scrap and cackles with, all his might, while the
great man handles truth integrally. He, as much as the lesser
thinker, is compelled by the necessity of the case to expound truth
one phase at a time and in that way exaggerate. Nevertheless you
will hear in all he says on that phase a sound as from other phases.
Particularly in the moderation of his statements will you hear that
sound. His language is not pushed into the extreme possible
intensity of language. While he shows that he has interest in his
theme, he shows that he has heard of other themes. Focus the entire
vital heat of your body on some single square inch of your body,
and you have an interesting inflammation, an inflammation which
attracts much more attention than forty whole bodies, with their heat
uniformly distributed. And in like manner a preacher who accumu-
lates his entire energy and fire on the one truth that he is discussing,
and thinks of nothing else, may set the people agape more than the
full-globed, all-comprehending man, whose heat on this and that
does not proceed to the inflammatory point, because he has a fervid
sense of numerous other truths and themes.

You have a good illustration of this that I am now trying to set
forth in the mental temperance of a statesman or public man, who
is historically informed and cultured ; his temperance in the midst
of the flow and passion of present events, as contrasted to the

YALE LECTURES. 343

vehemency, overaction and overstatement of the public man who,
as knowing nothing of history, has nothing with which to compare
the present. You will hear this last, saying: — "The treason of
Jefferson Davis was the greatest crime since the crucifixion of the
Son of God" — " Ulysses S. Grant is the greatest general since Julius
Csesar" — and like ear-catching utterances. "This presidential
election is the most important one since the foundation of the gov-
ernment ; if we lose it, the cause of free government is set back a
hundred years ; " and so on. Now if this man only knew anything
that has occurred between the date of the crucifixion and the last
election, he would be more entitled to make these stunning general-
izations ; but he does not know. Perhaps some of these broad and
impressive things that he says are true, but he does not know that
they are. He is too ignorant historically for that.

Neither does that denominationalist who magnifies a pulpit
orator of his own persuasion as the chief pulpit power of the
Nineteenth Century, know much probably of the pulpit giants
outside of his own circle and his own land.

The truth is, all persons and things and truths are truly rated
only by those who are in possession of the large measures of history.
Exaggeration is the child of ignorance. Exaggeration comes of an
isolated and unrelational contemplation of the objects of thought.

But Gentlemen, there is a form of recoil from exaggeration, on
which I ask you, so long as you live, to lay your rather undivided
contempt. The moderation, the non-gushing habit of a wide-
minded thinker, scholar and man of information, is a truly respect-
able and imposing thing, as I have already implied. His considerate
diction and his tranquil argument go home with their whole force.
You know the man, and deduct not one ounce from his statement.
Even when his diction is really tame, as sometimes happens, by
reason of his mortal fear of excess, you feel that an occasional ice-
berg in the midst of the general inflammatory condition of human
thought, is a force in favor of sanity and repose ; and you do not
mind running your own craft with her coppers all hot in under the
shadow and wholesome chill of that solid mountain of ice. Also
when your cool man, by reason of his many-sided knowledge, is
made to be inordinately prudential and wavering, so that he drops
out of the practical push of life, you recollect again his value in
reducing the fierce temperature of the creation, and are thankful.
Moreover if his prudentialism, and his unaffirmative or mildly affirm-

344 YALE LECTURES.

ative tone extends even to moral questions, so that his yea and nay
are not wholly yea or nay, but a little of both ; as was supposed to
be the case with our great Daniel Webster, in some respects, thirty
or more years ago ; still, in the midst of the frantic positiveness of
multitudes who are positive in inverse ratio to their information
and their sense of the totality of things, it refreshes you to see an
extreme man who is extreme in the direction of tranquillity and
considerateness.

But I cannot say so much in praise of that affected moderation
which we sometimes see — that refusal to be absolutely concluded
and enthusiastic in respect of anything, which some persons put on.
They put it on and there is where the contemptibleness of the
thing comes in. They have no all-sided information and all-sided
habit of thought, which moderates them ; but they moderate them-
selves intentionally and deliberately, because to be moderate is so like
those unexcited and well-poised men and women who are informed
and thoughtful. When I first visited the old world and saw certain
first things over there, I was much moved ; but I had with me as a
temporary companion, a young Englishman, to me a stranger, up
from London on his country vacation, who sat in the same beautiful
ruined Abbey that was near drowning me in a certain sort of
emotion, and serenely nibbled his lunch. He was not hungry (we
had just had our breakfast) but neither was he hungry for the
Abbey ; and as between the two, it was much more genteel to eat
and not let the Abbey run away with him, than to imitate me and
let it out that he never before saw an Abbey in the beauty of hun-
dreds of years of decline, and so advertise his own greenness. The
gentility of indifferentism ! — that is what I want you to despise.
If you are so completely informed about Abbeys that you cannot
learn anything more in that line, and if you have been daily rubbing
against Abbeys from the moment you were born, and on that
account are more bewitched with your lunch than with the moss-
mantled pile ; why go on and eat ; — that is honest, and to that
extent it is respectable. But if you are as unpracticed in Abbeys as
is the over-flowing Yankee man at your side, and devote yourself to
your lunch simply to lie, and notify him that you are not so much
of a fool as he (which is just what millions do) then there is noth-
ing respectable about it. To be green is no discredit necessarily
(though it is a misfortune) but to be untruthful is a great discredit.
Sometimes even young men and young women assume this gen-

YALE LECTURES. 345

teel indifference to all things, whereof I speak. When a mature
person puts on indifference, we may be deceived by him at first.
Possibly the man is as informed and experienced and as staled by
experience as he appears to be ; but as to these young people we
know better right off. They have not been in the world so long,
and traveled about so much and so deeply entered into all sorts of
things, that a fine landscape cannot flush them, and a fine oration,
or concert, or picture is a weariness to their souls ; and a fascinating
human character has no fascination, they have encountered such a
glut of them. No ; they, keeping cool as they do, are little hum-
bugs— and plain humbugs.

Is it exaggeration to oversee and overstate : — to wreck one's
native tongue in trying to express one's strong impressions ; as some
young gentlewomen are malignantly accused of doing — but is it not
also exaggeration to purposely and guilefully cultivate languor, ennui,
and an air as though you had seen everything there is to see, and
sampled it, and engulfed yourself in satiety by much sampling?
Is it not exaggeration to profess and pretend to the moderation of
the many-sided observer and thinker? Is it veracity in the use of
language, to call a whirlwind "elegant" and an avalanche "a nice
thing" and a magnificent sunset "a rather pretty scene" and a
Gen Gordon shut up in Egypt, and oblivious of everything save
God and duty, "too lovely for anything !" Are not these diminu-
tives— these hypocritical diminutives, lies. If they had in them
only the infirmity of inexactness they would be inveracious and a
sort of slander — for no one is entitled to apply to things that are in
reality so overwhelming, such incommensurate, petty and miserable
adjectives. But when these adjectives are selected for a hypocritical
purpose, they contain a second immorality.

O ! how good it is to get out of all this feebleness and imposi-
tion, and out of real indifferentism with its tamed-down language
and its unflushed face, into the outrightness, rest and self-commitment
of Shakespeare, and Hebrew prophets, and imprecating Psalmists
who knew the difference between Babylon and Jerusalem and did
not doubt that God also knew the difference ! — to get away from
that everlasting balancing of probabilities in the moral field, which
emasculates a man's affirmatives and his negatives too — to be out of
it into the clear sight and the perpendicular faith even of such
whole-hearted haters, and un-Addisonian rhetoricians, as Thomas
Carlyle, and Dr. South, and John Milton, in some of his prose
23

346 YALE LECTURES.

utterances ; and many another utterly resolved and vehement soul.
Of course no extreme can be defended, but as between the lacka-
daisical on the one side and the over-rugged on the other ; as
between Hercules and Nancy; as between strength, vision and
fresh sensibility exaggerated, and the exaggeration of diminutives,
indifferentism, pretense, and weakliness, can any reasonable mortal
hesitate ?

Now in some pulpits it is Nancy that you hear, and not Hercu-
les. It is not Miss Nancy, but alas ! it is Mr. Nancy. First, he
thinks it would be unphilosophical to warm up and say something.
The true way is to put in the pros and cons, and when you get them
all in to just stand in them chin-deep, and look helpless. This
preacher has reduced dubiousness to a fine art. Doubtless he has
escaped out of exaggeration, but he has not landed anywhere.
Neither has he landed his people anywhere. In the next place he
abates his diction to correspond to the neutralism of his thought.
It is proper and pale, and inoffensive and unpotential, and void of
positive verity. An adjective with a real swelter in it would con-
vulse him. Doubtless there are many sweltering realities in the
Book and Providence of God, and in human life, which ought not
to be formulated at all unless in terms correspondingly sultry ; but
this man is in the moral bewilderment of the idea that a thing
understated is not wronged and therefore, to be on the safe side he
tones down his utterance beyond the facts.

To be on the safe side ! Well, Gentlemen, as my final contri-
bution to your enlightenment to-day, I will draw out here a recipe
for keeping on the safe side. Are you afraid you shall seem more
interested in the things you describe than the real worth of those
things will justify? Are you afraid you shall seem more orthodox
than you are, more pious than you are, more fascinated with each
parishioner than any mortal of any discrimination can be with some
of them, more emphatic all around than the facts will warrant?

Well, listen. As regards the truths we are called to preach,
and the human and divine interests we are set to conserve and ad-
vance ; thank God over-emphasis is not possible. Not to emphasize
them and make everything ring when we discuss them, is to imitate
that man referred to who spoke of a hurricane as "a nice thing,"
and of God's vice-regent in the Egyptian desert with the hosts
of Hell surging at his gates day and night, as "just lovely." Let
no preacher practically disparage the things whereof he speaks, by

YALE LECTURES. 347

speaking of them faintly and in a small way. They are not small,
and he need not be when he handles them.

There is no difficulty there. The lawyers and the doctors do
not have just the advantage that we do at that point. The realities
to which they give themselves are pretty great, and they may put in
their energies accordingly; but ours are much greater. We have
undertaken to co-work with the Son of God in the spiritual salvation
of the world, to fill up (O ! searching thought !) "to fill up that
which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of the
Church which is his body ;" not by physical endurances necessarily
or mainly, but by entering into the fellowship of his spiritual
anxieties and sufferings, which spiritual sufferings of his are the
pivotal point of his mediatorship, the point of ultimate pressure
when he bore the sin of the whole world. If a lawyer gets a case
involving a few millions, he considers that he has a great case, and
he moves into it with all his powers, and his entire argument palpi-
tates with the heart-beat of those millions, while neither judge nor
jury look upon it as anything unseemly or disproportionate if his
language seems to say continually : — " This is a matter of millions."
Well, let us preachers talk as though we had millions in the case.

But as to that recipe. Here it is.

If a man is substantially orthodox, and substantially religious,
and substantially resolved to save his every parishioner, then he
himself is saved forever and utterly from all kinds of excessive
action and speech.

I read in an English newspaper of a gentleman in London, a
Swiss gentleman of much character and ability, but of a curious
negligence in keeping himself personally clean. He began to be ailing
in a way that he did not understand and he sought the counsel of an
eminent physician, who knew his peculiarities. And this physician
wrote out an uncommonly particularized and professional prescrip-
tion for him; — which he carefully read and then said: "Why,
Doctor, I do not see that this is anything more or less than taking
a bath." "Well, it is open to that objection," replied the Doctor.
"It is open to that objection."

And my recipe is similar to that. I introduced it with some
pomposity, as though I were opening a brand new box of wisdom,
but in reality it is as old-fashioned and tame as taking a bath. I
simply say : — My Dear Young Brethren, do you just be good men,
and then you may speak and act, orthodoxly, piously, and with

348 YALE LECTURES.

pastoral affection. There will be no exaggeration and hypocrisy of
exaggeration in it. But out of you (as the Holy Scriptures intimate),
shall flow veracities like rivers of living water.

Now notice, I do not insist that you shall be good, by a good-
ness such as only one minister in ten thousand reaches, before you
shall let yourself be a preacher or a pastor at all. Of course that
one man in ten thousand is the very man you must try to be — it
were shameful to aim at anything less — but the presumption is that
you will not be he. You will be more than you would be if you
did not strive to be he, but the Chances that you will reach to his
stature are nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to one. A
discouraging way to state it, but we want to get at the facts.

Well, as extreme saintliness is possible to you, but extremely
improbable (according to those figures), I advise you to make sure
of a decent average of goodness among that multitudinous nine
thousand and over ; and on that as a working basis rest your min-
istry down, and go on. As your years multiply and your spiritual
strivings multiply, and you approximate that eminent and solitary
divine just mentioned, you can lift your ministry, your preaching
and your pastoring to square with the new facts. If your preach-
ing and pastor-work advances faster than you advance toward
yonder eminent saint, that is inveracity — the thing I am lecturing
against — but if you advance your talk, and your deeds, and your
asking your people about their families, only and precisely as you
yourself do interiorly get on, that is exactness before God and man
and before your own conscience. Do that, and you can roll your-
self as a sweet morsel under your own tongue, all the while. And
you can do that. Theoretically, you can be the one minister in ten
thousand, but with ten thousand figures, save one, against you, your
theoretical possibility is mainly a beautiful object of contemplation.
But to be a good man simply, is practicable. You can have a sharp
and effective conscience. You can have religious feelings. You can
have communion with God. You can have the graces of the Holy
Spirit. I will not stop to name those graces, but you can have
them. And you can have in you a daily steadfast push to do
your duty. And if you get all those plain and feasible things,
you are a man worth having in any parish — city or country.

And then as to that ofttimes pretty difficult matter, the having
an enormous interest in every pew-holder, both temporal and spirit-
ual, I observe :

YALE LECTURES. 349

First. — That there are undeniable differences in pew-holders,
which differences not to see were unintellectual and inveracious.
Some of these persons it were the work of a lifetime to warm up to,
particularly if you keep in mind their characteristic imperfections.
By dropping those and making believe that they have no imperfec-
tions you may embrace them with a degree of heartiness : — but it
is better to take men just as they are, and accurately size the
dimensions of the problem and the job you have to handle. Let
us know the worst.

It would seem then — taking the matter as far as we have now
got along in it — it would seem that a minister, an honest and dis-
cerning minister, simply cannot treat his whole parish alike. He
may treat them alike in all ways of practical kindness, but when
you come to the endearments of personal intercourse, the melting
right down on one's neck, so to say ; why he cannot. He must
select. Even Jesus knew the difference between Herod and Pilate
and Mary of Bethany — knew it and marked it.

But let us rise a little now, and light up this terrible matter,
by a second remark, which does light it up, and let the minister out
into a plain and good path.

Our specific and characteristic relation as ministers to our
congregation is religious and not social. To be sure sociality comes
in, incidentally, and may be very sweet, just as when we go a-fish-
ing, it is necessary, and may be refreshing, to get down to and
perhaps into the same water with the fish. The fish are pleased
and we are pleased very likely. But that is not what we are there
for. No ; we are there to catch them. If their being pleased to
have us in the water with them, makes it easier for us to catch them
(as it probably does), it is all right; but pleasure — either in them
or in us — is not our end.

Well, the moment a minister disengages his end or aim from
sociality, and everything else, and bears right down to the personal
salvation of these men and women, the solemn question whether he
can bring himself to really enjoy falling on their necks, and on the
neck of Herod just the same as on the neck of John or Mary —
that question subsides. He does not care whether he can or not.
He loves them all, as the purchase of the Lord Jesus ; and the
more it seems unlikely he can ever love this one and that one of
them on natural principles, they are so faulty and disagreeable, the
more intensely is he drawn to them in spiritual affection. Just

350 YALE LECTURES.

think of Mr. Moody standing before a great assembly of roughs in
low London or low New York ! A steaming witch's cauldron
were not more repulsive to every moral sense and every physical
sense. But this very repulsiveness is what attracts Moody to them
infinitely. I do not doubt that the man, any time, on a square au-
thentic challenge, would die for the most far-gone scoundrel among
them ; and do it joyfully. Let a minister once get that affection
into him, the religious affection, the true affection of his holy
office, and it transfigures all his Herod pew-holders before his eyes.
— Yes, the beauty of him who died for these Herods is imputed to
them, and he sees them in the glory of that ideal character to which
by the redeeming grace of God they may come.

HIGH-HEARTEDNESS IN THE
MINISTRY.

My brethren, it is one of the best blessings to be permitted to
be a Christian minister. Permitted by your personal make-up ; per-
mitted by your circumstances ; permitted by the favorable voice of
the Church ; and permitted by the sufficiently clear call of your God,
delivered to you by the Holy Ghost operating in your consciousness.
With what a solid and good feeling, now, I give to you that testi-
mony, founded on what little I myself have experienced and upon
a considerable observation of the ministerial class. In fact, I do
not see how a man could consent to stand here and speak in these
courses of lectures at all, if he did not have that feeling about our
vocation. I think your honest faces down there, looking at him,
would make him blush at his own hypocrisy should he try it.

However, there is slag in almost everything. This is a world of
slag. Slag came in, when Adam went out of paradise and it is
here yet. And so there naturally come into our work some things,
and some things are often allowed to come in when there is no need
of it, which tend to kill enthusiasm in the minister ; so that you can
actually see scattered instances of them, who started out with fresh-
ness, determination and expectancy, but have gradually sunk into
routine, dignity, decorum and unhopefulness. They are not de-
moralized, in the sense of being immoral, these that I have in mind.
They have not lapsed from the truth. Their trumpet, what trumpet
they have, gives no uncertain sound. They move through the
circle of their duties with the punctuality of a chronometer. Their
long professional service has stamped their personal appearance
and demeanor, so that they are eminently respectable men to
meet and look at. And they will keep on in their appointed round

352 YALE LECTURES.

till their years end, and will have some conventional scripture to
speak for them, on their tombstone. But they are not enthusiastic.
I do not mean gushing, but enthusiastic. Some of God's ministers
are as chirping at sixty or seventy years of age, as they were when
they began. They have found nothing in the courses of their work
to make them humdrum. But these others have. And now, what
is it that they have found ? Just what the chipper ones have found,
in many respects.

For instance, when they began to be preachers, they supposed
that if they made good arguments, before a reasonable congregation,
and quoted good scriptures and closed their discourse always with
a suitable, well-meant, unimpeachable application of their subject,
then all those reasonable human beings would be convinced and act
accordingly ; but behold, as often as anyway, when they preached
there was no particular sign that anybody was convinced. They,
the people, listened to their sensible and warm-hearted young man,
and were glad they had secured such a promising minister, at a price
that they were able to pay, but as for proceeding to be converted,
or to be perfectly sanctified, they did not. Well, if this discomfit-
ure had been for one Sunday only, the man could have lived through
it ; but lo, it kept on. By and by, it began to occur to him that the
law of Christian preaching might be, that it does not convert every
soul instantly. Then he remembered that, in the School of Divinity,
he had been taught how the heart of man is depraved and unwilling
and hard to melt down, and so on. He recollected too, what he had
heard many times, but never thought of, that the most successful
ministers who ever lived, had more defeats than successes in this
very matter of souls saved. Whitefield, Moody, Wesley leave a
hundred times more people unconverted than they convert, in the
places and mass-meetings where they speak. And as though to
indicate to them that they must all expect just that, it is related of
Jesus himself that whenever he spoke to men, the listening multi-
tude divided, some saying yes and some saying no ; and divided in
no middle line ; moreover, the result being, even as Jesus expressed
it : "Many are called, but few chosen."

It seems strange that a person can live twenty to thirty years in
the world, go through College, spend three years in a theological
Seminary, hear a good many valuable lectures from a series of plain-
spoken and warning men ; and yet commence to be a preacher with
no practical sense of this thing that I am now telling ; so that he is

YALE LECTURES. 353

disappointed and chilled when his charges from the pulpit all the
year long are so numerously resisted and not made the most of, by
both saint and sinner ; but so it is — being told a thing is so curiously
different from personally encountering it.

To tell the truth, my young brethren, I myself struck a streak
of disappointment right at this point. I did not find what I expected.
I did not know that I expected it — we never know half that is in us
— and one of the great uses of practical life is to bring us to a con-
sciousness of our own contents, in the way of knowledge and the
rest. I did not give up, but I could see how a man might at any
rate, how he might slacken by and by, and deliver his strokes for
conscience sake mostly ; or because it is the proper thing to do,
according to all accounts. I think my teacher in theology helped
me to a good deal of confidence in the power of mere argument.
Of course he did not fail to inform me, that argument unassisted by
God's direct unction must be a failure, but he made such an admir-
able argument always himself, when he tried and withal had such
a fine soldierliness in it, that made as I happen to be I could
remember not much save that. I believed his doctrine of unction ;
but as often comes to pass with beliefs, I folded it decently and
respectfully away ; swore by it when called upon and proceeded to
get along without it in a measure. Therefore, my fervor in preach-
ing was in risk of ebbing, when I saw that all the world was not
directly moved thereby.

Again, some are cooled a little by the unexpected parishes in
which they find themselves somehow — soon or late — small parishes
— parishes not on the line of any railway or turnpike — parishes of
limited salaries, limited church attendance, limited increase of chil-
dren, limited vivacity and perhaps limited intelligence. They never
supposed their merits ranked as low as that. They were bright
enough in the Seminary, wrote good compositions, attended to their
studies, were reasonably well spoken of, had a good voice, were easy
and successful in their gestures, took their license in their pocket
all their last year and went about preaching with what seemed
acceptance at the time ; and now, at the end of twenty years, they
are lodged and seemingly stuck where there is neither railway, turn-
pike, nor increase. Such a discrepancy between a man and his cir-
cumstances no one can appreciate who has not been in it. And
then the way it confuses a man's mind ! How did I get here, he
says. What secret faculty, attribute or endowment in me, or set of

354 YALE LECTURES.

endowments was it, that caused me to be shoved along down and
down, by not easy stages, to this place and doom.

Dear Soul ! that has happened to him, very possibly, which
happens to men in every calling. He is a solidly meritorious
person, just as he thinks he is. His head is excellent and his char-
acter is excellent. But time and sufficient experiment have brought
to light a constitutional disqualification in him for that particular
service on the face of the earth, the sen-ice ministerial. Very likely
it is a minute point ; but as the smallest kind of a sufficiently sharp
tack in the bottom of a man's shoe controls the whole situation and
makes it necessary for him to get another shoe, so that little disquali-
fication is the explanation of the mystery of that minister's career.
When I heard Cardinal Manning and listened to the victorious and
far-reaching sniff that he gave whenever he made a thoroughly good
point, I thought that for a settled preacher in a first-class position,
he would hardly answer. A sniff is nothing. It does not disprove
a person's character. It does not show that he is not learned, able
and godly enough to be a Cardinal ; but it might prevent his being
a Cardinal, if the duties of that great office required him to stay on
one spot forever, among the same set of people and in such close
quarters that they could hear and could not fail to hear, every sniff
he put forth — thousands in a year, perhaps.

It would be ungracious in me to give a list of the many kinds
of sniff that hinder men. It is some defect in the man's oratory,
perhaps ; it is something or other that you can hardly put your
finger on in his manners ; it is his inborn proneness to doubt a thing
which he has struggled against but has not yet extirpated ; and his
preaching, in various ways, is made unacceptable by that feature of
his mind ; or unconsciously he is dogmatic and conscientiously
aggressive and can hardly sit five minutes in a parlor without coming
at you with his battering ram ; his well-meant and Christian batter-
ing ram, to be sure, and designed for your salvation ; nevertheless,
you do not want any salvation that is brought in that way — depraved
human nature being ridiculously particular about the way in which
good is done to it. Or this good man is naturally very reserved and
the modern parish insists on a good deal of effusiveness ; or while
he is congenial to old people, he is not winning with the young — or
to boil it all down into one sentence and state vaguely what I do not
relish analyzing — he is not popular. It was supposed when he was
young that he was going to be popular ; and he supposed he was ;

YALE LECTURES. 355

but no one then suspected the sharp tack that would begin to stick
up in him, as parish after parish tried him on and wore him a little.
So he is not as enthusiastic as he used to be.

Again, and on the other hand, some ministers are so popular
that, being much praised and stall-fed by their admiring parishion-
ers, they grow fat, contented and dull and greatly need to be pricked
by the sharp pricks of adversity. To be sure, when they get soggy
enough, they are no longer popular ; but what made them soggy
was too much prosperity and pampering. Pampering tends to kill
a man's noble enthusiasm.

Again, his early enthusiasm may grow tame by reason of his
habitual contact as a preacher — his professional contact — with the
truths of God and the things of God. All the time he moves among
them ; all the time it is his business to handle them ; all the time
this necessary familiarity may reduce that lively sensibility in regard
to them which he once knew.

And again, a minister may unwittingly numb himself and settle
into the deadness of rut-work and go by routine rather than by spon-
taniety, by starting on his career with a not absolutely supreme
intention to do good and let all considerations, personal to himself,
go. There is an opportunity for great self-deception just there, my
brethren. I am not willing to believe that any man of you is con-
scious at present of anything but a determination to do God's work
and not cherish yourself — not care more for salary than you do for
souls — not delight in a brilliant parish call more than in a large
opportunity to bless mankind. Theological students have a good
deal of human nature in them, but they are all honest to that extent.
However, they are not all as sanctified as they may think they are.
A quotable per centage of the students here and everywhere, will
incline to use the parishes that call them and their opportunities as
ministers, for their own advantage more than they ought. They are
capable of that kind of alloy in their motives. They do not now dis-
tinctly anticipate such works, but it will come. Well, they must
fight against it. I presume all of them will. And one of the
reasons why they had better is, that a service of God carried on
with that admixture of the personal element works tremendously
to extinguish the characteristic enthusiams of the ministerial office ;
and I can point you to men now living whose life is unhappy, who
have a great deal to say against parishes and their meanness and
their poor appreciation of what is done for them, and who discharge

356 YALE LECTURES.

their official duties in a perfunctory torpidity and with just the joy
of a man on a tread-mill, because they have slipped along into self-
serving ; although it may be that even yet they are not quite aware
of the slipping.

I have now given you some specimens of the things that tame
down the ministerial man from the beautiful ardor and expectation of
his first sermon-work and pastor-work, into the round-and-round and
around again, of a merely perfunctory fidelity. I have omitted,
though, one of the frequent forces of dullness, namely : — the neces-
sarily routine character of some of our work — and I have made the
omission, because I want to discuss the formidable subject of rou-
tine in another lecture.

I have also omitted the depression which a good and faithful
minister may feel when he notices the numerous Christian congre-
gations that are captivated by shallow men in the ministry and men
of no taste and mock orators and unserious men and men every
way unseasoned, untempered, unregulated and uncalled of the Holy
Ghost too, one would say. When a true minister is sick of such
sights, he is led to inquire within himself, why should I offer my
services to this unperceiving generation. Would that God would
let me out into some pursuit and calling where a sterling man goes
for what he is worth. So frequent has it come to be that people
are bewitched by inferior ministerial gifts, that great popularity in a
preacher almost creates a presumption against him, in serious and
well-balanced souls, who know nothing of the man as yet, save the
one thing that he is very popular. Mr. Ruskin hits the matter off,
I remember, in one of his customary thrusts, by saying : — "a popular
preacher is admired by the majority of his congregation for the
worst parts of his sermon." But let it go. I am glad to be through
with this business of telling what depresses ministers and deadens
them. For now I am ready to spread myself out on the things that
nourish enthusiasm in a man and keep him alive, merry-hearted and
aflame, notwithstanding all possible disadvantages and discour-
agements.

And first, the feasibility of a life-long chirkness and upbubbling
of the soul, is settled by the many plain instances of the same. We
look for some bubble in boys and beginners. It is natural to them.
The force of life in them is not yet abated by the pull and the drain
of multiplied years, and they have not come into the full stress and
wear of affairs. But have we not all seen old boys in the ministry,

YALE LECTURES. 357

gray and worn men with a boy's heart under their old jackets, a
boy's zeal, a boy's dauntless expectation ; men that like to preach
as well as they ever did, like to strive for souls, like to defend the
truth, like to believe in the kingdom of God and its ultimate domin-
ion ? Why yes ; and things like that are not uncommon in other
professions and pursuits. There are aged lawyers whose passion
for legal investigation and work is a supreme delight to them and
much more than in the days of their youth. And scientists and
musicians and teachers and business men, have a similar experi-
ence ; and even sheer money-getting, that pitiful blind lust for
accumulation, often grows to an inextinguishable rage, as the years
go on ; so that the man goes out of the world at four or five score
— no matter how old — with a money-eagerness still on the increase.
If a secular pursuit, that in the nature of things cannot engage and
inspire one-half of a man's soul, may make him so indefatigable and
so elate, so long as he lives ; and if a pursuit that is not only secular
but directly cross and crash to everything fine, noble and spiritually
pure in our nature, can keep a man alive, agog, industrious and
devoted, so long as breath remains in his body ; would it not be
strange and infamous too, if ministers failed to reach a similar undy-
ing zeal ; stimulated as they are by the highest conceivable motives
and fascinations.

The lawyer, the scientist, the statesman, the philosopher, is led
on, I will suppose, by his love of truth ; but consider the superiority
of the truths that lead us on, as suited to inflame feeling and
endeavor ; the truths of God and the truths of man as the child of
God, foredoomed to immortality and chosen in Jesus Christ tc
eternal life. Our truths stir us up and keep us going, by their very
dimensions. It is no mere sharpness that we are called to in our
studies, not microscopy, pettifogging, atomizing, however important
they may be ; but it is to affairs of size, of out-stretching self-expan-
sions, which ask for the grandest we can do.

And another thing ; some might think that this very size that
I speak of, in the truths we pursue, must prevent our getting far
into them and therefore must tend to daunt endeavor and depress
the mind's natural ardor ; but we, who are in the business, know it
is not so. A great truth is much more stimulating than little truths.
Moreover, we do get in to them by our labors. We find out one thing
after another in the field of religion and the field of theology ; partly
because things actually new are brought to light now and then and

358 YALE LECTURES.

partly because the very old truths which we have always known and
the Church has always known, are freshened to our apprehension in
such wise as to seem new. How common it is for Bible readers
and students, to have texts that they learned in childhood, have run
against and considered a hundred times since and have often
expounded to others, suddenly star forth before them like meteors,
and fill them with divine delight. Along the horizon of every
inquiring and devout mind, there is always a flicker and a glow, as
of truths yet hidden behind the hills ; and the expectancy thus kept
alive and the deep questioning, are among the most sterling joys of
our life. How reprehensible and dreadful is that minister who, in
the midst of such possibilities and called daily to handle and apply
the truth of truths, can humdrum and gradually die down into just
a respectable automaton !

Passing now to a point under the head of supports for a minis-
ter's enthusiasm, I mention something very fundamental indeed ;
something which alone is more than sufficient for any amount of
perseverance, high-heartedness and increase of joy. I refer to that
sense of mission which we may all have and one as much as another.
In so far as your call to the ministry and your mission to men from
God, is by you simply inferred from your mental endowments, your
proficiency in scriptural and other learning, your ability to address
assemblies, your circumstances in life and the verdict of an ecclesi-
astical council, assembled to pass upon your case and send you out
humanly authenticated, multitudes of men may have a better call
than you. Their gifts, acquisitions and external furtherances, may
be more than yours ; and the council that inspected them may have
worked itself up to a more rousing majority than your council could
see its way to ; and even if your council was unanimous about you,
possibly it was one of those luke-warm, guess-work and charitable
unanimities, that are fair to look upon outwardly, but within are
only so-so.

But there is one form of call in the which you need not be
beaten by mortal man, be he never so brilliant and the darling of his
council ; your access to God and God's access to you, the mutual
approach of you and God, is just as open, direct and assured as can
be another's ; and that which is the ultimate factor in all real calls
— the soul's message and commission from God direct, private and
inaccessible to all inspection by bystanders, doubters, critics, well-
wishers and inquiring councils — that may be yours perfectly. Many

YALE LECTURES. 359

a man has it and so may you. And while I would not advise a
young man to refuse the ministry because this his inward summons
from God had not yet come to be quite irresistible \ the fact being
that many an excellent and successful minister has gone to his work
without that clear inward foreordination that he desired at the time ;
yet I would say to you, that when a man has reached the thick and
thunder of life's battle, or say, when the great waters that are fain to
drown him, strangle his zeal, kill his vigor, put out all his fires and
water-log him generally, are rolling in, there is no dam against them
more heaven-high and solid that he can raise, than his constant
remembrance how when he first went out on this business of trying
to save souls, he did not send himself, and was not sent by man in
the main, and was not pushed in by a lot of conspiring circum-
stances, but was sweetly constrained by the spirit of all grace. And
so constrained it would have been the woe of his life if he had
not gone in ; so constrained too, that he could have withstood, (so
he felt at the time) , the lack of all customary external furtherances ;
and perhaps even the adverse finding of a fallible human council.
How such a memory as that lights up a poor, tried minister's soul
and keeps him warm and elate forever. There is nothing perfunctory
about him and cannot be.

But as I intimated, many (and perhaps a majority,) are in the
ministerial office with no such supreme off-send to fall back on
when life grows heavy, when the parish is small and away from the
turnpike, when they find they are not orators and when perhaps
even their personal godliness seems mysteriously to have less weight
with the populace that they would have supposed it must. They
may be truly called ; that is, they are in the vocation where they
ought to be ; and yet they did not secure, when they started, quite
that call in the soul to which I have referred ; and now what shall
they do ?

I should reason on their case in this way. It is not wonderful
that they missed that special, luminous, self-evidencing, never-to-be-
forgotten call, at the beginning of their official career. They were
young — young in every respect. They did not realize the worth
of such a call and therefore did not seek for it so earnestly as they
might. They had not learned the secret of full converse with God.
In their exuberant young energy they did not conceive the miser-
able uselessness of all human energies, however exuberant, aside
from the spirit of God. Most men have to do their natural best

360 YALE LECTURES.

and be baffled a thousand times, before they can learn that one
thing. It is not wonderful then, I say, that these ministers have not
a first-class "call" to remember and ground on and get daily
strength from.

But now they have had experience. The futility of man's forth-
puttings to do God's works, they have learned from many a defeat.
Contrariwise, the triumph of the feeblest forth-puttings, if only God
assists, they have also learned ; by an occasional experience of their
own and by a good deal of watching of ungifted but consecrated
brethren, they have learned the way of prayer. The path between
them and their God is trodden bare with their footsteps. So now
they are in a way to get a call for themselves. They need not strike
out for a great general call to cover their entire remaining life, such
a call as a young man before he begins may naturally seek. No, let
them push for a smaller thing than that, a thing, at any rate, more
detailed and close at hand. For instance : let them refuse to preach
on any given occasion till God distinctly gives them the sermon for
that occasion — the topic — the text — the handling of the topic.
Let them insist on that specific call. It is a pretty cheap minister
that never had a sermon given him. And if he can have one, he
can have a thousand and every one. The God that gave the one
can give the rest. The man that got the one, can get the rest. The
secret that brought the one, will bring them numberless and sure ;
and the secret that brought the sermon, will bring anything. For
instance, the minister can have his public prayer given him, or the
private word of counsel he is going to speak, or the settlement of
the numerous practical questions that come up in the course of his
ministry, as easily as he can have his sermon given. And all these
givings from God are specific calls of God. Hence, when a man
moves out to a particular thing on a call, he moves strong ; and he
is happy and he tends to believe in the ministerial office ; and he
thinks a parish off from the turnpike is worth saving and might fitly
occupy the gifts of an archangel. When some deacon of his, with
a strong and penetrating mind and frank and conscientious habit of
speech and a due sense of his official importance, tells him that he
did not enjoy his sermon, did not approve of it and did not think
he was impressive in its delivery ; although the minister is mortified
at first and confused in his mind, nevertheless, -presently it comes to
him that he got that sermon from God, on his knees — on his knees
more than once — on his knees every day while he was writing it he

YALE LECTURES. 361

was speaking with God and God was speaking with him ; and while
he was sitting at his table making his pen go, hunting for scriptural
references, looking at his commentaries, doing his work, his soul
felt itself to be feasting — it was feasting — God feasted him ; and in
that way constantly God undersigned his name to that sermon — and
a man with all this recollection and assurance in him, can stand ten
deacons — ten perspicacious deacons. And the beauty of it is, he
can stand them, not as withstanding them, not combatively, not
resentfully, but receptively, genially and in that prudent spirit of
silence, which is so wholesome always in a parish. Why should this
minister make contention, or feel hurt, over a matter on which God
has definitely spoken to him. The minister may be mistaken about
God's part in that sermon — to mistake is human — but probably he
is not mistaken. He is no more likely to be mistaken than he is in
any other quite plain thing. However, all I want to inculcate along
here, is the general idea of the practicability and the usefulness of
calls as numerous as the numerous details of a minister's daily life
and labors ; and emphatically do I wish to lift up and magnify these
specific habitual calls, as a first-rate antidote for the dejections, or
forces of dejection, inherent in our office ; and the much more
multiplied dejections that are not inherent in the office, but are let
in and lugged in by ministers themselves ; and are thrust in by
perverse or misjudging men and women on the outside.

It is often that ministers find their circumstances rather deso-
late— their deacons too perspicacious — their congregations too full
of old roots of bitterness ; their own oratory too feeble and their
salaries as feeble as their oratory. But none of these things move
them, or diminish their industry, fire and hope, provided all along
through the stretches of desolation, God drops in His clear, sweet
calls and calls, like bells out of the sky, and fills the souls of his
servants with the great music of them.

But now, thirdly ; close along side of what I have been saying,
comes this thought ; a man in close practical converse with God, in
the manner just explained, is instinctively hopeful, warm and
undaunted and unable to be sunk in his spirit by any criss-cross of
circumstances. It is not a matter of reasoning, thus — " This ser-
mon of mine was unquestionably given to me by my God, because
I besought him ; therefore I stand to it, deacon or no deacon and
rejoice therein " — no, the matter of which I now speak is much
less argumentative than that and much more mystical. It is this the
24

362 YALE LECTURES.

man, by virtue of his habitual, close terms with God in the work of
getting his numberless calls, is unwittingly lifted up into a real
partnership in God's own repose and sanguine expectation; and
so, when the deacon speaks to him, or when the general work of
God moves on tediously in his parish, under his administration, or
the individual soul that he has labored with for weeks cannot be
won ; or his people get tired of his preaching and want him to move
on, or what is worse because vaster, when the cause of salvation is
stayed, or even retrograde throughout a whole nation and perchance
throughout the world ; he has no feeling that these things are of any
permanent moment ; he knows all the same that the kingdom of
God stands sure ; that the lion of the tribe of Judah is to conquer ;
that his own dead parish is not forsaken ; that yonder long-sought
person in his parish is not doomed ; that other days of grace are to
come. And somehow — he cannot explain how — as respects those
not few personal instances to which salvation will certainly never
reach, he is not cast down in just the way he should have supposed
he would be ; he is sorry but he is not desperate ; it is something
as though the persons were to be saved after all ; and in like manner,
his own unexpectedly small and inefficacious ministry does not
make him melancholy, not that exactly ; for perhaps it will add up
at the last better than he fears ; the reports are not all in yet and
they will not be till the day of judgment ; in any case, he simply
cannot find it in his heart to take on about it, as though there
were no God and no God's providence. He does not reason it out,
I say once more, but no matter, the peace flows into him and the
joy and the enthusiasm ; he can find few rational considerations to
support it, perchance, at present, but it does not need such support ;
it comes of itself — or to fall back to my original explanation, a man
in daily converse with God, a man full of God's calls and God's
personal dealings, by the nature of the case doth participate in
God's own inscrutable serenity as he looks from his throne down
on these same unnumbered, wide-spread deplorables of many kinds.
Now, brethren, I must give you another strong old recipe for
lassitude, perfunctoriness and the numbness of routine in clerical
people. This recipe now coming, does not operate on the outside
of the difficulty. It does not comfort the numb minister by telling
him how he can get his salary raised, or how he can make some
eligible parish call him away from the uninteresting old spot where
he now is, or anything of that kind j but like all good recipes, it

YALE LECTURES. 363

moves straight in on his joints, marrow and reins and totally revo-
lutionizes his inward parts. Let me open the matter in this way.
St. Paul speaks of our fellowship of Christ's sufferings, and now what
were those sufferings. They were these.

First, his self-denial when he left his primal state and incor-
porated himself in our lowly flesh and became subject to earthly
conditions.

Next, he took the burden of our dreadful case on to his sympa-
thetic feeling, thus bearing our sins as no man or angel could begin
to, because neither man or angel is deep enough in his sensibilities,
and because he is not comprehensive enough, either intellectually or
morally, to gather in the details of our lot and doom, in their entire
number and their entire size.

Next, in that which has come to be known, preeminently, as
the passion of Jesus, there was an unsearchable transaction between
him and his (and our) God, wherein he was dealt with and consented
to be dealt with and rejoiced to be dealt with, in a manner full of
agony for him, but full of deliverance for us — a transaction which has
been always both the fascination and the despair of theology : — a
transaction too around which the innumerable company of non-
expert thinkers and Christians have flocked, as though they all knew,
by their regenerated intuitions, that in the bosom of that mystery
somewhere, the crucial somewhat of their salvation was wrought.
But no matter about explanations and waiving everything save one
thing, I say, Jesus did suffer for us, substitutionally and mediatorially.

And now, as to our fellowship with him, in the three august
particulars of his suffering, just named ; his suffering by incarnation,
his suffering by sympathy and his suffering in the mystery of the
cross. I need not argue that as regards incarnation and the suf-
fering thereof he must stand forever alone, no mortal being able to
share it ; and as regards his crucifixion and the substitutional and
propitiatory suffering, in that he must, in the nature of the case,
stand forever alone ; so that the only remaining particular or point
at which such as we can follow him is his sympathetic deep concern
for men. And even there, we can only follow him afar off; but we
can follow him — yes, what he felt we can feel in kind, and it is one
of the earmarks of our regeneration if we do.

And this concern for men, this Christ-like concern, does not
concentrate wholly or mainly on man as an embodied this-world,
temporal creature ; a being that needs to be fed, clothed, housed,

364 YALE LECTURES.

educated and decorously buried ; that sort of sympathy is humanita-
rianism and while Jesus was a humanitarian, that was not at all the
unique feature in his character, function and career. Jesus addressed
himself to man as a spiritual personage and spiritually fallen ; and
whereinsoever he was sympathetically crushed by our lot, that was
the great point of the crush ; and it belongs to us to enter his fel-
lowship precisely there ; and a minister is no minister, but only a
lecturer and secularist, until he has entered there. And it lies in
the line of my subject to-day to add, that the minister who enters
there and there sympathetically expatiates, or as some would express
it, the minister who loves souls, aches for them, works for them,
storms heaven for them and has them for the spinal cord of his
whole official activity, is habitually full of joy, push and spiritual
seership, and can no more be dampened and made a professional
routinist and stick, than can God's angels.

The only objection I have to that traditional phraseology, "love
for souls," as a description of our fellowship with Christ in his suf-
fering sympathy with men, is that it is not broad enough. " Love
for souls" and "love for men," are by no means equivalent and
interchangeable phrases. A man is more than a soul. A man is a
soul and a body, with all that implies. And Jesus did not come to
save souls any more truly than he came to save bodies, with all their
belongings, conditions and inferences. The gist of the doctrine of
the resurrection on one principal side of it, is that Jesus assumed the
human body, in its limitation, disability and wreck ; took it down
into the tomb, where by right it belonged, under the old sentence,
— "The wages of sin is death," and rose with it, transubstantiated
into a body, spiritual, invulnerable, incorruptible and immortal ; and
that when he thus rose, or more accurately, when, after forty days
of lingering here, he ascended to the right hand of God, he shed
forth the Holy Ghost as he had promised he would, to start the prac-
tical recovery of our souls and our bodies ; our souls right away and
our bodies when the good time comes ; that recovery of our bodies
being sure to be a repetition, limb for limb and line for line, of the
recovery of his own body, when he emerged from the grave, tran-
substantiated, spiritual, invulnerable, incorruptible and immortal.
It is not good theology then, to say "love for souls," — that is if you
would be precise. It is not always necessary to be precise ; but if
we evangelical men complain of humanitarians that they omit the
souls of men from their anxieties and endeavors, we, on our part,

YALE LECTURES. 365

must take care not to fall into a similar pit and omit the bodies of
men from our concern, our theology and our benevolent forth-put-
tings. There is at present a confused push of undiscriminating
persons in the Christian Church against the resurrection of the body.
They think it is more spiritual and refined to ignore bodies and not
let the Christian salvation save them ; but the "vile body," that St.
Paul tells about, is no viler than the vile soul that lives in it — not a
whit — and if you are to be so over refined and fastidious, you must
ignore souls too. The fact is, the blessed Jesus addressed himself
to souls and bodies both. He took us in our total, double-phased
vileness ; and he raises us in mass, as sunken ships are raised. In
his person to-day, at the right hand of God, we . have a glorified
man, soul and body both, the perfect type in that respect and the
forerunner of the resurrection hosts that will pour into that same
holy presence at the last ; all with their bodies on albeit in such a
bodily transmutation, transfiguration and effulgence, as will make us
all turn in memory to this description of Jesus on the mount of his
transfiguration. "The fashion of his countenance was altered, his
face did shine as the sun and his raiment became shining, exceeding
white as snow, so as no fuller on earth can white them." Is there
lack of refinement here ?

The evangelical love for men then is what we ministers need
in order to life-long, spontaneous workfulness and high spirit. I
call it " evangelical " love in order to indicate two things ; that it is
another better and bigger thing than were humanitarian love ; and
that it is a God- born love, and is not natural. The Holy Ghost puts
it into our hearts. And the one disability of some ministers is, that
such distinctly supernatural love has never been put into them, and
is not the spring whence their countless ministrations among men
flow forth. They are proper persons. They behave. They dress
rigidly in black suits. They call on their parishioners. They visit
the sick. They are kind to the poor. They are very decorative on
a ceremonial occasion. They uphold philanthropies, reforms, sound
politics and those well-ordered conventionalities whereon the peace
of the world reposes. There is a rustle of respectability in all their
garments. And they accomplish much good, too. If we had never
heard of a higher good than they ever accomplished, we should have
said, they are doing well and none can do better. But there is
a higher good. While you are thinking of such a minister as that
and his fine image is before you, just say over in your mind, " the

366 YALE LECTURES.

fellowship of Christ's sufferings — the fellowship of Christ's suffer-
ings." Say it over again and again till you and the other in
question are enveloped in the atmosphere of it and he begins to
be judged by its judgment and his round of service gets measured
thereby; and see if he does not begin to shrink before you and
sound hollow comparatively and hardly seem a Christian minister
after all.

I speak sharply because the subject is a radical one. The one
trouble of all disheartened ministers is that they have fallen out, or
were never in, the fellowship of Christ's sufferings. It is enough to
discourage any one, (the poor disheartened man says), not to have
more converts, more hearers, more salary, more books, more rail-
road facilities, more proximity to the metropolis, than have I. Well
sir, if you had in you the evangelical love for men and the soul-
travail of the Lord Jesus, you would have all things, just as St. Paul
said concerning himself, " as having nothing, and yet possessing all
things."

But brethren, loving men in the evangelical way, as distin-
guished from the humanitarian, is not the easiest thing in the world,
but rather, is always a hard and unnatural thing ; and therefore this
serious question comes up : How shall we ministers get the love in
question? Many of us are constitutionally sluggish in our emotions
and unaffectionate. We may be pretty brainy and may therefore
have a never-dying interest in subjects and in the unfolding of sub-
jects in the pulpit ; an interest that, taken in connection with our
superior allotment of brains, makes able essayists of us and men a
good deal admired ; but as regards love to men, we are not gifted.
You may be a humanitarian by birth, thousands are ; but no one
was ever born an evangelical man-lover. Moreover, the men them-
selves that we are to make a business of loving are extremely
ineligible cases, as likely as not. Anybody can be a pretty fair lover
if he may select his persons ; but the dreadful thing about this
whole matter of evangelical loving is, that the more unlovely the
man or the woman, the more ardent and attached are we required
to be. There we are ; and what are we going to do about it ?

In replying to that, I go to the very foundation of the difficulty
at the start — I have done it already, in a passing way, but I wish to
do it formally and saliently now — and to say, that spiritual fervor
towards men, which is our most resplendent endowment as minis-
ters of the Gospel, has its beginning and its eternal fountain in a

YALE LECTURES. 367

personal experience of Christ for our own selves, by the Holy Ghost ;
a personal experience begun, kept up and daily renewed on and on.
If a man cannot say, I am crucified with Christ — I am dead to sin
and the world, and day by day I die to it, am dead and am buried,
something after the strong manner of St. Paul, then he has no
yearning over anybody, no motion within him to save his fellow men,
no evangelical love. He may have natural love in quantities, any
quantity ; enough to make of him an excellent humanitarian ; but
this other great kind of love, this greatest of all kinds, he knows
nothing about.

But I will suppose the minister has had his personal experience
of Christ — his regeneration, in fact, by the Holy Ghost — that to
begin with ; and that his experience of salvation is daily renewed
within him, so that therefore, love to men is at last natural to him.
Then next all along by study and meditation on the subject, he may
enlarge his conception of man, of his rank among created things, of
his very great dimensions, of his indefinite capacity for personal
expansion, his ability to suffer and to enjoy, his eternal inability to
go out of existence, the enormous ransom that has been paid down
for him, his salvability to the uttermost, under the terms of that
ransom, his present uncleanness and his possible holiness ; his
present spiritual debility and inaptitude and his possible vigor ; his
present weariness and disrelish and frequent despair in all moral
action and his possible spontaneity therein ; his present dreadful
selfishness towards his fellows and his possible concord and affection
towards them ; his present profound affiliation with the kingdom of
evil and his possible affiliation with the kingdom of God — and when
the minister in these ways of meditation has reached an ample idea
of man, an irresistible loving concern for him springs up in his soul ;
and in all he does as preacher or pastor, he is made ardent, ener-
getic and positively supernatural — while in this exalted passion, it is
all but impossible for him to think of such a matter as his own salary
and the size of his congregation, and the location of his parish, and
the small power of his own oratory and the swarm of little dejections
that fill the air like summer gnats and try to make an unhappy,
complaining, tormented creature of him. They simply cannot do it.

It is related of many Christian martyrs, how they literally did
not feel the fires that burned them up. I suppose there is good
physiology for that and good psychology. And our martyrdoms in
third-rate parishes, our personal exposure to able-bodied deacons

368 YALE LECTURES.

and others, our conscious lack of natural gifts, our lack, perhaps, of
educational gifts, our unoratorical way of speaking, (the best we can
do, but nothing to boast of) , our curious capacity, it may be, to
throw a coldness over the meeting when we go about in society,
(one would need to write a volume to rehearse all the inadequa-
cies of our tribe ; their real inadequacies, their imputed and alleged
inadequacies and that still larger class of inadequacies which are
neither real nor imputed, but are imagined by ourselves on the Mon-
days of each week ;) concerning the whole multitude of these, as
the martyrs mentioned were sublimed by the cause they died for, in
such wise that they did not know their hurts ; so our devotion to the
ends of the ministry, our love for those for whom Jesus died, will
at least minimize the disadvantages whereunto we maybe appointed,
and lead us to thank God every day that he was willing to put us
into the service of his Son.

Now, my dear young men, I want to stop here, on this whole-
some high upland which we have reached after some climbing ;
but for the sake of a complete statement, I will take you down to a
low place and say unto you, that a minister truly devoted to the
high ends of his calling, as just now explained, will be likely to have
all the temporal furtherances he really needs, all the admiration he
can stand, and calls from parishes loud enough, as likely as not, to
imperil his soul. Amen.

LEGITIMATE ELEMENTS OF
VARIETY IN CHURCH SERVICE.

I pass to-day to a consideration of the legitimate elements of
variety in the public services of the Church.

And when I say, legitimate elements, I intend in some wise a
slant at the elements illegitimate that have been known to slip in,
on a call from itching ears and itching eyes and that general itch of
the mind, which a certain very reputable writer hit off and made
immortal, when he said, "All the Athenians and strangers which
were there, spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or
to hear some new thing." Modern life is much more diversi-
fied and complex than life in the old time was. There are more
books to read, more theatres, operas, concerts, circuses, menag-
eries and side-shows to attend ; more expansiveness, multiformity,
glitter, gorgeousness and dizziness of social life ; swarms of re-
formatory movements, from the salvation of drunkards and street
Arabs, to the betterment of the dress of women ; more clubs, guilds,
and conspiracies ; more new-born ologies to investigate and be able
to pass an examination upon — all these spicy inventions have to be
supported and continually replenished with fresh victims. And at
the top of everything, stands that admirable modern monster, the
daily newspaper, to see that nobody goes to sleep in this miscella-
neous business of living and taking in all these varieties and inter-
esting phenomena, which are massed in the ample spaces of the first-
class journal ; massed, described, spun out, ornamented and some-
times illustrated with wood-cuts, so that even children cry for them ;
and by the time Sunday comes and these rather jaded and sometimes
blase multitudes of people who have been thus profusely entertained
during the week, are assembled in the Sanctuary to have their souls

370 YALE LECTURES.

saved ; I tell you, they know a dull service from one stirring ; they
want you to put on all your steam and blow your whistle in every
conceivable pitch. What they most delight in, is to have you tell
them in their Saturday's newspaper exactly what your entertainment
is to be ; the subject of the sermon, the musical programme, the
particular singers on duty for that day, who the preacher is and all
about it. A manful resistance to this pressure is kept up by
numerous old fogies — a considerably despised and useful class ; and
by force of them, aided to some extent by the better parts of the
Athenians themselves, who like a wide-awake life for six days, but
do not object to a comparatively peaceful harbor on the seventh ;
by the combination of all possible forces 1 say, the house of God is
preserved in a good degree of sanctity in many places ; the ancient
approved services go on for substance ; and only such departures
from old-fashioned ways are permitted, as God will wink at, pre-
sumably, in view of the hardness of our hearts and the weakness of
our frame and the beggarly elements whereof we are composed in
both soul and body. But it is not as it was, when the New England
ministers could preach an hour and then preach another hour;
and could even pray an hour and on particular occasions make a
service six hours long, with never a particle of sensational material
in it all, nor one word put in for mere entertainment's sake, from
beginning to end, nor a single thing done to ease the strain of strict
attention, or to comfort the stationary and fixed mortal bodies of
those fine old Puritans. Those days are gone. Somehow they have
left us. And now men lecture on the legitimate elements of variety
in the public services of the Church, as though the Athenian great-
grandsons of those same iron-built fathers must be humored in their
desire for varied — not to say variegated — exercises in the Sanctuary.
My brethren, I am not going to surrender anything important
to this outcry for ease and entertainment in the house and worship
of God, but I will indicate certain points where it is not impossible
to introduce that diversity which even the most sanctified souls do
really enjoy ; and more than that, turn it to good spiritual account.
Let it be granted that in certain great staples, public worship is to be
the same, unchangeable forever ; as, that it is to be made up of prayer,
praise musically expressed, Scriptural readings, preaching and the
several ordinances which the Scriptures make binding on us ; and
that these solid terms and details of any and every service are to be
strung along in an outline order, which must be approximately the

YALE LECTURES. 371

same for all time ; let so much as that be conceded (as it will be by
people who think the subject out) ; and then the several easements
that may be let in for soul and body, are something like the fol-
lowing.

First, as our bodies naturally abhor a fixed posture if it is too
long continued, and as a body full of abhorrence can greatly discom-
pose the man in it and spoil his worship, it is best that our services
should call for quite a little change of posture as they move on. If
a service is properly organized, it will require diversified bodily
movements. There is a congregation of sensible people, for whom
I have sometimes officiated, that unanimously keep to their seats
and rise not at all, until the singing of the last hymn ; and they do
not rise then on any feeling that God's praise should not be sung
down-sitting, rather than in a posture of special reverence ; for if
any such feeling was in them they would rise at the several times
when his praise is sung in the earlier parts of the hour — no, they
rise, partly because it seems about time so to do, and partly because
once up, they are already to march out and lose no time, so soon
as the benediction, which immediately follows the hymn, is spoken.
Now that people are continually violating one of the solemn proprie-
ties of God's house — inconsiderately of course, for they are a rever-
ent people. They bow their heads in prayer. That address to God
they take some sense of. , Why then, do they not sense it when they
move out towards God in song and make some bodily testimony
corresponding, and thereby take some of the physical tediousness
out of their service ?

I have been in assemblies, a very few, where, when I said,
"Let us pray," scarcely any one went down at all. There they sat,
as stiff-set as though head-bowing might lead on to some formalism.
They were good enough people, most of them, but they had not
given attention to the very axioms of right action before God.
Posture is nothing and piety is everything, I presume they would
say, if being challenged on the subject, they had the pluck to say
anything.

When the officiating clergyman in the Protestant Episcopal
Service, begins, "Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture movethus,"
and so forth, the dearly beloved brethren in question get upon their
feet to hear what he may have to say ; and they do it because it is
more decent to stand when you are addressed by a person in a
formal way ; and they ought therefore to stand through the sermon,

372 YALE LECTURES.

if it were practicable. I have never carefully examined the printed
services of the great liturgical bodies, to see whether every bodily
change therein required is founded on the nature of the particular
act performed at each change, but I presume it is. Those liturgical
Christians, taken all together, have made some study of such things
and their worshipful practices are apt, to that extent, to be rationally
grounded. The minister kneels in the prayers for the same reason
that the congregation do ; because he then comes into the presence
of God and speaks to him ; but in the Absolution he stands and
they remain kneeling, because he is then God's spokesman to them
and God's gift-bringer, while they are recipients from God, through
him.

This matter is full of detail, but the main thing I am after in
referring to it at all, is to bring out before you one particular where-
in the public service may have some elasticity and not amount to a
bodily imprisonment, especially to young children. When you sing,
stand up, or do something to show that you know you have come
to another turn in the ongo of the worship. When the prayer has
been reached, bow down, or else stand up, as our fathers did — either
way is Scriptural, at least do something. When you receive the
benediction, bow your head, unless you are so stiff a congregationalist
and so afraid of admitting the priesthood of the ministry, that you
cannot conscientiously take an attitude which says that something
did really come from God to you through that speaking man's —
"The Lord bless you" — floating down from the pulpit. When the
choir are singing their piece, you must settle for yourself what you
had better do then. Theoretically they are praising God, very
likely speaking for you in the matter, because you have never
learned the fine, etherial language they are using, in order to speak
for yourself; and therefore, it would seem you ought to stand up,
just as you bow in prayer with the minister when he theoretically
voices your prayer for you. And by these several corporeal flexi-
bilities, you shall not merely adjust yourself to the varying realities
and the obvious decorums of the occasion, but do something to
save yourself from a feeling of monotonousness in the church
worship.

Again, the minister can introduce certain reliefs, by cultivating
a reasonable variety in the tones of his voice and a reasonable ver-
satility in his gestures, too, I may add. Perhaps you will feel that I
am detaining you on minimum particulars now, and I do not myself

YALE LECTURES. 373

suppose that tones and gestures in a preacher are so momentous
as piety. A man cannot get into heaven by the lift of his own ora-
tory, so fast as he can by the lift of his own piety. Still when he
comes to the tug of lifting others into that bright haven, the awful
fact is, that voice and a few apparently small things of that sort, are
among the maxima of personal influence. It is one of the unescap-
able disadvantages of preachers as compared with all other orators,
that their subjects of discourse, being uniformly grave ones, and not
unfrequently even terrible subjects, tend towards and almost compel
solemn vocal tones, and also easily carry a man into cadenced tones,
otherwise called "sing-song." That mellifluous embroidering of
grave tones which our church organists practice, we preachers can-
not emulate, for we use an organ of only one pipe — though a pipe
of much range — and then, if the truth must be told, ministers are
more serious men than organists, on the average, and before God do
not dare put even their one pipe through all its possible variations,
when they preach. However, we must shun monotony. Other
things being equal, that will at least double the length of our pas-
torate. I have been in this evil world longer than you have, young
men, and that is one of the things I have discovered.

As to monotonous gestures, those appear only on those men
who have given careful attention and a good deal of practice to
delivery. Probably they have been in the hands of some teacher of
oratory, have learned rules of gesture and have studiously made
gestures in private. I heard a minister of some name and some pith,
repeat, memoriter, a thoroughly elaborated, doctrinal sermon, an
hour long ; and knowing his memoriter habit, I expected to notice
that he said the same words that he did before • but I declare unto
you, he made the same gestures all through — for, all the principal
gestures, the absolutely killing ones, I could definitely recollect.
They were good and they came in all along at exactly the same
points as on the first occasion. You might say, if they were at the
right points on the first occasion, why should they be changed to the
wrong points on the second for the sake of variety ; and perhaps I
could not answer you, but T could suggest and I would suggest, that
a certain effect of monotony cannot be escaped if preachers are
going to cut-and-dry things in that manner. Cutting-and-drying,
when carried beyond a certain line, becomes what is known as
mannerism ; and did you ever know anybody who liked mannerism,
when he really took a full sense of the thing? Vary your voices

374 YALE LECTURES.

then, gentlemen, so much as circumstances will permit, and when
you come to giving us gestures, let us have a diversiform assort-
ment. Let up on your solemnity a bit, for the time being, if you
cannot make your voice flexile otherwise ; and give us a change
from gestures, even in the form of non-gesturing for a space, so
that we may the more relish your prepared, proper and infallible
gestures, when you get back to them.

Thirdly, do not make your services monotonous in and by
your strong push for unity in the service. I spoke to some of you
here two years ago, of a Communion service I had attended just
before, wherein the able and well-known man who conducted it,
came near being the death of us, because in his Invocation at the
start, he took us straight to the Holy table and to the centermost
and most heart-moving realities of it ; and then in his choice of the
hymn immediately following, did the same thing ; and then read an
intense Scripture in the same line and then prayed at length, on the
same subject, mostly ; and preached on it three quarters of an hour
and then called us to sing one of the fervid, good hymns on the
Passion of the Lord ; and finally invited the meagre remainders of
our feeling to warm up to what was really the focus of the occasion ;
though as you see, that focus had been by him carried back out of
its place to the opening act of the service — the Invocation — and
from that had been kept moving along down through all the details
of the worship, a perpetually present and traveling thing. The man
or woman in the pew, who had moved through the foregoing parts
of the exercises that day with only a languid enlistment of his or her
feeling — or possibly with no enlistment at all — could accept that
invitation to warm up when the table was at last reached ; but I,
who had been fool enough to start off with the minister in his Invo-
cation and warm up there and be as over-quick as he was ; and
thereafter had kept warmed up every time he asked me to ; I, be it
said had come to the end of my responsiveness ; and what he did
at the blessed table was of comparatively no account to me. I
was as empty as a last year's nest. I had been privileged to be
present and assist at a magnificent instance of unity, but it was
one of those cases referred to by the late Duke of Wellington,
where a victory is worse than a defeat.

Brethren, unity is not incompatible with variety. I have care-
fully counted the separate and different particulars of that Sunday
morning's transaction ; and I find there were eleven of them, if not

YALE LECTURES. 375

twelve — enough, in conscience, to have secured the most ample
diversity. And the way to secure it, was to make the seven partic-
ulars that antedated the administration of the Supper, just range the
utmost permissible limits of the inner circles of the Christian religion.
There was no need to go out of sight of Calvary and the Cross.
No ; it was necessary on that occasion to keep near to it in hymn,
prayer, Bible lesson and sermon ; but if the minister had made his
Invocation (that which Invocations always should be), an asking of
God's blessing on that Service then begun, (that and nothing more)
and the hymn following, a magnification of the Lord's day ; and the
Scriptural lesson a history of the origin of the Jewish passover (that
for example) , and the succeeding long prayer, as rangey a thing as
prayer ever has the conscience to be ; and the sermon a root dis-
cussion of self-sacrifice, from the text — "Verily, verily, I say unto
you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth
alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit," — if these had been
the preliminaries, would they not have been in perfect unity with
the ceremony to follow ; and yet would any decent man have had
the least sense of being tired on account of monotony ?

So at a funeral, if that happens which I have sometimes known
to happen, that three prayers are offered by two or three ministers,
at the house and at the grave-side, and that in those successive
prayers, all those especially bereaved are photographed in outline
and commended to God three times over ; to be sure unity is
secured, but it is the wearisome unity of a monotone, whereas, in
all Christian services, the only right unity is that which you see in a
good picture, where there are never-so-many elements, or forms of
material present ; human figures, hills and valleys, trees, breadths of
haze, lights, sky-lines and what not ; but all are victoriously reduced
to the oneness of an absolute composition, by that unifying genius
which no man can analyze and tell how it does what it does, but in
which man is the image of the God who made him, as wonderfully
as at any other point of his mental organism, save only his moral
attributes and the workings thereof. The organization of a service,
then, so that while it may be very plural in its details and full of
variety, it shall be a solid unity, is a work of art, a real composition,
and it needs some thought and care. Still further, the result to be
secured is such a choice one and in such a choice field, that it is
worth some attention. It requires some attention, and some atten-
tion not only to compose and unify the legitimate elements of variety

376 YALE LECTURES.

in God's worship, but to eliminate all spurious elements, sensation-
alism, vain-glorious music, eloquent prayers, rituals that are the
product of one local minister's brain, unsaturated by the liturgical
wisdom of the ages ; in short, all the spawn of the spurious.

Fourthly, a word as to variety in sermons. How shall sermon-
izers be various and so not tire their audiences? Shall they go
outside of Christianity and outside of the Bible for fresh and taking
topics ; topics that men are immersed in at the moment and are
therefore likely to give their attention to if their minister takes them
up — such as the election, the murder, the strike of laborers, the great
defalcation, the last scientific or other book? No — Christianity is
fertile enough in topics, if you only find them. If you want to
allude to the murder and the defalcation and the book, as illustrating
or as clinching some Christian thing about which you are talking,
very, well ; but do not make the body of your discourse of secular
material and stuff.

But just as energetically as I say, do not go outside of Chris-
tianity— in a large interpretation of that word Christianity — do I
add : be careful, while you are observing those true and obvious
limits, be careful not to make your Christian sermon itself dull, by
too exclusive preaching on a small assortment of truths. You have
heard it said of some men, that they have only about one sermon.
They preach from a good many texts and on a good many subjects,
but they always preach the same sermon. All roads lead to Rome ;
and these preachers in all their themes bring up at their dear Rome
presently. At a certain Yale commencement, as much as thirty
years ago, the annual concio ad clerum was preached by the Rev.
George Perkins, and his subject had been given him a year before-
hand by the General Association of Connecticut, and it was Chris-
tian Sanctification. Perkins was a strong man and an excellent and
successful parish minister, and a redoubtable, much-speaking anti-
slavery man. We all knew what he would most want to discuss in
that concio of his, but, said we, " he is tied up for once ; Christian
Sanctification is his subject, unanimously voted to him and there he
is." Perkins was as able to discuss Sanctification as the next man,
he was considerably sanctified himself; but when we flocked into
yonder Church on The Green, to hear him, he gave us for his first
sentence, these words : — " The greatest hindrance to sanctification
in this country, is Slavery ;" and from that he went on to give us
one of his plain-spoken, rousing and good anti-slavery speeches. I

YALE LECTURES. 377

am not here to say whether he did right or wrong, but I want to
caution you against habitually having one discourse, whatever your
subject may be, or at most but half a dozen discourses ; better have
more. We all know that Christianity has her major truths and her
minor truths ; and that majors may go into sermons oftener than
minors ; and that some majors are so immensely major (the majors
of the majors), that tones from them — tones direct or tones far-away
and faint — may reasonably be heard in a good part of our public
utterances ; but to say, as some men have been known to, that we
will never preach a sermon from which a man listening might not
learn the way of salvation and be saved then and there, if he never
heard a sermon before, is to limit one's self and cut off one's variety
and provide for our being tiresome over much.

Also, why should every sermon that we preach be constructed
in one and the same way, as so many heads and two applications,
one to saints and one to sinners ; why not make lots of sermons with
no heads and no applications, like a poem ? The highest kind of
poem never has heads, much less thrusts them forth and calls the
world to make a note of them. It has a skeleton and points of
juncture and articulation in the skeleton, but all that is concealed, not
in any guile, or even with intention, any more than a born infant is
deliberately planned and plotted to conceal that frame work which he
undoubtedly has. A born sermon never advertises its joints, first,
second, third and fourth and so on ; though a very important class
of sermons reasonably may and often do and even perhaps must \
I refer to such as are formulated by the formulative intellect, being
manufactured rather than born and designed to instruct rather
than magnetize.

Again, why should a preacher be habitually didactic, or habit-
ually expository, or habitually hortatory, or habitually argumentative,
or habitually pathetic and think he has failed if somewhere in his
discourse he has not visibly wept, or let a tremulo into his voice.
There is enough to weep about, more than enough, and a preacher
had better let himself do it sometime before he dies, and perhaps
several times, but why found his reputation on that and be monoto-
nous about it. There is nothing more tedious than tears, if they
are let on too frequently. "This is a poor community to cry in,"
said one of my deacons one day, when we were querying whether
to call in a certain emotional evangelist. "This is a very poor
community to cry in."
25

378 YALE LECTURES.

And it is a poor community to do any one thing in monoto-
nously. All sorts of sermons are open to us to preach. And let us
preach them. Sometimes we may take the modern newspaper
article for our model and be short, direct and business-like, letting
exordiums and perorations, heads and applications, appeal and
hortations and all that kind of valuable machinery go. Sometimes,
however, we may put all the machinery in ; and speak an hour per-
haps in order to get it in. Sometimes we may wrestle on a subject
till we exhaust it, but more often we had better take a lesser task
and treat just an interesting corner only of the subject, getting
through in twenty minutes, if we have good luck. Why be monot-
onous, I say again. Why have certain doctrines that you dearly
love and build up your experience on ; and then feel like a fish out
of water, if you are not speaking on those. You are a Calvinist, I
will suppose. As likely as not you are an Arminian, (Arminians are
pretty thick, the Methodists being responsible for making a swarm
of them) ; but I will suppose that you are a Calvinist. So you will
preach Calvinism. All right, do it ; but the items of agreement
between you and Arminius are more than your items of disagree-
ment ; therefore, why not multifold your preaching and ease your
hearers, by going over among those items frequently ? Not merely
would you thus give comfort as not seeming to them monotonous,
and amaze your congregation by your versatility as a man of mind,
but when you got back from your excursion among those neutral
items and began to enforce your Calvinism once again on the peo-
ple, you would find that you were impressing them decidedly more
than would have been possible, had you stood by your Calvinistic
specialties straight along and fed them out to your sheep, unmiti-
gated and undiversified by perhaps less condensed food. We have
learned in physiology, that our nutriment should not be in the
quintessence form always, but should be ameliorated by admixtures
of lesser value and even by a certain ratio of what might be called
trash material, that is, that cannot be assimilated but must go for
waste ; and yet meanwhile may serve some mechanical, or other use
in the processes of our systems.

Before I leave this subject of diverse sermonizing, among the
rules for securing it, such as various reading and all kinds of contact
with human life as it is and with Nature and with Art, I would like
to mention prominently and in fact put before everything else, the
rule that you must have contact at all points, contact at all points

YALE LECTURES. 379

rather than a few, with that world of multifarious material massed in
the Bible. At first, it would seem as though all ministers inevitably
would have this contact with the entire contents of the Book ; but
it is not so. The undeniable presence in the world of monotonous
preaching proves that. Men could not be monotonous if they had
possessed themselves of the universality of this volume, that is if
they had drawn their topics from all parts of it, enforcing upon
themselves some sort of system in the matter, instead of going into
the book hap-hazard when they wanted a sermon, after the fashion
of the grab-bag. Grab-bag selection exposes us to the peril of
preaching our whole life through, without using at all some of the
material that the Bible has waiting for us. That is why I took it
upon me last year when I was here, to speak some kind words about
that round-and-round of contemplations, prayers, services and ser-
mons established and made sure by the Christian Year, that device
of the liturgical communions of the world. I said then, and I say
now, that I do not hold that up as a divinely ordained curriculum
at all ; I do not even say it is the best one ; but I insist that some
cycle or system is necessary, if ministers are going to be made
certain to preach on all proper and good pulpit themes, and preach
on them with a duly distributed emphasis on each theme. Let a
preacher provide his own curriculum, if he does not entirely relish
one drawn out by the church at large. I am sure however, if some-
how he could be induced to let the godly wisdom of somebody
besides himself be called in, it would plainly appear in the result,
that the godly wisdom of ages on ages, and millions on millions of
men — hosts of whom were exceedingly well-furnished men — adds
up larger, as a rule, than one man's single, solitary and lonesome
wisdom. But no matter about that, if only he will start out to have
his weekly choice of pulpit subjects regulated in the main by a
deliberately chosen and previously-established order, even if it
must be that nobody but himself deliberately choose and establish
it, let him move by a doctrinal order if that suits ; engaging with
himself to make the circuit of all Christian doctrine in the course
of twelve months or two years say, using his Sunday mornings for it,
and leaving his second sermon, each Sunday, to be given up to
more miscellaneous and disorderly discoursings. Let him take his
liberty, I repeat, as to the particular order he will obey ; taking care
simply that his pet order be formulated on a Biblical basis and
therefore includes all preachable things ; each preachable thing

380 YALE LECTURES.

being magnified by him, or only moderately magnified, according
as it is moderately magnified or not in Holy Writ itself.

You understand, brethren, I am harping as I do on a system-
atized flow of subjects, with only one thought in my mind, although
movement by system has numbers of advantages — only one thought,
namely : that if you go by some preconsidered and thoughtfully
prepared cycle, in your preaching, you are likely to be a man of
variety and so far fascinating and not dull. Your cycle, of course,
whatever form it takes, must rest on the Bible as a whole and not
on the Bible in spots ; therefore your multiformity as a preacher
will correspond to the almost illimitable multiformity of the Bible
itself. So much as to sermons.

Fifthly, let us look at prayers. And there I touch more diffi-
cult ground. You cannot limber your voice much in prayers and
secure variety in that way, and you certainly cannot make many
gestures ; and it is preordained in the nature of things, that prayer
shall have certain fixed features, such as confession, supplication,
intercession and thanksgiving; and besides, if you undertake to
make yourself too interesting in prayer, by an ever-changing way
of treating confession, supplication, intercession and thanksgiving,
you are kept on such a keen intellectual and rhetorical jump that
neither you nor your congregation can really pray. As intellectu-
alists and rhetoricians you may have a very fine time indeed and be
something worth going to, but as petitioners before God, you are a
failure and a public nuisance. So then, as regards prayer many are
led to say : Let the prayers of the Church be written out and
prescribed ; let us have just that uniformity and run the risk of the
tedium of repetitioners — so much risk as there actually is ; which
is not much. But others, while they admit the comparatively nar-
row range for versatility in prayer to which we are confined, proceed
to add : But within that range, we can legitimately do some things
to escape the drone of sameness ; for instance, we need not make
a distinct effort to get into the same phraseologies every Sunday ;
we may avail ourselves of so much diversity of diction as is natural
to us ; and again, we may be pastorly in our hearts, so that when we
are presenting to God the case of our people, we slip easily and
sweetly in to a good deal of minuteness and have the advantage of
the endless variety of minuteness ; moreover, if the minister is as
religious as he ought to be and when he prays, moves in on God
by the Holy Ghost and not by his own impulse, he will always

YALE LECTURES. 381

seem fresh, diversified and satisfactory, whether he touches custom-
ary points or uncustomary, and whether his vocabulary is new every
Sunday or no ; and one of the great advantages of extemporized
prayer (they add), comes in there ; prayer in its ideal, as carrying
us into the presence of the Most High God and enforcing upon us
therefore, particularly, a high-type utterance, is such a total impos-
sibility for mortal man, that perforce he is thrown upon the aid of
the Holy Ghost, and once brought to that, it is not possible, as was
said, that he should be monotonous and uninteresting. There may
be a good share of sameness in him from Sunday to Sunday, his
bump of language may be small and his natural bump for ideas
may be small, but an inspired man's small bump is better than the
powerful bump of a man uninspired just as Mr. Moody's ignorance,
which he once said he had consecrated to God, is more of a force
for all the practical purposes of the Kingdom of God, than tons of
unconsecrated learning.

Thus runs the talk, pro and con. And in the midst of it we
must accept the denominational position and pulpit and liturgical
usage wherein God seems to place us, and do the best we can. My
own experience of public prayer is hardly worth referring to, except
perhaps as a warning ; but with my tendency to amplification, not
to say inflation, and considering, on the other hand, the insatiable
desire for brevity which distinguishes the modern congregation, I
have concluded at last to be satisfied if I can get into each prayer
some of the essential objective and other elements of prayer. In
respect of the proper spirit in prayer, we assuredly should not be
satisfied unless that is in always and every time ; but as respects
everything else, we should not be too hard upon ourselves. I know
it is a fallacy to say that the Publican's prayer — " Lord be merciful
to me a sinner ;" and the prayer of the crucified malefactor, "Lord
remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom ;" and the prayer
of Peter sinking in the waters of Galilee, "Lord save me" — I know
it is a fallacy to mention these and like instances, as legitimating
the omission from public prayer of the larger part of the elements
of prayer full and complete ; but it is a comfort to think of these
instances, nevertheless. The thief on the cross had not time to go
through the entire service of the Book of Common Prayer and
close with a recessional hymn • neither had Peter. They were both
in an emergency. But not much more of an emergency than a
modern, extempore minister is in, leading the prayers of a congre-

382 YALE LECTURES.

gation with the remorseless church clock ticking in front of him and
the modern man in the pew, with watch in hand timing his progress.
The moral pressure on him to get through is strong, knowing as he
does that if moral pressure fails on him and he keeps on being
lengthy from year to year, by and by physical pressure will take
the field and carry him off out of that parish. I feel then, for
myself, that all I can engage to do, as regards completeness of
prayer made interesting and profitable by due versatility, is to do
the best I can. And angels could do no more. I will aim at a
prayerful spirit. I will aim to be tolerably brief. And as to things
further, I will take my chance ; using what intellect, taste, power
of expression, pastorly thoughtfulness, Biblical scope and so on,
I happen to have at the moment and throwing myself on the chari-
table consideration of the assembly, be it more or be it less. It is
one of the stock remarks of the liturgists though, that all such
well-meaning clergymen, however inspired, do at last have ruts
in which they move, though not conscious of it always. All I
can say is, I hope this is a slander. Some of the extemporizing
ministers reply that they know it is. And there I leave the case.

Sixthly, how shall we escape sameness in the administration of
ordinances and in the management of ceremonial occasions that are
not ordinances ? I think I notice a growing disposition all around
not to escape sameness in these matters, but to let it in and love it
and deal it out to the people and make them likewise love it.
Most of the young and old couples now-a-days, in the regions where
I live at any rate, when they come to the solemnities of wedlock,
desire to be married in the use of some determinate office or ritual
that a good many other couples have used safely and successfully.
Whether it is that they distrust the faculties of the clergy, or that
formalism is on the increase, or that a wedding has come to be
thought more of an occasion than it used to be, or that in the
alarming increase of divorce there is a corresponding instinctive
desire to forestall divorce by the introduction of more nuptial pomp,
impression and nail-fast ceremony, I know not ; but the drift is all
one way. And I like to humor it. I like it for the parties concerned
and I like it for myself. It comforts my ceremonial consciousness,
(whatever that may mean), to do just as those couples say. So
far as variety is concerned, every wedding is such a fresh thing,
in its own self and essentially, that no repetitiousness of ritual can
tame it down, I find. A Sunday's service may be humdrum by the

YALE LECTURES. 383

operation of various causes ; but a wedding never. Every bride is
a new instance of beauty and sweet expectancy ; every bridegroom
is more captivating than he ever was before. Every wedding march
that the sympathetic organ careers through seems as good as new ;
and then there are the flowers and the people and the girl's father
and mother, with their hearts full of crying and laughing both ;
while all other hearts all around-about are sympathetically in much
the same predicament ; and now if, when the rejoicing organ stops
and the people hush down, the minister lifts up his voice and speaks
forth an order of words wherein you can hear a sound of all genera-
tions and can feel the touch of innumerable like gracious occasions,
do you suppose that it necessarily quenches that wedding ? I never
found it so. It lies in the very nature of ceremony to be repetitious ;
to follow well-known, oft-repeated lines of action and utterance. It
is not possible to get any ceremoniousness at all in, on the principle
of helter-skelter. Some extreme persons, in order to forestall
formalism and vain-gloriousness, would just deify helter-skelter and
have that for the one embellishment of what are called occasions ;
for instance, making all weddings different from all others ; and
administering even the Sacraments of the Church in at least so
much free-and-easiness that the congregation cannot tell quite what
is coming.

Well, speaking of ordinances, it is inevitable that there should
be a large constant or unchangeable element in them all. That, at
any rate. To begin low down and take a perfectly safe position, I
should say that in every infant baptism there must be an infant.
There is no chance for variety and originality and helter-skelter
there. And there must be some responsible person, or persons, to
present the infant. And there must be water, more or less. And
a certain uniform, unchangeable act must be performed ; in which
act certain ideas are involved always — which essential ideas it is
customary to express. Baptism is not an ever-fluctuating mere
show, but back of all the conventional or ritual drapery of it, there
lies an unchangeable core of reality ; a great core it is too, else bap-
tism could not keep up century after century.

And similarly, in the Lord's Supper there are essential things
which can never be changed, because they are essential. Helter-
skelter must keep away.

But these essentials of an ordinance being secured, God leaves
us to our freedom, only stipulating that in all our ceremonial

384 YALE LECTURES.

amplifications we keep in the line of the core-realities of the ordi-
nance and simply give those core-realities a more voluminous
expression, just as he insists that a seed, if it would not remain a
seed (as most likely it would not), shall unfold itself in infallible
conformity to the vital idea or type that is in it.

And now since I have spoken deprecatingly of picking out pul-
pit subjects from the Bible without any method, like children blindly
fingering in a grab-bag, I desire to be consistent and advise you :
First and most certainly, not to extemporize on the spot your ritual
additions to the core of God's ordinances, so that nobody can begin
to tell what is impending ; and secondly, if you do not think it best
to subject yourself verbatim to any ritual thus far devised by men
or churches not to manufacture your ritual in any grand desire for
originality or popular variety, but far otherwise with a reverent and
cultured desire to assimilate your ceremonial to those great outline
features of ceremonial, which characterize alike every liturgy ever
published by any branch of the church universal.

You observe, my brethren, that I am falling back again on my
feeling that any ceremonial occasion, because it is just that, a ceremo-
nial occasion and not something else, is entitled to a good measure of
stability of procedure and must have it if it is not to sink from a cere-
mony, or even a church ordinance, into I do not know what, — into a
thing of poor effect on all beholders and participants, at all events.

Finally, the only remaining forms of possible and decent variety
in church sevices, that I need to mention, are, a wide selection of
Scriptural lessons ; a similar wide selection of hymns to be sung ; and
a reasonable use of what may be called special services ; praise
meetings. — anniversaries — services of benevolence or reform — com-
memorative meetings and others.

Some ministers are extremely conservative in regard to these
last. You cannot get into their church buildings with your mass
meetings in furtherance of this and that. They uphold the regular,
orderly worship of the church, they say. Our Protestant Episcopal
brethren are rather careful on that point. Others are ready to let
in almost anything that promises any good to man — to his body or
his soul — or to any of his interests. Secular lectures may come in ■
and political assemblies may come in, if only they have some show
of moral intentions ; and town fairs, educational conventions, con-
ventions to get women their rights — yes, the innumerable ferment
of this practical, man-loving ninteenth century may come in.

YALE LECTURES. 385

I think that when these things come along naturally — the best
of them — they may be accepted as a good thing enough in the
sanctuary, especially if the place where we live has no public-hall ;
but I would not artificially get up occasions for the one purpose of
variety, that people may get their religion in unusual and perhaps
partially disguised forms. I do not argue the matter, but leave it
there.

The selection of Scriptures and hymns is more important to be
attended to ; but I have already laid down the principles that should
govern that. Half the time, when I exchange pulpits with a brother
minister, I find when I get home that he has given out to my people
some hymn that I never did. I look that hymn over and get some
one to play or sing to me the tune to which it is set in our church
book and I find probably that it is as good as many hymns which I
have given out. Thereupon I reflect afresh on my own limitations
and wonder why I am not more all-ranging than I am. I tell you,
brethren, we all need watching lest we grow narrow and set and
therefore stupid, in our preferences and tastes. A private man may
grow stupid if he wants to, but a minister must not, because if he
does, this stupidity of his is the measure and limit of the opportu-
nities of a whole congregation. They have to sing his narrowly-
selected few hymns. And they have to hear, mark, learn and
inwardly digest his ever-recurring little round of Scriptural read-
ings ; the copious, round-about, all-sided, mighty Word and Book
of God, being scrimped to the dimensions of his individuality and
not suffered to speak with more than half its voices. I consider an
established lectionary as an almost necessary thing in all churches.
Let alone in this presence — this strong congregational presence —
the question who shall establish the lectionary ; there ought to be
one. The Congregational Conference in this State of Connecticut
ought to issue one for our state ministers to look at. They need
not worship it — that would be uncongregational — but they could
look at it and offer themselves to be enticed by it ; and the beauty
of it is, they could use it and their peoples know it not. Perhaps
the greatest difficulty in the way of such a movement is, that so
many of our ministers are under the impression that the sermon
they have in the pulpit with them, must determine the lesson that
shall be read that day. Unity of impression requires that, they
fancy ; whereas it would be an aid to impression if they did not
make the lessons, the hymns and all the prayers, revolve around

386 YALE LECTURES.

that one manuscript, even as it would have been an aid to every
interest involved if that minister who made everything revolve
around the communion service, as I explained to you, had diversified
the occasion more.

But why do not we all use the well-considered and wide-sweep-
ing lectionary of the Protestant Episcopal Church ? Because that
scheme of Lessons is grounded on the Christian Year — an invention
which we all respect as a well-intentioned effort to provide an ample
and thoroughly Christian cultus, but which for historical and other
reasons many of us have not adopted and perhaps never shall. So
then, we had better begin to make a lesson-order of our own and
see how we come out. If we come out as well as the Episcopalians
have and furnish for ourselves a round of readings, wherein all parts
of the Bible are honored, we need not be ashamed, whatever prin-
ciple of selection we adopt. But I want something. I want it for
myself. I want to see my Brethren in it. I want to have you
young ministers put through that orderly march and to see you
absorb the insensible culture of it and become Catholic in your
taste and Biblical, rather than denominational in your theology, fat
with the fatness of many foods rather than lean and grim through
feeding on this or that special food.

For the man who has established his lectionary, by the logic of
the case has therein established the course of his sermonizing also ;
or what is the same thing, the course of his thinking ; the shape
therefore of his entire religious development.

I leave these freely-spoken thoughts with you, dear brethren, to
sift, expurgate, chew upon and charge against me, if need be.

ROUTINE: ITS PERILS AND ITS
VALUES.

At first I looked for a better word than routine to describe
what I am after; for so many people and ministers have come
under the supreme influence of the Perils of Routine, that the term
itself has a meanish kind of savor, and it makes one draw a tired,
long breath, just to hear the sound of it. But I found it was the
best I could do, all things considered, and so I move out and forth
under the burden of it. However, in its use I shall refer simply to
a fixed round-and-round. It does not hurt the planets to go round
and round, neither does it hurt the Maker of the planets to have
them do it ; and it seems to be proven, therefore, at the very begin-
ning, that routine is not necessarily bad. It is bad or not, just
according to the creature that is in the round-and-round. The
right kind of a man or minister finds it beautiful, is as happy in it
as the stars in their courses, and as much helped along.

I wish, friends, you would consider this gigantic, multiplex,
eternal, circularity over our heads here in the sky, and all about,
and let it prepossess you a little in favor of Routine. It is a curious
and fascinating circumstance that God has builded his universe to
go in ever-repeated circles so much. On the face of it, it looks as
though the curve had something in it essentially delightful to his
mind ; and that the countless whirl of things along their curved
paths in such a wide immensity and in such perilous-looking, hair-
breadth ins-and-outs among themselves, were a most satisfactory
spectacle to his eyes, he being able, such is his boundless faculty, to
contemplate it in its magnificent entirety at a glance, rather than
pick it up in laborious piecemeal as our wretched little faculties do.

388 YALE LECTURES.

I know it would fairly intoxicate a man to look down on some good-
sized handiwork of his own like that and watch the interplay of the
thing, the junctures made by the many movements, and get the
perfect harmony and co-ordination all through : all set in cycles
also, and the eternal grace of cycles. I never heard that there was
any mechanical difficulty in setting up a universe on the rectangular
principle mainly, with its endless jerks on the feeling of all behold-
ers. Neither can I imagine that there would have been any mechani-
cal difficulty or any inability whatever, as respects the measure of
God's power, in fashioning and running a creation wherein the fact
of a thing's having occurred once — as the rising of the sun, or the
flood of the tide — would be sure proof that that same thing would
never occur again to all eternity. The inconvenience of such a
creation as that in the matter of laying our practical plans, and the
sense of insecurity and apprehension which it would shed abroad
in men's minds, would be something, evidently ; for example if I
agreed to lecture here at three o'clock, and on arriving here found
that the sun had not yet risen, and so far as heard from might not
rise for a week, or perhaps a year, or possibly never, having gone
off to the outposts of God's realm as though on some mysterious
lark — the inconvenience and anxiety, I say, of such an infinite
organization of desultoriness as that would have been painful ; but
such an organization would have been practicable, I take it, to a
being of infinite power. It would have only been universalizing
what is supposed to occur in the case of a miracle ; that unforsee-
able irruption among the fine old and much beloved uniformities of
Nature. But our God is no such a person as that. It is constitu-
tional with him to be a routinist considerably, and he has so made
us that it is both a pleasure and a necessity to be routinists too.
And this natural predisposition to circularity in the Maker of
all things, after it had embodied itself in great Nature and in the
structure of man, was sure to manifest itself in other fields of God's
activity. Therefore, in the only recorded instance where he has
definitely and minutely expressed his mind in regard to human
public worship of him ; he has assimilated the worship to the cycles
of the firmament — that first, as was naturally to be expected — then
next as could not so easily have been anticipated, he started rota-
tions of sevens ; seven days, seven years, seven times seven years ;
a whole miscellany of sevens round-and-round, thus giving an arti-
ficial sanctity to the number seven forever. The number three also

YALE LECTURES. 389

got in. And in every substantial respect, that old Jewish cultus
was methodical and repetitious to the last degree. When the priest
in the temple had done a thing, or a definite set and circuit of
things, he had to go over it all again, verbatim, and the priests
themselves had their turns and relays of service in a fixed math-
ematical order of hours and days. These orders, cycles, mystical
sevens and all the rest ; these holy and sweet routines, could be
converted into the numbness and tiresomeness of routine in an evil
sense ; and the Prophet Isaiah in his first chapter has opened him-
self out on that with a wholesome rage ; nevertheless, the God of
the orderly firmament took the responsibility of being orderly also
(orderly and repetitious) in the worship which he appointed, and if
men turn his good thing into an offence, on them be the curse.

I want to speak for a moment rather analytically on the special
risks of any round-and-round.

We are so made — and I am glad we are — that habitual action
— action in a much repeated circuit of action — tends to become
automatic ; and the bad feature of automatic action (on its religious
side) is that it tends to be unreflective, inattentive, mechanical,
formalistic, and does not sense what it is about. For example — an
automatic man — a man who has prayed to God innumerable times
and got dreadfully used to it so that he has only to start his prayer
and the prayer runs on, hums and drones of itself — that man does
not feel whose presence he is in, and whom he is speaking to. An
automatic minister converses with people about their souls, and
pretty much forgets all the while, the serious and tender realities
he is handling. An automatic ritualist travels through the sufficiently
excellent book of worship in his hand on any given Sunday, with
so little conscious impression on his dulled feeling as he passes
along that he comes to the end with only a hazy self-satisfaction as
having wound his way through an appointed opus operatum spell,
a deft sort of contrivance for blessing souls without their knowing
it; that as distinguished from a recollected, volitional, attent and
consciously receptive march from step to step of the service. And
the greatest suggestion that we non-liturgical people make against
printed rituals, is that they produce human automata too much ; the
very persons that Isaiah in his first chapter made his terrible stroke
at. That is what we say, but of course the automata referred to
are wide-awake enough yet to strike back.

An automatic theologian is a man who has a definite, limited

390 YALE LECTURES.

set of first-class doctrines, perhaps the sacred seven, perhaps the
partially sacred three or five, on which he has run his mind around
at the same gait three hundred thousand times ; until now if he
be started — whether by himself, by the nudge of an antagonist, or
by a sudden wind, he goes the same track without the ghost of a
volition in his own mind to help him along, but simply as an expert
plays a piano ; with no voluntary touch of this, that and the other
key, as is proven by the fact that at the same time he is playing,
this expert can carry on a conversation, or read a book, or absorb
himself in a game of chess. It is easy to see where his mind is.
It is on those other things. Therefore it is not on his playing.
That playing is done by his unconscious self; that artificial and
second self which has been created by diligent routine. Well, this
theologian referred to, this finely developed machine, as he does
not run by conscious intelligence, so he is not accessible to the
attacks of intelligence from the outside. You cannot upset his
theology. Neither can you modify it. Neither can you cause it to
expand from its own core, and be itself, yet bigger. That would
be contrary to the genius of iteration and automatism. Automatism
in man is parallel to instinct in animals. The animals are born
with their instincts, while men get up their automatism by force of
routine. But, once gotten up, it is instinct over again pretty much.
The little duck just out of his shell runs to the water infallibly. If
he were omniscient, he could not do it more surely. But that
duck is not omniscient. He is not even reasonable. Therefore
you cannot reason with him. He would remain a duck, even if
Jonathan Edwards took him in hand. Well, he ought to. But that
is not the reason that he does. No, he has no reason. I do
not complain of him. I only protest against his being called
intelligent.

Now, wherein does the theological automaton differ from the
duck? In some particulars no doubt. First of all, he was not
born so. God forbid. He originally selected his theology in the
exercise of more or less mind. Perhaps he reasoned on it a good
deal. Perhaps he took it by inheritance. Perhaps he was not
capable of real reasoning, but was capable of fumbling or trying to
reason and his theology is a resultant of his rumblings, taken in the
aggregate. But, whether in one way or another, he did secure his
theology, and then he began to convert himself into our automaton.
He ran his theological scheme through his mind over and over year

YALE LECTURES. 391

after year, with such sameness of argument, meditation and what
not, and with such inattention to all distracting side-lights and new
lights, that at last his whole nature (thus mysteriously are we made)
began to keep step to the tune of it, and now that nature of his is
like that cork leg, so famous in song ; it runs itself. Say, Predesti-
nation, and off it goes. Say, Free-Will ; Say, Irresistible Grace ;
say a dozen different things that I might mention, and it acts like a
hist-a-boy to that automaton. It winds him up and he buzzes till he
runs down. Or considering him as a duck, he blindly starts for the
water. What was not instinct in him at first, but a show of reason,
is pure instinct now. I do not say he should not take to water, or
to speak literally, that he ought not to hold to his theology ; but I
say he should not hold it automatically. He did not start it so.
He started his theology like a flexible human being. He thought —
more or less, as I have said before — he paused, he inquired, he
asked his neighbors perhaps, ,|he prayed about the matter, and a
thing that started in that way, why should it not be kept up in that
way ? If the way was good enough to begin with, it is good enough
to keep on with. He is older now than he was at first, and he has
more neighbors to ask, and more light has had time to break forth
out of God's holy word ; the Book has even been revised since he
began to be an automaton ; and he is losing all this, and how can
theology ever make any advance either in him or in the world, if
things are to be carried on in his fashion ?

Moreover, if he ever undertakes to preach, the people will not
be stimulated by him. They know a machine when they hear the
creak of it. They know that the speaking automaton up there
does not himself intensely taste the ideas that he is promulging.
They know, too, that those words of his are not the live product of
his mind on the spot, as fresh to him and as delightfully flavored to
his perceiving taste, as though no one had ever thought of them
before ; much less used them. For an automatic thinker is likely
to be an automatic rhetorician. He uses the words that conven-
tionalism dictates ; he has heard them all his life, and spoken them
all his life, and worn all their original bloom off and totally lost their
sap and the thrill of their root-meanings, and he handles them and
tosses them off as so many dead things ; they are dead to himself;
and dead to his hearers because dead to him. I cannot explain it,
but so it is, a man who does not reach the tongue of his mind down
the whole length of the deep significance, physical, historical and

392 YALE LECTURES.

associational, of every term he uses in his public utterance, as the
humming bird probes the heart of the flower with a quiver of de-
light, cannot pass those words of his over into listening minds in a
way to start them into any particular quiver.

In expounding to you, as I now have, the insensibility and
unconsciousness of mental movements automatically carried on, to
which automatism routine undoubtedly tends, I have said the prin-
cipal thing that can be said against routine. Still, I would like to
add a word more in the same line. If a minister confines himself
to the duties of his profession entirely, to sermonizing and pastor-
izing in their never-ceasing circuit, under the impression perhaps
that it is his duty to do so, or possibly because by long separation
from other things he has lost all relish for other things ; it will
surely hum-drum him by and by, lessen his vigor, lessen his zest,
lessen the elan of his attacks ; and lessen public interest in him.
The subjects we treat are large and many sided, the human interests
we manipulate are the supreme interests of life, and have in them
great pathos and great fascination ; nevertheless we must range be-
yond our parish and our preaching a good deal, if we are not going
to lose our spring. We must read something beside theology.
Poetry will be good for us. Fiction will be good for us in well-
chosen doses. We should hear music. We should look into books
of science. We should luxuriate in pictures. We should visit Wall
street. We should go down to the sea in ships. We should have
a very diversified circle of acquaintances ; and be sure not to have
them all alike. Some of them may be saints, but they need not all
be. Some of them may be sombre, but some of them should be
humorous, and occasionally one may even be of the twittering sort.
Birds twitter, and bird-like natures always may. As I came along to
this point in my lecture, I paused and began to run over in my
mind the names, faces, manners, dress, character and history of
those whom I know, crony with, and depend on ; and I declare to
you it was almost as good as a three day's outing to drop on to
each one in that way, and fondly analyze them all. Human beings
are exceedingly interesting. And they are put up in such different
shapes ! Under the general sameness, of course, that belongs to
human nature, you find on a genial inspection and shape of each
such an infinite miscellany of attributes, traits, idiosyncrasies, in-
firmities and pleasant forms of perverseness, as are partly comi-
cal, partly touching, partly amazing, partly admirable and partly

YALE LECTURES. 393

frightful besides. At any rate it is good to go among them. There
are two kinds of recreation. One is to go to sleep, or what is the
same thing, fold your hands, half-close your eyes, sit around and be
stupid and let your nature carry on her insensible and unsearchable
recuperations in you. The other way of recreation is to keep
awake and keep pretty bright and simply move your mind around
on things that you are not used to, things outside of your profession ;
public entertainments, excursions, "hunting, fishing and war," as
we used to read in the old geographies. And especially upon the
face of Nature do you move around — move slowly; loaf; Nature
takes loafers into her arms and loves them, prefers them and tells
them things and soaks her own peace into them and smooths out
their seemingly hopeless kinks and hushes their nerves and elimi-
nates from their make-up their artificialities and twists of dishonesty
that they get in society and sends them back home feeling like a
wood-nymph. That is my experience.

Recreation by diversifying your mental action ! That is the
idea. One night last week when I was writing this lecture, it sud-
denly staled on me. But I went off that evening to the regular
meeting of the Liturgical Club, to which I belong ; a club made up
of three kinds of clerical men ; Episcopalians, Catholic Apostolic
ministers and a more feeble number of Congregationalists ; and I
watched the play of their strongly contrary individualities for some
two hours, and played my own individuality too a little, and went
home as good as new — and the next morning this tedious lecture
fairly blossomed again.

That is the way it works. Do not wear yourself out in routines
of labor.

And I may add — do not become so entirely a routinist in your
work, especially in your intellectual work, that if it so happens
some time that you are called on to do work outside of your dear
routine, it will nearly incapacitate you. Some ministers cannot
much more than half think, except as they are in their own library
and at their own desk. And some ministers can not preach with
any freedom and power in a strange pulpit or on an open platform
or at a street corner. It has been true of some lawyers that they
could not make an argument, if they could not have something to
twirl in their fingers while speaking. A great many public speakers,
(preachers generally they are,) have a regular motion of their body
which has come to be necessary to the facile action of their intellects
26

394 YALE LECTURES.

— they rest on one foot and then on the other — or they turn their
heads so and then so and then so again, or they oscillate in a balance,
now on their heels and now on their toes, or they keep their hands
traveling monotonously, or they make some particular and perhaps
eccentric gesture with one hand, while if that hand were tied behind
their back it would end all further possibility of intelligent utterance.
It is not well to be a slave to routine.

I call your attention now to the second general head of my
discourse, namely : The value of routine. I put value last and
give it the advantage of a last mention, because I want to make
my greatest impression with that, for, be the perils of routine what
they may, I think you had better have them for the sake of the
values mentioned. Well then listen while I recount those values.

First, in the matter of your church services — and perhaps in
some of your other official services — it is a comfort to your people
to have you a calculable man, not like that suppositious sun which I
mentioned as not having risen yet when I reached here at three
o'clock to lecture ; nor even like a comet, which is sure to come
sometime but nobody so far knows when ; but rather like our actual
old trustworthy sun, the orb that is always on time, not behind-hand
and not before-hand and always just about so hot in summer and
less hot in winter, always keeping his appointments with the other
orbs, so that they all love him and can pre-arrange their daily and
yearly affairs on the solid ground of his foreknown fidelities. That
is the kind of minister to be, if you are to have the hearts of your
people. They want to know whether you are going to call on them
in the church to keep Easter in the Spring somewhere, or at Christ-
mas time — whether at an infant baptism you will have an infant
present or not — whether the ritual for morning and evening service
which you have been moving in for some time, is likely to be turned
end for end some Sunday, or totally supplanted by some new order,
and whether in these total supplantings, as they promiscuously come
along, a philosopher could discover any regulative principles of
before and after in the flow of the details.

It is a great advantage to your people to have you methodize
your activities and functions to a certain extent. That first.

Secondly, it is a great advantage to yourself. Not to mention
the satisfaction of noticing that your people are contentedly resting
down on your orderly faithfulness, you can do more work and do
it easier on system, than you can on spurt, lawlessness and disorder.

YALE LECTURES. 395

That is often said; and it is true. And I am going to tell why.
There are several wherefores.

If you have a method and stand to it every time you make the
circuit of that method, your mind and body both do more and more
catch the run of it, get used to it, fashion themselves to it and have
it for their second nature, their instinct, yes, their automatism. I
have reviled automatism in certain connections, but now I am going
to praise it. There certainly are many kinds of work where the
automatic principle is good enough. There are even many kinds
that cannot be at all performed except as that principle is brought
in. Let me illustrate that. The shortest cut between any point in
the high air and a given point on the ground, is a curve, not a
straight line but a curve ; and the hawk, when he dives for his prey,
always travels that curve. He does it by instinct. If he had to do
it as taught by some professor of mathematics, he would fail. And
if his mind were as large as Plato's, instead of being nothing but a
hawk's mind, it would not alter anything ; he simply could not keep
that ideal line. Mere reason is not equal to finding its way practi-
cally along that curve. The passage must be made automatically.
It must be in the hawk structurally and congenitally so to do.

Similarly, if Dr. Carver, when hundreds of glass balls are thrown
into the air, is going to catch every one of them on the wing with his
rifle and break them, or if the pianist is to rush through his complex,
amazing fingerings with his eyes shut and his thoughts at the ends
of the earth and with no more consciousness of directing that finger-
work than though he were dead ; or if Mr. Blondin is to walk on a
rope in the air across Niagara and wheel a wheel-barrow along the
rope and for aught I know wheel himself in his wheel-barrow, and
all in a poise as assured and safe as your poise when you tread a
side-walk ; then in lack of any instinct for such astonishing doings,
the men must drill themselves till they get up an instinct ; they
must routine and routine and routine, I do not know how many
hundreds of times ; routine their muscles and their whole bodily
apparatus ; routine their perceptive faculties ; routine their concen-
tration ; routine their entire selves in fact, until the greater part by
far of their performance has passed beyond the lines of voluntary
action clear out into absolute mechanicalism and they are scarcely
more than hawks diving instinctively down the air short-cut.

There are many amazing achievements, like rope-walking, or
the feats of gymnasts in the arena, or the miracles performed by the

396 YALE LECTURES.

sleight-of-hand man, which at first thought we should call physical
wonders merely, and therefore illustrations simply of the great spon-
taneity of action to which the body may be brought by long practice ;
but really there is as much mind as body in these doings, and the
possibility of mental spontaneity at last is also illustrated by them.
When somebody walks the rope, he does not do it in the use of the
same kind of mental faculties that Milton used when he wrote Para-
dise Lost, or the lawyer uses in a great argument, or the preacher
in his great discourse, or the high-class mathematician in some
abstract discovery that he makes ; but that man up there on the
rope uses mind after all and what mind he does use, he uses con-
summately. It is faculty in absolute drill and scarcely less infallible
than the hawk's instinct rushing along his curve. Moreover it is the
same grade of faculty that the carpenter uses when, with his trained
eye, he makes instant judgment on such matters as size, form and
distance ; or that the marksmen uses for similar purposes, or that
even the painter uses when he arranges spaces, vistas, dimensions,
heights and the like on his canvas. Moreover, there is a fine exhi-
bition of disciplined will in the rope-walking, that steady will ; con-
trolling muscle and nerve and the natural terrors of the mind, was
not born such a will as that ; it was born like all other wills, pliable,
timid and fluctuating ; but having been put upon its mettle daily for
years and years, all those congenital infirmities have been worked
out of it and there now it is, ruling the difficulties of the occasion
and facing awful perils without the least conscious effort.

So then, it is not a bodily automatism alone that we are called
to study and admire in these cases of skill and nerve, but a mental
automatism quite as much ; in other words, a manikin on the rope
in the gymnastic arena, or in the sleight of hand, could not begin to
do what the man does ; and therefore while in these cases we are
made to know the wonderful perfectibility of the human body by
dint of routine practice, we are quite as certainly made to know the
perfectibility of our intellectual parts by the same means and (by
analogy) of our moral parts. If the several perceptive faculties
which these physical experts bring into the field when they perform^
can be made such exceedingly capable faculties, especially if they can
be brought to operate in such entire unconsciousness of effort at the
moment — yes more than that, if they can be brought to act absolutely
well, even if the man turns his attention completely away to other
matters, then we are prepared to believe that men can be worked

YALE LECTURES. 397

along, or routined along — for it is routine that does it — until they
shall operate in a similar, non-voluntary, unlaborious, automatic man-
ner, throughout the entire range of their higher attributes ; that is,
let a man concentrate himself on the discipline of any one of his
native powers and subject that selected power of his nature to the
tremendous influence of a duly-protracted round-and-round and
there is almost nothing that is not possible to be done. Done, for
instance, for the imagination or for the memory or for the faculty of
abstraction or for the conscience. And not only is it possible to push
any single, selected faculty — as imagination, memory, abstraction or
conscience — on thus into perfection ; but (what is much more
marvelous), it is possible to harness up a. team of faculties and
diligently routine them together, even as raw soldiers are routined
together in military drill, until said faculties are able to move in
absolute co-ordination, in absolute spontaneity together, starting off
all of them at the least crack of the whip on an automatic dead-run ;
an unreflective dead-run, an unconscious dead-run, a machine-like
run, an undirected run, a run of their own motion, a run by blind
habit, a triumphant run too, such as could never have been approxi-
mated, save by the calling in of the automatic principle.

Every thinking man can illustrate this from his own history —
and I can — thus : When I have gathered together a miscellaneous
heap of memoranda for a sermon, the next step I need to take is
to organize that miscellany under some terms of order. It will not
do to tumble it out on my congregation in its present confusion and
lack of unity, any more than it will do for a painter to empty the
unassorted contents of his mind on to his canvas. Well, there are
several possible principles of order whereby I may reduce that heap
of valuable stuff to shape and make it comprehensible ; some of
which principles are superficial and scarcely more dignified than a
trick, while others are philosophical, deep and true. Among these
perplexing possibles I must choose. I dare not undertake to say
exactly how many of the faculties of my head are involved in this
business that I am now describing. A good many ; I am sure of
that. By my perceptives I look at my written memoranda. By my
memory I recall just what those very abridged and imperfect memo-
randa stand for. By something-or-other in me I decide the com-
parative value of those recorded items and the precise place or rank
to which they therefore shall be assigned in my discourse. Undoubt-
edly that something or other in me is my religious nature, for one

398 YALE LECTURES.

thing. For instance, an item that on inspection seems a little
irreverent, my reverence rejects. An item not wholly harmonious
with the revealed truth of God, my reverence and my sanctified
affection and my truthfulness, reject. Perhaps some one of these
memoranda is full of fine analysis or full of ideality and I shall take
hold and deal with it in the use of certain corresponding powers of
my nature. It begins to look as though all there is of me were
embarked in this enterprise. I am not marching into it by any
single faculty or any six faculties, but I am using my entire team.
It is a very complex case of cooperation. But I do it easily enough.
As likely as not I will have that chaos subdued in a few minutes. I
do not go around among my numerous faculties and exhort each
one to do his very best now and keep the touch of the elbow with
his brother faculties and not get into the see-saw of an ugly mule
team. When I began to make sermons, I did a good deal of this
exhorting and consumed much time on it. My team had never
been hitched up before — not much at any rate — certainly they had
not been hitched to anything so big as a sermon. So I had to
exhort them and coax and flog. But I accepted myself as I was
born and proceeded to practice coordination. I exhorted the
faculties. And I whipped them. I did it every week. Some weeks
I thought I had gained on it. Then again, I thought I had not.
However, on the whole I did gain. And now when I get my chaos
assembled — my unformulated materials of discourse — all I have to
do is just what a famous public singer told a friend of mine she
does when she is on the stage and wants her throat to trill. She
practiced daily four years, she said, and had not even then succeeded
in reaching the trill she was after. The physical organs, the organs
of articulation and her mind, in the several faculties involved, were
not yet quite co-efficient and simultaneous in their action. They
could not catch the knack of hitching up together and trilling. But
at last, suddenly, the lady could not tell how, the long-sought hitch-
up was made and off went the trill like a bird. And ever since
that moment she has had no difficulty. The inharmonious powers
once harnessed up, never unharnessed. And now whenever she
wants to perform that feat, she simply gives the word to the facul-
ties concerned and they take care of it all. She feels and knows
that they do it and not she. The performance is taken right out of
her hands. What was volitional for a long time and accompanied
with a great deal of pushing, is now involuntary ; as involuntary

YALE LECTURES. 399

as the tick, tick, of a wound-up clock. So the minister with the
stuff of a sermon on hand, which he is going to organize. For
years it went hard with him to do that — rather hard — but now the
hard is easy. He can start his trill with the snap of his finger.
While he is simply looking at that mass of material, its atoms begin
to move. And they do not move promiscuously either. Evidently
they have been seized with a common idea. It is like the drum-
call in an encampment of soldiers. The soldiers pour out innumer-
able and fly everywhither, but behold, they fly into companies and
regiments. Those incoherent, insensate atoms (the minister's ser-
mon stuff) do the same thing. They are not insensate. They have
caught the hint of their master. It is a case of trill. They organ-
ize themselves. The minister does not do it. At most, he simply
watches the thing go on and enjoys it. It is just like music, the
way those atoms and crude masses make haste to get themselves
into orderliness and there stand in beautiful array.

I have made too many words on this illustration, but it will
stand for a large class of mental processes ; processes self-moved,
processes wherein numbers of our mental powers (to say nothing of
our corporeal powers) , conspire and pull together and do it spon-
taneously ; processes that are never possible to be arrived at except
in one way, namely ; by long routine.

I beg you to take good notice of that last ; that certain mental
works never can be done at all, if routine is not called in and
pushed and pushed till what was difficult has become second nature.
All expert doings depend on just that and that is one of the greatest
values of routine. I spoke of a long-practiced minister's looking
his sermon stuff into shape in a few moments, but that is not the
only line of work wherein his life-long routining tells. It tells in his
amplification of that same discourse. It tells in the fairly bewitched
way in which the entire mixed contents of the creation, like live
things flock to the out-looks of his mind as he writes, begging to be
let in for the illumination and enrichment of that discourse. He
does not have to send out a search warrant for these things. Once
he did and his search-warrants could not bring in more than a
fraction of them either. But the warrants have been flying about
and all abroad for twenty or thirty years now, and the creation has
taken the hint at last, so that not a single search-warrant is any
longer necessary. No ; but as the heaped-up, unarranged mass of
sermon-stock that I mentioned as waiting to be organized, suddenly

400 YALE LECTURES.

developed a stir in all its atoms, when the master's order-loving eye
lighted thereon, so the innumerable things of the creation, so soon
as they got wind of it that the minister had gone to his desk for
amplification, took up an automatic movement towards that desk
and poured in a very embarrassment of riches.

Or, take the minister as publicly extemporizing, whether in
prayer or discourse. Once he always rose to utter himself with
trepidation. He was not sure of his words and he was not sure of
his ideas. But now he could go on forever. Sometimes he does.
As likely as not he is eloquent. He does not try to be. He passed
clear beyond trying years ago and now it is a case of trilling. Or it
is like those amazing, musically-organized Italians who improvise.
Those men versify and rhyme and sing and touch the whole thing off
harmoniously on their guitars, with the facility of rippling brooks,
because they have for a long time turned their whole peculiar nature
— body, soul and spirit — into a routine of improvisation.

Of the same sort precisely, is that unconscious personal poise,
and unconscious ease of conversation, repartee, fence and sparkle,
which many a woman of the world displays. Such a man as Daniel
Webster or John Foster and a thousand more exceedingly able men,
look upon her as an almost supernatural being ; she is so frightfully
superior to them in all this beautiful airiness ; whereas the truth is,
her life has been spent in that thing until she ripples, glitters, tosses
you on the sharp end of her bodkin and makes you to feel like a
fool, automatically. She can sparkle as easily as you can prose on
the weather.

In all the fine handicrafts, this same principle comes in abun-
dantly of course. Proficiency in every department of human devel-
opment depends on skill artificially worked up — worked up by
routine.

And all these brilliant inventions in the practical field and these
brilliant discoveries in the field of science, those of them which are
reached by sudden intuitive outsprings of the mind rather than by
methodical processes of reasoning — and there be many such — are
apt to be the work of well-routined minds ; solidly methodized
minds ; minds that have come to supreme facility by much precision
and practice, so that, although seeming sudden, they are not mere
guess-work and upstart movement but rather the blossoming of
a plant which had in it the manifold potentialities of a blossom
after all.

YALE LECTURES. 401

I say then, one of the uses of routine is facility. Work by
method makes facile work at last, because we, in mind and body
both, are capable of automatic action.

And speaking still further on the idea that he who works by
method and consents to routine, works easier and can do more
work, I mention this.

That routine gradually stamps out reluctance in us, so that we
lie down under it as we do under any other inevitable and waste no
time or friction in halting and rebelling. When the chaotic masses
of the primal creation were first lumped into shapely globes and then
set in the bondage of definite orbits and precise time-keeping, day
and night forever, I can imagine that they did not enjoy it and
would have sulked and possibly did sulk in the privacy of their own
minds — but what was the use — the course of created things was
established and started and there they were in the whirl of it. So
sulking died out, just as a minister's groanings over his first sermons
died out, as the routine that he had chosen for life went on and as
his groanings over his first pastor-work died out. Routine kills
groanings and the good breath thus saved is turned into work. I
have certain days in the week when I make parish calls, I will sup-
pose ; a certain day or days when I attend to odds and ends ; cer-
tain mornings when I write, certain hours when I receive the human
family, certain hours when I pray, certain times when I fast, certain
times when I take exercise, certain times when I cast overboard all
work, empty myself of intentions and float round in a vacuum. I
framed out my time in this manner years and years ago, I will still
suppose, and now the question of times and seasons never comes up.
Tt is fast-time say. Well, if I had not my routine established, I
should beg off sometimes. There is nothing in fasting that is con-
genial to the bodily appetites. Wliat they like is eating. And
where a person is born very fleshly they like eating first rate. So I
incline to beg-off. And I not merely beg but I reason. An ingen-
ious man can see a good many alluring arguments for not fasting.
So I might spend a week debating the question, procrastinating,
shivering on the brink, wondering whether I had better ever begin.
So in the matter of calls, I had rather read my book. And in the
matter of my prayer, my newspaper has just come in, or my sensi-
bilities are dull, or I am somehow in a mysterious inertia. Now the
non-routine man fritters away half his time, petting his own reluc-
tancies, his indisposition to take up tasks and disagreeable duties ;

402 YALE LECTURES.

whereas, if his allotment of time from his God were clearly pro-
grammed and foreordained, when this or that duty arrived he would
move to it with something very like spontaneity. Take it as respects
the choice of topics for sermons. Many ministers spend almost as
much time hunting topics, or selecting topics from those which they
have hunted down, as they do in unfolding the same ; and withal,
this hunting business is much more vexatious and killing than un-
folding is. Supposing now this topic-hunter had a prearranged
general order of topics. Supposing he was a Christian-year man.
Supposing he was a doctrinal preacher and worked up a course of
doctrinal sermons once in so long. Supposing he even took for his
rule the tossing up of a penny and letting heads or tails decide.
Suppose almost anything in the direction of method and routine.
Do you not see that that ends hunting, in the main ? When a thing
is nailed right on to a man by a prescribed order, he has nothing to
do but take it and make the best of it and spend not a minute in
further search, or in grumbling. You might imagine that a forced
topic would breed grumbling, but it does not. Routine men find
that it does not. At Christmas, Epiphany, Good-Friday, Easter,
Ascension and Whit Sunday — those Christian-tides, for example —
you are looked to, I will suppose, for a particular sort of sermon
every year so long as you live. But this, like any other circuit that
any reasonable man or Christian body is likely to adopt, is full of the
best kind of suggestiveness to the mind ; so that when any given date
or period arrives, the mere coming of it with its cargo of meanings
starts the man into fertility straightforth. Moreover it lies in the
nature of the mind, that so soon as it plainly discerns the inevitable
— especially if it is a genial inevitable — it acts like those spontane-
ous atoms in the minister's pile of sermon-material, when the minis-
ter's awful eye rested upon them. They started with alacrity and
any mind in its predetermined and unescapable circuit of thought
always developes alacrity so that, verily that is fulfilled which
William Wordsworth said in his now famous address to Duty :

Stern Lawgiver ! Yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face :

Then Wordsworth takes wing in a flight like the following, still
apostrophizing Duty : —

YALE LECTURES. 403

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,

And fragrance in thy footing treads ;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee are fresh and strong.

No doubt, each man of us ought to go to his duty in each case
of duty by the pull in part at least of great motives consciously in
him at the moment, and if we live long enough, and the grace of
God to us-ward fails not, we shall eventually find ourselves in that
state ; a state so blessed that it is hard to wait for its coming ; but at
present, as a matter of fact, we all have our lethargies, when the pull
in us and on us of motives is feeble ; and in these low times, rather
than that we totally come short and leave our duty undone, it is
well if we are started forth by the simple nudge and joggle of
routine ; fasting, for instance, because the time for fasting has come,
calling on the parishioners because it is the day for it, praying be-
cause it is the hour for prayer, and not because we so want to do.
A debate might be raised on the exact moral worth of such perform-
ances as those, either to the performer or to those performed upon,
but all debate is cut short the moment it is mentioned that God
himself has appointed days, dates, hours and numerous circularities
of human action, knowing, all the while, that not one man in all
generations forever would come up to those appointments, each
and all, and every time, unlanguidly. He knew we could not do it.
Nevertheless he made the appointments. Therefore his mind must
be that we take these our necessary, occasional torpidities with us,
and go in to the duties. And if that is his mind, then we may
reasonably look for a blessing, in such unaffirmative, matter-of-
course routine fidelities. And I think it may be noticed, in human
life, that the steadfast time-keepers, the men that never ask permis-
sion of their moods to keep their engagements with God, and their
engagements with men for God's sake, are blessed. They make
better characters than the disciples of do-as-you-feel. They are
honester. They cannot be tampered with. Put them in an awful
gap, turn away your head five minutes, and then look back ; they
are there still. Turn your head, if you want to, six months. Still
they are there. Cicero's "abut, excessit, evasit, erupit" and the
rest, does not apply to them. They have not erupit. They have
not even abut. And they never will. What can you expect of a
man that goes by his moods, never does any thing that he does not
want to, or, at the best, procrastinates, hoping that sometime he will

404 YALE LECTURES.

want to. I say unto you, such an one has provided fundamentally
for his own ruin, and for his own uselessness, considerably, among the
children of men. The truth is, my Brother, by diligence you can
kill your own moodiness and make yourself a steady-going-person.
You can kill your moral moods, and you can kill your intellectual
moods. I marvel when I notice how much more uniform the action
of my own mind is than it once was. I can get something out of
it any day. I do not say what, but something. Long ago, when I
used to go to my study to think and write, I could not tell whether
my mind would give down that day or not. Now I know. I know
it will. So far as quantity of production is concerned, a stupid
day is about as good as a bright one with me. And when a stupid
writing-day happens along, I keep firmly to the routine of produc-
tion and put up with some falling off in the quality, for fear that if
I ease off on the routine, my once moody mind will fall from the
grace of uniform productivity back into its original state of incon-
stancy, costiveness and inability, and have whole days of no yield
whatever. Keep your sap running, lest it forget how.

As I come now to the close of this lecture, I begin to think of
my own reputation for consistency, for did I not name it as one of
the evils of automatism on its religious side, that it tends towards,
even if it does not involve an inattentive, mechanical and therefore
formalistic style of observance and duty-doing ; nevertheless, have I
not gone boldly forward to magnify routine fidelities ? I have not
the least doubt that I could worm my way out of that incongruity if,
after having spoken to you so long, I might take time to do the nec-
essary amount of squirming. I can recollect the time when if I
seemed to contradict myself, I was frightened ; but I have got over
that. Now I go straight on and say what seems to be true as
regards my subject, and take it for granted that all those sayings
will fight it out among themselves and get a real concord and
peace.

The problem to-day is to accept routine and even automatisms
with their unquestionable advantages, and yet not take on any of
their disadvantages. A very critical piece of navigation. But,
Beloved, that is about where we mortals are in most things. It is
like paddling a birch canoe. You must sit in the middle, sit per-
pendicular, not turn your head much either way, and part your hah
in the middle (as some one has said), else you upset. Well, there
is where we get discipline. In this life of ours, with its many forms

YALE LECTURES. 405

and instances of difficult navigation, we are to consider, to balance
things, to watch ourselves, to secure preponderations often by the
weight of a single hair, to run the gauntlet of many dangers and
not be caught by any of them. That is what we are in the world
for and out of it comes character.

A large amount of our activity, and a considerable part of our
responsible action needs to be relegated to our automatic powers.
After that is done there is no danger that there will not be hundreds
of things left to be attended to volitionally and in full consciousness
of what we are about. Take our constant walking as an illustration.
We simply cannot give to it our voluntary attention. There is too
much else to busy ourselves about. It must go on mechanically.
Take the operations of an accountant. He adds up his long
columns of figures and runs through his long processes with spon-
taneous inattention ; and his business would kill him if it was not so.
Take these mechanics who stand at a bench and do some one
small thing over and over forever. We call them "skilled work-
men," and pay them high wages, but this skill of theirs that we are
willing to pay so much for, is simply the more or less automatic
facility into which they have perseveringly routined themselves.
But their craft still requires from them a great deal of determined
conscious attention, and by as much as their faculties operate auto-
matically, by so much are their minds released and at liberty to give
themselves to this conscious and considerate attention, and thus
reach on towards perfection in their craft.

So in the domain of morals and religion. In so far as our
numerous fidelities to man and God have come one after the other
by long practice to be what you may call automatised, we are set
free for the labors of intentional and effort-full action. By the grace
of God our expectation is that some day our total action will be to
a good degree automatised. At all events it will be spontaneous.
It will come from us with ease and satisfaction. We believe this,
because it has been promised. We believe it too because already,
at particular times, under special inspirations of the Holy Ghost, the
whole team of our lumbering and reluctant powers and energies
have swung into a blithesome flight, a beautiful fury, a complete
liberation, a something unvolitional and lyrical to the last degree.
That is the ideal condition of man ; and this automatism that I
have said so much about, with its perils and its many values, is the
foreshadow and similitude of that. And it is a precious thing that

406 YALE LECTURES.

even in the natural action of our natural powers, and so low down
as these half-wrecked, corruptible bodies of ours, this automatic
similitude and prophecy doth develop itself in never-so-many forms.

ADDRESSES.

HENRY WILSON *

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford, Jan. 13, 1878.

How far it is grateful to the departed when we who remain
remember them, and speak forth their names and their worth, I will
not undertake now to determine ; but this one thing is plain, that
these rememberings are of great benefit to us, as they certainly are
most congenial to our natural feeling. They serve to bring down
into this unrestful life of ours the peace of that still country into
which our beloved are withdrawn. They make that country, so
remote from the ordinary thought of man, to be very near and very
real ; and they give us such a clear and strong sense of it, that when
at last we ourselves shall go out into it, we shall feel that we are
entering a well-known and home-like land. Yes, I do not doubt
that there are here present to-day many who, by virtue of much
recollection of dear ones gone, and much dwelling upon the serene
estate into which they have ascended, are in actual present posses-
sion of that hereafter as truly as they are in possession, by the senses,
of this world which they now inhabit. And this calling to mind of
those lost to us does also mightily quicken our sense of the redemp-
tion through Jesus Christ. We think of what that redemption has
already done for them, and that it is solemnly pledged, in some
future glorious day, to restore even their bodies, fashioning them
into the likeness of Christ's own risen and immortal body. And as
we ponder these things, and (as is natural) widen our thought to
include the many millions besides our own dead, who have entered
into the same redemption and the same resplendent hope, that
redemption, I say, grows to be a most radiant and immeasurable

*Composer of church music. Organist of Christ Church, Hartford, 1855-1877, and 01'
Park Church, 1877-1878.
27

410 HENRY WILSON.

thing before our eyes, and we long with a great longing to be our-
selves entered into the fullness of it. Also, when we recount those
unseen redeemed millions of our God, we are made strong for the
appointed conflicts of life, and when we see this or that good cause
in a small minority here on earth, and suffering defeat, our souls
easily take an appeal from these overriding earthly majorities to
yonder spiritual hosts, even to that "great cloud of witnesses" to
which the sacred writer refers, and to which the hard-pressed chil-
dren of God in that early day, I have no doubt, did continually
appeal.

So, on all accounts, let us never forget those who have left us.
Let us recall their names in the household, in the sanctuary, in the
daily way of life. Let us lay them down to their rest amid the
sweetest scenes of nature, and in fields made beautiful by reverent
art. Let us fill the air over them with the words of the great Chris-
tian assurances and thanksgivings and benedictions. And, year by
year, at suitable times and in suitable ways, let us turn to them in
especial recollection — not in melancholy, but in tenderness and in
the joy of the sons of God. All of which, I say, in a general way,
but oh, with what particularity it applies to this dear man, so much
in the thoughts of us all this day !

Permit me, for a few moments now, to confine your attention
to him, and name before you certain considerations in respect to him,
which are fitted to bring satisfaction rather than depression to our
troubled hearts.

First, if we recall what he personally was, surely we cannot be
otherwise than gladdened. My own intimate acquaintance with him
began in 1861, sixteen years ago, and from that time to this I have
known him like a brother, and in a way of love so deep and fond,
that the removal of no acquaintance has ever touched me just like
this removal. And I do not seem to be alone in this. The men
and the women whom I have seen weeping since last Tuesday assure
me that I have not misestimated this man.

To name the greatest thing first, his integrity was absolute, and
his purity of mind without a stain. Into whatever field his uncom-
mon wit led him, he maintained his soul's whiteness, and into what-
ever company he might be thrown, you could be perfectly sure that
he would retain there his sweet spotlessness.

Next, he was a loving man. This was shown in the beautiful
harmlessness, always, of his wit. In fact, it was not exactly wit that

HENRY WILSON. 411

so characterized him, but humor rather — that laughter-provoking
play of the mind which is suffused with kindly feeling, and has its
main distinction in that. Countless times I have known him to
make personal hits that were irresistible and could never be forgot-
ten by the victim of them, but I never knew a person to feel himself
wounded by these thrusts. There was too much love in him for
that. And this loving nature of his it was, this loving nature joined
with great sprightliness of mind and rare intellectual gifts in several
directions, which made him so much a favorite in general society,
so that hardly any one in this community could be more missed in
this regard than he will be. Missed by his pupils ; missed by his
musical acquaintances ; missed in the households where he was a
frequent visitor ; missed in the happy social assemblies which he
enlivened ; missed in the mourning minds of those chosen ones to
whom he gave himself in ties of special confidence and communion.
I am grateful now that last summer, in the days of vacation at the
seaside, he and I spent several continuous weeks together in con-
stant converse, and that all my most admiring and affectionate
thoughts concerning him received a new confirmation in that pro-
tracted and close intercourse. He then and there put his final and
deepest stamp upon me, and I shall remember him as he there
manifested his characteristic qualities, in a manner to make it
impossible, I fear, that I should ever visit that summer resort for
any stay again. I prefer to leave that place associated forever in
my mind with him, without any intermingling of new experiences
and associations.

And here let me say that I feel as though I had myself received
a personal and especial favor in those many and most moving testi-
monies and attentions accorded to Mr. Wilson in the last days of his
life, and in those bountiful and loving outpourings which have been
paid to his memory since he died. To those attached friends who
stood by day and night during those long hours of uncertainty and
sickness, to the hundreds who called inquiringly at his door, to the
gentlemen who forsook their own affairs that they might give their
time to him, to those many who lent their aid to make the day
wherein we bore him away to his rest like the movement of a full-
toned tender hymn by reason of the flowers and the attending multi-
tudes and the music and the divine services that filled it ; to those
friends of long standing and often tested who insisted that his form
should be laid right among the burial-places of their own households,

412 HENRY WILSON.

so that now we are permitted to think of him as asleep on that noble
overlooking height in our noblest gathering-place of the dead, where
all those who loved him best would have chosen he should lie ; and
finally, to that large company who have pressed close about her who
is now left so lonely, giving to her their tears and their supporting
strength, while they continually invoked upon her the blessing of
Him who has promised to be the widow's God, — to these all, my
heart would prompt me to return thanks, even as though they had
done it unto me. And as all these things went on, and especially
while we were returning to our homes that burial day, it incessantly
occurred to me, Oh, that I could certainly know that our dear Wil-
son himself was understanding what a sincere and immense tribute
we, his own, were paying unto him, and with what fullness and
unanimity we were certifying to our sense of his life of service on
earth !

And at this point I would dwell a moment on his worth to the
world in that department of noble art to which he devoted his life.
It is meet, I think, that I should mention this thing, and lift up a
note of thanksgiving for what he was able to accomplish, especially
as we are gathered together in the sanctuary where he officiated
during his last months in this world, and where the sounds of his
organ have scarcely yet died away. On this subject I am neither
able nor willing to speak with the careful exactness and the judicial
coolness of a musical critic. The tones of his music haunt me too
much just now for that. This last week the king of Italy died, and
his son and successor, on taking the throne and issuing a proclama-
tion to the people, says, referring to his departed father : " His
voice will always resound in my heart." And so say I in regard to
this king in another field, " His voice will always resound in my
heart." Wonderful indeed were the uplifts and the soothings and
the divine illuminations which' he has ministered unto many of us.
In our moments of weakness, in our times of heart-sinking, on
occasions when the love of God to us in Christ Jesus has not been
clear to our confused and cloudy minds, in our weariness with this
present world, in our manifold dead-heartedness and doom, and in
our mighty bereavements, what has not Henry Wilson done for us !
No language can tell it. A great leader and composer of church
music stands and serves in a most divine and most touching office.
I wish those faithful men could know how they bless us, and what
love we bear them. The cold-hearted and the critical may say what

HENRY WILSON. 413

they please about them, but we, the myriads and millions to whom
they have opened heavenly riches, and whom they have oft times
carried clean and clear above this miserable world, will encircle them
with our acclamations while they live, and strew their graves with
benedictions when they are dead. No form of human expression
approximates the form musical. The spoken words of the preacher
are to me a mere dullness in comparison with it. The victories of
the canvas or of the sculptor are feeble by the side of it. In
copiousness and versatility, in limbemess, in refinement, in its easy
playings off into the infinite, and in its triumphant utterance of the
unutterable things of the human heart, yea, in many things, music is
the language of all languages ; and when the Holy Scriptures would
most set forth the experiences of the better world, they formulate
them in terms musical, and represent the life there as an utterly
songful thing — the redeemed are organized in immense choirs, and
they carry harps, and there are tuneful shoutings like the voice of
"many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder," and all ages
and all generations take their several parts in that immense choired
movement. And as often as I think of this our dear friend, it best
suits me to think of him as now exalted into that celestial move-
ment ; that finely trained and most sensitive musical perception of
his being now and at last satisfied, perfectly satisfied, and all his
exquisite development while here being turned in now to enhance
his gladness and augment his service of his God there.

I need not say to this assembly how widely celebrated the choir
of Christ Church, under the leadership of Mr. Wilson, had come to
be. Neither need I speak to the professional musicians here pres-
ent of the worth of his original compositions. We rejoice in his
genius. We rejoice in his sturdy faithfulness to his conception of
what church music should be. We bless him for certain special
compositions of his which we have heard over and over, and which
to us are as unforgetable as our own names. We shall remember this
and that great day of the Christian year, when we of other com-
munions gathered in Christ Church in crowds, to hear his organ and
his choir fill out our best idea of what the day should be, and how
it should be kept by the assembled church. Ah, yes ! for many a
year that hand of his will play upon our heart-strings as in the days
now gone, and keep us longing for a meeting with him again in the
better world.

I spoke of Mr. Wilson's exquisite musical developments as

414 HENRY WILSON.

coloring his life in that world. Precisely in what ways the present
training of our faculties in this or that chosen vocation will go to
modify our experiences yonder and stamp its features on our
appointed angel life, we in our dimness and slow sight are not able
to say ; but does any one doubt that our life on earth is in fact a
carefully chosen apprenticeship for that life ? Is it to be believed
that a fine-grained and powerful musician, at the very head of the
world's art in that line, like Beethoven, he on one hand, and on the
other a redoubtable strategist, or a sailor, or a converted Indian, will
go into and have precisely the same heaven, all differences of devel-
opment here going for just nothing, these beautiful earthly individu-
alities being abolished and heaven amounting to nothing more than
an infinite aggregation of stupid uniformities ? Does God show his
great love of personal diversity by ordering one life thus and another
life so, and then after death make a short turn, deny his own self,
and ordain an eternal dead level of being, as though he best liked
that? No, it is not possible. As one star differs from another star
in glory, so also is it as to the life everlasting— not only in respect
of moral diversities in God's gathered people, but as to differences
intellectual and affectional, too, so that a Wilson will remain Wil-
son to all ages, and we his old companions and intimates will detect
his well-known mind-play when we meet him, and can have it for
one of our distinct hopes that we shall thus resume the intercourse
which was so precious to us here. And if it be so that the absolutely
unique individuality of every living man shall be perpetuated for-
ever, and that our particular drill in this world will prove formative
of our personal experience and service in that other, then how
pleasant it is to think of that special career which must be assigned
to our friend by virtue of his musical discipline in these days and
years below. It is hard to believe that the Scriptural way of setting
forth heaven as a musically organized estate has not some literalness
in it ; and if it has not, nevertheless that imagery must be good and
sufficiently exact for representing the real lot and occupation of this
friend for whom we mourn. All organs upon which he ever laid his
hands here, failed more or less to voice his soul's highest and most
lyrical feeling — all human voices ever under his training were but
partially broken vehicles of expression for his most acute and exact-
ing conception ; though sometimes let me say, his soul melted within
him at what the human voice could do, and it was a touching fact
that during his last illness he was overheard murmuring and saying :

HENRY WILSON. 415

" ' How lovely are the messengers that bring us the gospel of peace ;'
did not she sing that beautifully?" He having in mind a dear
member of his choir. And if I should repeat to the different mem-
bers of this same choir the cordial words I myself, in our frequent,
intimate conversations have heard him speak concerning them, it
would do their hearts good I know. Yes, he has often said to me
that he could not keep back his tears as he sat at yonder organ and
listened to this or that exquisite effect of the voices at his side, tears
of simple delight sometimes, and then again tears of irresistible feel-
ing at the sacred and tender thoughts so perfectly rendered. Still,
as I said, he had in his spirit musical movements, which absolutely
could not be stated by any earthly instrument, or in any known
terms — dim movements not yet fully formulated even in his own
mind, prophetic flutterings as of unborn possibilities, such as all the
sons of genius in all fields know, the obscure Teachings out of the
infinite soul within us seeking scope and the full-born life of eternity.
And I repeat, it gladdens me to think into what musical and other
realizations and fulfillments he has now entered, and how his striv-
ings and rehearsings, and thirty or more years of faithful work, will
tone his heaven and will make it sure that God, who has a charac-
teristic place for every one, will give this man his own place, and
cause his ever-unfolding life and duty there to correspond and be a
continuation, to his peculiar pupilage and culture here, so that in
some future, God willing, we who have admired him and been
assisted by him so much, will gather about him again something
after the old sort, and under the sweet constraint of the old spell,
the old spell made perfect in the perfectness. of Heaven.

Referring a moment more to Mr. Wilson, as he now is, let me
remind you how blessed it is for him that he has been permitted to
go. You all know how sensitively organized he was, and how much,
therefore, (like all finely impressible persons) he was compelled to
suffer. He would not have been just the artist which he was, except
for that keen sensitivity of his. It was both beautiful and sad to see
how a false note would torture him, and how the nearer he came to
his musical ideal, the more tormented he was if he could not abso-
lutely reach it. His whole form would sometimes writhe under the
distress of it. And in fact all things struck him keenly. He was
sheltered in a home and cared for by a love, such as many men do
not know ; — and his pathway was diligently smoothed for him, and
all rude winds were warded off by one whose daily joy, yes, whose

416 HENRY WILSON.

very life, was in his faithful love ; but this earth is not the very best
place for such as he, and may we not bless God that he is now tran-
quilized in the deep-flowing, calm life of the eternal ; the most
joyful joys he knew here being exceeded seven-fold by his experi-
ences there ; the home love in which he delighted here, being but a
faint human image of the love divine which has now received him.
For although our friend was not a demonstratively religious man,
and under the stress of his disease could not leave us any last bright
words of Christian testimony, but only a single sudden ejaculated
good-bye to his dearest standing around, nevertheless we all knew
where his heart was, and for long years had been ; and he had pub-
licly signified the same as a communicant in Christ Church, so that
now we think of him as gone to be forever with the Lord.

Those who were present in the Park Church Sunday before last
— his last Sunday of service — will remember with what felicity and
force and true feeling he went through our beautiful commemoration
of the departed. It seemed to me nothing could be more satisfac-
tory than his work was that day. And now to my mind, and to the
minds of many, that whole blessed morning, and all the words of it,
are eternally associated with his name. So often as the last Sunday
in each year comes around I shall recall him, and silently in my
deep heart I shall say — as he then sung : —

Sleep thy last sleep,

Free from care and sorrow;
Rest where none weep,

'Till the eternal morrow.
Though we may mourn,

Those in life the dearest,
They shall return,

Christ, when Thou appearest.
Soon shall thy voice

Comfort those now weeping,
Bidding rejoice,

All in Jesus sleeping.

HORACE BUSHNELL.

Delivered on the Occasion of the Unveiling of a Bushnell

Memorial Tablet in the Park Church, Hartford,

November 24, 1S78.

Some months ago it entered into the heart of a certain gentle-
man in our congregation (whose name I would mention if I dared,
for we feel that we are greatly indebted to him) that it would be a
fitting and useful thing to place upon the wall of this edifice some
memorial of Horace Bushnell. On speaking to others touching his
thought, he found them to be of the same mind, and thus encour-
aged, he started out with his customary energy to make his thought
a fact. It did not seem best to make a general appeal on the
subject to the numerous friends and admirers of Dr. Bushnell, nor
even to mention it to the mass of this congregation. Had all been
informed who would have been glad to contribute to this work, I do
not know what we might not have built to the name of this great
man. I am informed by the gentleman referred to, who has con-
ferred with the donors and received their gifts, that the cheerful
and prompt sympathy with which he was met as he went among
them will always be one of the pleasant recollections of his life.
Some of them are men and some are women ; some young and
some old ; some in deep accord with the well-known theological
views of Dr. Bushnell and some in open dissent therefrom ; some
constrained to take hold of this movement by the promptings of
their own grateful feelings, while others, in addition to that and
quite as much, were constrained by the memory of their departed
parents, who were admiring and attached parishioners of Dr.
Bushnell long years ago. They make up a various company, but
they all are heart to heart in this testimonial.

418 HORACE BUSHNELL.

What that testimonial itself is, and with what success it has
been labored upon, you will see for yourselves in a few moments.
We hope it will be satisfactory to you, and especially that the
portrait will commend itself to your judgment and your recollection
of what Dr. Bushnell was. It may be proper to state that that por-
trait is the gift of one family among us, and that in it are represented
many tender and imperishable memories. In it no attempt has
been made to set forth Dr. Bushnell's face as it appeared in his ad-
vanced age, but rather, while filling it as far as possible with marks
of his life-long character, to recall the days of his unabated vigor —
a most difficult thing to do you will see in a moment — and one in
which we can least look for the unanimous approval of the people ;
and yet it has so far secured the assent of the few who have seen it
as to make us hope for a large verdict in its favor when it shall have
been generally examined.

This memorial stone, then, is the gift of a few persons — part of
whom are of this congregation, and part outside of it — and their
request that this church and society would receive it into their
custody, place it upon the wall of their edifice, and engage that
it should be sacredly preserved forevermore, has been responded to
by both bodies in the cordial and unanimous action of their several
committees — which action, I here and now formally and publicly
affirm and announce, thanking God that he has moved these
donors to this deed, and invoking on their heads his blessing.

And now let me say I am glad this memorial has been reared.

Dr. Bushnell was always a particularly dear man to me.
Long before I knew him personally I had read his books and felt
the impulse of his most quickening mind. I did not at that time
know a great deal about theology, and could not venture to say
whether he was right or wrong in his much debated views. Neither
did I profoundly care, but I was able to see that God had given
him a most rare intellect, and that, in one way or another, he
had come to such an ability to express himself and impress himself
upon the receptive, as is not reached by one in millions. By those
matured and disciplined men who have already established their
opinions and formed their style, the movement of Dr. Bushnell's
mind, and his unique diction, may be less readily received, but to
young men unformed and limber, his way of stating himself, may
easily be most fascinating. So I found it, and I was in some sort a
disciple of his, and an enthusiast in his behalf (an intellectual

HORACE BUSHNELL. 419

enthusiast) at the very first of my reading him. And in my literary
tasks in college when my mind was jaded, and invention, for the
moment, had died out in me, over and over I renewed my poor
energies by contact with his genius, as I read page after page of his
writings. I never saw him though, till I heard him preach, one
Sunday evening, in the Center church of New Haven, I at that time
being a student in the Divinity School there. I remember him
better than I do his sermon, because, although I supposed my
mind to be already pretty well adjusted to his, yet it was not so far
adjusted as to make it possible for me to receive the full impression
of his discourse. Twice afterwards I chanced to hear him with
much the same result, but in 1857 I came to Hartford and took up
a pastorate right alongside of him, and, by frequent intercourse,
began to enter myself into the play of his mind ; and for nineteen
years, day in and day out, I observed him and heard him talk, and
heard him in public address, and watched him in all the to-and-fro
of his private and public life— and I am bound to say that my early
conception of him and his power was only made greater by all this,
until now my fully ripened and final opinion in regard to him is
what my early admiration declared, that no thinker was ever more
magnetic, and no rhetorician ever had a more supreme command
of our English tongue. To the very last of his life his mental
affluence and his masterly expression were an incessant wonder
to me.

As I came to do some thinking on those themes where
he has most attracted the attention of his fellow men, I was con-
scious of some divergence from his views, and my most remember-
able Christian experiences have been founded on conceptions of
Christ and his work which he energetically discarded. And in
view of that, it seems as though it ought to have been a trial to him
when I came to be the minister of his church. He knew that
certain doctrines of his, on which he had labored as for his life,
would be every now and then denied by me, directly or indirectly,
and that they would be denied with a constitutional positiveness
about equal to his own, and I shall always remember, with both
amusement and admiration, the characteristic and hearty bluntness
with which he spoke out before the council which had just finished
its examination of me in the chapel of this church, and said to
me, "You'd better have said nothing at all." That was his
manner. No bush-fighter was he, no back-biter, no secret peddler

420 HORACE EUSHNELL.

of innuendoes, but a face-to-face, square man, always ready with his
yea or nay, and to be relied on forever. Yea, a man to be profoundly
loved for his immense and courageous sincerity. But that was the
last of his frank shots at me, publicly delivered. Of course he must
have been often tormented, during the six years that he sat here be-
fore me, and endured my goings-on ; and, doubtless, if at any time
some one really wanted to know what he thought of this or that utter-
ance of mine, he considered it no sin to say, but I had him for a
steadfast friend to the end, in spite of everything. He insisted that
under the circumstances, as they at last shaped themselves, I ought
to come to his church, and he earnestly argued with me on the sub-
ject ; and then when I had come, he stood by — and I out of my
heart stood by him, as I always had, and still do, so that the setting
up of this memorial, now, is as precious to me as though it were
set up for myself — and more so.

When I began to put down these personal recollections of
mine I had no thought of carrying them so far. Pardon me if I
have over-stepped the bounds on this public occasion.

My second reason for gladness at what is this day done
comes out of my grateful sense of what Dr. Bushnell has done, and
will for a long time continue to do, in liberalizing theological
thought, and getting for all the rest of us a large and safe opportu-
nity for the full expression of what we honestly and religiously
think. He fought a good fight, and the last twenty-five years have
had the advantage of it. We of this free day can hardly appreci-
ate the atmosphere of suffocation in which he tried to draw his
breath. It would seem scarcely to be believed by us, were it not
historically written down, that he was compelled to make the con-
tention which he did, and to suffer the irritation and acrimony and
assault of many brethren intent on his overthrow. Not the over-
throw of his opinions — I do not now mean that — but the overthrow
of him personally and the casting of him out of the ministry. A
thoroughly open and downright attack on a person's opinions is
right enough, and no one should complain of that ; but to go on
to dislodge him from the Christian ministry is another thing. It is
not difficult to understand the feeling of those who took this course.
It was natural and it was able to support itself by considerations
plausible and powerful. They had no doubt that that busy-headed
and free-spoken man had contradicted fundamental truth, and had
done it in a manner most eloquent and insinuating. They believed

HORACE BUSHNELL. 421

that if he was let alone to propagate his ideas and the contagion of
him was suffered to spread, there would be hosts of people who
would be unmoored in their doctrinal views, and that, therefore,
sooner or later, hosts of souls would be shipwrecked for time and
eternity. They clearly saw that, they thought ; and they, in con-
science, could not suffer such process of doctrinal demoralization
to go on. Had they lived some centuries earlier, they would have
sincerely considered it their duty to take Dr. Bushnell's life. As it
was, they contented their consciences by striving to take away simply
his pastorate and his ministerial functions generally. But they
were mistaken in their duty. They were undertaking to extinguish
a sacred right — the right of free thought and free speech in religious
things ; a right which has its limitations, as we all know, so that in
any case which comes up the question is pertinent, Have those
limits been reached by this man? — and on that question the
honestest may divide, as men did on Dr. Bushnell. The one point
is, which party was right, his or the opposition ? In view of the
light shed upon that, by the quarter of a century which has since
passed, I say, he was right. That is, it was his right to stay in his
pulpit, and speak his mind and publish it, and leaven public
thought as much as he could. On the other hand, it was their right
to head him off by any amount of frank and determined discussion.

Well, in the discussion which did come up, and in the attempts
to silence him by ecclesiastical action, he made a highly powerful
showing, I say, and did a grand service for all other men — even for
his own foes, if they had but known it, for it would have been no
kindness to them and to their posterity to let them put our Congre-
tionalism under the bondage which they proposed, and prepare
a future here in which no thorough broad-feeling and self-respecting
man would care to stand as a Christian minister.

Dr. Bushnell had some exceptionally strong qualities for the
conduct of a campaign of controversy like that.

In the first place, he had no such reverence for the opinions of
other people as would make him weak in resisting them. Some
good men lose all power of assertion the moment their positions
are largely assailed. They succumb to the simple weight of
authority against them. If they are decisively outvoted, that fact
alone changes their mind, or at least introduces into it a degree of
uncertainty, so that they have not much more to say. Dr. Bushnell,
on the contrary, was the more energized, by adverse votes, and all

422 HORACE BUSHNELL.

the more joyfully put his powers into the field. In some respects it
would have been an improvement in him, I have thought, if he
could have a little more bowed down before great authority ; but
in the one matter of standing in a desperate gap, one man
against all men, and deciding a particular battle, he could not have
been much improved. His small respect for the bare dictum of
anybody made him a first-class man of war. And, after the war
was past, and the days of peace had come, and there seemed to be
less need of that burly independence of his, it was refreshing,
often, to see his old habit still work.

Another qualification which served him well was an extraordi-
nary amount of confidence in the decisions of his own mind.
What he saw he saw clearly, and seeing it clearly, stood thereto. He
saw clearly, because he had a good deal of brain to see with. And
not merely mass of brain did he have, but vitality and mobility, so
that, when he addressed himself to a subject, every atom of him
went in full-spring. Some great heads sit down on a subject in a
lethargic, old grandmotherly way, and they fumble, and guess, and
miss the points, and run things together, and take forever to reach
a decision, and then do not know so well as they would like to.
But he went into matters in his total force and with a solid enthu-
siasm, catching the points, and tracing the lines of difference with
the instinct of a hound. Wherefore, it was natural that he should
be confident of the validity of his own perceptions and verdicts.

Another item in his panoply was a perfect consciousness of his
own integrity and love of truth. He did not fight for mere victory's
sake. He had no selfish ambitions to push on. He was simply
bound to have that prevail which ought to prevail. Where a man
feels like that, it allies him with God and puts him in the way of
mighty furtherances from that quarter, and makes it no easy task to
handle him. Dr. Bushnell was human, and may have been caught
in an occasional flush of personal and second-class satisfaction that
this or that antagonist was substantially crushed in debate ; as was
illustrated many years ago, when, the theological times being hot
and men on both sides accustomed to put in as for life and
speak their whole mind, he said of a religious newspaper, long
since defunct : "To say that this paper is behind the age is noth-
ing, it is behind all ages. It is as ignorant of the past as it is
opposite to the future ;" — in some instances, I say, I should not
wonder if it did him good to hear the ring of his own blows,

HORACE BUSHNELL. 423

and see the blood start where he hit. But the prevailing and
characteristic temper of his mind was a magnanimous loyalty to
truth, irrespective of all persons, personages and institutions. That
made him a redoubtable combatant.

Also, he had an almost unmatched ability to state a thing in a
way to make it seem true. Some advocates have a habit of pro-
longed and formal argumentation, step by step, and all the way
through you find yourself quite able and disposed to criticise what
they say, and perpetually dissent ; but with Dr. Bushnell, whatever
your disposition might be, he was continually carrying you off your
feet and insinuating his views into your soul, by the peculiar and
most rich way in which he worked up his subject, in both substance
and form. Many a time I have listened to him exhibiting what I
had not been accustomed to believe, and yet, for the time being,
and while under the spell of his statement of it, I would catch my-
self slipping into belief, and would need to walk around in the open
air a little, and observe where the sun, moon and stars were actually
situated, before I could restore my equilibrium. It would be a
pretty rank absurdity that he could not so present, if his heart and
convictions were really in it, which he could not so set up before
you and glorify, that you would not float about in a delicious dream
of assent. "Doctor, what did you preach about, yesterday?" said
a visitor in Hartford of a Monday morning to him, as he met him
on the sidewalk. " I preached a sermon to show that we know
more of the future than we do of the past," he replied ; and I have
no doubt he proved it. And if he had put it the other way, he
would have proved that too. That is, if his conscientious view had
been that we know more of the past, than we do of the future, he
would have made it seem so by his splendid statement thereof.
And along with the mere statement, the orderly and masterly mar-
shaling of his materials and his consummate diction, there would
have been a certain indescribable imperativeness, or genial insistance
in his voice, exceedingly well calculated to carry the day with his
hearers.

Well, you arraign such a man as that for heresy, and put him
on his defence, and you may be thankful if he does not carry you
over to his heresy — while he is speaking, at all events. And after
he has finished speaking, and you have settled back into your cus-
tomary convictions, you will be likely to discover that certain
ameliorations have crept into your mind, so that you are not as

424 HORACE BUSHNELL.

clear on the question of forever silencing him, as you were before
you were bewitched by the curious force of his honest plausibilities.
That is the way it works. And so, when Dr. Bushnell was tried by
a jury of his peers, it was not possible to get him condemned.
And the more especially was it not possible ever to condemn him,
because then, and more and more as the years went on, it was per-
fectly evident, to both friend and foe, that he was a deeply religious
man. Whom God has accepted it is pretty difficult to discard, and
say he shall not preach. His affiliations with God, and the secret
connections of his inner life with the very life of God, were not
signified and expressed in the old-fashioned forms of utterance,
and he often wandered from the beaten paths of speech so com-
pletely that numbers of traditional folks, trying to follow him, did
not quite know where they were, and wondered whether they were
not engaged in an excursion eternally out of sight of land. But all
that sort of uncertainty passed away at last, even in their minds ;
and as he moved on gradually into the sweet ripeness of his later
life, by universal consent there was no one among us more utterly
attuned to divine things, more profoundly experienced in God,
more full of the sober satisfactions of a rational piety, more sensi-
tive to supernatural impressions, more polarized upon those ineffable
things which make the bliss of that heaven into which he was soon
to ascend. He religious ! Listen to his voice of prayer. Read
his amazing sermons, with their mighty spiritual intuitions ; their
great reverberations as of the Eternal ; their tones from far away ;
their oft-times majestic onflow, made musical by the full inspirations
of God. No dissonant and distempered nature ever put forth such
signs. And it was beautiful to see in his old age, how these supreme
qualities came to the front, and clothed the still robust, and reso-
lute, and downright workings of his intellect with that softness and
gentle beauty wherein we so often see the distant great mountains
stand, their rugged grandeur toned and illumined till they seem
like the forms of a dream.

So he stood for us, and spoke for us, and won the day for us,
in some important respects, by force of exceptional endowments
and great gifts from the hands of God.

My third reason for satisfaction that a memorial of him has
here been raised, springs from my sense of what he was to this
city, where he spent his life of work ; and, work over, laid himself
down in his last sleep. The fame of our little metropolis rests on

HORACE BUSHNELL. 425

her great and useful men. In so far as she has great writers, great
statesmen, great inventors, great lords of business, great theologians,
great lawyers, great saints and so on, she is a city set on a hill, and
a prosperous city.

Well, Dr. Bushnell carried the name of Hartford to the ends of
the earth. Only a few weeks since, I received a letter from a
prominent clergyman of the Church of England, inquiring about
him, and he spoke of him as his "teacher and helper," and went
on to remark on "the vast and constantly increasing number of
enthusiastic friends" whom he has in that country. The themes on
which Dr. Bushnell wrote were not such as to spread abroad his
name most rapidly, but wherever he does go he inevitably makes a
large impression, and lends renown to the name of the city which
was his home. And, considering that, and remembering, too, the
much more than common interest which he had in this place, as
also his practical works for its improvement, I expect to see a statue
of him on yonder Bushnell Park some day, set there by his proud
and grateful fellow-citizens.

But if this city has cause to remember him and perpetuate
his name in memorial acts and offerings, what shall I say of the
obligations of this church, on which he spent twenty-six years of
toil, in all the walk and way of a faithful minister of Jesus Christ?
He resigned his service here in 1859, nineteen years ago, and,
during that time, many of his parishioners have died, many have
removed, and all of those of his congregation who were children,
and too young to understand and appreciate him, have grown up
into the congregation without any real personal knowledge of him
as a preacher and pastor. Therefore the number of those remain-
ing here to whom he ministered is not large ; but they will under-
stand it when I say that perhaps never was there put into a quarter
of a century of public preaching and teaching, by one man, such a
body of remarkable thought as went into the work of Horace
Bushnell, while he was the minister of this church. It was a won-
derful opportunity to sit habitually within reach of that man's
utterance. During the last years of his life he once in a while came
into our chapel service on Thursday evening, and a few times, when
there was opportunity, he rose and spoke ; and although he was
then past all power of concentrated and long continued mental
labor, being in a state of physical damage that would have quite
cowed most men, yet the things he said in those little talks were as
28

426 HORACE BUSHNELL.

characteristic, and as unapproachable in their kind by other men, as
anything he ever printed in the days of his prime. I recollect with
perfect distinctness how almost every turn in those off-hand deliver-
ances was an intellectual surprise to me. Well, to be a parishioner
of such an one as that, to be in habitual contact, not only with his
public and formal utterances, but also with his unique and massive
personality, as revealed in private and brought to bear in the daily
detail and minutiae of life, was to be exalted into a privilege not
easy to be measured. And there are intellectual and cultivated
men in this city who look back to the time when he was speaking
and moving among us as a time almost impossible, in the eternal
nature of things, ever to be repeated. Of course, the very fact that
he was so unique, and of such marvelous endowments, shut him
away from many (even from their apprehension) ; and the fact
that by-and-by he began to seem to violate certain old and cher-
ished forms of religious thought shut him away from certain others,
so that they underrated his mental power in some cases, very likely.
But to those who were able to receive him, and really gauge his
dimensions, he was one of God's most rare works, and a singular
intellectual and spiritual blessing. And even those who could not
harmonize with his mind and his doctrinal ideas, and were there-
fore in danger of misestimating his exceeding abilities, came at last
to accept the general admiring verdict on him — as is illustrated by
; the fact that the aged Mr. Hosmer, whom this city has just lost,
and who withdrew from this church as a practical protest against
Bushnellism in theology, was one of the most liberal and most
cordial of those who gave to this memorial here set up.

I have spoken thus far of Dr. Bushnell's mind as a bountiful
gift to this church, but his work here was not a magnificent piece of
intellectualism, and that alone. His great powers were consecrated
to Christian uses and Christian results, and what those results were
I might show a little, did I please to draw facts and figures from our
church records. But only a little, because his work in the world
was more universal than particular ; and even where it was particu-
lar (as in sermons preached here), the things accomplished (three
quarters of them) are not capable of registration on church records.
The full statistics of him you will have to wait for until God gets
ready to expound them. To hunt them up now would be to search
the recesses and silences of thousands of souls, and to go also
among the dead, who are, and ever shall be, profoundly different

HORACE BUSHNELL. 427

from what they would have been but for him. This is true of all
Christian ministers, I know ; but of him it is singularly true, because
he did not aim at results on which you can keep tally so much as
some, and because the build of his mind was such as to qualify
him brilliantly for works and results imponderable in any known
scales.

Speaking still a moment more on our satisfaction that this
memorial marble has been prepared, and on our reasons for being
thus satisfied, I observe that it is always a benefit to survivors them-
selves to thus recall and celebrate their worthy dead. There are all
sorts of culture in it for them, and in the memorials which they
piously erect they provide a culture also for succeeding generations.
These solemn acts of remembrance take us out of the strain and
agitation and fret of the Present into the deep and soothing quiet
of the Past. These acts awake in us a deep personal tenderness, as
bringing us into communion with our brethren who have forever
disappeared. These acts put us genially under the influence of the
opinion, and the personal and public life, of the Past. They there-
fore render us deep-hearted, and teachable, and loyal to established
verities and sanctities, and thoughtful and recollected and tranquilly
earnest, thus saving our life from rawness, and immoderate impulse,
and shallowness and the various infirmities of an imperfect civili-
zation.

And as to the people of the future — why, it is easy to learn
what we do for them by the durable memorials and commemorations
that we invent, if we will but recollect what is continually done for
us by those memorials which previous generations have transmitted.
How did you feel in Westminster Abbey, as you passed from point
to point and gathered up into your mind its world of old memories ?
How did you feel as you wandered from city to city of Italy — that
incomparable land — and observed its cathedrals, galleries and amphi-
theatres ; its broken columns, historic roads, and arches of triumph ;
its fields of ancient battle, its beautiful seas, its isles like the isles of
dream-land ; its disentombed cities and arts, and reminders mani-
fold of a marvelous long-gone day — how did you feel, I say, and
what would that fascinating country have been to you had the former
inhabitants left not one visible vestige of their existence and their
greatness ? And when you made a special visit to the grave of that
one man who has most influentially entered your soul and your life
— some poet with whom you have habitually communed ; some

428 HORACE BUSHNELL.

philosophic thinker who has mightily widened your horizon and
rectified your wandering and lawless thought ; some theologian or
reformer or man of science ; some sweet saint whose example has
suffused your life with light ; some martyr whose devotion has thrilled
you a thousand times, and has always been your one bugle-call — at
that grave, I say, what has it not been to you, first of all, that you
could find your way to it and identify it anyway, and then that you
found it suitably honored, so that you could read there his dear name,
and a sentence or two descriptive and significant of him, and could
there stand in communings indescribable, and in an overflow of not
unhappy tears? Aside from our fellowship with our God, there is
nothing on earth of such pure delight, and such enrichment, as
these pilgrimages through the Past, and these visitations at the rest-
ing-places of the dead. That, then, friends, is what we provide for
those coming after us, when we build these remembrances. We
dot the earth with sanctified spots to which our children will resort,
when we are gone, for wholesome reflection, for grateful tears and
for noble inspirations. Many years and many generations from now,
we hope, there will be those who will look upon yonder tablet, and
yonder sculptured head, and rejoice that Bushnell once lived, and
that we his contemporaries had the heart thus to magnify him, and
set our formal seal on his name and fame. The last words of Dr.
Bushnell's will, written by himself not long before he died, were
these : " With unbounded affection for those coming after, known
and unknown, I subscribe myself, Horace Bushnell." I fancy, there-
fore, that, if he could now speak to us, he would thank us that we, in
what we have done, are giving him an opportunity to salute those
coming after and speak a personal word in their friendly ear. We
wish we could have perpetuated his actual presence on earth, and
given the people of other periods to know by their own sight what
a man he was ; but he could not longer remain, and so we do the
best we can, and bestow on them this gift and sign in marble.
Remembering, as we do, how all great souls — and all small ones, too
— desire to be remembered in after times, and to have a part and lot
in all things done under the sun, we think it would be selfish in us,
and a mean unbrotherliness, if we did not honor this their wish, and
prepare for them what immortality on earth we are able. What title
have we ourselves to be remembered after the grave hides us, if we have
not grace and nobleness enough to hallow our own dead, and set
up this and that barrier against the oblivion that would engulf them ?

HORACE BUSHNELL. 429

And while we perform these fraternal acts, we should not insist
that our dead should have been perfect persons in order to be enti-
tled to all this homage. Nay, we will not. We know that they
were of our flesh, and " struggled hard, as we do now, with sins and
doubts and fears." So it was with him of whom we this day speak.
And when I praise him as I have, I well understand that it is an
erring and sinful man (nothing but a man) that I praise. But while
I recollect and so confess, it does not to-day take any hold on my
feeling. Fond of him while he was living, and not disposed to
search out and emphasize his faults and short-comings, I certainly
am not the less fond now that death has put its sacredness upon him.
It is almost impossible to speak in an absolutely judicial tone of one
who has done us great service, whether he be living or whether he
be dead. The idealization of love, the transfiguration in which it
clothes its own, is a beautiful infirmity — so beautiful that we may
well suffer it, I think, especially in a world where there is much
unsympathetic criticism, and a steady flow of dispraise and belittle-
ment, even against those who are most after the pattern of the
divine.

JAMES A. GARFIELD.

Delivered at Park Church, Hartford, Sept. 25, 1881.

It is impossible to add aught to that unprecedented outpouring
and testimony which day after day has filled the daily journals ot
this country and the world in regard to President Garfield, his life
and his death. And yet it does not seem possible, even if it were
fitting, to let this holy day pass, and our worship go on, without
some further remembrance of him, and some further observations
upon that great event which we all so deplore. Will you give me
your attention then for a few moments while I recount some things
which tend to make this very sorrowful loss of ours not wholly
intolerable to our hearts.

It is enough to fill us with a deep and solemn joy that our
President was ready to go, as having long been established in the
Christian faith, and long accustomed to carry the burdens and meet
the ills of life in the strength of Him who is all things for evermore
unto his beloved. He was born into a family steadfast in God. He
was piously and diligently taught from the first. He went forth to
his first tasks with the faith of his mother strong in him. He con-
secrated himself to the service of his country in war, not only as a
patriot but as a Christian. He trusted in the Lord God of hosts in
all the perils of battle. He returned to civil life and legislative
service, on principle. And all through his long public career he
kept himself personally pure, defended this and that in God's name,
drew close to God in prayer and frequent worship, and commended
himself unto all men as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. There-
fore it was to be expected that he would come up to death with an
inspired courage, as he did, and would leave the millions who mourn
for him to rejoice themselves in a thankfulness which words cannot
express. He sleeps in Jesus, blessed sleep.

JAMES A. GARFIELD. 431

I remind you too that although at first his death seems un-
timely, because he was not yet old, and because his children were
yet young, and because he seemed to be on the eve of doing more
for his country than he had ever done, nevertheless he had, in fact,
rounded out an uncommonly full life ; a life indeed so complete in
great services that any of us would be more than satisfied if we could
work out one like unto it. There was no time lost in his fifty years.
In his very childhood he began his tasks, and from that time on till
his breath ceased in death, his hand and head and heart were busy
and his manly earnestness never flagged. After some years of hard
manual labor, and after some suitable preparation for it, he became
a teacher, than which no vocation more draws on a man's powers,
more inspires a true and good heart, or more tells on the welfare of
the world. And, according to all accounts, what his hands found to
do in that pursuit he did with his might, and in a conscience void
of offence towards God and man.

Then later, in 1861, he with characteristic zeal and devotion
responded to the first call of his country for men to put down rebel-
lion, and on that new field, by universal consent, he carried himself
with an ability, and a self-forgetfulness, and a success, very honor-
able to himself and beneficial to his country. Already he had
arrived at a point where it could hardly have been called untimely
had he died.

But his most serviceable and brilliant years were still before
him, for now he enters the national congress and for eighteen years
on that conspicuous floor, and at one of the most important periods
of our history, he stood in the front rank of debaters and parliamen-
tarians, upholding the great principles in behalf of which the great
war had been fought through, assisting to lay anew the foundations
of the republic, and furnishing to the political student and the states-
man of coming years a body of speeches, arguments, and orations,
on matters fundamental to the public welfare, as vigorous and mas-
sive, as high-minded and as true to the laws of God, as anything of
the kind in all our later history.

A powerful orator on the field of civil debate and in perilous
times, a man of presence and courage and great-heartedness, and of
ingrained and incorruptible high principle, is one of the finest fig-
ures on earth ; and Mr. Garfield could have afforded to rest from
his labors if he had left only his parliamentary renown to speak for
him unto succeeding times.

432 JAMES A. GARFIELD.

But I do not know but the man has accomplished as much
in his dying as ever he did by his living — though it should be
said that his dying would have been a comparatively futile event,
had he not already greatly commended himself to his people by the
solid and even resplendent services of his life. Many good men
and saints of God passed away on that sad day in September which
saw him go, but the world at large did not even know who they
were, and could only think of his going ; and the reason for that
was (in large part) that his life had been filled with works well-done
that bore directly and visibly upon the interests of this entire nation,
and therefore of all mankind.

But many a man of great services has not been so fortunate as
our President was in working great results upon his bed of death.

Notice how that matter stands.

In the first place, those openings of domestic love which have
come to the observation of mankind during our long and terrible
days of waiting and watching by his bedside, have been a very gospel
to the universal heart of man. The pathos of it has been something
utterly irresistible. Gen. Garfield's early home life, his affectionate
laborious mother, his older brothers sacrificing themselves for him
the little one, his first contributions to the comfort of the family
when he grew to be old enough to do anything, his marriage to the
girl whom he had taught in his school, his devotion to her, and hers
to him, during all the days of their early hard pulling together, his
instinctive recognition of her, and of the mother who bore him, in
that kiss of mingled memory and affection, so much commented
upon, which he gave them when he had taken the Presidential oath
and stood at last on one of the awful summits of the world ; all these
home-bred realities which have been gradually disclosed are a bene-
diction, I say, and an education to all human-hearted persons even
unto the ends of the earth. And then, to crown all, how during
these last eighty days of trial the name and form of Lucretia Gar-
field have gradually come into the foreground ; the woman, gentle,
strong, and faithful ; and how the kings of the earth, and the states-
men, magistrates, and parliaments, of the whole civilized world have
saluted from afar that gentle form, and have rained their benedic-
tions upon her head, she meanwhile pursuing her daily way and
bearing her daily dreadful burden in a quietness that was sublime ;
the quietness of a life-long love for him who was fading away before
her eyes, and of a life-long trust in his God and hers. I do not

JAMES A. GARFIELD. 433

know that ever in the history of the world has a woman been set
upon just such an eminence, and in the blaze of it has carried her-
self in such absolute modesty, sweetness and strength.

I repeat ; it is to be mentioned among the felicities of General
Garfield's career, and as one of his final services to mankind, that
he and his in the providence of God have stood before the world in
a domestic picture most edifying to contemplate. It is one star in
his diadem of stars that his domestic life would bear the world-wide
publicity to which it has been exposed.

Another work which he has wrought in his dying, as he was not
able to do in his active life, is this : he has exhibited the highest
qualities of the human soul under a pressure to which not many are
ever subjected, and in thus doing he has delivered a lesson and an
exhortation to us all. Behold ! what patience there was in him, what
equanimity under the terrible fluctuations of his case, what consid-
eration for those about him, what courage to the very last, what
steadfast silent refusal to load those whom he loved with any anxiety
or foreboding of his own, if any such he had. To be sure, these
special, fine attributes were in him long before, and had a good deal
of exercise doubtless in his years of war, and in his many struggles
of debate and legislation ; but they came to their utmost in his long
final contest with death ; and besides they were displayed on a
vastly more public theatre than ever before, and under circumstances
impressive beyond all parallel. What a preacher of the best things
of character he was, and is.

I but put forth a variation of the same theme when I add that
in his long dying he did a matchless service in whelming all sections
and classes in this country in a common noble and tender feeling,
and melting all nations into such a unity of the heart as was never
known. A few years since, we had not those wonderful methods of
swift intercommunication which we now have, so that a world-wide
solidarity of feeling, such as we have seen of late, was impossible.
It took weeks to get a message to England, and months to reach the
outmost nations ; but now the stroke of General Garfield's pulse at
any given moment, was simultaneously observed by the entire circle
of the populations of the globe — and this sense in all men's minds
that they were sitting together, at the same moment, over the same
sufferer, watching the swell and ebb of his life, greatly assisted their
interflow of emotion, and unified them in a manner truly wonderful.
And certainly that is a good thing. We, the nations, are divided

434 JAMES A. GARFIELD.

from each other by long intervals of sea and land ; by diverse blood
and training and history, by the memory of old wars in some in-
stances, and by a general inability to see eye to eye on a thousand
things. But these many tones of dissonance were all drowned in one
mighty melody of peace and love around the couch of our suffering
President ; and from no land among all lands have we received
expressions more heart-melting than from our enemy of years ago —
Great Britain — whose Queen, overriding the conventionalities of roy-
alty, and grounding herself on her womanhood and her recollection
of her own sorrows, has put herself heart to heart with Mrs. Garfield,
and with our whole people, in dispatch after dispatch from her own
hand ; has ordered her court into mourning, and by a command to
her ambassador at Washington has placed upon the President's bier
a wreath with these words : — " Queen Victoria, to the memory of
the late President Garfield — an expression of her sorrow and sym-
pathy with Mrs. Garfield and the American Nation, Sept. 22, 1881."
I think that the American people will be ready now as never before
to subscribe their amen to the words of the Poet Laureate of Eng-
land, when he said and sung years ago, addressing his Queen :

" May you rule us long,

And leave us rulers of your blood,

As noble till the latest day;

May children of our children say,

' She wrought her people lasting good.'

Her court was pure, her life serene,
God gave her peace, her land reposed,
A thousand claims to reverence closed
In her as Mother, Wife and Queen.

And statesmen at her council met,
Who knew the seasons when to take
Occasion by the hand and make,
The bounds of freedom wider yet,

By shaping some august decree,
Which kept her throne unshaken still,
Broad-based upon her people's will,
And compassed by the inviolate sea.*'

Men and brethren, in this unity of peoples and kingdoms,
brought about of late by our anxiety and woe, you have an illustra-
tion of what is permanently possible, yes, of what shall actually be,
in the golden age of the world, when

JAMES A. GARFIELD. 435

" No more shall nation against nation rise,
Nor ardent warriors meet with hateful eyes,
Nor fields with gleaming steel be covered o'er,
The brazen trumpets kindle rage no more;
But useless lances into scythes shall bend,
And the broad falchion in a ploughshare end."

Another victory of our dying President, and another universal
service to right thinking and right feeling, is the demonstration
furnished in his case that the radicalism of those who say, " One
man is as good as another," meaning thereby that a man is to be
taken for what he personally is, and is to have no esteem or defer-
ence on account of any official standing he may have, is wrong and
cannot be vindicated. We, in this country, (many of us,) have
often ridiculed the homage paid to kings and queens and other
grand officials in the old lands over the sea, especially in instances
where those grandees have been in themselves insignificant, and
even contemptible. But the truth is, the person who happens to be
the sovereign of England (for example,) at any given time, be that
person man or woman, wise or foolish, moral or immoral, has two
great distinctions which entitle him or her to unusual deference.
First (to use the very language of St. Paul on this subject) ; "He is
the minister of God;" "for there is no power but of God; the
powers that be are ordained of God ;" "for this cause pay ye tribute
also, for they are God's ministers." Therefore, when Thomas Jef-
ferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, in 1776, that:
"All governments derive their just power from the consent of the
governed," he did not cover the whole truth on that subject. He
did not bring in St. Paul's idea at all. It was natural that a man of
his religious views should not. Moreover, it was natural that all our
people in that day should tend to lose sight of the divine side of
human government, and dwell altogether on the people as the source
of power and authority, because they were just then falling back on
the extreme right of revolution against their oppressive King, —
George the Fourth of England — who had lost his divine right to be
their monarch if ever he had any, they would all say. As time went
on, and our national experience was enlarged in several great crises,
(notably in the war of the Rebellion, in 186 1,) men began to recover
that lost doctrine of Rulers the Ministers of God : — and our whole
onset on the insurrectionary southern people was just a gigantic
statement of that doctrine, as against their Jeffersonian notion that

436 JAMES A. GARFIELD.

no government has any authority a moment longer than the people
like. We have shed the blood of myriads of men and have
expended money by the billion, to establish St. Paul's assertion,
and prove that a civil ruler is more than that same man would be
as a private citizen, and is entitled to more consideration.

And now in these last days the same truth has been announced
in another way — namely : in the honor, at once magnificent and
tender, which has been accorded to General Garfield, with a spon-
taneity and a whole-heartedness which were universal. It was
because he was the anointed of God (that in part) that the best
surgeons the land could afford stood guard at his bedside, that
innumerable letters of love and good cheer were poured in upon
him, that every Sabbath service in the land made mention of his
case before God, that every day at millions of family altars petitions
were sent up, that other lands hailed him and blessed him in con-
tinual telegrams, that railway companies stood ready to carry him
whithersoever he would, ministering to his weakness by their utmost
skill, as though they were carrying an angel ; and now that he is
dead, it is because God's minister is dead that the bells are tolled
all round the world.

I said that as over against that radicalism which holds that one
man is as good as another, the truth is, every ruler has two distinc-
tions which make it fitting he should be revered. The first distinc-
tion I have mentioned. He is the vice-regent of the Most-High.
And the second is, that in him is embodied and symbolically set
forth everything that makes the nation whereover he presides to be
a nation. The American people are fifty millions strong, and Gen-
eral Garfield in his own person was those millions. We all headed
up in him. So we felt and so it was. When he was shot, we were
shot. When the Pennsylvania Railway Company took him up ten-
derly in its arms, him and his whole household, and fled with him
as on wings to the healing airs of the sea, hushing all along the way
the thunder of their countless trains, and rolling into Long Branch
with their precious burden like armies coming home from victory,
every man of us felt that he himself had received a personal atten-
tion from that great corporation. Great is the power of symbols
and symbolic persons. Remember what the flag was to us in 1861,
when it was attacked. In ordinary times it swings from its staff a
beautiful object and sufficiently dear ; but in times of national peril,
by a grand movement of the imagination, the people flock to it, and

JAMES A. GARFIELD. 437

set their eyes upon it, and glorify it beyond all power of expression ;
because it is natural in great excitements to sum up all that we think
and all that we feel in symbols that are compact and vivid and con-
tinually visible. So the army can the better push into the battle
with that in sight. So the dying soldier can the more calmly die
when that waves before him. So the legislator can the more devot-
edly act for his country's good, when in the air over the hall where
he sits floats that emblem of nationality.

In the case of the flag our enthusiasm is aroused by a symbol
pure and simple — that is, the flag in itself is nothing, all its interest
is symbolical — in the case of a symbolic person, as our President,
there are three interests combined ; first, the man ; secondly, the
man as God's agent ; and thirdly, the man as the representative of
our nationality. And if the man in himself is strong, good, and
attractive (that first) , — and if the man has been duly chosen, so
that he is God's minister and our representative indeed (that
second), then all conceivable forces of influence are met in him,
and there is no end to the delight wherewith his people look upon
him, no end to their indignation when he is insulted, or their grati-
fication when he is respected, no end to their sorrow when he suf-
fers, their mourning when he dies, and their tearful thankfulness
when the nations of the earth uncover their heads about his bier,
and lift up their dirges and the lamentations of their bells over his
grave.

Thank God that the essentially representative character of a
ruler has again been mightily declared, — his character as representing
God, and his character as the personification of his nation, — and
thank God that Mr. Garfield was such a kind of man, so able,
noble and good, that when we come to pay him the official honors
that belong to him, we are not filled with any reluctances as though
Garfield the man was less and meaner than Garfield the magistrate,
but contrariwise, we gather about him with the entire affirmation of
our judgment and conscience, and the entire homage of our hearts.

And now, one other point, wherein he did a special great work
in his last days, and made his bed of death more a throne than his
chair of office could ever be.

In the first place, his protracted disability, with its intense fluc-
tuations of hope and fear, has brought this nation to their knees,
with remarkable unanimity and earnestness ; and has notified them of
their own instinctive and ineradicable confidence that there is a God,

438 JAMES A. GARFIELD.

and a personal God, and a God who desires to be entreated by his
creatures. In prosperous times it is easy to conceive doubts and
bring forth many vaporings of argument to the effect that as likely
as not there is not any God, or, if there be, that he cannot certainly
be found out ; or, if he can be found out, that it is of no use to urge
him to do this or that, his mind having been made up from all eter-
nity, and his plans laid out. But in the stress of disaster the soul is
apt to settle back upon its inevitable knowledge, its primary affirm-
atives which, so often as any way, lie below its ordinary easy obser-
vation, (just as in dying, not unfrequently, the memory calls up
numerous things which had not been thought of since childhood,
and which would be supposed to have lapsed from the mind for-
ever)— and so, in the twinkling of an eye, you shall see the forty
atheistic surmises that may have half undermined the faith of a great
people, exploded as by the seven thunders of God ; and down upon
their knees they go, and the sky resounds with their outcries. Not
every one of their outcryings has in it all the elements of prayer ;
nevertheless it is good that God is thus practically acknowledged ;
and what a work he has accomplished, who in prostration and fee-
bleness, yea, and by force of that very feebleness, has thus con-
strained and solemnized and bowed down a whole nation.

But it turns out that this wrestling unanimity of petition has
been resolutely negatived by the Most High ; — in which I notice
two things. First, a most impressive self-assertion, and awful sov-
ereignty, on his part ; and secondly, a special challenge to our faith.
I cannot well describe my sense of the majesty of God as made
known in this his recent refusal of the desire of his people. O ! that
monarchal will ! Albeit by no means a cold will, but a warm one.
It is not likely that He who created Mr. Garfield, and redeemed him,
and brought him into the kingdom of his grace, would withhold from
him any good thing out of sheer cold-heartedness. No, that en-
throned will, before which all creatures are as insects in the shadow
of Mt. Blanc, is as suffused with every conceivable geniality as is
that same white and holy Swiss Mountain when the descending sun
has laid upon it its tinges and blushes and heavenly afterglows. In
so far as God's will is resolute and will not bend at this or that
point where we think we would like it to bend, the explanation must
be that he sees all things in their relations and the end from the
beginning, and is committed by the whole stress of his love to safe-
guard all welfares ; so that that absolutism of his which rejects a

JAMES A. GARFIELD. 439

nation's prayer is just his all-including tenderness doing its proper
work. It would be a dreadful state of things if people, by massing
themselves and prolonging their urgencies, could get in upon the
feeling of God in a way to make him forget his wisdom for the
moment, and his obligations of affection to other peoples and in-
terests, and bestow a gift as when an inconsiderate mother unable to
resist a teasing child, grants unto him that which eventually destroys
his life.

The subject of prayer, its answers and refusals, is one too large
to be treated just here ; so that all I can undertake to say for the
present is, that in God's denial of us of late, we have an inconceivably
robust notice served on us of his fatherly absolutism ; and a call also
to trust him perfectly because although absolute he is fatherly. We
have it for our special privilege just now to walk by faith. Plainly
we cannot walk by sight. If our President had been spared in con-
cession to our agony we should have had a touch of sight, (such as
God often grants,) but as it is, there is nothing left for us but to rest
in faith — unless indeed we choose to let our grief run away with us
and land us in Atheism. And Atheism is not sight but rather every-
thing negative, and dark, and distressing.

For my part, I have taken pains years ago, to look this matter
of prayer through, in so far as one can ; and the result is that the
removal of our dear President when all mankind wanted him and
prayed for him, not merely does not bewilder my hold on God, but
sends me to him in a new devotion. Yes, it is a solemn exhilaration
to observe that august fortitude wherewith he adheres to the best,
even though for the time being he may seem inclement to the suf-
fering creatures and multitudes who throng to his feet. You are
safe, and I am safe, and all things are safe, under the shelter of an
administration which is braced and buttressed by such integrities.

And as to prayers, why, put them in none the less because of
these invincibilities in God, because he has told us to, and because
many a blessing is secured by prayer, (even visibly sometimes,) and
because God's refusals are rich in glorious results, precisely as the
wealth of many a man is the result of self-denials inculcated and
forced upon him by his father when he was young and more full of
wishes and longings than of wisdom.

Brethren, I have thrown upon one of the gloomiest and most
heart-breaking events of the ninteenth century, two or three sweet
cross-lights of comfort ; and whereinsoever the death of this much

440 JAMES A. GARFIELD.

admired and beloved man still seems gloomy to your sympathetic
and disappointed feeling, I pray that you will try to rest in faith,
patiently waiting for that sure day when God's full explanations shall
pour in, and every darkness of his earthly providence shall seem to
shine before our adoring eyes with an absolute refulgence, even the
refulgence of his perfect love.

And now on the morrow, in the midst of I know not what
pagentries of mourning, attended by an innumerable concourse of
his countrymen, under the eye of his wife, his children and his
mother, almost in sight of his home and his birth-place, on the
shore of that inland sea he loved so well, in the very spot he had
often mentioned as the one in which he would like to lie, he will be
lowered to his rest. And by our sympathetic feeling we shall all be
there — we and our wives and our children — we shall all be there.
And while the bells of Cleveland and the measured martial music
fill the wide spaces over that city with their sorrow, our bells from
Canada to the Gulf and from the Eastern to the Western sea will
also all sound out their grief; while from the Cathedrals and the
countless towers of our mother-land responsive tones pour forth,
joined in the upper air by the murmur and mourning of the peopled
world.

LEONARD BACON

Delivered at the General Association of Connecticut Congrega-
tionalists at mlddletown, conn., june 20, 1882.

I never succeeded in telling Dr. Bacon how much I admired
him and loved him ; he was not a soil that seemed naturally to drink
in that kind of rain, and the rain grew discouraged ; neither
have I been able to speak my mind about him since he died. When
a vessel goes to sea overloaded, she ships water and misbehaves, and
how could I, loaded up with Leonard Bacon and my heart sunk to
the gunwales, voyage out into the perils of public discourse in mem-
ory of him. I think to-day that, were all time at my command, I
would put to sea and take my luck, sink or swim. As it is I will
only make a few movements and small circuits in plain sight of land.
In whatever circuit, however, it is inevitable that we hear the great
monotone of the open and free ocean ; — or, to come back to literal
speech, it is impossible even to speak the name of Dr. Bacon, with-
out calling up the grand sound of his great character and his great
life.

It has been said that falling in love amounts to a liberal educa-
tion ; and I put it down, therefore, as the first thing wherein I was
profoundly beholden to this man, that he furnished me an object on
which to pour myself forth in a practically unlimited way. In my
judgment the principal thing in the world is its men and its women.
Great and dear is this green month of June, made originally for the
General Association of Connecticut to assemble itself in and open
out its happy feeling ; great the overarch of heavenly blue ; great the
careering night with its embellishment of stars ; great and solemn
the outstretch of astronomic spaces ; great and also bewitching,
29

442 LEONARD BACON.

that everlasting march and miscellany of phenomena, which consti-
tutes our environment here. Nevertheless, let the heart speak, and
the greatest interest in God's whole round of fascinations is the
people. Multitudes of them I have never really gotten hold of in
any visible way ; but I take a sense of them stretching away beyond
my horizon and I have a feeling of their company present and to
come ; many of them to whom I do have access are not superfinely
made up, but then no more am I ; so that they and I have a good
deal of mutuality and I humbly look for more ; but among the many
of all sorts who constitute the grand total of mankind, there emerges
now and then some bulky personage, bulky and balanced and
supreme and full of the very energy of God, in whom is summed
and typified the scattered potentialities of man ; so that the rest of
us spontaneously take him up, and point to him, saying : — "There
we are, there play our thoughts, orderly and beautiful, there moves
our majesty, there shine we at our best, there is told forth the ulti-
mate stature of man on earth."

What I most want to say though just here, is this : — That these
personal instances are an eminent Godsend in that they are some-
thing on which we can flood ourselves out in a manner and measure
that is very educative to us, very expanding, very full of touches of
the infinite, and of course very satisfying. Nor, to tell the truth,
is it necessary that these adored ones of ours should be perfect or
approximately perfect, but only that there shall be so much of them,
and of such quality, or so much of subtle adjustment of us to them
and of them to us, that love and enthusiasm can get a fair start ; for
these beautiful passions, once in motion, have in them a great
power of idealization. Like the sun, they make all things shine,
they irradiate blemishes, they make midnight bright.

We look to young men for these hero-worshipings in the main ;
but numbers of times in my later years I have found myself caught
in the same gracious fury ; and I have always been grateful to Dr.
Bacon that he was born of such size, and so diligently amplified
himself as his many years went on, and built himself up so four-
square, proportionate and solid in character, and withal made so
few mistakes, that I could dwell upon him in my heart with more
than contentment, could fire up over him on occasion, in a total
conflagration of good feeling, and can contemplate him now in his
completed life, as one looks back to some old-time masterpiece,
some picture, some poem, some cathedral, some oratorio : — oratorio,

LEONARD BACON. 443

I say, for a well-rounded and true life is really a musical product ;
it touches us as melodies touch us, it has in it the secret law of har-
monies, it coasts the infinite as all great music does, it takes diverse
ranges of expression, and it is an organized unit of life most impres-
sive and delightful to the beholders.

If I descend from this general outburst of gratitude to analyt-
ical portraiture, and try to taste Dr. Bacon in his elements, I strike
directly, of course, upon those features of his make-up which, out-
standing as they are, like promontories, all the world has noted over
and over.

There was his admirable physique — not tall and stately, except
when preternaturally magnified under the force of some immeasur-
able subject from crown to sole — not handsome, especially if by
handsome you mean pretty (not that, God forbid) : — a physique
nevertheless, distinctly individualized and powerfully masculine, with
a head over all and a face which one is very pleased to remember ;
a head massive and suitably set off with an abundance of energetic
and characteristic hair, which in a rousing debate took a part as
distinct as the doctor himself did, and much enforced his ideas, I
used to think ; a face of much strength, sometimes all strength,
sometimes all humor, sometimes all tenderness, sometimes all three,
a truly royal and most usable face — a physique of great toughness
and foreordained to longevity. So tough and enduring that his
handwriting was untrembling to the last, his voice deep-toned and
gravely melodious, with never a touch of old-man's piping in it, and
all his mental action enforced and sent home by a great bodily
emphasis. So his life was one of thorough-going health ; not dys-
peptic, not puling, not marked by passages of collapse and foreign
voyages for health, not set upon by physicians and medicines and
the other makeshifts of mortality ; but full of work and pertinacity
and honest fighting — all of which endurability was pathetically sig-
nified in the fragmentary, and scarcely dried manuscript he left when
he took his sudden march out and away.

Such was the outer Bacon as he appeared to my eyes, and I
expatiate upon these details with a mysterious fondness, and I do
not now see why I should not be utterly disconcerted and dissatis-
fied, if I ever meet Dr. Bacon in some improved body. I do not
at present agree that it can be improved. But sufficient unto the
day is the evil thereof.

Pass inward now a little upon the man. And where shall I

444 LEONARD BACON.

begin ? I do not know that it makes any difference where I begin.
Strike in anywhere, and instantly you reach the Baconian flavor, as
an apple bitten here or there smacks of its stock and type.

It is a relishable thing to me to celebrate his combativeness,
and his very respectable and valuable self-esteem, and his inflam-
mable indignation, and his beautiful target-practice on opponents in
debate, and his courage to state a thing when it needed to be stated,
and his agility in getting on to all sides of a subject and speaking
on them all, with a fine disdain now and then of what Dr. Bacon had
said on a previous occasion — at least so it looked to superficial
spectators. All these strong and lively virtues of his I recall with a
particular gusto — and all the more because they are the sort that so
easily carry a man into downright misdoing and a poor show of
himself, but in him stopped always short of that ; right on the
crumbling edge sometimes but never over the edge*. O ! he was a
master of edged tools ! He swung them and they glittered and
numerous things and persons were cut down, but he had no love of
savagery, and he was as tender of an opponent as of a friend, pro-
vided he would stay slain and dead, where he belonged.

I use the images of warfare, but I need not say to one who
knew him that no carnal weapons ever got mixed into his use of
whatever sharpness. It has been my privilege to receive numbers
of his thrusts, but I never felt in the least hurt by them. The last
totally destructive shot he discharged at me, was fired a year ago
last winter. I went to New Haven to deliver a lecture before the
theological students, and, having a few moments to spare beforehand,
was addressed by Dr. Porter with the encouraging remark, "Well,
Brother Burton, we are ready to receive light down here even from
Hartford." While the ripple of that pleasantry was passing around,
Dr. Bacon dropped in, and was told of what had just been said ;
whereupon with a supernatural promptness he replied : " It's
precious, there's so little of it." It may seem to you that I ought to
have been disabled by that, and retired ; but no, I went on just the
same, and was helped rather than hindered by what he had said.
There was wit enough in that observation, and truth enough too, to
make an end of me, but dear me ! if you could have seen his face
when he spoke. Such a mingled illumination of intelligence, fun
and brotherly love — it would have made a delicious photograph in
your memory forever. At any rate it did in mine. I shall sorrow-
fully miss his first-class personalities.

LEONARD BACON. 445

It lies right along side of this, to say that he had no grudges,
and no envies, and no suspicions, nor any other satanic attitudes
towards other men. He remembered in a way truly fearful. He
remembered you, and what you said, and what you did not say, and
the whole miserable or unmiserable figure you cut on this or that
interesting occasion ; — and years afterward, in some circle or on
some public occasion it might suddenly transpire that he had always
carried your photograph next his heart • — not as intending to way-
lay you in some remote and convenient future, but as having in him
a memory constitutionally unable to discharge anything, from the
landing of the Pilgrims to the latest joke ; and suddenly, I say, this
fatal gift of recollection might show itself in some lambent or other
allusion to you, or your defect, like a flicker of moonlight around a
ruin — but as for any conceivable meanness against persons, no such
evil birds had any hiding in him or ever could have. At that point
he was the noblest man I ever knew. To be sure, Jove among gods
is more easily noble and indisposed to shoulder and crowd his
brother and sister gods, because he is Jove, the supreme Olympian
figure by universal acknowledgment ; — that is one of the advantages
of greatness. Still, how often we see the greatest pothering in small
feelings as though there were no greatness in them ; men of genius
unable to discern any touch of the admirable in anybody else — men
of place and power and real worth just missing of universal worship
by reason of some small fly in their ointment, (small but powerfully
diffused) ; some mean spirit of competition,' some sensitiveness to
personal affronts, some false tone in the otherwise perfect chorus of
their attributes. The organization of Bacon was orchestral and
grand, and no string or pipe of meanness interpolated the blasphemy
of its discord.

I have sometimes asked myself whether this nobleness toward
his brother men was mainly ethical, or mainly sympathetic ; and I
am not sure that I can tell. Probably it was both. Dr. Bacon on
his emotional side was always more or less inscrutable to me. His
ethical side was absolutely unconcealable. It stood in the fore-front
of his nature, high and broad and massive, marble-like and holy.
But as regards his heart he was confusedly interpreted. Some called
him cold. Others said, "he looks so but he is not." I joined that
latter class. He never gushed. He never seemed to appreciate
gush. He would not cry. He would not laugh if he did not want
to. I saw him one week-day evening in his church, in the midst of

446 LEONARD BACON.

a multitude who wept and shouted for two hours under one of John
B. Gough's old-time rushes of popular eloquence, and the only things
in the house that neither wept nor smiled were Dr. Bacon and the
marble pulpit against which he was backed. Long years ago I heard
him, of a Sunday morning, preach a sermon in memory of his own
daughter who had just died, and I, who knew her not, could not
have spoken of her with such unvarying calmness as did he. I have
looked into his face when I tried to shed on him a few bedewings
from my fountains of feeling towards him ; and I do not know to
this day whether he even heard what I said, so placid was he. What
would have happened had I let out on him my whole flood, I can-
not tell. Nothing, I suppose, excepting, perhaps, some movement
of pleasantry, as when Memnon made some reputed murmur under
the kiss of the morning.

And yet this man must have had heart, else how could he so
overwhelm the tender feeling of others as he sometimes did in dis-
course ; and how came he to be always so standing by and bearing
a hand where the rights and interests of men were attacked ; and
how is it that such multitudes of us who have been wounded by his
lance do not feel wounded ; and how is it that he was the center of
such a family love as makes earth heavenlike ; and finally how is it
that torpid persons like myself are so thawed and ridiculous when
his name is mentioned, and so lonesome forever now that he has
gone?

So I should say that his bearing towards men was very largely
affectional, albeit his phenomenal self-command in all matters of
tenderness made him seem statue-like. I have sometimes wished
that he had been more infirm just there ; but after all, in a change-
ful landscape, with its smiling and its weeping, the strength of the
hills is no mean feature, and in our moments of utter humanness and
brokenness, how sweet it is to commune with their eternal repose.

You notice, brethren, that I could easily wander all day among
the characteristic features of Dr. Bacon, but I must omit much and
make haste.

How many things I remember ; things he said, things he did,
things he undoubtedly and externally was and is.

He was a stable theologian and yet most limber to adjust him-
self to all thought, and most wide-sweeping in his sympathy. I came
out of his church on the day of his funeral, and there up in the air,
in the drizzle and gloom of the late and rainy afternoon, I heard the

LEONARD BACON. 447

mingling of many bells. It was fitting, I thought, that there should
be much lamentation over such a man ; but presently I noticed
that the lamentation was made up of many kinds. St. Paul's was in
it — the Methodist bell was in it, the college was in it, and several
more were in it, I was told ; — and then, over all and as it were
embosoming all in its deep tone, the great civic bell in the court-
house tower sounded forth its mourning — and I said in my heart :
" It is well ; for did he not include ye all in his love and service ; a
Congregationalist, clear-cut, debative and indefatigable, and yet a
catholic Christian of the noblest mould ; a minister of the gospel,
devoted and laborious, and yet a distinguished civilian, a man of
the sort in whom courts have their safety and their honor, munici-
palities their health and their renown, and governments their stead-
fast anchorage at the throne of God." Thus spoke my heart within
me, while in all the towers the day's sorrow was tolled and tolled.

I remember also his pulpit and platform rhetoric, which fitted
him admirably, mind and body. Such a body as his required such
a rhetoric, sinewy, affirmative and vital. And his mind required
such a rhetoric, large-moving, lucid, orderly, grave, and, in passages,
flushed with the colors of noble sensibility and a cultivated ideality.
The sound of him was sometimes dull, as he moved ; and there were
those that hungered sometimes for more flush, and more efferves-
cence, and more of the lesser and more sophomoric forms of mind-
play ; but adding up, now, all his public deliverances that are left in
print, and adding up the still clear traditions of his unpremeditated
utterances, have- we not a ponderous mass of powerful work, a
rather first-class instance of English undefiled, English well organized,
and English put to strenuous use always ? It is good to have such a
diction abroad to tame down the froth of more incontinent men,
even as it is good to have the beautiful severity of Greek art to
chastise the lawless spontaneities of souls overstocked with fancy,
sensibility and sentiment.

The conversational vigor, variety, vivacity, and memory-work
of Dr. Bacon has not failed to be remarked upon by many, and I
can believe what they say. Not many extended meanderings of talk,
man to man in privacy, did I ever have with him ; only brief inter-
views did I catch — not because of inaccessibility in him, I suppose,
but because, though often warned of the peril of it, we all incline
not to visit the Niagara which we can visit any day; and also
because we all suppress ourselves under the sophistical impression

448 LEONARD BACON.

that our affairs are too urgent day by day for deliberate visitation.
The greatest of urgencies is that we get contact with first-class and
contagious people ; and not let Niagara cease forever before we reach
it. Last summer in Norfolk, where he and I were leisuring some
miles apart, I had a few genial glimpses of him — sweet, sad glimpses
they seem to me now — and I noticed with much admiration his
undiminished mind, his clear flow of anecdote and reminiscence, his
likelihood never to lapse into any mustiness of old age, any maunder-
ing, any substantial slackening of his life-long, splendid sanity. I am
grateful that these cheerful prognostications of mine were fulfilled,
and that the disease that slew him was no mind-muddling thing, but
a clean, unlingering death-stroke, such as was befiting for a man who
all his life had himself kept clear of indecisive and circuitous methods.
While I thus celebrate his old age I must not forget to recall
his freedom to the last from down-hearted views of himself as a
mortal man soon to die, or of anybody else, or of the world at large.
Death gets to be an excessively large theme to many old preachers,
and people all alive as yet do not sit easily under their continuous
solemnity ; but Leonard Bacon escaped these unnecessary rumina-
tions, was too much alive and invincibly young to feel moved there-
to, and had the same dauntlessness and victory of life for others,
as he looked at them, and for the world. Some of us have moods
of giving up, and letting the world follow its wretched gravitations
and go astern to whatever destiny seems good to itself; and many
of us are occasionally debilitated by the sorrowful mystery of life ;
we were made so, I suppose, but Dr. Bacon was not. He was a very
serious man in the main flow of his nature and he saw enough in
man and in man's life on earth to keep him attent and workful, but
he was no man to pipe Jeremiads ; partly because his natural organ-
ization was affirmative and soldierly, and partly because he was a
theist and a Christian to his heart's core, and in the tumultuation
of whatever chaos could distinguish the firm preludings of the pre-
appointed cosmos — cosmos for himself after, and in spite of, the
approaching overthrow and confusion of death, and cosmos for all
creation. To the very morning he died, and in all mornings, it was
in him to say what our poet has said :

" Over the winter glacier,

I see the summer glow;

And through the wild-piled snow-drifts,

The warm rose buds below."

LEONARD BACON. 449

It would be interesting to me to know how far temptation could
ever get hold of Dr. Bacon — how far he ever saw any glitter in the
bribes of life, any allurement in its many-phased fleshliness, anything
perilous to his inward wholeness in the fascinations of intellectual-
ism, and so on. If he was as unassailable as he seemed, it is awful
to think of, that we have had such a man among us ; awful yet
exhilarating. What a judge he would have made ! How terrible his
moral and other perspicacity, and his relentless hold on the actual
momenta of things ; — at the same time doubtless what fatherliness
(of the grave sort) ; and on occasion what sweet relaxations of the
absolute straightforwardness and doom of justice. I glory in Dr.
Bacon that the temptations of life struck such a breakwater in his
person, and that in his long warfare of all sorts against slavery and
many other misdoings, wherein he laid on and spared not, no man,
however enraged, has been able to impugn his character, or even
raise a haze of doubtfulness about his person. Full-orbed and
solar shone he, in whatever attempted fog — and now that warfare is
no more for him, and in silentness he lies, how distinctly unblemished
in his renown, how serene and copious the light he sheds.

I do not see but a grave burden is laid on the sons he left.
Whether they — six strong — can perpetuate the solitary force of their
father, remains — I will not say doubtful, but unsettled. One bears
his name, except that midway in the grand old name has been
inserted that of Woolsey — Leonard Woolsey Bacon — against which
insertion I should want to rebel were it not that it is just what it is,
and was put in there on an impulse of love for one who to the last
was very dear to Dr. Bacon. What our remaining Leonard will do
with this two-storied benediction I do not quite know. If he shows
himself a full-sized Bacon it will be first-rate ; and if he shows himself
a full-sized Woolsey it will be first-rate. And if by some phenom-
enal good fortune he should blend in himself the outstanding attri-
butes of both, it would be a combination and coordination offerees,
from which one's imagination draws back — not in terror exactly, for
would not the St. John in Woolsey diffuse itself through the Boanerges
in Bacon and the Boanerges in Bacon shed its vehemence through
the St. John in Woolsey, — not in terror I say, but only in amaze-
ment that God should let two such plenary personages flow together
in one man.

I hope that some Bacon (one or more) will take the place of
their great sire in the councils and assemblies of our communion.

450 LEONARD BACON.

No man among us contributed to these convocations such an un-
varying fidelity of attendance as he, or such a pronounced and
masterly participation in their affairs. What I shall do in all future
meetings, with him away, I cannot yet see. My heart forbodes
much loneliness and leanness and wistfulness ; not as though the
many dear brethren all about will cease to be dear and interesting,
nor as though powerful men are no longer possible to God ; but
who will bring in just that virile and high-flavored individuality, to
which we have become so wonted in him : — an individuality always
alert, always on its legs, always with two pistols in its belt and a good
sword at its side ; always spicy with quotations and personal allusions
and the resources of history; always Congregational by force of
much thought on the subject and a good rootage in the Congrega-
tional old past ; always ready, too, to rise into movements of devo-
tion and lead us out and up in prayers of great reverence, solidity
and fitness ; where is the living man to perform this diversiform
service in our Israel ? So say we all, I fancy.

Well, the old oak has gone down, and we who sheltered under
it are out in the open sun. I did not know, until he fell, how much
I had sheltered under him. His presence in the state was an
authority. His fighting power was a defence. His hale old voice
had a comfortable resound in it. His long-established leadership
made a good rallying point when a rally became necessary.

But he sleeps, I say. God took him, and he sleeps well. In
a certain spot in New Haven (a good place and full of historic
company for him) was laid the visible Bacon. The essential Bacon
has gone his unknown way — plumb down and bottomless some wise-
acres tell us. I turned over in my mind their wisdom, at the Doc-
tor's funeral ; and gave it a good look. I always knew it to be a
melancholy preposterousness and practical lunacy, though lighted,
here and there, by a glint of apparent reason ; but when I came to
apply it to Dr. Bacon, the shameful incongruity and inconceivable-
ness of it was suddenly revealed. Annihilation is conceivable in
connection with a man who deserves it ; but for a man full of God,
and strong- built in God, to be blown out, is next to saying that God
is blown out. A logical issue from which these men do not shrink,
to be sure ; but we shrink, and mankind at large do. As Dr. Bacon
lay there in the aisle of his church and the many feelings of the
hour tided into us, .and by force of the movings of our better nature
we struck into practical seership ; behold, we followed him in

LEONARD BACON. 451

indubitable vision into his new ranges of life — not in clear detail,
but in substance ; our souls refused and vitally abhorred that
ghastly non-sequitur the extinguishment forever of a son of God ;
and we took a new engagement of eternal life ourselves, and are
now on our way into it — or rather we are now in it, by God's
impartation of himself unto us ; and, by many a token, we shall be
in it, even by token of these prophetic feelings that break into
us, on every suitable and inspiring occasion.

It is well to recall and reconsider Dr. Bacon and make a day
of memory over him, as we have now done ; but hope is more than
memory, in this case as in many others — or say, hope stands on
memory, and thus gets its off-look — and some day, somewhere, by
some path of travel or circuit long or short, we shall come to this
man again, everyone of us, please God, and resume what is now
broken off; and have a general meeting, and a general interflow,
partly commemorative no doubt, but quite as much anticipative ;
while on all sides around us will stretch and stretch away — well, we
cannot call it June, and yet what shall we call it, that opening of the
eternal year?

FOURTH OF JULY ORATION.

Delivered at Hartford, July 5, 1882.

The American people for many years now have been subsiding
from the more vociferous and explosive celebrations of this national
anniversary. In some communities — city and other — they have
even gone to the extreme length of resolutely ignoring celebrations,
and settling down to absolute peace, as though the nation was
reaching that pitiful point of weary age where the grasshopper and
the firecracker are a burden. Still, I do not understand that this is
owing to any unyouthfulness and dullness of old age toward the
sky-rending heigh-ho of unrestrainable multitudes, but rather to that
law which you see illustrated in married life. Two lovers pass out
of their first vivacity and mutual demonstrativeness and general
state of outburst — founded for the most part on instinct — into a
reflective and calm contemplation of each other's excellence and an
intelligent sense of reciprocal ministries ; a condition of affairs that
seems tame and deplorable to inexperienced beholders, but to us
who are in it, seems all-sufficing and somewhat we can easily hold
to, nor can do otherwise than hold to, while life lasts and eternity
endures.

I would not offend the gun-firing interest here present ; more
especially since I am now about to speak of this our country in
a way of admiration that will be seen, I hope, to furnish a good
foundation for much Fourth-of-Julyism, whether of noise and public
pomp, or the retired contemplation and silent gratitude of those so
inclined. It makes one shudder to think that, antecedent to 1776,
there had been no Fourth of July, but only a perpetually recurrent
date, hollow and waiting to be filled, like the empty bucket of a
revolving, dry water-wheel. Days and dates are astronomically

FOURTH OF JULY ORATION. 453

brought about and might go on forever with nothing of much avail
in them, even as before men were created, days and dates came
round and round with a beautiful punctuality and sense of duty ; but
as it seems good for the dry wheel to catch up water by and by, to
revolve thereafter brim-full and dripping, so it is comfortable that,
at last, the race of man being started, dry dates began to be filled
with human deeds, as births, deaths and nameless hosts of doings
great and small.

It is idle to deny that this Fourth of July, among the rest,
began to be filled at once. Thus, at an exceedingly early day no
doubt, some person was then born, then another, then many, until
now on any fourth whatsoever births pour in in swarms. And no
man with a heart in him will claim that these incomings do not
magnify and sanctify and make pathetic that date which from all
eternity had been insignificant and untender. But, my fellow-
citizens, it takes more than personal births or any such to make any
day and date really supreme and overflowing ; nor might the birth
of a nation suffice ; for national births turn out miserable instances
of nothingness and vain-forwardness not infrequently. But, accord-
ing to all known records, no transcendent thing chanced to come to
pass July Fourth, in the long times of old ; no imperial and universal
man came in ; no magnificent nation ; no solitary and never-to-be-
forgotten stroke of God. No, as though the whole thing were
intelligently pre-determined, that one day was kept clean and clear
for our fathers to make their great manifesto in ; and when the thou-
sand of waiting years were fulfilled, on the exact click of the clock,
our fathers did strike in, addressing King George and all mankind
in an inspiration which they at the time knew to be considerable,
but which the hundred and six years since passed have proven to be
complete. We often admire the stately concurrences of the sky, as
where comets come back from incalculable wanderings and pass
among visible worlds in momentary peril of countless collisions,
but withal in the use of such cunning that no clash occurs ; but the
way our sires seized that long-tarrying date and made it famous for-
ever, was twice sublime, it being concurrency in the realm of human
volition and dependent for its exactitude on millions of free wills,
first and last.

I speak imaginatively, I know, but I in no wise over-color the
underlying solid fact of the providence of God in all history ; to
shape the contour of it, to be sure, but also to manipulate its details

454 FOURTH OF JULY ORATION.

and get them moving in such manner as to make that contour
perfect and possible.

In heaven's eternal councils our national day was fixed ; in
heaven's councils our fathers were set in their place ; and by the
time-keeping instinct of Almighty God it was secured that the men
and the day coincidently struck with a resound that shall never
cease.

But it is time, now, that I analyze this resound and find what
is in it. In other words, why do you and I so love our country,
and so emphasize the day of its birth ?

My first note is that our country insinuates herself into our
affections, much as everything else gets in ; covertly and by no
appeal to our sense whatever. When a small duck makes for the
water, as his first great movement in life, it is not because the water
has approached him with a well-argued and formal petition to draw
nigh, which petition has been elaborately considered and reasoned
and consented to by him ; and in like manner when children rise
before light every July Fourth and make all creation lively with their
free noise over this great country, it is not at all because they have
analytically explored that greatness and rationally settled in their
minds that the greatness is great enough to justify the noise ; and
later when the boy is not unwilling to march out with the regiment
in defense of the homeland in some capacity suited to his littleness,
it is largely on the small duck principle that he goes. Somehow he
has an instinct for it ; possibly hereditary — that is, his father grew
into a great attachment to his native land, and his grandfather
fought in the revolutionary war, and along the whole line of his
sires there was a strong-blooded patriotism, and he was begotten in
their image.

That to begin with.

After that he picked up his patriotism by contagion for a while.
He had much contact with the gusto of his elders ; their annual
July rage, their enthusiastic politics wherein once in so long they
saved the country, their national hymn singing, their commemora-
tive structures and their patriotic baptisms where the children were
called George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and
other heavy-weight and historic names.

In these unintelligent and semi-intelligent ways our first patri-
otism gets into us and makes its first headway. When I call it
unintelligent I intend no disrespect. We are caught in numerous

FOURTH OF JULY ORATION. 455

unconscious prepossessions in our young days, and should shake in
the wind all our lives if we were not. That is God's method of
getting steerageway on us as we put out into life, and making us of
some vigorous account. And a man who has a thoroughly head-
strong bias in the great constitutional passions of his soul — his
patriotism, his religion, and all that — is a much more usable factor
in the world's affairs than the man who leans all ways at once — so
well as being twice as interesting.

But passing out from the boy-time with its great instincts and
its fine sensitiveness to contagion, I find that a person's patri-
otism gets a great lift from the physical and social environment in
which his life goes on — though, to tell truth, that sort of influence,
the influence of environment, begins even in the boy time. I love
my country because all my personal experiences are associated
therewith. I was born in it — in a certain town and on a certain
spot and in a certain state — and as my years go on and I gradually
see the immensity of that circumstance, my birth, (its immensity to
me, and its soft appeal to my feelings), behold ! this ever-swelling
interest passes ever on to my birthplace and birth-land. Any land
that consents to have me born in it, naturally has my fealty forever.
So we all feel.

Well, being born, I began to move out upon my native scenery,
in much exploration. I notice overhead a magnificent sky, in
which all sorts of pomps and sweet vicissitudes go on by day, and
a much bespangled and fascinating pomp goes on by night. I lie
on my young back and converse with that infinitude with much un-
conscious edification and much mysterious inflooding of sky-born
influences. I hear the rush of rivers and the thunder of storms
that correspond to the several greatnesses and grandeurs among
which they rage. I wander in great forests, I look up to great
hills, I thrill to the sparkle of the morning, and silently tone down
to the pensiveness of the evening sky. I take my map and proudly
note the continental stretch of this my dear land; its mountain
forms, its sea-like plains, its innumerable nooks of loveliness, its
enswathing oceans, its sweep of zones and climates, its vast and
lovely invitation to the whole family of man. Patriotism is a local-
ized feeling, I say, and does not even insist that its native scenery
shall be in anywise notable. See the Hollanders fight for their tame
landscapes. Hear Charlotte Bronte glorify her solemn moorlands.
Listen to Walter Scott, while he expatiates on some unfascinating

456 FOURTH OF JULY ORATION.

patch of Scotland, and sings love-songs to it, and gives you to
understand that that beloved patch of nothing in particular is the
long-lost paradise of man.

But I must not dwell too long on scenery, neither must I dwell
on other personal experiences of ours which lend their interest to
this the country in which they come to pass ; as, our homelife with
its tender and now unutterable to-and-fro ; our school-going, our
school fellowships and all the much remembered gladness and
pathos thereof ; our out-going to begin life and all the diffidences
and heart-sinkings and backward longing of that. These things,
one and all, are tributaries to our patriotism, and could not be at all
omitted in my display of the contents of that great word.

Again, I find in our patriotism an element of delight in the
historic record which this nation has made. We in these parts
are accustomed to trace back to Plymouth Rock, and rather con-
ceive the whole country as disembarked from the Mayflower one
wintry day some years ago. Well, from whatever disembarking, on
whatever several shores, this very composite nation did actually
come, it is good to know that these disembarkings had great stores
of manly stuff in them, and were likely to eventuate in a people,
not merely numerous (which were nothing, and worse ; see the
terrific spawning power of many low-class and unprofitable creatures
in the animal ranges below man), but in a population of potential
men and women, among whom all industries should thrive, all cul-
ture bloom, all divine faith have a good hold and all heroism and
militancies spring forth. Wars have arisen and been mightily
fought through and ended by us, wars not meanly conceived in the
main nor waged in a simply hell-born hate. Our first one wherein
we undertook to back the effrontery of our birth, has passed out
now from the misconceptions of the period into as serene and
shining a piece of history as the world ever saw. There it stands,
unobliterated and bright, for the whole world's pious reading — and
bent over it, behold our old mother herself from whom we broke
away, her British spectacles wet with the joy and pride of her eyes
that children so stalwart should have been born of her. Then in
1812 we insulted the dear old soul again and she accepted the
lesson we gave her and assisted to incorporate it in the public law
of Christendom. Then thirty to forty years later we broke out into
what seemed to many a partially unnecessary swagger in the region
of Mexico ; which I touch lightly, only saying that if swaggering

FOURTH OF JULY ORATION. 457

be done, let it be well done — as it then was. And finally in 1861

so near that we still hear the roll of the drums, and still count up
the endless unsunken green graves, and still mark the mourners
going about the streets — we took up another task, the exact like of
which, perhaps, was never known; took it up with a mixed
vehemency no doubt (after the manner of men), but clarified our
intelligence as we went on in it, and clarified our motives, and struck
out free and broad upon the drift of God's providence, reduplicating
our vigor as the stress grew heavy, filling each awful chasm
as it opened with our living masses of men ; our southern brethren
meanwhile meeting us everywhere with a valor and a fiery home-
love which won even our admiration, and vindicated the great race
from which they sprung and made us not unwilling on every suc-
ceeding Fourth of July forever to mingle our songs with their songs
and intertwine our flags in a common jubilee. For five years we
put ourselves to it, north and south, in a manner practically immeas-
urable in its physical and economic outlay, immeasurable in its
heartbreak, immeasurable in its unfoldings of some of the best quali-
ties of man, and immeasurable (thank God) in the brilliancy of its
undisputed issues and the magnitude of its hold evermore on the
destiny of mankind.

I select these more outstanding features of our national record,
because in a hurried celebration of what we have done to justify
this love which we feel for .our native country, it is only things out-
standing that I have time to name ; and because when a people are
completely aroused in the passion and agony of a great war, their
fundamental traits of all kinds get declared ; and whether they be
understocked in the solid materials of character and force and be
nobodies, or on the other hand be men, is plainly and suddenly
made known.

In these struggles some great personages were developed and
some names given to universal fame, the mention of which on this
platform, on this day of public enthusiasm, would be to your feeling
like a discharge of artillery, excepting that possibly I might
bewilder some of you a little ; when in the catholic feeling of this
great day I came to mix up such names as Grant, Sherman and
Sheridan with such as Lee, Jackson and Johnson. For my part I
find that my antagonism to that southland is less and less personal
and more and more a matter of conflicting ideas.

But let us enter upon no debates. We are proud of our nation
3°

458 FOURTH OF JULY ORATION.

on the martial field. We are proud of our statesmen, jurists and
legislative leaders. We are proud of our inventors, and our chiefs
of industry. We are proud of our unfolding literature and its
beloved names ; names sadly thinned out of late, but when these
stars fade from our sky they do not on that account grow dark, but
on other worlds they shine — and even here, does not the light of
them still illume our daily way, do not their voices still make melody,
and when we faint or are sad do we not revive ourselves by them ?

I referred to the ideas which the American people have
espoused, struggled for and vindicated, as a part of the reason that
we are able to love our country as we do. Those ideas are such as
to make this land the best home on earth for the millions of man-
kind. The best home on earth ! I have made some runs in
countries over the sea, and I find myself exceedingly appreciative
of the historic accumulations, and the established and enriched
civilizations to be found there. Indeed, my fellow travelers were in
constant fear, I believe, that this and that allurement would take me
captive and lose me to my country forever. Nevertheless, I still
live to say that this is the best place on earth for all mankind to
assemble in. We have room for them. We can feed them. We
will let them all vote, years before they ought to. We will let the
vote of a common man go for as much as the vote of the most
uncommon. We will give them equal laws. They may have their
own religion. They may keep up their old-country innocent habits.
They may turn out in processions of their own, and make all heaven
ring with their foreign songs in whatever unpronounceable tongue
they like. They may have St. Patrick's days, or anybody's days.
They may marry us, if they want us and we want them. And the
children wherewith we are blessed shall be of any nationality they
please. Oh ! it is the freest kind of a country, and they are find-
ing it out. The day is near when there will be more Irishmen here
than in Ireland, more Germans than in Germany, more Scandinavi-
ans than in Scandinavia, more Italians than in Italy, and more
candidates for office, male and female, than in all the rest of the
world put together.

Of course it is important that these miscellaneous contributions
to our national life should be really melted down into that life, and
not remain in unreduced lumps. What would the ocean come to if
it could not really salt the millions of fresh-water streams pouring
down into it. Perish the thought that we Americans are the only

FOURTH OF JULY ORATION. 459

known salt. But this is the point ; we have undertaken over here
to give the world an original specimen of salt, and we do not want
these Italians, French, Irish, Germans and all the rest, to be season-
ing us to death with their kind, and thereby flatting out this last
great experiment of earth and time. The Darwinian idea is, what-
ever can be flatted, let it flat ; and I suppose our people must
accept this. All the while, though, we have a clear preference as
to who shall fiat. Or rather, disentangling myself now from all
comparisons, let me say that while we have a considerable ambition
to preserve a flavor of our primal stock, and have ourselves honored
by being grafted into the stock, rather than have ourselves confused
by being grafted scionwise into every thing that comes along ; we
certainly are not unwilling to receive into our sap and blood the
diverse piquancies which these foreign nations are willing to con-
tribute. It always makes a relishable sensation in my mind, I
notice, to think what a heterogeneous lot of ancestors are repre-
sented in my single make-up. It gives me a feeling of plurality
and power, and of possibilities of infinite expansion. Half of my
ancestors lie latent in me as yet, but some day under just the right
circumstances any one of them may break out in some absolutely
new forthputting of mine ; or in my posterity, perhaps, these laten-
cies may develop. Well, the more latencies the better. What is
the use in being only one man, when you can just as well be a mil-
lion ? And what is the use of having a nation monotonously made
up and all first cousins ? Nature abhors such a simple stock as
that ; and here on this continent we have laid out for something
more composite and interesting. Of course, we have our little
squeamishnesses about this process of admixture ; and occasionally
we pass a Chinese bill under a flutter of apprehension that the Mon-
golian type will prove too much for us ; but these coynesses of ours
will all pass away at last, and we shall open a western resort for the
total race of man. And when we get them here, as I said before,
we shall give them the largest liberty, we shall defend them,
praise them, vote for them, and love them ; but while we are thus
sweet and have them at close quarters, we shall energize upon them
tremendously by our free institutions, our usages, our school books,
our literature, our political campaigns, our churches, our Fourths of
July, our intermarriages, and other like bewitching remedies, until
we have in these parts an American man — not a foreigner, nor a
Yankee, exactly, nor anything else but a new species; as Mr.

400 FOURTH OF JULY ORATION.

Darwin would say, the last evolution of a process that began away
back in some period utterly inchoate, nebulous, and unfathomable.
I contemplate this upshot with a good deal of hilarity, you see,
and yet I know that no splendid eventuality in the human realm
ever comes by luck, nor even by the sole energy of Almighty God,
but rather by the concurrence and coefficiency and dutiful strong
endeavor of all living forces ; just as when the sea is about to make
a surge it calls on every drop in all its waves to push. This nation
has its defects to be attended to, its false laws, its false methods, its
pernicious usages, and its great sins to repent of. When innumer-
able individualities are aggregated and called a nation, they are not
necessarily better than they were before. The one thing that most
disfigured us, as a people, and made us intolerable to God and man,
was not anywhere to be found when the war of the rebellion ended.
Under the smoke of that uproar some angel of God came down and
set us free of it. And now what remains but for every man of us
to do his public duty in the most straightforward and God-fearing
manner so long as he has a country. On a great call we would all
fight for her. Well, then, let us do for her each lesser and little
thing that comes in our way. We are in an unusually uplifted state
of mind, I suppose, on this patriotic anniversary. This is a good
occasion, therefore, for taking our freeman's oath anew. Our flag
floats over us unchallenged by any power on earth. We are fifty
millions strong and more coming. We are in convenient discon-
nection from the great, sensitive and high-strung powers of the earth.
We have self-esteem enough to stock any three ordinary nations.
We have a language in which a man can say anything that is fit to
be said. We have under our feet buried a line of forefathers as ro-
bust and respectable as any one could ask. We have an unique
system of government, whose uniqueness, though, has not destroyed
it yet, notwithstanding several strains that made everything creak.
We have a passion for popular education, and a deep reverence for
law. We are family men, too, and have the steadfastness and
decency and the strong ways of the heart, that come of being in a
genuine nest rather than all abroad. Moreover, we have fair women
true, strong, and sweet, to hallow and keep the family. We have
unlimited deposits of wealth in our soil and our deep earth. We
have great inland water-courses for the passage of our vessels of
lading and of pleasure. We have almost all conceivable sceneries.
We have hot days that are first-class, and cold days that are equally

FOURTH OF JULY ORATION. 461

vigorous and unrestrained ; and cyclones that are the admiration of
the world. We have a most exuberant and omniscient press, and yet
a press as observant of the lines of morality, cleanliness, common
courtesy and all Christian integrity, I verily believe, as any press on
earth. We are a very composite people, as I have already explained ;
and our manner of government is complex, and built up by a
ticklish balance of forces antithetic ; and it used to be thought that
a people like us, and so situated, might fly into fragments some day ;
but the forces of solidarity have proved supreme thus far, and they
will, so long as every man of us does as well as he knows how — and
especially if our free religion is permitted to have its full diffusion.
We have managed to survive now over a hundred years, and that
hundred years back there is invaluable to us as a conservative
anchor-ground. It is like a hold on some shore while we move out
into unknown seas.

So my fellow-citizens, my heart will not let me believe that this
good ship of ours is to founder. Many sad things have come to
pass, and that may, but it will not. Let us swear that it shall
not.

The words are pretty old at last, so that I might hesitate to
quote them ; but when I recollect that the hand which wrote them
is dead now, so that they are brought to us afresh by the pathos of
death ; also when I give myself up to the natural emotions of this
jubilant anniversary, I no longer hesitate, but move right on to say
asjDur dear poet better sung : —

"Sail on, O ship of state !

Sail on, O Union, strong and great !

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate.

We know what master laid thy keel,

What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,

Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,

What anvils rang, what hammers beat.

In what a forge and what a heat,

Were shaped the anchors of thy hope.

Fear not each sudden sound and shock,

'Tis of the wave, and not the rock;

Tis but the flapping of the sail

And not a rent made by the gale !

In spite of rock and tempest's roar,

In spite of false lights on the shore,

462 FOURTH OF JULY ORATION.

Sail on; nor fear to breast the sea !
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayer's, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee, are all with thee ! "

ESSAYS.

WORSHIP.

Read before the Hartford Liturgical Club, Dec. 18, 1878.

Whatever human act, utterance or ceremony has in it an inten-
tional ascription of worth or worthiness to God, whether on account
of what he in himself is, or on account of his works and his promises ;
that act or utterance or ceremony is Worship, and has in it the very
essence and soul of worship, and carries in it the precious efficacies
of worship.

Under this definition, many things not generally thought of as
worship are included ; and some things quite commonly thought of
and talked of and practised as worship are doubtless excluded.

We are taught in the Holy Scriptures that servants are to ren-
der service as unto the Lord ; also that subjects are to obey their
rulers, that children are to honor their parents, that, wives are to
honor their husbands, that those possessed of this world's goods are
to assist the unfortunate, all unto the Lord ; and, in fact, that what-
soever is done in word or deed, even down to the commonest acts,
is to be done to the glory of God. That is the ideal life, the life
whereunto some attain, we believe. So then all life, as being conse-
crated to God and his honor, may be a worship, as truly so as is
prayer in the Christian assembly. So much as that is included in
worship in its true definition.

And as to the excluded things, behold, all public prayings
which are addressed to the congregation are decisively excluded,
and all soliloquizing prayers ; also all prayers of rebuke, which are
pointed at absent sinners, as wicked politicians, dram-sellers, per-
verse theologians, Turks, Mormons, and disciples of wild-fire, against
all of whom it is right enough to pray, but the praying in the form
of it, and in the aim of it in the man's consciousness, must rise

466 ESSAYS.

towards the Most High and be spoken unto him. Whereas, we all
know, that so often as any way, the man praying has no up-go at
all, any more than he has in soliloquizing, but is making an argu-
ment or curse directly against those pestilent human persons, as
forgetful of God as though there were no God, and as though he,
the man, had been substituted in God's place with a commission to
dispense his reprimands. All these and the like manward prayings
have no more prayer in them than the charge to the jury by the
judge has, and they have no worship in them either; for, according
to my supposition, they are neither directed towards God, nor
towards man for God, (that is in his honor), but are purely human
movements, movements out of the human, movements upon the
human, movements in a simply human impulse, whether of wrath or
self-conceit or love of approbation or some other.

All solitary choir-singing, too, where the performance is so
infected by a supreme art-motive and ambition for praise, as to be
addressed really to the congregation, is excluded from our definition
of worship, of course.

And if the whole worshiping congregation, in their prayers,
their songs, their ordinances, are just in the movement of a formality
(that and no more) , they being thoughtless, or reverently listening
to the sound of their own voices, or sailing about in a pious-seeming
service, instead of putting themselves in upon a prayer-hearing and
praise-hearing God in mass, determinedly and with the stress of real
feeling, — that congregation has fallen utterly out of worship, and the
fact that their service in the externals of it, the wording, the kneel-
ing and all the rest, points plainly out towards heaven, will no more
save that people from the displeasure of the Almighty, than the up-
ward-winging holy hymns sung by the aforesaid unheavenly quar-
tette save them. If a service in all its appointments is formulated
in a true conception of worship and the assembly take that holy
thing, holy in the form of it, holy in the origin of it, and holy in the
inestimable associations that cling about it — if they take that sanc-
tity and turn it into a mockery, their act seems more heinous, than
if they had gone before God in the hollow-hearted use of some
trumpery of their own invention, at the moment.

So much by way of definition. Worship to be worship must
terminate consciously and intentionally on God, and must be
designed to ascribe worthiness to him.

Of course no one can approach him with that thought in his

ESSAYS. 467

heart, without being rilled, more or less, with a sense of his own
unworthiness ; and right at that point, therefore, there slips into
worship inevitably the element of confession. And along side of
that and wrapped up in it, indeed, is a sense of want which neces-
sitates entreaty for one's self, and so that element slips in. And then
when, in your worshipful approach, you get to recounting his worth
and his numberless worthinesses, lo ! it appears that three-quarters
of them have had respect to other people than yourself and it would
be impossible for you to celebrate those worthinesses without break-
ing into intercession ; and thus there floods into your worship that
great element — so that your worship as you proceed, turns out a
complex thing • not winged but many winged ; not a stream, but a
stream made affluent by the inflow of mighty tributaries and made
thrice urgent upon God also in that way. So that when we speak
of worship, although we still cling strictly to our original definition
of it, because that definition was a precise and valid one, we
include Thanksgiving, Confession, Petition for our own selves; and
the bringing in of offerings in God's honor, Intercession, Ordinances ;
and I shall handle the subject of worship as thus rich in its contents.

And now, as bearing directly on our subject, the public worship
of God as a spiritual education, let me draw out certain thoughts
in their order, points fitted to show that worship is a spiritual edu-
cation, specially so, and in the nature of the case must be.

Turning to the Bible, I notice that God, directly upon the
fall of the human race in Adam, provided and specified an
access unto himself in animal sacrifices. The first we know, sinful
men are in that exercise and worship.

Then later and in due time, God declared a highly formulated
ritual, wherein nothing was left to the wisdom of man, but all was
made express, particular and minute ; its officials, its sacrifices, its
days, its utensils, its pomps and the places and buildings whereon
and wherein those ceremonies should go on, — even as it is said in
the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Moses was admonished of God
when he was about to make the tabernacle : See, saith he, that
thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the
mount." And if we look back to see what that pattern was and
how far it was detailed, we discover that the specifications thereof
reached the last jot and tittle, as though, in God's thought, the
matter of his worship was one of transcendent moment and big with
benefit for men. It is incredible that he should have particularized

468 ESSAYS.

and emphasized and solemnly enjoined as he did, and should have
sent his swift judgments on those of his Israel, who departed in the
least from that carefully appointed worship, if it was not his design
that worship should be a chief force in the spiritualization of man-
kind.

Run through the Bible, too, and observe how dear to him
places and assemblies of worship evidently were. He actually
inspired those who were to build the first tabernacle of Israel, in the
days of the great Exodus. He filled them, says the record, "with
the Spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge,
and in all manner of workmanship ; and to devise curious works, to
work in gold, and silver, and in brass, and in the cutting of stones,
to set them, and in carving of wood, to make any manner of cun-
ning work — to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the
embroiderer in blue and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and
of the weaver, even of them that do any work."

And when the tabernacle was completed, lo ! Jehovah signified
his acceptance of it and his delight in it by appearing in a cloud and
covering it and so filling it with his glory that Moses, overpowered,
was not able to enter into it. And fire by night and cloud by day
were upon that Sanctuary, "in the sight of all the house of Israel,
throughout all their journeys."

And similar mighty and thrilling demonstrations were made
when Solomon at last built that famous temple which was the Jew's
pride and the apple of his eye at the time, and has been a memory
in his heart in all the days of his sorrow and exile since. When the
ark of the covenant was taken unto its place in that house, into the
most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim, and the chief
priests and the singers with cymbals and psalteries and harps and
trumpets lifted up their voices together with a loud noise and
praised the Lord, "then," says the history, "the house was filled
with a cloud, even the house of the Lord ; so that the priests could
not stand to minister by reason of the cloud ; for the glory of the
Lord had filled the house of God." And when after that, Solomon
had offered his prayer of dedication and had ended, fire came down
from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices,
and the glory of the Lord filled the house again and shone with
such brightness and made such an atmosphere of the supernatural
all about, that the people " bowed themselves with their faces to the
ground upon the pavement, and worshiped and praised the Lord."

ESSAYS. 469

And we are taught that the very utensils of the temple were
also held sacred by God. And when Uzzah once laid his hand
unwarrantably upon the sacred ark, "the anger of the Lord was
kindled against Uzzah, and God smote him there for his error ; and
there he died by the ark of God." And when the Philistines
conquered the Israelites in battle and captured their ark, it was a
curse to them and the hand of the Lord was heavy upon them
until they returned it. And we are told in another place, that the
eye and the heart of God were so upon his temple at Jerusalem
and he was so well pleased with the assembling of all his people
therein, three times in the year, that he engaged with them and
made his solemn promise to stand guard himself over their property
and protect it, while they left their homes and from all places
throughout the land went up to Mt. Zion and the temple.

And what God was in those times he without doubt unchangeably
is ; and throughout the whole Christian era, he has been continually
testifying of his will touching sanctuaries and assemblies. Not in
overhanging strange clouds and signals of fire, though the day of
Pentecost when the Holy Spirit so came was not without marvels
like that ; but in signs, notwithstanding, equally incontestible and
quite as overpowering ofttimes. God's invisible presence and God's
unseen strokes are an habitual experience in all the temples of the
world, wherein his true disciples do gather together. Which is only
what we should expect on the ground of what our Saviour said : —
"Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I
in the midst of them." Ah yes! "thy way, O God, is in the
sanctuary." "The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the
dwellings of Jacob."

And God's people have always felt with him that it is the
dearest place on earth. David said, "how amiable (that is, how
beloved) are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts." "I was glad when
they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord." "My
soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, in a dry and
thirsty land where no water is, to see thy power and thy glory, so
as I have seen them in the Sanctuary."

Speaking still of God's interest in worship as though charged
with spiritual advantages for men, I recall the fact, that in fullness
of time he designated a Mediator, in whom all preceding Mediations
should have their fulfillment ; he implying in that act that worship
was to be a permanent and universal Institute.

470 ESSAYS.

I notice, too, that by our Lord, a memorial feast was appointed
as one form in which the people of God forever might draw nigh
unto him. And as regards that feast, I remark, that if we take the
low and rationalistic conception wherein it is made to be simply
and only a memorial before the people, of the great sacrifice for the
sins of the whole world, the entire force of it being directed upon
the communicant, and he receiving it as operative thus and no
otherwise, so that at first it might seem that there was no worship at
all in the ceremony ; yet, and even then, there is somewhat wor-
shipful in it, for the reason that the hearts of those participant are
focused upon the divine and suffering Lord Jesus in thankfulness
and adoration, and upon him who gave his only begotten Son for
our redemption.

But if we advance a step and conceive the Holy Supper as also
a memorial presented before God, wherein it is urged on him by
his upward gazing people, in mingled thanksgiving, confession and
beseeching, that Jesus Christ bore our sins in his own body on the
tree ; then truly there is worship in its utmost directness and fullness,
a worship all the more complete because it is assisted, called out
and borne up by things visible and by acts taking hold of the bodily
sense.

But if we go still further and plant ourselves on the full doctrine
of the Real Presence, as held by the extremest Sacramentarian,
whatever vicious elements may thus be imparted into the transac-
tion and rite, and however the intention of our Lord in it may thus
be perverted, I think it cannot be denied that there remains in it a
movement of worship and a great movement too; -and I am free
to say, that often in the Roman Mass, putting my reasonings and
preconceptions behind my back and falling in sympathetically with
the adoring and prostrate people, I have seemed to myself to be
commonly carried out towards God in every worshipful feeling.

But all theories aside, it is plain to be seen, that in that out-
spread table, as set for us by our Lord himself, and in our necessary
acts in connection therewith, we have worship in one of its most
concentrated and energetic forms. And that he should have
ordained that rite, is a practical token of his estimate of worship as
a means of religious education.

And while I am referring to various Institutes, I may just men-
tion the matter of offerings, as expressly given to us in Holy Writ,
for a worshipful exercise ; as where it is said that the prayers and

ESSAYS. 471

alms of Cornelius had "come up for a memorial before God."

Moreover, in the book of the Revelation of St. John, we all
remember how Heaven itself is represented as a place of assemblies
and full-toned, mighty worship ; a worship of grandeurs and majes-
ties and multitudes ; an inconceivable choired movement about the
throne of God and the Lamb, perfect in its holiness, perfect in its
liberty, perfect in its joy, perfect in its concord, perfect in its equal,
unremitting and everlasting onflow.

Now, gathering up these many strong expressions of God him-
self through his Book, in respect of the worship of him, I find myself
already conclusively settled in the thought that worship by the
assembled church must have in it an amount of spiritual furtherance
not easy to be measured. God does not launch a system of
machinery, to use a not very pleasant word, in a manner so
explicit and impressive, and then all along gather about it such
consummate diverse tokens, thus reiterating himself on the subject,
as though it were a main subject for both him and us — he does not
do all that, with a view at last and in these days to declare public
worship a small and inefficacious thing, so small as to be quite out-
done by preaching and religious newspapers and societies of Reform
and Bible classes, and staying home Sundays to read good sermons
and pray in one's closet.

There is a great notion abroad in the Christian world, about
having a profitable Sunday at home, reading a sermon better than
you could hear in the church, and offering up prayers just as
valuable to your soul as though a thousand people were joined with
you in it. On the face of it that notion is indefensible, implying
as it does that God will put dishonor on his own appointments and
ordinances, and declare them futilities. Moreover, it is a fact of
universal observation, that a private worship which thus disparages
church worship always ends in despising itself, as it logically ought,
and dies out. Nothing is more demonstrable, from the facts of life
and from the nature of the case, than that the private worship of
God roots in the public and has no power to keep itself up alone.

My second general thought touching our subject has respect
to the great value of self-expression, whether in religion or in things
secular. This value divides itself into two particulars. First, as we
ourselves are twofold, body and spirit, and as a spirit without a
body would not be a man, while a body without a spirit certainly
would not, so it is necessary that our mental states, our thoughts and

472 ESSAYS.

our feelings, should body themselves forth if they are to amount to
much — I do not mean now, amount to much as an influence on
beholders, but amount to much in themselves. A thought unbodied,
or an emotion, does not stand in its entirety ; it is less than it need
be and ought to be less in size, less as told in consciousness, less
distinct, less in our own possession for use. After I had received
a license to preach and was about to conduct my first religious ser-
vice, I could not recollect certain points in the order of service ; and
when suddenly called to baptize two children, my first experience
of that kind, again I could not recollect, and was driven out into
the purest piece of extemporization known since the foundation of
the Christian Church. Now I had seen those things gone through
with hundreds of times and knew all about it, but you see my
knowledge had never yet come fully into my own possession,
because I had not given it a body and put it out into practice.
When once I had made my knowledge an overt thing, I had the use
of it ; it was full-born in me and I did not stumble any more.

So faith without works (that is, not embodied) is dead, and no
more, whether for size or useableness, than my knowledge was.

And love unembodied, that is, not playing out towards its
object in practical service of some sort, is uncompleted, not half
itself, and dwindles.

And why does not the same law hold in worship ? A worship-
ful thought, a worshipful feeling, declared, put into an ordered and
sufficient round of utterance and ceremony, is continually greatened,
continually strengthened, continually approximated to its normal
and possible entirety. And a worship of no sufficient amplitude, or
one-sided as dropping out half of the truths of God, or reduced to
pure bareness for the sake of spiritual religion and through fear that
the senses will get the upperhand — a worship, in ' other words, that
refuses the pious soul a chance to embody itself, condemns that soul
to dwarfishness, more or less, to something akin to the personal
incompleteness of a human ghost, which ghost, if he could only get
into a body, would not merely be more of a man, but more also
in the ghost part of him ; or, in other words (what amounts to the
same thing in principle), faith without works is dead.

That, then, is the first use of worship as a vehicle of expression.
It gives the Christian soul a chance to pass itself out into a divinely
appointed incorporation, and thus grow. And an examination of
Christian history will show that an unworshiping piety, or a half-

ESSAYS. 473

worshiping piety, has always been full of defect, warp, unbalance
and poverty.

Then again, it is to be borne in mind, that faith, hope, love,
contrition and godly desire, when once formulated in the provis-
ions of worship, get a very helpful reactive influence from those
formulations themselves. If all the evil in us, the carnal longings,
the plottings, the vengeances, the unchastened ambitions, were once
suitably externalized so that we could put our eyes upon them, is it
not likely that we should take a sudden new sense of ourselves ?
Certainly we should. And similarly, if our total spirituality is put
into expression in hymns and prayers and chants and creeds and
sacraments, will not those externals, in their turn, play in upon us
and we thus come into a double action of grace, into the spiritual
benefit of expression, (even as anger flames all the higher when
spoken out), and into the spiritual benefit of worship as a thing
exterior to us, to be contemplated and received as an impression at
its various points of contact with us ?

I pass now to a third general thought which I simply name
and then leave it, though it is one of some importance.

Inasmuch as worship is converse with God, it must be that in
so far as we genuinely and earnestly and often enter into it, it will
assimilate us to his likeness. That is the natural law of the case.
Which law is phrased in current speech in that saying — " A man is
known by the company he keeps." Divine company makes divine
souls. And if we could keep the whole world in willing, daily con-
verse with God, through worship or in any way, it would be straight-
way a redeemed world.

But in addition to that communion of worship with its natural
blessing, we have this supernatural effect, namely : — that while wor-
ship of one alone is a sweet constraint upon our Heavenly Father,
the approach of an assembled multitude has much more prevalency
in it, as was indicated by St. Paul when he called upon the Corin-
thians to pray for him, saying — "we trust that he (God) will yet
deliver us, ye also helping together by prayer for us, that for the gift
bestowed upon us by the means of many persons, thanks may be
given by man on our behalf." And to the Romans he said — " Strive
together with me in your prayers to God for me, that I may be
delivered from them that do not believe, in Judea."

A critic full of human wisdom naturally makes a stand against
the idea that the Most High has respect unto numbers in that way

3i

474 ESSAYS.

— and human numbers at that — but praying does not grow cogent
and compelling, according as the prayers are multiplied ; then
plainly the praying of the single man all by himself has no efficacy.
If an aggregate mass of silver dollars is of no more worth than one
of those dollars, it must be because all the dollars are spurious. If
they were separately real silver, ten thousand of them together would
figure up ten thousand times as much as one. Of course spiritual
influences cannot be mathematically measured ; but we may say in
a general way, with all Holy Scripture to back us, that the prayers
of the assembled church are more than prayers private, because
God is pleased to declare himself, subject to the stress of numbers
and vehemencies even ; and if it should still be said that a thousand
praying souls scattered and private, must be equal to the same souls
assembled worshipfully in the same place, I reply, first of all, that
the thousands of the Christian Church staying by themselves, as a
matter of fact do not do the amount of praying that they do when
called into assemblies ; and secondly, if they did, they would not so
entirely agree as touching the same things ; and thirdly, by the
natural law of the case, assemblies are immensely assisted by their
mutual magnetism, assisted in fervor, assisted in unity, assisted in
clear-cut vision of truth, assisted to a realistic hold on God as the
necessity and joy of souls, assisted, in fact, in all that makes prayer
prayer and carries it home upon the waiting will of God. Which
power, of action, by virtue of the enthusiasm and mutual potency of
consenting numbers, is illustrated in part by the fact that a body of
men can march longer and keep better heart, as striking the same
step and swinging forward to the time-beat of music ; by the fact,
too, that religious revivals never come to their full and overwhelming
sway, except in the presence of multitudes ; as I myself found
several times in the days of my youth, when I particularly hated and
despised such movements. I was nearly laid out upon the ground,
despite all my wrath, by the psychological thunders of power in a
thoroughly unified and well-heated crowd.

Speaking of the force of numbers, I ought here just to add,
that when the church gathered together lifts up her common worship,
the blessed dead pour in to swell the movement — at any rate to all
sympathetic and perceptive souls they do ; even as once in West-
minster Abbey, when the minister mounted the reading desk and
began the lesson, "Wherefore seeing we are compassed about with
so great a cloud of witnesses," I had as distinct a sense of the

ESSAYS. 475

presence of the departed, (a host of whom lay in silent death
about me) as I had of the living ; and those shadowy presences
swarmed into the entire service, upheld the chants, emphasized
the Amens, environed the preacher, took possession of the rever-
berating spaces in the name of the Unseen ; and while the little
company below, went on with their comparatively feeble worship,
added thereunto a heavenly majesty, by force of their innumerable
host. I claim that this is a real element in worship, and that, in so
far as God's people come into the great thought and feeling of the
Communion of Saints, they will fill their solemnities with those
celestial influences and worship as reinforced by the whole King-
dom of God.

Worship is a spiritual education of untold force, because of
the great things which are taken for granted and acted upon in
it, — the existence of God, for example, and his grace and providence
and our corresponding obligation to him.

One way to indoctrinate people, is to hammer it into them by
direct argumentation, in which case you invoke the opposition of
their wills and their logicking faculties as likely as not, and do not
succeed in your hammering. Another way is to get them acting,
as though the doctrines and facts were all right, as in worship.
Stand them up on their feet to recite the Creeds. Sweep them into
the hymns, as reluctant drift-wood hanging to the river's banks is
taken along by the freshets. Bow their decorous, but not fully-
believing, heads in prayer. Start them into a drill of manifold action,
whether on principles of decorum and the contagion of a crowd or
something else ; start them in — especially start them so young that
they but faintly know what they are about, and preoccupy them for
God, even as Satan is sharp after them for his service ; thus gradually
entangle them with and in doctrine, and mix Christianity in with
their earliest associations, so that in after life, if they want to get
free and be free-thinkers and free-livers, they shall find that they
cannot do it ; that when they get about so far, there comes a tug on
their heart-strings, a tug of pathos as well as of early conviction.
These unpreoccupied immortals are free plunder to the forces of
redemption, and while Catechism is good didactically put, Cate-
chism insinuated is better — better as I said, for being less cross to
the human grain and more likely to reach to the inmost roots of per-
sonal life ; better, as more of the nature of a soak-in and universal
suffusion, than of an entrance by the break-down of breaching

476 ESSAYS.

batteries; better too, as taking advantage of early habit and
indestructible personal and other associations.

In advocating this guile on children and on adults, no one I
hope, will understand me to favor enticing full-grown men into acts
of worship in which they do not at all believe, — they falling in be-
cause multitudes of others do. No. But I do maintain that where
a person's faith is feeble and full of doubt, or where he is clear at
some points of faith and halting at others, it is a legitimate piece of
business to swing him into a full orchestra of worship ; a worship I
mean of full statements and full implications of all needful doctrine ;
the man being induced to give God and Christianity the benefit of
his doubts. There are several pipings in that orchestra that are not
utterly comfortable to him yet ; but inasmuch as that musical com-
bination is really the right thing and divine, put him into it on the
ground of what affinities he does have already, and it will surely be
educative upon him, and unconsciously and before he knows it, he
will be in the flow of the whole movement ; and, what is more, if the
worship travels the entire circle of doctrines, as it ought, and ren-
ders them in their true balance, major things being voiced with a
major accent, while things minor are kept in their true undersong,
then our man under process of insinuation as aforesaid, is slid along
into two most excellent advantages — he is put in possession of all
doctrine rather than a part, and he is indoctrinated proportionally ;
and a Christian character thus developed, takes on a correspond-
ing fullness and proportion and health. And in my judgment, these
results are not practicable to the full, except as the church worships
in a service carefully prepared beforehand and liturgically, instead
of by the solitary voice of an official. I return to my statement
now, that worship is a great and peculiar spiritual education,
because it puts us into an ever-repeated round of actings, wherein
all doctrines and facts necessary to the Christian life are assumed.
Therefore I should name worship as the best of all antidotes for
Atheism, for Pantheism, for Naturalism, for Materialism, for Ration-
alism and many more. Let a people go before God in unison
several times a week, and be carried through a circuit of acts and
utterances and grand uplifts, wherein at every turn his great name is
sounded forth by their ownselves, and there is no use in besieging
them with this and that plausibility to the effect that there is no God,
or that if there be, he is at best only an unimpersonated and unknow-
able All, or "stream of tendency that makes for righteousness."

ESSAYS. 477

Also, let a people spend several hours every week beseeching
God to do thus and so, and there is no use in telling them that he is
so imprisoned in natural law and in the fearful grind of a uniformity
made up before time began, that he can give no ear to the petitions
of his creatures ; and that petitions therefore are useless, Fate having
got in ahead of them by several millions of years.

Also, let a people be thoroughly habituated to the handling and
the actualization of spiritual verities, in much public worship, and
what use is there in approaching them with a theory, materialism so
called, which blots out in one stroke of ruin the whole invisible
realm of God. They will not believe it. No — they will not incline
to believe anything which logically undermines the reality of their
own dear worship ; especially if they began that worship when they
could only lisp it, and have thus knit it into their spiritual structure
and the very life of their hearts.

By so much then as all untruth is a spiritual hindrance, by so
much is worship a spiritual education, as being a practical antidote
and preventive to untruth.

There is one form of error and soul-damage against which
worship — worship, I mean, strongly formulated and systematic and
enforced upon the attention by the pressure of great authority, his-
toric and other, as in the chief liturgies of the church — is perhaps
the only complete provision. I mean that conglomeration of high
heats, high visions, fits and starts, intense subjectivities, intuitional
conceit and inward self-fumblement, known as Mysticism in the
worst sense of that word.

In so far as mysticism teaches simply that piety has an inward
phase to it, and can be duly studied only as we recognize those
interior aspects ; and teaches the doctrine of a direct commerce
between man and God in the secret places of the human soul, which
commerce of course implies more or less inward vision — and so forth
and so forth — I have no quarrel with it. And no doubt it can be
shown that the Christian church in her recoils from mysticism, has
sometimes toppled clean over into something worse, if possible.
A religion which has nothing at all in it that may properly be called
mysticism, is completely stranded on the shores of sense, has no
power to conquer the world, and would not do the world much good
if it did conquer it. But mysticism, as it has frequently developed
itself in history and as it is now present in thousands of churches,
sometimes overtly, but as often covertly and unrecognized by the

478 ESSAYS.

victims themselves, is something to be greatly deprecated, dreaded
and planned against. The idea of the paramount and infallible
authority of Holy Writ, is a formidable antagonist to it, and all the
safeguard that half of Protestant Christendom has. But the other
half have built over against the danger, a heaven-high bristling forti-
fication of Church authority and a well-wrought system of holy exter-
nalities.

Well, I judge that God, in those several acts wherein he
appointed public worship, and our Lord in what he did in the same
direction, partly in his own person and partly through his Apostles
commissioned by him to set all things in order after he had gone,
meant to put a brand on all overdone and fanatical emphasis on
interiors and practically forestall it. For various reasons it was not
forestalled completely, universally and forever. But in good part it
was. And in those appointing acts of God and his Son, Jesus Christ,
and his inspired Apostles, we have the clue to our mightiest weapon
against a false mysticism. That is, let all the people be trained in
public worship. Not worship wherein one speaking man and func-
tionary comes before God in a highly individual out-play of his own
precious and intense moods and tenses, in which out-play the wit-
nessing people try to hang on ; not that, but worship- in which the
soul and all souls gravitate outward, as they ought, being put
through a sufficiently express, full-stated and varied round of objec-
tives, whose pointings are away from introversion and an undue
interest in one's own mental states, — a worship in which all can join,
because the peculiarities of individuals and their passing moods,
are not in it. A worship so far projected into the dangerous region
of sense, that it will powerfully commend itself to people in bodies
and endowed with eyes and ears. A worship which when attacked
as too sensuous and formal, can vindicate itself by Judaism in the
past, and Heaven's revealed worship in the future, to say nothing of
the general practice of Christendom in all its ages. Let the Church,
I repeat, have that perpetual schooling, not with a too rigid uniform-
ity, I should say, but with a good degree of variety and an occasional
interplay of liberty, even as God himself, when he set up his creation
and appointed her eternal order, reserved to himself the privilege of
an inroad now and then and a free stroke, as in miracles. Give
us this public service and let us have the whole world in it, and the
spiritual education of man would go forward in godly sobriety — not
in jerks but with the sure steadiness of the advancing Spring, wherein

ESSAYS. 47!)

the countless buds are not twitched open, now these now those,
with a snap all around, but are slowly, silently, beautifully, mightily,
completely unfolded, in the orderly push and push of an irresistible
life. And with this abolition of eccentric and explosive spiritual
experiences, would disappear all that distressed minute and
inquisitorial self-inspection which turns the Christian life of millions
into joylessness, and is as indefensible in the light of psychology as
it is in the light of the Scriptures. Thomas Carlyle makes sport of
what he calls "the supernatural chicken bowels" of the Roman
Augurs ; but here in these modern days are pious examinations next
door to those, and with results equally luminous and wholesome.

Perhaps the Club think I do not speak of these things with
sufficient reverence ; and if I do not, the reason is I have no great
reverence for them, though it is certainly pathetic that so many
honest and strenuous souls, being caught in a snare and a delusion,
should so gloom their whole earthly life, and make spiritual health
an impossibility.

LOVE OF TRUTH.

Read Before the Hartford Monday Evening Club, January 6, 1879.

Love of truth is in all men, born in them ; and with the im-
mense advantage of that beautiful bias we start out to make
character.

If I be asked how I know that men are naturally thus endowed,
I reply : First, Because / am, and always was ; the thing seeming
to be in me so deeply and so inwrought as to indicate inheritance.
Secondly, If men were not constitutionally truth-lovers, it would be
hopeless to press truth on their attention as having a right to be
received by them and obeyed. What use is there in addressing
people in a matter wherein you have no purchase on them in their
minds. Thirdly, The universal eagerness of men to find out things
proves it. See it in science. See it in religion. See it in explor-
ing expeditions. We are all on a keen jump in forty departments
of thought, hunting up realities — facts and truths — and never a man
of us content with make-believes or misconceptions. Hence pro-
gress, and without this inward, inborn spring, no progress could be.

But of course, this same creature (man, so-called) has numbers
of other and contrary springs in him, and out of the lively war of
these original impulses comes much confusion, — in fact, every kind
of forth-putting conceivable ; the same person blowing hot and
cold, and traveling seven ways at the same time. And I fancy it
may prove intellectually edifying if I proceed now to indicate a
few of the principal evil forces whereby this instinctive, blessed love
of truth in us, is often headed off, and not permitted to mould our
character and express itself in our life.

ESSAYS. 481

I look upon this our native instinct for truth as the centermost
and most momentous circumstance in our constitution, the one fea-
ture around which character most organizes, and around which alone
solid and right character can rally. A person who just gives his
natural desire for truth full play, who diligently and candidly and
courageously looks into all things in the interest of that desire, who
calmly accepts all discoveries, and resolutely conforms his acts
thereto — that person, and only he, is a thoroughly charactered and
full man. The fundamental question always, and the only one need-
ing to be asked, in order to the settlement of a human being's case,
and the assignment to him of his real rank in the creation, is the
question whether or not his truth-loving, which he cannot help, is
allowed by him to work in its own characteristic way, and work out
to the last item its own proper results. Every bad man, every one-
sided man, every bigot, every tyrant, every Pharisee, every coward,
every malformed or mal-administered person on earth, can be
thoroughly tested and shown up by the application to him of that
profound and awful question.

Well, let us inquire what hinders men in this main matter.
Why do they shirk investigation ? Why do they repudiate the plain
results of investigation ? Why do they not look tranquilly out upon
all things, with an honest simplicity, and receive all things that are
able to authenticate themselves, and practically proceed upon them ?

I answer in the first place, that any quantity of people are afraid
they shall "lose their souls," as they say it, if they voyage out into
the open sea in that venturesome manner. Their idea is, that their
salvation depends on the sincere reception of a certain tolerably
complete round of religious doctrines, and they are afraid that in
this open-sea navigation they shall lose overboard some of these
doctrines. Concerning this fear of theirs, I remark that while there
is a certain amount of plausibility and respectability in it, and a
certain conscientiousness, it is sufficiently answered by two consider-
ations : first, that a genuine truth-seeker will be likely to get hold of
and not lose overboard all necessary doctrine ; and secondly, that
when we come to compare a good and full hold on objective truth
as a means of salvation, with a real desire for all truth as also a
means of salvation, behold, comparison is almost impossible, so
superior is that desire to objective accuracy.

This is dangerous ground which I now tread, I know ; but I
have threaded the matter out to my own satisfaction, and I have

482 ESSAYS.

settled for life on the thought that every possible salvation is secured
by us, when our natural love of truth is suffered to unfold and work
forth according to its law. It will land us in some errors, of course,
on account of our finiteness and so on, but it tends all the while to
clear us of errors, and whereinsoever it fails for the time being, the
errors will not kill us. In my judgment nothing more needs to be
industriously hammered into all men, than the moral necessity of
this one subjective soundness.

Another hindrance to the desire for truth in its natural out-
workings, is our dread of the animadversion and the penalties of
society. In no country under heaven is there, as yet, perfect free-
dom in that regard. If you think your honest thought, without
respect to anything except the real seeming of things, and speak
your honest mind without passion or conceit or obtrusiveness or
disputatiousness, but only with an unstrained and natural loyalty to
truth, you will necessarily sometimes run foul of the conventional,
and will be considered more or less objectionable on regulation
occasions, and an unclassifiable human specimen. In all of which
there is so much of discomfort and inconvenience, that you will be
fearfully tempted to subside out of your absolute integrity into a
regulation specimen yourself; and, unless you have lived in integrity
long enough to know the unexampled sweets of it and what a con-
sciously saved and clean feeling it gives all the while, you most
likely will flinch a little, and be a lesser person than you might.

Then there is the almost more dreadful dread of theology and
the church and the various sanctities confederated therewith. The
line between authority on the one hand, and mental and spiritual
freedom on the other, may not be an easy one to draw, but one
thing seems to me plain ; that we must consider the voice of the
church, in her creeds and all the rest ; and the voice of the Bible,
and every other authoritative voice, we must consider and decide
upon in a rugged and absolutely incorruptible adherency to our
private and individual perception of truth. The divergence of a
hair's-breadth from that awful individualism is a profane abnegation
of the most radical and germinal of all duties, and the beginning
of personal demoralization. That, also, needs to be much enforced
everywhere. And if that view, although it may seem to be the
mother-thought of all evil and of universal chaos, is minutely
studied, it will be found to be full of safeguards. Practically, it
will often produce disorders, because whatever right thing men

ESSAYS. 483

undertake to administer, they are likely tc push out of proportion
sometimes, but ideally, and as the thing to be fulfilled so well as we
can, that view is more conservative of every interest, than any
other.

Another force that corrupts and enfeebles our desire for truth,
is our early indoctrination in a set of opinions, which are precious
to us, by all the love we feel for father and mother and the first
teachers, and which we are afraid will somehow receive damage if
we start out with them into the illimitable domain of free inquiry.

And right here comes in another fact, — namely : that we have
had invaluable experiences of the soul, which gathered themselves
about, and formed themselves upon, certain views ; and it is pretty
chilly and disagreeable business, to imperil those views by following
our love of truth out into the rather broad question ; " What is
truth?"

Then there is fear of inconsistency with our own selves to pre-
vent a straightforward following out of our impulse for truth. Our
fear, too, that we shall seem intellectually conceited and rationalistic
if we assent to nothing which does not appear to us true. In many
communities, moreover, it actually interferes with a man's business,
and cuts off his prospects in life, if he conscientiously follows his
own mind, thinking his own thought and modestly expressing it on
occasion. Speaking of a man's business, I do not see how a pro-
fessor of theology, in active service, can really preserve his integrity.
The amount of yearly swearing to unchangeable minute statement
which he is called on to perform ; the forty thousand Drummond
lights which are turned upon him by the general public to see
whether he ever draws an unusual breath, and the instant loss of
students if he does ; the necessity that the young men under him
should feel themselves in contact with a positively grounded and
almost omniscient man, in order that they themselves may get
grounded so soon as possible, — make up a situation nearly impossible
to be held, unless the man in it consents to a certain degree of
warp, and a pretty vigorous repressal of his God-given hunger for
and search after truth, in the more exuberant and free-moving
excursions of that search.

The minister of a church, too, is subjected, no doubt, to a
similar distress. If he has sufficient strength with his people, he
can travel around with a considerable liberty of mind ; but if he is
weak in himself and weak with them, he is in a poor plight for

484 ESSAYS.

perfectly unbiased thought, and probably does not attain unto it.
I would not say that he is deliberately dishonest. It would be
cruel to apply so strong an adjective to so weak a person well-
meaning and struggling with great disadvantages. But I am clear
upon it, that his substance of character would be more milk-white
and massive, and more a delight to his own self whenever he con-
sidered the subject, provided he only could be more in the open
fields and had not so many watch-dogs after him.

So in other pursuits. Politics for instance. It is rather hard
for a tender-minded man and candidate, to tell exactly where he
stands, when his voters stand all ways.

And it is hard for a sensitive and obliging man of business — a
retail trader say — to affront conventionalism or that form of religion
which happens to be in vogue where he lives, or to run the risk of
affronting them by a warm and lively pursuit of truth as she presents
herself before his own mind.

There are many difficulties in this matter, and reasons enough
in this miserable world, why that love of truth wherewith we all be-
gin, should have a rough time in forming our character on its own
idea and putting our life under its law. " Out of this place !" is
the pretty general voice and outcry against these simple-minded
obstinates, who just reverently follow their light. So if one really
concludes to do that little, natural and most obvious thing, to-wit :
to follow his light, and not follow where, for him, light is not, — a
proceeding as obvious, that is as self-evidently the right thing as
that flowers should turn to the sun, — it amounts to a very radical
and solemn consideration and self-surrender. It implies and in-
volves a spirit quite unworldly and martyr-like. And millions of
tolerably decent folks are not up to it. Especially as they have a
weary and half sad feeling, many of them, that truth, especially
religious truth, is not very much to be got at any way, by such crea-
tures as we are ; — no matter how martyr-like and struggling we may
be. There is much debating, and a great fury of yea and nay,
they say ; and the best men and the brightest divide off and take
different sides, and make the salvation of us all turn on their
specialty; and what is the use of making sacrifices and losing
splendid chances in life, by the heroic pursuit of a very sweet crea-
ture (a bird, you might call her, this truth) who is also very flitting
and elusive, and fly-away ? So they talk ; forgetting all the while
that the inborn spirit to pursue truth, and worship her, and swear

ESSAYS. 485

by her, is more than the mere getting her, goes more to make
character, and is indeed the only organific energy and salvation in
a man.

But while so many flinch for one cause and another, and have
not the root of character in them, as much as they might have,
others many do not flinch ; and as society and the church more
and more understand this great right of free and unterrified think-
ing and speaking, and the right of each person to evolve his life
and make up his daily circumstances originally (in so far as he does
not interfere with his neighbor's right to do the same thing), then
we shall have a great multiplication of truths, devoted people, a
great multiplication of origina^personalities and original lives. For
one, I rejoice in the increase of that kind of thing. Undoubtedly
this grand self-assertion in behalf of which I speak, this resistance
of the private man against all attempts to force upon him what does
not happen to commend itself to his sincere perception, must be
attended with some vaporing and some license, and some fanatical
attempts at destructive overturnings of this and that. But the gen-
eral movement towards personal liberty is right. And in the
gigantic to and fro of the movement, if some extremes are reached
occasionally, I would not be too severe upon it. We clergymen
not unfrequently come across sensitive and free-ranging people who
will not come into the Christian church, because they are afraid their
rights as thinkers and discoverers will be abridged in there. And
I can see just what they mean. Some churches are a mean man-
trap. They have a minute creed which you are called on to accept
when you go in, and your heart so longs for church life that you
swallow hard and take it down. But by-and-by, as you go on with
your thinking, you find that you have taken in more of a cargo than
you can be responsible for, and more than you were really aware of.
But how to unload — that is the question. The minute you stir, the
minister is after you. And if you very visibly and notoriously stir,
the whole machine is after you. You meekly ask to be let out of
that. You are not a disturber. You do not want to carry on a de-
bate within the sacred precincts. All you want is to quietly leave,
but that is refused. There are lots of ways into the church, but
there is only one way out of it (they tell you) — and that is, to be
thrust out. They do not so call it, but they rise into resounding
six-footed Latin and call it excommunication. Still it puts you out
just as much as though there were no Latin about it. In truth the

486 ESSAYS.

Latin hides a very vigorous Saxon procedure. Now, I say, I have
a degree of sympathy with these martyrs to the truth, or if not to
the truth objectively considered, to the spirit of truth. The
church is wrong when she thus violates the personal integrity of her
members and practically seeks to debauch them at the very seat of
their integrity. Those excommunicated ones are conscientiously
fulfilling that which should be the chief, if not the only condition
of church membership. That is, they are loving truth, and pursuing
it, even into the resolute enduring of public persecution for its
sake. No highest personal nobleness is possible except on exactly
their ground. And, if such people are continually excluded, in
order that the church may peaceably and piously wear the muzzle
of this or that infallibility (Papal, or Protestant Papal) by-and-by
it will be true that the real kingdom of God is shifted out into the
camp of the excommunicants ; and the disciples of extreme
authority will be left no practical function save to inhabit a last
year's nest, and laboriously strive to fructify its melancholy and
eternal barrenness.

It is something to do a man's heart good, that the number of
Truth's pledged men — the sincere and devout followers of their
own light, I mean — are visibly on the increase in all free and
unpersecuting lands ; and that even where bigotry and violence are
in the ascendant, there are great mutterings, and an occasional
square onset upon all sorts of infallibilities and their conceited
omniscience.

It is something, too, for thanksgiving, that this quiet resting
down on the affirmations of one's own mind, illumined by all the
lights one can get (which seems to me the divine ideal of life) is
apt to vindicate its divinity, as I have already implied, by its several
plain results in character. In a world where this personal freedom
is not quite liked by, perhaps, the majority, the men who practice it
are so resisted and are forced into such effort to keep it up, that
numbers of them grow more eccentric and more ferocious than is
seemly; and their disagreeable exhibitions of themselves have
given an unsavory repute to the whole class of independents. If
saplings are let alone, they gradually reach out into the open sky
with a true stateliness and beauty, but if they are interfered with
and piled upon, and are compelled to squirm about in all directions
in order to get out and up at all, their life is malformed, and they
are no particular grace on the landscape. So these free-spirited

ESSAYS. 487

men. If the manifold human popedoms let down on their heads
the flat stones and what not, of their bulls and syllabuses, of course
some of them in their necessary squirming and lifting under all that
will cut a disagreeable figure. But where a man is substantial
enough, to move with steadiness through whatever oppositions and
small hectorings, he makes one of the finest objects in the world.
He constantly secretes character as the oyster builds its pearl, and
the easy courage of him is at last sublime.

In my first service as a Christian minister, I one day called on
a parishioner whose last-born babe I had not happened to see.
But while I was observing and admiring the child, I suddenly
noticed that its eyes were crossed. Of course, it was an improper
thing for me to do, but I was so arrested by the fact that, uncon-
scious of anything else, I mentioned it with due amazement. The
mother was silent, but my wife, with the customary thoughtfulness
and courtesy of this wicked world, denied it, and as the deformity
was slight and variable, I was for the moment bluffed off and
silenced. But pretty soon those eyes were crossed, and I rallied on
it again. But by profuse winking on the part of my wife, and a
general sense of something in the air which I did not quite under-
stand, I was brought into subjection once more. However, all
through that call my incorruptible integrity at intervals broke out.
There before me was a plain physical fact, concerning which an
effort was making to raise confusion as though it were not a fact,
and the iniquity of the proceeding I could not submit to. Since
that day I have subsided into the customary inveracity of mankind,
and am not much better than anybody else ; but, as Adam occa-
sionally reverted to the Eden he had left, I often look back to that
condition of aboriginal simplicity, musingly if not mournfully. In
that fine stupidity of mine, you will observe one supreme virtue,
namely : that a fact, a real thing, allured me as the sun allures its
satellites, and I moved towards it with a gravitation and an impetus
absolutely indivertible, and absolutely inconsiderate of prudentials
and all earthly circumstances. In a well-regulated man, prudentials
are just as real realities as squints of vision, and should be gravitated
to on account of said reality, and whoso is wont to make indivert-
able straight marches right across them, in pursuit of whatever fact
or truth, will find that he is stepping on live creatures with fangs
and a powerful snap. But I am fascinated, after all, with a person
so unsophisticated as to pursue truth or any other reality, in an

488 ESSAYS.

unconscious assumption that no other course is either possible or
conceivable. Once in a while, in the religious world, and in the
world of philosophical or scientific investigation, we come across
these unperverted aboriginals, these souls that keep up the simplicity
of their childhood, looking into things with a straight-forward
boldness which they never think of as boldness, and placidly speak-
ing their minds as though there were no reason why they should not,
placidly acting out their thought without apology or debate, as
though men were in the world for that one purpose and no other,
and could not be men really and totally on any other plan.

AGNOSTICISM.

Read Before Hartford Monday Evening Club, November 7,

Agnosticism is no new thing, but a very old one rather ; as old,
in fact, as philosophic thinking ; which takes it back several thou-
sand years. There may be some comfort in that, as there certainly
is some discomfort. I notice that when I have a pain which is
absolutely original in my experience, it frightens me. It may not
be severe, but it is so original. My system has taken a new depart-
ure, and perhaps I have come to the beginning of the end. So, if
Agnosticism were a new pain, it possibly might be a forerunner of
the final catastrophe here, — that tumult of Gog, Magog and Chaos
to which some theologians look forward. But it is not new, I say.
Contrariwise, it is the identical old headache and heartache that
lodged itself in the human race and began to riot, when they began
to turn their attention strenuously and acutely to the reasons of
things. So let us not be too much frightened.

On the other hand, it is distressing that this incubus holds on so.
Unhorsed in one period by some corps of great thinkers, it some-
how manages to get astride of us again in course of time, having
in itself a curious amount of indestructibility and persistence and
aggression ; which seems to point to some fatal defect in human
nature, either intellectual or moral or both.

The course of philosophic thinking, from the beginning until
now, amounts, on the whole, to just a gigantic oscillation of the
mind of man between this thing now called Agnosticism at the one
extreme, and Idealism at the other ; with no more ability to abide in
one stay than have the ever-swinging oceans. The path of a horse
in a mill, round and round forever, is not more beaten than is the
track of this philosophic to and fro, tramped by the great leaders

32

490 ESSAYS.

of thought and their innumerable following. There is a certain
uniformity, however, in the movement of the horse which does not
hold in this other and vaster and more momentous motion. It is
not the exactitude of the pendulum that we have in it, but rather
the eccentricities of the tides, which, although they manage to
reach their bounds at last, are caught in numerous besetments by the
way, both earthly and astronomic ; as, great winds, and the occa-
sional lift of a submarine earthquake, and a pull altogether of starry
influences ; or, contrariwise, a pull divergently. Under the stress
of these numerous forces, the sea rolls in a little early and over-
floodlike, one day ; and on another, a little languidly, perchance ;
but it is always safe to wait for it — it will be on time, and no
mistake.

So in the strugglings of the mind of the world to complete its
foreordinated oscillation, now into Agnosticism, and now into Ideal-
ism ; many interferences sweep in to retard or quicken, as the case
may be. In a heavy march toward Agnosticism, in a nation or era,
if some Plato happens to be born, behold ! straightway, a tremen-
dous retard towards Idealism. Or, perhaps the stars will so conjunct
that a John Locke, or a Francis Bacon, manages to get in here,
whereupon the march slackens fearfully, and Idealism, it may be,
goes into disgrace for centuries ; but, like frogs in a solid rock, it
still lives, and in due time comes forth simply rested for a still more
energetic push on. So it goes ; in the most wearisome see-saw ever
heard of, if we consider only the desirableness of getting really es-
tablished in something some day. And what is notable, even
Christianity, the most immeasurable factor ever introduced among
this world's affairs, does not suffice, as yet, to make a synthesis of
those two great extremes of thought, and bring the human family to
the peace and delight of a stable equilibrium ; as is evidenced in
the lusty vigor of this new-born child ; this darling and young
Hercules of the nineteenth century, Agnosticism.

Well now, exactly, what is Agnosticism ? In defining it, I will
use the words whereby it has been described in other times, in order
that I may identify the familiar old pain. It is a form of Secular-
ism ; a form of Materialism ; it is a form of Sensualism (using the
word in its historical meaning, as a term of Philosophy) ; a form of
Utilitarianism ; a form of Positivism — and I know not what else
beside. But if you take these seven words and things : Secular-
ism, Materialism, Sensualism, Externalism, Utilitarianism, Positiv-

ESSAYS. 491

ism, and Agnosticism, it is a fact that through them all there runs
this cord of unity, and this evil virus and main feature — namely : —
they lay their stress of thought on the sensible as distinguished
from the supersensible ; on the physical as distinguished from the
spiritual ; on the external and visible as distinguished from the
internal and invisible ; on the temporal as distinguished from the
eternal ; on the multifarious interesting particulars enclosed in this
horizon right about us, as distinguished from the unhorizoned im-
mensities beyond. All of which characterizations of mine may be
well enough summed up, for short, in the one statement that these
various affiliated Isms do all take for their theatre and their delight,
that realm of things, and that only, which is recognizable by the
senses. I say, that only ; by which I mean simply that the drift of
these systems, the drift logical and the drift actual, is that way ; and
the logical upshot of them all, is the utter subversion of the super-
sensible. Of course these Isms reveal themselves in all sorts of
degrees, both in single persons and in nations, and in particular
periods. For instance, from John Locke to Comte, or from Bacon
to the subsequent full-blown sensualism of French thinking (with
its natural result, the French Revolution) , or even to Mr. Huxley,
is a considerable stretch ; not much of a stretch chronologically,
but a large one mentally ; and yet nothing is more demonstrable
than that the philosophy of Locke, and the labors of Bacon, led on to
the strong sensualistic system wherefrom the world has since suffered ;
partly because Locke and his co-laborers were incorrect in some of
their reasonings, I suppose, and partly because human nature is
what it is ; to-wit : a perverse thing, which can take so wholesome
a windfall as the Baconian method and animus, and turn it into a
great curse. In like manner, the Idealism of such a man as Plato,
being fastened upon by such a man as Bishop Berkeley, can be de-
veloped and carried out and misused until behold, we have no mate-
rial realm left, but are all sunk away and merged in the immaterial
and ideal. These diseases, I say, come on, sometimes strong and
sometimes weak, but their essential nature is the same always.
John Locke was a philosophic positivist, though in the egg as yet.
And Dr. Bushnell, by his supreme intuitionalism, was a latent and
potential Berkeleian. At seventy-four years of age, he was taken
out and set among the strong objectives of the eternal life, and,
therefore, never landed in the full Berkeleian affirmative ; although,
doubtless, his intuitional habit kept on strong enough, and even

492 ESSAYS.

advanced, approximating ever the direct and absolute vision of
God himself.

In the case of Locke or Bushnell, their peculiarity did not go
to the point of personal damage, any more than that transient
Agnosticism into which even the men of faith sometimes swmg is
the ruin of them ; nevertheless, Agnosticism or any other error is
unalterably evil, and naturally pushes out into visible evil in the long
run of the generations.

So much as defining Agnosticism ; and whereinsoever I have
failed to make it stand out in its full character, I shall be able,
perhaps, to make all clear while I go on, now, to speak of some of
its causes.

But, before I do that, I want in a single word and as a matter
of justice, to distinguish it from Scepticism. Scepticism stands on
the outmost coast of the physical realm, and looking over into the
meta-physical, the super-physical, the immaterial, declares : There
is nothing there, — no God, no angels, no immaterial soul of man,
no personal immortality for man : nothing but a shoreless vacancy.
Agnosticism, on the other hand, takes position on that same coast,
looks abroad upon that same outstretched immensity, and with
voice more subdued and a less bold face, says : Perhaps — there
may be and there may not be ; I cannot tell, and, as I cannot, I
will not try ; it is irrational to affirm where you have no solid
ground for affirmation, and equally irrational to deny where you
have no data ; I take my stand in absolute neutrality. Which of
these two attitudes is best it may be difficult to say. Agnosticism
is the more reasonable of the two, and perhaps it has this other
superiority ; that it is not so easy to be maintained against the push
of the great instincts and yearnings of the soul. If you are going
to stand in a hurricane, you must not plant yourself upright and in
equilibrio, or agnostically, as you may say ; but you must be braced ;
and so, in the sweep of the soul's fundamental and inextinguishable
longings, as towards God and immortality — a sweep which in our
moments of deepest thoughtfulness, and in our moments of anguish,
is stronger than all the winds of heaven — the agnostic neutralism is
impracticable, and its disciples have the blessed advantage, that
they cannot stand there, but must topple over, now and then, into
the mighty affirmatives of faith. With the sceptic it is not so. He
is braced. He has uttered his everlasting nay, and no rush of
emotion, or high-swelling tribulation can easily move him.

ESSAYS. 493

But notice this also, in the comparison of the two systems in
question : — that the forces which carry a man into Agnosticism,
tend always to bear him on beyond that, into a thoroughly affirma-
tive Scepticism. Agnosticism is a way-station on the road to that
dreadful city, and half the trains do not stop at that station at all,
but run express and swift.

But now, as to the causes of Agnosticism. It is an endless
subject, but I will strike it at a few points.

I hope it will not be considered merely the nonsense of a
Christian minister, if I suggest that the universal evil heart is a
great help in getting Agnosticism born into any generation or era.
That is always on hand. It was one of the sad, accusing words of
our Lord, that men love darkness rather than light because their
deeds are evil. From which, let no man conclude that every agnos-
tic, as his first step towards Agnosticism, deliberately seated himself,
to plan how he should reason God out of the universe and destroy
the doctrine of free will and responsibility and an immortal life, in
order that, having made a clear field for himself, he might proceed
to steal and murder as a business. No. The agnostics are a gen-
tlemanly people in this day, as a rule, and moral, and often thought-
ful and earnest, and not bad to live with. I shall pretty soon
mention the fact, that in those historical instances where their god-
less and physical principles have been carried to their natural issues
on a large scale, so that mankind could really see them and under-
stand them, they have proved themselves everything necessary to
make hell, just as we might expect them to : nevertheless, not
every physicalist, in his thinking, has gone on to the eventualities
where he belongs. That is true. At the same time, that word of the
Lord is true : — Men love darkness. And this everlasting, helpless
oscillation of philosophy in all ages, to the which I have referred,
is considerably attributable to that sad truth. If the mind were
a thoroughly straightforward instrument of thought, we should
get something settled, by-and-by. Of course, it is a part of our
finiteness to fluctuate, and to land in some places where we had
better not be ; but we should get along with that pretty well, and
less and less err, were it not for this constitutional touch of insanity,
sometimes called depravity.

My second observation on the causes of Agnosticism is, that
by our senses we are related to the material domain, so variously
and, in especial, so intimately, that many of the best thinkers the world

494 ESSAYS.

ever saw, and of the honestest and cleanest men, have held that all
human ideas have their start and cause out in that domain, the
mind having no power of independent origination whatever. That
was Locke's position, and it was exactly at that point that he, good
soul, unconsciously provided the pestiferous but exceedingly plural
egg, out of which was to be hatched that whole brood of sense-
bound Isms which I have already mentioned as the twin sisters of
Agnosticism. Locke was the chief modern Apostle of that " Gospel
of dirt," at which our now departed friend and brother, Thomas
Carlyle, occasionally hurled his objurgations ; albeit no man of
woman born was less dirt-like in himself than that same Locke.
But he laid down and elaborated with conspicuous ability the
sensational philosophy.

And not only are we so related to the world of sense as to
have made that philosophy one of the chief plausibilities of the
world, and an ever-recurring form of thought ; but in our infancy,
before we know anything in particular, the whole movement of our
mind is outward and our whole interest is there ; and if we looked
simply at a young child, we should be compelled to say ; " Locke
is right ; the sense-world is the mother of every mental movement
we make." At any rate, that world gets the start with us ; and the
first we know, we are mortgaged to her ; and all the thinking we do
then, or thereafter forever, is done in physical molds.

And this is one of the reasons, I say, that so many of us turn out
agnostics and the like. We are related to the sense-world ; that, at
first, is the only world of which we know ; we are forced into sense-
forms for all our thinking, and our life, while life lasts, is environed
in sense and most energetically addressed and stimulated thereby.

Then, too, if we turn ourselves, in the maturity of our powers,
to carefully consider the arguments for the materialistic view, we
find that they make a good show of strength. It is most interesting
to observe the efforts of men on that subject.

In old times, they gave us Dualism, which teaches an eternal
system of matter, and an eternal God ; two infinities, side by side.
Then again we have Materialism, which makes matter to be the All,
and expunges God and the spiritual nature of man and all spirits.
Then, at another time, we have Idealism pure and simple, which
makes Spirit the All, and wipes out Matter. At another, in sweeps
Pantheism, which expunges neither Matter nor Spirit, but identi-
fies them ; which is the most curious performance of all.

ESSAYS. 495

But our business now is with Materialism ; for that is the pet
view of these days, among sceptical people.

And I say that any candid man must acknowledge that the
materialistic theory has a considerable number of fair-seeming con-
siderations in defence of itself to present. In a fuller discussion of
my theme, it would be my duty to recite those cogencies.

But, fourthly, Materialism, (recently baptized Agnosticism)
gets a strong advantage in the well-known excesses of its eternal
old antithesis and enemy, Idealism. If some great man sets up the
doctrine of Nothing but Mind, and leaves us all afloat in that
infinite Impalpable, it is pretty natural for us to make a desperate
effort to get solid ground again ; and after gasping in that thin air
of the Ideal about so long, something more solid is likely to seem
so sweet and comfortable, as to make us foreswear the Ideal alto-
gether. And that is the way it works, actually and historically.
The rebound from Idealism is Sensationalism.

And then notice the thousand and one top-heavy and fantastic
movements, into which Idealism starts out. Mysticism, and all
forms of over-subjectivity in religion ; that is one movement.
Asceticism, as a recoil from physicalism, is another. Spiritualism is
another. Superstition is another. The numerous phases of popu-
lar spookery, sometimes shaping itself into Spiritualism, and some-
times into something else, come under the same head. Presenti-
ments, dreams, feelings in the bones, noises in the air, death-watches
ticking in your bedstead, natural physicians (Indians, Grandmoth-
ers, Aunts, and wild-looking females) — all these unverified and
unverifiable and semi-lunatic diversions and solemnities of the
human mind, are exceedingly unpleasant to the rationalistic habit
of the agnostic and his materialistic brethren, and furnish them
the stock for a good many really impressive observations.

Of course, there are often important truths lying around some-
where in these various developments of Idealism, as in Mysticism,
and Asceticism, and Spiritualism ; and I, therefore, do not wish to
speak of them with more irreverence than they deserve ; but
nobody can deny that these outgoes of the Idealistic principle
develop very flourishing exaggerations occasionally ; and on these
exaggerations, I say, Agnosticism gets a purchase for the spread of
its own views.

Again, you will expect me to give as one of my explanations of
Agnosticism, the wonderful development of Natural Science in this

496 ESSAYS.

great Baconian period. In the old Greek day, where there was a
Divinity hidden in every tree, and every movement of the natural
world had a God immediately behind it as its personal cause, the
study of Nature (especially so much study as the Greek gave it)
could not breed a rationalistic, sceptical, and physical habit of
mind ; but that old sense of gods all about, and close about, has
gone ; and even so late as when Lord Bacon was born, the one
Supreme Deity of the creation was beginning to be pushed back
from his old-time immediacy in the operations of nature, by an
upspringing feeling of second causes, in the mind of man. And
that feeling Bacon nourished immensely by his introduction of the
experimental method. Under that method, the multiplication of
second causes has gone on until now. Under that method, pro-
ceeding as it does by demonstrative processes, the value of reason-
ing on merely probable data has been obscured ; and the fact and
worth of Intuition as a mode of discovery, has been gradually lost
sight of. Under that method, there has been an enormous addition
to the material comfort of life, by all sorts of useful discoveries ;
which is another loud call on the mind of man to consider and love
the visible and physical. Under that method, insisting as it did
that nothing should be accepted save as established by independent
and unbiased observation, a spirit of individual free inquiry was
shed abroad, out of which intellectual pride and dogmatism could
easily come. Let no one undertake to deny the incalculable value,
on the whole, of the Baconian new departure. The way it went in
among the scholasticisms and the laborious futilities of the previous
period, like a bomb shell in a cob-house, is beautiful to behold :
and the way in which, since that day, it has enlarged the boundaries
of knowledge, and laid the foundations for a golden age, is also
beautiful as well as amazing ; but, meanwhile, a good deal of vapor-
ing has occurred, a good many highly materialistic Isms have
sprung up, and a good many assaults have been made on that
blessed Religion which Bacon revered (but did not always prac-
tice) ; until we are in the condition of a sick man who has taken
into his system a powerful medicine, and is on that account surely
on his way to health, but is fearfully griped by it, notwithstanding.
It is no fault of Bacon, or of Natural Science, that we are in
just this ; and I sometimes feel almost like pardoning all the rest of
us, that we have suffered the new era to drift our thinking into such
agnostical ways ; because the drift is so strong, and because there is

ESSAYS. 497

such innocency of aspect in the causes that have carried us along ;
although, of course, I know that, while we were indulging ourselves
in the fascinations of natural study, and natural discovery, we
should have kept up the ideal and supersensible side of things, by
prayer and holy living, and a tender respect for the inner Light, and
a thorough-going study of the validity of the intuitional method.

Which reminds me to say that Agnosticism is, without doubt, in
large part, a recoil from the principle of Authority, as embodied in
the truly despotic doctrine of the Mediaeval Church ; — to say
nothing of other and less formidable embodiments of it.

And while I am upon the Church, let me add, that such good
people as Jonathan Edwards, and all high and excessive Calvinists,
are unwitting helpers of Agnosticism ; and make it possible ; and
this in several ways. In the first place, they set up a God, who not
merely never was, but never deserved to be ; a God which the
human race will not bear more than so long ; a God which makes
it important to show that the material universe is the only thing we
have to dread, and that this life in the body does not eventuate in a
Beyond suffused by that same divine presence.

In the second place, Edwards and his kind, by their tremen-
dous demonstration of the helpless bondage of the human will, in all
its acts, under the push of efficient causes ; have established for us
a fatalism as fatal as the mechanical fatalism of the materialist who
holds that the mind is a purely physical thing, and therefore moves
evermore under the compulsion of physical causes. Who cares
whether Edwards compels him, or the mechanicalist and atheist,
Mr. Holyoake ; he is compelled, from whomever, and Edwards and
Holyoake are yoked up together to do it for him. I do not say
that Edwards had not some views which saved his fatalism from its
full effect on mankind, but I do say that, in millions of cases, his
brainy demonstrations about the will of man, and the decrees of
God, have assisted the physical philosophers in their materialistic
doctrine of necessity.

I conclude my exposition of the causes of Agnosticism, by
remarking that there is a bewitching humble-minded look in it,
which might easily lead one to believe that Humility is its one and
only mother ; as where Renan calls this attitude : " the effect of a
profound piety trembling lest it blaspheme." Its advocates claim,
in their writings, that theirs is the only truly modest position, as
respects the transcendental and spiritual parts of the universe. And

498 ESSAYS.

I fancy that every deeply meditative and candid mind has moments,
when it does seem the humblest thing not to be very affirmative.
And many of us who are not very profound feel so. For my part I
always feel so, when I meet those omniscient persons who infest the
church and infest theology and infest life. When some clear-cut
Trinitarian takes me in tow for a voyage back into the psychologi-
cal recesses of the nature of God, and once there, gets out his
instruments and triangulates the whole region, and then calls on me
to sign my name to it, and seems thunderstruck if I hesitate, I think
that Nescience is the best invention whereof I have heard. And
there are numbers of more accessible regions than that, into which
we get invited where Nescience is a perfect comfort.

Moreover, one has sorrowful moments, moments of bereave-
ment, moments of moral discomfiture, moments of an awfully dis-
tinct sense of one's own mental limitations, moments, therefore,
when the soul instinctively cries out for a much more than common
assurance that there is a God, and a good God, and a helping God,
and a future for men, and a Spiritual Kingdom all around ; and at
those times, in lack of just the demonstrations which we crave, and
in the nature of things cannot have, it is easy to pass into the infinite
nebulosity and incertitude of Agnosticism, and to feel that anything
more affirmative than this is a little venturesome, not to say dogmatic
and immodest.

As I am simply giving the causes of Agnosticism, I will not
argue whether such an attitude and feeling actually do spring from a
specially humble state of mind, any farther than to say, that under-
neath this alleged humility, lies all the while the vicious assumption
that transcendental and spiritual things are not clearly discoverable ;
which is the very point in dispute between Agnosticism and faith.
We who hold to the actuality of the Spiritual, do most energetically
and clamorously affirm that God is triumphantly discoverable, as
much so as his physical creation ; that the mind of man, and its
spirituality, is also discoverable, as much so as his body ; that
man's immortality as a personal unit is verifiable, not by a scientific
— that is by a demonstrative — process, but by the method of moral
reasoning, which moral method rests at last on inevitable intuitions,
just as does the demonstrative method. And for the agnostic to
start up with the idea that he is the humblest creature on earthy
because he declines to rest his faith on the verities unseen, is to beg
the question between him and the rest of us.

ESSAYS. 499

However, I do think that there is a certain superficial show
of humility in the agnostic neutralism, which makes it taking to
some, and helps multiply disciples for it ; more show, in fact, than
there is in the humility of the Idealist, who declines to believe in
the physical verities of the agnostic, on the ground that they are
not solidly discoverable, while man's soul, and God, and the forty
Unseens are.

Now, if Agnosticism, and its entire tribe (Materialism, Secu-
larism, Utilitarianism, and the rest), were simply so many gymnasia
for the exercise of the intellectual faculties of men, where people of
leisure and acumen could spend a spare hour occasionally, and get
a good sweat pushing against each other, then there would be no
occasion for alarm at them. But the truth is, their speculations are
practically just a hundred-handed infernal bomb-throwing every-
whither among the sacredest treasures of mankind.

It is a pretty considerable move to retire God into the limbo
of Neutralism, and make him a practical nonentity to his creatures ;
such feeble small children "crying in the night," as we are. And
quite a move, to take a man thus bereaved of God, and circum-
scribe him in the seven-by-nine cage of the Present and the Sensi-
ble, when he has generally been accustomed to suppose that this, his
present state, was only a small preambulation preparatory to the
real and solid business of living. And quite a move to bewilder
the consciousness of man, as to its own unrestrainable affirmatives ;
and put the free soul under the despotism of material causes, by
demonstrating that the soul itself is a material entity.

When all these things are fully done, where are your highest
sanctions of civil law? Law rests on mere prudentialism, when you
are not permitted to track it back into the bosom of God ; and its
awfullest efficacies are gone. And where is your best literature?
Take the supersensible out of your Poets, and what flabby nobodies
they are. Think of an agnostic Shakespeare, an agnostic Words-
worth, an agnostic Tennyson, an agnostic Milton, an agnostic
Bryant. Talk about "Hamlet with Hamlet left out !" Why, this
were Shakespeare with Shakespeare left out. These men formulated
their material from two sources ; from human life, and from the
external creation. But do they stick fast in externals ? Is it not
the very glory of their genius that they go behind all surfaces, and
leaven the sensible with the supersensible, and make us all feel that
we have our rootages in a spiritual soil ? If they describe a land-

500 ESSAYS.

scape, do they make it to be just a spectacle ? Do they not rather
show it in its spiritual meanings ? The multifold visible is only the
hither face of the invisible ; it is God stated ; and by as much as
man is made in the image of God, it is Man stated ; yea, the gigan-
tic vernacular of those two it is ; and it were a shallow piece of
business for a man not to recognize his native tongue. Poets do ;
at least, the mightiest and deepest of them ; and that is their great
distinction among men. In fact, it is enough to make a genius of
any man, to have just that sense of the interiors of things.

And the same distinction holds in regard to Artists. An
agnostic artist may present forms and sensible facts, and may gain a
certain eminence by that mere mechanical knack ; but to make a
landscape live, you must penetrate to its living substratum. Or,
take a human face ; what a blasphemy against the soul behind it it
would be, to paint some faces in their physical literality. The face
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, taken agnostically, is as unornamental a
fact as the dog-faced knob on a front door ; but taken from the
interior, I have seen it shine in a lambent splendor for the instant,
in a manner distinctly supernatural. And it ought to be painted
just when thus inundated by the supersensible ; or not painted
at all.

Another of the fundamental infirmities of Agnosticism is, that
it does not provide a sufficient basis for morality. Of course, that
is strenuously denied by agnostical thinkers, and to deal with their
denial fully were the work of a book rather than an essay, so that I
can only refer to it here.

Morality considered as having in it an ethical, or moral, ele-
ment, (an element that is, of right and conscience) must get its
ground of right in one or more of the following considerations :

First. Men may do thus or so because it contributes to the
public welfare, that being the ultimate and one thing that makes
right, right.

Secondly. Men may do thus or so because it contributes to
their own welfare, that being the ultimate standard of right.

Thirdly. Men may do thus or so because they thus conform
to the laws of their own nature, those laws being the standard of
right.

Fourthly. Men may do thus or so in conformity to the laws
of their environment, that being the standard of right ; under that
term environment being included the totality of a person's circum-

ESSAYS. 501

stances, such as, external nature, social surroundings, and his
manifold encircling temporalities.

Fifthly. Some have managed to get themselves so low down
as to consider self-indulgence, or a literal obedience to all our
natural impulses, the law of right ; a very beastly and almost
incredible self-obfuscation.

And Sixthly. Men may do thus or so in obedience to the will
of a supernatural, personal, and supreme Power; known in our
vocabulary as God.

Now, I say, if morality, considered as having in it an element
of Tightness, is to survive, it must survive as resting back on the
will of God, or on some one of these earth-bound and sense-bound
views. But Agnosticism, as teaching that God is not discoverable,
is compelled to base its morality on these sense-bound or material-
istic views, and the question arises : " Are these views an adequate
basis of morality?" Professor Tyndall, Professor Huxley, Herbert
Spencer, Mr. Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Professor Clifford, George
Eliot, and a bright multitude more, say : Yes, morality can stand
without any reference whatever to the will of a God ; there is no
God ; or, if there be, the mind of man cannot find him. On the
other hand, the Christian thinkers say : Take away God, and mor-
ality breaks down. It may keep along for a time by virtue of the
momentum which it has acquired under the push of a God-inspired
religion for thousands of years, just as a steamer may advance for
quite a while after its engine has stopped ; but as that steamer con-
tinually slows and at last ceases from all movement, and rolls help-
lessly and chaotically, so morality, emptied of God and his
sanctions, eventually falls into a chaotic rolling, and becomes a
mere wreck.

In support of their idea that morality can take care of itself,
and would be in no wise bereaved or enfeebled were Theism to
perish eternally from the earth, the materialists resort to several
lines of thought.

They refer us to numerous actual instances of an absolutely
untheistic morality. To which we reply : There is not any real
instance. I presume that eminent English atheist, Mr. Bradlaugh,
would be glad to offer himself as a first-class instance of a person
emptied of God, and yet not demoralized ; but Mr. Bradlaugh was
born of a Christian stock, was rocked in lullabies of the Christian
faith, no doubt, did breathe the airs of Christian England before

502 ESSAYS.

he knew what he was breathing, and was thus manifoldly mortgaged
to religion ; so that now if he was brayed with a pestle in a mortar,
and his ultimate atoms exposed, it would be found that every atom
of him was spoiled, for our purpose as an illustration, by a theistic
or religious tinge. Religion cannot be purged out of a man, nor
out of the structure of society, so as to furnish a blank instance ot
godless morality. Carry the sea-shell to the outposts of the uni-
verse, and even there you will detect in it the unspent voice of the
sea ; and let a people carry themselves away from God by a depart-
ure immeasurable, still all over them would be seen the marks of
their indefeasible creatureship in him, and of their nurture in the
wholesome airs of his moral administration. We cannot get a
thoroughly blank human specimen, to examine, I say.

Again, I would assert, that a thorough inspection of nations
that have gone upon record, shows that religion — or a belief in God
and an eternal life — greatly nourishes morality, and that morality,
therefore would have starved in those recorded instances had
religion been withdrawn.

Some would say that some historic religions have been so full
of monstrous conceptions of deities and so on, and these concep-
tions have operated such debasement on practical life, that to have
exploded the religions, and remitted the peoples concerned to the
mere earthly prudentialisms as the bases of their morality, would
have been a great improvement ; but I deny that, and as against it,
speak a word of the insufficiency of the several utilitarian and
prudential substructives of morality. I think that the theory which
makes the highest happiness of humanity at large the rule of right
acting for each man, is about as handsome looking as any of the
earth-bound rules of virtue. Do in every case what would be for
the universal good : — that is the theory. Well, a redoubtable
sociologist, like Herbert Spencer, or a powerful man of philosophic
leisure, like John Stuart Mill, might gradually elaborate a scheme of
practice for himself, well conformed to the happiness of universal
man ; but most of us want something simpler than that : — a plain
command of some supreme personal authority, were worth to the
average man a million of these grand ways of getting at a valid
morality. The welfare of humanity is a too vast and vague object-
ive on which to fasten, and by which to rule and inspire ourselves.

And speaking of inspiration reminds me to say, that a morality
which draws its sanctions and imperatives from God, has reached

ESSAYS. 503

the head-springs of all highest inspiration, for creatures made just as
we are. It is possible to fire up and get enthused over abstrac-
tions, to a degree, but always the supremest fascination is a personal
fascination, as I might illustrate at large. God's works are appeal-
ing ; and God's providence is so ; but God himself is ten times so ;
and when he stands forth in his eternal Son, and gives us the express
image and very fullness of his Godhead, in a human personalization,
nothing so appealing can be conceived ; the whole thing is in the
line of our natural interest in persons, and every faculty in us is put
upon its utmost. Let a morality get its law and its impulse there,
in that divine Person, rather than in some impersonal and purely
terrestrial consideration, and it cannot be otherwise than the very
noblest, and cannot be otherwise than spontaneous, affirmative and
beautiful ; in fact, morality, when thus inflamed and sublimated,
becomes religion, and precisely that mergence and organic unifica-
tion of the two is life, our life, in its highest ideal. One might
think, at first, that the general human welfare, as a rule of morality,
is a rather personal thing, and has in it some personal warmth of
appeal ; and it has (somewhat) ; after all however, Humanity has a
too vague and multitudinous sound, to be really effective. It is
next thing to impersonality.

I have virtually said it already, but I want to say now very dis-
tinctly, that all those utilitarian and materialistic grounds of duty
which the sceptical philosophers are trying to put off upon us, as a
substitute for the imperatives of religion, are too nearly on a plane
with ourselves, for a real solar lift upon us. We are in the flesh,
and our feet stand on the earth, and it is not much to us to be
pulled on by fleshly and earthly considerations ; we cannot get more
than about so high, unless something transcendental and supernal
takes hold of us. Out of the sky, we want the sanctions of our
morality to come ; if we do right, we want to feel that the Tightness
of our right rests back on the Most High God ; if we hear any
thunders of doom when we do wrong, we need to have them sound
forth from a far-away eternal life ; a doom with a long roll in it, and
not the rattle of a mere this-world reverberation. Morality grows
earnest and behaves itself, when addressed by these practically
infinite exhortations.

In my indictment of Agnosticism, I would not fail to mention
distinctly before I close (what I have hinted already), namely, that
it is very full of sorrowfulness of spirit for those who embrace it, as

504 ESSAYS.

is proven by many a pathetic confession by agnostic celebrities.
Being an agnostic does not discharge a person from the constitu-
tional longings of the universal human soul. He still needs and,
at times, yearns for a God, his light in darkness, his consolation in
grief, his rest in weariness, his companion in the awful stress of the
spirit's inevitable lonesomeness. He still revolts from annihilation
with its unutterable silence and darkness, its ever-extended cessation
from all the joys and zests of being. And quite as much as his own
everlasting nothingness when his life ends, does his soul abhor that
separation forever from all whom he loves, which is a part of his
dreadful doctrine. Yes, he is a man like the rest of us, with a
man's outreachings, wonderings, and inappeasable tendernesses.
Therefore his unbelief is an agony to him, whenever he grows seri-
ous and lets the great instincts of his better nature play. And there
is nothing in literature more deep-hearted and touching than the
frank confessions, at this point, of some of the modern leaders of
unbelief. See poor John Stuart Mill, leaving his native England,
and spending the last years of his life on a malarious and death-
dealing spot in Southern France, that he might be close by, and
constantly visit, the grave of that wife whom he fairly adored, but
whom he did not quite dare expect ever to meet again.

Read the cheerless epitaph which the atheistic Clifford, of
England, the brilliant Mathematical Professor of the Cambridge Uni-
versity, ordered placed over his own grave : " I was not — I was
begotten — I lived — I am not." There it stands over the place
where, gone in his young manhood, he sleeps the long sleep. Or
listen to these words in one of his published essays : "It cannot be
doubted that belief in a God is a comfort and a solace to those who
hold it, and that the loss of it is a very painful loss. It cannot be
doubted, at least, by many of us in this generation, who either pro-
fess it now, or received it in our childhood, and have parted from it
since with such searching trouble as only cradle faiths can cause.
We have seen the Spring sun shine out of an empty heaven to light
up a soulless earth. We have felt with utter loneliness that the
Great Companion is dead. Our children, it may be hoped, will
know that sorrow only by the reflex light of a wondering com-
passion."

So much, poor Clifford. Or listen to another of kindred spirit,
an able, sad, man, in the forward ranks of those who deny God and
eternity, and preach the gospel of despair. He thinks, not only

ESSAYS. 505

that an endless Future cannot be discovered by the anxious mind of
man, but that, as we pass on into old age, we care less and less
whether it can be discovered. He says : " Age has quenched the
passionate desire of life with which at first we stepped upon this
earthly scene. We are tired, some of us, with unending and
unprofitable toil ; we are satiated, others of us, with such ample
pleasures as earth can yield us ; we have had enough of ambition,
alike in its successes and its failures ; the joys and blessings of
human affection, on which, whatever their crises and vicissitudes, no
honest and truthful man will cast a slur, are yet so blended with
pains which partake of their intensity ; the thirst for knowledge is
not slaked, indeed, but the capacity for the labor by which alone
knowledge can be gained has consciously died out ; the appetite for
life, in short, is gone, the frame is worn and the faculties exhausted,
and the idea of renewed existence can offer no inspiring charms.
Our being, upon earth, has been enriched by vivid interests and
precious joys, and we are deeply grateful for the gift, but we are
wearied with one life, and feel scarcely qualified to enter on the
claims of another. It may be the fatigue which comes of age —
fatigue of the fancy as well as of the frame — but somehow what we
yearn for most instinctively at last, is rest ; and the peace which we
can imagine the easiest, because we know it best, is that of sleep."
And by rest and sleep, Mr. Greg means annihilation.

Eighteen hundred years before Greg poured forth this melan-
choly strain, another celebrated man, also nearing the close of life,
vented his mind on this wise : " I am now ready to be offered, and
the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I
have finished my course, I have kept the faith ; henceforth there is
laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the
righteous Judge, shall give me at that day ; and not to me only, but
unto all them also that love his appearing."

Now, Mr. Greg himself would say that this swan-song of St.
Paul was three times happier and more engaging than his, but he
would proceed immediately to add ; — " It is no proof of the valid-
ity of a faith that it is pleasing to the mind ; in three quarters of all
known instances in this life, what we want, and would enjoy, does
not come to us ; and we must not infer immortality from the fact
that we desire it (as most people confessedly do)." To which I
should reply : It is hardly possible not to feel that any religious view
which meets and satisfies the deepest and most beneficent longings
33

506 ESSAYS.

of men, in all ages and races and under all circumstances, presum-
ably has something in it. It is not demonstrably true (that view is
not), it cannot be validated by a scientific process of reasoning, but
it rests on moral evidence which is well nigh irresistible.

I should charge it, then, upon these great Modern Denials
(Agnosticism and the rest), that they make no sufficient provision
for our unutterable and most pathetic necessities.

And they cannot prevail. They are antagonized by the great
moral and other intuitions of mankind. They are likely to be
repudiated whensoever we come into moments of extremity, in the
passing of our life ; as when we are in great peril, or in a deep
sense of guilt, or forsaken, or bereaved, or profoundly confused and
afflicted by the disorders of the creation ; moreover, great intuition-
alists are sure to arise, men of exceptional profundity, comprehen-
sion, will and magnetism, who will overwhelmingly re-assert the great
and holy faiths of the world, obscured, for the time, by the dust-
throwing of materialistic thought. And finally, to make all seven
times sure, the Holy Ghost is here on earth operating in the inter-
est of faith ; and whenever that Mighty Spirit goes into a human
soul, and there generates a supernatural experience, that soul
becomes anti-agnostic, anti-Clifford, anti-Greg and anti-everything
you can think of that would blot out the world of spiritual realities
and the life immortal, and endungeon us in what Clifford calls
"an empty sky, and a soulless earth," wherein the function of man
is to sit in utter loneliness, and mournfully wish there only somehow
could be a God.

SERMONS.

THE CHURCH OF THE
LIVING GOD.

Delivered at the Organization of Dwight Place Church,
New Haven, Conn., Dec. 5, 1872.

As we are gathered this evening for the organization of a
Christian Church, what I have to say to you will be thrown into the
form of a reply to the question : In what respect is the Church
God's? According to that expression of Holy Writ recorded in
Timothy iii, 15, "the church of the living God."

And I shall have accomplished my whole design if I succeed
in recapitulating and putting before you, with a degree of freshness,
certain points of your own familiar knowledge.

First then, the Church is His because He founded it. And
this may be illustrated by several courses of thought.

There is that in the constitution of the human mind itself which
predisposes us, and not merely that but morally forces us, as you
might say, to associate ourselves with those who have been through
experiences like our own, or are running a course of life parallel to
ours ; and the deeper these experiences and the more marked the
course of life, the more inevitable and the more binding and sweet
is this affiliation. Wherefore, the world is full of guilds, confedera-
tions, fraternities, cliques, parties, civil communities and the like.
Sometimes it is a society of artists. Sometimes a cooperative union
of work people. Sometimes an alumni association. Or, again, it is
an international society extending through all lands, or a scientific
society, or a gang of rogues engaged in a common course of trans-
gression. The forms of these leagues are as various and innumer-
able as the circumstances of life, but they all rest at last on the

510 SERMONS.

constitutional gravitation of like to like, which gravitation is the
clear voice of the Most High himself, on the question of these social
crystalizations into this and that — not his approval of this or that
particular form of the thing, not that of course, but his approval of
the general idea of fraternization and organization on common
grounds of experience and design. It is his will that men should
confederate kind with kind, else he would not have stocked them
so heavily with that instinct of association, even as he would not
have so filled every orb in the sky with an irresistible outgoing
toward its fellow orbs, except as he had determined that they should
troop the firmament in joyful grand companies, in an eternal
rhythm and song.

Well then, take the souls of men and fill them with all the full-
ness of God, or strike a lower key and let them take in only the
precious beginnings of that fullness ; such as the sense of guilt taken
away, the struggle of new purposes in them, the uplift of unaccus-
tomed longings, the emancipations from bondages more or less, the
new vision of Christ, the ever increasing and adoring grasp of his
work as it relates itself to the throne of God and the necessity of
man, the trust in Providence, and the secret answers to prayers sent
up in the name of the Mediator, and the firm out-look into life, and
the peaceful anticipation of death as a moment of victory through
him who has loved us all. Why ! with these and things like these
in numbers of people scattered about, how could it be at all avoided
that they should seek each other, as contiguous drops of water long
each for each and strive to make one flood ; and why is not this
instinct of aggregation as much divine, divinely intended and infalli-
ble, as the southward impulse of departing birds in the chill Autumn.

Is the organization of men in civil communities a divine thing,
as being the normal outcome of our human nature all the world
round? And is marriage something divine for a similar reason?
And do all thoughtful and right-thinking men on that account attach
a certain sanctity to these things, and bow to them with a reverence
beyond what can possibly be accorded to any contrivance of man ?
Then does the Church shine also with the signatures of divinity and
demand our homage as her birthright.

And this presumption in favor of the thought that the Church
is God's, derived from our natural constitution, is confirmed, of
course, and lifted above all doubt so soon as we open the Bible on
the subject and begin to receive its testimonials. I will not go back

SERMONS. 511

into the far Old Testament period, although our subject fairly takes
us there • but I ask you to remember how common this expression
of my text — "the church of the living God" — is in the New Testa-
ment. St. Paul seems to have an especial affection for it. He
speaks to the Thessalonians of " the churches of God which in Judea
are in Christ Jesus." "The churches of God." And in like
manner to the Corinthians, he says : " despise ye the church of
God?" And in another place — "Give none offence neither to the
Jews nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God."

You will observe too, how frequently the Church is called "the
body of Christ." And how it is said that he loved the church and
gave himself for it. And how God chose it to be the theatre on
which, and the organ through which, he would display himself even
"unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places," — demon-
strating his manifold wisdom, as the expression is, beyond all the
disclosures he had ever made in the glorious physical creation.

Furthermore, the book of the Acts is a quite extended account
of the way Christ's Apostles, instinct with his own animus and put
on precisely the right work by the indwelling Spirit of God, went
to and fro gathering churches in his name and to his glory, thus
giving unto men forever a sure sign as to God's will and the true
way of assisting Christianity in the world.

And what is baptism (which he certainly appointed), but an
initiation into something ; and what is that something, but a divine
society ?

And besides this, hath not our God put upon us poor, broken
mortals, gigantic works in his behalf, which it were impossible for us
to fulfill, did we remain in isolation one from the other? We are
commanded to assist each other in the things of the spiritual life,
and to hold forth the light of life for the illumination of the dark
world ; to withstand error and upturn communities of selfishness,
and cleanse the whole air of the globe, and push perpetually for-
ward a vast, impossible propagandism — impossible on principles of
sheer individualism, and impossible, I may add, on any natural prin-
ciples whatever.

Wherefore, I lay it down as my first point, that the Church is
God's, because he both directly and indirectly founded it.

And I hasten joyfully to declare unto you, in the second
place, that she is his, because he has preserved her in a manner often
remarked upon as being very wonderful, and as being full of omens

512 SERMONS.

for the periods yet to come. I can say not much about this great
and thrilling matter now, but you yourselves know what enormous
disadvantages have at different times (and all the time), loaded
themselves on the Christian Church and how in despite of all and
in a sense, by the help of all, she has maintained herself and
enlarged herself and strewn the ages with her victories. Christ
himself said that the gates of Hell should not prevail against her.
And they have not. They have tried. They have resorted to physi-
cal force. They have marshalled great armies in the business. They
have undertaken private murders, and have practiced all sorts of
private and public torments on Christ's helpless ones ; and have thus
unwittingly lifted one and another of their victims into a celebrity
whereby they have been ministering spirits to the whole body of
God's people in all generations since. For there never died a Chris-
tian martyr who did not multiply men and women of the martyr
spirit beyond all computation.

And in addition to force physical, all sorts of forces spiritual
and intellectual, have been thrown into the field against her. Athe-
ism has assaulted her God. Pantheism has assaulted her personal
God. Naturalism has laid siege to her very corner-stones, and done
what she could to discredit her supernatural claims and overturn her
adorable mysteries. Spiritualism has undertaken to supplement her
spiritualism by one more authentic and all-revealing. Morality has
promised to supplant her by something just as good as herself, and
has always been at it. Materialism has breathed upon all her inter-
ests with her pestilent cold breath. Old paganisms, too, have set up
their colossal forms in dispute of her progress, confronting her
antiquity with an antiquity almost as remote, mustering traditions,
civilizations, systems of education, old habits of thought and even
many alleged supernatural attestations, in antagonism to her supreme,
tremendous claims.

And within herself and among her own people, she has been
set upon in a manner to destroy her, if her destruction were possible.
Sacramentarians, Roman and other, have striven to make her sacra-
ments ridiculous, by their preposterous high claims in regard to
them ; and Rationalists, on the other hand, have vacated these
sanctities of their whole pith and dignity, by a philosophy too full
of- the earthly to have any divine left in it. Yes, the Church herself
has swarmed with partialists and partialisms of many kinds, — preach-
ers in an enthusiasm amounting to a monomania, almost, over certain

SERMONS. 513

particulars or departments of Christian truth, while to other partic-
ulars of the same authentic and precious circle of truth they have
been nearly blind ; theologians handling the things of God, in a
similar disproportion ; creeds good enough so far as they go, but
not going far ; spasms of benevolence in certain directions and no
more ; highly charged and super-charged individualities, too indi-
vidual to be brought into any general scheme of order and truth ;
eccentricities, fanaticisms, conscientious ferocities, abnormal mani-
festations without number ; these miserable infelicities and sorrowful
great adversities, have discomposed the Church within herself, I say,
and have joined with adversities more external, to make her way
down the centuries one of tumult and strain and peril, like the
passage of a ship through cross-currents and through wild winds
blowing with all their might every whither, with some traitors on
board besides, and many more who, not intentional traitors, do so
fuss about and take a wrong hold, that they are almost as hindering
as very traitors.

And yet, I repeat it, this institution still lives ; and where she
ought in all reason (more reason), to have died, she has only the
more abundantly lived ; and where certain sharp men and men of
genius have prophesied that she would go under, she has persistently
floated ; and where she has been so worm-eaten by error, that she
might have been supposed to be eaten clear through and about to
fill, she has not filled, somehow she has not. And although, doubtless
ofttimes, she has been invisibly attacked by devils, and although these
same spirits of evil have lent the enthusiasm of their own animosity
to the human creatures who have set themselves in array against
her, thus making their energy more energetic, and their craft more
crafty, and their perseverance more unconquerable ; and although
Death has not failed to stalk into the field and continually seize away
the forces of the Church, one by one, and sometimes by hundreds,
not sparing even those on whom the cause of God most depends,
the air being forevermore full of this sorrowful emigration out of the
earthly into the heavenly, so that in a few years there would be no
semblance of a Church left in all the world, did not God interfere
to maintain his own — behold ! blessed be his great name, he does
interfere ; and as to this gluttonous Death, he withstands him
and nullifies his eternal movement of destruction among the
children of men, by mighty inflowing tides of new life, and by
incessant glorious regenerations among each last-born generation.

514 SERMONS.

Yea, all satanic works he counter-works in ways more than we
know ; but among the rest, by angels of light we presume, for
have they not always attended the great redemption, from the
day when they appeared unto Joseph and Mary, down to this
moment ; and all along the pages of the Bible from Genesis to John
the Revelator, do we not every now and then catch the gleam of them
and of their blessed ministry, they being so touched by what they
know of our case and the boundless grace of God towards us, that
they can in no wise be detained behind the veil which screens their
land from ours. Yes, by willing angels, by the Holy Ghost, by the
inspired word, by indestructible sacraments, by many instruments and
intermediates, but chiefest of all, by his own direct power in men
both good and bad, in one inspiring and in the other restraining, he
triumphantly defends the Church and turns all her defeats into vic-
tories, putting her out among the instabilities of the world and the
whirl of its mutations, as one thing that cannot be shaken ; overthrow-
ing nations but preserving her, rolling a tide here in which empires,
races, tongues, philosophies, arts, landmarks, codes, thrones and
every conceivable grandeur and fancied immortality, are made to
sink and disappear, like foundered ships, while on this same tide and
over its peopled sepulchres, he causes this one indestructible to ride,
if not serenely yet safely, in continual verification of that sure
promise — "the gates of Hell shall not prevail against her." In
which promise we have summed, in one sentence, many a more
amplified and resounding Scripture of assurance to the same effect ;
for, as far back as the Bible runs, the steadfast estate of the Mili-
tant Church is a dear theme, and there is nothing anywhere more
majestic and melodious than the utterances of David and Isaiah and
others, when they voiced their whole expectation on that great hope
and subject. The Church is the church of the living God then,
because he has amazingly preserved it.

And thirdly, because it is organized for purely God-like
ends. The Church undertakes the case of her own membership, in
the first place, and strives by many means to assimilate them to God.
She thrusts her first day, her Lord's day, in among the rushing
other days and makes a space of peace in which the tumultuated
faculties of men may compose themselves and may quietly reach out
beyond these small but noisy visibles, these finities, this transientness
and fading glitter, and may take hold on the substantial and ever-
lasting. And that first-day silence she fills with voices of her own.

SERMONS. 515

The melody of her bells floats out over the tired world. Her mani-
fold distinct utterances of God and eternity and obligation and sin
and redemption silence (or would) all lesser tones. The seclu-
sion and tranquillity of her sanctuaries, the speech of her preachers,
the more full and forceful speech of her sacraments, the accord of
her tuneful assemblies, the outshinings of her Holy Book ever read
and studied, the uplift of her prayers, the play of sanctified human
sympathies, charging the very air of the temple with a magnetism
which, ofttimes, even the dullest must feel, the ingathering of child-
ren and the flow of their voices in prayer or hymn ; the memories,
too, which hallow the sanctuary and its services, the early times of
one's own life that are in those services, the long-gone blessed dead,
who draw nigh and participate — by all these and other ways and
forces, the Church operates to safeguard her members and nurture
their holiness and arm them against the onsets of evil and prepare
them for that Eternity, into which their millions on earth are con-
tinually emerging.

That is one of her purposes. And another is the calling in of
the world's people as rapidly as possible, that they also may be sub-
jected to this same drill and nurture and inspiration, and may be
lifted to that same home and rest in the heavens.

Recollect, moreover, what ends of good the Church secures
outside of her own limits and in the world at large. Even where she
does not convert, she does authoritatively arrest a good deal of evil,
and foster a vast deal of good. What checks she puts upon these
slimy and reptile issues of the press, so that they do not overrun us.
What tonic currents she pours through literature in all its better
forms. How she holds legislation up to the measures of equity and
virtue. How she tempers the severities of government and breathes
her ameliorations and her heavenly health, too, into prisons. And
she presides in courts and strikes the balance between man and man.
She harmonizes the antagonisms of classes and races and jealous
nations. She goes to the field of battle and saves men from the
grossness of pure murder by her inspirations of noble motive. She
enters the diplomacy of nations to expurgate it of its cunning and
irritability. She guides the brush of the painter, the sceptre of the
king, the pen of the author, the brain of the philosopher, the music
of the poet, the movement of all human life. Not perfectly. No,
not that. But she comes in omnipresently to do what she can, and
she does so much in the great dark outer world — the world of

516 SERMONS.

ungodliness, I mean — that nothing is as it would straightway be, if
she should withdraw and never again interpose in any human affair.
She buries the dead, and scarcely ever a person dies but she is sent
for. She encloses and makes beautiful these fields of graves, which
brighten the landscape. She writes on stone and brass all those
sentences of comfort and hope which you read above the dead.
She presides at all marriages, and the most abandoned have a feeling
that their love has not had set upon it its last and best seal, unless
they have stood at her altar and been blessed in the gracious words
of her benediction.

These, then, are the ends of the Church ; to nurture her own, to
draw in and bless others, and then, beyond the circuit of her con-
verting grace, to make an influence in behalf of God, which, while
it does not qualify men for heaven, does put them in the way of a
decent life on the earth ; and these aims show that she is a thing of
God, belongs to him, is entitled to wear his name and ought to have
been called by the Apostle, as she was "the church of the living
God."

I had thought, under a fourth head, to speak of the final
victory promised to the Church, as one of the divine signs upon her ;
but that thought is so akin to that of the miraculous preservation of
her thus far in the world, that, if I undertook to handle it, I should
most likely seem repetitious.

But let me say here, if the Church is of God as reaching for-
ward into a future, so resplendent as she is, as reaching back into an
antiquity most remote and remarkable. The moment I think of her
as beginning with the fall of man, (or at least beginning to be spoken
of and prepared then) and thereafter extending clear down to the
end of the world, an organized and ever-organizing life, the central
interest of every era, in any true view ; the one and only thing around
which Almighty God collects his principal activities and plays the
full splendors of his nature ; the one institution which he inhabits and
inspires and makes the organ of his being and will, insomuch that he
calls it his own body ; the one creature of his which he certifies to
by signs supernatural in great numbers ; the one thing that binds all
ages together and makes them coherent and not a rope of sand ;
the reason that the ages have been and shall be permitted to go on
and unfold themselves ; the one and only thing, too, that shall sur-
vive the end of the world and move off full-freighted and undamaged
when all here has gone to wreck — when I begin to remember all

SERMONS. 517

this of the Church, then forthwith I know and cannot doubt, that
she is God's precious child to whom he is more committed than to any
othei, and in whom his several attributes are more plenarily resident.
I referred to her antiquity. And aside from the thought that
an institution which started so early and has survived so contin-
uously is therefore and undeniably divine, what fascinations there
are in her as being so almost immeasurably old and as garnering
therefore such wonderful memories. What fragrances of primeval
piety there are in her robes. What reverberations of history. What
haloed great names illuminate the roll of her redeemed millions.
What gracious heroisms, what splendors of faith, what sobbing pen-
itences, what supreme emergencies supremely mastered, what divine
death-beds, what sonorous rituals, what groans of typical sacrifices,
what seerships, what prophetic fulfillments, what a drift and subtone
of ante-messianic ages, what a summation of six thousand mighty
years, the years of God's slowly unfolding redemption, there are in
her and carried by her into every thoughtful mind. And so, when
we stand in the crowded ranks of her membership, into what personal
associations we rise. We enter into the fellowship of Abraham's
faith and are of his innumerable seed. We are joined unto the elect
souls of every race and time, to the glorious company of the Apos-
tles, to the goodly fellowship of the Prophets, to the noble army of
Martyrs ; or, as the great Apostle puts it in his full-toned incompar-
able way — "Ye are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the
living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company
of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first born,
which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the
spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the
new covenant, and to the blood, sprinkling of that speaketh better
things than that of Abel." For this Church spreads over two worlds
and the main weight of her membership is not here. Evermore, the
earthly is blossoming into the heavenly, and the feet of many of us
here do already take hold of the verge of that other department of
the great Kingdom ; and our souls shall, ere long, go to swell that
radiant majority. But even now, in our more perceptive moments,
we feel that they and we are one. We are great by their greatness.
Every past and every future and both worlds converge to God's
Church at this moment on earth and in her are represented. And
in this view, there is no strong passage of Scripture referring to her,
which is any more than commensurate with her greatness ; and our

518 SERMONS.

hearts are ready to say with the old-time sorrowful exile from Zion
— " If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cun-
ning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof
of my mouth ; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy "

LIFE A DREAM

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford April 23, 1882.

Surely every man zvalketk in a vain shew. — Psalms xxxix, 6.

It is a thought of the Bible, and has come to be one of the
common thoughts of men, that this life of ours is a dream, though
the manifold validity of that comparison is not ordinarily reasoned
out. I propose to reason it a little and to show that life is a dream,
not only in those respects which the most attract attention, but in
others quite as significant and morally impressive.

And first, it is so because it is so fleeting. That is one of the
points mainly thought of when men say, Life is a dream. Some-
thing has happened to admonish them of its brevity. Some death
has occurred. They have had their attention called to some struct-
ure like the pyramids of Egypt, which are thousands of years older
than the Christian era, and in the shadow of their perpetuity, the
years of a man have seemed as nought. Or they have contemplated
the cycles through which some of the orbs of the sky travel and the
still more enormous movements of the banded constellations, and
then have turned to man, to be struck by the contrast of his soon-
completed career. In the fall of 1869, I spent a couple of weeks
in Heidelberg, Germany, and I recollect one night there, when the
full moon hung in the sky over that mediaeval poem, the old Castle
on the mountain, I spent a long time in the open air looking up to
both and thinking many things. And among those things, this
reflection continually returned. In yonder castle, moonlit and
shadowy and old and desolate, there were pomps and merry-makings
and the round of high life and busy life, before Columbus discovered
America, and around it ofttimes raged the thunder of war ; those

520 SERMONS.

merry makings are hushed, those noises of war have died away, the
participants therein are all asleep in the grave, and other generations
who followed them in long succession are all likewise asleep in the
sleep that knows no waking. And yet there stands the castle ; dis-
mantled and broken, to be sure, and touched all over by the ravages
of time and the stormy passions of men ; but there for substance,
and a type of the unchangeable, after all ; there like the mountain
height on whose slope it hangs, there like the Neckar which flows
forever at its feet ; and as I considered this, gradually my own
existence seemed to narrow to a hand's breadth, and I understood
anew that saying of the Psalmist — " they are as a sleep : in the morn-
ing they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flour-
isheth and groweth up ; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth."
And surely, none the less did that same feeling of my own transient-
ness impress me, when I lifted my eyes above the castle and marked
that rounded moon riding there in her glory, old as the creation is
old, and full of memories of the morning thereof, and yet as fresh and
young and luminous as though set in the firmament that very night
for the first time. When I consider thy heavens, O God, the moon
and the stars, which thou hast ordained ; what is man, whose breath
is in his nostrils and whose days are as a watch in the night.

Life is a dream, I say, because like a dream it speedily vanish-
eth away. That is a phase of the matter which strikes everybody ;
and it is that phase of the comparison, I suppose, that very obvious
phase, which caused the thought, Life is a dream, to come into
such universal currency in the thinking and the speech of men.

But secondly now, consider how brokenly our minds are con-
nected with the external world in dreams, and in what an incomplete
and confused way we grasp that world therefore. In deep sleep
our relations to things external are utterly cut off and we do not
dream at all, and the world is as though it were not ; but in dreams,
the things about us do have some hold on our senses, and that hold
of theirs is the reason that we dream. Some uneasiness in our
bodies starts our minds off. Some noise on the highway, some
distant roll of rail-trains, some dropping of this or that in our rooms,
some spoken word, some touch of some hand — any one of hundreds
of things, may so far reach into our sleeping faculties as to set them
dreaming. But the point I am after just now is, that we have no
clear and intelligible comprehension of the realities about us. Those
realities press upon us sufficiently to originate thought within us and

SERMONS. 521

determine its character in some measure, but not sufficiently to
force themselves into our consciousness as external realities. A
very curious fact. In my waking hours, if an object reaches my
mind, straightway and inevitably my mind travels out to consider
that object, and that is the way in which I become aware of the
universe and do look at it as it really is ; but when that same object
impinging upon me causes me to dream, my mind does not arise
up and follow out, and on that object locate, but contrariwise, it stays
within itself and moves about in all sorts of fantastics.

And right here I discover a parallel, viz : as the dreaming mind,
although in actual connection with an environing world, has no
distinct perception of that world ; so through all this earthly life of
ours we are surrounded and pressed upon by a spiritual world, of
which we have but a very broken and insufficient perception. It
has some access to us. It starts motions in us which we should
never have otherwise, but those inward motions thus started we do
not often track out and forth to their spiritual and supersensible
causes — not naturally at least ; we dream, those great actualities make
dreams in us. God gets at us and into us, enough to start us off in
that way, and angels do, and scores of wafts and hearsays from the
invisible do, and in our better moments, doubtless, we make a push
outward into perception (spiritual perception) and become aware
of that other realm ; but in whatever moment and however much
inspired and put on our best, our sense of those outlying things is
fragmentary and vacillating and dream-like. So that when we die
and are literally carried over among them, it will be considerably
like waking up from the dreaminess of sleep, and we shall say to our-
selves— "Well, here is that world that I often guessed at, and often
saw in scattered and straggling rays of light, but oh ! what a different
and vaster world it is than I had anticipated ; how vividly real all
these things now are ; the unseen personages, how visible they are
and how near to me they come and into what intermingling with
them I find myself flowing ; what countless spiritual relations of all
earthly events I now discover, what outstretching perspectives, what
encompassing spiritual sceneries ; I am awake, I am awake ! I
dream no longer ; the reign of fantasy and hallucination is over and
the reign of the real has come."

I may add here, that while our present relations to the super-
natural sphere are thus dream-like, our relations even to earthly
things and affairs are a good deal so. The materialistic scientists
34

522 SERMONS.

think that when they have denied and excluded the supernatural,
and cut us off from the intellectual Mightiness incident to excursions
and explorations in that imaginary range, and have brought us
sharply down to the physical domain, they have established us in
solid and reasonable perception ; but nothing is plainer, on a careful
and candid scrutiny, than that these material actualities, in which
they imprison us, have spread over them more or less of illusion,
and are grasped by us, at best, in only a fluctuating and partial
manner. The scientists themselves have demonstrated the partial
character of our comprehension of the material, by their doctrine of
what they call "the relativity of knowledge," which is this :

That all we know of external objects is, that they produce in us
certain states of consciousness by virtue of their adjustment to us, as
where a body gives us a sense of color and form and hardness ; but
this our sense of color, form and hardness, gives us no information
as to the essence and substance of that object in which these several
qualities inhere ; and outside of the power of that physical object to
impress us in that threefold way and make us say, " lo ! it is red, it
is round, it is hard," it may have a dozen other powers, and a dozen
other attributes, perceptible to the Creator if not to us ; so that the
universe in its entirety is to the universe as perceived by us, almost
as God to the vision of an inspired man is, as compared to the
vision of him which a brute has.

That is the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge. And it
shows, I say, that in our present condition, the most real of things
— even those things on which our eyes look — are conceived by us
only in certain phases of their total reality.

I spoke too, of physical things and all tangible affairs, as held
in our conception only with much fluctuation, and is not that so ?
Take a boy's view of his visible surroundings and of the flow of
human events, and compare it with his view of the same things when
he gets to be thirty years old, or compare his view at thirty with his
view at three-score and ten. Why, the difference is immense. The
things looked at are substantially the same, but the person who
looks is the same at no two points in his life. The old man looks
back to his childhood and comments on his notions of things then
as ridiculously inadequate and incorrect ; for example, his view of
his friends, or his view of what is possible in life, or his view of
the general lot of man, or his view of death and eternity.

But his youthful judgments were not more ridiculous than his

SERMONS. 523

present old-man's judgments are, as measured by the realities of
things. The old man thinks that his large experience of life has put
him in possession of life as it is \ but what life really is, cannot be
known by him till he comes into possession of all its relations ; just
as a student of history cannot understand any given period, until he
looks into the times antecedent out of which that period sprung, and
into the times subsequent into which that period has flowered forth.

All these things lead me to say, friends, that our comprehen-
sion even of the present world and the thousand-fold motion of its
affairs is changeful, inaccurate and incomplete. We see them bro-
kenly, fitfully and unreally ; and in that respect we are as men in
dreams.

Thirdly, there is another particular in which this life that we
are now living may reasonably be called a dream. You know that
in dreams no amount of absurdity surprises us. We float through
the air, and we take it as a matter of course and a thing no stranger
than walking. We see persons in our presence changing from one
to another in an instant ; our neighbor becomes suddenly our other
neighbor, our father transforms into some hero of history, and
these transformations excite no wonder in us. Also the scenes of
our dreaming change from one locality to another, thousands of
miles apart, and that seems natural. Also events succeed each other
in the wildest incoherency, and in the midst of it all, it does not
once occur to us that anything disorderly is going on. Thus mar-
velous are the dream-movements of the mind.

And similar to that are the waking notices we take of the things
now about us. The forms of the preposterous, the disorderly, the
chaotic, in this life are countless. The base succeed, that is pre-
posterous and disorderly. Criminals escape. The good are
crushed. Benevolence brings persecution. Industry ends in pov-
erty. The wise are despised. Plotters catch their victims. Thrones
of evil are in honor. Religion is hooted at. Guile works better
than straightforwardness. Jesus is crucified. Windiness passes for
oratory. Sense passes for dullness. Occasional touches and gleams
of a lost moral order there are of course, but on the whole, or largely
at any rate, confusion is king and the general run of things is to all
points of the compass at once, as though the laws of the creation had
gone mad and were now ramping every-whither. It is the topsy-
turvy of a dream. And yet we contemplate it much as in dreams
we contemplate those incoherencies and impossibilities and weird

524 SERMONS.

shiftings and incredible whimsicalities, to which I referred. We
take it as a matter of course and as though it were a sort of orderli-
ness, that every moral incongruity should start up and every sort of
preposterousness come to the front. In our dream we fly through
the air and no bird could do it better, and that seems to us the
normal motion ; likewise in our life-dream, myriads of flyings through
the air occur, and we not merely do not marvel at it but we expect
it. Tis a piece of dreaming, and blessed be God, like all dreaming,
it cannot last. We shall awake and rationality shall at last prevail.

I do not know how far I might pursue this analogy of life a
dream, but I will not mention many particulars more.

Fourthly, it is remarked upon in the books of science ; and
very likely you have noticed the same in your own experience, that
often and often (and perhaps more often than any way), the con-
science, in dreams, is suspended ; so that the best of people commit
the most savage of crimes without the first stroke of remorse.

And I suggest that similarly in waking life, we are often as
those who dream. Conscience retires, and we are left to run wild
in things reprehensible, without any clear consciousness of what we
are about. We cheat and steal, and seem only to be diligently pur-
suing our business. We lie, and think that we must. We masquer-
ade in all sorts of hypocrisy, and call it courtesy and prudence. We
grind the face of the poor, and call it "the survival of the fittest."
We deny the existence of God and teach men so, and then feel
persecuted because everybody does not treat us as though we had
done no such thing. We squirm around and beslime ourselves in
politics, and consider such doings the necessary and defensible
means of success. We are moral dreamers. But some day we shall
awake. This cannot last, we were not made to be forever dream-
ing. Illusion is fascinating, but in the universe of God, only that
which is real can abide.

And this reminds me to say, lastly, that as in dreams, when we
awake and look back we are filled with many feelings, so in the final
waking from this dreamful life many agitations will seize us.

In the first place, we shall be filled with wonder at the mistakes
we made down here. We had agonizings here which we shall then
see had no foundation in fact. A friend of mine told me, that in
his youth he was bathing alone on the shore of the ocean and swim-
ming out freely and far, in what he supposed to be a safe movement,
when, on looking back, he found that a secret underflow had been

SERMONS. 525

drifting him. Thereupon he turned and made a struggle coastward.
He was a first-class swimmer and he made headway, but the way
was long and the tide was ugly, and finally he could do no more.
Then he solemnly committed his soul to God, ceased striving and
sunk — and touched bottom in not more than two or three feet of
water. For a considerable stretch, while he was slowly verging
towards death, there right under him had been the solid ground.

And, my friends, just so delusive as that, are a large part of the
great anxieties and terrors of life. They are dream-born. There is
nothing in them. They are night-mares. We drown in waters two
feet deep. We fall off from precipices where there are no precipices.
We are run down by rail-trains of our own imagining. We are
caught in whirlwinds that have no wind in them. We are struck by
thunder-bolts that have neither thunder nor bolt. And we shall see
it to be so from heights of the hereafter, and we shall draw a long
breath of amazement when we see.

Moreover, we shall draw another long breath when we discover
the many instances here below where we paddled about calm-minded
in seeming two-feet waters that were miles deep ; and walked
serenely on dizzy edges, not knowing the precipices below us ; and
marched along through alluring forest paths full of delight and song,
when a hundred ambushes were set for us on either hand.

A time of much marveling will our eternal waking be.

A time of much sorrowing too, perhaps, — sorrow that we did
not know our day of privilege, sorrow that we did not discern our
obligations to others, sorrow that we wandered and wasted our
time, sorrow that we looked not beyond our mortal and transient
estate, sorrow that with the love of God all the while over us, like
a motherly brooding, we did not more see God's face and feel his
breath and detect his gentle hand, but did rather conduct ourselves
like orphaned children, and cry and worry and put forth our little
potherings of effort and self-help.

A time of much sorrowing will the eternal waking be.

A time of much rejoicing also, of course, as I have already
intimated. Yea, a time of many things.

And why should good men dread to fall asleep in death, that
they may pass to the eternal awakening?

I do not know that death, in itself, is any more remarkable than
sleep ; or that passing into a state of personal existence beyond
death, is any more inherently incredible than that passing into the

526 SERMONS.

dream-state of which we have all had so much experience. A man
dead gives no more sign of knowing nothing than does a man fully
asleep, and a man dreaming is as far out of his customary state of
mind as a man can be in eternity. What a baseless thought it is,
that an existence for us beyond this present, is not a thing easy to
be believed, when millions of times every day people are experienc-
ing changes as great as that. Not merely do we pass into uncon-
sciousness by disease and by blows and by the daily process of sleep ;
and not only do we daily and normally pass into states of dreaming ;
but in many instances, men broad awake have ceased to be them-
selves, (that is to themselves, they have ceased to be) , have lost
their identity and gone over into a new self-consciousness, and in
that amazing new consciousness have figured for a time. According
to the accounts given, there was a case like that to the eastward of us
not long ago. A clergyman suddenly became another man to him-
self, and wandered off in a brand-new identity and did things utterly
at variance with his former character, just as a new man ought,
— and all that he did was as of a new man. It was as though I
should be instantly annihilated here and now, and a new-created
personality should be put into my place and my tracks.

Well, with these profound personal changes possible and fre-
quently occurring, why should we hesitate to accept that idea of
transformation -at death, which the Scriptures give us, and that very
transformed life beyond, of which they speak in such plain terms ?
For one, I do not hesitate. I believe all that the Scriptures say. I
see no reason why I should not. I see strong reasons why I should.
And I am glad the eternal transformation is coming. I have been
into dreamland. I have been into unconsciousness a great many
times, and now and then some brother man of mine has shown me
what it is to change identity ; and now I am ready to see a more
joyful thing than these all (more joyful though not more wonderful)
and to take on the attributes and put forth the phenomena of an
absolutely spiritualized existence. It will not be unconsciousness,
but consciousness. It will not be dreaming, but the widest waking.
It will not be a mysterious change-off into an absolutely new man,
like that wandering clergyman ; but it will be a sufficiently new man,
brimful of recollection and all aglow within and ablaze with a sense
of indestructible identity. I do not know but some people fancy
that the river death will prove a Lethe for us, wherein all our memory
of earth will be submerged bottomlessly ; but there seems to

SERMONS. 527

be no Scripture for that notion to stand on, — and why should the
redeemed children of God want any such submergence, which, while
it drowns out of us all recollection of our mistakes and our sins, to
be sure, does also drown out of us the life-long sweet mercies of
God. A purely unhistorical heaven, a heaven in a state of absolute
severance from earth by the deluging of Lethe, might have in it
some conceivable felicities, just as some plants are able to flower
without any rootage in any soil and simply in the air ; but the most
robust and strong-flavored growths and the most enduring blooms
stand in the earth and draw, day by day, upon its generosity,
transmuting its dull particles into life and its dark mould into beauty.
And so our heaven shall reach back into our earth-life, and by
transmutations inconceivable of most unpromising elements here
furnished, shall build itself up in I know not what luxuriances, and
shed abroad I know not what fragrances, and glorify itself in I know
not what eternal beauty.

THE TRANSIT OF VENUS.

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford, Dec. io, 1S82.

The heavens declare the glory of God. — Psalms xix, 1 .

I watched the transit of Venus, last Wednesday with very great
interest, as millions more did. But in addition to that, I noticed in
myself all day a curious proneness to tears over the matter, as
though there were some elements of pathos in it hidden away some-
where ; and at last I was led to analyze the subject and see whether
there really was any occasion for a full-grown and more or less
hardened man to cry, because Venus had arrived on time and was
exhibiting herself as well as she could on the great disk of the sun.

Of course, I did not fail to suggest to myself that I was prob-
ably in a more than common state of impressibility in mind, or in
body, or in both — in both most likely ; for those two are marvel-
ously intertwined and interdepended, so that if the mind com-
mences an agitation by reason of some stroke upon it (some sudden
idea, some anxiety, some sorrow, some delight) straightway the
body is drawn into a sympathetic participation ; and on the other
hand, if the body receives some strong impression, its mate and
other self in here, faithful as a mountain echo, is analogously im-
pressed. It is a wonderful thing, this dual constitution of ours,
with its back-and-forth of mutuality, and doubtless some day, that
is in our resurrection embodiment, we shall see still more wonderful
things in the way of reciprocity and unification of soul and body.
And in that coming state also, these our days of exceptional sensi-
bility, when everything takes hold of us mightily, will be exceed-
ingly multiplied, so that whenever we are overtaken by an event, or
a special flow of circumstances, or an inrush of thought, our entire

SERMONS. 529

being will vibrate and thrill to its deepest deeps. Is it not pitiful
that those moods of high receptivity do not come to us now more
frequently than they do, so that we need not let ten thousand
striking things go by without receiving any stroke from them ?

But secondly, while studying my own case, I did not forget
that all sorts of excitement reveal themselves in tears as their natural
language. Joy weeps as instinctively as sorrow does. All the
world around, and among all races, that is so. A vision of celestial
beauty will make us weep. A strain of music will do it. And it
does not need to be minor music, either. A sudden fright will do
it. A sudden relief from a heavy burden, a seeing of some person
whom we had not expected ever to see again, a first sight of a dis-
tinguished man, or of a celebrated country, or of a famous building,
or of a hallowed grave, will do it. Tears are Nature's waste-pipe,
when her emotions of whatever kind are at full flood, and can no
longer be endured ; so that if you see a person crying, you cannot
tell whether it is because he is very sad, or very glad, or whether it
is not both together ; after the manner of this much-mixed human
life of ours. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, and it is no
egotism if we make ourselves our frequent study and contemplation.
A man, be it yourself or another, is a masterpiece of God's hand ;
and oh ! how much he can suffer and how much he can enjoy.
How much he does, and how much he will. It seems now as if
our emotions were infinite ofttimes, but what do they amount to in
comparison with the infloodings that shall fill us in the life which is
to come ; when our souls are expanded to the uttermost, when
every chord in us is sharp-strung, when everything we see is clearly
seen, when God lets in on us his whole contribution of thoughts
and things. O ! that exquisite and profound life and living ! God
help us when we get into it.

But all these words are preliminary, and I ask now directly,
was there anything pathetic in that great fact in the sky, last
Wednesday? Yes, there was.

That punctual re-appearance of the orb was our God tenderly
mindful of the welfare of his creation. Not merely was it not in
his heart, that the general frame-work of things should precipitately
break up in a crash not possible to be conceived, but his feeling
would not permit him to introduce the slightest jar, with its general
consternation. So, at the instant his long-wandering creature was
due at the sun's eastern edge, he had her there, solid and true ; she

530 SERMONS.

had been careering through space, she had felt the pull of many
other worlds as she traveled their vicinity, she had looked off into
God's bright-peopled vastness and had felt the fascination of many
fascinating creatures like herself, and there is no telling what those
miscellaneous allurements might have accomplished ; but her Maker
was her friend, and our friend, and so she left not her path for a
second, but bore straight on to her goal and across the blazing sun ;
and when she could no longer stay, she careered forth upon her
endless journey to fulfill her cycles as aforetime and accomplish her
beautiful eccentricities, and keep up her one full and sweet voice in
the everlasting harmonies of the sky. It may well bring tears, that
our God is so loving, steadfast and punctual, on every post, outpost
and hinge-point of his universe. It is the boundless tenderness in
him, I say, which makes him uphold these innumerable concurrences
everywhere. It is because he remembers his living creatures who
swarm his worlds and hang upon his providence, the men, angels
and archangels, the unintelligent creatures who, although unintelli-
gent, are capable of weal and woe ; and the beings we never heard
of who very likely populate these stars, planets and constellations
which fill all space.

And these fidelities of his in the firmament suggest to us his
more minute fidelities, near at hand ; as his hearing the ravens when
they cry, his providing for every living thing, his embellishment of
the flowers, his shepherding of all the bleating folds, his care for
little children and for the helpless and the old. Oh ! it is precious
that he is all around us so, and so concerned for us, and so sleepless,
and so condescending, and so strong, and so full of plans for our
good, and so patient with us, and so communicative in various ways
in order that we may not miss him or mistake him. In our night-
times of sadness we hear him speaking to us. In our great weak-
ness we feel the touch of his dear hand of strength. In our sinnings
we receive the benediction of his mercy. In our heart-brokenness
he brings us his balms. And when we swoon under our inevitable
death-stroke, his rod and his staff they comfort us.

And while speaking of his tenderness, as brought to our minds
by his law-keeping habit in the sky, it is well to recollect how very
serviceable to us it is, that he, as being thus law-keeping and orderly,
is perfectly calculable in his ways. All our practical affairs rest
securely on the fact that he can be counted on forever. The things
he has always been doing, he is sure to keep on doing, and we

SERMONS. 531

adjust our life to that. We conform our business to his ever
punctual hours. We appoint our assemblies according to the
motion of this his earth. We arrange our sleep according to the stead-
fast recurrence of his nights. We put in our crops in sure trust of
his season. We build our water-wheels according to the foreseen
flow of his rivers. We fix our hour of battle by the punctuality of
his day-breaks. We make ten thousand engagements with each
other on the supposition that he will keep his engagements in
nature ; that is, that he will maintain his natural laws. Indeed,
all human life would go into instant chaos if we could not foreknow
what he will do, on and on.

And what I note in all this is the pathos of it. That he, so
great, should serve us in these innumerable ways of use, that he
should thus eternally bind himself to our necessity, especially when
almost none of us treat him as we ought ; it makes a great appeal
to a man's feeling, and sometimes brings tears to his eyes, if he has
any possibility of tears in him.

Another touch of the pathetic that I found in the occurrence
of last Wednesday was this :

In their watch-towers in this city, and in numerous other
places far and near where the planet was likely to be visible, were
inquiring men ; mere midgets in the immensity of the universe,
straining their eyes, and concentrating their brains, if peradventure by
the labor of them all together, some item of new information might
be gained for the groping mind of man. It reminded me of the
ignorance and the wondering and the constant question-asking of
little children, who, as but just arrived in these parts, cannot know
much, but must push on and on through many years of search —
and the ignorance of children is always touching in numbers of
ways. It seems pitiful that, with so much to know, there is so little
they can know. It melts one to notice in what an unforeknowing
and unsurmising way they move on towards the full reality of life.
It seems to them thus and so, but we know it is neither thus nor so.
Life is more sad than they think, and life is more delightful than
they think. Life has more outreaching relations than they can
imagine. And it has more opportunities. And it leads on to more
unbounded personal expansions. Why, if they could see themselves
as they will be, before they die, they would be utterly dazed at the
sight. I find myself continually amazed at myself because I am so
different from the me of only a few years ago — everything looks

532 SERMONS.

larger to me and more tremendous ; joy does and sorrow does ;
God does and man does ; time does and eternity does ; truth is
greater and error is greater ; the kingdom of God is more and the
kingdom of Satan is more ; and this greatening of all things before
my eyes makes me also seem greater to my own self. And so, I
say, children could hardly live through it, if life as it is should
suddenly come before them.

But even men are but children by any large measurement. As
Tennyson has expressed it :

"Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last— far off— at last, to all,
And every winter change to Spring.

So runs my dream : but what am I ?
An infant crying in the night :
An infant crying for the light :
And with no language but a cry."

These astronomers, with their glasses set, represent us all.
How little they know. How much they want to know. With what
endless energy they try. How sad it is that the universe evades
them so almost uniformly. With what a feeling of mingled amuse-
ment and pain the higher intelligences of God must look down on
their puny explorations. We could weep for them, and for our-
selves, that the utmost sweep of the telescopes reaches only the
fringe of things, the suburbs of the universe, the outlying and
hithermost realities.

Still again, I think it is pathetic to observe how the sympathy
of the whole family of man rallied about those astronomic explorers
last Wednesday, scattered up and down several continents. Great
unanimity of excited feeling is always impressive, whatever the occa-
sion. It may be a multitude of people listening to some eloquent
speaker. It may be a whole sisterhood of nations simultaneously
watching the death-struggle of a single man. It may be a people
waiting the daily expected return of some fleet sent out for dis-
covery. It may be a mass-meeting of Christians all aglow with
some great theme of God. It may be some single community
touched by a sudden panic. Many are the forms of the phenome-
non, I say, but it overwhelms one always to mark an innumerable
interflow of hearts. And when the organized numerous populations

SERMONS. 533

of mankind, now so separated and so built up in diversiform and
contrary habits of thought, feeling and action, are brought into the
concord of heavenly love ; and when, moreover, our means of inter-
communication shall be perfected, so that the total family of man
can almost instantaneously be organized and concentrated on any
given point, we shall see consolidations of live feeling on the grand-
est scale, and whoever weeps now from excess of emotion when he
merely sees certain hosts of people keeping step and shouting in a
common enthusiasm over a few men of science attacking the old
secrets of the sky, will then, if he be an observer of things here
below, find himself in such a conflagration of feeling as is hard to
conceive.

The pathos of sympathy ! The pathos of sympathy ! See it
in the circle of home-love. See it at the burial and at the bridal.
See it in the Thanksgiving home-coming. See it in the outbursting
of patriotic peoples. See it in all the thousand-fold play of human
hearts. And thank God for it.

Another element of pathos which I succeeded in finding
in, or getting out of, the occasion of last Wednesday, came from
the suggestion it made to me ; First, that we, as truly as the planets,
are under unchangeable law, moral as well as physical, which law
we have unanimously broken ; and secondly, that this inexorable
lot of ours has been tempered by interfusions of grace, even to
the extent of law-suspensions, and law-ruptures ; as where Jesus
Christ, in whom all grace heads and organizes and dispenses its
benefactions, was born abnormally, and, once here and fairly at
work, did interject not unfrequent miracles into the universal awful
structure of law.

First, as to our lot under the reign of law, is it not heart-
breaking to notice a person disabled for life by even an inadvertent
transgression of some physical fiat, or one dying by a disease which
reached him by contagion, or a child ruined by the very love of his
mother, or a man of great benevolence paralyzed by overwork in
behalf of his fellow-men, or a kind-hearted boat's-crew drowned
while pushing off through the waves to deliver a ship's company?
God, in nature, is terrible at this point. He does not discriminate
between his friends and his foes. He slays a little child as soon as a
ruffian. He bears on, and spares not everywhere. In the case of
planets, it is beautiful that they are under law — beautiful for them
and beautiful for us, and beautiful for all fellow-orbs. They do not

534 SERMONS.

know enough to break law, but move on with a brute blindness for-
ever. We are endowed more highly and more terribly. We are
given minds and wills and impulses, and then are left free to in-
dulge them or not. And we indulge them. We drink poisons.
We overfeed. We overwork. We exaggerate our push of busi-
ness. We plot plots. We are untruthful. We cherish revenges.
Taking us altogether, we break all the laws of God. And it makes
one weep to see how the laws turn on us. We are sorry for what
we have done, but that does no good. In the physical depart-
ment it does no good. We repent. We cease from poisons, we
cease from carnality, we slacken work, we do as well as we know
how, but our disobediences more or less pursue us so long as we
live. Even the incoming of grace does not alter that. That
sickly Christian man whom you see is very dear to God now, but
that sickliness abides. He is working out one of God's unchange-
able penalties. A most impressive and melancholy fact.

But not more melting in its way is this other fact ; that
this law-enforcing, almighty, eternal One diverges at points from
this straight-forward, appalling march of his, under the impulse of
his love, diverges and lets in mercy among these forty-thousand
inexorabilities, something as though Venus on her way should be
bidden to turn out for some man's benefit. God turned out from
his indivertible, old path-keeping, and sent his Son among us by
an unprecedented approach ; and in many another sign and won-
der he turned aside. When he quelled the waves of Gallilee he
did. When he raised Lazarus he did. When he rolled away the
stone from the tomb of Jesus he did. In fact, when he had once
turned aside in the incarnation of his Son by the Holy Ghost and
the Virgin Mary, he inaugurated a whole series of exceptions to the
unchangeability of law — and you and I are living in the daily benefit
of this exceptionalism. And I want to say again and keep it before
you, that when God thus arrests himself in his customary mode of
action, because his creature, man, will be eternally ruined if he
keeps on, the sight is very impressive upon our feeling, if so be
that we are open to receive it and let it impress us. It is as when
great and celebrated men turn aside for a little child, humor him,
listen to his complaints, show an interest in his play, invent games
for him, spend time, neglect their work, safeguard him, plan for his
future, obey his whims and act as though they were his born slaves.
How often we see that, and what a sweet appeal it makes. So our

SERMONS. 535

Heavenly Father ; he turns aside. He suspends his great laws.
He bends himself low and listens to us and waits, and puts up with
our foolishness, and considers our troubles, and introduces a dis-
tinct element of motherliness into the steadfastness and rigor of his
fatherhood. And some of the most heart-warming passages of
Holy Writ are those that dwell on this very thing.

I do not wish to make a wrong impression in relation to the
miraculous in the administration of God, and I therefore pause right
here long enough to say that it is not necessary to the idea of a
miracle that it should be considered outside of all law ; but only
that it should be a visible interruption of the laws of nature as
known by us, and established. It has often been thought, and, in fact,
it has been the prevailing conception, that a miracle is God taking
a sudden start and acting on an impulse, a gush of feeling, as you
might say ; an unreasoned and undeliberated and unprevised play
of his own personal freedom. The miraculous has been made to
seem more sensational by this view of it. It has been supposed
that by that view miracles have been more utterly separated from
the orderliness of law, and the dullness of orderliness.

It is one of the benefits of the modern scientific and natural-
istic attack on the whole doctrine of the supernatural, that Christian
thinkers have been driven to lay a strong stress on the thought —
likely to be admitted by all considerate and candid persons so soon
as stated — that God's miracles are only a part of his general order-
liness, and get their eccentricity and their sensational appeal to the
notice of men, much as the tremendous charges of electricity, silent
and invisible in our thunder-clouds, appall the world by darting
through our atmospheres with a rending that makes everything roar.
We think of the electricity as all orderly and under law so long as
it stays up there in the clouds ; but the forth-leaping and the flash-
ing and the thundering are just as orderly, and law-full. In like
manner, I say, God's movement in upon our visible realm, in that
irruptive event which we call a miracle, is a law-keeping movement
— only the law which he keeps just then is the law of a higher realm,
even the supernatural. It is the supernatural flashing through the
atmosphere of the natural, and irresistibly arresting the attention of
mankind. It is incredible that God should ever act in fits and
starts ; that is, in ways fundamentally incongruous with his general
way of acting, which general way as we all know is uniformity, or
law.

536 SERMONS.

I pass now to a final thought. I have been speaking of what
seemed to me the pathetic aspects of that great event in the firm-
ament the other day, with the effort of the civilized world to note
it accurately and make a good study of it. I leave that now to
remark on another point.

Our exceptional interest in the transit of Venus was attributable
in part to the unprecedented way in which our attention had been
called to it for quite a time beforehand. It reminded me of an
Easter service which I attended at St. Peter's, in Rome, where the
great multitude in the building were worked up into the most in-
tense expectancy by a long waiting, and by the boom of signal guns
and other striking foretokens and heraldings scattered along at in-
tervals through the waiting. By the time the Pope entered with his
shining ecclesiastical procession through the wide-swung doors of
the church, we were in a state of impressibility that needs to be
felt to be understood. Likewise the transit ; it had been announced ;
the newspapers of the world had discussed it ; specialists had pub-
lished explanatory articles ; the habits of the planet and its previous
doings for centuries had been spread out ; the dependence of future
astronomic calculations on the precision of our observations of this
coming phenomenon had been brought to the public attention ; and,
to farther sharpen our eagerness, a band of foreign men had selected
our city as a good spot on which to set up their instruments, and
their daily doings as they carefully made ready for the critical day,
had been diligently and sympathetically reported. Venus was
enormously advertised, and the result was, she had such a world-
wide assembly of witnesses and wide-awake friends as she never had
before.

And in my discursive thoughts on the whole great, miscellane-
ous occasion, I could not help remembering what our forth-going
into the eternal life will be, and our first opening of our eyes upon
the scenes thereof, in view of the fact that during our whole life
here we have been having our attention called to it ; by innumer-
able readings of the Bible, by innumerable sermons, by myriads of
references to it in books and journals, by many death-scenes, by
many bereavements, by many cities of the dead which we have
noticed, and by the constant spontaneous play of our primal instincts
unable to turn away from the fascination of that vast Obscure, and
home-land of all human populations. What will it not be to see the
men there of whom we have so often heard. What will it be to see

SERMONS. 537

the once earth-bound and crucified Redeemer of our souls, whose
name has been in half our thoughts from the cradle to the grave.
What will it be to see at last exactly what that four-square magnifi-
cent city is which John describes ; what that green land with its milk
and honey and wine, what the throne of God and the Lamb, what
the praises day and night of the multitude redeemed, what the far-
stretching hosts of immortals not earth-born, what the throne of
Judgment, and the Judgment searchings and dooms and divisions,
what the voices in which they speak there and the bodies they wear,
and the communications and communions wherein they indulge,
what the rememberings and forgettings, and whether there be forget-
tings at all ! How many thousands of times our attention has been
called to these things, how often we have prayed about them and
imagined, how often in the long night hours, our minds more awake
than in the day, we have expatiated in that field, how often in sick-
ness with possible de°,th before us we have followed the same theme ;
our mother taught us in it, our familiar hymns sung of it — indeed
all our earthly experience has been telegraphically woven together
with those realities, along countless wires strange thrills have come,
and distant-sounding voices, and articulations obscure and unnatural,
as though our faculties were not yet adjusted to that somewhat ;
and now, at last, to be bolted into those much-heralded things,
what must the eagerness of it be ! — and the wide amazement and the
confused energizings of our powers put upon a sudden effort to make
themselves at home in an untried condition. What must it be to the
astronomers to throw away their instruments and search the universe
with vision purged and triumphant ! God has great surprises for us.
Great surprises ! Great surprises, of course, in the sense that much
not expected by us will come, but quite as great on this ground also,
that things long expected startle us for the very reason that they
have been long expected and dwelt upon. Many times death has
been long foreseen, but it is apt to be a surprise to bystanders,
nevertheless, when it really arrives. And in the same way and for
the same reason, our arrival in the Hereafter will be charged with wet-
eyed wonders and sweet astonishments.

Brethren, I feel that there is less than my usual unity in the
remarks which I have made this morning. But I have this to com-
fort me, that many times, in discourses of the utmost unity, the good
gained by different persons listening comes from single sentences
and single thoughts that are no essential part of the substance and
35

538 SERMONS.

general movement of the discourse. I would not make that an
argument for a scattering and unorganized treatment of subjects;
but only a solace when, for any reason, one happens to fall into
scattering.

MODERN INSPIRATION.

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford, April 15, 1883.

The Second Chapter of 1st Corinthians.

It seems strange that many Christians make so little as they do
of the direct inspiration of God in souls. They seem to admit with
all their hearts that there was any amount of that kind of thing in
Bible times ; that Prophets had it, that the Patriarchs had it, that
the twelve Apostles had it, that the hundreds of miracle-workers
had it, that Simeon had it, and Mary, the Blessed Virgin, and all
preachers of the Bible day, and hosts besides mentioned in Holy
Writ ; and especially that all the persons who wrote the Bible had
it to such an extent, that in the writing they fell into no mistake —
at any rate, into no important mistake. So much as that they freely
say, but the moment we undertake to bring them down beyond the
Bible date and establish inspiration as an all-time gift — all time as
truly as any time — they make a stand and set up the distinct, affir-
mation, that the inspiration of those first men was quite unique and
solitary, and must never be looked for again. That inspiration was
for a special purpose, which purpose was fulfilled forever, and now
we have the Bible for our guidance and need nothing else. That is
their doctrine.

And now I ask : — Whence comes this impulse of denial m
Christian people, and why is it they will not consent that we shall
have in our natures, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God
of the Apostles and the Bible writers and five hundred more, of
whom the Bible says, that they had God? What great interest is
going to suffer by the wide shedding-abroad of the idea of modern
inspiration? Well, first,

540 SERMONS.

The era of the coming of Jesus into our world was an unprece-
dented era, and was therefore accompanied by unprecedented
tokens. Christ's advent, in the nature of things, was unrepeatable,
and might well be marked by unrepeatable phenomena ; like herald
angels in the sky, and supreme, supernatural impressions on many
minds, and gifts of tongues, and raisings of the dead, and a whole
special inrush of marvels. And in so far as the epoch was peculiar
and was attended by peculiar manifestations, that furnishes some
show of ground for those moderns to stand on, who insist that those
first inspirations were local and transient.

In like manner, the supernaturalisms of the Old Testament may
be explained upon — and are explained upon. They were special, it
is said. They appertained to special occasions. They bore on
special ends. They naturally ended when the occasions were past.

That is the first thing I should mention in explanation of the
idea held by so many, that inspiration is not a permanent gift. I
am not arguing the point quite yet, but if I were I should say right
here, that while we must admit that signal times and occasions
naturally call for signal demonstrations, and while we must admit
that such an occasion as the advent and such a period as the three
active years on earth of the Lord Jesus, were abundantly signal and
did coruscate with particular splendors such as may not be seen in
our period, nevertheless in the one underlying great fact of God con-
versable with men then and there, that time had no advantage over
any others, (ours, for example). I mean to say, God is always in
converse with men, directly so, in one way or another, and the only
thing that specializes any one time in that regard is the form in
which that converse is carried on. In Israel of old, God chose to
approach men in visibility ; in the Shekinah located in the Holy of
Holies in the temple, and somehow, by the breast-plate of the High
Priest, he conversed with man; but when his eternal Son arrived in
our world, the Shekinah faded away and the speaking breast-plate
was dumb. But God had not withdrawn and utterly given up his
intimacy with his creatures, on that account. On the contrary, he
was more among them than ever and more in them. In like man-
ner, at the advent of Jesus, a new order of supernatural converse
was inaugurated, the most luminous and comfortable ever seen up
to that time ; but when Jesus ascended into heaven, that particular
order ceased and a new era swept in, the greatest of all, even the era
of the Holy Ghost, and God settled himself down upon that, as his

SERMONS. 541

final order — and it is in that era that we are — and what I say about
it is, that there is as much God in this last order, God with men,
God in men, God inbreathing, inworking, ingenerating and inwardly
speaking, as in any other the world ever saw. And when Christian
people lift up the Bible times as the conspicuous times in all history,
in the matter of God present with men, they stick fast in phe-
nomena, and do not run back to their underlying ground. The
ground fact is, — God always in converse with men ; the manifesta-
tion of that fact may be the Shekinah, or the speaking seer, or a sud-
denly appearing angel, or the visible return of a dead man, (like
Moses and Elias on the mount of Transfiguration), or the impres-
sive night dreams of Joseph and Mary, or the dropping dead of
Ananias and Sapphira because they had lied, or the dove and voice
at the baptism of Jesus, or the rushing wind and cloven tongues of
fire and polyglottic speech on a certain day of Pentecost, or the sub-
sidence of the bestormed sea under the command of Jesus, or the
highly flitting and apparitional appearances of the risen Lord /or
some forty days, or the powerful indwelling of the Holy Ghost in
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Paul, Peter, James and Jude,
when they wrote the several books of the Bible.

Secondly — still explaining the infidelity of Christian people —
I remark, that the thought of God close to men and inspiring them,
now as truly as aforetime, is made uncongenial to many by that
great and prolific study of nature which distinguishes these modern
times. Before Science had commenced her movement in that field,
devout men found it easy to recognize the nearness of God in all
things, — even his immediate nearness ; and in the writings (espe-
cially the poetic writings) of all primitive and unphilosophical peo-
ples, you will notice a vivid sense of God in all things and events ;
a superstitious sense of him we are accustomed to say in our wise
manner, it being superstitious, in our view, to ascribe to a super-
natural personal agent any phenomenon which can be explained on
natural principles, (or in other words, on the principle of second
causes) . In our explorations of nature, and of the workings of the
human mind, and of the on-go of all visibilities, we have discovered
that between God, the great first cause, and the phenomena which
we contemplate, there are millions of subordinate and intermediate
causes, and this interposition of intermediates, you see, pushes God
back a little (possibly a good deal), from his old, supposed imme-
diacy and close quarters with us ; and in many cases men get him

542 SERMONS.

so far off that it is, to their feeling, practically as though he were
obliterated ; and in the case of many Christians, God is made to be
so remote by the doctrine, the true doctrine, of second causes,
that his living hold on them is weakened, and when you come to
preach to them of God in men, for all sorts of working and practical
purposes, in a literal hand-to-hand converse and management, they
incline to. pooh-pooh it and to set up the fiction that God is on
earth pouring in his personal inspirations, on great occasions only,
and only in ancient times. The primitive and unrefiective peoples
were more nearly right than these Christians are. These interven-
ing second causes, of which so much is made and on which so much
dependence is placed for explaining the things we see in nature and
in mind, are simply God's instruments for effecting his purposes ;
instead of operating by his own visible hand, he stands back and
throws into the foreground and keeps playing there these forty
thousand finite forces, physical and other ; which forces, in so far
as they are physical, scarcely deserve to be called forces, because in
themselves they have no efficiency, but are only God's absolutely
inert tools.

But I must not get myself too deeply involved at this point. I
have no time to go the whole length of it. I only want to say that
our modern view of the creation as full of second causes, is one
explanation of the fact that so many disincline to accept God in any
sort of immediacy. Whatever may have been in Bible times, there
is no such thing now, they think.

A third cause of this denial of God present and within us, is
the frequent absurdity of the people who do admit the theory of
divine inspirations, both modern and ancient, and modern as much
as ancient ; and not only admit the theory, but offer their own selves
as instances of such inspiration. Not long ago, in Rhode Island, a
father and mother killed their little girl, because God told them to,
they said, just as he told Abraham to slay Isaac. God did not
speak to them audibly, but he did a thing as authentic as that, in
that he irresistibly impressed their devout and docile minds. Mysti-
cism has made a great figure in Christian history, and in heathen
history as well, and mysticism is — what? It is the doctrine of
interior, divine inspiration, this very doctrine for which I am plead-
ing, a doctrine indispensable to the life of the Church ; but of
course, when men get pretty full of it they easily edge along into the
feeling that the inner light in each man's soul is all the light there

SERMONS. 543

is that is 01 any special consequence ; and when they get to that,
some of them will be sure, by and by, to do something pretty ridic-
ulous or pretty dreadful. Witness the killing of that child — as
honest an act as was ever performed, I suppose. Witness the high
and mighty doings of the Salvation Army, (so called) in Europe.
Witness the extravagant asceticism of thousands in all ages and all
religions, who have retired from the world and fasted and tormented
themselves to gain the inner light. Witness William Cowper and
many more, who thought God came to them in distinct voices in
the night.

But here you may ask me : Do not these flightinesses of mysti-
cism show that the doctrine of God's direct light in the mind is a
false doctrine ? — and to this I reply, No. But they show that that
doctrine needs to be supplemented by the equally true doctrine of
external guidance — by the Bible and human advice, and a study of
events, and a diligent exercise of our common sense on all the data
furnished us in every case. Mysticism is the natural antithesis of
externalism, as represented in Creeds and Ordinances and Priest-
hoods and Councils and infallible Popes and Conventionalism and
so on ; and when this externalism gets to be excessive and too
heavily superincumbent, so that liberty and individualism and all
blessed things that depend on these, are in danger of their life,
mysticism, sooner or later, takes the field, of necessity, and taking it
under those very express and exigent circumstances, it goes the way
of all reactions and develops excesses of its own very likely. And
then there will arise up many to declare that all light is in the Bible
and in standards external, and that the wonderful movements of God
in souls, inspirations and what not, ceased some eighteen hundred
years ago.

I have now spent time enough in telling how the notion gets
abroad, that divine inspirations have ceased in the main and must
not be expected.

Let me throw out two or three considerations in opposition to
that view. And first,

The Bible teaches in many a passage, that it itself cannot be
effectually understood by any man, except by the direct light of
God in the mind ; so that that great, infallible, external guide, the
Bible, on which the unmystical man so grounds himself, is made to
be a futility in the main after all, unless the fundamental point of
mysticism, the thought of God in the private soul, is conceded.

544 SERMONS.

Hear these words of Jesus himself: "The Comforter, which is the
Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach
you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever
I have said unto you." Hear this also : "When the Spirit of truth
is come, he will guide you into all truth." And this : "He" (that
is the Holy Ghost) " shall receive of mine and shall show it unto
you." And St. Paul tells his Ephesian brethren, to whom he writes,
that he is continually praying for them that God " may give unto
them the spirit of wisdom and revelation." And to the Corinthians
he says : "the things of God knoweth no man, but the spirit of God.
Now we have received the spirit which is of God, that we might
know the things that are freely given to us of God ; the natural man
receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God." And much more to
the same effect, scattered up and down his Epistles. So, with the
Bible in his hands, how can any man deny the inspiration of God in
souls ? The Bible, as a Book of salvation, is a failure unless it is
supplemented by the inner light. So Jesus and his Apostles teach.

Again, men in all generations are continually coming into exi-
gencies, where the Bible is not a sufficient guidance — into questions
of truth and questions of conduct and into deep waters of experience.
The ever-active theologies of the world and its ever-active science
and philosophy, put forth theories and reasonings that we are to
decide upon, on which there is no written "thus saith the Lord,"
either yea or nay. The theories in question had never been broached
when the Bible was written, or if they had, the Book does not refer
to them.

And then, in matters of conduct, almost every day of our lives
we feel that we want divine direction ; and sometimes we feel that
we must have it and cannot go a step without it, the interests in-
volved are so precious. And we go to God in prayer for it. And
why do we, if inner light is an inadmissible thought. I say inner
light, not inner infallibility, though in myriads of cases the light
given amounts to infallibility in this sense, — that it saves us from
mistake actually and completely. Infallibility may mean that a man
cannot err, (as God cannot, and as his earthly vice-regent it is sup-
posed cannot), or that he does not err. And it ought to satisfy a
practical person if God leads him so that he does not err.

Well, these emergencies, I say ! these practical emergencies of
ours ! Every parent has them in the handling of his children. He
is called to make decisions concerning them, on which, according

SERMONS. 545

to appearances, their whole destiny will turn. It is some matter of
their education, (where they shall go for their schooling and what
they shall study) ; it has respect to their companionships, or their
vocation, or their marriage, or their church relations, or some con-
stitutional infirmity in them, or, on the other hand, some specially
brilliant aptitude with which they are endowed. And that parent's
heart, loving to the last degree, dreads to deliver a judgment full of
doom for creatures so dear, and flies to God for his word on the
subject. Perhaps he goes to the Bible, that written word of God ;
but more likely he takes what Biblical knowledge he already has,
and what familiarity with Biblical principles and the Biblical spirit,
and with those things in his mind he seeks a private personal inter-
view with God, who has told him to cast his cares on him, and in
that interview he begs to be informed what to do, by a word of
information, original, explicit, directed to him and nobody else,
made for the occasion and covering all the anxious circumstances of
the case. If he be a religious man, if he believes there is a God,
that direct march into his presence is as instinctive and inevitable
as a thirsty person's search for water.

And business men are often under a similar pressure. They
know not what to do. The data furnished them are insufficient for
a solid decision. And yet a decision must be made — made in sim-
ple guess-work, as the case stands ; and reasonable beings do not
like to go by guessing. There is too much peril in it, and a humil-
iating lack of intelligence. They want a decision that has sense in
it. And the Bible has nothing to say on the subject. The Bible
tells us to be honest and lays on us a few valuable generalities of that
sort, but it does not speak on this and that investment which you
are contemplating ; it does not give you its mind on that partner-
ship you are thinking to form ; it does not meet you with its clear
and detailed word on most of the peculiar sets of circumstances in
which you find yourself placed, sooner or later, in business life.

In subjects of legislation, also, and of civil administration, men
are often at their wit's end. For example, hear Abraham Lincoln
say in our days of war: — '-'If anybody in hell suffers more than I
do, I should like to know it." His public cares grew to be almost
intolerable. He felt that he had not the wisdom necessary for the
tremendous situation in which he found himself placed, as the civil
and military head of this sore-struggling and imperiled republic.

So I say, our life on earth is not possible to be lived in any

546 SERMONS.

quiet of mind, on Bible guidance only. Our questions kill us ; and
our mountainous burdens crush us, if indeed it be so that we can
have no God in our minds and souls and hearts.

Thirdly, I argue the reality of modern inspirations, on the
ground of experience. There are millions of people who delightedly
testify of God's illuminations in them, and God's warmths and God's
strengthenings and God's consolations. At this point, of course the
rationalist is especially festive and hilarious with his objections.
" How do you know that these illuminations, warmths, strengthenings
and consolations came from God ? " he says. "You are fearfully and
wonderfully made, and perhaps they bubbled up from some remote
and unsearchable parts of your own constitution. And then imagi-
nation is a great thing in men. You get it firmly impressed on your
mind that you are going to be sick in a certain way, and you will be.
If you believe that a certain star can be seen in a certain part of the
sky, look long enough and you will see it. If you believe that there
is a God who answers prayer and produces certain feelings in souls,
then when you pray you will surely have the feelings, more or less.
Imagination is one of the most remarkable endowments ever heard
of. Now, how do you know that your experiences are of God —
your lights and your comforts and your empowerments and your
numerous beautiful upliftings? How do you know?"

Well, how does he know anything. First of all, by the exercise
of his reason on evidence presented. But secondly and more
important, all his knowledge rests at last on his capacity of intui-
tion. That is, he is such a being that by simply looking he sees
many things. Some things he cannot see till he has been through
a reasoning on them, but some things he can. For example, while
he is putting in these lively objections of his, he is conscious ot
certain processes going on in his own mind. There they are in him
and he sees them. He does not see them by the help of argument
on evidence presented, but he sees them without an instant's argu-
ment. He sees them as clearly as though he had argued on them
a thousand years. There is no room for argument. It is perfect
knowledge at first sight.

Or take this illustration. Our objector looks at some external
object — a human face, say. Through his physical eyes, that face
produces a certain impression on his mind. He is conscious of a
mental state which he thinks was produced by that face. But phil-
osophic idealists, like the famous Bishop Berkeley, tell him that

SERMONS. 547

there is no real face there. This impression in him is all brain-
work. There is no solid external world. And they support this
view by various ingenuities. And what can he say ? Why, only one
thing which men always have said against idealism, namely : — I
intuitively know that there is a certain mental state in me, and I
intuitively infer that that mental state is an impression made on me
by yonder real face. That is the whole extent of his argument.
And there is no argument about it. It is simply stubborn affirma-
tion, founded on consciousness and intuition. And all human
reasoning, however long-drawn, complicated and convincing, rests
at last and rests continually, (that is to say, at every step), on that
corner-stone, the intuitive affirmations of the mind. It seems more
intellectual and more nourishing to our intellectual conceit, to reason
logic-wise and spin out, in order to get to results, but in reality
direct vision is our most consummate and startling intellectual
endowment, even as God is all vision and no reasoning ever on
any subject.

Well now how does a godly man seeking light and so on from his
God, know, — first, that he has the light, and next, that the light comes
from an external, great light-giver to whom. he has prayed. How
does he know it ? I reply, he knows by consciousness, that light
and the rest are in him ; and he knows whence they came, by intu-
itive inferences. Of course, the point of peril in this business, the
point where mistake is most likely to get in, is that intuitive infer-
ence. But it is no more perilous than our objector's intuitive infer-
ence from his inward impression, to that external face which I
mentioned. Berkeley says mistakes do come in just there. But
ninety-nine one hundredths of mankind resist Berkeley and rest
quietly on their intuition of the matter in this calm assurance, each
man being sufficient unto himself, though of course it adds to his
contentment to know as he does that nearly all other men are in
the same assurance with him. So, when a man tracks his own
inward experiences out to God, intuitively, while there is a theo-
retical possibility that he is mistaken, yet that possibility does not
weaken his conviction that he is right, especially when he finds that
all pious souls that ever lived have been accustomed to trace their
spiritual experiences to God, just as he himself does.

And that, brethren, is what I have to say to you on the reality
of modern divine inspirations, as proved by the experiences of
believers.

548 SERMONS.

And I may add here, without dwelling on it, that these alleged
inward workings, have authenticated themselves to bystanders and
honest observers, in instances without number. "By their fruits, ye
shall know them." Look at the marked conversions that have
occurred, where men have made a total turn and a turn for life.
Look at the patiences and the forgivenesses and the generosities and
the magnanimities of all kinds, and the holinesses, which men have
exhibited, in attestation of the idea that God is with men and in
men and working in them as truly as he ever was.

The last thought that I should care to present on this subject
is, that if it be granted that there is a God, and a God who, as having
created us, is interested in us, we should naturally look to see him
seeking an access to souls, to help them ; especially as human souls
are in an evil case and need help — sometimes awfully, as I have
explained before. His fatherly feeling must constrain him to help,
and when we go out into an argument to show that he actually does
help, that feeling of his ought to create in us a continual preposses-
sion in favor of the thought that he does help. It is a peculiarity of
our good feeling towards persons, that we like best to help them in
person, rather than by circuitous and impersonal methods. If you
endow a college for the benefit of all succeeding generations of
students, that is an indirect and impersonal gift. You do not dis-
tinctly see and feel the ycung people you are assisting, face by face
and name by name, and a considerable part of your felicity in making
the gift is lost therefore. But if you go to a single student in the
privacy of his room, and there heart to heart learn of his needy case
and put your assistance by your hand into his hand, you and he both
are magnetized. There is nothing so warm as personal care, per-
son dealing with person, as you see in the case of a mother doing
for her children, or in the case of a missionary to the heathen, who
loves his heathen much more than we do who pay the missionary's
salary ; while the heathen on their part, love him ten times more
than they love us, who sent him to them for their good.

And I do not see why this principle may not hold in the bene-
factions of God to men. He has given us a word from himself in
the Bible. And he is doing millions of things for us by second
causes and by messengers ; but how can his feeling be thoroughly
satisfied by these ways of indirection, and how can we on our part
be completely drawn to him in these ways ? It is not possible. The
exigencies of his feeling and of ours require that sort of personali-

SERMONS. 549

zation which is secured by his direct interior gifts to us, his gift of
light and his gift of consolation and his gift of strength and his gift of
pardon. We want to feel the touch of his hand, and his love cannot
be satisfied till we do.

My brethren, let us hold to God imminent in souls forever.
All good men are inspired. Thousands of inspired sermcns will be
preached to-day. Thousands of missionaries are inspired. Bryant's
Thanatopsis was inspired. Charles Wesley's hymns were inspired.
Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg was. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's
Cabin was. Many a warrior has been, many a statesman, many a
philanthropist, many a reformer, many a mother disciplining her
child, many an injured man forgiving his enemies, many a terribly
poor person refusing to steal when specially tempted to it. Florence
Nightingale, John Hampden, John Wesley, John Newton, Emerson ;
the whole innumerable company of God's people, great and small,
all have had their moments of inspiration, their clear visions, their
deliverances, their spiritual liberties, their songs in the night, their
God-born hopes, their out-bursts of vigor, their lyrical movements
that were not natural to them. And it behooves us to recognize
these possibilities and live our life in the faith of them. On the level
of naturalism what drudges are we. On the high up-lands of super-
natural grace, what winged creatures we are and to what superior
destinies we move on.

Perhaps some one here, as I close, would like me to answer this
plain question : — Wherein does the inspiration of the writers of the
Bible differ from the inspiration of men in these days ? Well, I will
answer. There is no difference in kind between the two inspira-
tions. None at all. The inspiration of the author of the Epistle to
the Romans and the inspiration of Rev. Charles Wesley, author of
numerous first-class Christian lyrics, are both alike God breathing
himself into men. And the only difference possible to be estab-
lished between the writer of any book of the Bible and Charles
Wesley, in the matter of inspiration, is that the Bible man may have
had a higher degree of the one and same inspiration than the
modern man did. I say may have had ; by which I mean to
imply, perhaps he did not. It requires more of God's inward help
to write some things that Wesley did, than it required to write, for
example, some of the historical portions of the Bible, (important as
those histories are) — though on the other hand, no Wesley ever rose
to a point where he could delineate the future ages, as the Hebrew

550 SERMONS.

prophets did, or could achieve St. John's out-burst of mighty reveal-
ings in the last book of the Bible, or could expound all doctrine
like St. Paul in his Epistles, or could move out and back into the
mysteries of the Godhead in those authoritative and almost awful
sentences of the Evangelist in the opening of his Gospel — "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God."

And so, my friends, in universalizing inspiration as I have done
in my exposition of it this morning, I do not understand that I have
in anywise dimmed the glory of the Bible, as the supreme Book of
the world. No, there it stands and there it shines forever.

THE FELLOWSHIP OF CHRIST'S
SUFFERINGS.

Delivered at the General Conference of Congregational Churches
of Connecticut, at Danbury, Conn., Nov. ii, 1885.

2 Corinthians xi, 22-33; x"> i-n.

There have been three distinct periods, or stages, in the life of
our Lord. The period anterior to his incarnation, the period
between his birth and his ascension, and the period from his ascen-
sion to the present moment ; the period of his primal and divine
glory, the period of his humiliation some thirty-three years long, and
the resurrection or present period, which resurrection period is not
to be conceived as his return to the self-same glory, which he had
with the Father before the world was. Oh, no ! the resurrection and
ascension of him was not a simple re-instatement in his ante-human
lot ; his incarnation, therefore, being but a temporary taking of our
nature for the accomplishment of a certain purpose ; but rather, a
passage of the permanently incarnated Son of God out from the
humiliation of his earthly years, into a final exaltation and glory
which he had earned by his great and blessed works for man, espe-
cially by his adorable and mysterious passion ; so that the first glory
which he had with the Father, is differenced from the glory which
he now has with the Father, by this one immense and pathetic'
factor, namely : — he is now man glorified ; our humanity, in his
person, is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Origi-
nally he was the Son of God, that and no more ; to-day he is also
the Son of man ; our doomed nature which he took he released
from doom and carried up to an everlasting enthronement, going

552 SERMONS.

up thither not solitary, let me add, but accompanied by the whole
innumerable host of his beloved, for whom before God he was, from
first to last, the accepted and dear representative.

And now I am ready to raise the question of the suffering of
this great personage : first, as the Son of God, back there in that
primitive eternity ; next, as the Son of man, " conceived by the Holy
Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary," and lastly, as the Son of man,
passed out beyond death, made glorious in the glory of the resur-
rection and raised to the right hand of the eternal throne. It would
require some heavy wading and more time than I at present have,
to discuss the passion of the unincarnate Son of God. Perhaps you
think I could not establish the fact of his passion at all, in any
proper use of the word. I know that the Christian theology has
always been very careful not to humanize God, by attributing to
him this and that feeling too much like our own. I know, too, that
Christian thinkers have done a good deal of thinking and sometimes
a good deal of what I should call squirming, to explain the undeni-
able passion of the incarnate Son of God, the man Jesus, in a way
to make it something vastly more than the suffering of mere man,
and yet not involve his divinity therein, so as to cloud it and make
it seem less than divine. It has always seemed safe enough to me
and incomparably the most heart-warming, to insist on the infinite
sensibility of God, — Father, Son and Holy Ghost ; God in eternity,
God in time, God unformulated, God formulated in whatever terms
whether things or persons — God sensitive everywhere and forever.
If the infinite God does not know sympathy and the sorrows of sym-
pathy, where did this redemption of man, that we all so delight in
and magnify, get its start? Jesus himself dropped a plummet down
to the very bottom of this subject, when he said to Nicodemus, " God
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son." The salva-
tion originated in his much-moved feeling then, and nowhere else ;
and this idea that the redemption tracks back to the spontane-
ous heart of God, sweetly agitated over our case, is one of the most
constant refrains of Holy Writ and the most melodious of all.

Therefore, as regards the first period in the life of our Lord and
the second and the third — and the first as much as the second or
third — I desire to carry the impression of sensibility from beginning
to end, sensibility in every direction ; sensibility towards holiness
and towards sin (or moral sensibility) ; sensibility towards pain
and towards pleasure wherever in the universe it occurs ; sensibility,

SERMONS. 553

especially, towards human beings in their most miserable and hope-
less condition ; so that when the Word became flesh and dwelt
among us and was most evidently distressed for us, that distress was
not a totally sudden and new thing, but was an old thing, even an
eternal, now at last emerged in a form very comprehensible to man
and very affecting ; albeit in this emergence of original sensibility,
certain unwonted human elements mixed in.

Holding this view of the primal life or first period of our Lord,
it is but consistent that I should look upon his present life in the
heavens, as one of precious, unabated sympathy with us.

" Clothed with our nature still, he knows
The weakness of our frame.

Nor time, nor distance, e'er shall quench
The fervor of his love."

And this love that he has, mark you, is a love of sympathy ; in
other words, it is love for the woe-begone and suffering, so that it is
essentially a suffering love, or love suffering. To be sure, at his
resurrection and ascension he went into a transfigured and glorified
condition and was no longer the "man of sorrows," in precisely the
sense in which he had been — all that was ended when he had seen
death ; but this progress of his into a triumphant and glorified stage,
did not imply his disengagement from sympathetic participation in
the misery of our case ; how could he be an effectual advocate for
us before God, if he no longer felt in his heart the burden of our
burden ? The travail of his soul, as the mediator, was past when
he rose from the dead, but his soul still travailed, because it was a
soul and not a thing — it being an essential trait of souls that they
travail, all of them, the good and the bad ; but good souls as being
affectionate, and Jesus is evermore a good soul — no exaltation can
alter that.

But now let us confine ourselves to the thirty-three humiliated
years of the Lord ; that tumultuated and sorrowful interval between
the glory which he had with the Father and the glory which he won
with the Father; that flow of years to which St. Paul referred,
when he declared there was nothing which he was not glad to lose,
if thereby he might know him and the power of his resurrection, and
the fellowship of his sufferings, being made comformable unto his
death ; if by any means he might attain unto the resurrection of
the dead.

36

554 SERMONS.

What were those sufferings ? In replying, I cannot quote proof-
texts and expound particular passages, (you would not be patient
with me if I undertook it), but I will rapidly give the teaching of
Holy Writ on the subject, taken as a whole ; thus :

The incarnation of the Son of God was a profound self-abne-
gation on his part ; and it would have been so even if, in being
made man, he had been made man ideal, man as God originally
conceived and intended him, or man as he will be when he comes
to his perfect redemption ; but, behold ! it was not ideal manhood
that the eternal Word took and became, but man fallen, fallen in
both body and soul. That broken and disabled thing he took,
determined that in his person, one man for all men, it should be
raised to man ideal and perfect. More specifically, he took our
intellectual limitations, beginning, an unknowing babe ; as unknow-
ing as the rest of us, and growing from knowledge to knowledge.

He took our body, sin-struck, suffering, mortal, doomed ; and
man-like he died. He took our external condition, the rough
elements of nature, the roughness of men and mobs ; in short, our
whole sore and sad environment he took. He took our nature as
liable to temptation, and was tempted in all points like as we are ;
and he gained his moral expansion and final magnitude by that
particular kind of struggle.

These were a part of the infelicities he incurred, a part of
what are called his sufferings. Different forms of self-denial they
were ; and how pungent and afflictive they were, we can understand
only by remembering who it was that immersed himself in all this,
and from what a transcendent pre-existence he came down.

But I have not as yet gone to the depths of this matter ; there-
fore let us take two steps more and speak ; first,

Of the manner in which he took us, a precious burden upon his
innermost feeling. He entered himself into our lot and bore it and
was in that sense our substitute, as no one else ever was or could
be. Why?

Because, as being very knowing, beyond the children of men,
he perceived what we each one, personally, amount to ; how sizable
we are originally and by creation ; how immeasurable we are in our
possibilities if rightly handled and made the most of; how one
human babe adds up larger than all the added and multiplied worlds
of space, and bears in on the tender feeling of God three times as
irresistibly, the fact being that in the whole material creation there is

SERMONS. 555

not one touch of pathos, while in the babe there are floods of it ;
also how this human creature, thus large and thus stored with poten-
tialities, had missed his destiny, lost his God, 'condemned himself to
an eternal development along lines of evil and lines of sorrow — all
this, I say, he noticed, comprehended and felt ; and he felt it, not as
respects the few persons on whom his eye happened to rest, but as
respects all persons of the living and of the dead and of the unborn ;
the whole stupendous, human disaster in its several awful measure-
ments he grasped, and grasping bore and carried, and went down
under in particular moments of agony. A tender and beautiful
essay has been written by a modern man on "a great multitude a
sad sight ;" but how great our human multitude is in its total, only
Jesus could know, how great each soul is constitutionally only Jesus
could know, and what it is for a man to be lost, only he of all woman
born could tell. A great multitude a sad sight ! Sure enough ! A
great multitude of fallen leaves is not so very sad a sight, or fallen
insects, or fallen particles of dust. The sadness lies in the size and
grandeur of the thing that is fallen ; and a fallen world of men,
ordained to live forever, was such a weight of sadness as we cannot
conceive, on the sympathetic nature of the incarnate Son of God.

But now, secondly, I strike the deepest of all the deeps of this
deep and holy subject, the sufferings of the Lord, when I suggest
that there are numerous passages in the Old Testament and the New,
which speak of his passion, which cannot be explained and made to
sound their full tone, by the idea just unfolded by me, that Jesus
stood in our place sympathetically and in that way bore our sins.
Many rude and unpardonable expressions have been made, first and
last, in theological discussions and in sermons about Jesus bearing
the wrath of God and God's penalties in our stead and behalf; and
a good deal of venturesome dogmatizing and analysis has been done
at that point in the Lord's work, and this age vigorously recoils
from all that rudeness, not to say coarseness of expression ; neverthe-
less, the substitutional idea, as displayed and much emphasized and
turned over and about in the Scriptures, is not exhausted by simply
saying — Jesus was infinitely sympathetic. He was that, but he was
more. There was a mysterious transaction between him and God
as respects us and our sin. A transaction, wherein he and God
mingled with each other as though in a mutual wrestling ; a transac-
tion to which all Christian hearts gravitate in a peculiar way ; the
more it is inscrutable, the more fascinating it is ; half of the hymns

556 SERMONS.

we sing gather to it ; around it have the great Christian artists
flocked for their deepest and most exquisite inspirations ; and often
when they have dealt with themes remote from the Passion, they
have glorified those themes by lights from the Passion, so that if
Raphael paints the Transfiguration, the face of the transfigured one
is serious, as befits a man who has just conversed with Moses and
Elias concerning the things he was soon to suffer ; and if he paints
the Holy Child, or the blessed mother, still the faces are likely to be
half-pensive, as though touched and made pensive by something
akin to profound premonitions. At the garden and the cross also,
does theology most linger and strive, as though the more she cannot
explore the mystery of the mediation, the more unweariedly must
she try to ; and all this convergence of human interest to this par-
ticular spot and crisis in the life of the Lord, is the intuitive testi-
mony of redeemed hearts to the fact of a great and wonderful some-
thing in there, on which their salvation pre-eminently turns. I prefer
to leave that something unformulated. I draw no lines through that
vagueness and vastness. I am most impressed when I stand on the
borders of that cloud-land and listen to reverberations from far
within, which I cannot explain. Forth from the mystery come a
few plain-spoken outcries from him who is enshrouded and hidden
in that gloom — "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,"
and the like ; but even those cries I will not search too narrowly —
enough is it for me that he bore my sins in ways known and ways
unknown ; the simplest doings of God are unsearchable, and why
should not this pivotal instant in the drama and tragedy of redemp-
tion be unsearchable, too.

A final word now on our fellowship of his sufferings.

Whereinsoever his incarnation and the events of his incarnate
career were a suffering to him by virtue of the glory from which he
had come down and which he had lost, and by virtue of his divine
nature imprisoned in the finite and chafed by human circumstances,
of course he stands forever alone and no fellowship with him is
possible. The one and only respect in which we can be like him
there is this : as he sacrificed himself for others we can sacrifice our-
selves for others, we in our way as he did in his ; but it is that dis-
tinct and blessed thing, self-sacrifice, in both cases.

Again, as respects those transcendent and mysterious experi-
ences of his in the garden and on the cross, to which I have just
adverted, he stands forever alone. He is the one and only Mediator

SERMONS. 557

between God and man. We can be intercessors but not mediators.
If there be any penalties to be paid for anybody, to God or God's
justice, we cannot pay them. If God is willing to deal with the
human race in the person of some substitute — in any sense — we
certainly cannot be that substitute. We are not sufficient there-
unto in either size or character. We all need a mediator ourselves.
The fellowship of his cross-pangs, no one can experience.

What then is left for us ? Is there any fellowship of his suffer-
ings which it is feasible for us to enter ?

On that I ask, what does St. Paul mean when he says to his
brethren of Galatia — "I am crucified with Christ." He means,
I have gone through that radical, soul-piercing and really terrible
process, dying unto sin and being dead to the world, even as
Jesus, though tempted, was gloriously dead to that whole thing.
Crucifixion is painful ; scarcely is it possible that any physi-
cal suffering should be more intolerable than that ; but here is a
slaying and self-destruction far more acute; "a sword that pierces
to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and
marrow," the sword of self-denial in a selfish nature. When Christ
was crucified, it carried with it, involved, made sure and brought on,
this mental and spiritual crucifixion in me, Paul ; and when I, Paul,
was thus crucified and dead, that death of mine was Paul made
dead, in, by and with, the death of Christ — his hurt and suffering
became my hurt and suffering, my precious hurt and suffering ; in
that way I was "dead with Christ," "I glory in the cross of the
Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the world is crucified unto me and I
unto the world." And, my brethren, right there we all have a feasi-
ble and bounden fellowship with our suffering Lord. The thought
is a little mystical and elusive, hard to get at and hard to hold
steadily — the thought, I mean, of crucifixion with Christ, by the
death-stroke of inward self-denial. The thought of dying to sin and
being dead to the world is plain enough, but the exact point of con-
nection between that form and item of man's suffering and the suf-
fering of the crucified Jesus, is not so plain ; but no matter, it is our
dear privilege to be crucified, every one of us, by faith in the cruci-
fied ; and in so far as that deepest and most revolutionary of all
experiences has been really accomplished in us, we shall be apt to
discern the great import of that utterance, " I am crucified with
Christ," and of the several equivalent expressions scattered up and
down the pages of the New Testament.

558 SERMONS.

That is the first form, then, of our possible suffering with our
suffering Lord, and all other suffering with him proceeds from the
common root of that great experience.

Again, what does St. Paul mean when he speaks to the Philip-
pian church of knowing him in the fellowship of his sufferings and
being made conformable unto his death ? The context explains it.
He refers to that loss of all things for Jesus' sake, which he had
experienced, even as Jesus himself had suffered the loss of all things,
honor, ease, this world's goods of every sort, in order to the dis-
charge of his mission. None of us will fail to remember those vivid
and energetic statements which St. Paul made, in regard of the trials
and storms of his lot since God turned him into the way of Jesus
and the cross. " I die daily," said he, summing the whole matter
up ; and his favorite way of looking at this daily death of his, was
as a fellowship with his dying Lord, whose death on Mount Calvary
was but one feature of a life-long and daily dying which he had
endured in his renunciation of all worldlies and his acceptance of
the hate and persecution of men. Of course, a man whose spiritual
career had started in an inward dying to the world, as Paul's had,
was likely to go on to all kinds of external renunciation and daily
deaths of human buffetings. Inclusively, he had consented to that
and pledged himself to that, when his soul became a soul crucified
to sin and the world. And I may say of this all-including self-cru-
cifixion as I pass on, that, like the passion of Jesus, the sharper and
more total it was the sweeter it was, so that more than once in his
epistles he testifies to us that his one brimming cup of joy in this
evil world was this tragic identification with his Master.

And, my brethren, we are invited to the same identification with
him. The old fires of martyrdom are quenched, the cross on which
Christians used to be tortured to death has disappeared from among
the barbarities of Christendom at any rate ; Christianity is even
popular throughout our communities, in a certain way and measure,
and it would not be possible to make for ourselves such a formidable
list of external renunciations and sufferings as Paul wrote out and
described as his daily dying ; nevertheless, if we have indeed had
accomplished in us that first crucifixion with Christ which I men-
tioned, the crucifixion of our flesh and the lusts thereof, so that we
are dead to the world and the world to us, it will assuredly come to
pass that we be accounted a peculiar people by a worldly world, a
people to be despised and spoken against and ridiculed ofttimes ;

SERMONS. 559

and moving in this alien atmosphere and continually touched by its
silent sub-acid elements, which we feel the more keenly the more
we are spiritualized and refined, we shall come to understand that
the words of Jesus had a universal and eternal application, rather
than one local and transient, when he said to his much-despised and
oft-abused disciples — " If the world hate you, ye know that it hated
me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would
love its own, but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen
you out of the world, therefore, the world hateth you. Remember
the word that I said unto you, the servant is not greater than his Lord.
If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you ; if they
have kept my saying, (which they certainly have not) , they will
keep yours also." That is true, and so in all ages very devoted and
Christ-loving men have not shunned persecution for Jesus' sake, but
have even prized it as a badge of discipleship ; and in times of
violence when men have been put to death for the truth, there have
not been wanting some who even longed for martyrdom, that they
might thus the more deeply enter the fellowship of his sufferings,
be enrolled among the heroes of faith and receive a final, supreme
certification of their loyalty to the suffering Son of God.

But there is one other form of suffering fellowship with him, to
which I must not fail now, at last, to call your attention. I refer to
his estimate of men and of their situation, and his resulting sympa-
thetic travail of soul.

My brethren, a serious debate is in progress in our communions
(to say nothing of other communions), in respect of the eventuali-
ties awaiting wicked men. I feel the surge of it in my own heart,
and I have the tenderest interest in the good souls who are expend-
ing themselves on that problem. May God lead them into his light
at last, and meanwhile, let them have all the time and room they
need for the carrying forward of their own minds to a point and
pillar of rest. But to-day, in the presence of the sufferings of
Christ, touched and mellowed by those numerous Scriptures which
dilate upon that theme, arrested also by those profound texts which
insist upon a reproduction of that same passion in our souls, so that
we can speak of our suffering as Christ's suffering, (as St. Paul did),
— in the presence I say, of all this, and by all this made to know
incidentally what a man is, what a soul is worth and how very great
(to say the least of it), the destiny of any and every man must be,
I have no heart for refinements upon the question, how long will

560 SERMONS.

wicked men survive, how long will they remain wicked and how,
precisely, will they fare when they get out into their other and hidden
state? It has been feared that insufficient ideas on this subject will
get in among us and get abroad, and will cut the nerve of our evan-
gelical energy ; but that nerve will never be cut, so long as our
thinkers, in their much thinking speculation and forelooking, do
habitually contemplate the sufferings of Christ, in their whole breadth,
multiplicity and awful depth, and do constantly remember that how-
ever difficult it may be to settle this or that point of theology, it is
not at all difficult to see, but on the contrary most difficult not to
see, that we who profess and call ourselves Christians must arm
ourselves with the same mind that was in him ; the mind for suffer-
ing sympathetically for and with men. The sufferings of Christ are
Christ's practical exposition of the eternal destiny of men. A small
being and a small destiny could not have called forth that stupen-
dous expression from him.

But how shall we, men and poor creatures, reproduce in our-
selves the Redeemer's sympathetic travail of soul over the individual
man and the sinful millions of the world ? In fact, can we ?

Paul did. All the first disciples and evangelists did. Wesley
did. Knox did. Thousands of men and women now living do.
Yes, it is practicable. We should not be so much exhorted to it in
the Scriptures, were it not.

There are great difficulties in the way ; such as the unloveliness
frequently of those for whom we are to feel this Christ-like tender-
ness ; and our own phlegmatic, or unemotional temperament ; or
our absorption, perhaps, in materialistic studies, so that Nature
is greatened before our eyes and man is cheapened ; or our total
absorption in mere humanitarian endeavors as distinguished from
endeavors evangelistic ; endeavors I mean, that contemplate and
care for man as a natural and this- world creature, needing food,
raiment, shelter, education and personal protection, rather than as
a spiritual and religious and eternal creature.

These are some of the difficulties in the way of what is called,
old-fashionedly "love for souls," but which I, following the line of
my subject, describe as suffering with Christ.

And now, in spite of everything, how shall we come to that?
Many of us never do, very much, and therefore never amount to
much as evangelical powers on earth. But many do and how do
they?

SERMONS. 561

Well, if I may be permitted to go to the very foundation of
this matter, at the start I will say, that this particular and unique fervor
has its beginning always and its eternal fountain in a personal expe-
rience for one's self of Christ by the Holy Ghost, a personal experi-
ence, begun, kept up and daily renewed, on and on. If a man
cannot say, " I am crucified with Christ," "I am dead to sin and
the world, and day by day I die to it, am dead and am buried,"
then he has no evangel to deliver, no yearning over sinful men, no
longing to save them ; and he knows nothing of that mighty love
for each individual of our race which filled the heart of the
Redeemer. He cannot say — "Woe is me if I preach not the
Gospel." He cannot say — "I am willing to be accursed from
Christ for the salvation of my brethren, my kinsmen, according to
the flesh." He cannot say — "I travail as in birth-pangs, that
Christ may be formed in you." He cannot say as John Knox did
— "O God, give me Scotland or I die," and as myriads of less
renowned men have said for substance.

But this fundamental experience having been secured, and love
for souls having been thus made possible to us, there are various
ways in which the love may be stirred up and made to flame.

For example, we may studiously enlarge our conception of man,
his rank among created things, his very great dimensions, his
indefinite capacity for personal expansion, his ability to suffer and
to enjoy, his eternal inability to go out of existence, the enormous
ransom that has been paid down for him, his salvability to the utter-
most under the terms of that ransom, his present uncleanness and
his possible holiness, his present spiritual debility and inaptitude
and his possible vigor, his present weariness and disrelish and fre-
quent despair in all moral action and his possible spontaneity, his
present manifold dreadful selfishness towards his fellows and his
possible concord and affection towards them, his present profound
affiliation with the kingdom of evil and his possible potential affilia-
tion with the kingdom of God. Such studies and meditations as
these, made habitual and carried on in the light of the Holy Script-
ures with much prayer for light all the while, will make us feel
about men as Christ felt, will sweep us into and engulf us in, the
fellowship of his sufferings, will make Gethsemane and Calvary with
their mystical passion seem credible and precious, will make the
Incarnation with all that it implies, contains, enfolds and enshrines,
seem credible ; will illuminate all doctrine, in fact, will give us a hold

562 SERMONS.

on all doctrine as an instrument for human salvation, rather than as
an instrument for speculation, combat and sharpening of wits, (for
always when doctrine is contemplated, explored and used thus in-
strumentally, it is likely to be held truthfully and in the right pro-
portions of truth, and heterodoxy is forestalled — that I throw in by
the way) .

Also these contemplations of man in his several aspects, and
the concern for him as a spiritual being which is thus made to
spring up in us, will cause our sermons, if we are preachers as many
here present are, to be fashioned and intended as instruments of
salvation rather than as specimens of rhetoric, logic, decoration and
sensation ; also a large estimate of man as worth saving and possible
to be saved, will obliterate for us all differences between one man
and another, as high and low, great and small, brainy and feeble,
amiable and wicked. For where all are infinite practically and
potentially, as all men are, both naturally and by the grace of God,
of what account are distinctions ? When the midnight angel put the
blood mark on the Jewish houses in Egypt, he did not stop to ask —
" what particular Jew lives here and here and here, and what kind
of a man may he be?" and when the blood of the Lamb slain from
the foundation of the world, was to be sprinkled on the children of
men, similarly it was sprinkled upon all ; all received that token of
their own consequence or worth, as subjects for salvation and of the
corresponding tender interest of their God — and we should all follow
the lead of that token and consider man simply as man, as all those
are likely to who discern the infinite in every human creature, how-
ever little. And what other wholesome effects will follow that study
and Scriptural estimate of man whereof I speak, I cannot now say
and do not need to, I hope, after so much has been said and so
much valuable time consumed. No man knows the worth of a soul
till he knows the worth of his own soul, and no man knows the worth
of his own soul until the Holy Ghost has entered him, and by this
and that supernatural work, there has developed to his conscious-
ness the hell of natural elements in his nature and the unlimited
good possibilities of that nature notwithstanding. And even if a
man could know how immensely worth saving souls are, without this
inward experience of his own, what courage would he have to work
for their salvation ? A man not saved himself work for the salvation
of others with any zest and push ! Is that likely ? How does he
know that they can be saved ? He has had some hearsay on the

SERMONS. 563

point, but he cannot feel it in a way to make him take hold and work.
No one was ever effectually notified of the salvability of men, or of
any man, except by the kingdom of God being set up in his own
heart. And have we not all noticed, my Christian brethren, that
when we are ourselves most saved, are in our highest states of grace,
are most conscious of God's victory in us, everything seems possible
in the way of conversion and salvation for others.

I have said a good deal about suffering to-day, but I hope I
have not let any lamentation into the subject. That would be very
unscriptural. Was Jesus a lamenting, downcast man? Was Paul,
who spoke so much of what he had to pass through ? Is this Gospel
set in a minor key? Do we not read of the sacrifices of joy, imply-
ing that self-sacrifice and suffering may come to be the very wine of
life? "I have meat to eat that ye know not of," said Jesus, "my
meat is to do the will of him that sent me and to finish his work j"
and when he had reached the point where he could say, " It is fin-
ished," all waves and billows had gone over him, and his suffering
mediatorship was at its climax — such inconceivable extremities as
that were the meat on which he feasted, and which others who were
full of this world's bread knew not of. Into " the sacrifices of joy" he
had fully come ; and he calls us all to drink with him of that cup
and eat with him of that meat and partake with him of that honey,
milk and wine, the very fatness of the Kingdom of God.

NATURE EXPRESSIVE OF GOD

AND AN INSTRUMENT OF SELF-EXPRESSION

FOR MAN.

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford, May 15,

The heavens declare the glory of God. — Psalms xix, 1, 2.

My Friends — I myself get so much help of several kinds from
my frequent converse with the scenes of Nature, that I am con-
tinually tempted to give discourses on Nature from my pulpit, by
way of helping others into the same advantage and felicity. Some
do have the felicity already, but many do not ; and yet nobody
need fail of it. One is a little timid about bringing a good deal of
Nature into the pulpit, because many have a feeling that that is not
preaching the Gospel quite as definitely and exclusively as a man
ought. Some sinner inquiring about the way of salvation might be
present, they say, and a sermon on Nature would not touch his
case. I have heard it said that no sermon ought to be preached,
ever, in which a sincere inquirer might not find enough of Christ to
make a Christian of him. That is a narrow and indefensible view,
I am sure, but I will not prove it now. Neither will I undertake
to tell all the good uses of Nature-discourses. I will only take time
to assert that God has other than Gospel or Bible words for the
children of men, and all of God's words are important to be lis-
tened to. A good deal of harm is done by the notion that God,
speaking to us through Nature, does not need to be heeded. He
does need to be heeded. The Bible is no more truly a Bible than
the creation is, though it is a richer one, because it contains Jesus

SERMONS. 565

Christ and his salvation. Some honest persons think the Old
Testament has largely outlived its usefulness, because a better
Testament has come ; and in like manner, and with as little reason
for it, many think that Nature is less important than it was, because
the Bible has been written. Nature, as a revelation of God and an
instrument of expression for man, is as important as it ever was ;
and it is being used with more effect in these modern days than it
ever was before — a great deal more. It is more studied by religious
men and by all kinds of men ; science has compelled it. That for
one thing. And this shouting of some to the effect that the Bible
is getting dishonored, because millions of us are inclined to listen
to God through whatever organ or channel he utters himself, is
both unintelligent and futile. The world has waked up to God in
Nature. The poets have waked up to it, and all thinkers of a wide-
ranging intellectual habit have waked up to the fact that Nature is
a magnificent instrument of self-expression for man, as much as it
is an instrument of self-expression for God. The forms and actions
of Nature are the vernacular of both man and God ; and so man
and God meet at that point and understand each other. Robert
Browning has written a characteristically obscure and characteristic-
ally profound little poem to bring out the idea that Nature is not
a mere spectacle to delight the senses, like so much tinsel, but is
the investiture of God and must be so looked at ; and that in order
that it may be so looked at, the on-looker must have love in his
soul. Love ! which is the essence of the God who tries to speak to
his children through these his works. Love ! which is the essence
also of the Christ. The summer is affluent, he says, the sky is
blue, flowers are beautiful, the leafage of the leafy world is all you
could ask for, but what do these things and ten thousand more
amount to if you have not the heart or the nature to see the
spiritual contents of them, the divine in them, the blessed God
back of them ? He calls his poem " Wanting is — What ? " or, in plain
English, " What is, wanting or lacking ?" Hear him set the matter
out.

Wanting is — what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant —

Where is the spot?

Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same,

Framework which waits for a picture to frame :

What of the leafage, what of the flower?

566 SERMONS.

Roses embowering with nought they embower !
Come then, complete incompletion, O Comer,

(That is, O Christ-Spirit, O Love.)
Pant through the blueness, perfect the Summer !
Breathe but one breath

Rose-beauty above,
And all that was death

Grows life, grows love,

Grows love !

Now, that energetic flow of true and deep feeling might not
convert a soul as directly as the preaching of Christ would ; but
that feeling about Nature as a hollow thing, except as spiritually
conceived, and that thorough conviction that Nature cannot be
spiritually conceived by any but a spiritual mind, is intensely
religious and is biblical in the sense of being harmonious with what
the Bible teaches. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, says
St. Paul in so many words ; and that Nature is essentially spiritual,
says the Bible all through.

I was speaking of Nature as an instrument of self-expression
for us, and it were possible to make a large argument thereon ; but
I prefer, for once, to resort to the poets for a statement of that and
of certain things immediately adjacent thereto. So soon as a
person fully takes the two-fold idea — first, that Nature is of God
and is full of God ; and, secondly, that Nature is the counterpart
of man as a spiritual being, his other self, his twin brother, he
begins to snug close to her, and enjoy her, and speak of her in a
dear way, and illuminate his utterances with her images, and make
her the vehicle of his experience. I have begun on Browning, and
I will illustrate this also from him. He had lost a much-loved
friend by death. That friend died in May, and in his first tremen-
dous feeling about it he wished that that month of the year might
be abolished and no more Mays come forever and ever. Let it
disappear with that precious buried man. A natural thought of deep
hearts. In 1867-8, after our war of the Rebellion was closed, our
Government sent a sort of show squadron to the principal ports of
Europe, which was received, of course, with great attention ; and
an officer on that fleet told me that when they were entertained at
a banquet in St. Petersburg, the Russian gentlemen, their hosts, at
the close of the banquet proceeded to destroy the costly dishes and
furniture, vowing that they should not be used by anybody save
these Americans. And many of us know spots in the world,

SERMONS. 567

objects, scenes, lonely walks, single trees, a rock, a certain flower,
a certain lake or stream, or wood, or height, so associated with this
or that friend, the soul of our soul, that it seems a sort of profana-
tion for any other human being to have anything to do with those
objects. So then the poet's feeling about that dreadful month of
May was natural. He wanted no more Mays to come. But after-
wards, as a really loving heart must, he relented. Other pairs of
friends would want the recurring Mays, the May moons, the long
evenings under the sky, and all that, he said. Therefore, let them
have them ; let them have them. But there is one May plant that
appears in the woods, whose green is streaked with red, which he
would like reserved from all future pairs of friends and destroyed
from the face of the earth. He and his lost one had had much to
do with that plant, and now, whenever he saw it, that red streak
seemed as though it were his own heart's blood, it so anguished his
fond, remembering mind. And this is the way he writes about that
whole matter :

I wish that when you died last May,

Charles, there had died along with you
Three parts of Spring's delightful things;

Aye, and, for me, the fourth part too.

A foolish thought, and worse, perhaps !

There must be many a pair of friends
Who, arm in arm, deserve the warm

Moon-births and the long evening-ends.

So, for their sakes, be May still May !

Let their new time, as mine of old,
Do all it did for me : I bid

Sweet sights and sounds throng manifold.

Only one, little sight, one plant,

Woods have in May, that starts up green

Save a sole streak, which, so to speak,

Is Spring's blood, spilt its leaves between, —

That, they might spare; a certain wood

Might miss the plant ; their loss were small :

But I, — when'er the leaf grows there,
Its drop comes from my heart, that's all.

That is emotion in a very deep and intense form, and it is not
insane emotion or eccentric emotion ; emotion, I mean, one side
of the beaten paths of human experience. On the contrary, it is

568 SERMONS.

what all hearts feel, if they are profound and vital enough and are
accustomed to associate their heart experiences with outward
things. But I have brought up this piece of writing to show in
what a near and dear way one snugs close to' Nature so soon as he
learns to conceive her spiritually, as expressive of both God and
man. The May in that poem, the May moons, the evenings long
and late, the one blood-streaked little plant in the May woods, are
deftly commingled with the sweet and pensive agitations of the
bereaved human heart, and made an instrument of utterance for
that heart. A perfectly legitimate proceeding in the principle of it.
A sort of proceeding for which Nature was created. A proceeding
which marks a poetic mind, to be sure, but then we are all potential
poets. It is no more feasible for Browning to convert the May to
his private use, in that fashion, than it is for you and me ; neither
does the May, with its moons and all the rest, belong to him more
than to us. It belongs to all of us, because the kind God of all of
us made it and set it in tune to our needs. None of us can versify
what we think and feel, as Browning can ; but we can, every one,
have in us the stock for versification, and in some remote life we
shall use it, perhaps, and be poets. For my part, I am not afraid
to say that in this his genial, vivid and subtle hold on, and fellow-
ship with, natural things, and in his turning of them thus to his
personal uses, I myself am a true kinsman of his. So are many of
us. And it amounts to an immense expansion of our intellectual
and emotional life, to be thus congenially intermingled with the
creation of God. It is a great self-expansion to be affectionally
intermingled with our human kind. The mother is personally
quadrupled in and by her sympathetic involvement in the life and
fortunes of her children. The fond husband lives in his wife, as
she also does in him ; so that when a man and woman marry, it is
not simply the adding together of two lives hitherto separated.
Nay, it is the very great enlargement of each life, so that they add
up, not one man and one woman — one and one are two — but one
man vastly enlarged and one woman vastly enlarged — one and one
are ten ! So, through the whole realm of personal relations. An
isolated life is an unsizable thing, so well as pretty empty of joy.
A life associated and sympathetic is a delightful self-expansion ; and
if we are sympathetically one with all mankind, as Jesus was, we
are practically infinite persons and often feel that we are. All of
which I say, as prefatory to this other equally true saying : that he

SERMONS. 569

who is sympathetically intermingled with Nature doth secure for
himself still another expansion ; he is sizable by her size ; he is
manifold by her manifoldness ; he is various by her variety ; he is
alive by her life ; he is inwardly beautified by her beauty ; he
is affluent by her affluence ; he is in the beat of her harmonies ;
he is inspired by her God ; living he twice lives, and dying he dies
in the repose of her bosom, even as Matthew Arnold, in a certain
poem of his, says he wants to. I wish I had time to quote the
whole of it. When he dies, he says, do not bring to me my heirs,
the doctor, the minister, the close room, the gloom, and all that.

Bring none of these; but let me be,

While all around in silence lies,
Moved to the window near, and see

Once more, before my dying eyes,

Bathed in the sacred dews of morn

The wide aerial landscape spread —
The world which was ere I was born,

The world which lasts when I am dead;

Which never was the friend of one,

Nor promised love it could not give,
But lit for all its generous sun,

And lived itself, and made us live.

There let me gaze, till I become

In soul, with what I gaze on, wed !
To feel the universe my home;

To have before my mind — instead

Of the sick room, the mortal strife,

The turmoil for a little breath —
The pure eternal course of life,

Not human combatings with death.

Thus feeling, gazing, might I grow

Composed, refreshed, ennobled, clear;
Then willing let my spirit go

To work or wait elsewhere or here !

Our best literature, both prose and poetry, is full of this iden-
tification with Nature and self-immersement in her, in such wise as
to share her peace, her largeness, her seriousness and beauty, and
all that goes to make up her infinite and ever-changeful and flowing
life. Tennyson furnishes us hundreds of instances of it. Words-
worth and Nature are twin souls, and I could quote to you from
37

570 SERMONS.

him for hours, in illustration. Cowper is another who is rich in the
same way of feeling. And there be many more. It is one of the
glories of modern times that our writers are in this secret of identi-
fication with Nature. It shows depth, it shows spiritual elevation,
it promotes mental fertility in the writers themselves ; and in so far
as we read them appreciatively, we are let in to all which they
experience, as thus conversant with natural things. Poetry depends
for its material on human life and on Nature. In so far as it con-
fines itself to human life, it tends to become over-intense, morbid,
mournful, complaining and unwholesome ; much as Matthew
Arnold was' afraid he should be and feel, if he should die in the
smother and gloom of a close room, with the doctor and others
crowding about. But when poetry moves forth into the creation
for her stock and stuff, she broadens into the sanity of the creation,
and her songs of human life begin then to have health in them and
an all-out-doors largeness ! True, the creation itself is a sin-cursed
thing, according to Holy Writ, as truly as are the human soul and
human life ; nevertheless, her accursedness seems more mingled
with ameliorations than man's does. She is more reposeful than
man, or has more moments of repose. And she sheds repose, when
looked at and communed with, more than man sheds it. In a
household where all is love, there is much peace ; love anywhere
makes peace, but love is not always the only thing even in the
dearest household, nor even in the communion of one and one.
In fact, love itself brings in anxiety and agitation ; the more love
the more agitation ; and every now and then, despite all the love,
everything seems going stern first. That is, life at its best ; and
then if you take life at large — life in bad households, life in great
cities, life in barbarian communities, life in famine, pestilence and
war, life in its thousand diabolical forms of selfishness and trans-
gression— why ! it is enough to break one's heart to contemplate it,
so that most people refuse to contemplate it. But there is nothing
heart-breaking in the blue sky, and that same sky when set with
stars does not breathe restlessness into the mind, nor any such
thing. Go up to some height and look over one of our pastoral
landscapes, and what quietness there is in it always for your mind,
tired and vexed by the toil and friction and sorrow of life. What
quietness ! How softened all the sounds come to your ear ; the
lowing of cattle, the rumble of wagons, the shouts of laborers, the
barking of dogs, the thunder of rail-trains, the bells in the steeples

SERMONS. 571

telling off the hours. How soothing to the eye the outspread green
of the fields and forests. In what a tranquil and sweet way the
thought of copious plenty for man and beast is carried into your
mind by the great and diverse spread of growing harvests before
your eyes. How still and assuring stand the great hills. How
music-like is the noise of the flow of the streams through the val-
leys. How peace-giving the flow of curves by which all things are
bounded and defined, the graceful circle of the horizon, the soft-
ened contours of the hills and mountains, the sweep of the forests,
the wind-and-wind of the brooks, the aerial circuits of the birds.
And even the scattered farm houses ; with what serenity and bene-
diction they come into our feeling. No doubt, under all those
rural roofs, there is to be found the uneasy human heart and a
great deal of jar and misery. We know that right well. We admit
it. And we try to be sorry and stirred up about it as we stand
there on our height. But these spots of human fret, these tragedies
and what not, under the roofs, are so scattered and so set in the
boundless calm of Nature, that we are unable to take their curse
and agitation into our souls. Peace prevails over disquiet ; and we
assimilate to the serenity of Nature, and something that seems like
the very peace of God is granted unto us. Of course, I do not
forget that Nature has her storm scenes ; her furies of cold, heat,
earthquakes, deluging rains, desolate midnights, droughts and
deserts, untimely frosts ; and portents in sky, earth, and sea. But
what shall we say of these ? Are they much better than the worst
forms of human life to commune with, and gather in for the material
of poetry and literature ? Yes, they are. The agitations of Nature
— all its ordinary agitations at all events — its customary storms as
the year rolls around, its wild-flying snow showers, its roaring, windy
rains, its roll of seas against rocky shores, while they unquestion-
ably arouse the mind and, in that sense, destroy our peace for the
time, do not make us to be unhappy and to wish not to live any
longer, as human life looked at by us frequently does. No, we
are more full than ever of the joy of living, when we are in the
midst of these tumultuations of the visible world. They do not
depress us. They do not cause us to doubt the administration of
Almighty God. They do not start in us a disrelish of our human
kind, as too much familiarity with human life at large easily may.
They do not start in us that direst of all things, remorse. I do not
know that they even suggest disorder necessarily, and make us

572 SERMONS.

wretched in that way. A great storm, a frightened scurry of dark
clouds across the sky, a mutter of thunder, a frisk of electric zig-
zags in the night, a downfall of avalanches, a sweep of floods ; these
seem just a normal part of the bigness of Nature, and what might
have been expected from such immenseness as hers and such
almost almighty forces. The human mind actually needs these
titanic movements, these awe-inspiring exhibitions of force, as a
match to certain moods of her own, and a suitable language for
those moods. At any rate, none of these more striking on-goings of
Nature are in any way unwholesome for men to look at, dwell upon,
and mentally mix in with. Neither do they ever make us unhappy,
except as they destroy life, and thus become a part of that confess-
edly depressing thing, human life.

I have spoken to you a good deal this morning of tranquillity,
and of Nature as able to minister it to us ; and it may occur to you
that I have pushed that particular form of blessing into the fore-
ground rather excessively, as though simple peace within ourselves
were the all of life. On that I would like to say some things.

When I speak of repose of mind in this admiring way, and
praise Nature as a great giver of it, I am not thinking of lassitude,
supineness, inertia, like the stillness of inanimate things. I am
thinking of a very affirmative and full-girded state of mind, every
faculty alert, every sensibility alive. I should not say that Nature
is fitted to breathe repose, in the sense of supineness or lethargy,
into man. We speak of her "inanimate" forms, and one might
infer that those forms are likely to communicate inanimation to
human beholders ; but, to say the truth, I do not consider any
natural thing inanimate. A mountain is as inanimate as any, I
suppose, but the mountain looks to me like the very image of
infinite live strength, in infinite repose. And when I chant in the
psalm "The strength of the hills is his also," I should almost as
soon impute inanimation to the power of God, as to call the strength
of the hills an inanimate strength. But, some one may say : — " In
real strictness of speech, are not the hills inanimate? after all, are
they not? and is it not a poetic flight, not to say flightiness, to
speak of them otherwise?" To which I make answer :

First, That, by virtue of the all sorts of active processes eter-
nally going on in the mountains throughout their interiors, as well
as by virtue of the numberless live processes that go on upon their
surfaces, the great and little growths, tree, flower, plant, and vine,

SERMONS. 573

one is not quite true to his own feeling about the mountains if he
does not call them live creatures.

Secondly, It is one of the prerogatives of the mind of man to
turn inanimate things to animate uses, as where Browning made a
certain leaf of a certain plant that was streaked with red stand for
his own unutterable sorrow ; and where an inanimate thing is thus
used, it is quite inevitable to a right feeling mind to ascribe anima-
tion to that inanimate itself; it is not merely poetry to do this, but
common decency ; a mind that will not do it is too wooden to be
interesting.

So much on Nature as fitted to invigorate rather than lethar-
gize the mind. It is her function to invigorate. The repose she
gives us who come close to her is a live repose ; a state of mind
wide-awake and most affirmative.

And I insist that that particular kind of repose — a girded and
encouraged state of mind, a mind at rest because not unhappy — is
what is needed by us for the best action of our minds and hearts in
every direction of action. Particularly is this kind of inner tran-
quillity favorable to piety. It is favorable to kindliness, to prayer-
fulness, to meditation, to patience. If I am not at fret within
myself, I do not fret at other people. If I am not perturbated
within my soul, my soul mirrors God and all heavenly and spiritual
things, as the still lake mirrors every over-passing cloud. I must
be tranquilized then, and kept tranquil. That is the first and
greatest thing. And Nature must be permitted to do it for me in
her way and measure, as she stands ready to.

I wish to say distinctly as I close, however, what I have said
before, for substance : that Nature has the means whereby to
express and communicate to us many ideas and feelings that would
not come naturally and altogether under the head of repose, per-
haps. When Matthew Arnold stood on the shore of the sea at the
Straits of Dover, in the night, with the moon overhead, and
wrote :

Listen ! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the /Egean, and it brought

574 SERMONS.

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery ; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea, —

he was sufficiently composed, by that which he saw and heard there,
we may say ; he was not untranquil, but solidly settled in his mind
rather ; and yet there was more than tranquillity in his mind ; the
scene was more than tranquilizing ; it poured forth an eternal note
of sadness, and he, the sensitive man, responded in kind, deep
calling unto deep. And if you will turn to that matchless series of
melodious lamentations, the "In Memoriam" of Tennyson, you
will find quantities of the same thing ; a rhyming of the soul of man
with the soul of the universe ; a making Nature rhyme with the
mind of man ; a willingness of Nature to be thus rhymed ; an
infinite flexibility on her part to human use.

For she is ready to match his every mood. Not merely does
she glide

Into his darker musings with a mild

And gentle sympathy, that steals away

Their sharpness ere he is aware —
but,

For his gayer hours

She has a voice of gladness, and a smile

And eloquence of beauty.

And I know no better illustration of the idea that Nature adjusts
herself to us manifoldly, according as our mental states and moods
manifold themselves and need her, than the closing lines of that
great poem of Browning, entitled "Saul." King Saul had been in
one of his almost or quite insane moods, and, as usual, young
David, the shepherd and harpist, had been sent for to soothe him
by his music ; and he did soothe him, and brought him back to
rational life once more, and to his great duties as king of Israel.
But, in this musical work, David himself had worked up into a truly
divine and wonderful exaltation. He was profoundly inspired by
the things he sung. He became a seer, in fact, and clearly saw the
far-away great Son of David who was to be the Redeemer of the
world. Saul had a dark demon in him, and David, in his struggle
to expel that demon, had felt himself in conflict with the whole
kingdom of night and hell, the unseen persons and powers that
infest the creation and all take a hand in the fight whensoever one
of their crew is attacked ; precisely as the final great Son of David

SERMONS. 575

was to feel when He should come into the world to judge and cast
out the infernal Prince of this world. But David conquered, I say.
The demon was cast out, and the dark powers of the creation were
mightily stirred up by it, and David, on his way home that
night, felt them all about him in a weird way. All customary sights
and sounds revealed them. Hear him describe it.

I know not too well how I found my way home in the night.

There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right,

Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive — the aware —

I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there,

As a runner beset by the populace famished for news —

Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews;

And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot

Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge : but I fainted not.

For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported — suppressed

All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest,

Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest.

Then David goes on to say how, in the morning, the benignant
powers of the universe came to the front ; the bright kingdom in
behalf of which he had made his contest against the demon in Saul ;
though, you must understand, these bright powers are not rejoicing
oVer David's victory merely, but are rejoicing anticipatively, and in
clear assurance over the like, but larger, victory of Jesus Son of
David, in fullness of time. Their jubilee on this occasion is three
times a jubilee on that account. Listen to David again, and see
David and the redeemed creation mix in together, dance together,
shout together, and be one, thus :

Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth —

. . . . I saw it die out in the day's tender birth;

In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills;

In the shuddering forest's new awe; in the sudden wind-thrills;

In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling still

Tho' averted, in wonder and dread; and the birds stiff and chill

That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid with awe.

E'en the serpent that slid away silent, — he felt the new Law.

The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers;

The same worked in the heart of the cedar, and moved the vine-bowers.

And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low,

With their obstinate, all but hushed voices, — E'en so ! it is so.

Dear friends, I wish we all had the vigor to use great Nature
in that masterly and effectual way. She waits to be used. Be you

576 SERMONS.

exalted like David, demonized like Saul, bereaved like him whose
friend died in May, surcharged with adoration like him who wrote :
" The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth
His handywork ;" or joyful in an overruling providence like him
who said : " Consider the lilies how they grow, they toil not, they
spin not, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these" — be you in almost any state of
mind, I say, God's creation is able to speak to you in terms suited
to your case, and give you terms wherein to vent your pent-up
seership, insanity, mourning, hope, worship, or whatever it may be ;
your pent-up self being apt to be in that way relieved always ; for,
while ordinary words spoken by us in expression of the fire in us
do often but inflame that fire, these other words, the objects
and motions of Nature, being brought in to express what is in us,
do tend to appease all unpardonable fires, and at the same time
to feed the better fires of the soul.

And so I am not ashamed to have made a plea for her here,
this morning.

THE COMING OF CHRIST.

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford, Dec. 26, 1866.

And, behold, there was a man in yerusalem, whose name was Simeon ;
and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel :
and the Holy Ghost was upon him. And it was revealed unto him by the
Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ.
And he came by the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in
the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law. Then took he him
up in his arms, and blessed God, and said,

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word :

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people ;

A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

—Luke ii, 25-33.

It is on some accounts difficult for us to fully and with full
feeling understand the great and peculiar joy of this good old man,
taking Mary's holy babe in his arms. For the coming of Christ is
no longer a new thing, and to us moderns just as familiar as sunrise
and sunset. It is even a trite thing to hearts unrenewed. It has
been a theme of all pulpits in all the Christian generations. It has
been celebrated anew as each year came round. It is the burden of
many an oft-repeated chant and of hymns almost without number.
It has passed into the customary thinking of Christendom, and has
domesticated itself in the feeling of the civilized world. And the
result is, some effort is required to place ourselves in the exact
position of a godly Jew who has suddenly met in the temple, and
in the form of a little child, him on whom his heart had for long
years been set, who had been the hope of his days and the dream
of his nights, Jesus, the consolation of Israel and the light which
should lighten the Gentiles.

578 SERMONS.

But, with a view to possess ourselves of Simeon's feeling a
little, let us consider a moment how the case stood and what were
the special causes which wrought in him and lent their fire to this
day of his rejoicing.

God had toiled for thousands of years to raise the Jewish
people to just this state of eagerness as to the incoming of this
babe. He had instituted a whole typical economy wherewith,
enforced by never-ending iteration, he would profoundly indoc-
trinate the nation in the idea of a deliverer about to visit the earth.
He promulged a bright hint on the subject, a vague suggestive
omen, at the very starting-point of human history. And from that
he went on from prophet to prophet, announcing his purpose more
and more clearly, speaking of a distinguished personage to appear,
and putting in feature after feature of his life and character, setting
him forth in gladsome images and grand outbursts of poetry, mak-
ing the old records glow and sing wherever they spoke of him ; as
though, when the time came, the heavens were to open and let
down such a benediction as no Hebrew bard, though full of the
Holy Ghost and of power, could adequately set forth in any such
stinted terminology as the poor languages of earth can afford.

And then, side by side with all this external drill, through eye
and ear and wondering sense, God carried forward a more secret
effort bearing to the same end. As now, when his chosen truth is
preached and his appointed ordinances are observed, and all the
objectivities of the Gospel are operated and made a form of exer-
cise for the people, he goes with them by the Holy Ghost to
prepare the mind for their full effect, and thus renders powerful and
victorious what, except for this inward and invisible work, would
be as futile as the displaying of pictures before the eyes of a blind
man, or the tuneful thunder of organs in the dull ears of the deaf;
so in the times of old, when prophets spoke and priests shed sacri-
ficial blood, and the sacred pageantries of Judaism moved before
the vision of the people, he accompanied this impressive outward
by influences unseen, by the Holy Spirit (we should say), soften-
ing the natural hardness of the mind, relieving its obtuseness,
quickening its power of reception, opening it to those great pre-
monitions which that ever-present externalism was fitted to convey ;
so that by a double instigation and illumination, that first on the
sense and secondly that on the heart, the docile Jew was led gradu-
ally along into the full strength of the Messianic hope. And how

SERMONS. 579

strong that hope would naturally be, you can see, I think, from a
consideration of these causes just named. By them the ante-
Christian ages were made to be one long, tremendous gestation
wherein Christ, the desire of all nations, moved forward to the
birth.

And it is reasonable to suppose that this mighty Hebrew hope
waxed with the increasing centuries ; partly because the voices of
the prophets rang clearer, but not for that reason alone. No, but
experience tells us that an old hope is the strongest by virtue of a
law within itself. When I look forward to some pleasant thing I
am glad, but when the weeks of waiting grow few, my heart rises to
an intenser expectation, and when I reach the immediate eve of the
joy my feeling is so deep and tremulous as to drive sleep from my
eyes, maybe, and I am wearied and wasted by my so ardent fore-
looking. Thus we have all found it often and often. Well then,
take a national hope that has stood and waited for a thousand years,
and to what fervency must it have come ! It has been handed
down from father to son. Mothers have whiled away the days in
reciting it to their children. It has been an element in the very
blood of the people, which each ancestor has transmitted to his
posterity. It has been the most golden legacy of one generation
to the other. It has stood with face bent on that nearing future,
not sick and weary through long delay, but kept up by assurances
undeniable that the bright day would come. And how inveterate
at last, how wrought into the soul's substance and what a fascina-
tion, must that expectation be ! Behold the Jew of to-day with his
most ancient hope, as inseparable, he and it, as thought is insep-
arable from a thinking substance, so that when we say Jew we
always include under the term that long-established, unweary and
impregnable hope — the centre of their faith and the most ineradi-
cable fibre in their singular constitution.

And for still another reason besides its age, must the anticipa-
tion and desire of Israel have strengthened as the day drew nigh.
For is it not likely that God, as the old world's affairs were con-
verging to the shining crisis, as all currents were streaming down
towards the advent, as the nations, both sacred and profane, were,
though in blind unconsciousness for the most part, preparing the
fullness of time, is it not likely, I say, that as this majestic process
went on and the Lord's anointed actually approached, God would
move on human hearts by his Spirit more and more signally, in

580 SERMONS.

order that the feeling of man might keep pace with the steady
progress of outward events? Would God through his providence
lead forward all affairs to the issue, and the incoming of the
Christian period, and at the same time leave the mind of his Israel
and the hope of his chosen people stationary and behind every-
thing else ? Nay, God works harmoniously with himself, and what
he performs in one field of exertion he is sure to support in
another, moving down the ages in parallel lines of effort, his provi-
dence in nature and his providence in the realm of spirit being in
full accord, and as true yoke-fellows pushing two diverse but
co-efficient industries on and forward to the same result. If Mes-
siah was close at hand then, it is probable God would, by direct
influences on all susceptible souls, emphasize unusually that sublime
historic hope. And the people generally would be in a more than
common fervor of expectation. And in such men as this Simeon,
so lofty in his faith and spirituality and patience, the general hope
would naturally make head and throb into a keen eagerness, a holy
enthusiasm. The prophetic centuries would culminate in them and
their longing. As the spirit of an era is embodied in a few foremost
and finely-endowed men, their brains being the concentrated centre
and capital of its brightest thoughts, and their efforts and lives
being the chief and most telling expression of its drift and aspira-
tion ; so these Simeons and Annas, cloistered with God, and living
a life open to his grace, stood out in the far foreground of the
Hebrew ages as the most consummate exponents of the one
master-thought of all those ages. All previous longing reached
full sea in them. All the tremulous eagerness of the devout mil-
lions who had died, was summed in their ardor. As the great
cave on the shore takes up into itself the whole fullness of the ocean
and, in one hollow thunder, voices the commingled roar of its
leagues and leagues of waves ; so these great saints took up into
themselves the fullness of the joy of all the old times, and voiced it
in these outbursts of gratitude as they watched the first glimmer of
the day-star, and then sprang to their feet with Hosanna upon
Hosanna, as it broke effulgent o'er the mountain-top.

Remember also, as explanatory of Simeon's feeling, that the
Jewish nation at that time, although desiring the Messiah as never
before, had sunk from the pure spiritual idea which seems to have
animated their prophets of long ago, and had taken instead a more
carnal and earth-like thing — the expectation, namely, that the

SERMONS. 581

promised One would be a National King and a man of war to re-in-
state the now subject Jew in the imperial dignities he held in the
days of old. As opposed to this ignoble conception, Simeon and
such as he stood lights in a dark place and their feeling flamed
higher within them by virtue of the contrast wherewith they were
encompassed, there being nothing better fitted to attach a man to
a chosen idea and to give it moment and value before his own
mind than a consciousness of isolation in the possession of that
idea, all other men standing in dissent therefrom. As others
wearied their eyes looking for an earthly monarch, so the more
passionately did they fix their hopes on a better kingdom. As
there were none on the face of the earth with whom to share their
noble expectation, they had nothing to do but brood their precious
idea and commune therewith, and the more it was brooded the
greater it grew, till like a good demon it possessed them and was
the key to their whole experience and life.

Recollect also the curiosity as to the near Messiah, which in
the last days of Judaism must have filled the good men of the
nation. We have an honest curiosity, a sharp hunger of the mind,
to see the ascended Christ ; a curiosity, I mean, not founded on
gratitude and an affectionate remembrance of what he has done
for us and for man — no, but founded on a primitive instinct of the
intellect. We should like to see him whose name so fills the
annals of man and is so shining among the great names of the
world and the generations. We have heard so much of him, we
have read so much of him, we have seen so many hundreds going
about in praise of him and in fulfillment of a discipleship under
him, we have known of so many dying for him, the earth is so full
of memorials and mighty monuments of him and his career, that it
would be a memorable and thrilling day to us could we see him
once face to face. And thus, precisely, must curiosity have stirred
in the soul of Simeon, and in all Jewry in fact. For there was no
one whom they had heard mentioned so much. Their Scriptures
were full of it. Their religion was full of it. No one held so lordly
a place in the chronicles of their race. Their kings from of old
had uncrowned themselves before the majesty of this as yet unborn
personage. In the days when Jerusalem was a queen and her
magnificence outshone every other earthly splendor, her wise men
and teachers were proclaiming another day when, Shiloh having
come, a kingdom should be set up, in the glory of whose magnifi-

582 SERMONS.

cence that time should fade away and be remembered no more .
And, in view of all this historic iteration of his great name, it must
be that Simeon felt himself under a spell, and a personal magnet-
ism as it were, and watched with a curiosity inexpressible for this
one called, "Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlast-
ing Father, the Prince of Peace."

Putting all causes together then, and recollecting everything
which wrought on this devout man's mind, do we not begin to
understand and appreciate his satisfaction on meeting the infant
Redeemer, and being told on so high authority as that of the Holy
Ghost, and so impressively that he could not doubt it, and believed
it with all his heart, that that little child, held in a mortal mother's
arms, was Shiloh, Messiah, Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God,
the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, the Desire of all nations,
the Key to all time, the Conqueror over death, hell and the grave,
and the One whose hands hold the gates of eternal glory ! 'Twas
fit that Simeon should be glad, and that Anna, holy prophetess of
God, should be glad and grow young again in the midst of her
four-score years and four, and that they both should speak and
testify aloud in the sanctuary, of the felicity which was crowning
their old age, and of the good news which was unto all people and
was to inaugurate time's latest and most blessed age.

And now let me say, that in order to our entering into the full
fellowship of their joy and establishing ourselves in their spirit of
gratitude, thus rendering ourselves brethren and fellow-saints with
the whole chosen host of our God from Abraham of the far morn
down all the happy ages of grace — in order to this, two courses of
effort lie open to us, which I mention in the way of addition to the
considerations I have just now been offering, as fitted to bring us
heart to heart with the just and devout men of the time of Simeon.
Two forms and courses of effort.

First. As Simeon's mind did, day by day, doubtless run back
and recount the signs, types and prophecies of the approaching
Redeemer, with which their past was crowded and glorified ; and
as he thus fed the fires of his inward life and managed to keep
himself alive and true and in a steady, calm, heroism of confidence,
in the midst of a too general decay of godliness ; so we may tra-
verse these two thousand fruitful years which have unrolled them-
selves since that day, " the years of our Lord " as it is our habit and
delight to call them, and musing upon the cheerful particulars of

SERMONS. 583

that new era we may warm ourselves to a heat which any Jew
aforetime could hardly know, and may refresh and stay ourselves
upon Christian facts which are real prophets all, and as significant
of a fair future yet to come, as the words of Hebrew seers were
significant of a Messiah : — and thus by virtue of a history such as
Simeon could not recall, we may serve our own souls and build
ourselves up, and stand and rejoice to stand for God in our place
and time, thus joining hands with all who have gone before and
making ourselves part of that august brotherhood and empire of
redeemed souls.

And what say these years and centuries of our Lord ? Would
to God we had them within our grasp, by a specific and exhaustive
historic knowledge, that every jot and tittle of their untold mass of
details was gathered into our strong memory, each event which has
transpired, each Christian who has lived and served the common
Master, all the wars of tongue, pen and sword our conquering faith
has waged, all the legislation in God's name, all the disasters which
turned themselves to blessings as the years ran, all the fierce
struggles of heavenly ideas to subdue the reluctant race ; and above
everything else, would to God we knew as he does and could dis-
play as he can the profound purpose, the religious meaning,
tendency and function of each period and great movement from
the day that the child Messiah came suddenly into the temple until
now. Then we would re-collect the past, and read the brilliant
pages of these years, after a manner and with an intelligence in
some sort commensurate with their moment. I think it will be one
of the sweetest employments of our eternal life, to take up the now
half-veiled history of earth, and read it in the blaze of that day,
finding God in it .all, and seeing in vision, particular and explicit
at last, how all the days, centuries and periods were strung as so
many jewels on one cord, coherent all, and all precious by virtue of
one great decree which threads the ages, held fast at one end in
God's almighty hand, and fastened at the other to the great goal
and post whereto we tend.

■ But look back in an exceedingly general and cursory way.
Number the converts our Saviour has made. Before Simeon's
day they stood as scattered, lonely lights, of little general account
except as they were forerunners of a fairer time ; but now that
fairer time has come, or has begun to come ; those scattered lights
stand thick now, and here and there they are multiplied into a

584 SERMONS.

broad, continuous brightness. The night does perceptibly give way
before them. And down through the past we see them shine ; and
the silent ages now gone get their chief interest and splendor from
them. In the days of the apostles, disciples came, as the Spring
rains come, in outpoured and abounding tides. Three thousand in
one day, was the way those doves flocked to their windows. Not
three thousand every day, I know, but great numbers for all that —
exceeding great, considering the dreadful obstacles which beset a
life of faith in that primitive time. After that came declines, and
then recoveries — and thus on and on, in alternate lulls and gales,
God's winds did blow. Now the earth was almost a desert, and
then, a little later, it grew green and bloomed and mighty harvests
waved. Now the world seemed cut off from the heavenly springs,
and again they were opened and everywhere ran the fertile streams.
But when you estimate and sum the spiritual income from those
inconstant generations, behold ! what a number, what a church
when all assembled, as they all are now, what a song when they all
sing with the eternal redemption for their theme, what a white light
they shed when they move all in the white robes of their purity ;
and what a substantial inauguration our Lord would have even at
this present time, were he to cease from the earthly toils of his
grace right at this point, shut forever the earthward gates of
heaven, and, thus closed in, gather about him the pomps of the
final coronation.

Think also how many millions of men who, although not
saved, have notwithstanding been touched and civilized, and
brought to a finer humanity by contact with these living souls of
God. An item this, which we do not always remember when judg-
ing of the work of Christ in the world. Beyond, outside of the
full influence of Christ on human souls, is a vast encircling penum-
bra of beneficient influence ; or a scattered reaching out of the
forces of grace into the land of the enemy, beyond the outmost
pickets of the armies of the Most High. And thus in old times,
how the barbarities of heathenism were mitigated, how the outward
lives of men were restrained and purified, how the excellent chari-
ties of the Gospel were diffused and made a precious element in
social life, how false ideas were rectified, how the grasp of strong
superstitions firm-fixed upon the fears of men was enfeebled, how
rude tastes were exalted and savage asperities assuaged, and how in
ways numberless the unregenerate populations were molded for the

SERMONS. 585

better in this life, although God's grace did not reach to their
deepest hearts and did not gird them for the valley of the shadow
of death and for the eternity beyond.

See this same thing illustrated in this later day. To enumerate
the sons of God now living is very easy, for they are few by the
side of the thousand millions who fill the earth ; and yet the influ-
ence of these few is as broad as civilization, and will soon be
coextensive with the race. Look at the American people. How
many Christians are there here ? Only a too small fraction of our
thirty millions. But that fraction is so strong as to cause all the
rest to assume for themselves the general name of Christian. And
Christian they are, by a thin varnish at least.

See how it works. All the people pay a certain respect to the
ordinances and institutions of Christianity. When their political
conventions are gathered, they are pleased, rather than otherwise,
to have some clergyman at hand to call upon God for his blessing.
Congress must have its chaplains ; the minor legislative assemblies
must seek God's face and smile before they begin the day ; in the
army and in the navy prayers must be offered, the people think,
prayers in Christ's name, too, every one of them ; no chaplain could
hold his place a minute if he approached the eternal throne in any
other name than that. And if the worst citizen we have was about
to be married, he would probably choose to put the act under a
religious sanction and have some minister beseech the Lord to
ratify the deed. And do we not all wish to be borne to the burial
and laid down to our cold, dark sleep in the use of Gospel rites ?
How Christian the slow procession as it moves through the streets,
silently and accompanied by the tender respect of all the peopled
way. That hush along the whole line, that tardy motion, as in love
and gentleness towards the dead, that pause or half-pause of
thoughtful wayfarers as in sorrow for those who weep and in pity of
a brother man broken down and slain in the battle of life, and in
solemn remembrance of their own last day, that sad decorum with
which the whole thing proceeds, — all these have in them more or
less a Christian element. And then the sequestered field of graves,
how Christian the spot ! One side of the world's noise, its
silence broken only by the step of the mourner, or of the man
who would wander for a little in reflective mood along the borders
of eternity ; its heavy evergreens lifting up their perpetual prophecy
of the immortal Spring in that other land ; its memorials of stone
38

586 SERMONS.

and marble and brass, a sign, each one of them, of the brotherhood
of man and of the new ties by which all souls are knit to brother
souls since Jesus has come ; its innumerable Scriptures chiseled
here and there which in their momentous significance are as the
never-ending flow of grave, grand melodies over the dead, with now
and then a victorious hallelujah intermingled, so that the song of
the winds murmuring in summer days and mourning hoarse in the
desolate autumn, or roaring down the landscape in the wild winter, is
nothing near so imperial a chant ; the groups, too, uncovered about
open graves, while under the broad sky Christianity lifts up her
voice and recites her venerable forms, her warnings, prophecies and
benedictions ; how Christian, how Christian all this, I say ! And
in our woefullest wickedness these beautiful usages still possess our
feeling, and when we die we all want the Gospel to bury us. And
this nearly universal desire is an indication how far beyond the
actual church the Scriptural leaven has extended.

And there be other signs of it. Before the onset of Christ's
new law of love, our legislation has gradually relaxed its unreason-
able severities, our prisons are not the hells they used to be, our
hospitals lift themselves on every side, our very manners, too, are
shaped by Christian doctrine, our conception of the rights of
man is advanced. Christianity made this very war in which we are
so slaughtered ; she has taken the sword to vindicate her generous
ideas, operating through mean men a good deal to be sure, and
therefore in some risk of a temporary failure, but mighty to raise
commotions, a genuine mother of storms through all the future, for
all that. Christianity controls our press. There is scarcely an
editor in the country who dares put his journal avowedly on the
side of Antichrist, even if he wants to. Even our Jews are for
Christ ; all is they want to be sure which is he. Our very blas-
phemies are an incidental proof of the presence and omnipresence
of Christ, for men do not any longer say "By Jupiter," or "By
Hercules," and the like, very much ; but 'tis his dear name they
desecrate. And then, not speaking of our own people particularly,
but of all civilized countries, how the tastes of men are meliorated ;
how ashamed they all are to go to war for mere ambition's sake,
and how sure they are, when about to commit that great crime, to
so far defer to the self-evident truth and nobility of Christ's ideas
as to pretend they are set to champion assaulted or imperiled just-
ice, the rights of God and the weal of man. It is a great thing

SERMONS. 587

gained when a villain is forced to disguise himself in the decent
robe of honesty. Look, moreover, at the festivities of this annual
Christmas week. What do they signify ? These public assemblies,
where saint and sinner sit together and are both cheerful, though in
different ways and degrees ; these churches decorated with all that
the winter has left of the green year, these family meetings, these
gifts, this household mirth and plenty, these universal greetings
and benedictions, this opening of all hearts as though the very
devils were touched for once by the finger of the Messiah — what do
they mean ? Why they mean that Christ has come, and that the
hilarity of the church at the advent of her Lord has so overrun as
to infect all others with a certain semblance of her own joy, until
the race exults as though it were unanimously safe in the kingdom
of grace. And these commemorations do certainly have a use
upon the unchristian multitude, and deserve to be mentioned as
one feature in the general Gospel aspect of the modern world.

Remember again how much has come to be done, by saint
and sinner both, in the way of missionary work in behalf of the still
unevangelized communities of the globe. Lo ! Christ is here
surely and has been long moving in the midst of men, occupying
the successive ages by his industries, and gradually forming the
nations to his praise ; else why this baptized zeal, this giving of
goods, this consecrating of sons and daughters, in order that the
Glad Tidings may be circulated to the uttermost places of the
earth? This outbirth of the philanthropic and militant spirit, both
in the church and out, is one of the principal achievements of
Christ, and ought to be dwelt upon more lengthily than I can
to-day and now. For I wish to hasten and remind you of that ever-
increasing expectation of the golden age under the dominion of
Christ, which has intrenched itself in the heart of mankind. The
good and the bad alike look forward confidently to that harvest-
field of time, — that reaping to which all our uncounted generations
have sowed. The seers of Israel saw it and wrought hymns in the
joy of that foresight. The saints of Israel saw it and were strength-
ened. The people of Israel turned their faces to it and waited.
But the world at large, in lack of those forewarning signs which
enriched the Hebrew economy, did not much anticipate the new
heavens and the new earth. A few prescient men, longing much
and not wholly shut out from God's love and light, albeit they
bowed to the divinities of Polytheism, did half forefeel the distant

588 SERMONS.

day ; but they were scarcely more wise in the matter than these
plants in dungeons are which go creeping towards the single ray of
light shooting through the dungeon's gloom. They knew they were
dark, and that alone suggested day. But whether the thing they
needed would ever come they could not firmly say, and they could
not support thereon an unwavering hope. And their heathen
fellow-men, the less sagacious and less spiritual multitude, who
rested in their idolatries and lived on them (in so far as an immor-
tal can live on such chips and chaff), they did not hope even so
stoutly as did these their leaders and sons of inspiration. So it was
substantial night in all those pagan lands, and under the heavy old
gloom the leaden-footed years went round and round.

" But hark ! A glad voice the lonely desert cheers;
Prepare the way ! a God, a God appears !

The Saviour comes ! by ancient bards foretold :
Hear him, ye deaf! and all ye blind, behold !
He from thick films will purge the visual ray,
And on the sightless eye-ball pour the day."

And so the blind people began to see and to foresee. Dimly
on their sad horizon broke the faint day. And Hope leaped for-
ward to meet it. And the trembling dawn faltered on into firm
morning, until now all Gentile tribes of man, who have heard the
Gospel news and have been at all educated into its ideas and
aspirations, are mounted to their outlooks in watch for the prom-
ised age of gold. Saint and sinner they seem to know it will come.
The sinful do not help it on at all, and they stand so in the way of
it that God would need to clear them out of the earth in order to
bring it in, and yet they seem to congratulate themselves that such
an era is to be. Their orators speak of it often as a coming not to
be deplored but longed for. Their poets enliven their song with
it. Their whole manhood is actually tinged by it sometimes. You
will hear them defending righteousness, in days when righteousness
goes weary and scarred and has not where to lay her head. " It
will not always be so," they say, "the right will be uppermost
by and by, the throne of God stands, the march of the race is
onward." And they believe what they say, and they appeal to the
Most High on the point, and their faith nerves them and they
stand, like a rock in the encircling billows. And this confidence of
theirs which makes them so valiant and of such large account in

SERMONS. 589

the manful struggles of the world, and so much a bulwark to what-
ever cause they pledge their energies, this admirable confidence of
theirs in that future of victory, is borrowed unconsciously from that
Christianity which they in practice reject, and is an inadvertent
testimony to Christ's power to permeate and qualify the thinking
even of those myriads who are unreconciled to him and will never
enter his kingdom of glory. And this is a good instance, it seems
to me, of that which I have been trying to exhibit, namely ; that by
contact with souls renewed, and by breathing an atmosphere satur-
ated with ideas, doctrines and principles which these souls have set
afloat and by God's grace keep afloat, the unchristian masses
absorb enough of the Gospel to entitle them to the name of
Christian, in a certain superficial and yet important sense, so that
among the historic triumphs of our Lord Jesus Christ and as one
of the most noteworthy results of his advent, is to be reckoned this
quasi-dominion over those who do not love him. And this half
dominion is no small cause of joy to us, when the day of Christ's
birth comes round ; not merely because it is in itself of value, but
also because it prepares the way for the Church to multiply her
true and godly votaries. For dawn precedes day. The scattered
drops go before the shower. The feeblest green foretells the sum-
mer's wide and gracious bounty. The many lower creatures that
peopled the geologic immensities of time, ascending with infinite
delay from type to type, heralded God's perfect form of man. And
this universal gradualism prevails also in the conquests of the
Christian religion, and this outlying penumbral influence which I
have described, this dissemination of Christly thoughts and germ
thoughts and laws, and this partial modification of the undevout, is
the natural precursor of a completer work, even the salvation of the
soul.

We were saying, that if we would enter the fellowship of
Simeon's joy, and in order thereto, two causes of effort are open to
us. And one was to gather the bright details of Christian history,
and thus magnify the Advent and increase its impression on our
minds and hearts by studying its great results.

And the second, which I shall merely mention, is to live
Simeon's holy, spiritual life : for whoso lives in that true and
exalted way will surely find his apprehension opened to receive the
Messiah, and out of that open apprehension gratitude will grow, and
he and those divine souls who waited for the consolation of Israel

590 SERMONS.

will flow together in one blessed feeling, bridging the outstretched
interval between this and then and living, one family, one life.

And now, as I leave this subject, permit me in a word to
remind you of that other Advent, still to occur, when you and I
shall be called up out of our graves to meet the descending Judge.
For he who was slain doth live again.

By death he death's dark king defeated,

And overcame the grave.
Rising, the triumph he completed;

He lives, he reigns to save !
Heaven's happy myriads bow before him;

He comes, the Judge of Men.
These eyes shall see him and adore him.

Lord Jesus ! own me then.

"I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at
the latter day upon the earth : And though after my skin worms
destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God ; whom I shall see
for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another ;" cries an
uplifted voice away back in the dusk midway between Adam and
Christ. To which, out of the morning glories of the better dis-
pensation, a whole happy choir of answering voices breaks forth,
tears mingling with their praises and praises irradiating their tears,
while they cry and say : — "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh
away the sin of the world."

And now we, the people whom prophets saw sitting in the
shadow of death and afterwards beamed upon by a light such as
never gilded their day; we, children of hope, standing midway
between Christ and the Judgment, take up each one that olden
jubilee and song of faith, century hailing century backward across
a broad abyss of years, and in solemn expectation we testify each
and cry : — I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand
at the latter day upon the earth : And though worms destroy this
body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. For Christ our Lord is
risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep. Amen and
Amen.

CHRIST'S SUPREMACY IN THE
HEART.

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford, March 18,

What think ye of Christ?— Matt, xxii, 42.

I have received a letter from a Christian friend, in which she
makes some anxious questionings, whether in her thoughts of heaven
and in her hope of being there some day, her feeling is most aroused
by her expectation that she shall meet Christ there, or by the expec-
tation that she shall meet there the children whom she has lost.
" Which is the supreme element in my longing," she queries. "If
Christ, then I feel safe, but if my children, then how can I be safe
— for does not he demand a clear ascendency in my heart?"

This letter led me into some reflections which I will now put
before you, though I will not confine myself to the exact particulars
of her case, but, rather, spread abroad upon a general subject.

I think that many Christian people find themselves confused
sometimes, as to Christ's supremacy in their feeling, and are there-
by made anxious. When the heart is full of loves, personal and
other — as all human hearts are — it is inevitable that the transcend-
ent affection should be a little difficult to get at, ordinarily. Take
it in the matter of our love for human beings, and how hard it is to
decide often. Let me ask some deep-hearted man here — whom do
you love best, your wife or your children ? Or, take the children by
themselves, which one of them do you love best? The little one,
perhaps you would say at first ; he is so helpless and so innocent,
and so perfectly confiding, and so infinitely cunning and all that.
But stop ; think it over. That full-grown son of yours was all that,

592 SERMONS.

and his entire sweet childhood has gone into your heart forever ; and
if anything should happen to him, instantly all his cradle days would
come back, and his days of prattle and his young trust in you and
the clinging of his arms around your neck. Yes, he would be your
little one again ; and in addition to that, all his later years would
pour in to melt you down ; so that reasoning the whole matter out,
as coolly as possible, it seems, after all, that perhaps you love him
the best ; and that if you were really driven to decide which one you
would prefer to lose by death, you might say, "let the little one go."

But I imagine, O man, that by the time you had made your
decision, you would find the little one surging in on you in a way to
compel you to re-open the whole case ; and there you would be,
oscillating between two infinities in complete helplessness. You
could not say — " let that child go — or that — or that — or that." And
you could not say — "let my wife go, rather than any child of my
group of children." You cannot tell which you do love best. And
even if in some extremity you were called to choose between your
child and another man's child, and say which you would rather have
given up to death, you could hardly tell. The fact is, in the face of
that other man's child, you would see your own — and the longer you
looked the more you would see it ; and at last, the utter and unut-
terable preciousness of your own would be so imputed to that other,
that to reject that, would be about the same as rejecting your own.
And that would be true just in proportion as you were a greatly loving
father. And on these great indestructible facts, is founded the
magnificent and heart-melting solidarity of mankind. In so far as
a man is a lover of a certain circle, he tends to be a lover of all
human beings.

Now, I would not press this illustration too far. I know
whether I love my household better than I do Nero, eighteen hun-
dred years back there ; and better than I do millions of people now-
living. So all I mean to imply in my illustration is, that in cases
where we do intensely love, as in our own families, it is very easy
to be confused on the question, which one we most love ; and in
like manner, if I think of Heaven as the place where my dear chil-
dren are, and the place also where my precious Saviour is, I may be
rather innocently confused as to which of those two allurements,
both enormous, do most fill my ever-yearning mind. Both of those
loves outrun all measurements ; and of course if I cannot meas-
ure either, I cannot tell which is the largest. If I look out upon

SERMONS. 593

the Atlantic ocean I cannot see land ; if I look out upon the Pacific
ocean I cannot see land ; how then can I tell which is the broadest ?
They are both broadest, to my shoreless feeling about them.

So my first remark is, many Christians find themselves in doubt,
as to which love is their dominant love, just as my friend who wrote
the letter was ; and neither of them is necessarily guilty on
account of it. They are in the same difficulty, when they come to
compare their affections for human friends, one with another.

But some one will say to me — " your illustration breaks down,
because we ought to give Christ our supreme love and ought to
make sure that we do ; whereas in the case of human friends, we are
not called to make any such discrimination, and get it definitely
settled that this or that person is the supreme one to us." I reply
— all I am trying to show now is that where the heart is profoundly
that is to say infinitely, engaged in several directions, it lies in
the nature of the case that it should be pretty difficult always, to
pick out the supreme love and absolutely identify it ; so that if we
are not always clear in regard to Christ, we may not be utterly
criminal in the matter.

But, by way of farther explication of this subject, I will say :

Secondly, that confusion as to our supreme love, arises in part
from the fact that those feelings in us which are most vivacious and
make the liveliest ado in our consciousness at the moment, are apt
to pass with us for more than they are. For example, I am toiling
along a country road, when suddenly, a beautiful view opens before
me and my sensibilities spring to their feet, in what seems a perfect
delight. If I took an inventory of my emotional contents at that
instant, I might say — "there is no delight anywhere in my soul
superior to this." That would be my natural utterance. Truth
would seem to compel me to say that. But while I am still looking
at that enchanting outspread of scenery, a certain friend of mine,
whom I love mightily, whom I have not seen for long years and did
not suppose to be in this country, approaches me from behind and
calls my name. Then, where is my joy of scenery? And if some
one asks, which is most delightsome — that landscape, or that
beloved face ? with what energy I repudiate the intimation that any
comparison between them is possible. The landscape was supreme,
but a supremer has arrived.

But while I am in the mid-flow of love's luxury in meeting that
friend, a messenger arrives with a telegram which I open, and find

594 SERMONS.

that a wayward child of mine, who ran away from me years ago,
sending back no tidings, for whom I have prayed in daily agony,
that he might be redeemed and that I might see him once more, had
wandered into one of Mr. Moody's meetings in London, had been
converted and had started for home. Now I am touched with a
feeling deeper than that of the landscape, and deeper than that of
the friend. Oh yes, much deeper. I thought I was supremely
happy over the landscape, but I was not ; I thought I was supremely
happy over my suddenly appearing friend, but I was not. No, a
thousand fathoms down below all these, in my unfathomable heart,
was a yearning which I had forgotten, and a moaning and a perpet-
ual cry unto God — and once touched down there, there breaks up
into my consciousness a flood vaster than all the floods of the sea,
and those surgings of friendship and of esthetic sensibility which
seemed the greatest things possible, a few moments before, are found
now to be almost mere froth, they are so small comparatively.

But now, make one other supposition — a bold one but conceiv-
able. While I am thanking God for the deliverance of my child,
and while all the years that I have been waiting for it are resounding
in my feeling, behold ! I am approached by One whom I have seen
a thousand times in my imagination, even by him who bore my
child's sins and mine, and the whole world's, in his own body on
the tree — there he is — that visage which was marred more than any
man's, those wounded hands, that wounded side, that human form,
but all transfigured in the glory of the resurrection ; there he is and
there I stand face to face with him — the dream of my whole life is
fulfilled and I see him ; and now what says my feeling within me ?
Do I shout? Do I weep? Do I speak? Do I seem agitated?
Am I even as much excited as I was when I first caught sight of that
glorious landscape ? No, I have been struck now in the profound-
est range of my nature and I am calm, unutterably calm ; but oh,
so joyful ! To have recovered my child was enough, and in my
emotion over that I should have said — in that direction my affec-
tions tide heaviest, but now I see that the heaviest of all movements
in me is and was the Christward movement. It is not a noisy
movement, so far as my consciousness of it is concerned, and I
might easily miss it from among my emotions in ordinary times, but
it is deep and real and the dearest thing I know. Some rush of
business might make me forget it, or some petty, passing anxiety.
My daily newspaper might. A flush of humor might. The whistle

SERMONS. 595

of a locomotive might, or a gathering storm, or a flight of birds in
the air, or the chirp of a cricket in my house, or the robin-song in
the tree. I am in a world full of sights and sounds and surprises,
and I am a creature of sense constitutionally, and these forty thou-
sand small things get into the foreground of my life and I seem
mortgaged to the trivial ; but one vision of him who has redeemed
me and the whole fallen creation, (such a vision as I shall surely
have out somewhere beyond death) , will dispel instantly and utterly
these many lesser engagements, and I shall settle to my true pole-
star unconfusedly and forever.

My third remark, suggested to me by my friend's letter, runs
on this wise : — some pious people do not gather their pious experi-
ences about the personal Christ as distinctly as some of the rest of
us do — for one reason or another they do not ; and therefore in
their thoughts of heaven, I should rather expect they would often
question, whether their anticipated meeting with Christ there is so
delightful as their anticipated meeting with children and others in
that country. It seems strange that the religion of religious people
in Christendom should ever fail to be full of the personal Christ,
distinctly conceived and much communed with. Christ came into
the world for two purposes ; to lay a basis of forgiveness for sinners,
and to present God to the mind of man with unprecedented clear-
ness and persuasion, the implication being that the old-time presen-
tation of God was not sufficient to make men know him and draw
near unto him in confidence and affection. If they would have
known him and would have drawn near, that would have been
enough. That is salvation always.' And in so far as any particular
persons can do that without Christ, as known and distinctly con-
ceived by them, they are at liberty to do it. The Patriarchs did it.
The Prophets did it. A scattered few at least in heathendom have
done it. And in Christian lands, I say, some find their way to God
and are on terms of acceptance with God and are in God's service,
without any such full and habitual concentration on God's Son as
they might have. They confess him as their Saviour, they accept all
that the creed says about him, they join with others in magnifying
him ; but while multitudes clearly see him and commune with him,
and speak with him in prayer, and refer their questions to him, and
cast their cares and griefs upon him, and take him for their actual
bosom friend and nearest intimate, as really and as delightedly as
though he were here bodily, these others think of him much more

596 SERMONS.

vaguely ; do not get him before their mind's eye, do not fasten upon
his personal form as it appeared on the earth and as it now is in
glory ; and therefore of course do not make their whole heaven,
as they anticipate it, to circle about him with absolute distinctness,
and in him converge and merge all its many elements.

I do not think we can deny the reality of the religion of such
people; (they put forth too many strong signs for that), but I
consider it unfortunate for them that they do not follow the more
personal way of experience as just now described ; and when piety
is stated in the New Testament fashion, as supreme love and
loyalty to the personal Lord Jesus, I should certainly look to see
them very doubtful very often, whether or not they are Christians.
And when heaven is represented in the Scriptures, as made up
mainly of the glorious presence of Jesus, the Saviour, I should
expect them to wonder whether they are supremely drawn to it
under that view, and are not rather most drawn by certain reunions
— human reunions — which they are to enjoy there.

I have one other suggestion to make ; a final suggestion. It
so happens in the case of many of us, that we have not any children in
Paradise, they are all with us ; neither have we there any other
person whom we long to meet every day of our lives, with a longing
that can hardly be appeased ; so that if our blessed Lord is really
dear to us, he has no competitor over there in that country to con-
fuse us and throw us into wondering whether he is the one whom
we most want to meet. With mothers who have children there, it
is different. The mother-feeling is the strongest natural feeling there
is. The father- feeling comes nearest to it, but taking fathers as they
average, they do not come very near to it. Once in a while you
will see a man most bountiful in his emotions and most tender, to
whom his children go in a way as nestling and intimate as to their
mother, and when a man thus molded is also thoroughly strong and
perhaps massive in his build, I do not know anything under the sun
more touching and beautiful. * But you do not very often find
instances just like that. No, it is the mothers that do the loving.
They are related to the children in a mysterious intimacy — that, to
begin with. Bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, the children
are, — an intimacy that has no parallel in nature, an intimacy to be
sure that is not kept up in its literality ; and yet after the two lives
are separated and the child starts out on its individual career, that
first absolute unity of life seems somehow to shed an indestructible

SERMONS. 597

warmth through the mother-mind and bind her to her offspring in
eternal bonds. Then next, it is the mother's arms, mainly, into
which the children are born. She enfolds them, she warms and
nourishes them, from her overhanging face of love they receive their
first communications, from her hand their first soothing, from her
voice their first cheer, from her lips their first religion, at her knee
their first prayer, from her watchfulness their first defence ; and if
we pass beyond these first things and move along the years of
expanding childhood, while the father has his function more and
more in certain ways, yet it is never quite possible to unseat the
mother from her ascendency and original queenship ; and when old
men in the mind-wandering of death begin to call beloved names,
always you will notice it is their mother they call rather than their
father. And for one, I, a man, am not jealous of this preference.
It has been earned. By the ordination of nature it has been made
her privilege to earn it, in travails manifold and unutterable ; yes,
in unprecedented outlays of both soul and body. • But, having thus
entered herself into love's depths and made herself her children's
dear nest, it comes inevitably that her loneliness and her longing and
her agony shall also be transcending, when those same children are
plucked away and carried beyond sight and given over to some
strange, new mothering out somewhere. She misses them from her
arms, she misses them in her plannings, she misses them at even-
tide, she longs for them in her night wakings, she hears their voices
in the voices of other children, she remembers them in the house-
hold anniversaries, she sees their picture on the wall, they run
through all her life like a refrain ■ and then, when her thoughts go
out towards Paradise and the millions of millions therein, she can-
not much pause on the many of whom she has only heard, however
great their renown may be and however resplendent their saintship ;
but past them all she flies to find and fondle her own, to ask from
them innumerable explanations, to note what changes have come
over them, to listen for the old tones, to hear them call her
mother, to feel their heart-beat, to luxuriate in the old warmth —
and in the midst of it all, is it wonderful that she feels something
as I did when that telegram came announcing that my child
was redeemed and was homeward bound ; feels that is, that her
children are her one cup of joy, that she wants nothing but them,
that Paradise is not much but meeting them, that the surrounding
other hosts there are well enough, but are not they ; and that

598 SERMONS.

even a vision of Christ could scarcely surpass her reunion with
them.

Worry not, O mother. Wait till you see Him ! Wait till it
comes to you that that dear Paradise was purchased by him, that
your children are there as borne there by his commissioned angels,
that you yourself are there, a ransomed sinner redeemed by his
blood ; that the encompassing multitudes white-robed are the tro-
phies of his grace, that the eternal song they sing was put upon their
lips by him, and that if the future of them and of you and your chil-
dren is to unfold blissfully forever, it is by his adorable mediator-
ship that'so it is — wait, I say, till these undeniable realities get their
full stroke upon you, and notice then the vibration of the great major
chords of your being. You admire the flowers with their lovely
coloring, and the variegated plumage of birds, and the forest's diversi-
fied green, and the flash of the diamond, and the sparkle of the
illumined sea, and the many glories of the ever-varying firmament ;
but these all are only the Sun, in its innumerable reflections, and
knowing that, as you do perfectly, it would be curiously inconsider-
ate and illogical in you to take no interest at all in the Sun. These
many illumined surfaces fascinate you, and while under their fasci-
nation you naturally do not think of the Sun, but when your atten-
tion is called to it you cannot help thinking of him and making
much of him. And those multiplied surfaces far and wide, are
given you in order that you may the more completely know and
admire that great luminary which produces them all. What must
that orb be which can thus bespangle and glorify the entire visible
creation — and in fact make it visible.

Well, you see the application of my parable. All souls saved
and imparadised ; be they your children, O mother, or yourself, or
whoever they may be, are the glorious Redeemer in his distributed
effulgence ; all their shining is He shining. While you are looking
at them and are full of love for them, it is easy to think only of them
and I do not know that the Lord Jesus will be severe with you if
you do ; but these reflections of him should serve to make him the
more known to you and the more adorable. What must that One
be who can produce all this. And if you are a true Christian, you
will be likely to think of that sometimes. And if Paradise seems
sweet to you, with its meetings, the author of the Paradise and the
meetings will seem sweet to you, and it would be illogical in you to
the last degree if he did not. It occurs to you occasionally, that

SERMONS. 599

your departed friends are the main element in the heaven you hope
for, perhaps. Well, perhaps they are, but the fact that you have
that surmise does not prove it — any more than my delight in the
landscape which I mentioned, proved that that was the greatest
delight of my soul ; or than my joy over my friend returned, proved
that the greatest thing in me ; or than my ecstasy of tears and smiles
when that telegram came, proved that the greatest. We know not
what is greatest with us until the greatest things are actually pre-
sented. Half the time in this life of ours, Jesus is not consciously
before us, and cannot be. But sometimes he is ; and those are
the times that test us. He is put before us in sermons now and
then, fairly and squarely. He is put before us in calls to action for
him. He is put before us in calls to self-denials for his glory. Also
in noble human examples. Also in great emergencies we are made
to be very serious and to feel about for our spiritual supports, and
then we think of him.

But the most wonderful of all test hours will be when we meet
him beyond this life. The confusing noises of earth will have passed
back into the infinite distance then, and we shall have the full use of
our faculties. The immense strain on our attention of this world's
duties will have then been taken away, and we shall gaze upon him,
unembarrassed by any distraction. The precious affections, too,
which now bewilder us by their lovely urgency will settle into the
background, when that form divine appears ; and our soul within us
will stand forth in absolute attention to that vision. Then, O mother,
if you falter and betake yourself to your children, it is even as you
feared and you are not a Christian. But many now fearful, will not
falter. As the ocean lifts to the full moon, as planets move down
ever to their central sun, as great nations rally to their hero, as lovers
flow to their mates in gravitations irresistible, so will they, the hither-
to fearful and faltering ones, confess him as the fairest among ten
thousand and the one altogether lovely. Often the magnetic needle
trembles and blunders and gropes and knows not where to find the
pole. There is iron about somewhere that confuses it. So in this
life we tremble and are confused. There are disturbing forces on
every hand. But as the needle still seeks for the north and, when
this and that are withdrawn, finds it and there rests, so we at last
surely find our hearts' true treasure, our Redeemer and our All ; and
there rest forever.

God hasten the day.

JESUS WEEPING OVER
JERUSALEM

FOUR DAYS BEFORE HIS CRUCIFIXION

Delivered at the Park Church, Hartford, April 3, 1887.

The religious system of the Jews centred in the temple at
Jerusalem, and thither all Jews were compelled to come at stated
times year after year, and go through certain ceremonies. But of
these universal upcomings to that capital city of their religion, there
was no one equal to that great Spring Festival, the Passover. That
it was that commemorated the miraculous deliverance of their
nation from its four hundred years of bondage in Egypt, and the
people swarmed to it with a special delight. It was a man's-festival
to be sure, in that only the males of Israel, beginning at twelve years
of age, were required by the law of God to attend it ; nevertheless,
women and children came in great numbers, for the sake of the
outing, the excursion, the multitudes they could see, the personal
friends they might meet, the religious ceremonies they might wit-
ness and the general air of jubilation. The result was, that millions
at once came together to keep this great anniversary. They filled all
habitable places in the city ; and then in all the country immediately
around about, they put up temporary booths of branches of the
trees and what not, and thronged them. At these annual gatherings,
they renewed their friendships, they did some trading, they revived
their patriotism, they unified and consolidated the national life. It
was a very great time, as you can see in a moment. Our yearly
Passion week and Easter corresponds to the time of their Passover ;
and millions more keep these anniversaries than kept that one of

SERMONS. 601

theirs, but we hallow the season in scattered assemblies all round the
globe, while they kept it in one national mass-meeting. Those of
us who bethink ourselves when Easter comes and are withal imagi-
native, so that we can see the absent as though present, do realize
these far-scattered millions of the world who join us in the Easier
joy, and yet even our realization of this vast community of holy
feeling is much more indistinct than the Jew's realization of the
Passover hosts and the Passover delights. He literally saw his
millions. They were assembled before him. At every step in the
Holy City he met their crowds. On every height that encompassed
it, his eye caught their innumerable green tabernacles. Yes, the
whole Israelitish world were there, visible and audible and full of the
contagion of the scene and the occasion.

Well, it was at the Passover that Jesus was crucified, as I said.
The whole land had heard of him ; and the Passover hosts, when
they arrived in the city that year, from the North, South, East and
West, began to inquire whether he was there. They wanted to see
this wonderful man. They wanted to hear him speak and get a
sense of him. Many of them had never met him at all — they had
simply caught the rumors about him. Many of them had met him
but a little and wished more of him. Many of them had seen him
considerably and therefore now longed for him. He was not there
at first, but he came. He came up from Jericho on the east, over
the Mount of Olives, down through the deep valley of Kedron and
entered the city. Then many things occurred ; yes, those last few
days of his life were full of interest. They were felt to be very
interesting at the time, but oh, how unutterably interesting are they
to us, who understand those days as no man there and then could !

I am not intending this morning to recount those last events,
but only to mention one of them, and to that end I have put
the Passover occasion before you a little. To the same end also, I
would like to picture to you the geography of that region at certain
points.

I will suppose that where our Connecticut river runs here on
the east, is a great valley hundreds of feet deep, and that on the
west of the city, bounding it, is another similar valley, and that these
valleys move along southward and finally come together and head off
the city on the south. There stands Hartford on a high triangular
plateau, circumscribed on the east, west and south, by these yawn-
ing valleys ; while on the north it stretches away into the country
39

602 SERMONS.

with no break. Now that gives you the topography of Jerusalem.
At the bottom of that eastern valley is the garden Gethsemane.
Beyond the valley and bounding it lifts Mount Olivet, some five to
six hundred feet above the valley and overlooking the city. If you
ascend the slope of Olivet, pass over the summit and begin to
descend on the eastern slope, pretty soon you come to Bethany,
that famous village where dwelt Mary and Martha and Lazarus, and
where Jesus often visited, and where he spent his nights during that
last Passover. All the day long he moved among the city crowds,
doing what he could, answering their inquiries, opening to them
such things as they could receive and some things that they could
not receive, giving out mysterious intimations of tragic events close
at hand ; making his disciples pretty anxious sometimes, he was so
full of premonitions ; encountering now and then a grumbler and
hater and dealing with him ; not shunning the places where the
multitude did most congregate, but pushing in among them with his
strange, sweet speech ; sometimes permitting a mighty concourse to
mass about him and listen and get excited, and then slipping away
from them and escaping an uproar — each day, I repeat, of that last
Passover period, he spent in things like these, and then at night-fall,
jaded and perhaps pensive, he, accompanied by one or more of his
Apostles, moved off through Kedron, up Olivet, among the count-
less Passover booths, on and on, to the retirement and the love and
the quiet country sleep of the dear village. Precious days ! Precious
nights ! Precious glimpses of the Son of man !

At last the final Sabbath of his life arrived, the day of the week
corresponding to our Saturday. The Friday following he would die.
No one save him knew the exact day. In fact, no one knew
he was to die. He had spoken of it repeatedly — not naming the
day at all — but the speaking took no definite hold. It troubled some
of them that he should talk so, but it did not enter their minds as a
real thing ; and so when it actually came, they were just stunned and
helpless. But the last Sabbath had dawned and he spent all its
hours in peaceful Bethany. The last evening of the week, namely on
Friday, he had traveled out there as usual and there he was. And
there he staid — with his disciples, with the much-loved household
who had so often entertained him, with his own thoughts, with the
seclusion and silence of nature, in much prayer no doubt, and in
many little turns, asides and quiet tokens, of which we have not
been told, but which we can easily imagine. Those about him, I

SERMONS. 603

say, did not know what was in the immediate future ; and yet such
a person as Mary must have felt a certain persuasive something in
his mood and air that day — something that drew her to him and
made her to be still as she sat at his feet. There is nothing more
mysterious than these voiceless communings with those whom we
love. We read their hearts, we note the flow of their thoughts,
though they speak not. We follow them about, we do this and we
do that, we gently adjust ourselves to their state of feeling, we
minister to them, we give them our deep companionship and they
receive it ; and yet continually all is still. I do not know but this
is a sign unto us of the manner of intercourse in the other life
whither we go. I can think of nothing sweeter, — perfect love and
perfect mutual understanding and no words needed, while our souls
move on together through their appointed and ever-changing moods
and fluctuations.

Thus ran that day of days in Bethany, so far as such deeply
perceiving persons as Mary and the Master were concerned.

But, before the day was over, there began to be arrivals from
Jerusalem ; and finally these arrivals amounted to a large company.
They had missed Jesus and had tracked him. The days previous
had greatly increased their curiosity in respect to him, and in many
of them it is easy to believe there was something more than curiosity.
Moreover, they had all heard of the wonderful raising of Lazarus
from the dead, out in that mountain village ; and they would like to
see him and his sisters, and the house and the place all about, and
hear them tell of the event perhaps. Human nature is the same the
world round. At any rate they were there. When people had left
their homes all over the land of Israel, as they had, and had made,
many of them a long journey, to get to Jerusalem, and there had
camped down almost hap-hazard and were living in an irregular
fashion, and were roaming a good deal from tent to tent to look up
their acquaintances and friends, naturally they had arrived at a state
of mind that made them particularly impressible to anything that
might happen along. They were agog, they followed the last
wonder, they had not much else to do. They were good material
for a mob, as was often found. And a swarming excursion out to
Bethany was one of the most natural things in the world. And
there they were.

But the night of the Sabbath passed and the morning of the first
day of the week came on, and Jesus started for the city once more ;

604 SERMONS.

attended of course by his disciples and his company. They did not
go straight over the mountain to Jerusalem, but they took a more
circuitous path around the southern slope of Olivet. At a certain
point, the road which winds southward and westward turns north-
ward, towards Jerusalem now on the north ; and presently the
great and glorious city suddenly emerges. But before Jesus had
reached that point of vision, he was met by an excited multitude on
their way out from the city in search of him ; and those two crowds,
the crowd ingoing and the crowd outgoing, met and mingled around
his person, and there were great shoutings and a strewing of green
branches and garments in the way, for Jesus to ride upon ; and a
considerable amount of unconscious fulfillment of ancient prophe-
cies concerning the Messiah, was accomplished right there, we are
told, and you would think that a King was on his way in a triumphal
procession to his capital. These people had a great feeling about
this man, that they did not themselves understand. Of course the
whole nation were in a constant lookout for the coming of Messiah
to take the throne of David, and from Jerusalem give law to the
world ; and it was borne in upon the minds of this tumultuous host
on Olivet, that Jesus was that Messiah, and that he might ascend his
throne at this very Passover. And mingled with this earthly concep-
tion were dim other conceptions ; no doubt, in the minds of some
other and higher, even a spiritual conception. It is hard to say
exactly how they all felt, but they were in a ferment and woke up
the whole mountain with their Hosannas. Particularly at that spot
on the road where they first caught sight of the city, did they huz-
za. It was a magnificent city in those days. It stood well and
showy on its high promontory. It shone well in that morning's sun.
It appealed grandly to the patriotic and passover feeling of that
great caravan on the hill there. Travelers who go over that path
to-day, tell us that the sudden sight of Jerusalem at that point is
very impressive, notwithstanding that the old, imperial city is gone,
and only a poor mockery of her remains.

But while the people shouted, and Jesus, being appealed to by
some unhappy Pharisee to hush their noise, refused to do it, saying :
" If these should hold their peace the very stones would cry out."
Behold, he himself was weeping. And why was that ?

I reply, first of all, that when a man is full of sensibility he is
like a full vessel ; the least jar of any sort makes him overflow.
Have not we ourselves had days when things most trivial would

SERMONS. 605

make us weep ? They were not necessarily sorrowful things ; unsor-
rowful things would do it, just as soon. And Jesus must have been
full of feeling on that morning's march ; and when the city struck
his eye, unexpectedly very likely, he could restrain himself no
longer. I do not say that that fully explains his tears, but it is the
first step in the explanation. He was by nature a man of profound
emotions, and under the circumstances where he now found himself,
he was particularly emotional.

Let us look into those circumstances wherein he was, a little.
I will not dwell upon them much, but I will run them over. I love
to do it.

It was something that a man who had endured as much dis-
favor as he had should find himself now suddenly encompassed by
such a resounding acclamation of friendship. Of course he knew
that there was some dross in it, and that he could not depend on it
through all things and forever. I do not mean that there were any
hypocrites among those shouters, but only that the shouters had not
gauged the whole situation, did not fully know Jesus and had no
idea of the great trial close at hand and how poorly they would bear
it. However they were sincere, and their enthusiasm must have
been sweet to him.

It also represented to him, very likely, that great coming time
when he should be hailed as the Messiah by the united world,
redeemed by his blood. The first drops of a shower are much more
than so many drops — they have in them, to our feeling, something
of the refreshment of the whole shower which is to follow.

In the next place, it was especially easy for him to weep, be-
cause he knew that his affairs were nearing their great crisis. He
was not afraid, but he was sensitive. In four days, his task as
Redeemer would settle upon him with more than the weight of
worlds. A General Grant may stand front to front with death, and the
situation is a very solemn one, but Grant knows that his dying is to be
for himself only and not for the sins of the whole world. Jesus carried
us all. He knew it. He foresaw it. He felt it. If in Gethsemane
he prayed God to be released from it, it is probable that as he con-
templated it four days away, it filled him with a special sensibility.

Again, as he was tenderly human and affectionate, it must have
pressed upon his feeling that he was soon to be separated, practi-
cally forever, from the familiar scenes and persons of his life-time.
There were Bethany and the circle of people there resident. Here

606 SERMONS.

was the oft-trodden Mount of Olives, associated with some of the
great experiences of his life. Yonder was the dear city. Away to
the north was his native Nazareth and Galilee where he had labored.
He was nearly done with all these. And with the Apostles who had
followed him about and were still with him this very morning, he
was nearly done. To be sure he would see them again when he
rose from the dead, but only transiently. And he would see Beth-
any again, for from just about there, he would ascend into heaven
at last ; but Bethany as a visiting-place and a tarrying-place and a
place of love, repose and refreshment, he could not know any more.
Possibly thoughts like these did not enter his mind consciously and
distinctly as he rode towards the city, but they most likely toned
his feeling and made it deep, all the same ; for have not we fre-
quently noticed in ourselves, shades of emotion and even strong
emotions, that we could not trace to any thoughts of which we were
at the moment, aware?

.But there was one cause of his tears which is expressly men-
tioned in the sacred narrative, thus — " He beheld the city, and wept
over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy
day, the things which belong unto thy peace ! but now they are hid
from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine
enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and
keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground,
and thy children within thee ; and they shall not leave in thee one
stone upon another ; because thou knewest not the time of thy visi-
tation."

In this passage of sympathy and lamentation, there are two
feelings ; the feeling of a patriot who foresees the desolation of his
country, and the feeling of one who had been sent to redeem
Israel from her sins and all the calamities thereof, but had been
rejected.

First, Jesus the lover of his country. Why should he not love
it? He had spent all his days in it and had never seen any other
country. All his experiences were associated with it. It was the
land of his mother and his brethren ; and all the generations of his
kindred were buried there. He had received the impress of her
institutions. He had been reared in her religion and had loved it.
From the day he was twelve years old, he had come up regularly
with the pilgrim bands to yonder city on the hill and yonder Mount
Zion, the glory of all the earth, to keep holy days according to the

SERMONS. 607

traditions of Israel, and all the pious culture he had ever had was
from the great Israelitish cultus there centred.

Moreover, this land was a beautiful land to look upon, a land
of hills, valleys, streams and mountains, a land of milk, honey and
wine ; a land of whose metropolis there now in his sight he could
say from his heart — " Beautiful for situation, is she * * * walk
about her and go round about her : tell the towers thereof. Mark
ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces ; that ye may tell it to
the generation following." And now he knew by the spirit of
prophecy that was in him, that in a single generation or so a great
Roman commander would besiege that beloved city, would capture
it and would signalize his victory by ravages, destructions and mur-
ders, so terrible that mankind forever should remember them and
mourn for the queen city of the earth.

Therefore the blessed Jesus wept, and while the happy multi-
tude shouted, still he wept.

But all this was easy to be averted. If only she could receive
her Messiah, she need not fall. This was the special day of God's
visitation to her. He had sent his Son to her. Jesus had preached
in her streets. He had shown her his miracles. He had borne with
her and entreated. " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the
prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee ; how often
would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather
her brood under her wings, and ye would not."

The tears of Jesus over Jerusalem, were the tears of the
Redeemer of the world over the spiritual blindness of those whom
he has redeemed. He weeps for their temporal calamities, their
overthrown cities, their poverties, hungers, sicknesses, ignorances
and mutual cruelty, brought on by their sins ; and he weeps for their
spiritual calamities, their dark, low and terrible states of soul, where-
by they are shut out from the kingdom of heaven.

And there on southern Olivet, facing the city, admiring her,
loving her, sorrowing for her, I leave him. The sun shines, I imag-
ine. The earth blooms. The city of marble and gold glitters like
a gem. The noise of the shouting people fills the air. The green
booths of the great Passover assembly stretch away in the distance.
The sky resounds with prophetic voices, for him who has ears to
hear. And back out of sight as yet, but close by, only four days
off, glooms the great shadow and midnight of all time. Out of
Bethany and down from Olivet, into that unfathomable shadow, this

608 SERMONS.

festive procession marched ; but beyond the shadow behold a light,
a light most glorious and divine, upon which no shadow shall ever
fall. In that light resplendent, I see the resurrection form of this
man of Olivet ; and around him there is gathered a resurrection
assembly, outnumbering this procession along the slopes of the
mountain, as the sands of the sea outnumber all mortal numbers.

FOREIGN LETTERS.

FOREIGN LETTERS.

Extracts from Letters written to the Hartford Evening Post
in the Years 1868 and 1869.

IRELAND.

ON THE WAY TO KILLARNEY.

We sighted the dim mountains of Ireland at two o'clock of as
beaming and perfect a day as ever shone on any land or any sea,
and from that until the darkness came down, our progress along the
coast was just the unrolling of a perpetual pomp, and whatever I have
since seen or may hereafter see of the misery and squalor of Ireland,
and however much the country may be disparaged in my hearing,
no matter — nothing can quite do away that first fine impression.
The mountains when first seen, were covered with an exquisite
sunny purple veil, and they seemed hardly more than a gentle
dream ; and even when we drew near and began to distinguish de-
tails, light and shade, cottages, huts, spires, towers and all the rest,
everything was softened and beautified under the light in a way
most wonderful to behold ; and when at last the sun went down, he
did it in a display such as one might not see again in a life-time.
It was not merely a radiant and many-hued sunset, but a sunset
among the mountain peaks, and upon a land of story, of a history
running back into the twilight, a land of courage and eloquence, of
sorrow and song.

Dear old Ireland ! I do not wonder that her people love her,
and mourn for her, and plot for her, and shout her history in the
ears of the nations wherever they go, all round the world. Curses
on the brute that won't throw up his hat and make heaven ring for
his native land ; and how can an Irishman in foreign countries,

612 FOREIGN LETTERS.

with a heart of the ordinary Irish size and sensibility — and they are
apt to be big and lively — help reverting to these fields and cottages,
and precious home scenes, and growing red in the face when he
remembers all the mingled gloom and glory of his country's history,
and joining hands with his fellow countrymen to keep her memory
green forever.

I propose to join an Irish society as soon as I reach home. I
do not know but it is a pure invention of mine, but I have a feeling
that there is more love in these huts about as large as your fist,
such as I kept seeing as I looked from the window of the car on
my way to Killarney, than there is in the grand houses of more
prospered people. Where people all live in one room, it promotes
fellowship, I should say ; and I have always noticed at home that
an Irishman thinks more of a cousin than we do of a brother, and
of his nearer kinsfolk in the same proportion. Moreover, common
troubles, a tug together in the same great poverty, a self-denial on
the part of each one for the sake of the rest, all this tends in like
manner to weave ties from heart to heart, which can never be
broken, and to put each member of the family forevermore under
the power of the dear homestead and the dear by-gone years. At
any rate, I saw the cottages and thought these thoughts as I flew
along.

MUCKROSS ABBEY.

And that was the first real old-time ruin I ever saw ; and if I
was not afraid some cold-blooded, unecstatic creature out your
way would laugh at me, I would write down here just how I felt.
Most likely I shall never feel so again. I'm afraid not. Here all
my life I've been longing for a ruin, and at times have been almost
willing to be a ruin myself, just to look at it. And all my life I've
been wanting to see ivy, and ivy on a ruin, too, with perhaps an owl
and a bat and a few such homogeneous accessories thrown in.
Wherefore, when I surveyed this half broken-down marble edifice,
some parts of it seven hundred years old ; when I walked through
it, through and through, paused at the old tombs in the choir,
delayed in the well-preserved cloisters, saw a yew-tree as old as the
building (my first yew-tree, mind you) filling the whole garden
upon which the cloisters opened, looked up at the marvelous ivy
on the tower perfectly covering one side of it, and, in the transept,
sat still and listened, and took the whole hush of the place and just

FOREIGN LETTERS. 613

sunk back into that old dim past ; why what is the use of pretend-
ing that I was not touched on an entirely new spot, and touched,
too, in a way to be remembered for many a day. To me there is a
beautiful feeling, a kind of sweet human streak, in the way that ivy
in this country takes it upon itself to clothe all ruins. As though it
had in it a gentle pity, it hastens to hide all deformities and subdue
all harshnesses, and throw over their desolation a perfectly bounti-
ful beauty which abides, unfading, the whole year round, and makes
a crumbling and broken old age more charming even than youth,
although in a different way. The roof of the Abbey is entirely gone,
and other dilapidations have occurred ; but no matter, and so much
the better, in fact. The walls still stand, and the sepulchres are
there, and the past is there in its undiminished power; and so
much was I taken by it that I walked two or three miles that even-
ing afterwards, that I might see it alone and by moonlight, only
the dead and I and the Abbey — we three. It was nearly midnight
when I left ; and while my moonlight was not so full as I needed
for the full effect which I sought, still what I came short in moon-
light I made up in owls and so on, for when I entered the nave
I started one, and as I stood and listened, presently a bat flew out
of the ivy on the tower, and back and forth, and the longer I stood
the more noises I heard — departed monks and so on — until when I
left the lonely spot, the building being fittingly a quarter of a mile
out in the fields, separate from all the living and the present, I
thought that while I should dearly love to be buried there, I'd
prefer not to spend my nights there beforehand. Graveyards and
the like are very powerful about midnight, especially if you sit
stock-still a long time and listen.

ENGLAND.

HAMPTON COURT.

In the building, which with its courts covers eight, acres, there
are some thousand or more pictures to be seen, besides old-time
furniture of departed kings and queens ; to all of which I paid the
reverence which was due. Among the pictures are some which I
should hardly care to be asked to carry off as a present. Bonaparte

614 FOREIGN LETTERS.

the First broke out one day in his haughty fashion with the inhu-
man and contemptuous remark: "Too many men — too many
men !" And with a similar brutality I exclaim : "Too many vir-
gins and nymphs, and gods and goddesses, and other supernatural
trash." I have not been much ravished by any Madonna which I
have seen yet. And most of the Holy Families, thus far, are a
failure, for me. So are all the forms, heads, and faces of Christ.
In my poor judgment Christ cannot be painted, and whosoever
attempts to express that inexpressible, just commits a very human
piece of stammering. What is the great Guido's "Ecce Homo?"
Nothing, nothing. And Correggio's, too? Nothing, I say again.
And the Christ, in West's most impressive and melting of pictures,
"Christ healing the sick?" Almost nothing compared with the
august reality as it stands in Christian feeling. One could weep to
think that Christs have been painted by man in all ages. Murillo's
celebrated Holy Family here in the National gallery is a very rich
and sweet and eloquent thing, and one at first is almost of a mind
to accept that darling young form and face in the foreground, so
sweetly human and yet so exalted ; but on a second thought one
sees (as I do) that Christ, even in his youth, is beyond the reach
of art. It is a good and beautiful thing that men in all ages have
wanted to tell of Christ in their art, and their struggles of genius
have been triumphant in some minor respects, no doubt ; but they
can never tell the whole story, and it jars one to see how far they
fail of the heart's ideal. All of which I launch out for the comfort
of it, not knowing precisely how much heresy there may be in it,
nor, in my blessed ignorance, caring ; but perfectly willing, never-
theless, to go on seeing and hearing and studying, till somewhere
on this planet or some other, I find on some canvas in full majesty
and benignity, may-be, him whom the ages worship, and in whom
our countless art-sensations live.

THE BANK OF ENGLAND

stands square and solid on an area of four acres, and is worth
visiting, although I was not led to it by any commanding interest
in it, but partly because I was offered a permit and the favor of his
company by a cheery and genial Englishman, a lawyer, whose
rotund, intelligent and hearty face would be worth one thousand
pounds a year to any man, and is a public benefaction wherever it
goes. A full-blooded, cultivated Englishman, when you get inside

FOREIGN LETTERS. 615

of him by showing your right to go there, is a first-rate human
being, and you may count on him till the last shot is fired. I con-
fess to a love of him, and do greatly like to take the shock, or the
steady current, as the case may be, of his splendid magnetism.
His beef and his port, and his athletic out-door life, and his
glorious self-esteem, and a dozen other similar substantial, seem to
conspire to make for him a presence, and a red-blooded vigor in
every direction, which is very breezy and stimulative and good,
especially for people who are a little pale and thin, and of a too
humble and self-distrustful build. So I followed the lead of the
lawyer and went around the bank, and could not help liking every-
thing that he did.

It is a great affliction to have much money. One never has
any peace till he gets rid of it. Here now this great bank can
hardly sleep nights for fear that some one will be thieving its treas-
ures. It has a company of soldiers come down from the Tower of
London every night to stand guard within its walls. And as for the
daylight hours, why, it has its whole force of work-people, twelve
hundred strong, ready to fly to arms in any emergency, they being
organized and disciplined as a military force, and every man know-
ing his exact place, should an alarm be raised. And you may go
clear around that four acres of granite and not find a single outside
window. It is all wall and nothing else. And all the way around
are stones so arranged that they can be suddenly displaced for the
protrusion of rifles. And when you are visiting the interior, as you
pass from room to room, bells ring and guards fly about until you
might think they had taken you for a king and were paying you
honor, but that isn't it a bit. It is because you are probably a
thief and will be pocketing thousand-pound notes or great bars of
gold, if you have a chance. And they never permit you to enter
the vaults where the bullion is, except in the presence of a director
of the bank. "With us the president himself went, we being more
than ordinarily suspicious characters, I suppose ; for while a clergy-
man, by virtue of his office and pretensions, is under special pledges
not to steal, by virtue of his poverty he is under uncommon temp-
tation to do it. When we went into the room where their coin and
bank-notes are gathered in almost fabulous sums, the treasury, four
men watched us, with I do not know how many more hidden
behind screens and doors. And when they put into my hand a
package worth five millions of dollars in gold, I wondered that the

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entire building did not quake. They expected to see me quake, I
presume ; but I didn't half so much as I do when I draw my
monthly salary at home. Now, what is the use of being immensely
rich and living in perpetual consternation, like that great bank ? I
would not change places with it for the world. The president of
the concern has a great salary, I was told ; I was about to put down
here how much, but do not dare trust my memory on the subject,
so name any figure you please, and it is more than that ; but what
is that to peace of mind ?

I left the vast building in a partially dazed condition, confused
by the enormous and unaccustomed figures and facts which they
had dispensed to me, perfectly turned round by the many rooms,
halls and staircases, through which I had been led, wondering how
any one in England could be poor, with such a mighty affair as that
making money in full run all the time, speculating as to what rank
among human occupations ought in fact to be assigned to this
handling of money, and sure that my pockets were just as empty as
when I went in.

THE QUEEN'S STABLES.

I looked into the Queen's stables both at Windsor and at
Buckingham Palace in London, and should quite like to be one of
her four or five hundred horses. It must be solid comfort to be as
handsome as they are ; handsome, I mean, in the grand, solid way,
and not merely doll-like ; and to live in such nice rooms, too, and
not have to comb your own hair nor wash your own face, but be
combed and rubbed and all by a man who is proud to do it for
you; and to have such lots of good carriages to draw about,
especially the great state-carriage, as large as a small house, weigh-
ing four tons, and burnished and bedecked beyond all account,
while the harnesses for the eight cream-colored horses that draw it
up to the Parliament House and back, when the Queen goes up in
state, are fairly stiff with gold. Moreover, it must give one a good
feeling to have a splendid-looking man, tall, finely proportioned,
and with an air like a bishop, sit in an office by the great outside
gate (as at the Queen's stables in London) clothed in gorgeous red
velvet from head to feet, and look down on all applicants for
admission, and tell them whether they can come in or not. And
then to carry kings and queens and young princes and princesses
on your back all about the country on a smart gallop, while every-

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body looks and takes off his hat ! Why, I've been delighted to get
down upon my hands and knees and carry even an ordinary little
American boy whom I know ; and what must it be to have been
born on all fours and to carry a high-born — yes, tip-top born —
English boy !

ANTWERP.

THE MARKET PLACE.

Everywhere in Europe, thus far, we have observed these
market places, where you can see the common people just as they
are, notice their costumes, hear their noisy chaffer, and mark their
forty idiosyncrasies. I like to be among them and feel the play of
their life about me. They are very vivacious and demonstrative,
but never rude. What unseemly words they may sometimes vent
are all lost to me, and so I have an impression that they never
speak such. I have an exceedingly cordial feeling towards the
common people of the Continent, so far as I have seen them. I
have longed to speak with them and let them know how I go out
to them in all the joys and sorrows of their lot. A hundred kind-
nesses they have done me as I passed along. I have not, in a
single instance, met a rebuff where I have sought their aid to find
my way, or to gain information as to a hotel or rail-train, or any-
thing else, and generally they have volunteered more than I sought,
being pleased, evidently, to study out my pantomime, and further
the wishes of such a poor jabbering thing. In a few instances I
have met stolidity, which had, at first, the appearance of unwilling-
ness, but that is all.

THE CATHEDRAL.

No American ever saw in his own country such a cathedral as
there is in Antwerp. To begin with, it is so old that the elements
have actually gnawed into the stone of it, eating away the sharp
edges, roughing the face, and crumbling the delicate stone fret-work
woven about the spire, in such a manner that it needs the strength
of the iron rods, which were run through it when the edifice was
built. And it contains pictures which have won the praise of
generations, and would scarcely be exchanged for the wealth of
40

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kingdoms. It stands in the form of a cross, a form to which all
there is in us responds. We are feeling all the while that it was a
touching thing in the old builders to pile up their structures in that
shape, doing thus what they could to make, what was at first a
shame, the world's glory and joy. One sees more of that symbol
in these lands than he does at home, and I do not deny that I am
pleased to see it, although it might be expected of me by some,
perhaps, that I should show my Protestantism by disrelishing such
a various and universal display of crosses and crucifixes. Some of
the crucifixes which one sees perpetually, in churches and by the
road-side, in Catholic countries, are rather tedious to the eye of
mere art ; and, in addition to that, no doubt a brilliant argument
can be made on the " excessive and superstitious exaltation of this
and other symbols ; " but 1 find myself ignominiously declining the
argument, and overlooking the poor art very much, and forgetting
everything except this : that, above all differences of creed and
nationality, and in spite of all ignorances, perversions and super-
stitions, the great, solemn, melting fact of Christ's death for the
world, is lifted up as by all human hands on spires, highways, and
mountain heights, in art, worship and song, being thus celebrated
and magnified and kept resounding, so that he who is ignorant of it
must be willfully ignorant, and he who is ruined forever must be
ruined in defiance of such a din of testimony and warning as is
sufficient to fill the whole arch of heaven.

The Antwerp Cathedral is a Latin cross, three hundred and
ninety feet one way, and two hundred and fifty feet the other. The
spire is four hundred and four feet high and you ascend it by six
hundred and sixteen steps, and in it hang eighty-three bells ; and
those bells you can hear every fifteen minutes all day and all night ;
when the half hours are completed, you can hear a good deal of
them, and when the whole hours are completed you have a pro-
longed concert of them ; and at certain times, on certain days, a
musician sits at a key-board and plays on them at greater length
yet, so that that old tower is one of the most voiceful and indefati-
gable melodists the world ever knew ; — and when I call it a
melodist, I mean it, for those eighty-three bells, while they are
sonorous, are subdued and soft, as though the centuries had mel-
lowed them ; and when I leaned from my window in the night, and
traced the spire up till it was lost to my eye among the stars, and
listened to those chimes up there in the stillness and the vastness, I

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thought nothing could be finer, more soothing, more elevating ;
that they were as though the stars themselves were singing in their
courses and their gentle voices were floating down upon the world.
And I thought, too, that if the Antwerp people wrangled and
jangled and lived meanly right under those eternal, sweet-toned
bells, they ought to be given over by both Catholics and Protest-
ants, and left to go to their own place post-haste. Still I noticed
next day that even I, myself, had subsided to the same old
dog- trot as before, and did not half live up to the rhythm
of the bells ; though I'm thinking that perhaps some day, after
all, I may show that I secretly caught something of their con-
cord— for how can it be, pray, that these things should not fashion
us just a little ?

RUBENS AND VAN DYCK.

Of the paintings in Antwerp, and there are a goodly number
of them there, those which most drew my attention were by Rubens
and his distinguished scholar, Anthony Van Dyck. These artists
both grappled with sacred subjects of the highest cast, and my brief
study of their works, whatever else it has failed to do, has not failed
to raise in me an insatiable desire to return to them some day again
before I die. It is curious how the great monarchs among men
establish their ascendency over us, the moment we enter their
presence and come within the sweep of their magnetism. Here
now are these painters. I had hardly saluted them before I began
to be grateful to them, and now, should any one in any way wrong
them, slandering their name, lying about their pictures, underrating
their artistic aims, striving in any manner to qualify their good
standing with the next ages, I should feel as though personally
attacked ; and if fire or the ravages of war or anything else should
destroy or dim certain works of theirs which I have been privileged
to see, I should mourn as under a personal bereavement. A real
great man is a treasure, and the benefaction even of his silent
presence among us is more unto our hearts than all the gold of the
world.

ROTTERDAM.
As we entered our hotel in Rotterdam, there, nearly in front
of it, a great East Indiaman was lying (for the city is only eighteen
miles from the sea, and the largest vessels come up to it), and on

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her decks were swarms of soldiers, for Rotterdam has great inter-
course with India, and on the deck were swarms of their friends
and kinsfolk, men, women and children, bidding them good-bye ;
and, though I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my
own eyes, those mere Rotterdamers were crying just as you and I
and lots of old ironsides did in 1861, when our men used to go off
to the war ; and I loitered a minute to see whether they did it pre-
cisely like other folks — and they did. The women put their aprons
to their eyes, the men looked into the air in a brave way and kept
winking, and the little children hung on to skirts all about, and
looked up and wondered, and in lack of perfect knowledge of India
cried because the rest did. I was on the brink of crying, too ; but
as I did not understand the language, and as they seemed to have
help enough, I hurried into the hotel just in time to save myself. I
had a weak little feeling in a spot in me for some time, but time
and dinner gradually brought me around.

THE HAGUE.

We saw, in a public square, a bronze statue of William I, Prince
of Orange, with his dog at his side — and that I liked, for the dog
saved him from assassination once and pined himself to death after
he was, at a later day, actually assassinated. The story is told on a
monument raised in another place to the memory of William, and
there, too, the dog is to be seen lying at the feet of his master.
Where the dog is now I do not know — any more than I know
where William is — together, though, somewhere, very likely ; I hope
so. The tidings have come to me recently that a dog which I
bought some ten years ago, and whose manner of life and daily
conversation from that day to this has been matter of unceasing
remark and admiration in the family, has succumbed to mortality,
and gone under the sod in the back yard, where a rose bush has
been planted at his head and another at his feet, that the faithful
old soul may blossom in the dust, and have over him whensoever
the springs come the customary types of a resurrection. And so I
am tender on the whole subject of dogs (good ones), and would
confess, if I dared, that when old Jack's decease reached me, and I
sat down in my room at nightfall and thought it all over, and
remembered that I should never see him again when I went home,

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on Thanksgiving days and Christmas days, and should not have him
to leap upon me, on my return after weeks and months of absence,
and should never have his benignant old countenance look up
into mine any more, nor his joyful bark, nor his joyful great tail,
nor the great example of his virtues, I moistened my two eyes
without half trying, and wanted to go home. I had rather be a
good dog than a bad man, and run the risk of it. Jack will never
have a fine bronze statue in the public square, because I never
shall, but that is the only reason. When I order mine I'll order
his, and we will go down to posterity together — immortal dog,
immortal man.

THE CITY OF AMSTERDAM.

ITS PICTURES.

There is a permanent gallery of them there, and a gallery
which seemed to be partly permanent and partly annual. The
paintings are mostly Dutch, by Rembrandt, Paul Potter, Cuyp,
Ruysdael, Wouvermans, Van der Heist, Gerard Dow, Teniers, Van
Dyck, and others. I run over some of the names, as knowing that
some of your readers will recognize them as old friends. I met
Rembrandt there again with more than common satisfaction, having
learned, even in England, to love his vigor and his rich and swarthy
coloring. I found, too, that Ruysdael and Wouvermans have painted
what I can very much enjoy — yes, and others besides — the list of
them is getting longer than I thought it would. Great men some-
times select subjects on which it is impossible for them to do their
grandest, and sometimes a more common man will choose a theme
so worthy, and will work it up with such sincerity and such a lofty
intention, that you fellowship him and love him in spite of every-
thing. A painting that has not much of an idea in it is an irre-
deemably empty thing, I do not care whose it is. Mere technical
skill — skill in composition, power as a colorist, and all that, are not
enough. They need to be put out into ranges of effort that are
large and noble, before they can take much hold on men, and
entitle themselves to the world's praise.

By the way, how did the ancients live without landscapes in
their painting? Isn't it a privilege to have been born since land-
scape painting was ? I could kiss the feet of some men whose

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representations of natural scenes I have looked at — Turner, for
example. I was not in the room in the National Gallery, London,
where his pictures are assembled, half so long as I wished and
needed to be, and I can understand how many of his works should
receive no notice from the multitudes who drift by them ; but I saw
enough of him to assure me forever that, when God sent him into
the world, he meant to have mankind enriched by interpretations,
most masterly and immortal, of the manifold great creation about
us. I should be happy to trade off all that I ever did or ever shall do
for single ones of his landscapes. It is marvelous how artists can,
with such sheer daubs and chaoses of color (as they seem at first),
contrive to reveal so much of what a person, such a novice as I,
would call positively unreportable in any way.

GERMANY.

ON THE RHINE.

Whoever writes of the Rhine should do it with a pen dipped in
light, while I can command nothing better than ink, but with what
I have, I will splutter along and do the best I can. I should like
to shoulder my knapsack, and spend a month or two in leisurely
walking, and day-long dreaming on that beautiful river, in the right
season of the year ; sitting down on every stone I came to, trudging
up every valley, climbing every castled height, reading all the
Rhine legends, stories and poems that were ever written, steeping
myself in the delicious historical atmosphere of the river, re-peopling
the many castles of it, visiting the unparalleled, romantic maidens
that used to live in them, as thick as morning-glories around a cot-
tage door, tilting with the knights and having duels with them over
the maidens, reproducing the thousand and one marvels of that
picturesque old time ; the sounds in the air, the apparitions, the
river nymphs, and forest nymphs, and I know not what else, till at
last the tired had all gone out of me and I cared no more for the
nineteenth century and its stir and din, than a man asleep in his
bed, lapped in gorgeous dreams, does for the wind that roars and
flurries and kicks up a dust outside of his locked window. Pretty
tired people sometimes long for what they call the rest of the grave,
but that is going into it a little too deep ; the wide-awake semi-.

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languor, the retrospect and reverie and snake-like lying on a sunny
rock, of a Rhine sojourn, as set forth above, would be nearer to my
mind, I think. I would have though, a very congenial friend or two
alongside if I could, or perhaps about forty rods behind, for fear
that they might speak to me or I to them at the wrong moment
some time, and break up some golden dream of theirs or mine. I
fear, that if I had such a chance as that, I should never be seen in
Hartford any more ; but that the last you would hear of me would be
to the effect that an old man with long white hair and dreamy loiter-
ing step, whose history nobody knew, but who for some two hundred
years had been seen slowly journeying to and fro, up and down, in
the valley of the Rhine, familiarly known by all the children in all
the cottages along for generations, and not unloved for his peaceful
and meditative air and slow-spoken and low-spoken kindliness (for
I think my natural acidity could be sweetened even to that if only I
could get Rhine enough into it) had suddenly disappeared from his
haunts and customary rounds, and was. popularly believed to have
been taken up into heaven, long gray hair, staff and all. I am in
hopes that that is about the way things will go in the coming golden
age ; and that men instead of fretting themselves to death and drop-
ping down at about forty years or so, will stay and stay and stay,
growing riper and riper and more and more benignant, until in some
little flurry of wind some day, like that which shakes down the per-
fect apple in the still autumnal sunlight, they will be shaken off into
the Eternal without a twist or a bruise or a shudder.

COBLENZ.

There is a palace of the King of Prussia at Coblenz, and a
pleasant little room in it has been assigned to the English Church
for purposes of worship. So I dropped in there at the morning and
the evening service. I found a full and exceeding respectable
assembly of English people, and I much liked the sort of God-save-
the-Queen heartiness with which they walked into the business of
the occasion. It is very stupid in me to see things so, I know, but
the English in these chapels on the Continent, when carrying through
their services, seem to me to be doing it not alone on the spur of
reverence for the Divine, but considerably out of respect for British
institutions, just as they fight for the flag. They chant " Glory be
to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost," with their

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fists doubled up and their eyes over their shoulders to see if any-
body dares deny it. And of course nobody dares, with such big-
bodied, resolute-looking people eyeing straight at him. I wouldn't
do it for the world. I should expect a British regiment to be sent
after me in ten minutes. No doubt the fact that these worshiping
people feel themselves in a foreign land, where another language
and other institutions and ofttimes another religion are in the
ascendency, and the miserable foreigners outnumber them millions
to one, rouses them into a more decisive individuality and self-
assertion, and brings out the British in them as long as stag's horns.
Well, let it stick out, I say. I look upon downright conceit for
one's own country, and a robust assertion of her merits in the face
of all creation, much as I do upon a father's pride of his boy, or a
boy's idea that his father is the tip-top of the lower creation. I used
to think my father had more money than all the millionaires and all
the banks in the country, and that he could whip all men and devils
combined. And that made me feel safe. God in his great mercy,
grants us these fine delusions. And to be overweighted thus at
spots in our constitution, serves a thousand royal uses, just as an
arrow needs to be leaded at the head if it is going to hit the mark.

FRANKFORT TO HEIDELBERG.

From Frankfort to beautiful Heidelberg, a journey of some
three hours by rail, you pass through a perfectly level and perfectly
cultivated country, with the dim mountains of France on the far
right, and, for a good part of the way, with the Odenwald and its
mountains on the near left. Those mountains on the left are richly
wooded and castle-crowned, with numerous quiet villages along the
green slopes at their base, and I thought as I continually watched
them that nothing could be more satisfactory to a tranquil-minded
man, who loves Nature in her scenes of peace, than to travel on
horseback from village to village, and from nook to nook, along that
mountain road, famous for its beauty, — stopping with the villagers,
climbing to a castle occasionally, drinking at the streams, stretching
out on ihe sunny grass now and then, and lazing along just as though
life had no busy duties and never came to an end. Ye gods ! what
a fair world this would be, if we were only decent, and never sick,
and never hurried.

HEIDELBERG UNIVERSITY.

There is a very ancient university in Heidelberg, with some
seven hundred students, though it makes no show of buildings ;

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neither did the students make any show when I was there, it being
the time of vacation ; yet it must have been in good part out of
respect to the American students there, I should think, that the
clergyman in the English chapel, whose Sabbath service I attended,
when he came to the prayer for the Queen of England and the
Prince and Princess of Wales, and had added a petition for the
Grand Duke of Baden, went on to pray also for " His Excellency,
the President of the United States." Certain Americans with me
have claimed that whenever in the English service we have heard
the President of the United States prayed for, (and we have heard
it now in two or three places on the Continent) , the English people
have not put in the amens very resonantly ; but upon my honor I
believe they are wrong. At Heidelberg I was too busy choking back
a little cry to see who said Amen. It suddenly thickens up my
throat like a bad cold to hear my country prayed for away off in
these lands — particularly when I am not expecting it — and to hear
it, too, from the staid and order-loving church of England, which
doesn't admit any new thing into her fixed and venerated service on
anything less authentic than an order straight from the throne of
God. One sees what it amounts to to have a native land, when
once he passes out of it. In my enthusiasm for these old countries
I had begun to question whether my attachment to our raw young
America might not be weakened somewhat ; but when that prayer
came and I began to bubble up, I knew better.

SWITZERLAND.

What shall I say to you, touching the view from Rigi's very top ?
Had I better say anything? I scarcely know. Do you ask me
whether my expectations were met ? O yes ! they were, and in one
respect decidedly more than met. I refer to the mountains of snow
to be seen off in several directions. My friend, those mountains do
not seem to be of the earth. They taper along up into the sky, and
they take your mind along up with them, until, when sky and white
peak meet, you feel that between the glory of one and the glory of
the other there is absolutely no dissimilitude ; the mountain splendor
merges into the firmamental splendor without the least break or jar ;
it is a terrestrial song and a song celestial blending perfectly, the

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terrestrial refining as it mounts until all earthly harshness is purged
away, and it flows into the current of the celestial, clear, musical and
divine, making with it one indistinguishable wave forever. I had
never been told of this, or if I had been I had forgotten it, and when
I looked and saw it all with my own eyes, between gratitude that I
had had that privilege before I die and such a transcendent sense of
the God of heaven and earth as I never knew, and delight that the
earthly may sublimate into the ethereal in that marvelous and per-
fect manner, and a deep undertone of suggestion and lofty assurance
that what white mountains may do, men can, and that, doubtless,
everywhere in individual instances the human is continually ascend-
ing into the divine, and that eventually all mankind will have reached
that same whiteness and height and ineffable splendor ; putting all
these and other things together, I say, I found I could do nothing
but stand and quietly weep in a delight which would not be con-
tained. I was not unwilling to die right where I stood. I thought
I wanted to be off —for death did not then occur to me as a dark
crisis and struggle, not at all, but only as a simple natural ascension
under the lift of God's gracious laws into the region where we
belong.

ALPNACHT.

At Alpnacht we spent a Sabbath, and it was a Sabbath so retired
and so full of the peace of nature to us, that I would like to cele-
brate it here in a word or two. Alpnacht is right at the foot of
Pilatus, and between the foot of the mountain and the lake there is
just room enough for the road to run, and the village of a dozen
houses to string along that one street. The sun shone that Sabbath,
and we walked abroad in it a considerable part of the day, a mile or
two each way along the Lake road. Close by the hotel there was a
Catholic Chapel with a stone floor, and just the size of a small-sized
brown school-house at a country cross-road in Connecticut ; and at
three o'clock in the afternoon the priests from the great church over
a mile away were to perform service. So in the morning we did
nothing but worship under the sky. We sauntered along, looking
up the sides of Pilatus where there were green pasture lands and
orchards, and unpainted cottages, and any amount of tranquillity
and household happiness, on and up high into the air. We knew
about that tranquillity and household happiness, by the plain impossi-
bility that such a rural scene as that, so still and bright and full of

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half holy repose, should have anything else in it. It was the perfec-
tion of simple country happiness, it seemed to me. We picked up
apples. We sat on logs by the wayside. We went through the
silent churchyard, where the dead were — which was the first hint we
had had that they ever die in these sweet valleys. We met boys and
girls, fresh-faced, human-faced creatures, just such as grow in Amer-
ica, who looked up at us, the only strangers in that region, in peace-
ful wonder, taking off their hats as they passed, even as their fathers
did.

We listened to the innumerable cow-bells — and a cow-bell in
this country is'nt a dull-sounding piece of nothing but sheet-iron
such as we afflict cows with at home ; but it is a first-class rever-
berator made of genuine bell-metal, and the tinkle of it is'nt a
tinkle — no, it's a ring, a melodious ring, a ring that pleases the
imagination and adds a touch of sentiment to the hills ; and a big
one, too, for the bells themselves are big, and sufficient often for the
belfry of a small school-house. I noticed this all through Switzer-
land. And it is reasonable, too, for the cows in Switzerland belong
to the upper classes and live in the same houses with the people a
good deal, and are affectionately watched whenever they go out to
grass, and are not left to shift for themselves a minute ; because, you
see, if anything happens to a man's cows, where is the support of the
family to come from ? All along these valleys and on these moun-
tain uplands and slopes, grass is the great thing, and that grass must
be made to keep the people alive somehow, and the cow is that
somehow. (She and the goats.) Dear old creature ! She makes
butter and milk, and skim-milk, and all kinds of milk and cheese ;
and in winter she lies in the bosom of the family and keeps them from
being cold and lonesome ; and all times in the year she draws carts
with a meekness that is equal to a church in each place for moral
influence ; and she is the universal fertilizer so that the grass need
not run out ; and at last she gives her body to be eaten and her hide
to make boots, and her memory for a poem and tradition forever.
In the early spring the cows are driven in companies under cow-
herds up to the lower pastures on the mountains, and as the season
advances they go higher and higher, till in the full greenness of
summer they rest in the topmost pastures, making milk, butter and
cheese all the way you see — and then in the fall they are driven
gradually back into the warm valleys again ; and we have met droves
of them on their way home for the winter, fat and milky and balmy-

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mouthed, with the cowherds behind and the noise of the bells
everywhere.

I always wanted to put my arms about the necks of the whole
crowd. Yes, they kept that Sabbath with us at Alpnacht.

ON THE ROAD TO INTERLAKEN.

In this village, too, there was a great Catholic church, and in
that church the remains of St. Nikolaus (so called) who lived and
died in that valley hundreds of years ago, and was of such influence
on account of his great intelligence and wisdom and integrity and
piety, that the name of him is a gracious presence yet through the
whole region, and his pictured face is scattered through the homes
and huts of the people far and near, like the face of the Virgin. He
was not an ecclesiastic, but a simple farmer, full of character, retired,
unambitious and rustic, but a natural king nevertheless, whom men
high in state used to visit for his counsel, and whose appearance in
any anxious state deliberation was the signal of peace and light. As
I walked about the church and read of him, and then looked off
upon the hills around which his memory lingers, I concluded that
that kind of living is about the ideal thing ; that if I only had a
valley and a good start I'd try it myself; that valleys remote from
the thronged world, where nothing more stimulating than a stage-
coach ever goes through, where each day is like the one that went
before it and all days are Sabbath-like for stillness, where life is not
tense and complex and fictitious, but leisurely, simple and natural,
where neighbors are so far apart that they do not jostle, and one
can drink out of his own brook, and turn his children out to grass,
and drop down and say his prayers anywhere without being over-
heard ; that such places must be, on the whole, unusually favorable
to a serene and ripening saintship, and an honest death, and a grave
where the country-people shall gather and tell their children about
you and call you good Brother Nikolaus, a specimen of your bones
meanwhile being exhibited in the one village church.

AN ALPINE HORN.

At Lauterbrunnen I for the first time heard an Alpine horn.
And tried to blow it too, and was as red in the face as though I had
swallowed a horn or two. The horn which I saw there was seven or
eight feet long, curved at the large end, made of wood bound round
with thongs, I should say, and quite too heavy to be held out at

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arm's length, especially when one wants his entire and unabridged
muscle and wind for the blowing business. You will ask me whether
anything really musical could come out of that wooden hole by ever
so much blowing? Yes, there could. The double echo of that horn
rolling up the great mountain-side toward the Jungfrau as regularly
as that fellow swelled and tooted, is among my most exquisite rec-
ollections of the Alps. When the sound emerged from the flaring
end of the concern it was bright, wild, lightsome, full of the air and
full of the hills, a delicious bit for the imagination ; but when, after a
little interval, the mountains caught it and dandled it to and fro from
height to height as in gentle play, I noticed, and noticed breathlessly,
that it was gradually refined and softened, each echo being mel-
lower and more musical than the preceding one, until when it died
away at its loftiest, it had discharged itself of every stain of the
earthly, and had risen into the pure spiritual faint and far ; so that
if God's angels bent low and caught it, and carried it up and made
it to be forevermore one of their own melodies, I do not a bit
wonder at it, for I doubt whether the best of them could beat it in
the best flight he ever made. I recollect writing to you of the
ascent of the earthly into the heavenly in the case of those so lofty
snow-mountains which I saw from the top of Rigi ; and now here
was another analogous instance, this being an appeal to the ear, and
that to the eye. And the impression of that echo spiritualized away
into heaven's blue, and lost, was not in the least diminished when
my eye, starting from the point where my echo sunk away into
silence, ranged back and up a little, and there caught the radiance
and glitter of Jungfrau and Silberhorn.

Silberhorn is twelve thousand feet high, running up into a
conical peak, smooth, white, holy ; there being absolutely nothing
there but the solemn, eternal snow, and the effulgence of the sun ;
no flying dust, no footprints, no stain of thaw, no stain of mortal
breath ; nothing, I say, but the awful whiteness and the silence ;
and it occurred to me that if an arch-angel robed in heaven's
purest white and invested by all conceivable haloes and outshining
glories, should descend through that over-bending sky and stand on
that peak, he and his surroundings would make one congruous and
perfectly harmonious vision. He would befit the place and the
place would befit him ; and the idea of any mere man ever standing
up there with the soil of our earthly paths on his feet and the stain
of our low earthly habits on his soul seemed a sacrilege and a thing

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not to be suffered. Nothing in Switzerland has impressed me more
than the indescribable whiteness and loneliness and the fairly celes-
tial glory of these summits where the cold is unbroken forever and
the dry white snow always shines, and the paths and works of man
can never reach, and the great sky, catching the solitariness and
splendor of the mountain, bends over all with a corresponding
splendor. The thing is full of the moral sublime, and must not be
classified among simple earthly and material visions.

THE BLACK AND WHITE LUTSCHINE VALLEYS.

Of the people along those two deep, narrow, unsunny valleys
that we wound through that day, the less said the better. I mean
to write you a little more at length than I can at the close of a letter,
concerning the common people in Switzerland, as I have seen
them. I should not want to live along the Black or White Luts-
chine. Nature is too much for the people there. The only really
satisfying, human thing that we saw on those roads was an occa-
sional child. A boy attended our carriage for miles up the Grin-
dehvald road, with a block in his hand to put behind our wheels
when the horses rested, in hopes that this volunteer service would
provoke us to throw him a little money. Well, it did, and if he had
put the block in front of the wheels instead of behind, we should
have done it all the same ; because he had, perhaps, the sweetest
boy face that we met in all our journeyings. He said nothing to
us, and was so retired as scarcely to answer our questions, but his
uplook into the carriage now and then, as he trudged alongside, was
sufficient, and won us all. How he came there I do not know. I
did not see any one fit or able to be the father of him, or the mother
either. It is amazing how God can keep the world full of such
dear prevailing things as all children are apt to be when young
enough, while the men and the women, the reputed fathers and
mothers of them, are such comparatively pitiable specimens (so
many of them). That Black Lutschine boy flowered out of the
cleft of some rock up there, I verily believe. I wish I had him all
washed up and out at play in our goodly Hartford, so that he
shouldn't degenerate into an Alp peasant, with a basket larger than
himself strapped on to his bent back, and thick wooden shoes on his
feet, and goitre on his neck about the size of a watermelon, and a
weary, old, brown face, and a drag in his steps, and a wooden old

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wife to help him dig his few potatoes and lay them in. I wonder
why these human buds all about the world are permitted to try to
unfold in our inclement airs, and are not rather caught straight up
to where they came from and where they belong. It would be sore
and lonesome wayfaring for us old grizzlies if they were taken, but it
would be giving them a better chance, one thinks ; moreover, it
would stop there being grizzlies anymore. All of which I submit in
great humility, not knowing how to manage even my own little
affairs very well, much less the affairs of the populous creation, but
desiring to fling out a few things now and then, notwithstanding, on
the principle in part, that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

THE GEMMI PASS MULE.

I rode a mule, and my friend rode a horse, the mule being the
softest and given to me because my life was of importance, while
his, as only a layman's life, was comparatively of no consequence at
all. Still I should have rather played layman and taken the horse.
A mule isn't a very finely organized beast. He never takes a hint
until you bring it home to him with something sharp. He has a
mind of his own and goes pretty much where he pleases. He
generally walks nearest the precipice, so that if you fall off you may
make a sure thing of it. He feels you pull the bridle and goes
right along all the same. He turns around and stops every now
and then to get the view back of him — at least mine did that
morning. He carries his head low and professes to be meek when
he isn't. He doesn't know half so much as a person ought, to jus-
tify him in acting on his own responsibility as much as he does.
In fact, to speak plainly, he comes within one of being an ass. He
may be a Christian — I do not profess to be able to look into the
heart — but if he is, I prefer to ride a sinner.

A WALK BY THE RHONE.

And now I submit a consideration or two as to that walk
along the Rhone, and what I saw and what I felt and did not
feel. No doubt you think it was obstinate in me to forsake
all things and cleave unto Zermatt in this manner, but you are
mistaken. I did it as a girl forsakes her father and mother and
cleaves unto her lover, by an inspired instinct ; and though, like
her, I shed a few natural tears, perhaps, as I saw that carriage drive
off with that misguided fellow-mortal in it, yet, like her again, my

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heart sung a love song within me, and I cooed along towards
Zermatt in the most affectionate and satisfied manner. I count
that solitary walk of twelve miles to Visp that day among
my most rememberable bits of travel. And the state of the case
was this :

First, I knew that at Zermatt, a day's journey from Visp,
Nature has tumbled herself up in a way to astound everybody who
goes there ; and an intelligent English friend in New York had told
me all about it before I started from home, and had put into me so
much of his own enthusiasm on the subject that my motto ever
since had been : "See Zermatt or die."

Secondly, the instant I was alone (it was the first time since I
came to the Continent) I began to be twice as thoughtful as before,
and was astonished to find what excellent company I could be unto
myself. I am afraid it would not last long, but for twelve miles it
was rich. I walked into the affections of the mountains and they
into mine, just as two horses put their heads together at lazy mid-
day in the pasture and stand motionless and sweetly confidential,
and, without speaking a word, take the whole sense of each other.
I fellowshiped the people along the road in a very interior way,
and they knew what it all meant and sidled up to me. Little boys
spoke to me. Dogs jumped upon me. The trees and I hob-nobbed.
The voices of the waterfalls had a social sound. The sun soaked
into me as though he meant it, and was willing to rob the landscape
to supply me. The dust settled on my shoes still and friend-like,
and not a bit as though it meant to make me dirty. A beggar sat
by the roadside and did not look up as I passed, knowing by the
very sound of my footsteps that I was genial and he needn't be
scared. A woman was stretched out whole length under a tree,
with splendid large feet and blue woolen stockings heavy enough
for working-day trousers ; and although in excess of prudence, as is
becoming in a woman, she raised her head as she heard the sound
of some one approaching, yet the moment she set eyes on me she
dropped back again and was as content as though I had been her
father. In fact I was her father. I was the father of the whole
Rhone valley that day, and I wouldn't have hurt a hair of its head
for anything. And the whole valley knew it, and gathered up about
me like the creatures about Orpheus when he played. And, you
see, if I had not been alone all this would not have been. I
should have just been talking to that fellow in the carriage all the

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way, and this other company would have held off, seeing me pre-
occupied.

Thirdly, the scenes and sights of the valley were delightful, as
I have hinted already. The sky had not a cloud. The wind was
asleep. The golden haze filled the air. The fields on either side
were full of people getting in their fall crops — dear old crops,
familiar to my eyes from childhood, the self-same ones, as sure as
you live. And the horses and cows, unhitched from the lumber-
box-wagons, were standing lopped down and sleepy under the
trees to which they were hitched, till it should come time to go
home. The women were digging and the like, and the men were
digging and the like, and the children were quietly lounging. The
mountains on my right were close by and lofty, and I saw flocks of
goats along their rough sides, sometimes a hundred at once, it
seemed to me, climbing over the bowlders, skipping along the nar-
row ledges, and nibbling the meagre grass, here a spire and there a
spire. The mountains on my left were a little farther off, with a
splendid frontage to the south, broad and high, and on those great
slopes, up to the very top, there were grape-vines, brown and beau-
tiful and rich, suggestive of a thousand vintages and the good cheer
of a thousand years. (I composed a fine ode to Bacchus as I
passed along.) I saw, too, a Catholic chapel about the size of a
narrow engine-house, curiously meagre, and pasted and wafered to
the side of the precipice, high up. I found that it was a point of
pilgrimage, approached by twelve stations, so called, at each of
which stations, were pictured representations of successive stages in
the Passion of our Lord, before which in succession, devout pil-
grims might bow on their way up, and worship and remember.
And the whole thing added a veritable sanctity to the region ; and
though I did not go up, yet my thoughts went up, and off there in
the middle of the road I faced about, and stood and thought the
matter over, and then and there joined with the whole redeemed
earth in confessing the Saviour of all, saying in my heart, in those
so dear words of the English Church service, which I have wept
over many a time as the worshipful congregations have uttered
them : " When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou
didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers." But I could
not stay, and trudged on. I went through several sleepy villages,
which were rather presentable. I talked by signs with a little boy,
who wanted to carry my knapsack for me. I saw a man and a
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woman hitched together to a loaded cart, which they were dragging
along the road ; and I stopped the team and asked it how far it
was to Visp, and they told me by counting it off on their fingers,
indicating the halves by showing half a finger ; and if that team
were not genuinely glad to assist me, then their looks belied them.
You can't get all the humanity out of human nature, if you do hitch
it to a cart and pretend it's a donkey. I saw grand snow-mountains
all the while, especially ahead of me, where the valley seemed to
close up and end ; but the valley did not end there at all, and the
mountain, after my twelve miles of travel, was just as far off and
iust as near "as when I first began," like eternity in the old Metho-
dist hymn — which is glorious in eternity, but discouraging in moun-
tains.

FROM VISP TO ZERMATT.

THE SCENERY.

Of the noble scenery of the valley, it is impossible to say too
much. Close about you there are such awful uplifts as these :
Balferin, twelve thousand three hundred feet high; the Dom,
fourteen thousand feet ; Mischabel, fifteen thousand feet ; Matter-
horn, fifteen thousand feet; Little Matterhorn, twelve thousand
feet; Monte Rosa, fifteen thousand two hundred feet; Gorner
Grat, ten thousand feet ; Weisshorn, fourteen thousand feet ; besides
several more, between one and two miles in the air. Remember
these are not far away from you, but you travel in their very
shadow, you see their tops, you feel their cold breath, you walk
softly in the almost insufferable presence of their sombre majesty.
And when I say almost insufferable presence, I speak from the
stand-point of my own feelings about them and leave other people
to speak from the stand-point of theirs. I was overawed by them.
There was something so akin to the terrible about them that I was
unhappy, and felt as though a weight was taken from me when I
returned into the broad valley and more moderate scenery of the
Rhone. This impression of terror was deepened by my sight of
glaciers and my sense of the almighty forces perpetually at work in
those upper solitudes. I looked up the Weisshorn glacier on my way
to Zermatt, and as the clouds then stood, it seemed to come down
literally out of the sky. I saw a long, lateral ridge of ice fairly in

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the blue sky overhead, turreted and pinnacled, and crevassed and
cold, a terrific rampart, on which and in the midst of whose magni-
tudes and irresistible forces, a man would be less than nothing. It
made me feel small, and smaller and smaller ; and as I remembered
the God in whose hand these infinites are only toys, who lifts Mat-
terhorn as though it were but the small dust in the balance, who
rolls his earthquakes under these heights and ranges, and rocks
them as the wind rocks wild flowers ; who, in fact, bears up ten
thousand globes of seas and lands, and supports them from eternity
to eternity without a tremble or semblance of weariness, I felt
afraid and wanted to get where I could be reminded of his love and
gentleness once more, and could come out into the sunshine of the
idea that this amazing and frightful omnipotence is under a pledge
of grace to every living creature, even to every bloom of the field,
and every wandering bird.

ZERMATT.

A HOSPITABLE PRIEST.

Arriving at Zermatt just at nightfall, I found the two hotels
closed and nailed up for the season, and the rest of Zermatt nothing
but log-huts and the like, where cows hold the parlors and spare
rooms, and a man hangs up where he can. It was Saturday night,
too, and my German kindly informed me (for German is the
language of that region) that no one in the place spoke English ;
and I knew to a certainty that I did not speak German. So much
for traveling in the Alps in October. However, under a sudden
inspiration, I happened to think of the Catholic priest, and remem-
bering that that class do not ordinarily have a very numerous wife
and family, so that their houses are not very overrunning, and
remembering with what care they hunt a soul among the mountains,
I considered it not unlikely that the Zermatt father would take me
in for a single night. So I said "Priest" to my German, and he
led the way to the rectory and went in and told my story, I follow-
ing and standing in mute appeal while he did it. Whether it was
his German or my face, or a special providence, I do not certainly
know j but the round-faced, good father motioned to me with
smiles that he would accept me, and I then motioned with smiles

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that I would accept him. So I sat down, and after a considerable
period of silence, his silence being conducted in German and mine in
English, I took from my pocket three little lexicons (German, French
and English) which I always carry with me in these foreign coun-
tries, not to speak from, but in hopes that if I am shot at, the bullet
will lodge in them. And these lexicons I tumbled down before him
in hopes that he would find something in them that he could say.
After a few minutes' search, he looked hard at me and said :
"Coffee?" I shook my head for "No." In the course of five
minutes more of search, he faced me again and said : "Eggs?" I
said "No," and then proceeded to shake my head steadily for the
next three minutes, which he soon understood to signify that I did
not want anything at all. So that was settled. Pretty soon, and
after a little skirmishing, I pointed to myself and said: "Priest."
He evidently thought I lied. Then I pointed to myself and said :
"American priest," but he looked me over and didn't find the
proper ear-marks of any sort of priest, and was not a bit moved by
what I had said. He knew I was an impostor. His face showed
that that was his opinion of me. It was unfortunate that I had used
the word priest, perhaps. At last I raised my voice, pointed to
myself the third time, and said, "Protestant priest," and instantly
he sprang to his feet and took my hand, and shook it in a prolonged
and cordial manner. We had now reached open sailing, so I took
out my passport, written in French, which he could understand,
and gave it to him, and thus he got my name and exact place of
residence, and a general assurance that I amounted to something.
From that we went on the whole evening, talking through the lexi-
cons, and gesturing and laughing when we failed altogether to
understand each other ; his housekeeper, a powerful woman, paus-
ing occasionally in the middle of the floor as she passed through, to
witness the show. At last I started for bed, assuring him by point-
ing to the figure VI on my watch that I should leave for St. Nikolaus
at that hour in the morning, and saying to him that he would be in
bed, by pointing to his bed standing there in the room and laying
down my head in my hand and shutting my eyes. And as I
thought I might not see him in the morning, I filled my hand with
coin and extended it to him open, that he might take what he liked.
He hesitated and took a single piece. But I still held it out and
he took one more. And then I shut it, thinking the fun had gone
far enough — just far enough. I slept well enough in his little house,

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all browned by the weather, with brown boards inside, and great
stones on the roof, and the fairest of white curtains to keep Matter-
horn and the rest of them from looking right into my face while I
was asleep ; and in the early morning, after giving him my card and
taking his, I put out into the cold and windy valley, he following
me to the gate with his prayer-book in his hand (as his little church
in the yard was already calling him and his villagers to early
prayer), and bidding me adieu several times over; I liking him,
and he, I hope, liking me ; I having testified of my confidence in
him by appealing to him in my necessity, and he having signified
his confidence in me by opening to me his doors ; he thinking me
a poor heretic, I suppose, and I thinking him one, though I thought
he was a good-looking one, and did not care a brass farthing, in
fact, whether he was a heretic or not, just at the moment when I
felt the pressure of his kindly hand in farewell, and took a final look
at the chimney of his old house as I went over the hill. I'm afraid
the fellow will get into heaven in spite of his Catholicism ; and
Zermatt being fifty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea, he
is about half way there now. The other half will be the tug for
him, but he'll make it, I'm inclined to think.

Extract from a Letter to the Fourth Church, Hartford,
December 6, 1868.

Those of you who know me best will be able to surmise, with-
out a word from me, with what greediness I have received all things
in these strange foreign lands — their arts, their usages, their natural
scenery, and all the rest. Were I to write a volume, I could not tell
you all. I will take time only to say, that I have greatly enjoyed the
religious services of different kinds which I have been permitted to
attend. As sure as you live, my beloved friends, the very Gospel
which I tried so hard to get before you during the months before I
came away, the doctrine of Christ crucified for lost men, I mean, is
preached for substance in all these lands, by ten thousand voices.
I knew it before, to be sure ; but now I have heard it and know it
twice as well as before, and I cannot tell you how much I have been
moved by it.

I do not deny that the Gospel is ofttimes perverted here, and I

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suppose that if I only understood these Continental languages, 1
should find that some services which now please me, and only please
me, would not be quite so acceptable ; but as things are, I can enter
a Romanist, Greek or Protestant service, any Sabbath; and be thor-
oughly edified and be frequently melted ; because the foremost
thing in all the pomps of religious ceremony that pass before my
eyes, is that which is so well expressed in the English church-ser-
vice— "When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death thou
didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers." Christ died
for us, Christ died for us, and through Him we have eternal life they
all say ; and in French services, services in Greek, services in Ger-
man, no matter what, I do not, with all my ignorance, fail to catch
every now and then, the name which is above every name, and the
hallelujahs unto that great name ; and when the Greek worshiper
crosses himself and bows with his forehead to the pavement, I
understand perfectly well that it means, " When (on the cross) thou
hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom
of heaven to all believers."

And I see Christ's precious face and form on the pictured walls
and if I see the form of his mother also added, I straightway remem-
ber the words of the Angel in the Scripture — " Hail thou that art
highly favored ; blessed art thou among women," and am willing
that the mother of our Lord should stand in some eminence through-
out all generations ; and if I see the figures of apostles and saints
and martyrs standing about rather more thickly than I have been
used to see them, I say to myself:

" They do not stand there in their own right and in their own
dignity, but in the name and to the praise of Christ," yes, " the
glorious company of the Apostles praise Thee ; the goodly fellow-
ship of the Prophets praise Thee ; the noble army of martyrs praise
Thee ;" and really, Christian brethren, is it not sublime, this magni-
ficent unity of Christendom around the cross of the common Saviour?
In what a fellowship we stand ! What an august kingdom has been
founded here on the desolate earth ! What millions have been
gathered into it ! What hosts redeemed by Christ's most precious
blood, do stand even now on Mount Zion above ; and what added
hosts in the course of time's long ages shall be gathered in ! Some-
how I rejoice in these things for the last year or more, beyond all
my previous rejoicings. I start into Italy to-morrow to look upon
her scenery, and walk through her galleries of art, more to see if I

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cannot somewhere find some picture, painted by the hand of some
immortal master, which shall fulfill all my yearning and tearful feel-
ing touching the "Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the
world," than Tor anything else. If I could anywhere find his face
set forth in its whole mingled majesty and tenderness, so that that
which I feel I could also see, I should wish to abide by it forever
and never go back to my country any more. Well, most likely I
shall not find him in any place on the earth, but must content my-
self with waiting for the day when he shall reveal himself among
his saints, and with hoping that I may be of the number who shall
walk with him in white and see his glory.

A FRAGMENT.

Heaven is rest and joy, and it requires the heart to interpret
that, and grasp its immeasurable meaning. 0, when I am tired —
when my body is unstrung and my soul is jaded, when my hopes
flag, and my ambitions flicker in their socket, when the night does
not refresh me and the morning does not cheer me, when the song
of birds is heavy music, and all the trees of the field seem chastened,
and the brooks are weary and creep and gurgle and lament ; when
the beauty of women is vanity to my eyes, and I can see no dignity
in the faces of men, when the friends of my youth are scattered and
dead, and my eyes are evermore striving to look beyond the distant
horizon as for some country far away ; when long-gone forms crowd
my memory, the young, the old, the beautiful, the reverend ; when
my sympathies are pensive and retrospective, and I live with the
dead whom I knew, more than with the living whom I know ; when
the winds complain and sob at my casement all the day ; when the
love and the hate, and the efforts and delights of men seem small
and empty — O, when I am tired and sad and worn out — I know
what my God intended when he said, " rest and joy in Heaven."
Amen.

Date Due

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